Watchers (32 page)

Lem said, “In fact, a dog probably could be genetically altered to be able to speak. Might even be easy, I don’t know. But to give it the necessary vocal apparatus, the right kind of tongue and lips . . . that’d mean drastically altering its appearance, which is no good for the Pentagon’s purposes. So
these
dogs wouldn’t speak. Communication would no doubt have to be through an elaborate sign language.”

“You’re not laughing,” Walt said. “This has got to be a fucking joke, so why aren’t you laughing?”

“Think about it,” Lem said patiently. “In peacetime . . . imagine the president of the United States presenting the Soviet premier with a one-year-old golden retriever as a gift from the American people. Imagine the dog living in the premier’s home and office, privy to the most secret talks of the USSR’s highest Party officials. Once in a while, every few weeks or months, the dog might manage to slip out at night, to meet with a U.S. agent in Moscow and be debriefed.”

“
Debriefed?
This is insane!” Walt said, and he laughed. But his laughter had a sharp, hollow, decidedly nervous quality which, to Lem, indicated that the sheriff’s skepticism was slipping away even though he wanted to hold on to it.

“I’m telling you that it’s possible, that such a dog was in fact conceived by
in vitro
fertilization of a genetically altered ovum by genetically altered sperm, and carried to term by a surrogate mother. And after a year of confinement at the Banodyne labs, sometime in the early-morning hours of Monday, May 17, that dog escaped by a series of incredibly clever actions that cannily circumvented the facility’s security system.”

“And the dog’s now loose?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s what’s been killing—”

“No,” Lem said. “The dog is harmless, affectionate, a
wonderful
animal. I was in Weatherby’s lab while he was working with the retriever. In a limited way, I communicated with it. Honest to God, Walt, when you see that animal in action, see what Weatherby created, it gives you enormous hope for this sorry species of ours.”

Walt stared at him, uncomprehending.

Lem searched for the words to convey what he felt. As he found the language to describe what the dog had meant to him, his chest grew tight with emotion. “Well . . . I mean, if we can do these amazing things, if we can bring such a wonder into the world, then there’s something of profound value in us no matter what the pessimists and doomsayers believe. If we can do this, we have the power and, potentially, the wisdom of God. We’re not only makers of weapons, but makers of
life.
If we could lift members of another species up to our level, create a companion race to share the world . . . our beliefs and philosophies would be changed forever. By the very act of altering the retriever, we’ve altered ourselves. By pulling the dog to a new level of awareness, we are inevitably raising our own awareness as well.”

“Jesus, Lem, you sound like a preacher.”

“Do I? That’s because I’ve had more time to think about this than you have. In time, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You’ll begin to feel it, too, this incredible sense that humankind is on its way to godhood—and that we
deserve
to get there.”

Walt Gaines stared at the steamed glass, as if reading something of great interest in the patterns of condensation. Then: “Maybe what you say is right. Maybe we’re on the brink of a new world. But for now we’ve got to live in and deal with the old one. So if it wasn’t the dog that killed my deputy— what was it?”

“Something else escaped from Banodyne the same night that the dog got out,” Lem said. His euphoria was suddenly tempered by the need to admit that there had been a darker side to the Francis Project. “They called it The Outsider.”

Nora held up the magazine ad that compared an automobile to a tiger and that showed the car in an iron cage. To Einstein, she said, “All right, let’s see what else you can clarify for us. What about this one? What is it that interested you in this photograph—the car?”

Einstein barked once:
No
.

“Was it the tiger?” Travis asked.

One bark.

“The cage?” Nora asked.

Einstein wagged his tail:
Yes.

“Did you choose this picture because they kept you in a cage?” Nora asked.

Travis crawled across the floor until he found the photo of a forlorn man in a prison cell. Returning with it, showing it to the retriever, he said, “And did you choose this one because the cell is like a cage?”

“And because the prisoner in the picture reminded you of how you felt when you were in a cage?”

“The violin,” Nora said. “Did someone at the laboratory play the violin for you?”

“Why would they do that, I wonder?” Travis said.

