Alternate Gerrolds (23 page)

It was at this point that I realized the absolute corruption of power. Holmes had developed such an arrogance toward other mortals that he no longer regarded himself as bound by their rules. And likewise, I recognized that my life depended only my ability to provide continued service to him—at least until he tired of the game.

I have realized that there is no way that I can make any of this information public. Not even after my own death, not even after Holmes’. For with his time-traveling device, he can easily travel far into the future to see how history has regarded the both of us. Should he discover the publication of any manuscript detailing the truth of our exploits, he
would know that I had been ultimate source of the revelation. It would be a simple matter for him to return to our time and strangle me before these pages could even be written. My only protection, indeed the only protection for any of my heirs, is for us to keep this secret throughout all time. For I have no doubt in my mind that the man who is known as Holmes will track us down and kill us to prevent this truth becoming known.

After observing his ability to escape death over and over again, I have no choice but to assume that Holmes is effectively immortal, at least as immortal as it is possible for any man to be. If there is a way to immobilize the monster, I have not yet devised it.

But, now it is time for me to complete this piece and put it in a safe place. My next paper will detail my thoughts on how it may be possible to stop Holmes once and for all.

I shall now give this manuscript to one whom I trust and ask him to pray for us all. May God have mercy on my soul!

OKAY, I HEREBY PUBLICLY APOLOGIZE for pushing Mike Resnick into the La Brea Tar Pits. I did it. I’m sorry.

I won’t try to excuse it by saying it was poor impulse control on my part—after all I did smack him with two feather pillows, and the fact that I’d brought the pillows along was clear proof that the
stunt was premeditated. So I plead guilty for that and I apologize.

But I’m not going to give the money back. If the purchasing agent at the Page Museum was stupid enough to believe my story about having cloned a feathered mastodon, then that’s his fault and his employer’s responsibility.

But I do want to apologize to Bantam Books for spoiling their traditional Worldcon dinner excursion. They’d rented a big bus, filled it with beer and schlepped all of their most willing writers—those who hadn’t found other obligations with other publishers—off on the science fiction version of a magical mystery tour. Tom Dupree has already told me that I’m not likely to be invited back, and that’s probably punishment enough, I guess.

Tom also told me how much it cost to have the emergency vehicle called—they had to call in one of those extra-huge cranes that they use
for lifting boxcars to hoist Resnick out of the sticky black oil. He looked like a giant fudgsicle—or a Godzilla turd—and while he was hanging there, all gooey and dripping and glumphing unintelligible threats, that’s when I slit open the feather pillows and whacked him with them.

It was expensive, but—what the hell, even though I’ve apologized, I have to admit it was worth it. But Tom says they’re going to take it out of my royalties. Like that’s a threat. Maybe if they’d sell some books, I could get some royalties once in a while.

But I’m not worried. Even though the SFWA Defense Fund turned down my requests for legal aid, there are enough other former contributors to Resnick anthologies who have sent me generous checks—enough that I should be able to mount a credible defense. Just contributing a story to a Resnick anthology goes a long way toward proving temporary insanity.

Okay, yes, he deserved it—there’s no question that he had it coming. He shouldn’t have said what he said. He shouldn’t have said it on camera. And most of all, he shouldn’t have sent me a videotape of him saying it in front of an audience of three thousand people.

The only reason I’m apologizing now is that I didn’t know about his skin condition and how when the oil and the tar seeped through his skin, that it would render him sterile and impotent—kind of a chemical castration.

While all the behind-the-back jokes about Resnick’s new career as a harem guard, and how he’s now in demand for the soprano lead in
La Castrata
, have been funny in their own sick way, the fact is I’m really starting to feel bad about all this. The doctors say it’s unlikely that Resnick will ever grow another follicle of hair anywhere on his entire body—some kind of interaction with the pollutants in the tar—and because he has to wear those rubber pants because of the resultant incontinence problem, he looks sort of like a 300-pound baby. And they say he cries a lot too. Especially when the male nurses come to change him.

So, okay, I guess I’m not a very nice person. And this particular fraternity-level prank only proves that I’m not to be trusted out in public without a keeper. A simple pie in the face would have made the point just as easily and probably would have been a lot funnier too. But Resnick started it, so he deserves some of the blame. That remark about how “recombinant DNA splicing explains Gerrold’s nose”
hurt
.

The thing is—Resnick should have known better.

It’s no secret. Science fiction writers gossip. They talk about the stuff they’ve seen. Pournelle’s been inside the space shuttle, Benford gets guided tours of particle smashers, Ben Bova got an advance peek at the—oops, not supposed to mention that one yet. But you get the idea. Where do you think we
really
get all our ideas? We hang out every year at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—and hope for invitations to the real labs. And then we get drunk at the conventions and brag about what we’ve seen. I got invited to a tour of Intel’s new fabrication plant. Ellison got to see a building demolished with a new small explosive named after him. Roddenberry once got a free tour of the whiskey museum in Edinborough.

