Simon Hawke - Argonaut Affair

It was an incongruous room to be found in a palace in ancient Greece. The floor was parqueted wood covered with a Persian carpet. The furnishings were late Victorian. The wine decanter on the sideboard held a Margaux made from grapes that would not grow for several thousand years. The cork-lined wooden humidor upon the desk contained tobacco blended from plants grown in a country that would not be discovered for centuries. The briar pipe held in Drakov's hand had been made by an English craftsman whose ancestors were at that moment painting their backsides blue and worshiping the trees.

In a land that would be the cradle of civilization, at a time when that cradle had not yet been constructed, in a universe that was familiar and yet alien to him, Nikolai Drakov had created an environment that belonged to no one time or place. It was an environment that suited him, a man who belonged to no one time or place himself. It did not, however, suit the man who paced back and forth across the room, doing his best to control his temper and failing in the task.

"You are being unreasonable, Moreau," said Drakov, momentarily wreathed in a cloud of aromatic pipe smoke. "Everything is under control. Sit down and relax. Have a glass of wine. It will help steady your nerves."

Moreau stopped his pacing and stood in front of Drakov stiffly, his arms held tightly against his sides, his hands balled into fists. He was a small man, slightly built, with a high forehead crowned by a thick shock of unruly gray hair. His eyes were a very pale blue and he had grown a thick, luxuriant gray beard since leaving his own time. He was dressed in a white laboratory coat, a stark contrast to Drakov's elegant smoking jacket in black and red brocade.

"My nerves are not in need of steadying, thank you," said Moreau. "I am not nervous. I am not being unreasonable and everything is not under control. When I agreed to join you in this venture, you gave me certain assurances and you are failing to live up to your part of the bargain."

"And in what way have I failed, Professor?" Drakov said, evenly.

"In more ways than one," Moreau replied. "You are being careless, Drakov. Your monumental ego is placing this entire project in jeopardy. It seems as if you have gone out of your way to advertise our presence in this time period. Did you think the Special Operations Group would fail to notice? And now taking those temporal agents prisoner and bringing them here-the risk is simply unacceptable. You've told me yourself that these very agents have defeated you several times before and yet it seems you've failed to learn from the experience."

"Go on," said Drakov, his voice sounding dangerously calm. "You said I've failed to respect our bargain in more ways than one. What else?"

"You have displayed nothing but callous disregard for my creations," said Moreau. He put his hands on the edge of Drakov's desk and leaned down toward him. "I took my project away from the Special Operations Group because they insisted upon treating my hominoids as some sort of inferior sub-race. I did not devote half my life to this project merely to turn out genetically tailored mongoloids for the Special Operations Group to use as cannon fodder. I set out to create beings specifically designed to perform tasks and survive environmental conditions hostile to ordinary humans. I meant for them to work together, for hominoids and humans to complement each other in order to achieve a more perfect society. Yet fools and paranoid bureaucrats saw them only as slaves, creatures to be inhibited in their development so that they could not become 'competitive' with humans, to have their pain centers blocked and their minds programmed so that they could fight like automatons. I thought you were different. You made me believe that you were sympathetic to my goals, but you are no different from the others. Forty-seven of my hominoids were killed by those two S.O.G. agents when you sent them into that idiotic robot of yours. And for what? What did you accomplish? You killed one and took the other prisoner. Was that worth forty-seven lives?"

"Are you finished?" Drakov said.

"No, not quite. I insist that we move the headquarters of this project at once. It has become far too dangerous for us to remain here. I also demand that the prisoners be removed. Get rid of them. Clock them out to some other time period. Their presence here constitutes a serious threat to the project."

"You insist?" said Drakov. "You demand?" He rose to his feet, towering over the professor. "You arrogant pismire! You dare to dictate terms to me? I was the one who seized the Infiltrator Project from the Special Operations Group. I was the one who took a glorified university professor away from a government sponsored research project and gave him the opportunity to play at being God! Without me, you are nothing!"

"And without me," Moreau said, his voice barely under control, "you don't have the hominoids."

"You delude yourself, Professor," Drakov said. "I could easily have compelled your unquestioning obedience through psycho-conditioning from the very start. Santos is quite expert in such matters. I did not do so because I did not wish to risk damaging your creative faculties. However, do not make the mistake of thinking yourself indispensable. Do you think I have been merely sitting on my hands all this time? I have been watching you most carefully. Watching and learning. I am a highly intelligent man, Professor, but I am not a genius, as you are. I could never have created the hominoids myself, but given the creative spark you provided, I could learn to imitate the process. I do not pretend to have acquired all of your expertise, but I believe that I can create hominoids of my own now without any help from you."

"And you call me arrogant?" said Moreau, sarcastically.

"Here," said Drakov, picking up a file from the desktop and tossing it to him. "See for yourself."

"What is this?"

"Don't you recognize it, Professor? It's a status file on a new generation of hominoid. I have done this one exactly as you have done yours, only I wasn't going to tell you about it quite this early. I was going to save it for a surprise."

Moreau leafed through the file quickly, his eyes growing wider as he read it. "You can't be serious! This is some sort of joke."

"It's no joke, Professor, I assure you. By the way, please feel free to point out any errors you feel I might have made. After all, I am only the apprentice while you are the master."

"I don't believe it!" Moreau said. "You couldn't possibly have done this. It's beyond your scope, beyond all your abilities-"

"If that is, in fact, the case," said Drakov, "then it should show up in the status file. Does it? It is too early yet to tell how it will perform when it matures, but tell me, how does it look on paper?"

Moreau was shaking his head slowly. "This is monstrous!" he said. "Creating hominoids such as the titans and the harpies is one thing, but this is precisely what the government officials were most frightened of. This is a species that would compete with humans!"

"So you acknowledge that I have done it, then?" said Drakov. "That it is not, after all, beyond my capabilities?"

Moreau moistened his lips. "On paper, I must admit that it looks feasible," he said. "However, you have merely taken the first step. Still, I see that I have seriously underestimated you. I must congratulate you. Obviously, you are not as ignorant of the science of genetic manipulation as I thought. I cannot believe that you have learned all of this from me in so short a time."

"Now you underestimate yourself, Professor," Drakov said. "You have been an excellent teacher. However, you are quite correct. I am not an entirely unversed layman. Knowledge is power and power is a passion with me. To one who has lived as long as I have, and to whom time poses no barriers, it is not difficult to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge. I have spent years of study in preparation for this."