That was one the dog could not answer with a simple yes or no.

“Did you like the violin?” Nora asked.

“You like music in general?”

“Do you like jazz?”

The dog neither barked nor wagged his tail.

Travis said, “He doesn’t know what jazz is. I guess they never let him hear any of that.”

“Do you like rock and roll?” Nora asked.

One bark and, simultaneously, a wagging of the tail.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Nora asked.

“Probably means ‘yes and no,’ ” Travis said. “He likes some rock and roll but not all of it.”

Einstein wagged his tail to confirm Travis’s interpretation.

“Classical?” Nora asked.

Travis said, “So we’ve got a dog that’s a snob, huh?”

Nora laughed in delight, and so did Travis, and Einstein nuzzled and licked them happily.

Travis looked around for another picture, snatched up the one of the man on the exercise treadmill. “They wouldn’t want to let you out of the lab, I guess. Yet they’d want to keep you fit. Is this how they exercised you? On a treadmill?”

The sense of discovery was exhilarating. Travis would have been no more thrilled, no more excited, no more awestricken if he had been communicating with an extraterrestrial intelligence.

I’m falling down a rabbit hole, Walt Gaines thought uneasily as he listened to Lem Johnson.

This new high-tech world of space flight, computers in the home, satellite-relayed telephone calls, factory robots, and now biological engineering seemed utterly unrelated to the world in which he was born and grew up. For God’s sake, he had been a child during World War II, when there had not even been jet aircraft. He hailed from a simpler world of boatlike Chryslers with tail fins, phones with dials instead of push buttons, clocks with hands instead of digital display boards. Television did not exist when he was born, and the possibility of nuclear Armageddon within his own lifetime was something no one then could have predicted. He felt as though he had stepped through an invisible barrier from his world into another reality that was on a faster track. This new kingdom of high technology could be delightful or frightening—and occasionally both at the same time.

Like now.

The idea of an intelligent dog appealed to the child in him and made him want to smile.

But something else—The Outsider—had escaped from those labs, and it scared the bejesus out of him.

“The dog had no name,” Lem Johnson said. “That’s not so unusual. Most scientists who work with lab animals never name them. If you’ve named an animal, you’ll inevitably begin to attribute a personality to it, and then your relationship to it will change, and you’ll no longer be as objective in your observations as you have to be. So the dog had only a number until it was clear this was the success Weatherby had been working so hard to achieve. Even then, when it was evident that the dog would not have to be destroyed as a failure, no name was given to it. Everyone simply called it ‘the dog,’ which was enough to differentiate it from all of Weatherby’s other pups because they’d been referred to by numbers. Anyway, at the same time, Dr. Yarbeck was working on other, very different research under the Francis Project umbrella, and she, too, finally met with some success.”

Yarbeck’s objective was to create an animal with dramatically increased intelligence—but one also designed to accompany men into war as police dogs accompanied cops in dangerous urban neighborhoods. Yarbeck sought to engineer a beast that was smart but also deadly, a terror on the battlefield—ferocious, stealthy, cunning, and intelligent enough to be effective in both jungle and urban warfare.

Not quite as intelligent as human beings, of course, not as smart as the dog that Weatherby was developing. It would be sheer madness to create a killing machine as intelligent as the people who would have to use and control it. Everyone had read
Frankenstein
or had seen one of the old Karloff movies, and no one underestimated the dangers inherent in Yarbeck’s research.

Choosing to work with monkeys and apes because of their naturally high intelligence and because they already possessed humanlike hands, Yarbeck ultimately selected baboons as the base species for her dark acts of creation. Baboons were among the smartest of primates, good raw material. They were deadly and effective fighters by nature, with impressive claws and fangs, fiercely motivated by the territorial imperative, and eager to attack those whom they perceived as enemies.

“Yarbeck’s first task in the
physical
alteration of the baboon was to make it larger, big enough to threaten a grown man,” Lem said. “She decided that it would have to stand at least five feet and weigh one hundred to a hundred and ten pounds.”

“That’s not so big,” Walt protested.

“Big enough.”

