A terrific day, yes. But he knew it couldn’t stay that way for long, and he was right.
The annunciator light went on and the calm impersonal androidal voice said, “Dr. Van Vliet is calling on Line Three, Dr. Rhodes. He wants to know if you have a reaction to his report yet.”
Rhodes felt a falling-away sensation in the floor of his gut. It was a lot too early in the day to have to cope with Van Vliet and the complications that he represented.
“Tell him I’m in conference and I’ll have to get back to him,” Rhodes said automatically.
Nick Rhodes was the associate research director of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, which is to say that he earned his living trying to find ways to transform human beings into something that would be either more or less than human, Rhodes still wasn’t quite sure which. Santachiara Technologies was a subsidiary of Samurai Industries, the mega-corp that owned pretty near all the segments of the universe that weren’t the property of Kyocera-Merck, Ltd. And Alex Van Vliet was probably the brightest and certainly the most aggressive of Santachiara’s team of hot young genetic engineers. Who supposedly had come up with a hot new adapto plan, a scheme involving hemoglobin replacement, that was said by those who had heard Van Vliet’s lunch-hour explanations to have real breakthrough possibilities. That was a new angle, all right, and one that Rhodes found obscurely threatening, without quite understanding why. Just this moment a conversation with Van Vliet was an event that Rhodes wanted very much to avoid.
Not out of cowardice, Rhodes told himself. Merely out of a certain degree of moral confusion. There was a difference, Rhodes liked to think. Sooner or later he would work through the inner contradictions in which he had lately begun to become entangled and then he would deal with Van Vliet. But not just now, please, Rhodes thought. Not just now, okay?
He returned to his desk.
The desk had a very important look, a smooth, sweeping boomerang-shaped slab of highly polished wood, mottled red in color, a fabulous million-dollar chunk of rare wood torn from the heart of some South American rain-forest monarch. And it was importantly cluttered, too: data-cubes stacked in this corner, videos over there, a big pile of virtuals that included Van Vliet’s set of simulations and proposals along the far edge. On the left side, below desktop level, was a set of controls for all the room’s electronic gadgets; on the right, in a suspended drawer protected by a crystal-tuned privacy lock, was a small collection of cognacs and whiskeys, private stock of Nicholas Rhodes, Ph.D. And in the middle of everything, next to the grille of the annunciator, was the elegant six-sided holochip that Rhodes’ girlfriend Isabelle Martine had given him at Christmas, the one that proclaimed in letters of fire (if you held it at the right angle) the six-word mantra that Rhodes had formulated to encapsulate the specific tasks of his department, one word per face:
| BONES | KIDNEYS |
| LUNGS | HEART |
| SKIN | MIND |
Sweet of her. Considering that Isabelle fundamentally despised his work, that she inwardly hoped that it would fail. Rhodes picked it up and turned it over and over in his hand like a giant worry bead. BONES. LUNGS. SKIN. Yes. KIDNEYS. HEART. MIND. He stared for a moment or two at mind. Ah, that was the real problem, he thought, the true killer. MIND.
The annunciator flashed again and this time the voice said, “Meshoram Enron, calling on Line Two.”
“Who?”
“Meshoram Enron,” the automaton said again, with great precision. “The Israeli journalist. You’ve agreed to have lunch with him today.”
“Oh. Right.” Rhodes hesitated. He wasn’t ready for Enron either, just this moment—not, at any rate, one-on-one. “Tell him I can’t make lunch, how about dinner?” Rhodes reached without thinking for Van Vliet’s virtuals, put them back, pulled them toward him again, stared at them as though they had only just arrived at his office. “And if he says yes, call Ms. Martine for me and put her through when you have her. I’ll want her to be joining us.”
Back from the android, a few moments later, came the report: Mr. Enron would be happy to make it a dinner meeting. Would Dr. Rhodes care to pick him up at his hotel in San Francisco at half past seven? As for Ms. Martine, she was away from her phone, but a seek-message had been attached to her number. And there was another message from Dr. Van Vliet, who was very much looking forward to the opportunity to discuss his proposals in person with Dr. Rhodes as soon as possible, blah blah, hoping for an early response, blah blah blah—
Yes. Blah blah blah. A busy day, suddenly. Rhodes was starting to feel outnumbered. Van Vliet, turning the pressure on. This Enron, sniffing around wanting to find out God knows what. A spy, no doubt. All Israelis were spies, in one way or another, Rhodes thought. What next? And only ten in the morning. Time for the first drink yet?
No, Rhodes decided crisply. It is not time for a drink yet.
But if it was too soon to have a drink and too soon to deal with Van Vliet’s report, then he was making procrastination the order of the day, and that didn’t feel good either. With sudden manic decisiveness Rhodes overruled himself on everything he had just been telling himself. Total shift of direction, that was the ticket. Reaching under the desk, he deftly disarmed the privacy lock on the liquor drawer, brought forth the cognac, knocked back a quick shot. Pondered a moment, had another, a smaller nip. Then, as the glow began to spread, he picked up Van Vliet’s proposal again and clicked it into the playback slot.
Instantly a virtual Alex Van Vliet stood before him, small as life: trim, wiry little guy, chilly blue eyes, tiny close-clinging goatee, square-shouldered defiant stance that maximized his flimsy frame. Rhodes, a big shambling burly man, mistrusted little agile ones. They made him feel like a beleaguered gorilla surrounded by yapping monkeys. And gorillas were extinct, essentially. Monkeys thrived like mosquitoes in the world’s new jungles.
Behind Van Vliet, reaching its arms forward to surround his image like a sort of open-ended nimbus, was a snaking three-dimensional pattern of colored dots which Rhodes recognized almost instantly as a beta-chain hemoglobin molecule. Van Vliet was saying, “They are conjugated proteins and consist of four heme groups and the globin molecule. The heme component is a porphyrin in which the metal ion that is coordinated is iron in the ferrous state, that is, Fe+2. The globin component consists of four polypeptide chains, which are designated alpha, beta, gamma, and so forth, according to their amino-acid makeup.”
It was the middle of an elementary lecture on the function of hemoglobin. Rhodes realized that he had somehow activated the visual incorrectly and had missed Van Vliet’s introductory remarks. But that was all right. He could pretty well imagine what they were. Best to glide into them in a roundabout fashion.
“—all-important role of the hemoglobin pigment in mammalian respiration is to combine loosely with molecular oxygen, so that it is capable of transporting oxygen from the organism’s intake point to the point of utilization. However, hemoglobin has an affinity for many other molecules: for example, it readily unites with carbon monoxide, with disastrous effects to the body. It bonds easily with nitric oxide as well. Sulfhemoglobin, which is hemoglobin plus hydrogen sulfide gas, is another significant pathological form of the pigment. Hematin, which is the hydroxyl compound of heme—”
While he was speaking, Van Vliet moved briskly around the virtual stage, adjusting the molecular patterns behind his simulated figure with quick confident motions of his hands, like a magician rearranging his props. At his deft touch the bright patterns underwent instant metamorphosis to demonstrate each altered form of hemoglobin Van Vliet summoned forth. The colors were very pretty. Rhodes allowed himself another small drink. It took the edge off. Gradually Rhodes’ attentiveness diminished, not so much on account of the cognac as simply out of boredom and irritation.