“I’d still like to know just how he so quickly buffaloed Singh and Stekowski and, later, Baronian; maybe the investigations will shed some light on that little matter, too. All of his available records certainly appear to be in order, but then, skillful, well-funded experts can forge just about any document needed by anyone for any purpose … though I cannot for the life of me figure out just why anyone would want to sidetrack so innocuous a project as was Singh and Stekowski’s original one.
“Now if some other foundation or government was racing us for completion of a Pantherafeethami replication or a closely related project? But, hell, the Canadian government project was put into abeyance, wasn’t it? And they’re the only ones I know of who were even trying, who had the necessary genetic material to try … Wait just one goddam minute, here! The fucking Russians!
“Harel and his damned Russian bunghole-buddy this Piotr, the dude who got us those wisants hard on the heels of Harel getting the project headed his way. Could it be? Could it be that darling Piotr and his colleagues are themselves working on a sabertooth or dirktooth replication? Or could it be that they have even somehow ‘acquired’ by hook or by crook feethami genetic material? Could Harel be a Russian himself? He speaks Russian languages well enough, true, but according to his records, he was born and reared and educated in Israel. So we come back to the possibility of forged records, again.
“If anyone is capable of such forgeries, it would certainly be the Russians. But they wouldn’t, I think, be doing it for the money—more likely, for the prestige, the international acclaim, the damned propaganda value to them, still trying to prove socialist science the superior of western, capitalist science, just another rendition of the same old tune.
But if Harel is a Russian, why is he so openly contemptuous of all things western? One would think that he would cover his true beliefs thoroughly, in order to not be even suspected of … But of course, God, I’m dumb, at times! He’s supposed to be an Israeli Communist, this fact covers his close contacts with Piotr and the other Russians he’s always phoning and praising and bragging of knowing intimately. Clever, clever, Dr. Harel … or whatever your real name is.
“Now, next question: Should I phone these suppositions to the investigators? No, no, I think I’ll just let them work on unraveling the loose ends they already have in hand and see if they come to the same conclusions. After all, I could very well be wrong on this matter; God knows, I make my full, honest share of mistakes in life.”
Milo kept suppressing the urge to skip ahead through the boxes of binders and see whether or not Bedford’s conclusions regarding Dr. Harel had been proved correct in the end. The man Bedford described sounded to Milo like a type who would definitely benefit from application of a prolonged knuckle massage about the regions of the head and torso. He recalled that such men had been much more common in that long-ago world where few persons went armed than in this present one wherein everyone did so. Who had it been who averred back then that an armed society must be perforce a polite society?
“Most of the societal problems, back then, in the more or less civilized portions of the so-called western world, were directly caused by the lofty but totally incorrect premise that all persons are created completely equal,” the ageless man mused, while puffing in vain at his cold pipe.
“I’ve always been dead certain that what that group of rebels, revolutionaries, eighteenth-century radicals really meant when they framed those words was that all free, white, Anglo-Saxon gentlemen were created equal and they were wrong even at that. No two men or women are ever exactly, precisely equal in any meaningful ways, never have been, never will be.
“Some are physically stronger, some weaker, some are taller, some shorter, some are smarter, some denser, some are faster, some slower, that’s just Nature’s—or, if you will, God’s—way of it all. Some are gutless wonders, some are brave, some are very good, decent, honorable, some are bad and incredibly vicious, and the only provably sovereign ways to protect the good from the bad are very forceful and often fatal.
“The mistake of many of the western nations of the decades just preceding the horrendous eclipse of their era and the dawn of this present one was in allowing far too much power to the rather fuzzy-brained sociologists and experimental psychologists; given entire populations to play with, they and their ivory-tower supporters wreaked hellish havoc, turned beautiful, populous cities into places more deadly and dangerous than any jungle could ever have been.
“They and their minions first virtually disarmed the law-abiding segments of those populations with restrictive laws in regard to the private possession and use of firearms, then virtually tied the hands of the various strata of law-enforcement persons, insofar as apprehension and treatment of real criminals was concerned, so that in the end the only people who could live and work or play in any degree of physical safety were either those rich enough to afford private bodyguards or those willing to or scared enough to break the gun laws and carry deadly force.
“The so-called social scientists could never seem to get it through their pointy heads that some people are just born bad. No, they continued to prate about all criminality being ‘society’s fault,’ no matter how heinous or despicable the crime, no matter how arrogant, unrepentant or recidivistic the perpetrator.
“Those self-proclaimed ‘saviors of mankind’ wreaked an inordinate amount of mischief with their crackpot theories and out-and-out wrecked a proportion of real civilization, and I am very glad to say that in the end, none of the bastards survived. There are none of them and their harebrained disciplines extant in this world; folks here live by might and by right and mostly are too busy wresting out enough to eat to spend much time scheming against others.”
His gaze alighting again upon the already-read stack of Bedford’s folders, Milo thought, “Although I spent damn little time in the country after the early seventies I still did a lot of reading of U.S. newspapers and periodicals, whenever and wherever I could lay hands to them, so I recall more than just a little of these replication and recreating projects, the vast sums of money that went into them, the chaotic brouhahas that preceded and surrounded some of them and the final decisions that allowed nations and groups and companies to actually patent recreations of extinct animals. As I remember, though, the antislavery factions still were squabbling about the issue of whether or not primates with enhanced mentalities could be patented right up to the end of everything, and naturally, certain religious groups fought the entire concept from the outset on the shaky grounds that if God had had the animals die out, then it were blasphemous to try to bring them back to life … not that very many people paid all that much real attention to the foaming fanatics on that or any other subject.
“And God knows, the religious and quasi-religious flakes had as many causes over the years as the left-liberal flakes, the right-wing radicals or any of the rest of the lunatic fringe. After a short while, a reader got to recognize the telltale catchwords and phrases that indicated ‘this was written by or for a bunch of flakes’ and most of us would just glance briefly over the patent claptrap or skip it entirely.
“Thinking back on Bedford’s thing, the whole business seems to have started back between World War One and World War Two, when the Poles or Hungarians or one of the other Slavic peoples of Central Europe got it into their heads to breed back various strains of domestic cattle to reproduce the aurochs, Bos primegenus I think the scientists called it, the European wild ox that was the supposed ancestor of all domestic cattle and had been extinct then for about three centuries. They succeeded, and that gave everyone big ideas, but half a century or more went by before much more was done.