Exiled from Earth e-1

by Ben Bova

  She went to the window and looked out. Turning back to him, she asked, “And your room is in the same building?”

  “Downstairs.”

  “How many other women are in this building?”

  Lou shrugged. “This whole second floor is for women, I think. And there are a few married couples living on the island. They’ve got their own houses, though.”

  “I see.”

  “Look, Bonnie, you’re not sore about what I said when those Federal marshals arrested me, are you? I was scared, and surprised …”

  Her face softened a little. “No, it’s not that, Lou.”

  He walked over to her. “Then what’s wrong? Why’d you come if you didn’t.”

  “Why’d I come?” She almost laughed at him “I didn’t get much choice Two men picked me up at the office where I had just started working and packed me off. That was it No questions, no explanations. Just enough time to pack one bag. That’s all.”

  “They didn’t tell you…”

  “Nothing In fact, I’m still not sure of what’s going on.”

  Lou sank down into the nearest chair. “But Bernard must have…”

  Bonnie knelt down beside him and put her hands in his.

  “Lou, I’m sorry. When I saw you there by the plane, all of a sudden I thought it was you that had me kidnapped.”

  “You haven’t been kidnapped!”

  “I haven’t been invited to the prince’s ball.”

  He laughed at her.

  “Lou, what’s going on? Is everything going crazy?”

  Shaking his head, he tried to explain it as carefully as he could. The exile. Minister Bernard’s offer to help. The work that was going to be done on this island.

  Finally, she understood. “You mean we’re going to stay here… indefinitely? As long as they want us to? We can’t get off?”

  He looked into her pearl gray eyes and really didn’t care about politics or exilements or science or anything else. But he forced him self to answer, “We stay until we’ve finished the work that was going on at the Institute. When we show the world that genetic engineering can be done, then there’s no more point in keeping Kaufman and the others in exile.”

  “But that could take years,” Bonnie said.

  “It won’t take that long.”

  She looked away from him, off toward the window, like a prisoner who’s suddenly realized that the outside world is forever barred away.

  “I shouldn’t have asked them to bring you here,” Lou said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Bonnie… if you had known… if they told you that you’d have to live on this island until the project is finished … with me… would you have come?”

  She turned back to look at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “I don’t know, Lou. I just don’t know.”

  13

  There are more than three hundred trillion cells in the human body. Counting ten cells per second, it would take more than a million years to count them all. In each cell there are forty-six chromosomes; under the microscope they look long and threadlike, and they’ve often been described as “strings of beads.” Each “bead” is an individual gene, and altogether there are some forty thousand genes in any human cell. The zygote—the fertilized egg cell that develops into an embryo and within nine months into a baby—contains about forty thousand genes, just like any human cell. Half of this number come from each parent. Each individual gene is a complex molecular factory built of deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA), ribonucleic acids (RNA), and proteins. All the physical characteristics of the resulting baby are determined by the genes. Eye color, tooth structure, basic metabolic rate, chemical balance, size of brain, shape of nose—everything is controlled by the genes in the zygote.

  Lou’s work seemed simple and straightforward to him. He was training Ramo, the computer, to look over the detailed structure of each gene in a zygote and compare it to the structure of a healthy, undamaged gene.

  Ramo, being a computer, knew only what his human co-workers told him. But he had two advantages that no human possessed. First, he had absolutely perfect memory. Once the “map” of a healthy gene was stored in the microcosmic magnetic patterns of his memory bank, he would never forget it, never blur or warp it, never let any emotional conditions prevent him from seeing it exactly as it was given to him. Second, Ramo could work at the speed of light, rather than the tediously slower pace of the human nervous system Ramo could scan dozens of genes and spot the imperfections in their molecular structure in the time it took Lou to count to ten.

