Including the time he inserted the DNA of Peter Jance. The pregnancies were achieved through various guises-some-times as a result of purported in vitro fertilization, sometimes through supposed insertion of donor sperm. It was done hundreds of times, most ending in failure. But nine times it worked.
And the beauty of it was, only he knew. Only Frederick Wolfe knew the names of the DNA donors, only he had access to the dossiers the feds kept for him on the recipients, so great was their faith in his scientific genius. Wolfe realized that he was on the brink of incredible new breakthroughs. But he became aware as well of a certain suspicion around the lab, so he stopped. He had what he wanted, the secret knowledge that he was now, at the very least, a genius on a par with Peter Jance or anyone else in the world of science. He and he alone had created nine healthy human clones! He hung back and watched. For years.
Each child, each clone, was born to a couple who suspected nothing. Those who thought donor sperm had been the source of fertilization were of course the easiest: there was no suspicion when the child resembled neither parent. But even those parents who looked to find some resemblance were seldom disappointed. Whenever possible, Wolfe had taken pains to use DNA from friends who in one way or another resembled one or the other of these parents. With a few exceptions, the delighted couples assumed they were the full biological parents. The parents and their children, of course, were transients. Service people, they were soon discharged or transferred, and it wasn’t long before Wolfe had living miracles on five continents. He read the reports of their lives with a devotion so avid in its intensity that it registered on the parents as avuncular delight, winning their fierce and unquestioned loyalty. They were sure he had the best interests of their children at heart. But it wasn’t too long after his initial achievements that something far more interesting had occurred to Frederick Wolfe. Since each of these children was an exact cellular match to someone he knew, there would be, when time and circumstance demanded, absolutely no rejection of any part of one body grafted into the other. None.
Almost instantly, it hit him: what it really meant in its fullest realization. And that final, stunning vision was the seed of what Wolfe knew would place him in the history books forever. All he had to do was go to the right people in the military and tell them what he could do for military research, unbelievable as it might sound. At first the reception was guarded. They literally could not believe it. But he went over the whole proposal so carefully, in such detail, and with such attention to its potential that they finally believed. They were not only convinced; they were thunderstruck. Then the money came, and the name-the Fountain Society. In theory, he had explained, there was no reason on earth why any man or woman of genius-certainly his friends whom he had already duplicated-couldn’t be projected indefinitely into the future, riding piggyback on the bodies of their clones. And since nearly all of these clones were representative of major weapons scientists who were, despite their achievements, moving inexorably into their senior years, time was of the essence. The military got the message more quickly than he had ever hoped. His project was enshrouded in secrecy and funded with a generosity so extreme Wolfe could only surmise that they hoped he might start cloning them. He was overjoyed, and felt that he was at the brink of the greatness he always knew should be his. The truth was that if all the procedures were perfected-and he was certain they would be-then Frederick Wolfe would be forever enshrined as the genius of geniuses, the man who wrote and orchestrated the defeat of death itself.
Twenty hours after removing the lid of Peter Jance’s skull, Wolfe continued to work with an intensity that galvanized the entire operating theater. Twenty hours was the absolute limit that the brain could survive without oxygen, no matter how cold. Wolfe was racing against the clock, and the clock was held by the Grim Reaper himself. The procedure had been elegantly ruthless. Since Peter’s body was no longer needed, Wolfe had cut into it deeply, approaching the priceless gray matter from below the brainpan. He had isolated the twelve ancillary nerves, as well as the four branches of the carotid arteries, cutting away and removing all the surrounding tissue. By doing so he was able to leave the neural and arterial connections conveniently long before severing them from Peter’s body. The brain’s ultimate tether was the spinal column itself. This was cut between the first and second vertebrae with the same precision laser Wolfe had used on the other nerves. The low-heat ray was so discriminating that it could pass between two carbon molecules without damaging either. Appropriately enough, the laser was a product spun off from early weapons work by Peter Jance himself, though at the moment neither Peter nor Beatrice, who had not returned to the operating theater, was there to savor this pleasant irony. The stub of brain stem was capped temporarily to keep the cerebrospinal fluid from draining. Without this fluid, which provided energy for cell function in both the brain