“Oh, come on!” Kevin snapped, suddenly furious. His face was flushed.

Melanie’s eyes opened wide. “What in heaven’s name has gotten into you?”

Kevin instantly regretted his outburst. “Sorry,” he said. His heart was still pounding. He hated the fact that he was always so transparent, or felt he was.

Melanie rolled her eyes for Candace’s benefit, but Candace didn’t catch it. She was watching Kevin.

“I have a feeling you were as bummed out as I was,” she said to him.

Kevin breathed out noisily then took a bite of hamburger to avoid saying anything he’d later regret.

“Why don’t you want to talk about it?” Candace asked.

Kevin shook his head while he chewed. He guessed his face was still beet-red.

“Don’t worry about him,” Melanie said. “He’ll recover.”

Candace faced Melanie. “The bonobos are just so human,” she commented, going back to one of her original points, “so I guess we shouldn’t be shocked that their genomes differ by only one and a half percent. But something just occurred to me. If you guys are replacing the short arms of chromosome six as well as some other smaller segments of the bonobo genome with human DNA, what percentage do you think you’re dealing with?”

Melanie looked at Kevin while she made a mental calculation. She arched her eyebrows. “Hmmm,” she said. “That’s a curious point. That would be over two percent.”

“Yeah, but the one and a half percent is not all on the short arm of chromosome six,” Kevin snapped again.

“Hey, calm down, bucko,” Melanie said. She put down her soft drink, reached across the table and put her hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “You’re out of control. All we’re doing is having a conversation. You know, it’s sort of normal for people to sit and talk. I know you find that weird since you’d rather interact with your centrifuge tubes, but what’s wrong?”

Kevin sighed. It went against his nature, but he decided to confide in these two bright, confident women. He admitted he was upset.

“As if we didn’t know!” Melanie said with another roll of her eyes. “Can’t you be more specific? What’s bugging you?”

“Just what Candace is talking about,” Kevin said.

“She’s said a lot of things,” Melanie said.

“Yeah, and they’re all making me feel like I’ve made a monumental mistake.”

Melanie took her hand away and stared into the depths of Kevin’s topaz-colored eyes. “In what regard?” she questioned.

“By adding so much human DNA,” Kevin said. “The short arm of chromosome six has millions of base pairs and hundreds of genes that have nothing to do with the major histocompatibility complex. I should have isolated the complex instead of taking the easy route.”

“So the creatures have a few more human proteins,” Melanie said. “Big deal!”

“That’s exactly how I felt at first,” Kevin said. “At least until I put an inquiry out over the Internet, asking if anyone knew what other kinds of genes were on the short arm of chromosome six. Unfortunately, one of the responders informed me there was a large segment of developmental genes. Now I have no idea what I’ve created.”

“Of course you do,” Candace said. “You’ve created a transgenic bonobo.”

“I know,” Kevin said with his eyes blazing. He was breathing rapidly and perspiration had appeared on his forehead. “And by doing so I’m terrified I’ve overstepped the bounds.”

MARCH 5, 1997

1:00 P.M.

COGO, EQUATORIAL GUINEA

BERTRAM pulled his three-year-old Jeep Cherokee into the parking area behind the town hall and yanked on the brake. The car had been giving him trouble and had spent innumerable days being repaired in the motor pool. But the problem had persisted, and that fact made him particularly irritated when Kevin Marshall pretended not to know how lucky he was to get a new Toyota every two years. Bertram wasn’t scheduled for a new car for another year.

Bertram took the stairs that rose up behind the first-floor arcade to reach the veranda that ringed the building. From there he walked into the central office. By Siegfried Spallek’s choice, it had not been air-conditioned. A large ceiling fan lazily rotated with a particular wavering hum. The long, flat blades kept the sizable room’s warm, moist air on the move.

Bertram had called ahead, so Siegfried’s secretary, a broad-faced black man named Aurielo from the island of Bioko, was expecting him and waved him into the inner office. Aurielo had been trained in France as a schoolteacher, but had been unemployed until GenSys founded the Zone.

The inner office was larger than the outer and extended the entire width of the building. It had shuttered windows overlooking the parking lot in the back and the town square in the front. The front windows yielded the impressive view of the new hospital/laboratory complex. From where Bertram was standing, he could even see Kevin’s laboratory windows.

“Sit down,” Siegfried said, without looking up. His voice had a harsh, guttural quality, with a slight Germanic accent. It was commandingly authoritarian. He was signing a stack of correspondence. “I’ll be finished in a moment.”

Bertram’s eyes wandered around the cluttered office. It was a place that never made him feel comfortable. As a veterinarian and moderate environmentalist, he did not appreciate the decor. Covering the walls and every available horizontal surface were glassy-eyed, stuffed heads of animals, many of which were endangered species. There were cats such as lions, leopards, and cheetahs. There was a bewildering variety of antelope, more than Bertram knew existed. Several enormous rhino heads peered blankly down from positions of prominence on the wall behind Spallek. On top of the bookcase were snakes, including a rearing cobra. On the floor was an enormous crocodile with its mouth partially ajar to reveal its fearsome teeth. The table next to Bertram’s chair was an elephant’s foot topped with a slab of mahogany. In the corners, stood crossed elephant tusks.

Even more bothersome to Bertram than the stuffed animals were the skulls. There were three of them on Siegfried’s desk. All three had their tops sawn off. One had an apparent bullet hole through the temple. They were used respectively for paper clips, ashtray, and to hold a large candle. Although the Zone’s electric power was the most reliable in the entire country, it did go off on rare occasions because of lightning strikes.

Most people, especially visitors from GenSys, assumed the skulls were from apes. Bertram knew differently. They were human skulls of people executed by the Equatoguinean soldiers. All three of the victims had been convicted of the capital offense of interfering with GenSys operations. In actuality, they had been caught poaching wild chimps on the Zone’s designated hundred-square-mile land. Siegfried considered the area his own private hunting reserve.

Years previously, when Bertram had gently questioned the wisdom of displaying the skulls, Siegfried had responded by saying that they kept the native workers on their toes. “It’s the kind of communication they comprehend,” Siegfried had explained. “They understand such symbols.”

Bertram didn’t wonder that they got the message. Especially in a country which had suffered the atrocities of a diabolically cruel dictator. Bertram always remembered Kevin’s response to the skulls. Kevin had said that they reminded him of the deranged character Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

“There,” Siegfried said, pushing the signed papers aside. With his accent it sounded more like “zair.” “What’s on your mind, Bertram? I hope you don’t have a problem with the new bonobos.”

“Not at all. The two breeding females are perfect,” Bertram said. He eyed the Zone’s site boss. His most obvious physical trait was a grotesque scar that ran from beneath his left ear, down across his cheek, and under his nose. Over the years its gradual contraction had pulled up the corner of Siegfried’s mouth in a perpetual sneer.