Forty-Eight X (5 page)

“In the Middle East, in Pakistan, Somalia, Indonesia, much of the Muslim world, women are viewed like commodities. They’re property,” Double Espresso added. “The women there, they stone them, shoot them, hack them to pieces with axes, or set them on fire, because they’ve brought some perceived shame on the family. A woman gets raped, it shames the family. So they kill her. A woman wants to marry somebody for love. They kill her. Wants a divorce—dead.”

“The populations in those countries are becoming majority male, as well,” Shell pressed his point. “And, since males are innately more aggressive, they’re more malleable in becoming suicide bombers or determined soldiers.”

“We’ve called them crazy when we’ve fought them,” Coffee, Black No Cream, entered the conversation. “But if they were our boys, we’d be calling them heroic.”

“I won’t call people that are nuts ‘heroic,’” Double Espresso countered. “But what’s scary is that while most of these people still live with a tribal culture from the Middle Ages, they’ve got AKs, missiles, and fighter jets.”

Shell enjoyed golf, but he was playing today, just days after September 11, to urge a momentous change.

“Boys, with fewer females to moderate their social climate,” Mack Shell summed up the article, “the politics of these third-world nations is becoming more aggressive. Yet, as a society, we’re becoming more feminine, soft. Their nations are crammed full of testosterone, more inclined to seek glory in victory than sanity in compromise. American men change diapers while men in the third world shoot off guns in the air for kicks. Our young boys play video games of war while kids in the Middle East play with real guns, are taught to prefer death, and are transformed into car-driving kamikazes. For gods-sake, we’re afraid to use ‘the bomb.’ They’re intent on getting it. And does anybody doubt they’d use it? America’s character is clearly becoming more feminine. The third world, these theocracies, and most of the rest of our enemies, are becoming more masculine. What this newspaper story is asking us is this—if the nations of the world were a bunch of wild chimpanzees, how would America’s more feminine chimps prevail? I think we all know the answer.

“What we need, gentlemen, is a new defense against a new enemy. America’s survival can’t just depend on better and better technological weapons or bigger numbers like troop strength, tanks, planes, missiles, and ships. Our destiny is ultimately gonna be shaped by biology and demographics.”

Topped off with caffeine, the generals came to agree with Mack Shell’s conclusions.

As the generals got ready to tee off, Mack used the Sunday newspaper to wipe some mud off his golf shoes and noticed another article he had read in the morning paper. The second article was about the latest winners of Sweden’s Nobel Prizes. As usual, many were Americans. The most prominent was a geneticist from Stanford, Dr. Julius Wagner. Mack Shell had filed the name away in his head. He rarely bothered remembering trivia. But Dr. Wagner would not be trivia. The coincidence of reading these two stories was the catalyst for his grand plan.

Standing over his ball, he revealed what he had in mind all along.

“What the American army needs,” General Shell said, almost preaching, “are better soldiers—soldiers bred for the battles ahead.”

The others nodded their assent.

“What America needs,” Shell went on, “is an army of soldiers like that bunch of crazy chimps. An army not afraid of biting the nuts off our enemies.”

A few brief guffaws from his fellow generals quieted quickly. Lieutenant General Maximillian Shell wasn’t smiling. He was serious. It was there, on the par-five first hole, that the plan for the Lemuria Project was first hatched with Mocha Latte, Double Espresso, and Black No Cream. Mack Shell hit his first shot straight down the fairway. Sissy would eagle this one.

J
ulius Wagner, professor of genetics with an emeritus chair at the Stanford School of Medicine, scurried out of his house in his robe and bare feet to retrieve his newspaper. His morning paper was buried in the bushes in front of his home and, as usual, it was soaked from the sprinklers. How many times had he called his delivery people and asked them to toss it on the driveway? How hard could it be to hit a wide concrete driveway? He felt a twinge of pain in his lower back as he bent over to retrieve the paper. This was just another annoyance to make his life miserable—as was arthritis, dyspepsia, and most recently, well-wishers. His seventieth birthday was approaching, and every time someone called to wish him a “Happy Birthday,” he imagined them topping off their greeting with “Didn’t know you were still alive.” Why should he blame them? He wasn’t much for keeping up with acquaintances.

There were only a handful of people in the world who he believed actually cared about him—not his fame or the influence he could wield, but him. Yet more importantly, he couldn’t think of a handful of people he really cared about. There was his wife. But she was gone, having passed away from ovarian cancer earlier. That time had seen the greatest glory in his career, a Nobel Prize, and the greatest sorrow of his life. There was his daughter, Margaret, of course. He owed her a call. He didn’t call her enough. She was studying for her doctorate at that “other” school on the East Coast, Princeton.

He could have arranged her acceptance into a “better” program at Stanford, but she chose Princeton to distance herself from him. It was her choice, not his. It was that distance that made them distant. But that was just a lame excuse. He was smart enough to know when he was lying, especially to himself. Even when his daughter was a child and had lived at home, they were distant. His work, not his family, had always come first. Nevertheless, he thought again, he owed her a call. There was one other person Julius Wagner cared about. It was perhaps the most honest of his relationships, but it was also the most private. He cringed when he dwelled on emotions. He hated having them. Love and hate, joy and sadness, pride and shame, they were things he couldn’t measure on a graph or enter on a spreadsheet, annoying because he couldn’t quantify them, study them, or control them. That’s why he preferred to focus his attention on his work and why he was lazy in maintaining relationships.

Julius Wagner had a deep receding hairline with Einsteinian tufts of wild gray hair erupting from the back of his head and quite a few from his ears. He had a perpetual scowl and supposed he looked and acted like a loud, grumpy old man, even though inside he felt like a limp, seemingly spineless tabby cat. But that was okay. He still had important work to do. And the well-wishers—he’d just as soon toss most of them down a well.