  Lou often thought of himself as a teacher His job was to teach an extremely clever youngster—Ramo—how to do a very complicated job. A job that no human could do because it would take him too long, and his memory wasn’t good enough Just before the Institute had been closed, Lou had taught Ramo all the patterns of healthy gene structures Ramo knew what healthy genes looked like on a molecular level Now Lou had to teach him how to compare a real set of genes with the healthy structures he already knew how to spot the things that might be wrong with real genes, and how to show these imperfections in his viewscreens. Once this was done, Lou would begin to teach Ramo the biochemists’ remedies for fixing faulty genes. And once that was done, the immense task was finished. The work of genetic engineering could begin.

  But, sitting at the master control desk of the computer, Lou was much less than happy. The desk was a huge collection of control panels and viewscreens that reached around his padded chair in a semicircle. Within the reach of his fingers were controls that touched every part of Ramo’s enormous electronic mind.

  Lou was frowning as he slouched in the chair. He could see his own reflection in one of the dead viewscreens. He looked the way he felt It was mid-morning, according to the clock, but here inside the computer building it was hard to tell. There were no windows. The building was frigidly air conditioned and heavily soundproofed. Time meant very little to the computer.

  Two weeks had gone by since Lou had come to the island. Two weeks, and Bonnie was still as cold and distant as she had been that first day. She worked for Lou, she did her job well. She had lunch with him most days and dinner a few times, in the tiny overcrowded cafeteria that Marcus had put up near the lab complex. She even mended a hole in his pants pocket. But she still acted more like a wary employee than a friend.

  I should have never made them bring her here, Lou told himself for the millionth time that morning. She’ll never forgive me for it.

  The phone beside him buzzed. He punched the ANSWER button. Marcus’ untanned, bland-looking face appeared on the main viewscreen.

  “You wanted to see me?” he asked.

  Nodding, Lou said, “Some of the biochemists have been asking me to help them program Ramo to handle their work I don’t mind helping them, but it’s going to take time, and I thought you wanted me to plug ahead on the basic genetic mapping as fast as I can.”

  “The biochemists?” Marcus put on a worried frown. “Why do they need special computer programming?”

  “They’re working on something to do with drugs that affect the chemistry in the chromosomes, or something like…”

  Marcus’ eyes widened for a flash second. Then, he quickly regained his self-control. “No, you’re quite right. You shouldn’t be pulled off what you’re doing to help with that. Let some of the other programmers help them.”

  Lou said, “Okay, fine. I’d be glad to help them if they need it.”

  “No,” Marcus snapped “Urn, that is, they shouldn’t interfere with your work. Any way I’ll take care of it. If they come to you again, tell them to see me.”

  “Okay thanks. Thanks.”

  Marcus nodded and cut off the connection. The viewscreen went blank, leaving Lou to look at his own frowning reflection again.

  He worked at the control desk the rest of the morning, then around noontime phoned. Bonnie She was working with a trio of Chinese girls on the other side of the building.

  “I’m afraid
I can’t go to lunch with you, Lou,” she said without smiling “The girls and I are eating right here at our desks, we’ve got mountains of work to do.”

  Lou punched the OFF button, and this time turned his gaze away from the viewscreen.

  It was well past six o’clock when the phone buzzed again. It pulled Lou out of his total immersion in the work of teaching genetics to Ramo. He suddenly realized that he was bone tired his back ached, his head was throbbing, his eyes burned. But on the main viewscreen Ramo was displaying a detailed enlarged map of the molecular structure of a single gene. And part of the map—the area of the gene that was flawed—was outlined in red Lou typed on the master input keyboard, GOOD WORK RAMO. PERFECT. He muttered the words to himself as the phone kept buzzing.

  THANK YOU, Ramo flashed on the viewscreen.

  Lou reached out and touched the phone button Ramo’s words disappeared from the screen and Anton Kori’s lean angular face took form on it He was grinning hugely, showing big white teeth with spaces between them that made them look like a cemetery to Lou.

  “Can you have dinner with me?” Kori asked “I have a lot to talk about, a lot to show you…”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Lou said “I’m kind of beat “

  “Oh,” Ron’s smile faded, but only a little. “Maybe. Bonnie can… you have no objection? I’ve got to show these pictures to someone!”

