The Legacy of Alfred Bester

NOTE: This story is written as an epilogue to the Psi Corps series by J. Gregory Keyes. Characters and Places are the property of JMS, Babylonian Productions, and so forth.

She scowled at it briefly. "Wait a minute, will you? I just got back from lunch." She had been secretly hoping there wouldn't be anything for her to do immediately when she got back because she really just wanted to sit in her big green chair and doze for a few minutes. She bustled about her office, hoping to fool the computer and herself into thinking she was busy, but finally she gave up with a sigh. "Play message."

Ben Bester's head and shoulders appeared on the screen. He looked to be on death's door. His skin appeared greyish, his hair was a mess, and dark rings lined his eyes. Had she been a medical doctor, one look at him would have been enough for her to prescribe at least a month in bed.

He hesitated several moments, before something like bravado crowded the exhaustion from his expression. "The lab has all been arrested. Our prelimary hearing before the Board of Ethics will begin at sixteen hundred this afternoon. If you'd like, you're welcome to attend. We'll be in Hearing Room Two down at the Courthouse. Bring Linc." The message broke off abruptly. She wasn't sure if a time limit had run out or if he was simply too tired to end the transmission with a closing statement.

She frowned at the now-blank screen, then left her office to find the school secretary. She found him at his desk, fingering through a pile of papers. "I'll be leaving at fifteen-thirty, today," she told him.

He looked up in surprise, "I thought you were staying late tonight."

She shook her head. "Something came up."

"Your sister's not ill, is she?" he asked, immediately concerned.

Schlick shook her head. "No, no, she's fine," she assured him quickly, "My parents are also doing well. It's about a patient."

If anything, his concern grew. "One of the students?"

"No, one of their parents. Dr. Bester will be facing a board of inquiry this afternoon." She hadn't intended to tell him, but it was hardly a secret now, and the man would probably take it into his head that she had developed cancer or something next.

He finally relaxed, and surprised her by turning suddenly vindictive. "Oh. So they finally caught him red-handed then. Good."

She opened her mouth to protest, then shook her head in defeat. Ben had known how people would react to the twin test, and he knew how people reacted to his name. If he wanted to avoid that kind of talk, he shouldn't have supported this project. But surely she wasn't the only one who wouldn't automatically condemn him. . . . Was she?

Emily Schlick did not know what to expect as she let a Courtroom employee lead her and Linc through a door labeled "Hearing Room 2". Child psychologist or not, she wasn't sure whether it was simple shyness or a deeper fear that made Linc grab onto her slacks as though she were a security blanket.

She gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze to tell him everything would be fine, though she held no such certainty for herself. He relaxed marginally and followed her to seats in the second row of public chairs. The room was by no means full, but she suspected the turnout was higher than for a normal hearing. The first six rows on the other side of the central aisle were filled with men and women who obviously knew one another, though their dress code ranged from suits to stained lab coats. Only a smattering of people filled the rest of the seats.

The public area was seperated from the rest of the room by a wooden railing. The swinging gate where the central aisle ended merged smoothly into it, noticable only by the hinges and latch. On its other side, two empty tables flanked the gate, their chairs placed so that anyone sitting in them would have their backs to the audience and face a third piece of furniture that was more bar than table. The high backs of three chairs peaked from the opposite side.

After what seemed a short eternity, during which time Linc fidgetted but did not speak, a side door opened and three black robed figures entered and took the seats behind the bar. Linc stilled as the hard, solemn faces of the judges swept their audience. The leftmost one signaled to the baliff, and the side door opened again. Three men and three women dressed in suits filed in and sat at the table in front of the crowd of spectators. Two more men followed after a moment and took seats at the table ahead of her and Linc.

"Defendants rise," the center judge intoned, and four of the people from the first table stood. "Dr. Edward Jackson," the white-haired heavy-set man nearest his sitting attorneys straightened. "Dr. Marcia Larkis," the grey-haired matron beside Jackson tugged uncomfortably at the sleeve of her suit jacket. "Dr. Benjamin Bester," beside Larkis, Ben lifted his chin at his name. "And Miss Amelia Velistini," the young woman at the end of the table breathed in deeply. "You stand accused of unethical conduct in the realm of human experimentation, how do you plead?"