and spinal cord, as well as proteins and lymphocytes that helped guard against infection, Peter, or more precisely his brain, wouldn’t last a day. With the cut made and the capping accomplished, there was nothing anchoring this brain to Peter’s body. Wolfe gingerly lifted it out. With a gently sucking sound, the brain and its satellite eyes and optic nerves rose out of the massive exit portal Wolfe had opened in the top of Peter’s skull and face. This precious assembly he lowered carefully into a solution of dilute saline water, where it floated glimmering like some exotic creature pulled from the deepest reaches of the sea. With Hans, the procedure was more crude. Cutting the skull above the ears, the team simply scooped his brain out, needing only to expose the roots of the ancillary nerves passing though the bottom of his brainpan from his body itself. These connective elements, twelve nerves and four arteries, were what was needed to be preserved. That this came at the cost of Hans Brinkman’s brain itself-normally a catastrophic loss-was in this case inconsequential. As dazzling as it might have been, Hans Brinkman’s brain had never been more than a shadow of Peter Jance’s, lacking the indefinable God-given something that had elevated Peter’s genetically twin brain to genius from the day he was born. Hans Brinkman’s brain, now a heap of pinkish-gray slush resembling the contents of a dropped Jell-O mold, was taken away in a stainless steel pan. Now began the final and most harrowing procedure: the marriage of old brain to young body. How to accomplish this had proved devilishly tricky for Wolfe, and the procedures had been perfected at the cost of whole herds of pigs, calves and primates. The problem was the ancillary nerves, the twelve vital sets of neural cabling at the base of the brain. They controlled a host of functions, including facial movement and feeling, movement of the shoulders and head, balance and sound and smell. One trunk line, the vagus, ranged all the way down into the body cavity to affect the sensory, motor and autonomic functions of glands, digestion and heartbeat. Even though Beatrice’s genetic glue worked on these fibers much more quickly than on the more complex spinal column, their anatomical location presented the most delicate of challenges. Just behind the throat and at the very base of the brain, they were hell to access. The equipment and procedures Wolfe brought to bear on this problem wouldn’t show up in civilian labs for decades, if ever. There were micro-laser scalpels, bonding sheaths grown from fetal pig tissue, an exquisitely small and powerful CAT scan apparatus that allowed them to operate entirely by virtual/video facial screens, and robotic grasping devices small enough to fit between spine and trachea without causing so much as a hiccup. They made it feasible. But the procedure itself called for a virtuoso performance on a level never seen before. Even those watching in the gallery knew Wolfe was pushing the very edge of the envelope. Right now, the brain of Peter Jance was nothing more than three pounds of frigid protoplasm, and the body of Hans Brinkman was as cold as death, bloodless, and with a heart that had not beaten in eight hours. Until the connections were made, no one in the operating theater could say anything at all had been accomplished, beyond a massive expenditure of the U.S. government’s time and money. They completed the first splices, racing against time. Early impedance checks by the neurological monitoring team revealed brain-body communication. Though the activity was far from normal, information was passing from one realm to the other-which electrified the room and caused Oscar Henderson’s lips to start moving in something resembling prayer. Even Alex Davies craned forward, gnawing on a thumbnail. That the connections were functioning at all meant it was possible, just possible, that this operation, this leap in evolution itself, could succeed. The two men worked on for hours while the assistants ticked off, for the benefit of the gallery, the completed joins, brain-side to body-side. Wolfe and Barrola worked like men possessed, hands in robot servo-controls, feet controlling focus and pan by floor pedals, making tiny puffs into servo-control tubes that translated the intensity of their breath into attitudinal positioning of robot fingers. There were readings of one sort or another across every splice. Whether they would normalize was anyone’s guess. But now, something far more difficult had to be attempted. No one in medical history had ever accomplished what was to happen next, not even Wolfe. The reconnection of brain stem and spine was resistant to success by an order of magnitude that made all of what had gone before seem rudimentary There was, Wolfe desperately reminded himself, some reason for hope. The cuts on both sides, Hans’s spine and Peter’s brain stem, were flawless-no ragged ends of injured spines to contend with here as there would have been in a disastrous fall, for instance. And the contact planes between Peter’s brain stem and Hans’s spine were unique in an even more important way: because Hans was a clone of Peter, each severed end was part and parcel of the other, perfectly matched, cell to cell, fiber to fiber, DNA to DNA. They began the procedure to reconnect.