Forty-Eight X Page 4

  “The populations in those countries are becoming majority male, as well,” Shell pressed his point. “And, since males are innately more aggressive, they’re more malleable in becoming suicide bombers or determined soldiers.”

  “We’ve called them crazy when we’ve fought them,” Coffee, Black No Cream, entered the conversation. “But if they were our boys, we’d be calling them heroic.”

  “I won’t call people that are nuts ‘heroic,’” Double Espresso countered. “But what’s scary is that while most of these people still live with a tribal culture from the Middle Ages, they’ve got AKs, missiles, and fighter jets.”

  Shell enjoyed golf, but he was playing today, just days after September 11, to urge a momentous change.

  “Boys, with fewer females to moderate their social climate,” Mack Shell summed up the article, “the politics of these third-world nations is becoming more aggressive. Yet, as a society, we’re becoming more feminine, soft. Their nations are crammed full of testosterone, more inclined to seek glory in victory than sanity in compromise. American men change diapers while men in the third world shoot off guns in the air for kicks. Our young boys play video games of war while kids in the Middle East play with real guns, are taught to prefer death, and are transformed into car-driving kamikazes. For gods-sake, we’re afraid to use ‘the bomb.’ They’re intent on getting it. And does anybody doubt they’d use it? America’s character is clearly becoming more feminine. The third world, these theocracies, and most of the rest of our enemies, are becoming more masculine. What this newspaper story is asking us is this—if the nations of the world were a bunch of wild chimpanzees, how would America’s more feminine chimps prevail? I think we all know the answer.

  “What we need, gentlemen, is a new defense against a new enemy. America’s survival can’t just depend on better and better technological weapons or bigger numbers like troop strength, tanks, planes, missiles, and ships. Our destiny is ultimately gonna be shaped by biology and demographics.”

  Topped off with caffeine, the generals came to agree with Mack Shell’s conclusions.

  As the generals got ready to tee off, Mack used the Sunday newspaper to wipe some mud off his golf shoes and noticed another article he had read in the morning paper. The second article was about the latest winners of Sweden’s Nobel Prizes. As usual, many were Americans. The most prominent was a geneticist from Stanford, Dr. Julius Wagner. Mack Shell had filed the name away in his head. He rarely bothered remembering trivia. But Dr. Wagner would not be trivia. The coincidence of reading these two stories was the catalyst for his grand plan.

  Standing over his ball, he revealed what he had in mind all along.

  “What the American army needs,” General Shell said, almost preaching, “are better soldiers—soldiers bred for the battles ahead.”

  The others nodded their assent.

  “What America needs,” Shell went on, “is an army of soldiers like that bunch of crazy chimps. An army not afraid of biting the nuts off our enemies.”

  A few brief guffaws from his fellow generals quieted quickly. Lieutenant General Maximillian Shell wasn’t smiling. He was serious. It was there, on the par-five first hole, that the plan for the Lemuria Project was first hatched with Mocha Latte, Double Espresso, and Black No Cream. Mack Shell hit his first shot straight down the fairway. Sissy would eagle this one.

  And God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand, and also take of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.…” God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden.… He drove out the man.

  —Genesis 3:22-24

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Julius Wagner, professor of genetics with an emeritus chair at the Stanford School of Medicine, scurried out of his house in his robe and bare feet to retrieve his newspaper. His morning paper was buried in the bushes in front of his home and, as usual, it was soaked from the sprinklers. How many times had he called his delivery people and asked them to toss it on the driveway? How hard could it be to hit a wide concrete driveway? He felt a twinge of pain in his lower back as he bent over to retrieve the paper. This was just another annoyance to make his life miserable—as was arthritis, dyspepsia, and most recently, well-wishers. His seventieth birthday was approaching, and every time someone called to wish him a “Happy Birthday,” he imagined them topping off their greeting with “Didn’t know you were still alive.” Why should he blame them? He wasn’t much for keeping up with acquaintances.

  There were only a handful of people in the world who he believed actually cared about him—not his fame or the influence he could wield, but him. Yet more importantly, he couldn’t think of a handful of people he really cared about. There was his wife. But she was gone, having passed away from ovarian cancer earlier. That time had seen the greatest glory in his career, a Nobel Prize, and the greatest sorrow of his life. There was his daughter, Margaret, of course. He owed her a call. He didn’t call her enough. She was studying for her doctorate at that “other” school on the East Coast, Princeton.

  He could have arranged her acceptance into a “better” program at Stanford, but she chose Princeton to distance herself from him. It was her choice, not his. It was that distance that made them distant. But that was just a lame excuse. He was smart enough to know when he was lying, especially to himself. Even when his daughter was a child and had lived at home, they were distant. His work, not his family, had always come first. Nevertheless, he thought again, he owed her a call. There was one other person Julius Wagner cared about. It was perhaps the most honest of his relationships, but it was also the most private. He cringed when he dwelled on emotions. He hated having them. Love and hate, joy and sadness, pride and shame, they were things he couldn’t measure on a graph or enter on a spreadsheet, annoying because he couldn’t quantify them, study them, or control them. That’s why he preferred to focus his attention on his work and why he was lazy in maintaining relationships.

