Jesus Christ, Rhodes thought. He says it right to my face, and grins!
Rhodes had had about all that he could take, for the moment. He hit the button. Van Vliet disappeared.
“Ms. Martine calling on Line One,” the annunciator said instantly.
Grateful for the interruption, Rhodes brought her on visor. Isabelle—head-and-shoulders image—hovered before him, a slim, intense woman with oddly complex and conflicting features. Fierce glittering gray-violet eyes; a delicate, finely structured nose; soft, full lips: nothing quite went with anything else. Last spring Isabelle had had her hair turned a volcanic red and Rhodes still was not used to it.
She started right in, her usual brusque headlong approach: “What’s this about dinner with some Israeli tonight, Nick? I thought we were going to go to Sausalito and—” Isabelle paused abruptly. “Nick? You look so funny, Nick!”
“Do I? Funny how?”
“Your face is unusually tight. Your pupils are dilated. There’s trouble, isn’t there?”
Isabelle was always quick to pick up his somatic changes. But that was her business, after alclass="underline" she was a kinetic therapist. She spoke body language like a native. There was never any sense trying to hide things from her. She and Rhodes had been seeing each other for two and a half years. People were starting to ask him when they would be getting married.
She gave him one of her sensitive, caring therapist looks: Mama Isabelle, eager to relieve him of his anguish. Talk to me, sweet. Tell me about it and you’ll feel better.
Rhodes said, “It’s been a bad morning, lady. Couple of days ago one of the kids here handed me the goddamnedest far-reaching adapto proposal I’ve ever seen. A really revolutionary idea. Today’s the first chance I’ve had to play the virtuals he gave me, and I’m halfway through and too upset to go on.”
“Why is that?”
“Partly because it’s so radical. It would mean the sort of extreme measures you’ve always been worried about, human somatic adaptation right from the bottom up, not just some kind of quick fix. And partly because his approach is so snotty. He opens it by saying, essentially, that the rest of us are all so hopelessly conservative here that we might as well just quit and let him take over the lab.”
“You? Conservative?”
“Around here, yes. Anyway, I’m not yet ready to hear a kid half my age telling me in just about so many words that it’s time for old farts like me to step aside and stop obstructing the solution of the problem.”
“A solution which he can provide?”
“I didn’t get that far. Maybe he can, maybe he can’t. I’m inclined to believe that he can’t, because what he’s proposing is so far out that I don’t think it’s achievable. There are some built-in technical problems that seem inherently unsolvable to me. But what do I know? I’m only an old fart. He wants us to try a sulfur-based hemoglobin instead of iron-based, so that we can get along without oxygen when push comes to shove a couple of hundred years from now.”
“Would that be possible, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it very much. But if it turns out that it is, he’ll own this whole lab inside of a year and I’ll be out on my ear.” Rhodes managed an uneasy smile. “Maybe I ought to have him killed right now, just on the off chance that he’s really onto something.”
Her expression darkened as he spoke. Her eyes grew steely. The therapist was gone and the face on the screen now was that of the dedicated political activist. Rhodes began to worry. He dreaded that look.
“Is that all you can think about, Nick? That this kid will push you out of your job? What about the human race, for God’s sake? Transformation from the bottom up? What does that mean, anyway? Is he going to turn us all into some kind of science-fiction monsters?”
“Isabelle—”
“Sulfur in the blood? It sounds disgusting.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. It makes me want to puke, just thinking about it.” Rhodes wished he hadn’t gone into such detail with her: he had no business sharing company business with anyone on the outside, especially not Isabelle. She had connections to half a dozen reactionary San Francisco humanist groups. She could, if she chose, make real trouble for him. “Listen, let’s not get into all that now, okay? Especially over the phone. I’m aware that this is not a proposal you’re likely to think highly of. But we can discuss it some other time, all right? About this evening—”
“The Israeli.”
“Right.” Thinking of the upcoming meeting with Enron, Rhodes regretted more and more having opened up to Isabelle, now. “He’s a journalist, he says. Doing one of those uplifting features on the future of the human race, more or less—you know, the Frightening Challenges That We Face, and What Our Finest Minds Mean to Do About Them—for some big slick magazine that has about a billion readers in the Israeli-Arab world, and he wants to quiz me on the current state of American gene-splicing research. I think he’s a spy.”
“Of course he is. They all are, those Israelis. Everybody knows that. I’m surprised you’ve agreed to talk to him.”
“I have to. He cleared it with New Tokyo. I’m not supposed to tell him anything that has any substance, naturally, but Samurai wants the PR exposure. It’s a very big magazine. And the Fertile Crescent is a huge market for Samurai products. We are supposed to position ourselves for their readers as the last best hope for the salvation of humanity. I was supposed to have lunch with him, but I’d rather make it dinner. I want you along to kick me under the table whenever I start veering into classified areas.”
“Sure,” she said, smiling.
“But—please, Isabelle. No political stuff. No diatribes. You and I have our philosophical differences, and so be it, but tonight, in front of this Enron, is not the time to ventilate them.”
Her smile vanished. “I’ll try to control myself, Nick. I can be very good. But wouldn’t it help give his article a broader perspective if it were to reflect American diversity of opinion on the whole subject of human adapto work?”
“Please.”
“All right,” she said. Her tone was cool. Rhodes wondered whether she really would keep quiet this evening. Isabelle meant well, but she was a very volatile woman. Probably it had been a mistake to ask her along. But, then, probably the whole relationship with Isabelle was a mistake, and he had never let that interfere with anything up till now.
“I’ll pick you up at seven,” he said. “He’s staying in the city, and we didn’t discuss where we would eat. Maybe we’ll go over to Sausalito after all.” He blew her a kiss, through the visor. The thought came to him suddenly of the other end of the evening, when all the babble was done with and over and Meshoram Enron was out of his hair, and he and Isabelle were alone together at midnight in his flat high up above the bay—the lights low, soft music tinkling, maybe a little brandy, then on the couch with Isabelle in his arms, her sweet fragrance rising to dizzy him, his head swooping down to nestle between her breasts—
Yes. Yes. To hell with Alex Van Vliet and his red-and-purple snakes, to hell with Meshoram Enron, to hell with the whole doomed withering pollution-choked world. What mattered was to carve out an island of safety for yourself in the night.
Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again!
There was the annunciator light again.
Jesus. Rhodes glared at the machine. “If it’s Van Vliet, you can tell him—”
“Mr. Paul Carpenter is calling on Line One,” said the android blandly.
“Paul Carpenter?” Rhodes was astounded. He jabbed at the button and there was old Paul, all right, square in the middle of the visor, the unmistakable Paul, looking a little older, maybe more than a little, and with a dark shaggy beard covering the whole lower half of his face instead of the trim little Vandyke that he once had affected. His coarse blond hair was very much longer than Rhodes remembered it and he was tanned and weather-beaten and crows’-footed, as though he might have been outdoors a little too much for his own good, lately. It was five years since Rhodes last had any contact with him.