All the Little Hedgehogs

By Leigh Kimmel

In Soviet Union, genetic engineering does you.

Yona wondered why everyone kept steering him toward a military career, until one of his teachers noticed his aptitude for genetics. Now he's the personal student of Academician Voronsky, working in a secret genetic engineering facility in a closed town.

However, Yona keeps having to spend as much time babysitting the Academician's adopted son Kolya as actually doing genetics. When this extra assignment becomes a frustration, Yona learns just how quickly privileges can be retracted.

And then he starts learning just how deep the secrets of the Soviet human genetics program really goes.

A story from the Grissom timeline (Gus on the Moon universe).

Caution: Contains intense material that may be disturbing to some audiences. Reader caution advised

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223286820

Book preview

This book is a work of fiction. All names of persons, places and organizations are fictitious or used fictitiously.

Sunlight shone through the rows of specimen jars in their racks by the window, casting rainbow hues across the workbench. Tired of struggling to read in that strange light, Yona Feldberg looked up at the tiny bodies floating within the jars of preservative fluid like cosmonauts in their capsules.

Yona resisted a smile at the irony of that comparison. Throughout his youth in the Kolyma where his father administered labor camps, Yona had never questioned that Gagarin was not merely the first person in space, but the first human being. To be sure, the evidence had been there. However, Yona had never thought to wonder why the picture of Kolya the Hedgehog in the Animal Cosmonauts and Astronauts book should be a drawing rather than a photograph like Laika the dog or the Amerikanskis' Kham the chimp.

When Yona was in his teens, his talent for genetics had emerged and Academician Voronsky had sprung him from cadet school to work here at the Lower Volga Special Bio-Research Laboratory. Here he learned that hedgehog could also be jargon for a clone of Nikolai Yezhov used as a lab animal – like the fetal specimens preserved in those jars by the windows. In retrospect the play on words was obvious, since the name Yezhov meant hedgehog, but it still bothered Yona.

Maybe it was knowing the poor kid went up there without any training, not even enough to understand what was happening to him. And instead of being honored and feted as Gagarin would be two weeks later, Kolya got hustled off to a laboratory so Korolev's people could study the effects of space travel. After all, he wasn't a person, just another little hedgehog, a disposable clone from the condemned geneset of the disgraced secret police chief upon whom Stalin had placed all the blame for the Great Terror.

Which makes me wonder just what Vladilen Ivanovich was thinking when he decided to adopt one of them from the creche after his daughter died. Even in thought, Yona referred to the Academician by forename and patronymic, as was appropriate for a junior to a senior colleague working closely together. Formal enough to be polite, but not cold and distant as title and surname address would be.

At the other lab bench Kolya Voronsky bent over a lab notebook, brow furrowed in concentration as he recorded his latest observations. Although not yet ten, he worked here on a daily basis under his father's tutelage.

Speaking of whom, Vladilen Voronsky had just stepped outside. Much as Yona wanted to know why, he didn't want to look nosy. The Academician got interruptions all day long, since he had administrative authority over the entire laboratory complex but maintained his own research projects. Most of those interruptions were just one step above routine, things that couldn't wait for a scheduled meeting but didn't constitute