True-Life Adventure

horses— why not humans? It’s the obvious evolutionary step.”
    “You mean that if for some reason we needed extremely tall geneticists, we would just cross Kareem Abdul Jabbar with, say, Marilyn?”
    I used the example of his own wife deliberately and rather harshly, I thought. It was my experience that people who thought they knew exactly what was right for other people frequently didn’t see any reason to apply their panaceas to themselves and their families. But if I wanted to see Jacob trip all over himself explaining why my idea was lousy, I was disappointed.
    He looked as if he were finally making progress with a C-minus student. “Exactly! The thing could have all sorts of applications in every area of human endeavor. Do you see that, Mr. Mcdonald? There is nothing, no job, no chore, no task, no condition, that we couldn’t very specifically breed people for.”
    “Isn’t this a bit like Brave New World? ”
    “What?”
    “The novel by Aldous Huxley. About the future.”
    “Never heard of it. Lindsay would know— she’s the literary one.”
    “Lindsay? You mean Marilyn.”
    “Of course not. When would Marilyn have time to read novels? She’s like me. I mean, mentally she’s like me. Not nearly so good a physical specimen. Good idea to cross her with a basketball player.”
    “You mentioned Lindsay as if you were still married to her.”
    “Lindsay’s my mate. Perfect mate. Perfect complement. I looked for her until I found her and then I married her. And we bred.” His eyes actually got misty.
    “What about Marilyn?”
    “Marilyn? What about her?”
    “Isn’t she your mate now?”
    “She’s my wife. I needed one— mostly for Terry, you know. But how on earth could she be my mate? I could never breed with her. Don’t you understand? Marilyn has one of the top scientific minds in the country, but she lacks creativity. And beauty. And athletic ability. How could I possibly breed with her? I wanted a perfect child.”
    “And Terry is a perfect child?”
    “Perfect.” He got all misty again. “She was talking at eight months. Eight months, Mr. Mcdonald! Do you know much about children? Eight months! She could say whole sentences in perfect syntax. I taught her to read when she was three. And math, of course. She takes after me in that respect. She’s seven now and she can do calculus. But she takes after Lindsay, too. She had short stories published in children’s magazines before she started school— official school, I mean. We taught her at home, of course. Or I did.”
    I didn’t know much about children, but it occurred to me that Terry was probably an unbelievably unhappy little girl, with a stage father like this guy.
    “Is she beautiful?” I said.
    “A perfect physical specimen. Always at least a head taller than the other kids her age. Way ahead of most kids in how fast she learned to sit up and walk and all that stuff. Extremely superior child. Just like I planned it.” He took a breath. “You probably wonder why I do what I do when clearly this is the most important work in the world today— establishing human breeding patterns. I’ll let you in on something— I’m not going to be doing it forever.”
    “No?”
    “I had to establish credibility first. I’ve won one Nobel and I’m going to win another for the work I’m doing now. Count on it. It’s a certainty. I had to have those credentials before I could get on with my real work. But I’ve been working on it all along. I found Lindsay and then we bred and then I started Project Terry.”
    “Project Terry?”
    “That’s what I call it. Don’t ever say it around Lindsay. She hates it.” He shrugged his genetically perfect shoulders. “But she’ll have to get used to it, I suppose. That’s what I’m going to call the book.”
    “You’re writing a book about your daughter?”
    He nodded. “Of course. I’ve kept detailed notes from the first. I’ll publish it sometime in the next five years, when she has the equivalent of a college education, maybe a few stories in the New Yorker. Who knows? She may have won her own Nobel by then. I’ve already got her working with me, you know. By the time she’s ten, she’ll be an above-average scientist, and a couple of years after that, she’ll be top caliber.”
    “What about her illness?” I didn’t see any way to avoid bringing up the subject.
    He looked infinitely miserable. He nodded. “Yes. She has… the susceptibility. Something went