But Raft had given his order and moved on.
‘This?’
They peered at an unremarkable child’s body. ‘The hands. There was debate about the practical advantage of the little finger as an additional opposable thumb, but there seems no value in it. The body is being preserved for pathological tests.’
Raft was away, uninterested, but stopped by the next chamber, arrested by an intense revulsion. ‘Another Pollyanna!’
David hurried after. ‘No, no; this is quite different, experimental work of an unusual kind. I don’t encourage this sort of thing – too much intuition allied to too little logic – but the trio working on it are brilliant. It would have been unreasonable to prevent them.’
‘Stop yammering. What is it?’
‘A search for embryonic senses. You may have heard of people who can distinguish print or colour through their fingertips. Many can detect the near approach of an object like a pencil which does not actually touch the skin. There is the common awareness of being stared at. We can cite a number of possibilities of receptor symptoms based on, for example, fluctuations of potential in skin cells or detection of airflow and air pressure variation. Experiment of course involves suppression of the major nervous receptors in order to force use of the exotic—’
Parker ceased to listen and turned away from the thing, the Pollyanna body with no face at all, not even the Pollyanna disk of flesh but a globular nub, a huge and shining tumour, blue-veined under a circular crown of auburn hair.
Arthur’s loud derision shocked his sickness into control. ‘Nobody in his right mind wants to look at that subhuman radar station. It doesn’t work, anyway.’
Raft was sour. ‘The bitch is right. Show me something that works. A success.’
‘Please! Science is not a simple puzzle game. Centuries could pass …’ Only a frightened man would have lacked the control to allow him to talk of centuries to Raft. He said, despairingly, ‘We have something that may be a blueprint for tomorrow.’ He led them to the farthest slow chamber in the farthest row. ‘Here.’ He attempted pride in his exhibit but was too dispirited to impress.
Arthur gave a high-pitched laugh, a mockery as deliberate as spittle in the face. He was close to Raft, who flashed him a split-second glare of calculating rage, and that perhaps inspired Arthur to crow directly into his ear, ‘Look what ingenuity and an absence of common sense can do to the beautiful Daddy body.’
It was scarcely possible that the lightning backhander could miss his out-thrust face, but it did miss. Parker was sure only that Arthur’s head alone moved on his neck and that it moved no more than the fraction needed to swish Raft’s knuckles in empty air.
Raft must have caught something of it from the corner of his eye, for he turned completely in a transcendent anger. His lips barely moved; Parker was close enough to apprehend rather than truly hear him say, ‘Failure, eh? A failure to remember!’
David, with his mouth open for speech, froze in stupefaction, absorbed slowly what he had seen and blazed into stuttering fury at the only manner of betrayal which could touch his dedicated heart. ‘Arthur! You withheld information – suppressed data …’
Raft snapped, ‘Be quiet,’ and returned to calm with one of the intense nervous efforts of which he seemed endlessly capable. ‘Later you can give him what attention seems necessary.’
But he was shaken, violently shaken at being outclassed on his own ground of flicker-fast reflex. And it would be better for Arthur that he should not fall into the hands of the stern-faced clone-brothers. Parker made sure two of his men were watching them before he looked at the exhibit.
It was hairless. Perhaps it was a man, perhaps a woman, for he could see no genitalia of any kind, but the hips were abnormally, most femininely wide and sloped sharply inwards at the knees. The vestigial breasts were ready to vanish from the genetic pattern but the apparent disposition of fatty tissue was female although the shoulders were masculinely broad and the muscles under the smooth layers of fat were large and powerful.
‘This is the male specimen,’ David said. ‘The female is practically identical, save that the hips are rather wider and the point of sexual ingress is readily apparent.’ He might have been discussing furniture but his nervous eyes never left Raft.
