Forty-Eight X (35 page)

Shell smiled. “That’s Sicily,” he said. “It won’t come off.”

Shell began to walk away when the chimp called after him. He abruptly stopped to look back.

“What?” the general asked.

The animal tilted his head and proffered a chimpanzee’s congenially amusing ear to ear toothy smile. “Sissy,” the chimp murmured again. This time Shell heard him clearly.

Nothing happened on Lemuria of which Mack Shell was unaware. So, when Colonel McGraw delved into the design configuration of barges and chatted with the base meteorological officer, Shell knew. But he had given his orders and said no more. McGraw was a like a good son. He made him proud. But more important, Link McGraw understood the magic of Lemuria and his heart was pure.

Sissy
, Shell thought.
Only my best friends ever called me that
.

I
t was drizzling when Joshua Krantz exited the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He had been doing research there in their basement archives for several weeks. He ran with a limp across the street to the corner of Eighty-first Street and Central Park West and tried to hail a taxi. He still had a limp. One of the animal bites he had sustained eight months earlier had become infected, and after they had debrided his wounds and pumped him full of antibiotics for weeks, he had recovered. But with scarring, he still favored the leg. He was in a hurry to get uptown. Fala was pregnant, and he had just gotten a cell phone call that there was a problem. She was being taken to Mount Sinai Hospital on One-hundredth Street between Madison and Fifth. It was a short cab ride to the medical center on the other side of Central Park and just a few blocks uptown. Getting a cab was impossible. It was a damn drizzle, Krantz grumbled inside—a petty sun shower. But as soon as a drop of water fell from the sky, no New Yorker would tolerate walking anymore. Too much suede and leather at risk, he thought. Everyone was hailing cabs. Damn the leg, Krantz thought, and he began his wobbly jog across the park, past the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir, and out the other side at Eighty-sixth Street. He had been in New York for sixth months now and was familiar with all the landmarks. He hobbled by the Guggenheim and the Jewish Museum. He was almost there.

Fala was due in another month. That was one of several reasons they had come to New York. Although she had wanted to be near her family in Cairo, Joshua didn’t feel comfortable—as an ex
-Aman
agent—spending months in an Arab den. Krantz suggested they live in Jerusalem. But Fala, as much as she loved him, didn’t want to give birth to a
sabra
—a native-born Israeli. The solution came easily after her first ultrasound. Her doctors felt there was some possibility of fetal abnormalities. The measurements they took of head circumference, head to rump length, and fetal age were abnormal. They suggested other studies such as amniocentesis to look for genetic abnormalities but Fala declined. It didn’t matter what the tests showed. Abortion was not an option. Whatever gift Allah had decided to bestow upon her, she would accept.

Krantz arrived at Mount Sinai soaked. He didn’t know if he was wet from the rain or sweat. He sighed heavily to catch his breath and calm his nerves. His wife was in premature labor. He was there to be her strength. But they had already taken her to surgery for an emergency caesarian section.

She had ruptured her membranes and there was some fetal irritability, a delivery room nurse explained. Krantz tried to remain calm. The baby was only one month premature. He knew babies that young survived all the time. And anyway, Mount Sinai had a neonatal intensive care unit, as well. Fala was in the hands of the best doctors in one of the best hospitals in the world. He walked over to the hospital chapel anyway.

In the operating room, everything was quick and routine. The doctors and nurses had performed a thousand similar “crash” C-sections. Anesthesia was rapid, the prep quick, and unhesitant incisions were made through skin and then the uterine wall. In a minute, they had the distressed newborn in hand and the umbilical cord cut. The infant did not cry out, but it did take a single breath—and that would be recalled as the most remarkable fact. Taking a breath on its own, the baby could not be declared stillborn. That single breath was the definition that it had lived. Despite the unusual appearance of the newborn, the OR crew worked frantically to resuscitate the dying child. They intubated, suctioned, performed cardiac compressions, infused drugs first through the endotracheal tube and then through an intravenous line established in the newborn’s umbilical cord. The staff had seen unusual, horrid births before—conjoined twins, anencephalics, limbless infants. This baby was a new experience. The child had the puffy pink cheeks of a newborn but a small-sized head and high, overriding arched brows; most remarkably, it was covered in fine hair from head to foot.
A monkey child
, the doctor thought.

Joshua Krantz was shown his dead child and immediately he suspected what horrific and unusual events had occurred. He asked that the dead baby not be shown to Fala when she awoke. He would tell her it was stillborn and no more. That grief would be enough to handle. He asked that a pathology study be performed, including DNA sampling. And he particularly wanted a tissue sample sent to a geneticist at Stanford, Dr. Julius Wagner.

I
t had not been particularly difficult to rehabilitate Dr. Wagner’s reputation. His disappearance to head the secret Lemuria Project was revealed. But when it made headlines, there was no mention of any army division of chimpanzees. Instead, Lemuria was advertised as the president’s grand gamble to rid the world of cancer and AIDS and Alzheimer’s.

“Just as Einstein forewarned Franklin Roosevelt of the potential of the atomic bomb,” the president announced, “Dr. Wagner, one of our foremost scientists and winner of the Nobel Prize, informed me that we were on the verge of great discoveries in medicine and genetics. ‘We are on the cusp,’ he told me, ‘of eliminating the great scourges of human life.’ But this great leap forward, he warned me, would be endangered if left to competitive greed among multinational pharmaceutical companies anxious just to reap profits, or other nations who have a track record of stealing the intellectual property of others and calling it their own. I elected to invest not only in America’s future, but in the future of all mankind.”

