Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

  Carlos looked Will in the eye. “Mister,” he asked solemnly, “are you a good guy, or a bad guy?”

  Will thought for a moment and then shrugged. “All things considered ... a good guy. Although it’s often been a question of perspective.”

  Carlos studied him a moment longer. He was pretty sure of his ability to sniff out bullshit. All that perspective crap aside, this guy seemed okay. He was wrapped up in some weird shit, but still okay.

  “I’m Carlos Guerrera.” He offered his hand.

  “William Hill.” He shook hands and then gestured at Carlos’ white T-shirt, which bore a large American flag and the legend Made in the USA. “Nice shirt.”

  Carlos grinned. “It says it all, vato.”

  Will turned to Jeannie, seeing her close for the first time. He fought to keep his face stern. He wanted to stare and felt weak in the knees as if he were wilting before her beauty. He’d never seen a face like hers, but at the same time she seemed familiar. “And you are?”

  “Jeannie Nelson.”

  “You stay back here a minute,” Carlos said to Will as they all stepped into the kitchen. “Jeannie and I’ll go see who’s up front.”

  Will nodded. He watched through the service window as they went through the swinging door. Carlos stayed behind the counter and Jeannie approached a couple seated in the booth closest to the door.

  Jeannie tried not to appear nervous. The couple was in their late thirties, the man in a dark suit and the woman in a blazer and slacks. “Hi,” Jeannie said with a bright smile. “Welcome to In the Shade. What can I get you?”

  The couple said nothing. They sat staring at Jeannie, curious and studious, as if she were the sole reason they were here.

  A Page from the Past

  The Compound (outside Vienna, Virginia), Christmas Eve, 1960

  Lionel Eicher stepped through the door of the retrofitted cottage onto a wide veranda. He patted down the pockets of his stained lab coat. He found a package of cigarettes, lit one, and inhaled deeply. He was not allowed to smoke in the laboratory and this break would get him away from the music playing on the hi-fi.

  This time it was some jarring piece by Mendelssohn, the Jew who tried to hide the stain of his bloodline. Why not just be done with it and play the degenerate Jazz of the Schwartzes?

  Lionel thought Stern was being absurd when the old man said that by playing music night and day, alternating complex pieces with simple melodies, one could stimulate the brain of a developing child, even if that child was not yet born. Stern loved to ramble on about the intricacies of music and its therapeutic uses.

  Lionel chuckled and exhaled. His breath blew out in a thick white cloud, the warm smoke creating a dense cone in the frigid December air. He thought he must look like the big lizard in that monster movie he’d seen at the cinema a few years ago, Godzilla, a fancy creation of the Japanese. Germans made sausages and wine and beer and wore leather shorts. The Japanese were shrinking cameras and radios and made terrible monster movies. There was a time, though, a time when Germany and Japan did more than pander to—

  “Ah! Lionel!”

  Lionel Eicher looked over his shoulder. His mentor, Doctor Edmund Stern, was grinning behind the wired glass in the door.

  Lionel’s father had been a friend of Stern’s since before the war and had been instrumental in helping Stern relocate to America a decade ago. The elder Eicher was dead, but Stern was keeping an old promise that if he should reach America and prosper he would see that Lionel the boy got there too. Stern was thrilled to have Lionel the man under his wing.

  Lionel hated the old man—his crazed eyes, his perpetual frowns, that wild mane of graying hair. Stern looked like a psychotic Beethoven. Lionel was half Stern’s age and was already losing his lustrous black hair, which made him hate Stern even more. Yet Lionel had learned so much in the last decade, things he could not learn in any school in the world. With a sigh Lionel forced a smile and opened the door.

  “Herr Doctor Stern,” Lionel said with a polite nod, even though he had seen the man only moments before.

  “Young Lionel,” Stern rasped in his thick Rhineland accent as he stepped into the brisk morning air. The music swelled and was muted as the door opened and closed. Edmund had been working all night, and needed a moment to clear his head. “You need not call me Herr Doctor, my boy. We need no formality here. This is America, where every man is created equal.” He chuckled. “Here we must speak English and you must call me Edmund.”