The head held their attention. The features belonged to Raft – a Raft glorified and transfigured, every flaw teased out into a handsomeness, a sweetness, a human splendour. It – he – bore the most beautiful face any of them had ever seen; even in the relaxation which drains faces to blankness it expressed a power they could perceive only in terms of wisdom and nobility. It looked up at them, sightlessly, from a perfect mask fitted to an ambiguous body – a mask because its forehead ended at the supra-orbital ridge and the skull sloped back without a cranium. Its beautiful features were imposed on a brainless wedge of bone.
Raft asked, ‘Are you mad?’
Fright could not dim the sense of affront by ignorance. ‘Most certainly not! This is not beautified man to be judged by the standards of classic statuary; it is man as he can be! But man’s standard of perfection is ridiculously based on himself.’ It was as close as he dared approach to a thrust at Raft, who merely held him wriggling on his glance and said, ‘No brain.’
‘Of course there is a brain, but not in the head, exposed and vulnerable. Between the thighs, in an armoured pelvis, where the genitalia are also retracted until required. There is a small pseudo-brain in the head, little more than a relay station for the sense receptors, and even, there the bone structure is reinforced. This model is to be largely self-sufficient; it should not require clothing save under extreme conditions because it can grow a fine pelt if necessary and also has conscious control over skin pigmentation.’
‘Shut up!’
David became rigid; through stiff jaws he enunciated a useless plea; ‘The specimen must be observed through the eyes of science. Today’s man is not the evolutionary end.’
Raft bellowed, ‘Will you be quiet!’
David was quiet.
Arthur came in like a gimlet. ‘This model really should be able to control things but in fact that strategically placed brain doesn’t work too well.’ Raft remained still and silent. Arthur sighed great sorrow. ‘That’s the trouble with your more spectacular descendants, Daddy – they’re either sterile or stupid.’
Raft uttered a sound Parker had heard once before, on the therapy tape – a scream blending rage and frustration, fear and desolation, torn out of him.
It seemed, astonishingly, to serve as an instant and complete release. He seemed to forget Arthur and said smoothly to David, ‘You must kill this thing.’
David shook his head, unable to speak.
‘It is to be killed.’
David found a thread of voice to plead with a kind of hysterical determination, ‘Not destroy it; no.’
Raft cocked his head as if listening to words behind the tone. ‘Dedication is not enough, little man; you must learn what may and may not be done. This line of manipulation is at an end.’
David looked to Parker, but Parker’s instinct was for once with Raft’s; he did not fancy this vision of human glory.
Raft continued to lecture. ‘The quality of the work is undeniable but the direction unproductive. This—’ he dismissed the thing with a flicking finger ‘—may serve in a million years or so; for today we must anticipate evolution rather than attempt total revolution. Old John was right and his memory-dummy may be of use after all; the direction lies through my son Ian.’
The clone-brothers approved in their intense, soundless fashion. David’s face cried out fears and frustrations. Arthur, for once, was quiet. Only Parker, excited by a meddling devil, threw out an irresistible bait: ‘Your beloved son, in whom you are well pleased.’
No spark leapt; Raft was mildly surprised. ‘You quoted that before. Don’t let religious ecstasy get the better of you.’ His mouth slackened and an inner sight invaded his eyes. ‘But he is beloved and I am well please
d. He is the key to tomorrow’s humanity.’ His arm swept out as if to tip the contents of the slow chambers off the edge of the earth. ‘Well, Doctor David?’
‘I have nothing more to show.’ He was sullen and uneasy and for Parker’s money had every reason to be so.
‘Nothing at all?’ Parker asked, knowing his time had come. David held his eyes steadily while his face said he lied. ‘Nothing, Controller.’
‘Yet this hall is so small compared with the others. Where is the door to the rest of the floor?’
‘There is no rest and no door. This was a small storage basement which we cleaned out to use as – as—’
‘As a futurist zoo. But there is a door.’
Raft asked, ‘What are you talking about, copper?’ and David looked fearfully into the policeman’s immense sureness.
‘I talked to Lindley, Doctor.’
David’s fear burst out. ‘He had no right, no right! That was for Campion’s ear. For Security only!’
