Kolymsky Heights

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘But Anton, you are not able to see.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Anton said.

  It seemed that he took off the patches to shower in the morning, and that morning he had found that he could see. He had put the patches back on again because he had been instructed to keep them on. But in the maze he had taken them off.

  I was told at once and we rushed to test him. Through instruments we saw that every part of his visual system had regenerated. This happened ten days after the boost.

  To understand what happened now I must explain something of our organisation here. We come under the aegis of a Moscow body called the Scientific Directorate, and this Directorate I keep informed of our work.

  Every few weeks a member of the Directorate visits me: a security official but a well-informed scientist, a friendly fellow. This man now called me up and asked me to repeat the experiment with the rogue harmonic. He wished to see for himself how the circuit regenerated – the last couple of days of it, that is, for we had only Anton’s account of the timing.

  I set up the experiment, my friend arrived, we started up a machine to record the events, and in the 230th hour (after the boost) it began. First the ‘seething’ and then the emerging outline. In four hours we had full function; the same timing, within good limits, as Anton had reported.

  My friend took copies of this recording, and he left me some papers I had asked for. These were the latest studies in another field of optics; for in the days when Anton was blinded I had brooded on other possibilities.

  The network we had blasted out was a chemical network – enormously complex but one we had been able to follow (at least to clone in part). I wondered now if we could back it up in some way, as a safeguard against other accidents.

  Science had long backed up hearts, kidneys, many other systems, by copying the action of the systems. With the visual system our only sure knowledge was how it began, which was electrooptically. Perhaps it could be backed up electrooptically; with fibre optics.

  Our experts studied the latest papers on fibre optics. Extra filaments were required, many grafting techniques learned – all this work quite new. But we mastered it, standardised a procedure, and presently moved from bench work to rats.

  Here we had first to try to get a signal through the fibre. In the laboratory we had got one – nothing ‘visual’, but a measured change in a bit of brain material. With a real rat, a functioning brain, this would be very different. We stripped the rat’s network, grafted in our own, allowed it to heal and delivered the boost (still a necessity after any intervention).

  What followed was a moment of history.

  It was something, I should say, almost beyond belief.

  On the screen a blank network. Which within minutes began to seethe and then to grey. In fifteen minutes we had a full outline! The brain understood the fibre, had accepted it.

  This stunning success – we had looked only for an instrumental blip – held us at the screen for hours. A whole day passed before we dared expose the rat’s eyes and allow it to see. But there was no doubt it did see. It saw not well for we had been unable to tune fibre to a real eye. But it saw! For the first time a blind creature saw – through fibre!

  From Moscow, my friend made three urgent visits.

  His first was to watch us do the whole thing again. And then again – this time with the rogue harmonic. (The bureaucrats still had our harmonics programme on their agenda!) We did it – and with the expected result. The rogue harmonic ‘blinded’ optical fibre too, although again, as with Anton, only temporarily; as a re-test some days later showed.

  This work interested us not at all, but once it was over my friend’s visits became serious. We had found an answer to blindness! A synthetic channel had connected to a brain. To complete the circuit we needed only a synthetic eye, and a framework in which to use it.

  The framework was obvious, for it already existed – the familiar spectacle frame. And the eye posed no great problem.

  At that time rapid advance was going on with superfast self-focusing lenses, both commercially and militarily (they are used in the nose cones of missiles). We asked for and got whatever we wanted. And very soon had made extraordinary progress. For a start, we found it unnecessary to strip a whole network: it could remain in place, with just a ‘patch’ inserted.

  We moved rapidly to apes. (All this data you will be taking with you; here I give the sequence.) We make the incision above the ear and the patches – for stereo vision – auto-graft to a junction. With a protein gel this takes a week to unite.

  A patch goes in with extra fibre already attached, and its terminal is set behind the ear for the spectacle arm to make contact. Inside the arm matching filaments lead to the regulator chip for the lenses. The lenses, though cased in glass, consist of thin-film layers, a few microns each. (This last is a later refinement: I will shortly tell you how it came about.)

  We now had something of a problem. A scientific advance of great magnitude had been made and the question of publication arose. Nobody doubted that it had to be published, or that a Nobel and other prizes must follow. Just as obviously I could not be the one to take them. But who then could? No respected academic could take credit for work he had not done – which his colleagues knew he had not done!

  To this, after a time, my friend thought up an answer.

  For years we had been receiving help from various research bodies. (Unknown to them, of course; their papers came to us through the Directorate.) The suggestion was for these bodies to be fed bits of our work and steered to the same conclusions. An idea acceptable to me, although obviously it would take time.

  As indeed it did. Two years passed – no papers – and my impatience grew. I understood the problem. People on major work will not rush to publish until sure of their results. And not everything could be fed to them at once! All the same, my friend determined to steer more strongly; and in another year was able to advise that a promising paper was on the way from the Voronsky Institute (of Electro-Chemistry – they had done the early work on the visual chain I have mentioned).

