it. But you don’t want to do that, do you?”
“That depends,” I hedged-but his lip curled again, and I knew that I had to play the game more openly than that. “You have to give me more,” I went on. “You have to give me some idea of what you actually did, if you didn’t transplant the human sequences.”
“Why should I?” he countered, bluntly.
I wasn’t speaking for myself, but I had to make the offer. “Because we might still be able to put this thing away,” I told him. “We might not be able to unmake the discovery, but we might be able to save ourselves from its consequences, at least for a while.”
“No,” he said, wearily as well as firmly. “We can’t. We thought about it-Rawley, Brad and I-but we decided that we couldn’t. We’re not policemen, Dr. Hitchens, we’re not politicians and we’re not lawyers. We couldn’t put it away, and we still can’t. Not because it wouldn’t do any good, although it wouldn’t, but because it simply wouldn’t be right. We’re not going to cooperate, Dr. Hitchens. We’re not going to take it to the bitter end. They’re human, and every ovum produced by every animal on our farms and in our zoos is potentially human. That’s the way it is, and we can’t just ignore the fact. We can’t make any deal that doesn’t make the whole matter public.”
“You were the ones who never published,” I pointed out. “You were the ones who kept on working in secret.”
“Itwasn’t finished, ” he told me. I was sure that he wasn’t trying to wriggle out of it.
“If you’re telling the truth,” I told him, “it never will be. But you still have to convince me of that.”
He was still looking at me with faint disgust, because of what he thought I’d become, but in the end he had to loosen up. Like me, he didn’t have any alternative.
Even when we’d reviewed the tape and gone through it step by step, the senior Special branch men and most of the Home Office staff still didn’t get it.
“Okay,” said the Unit’s top man, “so the one you talked to was smart and kind of cute-but she isn’t ever going to get to court, let alone to daytime TV. She’s a pig. An animal. Wecan send her to the slaughterhouse. We can get rid of them all, if we decide that’s the appropriate thing to do.”
“We wouldn’t necessarily have to go that far,” one of the junior ministers put in. “Once people know what she really is, that will color everyone’s view of her. It doesn’t matter how cute or clever she is, nobody is going to make out a serious case for making anymore like her. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.”
What he meant, of course, was “let’s not throw the bathwater out with the baby.” He figured that there might be useful purposes to which the technics might be put-secret purposes, of course, if the legal advisors decided that the whole area was legally out of bounds, but government-approvable purposes nevertheless. He was thinking about designing ultra-smart animals for use as spies and soldiers. He’d probably been a fan of the wrong kind of comic books in his youth. He wasn’t thinking Boy’s Own adventures; he was thinkingReality is What You Can Get Away With.
The permanent under-secretary knew better, of course. “She was right about the records,” he observed, reflectively. “The fact that we failed to recover them makes it a mystery. As soon as the rumor spreads that you can turn animal embryos into passable human beings with standard equipment and a chicken-feed budget, everybody and his cousin will be curious to know how it’s done. We left it far too late to make our move-and I’m talking years, not weeks. We should have applied the new laws as soon as we had reason to believe that they’d been broken.”
“Without the records,” I said, quietly, “there’s no way to be sure that even the new lawshave been broken. And that makes it an even better mystery.”
“She’s apig, Hitchens,” the plain-speaking policeman pointed out. “She’s a pig that looks like a little girl.
If that isn’t illegal genetic engineering, what is?”
“If Hemans is telling the truth,” I said, “Applied Homeotics isn’t genetic engineering in the legal sense at all. He had to make up most of the missing one point four percent somehow, but if he’d simply tried to transplant or import it he’d probably have failed in exactly the same way that most other attempts to transplant whole blocks of genes have failed. Assuming that what he told me was true-and I’m inclined to believe him-his way ismuch better, and it’s not against the law. If this ever gets to court, we might have to hope that the backup records really have been destroyed-because if they haven’t, and Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby can use them to mount a successful defense, we’re going to look really stupid.”
