“I’m ready if you are,” said Barrola, more meekly than he had intended. “More than ready. Let’s go.”
Wolfe moved to Peter, Barrola to Hans. Each man was surrounded by his own surgical team. Each knew that if he failed he would never again rise to another such opportunity for power and fame, at least not within the labyrinth of secret projects that comprised the cutting edge of militarymedical technology. On the other hand, both knew as well that if they succeeded, their prestige would rise beyond their wildest dreams. And Wolfe himself was aware that as progenitor and genius of this project, his would be the credit for a discovery comparable to that of DNA, the key element in a passage from one level of human evolution to the next. His hand had never felt steadier.
He personally did the fitting and adjustment of the Mayfield clamp, a gangly apparatus of jointed steel that terminated with four prongs, looking like nothing so much as an elaborate set of ice tongs. The Mayfield clamp was designed to hold its subject’s head immobile in the ideal position so that no jiggle, no slip of placement, could ruin the control of the surgeon’s hands and blades themselves. The clamp had to be set perfectly to Peter’s skull, and to this end a small horde of technical specialists moved in around Wolfe, as did a second around Barrola. Wolfe fussed and chided as bolts were tightened and loosened, joints flexed and readjusted. When the clamp was in the shape he thought best, he had them affix the entire apparatus to Peter’s table. Then the tongs were brought to the skull at the four points of the compass and tightened down. The tiny runnels of vestigial blood were quickly blotted away by nurses, while the technicians began to raise the upper half of the operating table itself. Up in the observation gallery, Alex Davies watched Beatrice Jance turn away for the first time. Peter’s body, half supported by the rising back of the table, half-hung like a slab of meat from the clamp, was propped up like a derelict on a park bench. I wonder what she’s feeling, Alex thought, his bright eyes fixed on Beatrice. His own emotions he couldn’t have named, and wouldn’t have bothered to. They were an unholy mixture of revulsion, amusement and exquisite sympathy for the dying man on the operating table, a man whose genius he revered. There was something else, too, deep and perverse. It was a secret wish to see the entire operation end in a chaos of spurting blood and exploding equipment, while that abominable Nazi music rang out. It was the same lame highbrow bullshit his grandfather had tried to ram down his throat ever since he was three years old. His head sank onto his chest. My God, thought Beatrice, glancing over, Alex Davies had fallen asleep. Then she forced herself to look below again. The technicians stepped away from the tables. Wolfe glanced over at Barrola. He was ready as well. Wolfe took a careful, deep breath, bringing himself to his center until he could feel his breath in his ki. Then he quietly asked for his Midas Rex to be brought in. Barrola did the same.
In came the brass-headed bone saw, big and powerful and utterly without glamour-pure 1960s technology. The Midas Rexes were air-powered, and the fat green hose that ran from the compressed-air tanks made them look like something more suitable to a garage. But their power minimized the danger of splintering bone, so cleanly did they cut. Control was supplied by the surgeon, and Wolfe and Barrola were the best. After fifteen minutes of careful sawing, the OR looked like a smoke-filled back room and Alex Davies had perked up again. The fine dust from both men’s skulls twisted in delicate whorls under the intense lights, mixing with the raw breath of the two dozen technicians and doctors laboring in the frigid room. It was impossible not to watch. At last the machines fell silent. They were handed off to technicians and stowed; they would not be needed again. Wolfe paused over Peter’s body and looked up at the gallery, meeting Beatrice’s eyes for the first time. He could sense her anxiety, but also her gratitude, and this filled him with pleasure. He knew that she knew what came next, and loved the fact that she was to witness it-witness to his genius at work. But to his dismay she was looking too pale, shaking her head, obviously unwell. A moment later she rose and made her way shakily up the gallery steps to the exit door. He realized that he wouldn’t see her again, not until the operation was over. He turned back to Peter, lifted the top of his skull off, and dropped it into a stainless steel basin. There, gleaming grayish pink in the argon light, was what Wolfe had been born to preserve, the brain of what so many people, unacquainted with his own prodigious achievements, regarded as the greatest living genius of the twentieth century. It was Wolfe’s task now to ensure that this instrument would continue functioning into the twenty-first century as well. It was a task he had begun to prepare for thirty-five years ago, just two buildings away in his OB-GYN clinic, with the birth of Hans Brinkman himself.
Within six months of their first meeting, Frederick Wolfe and Peter Jance had become colleagues and, in the openly competitive fashion of scientific prodigies, close friends. In their prime, they had shared this base with dozens of the top scientists working for the U.S. government, each developing something that the Pentagon hoped would ensure its hegemony in those postwar years. Peter was busy blowing things up on the eastern range of Vieques, working at that time on rail guns, huge cumbersome devices that shot super-charged particles via what seemed now like medieval technology. He could never get them small enough to be practical, not even for battleships, and his failures were the source of much merriment to Wolfe and Beatrice, as well as to himself. Nevertheless, the feds loved Peter because the guns, big as the)? were, blew hell out of half an acre of island every time they fired. They had great hopes for his future. They knew it was only a matter of time. Wolfe was already far advanced in genetics, and as part of his quest he would call upon friends to serve as sources for material. Nothing drastic-just a pint of blood here, a skin scraping there; in return Wolfe would give them framed DNA printouts to hang over their desks. In the case of Peter and Beatrice, he also tried to help them through a difficult pregnancy, even though Beatrice had a raft of uterine fibroids that stacked the odds against bringing a fetus to term. Beatrice had miscarried, and she and Peter had never tried again. Wolfe sometimes thought Beatrice blamed him for the failure, believing, as she had once hinted in an unguarded moment, that his resentment of their potential happiness had somehow doomed her pregnancy. Nothing, as far as Wolfe was concerned, could have been more absurd. A married philosopher, as Nietzsche once observed, belongs to comedy-and so, in Wolfe’s view, did a married scientist. jealousy was beneath him, and therefore out of the question. True, Peter’s greater fame sometimes made Wolfe chafe, but it was a feeling he quickly dispelled by reflecting on how much more far-reaching and profound his own achievements were destined to be. During those years, he had to work in secret, in virtual anonymity, hiding his brilliance. And indeed, the project that would some day place him in the scientific pantheon, far above Peter and everyone else, had begun almost casually. It was by then common knowledge how to clone not only plants but animals at the level of tadpoles, and in Wolfe’s mind it made no sense whatsoever that it shouldn’t be possible to do the same with humans as well. It didn’t call for mad-scientist apparatus and blasts of lightning-all it required was a certain amount of daring, and the gift of insight and an understanding of genetic structure which no other researcher could match. And a healthy egg or two.
Which were almost laughably simple to secure, inasmuch as Wolfe ran a clinic that regularly drew worried couples from all branches of the service to his door. Eggs were his stock-in-trade. And if his experiments went awry, well, a miscarriage was nothing out of the ordinary for parents already used to disappointment. On the positive side, each time a pregnancy continued on into another trimester, he was an absolute hero. And so it was child’s play, really, once he had perfected the nanotechnology to remove the DNA from his friends’ skin scrapings intact. Extracting it from the eggs of the women who came to him for help was no problem. As long as he got it all, it didn’t matter how scrambled the DNA was. The real trick was inventing a glass pipette small enough and sharp enough to puncture a single human egg without destroying it. Once he had perfected this tool, he was home free, and using the Wolfe pipette, he both removed the DNA that was there, and injected the DNA of his fellow scientists. He was successful nine times.