F. Paul Wilson - Reborn

Finally, around dinnertime on January 5, she went into labor. Her membranes ruptured spontaneously. With a gush of warm fluid we were on our way.

There was little drama about the delivery itself. The contractions became longer and closer together, just as they should. Jasmine Cordeau had a generous pelvic structure; the child was in a normal cephalic presentation; as labor progressed at a steady pace toward delivery, we anticipated no problems. The only question hanging over us was : What will she deliver?

Finally, amid cries and moans, Derr delivered a head, and then an entire male infant . (Male! We were part of the way there!) He cut the cord, got him crying with a whack on the rump, then handed him to me for cleaning up. As I gently wiped the blood and membranes from his shivering, squalling body, my heart was thudding so hard and fast I feared it would break through my ribs. I examined him closely. His skin was red and mottled, as with all newborns, but he was Caucasian, as Caucasian as Derr or myself .

Myself.

I was holding myself! You were that infant, Jim, but you are me. I wasn't a new father holding a combination of himself and his wife. This child was all me ! It was me !

I wrapped him up in the flannel blanket we had for him. He was a hairy little thing, hairy like me. Even had little tufts of hair on his palms. I wondered if I'd had hairy palms at birth. I thought of asking my mother, and then realized she was his mother too !

I held him (you, Jim) against me and I felt an enormous surge of emotion. Until that moment you had been just another experiment; a momentous one, I'll grant, but just an experiment, the culmination of the long process we had begun with frogs and run through rats and pigs. You were an experimental subject, a thing, an it. First an embryo, then a fetus, but never a person .

All that changed as I cradled your red, squalling little body in my arms. I looked into your face and the enormity of what we had done hit me full force. Suddenly you were a person, a human being with a whole life ahead of you. In a flash I saw what you could expect in the years to come as the world's first human clone. A childhood under the microscope and in the spotlight; a tortured adolescence as a freak, the butt of jokes, the object of bigotry, scorn, ridicule, and possibly the object of hatred by some of the world's more fanatical religious groups.

And after a youth filled with that sort of trauma, what sort of man would you turn out to be? What sort of tortured soul would you possess? I saw you hating me. I saw you wishing you had never been born. I saw you killing yourself.

I knew right then that I could not allow any of that to happen.

After Derr had delivered the placenta, I asked Jazzy if she wanted to hold you, but she wanted no part of you. She seemed afraid of you. After he gave Jazzy something for pain, I handed you to Derr. As he held your squirming little body he looked at me. There was wonder, joy, and triumph in his eyes. But there was a cloud there too. I remember our conversation as if it were yesterday.

"We've done it," he said.

"I know. But now that we have him, what do we do with him?"

He shook his head and said, "I don't know. I don't think the world is ready for him."

"Neither do I," I said.

We fed you a sugar-and-water solution, bundled you up in your bassinet, and talked long into the night. For the first time since we had begun Project Genesis, I think we had some perspective on what we had been striving for, and what we had achieved. We had been pulp-magazine mad scientists up to now. Your cries were a dose of sanity. But we still weren't agreed on where we should go from there. I wanted to tell Laughlin that we had failed utterly and urge him to scrap the whole project. Derr thought that was too precipitous. He thought I was exaggerating the public response to a human clone.

Our argument grew heated, and Derr stormed up to the second floor to check on Jazzy. Lucky he did. Because of our argument, tragedy was narrowly avoided.

He was only gone a moment when I heard him calling Jazzy's name. I went to the bottom of the stairs and asked what was wrong. Derr told me that she wasn't in her room. He was going to check the bathroom. I went upstairs to check on you, and that's where I found her. She was leaning over your bassinet. My first thought was that Jazzy's maternal instincts had finally fought their way to the surface. Then I noticed that she had a pillow in her hands and was pressing it down over your face.

With a shout I leapt forward and yanked her away. To my immense relief you immediately began to howl. I knew then that you were unharmed, but I had to fight to keep Jazzy off you. She was like a wild animal, eyes wide, foaming at the mouth, screaming in her Cajun-accented voice.

"Kill it! Kill it! It is a vile and hateful thing! Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!"

Derr came in and helped me pull her away, then sedated her. As we locked her bedroom door I saw the look in Derr's eyes and knew that Jazzy's outburst was causing him to reconsider his position.

Her behavior was all the more shocking because, as far as we knew, Jazzy had no idea of what we had implanted in her uterus. I had been sure she thought us a couple of strange ducks, perhaps even a pair of pansies, who had impregnated her by artificial insemination (although I doubt very much those words were in her vocabulary). There was no explaining her bizarre, violent reaction to you, but the incident had united Derr with me in my opposition to letting the War Department know what we had accomplished.

We rented a hotel room for Jazzy and paid her her bonus. Derr visited her daily for the rest of the week, until she was completely recovered from the delivery. As soon as she was out of the house, I hired a nurse to take care of you.

After long deliberation we decided it would be best for you if we put you up for adoption. So we left you at the St. Francis Home for Boys in Queens. You know the rest of the story. You were adopted almost immediately by Jonah and Emma Stevens and taken to Long Island. We reported utter failure to Colonel Laughlin, turned in a set of phony experimental records, and were informed that Project Genesis was closed for good.

That should have been that.

But Jim, I could not let you go. You were on my mind constantly. I had to know how you were, how you were developing. You became such an obsession with me that in 1943I sold the Manhattan town house and moved to Monroe where I bought this old mansion. I lurked around the apartment house where the Stevenses first lived; when Emma took you shopping with her, I'd tag along behind and do some shopping myself, always watching you to see how you were doing, assuring myself that they were treating you right — that they were treating me right .

And I must confess to some scientific interest. (Don't be offended. Once a scientist, always a scientist.) I had a chance to satisfy my curiosity about the nature-or-nurture question: Which shaped us more, environment or heredity? I had been raised in an intellectual environment; although endowed with the physique for it, I never had much interest in sports. Although genetically identical to me, you were raised in a household where I doubt you ever saw anyone crack a book. As a result, you became a star football player. I thought that answered the question, but you also did extremely well academically in high school, were editor of the school paper, were accepted into college, and now I understand you are majoring in journalism. I recall my own intense interest in writing as a student.