“What of the unhappiness caused by the frustration of maternal instinct?” asked the interrogative voice, in a voice devoid of any real indignation. “What of the misery generated by the brutal wrench which you administered to human nature? There are many—and not merely those who survived the Crash—who would argue that ours is now a perverted society, and that the reckless fascination with violence which is increasingly manifest in younger generations is a result of the perversion of human nature occasioned by universal sterilization.”
“The empire of nature ended with the development of language,” the fake Arnett replied. “Ever since then, human beings have been the product of their technology. All talk of human nature is misguided romantic claptrap. The history of human progress has been the history of our transcendence and suppression of the last vestiges of instinctive behaviour. If there was any maternal instinct left in 2070, its annihilation was a good thing. To blame any present unhappiness or violence on the loss or frustration of any kind of genetic heritage is stupid and ridiculous.”
There was an obvious cut at this point. The next thing Arnett’s image said was: “Who told you about all this? It can’t have been Karol or Eveline. Somebody must have put the pieces together—somebody with expert knowledge and a cunning turn of mind. Who?”
“That’s of no importance,” the other voice said. “There’s only one more matter which needs to be determined, and that’s the identity which Conrad Helier adopted after faking his death. We have reason to believe that he reappeared in the world after an interval of some twenty-five years, having undergone extensive reconstructive somatic engineering. We have reason to believe that he now uses the name Damon Hart. Is that true, Dr. Arnett?”
“Yes,” said a voice which sounded like Arnett’s, ringing false because his head was bowed and his lips hardly moved. “The person who calls himself Damon Hart is really Conrad Helier. It’s true.”
Damon heard the sound of the helicopter before Silas Arnett’s image faded from the screen, and immediately rounded on his companion. Singh had heard it too, and he was seized by sudden alarm. He backed away, and reached for his jacket pocket. He began to say something. The expression on his face suggested that it would be something reassuring, but Damon wasn’t about to be reassured. He didn’t know for sure whose side Rajuder Singh was on, but he wasn’t prepared to take it for granted that it was his own.
Before Singh had any chance to say what he intended to say or to grip whatever it was he had reached for, Damon was onto him. The blow he aimed with the edge of his right hand was delivered with practised efficiency The old man went down with a sharp gasp of surprise. Damon pinned him to the floor and put his own hand into the pocket.
He pulled out a tiny dart-gun. It was incapable of inflicting any lethal injury but it could have paralysed him for several minutes before his internal technology mobilised itself to cancel out the effects of whatever toxin the darts bore—long enough for Singh to have made his escape from the house, if that was what he had intended to do.
Singh pried his right hand loose and tried to grab the gun, wailing: “You don’t understand!”
Damon lifted the weapon out of his captive’s reach but didn’t hit him again; he couldn’t be sure that the man bore him any ill will. “Damn right I don’t,” he muttered, through clenched teeth.
The noise of the helicopter was deafening now. It couldn’t land because the clearing wasn’t big enough but it was hovering close to the house. Damon presumed that it was unshipping men, who would burst in at any moment—but whose men would they be?
“Who are you really working for?” Damon demanded of Rajuder Singh, making his voice as harsh as he could. “Tell me now, or I’ll cut you up so badly it’ll take all the nanotech you’ve got six weeks and more to put you back together, old man.”
Singh must have known something of Damon’s past, and something of his reputation. His eyes flickered wildly from side to side, as if in search of inspiration. Damon produced the knife he always carried in his boot, for old time’s sake. It had a doubly-serrated edge, designed to tear flesh in the ugliest possible way. He stroked Singh’s cheek with it, and watched the blood fountain out.
“I can take your eyes out before they get here,” Damon said. “And if by chance they aren’t the cops, I can do a lot worse.”
“It’s not what you think!” the slender man gasped, seemingly desperate to spit the words out. “I really am with Karol and your father! Truly I am. If that’s the enemy, you have to—”
Damon didn’t find out what Singh would have wanted him to do if it had been the enemy—whoever “the enemy” might be—because the windows imploded with a deafening roar and two gas-grenades came bouncing across the carpet, pumping smoke.
“Oh shit,” Damon said, lifting his arm reflexively as if to shield his nose and mouth from the fumes. He knew that it would do no good; this wasn’t the first time he had been gassed by the cops. He shut his eyes tightly but he knew that it was going to sting horribly anyway, and he wasn’t in the least comforted by the thought that the men outside were probably doing it in the hope of saving him from coming to any harm at the hands of his captors.
Bitter experience told him to hold off as long as possible and then to take a good deep breath, but it wasn’t easy to persuade his reflexes to fall into line. He suffered several seconds of severe discomfort before he was finally able to let go and fall unconscious.
When Damon woke up he knew by the muted roar of the engines that he was aboard an aeroplane—not some glorified boxkite like the one the Australian had piloted, but a real intercontinental jet. He found that he was stretched out across three seats in the first-class compartment. Hiru Yamanaka was sitting on the opposite side of the aisle, watching him solicitously.
The Interpol man waited politely and patiently for Damon to gather himself together. “I’m sorry about the gas, Mr. Hart,” he said, eventually. “We didn’t realise that you had the situation under control, and we didn’t know who was holding you. When we saw the message that was dumped immediately after your plane took off we feared the worst. Did you see it, by any chance?”
“I saw it,” Damon said, sourly. “Have you interrogated Rajuder Singh yet?”
“Not yet. We confirmed his identity easily enough, but he’ll be out for a long while. He seems to have had a heart attack. Perhaps you frightened him. His internal technics will pull him through, but they won’t let him wake up for a couple of days. Nothing we can do about that without imperilling his life.”
Damon accepted a bottle of mineral water from Yamanaka’s perennial sidekick, but waved away the offer of plastic-packaged food. He sipped slowly from the neck of the bottle, but didn’t immediately raise himself to a sitting position. His head was still aching—but his mind was working well enough to alert him belatedly to the significance of what Yamanaka had said about the message advertising his peril.
“Did you say that the notice naming me was posted after the plane took off?” he said, to make sure.
“Almost immediately afterwards. That’s why we feared that the two events were linked.”
“Singh claimed that it was dumped beforehand—that Karol told the pilot to take me to... where was I?”