“I could swat down a man that size.”

“A man, yes. But not this thing. It’s solid muscle, no fat at all, and far quicker than a man. Stop and think of how a fifty-pound pit bull can make mincemeat of a grown man, and you’ll realize what a threat Yarbeck’s warrior could be at a hundred and ten.”

The patrol car’s steam-silvered windshield seemed like a movie screen on which Walt saw projected images of brutally murdered men: Wes Dalberg, Teel Porter . . . He closed his eyes but still saw cadavers. “Okay, yeah, I get your point. A hundred and ten pounds would be enough if we’re talking about something
designed
to fight and kill.”

“So Yarbeck created a breed of baboons that would grow to greater size. Then she set to work altering the sperm and ova of her giant primates in other ways, sometimes by editing the baboon’s own genetic material, sometimes by introducing genes from other species.”

Walt said, “The same sort of cross-species patch-and-stitch that led to the smart dog.”

“I wouldn’t call it patch-and-stitch . . . but yeah, essentially the same techniques. Yarbeck wanted a large, vicious jaw on her warrior, something more like that of a German shepherd, even a jackal, so there would be room for more teeth, and she wanted the teeth to be larger and sharper and perhaps slightly hooked, which meant she had to enlarge the baboon’s head and totally alter its facial structure to accommodate all of this. The skull had to be greatly enlarged, anyway, to allow for a bigger brain. Dr. Yarbeck wasn’t working under the constraints that required Davis Weatherby to leave his dog’s appearance unchanged. In fact, Yarbeck figured that if her creation was hideous, if it was
alien,
it would be an even more effective warrior because it would serve not only to stalk and kill our enemies but terrorize them.”

In spite of the warm, muggy air, Walt Gaines felt a coldness in his belly, as if he had swallowed big chunks of ice. “Didn’t Yarbeck or anyone else consider the immorality of this, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t any of them ever read
The Island of Doctor Moreau
? Lem, you have a goddamn moral obligation to let the public know about this, to blow it wide open. And so do I.”

“No such thing,” Lem said. “The idea that there’s good and evil knowledge . . . well, that’s strictly a religious point of view. Actions can be either moral or immoral, yes, but knowledge can’t be labeled that way. To a scientist, to
any
educated man or woman, all knowledge is morally neutral.”

“But, shit,
application
of the knowledge, in Yarbeck’s case, wasn’t morally neutral.”

Sitting on one or the other’s patio on weekends, drinking Corona, dealing with the weighty problems of the world, they loved to talk about this sort of thing. Backyard philosophers. Beery sages taking smug pleasure in their wisdom. And sometimes the moral dilemmas they discussed on weekends were those that later arose in the course of their police work; however, Walt could not remember any discussion that had had as urgent a bearing on their work as this one.

“Applying knowledge is part of the process of learning more,” Lem said. “The scientist has to apply his discoveries to see where each application leads. Moral responsibility is on the shoulders of those who take the technology out of the lab and use it to immoral ends.”

“Do you believe that bullshit?”

Lem thought a moment. “Yeah, I guess I do. I guess, if we held scientists responsible for the bad things that flowed from their work, they’d never go to work in the first place, and there’d be no progress at all. We’d still be living in caves.”

Walt pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his face, giving himself a moment to think. It wasn’t so much the heat and humidity that had gotten to him. It was the thought of Yarbeck’s warrior roaming the Orange County hills that made him break out in a sweat.

He wanted to go public, warn the unwary world that something new and dangerous was loose upon the earth. But that would be playing into the hands of the new Luddites, who would use Yarbeck’s warrior to generate public hysteria in an attempt to bring an end to all recombinant-DNA research. Already, such research had created strains of corn and wheat that could grow with less water and in poor soil, relieving world hunger, and years ago they had developed a man-made virus that, as a waste product, produced cheap insulin. If he took word of Yarbeck’s monstrosity to the world, he might save a couple of lives in the short run, but he might be playing a role in denying the world the beneficial miracles of recombinant-DNA research, which would
cost
tens of thousands of lives in the long run.