Supermind, page 14
Barbara paused before the massive black door with Hammond's name on it. She gazed possessively at the words Scientific Liaison and Investigation lettered on the panel. Then she took a small key from her briefcase, slipped it into the door lock, and pressed to the right.
The door swung silently back. Barbara stepped through into the outer office, heard the faint click as the door closed behind her.
There was no one in sight The desk of Helen Wendell, Hammond's secretary, stood across the room with a number of papers on it. The door to the short hall which led to Hammond's private office was open. From it Barbara heard Helen's voice speaking quietly.
Barbara Ellington had been assigned to Hammond—actually, to Helen Wendell—immediately after her return from the unexpected training trip to Europe. The memory of that vacation, as she preferred to call it, continued to exhilarate her. And yet, it evidently had been intended as a forerunner to her new assignment.
Aside from the pleasant salary increase, part of her interest in the position had been, and continued to be, the intriguing if somewhat alarming figure of John Hammond himself, and part had been an expectation that she would find herself in the center of the behind-the-scene operations of Scientific Liaison and Investigation. In that she had so far been disappointed.
Barbara walked over to Helen Wendell's desk, took some papers from her briefcase, and was putting them into a basket when her eye caught the name of Dr. Henry Gloge on a note in the adjoining basket. Entirely on impulse—because she had seen the man only minutes before—she bent over the paper.
The note was attached to a report. It was a reminder to Hammond that he was to see Dr. Gloge today at three-thirty in connection with Gloge's Omega project. Barbara glanced automatically at her watch; it was now five minutes to three.
Unlike most of the material she handled, this item was at least partly understandable. It referred to a biological project, Point Omega Stimulation. Barbara couldn't remember having heard of such a project while she was working under Dr. Gloge. But that was hardly surprising—the biological section was one of the largest in Research Alpha. From what she was reading, the project had to do with "the acceleration of evolutionary processes" in several species of animals, and the only real information in the report seemed to be that a number of test animals had died and been disposed of.
Was the great John Hammond spending his time on this sort of thing?
Disappointed, Barbara put the report back into the basket and went on to her own office.
As she sat down at her desk, Barbara noticed a stack of papers which hadn't been there when she had left on her errand. Attached to them was a note in Helen's large, clear handwriting. The note said:
Barbara,
This came in unexpectedly and must be typed today. It obviously will require several hours of overtime. If you have made special arrangements for the evening, let me know and I'll have a typist sent up from the pool to do this extra work.
Barbara felt an instant pang of possessive jealousy. This was her job, her office! She definitely did not want some other girl coming in.
Unfortunately, she did have a date. But to keep an intruder from taking her place in John Hammond's office, even if only for a few hours, was the more important matter. That was her instant decision, needing no second thought. But she sat still a moment, biting her lip; for that moment she was a woman considering how to put off a male who had a quick temper and no patience. Then she picked up the telephone and dialed a number.
For some months now, Barbara had settled her hopes for the future on Vince Strather, a technician in the photo lab. When his voice came on the telephone, she told him what had happened, finished contritely, "I'm afraid I can't get out of it very well, Vince, so soon after starting here."
She could almost feel Vince absorbing the impact of the denial she was communicating; she had discovered quickly in their brief romance that he was trying to move her toward premarital intimacy, a step she was wholly determined not to take.
She was relieved now, when he accepted her explanation. She replaced the receiver, feeling very warm toward him. "I really do love him!" she thought.
It was a few moments later that she suddenly felt dizzy. The feeling was peculiar, not like her usual headaches. She could feel it build up, a giddy, light swirling which seemed both within and without her, as if she were weightless, about to drift out of the chair, turning slowly over and over.
Almost simultaneously, she became aware of a curious exhilaration, a sense of strength and well-being, quite unlike anything she could remember. The sensations continued for perhaps twenty seconds; then they faded and were gone, almost as abruptly as they had come.
Confused and somewhat shaken, Barbara straightened up in her chair. For a moment she considered taking aspirin. But there seemed no reason for that. She didn't feel ill. It even seemed to her that she felt more awake and alert.
She was about to return to her typing when she became aware of a movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw that John Hammond had paused in the doorway of her little office.
Barbara froze, as she always did in his presence; then slowly she turned to face him.
Hammond stood there, staring at her thoughtfully. He was a man about six feet tall, with dark brown hair and steel-gray eyes. He seemed to be about forty years old, and he was built like an athlete. Yet it was not his appearance of physical strength but the fine intelligence of his face and eyes that had always impressed her during the ten days since she had been assigned to his office. She thought now, not for the first time: This is what really great people are like.
