Dr. Scolpes was perhaps seventy. His tights bulged across a formidable belly; he leaned backward slightly to offset the weight of it, and his walk was a waddle. His head was bald on top with bushes of hair at the temples. Like many plump men his face was smooth of wrinkles—almost like a baby’s—but the warm gray eyes showed more than a lifetime’s wisdom.
He seemed genuinely pleased to see Nick; they greeted each other as old friends, or perhaps more like a favorite uncle and nephew.
Then Scolpes took Hali’s hand and made a small bow.
“Delighted to meet my first Alta-Tyberian—and such a lovely one at that. Now I will explain to you what I do here. You must pardon me if I sound pompous, but you see I am pompous. It’s a hazard of being a leader in one’s field, a triple Nobel Prize winner, my dear.”
He cleared his throat and smiled impishly.
“Now I take it the boys over in Post 31 have shown you how they analyze the structure of the DNA. Once each of the little strands has been identified according to the proteins they produce—the proteins which will eventually shape a human being or an Alta-Tyberian, in all their marvelous, mind-staggering complexity—the information is passed along to me. With the help of my faithful little computer”—he patted the aging Cyber 9000 affectionately—“I design the replicons which will do the actual work.”
“Replicons?” Hali interrupted. “I hear that word again and again but I do not know the meaning. Could you explain?”
“Forgive me, my dear. A replicon is a sequence of DNA which can penetrate the cell wall and enter into the nucleus, where the original DNA resides, and maintain itself there, peacefully coexisting and recombining with the original DNA, subtly reshaping the function and purpose of the cell. The perfect house guest, so to speak. New cells create new structures; mutations are cured, longevity is increased, a third eye is added—whatever effect we are interested in achieving, within certain limits, of course.
“The actual mechanics are a bit less elegant than the theory. Once the computer has created the replicons, we add them to blood cells and cultivate them in an incubator. A small percentage of the replicons will become integrated into the blood cells. These ‘improved’ cells are separated from the rest and form the basis of the serum you will take back to your home world. Another ingredient in the serum is Growth Factor, which will accelerate the replacement of old cells in the body. This is how we will produce a generation of normal, healthy Alta-Tyberian babies.”
Hali smiled.
“It is also,” Scolpes continued, “the essence of how we make a man into a Lifestyler. However, in the case of the Lifestylers we aspire to a norm of our own creation. Rather like playing God and trying to beat him at his own game. We attempt to arrange the message units within a strand of DNA in such a way that the resultant being will appear as we have imagined him in our daydreams—and in our nightmares. It is the most difficult sort of prediction one can imagine, nearly as haphazard as predicting the shape of a tree by a glance at the seed. We fail often,” he added, a distant look in his eyes. Then he said to Hali, “Have you seen the Lifestylers yet?”
Hali shook her head. “I look forward to it.”
“You must take her to see them, Nicholas.”
“The trip’s all planned. We leave Friday. Lex’s temple is first stop.”
“Ah—then you could do me a very great favor. I spoke to Lex this morning. He said he had something to discuss with me—it had to do with the coming elections—but he was afraid to talk on the phone. He wanted me to drop everything and run over to the temple. I told him I couldn’t possibly because of the rush on the Alta-Ty job, but as soon as I’d finished I would be in touch. You must understand, my dear Ms. Hasannah, that the Lifestylers are half god, half superstar and used to being coddled. If I ran off every time Lex or Sir Etherium called, I’d never get any work done. Often the only thing bothering them is their own neurotic fantasies and by the time I see them they’ve forgotten all about it. