Second Nature

Chapter 29

29  

The rabbit looked dead. 

Eberhard couldn't believe it. Prometheus-A-one of the identical twin rabbits that had regenerated from the severed halves of Prometheus-sprawled in cedar chips at the bottom of its cage, smoldering like a burnt pot roast. Smoky haze drifted inside the glass. 

Goddamned thing shouldn't be dead. It made Eberhard so furious he wanted to kill it again.  

He had pinned down Prometheus-A with a manipulator hand and torched the rabbit's face with a half-minute burst from a blue-hot acetylene flame. Then he had punched the start button on his stopwatch.  

"Destruction of the eyes," he'd spoken into his throat mike and recorder. "How long will it take the rabbit to grow new eyes and regain its vision?" A penlight taped to a finger of the waldo would test pupil dilation as soon as the eyeballs regenerated. 

The stopwatch was still running. The rabbit's little face was a crispy mask of blackened meat and bone. Ten minutes had passed. No shimmering fog.  

Eberhard jabbed the body with a stainless steel finger. A burnt patch of fur stuck to the metal. Not a twitch. No breathing, no signs of life. Eberhard stabbed the stop-button of his stopwatch. Stupid bunny was a lifeless carcass. 

He withdrew his suited arms from the waldo sleeves. He gathered a syringe and Vacu-tube from a biomedical workstation near the animal cages. He inserted the gear into the cage through a miniature airlock, thrust his arms back inside the sleeves of the manipulator, and readied the bloodwork kit.  

Eberhard gripped the dead rabbit in steel fingers and held it in the air. The body already was stiffening.  

"What the hell's with you? Huh? Why'd you die on me?" 

He withdrew blood from a fold of skin at the rabbit's neck, dropped the carcass, and sealed the test-tube with the blood specimen inside a second sterile container. He removed this container through the airlock. He had to repeat the steps in reverse to examine the animal's blood at a microscope workstation built inside Gen's former quarters.  

Level Four Isolation Protocol was a real pain in the ass, and working an electron microscope by remote was a major part of that pain. Sweat ran down his brow into his eyes. He ground his teeth. After several false starts, cursing under his breath, he obtained a sharply focused image. Under high-powered magnification, he watched red and white blood cells float in a pool of clear plasma on the monitor screen. He saw fat globules. Platelets.  

What he did not find were mitobots. The mitobots were gone. 

His heart squeezed behind his breastbone. Why did they disappear? He pounded the Formica counter of the workstation. Why? 

He hurried to the cage with Prometheus-B, passed a bloodwork kit through the airlock, and thrust his arms into a set of sleeves. The rabbit thumped frantically and crushed itself against the far glass wall of the cage. Then it tried to burrow down into its bedding, kicking up a blizzard of cedar chips. 

"I'm just going to draw your blood, you little coward." Now that the rabbit was no longer invulnerable, Eberhard felt nothing but contempt for the beast. He withdrew a tube of blood and flung the rabbit aside. 

Back at the electron microscope, he found the same results. No mitobots. 

Eberhard jerked away from the video monitor. With sickening clarity, he understood exactly what had happened. He didn't even bother to check his watch. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he'd injected Gen's mitobots into the rabbits. The mitobots had reproduced a programmed number of times and died; then they had passed out of the rabbits in their urine. 

Exactly as Ozzie had designed them to do. 

Dark crimson rage drowned his vision. He clenched the steel hand of the waldo into a fist and hammered the microscope into junk. The image on the screen blinked once, then deteriorated to gray fizz.  

"Gen." In the sound of her name he tasted defeat. 

She was the one and only indestructible human. The mitobots thrived in her, but in her alone. The rabbits, Eberhard, everyone else, could only buy invulnerability for a short while, less than a day, until the mitobots had exhausted their lives. 

Eberhard screamed in frustration. He shoved away from the workstation, knocking the metal chair to the floor. He felt as if the rabbits themselves had betrayed him, yanked his dreams from his grasp, and pissed on them. Hadn't they pissed out the mitobots? 

He stomped back to the cage where Prometheus-B trembled, a white ball of fluff wedged in a corner. Eberhard shoved the blowtorch through the cage's airlock. Behind his faceplate, his lips curled into a sneer. 

He ignited the three-inch-long blue flame. 

* * * 

Eberhard paced the roadway between the large concrete-and-steel laboratory building and his rustic bungalow. Several hours had passed since he'd disposed of the animal remains in a high-temperature biowaste incinerator.  

The night sky was bleaching to gray in the east. His shoes crunched the gravel of the quarter-mile circuit; his eyes looked ahead but focused on nothing. 

He had accepted the fact that the mitobots thrived solely in Gen's body, remained and evolved only in her. In all others, they could live for only a short span-about twenty hours-until their functions shut down and they died. 

Gen is the mitobots' reservoir, the mother ship. By injecting myself with her blood, I can become godlike myself, with the mitobots performing any necessary healing-but only for a day. Less than a goddam day.  

Better than nothing, he admitted. How many ampoules of Gen's frozen blood did he have left? Five. No, four. Once thawed, the mitobots wouldn't survive inside the blood in the ampoules beyond the twenty-hour limit. He needed to harvest more of her blood before destroying her.  

He truly hated her. 

At first, he had envied her, wanting her power for himself. Invincibility-what could be a greater boon for a warrior? Now that he knew he could never attain her might, his envy congealed in his gut, solid as a cannon ball. All he wanted now was to eliminate her. But to do that, he first had to find her. Again, he went over every angle of the problem. 

The morning shift guards arrived on four-wheel all-terrain cycles. They saluted as they drove past. Eberhard wiped perspiration from his brow and his handkerchief came up pink where sweat had mixed with red rock dust. The rising sun now overlooked Salinas Peak, and Eberhard had failed to come up with a better plan than the one already in operation.  

Gen spoke scores of languages, and she could be anywhere in the world by now. But she couldn't hide forever. No matter where she went, her own strangeness would expose her. Even without witnessing her awesome powers of regeneration, people would notice she was extraordinary in body and mind. Eventually, news about Gen had to turn up; at least in local gossip, if not splashed all over the media. 

Weeks ago, on the day the Navy crew found her transponder beeping from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, Eberhard had issued a bulletin to all military intelligence organizations of the United States and its allies: Keep your spy networks open for any talk of a young woman with mysterious abilities-key words: magical, miraculous, supernatural, witch, witchcraft, healer, saint, and purple or violet eyes. Report anything out of the ordinary to Col. Jack Eberhard, U.S. Army, via the Pentagon. 

It wasn't much of a plan, but over time, it stood a good chance of success.  

The hardest strain of all was the waiting.