  “As you wish,” Lionel replied in cultured tones which spoke of an education begun at the University of Hamburg and completed at Oxford. “Edmund.”

  It was unseemly! To call one’s elder and employer by his Christian name as if they were common ditch diggers. Lionel had to force himself to spit out the name. Even though the old man was an odorous boor whom Lionel would have shunned in his own social circles at home, here he was Stern’s underling and had to suffer being called boy and young man.

  At least for the time being.

  He would have to do as the old man said. He had already done a great many things requested by the old man, some of which he found distasteful, most of which he enjoyed, but Ach mein Gott, the things he was learning! The things they were planning! What they had done last night—they had done the impossible! I am only thirty-five years old, Lionel thought. What might I achieve in another thirty years?

  Stern moved a finger in the air. “Concerto No. 2 in D minor for Piano and Orchestra. Allegro appassionato. Wonderful!” He looked at the grounds before them, studying the bland Quonset huts and cottages with simple exteriors that made up the facilities of the Compound. He looked at the bare deciduous trees and the rich conifers outside the electrified fences. He thought of the millions invested in this deceptively simple place and grinned.

  “Is it not amazing?” He asked. “Here we are doing work that is unethical and illegal, being funded in our efforts by the same government and by some of the same officials who tried so hard to exterminate us fifteen years ago.”

  Stern smiled and jerked a thumb toward the rising sun. “Not twenty miles in that direction is the White House and the home of the bald and grinning gnome who is the President of the United States. For governmental agencies, this is what the Americans would call ground zero. If I wanted to make my fortune all over again, Lionel, knowing what I know now, I would sell dark suits and sunglasses wholesale. We have the FBI at Quantico to the south, the CIA a few miles northeast at Langley, and within a twenty-minute drive in any direction you’ll find the Group up in Belle View and the School over the river in Glen Echo. We also have much more discreetly tucked-away operations like the Outlet’s collection of foreign academics, although the Outlet had to shut down operations after they, how do the Americans say it, dropped the ball, out in New Mexico. Washington D.C. is also the home of the Searchers, who are verrückt even by our standards, and the Office of Gross Removal and Restoration Exercises.”

  Lionel had heard this before. He knew the loss of the Outlet was their gain. The Compound had inherited the budget, goals and manpower of that agency. He nodded dutifully. Stern might be as aggravating as a festering boil on the buttock, but the knowledge they were sharing was fascinating, and Lionel was eager to return to his work.

  “In the center of all is the Compound,” Stern said. “Not the largest, not the smallest. We operate under budget always, and never report our profits. We are nearly invisible among so many clandestine agencies, yet our work may have implications beyond anything even we could imagine. We have made history today!”

  Lionel had to agree. He dropped his cigarette and ground it under his heel, then held the door for Doctor Stern. They returned to the Warm Room, Eicher grateful that their work in the basement Cold Room was done for the time being. Sitting in a chair in one corner of the Warm Room that was furnished like a nursery was a young woman named Garvin. She was nurse and wet nurse in one and she was holding a baby to her breast, gently rocking the baby to the madness of
the Jew’s Rondo Capriccioso.

  In 1935 that baby had been cryogenically frozen. Edmund Stern often fancied that even the infant’s dreams were held fast in ice, as clear and motionless as a picture in a big glossy American magazine. Every medical doctor of the time would have said the child was as good as dead. Freezing is easy, they would say. Thawing is the hard part. When freezing, the body changes. Cell walls expand, burst, and are irreparably damaged. It would take something special to get past that deadly circumstance. If you did freeze someone successfully and the frozen subject was thawed, how did you bring it back to life? People are not frogs. They cannot pass a long winter burrowed under the snow. Even a perfectly preserved subject would have some damage, most likely in the delicate and vital cells of the brain.