The professor spread his newspaper out to dry on the rear lanai of his craftsman-style home in Palo Alto. He lived only a few blocks from his campus office. He sat down with a cup of tea, gnawed on a bagel and cream cheese, and sifted through the dry sections. He wondered why he bothered with this antiquated method of getting the news when he could easily click through the pages on his laptop. But it was Sunday morning, the skies were crystal blue, there was a cool coastal breeze, and he was surrounded by bright red bougainvillea and the sweet fragrance of oleander. The Sunday morning paper was a comforting habit, hard to undo.

Aside from the comics, the obituaries were his favorite part of the paper. The front page was always about wars, disasters, and corruption. The business section was also always the same—the market was up, the market was down—with arbitrary hypotheses as to why, written just to fill the page. The obituaries, however, were wonderful. They were full of history lessons, morality tales, and enlightenments about everything in life. A former secretary of state had passed away. He had lied for his president. An old Nigerian dictator died in exile. Decades after raping his country, he was still worth billions. And someone he knew had passed—Robert Graham. He had met the old gentleman just a few years ago at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an organization that Graham had founded several decades earlier.

Graham had a prominent obit, a quarter page. The photo of him, however, was one taken at least thirty years earlier; he was ninety when he died. The old man was found dead in a bathtub in a Seattle hotel room, apparently having slipped in the tub, hitting his head.
What an ignominious way for a great man to go
, Wagner thought.

Robert Graham had been a multimillionaire. He had made his fortune by inventing the first plastic eyeglass lenses in the 1950s and selling his company, Armorlite, in 1978 to 3M for $70 million. Many considered him a genius. He could have continued inventing great things, parlaying a fortune into a bigger one, or just living a good life full of comforts and opulent toys. Instead, Graham went through most of his wealth trying to bring an old idea back into favor, the science of eugenics.

Eugenics is the theory that our preeminent traits are almost entirely due to heredity. The name was coined by a multifaceted nineteenth-century British aristocrat named Francis Galton from a Greek word meaning “well born.” Galton was the first to describe the distinction between “nature versus nurture.” But his beliefs were shunned in his time: the fashion at the height of nineteenth-century “enlightenment” was a belief in egalitarianism, where everyone was born with equal abilities, where elegant breeding and intelligence was something that could be taught—just as poor Eliza was taught by Dr. Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s
Pygmalion
.

Galton’s belief in eugenics was fostered by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin. Darwin, whose book
The Origin of the Species
was a best seller at the time and established the new science of evolution, also wrote another book,
The Descent of Man
. It was that book that really influenced Galton. In it, Darwin wrote:

“Our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment.… Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”

With that in mind, Galton wrote his own book in 1869 called
Hereditary Genius
, which claimed that “intelligence and character” were determined by heredity and not, as was popularly believed at the time, by “environmental factors.” His book was not as well received as his cousin’s “evolutionary” tale. It was one thing to suggest that primitive animals could “evolve.” It was entirely another to intimate that the world’s masses of impoverished peasants were likely to be forever relegated to that role.

Eugenics remained an out-of-favor theory until it became popular in the United States in the early twentieth century. “Enlightened” people advocated restricting “undesirables” from immigrating to the United States and preventing the inferior members of society from tainting the “gene pool” by limiting their reproduction. The policy was given a stamp of approval by the United States Supreme Court in
Buck v. Bell
in 1927. The case involved the compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, a “feebleminded” woman institutionalized in Virginia, whose mother and daughter were also “feebleminded.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion:

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices—cutting the Fallopian tubes.…”

This American practice ended in 1950, after states had forcibly sterilized over sixty thousand people. It ended not because of some newfound American moral propriety, but because someone else had became overly enamored with the American practice of eugenics—Adolf Hitler. Eugenics was, therefore, a theory thoroughly shunned when Robert Graham came to advocate it. But he had other ideas.

“Eugenics,” Graham posed to Julius Wagner and anyone else who would listen, “has gotten a bad rap. It remains a good idea that has been carried out poorly. You should not think of eugenics as a scientific plan to rid the world of inferior people. God forbid. What a modern civilization needs is a plan to breed better people.”

In 1970, Robert Graham used his wealth to create his “Repository for Germinal Choice,” a sperm bank that set about collecting the specimens of geniuses for use in breeding “superior” human beings. Graham was not so arrogant as to say he could decide who was a genius. He elected to allow the Nobel Prize committee to indirectly make that choice and set about soliciting Nobel Prize winners for his “Repository.”

Professor Wagner found considerable merit in Graham’s plan, but the political correctness of the late twentieth century doomed it. The newspaper obituary noted that Robert Graham was bankrupt when he died. Julius Wagner wondered what would happen to Graham’s sperm bank. He had a personal interest in the matter. Wagner had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research on gene splicing. As a member of that elite group, he had his own “genes” stored in Graham’s “Repository for Germinal Choice.” But more importantly, Wagner believed in what he and Robert Graham had come to call “benevolent eugenics.” He believed, as did all eu-genicists, that “nature” was more important than “nurture.” But that didn’t mean that people had to be blessed or doomed by their genes—just that adjustments needed to be made. Dr. Wagner, like Graham, wanted to breed better humans.

Professor Wagner spent the next day on the phone making inquiries. A medical waste company had been contracted to incinerate the “genius” specimens. In a back-door transaction, Wagner purchased them. It seemed like the perfect deal. The seller was saved the expense of destroying the material and made a few thousand extra bucks in the bargain, and the buyer was someone who had a reputation to lose and could be expected to be discreet.