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While Mosca and Lysle buzzed around in their huge glass dipterary, Thomas Cortlandt Spofford and Donovan Tesla Bruhn, B.Sc. (Wisconsin), Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley), sat conversing at Dr Bruhn's desk. They had agreed Dr Bruhn should dissect Mosca, in vivo if necessary, to seek out the defects---- above all, those productive of emotion, and use what he learned to prepare a perfected design. Then he would grow a new prototype. As for the fate of Lysle, it bore not a flyweight on their deliberations. At the moment, in response to a query from Thomas, Dr Bruhn was telling about the picture he kept on his desk, an advertisement from a 1925 National Geographic depicting two young women and a dowager in a touring car stalled on railroad tracks. The older woman sat behind the wheel, and a third young woman stood in front tugging the crank in desperate hopes of starting the car before the train hit. STOP! LOOK! THINK! . . . and you'll get your Philco now. A cutaway drawing of a Philco storage battery labeled 3-Point Superiority---- the points in question marked 1 and 2 and 3---- appeared below the desperate cranker, who, as Dr Bruhn had just explained, was his mother. She'd transubstantiated into this fantasy land when she'd modeled for the ad during her flapper days in New York City.
"One of my first memories is of that picture hanging in our living room in Clifton Park when we lived near Cleveland. I still remember studying it, and trying to understand the three-point superiority. To this day, Thomas, I'm convinced that's what first kindled my interest in chemistry. I say s0 despite the fact my father was chief chemist at Sherwin-Williams. As a child, I didn't know what that meant. What Sherwin-Williams meant to me then was their enormous electric sign on Lake Shore Drive which showed the world with a paint can poised above it. The can would tip, and colors would flow down from it, and words underneath would light up to say WE COVER THE EARTH ."
"Hell yes, D.T., I remember that same sign, from somewhere else, the where escapes me. We cover the earth. Like CIA. Only unlike that paint company, The Company leaves out the red."
Bruhn handed him the picture.
"Look at this carefully, Thomas. What do you see?" Garrison Station. Mom drops Dad there, to commute to the Stock Exchange, and then drives on, along the Hudson, by Bear Mountain Bridge and Anthony's Nose (a Mountain commemorating the proboscis of Mad Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary general whose forces landing across the river stormed and captured Stony Point), thence into Peekskill, and delivers me to grade school. Then, just to irritate Father, who never votes, she goes on to some Republican meeting. Those railroad tracks. Free association. But not open to everybody. Never be personal with subordinates. Take the twins on that ride someday. "Thinking about it, D.T., what I see first is these women are looking down the tracks as if the train's almost on them. They're scared. Sure. But there's four of them. Why the fuck don't they push the car off the tracks? This thing is sexist, it's dishonest, it's crazy. Yes. Crazy. So what's under all that? The Philco with its three-point superiority. It represents safety. Security. Trust. It's a magic icon, an if-only . . . . We're in the nineteen-twenties, when emotional advertising just began. When they went from facts to feelings. Still some facts here. That pseudo one, two, three science. Out with the old, in with the new. Hit emotions. Stir up anxiety with one hand---- like with a phony disease, like ask madame if she's a good fuck, like, in this ad, make you wonder if you can really trust what you really trust. Then in the ad give them a phony fix, a fake protector. That goddamned battery's a fucking father figure."
He handed the picture back to Dr Bruhn, who returned it to its place by the computer terminal. "The dead battery, D.T., it's a Philco." Bruhn stood, and paced to the glass wall of the perfected dipterous environment and back. "Thomas, what I see there is a picture of our civilization. Catastrophe is bearing down on the people and their disabled systems. Look. She's stopped cranking. It's too late. Here comes the black-market plutonium, all neatly packaged in an Iranian A-bomb. They're rabbits frozen in place by headlights. Their battery has burned out. Calamity hurtles down upon them, and they see it, and recognize it, and could escape it. But . . . ." He struck his desk. "But! Do they push? Do they do anything? No! They freeze! That's us, all of us. Ice!"
"Our civilization."
"All civilization."
