Choosing to work with monkeys and apes because of their naturally high intelligence and because they already possessed humanlike hands, Yarbeck ultimately selected baboons as the base species for her dark acts of creation. Baboons were among the smartest of primates, good raw material. They were deadly and effective fighters by nature, with impressive claws and fangs, fiercely motivated by the territorial imperative, and eager to attack those whom they perceived as enemies.
“Yarbeck’s first task in the physical alteration of the baboon was to make it larger, big enough to threaten a grown man,” Lem said. “She decided that it would have to stand at least five feet and weigh one hundred to a hundred and ten pounds.”
“That’s not so big,” Walt protested.
“Big enough.”
“I could swat down a man that size.”
“A man, yes. But not this thing. It’s solid muscle, no fat at all, and far quicker than a man. Stop and think of how a fifty-pound pit bull can make mincemeat of a grown man, and you’ll realize what a threat Yarbeck’s warrior Could be at a hundred and ten.”
The patrol car’s steam-silvered windshield seemed like a movie screen on Which Walt saw projected images of brutally murdered men: Wes Dalberg,
Teel Porter… He closed his eyes but still saw cadavers. “Okay, yeah, I get your point. A hundred and ten pounds would be enough if we’re talking about something designed to fight and kill.”
“So Yarbeck created a breed of baboons that would grow to greater size. Then she set to work altering the sperm and ova of her giant primates in other ways, sometimes by editing the baboon’s own genetic material, sometimes by introducing genes from other species.”
Walt said, “The same sort of cross-species patch-and-stitch that led to the smart dog.”
“I wouldn’t call it patch-and-stitch… but yeah, essentially the same techniques. Yarbeck wanted a large, vicious jaw on her warrior, something more like that of a German shepherd, even a jackal, so there would be room for more teeth, and she wanted the teeth to be larger and sharper and perhaps slightly hooked, which meant she had to enlarge the baboon’s head and totally alter its facial structure to accommodate all of this. The skull had to be greatly enlarged, anyway, to allow for a bigger brain. Dr. Yarbeck wasn’t working under the constraints that required Davis Weatherby to leave his dog’s appearance unchanged. In fact, Yarbeck figured that if her creation was hideous, if it was alien, it would be an even more effective warrior because it would serve not only to stalk and kill our enemies but terrorize them.”
In spite of the warm, muggy air, Walt Gaines felt a coldness in his belly, as if he had swallowed big chunks of ice. “Didn’t Yarbeck or anyone else consider the immorality of this, for Christ’s sake? Didn’t any of them ever read The Island of Doctor Moreau? Lem, you have a goddamn moral obligation to let the public know about this, to blow it wide open. And so do I.”
“No such thing,” Lem said. “The idea that there’s good and evil knowledge… well, that’s strictly a religious point of view. Actions can be either moral or immoral, yes, but knowledge can’t be labeled that way. To a scientist, to any educated man or woman, all knowledge is morally neutral.”
“But, shit, application of the knowledge, in Yarbeck’s case, wasn’t morally neutral.”
Sitting on one or the other’s patio on weekends, drinking Corona, dealing with the weighty problems of the world, they loved to talk about this sort of thing. Backyard philosophers. Beery sages taking smug pleasure in their wisdom. And sometimes the moral dilemmas they discussed on weekends were those that later arose in the course of their police work; however, Walt could not remember any discussion that had had as urgent a bearing on their work as this one.
“Applying knowledge is part of the process of learning more,” Lem said. “The scientist has to apply his discoveries to see where each application leads. Moral responsibility is on the shoulders of those who take the technology out of the lab and use it to immoral ends.”
“Do you believe that bullshit?”
Lem thought a moment. “Yeah, I guess I do. I guess, if we held scientists responsible for the bad things that flowed from their work, they’d never go to work in the first place, and there’d be no progress at all. We’d still be living in caves.”
Walt pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his face, giving himself a moment to think. It wasn’t so much the heat and humidity that had gotten to him. It was the thought of Yarbeck’s warrior roaming the Orange County hills that made him break out in a sweat.
He wanted to go public, warn the unwary world that something new and dangerous was loose upon the earth. But that would be playing into the hands of the new Luddites, who would use Yarbeck’s warrior to generate public hysteria in an attempt to bring an end to all recombinant-DNA research. Already, such research had created strains of corn and wheat that could grow with less water and in poor soil, relieving world hunger, and years ago they had developed a man-made virus that, as a waste product, produced cheap insulin. If he took word of Yarbeck’s monstrosity to the world, he might save a couple of lives in the short run, but he might be playing a role in denying the world the beneficial miracles of recombinant-DNA research, which would cost tens of thousands of lives in the long run.
“Shit,” Walt said. “It’s not a black-and-white issue, is it?”
Lem said, “That’s what makes life interesting.”
Walt smiled sourly. “Right now, it’s a whole hell of a lot more interesting than I care for. Okay. I can see the wisdom of keeping a lid on this. Besides, if we made it public, you’d have a thousand half-assed adventurers out there looking for the thing, and they’d end up victims of it, or they’d gun down one another.”
“Exactly.”
“But my men could help keep the lid on by joining in the search.”
Lem told him about the hundred men from Marine Intelligence units who were still combing the foothills, dressed as civilians, using high-tech tracking gear and, in some cases, bloodhounds. “I’ve already got more men on line than you could supply. We’re already doing as much as can be done. Now will you do the right thing? Will you stay out of it?”
Frowning, Walt said, “For now. But I want to be kept informed.”
Lem nodded. “All right.”
“And I have more questions. For one thing, why do they call it The Outsider?”
“Well, the dog was the first breakthrough, the first of the lab subjects to display unusual intelligence. This one was next. They were the only two successes: the dog and the other. At first, they added capital letters to the way they pronounced it, The Other, but in time it became The Outsider because that seemed to fit better. It was not an improvement on one of God’s creations, as was the dog; it was entirely outside of creation, a thing apart. An abomination-though no one actually said as much. And the thing was aware of its status as an outsider, acutely aware.”
“Why not just call it the baboon?”
“Because… it doesn’t really look much of anything like a baboon any more. Not like anything you’ve ever seen-except in a nightmare.”
Walt did not like the expression on his friend’s dark face, in his eyes. He decided not to ask for a better description of The Outsider; perhaps that was something he did not need to know.
Instead, he said, “What about the Hudston, Weatherby, and Yarbeck murders? Who was behind all that?”
“We don’t know the man who pulled the trigger, but we know the Soviets hired him. They also killed another Banodyne man who was on vacation in Acapulco.”
Walt felt as if he were jolting through one of those invisible barriers again, into an even more complicated world. “Soviets? Were we talking about the Soviets? How’d they get into the act?”