Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5

by Eric Flint

  He gazed at her a moment longer, then nodded, turned and walked off.

  II

  On leaving Barbara, Gloge went down several floors and stationed himself behind a pile of shipping crates. These were in a passage across from the locked door of the main photo lab storeroom. On the dot of 3:15, a door farther along the passage opened. A lanky scowling, redheaded young man wearing a stained white smock over his street clothes, pushing a loaded handtruck ahead of him, appeared and turned down the passage towards Gloge and the laboratory storeroom.

  It was the end of the lab shift. Gloge had discovered that one of the regular duties of Vincent Strather, Barbara Ellington's boy friend, was to return certain materials to the storeroom at this hour.

  Peering through the slats of a crate, Dr. Gloge watched Strather's approach. He was, he realized, much more tense and nervous now than he had been when he had given Barbara the injection. Of himself, Vincent Strather was not the kind of subject Dr. Gloge would have chosen—the young man was too angry, too bitter. But the fact that he was Barbara's friend and that they spent their spare time together, should be useful in the further steps of the experiment—so it seemed to Dr. Gloge.

  Sliding his hand under his coat where the jet gun rested, he moved quickly out into the passage and across it toward Vince Strather. . . .

  Even as he pressed the trigger, he knew his nervousness had betrayed him.

  The needle tip of the gun had been too far away from Strather; a foot; almost two feet too far. At that greater distance the jet stream, emerging from the needle at nearly a thousand miles an hour, had time to spread and slow down. It caught Strather high up on the shoulder blade and tugged at his skin as it entered. For Strather, the sensation must have been that of a sharp impact. He jumped and cried out, then stood shuddering, as if in shock—long enough for Gloge to slip the little gun back into its holster and close up his coat.

  But that was all. Vince Strather whirled. His hands caught Gloge by the arms, and his angry face glared down into the Doctor's.

  "You damn jerk!" he shouted. "What did you hit me with just now? Who the hell are you, anyway?"

  For a moment, Dr. Gloge felt appalled. Then he tried to twist out of Strather's hard grip. "I don't know what you're talking about!" he said breathlessly.

  He stopped. He saw that Vince was gazing past his shoulder. The young man's grip relaxed suddenly, and Gloge was able to free himself. He turned and looked behind him. He felt a stunned, incredulous dismay.

  John Hammond was coming along the passage, gray eyes fastened questioningly upon them. Gloge could only hope desperately that he had not been in sight when the gun was being fired.

  Hammond came up and said in a tone of easy authority: "Dr. Gloge, what's going on here?"

  "Doctor!" Vince Strather repeated, in a startled voice.

  Gloge put puzzled indignation in his tone: "This young man appears to be under the impression that I struck him just now. Needless to say, I did nothing of the kind and don't understand what gave him such an idea."

  He looked frowningly back at Strather. Strather's gaze shifted uncertainly between them. He was obviously abashed by John Hammond's presence and Gloge's title but not yet over his anger.

  He said sullenly, "Well, something hit me. At least it felt that way! When I looked around, he was standing there. So I thought he'd done it."

  "I was passing you," Dr. Gloge corrected him. "You exclaimed something and I stopped." He shrugged, smiled. "And that's all I did, young man! I certainly had no reason to strike you."

  Strather said grudgingly, "I guess I was mistaken."

  Dr. Gloge said promptly, "Then let's call it an error and forget it!" He held out his hand.

  Strather reached out reluctantly and shook it, then looked at Hammond. When Hammond remained silent, he turned away in obvious relief, took one of the boxes from the truck and disappeared into the storeroom with it.

  Hammond said, "I was on my way to your office, Doctor, where I expect to have an interview with you in a few minutes on the Omega project. I presume you were heading in that direction."

  "Yes, yes." Gloge fell into step beside the bigger man. He was thinking: "Did he see anything?"

  His companion gave no sign.

  A few minutes later, as he gazed across the gleaming desk of his private office at John Hammond, Gloge had the uneasy feeling of a criminal confronted by the law. It had always amazed him that this man—Hammond—could make him feel at very least like a small boy.

  Yet the discussion that now developed began with a reassuring statement from the bigger man:

  "This is a completely informal conversation, Doctor. I am not representing President Sloan at the moment—even less the Board of Regents. That has been deliberately arranged. It will make it possible for both of us to speak quite frankly."

  Dr. Gloge said, "Have there been complaints about my work here?"

  Hammond nodded. "You can't have remained entirely unaware of it, Doctor. You've been asked to amplify your project reports, make them more detailed and specific, three times within the last two months alone."

  Gloge was reluctantly deciding that he would have to tell some of his data.

  He said with apparent openness, "My reluctance to communicate has been due to a strictly scientific dilemma. Things were happening in the experiment but their meaning was not clear to me until very recently."