"Are you all right, Barbara?" Hammond asked. "For a moment, I thought you were going to fall out of your chair."
It was highly disturbing to Barbara to realize that her dizzy spell had been observed. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hammond," she murmured shyly. "I must have been daydreaming."
He gazed at her a moment longer, then nodded, turned, and walked off.
XXIV
On leaving Barbara, Gloge went down several floors and stationed himself behind a pile of shipping crates. These were in a passage across from the locked door of the main photo-lab storeroom. On the dot of 3:15, a door farther along the passage opened. A lanky, scowling, redheaded young man wearing a stained white smock over his street clothes, pushing a loaded handtruck ahead of him, appeared and turned down the passage toward Gloge and the laboratory storeroom.
It was the end of the lab shift. Gloge had discovered that one of the regular duties of Vincent Strather, Barbara Ellington's boyfriend, was to return certain materials to the storeroom at this hour.
Peering through the slats of a crate, Dr. Gloge watched Strather's approach. He was, he realized, much more tense and nervous now than he had been when he had given Barbara the injection. Of himself, Vincent Strather was not the kind of subject Dr. Gloge would have chosen—the young man was too angry, too bitter. But the fact that he was Barbara's friend and that they spent their spare time together should be useful in the further steps of the experiment—so it seemed to Dr. Gloge.
Sliding his hand under his coat, where the jet gun rested, he moved quickly out into the passage and across it toward Vince Strather. . . .
Even as he pressed the trigger, he knew his nervousness had betrayed him.
The needle tip of the gun had been too far away from Strather; a foot; almost two feet too far. At that greater distance the jet stream, emerging from the needle at nearly a thousand miles an hour, had time to spread and slow down. It caught Strather high up on the shoulder blade and tugged at his skin as it entered. For Strather, the sensation must have been that of a sharp impact. He jumped and cried out, then stood shuddering, as if in shock—long enough for Gloge to slip the little gun back into its holster and close up his coat.
But that was all. Vince Strather whirled. His hands caught Gloge by the arms, and his angry face glared down into the doctor's.
"You damn jerk!" he shouted. "What did you hit me with just now? Who the hell are you, anyway?"
For a moment Dr. Gloge felt appalled. Then he tried to twist out of Strather's hard grip. "I don't know what you're talking about!" he said breathlessly.
He stopped. He saw that Vince was gazing past his shoulder. The young man's grip relaxed suddenly, and Gloge was able to free himself. He turned and looked behind him. He felt a stunned, incredulous dismay.
John Hammond was coming along the passage, gray eyes fastened questioningly upon them. Gloge could only hope desperately that he had not been in sight when the gun was being fired.
Hammond came up and said in a tone of easy authority: "Dr. Gloge, what's going on here?"
"Doctor!" Vince Strather repeated, in a startled voice.
Gloge put puzzled indignation in his tone: "This young man appears to be under the impression that I struck him just now. Needless to say, I did nothing of the kind and don't understand what gave him such an idea."
He looked frowningly back at Strather. Strather's gaze shifted uncertainly between them. He was obviously abashed by John Hammond's presence and Gloge's title, but not yet over his anger.
He said sullenly, "Well, something hit me. At least it felt that way! When I looked around, he was standing there. So I thought he'd done it."
"I was passing you," Dr. Gloge corrected him. "You exclaimed something and I stopped." He shrugged, smiled. "And that's all I did, young man! I certainly had no reason to strike you."
Strather said grudgingly, "I guess I was mistaken."
Dr. Gloge said promptly, "Then let's call it an error and forget it!" He held out his hand.
Strather reached out reluctantly and shook it, then looked at Hammond. When Hammond remained silent, he turned away in obvious relief, took one of the boxes from the truck, and disappeared into the storeroom with it.
Hammond said, "I was on my way to your office, Doctor, where I expect to have an interview with you in a few minutes on the Omega project. I presume you were heading in that direction."
"Yes, yes." Gloge fell into step beside the bigger man. He was thinking: Did he see anything?
His companion gave no sign.
A few minutes later, as he gazed across the gleaming desk of his private office at John Hammond, Gloge had the uneasy feeling of a criminal confronted by the law. It had always amazed him that this man—Hammond—could make him feel at very least like a small boy.
Yet the discussion that now developed began with a reassuring statement from the bigger man:
"This is a completely informal conversation, Doctor. I am not representing President Sloan at the moment—even less the Board of Regents. That has been deliberately arranged. It will make it possible for both of us to speak quite frankly."
Dr. Gloge said, "Have there been complaints about my work here?"
Hammond nodded. "You can't have remained entirely unaware of it, Doctor. You've been asked to amplify your project reports, make them more detailed and specific, three times within the last two months alone."
