knew what was necessary. They were devoted to a single creed:
rationality. The remarkable advances we’d seen over the past century in
technology had to be matched with advances in the management of our race
the human race. Science and politics could no longer be relegated to
separate dominions.”
Gradually Ben focused. “You’re not making sense. Technology proved an
aid to the madness. Totalitarianism depended on mass communication. And
scientists helped make the Holocaust possible.”
“All the more reason why Sigma was necessary as a bulwark against that
sort of madness. You can understand that, can’t you? A single madman
had driven Europe to the brink of anarchy. On the other side of a great
land mass, a small band of agitators had turned an empire secured by
Peter the Great into a seething cauldron. The insanity of the mob
amplified the insanity of the individual. That’s what the century had
taught us. The future of Western civilization was too important to rest
in the hands of the mobs. The aftermath of the war had left a vacuum, a
powerful one. Civil society was everywhere in disarray. It fell upon a
small group of powerful, well-organized men to impose order. Indirect
rule. The levers of power were to be manipulated, even as that
manipulation would be carefully camouflaged by the official
instrumentalities of governance. Enlightened leadership was necessary
leadership behind the scenes.”
“And what was to guarantee that the leadership was going to be
enlightened?”
“I told you. Lenz was a farsighted man, and so were the industrialists
he allied with. Again, it comes down to the marriage of science and
politics: one would have to heal and strengthen the other.”
Ben shook his head. “That’s something else that doesn’t make sense.
These businessmen were folk heroes, many of them. Why would they agree
to consort with the likes of Strasser or Gerhard Lenz?”
“Yes, this was an extremely inclusive group. But perhaps you forget
your own father’s indispensable role.”
“A Jew.”
“Doubly indispensable, one could say. Substantial sums were transferred
out of the Third Reich, and to do so without detection was a challenge
of mind-numbing complexity. Your father, who was quite a wizard in such
financial matters, rose to the challenge. But, equally, the fact that
he was Jewish was exceedingly helpful in reassuring our counterparts in
~ Allied nations. It helped establish the fact that this wasn’t about
furthering the Fuhrer’s insanity. This was about business. And about
betterment.”
Ben gave him a frankly skeptical look. “You still haven’t explained
Gerhard Lenz’s special appeal to these businessmen.”
“Lenz had something to offer them. Or, at that point, I should say that
he had something to promise. The word had spread among the moguls that
Lenz had made some extremely suggestive scientific breakthroughs in an
area of direct personal interest to all of them. Based on some
preliminary successes, Lenz had, at the time, thought he was nearer than
he in fact was. He was flush with excitement, and the excitement was
infectious. As things turned out, the founders didn’t survive to
benefit from his researches. But all of them deserve credit for making
it possible. Billions of dollars invisibly went to support the
research–a level of support that made the Manhattan Project look like a
high school lab class. But now we touch on matters that may lie beyond
your grasp.”
“Try me.”
“No doubt your inquiries are purely disinterested, yes?” Lenz said
dryly. “Like Ms. Navarro’s.”
“What have you done with her?” Ben asked again, turning toward Lenz as
if coming out of a stupor. He was beyond anger now. He was in another,
calmer place. He was thinking about killing Jorgen Lenz, realizing with
peculiar satisfaction that he did in fact have it in him to kill another
person.
And he was thinking about how he would find Anna. I’ll listen to you,
you bastard. I’ll be civil and obedient and I’ll let you talk until you
take me to her.
And then I’ll kill you.
Lenz looked at him, unblinking, and then continued his explanation. “I
expect you’ve figured out the basic scenario. Quite simply, what his
work promised was the opportunity to explore the limits of mortality. A
man lives for a hundred years if he’s lucky. Mice only get two years.
Galapagos tortoises can live two hundred years. Now, why in the world
is that? Has nature dictated these arbitrary limits?”
