He felt the collar of my raincoat and made a small grunt of satisfaction. Pulling the fabric taut, he moved his hands to a small bulge in the collar and pushed it at me.
I felt the flat lump inside. I looked around the stitching to find a hole but saw nothing.
The professor passed me a small penknife from his cardboard box.
Holding the fabric against the table, I made a small cut along the seam and worked the flat lump out. It was the size of a large postage stamp, metal with a hard fabric covering on one side. Holding it on my flat palm I stared, wondering whether it was a tracking device or a listening device or both, and how long it had been in my coat.
The professor pointed to the ground under the table with the speaker.
I dropped the device into the grass there.
He pulled me close again, whispering into my ear, “Check the rucksack.” He continued to check the seams and lining of my coat.
I brought the rucksack over, emptied the contents and felt every panel carefully. There was another device within the padding of the outermost pouch. I cut a hole on the inside and worked the object out, dropping it into the grass under the droning of the professor’s recorded lecture. I checked all of my clothes.
The professor gave me a small screwdriver from the box. In a hushed voice close into my ear he said, “Take the batteries out of your computer and phone. They can be used to eavesdrop on conversation and track your movements.”
Working quickly in the bright sunlight, I removed the batteries, wrapping them in plastic bags and putting them back in the rucksack along with my clothes.
He rasped quietly, “Carry me to the chair.”
I picked up his thin frame easily, wrapped in his blanket, and put him down gently in the chair a short distance away.
Captain loped beside me, settling down on the grass next to the professor.
I brought the professor the cardboard box while he poured the coffee. It was still hot.
He said quietly, “Alright, we can talk with a small degree of confidence that we might not be overheard but keep your voice low.” He leaned over the arm of the chair and said to the dog, “Captain, if Ivanna comes, roff! Roff!”
The dog sat up, looked toward the house, looked back to the professor and replied with another small suppressed “roff” that puffed his jowls momentarily.
“Good boy.” He rubbed the dog’s head.
Captain settled down again, sniffing the coffee in the air briefly before putting his head on his paws, eyes open, ears twitching occasionally.
I asked quietly, “Who put those bugs in?”
“I have a large personal staff. Ivanna’s husband deals with general maintenance. He’s probably the one I trust least. But they could’ve been installed before you came here.”
“How did you know to look?”
“A long habit of routinely defending against industrial and military espionage. You’ve read the company history?”
I nodded.
“You’ve told me a young man has died. You start tracing the journey of a funnel-web spider. You ask questions and a girl suddenly loses her job and runs off to the West Indies. People are watching. Has it not occurred to you that you might be putting yourself in danger with this little inquiry?”
“It crossed my mind.”
“What made you come here then?”
“I wanted to see it through for Aleksy’s mother. I’m stubborn I suppose. When I saw that something wasn’t right, I wondered if you might be interested in helping me put it right.”
“I’m an old man now. I rarely put things right or even make my own fate. Now I watch, speak while I can and wait while destiny drags me unwillingly to a ragged end. Let me tell you a story. A year ago a journalist came here asking questions about HomEvo’s early history. He got off on the wrong foot with Ivanna by asking her how the invasion of Earth was going, but I found him quite personable. I confirmed some of the facts which he’d already uncovered. They weren’t secret, just forgotten. Tragedies from the distant past. I gave him nothing new. He was here for two hours and left in his car, taking the coast road back to Whitby. It was raining. His car went through the cliff-side barrier. No other vehicles involved. The flattened wreck was recovered days later from the rocks. He’d died from a broken neck, among many other injuries.”
“Are you saying it wasn’t an accident?”
“At first I thought it was just bad luck. Now I’m not sure.”
“Who at HomEvo would commit murder and why?”
“I don’t think that anyone at my old firm would resort to such a thing.”
“Who would then?”
“We have a number of single-minded investors. Hard men who might be unhappy about any damage to the business that reduces the value of their holdings. But even that theory seems far-fetched to me. Perhaps that young truck driver’s death is part of some wider conspiracy. Some scheme that’s yet to reveal itself.”
“And your holdings professor; do you or anyone else worry about their value?”
He looked surprised. “That is a rather forthright question.” He gave me a hard stare.
“I don’t mean to be offensive, but it’s an obvious question.”
He thought for a moment. “I suppose it is. Great wealth was a consequence of my work. It was never an objective. As far as my personal fortune is concerned, I have a long and increasingly detached perspective. When I’m gone, my share of the business will fund research programs which I consider important. There’ll be endowments to individuals and institutions. I’m close to the end of my life and have no need of a large fortune and I certainly wouldn’t kill to maintain its value. My work has always been about preserving and enhancing life. I wasn’t sure that the journalist’s death was anything other than an accident, but now your dead acquaintance is the third strange death connected to my world and I’m wondering if perhaps there’s a brutal influence at work.”
“Who else has died?”
“My lawyer died recently. Apparently he collapsed with a seizure while out walking, fell into a small stream and managed to drown in seven inches of water.”
“Was he a friend?”