"Not guilty, Your Honors," Jackson stated firmly. "The experiment was the logical next step in our research, the splicing method used is universally accepted and commonly used, the egg and sperm donors were fully aware of our intent, the children's future was considered and assured, and the twin test is unquestionably the most certain way to prove or disprove our theory by the scientific method." Either by rehearsal, psi command, or unspoken agreement, all four sat down together.

The room sat in silence for several moments before the central judge turned his head toward the other table. "Prosecution?" he prompted.

One of the men there rose, and addressed the judges. "In a disturbing return to the morals of the Psi Corps, these scientists have taken it upon themselves to play god with not only the lives of two unborn children, but also with the legal system, the scientific community, and evolution itself. During the course of this inquiry, we will learn exactly how the Corps still lives in our midst." The lawyer nodded once, then sat down.

Again, silence fell over the room. Then the judge rapped his gavel twice and signaled toward the baliff. As he opened the door for the third time, the prosecuter stood again and announced, "Prosecution calls Dr. Jeremiah Steward."

A man of middle years entered through the side door. Gray only barely touched his temples. His hair was otherwise a dark brown, and his eyes were only a shade or two lighter. He held none of the stuffiness Schlick had expected of a man rule-bound enough to turn in his collegues. He studiously avoided looking at the other scientists, and the lab contingent of the audience whispered darkly as their betrayer took the stand beside the judges. Steward wiped sweaty palms against his pants and seemed unwilling to meet anyone's eyes.

"Dr. Steward," the prosecuting attorney began without preamble. "Could you tell the committee when this all began?"

Steward cleared his throat, and looked up finally. "By 'all', do you mean the finding the sequence or starting the experiment?"

The lawyer made an expansive gesture. "Let us get the whole story. Begin at the sequence discovery."

"I don't know when Ben started his independant research. We all do some. Just trying things out, all on paper so to speak, looking for coincidences nobody noticed before. Usually, they don't pan out, but Ben found a real nugget a week and two days ago. He hit upon a sequence that may predict psi ratings. His initial results showed a 100% correlation, so he went for a bigger sample size. Even he figured it was a fluke. But two days later, when it finished -"

"Two days?" the lawyer interrupted. "How big a database was he searching?"

Steward blinked, then looked guiltily toward Ben. "The Psi Corps Genetic Library." Schlick wished desperately she could see Ben's face. "Sorry, Ben."

She could see his arm flex as though he made a small wave in front of himself. The looked at toward the audience with raised brows, then turned the expression at the witness. "The whole library? Does your lab have access to that?"

He shrugged, but his face was like a child's suddenly caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar. Or a deer caught in headlights. "Ben knew the password."

"Does anyone else?"

He shook his head. "Not to my knowledge."

"That wasn't in what you reported to the ethics committee, was it?"

"I, I forgot about it. It seemed so small an infraction next to the other." Schlick suspected the latter statement did not need the last four words to account for the first. If the scientists had gone through channels rather than playing maverick as they had, it would have been overlooked by every scientist in the lab and most probably the authorities as well.

"Tell us about what you did report."

"Well, his search of the Library finished two days later. The correlation was still in the high ninety percent range. Ninety-seven, I think. We looked at the exceptions, and found the vast majority had sequences that mapped to strong telepathic ability, but the were not telepathic at all. Mundanes like Director Kevin Vacit sometimes get into our Library, and they threw off the correlation. Vacit should have been one of the strongest telepaths ever born.

"Anyway, Drs. Jackson, Larkis, Bester, and I met to see what we should do about the discovery. Larkis, I believe, suggested the twin test. I questioned its legality, but Jackson put it to a vote. All but I were in favor. I told them I would report it if they attempted it. I had the next week off, and I figured they had dropped it. You simply can't set-up a twin test in a week. But when I returned this morning, I discovered most of the staff half-dead from exhaustion, and the rest absent entirely. They made no secret that the test had initiatiated and the twins already implanted into a womb. I reported it immediately."

Schlick noticed Jackson shake his head minutely, but the lead scientist made no objection, nor comment to his lawyer.

"You said the experiment cannot be set up in a week?"