  “Bonnie?” Lou felt his nerves flash a warning “Um… look, Anton—I’ll give Bonnie a call and we’ll both drop over to your place. Okay?”

  Kori bobbed his head up and down. “Wonderful. Come to my lab. Next to the instrument repair shop. Bonnie knows where it is.”

  I’ve got no right to be sore at her, Lou told himself as he angrily punched out Bonnie’s phone number. She wasn’t in her room. Glancing at the clock, Lou tried her office phone.

  Her face filled the screen and his anger melted.

  “Oh, hello, Lou. I was just leaving for dinner.”

  Keeping his voice flat calm, “Kori just called. He’s very excited about something, wants us to eat with him. Can you make it?”

  “Sure.” Without a moment’s hesitation.

  Lou asked, “Would you have been so free if I had asked you to have dinner with me? Alone?”

  For an instant a frightened look flickered in her green eyes.

  “What do you mean, Lou?”

  “You’ve been seeing a lot of Kori, haven’t you?”

  “Lou, I’m a tax-paying citizen or at least I was until I got hijacked here.”

  “So you are sore about my having you brought here!”

  “Of course I’m sore!” she flashed back “Weren’t you sore when they dragged you away? Do you enjoy being an exile? Is this island any better than the satellite or wherever it is that the rest of the Institute people were sent?”

  Lou heard himself mumble, “You don’t want to be around me, is that it?”

  “Don’t be sullen,” she said, smiling for the first time. “Lou, whatever we had going between us back at the Institute, it can’t be the same here. It just can’t be.”

  “That’s the way you want it?”

  She looked sad and lonely now. “That’s the way it’s got to be, Lou.”

  “Yeah.” He took a deep breath. “Well, how about dinner? I told Kori we’d both be over…”

  “All right,” she said softly. “As long as we understand each other.”

  He nodded, his face frozen into a bitter mask. “I understand.”

  He left his office, walked around the computer building, and picked up Bonnie They walked across the lab complex in silence Overhead the trees filtered an unbelievable sunset sky of pink and saffron and soft violet Through the boles of the trees, off at the edge of the reddened sea, the sun was huge and distended as it touched the horizon.

  If Bonnie and Lou had little to say to each other, Anton Kori more than filled their silence The moment they stepped through the door into his cluttered laboratory/workroom, he started chattering.

  “It’s fantastic, you’ll never believe it, it’s like something out of the cinema.”

  He bustled around the big room, dragging a table loaded with complex electronic gear across the floor and positioning it near the door.

  “Lou, would you turn on the switch for the laser?”

  Kori pointed to the wall over his workbench “No, not that one! The next one, on your left. Yes.”

  Lou flicked the switch. He saw nothing in the room that looked like a laser, but there was a hum of electrical power coming from someplace.

  “Wait ’til you see this. Bonnie, the lights, please. Behind you.”

  With a slightly amused smile, Bonnie turned off the overhead lights. In the darkened room, Kori’s bony face was eerily lit by the glow of the equipment on his table.

  “Now just a minute while I use this old slide for focusing…” he muttered.

  Lou found a rolling chair and pushed it over toward Bonnie. She sat, and he stood beside her, facing the slightly luminescent viewscreen at the far end of the room. A slide came on, some sort of graph, with many colored curves weaving across it.

  “Now the focus,” Kori mumbled. The graph suddenly became three-dimensional. The curves seemed to stand in the middle of the room. Lou felt he could walk around them and look at them from the other side.

  “Okay, good.” Kori said, so excited that his English had a decided Slavic edge to it. “Now we see what no man has ever seen before—except me.”

  The room went totally dark for an instant, and then it was filled with stars. Lou heard Bonnie gasp. It was like being out in space, stars as far as the eye could see: white, yellow, orange, red, blue—unblinking points of fire in the black depths of space. In the distance, the nebulous haze of the Milky Way glowed softly.