Thomas stood to go, and Dr Bruhn walked him to the laboratory door. Thomas gazed in deep satisfaction at the two specks flitting behind the glass of the dipterary. Dr Bruhn was suddenly aware of the thin blond hair carefully combed over Thomas' naked scalp. This virtual skinhead beamed and said, "An immense achievement, Dr Bruhn. Recovering a fly lost in a whole continent. Yes sir. We really accomplished something, didn't we?"
"You're the one who deserves the credit."
He smiled, and left.
Bruhn walked over to the dipterary and let the flies out. "How about that?" he said to them.
"You really going to cut me up?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I feel comfortable with you. Lysle, too."
"But that boss of yours . . . ?"
"Yeah, him," said Lysle. "I don't know what you feel, Doc, but me, I don't trust him, not at fucking all."
"Nor do I," said Dr Bruhn. "In CIA that's to be expected. You can't really trust anyone on the covert side except, possibly, yourself. What I can't stand about Thomas is something else, his, well . . . his SS sense of humor."
"What's that?"
"At Auschwitz, over the main gate, they displayed a slogan: Work Makes Free. Arbeit Macht Frei." Dr Bruhn crossed over to his desk, and sat on it. "Spofford is the sort of fella who, for the fun of it, would thrust a whoopee cushion under a guy being seated in the electric chair." He snapped a jazz cassette into his player, and as music softly swelled, the flies danced before his eyes. "Tell me, Lysle, is Mosca a good student? Will he learn how to pass as a real muscid?"
"He's trying, but he won't be valedictorian."
"I was once."
"Not for the same thing."
"No."
"I'm doing my best to be a true mentor, to teach him and at the same time be a perfect specimen of Musca Domestica for him to emulate. But look at the problems! I have taste buds on the soles of my feet, but you didn't give him any. I'm a male, but he's sexless. I eat; he doesn't. It's not as easy to be a fly as you might think."
"My friend, it's surely easier than being human."
"Doc, I'm still not sure what you mean by SS humor." "Thomas speaks of CIAIDS, a term he attributes to William Casey, and of CIADE, which he credits to himself. Thomas served in Guyana in the 1970's, and put CIADE into Company slang when the Reverend Jim Jones and almost one thousand followers, men, women, children, killed themselves by drinking cyanide KOOLAID, thusly writing finis on that MKULTRA project. He talks about the MK digraph, which leads the cryptonyms of several programs, as an acronym for Mind Kontrol, or Mengelean Klan, or Mass Kill. I begin to warm to him, even to like him, and then he says something like that. CIAIDS!"
"Yes."
"And not only that, but behind my back he tells people my initials, D.T., stand for delirium tremens. He jokes about me, says it's obvious to all I live in some crazed fantasy world, abounding with delusions, alive with death and demons."
The flies flitted and hovered and settled on his cassette player.
"And the US Department of Agriculture's cattle research station at Kikuyu near Nairobi. What I did there, my boy, was more than enjoy spectacular views of Mount Kenya while sipping Tusker Beer. Since 1942, USDA'd been a cover for biowar research. Kikuyu---- not the town, the lab, was established during World War II by British from Porton Down to test a vaccine for rinderpest. Our work there was . . . ."
He paused, silenced by the habitual discipline of suppressing classified truth.
Hell with it!
With all of them.
Fuck Secret, Secret Sensitive, Top Secret, Streeclass, and the rest.
Those restrictions don't mean I can't tell it to some flies.
Maybe not to birds and animals, but insects!
He told the flies in 1954 when friends still called him Donny and he was about to graduate cum laud from secondary school, his father died in an auto accident s0 deeply in debt as to snuff the plan to send him to college as had been done some years previously for his sister. So, now, how to study science? How to carry on? Upon being told as a volunteer he could select his specialty and eventually get help with college costs, Bruhn joined the army, and, after basic at Fort Ord, he trained with the chemical corps at Edgewood Arsenal. From there he went to the CBW center at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, where, in the Civil War, the legendary Barbara Frietchie had defied the Confederate army, and, more recently, the germ warriors had produced Anthrax Tower---- a building now also rendered legendary by being condemned and sealed, perhaps for centuries, because of contamination. At Detrick, he worked on the F-bomb, which spreads aerosol-suspended anthrax spores. A dedicated young man of IQ one-four-two, as he sometimes hummed to himself, tall and swimmerbuilt with a talent for science, a believer who studied chemistry in his spare time, young Donovan Tesla Bruhn earned the confidence of colleagues and scored high on his performance evaluations. His services in F-bomb tests---- carried out with the British in mid-Atlantic on rafts carrying healthy rats, sheep and other animals, which they bombed and then torched after collecting data--- confirmed another dimension of his quality: serenity under stress. Shortly after this, in 1956, CIA recruited him to work on MKNAOMI, a joint project with the army for developing and producing chemical and biological devices for CIA uses, including assassinations.