  This paper I saw, and it was a good one, although still a long way from the necessary breakthrough into optics. Patience! advised my friend. He had several lines out. Very soon now we would have news of optical developments.

  And so we did. But not, I think, in the way intended.

  It happened just then that a specialist in optics, whose work I had been following, became unexpectedly available. I asked for him to be approached, he accepted, and joined us. This man was greatly surprised at our advanced work, and especially with the boosting techniques.

  In the week of his arrival he asked for a private tête-à-tête and told me the following story.

  Some time before, while touring facilities, his plane had been forced to land in a remote area where the only accommodation was a certain rocketry centre. He had stayed the night and one of the staff, hearing of his speciality, had asked his opinion on some recent work. This man was a designer of circuits and the question he was interested in concerned optical fibre.

  In the designer’s laboratory miniature rockets were used for the testing of firing programmes – rather precise and exacting work. Missiles must constantly correct themselves in flight, and their terminal homing devices depend for accuracy on very brief rocket bursts. This requires exceedingly rapid start-up and shut-down procedures: the man’s particular field.

  Some weeks before a party of officials had arrived with a new device for test. The device was an electronic circuit, boxed with two quartz pellets, apparently for frequency modulation. The device was placed in the laboratory, the man instructed to install a programme for one of the bench rockets; and they all retired to an adjacent observation room.

  From here the rocket was activated – a normal ten-minute programme, allowing for many timed and recorded bursts – and after some minutes the electronic device was also remotely activated. The firing programme instantly changed. Firing did not stop. T
he device had been activated while it was actually going on, and it continued, not following its programme – a single prolonged burst until burn-out.

  When it was safe to strip down the rocket, nothing was found wrong with it. The circuits were intact, contacts and breakers all as they should be, the heat-protected wiring (of optical fibre) perfectly cool. The designer was asked to pass a signal through the fibre. He could get no signal through it. In some way it had been rendered inactive. All the same he was asked to leave it in position for a certain number of days, and then repeat the programme. This he did. And everything worked; the optical fibre again quite operational.

  He now asked, with much curiosity, what optical theory could explain such a thing …

  This was the story the specialist told me, and he said that having now heard of the incident with Anton he wondered if there could be some connection.

  I asked if he had told anyone else this story, and he said he had not. Optical fibre was not his field; he had almost at once forgotten it. His stay at the rocketry centre had been a mere overnight accident. A chance event.

  I asked him to let me think over this event.

  I thought it over, and I thought most soberly. Three years had now passed, with publication of our discovery no nearer. And far more, of course, since the work with the rogue harmonic – all that well behind us.

  But not evidently finished with.

  The quartz ‘pellets’, the remote boost, the ‘certain number of days’ of waiting … all this had surely to do with our rogue harmonic. The use of harmonics is not original. But this harmonic was original; it was not a thing come by accidentally. Somebody was using it.

  I asked the specialist to remain silent a little longer and waited for my Directorate friend to visit.

  When he did, I asked if work was going on with harmonics.

  Yes it was going on, he said.

  When was it intended to publish this work?

  In time, Efraim, in time.

  Had a use been found, perhaps, for the rogue harmonic?

  He gazed at me. ‘Why do you ask?’

  I told him why, and he sighed. ‘I am very sorry, Efraim. You should not have been embarrassed in this way.’

  But he explained everything to me – and very frankly.

  We had come on a principle of extraordinary military value. And to explain it he had first to outline the phenomenon of EMP – electro-magnetic pulse. This pulse, a side-effect of nuclear explosions, halts all electrical current in its vicinity – all current flowing in wires. Power stations stop, cars stop – and telephones, radios, lifts, lights; everything depending on electricity stops. Including, significantly, military command and control centres: no counter action could be ordered.

  The answer to this paralysis was found in optical fibre; a material not susceptible to EMP but very efficient in conveying signals. Because missiles in flight could also be affected – the firing circuits and fuses immobilised by nuclear blasts in nearby orbit – they too had been re-equipped. Now every nuclear power was invulnerable to EMP.

  To EMP but not – now – to everything. For our chance discovery had opened a new window of vulnerability.

  At the simplest level it could physically blind ground forces – on foot, in tanks, or in bunkers; for the frequency penetrated all structures. With missiles, and nuclear activity generally, its potential was incalculably greater …

  At present the tests were at laboratory level, but it was hoped to conduct them later on a missile in flight. Under current agreements the flight-testing of missiles had to be internationally supervised. Plainly, this test could not be supervised. But as it happened, China was not a party to these agreements, and a new guidance system was under development there. It would be flight-tested to their base at Lop Nor; indeed the commander there, a General Liu, had already been given advance instructions. Means were now being considered of ourselves supervising this test, by satellite …

  And how, I asked him after a moment, would this affect our discoveries for sighting the blind.

  ‘Efraim,’ he said gently, ‘you know what is needed to sight the blind, and how that operation is completed. To produce a paper showing the harmonics would lead to an investigation of all that band of harmonics. And then?’

