Porter kissed Ludmilla’s hand and then her face, and Ludmilla smiled and kissed him back.
‘Now it’s late for you, my precious. I’m sorry it’s so late. Raven couldn’t come any earlier. Tomorrow you can go back to your room. Say good night to him now.’
‘Good night, Raven,’ Ludmilla said.
‘Good night, Ludmilla.’
‘And take your glasses off. It’s time for sleep. Good night, my little sweetheart.’
‘Good night, Uncle.’
‘Well, then,’ Rogachev said, as they left the room, ‘so now tell me what I have made. And this is only the half of it.’
But Porter remained silent, watching him relock the door.
He had had a long day. A bitter wind had blown on the mountain top, the snow flurries whirling like devils over the compound. But the Evenks had remained cheerful and understanding of his lost sleep, seeing to it that he was allotted only indoor tasks in the morning.
He had told his news — of the distraught father, the letter to be rewritten, the ring that had to go to the grave — and they were certain that Stepanka would soon be up with new instructions.
But by afternoon Stepanka had still not come, and at two o’clock all of them had been ordered outside. A freighter plane was coming in, and urgent unloading had been requested before the weather worsened. For this the storage sheds had to be reorganised.
By three o’clock the plane had come and gone; and by four, though not all the cargo was yet inside, a cheery Major Militsky had called the men in from the wind and the snow.
A name had been chosen for the baby! Stepan Maximovich had an announcement to make.
‘Ten o’clock,’ was Stepanka’s whispered announcement to him. ‘One hour earlier than before.’ He didn’t know why. But by 9.55 Kolya was to be in position.
And by 9.55 Kolya was: in the washroom. And by ten was going through the wall again.
‘And this is only the half of it,’ Rogachev said. They were now in his study. The study adjoined the library and was part of a suite that included an apartment for Stepanka and his wife and also two bedrooms. The second bedroom was for a security official who visited regularly; and Ludmilla was now in it.
‘It’s not even a half of it! There’s more — far more. And yet we had set out to do something totally different … ’
44
We had set out to copy parts of a foetus: of Sibir’s foetus.
The father of the foetus had been a Neanderthaloid — not Neanderthal of Europe, which was in many ways a regression, but the earlier stock, not yet specialised, with higher vaulting to its skull. Of this there was no doubt. Sibir was typically ‘Cro-Magnon’; her child, broadly Neanderthaloid. And the differences between them were very remarkable.
Sibir was 1.89 metres in height, and her brain capacity 1300 ccs. Her child would have grown much shorter, but with a brain much larger — 1500 ccs, our calculations showed. Since a modern brain is roughly 1350 ccs, Neanderthaloid had 11 per cent more. This curious fact, already speculated on from earlier skull finds, was in itself exciting. But here we had an actual brain — unborn but whole, easily projectible from standard scales.
From hundreds of computer studies, we observed many differences in this brain. Zhelikov in his work had accumulated a large stock of brains (the heads of executed criminals) and these we used for comparison.
An immediate difference was in the visual-receptor areas — here very large. This was expected, for the foetus’s eye sockets were also large. Neanderthaloid was a nocturnal creature: he came out in the dark and had to see in the dark. For us this had important implications. Half the year we are in the dark here and Zhelikov had sought with his ‘worker’ apes to improve their darkness vision, but without success.
So, an extraordinary opportunity had opened up: to copy what we could of this new/old visual system.
Our own system is barely understood to this day. We know that the brain receives its signals in symbolic form − the optical cells sending thousands of digits of information that the receptors can decode and assemble. But the method of transmission, the network of transmission, the receptor areas themselves, were by no means clear.
These receptor areas (set beside our criminals’) were altogether clearer; as were the visual channels, making the network as a whole more comprehensible.
The network; although not its functioning.
Bodies function, as you know, largely by electro-chemical reaction — the optical system primarily by photo-chemical reaction. But its further circuits were little understood.
With the foetus’s brain we had so well-defined a circuit (and of a night-sighted primate!) that we were almost beside ourselves. The aim of course was to improve our apes: by providing more channels and larger receptors in the brain. This was certainly possible — for here nature had done it — and plenty of capacity still exists in the brain.
We set about it in this way.
(All our genetic work is this way.)
First, trials are conducted on the lower animals, rats, mice, etc. Required portions are excised and later replaced, to establish the surgery and its effect. The effect of removed visual ganglia is blindness, and it took many animals before we learned the technique of reinsertion. Then we moved on to the brain; the receptor areas here yet more complex.
It took us seven years, until 1985, to get a result. But in that year we got a good one — a 20 per cent visual improvement with test rats. Then we moved to the apes.
This was an altogether more critical undertaking.
The trained animals were valuable, their brains larger, the visual ganglia more complex. Also they were semi-human, able to express themselves. Even for the first stage — the trial removals and reinsertions — two full-scale operations were necessary; with recuperation after each one, and eyes kept bandaged until after the boost to restore vision.
The technique of boosting we had perfected with the rats; and vision will not resume without it. The visual chain is in fact a chemical chain. Some of its reactions code the signal, others open gateways for it, others transmit it. But whatever they do (and they all do it at once) they do electro-chemically. The strip we excise is therefore a chemical strip. And this strip will not on reinsertion resume function by itself.
It needs a boost, from a crystal-regulated frequency (as quartz in a watch or silicon in a computer.) Light will not do the job and can produce permanent blindness, for the network must be intact and operational before the eyes are allowed to work.
The boost is delivered by terminal to the skull, the animals’ eyes remaining sealed; and by means of instruments we observe the effects on a screen.
The frequency we use is a ‘harmonic’ (the so-called doppelganger or ghost echo of a frequency); and to get this echo we vibrate two crystals simultaneously.
With the rats this method had won us a straight run of twenty successes, and in every case the screen view had been the same. Initially the network greys out, although with continued seething (the molecular activity you see through an electron microscope), and after an interval of ten to fifteen minutes its outline returns, the activity of the network now at ‘dream level’ — the animal not seeing, for its eyes are closed, but with the inserted material accepted and the system restored.
With our first ape a very different story — in fact a disaster, and the reason you are here.