That he'd been named for Wild Bill Donovan, his first cousin once-removed, didn't hurt his career any, either.
"They swore me into CIA, but, for cover, kept me in uniform." He told Mosca and Lysle of his assignment to MKULTRA's subproject SIMIAN, a study of sick monkeys which sought diseases able to jump the species barrier and infect humans. Some of these, like
ASF---- African Swine Fever, derived from other species, had been intensified in monkeys, as, s0 to speak, élite-force training to prepare them for the invasion of people. Bruhn and his co-workers used serial infections to fortify the most promising of these diseases, especially those like ASF that strike at immune systems. Top priority went to discovering which, if any, could be developed into racially specific maladies subject to rapid diffusion through large populations.
"You see, fellows, the T-cells of the immune system are the prison guards. If you kill enough of them, the prisoners---- the local diseases that are in the blood all the time---- break out and do their stuff."
Eventually, SIMIAN expanded beyond the laboratory and they began working with "lizards": lab jargon for indigenous peoples. The Directorate of Plans organized this new effort---- by now partially centered in CIA-funded psychiatric clinics in Haiti and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe---- under the rubric of MKULTRA, subproject SORIAN. When by 1967 some success had been achieved and SIMIAN/SORIAN's range and need for secrecy had become extensive, they were both folded into MJSIMSOR and elevated to semi-autonomous operational status.
"Believe me, my friends, we felt fully justified in our work, and not only because we had to anticipate what the Soviets were accomplishing in the Baltic on Rugen Island and elsewhere. Things have come together somewhat now, but that was a time of fundamental flux, of maximum crisis. Vast areas of the world then emerging from colonial status were throwing off rule by European nations but holding onto modern technology. That was true above all on the immense continent of Africa. South of the Sahara, we Americans had to help the natives accomplish their transition from tribalism, which cannot survive immersion in advanced technology, to federal democracy, which can. Tell me . . . if the Americans hadn't helped with this, who would have? The old colonial masters? The same ones who'd set tribe against tribe, introduced Christ and cannon? Those powers who valued native people only as cheap and docile labor, as instruments to use in rivalries for world markets or as soldiers in extended national wars? So indifferent were the colonial powers---- including the honorary Aryans of Japan---- to native concerns that they left a legacy of exacerbated hatreds, shattered and addictive economies, and national borders having little or no relation to cultures or terrain or production or commerce, boundaries which often cut tribes in half.
"Ours was the only nation in a position to help the Africans, the black Africans especially. We alone could help them enter the modern world in the context of free markets, civil rights, and self-government. In Kenya, the Company gave significant clandestine support to Jomo Kenyatta and Tom M'Boya and the Mau Mau's campaign against the Brits. This transformation is alive with danger, violence. It requires sophisticated supervision. It takes time. S0 what do you do if millions of illiterate innocents are stampeded into submission to some horrible populist dictatorship to be ruled by force and fear expressed through torture, starvation, murder? What then? You prepare for drastic action. As a last and desperate option we had to be ready to spread an epidemic to which we're immune, one that would debilitate but not kill, s0 we could move in and fix things. That's what MJSIMSOR was all about."
"Yours," said Mosca, "is a truly human view."
"Yes. Human. Humane and hard and cruel. On the surface. But look at what's underneath---- with it we hold an option we will never use. An option, I might add, orders and orders of magnitude below that of thermonuclear war." He smacked his palm. "Open to what I'm saying! Listen to it! CIA foresaw the inevitable killer population explosion. So we determined to curb it rather than leave that obligation to chance and the Four Horsemen. Hence, selective diseases. Think about it! Pragmatically, practically, profoundly viewed, selective diseases represent an effective means of thinning populations while improving
their quality. Controlled kills of people selected and culled by a process based on equity and reason whose norms are deduced from primary economic imperatives and filtered through ethical standards and universal patterns of value as well, that is the alternative to universal death."