  "There is a feeling," said Hammond in his steady voice, "that your project is failing."

  Dr. Gloge said sharply, "The accusation is unworthy!"

  Hammond looked at him, said, "No accusations have been made—as yet. That's why I'm here today. You have reported no successes within the past six months, you know."

  "Mr. Hammond, there have been many failures. Within the limited framework of the present stages of the project experiments, that is exactly what should be expected."

  "Limited in what way?"

  "Limited to the lower, less complicated forms of animal life."

  "That," said Hammond mildly, "is a limitation you yourself have imposed on the project."

  Dr. Gloge agreed. "True. The conclusions I've been able to form at such lower levels have been invaluable. And the fact that the results of the experiments have been almost invariably negative, in the sense that as a usual result the subject animals evolved into nonviable forms, is completely unimportant."

  "As a usual result," Hammond repeated. "Then not all of them died quickly?"

  Gloge bit his lip. That was not an admission he had intended to make at this initial stage in the discussion.

  He said, reluctantly, "In a respectable percentage of the cases, the subject animals survived the first injection."

  "And the second?"

  Gloge hesitated. But there was no turning back. "The survival percentage drops very sharply at that point," he said. "I don't recall the exact figures."

  "And the third?"

  He was really being forced to make revelations. Dr. Gloge said, "To date, three animals have survived the third injection. All three were of the same species—Cryptobranchus."

  "The hellbender," said Hammond. "Well! A large salamander . . . Now, the third injection, according to your theory, should advance an animal along the evolutionary line stimulated in it to a point which might be reached through half a million years of natural evolution. Would you say such a result was achieved in these three cases?"

  Dr. Gloge said, "Since Cryptobranchus might be considered with some reason to be a species in which evolutionary development is at a practical standstill, I should say that much more was achieved."

  "What were the observable changes?"

  Gloge had been bracing himself as he made one admission after another. He was striving to decide exactly when he could start resisting the interrogation.

  Now! he thought.

  He said aloud, trying to appear frank, "Mr. Hammond, I'm beginning to realize that I was in error in not making more positive reports. I can't believe that you are really i
nterested in these superficial accounts. Why not let me summarize my observations for you?"

  Hammond's gray eyes were calm and steady. "Go ahead," he said in an even tone.

  Gloge outlined his conclusions, then. The interesting features were two-fold, probably equally important.

  One of these was that there remained in all life forms a wide evolutionary choice. For reasons that were not yet clear, the Omega serum stimulated one of these potential developments and no subsequent stimulation could alter the mutational direction. Most of these developments led to extinction.

  "The second feature," said Gloge, "is that the chances for success increase as the life form becomes more highly evolved."

  Hammond said, interested, "What you're saying is that when you finally start working with the more active mammals and eventually monkeys, you expect more and better results?"

  "I have no doubt about it," said Dr. Gloge, firmly.

  A secondary aspect—Gloge continued—was that brain areas which controlled the inhibition of simple reflexes often seemed to be the source of new neural growth and of sensory extension. The serum apparently intensified these effort points, increasing their operational flexibility. What went wrong was that all too often such one-sided inhibitory amplification ended in non-survival.

  However, in Cryptobranchus, the roof of the mouth developed small functional gills. The hide thickened into segmented, horny armor. Short, grooved fangs were acquired and connected to glands that produced a mild hematoxic venom. The eyes disappeared, but areas in the skin developed sight-level sensitivity to light.

  Gloge shrugged, finished: "There were other changes, but these would seem the most dramatic ones."

  "They sound sufficiently dramatic," said Hammond. "What happened to the two specimens which were not dissected?"

  Dr. Gloge realized that his diversion had not worked. "They were given the fourth injection, of course," he said resignedly.

  "The one," Hammond asked, "which was to advance them to a point a million years along the evolutionary line they were following—"

  "Or," Dr. Gloge said, "to the peak-point of that evolutionary line. The equating of the four stages of the stimulation process to the passing of specific periods of normal evolutionary development—twenty thousand years, fifty thousand, five hundred thousand, and one million years—is, of course, hypothetical and generalized. My calculations indicate that in many species of which we have knowledge in that area the two points might be approximately the same."

  Hammond nodded. "I understand, Doctor. And what happened after your evolved Cryptobranchus received the fourth injection?"

  "I cannot give you a precise answer to that, Mr. Hammond. In appearance it was a very rapid breakdown of the entire structure. Within two hours, both specimens literally dissolved," Gloge answered tensely.

  "In other words," Hammond said, "Point Omega Stimulation directs Cryptobranchus and, in fact, every species to which it has been applied into one of the many blind alleys of evolution."

  Dr. Gloge said curtly, "So far it has done that."