  He went on much longer – in fact with good arguments.

  (Ours was a military establishment. It had produced a military weapon. We knew other weapons developed here – disgusting ones. This one had all their potency but none of their vices. Our country was in a state of great instability, a beggared giant with nuclear rivals on all sides. The people might yet be exposed to horrors. The Directorate had a duty to protect the people. Sighting the blind was a magnificent thing. But for the moment this must have priority. People lived with blindness, but could they live after events that this was designed to prevent?)

  ‘Come – think it over! You’ll agree!’ he said.

  I did agree – why not?

  But all I thought was: they aren’t going to publish.

  Not now, perhaps not ever. It was slowly sinking in.

  ‘Efraim,’ he urged me, on leaving next day, ‘forget this military application. Your achievement is very great and no resources will be spared for you to complete it – and the world one day to have it! Each one of us at the Directorate, I assure you, is absolutely aware of what you are doing. Press on with it!’

  They were by no means aware of what I was doing. (For that same night I thought ‘To hell with them all!’ For everything they had an argument, and everything could be used for good or evil. Now the good must have a chance. It had come to me by chance. Now it would have another; and I embarked on the course that you know.) But we certainly pressed on!

  Our lenses at the time were bulky, heavy, quite awkward in use. This our specialist soon changed, for he was already a leader in the field of thin-film layers. And soon too we were engaged on improvements to the insertion procedures, trying them out on a batch basis (the operation is quite reversible); and were still doing it at the time of the explosion.

  Of our military work here I will not speak, so I say nothing of the explosion; except that it was calamitous. We lost the genetics lab. We lost the apes’ quarters – also their adjoining sick bay. Several apes were in it then recovering from operation, their eyes bandaged, and those who survived the blast we got outside as soon as possible, for a rollcall – although they were very few in number.

  The situation was now altogether desperate. Those apes still alive were badly contaminated. In a few weeks, only one of them was left – as it happened the least representative one; a testimony to my own hubris, and of a line that must not be crossed.

  This creature I had made myself, in a Petri dish: a non-hardy female. By then we could identify early the non-hardy and should simply have washed her away. But I was then working with the foetus and investigating what else we could draw from it.

  Since the contents of the dish (now fifteen years old, by name Ludmilla) would not be hardy, there would be ‘intelligence’. I decided to discover how intelligent this cell cluster could be made by copying cerebral material from Sibir’s foetus and trying to incorporate it. And this experiment was a great success – but a frivolous one, an unforgivable one, and one that must never be repeated! For Ludmilla is neither ape nor human. (In fact she is part Sibir, part Neanderthaloid, and part ape: an animal of a kind, but with a mind that I think is human.) The apes did not accept her and she lived apart, attached only to me. I gave her lessons which, alas, she found tiresome. On these occasions she had to sleep the night in a room kept for my Directorate friend; which room by association she also disliked!

  This she was doing on the night of the explosion – in safety. I rushed out myself, ordering her to stay in safety. And an ape would have done so, for they obey instructions. But she was concerned only for my safety and ran crying after me – into the secondary blast. This happened as I picked my way through the genetics lab. I had put on the mask and goggles we alw
ays wear in this lab, but the poor child was without them …

  Well, but see how things turn out.

  She was contaminated, of course, and also horribly blinded – her eyes requiring urgent removal for they were destroyed and infected – and thus became our first real patient. The others, remember, were experiments, still with their own eyes. Ludmilla had none; and so became the first true case of blindness in the world to be sighted by our operation.

  Well, it’s quite standardised now, the operation – simple and brief. All the parts of it are here: the incisions, the junction, the graft, the fibre, the regulator chip, the lenses. And the boost – the good and the bad, you see. All here.

  ‘All here.’

  Porter thought at first he was being offered a chocolate. The old man sat looking at it in his open palm: a gilt-wrapped dinner mint. Then he took another out of the drawer, silver-wrapped.

  ‘On disk. Four-centimetre disks. The silver one is by way of a history. A personal one, for you. The other has the technical information, a few hundred pages. It’s compressed – they’ll know what to do with it, the people you give it to.’

  Porter looked at the fancy coins.

  ‘What do I do with it?’ he said.

  Rogachev poked again in the drawer and withdrew two slim pouches, themselves not much wider than dinner mints.

  ‘They go in here. And the pouches in a belt.’ He found the belt, too, a canvas one. ‘And the belt next to your skin. The disks won’t deform or break. They’re encased, but don’t try to open the cases. It needs laboratory conditions to open them – below minus 240 Centigrade anyway, or they’ll be erased. There’s a temperature lock. That’s the most important thing to remember. Now – it’s late. Do you want a last drink?’

  It was indeed very late. It was almost three, and again they had talked the night away.

  Porter went and got himself a drink, and when he came back found the old man sitting with his eyes closed, deathly tired. But the disks were in the pouches, and the pouches in the belt, and on the desk under his hand was an envelope.