Chapel had to admit that Ian had already proven him wrong. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said.
“It’s a matter of will,” Ian told him.
Chapel shook his head. “No. I’ve tried to reason with chimeras. I know where that gets you. You’re a time bomb, Ian.” He turned to face Taggart. “Doctor — back me up here. I don’t know why you created the chimeras, but I know they were a failure. You had to lock them up in Camp Putnam, seal them off from the world because they were too violent. Maybe you thought they could be something else, but their level of aggression was more than you could handle. They—”
“I beg your pardon,” Taggart said, sneering. “There was no failure. The chimeras were — are — exactly what I meant them to be.”
“You meant them to be so aggressive they killed each other off while the U.S. military could only stand back and watch?” Chapel demanded. “You meant for them to be violent psychopaths?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Taggart said. “But the answer is yes.”
“Good God!” Chapel exclaimed. “What the hell did you think you were playing at? Why on earth did anyone authorize you to make these things?”
Taggart took a step backward and leaned against a stack of cages full of sleeping bats. “As an insurance policy, of course.”
DENALI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, ALASKA: APRIL 15, T+83:37
“Insurance policy?” Chapel asked, deeply confused. “Against what?”
“All this is top secret, Captain,” Taggart said. “Are you sure you’re cleared to hear this? I know my daughter isn’t.”
“Dad,” Julia said, “he has a gun.”
Apparently that was enough. Taggart shrugged and inhaled deeply before beginning his story. “It was 1979 when I was first brought in to consult on what became the chimera project. It had a code name back then — Project Darling Green — which thankfully was abandoned later, when we actually realized we could do it, we could solve the problem.”
“What problem?” Chapel demanded.
“Nuclear winter,” Taggart said. “You’re young. You might not remember what it was like back then, during the Cold War. We were locked in a stalemate with the Russians for so long. They hated us, wanted to conquer us. And we would do anything — anything — to stop them from taking over the world. After the Cuban Missile Crisis we understood that if either side started a war, it just wouldn’t stop. Nuclear missiles would launch. The world would be reduced to ashes. There were generals back then, smart men, really, who thought we could still win. That even after a nuclear exchange America could prevail. By the seventies, though, we scientists had figured out that was wrong — simply untrue. A thermonuclear exchange on a global level wouldn’t just turn cities to rubble and give a few people cancer. It would fill the sky with dust that would linger for years. It would change the planet’s climate and make human survival — not just American survival but the future of the human race — next to impossible. If the Russians launched against us, it would be the end of humanity.”
“But the Russians knew that, too,” Chapel pointed out. “That’s why they never launched.”
“It’s why they didn’t launch when they could still control their people,” Taggart said. “Even then, even in ’79, we could see the Politburo wouldn’t last forever. The Soviet Union was crumbling. The Pentagon was convinced, absolutely convinced, that if a coup or a popular uprising began in Moscow, then the Kremlin would start a war just as a last-ditch attempt to consolidate their power. At the time it was taken as gospel — a nuclear war was coming and could happen at any time.
“The generals came to me with an idea. A crazy idea, I thought, though it had potential — and they had money to make it happen, more grant money than I’d ever seen before for a project like this. What they wanted was… visionary. They wanted to create a new human race, a new phenotype based on good American DNA. A race of men and women who could survive even through a nuclear winter. People who were highly resistant to radioactive fallout, who were strong enough to live on polluted water and whatever food they could dig out of the ground. People with the immune systems of gorillas, people with the healing factors of lizards, people with the vision and the resistance to ultraviolet light of hunting birds. People to survive the apocalypse.”
Chapel glanced at Ian. “You gave them chimeras.”
“If you want to skip ahead, then, yes,” Taggart said. “The work was fascinating. It was incredible — Helen and I invented whole new fields of genetics and even basic biology. We had the money, the equipment, anything we wanted, anything we needed to do work that would have been unthinkable at the time. No one back then had even considered transgenics. The idea of splicing together disparate genomes to create a functional organism was pie in the sky, it was science fiction. Nobody understood homeotics at the time, work on atavisms was partial and hesitant at best, and we had barely begun to experiment with plasmids and gene therapy. But we knew it could work.”
“ ‘We,’ ” Julia said, softly. “You and mom both signed off on this.”
“Helen…” Taggart’s face grew wistful. “She was a genius. She and I together were… something more.” He shook his head. “We would stay up all night, hurling ideas back and forth, tearing holes in each other’s hypotheses, spinning out new trains of thought, building on each other’s brilliance. It was — it was the most satisfying relationship any two human beings could ever have. She understood what we were really doing. We weren’t just working for the Pentagon. We were working for the future. Both of us should have gotten Nobels out of that work. But it had to be kept secret, utterly secret.” He shook his head, but then he smiled as if he was reliving a happy memory. “DNA sequencers were so primitive back then, it was like coding genes by hand, like writing computer code on a legal pad.” He laughed. “We had to do all the basic research ourselves, compile our own library of sequences. There was no Human Genome Project to consult. I remember the night we finished writing down the final strings. When we had the recipe for what would become Ian and the others. It was well past midnight. We were tired, but we were also so full of As and Cs and Gs and Ts that we couldn’t sleep. We were talking in code, in genetic code, making jokes about our favorite proteins and dreaming of ribosomes hard at work. We went outside and looked up at the stars. We watched the moon set. It was like we had become something more than just human beings. Like we were little gods, at the dawn of a new creation.”
“And then you created two hundred embryos, which you implanted in the wombs of mentally ill women without their consent,” Chapel pointed out.
“Hmm. Yes. All right, we did,” Taggart admitted, waving his hands in front of him as if he’d like to argue the moral niceties but didn’t have time. “We ended up with two hundred perfect little organisms.”
“Babies,” Chapel said.
“Hardly. These weren’t like human infants. They could walk within weeks of being born — almost as fast as horses. They had teeth and they could eat solid food after a few months. No, these weren’t babies. They were the children of a new race. A new species, almost.”
“You locked them up in a camp in the Catskills. You gave them basic medical care, a little education, and nothing else,” Chapel said. “You raised them like children, but then they started killing each other.” He looked over at Ian. The chimera’s face was totally passive, unreadable. “They tore each other to pieces. They were too aggressive. Too violent. So you sealed up the camp and abandoned them.”
“Is that what you think we did?” Taggart asked, looking offended. “You think we made a mistake? That we were surprised and horrified that they were dangerous? Please. The world they were created for — the world under nuclear winter — was going to be a harsh and dangerous place. We made them aggressive so they could rule it. So they could own it. That was always part of the plan, Captain. They were always supposed to be that way.”