‘Why should he be loyal to your dreams? Lindley’s loyalty is to men and women; he did what he thought best. Only the whole truth can prevent disaster, Doctor.’ He waited, but David was silent. ‘When everything is in sight, we can deal with it.’ The biologist registered only frightened misery. ‘Come, come, man – show us the telepaths.’
His bomb did not explode, only fizzed a little.
Raft said contemptuously, ‘Telepathy’s a fairy tale and one that I’m sick of. Old John used to rattle nonsense about it.’
A clone spokesman said as from a vast height of superiority, ‘John was misled by our gift of communal empathy. There is no telepathic sense.’
Parker did not doubt their honesty. Arthur was looking anticipatory as at a new and amusing gambit. Only the man at the console, forgotten at the other end of the hall, swung in his chair to listen.
David, with wary eyes on Raft, said, ‘Damn Lindley for ever,’ and gestured to the console operator, who stretched a finger and pressed.
Not ten feet from the group a shallow cupboard swung in from the wall on hinges; behind it a lead-sheathed door hissed softly as it slide aside.
The spidery nakedness that had crouched there, listening with its starved brain, shrieked at its vision of their minds and fled out of sight.
8
Raft asked, ‘What’s that thing?’ His charge of massive disbelief heartened them all; they did not want to believe; even Parker clung to a half-hearted hope that Lindley had been mistaken, that he had deliberately lied or that David had made some idiot error of enthusiasm.
It required Arthur’s hard-headed frivolity to skip over fantasy to the problem. ‘My, my, but it takes real genius to keep a secret in Gangoil. Why, Doctor David?’
Yes, why? I’ll have that one in the force if he has to be psychoed into it. Parker echoed, ‘Why?’
David seemed barely to hold back from stamping with rage. ‘You damned policeman with your terror of telepathy! You ask me that?’
‘So not everybody in Gangoil approved and you were forced to hide the work?’
‘Old Heathcote began it.’ Venom overcame fear for a fitful spite. ‘He had more intelligence than the raging ape whose accidental gene structure was the cause of it.’ Raft only listened with granite gravity while the brothers clicked disapproval. ‘He made the correct deduction from the Commander’s reaction at the birth trauma but he wasn’t geneticist to follow it up alone. His assistants argued against the research – like you they lived in terror of truth – and when mental decay set in it was easy to convince him he was wrong. But a few were impressed and there was a split in opinion. The favouring group, of whom the new Director was one, acquiesced with the majority but established their own complex down here in the supernumerary areas. I don’t know just how the manoeuvre was managed, but it was a time of confusion, which probably helped. I was only a boy. I knew nothing of this until in my turn I became Director.’
‘And then went into it with a will.’
‘I had your doubts. But I am a scientist and know what every scientist knows – that what is discovered will be discovered again, that it is useless to hide a discovery.’
‘I think this particular discovery might well stay under cover for a few years.’
David shrugged. ‘The time for anything is the time at which it happens. The lightning doesn’t give warnings.’
Raft spoke with a faint slur and the muscles of his hands quivered minutely. ‘You’re a hick, Parker, a country boy who’ll believe anything. This little man is all talk and no production, only a shambles of failures. Show us the quadraphonic think tanks, Doctor.’
With nothing left to hide David had regained some composure; with faint derision he waved them through the door.
The clone-brothers pushed through in a body, for once less than co-ordinated in their angry interest; like their prototype they resented contradiction. Parker’s trained young men followed them smoothly and disposed themselves tactically.
Raft stood aside with a movement of natural courtesy and Parker nearly fell for it. With his foot in motion he knew with certainty that with Raft behind him he was a dead man, with his police out of sight and the brothers waiting on opportunity. The brothers were not yet alienated to the point of not supporting Raft in a moment of decision.
He brought his foot down in a smart halt, half turning to catch the starman’s grin that dared him to pass first through the door. He was slightly off balance and he thought Raft’s big hands were at the instant of action when a polite cough reminded them that Arthur still remained behind.
Raft relaxed and Parker cheered silently at proof that the Commander did not trust his ability to deal with that particular failure.