  There had been some brain damage, yes, but x-rays of the brain revealed the child had suffered a trauma before it had been frozen. The brain had frantically been trying to recover from the injury at the time of freezing. After the thaw it had automatically continued that work despite the passage of time, now repairing pathways damaged during the freezing process as well.

  This was the only child revived worth keeping alive. The others had come out of their long sleep with far greater degrees of freezing damage, large portions of their brains having turned to dead jelly upon resurrection. They had been euthanized without fuss, as was the plan for this child now that they were moving on to greater goals.

  Stern was convinced the only reason this child survived was due to the earlier injury. With work and therapy, and music to stimulate the newborn brain to heal itself by simply working to process the data received from its ears, the baby could grow into the living testament of Stern’s skills. A quarter-century after freezing the baby was alive and hungry, thanks to Stern, whose single most fantastic bit of cryogenic work was the creation of his amphibian derived glycol solution.

  As he liked to tell Lionel, life was not only an electrical phenomenon, it was also a chemical process almost as old as the Earth itself. Without the correct elements in the proper proportions one could not stimulate the life force with jolts of electricity, no matter how stirring the images of a Mary Shelley or a James Whale. No, life was electrochemical.

  With one series of injections Stern and his assistants had prepared an infant for twenty-five years in limbo, suspended between life and death. With another series of injections they had freed the infant from the grip of the cold and then restarted its tiny heart with a jolt of electricity. Now Stern could freeze the young Queen of England and bring her back from that sleep, but it would be nothing compared to the triumph of that final night back in 1933 when he perfected his formula at the expense of thousands of frogs and toads.

  Stern had smuggled that formula out of Germany along with his crude techniques for splicing genes and manipulating DNA, both of which Hitler had desperately wanted, just as der Fuhrer had wanted so many other things, from futuristic weapons to historic and religious relics, the things of science-fiction or ancient myth. Stern knew he had to keep his discoveries secret; the way he was able to cut and paste DNA as if he were a child playing with paper and scissors, and also the biologically preprogrammed buttons he had earmarked on his own map of the human genome that controlled everything from a person’s height to the color of their eyelashes. The world wasn’t ready for that knowledge yet. And he wasn’t ready to release a potentially dangerous or controversial technique to those who could use it for nefarious ends.

  Thinking of the dark piece of wood sealed in a glass box and tucked away in a drawer in his office, Stern recalled hearing of Hitler’s desperate searches for religious relics which might give him more power. If that crazy scheissekerl had been able to combine that ancient artifact with Stern’s modern techniques ... Perhaps nothing would have come of it. Perhaps Armageddon. Stern shrugged. One of these days he’d have to burn that fragment of ancient history and the dark strands entwined in one splintered end.

  Money alone had Stern’s allegiance. No mere man could possibly match its allure and power. He knew the United States would give him all the money he needed for his work. To Stern, there had been little difference between the U.S. Government and the Nazi Party. On the surface, of course, they were not at all alike. Eisenhower and Hitler truly had different ideas and goals. Yet deep down, the men behind the men in power were essentially the same.

  The men in power would do anything to achieve their ends, would pay any amount to those who could aid them. Stern knew his techniques could never really be used as a weapon, but they were probably the best insurance policy any nation or political movement could ever have. To freeze and then revive, he had shown he could do that. The President is mortally wounded, or has a fatal disease? Freeze him until a cure is found.

  Now that he had mastered cryogenics it was time to move on to greater things; the creation of a human clone. He had been cloning amphibians, rodents, cats and dogs for at least ten years now. If a President was sick or injured, parts of him could one day be instantly replaced with cloned organs or limbs. True, such a goal was a long way off and a clone would not be the original man, but what was any world leader these days other than a puppet controlled by the faceless, nameless men behind the scenes?

