We say nothing more even though I’m intensely curious about this human cloning thing. How is that related to the cats and tigers? Do they use a host as they did with Duchess? Who is the host? Or is it who will be the host? Where are they in their experimentation?
We remain side by side like an old couple not needing to do more than touch hands. I think about Tanya and wish she was with me right now instead of Aileen because I’m afraid my self-control will not be enough and I’ll give into my desire. I can feel my two inner selves battling for control–the good and the bad–the faithful and the cheater. The faithful intercedes and chases the cheater away. I feel virtuous, but only for a time. I know that in minutes or hours or days the cheater will return.
I try to think of nothing.
Chapter 17
“Flies from the forest, launches from the water, lays invisible for hours, materializes from thin air.”
–Spell of the Tiger
When I open my eyes the clock reads 3:39. I’m alone. I roll out of bed and onto my feet, wonder if I dreamt it all. I go into the bathroom to pee and then head for the kitchen for a drink. At the door I stop. The towel is still hanging over the control panel by two push pins. I take them and the towel with me to get a bottle of water. I desire a beer, but right now, in all things, I need to control my desire.
The day is uneventful; a quiet Sunday. I attend another memorial in the boardroom, this time for Thomas. It’s somber. Victor says that Thomas was like a son to him, that he personally traveled to Bangladesh to meet this young man who Wolf recommended, and his family and that he would accompany his body back to Bangladesh. He speaks for fifteen minutes about Thomas and his wonderful father and mother and siblings, and his contribution to the Sans Sanssabre mission. I try to get a read on Victor, his true feelings, but I’m unable to penetrate his closely held aura. I wonder if my trying is what is causing the block. Things will occur to me suddenly while talking with someone or observing them talking with someone else. That’s how my read on Aileen came about. I didn’t try. She just jumped out at me like words and pictures on a holographic page. It was as if she wanted to be read.
Aileen is at the memorial. Her eyes meet mine briefly then dart away. Otherwise she avoids me; almost too obviously as I’m sure I am doing with her. She is nervous that her yearning for me will be noticed by Victor. I’m just as nervous.
Lance is also there. He catches my attention. “I’ll be traveling to Bangladesh with Victor,” he says. “We’ll get together when I get back and get you to work. I hear you’ve been researching though.”
I tell him what I’ve been doing. I also mention that I have not gotten a tour of the lab as yet, that Doctor Zitnik doesn’t much like me.
“I’ll talk to him and get you in. He doesn’t get along with a lot of people. He’s very focused on his work and sees anyone coming into his lab as an annoyance, a disruption.”
“It’s much more than that,” I say.
“In what way?”
“He sees me as a tabloid writer who’s going to twist Sans Sanssabre’s mission into something grotesque and evil.”
“I’ll talk to him about that, remind him that everything you’ll write will be reviewed by me or Mister Vandermill.”
“That’s what I tried to tell him but I don’t think he believes me. He doesn’t like reporters, period.”
“We’ll get together when I get back. Meanwhile I’ll get you a tour.”
Henri Cassell approaches. “Tour of what, Lance?”
“The lab. Zitnik is not being cordial.”
Henri laughs. “Since when is Zitnik ever cordial?” He turns to me. “I hear you went face-to-face with Duchess. I’m impressed. I don’t think I could have done that without losing some bodily waste products.”
“I admit things were getting a bit loose.” I have yet to figure Henri out. The last time I talked to him he escaped me in a drunken stupor. Now that he has all his facilities he’s willing to engage me again. I sense he has an agenda, that his approaching chat with me is other than just making chat.
“Where did you learn that about Bengals?”
“That they don’t like the human face? I do a lot of reading and researching. It’s a belief in Bangladesh, one of those stories that’s passed about local folk.”
“Then you didn’t know if it’d work, did you?”
I grin. “No I didn’t. I was doing a lot of subconscious praying, I think. In any case, turning and running away didn’t seem like a smart option.”
“I’m impressed,” Lance says and then walks away.
Henri watches Lance until he is out of earshot and then says, “You need to get out of here while you can, Zach.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not so deep into us that you can’t get out. Sign an agreement that you’ll never write or speak of what you have seen here and you’ll be able to leave.”
I open my mouth to ask what he is talking about, but I’m stopped by his hand on my arm. “That’s all I have to say. Take heed.” He walks away after Lance.
After the memorial and a lunch I go down to the library and browse through the stacks to see what else is there that I might not have taken notice of before. I half expect to see something like, ‘The Art of Human Cloning,’ or ‘Making Babies From DNA, for Dummies,’ or ‘How to Create the Super Human Race.’ Of course there is no such thing or anything even close.
Take heed! Those two words still repeat in my head as I browse. Take heed of what? Get out while you can! That has been my thought very recently but I’m curious as to whether my reason for needing to get out is different from Henri’s. Aileen warned me as well and she didn’t deny human cloning when I brought it up, but we got sidetracked. I think about one of the things we got sidetracked on and feel another sexual rush. I force it away.