"You mean universal human death," said Mosca.
"Yes."
"Say Doc, do you really believe all that?"
"No."
"No?"
"I used to, but I know now I don't believe any of it. I have to think it through all over again."
"And?"
"I'm sixty-six. With a family, grown and gone. And I know one hell of a lot less than I did at thirty-six."
"And you created me to carry your tailor-made diseases directly to CIA's targets."
"Yes. As a vector. And as a spy, to seek out and transmit both audio and video. When the model is perfected, you, the lone prototype, will multiply into millions of perfectly obedient bio-robots who are extensions of human will and senses."
"S0 what you going to do with me now?"
"I'm supposed to dissect you, identify your defects, and build an improved prototype."
"But you're not going to."
"I'm not going to. Nor am I going to do any more work on MKMOSCA. No. I like you as you are. I'll destroy MKMOSCA, and MJSIMSOR too." Caught up in his energy, his companions buzz and flit around him. "My formal college mentor was Ira Baldwin at the University of Wisconsin, where CIA paid me through the cover of the Catherwood Foundation. Then at Berkeley, to a lesser degree, Wendell Stanley of the Biochemistry and Virus Lab inspired me. That's where I worked on my Ph.D. and, on the side, for money, on tasks set by the Oakland Naval Laboratories, the seagoing bio-war center. Baldwin and Stanley, too, had a formative influence on my scientific development, but my true mentor, the one whose ideas s0 deeply affected my own, whose beliefs I am just now beginning to shed, was the senior scientist at Kikuyu, Robert H. Harkinson, a man who'd worked at the Vigo biological weapons facility near Terre Haute, Indiana, and who'd been my boss back in the mid-fifties at Detrick."
Bruhn sits on his desk, tugs at his spectacles. "I'm s0 nervous I could start smoking again."
He stands and strides to the dipterary.
"In 1965, when I got my Ph.D., CIA sent me to New York to work in a lab run by one of their phony businesses, a proprietary called African Metals Corporation, located downtown, at 123 William Street. What do they do with the profits from all those businesses, or with the proceeds or budgetary surpluses? Here's what! They invest their hidden capital through MHMUTUAL. That, boys, is the investment committee for SOUTHERN CAPITAL, one of their private brokers. Some of their cash is tax money left over at the end of the fiscal year. When their proprietaries lose money, the taxpayers cover. But when they sell off their assets, or when they make money, like Air America did, where does it go? They must have billions slushed away by now. Yes. Well, when I got there, they put me to work on MKSEARCH, then MKNAOMI again, then Project OFTEN/CHICKWIT, a CIA-army study of offensive CB weapons. That related to ZRRIFLE: studies to develop a standing assassination capability. Which they've used from time to time. In 1975, they sent me to USDA's Kikuyu station. After an eighteen-year hiatus, I'd been returned to dear old MJSIMSOR."
He turns away from the dipterary and paces, rapidly, as the classified, unspeakable, unspoken, venting for the first time, breaks the discipline, the dam, and rushes out in a torrent of fluxing patterns.
"Abruptly, I realized all this time I'd been working on MKULTRA's mind-control program under different names, that is to say, on the attempt to use animals and humans as bio-robots to spy, infect, and kill. When I arrived in Kenya, Harkinson met the plane and took me to dinner in downtown Nairobi. He told me shortly before I'd left it, as its centerpiece, Subproject SORIAN had begun testing its most promising diseases by inoculating and infecting caged mental patients in CIA clinics in Haiti and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe. Of these maladies, those promising to be both destructive of immune systems and racially selective became SORIAN's focus, a very difficult judgment, morally speaking, he'd somehow managed to make. In the late nineteen fifties, in the Belgian Congo---- Zaire---- where the World Health Organization was testing three potential polio vaccines on the locals---- one was Salk's ---- Harkinson introduced viruses from SORIAN's best candidates into a substantial portion of the Koprowski vaccine. A splendid opportunity! Oh yes! Polio viruses and our viruses, both of them, even our reinforced swine fever, grow best in cultures of monkey kidney cells.
