for the unfortunate deaths which occurred during the course of the police raid on Hollinghurst Manor. The police had reason to believe that a serious breach of the law had taken place, and they were proceeding in full accordance with the law, but they deeply regret the fact that so many of those fleeing the building refused to stop when challenged, forcing the Armed Response Unit to open fire.”
“Never mind the bullshit, Hitchens,” he countered, curling his lip disdainfully. “Are they going to charge us, and if so, what with?”
“Okay,” I said, easing my tone according to plan, in order to imply-falsely, and perhaps not very convincingly- that there would be no more bullshit. “They haven’t decided yet whether to charge you, or with what. There are several different schools of thought. As soon as they catch up with one of the escapers-and they will-the hawks will want to move. You have until then to make your offer, if you have one to make.”
“Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be making offers?” Hemans countered.
“No,” I said. “I’m not. You’re the one who knows whether the experiments being carried out at Hollinghurst Manor were illegal, and to what extent. You’re the one who knows the identities of the children who were living in the house, and the extent of the irregularities surrounding the registration of their births, their schooling, and whatever else might come up. If you want to offer explanations and excuses before the police draw their own conclusions, you’d best do it quickly.”
He didn’t laugh, but he didn’t seem to be intimidated either. “You must have determined the identities of the ones you killed,” he said.
“On the contrary,” I replied, carefully. “The police haven’t been able to match the bodies with any public records or any missing persons. That is, in itself, cause for concern. There is no record of any application for the custody of any children having been made by you or any of your colleagues, so the police are completely at a loss to understand how they came to be resident in the house-or why, given that they were resident in the house, they don’t appear to have attended school or to be registered with a doctor, or…”
“This is a waste of time,” Hemans interrupted. “If you’re just going to pretend that you don’t know anything, I think I’ll wait for the formal interrogation, when my lawyer can decide how little I ought to say.”
“I spoke to one of the children in the aftermath of the fire,” I told him, abruptly. “She seemed to believe that she wasn’t the product of a human womb. Did you tell her that?”
“We told her the truth about her origins,” he answered.
“And what was the truth?” I asked.
“That she was the product of a scientific experiment.”
“An illegal experiment?”
“Certainly not. Neither I nor any of my colleagues has ever transplanted any human genes into any other animal. We have been exceedingly careful to work within the existing law.”
“But you haven’t published any of your work,” I pointed out. “You haven’t applied for any patents. Even by private sector standards, that’s unusually secretive.”
“We haven’t published because the work wasn’t complete,” Hemans retorted, “and now, thanks to your murderous interference, it never will be. We haven’t applied for any patents because we aren’t ready.
Not that it’s any of your business-or anyone else’s. Rawley, Brad, and I were able to finance this project ourselves.”
“The police didn’t set fire to the house,” I pointed out. “It isn’t their fault that your equipment and records were destroyed. You did that yourselves.”
“No, we didn’t,” Hemans lied. “The fire was an accident-the result of the confusion generated by the raid.”
“Your work wasn’t merely self-funded,” I pointed out, not wishing to pursue that particular red herring.
“It was clandestine. You’ve made every possible effort to keep it secret. You seem to have been using children as experimental subjects-children of whom there is no official record of any kind. Even if they were your own children, that would be illegal. If they aren’t…there’s a great deal that requires explanation.”
“And you already know what the explanation is, so we’d make better progress if you cut to the chase.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I don’t know any such thing. I don’t know that the story the girl gave me was anything but a pack of lies, cooked up to make your work seem much more successful than it was. We can’t interrogate the dead, so we have no way to know whether the individuals identified by genetic fingerprinting as pigs in human form were capable of speech, let alone rational thought. I’m certain in my own mind that the scene in the cellar was staged-how else would the three of them have been able to disappear, given that the exit they were ostensibly aiming for was blocked?”
“Maybe they found another,” Hemans said. “Who did you talk to?”
“She called herself Alice.”
“We all called her Alice,” he assured me. “She’s not among the dead, then? And she did get away from the gunmen?”
“Theywill find her,” I told him. “Whoever and whatever she is, she can’t hide. Wherever she went, there’ll be a trail. This is the twenty-first century.Nobody can hide for long.”
“That includes the people chasing her,” he pointed out. “It’s one thing to surround a house in the middle of a wood for one night only, and quite another to conduct a nationwide manhunt for weeks on end. How many are you looking for?”
“How many were there?”
He still didn’t smile, but he knew that that was one of the best cards he held up his sleeve. If we’d been fooled into thinking there were at least seven, when there were really only four, we might keep searching for a long time- and he was right about the difficulty of hiding a nationwide manhunt, whether that was the right word for it or not.
“Why did you do it?” I asked him, abruptly. “It’s such a strange thing to attempt. Why did you eventry? ”
“You’re a geneticist yourself, Dr. Hitchens,” he replied. “You, of all people, should understand.”
I thought I did. I thought that now was the time to show him that I did. “If you really did do it,” I said, “I can only conclude that it was by accident. I can’t imagine that you had the least idea when you started out just how successful your experiment in Applied Homeotics would be. I can only suppose that you started out trying to figure out what the limits of embryonic plasticity were, and that you wouldn’t have dared to superimpose a human anatomical template on the pig embryos if you had realized that it would work so spectacularly. Once you found out what the babies were actually capable of, you must have been thrown into a quandary, unable to decide what to do next-so you simply carried on, monitoring their development in secret, not knowing when or how to stop. You must have been grateful when the police finally made their move, taking the matter out of your hands.”
He looked at me with what seemed to me to be a new respect. “You keep sayingif,” he pointed out, “but you don’t really believe there’s an if, do you? You know perfectly well that Alice is the real thing.”
“I don’tknow it,” I told him, truthfully. “You’re the one thatknows. How clever is she, do you think?”
“Not so very clever,” he told me feigning slight reluctance. “Precocious, but not so very far from the norm. Only human. But her parentswere pigs, Dr. Hitchens. We did do it-and we’re prepared to defend ourselves in any court you care to haul us into. We’re prepared to defend it all the way. I like your label, by the way.Applied Homeotics sounds so much more dignified than Brad’shomeoboxing. If you know that that’s what it is, you must also know that it isn’t going to go away. Not now.”
Hemans didn’t just mean that he and his colleagues were prepared to defend the legality of their experiment and the merits of their new biotechnology. He meant that they were prepared to defend the humanity of its first products. Maybe hewas just a little bit grateful to have his hand forced, but he had decided long ago exactly how he would play it when the forcing started. He might have fallen into a godlike role by accident, but he had accepted the responsibility that went with it. Our side hadn’t, yet.
Our side had gone in blind and trigger-happy. That wasn’t my fault, but I’d have to carry the can along with everyone else if things continued to get more and more screwed-up.
“I also know that it can’t bemerely a matter of tweaking development times,” I said. “Pigs may have homologues of ninety-eight point six percent of human genes, but that still isn’t enough. Whatever you told Alice, you had to make up a substantial fraction of the remainder. Maybe you copied the sequences from a contig library, used YACs to multiply them and then delivered them into the embryo by retrovirus, but that doesn’t make it legal. Human sequences are human sequences, even if you build them base by base, and when you transplanted them into pig embryos you broke the law.”
“We didn’t transplant anything,” Hemans insisted. “We didn’t break any laws. Put us in the dock and we’ll prove
