"I'll be back to you."
"Fine, I'll be here."
"Thanks," came the mutter from the other end.
"Sure," Giraud muttered; and when the contact broke: "Damn hothead." He went back to the draft of the points he meant to make with Corain, interrupted himself to key a query to Ivanov's office, quick request for med records on Grant to Jordan Warrick's office. And added, on a second thought, because he did not know what might be in those records, or what Ari had ordered: SCP, security considerations permitting.
iii
The new separator was working. The rest of the equipment was scheduled for checkout. Ari made notes by hand, but mostly because she worked on a system and the Scriber got in her way: in some things only state of the art would do, but when it came to her notes, she still wrote them with a light-pen on the Translate, in a shorthand her Base in the House system continually dumped into her archives because it knew her handwriting: old-fashioned program, but it equally well served as a privacy barrier. The Base then went on to translate, transcribe and archive under her passwords and handprint, because she had given it the password at the top of the input.
Nothing today of a real security nature. Lab-work. Student-work. Any of the azi techs could be down here checking things, but she enjoyed this return to the old days. She had helped wear smooth the wooden seats in Lab One, hours and hours over the equipment, doing just this sort of thing, on equipment that made the rejected separator look like a technologist's dream.
That part of it she had no desire to recreate. But quite plainly, she wanted to say I in her write-up of this project. She wanted her stamp on it and her hand on the fine details right from the conception upward. I was most careful, in the initiation of this project
I prepared the tank
There were very few nowadays who were trained in all the steps. Everyone specialized. She belonged to the colonial period, to the beginnings of the science. Nowadays there were colleges turning out educated apes, so-named scientists who punched buttons and read tapes without understanding how the biology worked. She fought that push-the-button tendency, put an especially high priority on producing methodology tapes even while Reseune kept its essential secrets.
Some of those secrets would come out in her book. She had intended it that way. It would be a classic work of sciencethe entire evolution of Reseune's procedures, with the Rubin project hindmost in its proper perspective, as the test of theories developed over the decades of her research. IN PRINCIPIO was the title she had tentatively adopted. She was still searching for a better one.
The machine came up with the answer on a known sequence. The comp blinked red on an area of discrepancy.
Damn it to bloody hell. Was it contamination or was it a glitch-up in the machine? She made the note, mercilessly honest. And wondered whether to lose the time to replace the damn thing again and try with a completely different test sample, or whether to try to ferret out the cause and document it for the sake of the record. Doing the former, was a dirty solution. Being reduced to the latter and, God help her, failing to find solid evidence, which was a good bet in a mechanical glitch-up, made her look like a damn fool or forced her to have recourse to the techs more current with the equipment.
Dump the machine and consign it to the techs, run the suspect sample in a clean machine, and install a third machine for the project, with a new sample-run.
Every real-life project is bound to have its glitch-ups, or the researcher is lying ...
The outer lab-door opened. There were distant voices. Florian and Catlin. And another one she knew. Damn.
"Jordan?" she yelled, loud enough to carry. "What's your problem?"
She heard the footsteps. She heard Florian's and Catlin's. She had confused the azi, and they trailed Jordan as far as the cold-lab door.
"I need to talk to you."
"Jordie, I've got a problem here. Can we do it in about an hour? My office?"
"Here is just fine. Now. In private."
She drew a long breath. Let it go again. Grant, she thought. Or Merild and Corain. "All right. Damn, we're going to have Jane and her clutch traipsing through the lab out there in about thirty minutes. Florian, go over to B and tell them their damn machine won't work." She turned and ejected the sample. "I want another one. We'll go through every damn machine they've got if that's what it takes. I want the thing cleaner than it's providing. God, what kind of tolerances are they accepting these days? And you bring it over yourself. I don't trust those aides. Catlin, get up there and tell Jane she can take her damn students somewhere else. I'm shutting down this lab until I get this thing running." She drew a second long breath and used the waldo to send the offending sample back through cryogenics, then ejected the sample-chamber to a safe-cell and sent it the same route. When she turned around the azi were gone and Jordan was still standing there.
iv
It was a hike from the hospital over to the House itself, a long round-about if the weather made it necessary to go through the halls and the tunnel, a good deal shorter to walk over under open sky. Justin opted for the open air, though the shadows of the cliffs had cut off the sun and he ought to have brought a coat. He got tape-flash. He got it almost everywhere. The sensations got to him most, and his stomach stayed upset "You eat the damn stuff," Grant had challenged him, since hospital staff had brought two dinners. "I'll match you."
He had gotten it down. He was not sure it was going to stay there. It had been worth everything to have Grant able to sit up and laughthey had let him free to have his supper and Grant had sat cross-legged in bed and managed the dessert with some enthusiasm. Even if the nurses said they were going to have to put the restraints back on when he was alone for the night. He would not have left for the night at all, and Ivanov would have let him stay; except he had an appointment with Ari, and he could not tell Grant that. Late work at the lab, he had said. But Grant had been a hundred percent better when he had left him than when he had come in, quickly exhausted, but with liveliness in his eyes, the ability to laughperhaps a little too much, perhaps a little too forced, but the way the eyes looked said that Grant was back again.
Just when he was leaving the mask had come down, and Grant had looked sober and miserable.
"Back in the morning," Justin had promised.
"Hey, you don't have to, it's a long walk over here."
"I want to, all right?"
And Grant had looked ineffably relieved. That was the good in the day. It was worth everything he paid for it. He felt for the first time since that day in Ari's office, that there might be a way out of this.
Ifif Ari had enough to keep her busy, if
He thought of Grant and Ari, Grant already on the edge of his sanity-Grant, who had the looks, the grace that every girl he had ever known had preferred to him
He waded through tape-flash that diminished only to shameful memory, through a muddle of anguish and exhaustion. He was not going to be worth anything. He wanted to go somewhere and be sickhe could call Ari and plead that he was sick, truly he was, he was not lying, she could ask him the next time he