"Not properly," Steward conceded. "Clearly, it was possible with cut corners."

The lawyer half-sat on his table, clearly pleased with the direction of the testimony. "Which corners were cut?"

"Objection!" the defense lawyer spoke for the first time. "Dr. Steward himself states he was not present during the experment's preparation."

"As another geneticist, he knows how long each step should take," the prosecutor argued.

The center judge nodded and did not consult his peers. "Overruled."

"Which steps should have caused the preparation to take more time than it did?" the lawyer rephrased his question.

"I've never known a twin test to take less than a year before the implantation to the womb, even under Psi Corps rules. The longest step is finding the surrogate and genetic donors, if only because of the beaurocrasy involved in that step. Legal forms, finding the right willing volunteers, doctor's visits, more forms, that kind of thing. Once you've got the zygote, which requires a donate sperm and egg, so we're already talking months into the process, you need to clone it. Meanwhile, you're also developing the sequence for insertion. That should take a month, at least. Then there's the insertion. You need to check and recheck that it got put in the right place, and that no other mutations occurred. Generally, that takes another couple weeks. Clone both the original and the altered one and freeze them in case the implantation doesn't work. Only then can you implant into the surrogate. This is the point my collegues reached in one week." He looked at the defense table accusingly. "I'd also like to know under which grant this was funded. I don't doubt you could get one for this, but not in a week, with time to spare for the rest of it." The scientists in the audience shifted uncomfortably.

The attorney smiled. Schlick did not think it a pretty one at all. There were images of Alfred Bester hosting interrogations that were more charming. "No further questions."

The defense attorney rose as the prosecutor returned to his seat. "Is it not true that with the majority of the staff working around the clock, the lab's portion of the preparation could be accomplished in a week?"

"I wouldn't have believed it before today, but they seem to have."

"Are not splicing, cloning, and surrogate implantation standard procedures dating back to the late 20th century?"

Steward nodded. "Any genectist worth their tuition can splice and clone in their sleep. Surrogates are not exactly common, but the procedure is by no means new or experimental."

"Then what have you against the twin test?"

Steward's eyes widened in surprise. "Do the words 'human experimentation' or 'eugenics' mean anything to you? We fought the War to stop this nonsense. Maybe it'd be different if they went through channels. But it's like the Corps all over again," he rammed a fist against the rail, and shook his head angrily. But he kept his voice even, if strained. "This isn't just breeding a super telepath, it's literally building one. Not to mention, these are unknown waters, here. The sequence in question, by all preexisting theory, should not affect anything. It's in the middle of the random garbage between genes. What we thought was random garbage, that is. This is a shot in the dark. We don't know how this could affect someone. You want a twin test? Do one on a pair of, I don't know, sheep or something. See, first, if changing the in-between makes a difference there. My collegues are moving far too quickly on this."

Well, Schlick thought with a wince, that was one cross-examination question that back-fired. It should have been in the prosecution's repetoire.

"Why did you take the week off?"

Steward brushed sweat from his brow, and shot a glare toward the table of scientists. "It was suggested by Dr. Jackson." There was a small commotion at the table, that Schlick could not follow, since their backs were to her, but Steward and the judges shifted there attention to them.

"When?"

"Just after I told them I would report them."

"Did you not know what they intended?"

Steward sighed in resignation. "I knew it. How could I not? They knew I'd report it, too. Ben even joked that if they lost, I'd get a promotion, and if they won, I'd be fired. I took the week, but I did not, could not, believe they would finish so quickly. Sure, I knew they'd start while I was gone, and hope I would change my mind, but it never occurred to me they might finish. It was one single friggin' week. One. By the soul of Stephen Dexter, even those four must be astonished that they did it so fast." His wave toward the defense's table drew attention to Ben coughing over a laugh.

"If I weren't so dead tired, I would be," the geneticist agreed out of turn, amusement still coloring his voice. His attorney shot him a silencing glare and the judges frowned. Ben seemed unconcerned from what little she could see of him. Bravado, Schlick guessed.

"No further questions." The defense attorney took his seat, significantly less pleased than his counterpart.

"Redirect?" the center judge queried. Procescution declined. The baliff escorted Steward out through the side door.