In this case, I know that the research papers haven’t been published yet, there aren’t any articles yet in
Scientific American
or
Discover
magazine; only a few weird articles in the
National Enquirer
about potatoes with real eyes and hairless mice with purple mohawks. Oh, wait—there was that one thing in
Discover
, but it was in their April issue and everybody thought it was another one of their silly April Fool’s jokes, like the particle the size of a bowling ball or the naked ice-borer that grabbed penguins from underneath.

But the fact is, they have been doing some serious gene-splicing work at—well, never mind. I could tell you, but then I’d have to hunt you down and kill you. Everyone who reads this. And that would seriously decimate the population of science fiction readers. Or maybe not. How many people read Resnick anthologies anyway? Not that many. The loss would hardly be noticed.

But anyway, I was invited up to a place in Marin County. It’s funded by a couple of famous movie directors, you figure it out. This goes back more than fifteen years, when they first decided they wanted to do a dinosaur movie—only at that time nobody, not even Stan Winston’s guys, could figure out how to coordinate all the separate machines necessary to create an illusion of real motion. That was when computers were still as big as refrigerators and cost more than Ferraris.

So that’s when the dinosaur cloning project really began. They thought they’d make their movie with real dinosaurs. And maybe even open a park too—which is where they got the idea for the movie that did get made.

It wasn’t done with amber—although that’s sexier because it films better. It was really done by processing coal. Coal is really a compressed
peat bog. And peat bogs are really good at preserving dead things—every so often somebody finds an ancient mummy in a bog. Well, sometimes they find dinosaur bones in coal—so if you process the coal immediately around the dinosaur bones, you get chains of DNA.

Most of it is damaged, of course. DNA doesn’t last for eighty million years. But if you collate all the different chains, you can put them together and pretty much approximate what was there in the first place, and then you can plug them into ostrich eggs and see what you get. Mostly, you get deformed ostrich embryos. So that was pretty much a dead-end. It used up a lot of money, but the movies were paying for the research, and it was tax-deductible too, so the thing just chugged away, burning dollars and coal at the same rate.

But after a while, the guys in the lab coats decided to try something else. They thought, “Hey, why don’t we back-breed from existing species of birds and reptiles until we match the dino DNA?” And so they started down that path with high hopes. That was another good way to use up millions of dollars a year. Pocket change.

Somehow, the back-breeding project took a side-turn. I think it was the time that they were trying to do all those weird fantasy movies. The Henson people were good with the puppets. The Winston people were getting better with the machines. The computers were getting smaller. But it still wasn’t enough—and meanwhile, the guys in the labs had gotten a little stir-crazy—

Oh yeah, I should explain that. Because the whole thing was being done in such incredible secrecy, they had built this little city off in the hills north of the bay; the cover story was that it was a movie production facility—and they even built a real recording studio there as a kind of false front. But underneath it were the real labs. And because the work was so secret, the scientists and all the technicians were literally confined to the site. They were allowed to see their families only on Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was like being sent to Antarctica, but without the snow.

So, yeah—they got cabin fever. And they got crazy. It happens.

When I was in college—USC Film School, although I try not to admit it—one of the animation professors told us of a “tradition” at animation studios. Pornographic cartoons. Each animator would (on his own time) add a scene. The next animator would pick it up where the last guy left off. Back in the days of wild fraternity parties and pornographic
movies—before VCR’s—some of these animated films were floating around town. I remember one with a farmer and a donkey and ... well, never mind. I also remember the instructor sighing wistfully. “Ours were good, but they were never as good as the ones coming out of Disney. Now those guys were great.” I don’t think any of the Disney stuff ever got off the lot though. I never saw any of it. I wonder sometimes if Walt did. I’d be surprised if he didn’t.

Anyway, that’s what started happening at Project Back-Breed. The DNA Team started mixing genes just to see what would happen. They weren’t having any luck with anything else—they hadn’t licked the viability problem, nothing lived; so they got desperate just to see if they could make
something
that would survive.

That’s where the hairy chicken came from. They actually created a small flock of hairy chickens. They looked like furry bowling balls. They were hysterical to see—clucking around the yard like big fat tribbles. (That’s why I got to see them. Otherwise, I’d never have been allowed near the place.) Two of them were fertile, so they were able to breed several generations by the time of my visit. All colors—blonde, brown, red, white, black, even one with a weird purplish tinge. They were pretty good eating too. They tasted like chicken. Of course.

After the hairy chicken, the DNA Team decided to try going the other way, to see if they could put feathers on a mammal. That was about the time someone had the bright idea of injecting an elephant with frozen mammoth sperm. They’re always finding dead mammoths frozen in the Siberian glaciers, and it’s not that hard to chip some sperm out of the ice, defrost it, do a test-tube fertilization and inject it into an unsuspecting elephant cow. The technology has been used on horses, pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs, mice, gorillas, chimps and even humans. So why not elephants? What’s the worst that could happen, right?