  Julius Wagner had a deep receding hairline with Einsteinian tufts of wild gray hair erupting from the back of his head and quite a few from his ears. He had a perpetual scowl and supposed he looked and acted like a loud, grumpy old man, even though inside he felt like a limp, seemingly spineless tabby cat. But that was okay. He still had important work to do. And the well-wishers—he’d just as soon toss most of them down a well.

  The professor spread his newspaper out to dry on the rear lanai of his craftsman-style home in Palo Alto. He lived only a few blocks from his campus office. He sat down with a cup of tea, gnawed on a bagel and cream cheese, and sifted through the dry sections. He wondered why he bothered with this antiquated method of getting the news when he could easily click through the pages on his laptop. But it was Sunday morning, the skies were crystal blue, there was a cool coastal breeze, and he was surrounded by bright red bougainvillea and the sweet fragrance of oleander. The Sunday morning paper was a comforting habit, hard to undo.

  Aside from the comics, the obituaries were his favorite part of the paper. The front page was always about wars, disasters, and corruption. The business section was also always the same—the market was up, the market was down—with arbitrary hypotheses as to why, written just to fill the page. The obituaries, however, were wonderful. They were full of history lessons, morality tales, and enlightenments about everything in life. A former secretary of state had passed away. He had lied for his president. An old Nigerian dictator died in exile. Decades after raping his country, he was still worth billions. And someone he knew had passed—Robert Graham. He had met the old gentleman just a few years ago at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization that Graham had founded several decades earlier.

  Graham had a prominent obit, a quarter page. The photo of him, however, was one taken at least thirty years earlier; he was ninety when he died. The old man was found dead in a bathtub in a Seattle hotel room, apparently having slipped in the tub, hitting his head. Wha
t an ignominious way for a great man to go, Wagner thought.

  Robert Graham had been a multimillionaire. He had made his fortune by inventing the first plastic eyeglass lenses in the 1950s and selling his company, Armorlite, in 1978 to 3M for $70 million. Many considered him a genius. He could have continued inventing great things, parlaying a fortune into a bigger one, or just living a good life full of comforts and opulent toys. Instead, Graham went through most of his wealth trying to bring an old idea back into favor, the science of eugenics.

  Eugenics is the theory that our preeminent traits are almost entirely due to heredity. The name was coined by a multifaceted nineteenth-century British aristocrat named Francis Galton from a Greek word meaning “well born.” Galton was the first to describe the distinction between “nature versus nurture.” But his beliefs were shunned in his time: the fashion at the height of nineteenth-century “enlightenment” was a belief in egalitarianism, where everyone was born with equal abilities, where elegant breeding and intelligence was something that could be taught—just as poor Eliza was taught by Dr. Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

  Galton’s belief in eugenics was fostered by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin. Darwin, whose book The Origin of the Species was a best seller at the time and established the new science of evolution, also wrote another book, The Descent of Man. It was that book that really influenced Galton. In it, Darwin wrote:

  “Our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment.… Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

  With that in mind, Galton wrote his own book in 1869 called Hereditary Genius, which claimed that “intelligence and character” were determined by heredity and not, as was popularly believed at the time, by “environmental factors.” His book was not as well received as his cousin’s “evolutionary” tale. It was one thing to suggest that primitive animals could “evolve.” It was entirely another to intimate that the world’s masses of impoverished peasants were likely to be forever relegated to that role.

  Eugenics remained an out-of-favor theory until it became popular in the United States in the early twentieth century. “Enlightened” people advocated restricting “undesirables” from immigrating to the United States and preventing the inferior members of society from tainting the “gene pool” by limiting their reproduction. The policy was given a stamp of approval by the United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927. The case involved the compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, a “feebleminded” woman institutionalized in Virginia, whose mother and daughter were also “feebleminded.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion:

  “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices—cutting the Fallopian tubes.…”

  This American practice ended in 1950, after states had forcibly sterilized over sixty thousand people. It ended not because of some newfound American moral propriety, but because someone else had became overly enamored with the American practice of eugenics—Adolf Hitler. Eugenics was, therefore, a theory thoroughly shunned when Robert Graham came to advocate it. But he had other ideas.

  “Eugenics,” Graham posed to Julius Wagner and anyone else who would listen, “has gotten a bad rap. It remains a good idea that has been carried out poorly. You should not think of eugenics as a scientific plan to rid the world of inferior people. God forbid. What a modern civilization needs is a plan to breed better people.”

  In 1970, Robert Graham used his wealth to create his “Repository for Germinal Choice,” a sperm bank that set about collecting the specimens of geniuses for use in breeding “superior” human beings. Graham was not so arrogant as to say he could decide who was a genius. He elected to allow the Nobel Prize committee to indirectly make that choice and set about soliciting Nobel Prize winners for his “Repository.”