"Yes, boys. S0 now you see the picture. The Koprowski vaccine was tested on more than a hundred thousand villagers. Our pet viruses rode along. And some worked. What had originated in monkeys, and pigs, and sheep, amplified through serial infections, began taking hold in humans. Harkinson had accomplished a large scale statistical study of RV7914 and 47 and more. But were our best viruses racially specific? S0, as good scientists, what must we do next? I've taught you a lot about science, Mosca. What must they do now?'
Mosca flits to his shoulder and alights.
Mosca speaks aloud by forcing air in and out of his jet tube and modulating with wings and halters.
"Well, it seems to me they'd have to find two self-contained healthy populations, one of blacks, and one of some other race to serve as comparison, infect both, and see what happens."
"Right! That's what they did. Because the target was blacks derived from Bantu culture, just as were those vaccinated in Zaire, they used the citizens of Haiti, infected them through clinics, the whole being coordinated from a fully secure base at Saint Nicholas Môlé. As for the white group, operating through Plum Island in New York and the Oakland naval labs in California, MKSIMSOR infected the homosexual communities of New York and San Francisco, and then sat back to see what would happen. As Harkinson told me there at dinner: 'If your procedures are tightly controlled, as free as possible of random variables, every experiment is a success.' It turned out the agents they used infected both populations. Today, AIDS is rampaging through the world. But Harkinson didn't care. 'S0,' he said, 'SIV and ASFV didn't pan out. Big deal. Our experiment included nineteen others, different types of agents, all promising. Of these, one proved highly lethal in blacks, but only caused transitory distress among whites with a fatality rate of less than three percent. Here's a virus that acts quickly, and, when used properly, is easily controlled. Donovan, my boy, this superb biological agent will come in handy some day, believe me.'
"Harkinson daubed his mouth with a linen napkin, and went on: 'The SIV-ASV aspect leaves us with a political problem. AIDS is one chicken we cannot allow to come home. We kill it. Or we trick it into roosting somewhere else.'
"Or," said I, "we destroy the homing magnetic fields in its brain, and let it flutter to here, to there, to everywhere."
"'Exactly s0, Donovan. Leave no clues, or, failing that, leave too many.'
"Yes."
'"It won't be at all easy to preserve plausible deniability."
"That's for sure."
"'Especially now that Pravda doesn't have to guess at what really happened. They picked up the story from African newspapers. And
now one paper says the viruses are so homogenous---- have s0 few variations---- they must be manmade.'
"And because everybody knows we seek plausible deniability, that we plan the alibi along with the act, they counter with the doctrine of plausible culpability."
'Yes. Because we have an alibi for everything, people believe us responsible for everything, for an avalanche of evil.'
"And s0 now ours is to seek a cure, and concentrate on our cover-up."
'Yes, Donovan, my boy. That chore goes into a new program: MKCRYSTAL. The cover-up's off to a good start. CIA made a deal with the S0viets---- the KGB, not to badmouth each other about AIDS, and some other matters.'
"He signaled the waiter, ordered dessert.
"'And we have another program, even newer, crash status: MJDODO. The authorities are beginning to realize they themselves may be vulnerable. And they are. Why, they ask, did we not develop a vaccine while we were developing the disease? That's standard operating procedure in the army programs at Edgewood and at the CDC, but it's very expensive and slows the work. I told them our oversight must be the sad result of some bureaucratic blunder. The Directorate makes policy. We're scientists, not administrators, et cetera. They want a vaccine. Pronto. MJDODO began as of last week, 17 March 1975.'
"Saint Patrick's Day."
'"Yes.' Harkinson smiled. 'When the Chicago River runs green. I saw it once with my father, in . . . 1934. I was nine.'"
* * *
The flies planed down and perched on Bruhn's telephone. He drew a candy bar from a top drawer, and stripped it for Lysle. Lysle began to gorge. And shit. And vomit. No wonder they call flies the camels of the insect world. "And that, my friends, was in the last century, the last millennium. Just think of AIDS today! Maybe it'll kill everybody! All fucks may soon be lethal for the fuckers, and doom for the fetus." "Bye bye mankind," cried Mosca, from an ardent zoom. "Hoooo-ray!"
