Occupying most of a shelf beyond the table was a five-gallon aquarium tank bubbling with seawater. Immersed in the tank, pulsing repugnantly on a bed of sand, was one of Tenenbaum’s sluglike wonders. It was about eight inches long, with a primitive armor fringing its edges. It had striated, grainy skin; faintly incandescent blue panels on its humped back. Teeth gnashed at one end on its elongated body; a small tapered tail twitched at the other.
“This Tenenbaum, she believes genes answer to everything. Suchong think genes important—but the control of subject’s mind, conditioning of synapses, these things are more important! Who controls such, controls all!”
“I like that,” Fontaine said. “Conditioning is something real interesting to me. Read about it in some magazine. The Nazis were experimenting with it…”
Tenenbaum cleared her throat and said, “Now this man, Brougham, he is wounded—I will show you injury…” She lifted up the gown of the man on the gurney, and Fontaine winced to see a nasty, puckered, ragged tear in the man’s flesh, about seven inches long, haphazardly taped shut just above the groin. “He tries to use fishing hook to steal fish from fishery tanks! Ryan’s men catch him, slice him with his own hook. Now—we have extracted special material from slugs. Purified it. This material is made of special stem cells. Unstable. Highly adaptable. Please observe.”
She picked up the syringe and jammed it in the flesh just above the man’s groin. Brougham’s back arched, his body reacting—but he didn’t wake. Fontaine winced at the sight of the three-inch needle piercing deeply into the man’s gut.
“Now,” she said, “observe the wound.”
Fontaine did. And nothing happened.
“Ha!” Dr. Suchong said. “Maybe it not work this time. And your great theory—poof, Tenenbaum!”
Then the skin around the wound twitched, reddened, and the serrated flesh inside the wound seemed to writhe about… and seal shut. In a minute, only a faint scar remained of the ragged gash. It had healed before their eyes.
“I’ll be damned!” Fontaine said.
“I call it ADAM,” said Brigid Tenenbaum. “Because from Adam in the myth came life for mankind. This too brings life—it destroys damaged cells, replaces them with new ones—transferred by plasmids, unstable genetic material. Now, stem cells can be manipulated—their genes changed! We can make them this, make them that. If it can do this, heal instantly—what else can it do? Transform a man, a woman? Into what? Many things! Endless possibility!”
Suchong chewed at a thumbnail, staring at the experimental subject. Then he pointed. “You see there? On his head—some lesions!”
She shrugged. “Hardly visible. A few minor side effects…”
“Some may have much more! Your man with the miracle hands—that one behaves a little strangely now. And there are some curious marks on his arms. Like cancer! Uncontrolled cell growth!”
“So that’s the key,” Fontaine mused. “These stem-cell things and this… this ADAM? You can use it to change things up in a man—give him special abilities, like we discussed?”
“Precisely!” she said proudly.
Fontaine could tell she was speaking to him, though she never looked at him. She would turn her head his way, but her eyes were always fixed on some point over his left shoulder, as if she were talking to an invisible person behind him. “Growing hair, growing a bigger pecker, bigger muscles, bigger breasts for the ladies, bigger brains for the highbrows…”
“It is all possible with ADAM!”
“Hmf,” Suchong said. “You do not tell him how ADAM must be constantly re-energized!”
“Not a concern, Dr. Suchong!” Tenenbaum said, listening to Brougham’s heart with a stethoscope. “I have design for energizer—we will call it EVE!” She frowned. “But—the sea slug can only make so much ADAM and EVE. These sea slugs—we believe they are also parasites. We find on sharks, other creatures. Maybe they can be attached to human beings. A person could become a… a factory for ADAM. Then we have more ADAM for experiments.” She scratched thoughtfully in her unwashed hair. “Working with my mentor, all he thought of was how to find greater power in men! To breed them, to change them! Working at his side, I was thinking of another researcher. A greater one! Ha, ha!”
That was the first time Fontaine had ever heard her laugh—a brittle, almost inhuman sound.
“So this ADAM thing,” Fontaine went on, looking at the healed skin on the sedated man. “If you could get enough sea slugs, maybe some people to work with as… what would you call them, hosts… you could mass- produce this stuff?”
She nodded to the imaginary person behind Fontaine. “In time—yes.”
“But…” Dr. Suchong shook his head. “Suchong believe—ADAM could be addictive! My study of human beings shows me anything that make easy change in people, the people quickly become addicted! A man feels bad, takes drink of alcohol, very quick feels a little better—he becomes addicted to alcohol! Same with opium! Maybe same with ADAM—quick fix in man: addictive! Organism develops need for it. Suchong observe agitation in this man Tenenbaum found on dock. Sometimes he is… what is it you people say? He is ‘high’!”
Yeah. He could feel it. His cultivation of Suchong and Tenenbaum was paying off.
“Keep on this,” Fontaine told them eagerly. “I’ll make it worth your while—worth all our whiles!”
Sitting pensively behind his inner-office desk in the medical pavilion, Dr. J. S. Steinman was bored, and tired of fighting his own impulses. And only just now beginning to understand why he’d come to Rapture.
Steinman took a cigarette from the box on the coral desk, lit it with a silver lighter shaped like a human nose, and got up to open the curtains on his office port hole so he could gaze out at the sea—at kelp and sea fans waving in the current. Restful, that view. Nothing like New York. Always hectic in the Big Apple. People interfering with a man.
It was the implied condemnation he resented, the small-minded judgment of his greatness. How to explain what it was like to reach out for the planet Venus, in hopes of making it his pocket watch? How could he explain that he was sometimes visited by the goddess Aphrodite? He had heard the goddess’s voice so clearly…
Oh, how the goddess had thrilled him! Yes, it was true that he’d heard her voice while taking ether— cocaine and ether by turns, in fact—but it had been no mere hallucination. He was sure of that.
So when Ryan had approached him, saying that innovative surgeons would be needed in Rapture, he’d heard Aphrodite whispering to him again:
Steinman blew a plume of blue smoke toward the ceiling vent and turned to look at himself in the office mirror. He knew very well he was a “handsome” man. The elegant chin, the striking ears, the dark eyes, that