Arthur dragged an affronted David between them. ‘Controller, Director, Commander, in that order. Arthur’s new protocol. With himself trailing behind to see fair play.’
Parker passed cheerfully through the door with David after him. ‘Fair play,’ Raft said thoughtfully and moved obliquely through without losing sight of Arthur, who giggled gently. ‘Cards on the table now, aren’t they, Commander?’
They might have been again on the second of the basement floors, among rectangularly laid corridors and white experimental blocks, but these corridors were short and opened into a great partitionless space covering half the total floor area.
The greater part was empty but furnishings and equipment floated in it like jetsam; nothing, to Parker’s eyes, seemed arranged in a specific order. There were chairs and tables, couches and island bookshelves, floor rugs and areas which seemed marked out for games, small cupboards and beds, television sets and a movie projector. Some small white-covered tables, banked with equipment, each with its set of folding screens, recalled both an operating theatre and a deep-question laboratory. There were people he took to be nurses, all women, which might indicate that the patients – would that be the word? – were relatively harmless.
And the patients—
The spider-like one who had fled, a weakly slender structure of stick limbs and pigeoned rib cage, had taken refuge in a far corner of the hall, whimpering and pointing and trying to hide behind a harassed nurse. The girl cuddled and soothed and pitched her voice indignantly across some seventy yards. ‘Herbert says two of you tried to kill him.’
David called, ‘No, Clara, no. He startled them and misunderstood.’ He dropped his voice. ‘He saw aggression in two minds and became hysterical. Yours for one, Commander, no doubt.’ Raft made no reply. ‘Which other? Not the clone – murder is conditioned out of them.’
Parker shifted uncomfortably. ‘Me, I’m afraid. It was an immediate reflex, gone now. I could have killed it, like a snake – inbred reaction. It won’t happen again; the shock is past.’
Raft admitted surlily, ‘The same. A reflex, no more. It was upsetting.’
‘What was upsetting?’
Neither could answer; they had reacted, but to what? Raft had been shocked enough to attempt total denial.
Arthur spo
ke from the rear. ‘Funny, but I knew right away he had been there a while, listening to our minds. And when the door opened our thoughts hit him at full strength, as if the door had acted as a sort of insulator.’
‘It did. The area is lined with substances we have found to inhibit transmission. Can you be more definite?’
‘I don’t think so. I just knew that was it.’
‘Commander? Controller?’
Parker shook his head. ‘I didn’t think to question; it seemed like my own thought.’
Raft agreed tonelessly, ‘Just so.’
‘Proof of success, I think, in a small way. Herbert is very limited; he does little more than listen to emotions, but ninety per cent of people react to being listened to, which indicates some general sensitivity in the species.’
Parker asked, snapping despite himself, ‘Effective radius?’
‘Very small. About twenty feet. He can’t hear you now.’
Twenty inches is too far. (For a confusing second his mind darted aside to be astonished at possibilities in sexual encounter, to fall back before the probability that the talent would blight more unions than it blessed.)
He saw only two others besides Herbert. Each appeared to be male; they watched the invasion of their peculiar laboratory from opposite corners of the basement, only casually curious. A pattern in the furnishing emerged; each occupied a private island of single domesticity; the cupboards and laboratory tables fell into the spaces between. There was a fourth island.
‘Where’s the other one?’
‘Robert? At the far end. Probably on the couch with its back to us. He doesn’t like people near him.’
‘It looks as though none of them do.’
‘A matter of privacy, keeping out of each other’s ranges. Insulating partitions are impracticable, and the insulations are not fully effective.’
Parker barked at him, ‘Imagine a world of people fighting to keep away from each other. Worse, a world fighting to keep its distance from spies on whom it can’t spy back.’
Raft said negligently, ‘They’ll kill them, of course. But you can continue that line, Doctor; now we know the thing is possible you must develop efficient shieldings and so on.’ Then he rounded on the clone-brothers, instantly raging. ‘Why were you made? If I’d had my way you’d never have come to term. See where your damnable sensitivity has led!’
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