“You think you can do it?” another congresswoman this one from San Francisco-asked. Women of all sorts found themselves drawn to this man. Money, power, good looks, and good manners made it inevitable.
John Brightling smiled broadly. “Ask me in five years. We know the gene. We need to learn how to turn it off. There’s a whole lot of basic science in there we have to uncover, and along the way we hope to discover a lot of very useful things. It’s like setting off with Magellan. We aren’t sure what we’re going to find, but we know it’ll all be interesting.” No one pointed out that Magellan hadn’t made it home from that particular trip.
“And profitable?” a new senator from Wyoming asked.
“That’s how our society works, isn’t it? We pay people for doing useful work. Is this area useful enough?”
“If you bring it off, I suppose it is.” This senator was himself a physician, a family practitioner who knew the basics but was well over his head on the deep-scientific side. The concept, the objective of Horizon Corporation, was well beyond breathtaking, but he would not bet against them. They’d done too well developing cancer drugs and synthetic antibiotics, and were the leading private company in the Human Genome Project, a global effort to decode the basics of human life. Himself a genius, John Brightling had found it easy to attract others like himself to his company. He had more charisma than a hundred politicians, and unlike the latter, the senator had to admit to himself, he really had something to back up the showmanship. It had once been called “the right stuff’ ! or pilots. With his movie-star looks, ready smile, superb listening ability, and dazzlingly analytical mind, Dr. John Brightling had the knack. He could make anyone near him ! gel interesting-and the bastard could teach, could apply his lessons to everyone nearby. Simple ones for the unschooled and highly sophisticated ones for the specialists in his field, at the top of which he reigned supreme. Oh, lie had a few peers. Pat Reily at Harvard-Mass General. Aaron Bernstein at Johns Hopkins. Jacques Elise at Pasteur. Maybe Paul Ging at U.C. Berkeley. But that was it. What a fine clinician Brightling might have made, the senator-M.D. thought, but, no, he was too good to be wasted on people with the latest version of the flu.
About the only thing in which he’d failed was his marriage. Well, Carol Brightling was also pretty smart, but more political than scientific, and perhaps her ego, capacious as everyone in this city knew it to be, had quailed before the greater intellectual gifts of her husband. Only room in town for one of us, the doctor from Wyoming thought, with an inner smile. That happened often enough in real life, not just on old movies. And Brightling, John, seemed to be doing better in that respect than Brightling, Carol. At the former’s elbow was a very pretty redhead drinking in his every word, while the latter had come alone, and would be leaving alone for her apartment in Georgetown. Well, the senator-M.D. thought, that’s life.
Immortality. Damn, all the pronghorns he might take, the doctor from Cody thought on, heading over to his wife. Dinner was about to start. The chicken had finished the vulcanization process. The Valium helped. It wasn’t actually Valium, Killgore knew. That drug had become something of a generic name for mild sedatives, and this one had been developed by SmithKline, with a different trade name, with the added benefit that it made a good mix with alcohol. For street people who were often as contentious and territorial as junkyard dogs, this group of ten was remarkably sedate. The large quantities of good booze helped. The high-end bourbons seemed the most popular libations, drunk from cheap glasses with ice, along with various mixers for those who didn’t care to drink it neat. Most didn’t, to Killgore’s surprise.
The physicals had gone well. They were all healthy sick people, outwardly fairly vigorous, but inwardly all with physical problems ranging from diabetes to liver failure. One was definitely suffering from prostate cancer his PSA was off the top of the chart-but that wouldn’t matter in this particular test, would it? Another was HIV+, but not yet symptomatic, and so that didn’t matter either. He’d probably gotten it from drug use, but strangely, liquor seemed all he needed to keep himself regulated here. How interesting.
Killgore didn’t have to be here, and it troubled his conscience to look at them so much, but they were his lab rats, and he was supposed to keep an eye on them, and so he did, behind the mirror, while he did his paperwork and listened to Bach on his portable CD player. Three were claimed to be-Vietnam veterans. So they’d killed their share of Asians-“gooks” was the word they’d used in the interview-before coming apart and ending up as street drunks. Well, homeless people was the current term society used for them, somewhat more dignified than bums, the term Killgore vaguely remembered his mother using. Not the best example of humanity he’d ever seen. Yet the Project had managed to change them quite a bit. All bathed regularly now and dressed in clean clothes and watched TV. Some even read books from time to time Killgore had thought that providing a library, while cheap, was an outrageously foolish waste of time and money. But always they drank, and the drinking relegated each of the ten to perhaps six hours of full consciousness per day. And the Valium calmed them further, limiting any alteranions that his security staff would have to break up. Two of them were always on duty in the next room over, also watching the group of ten. Microphones buried in the ceiling allowed them to listen in to the disjointed conversations. One of the group was something of an authority on baseball and talked about Mantle and Maris all the time to whoever would listen. Enough of them talked about sex that Killgore wondered if he should send the snatch team back out to get some female “homeless” subjects for the experiment-he would tell Barb Archer that. Utter all, they needed to know if gender had an effect on the experiment. She’d have to buy into that one, wouldn’t she’? And there’d be none of the sisterly solidarity with them. There couldn’t be, even from the feminazi who joined him in running this experiment. Her ideology was too pure for that. Killgore turned when there came a knock at the door.
“Hey, doe.” It was Benny, one of the security guys.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
“Falling asleep,” Benjamin Farmer replied. “The kids are playing pretty nice.”
“Yeah, they sure are.” It was so easy. Most had to be prodded a little to leave the room and go out to the courtyard for an hour of walking around every afternoon. But they had to be kept fit-which was to say, to simulate the amount of exercise they got on a normal day in Manhattan, staggering from one dreary corner to another.
“Damn, doe, I never knew anybody could put it away the way these guys do! I mean, I had to bring in a whole case of Grand-Dad today, and there’s only two bottles left.”
“That their favorite?” Killgore asked. He hadn’t paid much attention to that.
“Seems to be, sir. I’m a Jack Daniel’s man myself – but with me, maybe two a night, say, for Monday Night Football, if it’s a good game. I don’t drink water the way the kids drink hard booze.” A chuckle from the ex-Marine who ran the night security shift. A good man, Farmer. He did a lot of things with injured animals at the company’s rural shelter. He was also the one who’d taken to calling the test subjects the kids. It had caught on with the security staff and from them to the others. Killgore chuckled. You had to call them something, and lab rats just wasn’t respectful enough. After all, they were human beings, after a fashion, all the more valuable for their place in this test. He turned to see one of them pour himself another drink, wander back to his bed, and lie down to watch some TV before he passed out. He wondered what the poor bastard would dream about. Some did, and talked loudly in their sleep. Something to interest a psychiatrist, perhaps, or someone doing sleep studies. They all snored, to the point that when all were asleep it sounded like an old steam-powered railroad yard in there.
Choo-choo, Killgore thought, looking back down at his last bit of paperwork. Ten more minutes, and he could head home. Too late to put his kids to bed. Too bad. Well, in due course they would awaken to a new day and a new world, and wouldn’t that be some present to give them, however heavy and nasty the price for it might be. Hmph, the physician thought, I could use a drink myself.