“I’ve known him since we started the company. Something may be afoot. I’d like you to let me know what you find out.”
I looked back to the table with the speaker. The lecture continued.
“Two hours. That’s the full length. But Ivanna will come back to check on us. When she comes, go to the speaker and turn it off, collect the devices and bring them back here in case she and her husband are conducting a sound check.”
He took a bright steel key from the cardboard box, the size of something for unlocking a castle door, and put it in my hand. “This key opens that gate,” he pointed to a narrow wooden door in the west wall of the garden. “When you go, leave it in the lock. Don’t take your car. Have a breakdown service collect it and return it to London. I’ll reimburse you the cost. It’ll be worth that expense to know that you won’t be smashed on the rocks. Captain likes you, so I presume you’re worth saving.” He smiled grimly.
“This map,” he pulled a single sheet of paper from the box, “shows the way across the farmland behind us, over the moor and down to the main road to Scarborough. There’s a service station here,” he pointed to a small square on the map, putting it in front of my face. “Hitch a lift from there. There’s lots of London bound traffic. Do you have money?”
“I have about two hundred pounds in cash. I’m sure someone will take me three hundred miles for less than that.” I untied the laces that held my heavy boots together, quickly took my shoes off, and put the boots on.
“Good. You asked me if there was something that I wanted to get off my chest. What would you do with that information?”
“Reveal the truth.”
“This truth serves no one. It’s already been paid for in blood, tears and money. You’d only remind some old people of a sorrow that they’ve managed to live with for over six decades. There’s no grand con
spiracy to expose. But it is something on my conscience. A story you’ll find troubling.”
“More troubling than a journalist smashed on the rocks?” I thought about the old man on the train to Flaxbury and his dead sister.
“Unfortunately, yes. Do you want the burden of knowing it?”
“I’ve come this far.”
“Since we’re in a feverishly suspicious mood, convincing ourselves that you’re a marked man and could die even if you know nothing, you might as well know about the events which haunt me as I prepare for my own final reckoning.” He wrote rapidly onto a single sheet of paper while he spoke. Folding the sheet and placing it inside a white envelope, he wrote an address on the outside. His writing was jagged like a seismographic readout, charting the nervous tremors of his old frame. “Take this to my daughter. She will help you survive, if indeed there is any danger.”
I read the jagged name. “Christmas?”
“She arrived at a festive time. It was that or Eve. I liked Christmas,” he said with a smile.
Captain lifted his head and gave a small grunt. His ears were up. Suddenly he sprang forward, ran around the side of the yew hedge and began barking loudly.
“Switch off the lecture. Get the bugs,” the professor hissed.
I ran to the table under the oak tree, picked up the playback device, waited for the voice to pause, and pushed the power button. The professor’s voice stopped. I found one device under the table. I could hear Ivanna getting closer.
Above the barking she shouted at the dog, “What is wrong with you today? Mind these drinks.”
I got on my hands and knees and peered into the thick grass. A glint of metal showed between the grass stems. Snatching up the bug, I ran back to the professor.
Ivanna rounded the yew with a new tray, eyes following the dog. Captain circled her closely as she made halting progress toward us. She glanced at the mud on my knees.
I put the bugs in my pocket discreetly and picked up the old tray so that she could place the fresh drinks on our table.
She asked the professor if he needed anything, and on being told that he didn’t, she took the tray from me and left, scowling at the dog.
Captain followed her to the end of the yew hedge, stood watching as she made her way back to the house, and at the clack of the doors closing, he loped back and sat next to the professor.
The old man patted the animal’s head and gave him a dog biscuit from his cardigan pocket.
I put the bugs back by the tree and restarted the lecture. Back at the garden chairs I sat down again with the old scientist.
He told me what was on his mind when he wasn’t thinking about Mars and Titan. It began with an alternative history of HomEvo; one that wasn’t on the website.
TEN
“You need to understand the context,” he said. “We made mistakes but they were understandable, given the attitudes of the time and the pressure we were under. Although that doesn’t mean that they don’t cause me profound disquiet.” He traced his long unsteady fingers over his temple. “Let me give you as complete a picture as I can in the time we have.” He drank some of the water, the small ice blocks gently clinking against the glass.
“Post-war there was tremendous resolve to maintain military advantage. The world war had ended but the cold war had begun. This country was virtually bankrupt again. Our war debt to the United States was almost four billion dollars in 1945. That sounds like a lot today, but in modern terms it would be about sixty billion dollars. And we also owed the Canadians about a quarter of that amount. We needed a smaller, more affordable military, but with the power to defend this country’s global interests.
“Maplethorpe, Chapell and I, had radical ideas on human physical development. People today call it the super soldier. A more physically powerful fighting man, able to carry heavier weapons, fight longer, withstand injury. One man with the battlefield presence of ten men. That was our proposal to the Ministry of Supply. I’d just completed a PhD research project on increasing muscle density in mammals. We focused on the development of steroids combined with anatomical selectivity, identifying people genetically predisposed to react well to chemical enhancement.
