The tall slender soldier was pounding on the cab door. “Move this train!” she shouted. “Move this train right now!” She pulled the door open.
“I can’t,” said the engineer. “I’ll have to run them down.”
“Move!” the soldier cried. “I’ll take the responsibility. That mob is out for blood. You’re endangering the passengers. Move!”
“Just let them try to get on this train,” the redheaded woman said. She was kneeling in her seat. Her lovely face was contorted with rage. The mob outside was chanting, but Paul could hear only an undifferentiated roar.
“I can’t,” the engineer said. A passenger near the door screamed, then another near the back of the car. An old man was trying to calm a sobbing boy. Paul could see the edge of a crowbar between the doors of the car. It could not hold much longer.
“Damn it,” the soldier shouted, “get out of that cab before I haul you out.” She held the engineer by the collar. The man stumbled out and she climbed in quickly.
The train suddenly lurched forward. The brightly painted faces disappeared. Muffled thumps sounded against the train, shaking it slightly. Then they were on clear magnetic track, moving again. The engineer had collapsed on the floor next to Paul, holding his face in his hands.
Paul looked away from the windows, feeling nauseated. All the illnesses of the past century seemed to have reached their fruition. He thought of the flame-filled sky of Dallas and wondered if they would burn themselves out at last. He so often felt like an observer of the world around him, marveling sometimes at the irrationality of humanity as one might wonder at strange customs or superstitions. At other times he was in the grip of a feeling close to despair, worrying about humanity’s aberrations and seeing the seeds of the disease in his own mind as well. But now he felt fear, a blind unreasoning fear of the others of his own kind. He had never felt that way about people before. He thought about his own work, his dreams of seeing humanity on other worlds, and wondered if he had only been aiding the spread of a cancer throughout the galaxy.
“Paul,” Chang was saying, “Paul, are you all right?” The words seemed to float to him through a fog. He managed to shake off the feeling and nodded. Then he squatted next to the engineer, hoping to console the man. “My God, my God,” the engineer moaned.
“Served the bastards right,” the redheaded woman muttered.
The train hurtled on through the night.
Paul was relieved to be back in the Midwest, to be home again. He had spent three days in Dallas with Morris Chang, trying to aid some of those who had fled the city. He had led medics to the injured, brought coffee to those waiting for word about their homes and families, and reunited a father with his missing son. When he left Dallas, after things were calmer, his friend Morris had decided temporarily to house a family whose home had been destroyed. He had wondered if he should leave, but Morris had persuaded him that the family needed the guest bedroom more than Paul’s presence.
Paul stood in the small train station, inhaling the crisp winter air. He had almost expected to see rain here too, but everything appeared unchanged. A white blanket of snow covered the ground in front of him and the city across the river from the station had a silvery glitter in the sunshine.
At last he saw the stocky form of Jonathan Aschenbach trudging toward him. “Am I glad to see you,” he said as Jon approached. “I feel as though I’ve been away for years.”
“You don’t know how relieved I was when you called,” Jon said. “After what I heard, I didn’t know if we’d ever see you again.” Paul picked up his suitcase and they walked toward Jon’s car.
“I heard it was worse in other areas,” Paul said. “I expected to find nothing here when I got back.”
“Well, there were wild parties, and some naked folk running around in the snow, but I guess we’re basically stodgy. Only two cases of arson in the whole city.” They stopped next to the car, a small dingy beige model that had seen a lot of wear. Jon opened the door and Paul hoisted his suitcase into the back seat.
“Thanks for picking me up, Jon.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Thank God Morris Chang lives where he does.” Paul climbed into the car. “He keeps most of his notes at home. A whole general theory of cosmology could have gone up in smoke.”
Jon drove the car out of the station’s parking lot toward the new stretch of automated highway. As they approached the highway, Jon punched out his destination and the car moved along the access ramp, shooting out automatically into the stream of traffic.
“You can relax now,” Paul said. Jon was still watching the highway attentively, holding the steering wheel with his hands.
“I still don’t trust these highways,” Jon said. “I’d rather stay prepared for an emergency. It’s hard for me just to let go of the wheel and let the highway take over.”
Paul had no difficulty in trusting the highway, feeling safer on it than on roads where cars were operated manually. The automated highways were a relatively new development and he doubted that they would soon replace local roads, but they were useful for traveling long distances. Although trains were popular, and necessary for traveling to cities where cars were not allowed, many people were too used to private transportation to give it up. The cars, with their nonpolluting engines, hydrogen fuel, and safety equipment, lacked some speed and maneuverability when driven manually. But on the automated highways, run by remote control electronically, they could travel at speeds up to one hundred miles an hour. All things considered, Paul regarded the cars as an improvement over the ones he had driven in his youth.
“I think Hidey wants to talk to you,” Jon went on. “He asked me to tell you to get hold of him right away, as soon as he found out I was picking you up.”
“Well, I feel like relaxing today, and I have some lecture notes of work on. I’ll call him later on this week.”
“He said it was pretty important.” Jon seemed to be forcing the words out.
