Blaine just looked at him.
“I should have suspected as much from what you told me this morning. All the clues were there. It couldn’t have been anything else, but I held to the hope it would be. Then, when the information came from the Gap…”
The old man’s voice trailed off. His eyes were fixed on the monstrous shape of Obie Seven.
“I called my work Omicron because it represented the fifteenth attempt at achieving the project’s goals. I wondered at first why the force you uncovered in Brazil hadn’t changed the title. Now I realize it’s quite fitting they left it as is. We were both going about things the same way, you see. Creating machines to do what previously only men had done.”
“There were no Operational Ballistic Droids found in the jungle, Professor.”
“No, Blaine, there weren’t…Because they escaped on your boat. Thirteen of them.”
“Machines?”
“What is a machine, Blaine? How shall we define it? In terms of mechanical parts formed of steel and diodes like my Obies, no. But in terms of being brought into existence and programmed toward a specific end, yes. A machine exists merely to perform a task that it will perform tirelessly until told to stop.”
The old man’s head bobbed madly as he spoke, wild white hair tossed about as if it were a mop.
“The purpose of the Obie series, the purpose of Omicron, was to imbue machines with more of the qualities of men — to better enable them to perform certain tasks. What if, instead, men were imbued with more of the qualities of machines?”
McCracken shuddered. He didn’t reply.
“What you discovered in the Amazon, Blaine, was a twisted version of my project. Thirteen men, created in whatever image some perverse man-god determined.”
“Created?”
“Poor choice of words on my part. Refined would be closer to the point.”
“Robots?”
“In a figurative sense, yes, but not a literal one. No hardware was involved, at least nothing beyond—”
“Beyond what?”
“I can’t account for the presence of the microprocessing experts. But they were there for a reason; that much is for sure.”
“Get back to the Wakinyan, Professor.”
“I’m speculating here, so bear with me. Say the primary purpose of what you’re creating — refining — is to kill. You would start with a thousand or so possible subjects and eventually narrow them down to a couple dozen before beginning.”
“You mean a single dozen.”
“Not at all. A dozen of the cubicles you found were unoccupied, remember? But that wouldn’t have always been the case.”
“Then what happened to—”
“I’ll get to that in good time, Blaine. You move your two dozen subjects to one of the most secluded spots on the face of the earth to avoid detection. Money is no object. Your complex is fitted with whatever it requires.”
“And there you train them to be perfect killing machines,” Blaine concluded. “The gymnasiums, the firing range.”
“But you’d be limited, wouldn’t you? You’ve known this kind of man, Blaine. Good Lord, you’ve killed plenty of them. Something more was needed than just training and conditioning.”
With that, Ainsley spun his wheelchair around rapidly and screeched toward his wall-length worktable. The wheels bounced over debris several times, and the chair itself rocked right and left. The old man took something from a large open drawer and spun back toward McCracken.
“This is the brain, Blaine,” he announced, motoring back. “A plastic model of it, anyway.”
Ainsley held the mass of yellow-gray sectional pieces together. It looked real enough for Blaine to wonder whose skull it had been lifted from.
“The list Ms. Maxwell provided me with, of logged researchers at the complex — together with your story and my own analysis of the videotape — can only mean they were working on brain manipulation down there. Neurosurgeons, chemical engineers, biotechnicians, DNA experts — it all fits. With the exception of those microchip people, of course.” Ainsley pulled several of the top sections of his model brain off and tossed them to the floor with the rest of the debris. “Truly a wonder of nature, Blaine. The wonder of nature. No one knows what percentage of the brain’s capacity has yet to be tapped. Estimates range from fifty to as high as ninety-five percent. The point is that the final frontier lies not in outer space. It lies quite literally within our own heads.
“The frontal lobe, the parietal lobe, the occipital lobe, the temporal lobe,” Ainsley said, pointing in turn to each of the sections of the brain. “I could go on naming sections and subsections for hours. But all you need to know is that research these last several years has concentrated on identifying the specific parts of the brain that control specific functions, emotions, and abilities. How does a professional athlete’s brain, for example, differ from that of an overweight man with a sedentary life-style? A murderer’s from a priest’s? A musician’s from a laborer’s? And if that specific determining region can be identified, then perhaps it can be manipulated, stimulated, to refine or enhance skills already possessed by the subject.”
“Sounds farfetched.”
“In a sense it is. The sedentary man could not duplicate the actions of the professional athlete because he has not been properly trained to carry them out. But add training to an artificially altered brain pattern and credibility becomes quite within reach.”
“Training,” Blaine murmured.
“Exactly. Tell me the features of an ideal killer, Blaine.”
“I could go on naming them for hours.”
“Start with the physical.”
Blaine seemed reluctant. “It’s hard to say. Of the best I’ve run into, I’ve never run into two who were alike.”
“But there must be certain common factors.”
“I guess,” Blaine said. “Reflexes…A kind of instinctive quickness that eliminates lag time.”
“Lag time?”
“The gap between realizing what you have to do and doing it. Killers who stay out there the longest have the shortest lag times. They can almost be in two places at one time. You can’t move faster than a bullet, but you can move faster than the man firing it.”
“I understand. Proceed.”
“Awareness. Great reflexes don’t help unless you stay in tune with what’s around you. The attack can come from anywhere. Recognizing it in time to respond determines your life expectancy.”
“Ah, so if an attacker can move faster than you can respond, he wins.”
“Or she. In a nutshell, yes. Like…”
“Like what?”
“An animal. They don’t think, so the lag between determining an action and undertaking it is nonexistent.”
“And if that same lag could be eliminated in a man? If there was a way to somehow stimulate and alter the area of our brain controlling response and reaction time?”
McCracken looked down at the plastic model in Ainsley’s lap. “You’re saying that’s what they created down there?”
“That and more, Blaine.”
“Yes, physical skills. The strength and quickness of the Wakinyan have been enhanced, too.”
“Enhanced to a hyperdegree, I should suspect, in subjects selected for already possessing large degrees of both,” Ainsley confirmed. “But there’s even more. The new makers of Omicron wanted to create machines, remember? You saw the handiwork of the Wakinyan. What comes to mind about it first?”
“They enjoyed it,” Blaine said, without thinking.
“You’re quite certain of that?”
“Oh, yeah.” McCracken’s thoughts drifted back to finding the Tupi boys’ bodies, then the ravaged corpses at the complex, and finally the corpses of Ben Norseman’s men. “No question about it. They loved every minute of their work.”