“Complacency,” Hali said softly, “is the first step in the fall of democracy.”
That took away Nick’s smile: messenger or not, she was right.
Sitting in the back of the GE cab. Nick had an overwhelming desire to ask her how she had healed his wounds—but it seemed somehow boorish, like questioning the quality of a gift. Instead he said, “How did you learn to speak English so well?”
“My people send groups of children to be educated on different worlds, to gain perfect knowledge of other cultures and languages. These children grow up to be emissaries. When I was a little girl I was chosen as an emissary to the English-speaking worlds of the Federation. It was a great honor,” she added with uncertainty.
“What would you have rather done?”
“Stayed home with my family. Played with other children like myself. Instead I lived with a human family and went to school with human children. Human children. They were told to treat me like one of their own and I'm sure they tried . . . but I was so different and young people are so cruel.”
She shook her head sadly.
PART II
A Tour of Mutagen
I
“These are the coldrooms,” Nick said, watching Hali’s reflection in the triple layer of insulated glass. The window gave a view of a cavernous room honeycombed with stacks of trays. Robots shuttled between the stacks, adding trays to some and removing them from others.
“It’s refrigerated with liquid nitrogen,” he continued, “to a temperature of —450° Fahrenheit. The trays they're carrying contain sperm, ova, blood samples, tissue cultures, amniotic fluid—occasionally whole zygotes—flown in from all over the galaxy. Naturally there’s a backlog. The samples can wait here safely until their turn comes in analysis.”
“The samples I brought,” Hali said. “They are waiting here?”
“No, you have special priority. They’re already in analysis. We’ll see them in a few minutes.”
They passed other coldrooms, “libraries,” Nick explained, containing DNA sequences from the last two hundred years. If at some future date alterations in the gene pool showed unsuspected—and undesired—side effects, they could always fall back on these earlier specimens.
Further safeguards existed in the form of supercooled zygotes stored in caves deep below the surface of the planet. If a war or a galactic catastrophe ever did annihilate life, sophisticated machines would grow man anew from these seeds and educate him to build the world over.
“To what end?” Hali interrupted.
Nick thought for a moment. He had never considered the question before. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “Why explore new planets? Why break the genetic code? Why do anything? Why not just stand around and . .
Then he recalled that that was precisely what the Alta-Tys did, stood around on one foot and gazed into space. He left the sentence unfinished.
II
A uniformed attendant stopped them in the entrance hall of the next building and fed their badges into a validater. Satisfied, he said, “Clean building, Mr. Harmon, sterile suits required.”
The suits were a disposable tissue-thin plastic sprayed with metallic paint to shield the wearer during radiation showers. They weighed only a few ounces and were quite comfortable as long as the room wasn’t too hot (the “clean” labs at Mutagen were kept at 50° F. for just this reason). The popularity of the tights, cape and codpiece fashion stemmed from the fact that Mutagen workers could slip in and out of the sterile suits without taking time to undress.
Hali’s dress was another matter.
“I think you’ll have to take that off,” Nick said, feeling a strange—and highly unprofessional—tingle of anticipation.
With no sign of shyness she slipped out of the dress and handed it to the attendant, who hung it in a closet alongside Nick’s cape.
Underneath she wore a sheer, skin-tight tube of elastic fabric which reached from shoulder to hip. Nick couldn’t help noticing how long and smooth her legs were, and he was surprised by the roundness of her hips and the small swells of her breasts. Before he had seen, in his opinion, a sufficient amount, she had shimmied into a sterile suit and the attendant was helping her position the helmet over her halo of cottony white hair and seal the clamps around the collar.
“Air comes through this filter disc,” Nick explained, tapping the coin-sized grating at the base of the helmet. “This way we won’t accidentally carry away any bacteria or viruses, and our own bacteria won’t contaminate the experimental work.”
“Showers to your left,” the attendant said.
The door had a stepped edge covered with a thick gasket. It closed automatically behind them, sealing them in a narrow chamber some ten feet in length. A second sealed door 22 lay at the opposite end of the chamber, an airlock configuration.
“Do this,” Nick said, and covered his helmet almost completely with his arms. When Hali had imitated the position he pushed a lever on the floor with his toe. An indicator light went on and a moment later it blinked off.
“Ultraviolet radiation. It kills off everything—except us.” Nick laughed nervously. The radiation showers were supposed to be harmless, but he had never been quite convinced.
Nick led her to a small table with a basin of liquid and a sponge floating in it, and sponged off both their helmets with a few quick wipes.
“Plain old ammonia. You hold your arms over your head to block the radiation. But then you need to do this so none of those nasty bacteria sneak by.”
At the press of a button a second door opened and they entered the building proper.
“Why such precautions?” Hali asked.
“Did you ever hear of the Cancer Plague of 1989?”
“What is cancer?”
“It’s a disease where cells start reproducing wildly for no apparent reason. Because it was one of the major killers of the twentieth century, a lot of researchers were working very hard to understand it. A common technique for examining cancer was to implant a carcinogenic DNA in an E. coli bacterium. Unfortunately the E. coli strain is very happy living in human intestines. All the labs had systems for biological containment, but the technology was primitive and the protocol was sloppy; somehow, some of the bacteria escaped. Because of the implantation, cancer, which usually isn’t contagious, became highly contagious. A plague spread across Terra killing millions and millions of people.”
“What happened?” Hali asked, her eyes wide with concern.
“A few months later a research team headed by a man named Chang found a general cancer cure. But since that time everybody’s been very careful about containment.”
He added thoughtfully, “Science has given us so many opportunities to destroy ourselves. Yet we survive and occasionally we even do some good.”
They ascended Post 31 to the Theta level disc and walked along the curving corridor. Nick stopped at one of many doors and slipped his badge into the slot.
“Yes?”—a voice from the speaker grill.
“It’s Nick Harmon. I have the emissary from Alta-Ty with me.”
The door opened—gasketed like the previous one—and again they passed through an ultraviolet shower, through a second door and into a laboratory of spotless white walls and gleaming counters. Sterile-suited men were hunched over holocube terminals, measuring angles and making notes; others built models of sticks and plates and colored balls; still others operated centrifuges and sequinators, computer consoles and electro-phoresis windows where nucleotides settled like layers of sedimentary stone.
They were greeted by Paul Capek, a brilliant, intense man of forty, of whom it was rumored that he slept a scarce three hours a night, relaxed almost never, and subsisted almost entirely on a diet of stimu-caff and quik-snax. Of his sixty-six inches of height, three inches were shoe heel. He spoke in rapid-fire bursts of words, rarely pausing for breath. After some preliminary questions about how Hali was enjoying her stay on Sifra Messa (very much) and whether she had seen the Lifestylers yet (she hadn’t but hoped to soon), he began his VIP presentation.