“You still don’t approve of the whole thing, do you.” Jon did not have to reply. Paul and Hidey had talked with him about cloning, partly because Hidey wanted to hear another point of view on the project and partly because of friendship. They had been friends ever since college. Hidey had eventually gone into genetics; both Paul and Jon had been students of astrophysics. Jon had shown great promise in the field and acquired his doctorate before making a decision to which Paul was not even now fully reconciled. Jon had decided to become a minister, after years in which he had flaunted his atheism. He was now the minister at a Protestant chapel near the university where Paul taught. Although he occasionally helped Paul with some of his papers, Jon’s energies were taken up most of the time by his clerical duties.
Jon, as many clergymen were now, was closer to being a mystic than the sort of minister Paul remembered from his childhood. It was the universe itself and the principles behind it that Jon worshipped rather than a patriarchal God. He spoke of Jesus as an example rather than as the Son of God. The traditional concept of a deity was as dead for Jon as for Paul. Jon would have no difficulty in finding his ideas compatible with other religions or even with Paul’s agnosticism. Jon had rejected further work in astrophysics not because it conflicted with his beliefs, but because it would take time away from tending to those who might need his aid and advice.
Paul might mourn the loss of Jon’s scientific abilities, but he could not logically object to the choice his friend had made. He and Hidey had started college in high spirits, being inquisitive and often reckless. Jon, an older student whom Paul had met as a sophomore, had been scarred and embittered by his Army service in Vietnam. His needs and motivations were different from those of Paul and Hidey. Paul had never fully seen into the heart of the stocky, gray-eyed young veteran. Even now, the silver-haired minister would not talk of what he had experienced during war.
Jon had been startled when Paul and Hidey revealed the clone project to him. Paul knew that Jon would not raise objections base
d on purely theological grounds. Those objections were in a sense unverifiable. But Jon did have ethical objections.
“You must realize,” Jon had said as the three sat in Paul’s living room, “that you are violating a rather basic principle here. We’ve always assumed that any kind of experimentation with human beings requires the informed consent of those concerned. You must have their permission and their decision has to be based on knowledge of the possible consequences, they have to be aware of the dangers involved. I assume you two are aware of any dangers as far as you’re concerned, but what about the clones you produce? You can’t get their permission for the experiment as they do not yet exist. Yet their lives may be filled with problems you can’t even predict. I’m not just talking about the way people treat them. You don’t really know what they’ll be like. They may not be able to function except as a group. They may be almost morbidly close to one another.”
“That’s a silly supposition,” Hidey replied. “You can do better than that, Jon. We have the experience of identical twins to go by here. The bonds between twins may be strong ones, but they certainly don’t function only as one entity. And as for the rest of your argument, well, we might as well tell people not to have children, since the children can’t give their permission before they’re born.”
“Come on, that’s not the same at all. In fact, don’t we all believe that parents do have some responsibility for their unborn children, that they should-n’t bear them capriciously or without some concern for their welfare? People with diabetes or Tay-Sachs disease aren’t even allowed to have children unless they agree to have the embryo treated for these ailments.”
“This reminds me of what I used to say to my parents,” Paul said, trying to lighten the discussion. “Whenever they wouldn’t give me something I wanted, I’d tell them I didn’t ask to be born, that they were responsible for me. It was an irrefutable fact.”
“You’re evading my argument,” Jon continued, ignoring Paul’s comment. “You still have to violate a principle that I regard as basic as far as experimentation is concerned, and which is one of the reasons I’ve been opposed to most biological experimentation of whatever sort. And even if we leave that aside, consider the implications of cloning itself. If it works, and you haven’t given me any reason to think that it won’t, every narcissist alive will be trying to use it. You’ll be interfering with the course of human evolution with no conception of what the results might be. What would happen in the long run if even a sizable minority decided to reproduce in this way? You can’t know.”
“Abusus non tollit usum,” Paul answered. “We can’t refuse to use something simply because it may be misused. You ought to know that. We might as well have banned the use of fire because an arsonist could use it to burn down a home. The wedge cuts both ways, Jon, you know that. On those grounds we could ban anything for the first time.”
“Speaking more pragmatically,” Hidey said, “we’re assuming that there will be some kind of control over this. The moratorium will expire, but I think it’s unlikely that we’ll move from such a rigid restriction to no restrictions at all.”
“But you don’t know,” Jon said vehemently. “Scientists, as you well know, or should by now, don’t have everything to say about how their discoveries will be used. You seem to be doing this for only one reason, simply to see if it can be accomplished. That’s not good enough, not with anything as potentially volatile as this.”
“But wouldn’t you rather have us do it than some other group?” Hidey asked. “At least we’re aware of these problems. Someone else might not care. And there are some very humane reasons for wanting to clone somebody.
Parents who lose a child, say, and can’t have another, might want to have a clone of the child they lost.”
“Besides,” Paul said, “this isn’t a terribly radical proposal. Look at Hoyt’s experiments in brain chemistry. If he could work with people, he could theoretically drive a sane man to murder. Consider Lubaaya’s work on genetic manipulation. He’s got a gorilla in his office working as a file clerk. Or think about Simon and her miniaturized electrodes. They were feared once, but now they help thousands of epileptics live normal lives. Things like that would have far more radical consequences than anything Hidey’s doing.”
