Too many floors to count later, we stepped into a cream-walled corridor, paced almost to the end of it, and went through a chocolate door that slid aside at the officer's vocal command. Inside, there was a room of alabaster walls with hex signs painted every five feet in brilliant reds and oranges. There was a small and ugly child sitting in a black leather chair, and four men standing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say something of monumental importance.
I didn't say anything at all.
The child looked up, his eyes and lips all but hidden by the wrinkles of a century of life, by gray and gravelike flesh. I tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.
There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes, and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation.
"You're the one they sent for."
For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose in me most nights when I considered my origins and the pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.
"You," the child said again.
"Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.
No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure the freak in the chair was finished.
He wasn't.
"I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry you came here. I'm going to see to that."
II
"That's the situation," Harry said, leaning back in his chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his attention.
The child-ancient's eyes, on the other hand, never left me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle of his world which did not draw the freak's contempt and loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living here and the congressmen who had supported the project since its inception could gloat: "Artificial Creation is a Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me. More than eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped super-genius who was no more than three years old but who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of a century of operation.
For the government, that's a winner.
"I don't know if I can do it," I said at last.
"Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk the others called General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.
"I don't know what to expect. He has a different sort of mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people who work here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I've unerringly turned over the traitors and potential security risks.
But this just doesn't scan like that."
"You don't have to do any sorting," Morsfagen snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. "I thought this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We've threatened the little freak. We've tried bribing him. The trouble is, he has no fear or ambition." He had almost said "tortured" for "threatened" but was a good enough self-censor to change words without a pause. "You simply go into his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything back."
"How much did you say?" I asked.
"A hundred thousand poscreds an hour."
It pained him to say that.
"Double that," I said. For many men, the single hundred thou was more than a year's salary in these time of inflation.
"What? Absurd!"
He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that, among other things, the child had given them an almost completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone, a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hundred big ones with an option to demand more if the work proved more demanding than I anticipated.
"Without your shyster, you'd be working for room and board," Morsfagen said.
He had an ugly face.
"Without your brass medals, you'd be a street-gang punk," I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.
He wanted to hit me.
His fists made flesh balls, and the knuckles nearly pierced the skin-they protruded so harshly.
I laughed at him.
He couldn't risk it. He needed me too much.
The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke of madness.
III
The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all that transpired.
"The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.
After he's placed in a state of trance, we administer 250 cc's of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular." The whitesmocked director of the medical team spoke with crisp, pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the maintenance of one of his machines.
The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something were trying to burst free of me.
"What's his name?" I asked Morsfagen.
"He hasn't any."
"No?"
"No. We have his code name, as always. We don't need more."
I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some churches deny me one; but then churches have been denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.
A team of doctors administered the drug.
"Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said. He had both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn't anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that overhung the room.
I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for the assault upon his mental sanctity.
Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the blackness of his mind, flailing and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes where the eyes should have been.
They mumbled things in their alien language, and they prodded me with cold instruments.
When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physician who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything intelligent to say.