And he owed it all to one amazing, wonderful woman.
At a genetics conference in Atlanta two years ago, he had met the woman who would change his life. She had kept to herself mostly. Talked to a few geneticists here and there. It almost seemed that she was interviewing potential employees. When Emil Kowalski met the raven-haired, beauty he didn't know what to make of her.
She was undeniably brilliant. She could discuss genetic theory and practice better than any mind he'd ever met. The men she spoke to weren't able to keep up. No slouch in his field, Emil Kowalski was made to feel like a freshman high-school biology student by this unknown female scientist.
She called herself Dr. Judy Fishbaum. No one at the conference had ever heard of her.
Despite the Atlanta heat, the woman kept a coat draped over one shoulder. That struck Emil as very odd.
She stood differently. Not like other people. It was as if she were keeping her one visible arm free to lash out. It was a stance for a prison, where one expected attack at any moment from any direction.
And the way she held the hidden arm. Shoulder down. So protective, For a little while Emil thought that she might be a recent amputee, embarrassed by a missing limb. But he dismissed that theory when he saw something move beneath the jacket. Whatever might be wrong, there was something there.
When she got Emil alone in the lounge of the hotel where the conference was being held, the woman who called herself Judy Fishbaum finally took off her coat.
He knew at once where she'd gotten her fascination with genetics. Her right arm was not fully formed. Undoubtedly a congenital defect had guided her into her current field.
Dr. Kowalski hadn't been prepared. He couldn't help but look. When she caught him staring, he was surprised by her reaction. He had assumed most people who had lived all their lives with a deformity would react to insensitive stares either with some level of embarrassment or anger. There wasn't a flicker of either on her pale face.
She didn't even look away. She continued to stare Emil straight in the eye.
"You're interested in this?" she asked, with not a flicker of emotion in her voice. The arm was raised. It was half the size of an adult arm. "It's not finished growing yet," she confided.
Emil Kowalski got a good look at the limb. There was a purr of pleasure from his companion when she saw the look of surprised understanding that crossed his face.
The arm didn't match. For one thing the skin was far too young for a woman somewhere in her late thirties. It was a child's skin. It was smooth and unmuscled with soft baby fat. The limb wasn't deformed in the least. Just small. As if the aging had been arrested years before.
"Oh," he said, his own embarrassment changing over to fascination. "It's not yours."
"Of course it is," she replied. "It's just not part of the original equipment." She flexed five pudgy fingers.
"Is it a graft?" Dr. Kowalski asked.
Doctors were doing that now. Grafting limbs. The success rate wasn't great, due to rejection by the body's immune system, but the work held promise. However, in the cases Emil had heard about, great care was taken to match the donor limb to the host. He had never heard of anyone grafting a child's arm on an adult's body.
"No," she replied. "Do you ever wonder-" she read his name tag "-Emil, why one strand of hair will fall out, only to be replaced by another? Or why one set of teeth is replaced by another in childhood, but a lost tooth in adulthood doesn't grow back?"
"Simple," Emil said. "Encoding. The body does what it's programmed to do."
"Yes, simple," she said. "It seems so odd to me. Hair is nothing. A throwback to another evolutionary stage. Human beings no longer need hair to survive. Yet why does nature still give priority to replacing worthless hair and not to vital organs? Or limbs?"
It was the way she said it. The stress she put on the last word, accompanied by another flex of that child's hand.
The truth hit Dr. Emil Kowalski like a hard fist to the stomach.
"That isn't a graft," he whispered, awed. Winking, she offered another contented purr. The coat came back on, covering the limb that Dr. Kowalski knew should not be, but was.
This was big. Research was heading in this direction, but results were still decades away. He needed to hear more.
Later, in a dark corner of the hotel bar, he heard her theories on transgenic organisms. Science was becoming involved more in the creation of new species. It was easier to mix genetic material and start from scratch. She explained that inherited genetic traits from one organism could be spliced into an existing organism without rejection by the host.
By this point it was very late. The bar had cleared out. She had ordered a martini at one point during the evening, but had taken not a single sip.
From the start she insisted that Emil drink only springwater. She told him she wouldn't waste time sharing thoughts with him if he wasn't stone sober. Dr. Kowalski agreed. He wasn't about to refuse an order from the most beautiful, brilliant companion he had ever gone out with.
They were whispering. Dr. Kowalski felt like a spy. It was all so exciting, so dangerous.
"There was research going on in this field before," he said. "You must have heard about it. In Boston? But it didn't work out. Both times there were deaths. After the last time, Congress passed a law against human testing."
"Human laws don't apply to us," she said.
Dr. Kowalski wasn't sure exactly what she meant by that. And at that moment he didn't really care. He put down his glass of water.
He was dizzy. His tongue felt too big for his mouth. By the time he realized she had slipped something in his drink, it no longer mattered.
He soon learned that his companion was the notorious Dr. Judith White, the infamous madwoman of BostonBio. She had used her own formulas to alter her features slightly just enough so that none at the conference recognized her. And that wasn't all.
The change came over Emil Kowalski rapidly. In the first terrible moments, the last vestiges of his humanity conjured images of bloody, half-eaten corpses like he'd heard about on the news. But when it was done, he had no desire to eat human flesh.
"I feel different," he said, puzzled. "Am I like you?" His voice was slower now than before. A low, contented moan rose from deep in his throat.
She shook her head. "I need someone with your brains, Emil, but with no ambition and total loyalty," Judith White explained. "If I'd made you like me, you'd be like all my young. Thinking with your belly. I couldn't have bodies piling up around your lab. That would draw the authorities. I've made you a totally new hybrid. I drew on a few different species. You're now as indolent as a cow. No Nobel ambitions from you. I'll tell you what to do and you'll do it. The rest of the time you'll do pretty much nothing. And you're as loyal as a dog. You won't dream of turning on me. Feel proud, Emil. You're a totally new creature, unlike any other on the planet."
Emil liked the idea of that. Almost as much as he liked the woman who sat across from him in the bar. He would die before he betrayed her. Knew it on an instinctive level. He wondered what his new wonderful friend wanted from him.
"I need a lab," Judith White said. "A good, permanent one. I can't keep moving from place to place, plundering equipment here and there, afraid of being caught. I need a base of operations, sweetcakes, and Genetic Futures is it."
And so began Emil Kowalski's relationship with Dr. Judith White.
Emil was satisfied just to do what he was told to do. For the past two years he did his work, and when he wasn't doing his work he spent his time either caring for his lawn or-better yet-staring blankly into space.
Dr. Emil Kowalski was staring at the wall of his San Diego office when there came a sudden knock at his door.
Emil wiped some lawn drool from his chin. "Come in," he called.
A young Genetic Futures scientist stuck his head in the room. The man seemed hesitant when he saw the dull-eyed look on Dr. Kowalski's face. He tried not to stare at the drying green dribble stain on his boss's white lab coat.
"We're all set to go," the young man said. "Whenever you get the specimen in, we'll be ready."
Kowalski nodded. "It might be days. Keep shifts on around the clock. Time will be vital when it arrives."
"Yes, sir. I'll let everyone know."
"Is there something else?"
The young man hadn't realized he was loitering in the doorway. He just couldn't believe it. There was a piece of grass sticking out of the mouth of Genetic Futures's senior geneticist. He had never believed the stories, always assuming "The Cow" nickname was just a play on Dr. Kowalski's name.