“I don’t see what I can do,” the senator said, his voice as calm as always. “Lieutenant Addington seems to have more than sufficient evidence. We cannot countermand the law whenever it displeases us and expect it to protect us the rest of the time.
“I regret to say,” he continued, “that I anticipated something of this nature. Apparently the Alta-Tys are not the friends they would have us think. But this is not your problem, Nicholas. You are no longer responsible for Ms. Hasan-nah. Mutagen has decided to discontinue work on the Alta-Ty problem—”
Hali, who had been sitting silently through all this, her head bent forward on her long slender neck like a blossom on a drooping stem, suddenly rose from her chair crying, “You must not abandon us, you are the only ones we can turn to. Do what you like with me, but save my people!”
The cops closed in on either side of her: they lowered her to the chair, and one of them brought her a glass of water.
“We’ll continue this conversation later,” the senator said. His head faded from the cube.
Nick just stood there feeling stupid and awkward. Lieutenant Addington was smiling at him with his crooked teeth. Those teeth. Nick wanted to knock them down his throat. Instead he turned around and left.
VIII
When Nick returned to his saucer the message light was blinking: Morgan Grim wanted him to call back as soon as possible. Nick tapped out Morgan’s code and seconds later that redhead’s image was inside the holocube.
“Nicky, I hate to cut short your vacation but we need you at the office. Fly back tonight—or in the morning if you’re too beat.”
“What about Hali? I can’t leave her.”
“You can and you will. We don’t owe the Alta-Tys a damn thing. Our boys have been busting their balls over this project for a week and a half and all we’ve got in compensation is two dead Lifestylers.”
“But she didn't do it!”
“That’s for the courts to decide. Meanwhile we’ve got a job to do. The paperwork’s four feet high on your desk.”
“W'hat if I don’t come?” Nick blurted out, before he could think about what he was saying.
Morgan didn’t hesitate a second. “First I have Central Power cut off energy transmissions to your saucer. Then I notify the Bank of the Cosmos that you’re no longer working for Mutagen and they stop your credit lines. Want more? You look for a new job. but you can’t go back to Mutagen. So instead you try the snack bar or maybe driving a cab. Naturally you can’t afford to stay in the club; you have to give up rocket polo and—Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, why are we talking this nonsense? You're a sensible young man with a full life and a promising career. You’re not going to give it all up for some alien woman you’ve hardly known two weeks!”
“Yeah.” Nick laughed. “I don’t know what I could have been thinking.”
PART IV
Life Back to Normal
I
Four feet of papers had been a slight exaggeration; still, enough work had accumulated to keep Nick very busy. Yet somehow he could not concentrate. He would read a simple technical paper three times through without comprehending a word; he would listen to Morgan for a half hour and recall nothing of what had been said.
Hiram Scolpes was delighted when Nick stopped by his office at lunch. The old man looked tired. A loss of weight had caused his face to craze with wrinkles like a balloon which had lost some air, yet his gray eyes seemed even wiser and more compassionate than before the tragedies.
He cleared the clutter off a chair and offered it to Nick. He took a minute to call downstairs for stimu-caff and quik-snax before settling into an ancient, beloved easy chair and beginning to talk.
“I’ve been giving some thought to these murders. It seems to me I was upset because I saw Lex and Etherium as outgrowths of myself. Extensions of my ego. When I heard of their deaths it was as though I’d lost a hand. Nicholas, we draw lessons to ourselves, and the lesson is that simply because we can shape the flesh, we must not come to believe that we are gods. Hubris, the Greeks called it. Insolence, overbearing pride. I thought Lex and Etherium were my creations. My petty ego blinded me to the truth. Recombinant—that’s the key; we do not create, we recombine. Only He creates.”
“He?”
“Anyone who works with a mechanism as intricate and elegant as DNA comes to believe in a God of one sort or another. The real tragedy,” Scolpes continued, “is your lovely Alta-Tyberian friend. I will recover and new Lifestylers will be produced, but she and her people appear to be bound for oblivion. And we had almost cracked their genetic code, that’s what’s so frustrating. Another two weeks . .
“She didn’t do it.”
“Of course she didn’t. What conceivable reason would she have? That she hates humans? My dear Nicholas, there are times when 1 hate humans, but I don’t go out and murder a Lifestyler. My guess is that Chief Clinger has made her the sacrificial lamb.”
‘‘Would he do that?”
Scolpes shrugged. “It’s happened before. Remember your Terran history. Late twentieth century. Every time an important, beloved figure was assassinated the police found some hapless drifter and pinned the charges on him. It satisfied the public and earned the cops commendations. And the real murderers—or so it was revealed decades later when certain files came to light—the real murderers were always a well-organized political body. A conspiracy.”
“You mean with the Kennedys and Samuelson and Martin Luther King? Yeah, I guess it’s possible.” Nick's gaze wandered. “I should have stayed with her.” he murmured.
“Pardon me?”
“Nothing.” Nick said, but Scolpes knew what he was referring to.
“What good could you have done? Some pointless act of heroism ending with a buzz of nerve guns and you reduced to a zombie for the rest of your life? No, Nicholas, the police are too powerful, the government too far removed from the people. That is the price we pay for our years of political indifference. Now put it out of your mind before it becomes an obsession. I’ve seen men ruined by such things.”
II
Nick left work early that day. He changed into his best cape, the turquoise one with the Lifestylers embroidered on it, and proceeded to the club. First he went to the member’s infirmary and had an injection of hypothalamus stimulant to counter his depression, which was growing worse by the moment. Next he visited the “Smoking Room” and consumed, down to the roach, four joints of old-fashioned tetra-hy-dracannabinal to fill the cracks left by the injection. While rolling a fifth his old buddies Tom Sultan and Larry “Crackin’ Heads” Parsee appeared, and told him they had missed his face on the rocket-polo court. They offered Nick a nasal inhaler containing a solution of tri-methoxy-amphet-amine and he accepted, hoping it would restore his flagging energies. Indeed, the liquid exploded against the delicate membranes inside his nose, filling his head with sunbursts and roman candles. And still, despite all this chemical hanky-panky, he felt that he did not much wish to continue living.
As he staggered into the dining room, the floor undulating beneath his feet, the ceiling fixtures turning into toe-hanging pterodactyls waiting to sink their stiletto beaks into the first juicy twenty-fourth-century Neanderthal to happen along, somebody called. The name sounded curiously familiar; Nick was so stoned it took him five seconds to realize it was his own. He turned to see Althea Clinger and her two best friends, Aynn Draper, a tall, quiet girl with straight black hair and a funereal air, and Dorce Ramonn, who was bosomy and giggled a lot. None of them was past eighteen.
“Could this be clean-living Nick Harmon,” Althea asked in mock astonishment, “who only has a social smoke now and then?”