"I thought you'd get a thrill out of that."
Bruhn glanced at his cassette player, opted against music. "My contribution to MJDODO was appreciated, even though we have yet to achieve a vaccine. I don't know why, but for some reason they have unequivocal confidence in me, which they wouldn't if they knew what goes on in my head. In 1992, they made me senior scientist of what they view as their most promising program, our very own MKMOSCA, and sent me here. As for Harkinson, he made a neat bundle on the side through HEPATEX, a company he started for culturing viruses in monkey kidney cells. HEPATEX had but one significant customer, a very generous one indeed. His own SIMSOR labs."
Bruhn laughed abruptly.
"That old s.o.b. died of colon cancer." Bruhn leaned against the dipterary and sighed. "Sometimes I think cancer is produced by bad karma. Deep guilts reach down into the DNA. I'd like to believe that. Say, do you know, my work in Africa changed me from a naive romantic into an angry cynic. In all those years, with all my gifts, what one thing of value have I produced?"
"Me," said Mosca.
A big smile welled up from those dear dead romantic days. "Yes, friends, I'm proud of that. Birds! I've always loved birds, Mosca, which is where I think you come from. That love. They're beautiful and efficient. Brilliantly designed. As a child, I noticed their skeletons find resonance in those of certain dinosaurs. Like that immense brontosaurus skeleton displayed in Cleveland's natural history museum. And when I saw it, I thought: This can't be a reptile. It's too bulky. This beast had to be warm-blooded. Science has finally confirmed what
a child sensed. Birds are direct descendants of the dinosaurs. When I learned about DNA, it came to me in a great warm rush that maybe I can bring dinosaurs back into the world. I still feel that way. All I need is one cell to give me the pattern. Maybe I can get it from the viscera of an amber bug, an egg-sucking amber bug that ate a dino epithelial cell. I can duplicate it, and clone it. My work may culminate in the resurrection of the dinosaurs. It may culminate in my forced appearance before the Nuremberg Tribunal. Well, if that happens, I'll have one hell of a lot of company."
An angry Mosca buzzed before his face.
"I, sir, am the culmination of your work. I'm a dinosaur, and more, condensed into a very small space."
"Yes, of course, that's true. You're built on a much better design than I am. We humans embody an accidental and flawed plan. Like the British constitution, we are an accumulation of expedients. Our bodies are not at all as well adjusted to the world as yours is, s0 through intellect we adjust the world to our bodies. Without the help of machines, we can't even fly."
He stood.
"Look at me! Look at this ugly and idiotic carcass! Our brains deserve a better vehicle. Now, with the vast clerical power of computers, we control DNA. We control the design itself. We can build a better vehicle to transport a better brain. We can direct and accelerate our own evolution. And way above that! We can jump directly to the optimum, which is what I'm trying with you."
"Me?"
"You."
"Yes."
"You are the first example of what life will become in the new millennium. You're a giant step up from designer children."
Bruhn sat on his desk, a hand on his thigh. Mosca perched trustingly upon it.
"It's a joy to forget about restraints, vulnerabilities, classified secrets, and be able to open up like this. You know, I think my only really pleasant memory of Africa, other than its great beauty, and the deep humanity of its people, is its birds. Most Anglos felt differently about the people. They were more in harmony with what my mentor, Dr Harkinson, used to say. And this is almost an exact quote. 'It may be for the same reason whores like seafood, but, sometimes, I can't help myself---- sometimes I think of black Africans---- yes, these big monkeys, as laboratory animals.' And sometimes when he felt intimate, he'd tell me about a game some of the British used to play when they were still in power. Kaffir treeing."
"Kaffir treeing?" said Lysle. "What's a kaffir?"
"It's a pejorative Anglos use in Africa to mean what whites mean in the States when they say nigger." He combed his hand back through his hair. "That old son-of-a-bitch used to treat it like a joke, but I knew he'd have loved to have done it. Kaffir treeing. A sport. You're out on a country road, with the other players, driving your car---- yes, a Land Rover. You come around a curve, see some kaffirs, and drive straight at them. You get one point for hitting a child, two points for an adult, and five if you can make a kaffir climb a tree. How's that for a mirror to the mentality of those who carried out the polio vaccine experiment on thousands and thousands of villagers? Sometimes I wonder, when the Nuremberg Trials reconvene, will anyone be clean enough to serve as a judge?"