  “Wide angle view, looking aft,” Kori explained matter-of-factly. “That bright yellow star in the center is—the sun.”

  “These are the tapes from the Starfarer?” Lou asked, and immediately felt sheepish because it was such a needless question.

  He sensed Kori nodding in the darkness, “It took the ship more than thirty years to reach the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. And it took more than four years just for the laser beam to carry this information back to us.”

  Another moment of darkness and then another picture of stars.

  “Wide view forward,” Kori said.

  There was still a bright yellow star in the center of the field of view. Kori flicked through several more holograms. The yellow star grew brighter, closer. Soon, Lou could see that it was two stars.

  “Alpha Centauri,” Kori said in an awed voice, as if anything louder might shatter the pictures. “Proxima is so distant and faint from its two big brothers that I haven’t been able to pinpoint it yet. It’s out among those background stars someplace. We need an astronomer here!”

  Lou shared Kori’s awe. “Alpha Centauri,” he echoed.

  “You were right, Anton,” said Bonnie. “This is fantastic… so beautiful.”

  “Wait,” Kori answered. “You haven’t seen the best yet.”

  He flicked through another dozen holograms. The double star grew larger. Lou could see that one of the stars was smaller and redder than the big yellow sun.

  “What are those two flecks, near the yellow star?” Lou asked.

  Kori giggled excitedly. “Flecks? Flecks indeed! Those are planets! Two planets orbiting around Alpha Centauri!”

  Lou had no words. He simply stared at the screen as Kori flicked on several more holograms, closer and closer, of the two worlds. On the very last slide only the second-most planet was in view. It looked like a fat round ball, yellowish-green, streaked with white clouds.

  “I haven’t had a chance to analyze the spectroscopic data,” Kori said, “but those clouds look like water vapor to me. It’s a bigger planet than Earth, probably a heavier gravity. But if there’s water, there could be life!”

  It was very late when Bonnie and Lou walked with Kori back to t
he dormitory. None of them had eaten dinner. In their excitement over the star pictures they had simply forgotten all about it.

  Kori stopped in the middle of the road, at a spot where the trees didn’t overhang, and threw his head back.

  “Look at them!” he shouted. “Millions and billions of stars. And millions and billions of planets. Some of them must be just like this Earth, waiting for us to reach them. And we can! We can reach them, and we will!” He laughed loudly, and then gave a shattering shrill whistle as he swung his long arms up toward the sky.

  “Hey, easy… you sound like you’re high,” Lou said.

  “I am high,” Kori answered happily. “I’m drunk with joy and knowledge and power. We can reach out to new Earths. That’s enough to make any man drunk.”

  Lou shook his head in the moonless dark. “Maybe we’ll need new Earths. We’ve certainly fouled up this one.”

  Kori laughed. He wasn’t in the mood for seriousness. “Wait until the people of the world see these pictures. Wait until they realize what it means…”

  “I thought the government wasn’t going to let the news out,” Bonnie said.

  Lou answered, “Marcus and Minister Bernard will get the pictures out to the newsmen somehow, I’ll bet.”

  Her voice was quiet but firm. “Will they? Do you really think that they intend to let the world know about this? Or about genetic engineering, when we get it to work right?”

  Lou stopped and looked at her. In the darkness, he couldn’t see the expression on her face.

  “What are you saying?” he asked.

  For a moment Bonnie didn’t reply. Then, “I’m not sure… I could be wrong. There’s nothing definite, but I’ve just got a… well, a feeling, sort of…”

  “Go on.”

  “Well… why do they have Anton working on nuclear explosives? What guarantees do we have that our work will be made public? Why are the biochemists working on cortical suppressors…?”

  “Suppressors?”

  “Uh-huh. I just found out this afternoon,” Bonnie said. “That’s what they need the computer time for: to select the chemical suppressor that does the best job of degrading cortical activity—permanently.”