“Like I said, you don’t get it. If they wanted to upgrade me, if they thought it was safe-and if that’s even possible-then, yeah, I’d do my duty.”
“Just like the soldiers they tested atomic bombs on? They were doing their duty, too.”
“What’s your point? I have a job to do, and I’m not afraid to do it,” his voice had grown louder. “Right now, my job is keeping you safe. Later it might be taking an inventory of our ammunition or something. And if my duty eventually included being ‘upgraded,’ then I’d follow through.”
I thrust my hands over my head.
“I surrender. Forget I mentioned it. Really, I have no idea how they made the Serpent. Surgery? Gene splicing, maybe? Perhaps they gave the test subject a spiked drink. I can’t wait to autopsy this one and find out.” Campbell nodded when I said “autopsy.”
“It was only a matter of time,” I continued. “You can build bigger guns, better armor… but in the end, you still have the same soldier wearing it. If you can manipulate a person’s genes to improve them, why not give yourself an unequaled edge?”
He shrugged. “I told you, it doesn’t bother me.”
“It bothers you that we have to fight this thing.”
“Yeah. But we’ll kill it.”
“The idea of creating beings like the Serpent, though, that isn’t disturbing to you. Right?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not a doctor. I’m just a SEAL,” he said, each word leaden with sarcasm. “If you want some kind of debate over this, you’ll have to find someone else to have it with.”
“I’m not trying to start a fight,” I said. “I guess I’m just thinking out loud. It’s one of those things that’s too big to just keep inside your head.”
I paused, my eyes unfocusing. The evidence, the SEAL, the room’s spare furnishings all wavered and became indistinct. I tried to allow my thoughts to crystallize in the blurriness.
“It’s like this.” I returned my gaze to Campbell’s face. The paleness I had seen before had been replaced with a flush of annoyance. His eyes flicked to the rubber band, and I stopped playing with it. “You’ve heard the phrase ‘the genie’s out of the bottle,’ right? It sort of ties in to the nature of science and knowledge. Knowledge in itself isn’t bad-it’s the application that can be unethical and dangerous.
“But the thing about knowledge is, once you discover something, you can’t undiscover it. And what we have here is the apparent discovery of how to improve the human body and mind. A concept that, in the abstract, is a good thing. After all, people constantly strive to better themselves. If they didn’t, health clubs and diet plans would be out of business.”
I hadn’t lectured students since grad school, but it felt like I was doing it now. If this had been a class, I would have waited for laughter at my last line. But Campbell remained silent, brows raised, eyes curious.
“However, in reality,” I said, answering his tacit question, “knowledge can’t exist in the abstract. As we have seen in the Serpent. Now that we can make soldiers who are faster, stronger and smarter than normal people, what happens to the normal people?”
“We kick its ass,” he said without hesitating.
I sighed, reaching for the folder.
“I’ve been to college,” he said.
“What?”
“I told you. I went for a year to Oklahoma State. I took a couple of philosophy classes. I speak some Navajo, too. That’s one of the hardest languages in the world, did you know that?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. But I did. I could see where he was going, and I felt guilty.
“My point is that I think you’re wrong, and it’s not because your vocabulary is too complex. You know?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Look at the history of war. Someone invented the sharp rock. And then the spear. Then the bow and arrow, and the gun, and eventually the nuke. But we’re all still here. The way I see it, if we’re smart enough to invent something, we’re smart enough to figure out how to deal with the consequences.”
“I’m not that confident,” I said.
“I guess I am.”
We looked at each other for a couple of heartbeats, and then he smiled and shook his head. “But we’re definitely both on the same team.”
“In that case,” I said, “let’s see if there’s anything in that folder about how the Serpent was created. Just so we have something to do while we’re waiting for its ass to be kicked.”
He pulled the file back and started flipping through it again.
“It probably would be toward the front, right?” he asked, continuing to pore over the pages.
“Yeah, probably.” I pulled my legs up onto the bench and rested my chin in my hand.
A few minutes ticked by. I tried to be as silent as possible, straining to listen for any indication of how the search-and-destroy operation was going. All I heard was my own heartbeat and intermittent, muffled voices from the direction of the control room.
“How about this? It’s a section titled ‘Transformation effects.’”
“Haven’t we already read about that?”
“No, we looked at the timeline. It had a different heading. The only reason I brought this one up is because the first subhead is ‘Treatment beginning.’”
That sounded promising. I didn’t expect to find anything of immediate use to us, but the scientist in me was clamoring to know more.
“Well, just skimming through here, it says the subject was ‘infected.’ That’s the word it uses. Um, I’m having a hard time with some of this stuff. This might be ‘genetic material’ or ‘gene material.’ Whatever it is, the treatment is changing it, according to this.”
“Pretty much what I thought,” I said. “Alterations that drastic have to be rooted in the DNA. I wonder how they started the changes. What else does it say?”
But he never got a chance to answer my question. Matthews’s head poked around the edge of the doorframe.
“Campbell, front and center. You’re coming with us. We need the manpower.”
Campbell looked at Matthews, then me, then back to his superior. “But what about her?”
“If we’re successful, she’ll be fine. If we’re not, it wouldn’t matter if you were sitting up here, would it? Now get to the control room.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, but Campbell stammered out a weak “aye-aye, sir” to the empty doorway.
He stared at the space where the officer had been for a moment. Then his resolve caught up with him.
“Time to go,” he said, patting his rifle as he pulled himself to his feet.
I was being left unprotected while an insane superman prowled the ship’s corridors. But I managed to smile and squeeze a joke out of the tension. “Just try to leave it in one piece, OK?”
“No promises. This thing fucked with the wrong platoon.” He paused in the doorway. “You’ll be safe.”
I nodded, and he slipped away.
As his footsteps faded in the hall, I probed my psyche, trying to pin down the feelings stirring within it.
There was fear there, sure. The room now seemed more like a trap than a haven; there was one way out, and the unbroken walls offered no place for a hunted doctor to cower.
Cower? Did I want to cower? The Serpent was like nothing I had encountered before. I made my living bringing secrets into view and unraveling the stories revealed by the physical evidence. But this thing was obscured from view. The only tools I could bring to bear on it were imagination and speculation.
Still, death was something I understood, had touched and studied. The prospect of experiencing it firsthand did not, I discovered, chill me.
So, fear. Fear of the unknown. I labeled it and placed it in its own mental compartment. But I knew it wouldn’t stay caged there.
What was this other emotion poking at me? Pulling it into the light of conscious thought, I saw it was curiosity. That made sense. If I didn’t know what we were facing, wouldn’t I want to find the answer to that question?