The 4 Musketeers Page #2

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it's bluish with this reddish tail.

Lives up in their forests, or mountains.

- It only sings at night.

- Like an owl?

No. When it sings,

all the Japanese start to feel much better.

Sleep?

In general. They even cry in their sleep.

- In their sleep!

- 'Chao van.' Never heard of it.

Have you sold a lot of them?

Around one and a half thousand.

- Maybe you could give us one?

- I'd be pleased to.

Just leave your phone number.

Well, you won't be able to

get through to the Lubyanka.

Better if you gave me yours.

Okay.

Damn, left my cards in the office as usual.

Let me give you my number.

Marina Borisovna.

Call from nine to seven.

When I'm not away,

I'm always in the office.

Or, well, leave a message with the secretary.

Thanks.

You want another drink?

Okay. Only something else.

- Champagne?

- Okay.

Hey, wake up.

I'm not sleeping.

So cheers! Marina Borisovna.

- What's your name?

- Oleg Nikolayevich

And yours?

Just Vladimir.

Well than Oleg Nikolayevich

and 'just Vladimir',

Let's go with the flow!

- Or rather - tune in.

- Not like in the army, though.

No, musically-speaking.

You a musician?

Do I look like one?

Yup.

No. Way off. Organic chemist.

Horrible!

In school I just hated chemistry!

All those formulas!

To each his own.

You in a chemical Institute, or in industry?

I work in a top secret department.

They used to call it a 'mail box'.

- For the military?

- No, not the military.

Why's it so closed then, this box?

It's hard to explain.

Inventions, or something?

There's nothing left

to invent in this business.

- In organic chemistry?

- No. In genetic engineering.

- Genetics? Trendy job.

- It's the job.

So what d'you do, breed sheep?

- That too.

- Cows? Cattle?

Yeah, that too.

- What, and people too?

- Of course.

What?

That's banned. There was some

international conference,

they banned cloning human beings.

You forget what country we're living in.

What is banned there is allowed here.

Yeah.

- And... it worked with a human?

- Yeah, long ago.

What? How long? Has some boy-clone

already been grown?

Not a boy anymore. Or even a teen.

What - a guy? I mean, an adult?

Sure enough.

The oldest is now 44 years old.

It's crap! 44! When was he cloned?

In Khrushchev's time?

The first human cloning

experiments began in 1947.

Professors Bronstein, Lukin.

Doctor Nesmeyanov.

The first success.

The first Stalin Prize in genetics.

Stalin Prize...

Genetics was outlawed back then.

Outlawed officially. But people

went on with their work, as usual.

There were two secret major government projects:

the atomic bomb and cloning. Only,

cloning is a western word.

Here we call it 'doubling'.

The objects are 'doubles'.

We don't use the word 'clone' in our institute.

Where is this institute? Or is that a secret?

There're no secrets nowadays.

Ever been on Volgina street?

- Where's that? - Somewhere near Belyaevo?

Yes. Shemyakin's institute of organic

chemistry is down there.

There's a secret laboratory in it. Where I work.

What, they grow there,

these people... 'doubles'?

No, we just have a laboratory there.

- The doubles grow in incubators.

- Where are these incubators?

What do you mean? There are quite a few.

How many?

I don't remember, when I started there

six years ago there were about 40.

- 40.

- 12 incubators in Moscow alone.

Four near us in south-west Moscow.

Eight in the suburbs.

I don't understand anything!

Do people grow in them?

We just have a laboratory.

We lay the genes down.

The people grow up in society.

Kindergartens, orphanages.

F***in' bullshit! Where'd these clones go?

To the army, ha?

No. Same as the rest... Different places.

There are special programmes.

Managed by special departments.

- Which departments?

- The KGB, the defense ministry.

- How many clones are there?

- In our laboratory?

No, in general? How many've been grown?

Hard to say. You see my professor -

he's been in this project since 1968.

He says that then throughout the country there

were about 6000 healthy

doubles and about 19000 sick ones.

Now... Jesus, I couldn't even tell you.

Wait, so you're saying that...

Nonsense... the 'doubles' are among us?

So why no-one knows about it?

Nobody writes about it?

In the president's administration

nobody's ever said anything!

There've been publications. A number of them.

Sure your people talked.

Just you didn't pay attention.

- I would pay attention to that.

- No, you didn't.

There was a big article six months ago

in a tabloid, 'Twins Village'.

It described a village somewhere in Mordovia,

that's full of sick twins. Twins,

triplets, quadruplets.

They all have some kind of internal disease.

- For twins it's a normal thing.

- Normal?

A lot of sick people too.

Yeah, but four kilometres from this village is

Soyuz 4 - one of the first Soviet incubators.

These twins are production waste.

The first Soviet doubles.

Volodya! Past midnight, great time for stories...

Let me tell you how I once saw a UFO.

Near Smolensk, after the army draft.

We were takin' a leak,

it was there, hanging above the forest.

Bluish-green!

Really. Three of us saw it.

The guys at the gate did too!

I once saw a ghost. In Petersburg.

I got so scared.

I'm not insisting on it,

let's go on to something else.

Just Marina asked me where I work...

Forget it. Hey,

get me a shot of something stronger?

Right. Before midnight - lower the strength,

after - raise it.

How do you know?

A lot of boozing in your line of work?

We like to relax. Work is tough,

just to get around.

And we can afford a drink.

- The whole firm relaxes together?

- Yup. Don't you?

- Or you got prohibition there?

- No, nobody bans it.

Just not in groups...

Everyone has their own friends.

We just go two or three of us to

our favourite places.

- Like where?

- John's, Kempinsky,

sometimes - Pushkin.

Volodya, I can't really recall any bars

around Belyaevo.

- Or you just booze in your lab?

- Pure spirit with the clones?

I've had a few drinks with them.

Not in the lab. In the slums.

- Where?

- In the Krasnoyarsk slum.

It's this place, where...

Well, it's kind of hard to explain.

Like a transit prison...

But let's go on to something else.

Barman, another 50 grams of

Moskovskaya and that's it.

- And 50 for me too.

- And I'll go home.

- Come on, tell!

- Tell her, she's asking.

You won't believe it

- no interest to be a clone...

Tell about this... this transit place.

Let's get this down first.

To 'accordance'.

What?

For everyone to live in accord

with his place on earth.

Good toast.

To start with, there are three types of doubles:

M-type, F-type and Type-4,

or simply 'fours'.

The Germans conducted the first in 1937.

It was M-type. Then stolen by the KGB.

Then Professor Bronstein modernized it,

added the domino principle: a paired chromosome

connected to the unpaired one when substituted.

That allowed for you to make one double.

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