“That’s no argument,” Jon responded,”and you know it. You’re talking about the lesser of two evils.”
“Damn it, Jon,” Hidey said, “the option of cloning should be made available to people. You of all people shouldn’t have such contempt for ordinary human beings that you think they’ll automatically misuse anything that comes along. We can’t afford to lose valuable abilities simply because the person who possesses them has only one life in which to accomplish anything. And there may be other applications of the technique that we’re unaware of now, but which could be crucially important later on. By using cloned organs, for example, we might greatly extend the human life span. We could clone people who carry certain recessive traits, traits which, with the wrong parental partner, might become dominant and adversely affect their offspring. Such people could have cloned children until we can find a way of altering such genes.”
Hidey paused before going on. “I want to move on this project, and I have to do it now. I think the restrictions might be back with us before long, I’d bet on it. If we can accomplish something in the interim, and show people that something constructive can come out of such work, maybe they won’t be so frightened of it in the future. It’s ultimately self-defeating to restrict research out of fear. We have to use our knowledge constructively and you don’t do that by hiding from it and suppressing it.”
Hidey seemed weary after making that statement, and Paul noticed that Jon too was affected by it. The stocky minister fell silent, running his hands through his short gray hair and staring at the floor. At last Jon looked up again.
“Maybe I was wrong about some of your reasons,” Jon said. “But I still think, Hidey, that you also want to make a name for yourself in your field. You haven’t been able to do much under the moratorium and this may be your only chance. And maybe you,” he went on, turning to Paul, “need someone to at least partially relieve your loneliness since Eviane died. The clones will be your only children.”
“A name for this is worth making,” Hidey muttered.
“Is there something wrong with my wanting children?” Paul asked almost simultaneously.
“You’re both practical people,” Jon said softly, “especially you, Hidey, at least where your work is concerned. So consider something else. This project of yours may accomplish just the opposite of what you want. You’d like to see biological research open up after the moratorium expires, but your project might be the catalyst that would produce a reaction against what you want. It may be just the sort of thing that would bring about more restrictions.”
The car rushed along the highway. Paul glanced at Jon and wondered if he might have been right. What were his own motives anyway? He wasn’t really sure. Perhaps he was not really considering this business as carefully as he should but was simply letting himself be pushed into it. He had not even thought about how people might react to the project. He remembered the hysteria of New Year’s Eve and shuddered. Perhaps that should be his biggest worry.
“I still haven’t made up my mind, you know,” he said to Jon. In a way this was true, yet Paul felt as though he had already assented to the experiment and the rest was simply a matter of details. He knew that he would go through with it eventually and had in fact already started planning for it. “I’ve been thinking about what you said, Jon.”
“I doubt that it’ll have much effect on you. If you agreed with me, you would have already dropped any idea of participating in this business.” Jon looked away from the road and directly at him.
There was nothing to say in reply. “I imagine,” Jon went on, “that you’ll probably go ahead. Well, I’m still your friend and Hidey’s too. I have a feeling you may need all the friends you’ve got
pretty soon.”
Paul thought of the Dallas mobs. There was no telling what public reaction would be and how much of it would focus on himself. Although Hidey and his people would be conducting the experiment, it was Paul whom they would clone and Paul who would be granted, in people’s minds, the semblance of immortality. What would they think of a man who had been duplicated several times?
Paul wondered if his cloned children would live to curse his name. He had decided to raise them himself. Hidey did not think this was necessary, but Paul did. He would be their social father, yet more than a father. They would literally be physical reflections of him. There was no way he could avoid this responsibility. He had almost welcomed it. Was it then a need to alleviate his loneliness?
“I don’t really feel that I’m doing anything wrong,” he said to Jon. “I know that’s not the most reliable indicator, but it’s served me well enough in the past.”
Jon was silent. Paul knew that his friend was not about to provide him with any comforting rationalizations. The car was suddenly filled with a loud buzzing noise and a light on the dashboard began to flash. Jon resumed control of the vehicle. They turned off the highway and onto the road that led to Paul’s house.
“We have to move fast,” Hidey said. “There’s no time to lose.”
Hidey Takamura, at fifty, was still a youthful man. Paul often asked if he had been engaging in gerontological research. Hidey’s hair was still black, his face unlined and his weight the same as when they were undergraduates. Hidey’s office was already clouded by the smoke of his cigarettes, which he continued to use in defiance of what Paul considered good sense.
Paul was sitting with Emma Valois in front of Hidey’s desk. Emma, a psychiatrist, was also involved in the project. She would not be working in the laboratory but would study the psychological development of the clones after their birth. She was a tall lanky woman in her thirties with prematurely graying brown hair and hazel eyes. She was also one of the few people Paul knew who displayed complete self-confidence and control of circumstances around her. She had been examining Paul since November, trying to uncover any psychological flaws that might affect the clones or indicate that Paul was a poor prospect.
Cloned Lives Page 3