Donohue didn’t answer. Instead, he stood and pulled out a photo pass for her laboratory and placed it on the desk.
‘The Department hired you six months later. You see, people like me represent a huge financial investment—money the Department can’t afford to lose. You’ll find your mutant gene function—that I don’t doubt. And it would be very nice to be able to prevent the kind of misery those eight guys in my squad endured. But I suspect it’ll turn out like the Hydra—there won’t be just one propensity attached to your gene function, and some will be good, some bad.’
He sat down on the desk again and held Julia’s gaze. ‘I don’t know what I’m defending anymore. You see, when I did, it was easy; now life’s got complicated, my job’s got complicated. I know this much: I might lack the ability to feel remorse, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t the intellectual capacity to develop compassion. But I’m one of the lucky ones. There’ll be hundreds of thousands out there, for generations, who won’t be so lucky; a sub-set of men targeted for one thing and one thing only, who will blindly follow orders, never fall out of the tree, and never find their compassion.’
‘You want me to stop my research,’ Julia said.
‘I’m asking you to consider the human consequences of releasing that information. There, now you know the truth. Tom Donohue is a dangerous idealist, so strike me down.’
He stood and started for the door.
‘If you don’t know who to trust, keep the gun. It wasn’t me who broke into the lab last night.’
After he’d left, Julia opened the chamber of the Magnum and spun it. There were no bullets.
55
London, 1861
THE LECTURE HALL AT THE BRITISH Association for the Advancement of Science was a large auditorium that had been built to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria herself. It contained at least four hundred wooden seats trimmed with green leather cushions, lined up in neat rows that ran from wall to wall with a central aisle cutting through from the double entrance doors to the podium. The side walls were decorated with wooden plaques upon which, immortalised in gold lettering, were listed the members of the society as far back as 1670.
Above the stage was a large stained-glass window consisting of a quartet of panels, each depicting famous explorers. The first was a scene of Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas. The Spaniard (in pantaloons and feathered hat) stood on the shores of the New World holding out what appeared to be a string of beads to an awestruck native. The next panel was of Captain Cook at Port Jackson, about to be speared by an Australian Aborigine; the third (a more recent addition) was of Dr Livingstone at Lake Victoria; and the fourth panel showed Marco Polo standing on the Great Wall of China.
The podium below held a piano (used for the occasional social gathering, and this evening pushed to one side) and a long table in the middle, upon which, at this moment, stood a large decanter of the best port the society had to offer, a glass in front of each panellist, and a jug of water. The air was thick with cigar and pipe smoke; a cloud of which had one of the speakers, the Reverend Gilbert Rorison, struggling for breath.
‘I cannot believe that this creature,’ he coughed, pointing to the pelt of a large male gorilla, which his co-speaker and fellow anti-evolutionist, gorilla hunter Paul Du Chaillu, had displayed in a rather gory fashion, hung from a steel stand to mimic the living creature’s erect position, ‘that this creature is my direct ancestor. My learned colleague Paul Du Chaillu will confirm the reasons for my convictions, having hunted and observed the creature at close quarters—’
At this point, half the audience—the charterists and workers to the left of the hall, who equated the plight of the gorilla (a creature they had embraced as their long-lost primate brother) with conflict over slavery in America—booed heartily.
The chairman, the eminent Professor Horatio Thorn, president of the society and famous for his 1830 essay entitled The Breeding Rituals and Gestation of the Egyptian Dung Beetle, hit the table with a wooden hammer. ‘Can we please have order in the hall! Order!’
At which the audience, after a few shouts of ‘Murderer!’, relishing the volatility of the debate, settled into good humour.
‘As I was saying,’ the Scottish Episcopalian minister continued, undaunted, ‘I have wondered publicly in my article on genesis whether Professor Owen—an associate
of the good Professor Huxley here—believes that Man was produced by Creative Law, and in that manner supernaturally through the womb of the ape?’
Professor Huxley, a man in his late forties, one of the Society’s more youthful members, sprang to his feet.
‘Semantics! Divine intervention is not the issue; the issue is evolution. As an anthropologist, I can assure you that however uncomfortable the notion might be, we are descended from apes. Transmutation is a reality, my friends.’
Du Chaillu rose to speak. ‘I have observed these heartless and ruthless beasts at considerable length, and I can reassure you that no ancestor of mine ever bore any relation to this demonic creature.’
Again, the crowd roared in indignation. Colonel Huntington, sitting four rows from the front, glanced nervously at the side door. His student was late. Wondering at the capriciousness of the younger man, the Colonel realised how much he had invested in Mr Hamish Campbell and how vulnerable that made him. And now what? He did not know if he could go on repressing his great, secret desire without falling into an abyss of despair—with which he was not unfamiliar. If he were to pursue it, he risked everything: his standing as an anthropologist and both their careers and reputations. Yet he found it impossible to keep away. He had to see him, to know that he was close. It was a compulsion; a fatal affection.
A movement at the periphery of his vision caught his attention. Dressed in a summer suit with a canary yellow silk waistcoat, Hamish Campbell appeared the embodiment of youthful confidence. But as he drew near, the Colonel could see dark shadows under his eyes and exhaustion in his face.
Hamish took the empty seat the Colonel had kept for him and turned his face to the front. The men barely acknowledged each other.
‘You got my message?’ the Colonel said eventually.
‘Evidently.’
The Colonel’s eyes slid sideways, furtively searching the boy’s face.
‘Are you well?’
‘As well as can be expected. I am in arrears with my rent and my servant complains he has nothing with which to keep the creditors at bay.’