“That won’t happen,” the permanent under-secretary said. “If they want any kind of life after acquittal, they’ll make a deal. They’ll give us their secretsand they’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement. The real question is whether other people will be able to duplicate their work anyhow, guided by the knowledge-or even the rumor-that it’spossible.”
“Who but the wackos would want to?” asked the chief inspector. “Do you really think the world is full of people who want to turn out imitation human beings? Even the worst kinds of animal liberation lunatics aren’t about to start clamoring for every piglet’s right to walk on two legs and wear a dress. This is the real world. Some animals are a hell of a lot more equal than others, and we’re them, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
It was time to cut through the bullshit to the real heart of the matter. “You’re not taking Alice seriously enough,” I told them. “You haven’t listened properly to what she and Hemans said. Suppose she’s right.
Suppose she isn’t a pig pretending to be a human. Suppose she really is a human.”
“She’s not,” the policeman said, flatly. “Genetically, she’s a pig. End of story.”
“According to her,” I pointed out, “genetics doesn’t enter into it. Human is as human does-and her brothers and sisters were the ones who got gunned down because they didn’t believe that their fellow men would open fire on a bunch of unarmed children. Without her school records, and until she consents to be tested again, we can only guess at her IQ, but on the evidence of my conversation and Hemans’ assurances I’d be willing to bet that it’s a little bit higher than the average teenager’s. You haven’t yet begun to consider the implications of that fact.”
“Ifpigs in human form are smarter than real humans, that’s all the more reason for making sure that all the world’s pigs stay in their sties,” the man from Special Branch insisted. The minister was content to listen, for the time being.
“If Hemans is telling the truth,” I went on, disregarding the policeman’s interruption, “he and his colleagues didn’t need to transplant any genes to make her human. DNA analysis of the dead bodies supports that contention. The difference between a human being and a chimpanzee, as Alice pointed out, is very small. The most important differences are in the homeotic genes-the genes that control the expression of other genes, thus determining which cells in a developing embryo are going to specialize as liver cells or as neurons, and how the structures built out of specialized cells are going to be laid out within an anatomical frame. If you have an alternative control mechanism which can take over the work of those controlling genes, they become redundant-and as long as the embryo you’re working with has the stocks of genes required to make all the specialized kinds of cell you need, you can make any kind of an embryo grow into any form you required. You could make human beings out of pigs and cows, tigers and elephants, exactly as Alice said-andvice versa.”
“That’s bullshit,” the policeman said. “You’ve said all along that they had to make up the difference. We have to have the extra genes that make us human.”
“That’s true,” I agreed, wondering how simple I could make it, and how simple I’d need to make it before he could understand. “And until today I’d assumed, just as you had, that the extra genes would have to be transplanted, or that they’d have to synthesized from library DNA and imported-but that almost never works with whole sets of genes, because mere possession of a gene is only part of the story. You have to control its expression-and that’s what Applied Homeotics is all about. We’ve become so accustomed to genetic engineering by transplantation that we’ve lost sight of other approaches-but Hemans and his friends are lateral thinkers. We didn’t get to be human by having genes transplanted into us-wegrew the new genesin situ. Only a few million of the three billion base pairs in the human genome are actually expressed, but it’s an insult to the rest to call it junk DNA, the way we used to. Most of it is satellite repeat sequences, but in between the satellites there are hundreds of thousands of truncated genes and pseudogenes, all of them in a constant state of crossgenerational flux because of transposon activity.
“Pigs may only have homologues of ninety-eight point six percent of our genes, but they also have homologues of almost all the protogenes making up the difference. Those protogenes are not only present within the pig genome, they’re mostly in the right sites. Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby didn’t need to transplant any human DNA-all they had to do was tweak the pig DNA that was already in place. And as Alice said when she had me trapped in Wonderland, if you can do it to a pig, you can do it to a cow-and given that the common ancestor relating
