Life must take life for the sake of life, but no worker should enter this great wheel of regeneration with any motive other than the perpetuation of our species. Only in the species are we linked to infinity and this has a different meaning for the species than it does for the mortal cell.
Janvert had taken a long time to realize the strangeness of his position. For a while, he felt he had become two distinctly different people and he remembered both of them clearly. One had studied law, joined the Agency, loved Clovis Carr, and felt trapped in activities that dehumanized him. The other appeared to have awakened as a fully recognizable individual while eating a meal with Nils Hellstrom and a rather doll-like woman named Fancy. This other individual had behaved in a wildly detached manner. This individual remembered walking meekly with Hellstrom into a room where people stood around and asked questions. As this weird other, Janvert remembered answering those questions with complete candor. He had answered willingly, searching out details that might expand the answers. He had actually worked very hard to make his answers understood.
There were other strange memories, too—big open tanks in a tremendous room, some of the tanks bubbling and seething; another equally large room crawling with toddlers, little children who bounced and played in odd silence on a screened floor that surged under them in places like a trampoline. He recalled an acid smell in that room, but with a sense of cleanliness about it. He remembered water spurting suddenly from the ceiling onto the toddlers as he passed, and then that other smell, the one he recalled from the whole other experience and was around him even now. It was fetid, rank, and warm in the nostrils.
The self he thought of as his original identity appeared to have been dormant all during the other experience, but it was aware now. He recognized where he was in both sets of memories. It was a room with rough gray walls, a depression with a hole centered in it in one corner for relieving himself, a waist-high shelf about one foot by three feet near the room’s only door, apparently of the same material as the walls. A black plastic pitcher and glass occupied the shelf. They held warm water. There had been a food bowl on the shelf earlier. He recalled that bowl and the blank-faced nude male who’d brought it—no conversation in that one at all. There were no windows in the room, just that one door and the toilet depression. He heard water rushing under the toilet hole occasionally. There were water jets around the depression, too, and they had turned on once, cleaning the area. There was no chair, only the floor to sit on, and he had been stripped to the skin. He could see nothing in the place that might make a weapon. The plastic water pitcher and glass wouldn’t break; he’d tried.
His memory presented him with the images of other visitors, too—a pair of older females who held him with remarkable ease while they examined him intimately, then injected something into his left buttock. The area of the injection still tingled. The return of his original awareness had begun soon after that injection, though. He estimated that had been at least three hours ago. They’d taken his watch and he felt unsure of time, but guessing at it made him feel he was doing something positive.
I have to escape, he told himself.
His weird other self, lapsing into a dormancy of its own now, brought up memories of hordes of nude people swarming in the tunnels through which he had been brought to this place. It was a human anthill. How could he escape through that?
The door opened and a relatively young woman entered. In the moment she left the door open he glimpsed an older, tougher looking female outside, carrying one of those mysterious weapons that looked like a whip with a double end. The young woman who came in had a stubble of black hair around the genitals and a similar cap on her head, and there was no moon-faced vacancy in her features or her movements. She carried in her left hand what appeared to be an ordinary stethoscope.
Janvert leaped to his feet as she entered, moved around near the shelf with his back to the wall.
She seemed amused. “Relax. I’m just here to see how you’re taking all this.” She clipped the stethoscope around her neck, took up the other end in her left hand.
Janvert groped for the water pitcher without taking his attention from her and his hand knocked the pitcher from the shelf.
“Now, look what you’ve done,” she said, bending to recover the pitcher which lay in a puddle of its own water.
As she stooped, Janvert moved in desperation, brought his right hand down in a vicious chop across her neck. She fell flat and didn’t move.
Now, there was the other guard outside. Relax and think, Janvert told himself. Cool green light from a recessed cove around the ceiling washed the room, creating a death pallor in the skin of the woman on the floor. He bent over her, felt for a pulse, found none. Quickly, he recovered her stethoscope, listened for a heartbeat. Nothing. The realization that his one frantic blow had killed her filled him with a chill sense of his own perilous position. Moved by urgency, he dragged the woman’s body out of the way to the right of the door, looked back to see if he’d left any sign of struggle. The water pitcher still lay there, but Janvert hesitated. The hesitation saved him.
Once more, the door opened and the older woman ‘poked her head inside with a look of obvious curiosity on her face.
Janvert, leaping from behind the door, grabbed her head, yanked her into the cell, bringing a knee up into her midriff. She grunted, dropping her weapon, and he released her, chopped her as he had the first one, whirled, and slammed the door.
Now, he had both of them and one of their weapons. He examined the odd whip-like object. The thing was black plastic, similar in color and texture to the pitcher and water glass. It was about a yard long with a stubby handle indented for fingers. There was a click-notched dial in the handle base and a yellow stud under the index-finger indentation.
Janvert pointed the double end at the guard he had just knocked down, and he depressed the stud. The wand went bap-hummmm, and he released the stud. The humming stopped. The older woman had jerked as the weapon came alive. Now, the skin along her exposed side began to turn a dark red-purple. He bent, felt for a pulse. Nothing. Two of them dead. He backed away, looked at the door. It opened inward, he knew, and there was a cupped indentation at waist height that he had tried earlier. The door had refused to open then. He wondered now if, in his panic, he had locked himself in. Desperation moving him, he tried the door. It opened immediately with only a faint click and he glimpsed people thronging past the door before he closed it.
“I have to think,” he told himself, speaking aloud.
They would expect him to head for the surface, of course. Could they have other ways of leaving, though? What lay below him? He knew there must be at least one lower level. His captors had led him past an open, doorless double-elevator shaft with bare-bones cars passing upward on one side and downward on the other. He held one of their weapons and he now knew it could kill. Hellstrom’s people would search for him. They’d move room by room through their tunnel warren, and they obviously had the manpower to be thorough.
I’ll go down.
He had no idea how far underground he might be. They had brought him on elevators and there had been many floors, but his other self had not thought to count them.
They’d fed him something to make him docile, of course. That other self was Hellstrom’s creation. It might even be the answer to Project 40. The MIT papers could just be a description of something needed to create the chemicals for manipulating humans.
The searchers wouldn’t expect him to go downward, though. If there was any other way out of this human anthill, he’d find it by doing the unexpected.