  Stern watched the child suckling at Garvin’s breast and smiled. The plan had been to euthanize the child once its mental faculties had been assessed. Two of the other six babies that survived physically but not mentally had been put down by Stern with painless injections. A simple task in theory but one that had filled him with horrified guilt in practice; he was certain he would have made a terribly inefficient Nazi. The other four infants were killed by Eicher.

  Stern had let Eicher put the babies to rest, mistakenly assuming the young man would give the infants a painless injection. When Stern performed post-mortems on the small bodies to confirm his suspicions of extensive cell damage he noticed bruising around each delicate neck, and in their eyes were unmistakable blood-red flecks of petechiae indicating death by strangulation. Herr High and Mighty of the Oxford Education enjoyed strangling babies? To end an experiment was one thing. To actually make an effort to create unnecessary pain was quite another. Stern had decided he would keep a close eye on young Eicher.

  Edmund Stern looked at the child again. He had been prepared to end this experiment too, but the child had changed that. Not only must the infant boy be a fighter to have overcome the odds up to now, but the little one had gotten to Stern, had become more than just a thing. When Stern was removing the gel that had been applied to the baby’s skin to prevent damage from the cold, the child had reached up and given Stern’s nose such a mighty squeeze that the man’s eyes had watered and he burst out laughing. Stern didn’t think he could put the child down after that. He had been surprised to discover he still had a heart under his clinical hide, a heart the child had stolen at that moment. Edmund gave the baby a fond look. The child’s care and maintenance could easily be hidden in Stern’s annual budget, and he could personally see to the boy’s education.

  He would name the child William Hill. It had a good, solid American ring to it, and it spoke of the child’s unfortunate hillbilly heritage. Stern was sure he could find some use for little Will around the Compound. If Eicher complained about the boy, Stern would be sure to let him know who was in charge.

  Thinking of the gift of life, Stern reached out and gently touched the crown of the baby’s head. His voice was warm with affection when he said, “Merry Christmas, William.”

  2

  Bus Stop

  Will crept down the corridor until he could see over Carlos’ shoulder. He saw the couple studying Jeannie. He’d seen that look before, and wondered why they were so interested in her.

  He remembered a girl he’d heard rumors about when he was growing up in the Compound back East, a girl who was being hunted then just as he was now, a girl who would be a woman now, a woman born in the Compound, a woman who was even more valuable than Will had been.

  He moved back down
the corridor until he came to two doors marked EXIT and GARBAGE. There were two people in the diner. There had to be more elsewhere. He went through the second door, easing it open and squinting against the sunlight.

  * * *

  Jeannie was beginning to feel like a bug under a magnifying glass. “Is anything wrong?”

  The man and woman in the booth shared a look. He shrugged. “I guess it could be her. What do you think, Betty?”

  She looked Jeannie up and down. “Well, Duncan, I’d say that she’s about five-five barefoot, and her weight is one-thirty or more.”

  “Jesus,” Jeannie said, her curiosity momentarily overtaken by anger. One hundred and thirty pounds?

  The woman named Betty ignored her. “From the way she blinks I’d say colored contacts are a given. Her hair color looks a little flat. It’s been dyed, maybe the eyebrows too. You better be careful doing that, honey, because you can blind yourself with those chemicals. I can’t judge the rest with her clothes on, but if she’d risk the eyebrows she’d probably risk it all. Am I right, Ms. Norman?”

  “The name is Bellows, actually,” Jeannie said in forced calm, hoping Carlos didn’t overhear. “Jeannie Bellows.”

  Behind the counter Carlos whispered, “What the heck?”

  The man named Duncan grinned and winked at Jeannie. “Well Betty, I wouldn’t mind having a go at the rest,” he said with a leer. “She looks like a classic thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty-six. An overflowing C-cup too, can’t fool me with that baggy uniform darling—”

  “Duncan,” Betty said, sounding exasperated.

  Carlos plucked the paper hat off his head, balled it up, and tossed it into a garbage can. He stepped through the swinging door and came out of the kitchen a moment later, holding a large cleaver.