I leave the library and note that the lab is empty. Is this the only lab? Is there another? All I’ve seen down here is this and the clinic where McCully was killed. This is a huge building. There is likely a lot more than what meets the eye. Is there a top secret lab where top secret experiments are going on? I try to envision how the elevator opens compared to the main floor. It faces the front of the building, so what I am looking at sets under the foyer area. My question is what is behind me, behind the elevator? The clinic is on one side, sort of between the lab and whatever else there is. Will that be included in the tour?
Get out while you can.
Should I not take the tour? Should I say I want to leave, tear up my contract and sign a no disclosure statement; tell them I’ll give the money back? Lord knows where I’d find it. I’m sure Tanya has quickly disposed of it.
Get out while you can.
I’m not so sure I could. It may already be too late. If I really believed my life was in danger would I be so calm about it? Is death really imminent here or is it all only a figment of my imagination?
Take heed.
Get out while you can.
At what level was Henri talking? If it’s so bad why is he still here? Doctor McCully was murdered because of Victor’s jealousy. It may be the same reason I feel a threat on myself. Maybe that’s what Henri is talking about. He’s giving me warning because it’s a well known fact that Victor has a vicious jealous streak.
There is more to this company than you see.
Aileen made implications that something else was going on. She didn’t deny human cloning. I’ve got to talk to her some more.
The elevator door opens. I turn around to find Doctor Zitnik scowling at me.
“Tomorrow at 10:00 sharp,” he says. “If you’re late, the tour is off.”
He opens the door.
“What about now?” I say. “I’m not doing anything right now.”
He renews his scowl. “I am!” The door closes behind him.
I punch the button to the elevator which has already closed. It opens. I start to step in and hear Zitnik again. He has returned. “On second thought I’ll be even busier tom
orrow. Let’s do it now and get it over with.”
I feel a little obstinate but I push it away. “Wonderful.” I follow him through the door and down the hall, irritated because I have no way of taking notes or photos.
Inside the lab I spend the first few seconds repeating in my head the combination to the cipher lock. I watched him punch in 2-8-4-5-?-8. The fifth number I didn’t catch. I picture the key pad and run it a couple times. I’m not sure why I want it but knowledge of this nature never hurts, unless you get caught trying to use it. The key is don’t get caught.
Even though I’ve been able to see the lab from the room at the base of the elevator I still had this thought that there was something I couldn’t see, like experimental animals growing in test-tubes or cages, or jars of failed embryo experiments. Instead what I’m looking at is tamer than my high school biology lab. No mice running through a maze, no refrigerator full of ready to dissect frogs, no skeleton in the corner. Just clean, well-organized counters with a lot of equipment, much of which I don’t recognize.
Zitnik makes a phone call from a desk in the corner and then returns to where I’m standing surveying the room. “Some things I will tell you, Mister Price, and some things I will not. Better than ninety-five percent of what we do is general knowledge throughout the world. Nothing secret; procedures you can find by browsing the Internet. I assume you have some knowledge considering the time you’ve spent in our library. With but a few exceptions every cell in an animal contains all the DNA information necessary to recreate the entire animal. The focus by most in attempts at cloning has been to use skin cells as they were determined to be the best bet, the strongest.”
“You didn’t have skin cells,” I say. “At best you had old bones and fossils. Am I right there?”
He laughs. “Let me tell you how it began. Victor and Aileen were working together on a site a few miles from the La Brea pits about ten years ago, private property that Victor had bought on a hunch. Aileen was exploring when a homeless man approached her ranting on about a secret cave. He was hoping for a monetary award. Her curiosity overcame her fear and she followed him.”
“How can there be a cave in that area that nobody knows about?”
“It’s theorized that the opening was the result of a recent earthquake. The cave turned out to be a small cavern. Ms. Bravelli called Victor. At that point they knew they had something good. Just how good, they had no idea. The cavern was not part of Victor’s property. He researched it and found there was a recent zoning inquiry as part of future development intentions. The owner quickly became a rich man as Victor purchased it for three times its estimated developed value.”
“But you said they still didn’t know what they had.”
“They saw what appeared to be the remains of various animals embedded in the walls and floors. That was enough. Besides, it was pocket change to Victor. If he lost the entire investment, no big deal to him.”
“What did they actually find?”
“You will see. It was another year before they found it. Victor spent another ton of money getting it out quietly, totally preserved in its stable state. By that time he had part of this building built and ready. He had no idea what he was going to do with it but he knew he had to take it somewhere remote and away from the curious eyes of the government.”
“So he brought it here.”
“Certainly. If the government got a hold of it who knows where it would be now.” He steps over to a door opposite from where we entered. “Lance said to show you everything having to do with how our sabre-toothed cats came to be.” He opens the door. “I’ll remind you that what you are about to see is not for public or government dissemination.”
The hall we step into runs equidistance in both directions before going around a corner at one end and terminating at an elevator at the other. We go to the elevator. Zitnik punches in another code I miss altogether. The elevator opens and we enter.
“What we are about to go into was designed according to specs by NASA. It’s the same design used in the space shuttles, except reverse.”
“Reverse?”