For weeks after the president’s announcement, Dr. Wagner announced one new scientific advance after another. The patents and copyrights were owned by the United States government and made freely available to anyone. It was a great humanitarian gesture applauded by every nation, every person in the world. And just as importantly for the president, it assured his reelection.

The one person who was initially most unhappy about Dr. Wagner’s rebirth was Nathan Stumpf. No dead doctor. No life insurance money. Despite an interesting adventure, he was as broke as ever. But those doldrums quickly ended. Because he had taken such good care of his daughter, Dr. Wagner used his significant influence to get Stumpf the job as head of security for Stanford University. He also began to get quite a few government consulting jobs. Nate Stumpf was a man who usually had plenty of things to say, but he quickly came to learn how lucrative not saying them could be. There was one more significant reward.

“I don’t know why I didn’t find you handsome before,” Maggie said, as she cuddled with him on her couch and played with his curly hair.

“You were distracted,” he said. “You thought you’re father had been murdered.”

“I never paid you, either,” she smiled.

“I’ve been paid,” he said, kissing her neck and fondling her breasts.

Indeed, he had been well paid. Nate Stumpf had a newfound prestige, a new wardrobe, a sporty new car, straight and shiny new teeth, and perhaps best of all, he had the girl.

When Mack Shell heard about Fala al-Shohada’s unfortunate childbirth experience, he felt some guilt but also perhaps relief that he had put an end to Lemuria. He had authorized the abductions of both Fala and Joshua Krantz. At the time, they had both been asking too many of the right questions. Shell had suggested the solution.

Colonel McGraw had trained several pairs of chimps to perform abductions. Four chimps had been easily transported into the Philippines as zoo animals and placed into a local chimpanzee sanctuary. Unfortunately, they had caused considerable disruption there when they escaped. However, they weren’t prevented from completing their mission. They rendezvoused on schedule with their commander, McGraw, who secreted them in oversized luggage and brought them into the Manila hotel. From there, it was easy to get them into the right room, where they anticipated the arrival of the Israeli colonel and his Egyptian paramour. The manpower, or rather chimp-power, was relatively overwhelming. An adult chimp had the strength of seven grown men. When Krantz left so quickly, the teams dealt with Fala alone. While one chimpanzee restrained her, the other slapped a prepared syringe into her thigh, injecting a high dose of ketamine, an anesthetic agent chemically related to the hallucinogen PCP. The sedative-hypnotic drug would incapacitate her for sixty minutes. She would be amnesic of the event. The team was, of course, adept at climbing. They carried their victim along the outside of the building to the roof. There, they entered the hotel’s elevator shaft and, holding their quarry, made their way down eight stories to a garage where McGraw waited with a recovery truck.

Once Fala and Krantz entered their hotel room, all the events were scheduled to unfold in exactly ten minutes. As long as there were no unexpected occurrences, McGraw knew his animals would perform exactly as rehearsed. But Krantz was not there, and there were four chimps to accomplish the task. They reached the bottom of the shaft in six minutes, not ten. There they would sit and wait for the exact time to exit. They had an infallible mental clock. Fala, however, had the misfortune to be in the middle of her menstrual cycle, that time when she was ovulating. She was secreting pheromones, a virtually imperceptible sexually alluring scent that evolution had refined in mammals to attract a mate at exactly the appropriate time for conception. McGraw’s chimps were not only chockful of new human genes and capabilities, but they still preserved their innate superior qualities, including a better olfactory sense. They were helpless in avoiding Fala’s chemical lure.

Mack Shell was horrified when he imagined his animals raping a woman. Thank God, he thought, she would never know. He also knew the encounter was brief. The primatologists had taught him a lot—an aroused chimp ejaculates in 4.3 seconds. If the deed was done, it was done fast. Fala’s pregnancy also answered one other gnawing question. Why had McGraw’s well-disciplined chimps attacked Joshua Krantz? The chimpanzees that attacked Joshua Krantz were the ones that had impregnated Fala. Joshua Krantz was attacked because he was a competing male. He put the future of their progeny at risk. It was a simple choice—survival of the species.

Julius Wagner also came to know what had happened. It was easy to surmise when he examined the dead infant’s DNA. But it wasn’t the terrible vision of bestiality that disturbed him. It was the fact that an interspecies breeding of man and monkey had survived. The child had taken a breath. Scientifically that should never have been possible. Humans and apes could not produce offspring because they each had a different number of chromosomes. Chimpanzees had forty-eight X, or forty-eight chromosomes. Humans had forty-six. Evolutionary theorists suspected that millions of years ago our chimp ancestors fused two chromosomes into one and that mutation resulted in the beginning of the new “human” species. Dr. Wagner’s experiments had been designed to mutate the animal for the purpose of performing a particular function—becoming an animal warrior. Somehow, and he had no idea yet how, those alterations had also altered the ape’s gametes, or sperm cells, so that it could successfully fertilize a human egg. Most hybrids were sterile—like a mule, a cross between a donkey and a horse. If this child had lived, would it have been sterile? He didn’t know.

A hybrid had been born—a humanzee. Had a new species been created? Humanity, Dr. Wagner believed, was an evolutionary accident. He would not debate religion and would willingly concede that man could have been designed by God. But if God had designed man, he certainly made his creation seem like an accident nevertheless. If the world, however, discovered that Julius Wagner had played God and was responsible for creating a human-ape hybrid—a creature that spoke, that reasoned, that had emotions—he would be vilified by every scientist, politician, theologian… everyone. But far worse, the foundations of science, politics, and theology would crumble. All men are created equal, was the world’s mantra. It was a noble thought that was still nigh impossible for men to live by. How would man ever accept another living creature being equal to them?