  Hammond was silent, then: "One more point," he said. "It's been suggested that you might consider taking on a sufficiently qualified assistant in this work. Research Alpha probably could obtain Sir Hubert Roland for a project of such interest."

  Dr. Gloge said coldly, "With all due respect for Sir Hubert Roland's accomplishments, I would regard him as a meddler here! If the attempt is made to force him on me, I shall resist it."

  "Well," Hammond said easily, "let's not make any unalterable decisions at the moment. As I mentioned, this has been a completely informal discussion." He glanced at his watch. "I'm afraid we'll have to terminate it now. Would you have time to see me in my office one week from today at ten o'clock, Doctor? I wish to carry this matter a little further, and that will be my first free time."

  Dr. Gloge had difficulty restraining his feeling of triumph. Today was Wednesday. He had selected it as his starting time because he had wanted his subjects to be away from their place of work over the weekend.

  Between now and Saturday, he could undoubtedly accomplish the second injections on the young couple.

  By the following Wednesday, the third, perhaps even the fourth shot would have been administered and all strong reactions either taken care of or the experiment terminated.

  To cover up his elation, Gloge said in the tone of one making a concession, "As you wish, Mr. Hammond."

  III

  Dr. Henry Gloge was awake much of the night, vacillating between hopes and fears of what he would find when he went to check on the first results of Point Omega Stimulation in human beings. If they were obviously negative, he would have only one choice.

  It could be called murder.

  Dr. Gloge approached that subject in a detached, undisturbed frame of mind. He had several times in his work secretly carried on a more advanced experiment while, ostensibly, following the step-by-step scientific method. Thus fortified by special knowledge, he had in the past been able to plan lower-step work with the sometimes intuitive insights gained from his unpublicized private investigation.

  The importance of the Omega project to him justified a similar expedient. Objectively considered, in the light of such a goal, the lives of the two young people he had chosen for the experiment were of no value. Their destruction, if it became necessary, would be in the same category as the slaughter of other experimental subjects.

  With human beings there was, of course, an element of personal risk involved for himself. It was that realization that troubled him, now that he had made the first injection. Time and again, Dr. Gloge awakened out of a nightmare-riddled half-sleep, to quail anew at the knowledge and to lie sweating with anxiety until he slid back into exhausted slumber.

  When four o'clock came, it was almost with relief that he arose, fortified himself with several tablets of a powerful stimulant, made a last check of his preparations, and set out across town toward the house where the Ellington girl had a room. He drove in a black panel truck that he had bought and equipped for his experiment.

  He arrived at his destination about a quarter past five. It was a quiet residential street, a tree-lined avenue in one of the older sections of the city, approximately eight miles west of the Research Alpha complex. Two hundred yards from the house, Dr. Gloge pulled the small truck up to the curb on the opposite side of the street and shut off the motor.

  For the past week, a miniature audio pickup-recorder, inserted under the bark of a sycamore tree across the street from the house, had been trained on Barbara Ellington's second-floor room, its protruding head cunningly painted to resemble a rusty nail. Dr. Gloge now took the other part of the two-piece instrument from the dashboard compartment of the truck, inserted the plug in his ear, and switched it on.

  After perhaps half a minute of twisting the tuning dial back and forth, he felt his face whiten. He had tested the instrument at night on two occasions during the past week. It was quite sensitive enough to pick up the sounds of breathing and even the heartbeat of anyone in the room; and so he knew with absolute certainty that Barbara Ellington's room had no living occupant at this moment.

  Quickly, he attached the recording playback mechanism to the little device, turned it back one hour, and put the plug into his ear again.

  Almost at once, he relaxed.

  Barbara Ellington had been in that room, asleep, an hour ago, breath even and undisturbed heart beat strong and slow. Dr. Gloge had listened to similar recordings of too many experimental animals to have the slightest doubt. This subject had moved up successfully, unharmed, to the first stage of Point Omega Stimulation!

  The impact of his triumph after the ghastly fears of the night was very strong. Dr. Gloge needed several minutes to compose himself. Finally, he was able to move the recorder by ten-minute steps to a point where the Ellington girl obviously was awake and moving about the room. He listened with absorbed fascination, feeling almost able to visualize from moment to moment exactly what
she was doing. At one point, she stood still for some seconds and then uttered a low, warm laugh which sent thrills of delight through the listening scientist. Perhaps a minute later, he heard a door being closed. After that, there was only the empty, lifeless silence which had startled him so badly.

  Barbara Ellington had awakened that Thursday morning with a thought she had never had before. It was: "Life doesn't have to be serious!"

  She was contemplating this frivolous notion with the beginning of amazement when a second thought came which she had also never had in her entire previous existence. "What is this mad drive to enslave myself to a man?"

  The thought seemed natural and obviously true. It had no general rejection of men in it. She still—it seemed to her—loved Vince . . . but differently.