We drop one floor and stop. There are two doors out of the elevator. The door opposite that which we entered opens after Zitnik enters another code onto another key pad. We step into a vestibule.
Zitnik explains. “Instead of being in a vacuum and needing to maintain a human-friendly atmosphere, we are in an atmosphere, unfriendly to our specimen, and need to maintain a perfect vacuum. We also need to be able to work within this vacuum ourselves.”
The lights down here are amber, and very dim. The elevator itself was the same way. He hands me a set of strange looking goggles.
“Put these on and then flip this switch. These are night goggles. Without them you can’t see much. With them you can see everything.”
I do so and the room comes alive. It’s not much larger than a standard bedroom. On one wall are what looks like space suits. There are plaques over the top of each with a name; Victor, Aileen, Jacob, and Peter. On the opposite wall are several windows which remind me of the thick drive-up windows at the bank. In between the two windows is a door that looks to be penetrable only with a small nuclear device. Zitnik walks over to one of the windows. I go to the other.
“Here is our sabre-toothed cat taken from the Bravelli Caverns in southern California. It’s roughly twenty-eight thousand years old.”
“Bravelli Caverns!” What I see is a black, shiny rock about eight feet high by about ten feet wide. It’s partially hollowed out in the middle, around what is obviously an animal, mostly embedded. I don’t see how they can tell it’s a sabre-tooth. “Is that hair?”
“Oh yes. This male specimen was no more than two years old at the time it was locked in this block of obsidian.”
“Obsidian? Amazing! How did it stay so intact?” I see a tooth now.
“It was a circumstance that could probably never be repeated–a perfectly timed event in which the cat got caught in the way of a river of lava. We surmised that he ran off in one direction to escape the heat and fell into a ravine filled with water. A leg of the lava, already beginning to cool, likely followed him in, engulfed him as the water boiled and then very quickly cooled the lava, creating the obsidian, and trapping him inside. In the process all the oxygen was sucked from him and the space he took up to create a perfect vacuum. The perfect fossil, you might say, suspended in time.”
I’m starting to see better definition now. “So you were able to extract DNA of your choosing.”
“Not exactly. We hoped for actual sperm. No such luck. The sperm was there but very hard and brittle. Still, we were able to extract perfect DNA strands.”
“So this is why you were so successful.”
“Not entirely. All this did was take the sabre-toothed cat up to the level of Dolly the sheep, Copy Cat, Merwin’s kangaroo and all the other live clones that are being experimented with around the world. We still had the same problem they had in that it would take up to a hundred or more failures before getting a success. Not good odds as you unkindly pointed out on the day you arrived.”
“You were the one who said it was a crapshoot.” If he thinks I’m going to apologize in exchange for bringing me down here, I think not. “I get the feeling your procedures differ from all those others. Maybe you’ve gained control of your crapshoot.”
“Not complete control, but damn close. The secret is in the medium in which the initial bonding and subsequent growth takes place.”
“You said you only had two failures.”
“Actually two that terminated themselves. The third we terminated at the hundredth split when we saw problems growing. After that we understood what the balance was and have had nothing but successes.
“Shall we go?” he says.
“I have never seen obsidian that big,” I say. I hand the goggles back to Zitnik.
“It was an amazing find.”
“How many?”
“Pardon?”
“You said you have since had nothing but successes. How many would that be?”
He says nothing as we rise in the elevator. When we step into the bright light of the hall, he says, “Six.”
I stop and ask, “The triplets. Are they considered one or three?”
“One.”
“Simon and Tricia make two. Where are the other four?”
“I have reached the limit of what I can tell you. We can go into the lab and I will show you our basic procedures and a little about the medium in which we incubate our growing cells. Unfortunately I cannot show you the actual chemical makeup of the medium because that is the crux of our success. In any company there are only a select few who know the secrets such as this so don’t feel I am purposely avoiding providing you that information.”
“I understand. But you can’t share with me the story of the other four sabre-tooth births?”
“Ask Lance for that information. I normally wouldn’t have taken you down in the vault except I was given the order by him.” He pokes his hands into his lab coat. “I have been very cordial, I believe. If you would like to see the remainder of the lab we can do that. Otherwise I have work to get back to.”
I accept the remainder of the tour; rather technical with talk of borrowing chromosomes by removing the nucleus from a cell and then injecting that into the egg, which has first been stripped of its contents. At first I get a picture of an egg and a hypodermic needle, but then he explains how small this egg and the chromosome are. When I ask how he does that, he says, “Very carefully. My procedure is extremely complex because of using twenty-eight thousand year-old DNA strands.”
It all goes over my head and because I didn’t bring a notebook or a recorder much of it will be gone before I get to my apartment. That’s okay though. The most interesting part, the sabre-toothed cat embedded in the obsidian, is still fresh in my mind. The technical stuff I can always come back for when I need it. Besides, I may not complete this assignment at the rate things are going. There’s going to be another death. I can feel the early rumblings of it deep in whatever center in me controls these psychic revelations. This is odd as I’ve averaged two a year over my lifetime. This is my second in a week.
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 13