“But we reached the limits of what we could achieve sooner than we expected in terms of the steroid side of the equation. We produced a profitable range of military-use drugs, but the big breakthrough eluded us. Consequently, the idea of influencing the genetic code captured our imagination. Instead of searching for the one person in a thousand who’d develop massively with steroids, we’d alter the genes of an embryo to enable them to become super-strong, right from birth; the manipulation of DNA to create supermen. We had an optical genius on our team who’d taken electron microscopy to a new level. By the spring of 1949 we were looking at the structure of DNA.”
“Wasn’t that later though? I thought the structure of DNA was identified in 1953.”
“We were years in front. No one knew, because our military funding prevented us from sharing our discoveries. Much later we watched in silent frustration when other scientists amazed the world with the discovery of the double-helix. Unknown to everyone, we’d already gone far beyond understanding the structure, experimenting with gene-splicing on simple organisms and then mammals, to the point where we were confident that we could identify genes responsible for bone and muscle development.
“However, the growing attention on DNA work rattled our funders. Our project had looked as though it was losing its lead. The world climbed on board with DNA research and grand projects were being proposed to map the entire genome and unravel its mysteries. It wouldn’t happen for decades but our government backers thought otherwise. Competition for funding was fierce. The big focus was on nuclear weapons and supersonic jets. Our project was cut off.
“But we knew we had something valuable, so we turned to the commercial market. We put a prospectus together to create a commercial genetic engineering business, ostensibly to create pest-resistant crops. Our big commercial idea involved modifying wheat with genetic material from mygalomorphs, especially the Sydney funnel-web spider, so that the crop would incorporate elements of the neuro-toxin and repel insects, while being safe for human consumption.
“Crop development and drugs for the military funded our superhuman project. It was a wide open field then, completely unregulated. We knew it wouldn’t stay that way. The pressure for tangible achievement was immense. But we were young scientists, still in our late twenties, charging headlong in a race with the rest of the scientific world toward a genetic breakthrough. We wanted to be first. And that’s when we made a mistake. We took what we thought was a calculated gamble. It was a dreadful miscalculation caused by overconfidence and lucky guesses that had enabled some of our trials to deliver fantastic results. Our luck ran out.” He wiped his nose with a tissue from his pocket and paused for a minute.
I waited silently.
“We had fifty human embryos, each with just four cells. We decided to splice the human DNA in those embryos with the muscle development genes from the funnel-web spider. Denser, faster muscles for greater speed and strength. We’d already had some success with mice. But we should have made much smaller steps. We were far too ambitious.
“We didn’t have the precision in splicing or the complete genome mapping available today. Our method for inserting sections of DNA was crude. We were slicing a tomato with a chainsaw. We also didn’t appreciate the interconnectedness of the complete DNA structure. The interplay between the genes adds a level of complexity which can make the final outcome unpredictable.
“Undaunted, we implanted modified embryos into volunteers from our own research community. When we ran out of volunteers we gave cash to surrogate mothers; young local women in Flaxbury and the surrounding villages. It looked like an attractive offer. Two years’ wages for a full-term pregnancy. In our contracts with the women, we thought we’d given everyone the right level of protection. The babies would be removed at birth, sight unseen by the moth
ers. A sacrifice when you’ve nurtured a new life for nine months. But we knew that although we were aiming for supermen and superwomen, we might get…aberrations. Our people even started saying it. Supermen or monsters. But there were no supermen.”
“Only monsters?”
“It was an epic tragedy.” He took a large envelope from the box and pulled out a sheaf of pictures, passing me the grainy black and white images.
I studied the first one. “I don’t understand what I’m looking at. The camera shake makes it unclear.”
“The camera is steady. Look again.”
I could feel myself frowning as I struggled to make sense of the first image. “I’m seeing a lot of limbs.”
“Correct.”
“And…no head?” I could hear a singing in my ears as the horror of the image slowly resolved.
“Almost correct. The creature has elements of the spider body plan, not just the musculature. The head is contained within an approximation of the cephalo-thorax structure. A combined chest and head. Look, this slit here at the end of the torso is the mouth beginning to open. Above, there are two eyes.” He put a second image beside the first. “In this other view of the same new-born creature, there are more eyes below the torso, similar to some of the ancient arthropods. The limbs have the common three-jointed assembly, but their number is horrifying. Eight limbs.”
Nausea swept over me. I turned away from the pictures.
“Hard to look at, I know. Harder for our scientists and assistants on the spot. This one cried out. The mother wanted to see, but we removed it. The medical team told her it was deformed and left it to the poor woman’s imagination to work out the rest. Anything she imagined would have been less horrifying than the reality.”
I turned over more pictures. The next showed an oversize thickly-veined human head with bulging eyes and mouth agape, four limbs sprouting directly from the base of the head and a withered torso hanging from the back of the skull.
Another was a confusion of body types. In expectation of an exo-skeleton, the organs had grown outside the human ribcage, heart, lungs, liver, bulging like huge tumors. The contorted face of the baby seemed to be screaming with pain. The horrors continued, picture after picture, each one a monstrous rebuke to Raymond Pendle’s oversized ambition.