Brian Stableford - Snowball in Hell

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SNOWBALL IN HELL

Brian Stableford

Critically acclaimed British "hard-science" writer Brian

Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including

Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the

Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The

Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tartarus, The Empire of

Fear, The Angel of Pain and The Carnival of Destruction,

Serpent's Blood and Inherit the Earth. His short fiction has

been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the

Genetic Revolution. His nonfiction books include The

Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Langford, The

Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000-3000. His

acclaimed novella "Les Fleurs du Mal" was a finalist for the

Hugo Award in 1994. His most recent books are the novels The

Fountains of Youth and Architects of Emortality. A biologist

and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading,

England.

Stableford may have written more about how the ongoing

revolutions in biological and genetic science will change the very

nature of humanity itself than any other writer of the last decade.

Here he takes a penetrating look at what really makes us

human—and comes to a few conclusions that may surprise you.

* * * *

FROM THE VERY BEGINNING I had a niggling feeling that the operation was

going to go wrong, but I put it down to nerves. Scientific advisers to the Home

Office rarely get a chance to take part in Special Branch operations, and I always

knew that it would be my first and last opportunity to be part of a real Boy's Own

adventure.

I calmed my anxieties by telling myself that the police must know what they were

doing. The plan looked so neat and tidy when it was laid out on the map with

coloured dots: blue for the lower ranks, red for the Armed Response Unit, green for

the likes of yours truly and black for the senior Special Branch officers who were

supervising and coordinating the whole thing. We deeply resented the fact that the

reports from the surveillance team had been carefully censored, according to the

sacred principle of NEED TO KNOW, but there seemed to be no obvious reason to

suppose that the raid itself wouldn't go like clockwork.

"But what are they actually supposed to have done, exactly?" one of my juniors was

reckless enough to ask.

"If we knew exactly" came the inevitable withering reply, "we wouldn't need to

include you in the operation, would we?"

I could tell from the reports we had been allowed to see that the so-called

investigation into the experiments at Hollinghurst Manor had been a committee

product, and that no one had ever had a clear idea exactly what was going on.

Warrants for surveillance had been obtained on the grounds that the Branch's

GE-Crime Unit had "compelling reasons" to suspect that Drs Hemans, Rawlingford

and Bradby were using "human genetic material" in the creation of "transgenic

animals", but it was mostly speculation. What they really had to go on was gossip

and rumour, and the rumours in question seemed to me to be suspiciously akin to

the urban legends that had sprung up everywhere since the tabloids' yuck factor

campaign had finally forced the government to pass stringent laws controlling the

uses of genetic engineering and to set up the GE-Crime Unit to enforce them. Once it

existed, the Unit had to do something to justify its budget, and its senior staff

obviously reckoned that whatever was going on at Hollinghurst Manor had to be

yucky enough to allow them to get that invaluable first goal on the great scoresheet.

It seemed to me that the whole affair had always had a faint air of surreal absurdity

about it. The illegal experiments that Hemans and his fellows were alleged by rumour

to be conducting were unfortunately conducive to silly jokes, ranging from lame

references to flying pigs to covert references to the raid as the Boar War. Even the

Home Office joined in the jokey name game; it was some idiot undersecretary who

decided to code-name the "target" Animal Farm, borrowing the most popular of the

derisory nicknames it had accumulated during the surveillance. It was, alas, my own

people who took some delight in explaining to anyone who would listen why the

people inside had allegedly taken to calling the project "Commoner's Isle". (It was

because the place where the ambitious scientist had conducted his unsuccessful

experiment in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau had been called Noble's

Isle.) When the inspector in charge of the Armed Response Unit assured us at the

final briefing that the people in the manor didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of

getting past his men he couldn't understand why the men from the ministry

snickered. (In Animal Farm, Snowball is the idealist who gets purged by the ruthless

Napoleon.)

In a sense, the inspector was right. When the Animal Farmers found out that they

were being raided and ran like hell they didn't, have a snowball's chance in hell of

getting past his men. Unfortunately, that didn't make them stop running and give up.

The part of the plan that included me involved uniformed policemen smashing their

way through the main door and making as many arrests as possible while my people

went for the computers and any paper files that were still around. We didn't expect

to get all the records out—we'd been told at the briefing that Hemans, Rawlingford

and Bradby would probably start crunching diskettes and reformatting hard disks as

soon as they were roused from sleep—but we figured that there'd be more than

enough left to salvage. They were scientists, after all; keeping backup files ought to

have been second nature to them.

Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple. The Animal Farmers didn't bother with

shredding and reformatting; they just torched the place. Nobody had thought to give

us gas-masks, and the fumes that met us in the corridors of the manor were so foul

and instantly dizzying that we should have known that they were toxic and turned

back immediately. Actually, that was what most of my colleagues did. I was the only

thoroughly stupid one. I kept on going, determined to get to the office that was my

designated objective. It was hopeless—but it was my one and only Boy's Own

adventure and I hadn't been trained to an adequate sense of self-preservation. I was

just on the point of blacking out when I heard shots fired in the woods, and realized

just how badly awry the operation had gone.

* * * *

I would certainly have died if I hadn't been pulled out of the fume-filled

corridor—and by the time my own team got around to noticing that I was missing it

was far too late for them to do anything constructive. It was the Animal Farmers

who saved me—not the scientists who had actually set up the illegal experiments, but

a handful of lesser beings who'd turned back when the shooting started in the hope

of finding a safer way out on the other side of the house.

I woke up with a terrible headache and stinging eyes, coughing weakly. It felt for a

minute or two as though my lungs had been so badly scorched that I could no

longer draw sufficient oxygen from the warm and musty air that I drew into

them—but that, mercifully, was an illusion born of distress.

I managed to crack open my weeping eyes just long enough to perceive that it was

too dark to see what was happening, then shut them tight and hoped that the pain

would go away.

Somebody lifted my head and pressed a cup of water to my lips. I managed to take

a few sips, and decided not to protest when a female voice said, "He's OK."

While I lay there collecting myself a different female voice said, "It's no good.

There's no way out up there. As the fire draws air upward our supply's being

renewed via the tunnel to the old icehouse, but there's no way through the grilles.

They haven't been opened in half a century and the locks are rusted solid. Hemans

should have taken care of them years ago. He should have known that this would

happen one day."

"There's a hacksaw in the toolbox," a male voice put in. "If we get to work right

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Brian Stableford - Snowball in Hell

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