"Birds, Doc. Birds."
"At Kikuyu our mail came via the US Department of Agriculture's quarantine station at Plum Island off the eastern tip of Long Island."
"How about those birds?"
"Tax money should be used to accomplish things we're proud of, not projects so shameful we have to hide them."
"Doc!"
"Yes. Birds. Weekends, I'd often go to Nairobi, to visit a prostitute of whom I was quite fond. Sometimes I'd go alone to Nakuru on Route E-10, the Kinshasa Highway, the main road to Uganda. These days they call it the AIDS Highway. That's because AIDS hitches rides along it and because little plank and metal shacks standing everywhere beside it sell beer and goat and often sex, served by women of whom ninety percent are infected. Back then in those better times, better for me, and for them too, if you think of trying to rear children there now, I'd stay at the Stag's Head Hotel, and spend my days at Lake Nakuru. These equatorial highlands are cool and fertile. Cornfields and olive groves and African cedars and banana trees abound. And it seems as if from everywhere you can see the snow cap of Mount Kenya. Lake Nakuru, and the town, the farm center of Kenya, are in the Great Rift Valley where mankind began. In a nearby cave they found skeletons of an early people, thirty thousand years old, buried in the fetal position, which is thought to indicate some formal religious rite. Sometimes I used to hunt for fossils around there, hoping to be as lucky as Leakey or Johanson and find another Lucy, then thought to be the first human, and resurrect her s0 she could ride on my resurrected dinosaur. CIAIDS! The irony of it! They paved the Kinshasa Highway, and so now it's nice smooth asphalt alive with Overlander trucks. The gravel and bumps and holes and ruts and rain puddles are things of the past. Progress! Sure! It's the AIDS highway! We've clearcut the jungles, and in doing so have made the exotic rainforest viruses into refugees, in search of a new career. Has mankind created his suicide pandemic at virtually the same place he began? I'm a life lover, and this is the context. I don't have to worry about modesty, or good impressions, or secrecy, not when I'm talking with you two. At Lake Nakuru the bird watching is absolutely fantastic. Some birders say it's the best in the world. Pink flamingos! A million of them. And variety! Almost four hundred species of birds! All this life, so colorful, s0 beautiful, thriving in water, on land, in air. Baboons live nearby. Hippos still roam there. Just remembering it takes my breath away. I'd watch all day, and chew khat, to open my imagination and sharpen my senses. On occasion, watching this marvel would call to mind everywhere wildlife is dying out, and science focuses its effort on death, not life, as at Detrick, where they do things like develop yellow fever and hemorrhagic fevers as weapons. To brood on this, as I often do, is to steep myself in melancholy. It's enough to make me cry."
Lysle settled back down on the candy bar and the taste of its rich sweetness delighted his feet.
"And Harkinson! Would you believe, he had ceramic dwarfs in his yard. In Kenya!"
Mosca hovered over Lysle, watching him shuffling and sucking and puking and shitting, and then, revolted, he zoomed up. "How you going to get us out of this?"
"Easy. Get you out."
"How about Spofford?"
"I'm a scientist, he's a case officer, an administrator. I work at science. I do as I please, and they pay. Thomas won't be a big problem. Consider this: The FBI doesn't think CIA is professional. And, of course, they're right. All we have in common, Thomas and me, is we're both ranked and paid as GS 15, which is bird-colonel level." Bruhn made a face. "Bird colonel." He drew a stamped letter from his drawer. "This is my resignation." He dropped it into the mail chute. "My luggage is packed and in my car." He reached in a side drawer and took out a green tin, once the home of Danish cookies, and punched a hole in the top. "Lysle. Come up here! I'll disconnect Mosca's tracker. Okay. Now you two, get in this can, and I'll put it in my dispatch case, and we'll go." He pulled off the lid. "Thomas? What's he going to do? Charge me with stealing a very valuable fly?"
"A very valuable fly; me, myself, and I," said Lysle. "And an ordinary artificial musca domestica, a false fly, a flyman."
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