  Professor Wagner found considerable merit in Graham’s plan, but the political correctness of the late twentieth century doomed it. The newspaper obituary noted that Robert Graham was bankrupt when he died. Julius Wagner wondered what would happen to Graham’s sperm bank. He had a personal interest in the matter. Wagner had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on gene splicing. As a member of that elite group, he had his own “genes” stored in Graham’s “Repository for Germinal Choice.” But more importantly, Wagner believed in what he and Robert Graham had come to call “benevolent eugenics.” He believed, as did all eu-genicists, that “nature” was more important than “nurture.” But that didn’t mean that people had to be blessed or doomed by their genes—just that adjustments needed to be made. Dr. Wagner, like Graham, wanted to breed better humans.

  Professor Wagner spent the next day on the phone making inquiries. A medical waste company had been contracted to incinerate the “genius” specimens. In a back-door transaction, Wagner purchased them. It seemed like the perfect deal. The seller was saved the expense of destroying the material and made a few thousand extra bucks in the bargain, and the buyer was someone who had a reputation to lose and could be expected to be discreet.

  Dr. Wagner’s purchase was handed over to him surreptitiously in a darkened movie theater in Palo Alto. When he exited into daylight, Wagner was surprised to find himself holding an old children’s Winnie-the-Pooh lunch pail filled with dry ice containing sixteen tubes with less than one hundred milliliters of fluid and a few billion sperm. No one took notice. He was just another eccentric professor walking about town. The specimens were then stored in the cryogenic vaults of Stanford University’s genetic research department under the nondescript acronym NOBPRIS. Only Professor Wagner needed to know it was Nobel Prize sperm. It was unusually propitious, he thought, for these unique specimens to fall into his hands at this time. After all, he was, perhaps, the only person in the world who had a truly good use for them.

  In the next few days, there were other calls he would make—to his daughter and to his closest friend. They were good-byes, although neither knew it. All his usual relationships were about to end. Professor Julius Wagner had made a bargain that Robert Graham, Francis Galton, and Charles Darwin would have envied. He was about to play God. His bargain, however, was not with the red-horned, pitchfork-wielding devil. It was with the United States government, the devil we all know.

  From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  It was not until the morning after that first test of his special forces that Colonel McGraw realized one of their weapons had been left behind. Like other seemingly inconsequential events, this one would prove to have far-reaching consequences. And Link McGraw was all too familiar with unintended consequences.

  Two years earlier he had led a convoy down the streets of Mosul. The lead vehicle was an HMMWV (M1025) or High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, the colloquial Humvee. The M1025 was equipped with armor and mounted with an M2 .50-caliber machine gun. The crew was trained to scan the terrain before them. The driver kept to the middle of the road and slowly pumped the gas pedal, speeding up and slowing down as if the road was a roller coaster of hills rather than to infinity flat. Two others peered out from an open hatch in the rear.

  On the side of the road, Iraqi men were doing “make work” jobs—raking a nonexistent garden on a dirt median strip. With the recorded chant of a muezzin from the ubiquitous minarets, the “gardeners” would stop their work and take time out to lay out their carpets for afternoon prayers. The convoy watched them carefully as they rolled past, fingers on the triggers. Most of the women they passed wore black chadors and carried sacks of household food or supplies atop their heads. The children, caked in dust, made play with
rocks and dirt, or sticks they pretended were guns. Every once in a while a collection of emaciated dogs would bark and give the convoy a brief token chase.

  There was plenty of garbage on the side of the road. But small stuff, household garbage that seemed to perpetually blow in the wind. No one watching seemed concerned about the larger carcass of a dead dog lying not unexpectedly more in the middle of the road. Leave dead dogs where they lay. The sky was pale blue, without a wisp of a cloud. There was not even a hope of rain to dispel the sauna-like climate. The desert air smelled faintly of eucalyptus and lime, but nothing was in bloom. It was just a desert farmer’s burn. And then in an instant, that sweet smell changed to the tearful odor of cordite.

  A roadside bomb was embedded in the carcass of the dead dog. The “improvised explosive device,” or IED, contained one pound of C-4, a case of nails, a corroded old 155-mm artillery shell, and a cell phone detonator. It exploded alongside the fourth truck in the convoy of two dozen vehicles and tossed it into the air like a child’s toy. The truck behind it caught fire and was shredded with shrapnel. Amazingly no one was killed. Give credit to truck and body armor. Many limbs would be lost, and several of these soldiers, who with the aid of modern battlefield medicine survived horrific wounds, would die just a few decades later, still relatively young men, bound to wheelchairs, succumbing to the scars of war.

  “Make time! Dismount! Dammit, make time,” Lieutenant Colonel McGraw yelled as he scrambled out of his armored vehicle with the rest of his troops. “Take cover. Take cover!” The order came with crackling static over the radios of the remaining vehicles punctuated with explosions and gunfire. There was no panic in his voice. McGraw was certainly anxious, but clearly decisive and in control under fire.