Lenz had begun pacing slowly back and forth in front of Ben, his guards
standing watch. “Even though my father was forced to move to South
America, he continued to direct his research institute here long
distance. Traveled back and forth several times a year. In the late
fifties one of his scientists made an intriguing discovery that every
time a human cell divides, its chromosomes, those tiny spindles of DNA,
become shorter! Microscopically shorter, yes, but still, measurably so.
So what was it, exactly, that was getting shorter? It took years to
discover the answer.” He smiled again. “Father was right. The secret
really was in our cells.”
“The chromosomes,” Ben said. He was beginning to understand.
Father was Tight.
He had an idea now where Max had gone.
“Just one tiny part of the chromosomes, really. The very tip of them
looks a little like those plastic tips at the end of shoelaces. Way
back in 1938 those little caps had been discovered, named ‘telomeres.”
Our team found that every time a cell divides, those little caps get
shorter and shorter, until the cell starts to die. Our hair falls out.
Our bones get brittle. Our spines curve. Our skin wrinkles and sags.
We get old.”
“I saw what you’re doing to those children,” Ben said. “The progerics.
I take it you’re experimenting on them.” And who else are you
experimenting on? “The world believes you invite them in for a
vacation. Some vacation.” No, he chided himself, must remain calm. He
struggled to control his rage, keep from showing it.
Listen to him. Lead him on.
“True, it’s no vacation for them,” Lenz agreed. “But these poor
children do not need vacations. They need a cure! It’s really
fascinating, you know, these little young-old people. They’re born old.
If you took a cell from a newborn progeric child and put it side by
side, under a microscope, with one from a ninety-year-old man why, even
a molecular biologist couldn’t tell the difference! In a progeric,
those little tips start out short. Short telomeres, short lives.”
“What are you doing to them?” Ben asked. He realized his jaw ached
from clenching it so hard so long. A mental image flashed of the
progeric children in the bottles.
Dr. Reisinger and Justice Miriam Bateman, Arnold Carr, and the others
were straggling out of the room, conversing.
“Those little shoelace tips, they’re like tiny odometers. Or timing
devices, say. We have a hundred trillion cells in our bodies, and each
cell has ninety-two telomeres that makes ten quadrillion little clocks
telling our body when it’s time to shut down. We’re preprogrammed to
die!”
Lenz seemed unable to contain his excitement. “But what if we could
somehow reset the clocks, hmm? Keep them from getting shorter? Ah,
that was the trick. Well, it turns out that some cells–certain brain
cells, for instance–make a chemical, an enzyme, that fixes up their
little telomeres, rebuilds them. All of our cells have the ability to
make it, but for some reason they don’t–it’s just switched off most of
the time. So … what if we could turn that switch on? Keep those
little clocks ticking? So elegant, so simple. But I’d be lying to you
if I said this was easy to do. Even with all the money in the world,
and some of the world’s most brilliant scientists to choose from, it
still took decades, and a number of scientific advances, like gene
splicing.”
This was what the killings were about, wasn’t it?
A neat little irony, Ben thought. People die so that others can live
far beyond their natural life span.
Keep him talking, explaining. Bury the rage. Keep sight of the goal.
“When did you make your breakthrough?” Ben asked.
“Around fifteen, twenty years ago.”
“And why hasn’t anybody else caught up with you?”
“Others are working in the field, of course. But we’ve got an advantage
they lack.”
“Unlimited funding.” Credit Max Hartman, he thought.
“That helps, certainly. And the fact that we’ve been working on it
pretty much nonstop since the forties. But that’s not the whole story.
The big difference is human experimentation. Every ‘civilized’ country
in the world has outlawed it. But how much can you really learn from
rats or fruit flies, for God’s sake. We made our earliest advances by
experimenting on children with progeria, a condition that doesn’t exist
elsewhere in the animal world. And we still use progerics, as we
continue to refine our understanding of the molecular pathways involved.
One day we won’t need them anymore. But we still have so much to