“But you didn’t pick up three stragglers in the house?”
“No,” he admitted, “but if you’ll pardon my pointing it out, Dr. Hitchens, I’m the one who’s supposed to be debriefing you. Yes, theycould have been piglets-and no, we wouldn’t have believed that if we hadn’t had the autopsy reports your colleagues carried out on the ones we shot. Personally, I’d have passed every one of the corpses as human, and I wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t believe otherwise until your colleagues came back to us with the results of the DNA-tests-but we didn’t capture any of the piglets alive. Now, would you mind telling me exactly what happened to you?”
“Not at all,” I said. “But there’s one thing I need to know. Was the shooting always part of the plan? Did you always intend to kill the children?”
He seemed genuinely shocked. “Of course not,” he said. “They wouldn’t stop. They just kept on running.
Theywere warned.”
The problem was, I knew, that they’d already been warned. They’d had far too many warnings for their own good.
I recited the whole story, in as much detail as I could remember, into Headley’s tape-recorder. I watched his expression becoming more troubled as I spoke, and I gathered that Special Branch were just as confused as I was as to what might be real and what might be bluff.
“This has turned into a real can of worms,” he told me, when he’d switched the recorder off. “We don’t know how many of the piglets might be missing. We’ve been waist-deep in lawyers ever since we got Hemans and his friends under lock and key, including lawyers claiming to represent your fugitive friend and her alleged litter- mates.”
“How many died?” I asked.
“Only seven,” he said, so weakly that it was obvious that seven was either far too many or far too few.
“Three of them were real humans. Unfortunate, but itwas their own fault. I think they wanted us to shoot, to put us in the wrong. I think Hemans told those kids to keep running no matter what because heknew that some of them would be killed. Cynical bastard.”
I had already told him that Bradby had warned his experimental subjects that an attempt might be made to wipe them out, but I wasn’t convinced that the warning had been cynical. It seemed to me that he might have been honestly concerned, and rightly so. If Alice and the othershad got away…
“We might not find it easy to prove in court that the other fourweren’t real humans,” I told Headley, although that news must already have been broken to him. “Did the DNA-tests throw up any evidence that they were transgenics?”
Headley shook his head. He seemed to understand the implications of the question. Transplanting human genes into animals was clearly and manifestly illegal, but if Alice had told me the truth, that wasn’t what had been done to her. If Alice really was a pig through and through, genetically speaking, then there was a slim possibility that Hemans’ lawyers could argue that what he and his colleagues had done wasn’t illegal at all. And if Alice was as human as she seemed to be in every respect except genetically, her lawyers might have a field day trying to establish exactly what the law might and ought to mean by “human”-assuming that the Unit ever caught up with her.
Whatever had been intended, it was obvious that the raid had been a colossal cock-up. It would be up to the minister to pull everyone’s irons out of the fire, and to look at the broader implications of what we now knew. Men like me were the minister’s eyes and brains, so it would be up to us to figure out what the real implications of the Animal Farm fiasco might be. Governments had been brought down by matters of a far more trivial nature and it was too late to hope that the situation could be contained. The cat was already out of the bag-or the pig from the poke.
Headley admitted, when I questioned him further, that without the records that had gone up in smoke, there was no way to know for sure how many experimental “piglets” there had been. They had always been kept inside, away from the prying eyes of the surveillance team, who wouldn’t have recognized them for what they were if and when they’d caught glimpses of them. Their creators and the piglets themselves knew the real number, but no one would ever know whether any figure they might offer was to be trusted. Now that we knew for sure that the piglets could pass for human, at least while they were still alive and kicking, we had to consider the possibility that some of them already were passing, in Brighton or in London, or anywhere at all.
If my evidence could be taken at face value, at least three piglets had escaped. Headley told me that other debriefings had produced evidence that at least two more, both female, might have evaded their pursuers in the woods behind the manor house. He was enough of an intellectual to understand my observation that it added up to a better breeding population than God had placed in Eden or Lot had led from Sodom.
As a scientist, of course, I wasn’t at all sure of that-engineered organisms hardly ever breed true, and it was perfectly possible that even if the ersatz girls could produce offspring, the offspring in question might have snouts and tails-but we had to consider the worst possible case. Bringing human-seeming babies out of a sow’s womb might sound no more likely than making silk purses out of sow’s ears, but we had moved into unknown territory, scientifically speaking. What did I know, given that I had never dabbled in illicit experimentation? What did any of us know, unless and until Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby condescended to enlighten us?
I suppose that I was lucky to be kept on the project, given that I’d ended up in hospital, but I was needed. I’d been brought in to analyze data, not to conduct interrogations, but the changed circumstances necessitated my taking a new role. My conversation with Alice had put me one up on my colleagues, so I was hustled out of the hospital with a bagful of pills as soon as the doctors could be persuaded to let me go.
“We haven’t charged them yet,” Headley explained to me, while I was being taken to the police station where Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby were to be questioned. “At the moment, they’re supposed to be cooperating voluntarily with our enquiries. We’re keeping in mind the possibility of charging them with arson, kidnapping and child molesting, but we want to see how they and their lawyers are going to play it before we go in hard. If they’re prepared to come clean and tell us where their backed-up data is-assuming they do have backups somewhere-we might still be able to tidy up the mess.”
It seemed like a reasonable assumption to me, although I wasn’t sure how reasonable our mad scientists would prove to be.
I went into the interview with Hemans thinking that I was the only one on our side who’d actually thought the matter through, and the only one to have grasped the full complexity of the issue. I thought that I might be approaching the high-point of my career-a taller peak than I had ever dreamed of scaling-if only I could keep my wits about me.
The interview was being videotaped, of course, but the tape wouldn’t be admissible in court.
I couldn’t measure the exact combination of emotions that mingled in Hemans’ expression as he looked at me, but there was at least a little contempt and at least a little distaste. I couldn’t understand that.
When I’d first met Hemans, way back in ’06, he’d been working in the public sector himself, helping to tidy up the loose ends of the Human Genome Project-but even before the HGP had delivered its treasure, its workers were being sucked into private enterprise. Comparative genomics was supposed to be the next big thing. I didn’t hold it against Hemans that he had jumped ship, and I couldn’t see any reason why he’d hold it against me that I hadn’t.
It was obvious by ’06 that the attempts that had been made to patent human gene sequences and develop diagnostic kits based on HGP sequencing data wouldn’t bear much commercial fruit in the immediate future, because they’d be tied up in the courts for years. The precedents for patenting animal genes had, however, been established by the Harvard oncomouse and all the disease-models that had followed in its wake. Given that all mammals had homologues for at least ninety-five percent of human genes, the obvious thing for ambitious biotech companies to do was to steer around the moral minefield by concentrating their immediate efforts on what could be done with animals. Pigs were already contributing organs for xenotransplantation, so they were a natural target for sequencing and potential exploitation, and there was nothing surprising in the fact that Hemans and his coworkers had decided to concentrate their efforts in that direction. What was surprising, though-and disturbing-was that they’d decided to cross the line that the European Court had drawn regarding the uses to which human genes could be put. What was even more surprising, to me-and even more disturbing-was that the way Hemans looked at me when I sat down to question him showed not the slightest trace of guilt or shame.
That made me wary, and wariness made me even more punctilious than usual.
“First of all, Dr. Hemans,” I said, carefully, “I’ve been asked to apologize on behalf of His Majesty’s Government