Gloge was reluctantly deciding that he would have to tell some of his data.
He said with apparent openness, "My reluctance to communicate has been due to a strictly scientific dilemma. Things were happening in the experiment, but their meaning was not clear to me until very recently."
"There is a feeling," said Hammond in his steady voice, "that your project is failing."
Dr. Gloge said sharply, "The accusation is unworthy!"
Hammond looked at him, said, "No accusations have been made—as yet. That's why I'm here today. You have reported no successes within the past six months, you know."
"Mr. Hammond, there have been many failures. Within the limited framework of the present stages of the project experiments, that is exactly what should be expected."
"Limited in what way?"
"Limited to the lower, less complicated forms of animal life."
"That," said Hammond mildly, "is a limitation you yourself have imposed on the project."
Dr. Gloge agreed. "True. The conclusions I've been able to form at such lower levels have been invaluable. And the fact that the results of the experiments have been almost invariably negative, in the sense that as a usual result the subject animals evolved into nonviable forms, is completely unimportant."
"As a usual result," Hammond repeated. "Then not all of them died quickly?"
Gloge bit his lip. That was not an admission he had intended to make at this initial stage in the discussion.
He said reluctantly, "In a respectable percentage of the cases, the subject animals survived the first injection."
"And the second?"
Gloge hesitated. But there was no turning back. "The survival percentage drops very sharply at that point," he said. "I don't recall the exact figures."
"And the third?"
He was really being forced to make revelations. Dr. Gloge said, "To date, three animals have survived the third injection. All three were of the same species—Cryptobranchus."
"The hellbender," said Hammond. "Well! A large salamander. . . . Now, the third injection, according to your theory, should advance an animal along the evolutionary line stimulated in it to a point which might be reached through half a million years of natural evolution. Would you say such a result was achieved in these three cases?"
Dr. Gloge said, "Since Cryptobranchus might be considered with some reason to be a species in which evolutionary development is at a practical standstill, I should say that much more was achieved."
"What were the observable changes?"
Gloge had been bracing himself as he made one admission after another. He was striving to decide exactly when he could start resisting the interrogation.
Now! he thought.
He said aloud, trying to appear frank, "Mr. Hammond, I'm beginning to realize that I was in error in not making more positive reports. I can't believe that you are really interested in these superficial accounts. Why not let me summarize my observations for you?"
Hammond's gray eyes were calm and steady. "Go ahead," he said in an even tone.
Gloge outlined his conclusions then. The interesting features were twofold, probably equally important.
One of these was that there remained in all life forms a wide evolutionary choice. For reasons that were not yet clear, the Omega serum stimulated one of these potential developments, and no subsequent stimulation could alter the mutational direction. Most of these developments led to extinction.
"The second feature," said Gloge, "is that the chances for success increase as the life form becomes more highly evolved."
Hammond said, interested, "What you're saying is that when you finally start working with the more active mammals and eventually monkeys, you expect more and better results?"
"I have no doubt about it," said Dr. Gloge firmly.
A secondary aspect—Gloge continued—was that brain areas which controlled the inhibition of simple reflexes often seemed to be the source of new neural growth and of sensory extension. The serum apparently intensified these effort points, increasing their operational flexibility. What went wrong was that all too often such one-sided inhibitory amplification ended in nonsurvival.
However, in Cryptobranchus, the roof of the mouth developed small functional gills. The hide thickened into segmented, horny armor. Short, grooved fangs were acquired, and connected to glands that produced a mild hematoxic venom. The eyes disappeared, but areas in the skin developed sight-level sensitivity to light.
Gloge shrugged, finished: "There were other changes, but these would seem the most dramatic ones."
"They sound sufficiently dramatic," said Hammond. "What happened to the two specimens which were not dissected?"
Dr. Gloge realized that his diversion had not worked. "They were given the fourth injection, of course," he said resignedly.
"The one," Hammond asked, "which was to advance them to a point a million years along the evolutionary line they were following—"
"Or," Dr. Gloge said, "to the peak-point of that evolutionary line. The equating of the four stages of the stimulation process to the passing of specific periods of normal evolutionary development—twenty thousand years, fifty thousand, five hundred thousand, and one million years—is, of course, hypothetical and generalized. My calculations indicate that in many species of which we have knowledge in that area the two points might be approximately the same."
Hammond nodded. "I understand, Doctor. And what happened after your evolved Cryptobranchus received the fourth injection?"
"I cannot give you a precise answer to that, Mr. Hammond. In appearance it was a very rapid breakdown of the entire structure. Within two hours, both specimens literally dissolved," Gloge answered tensely.
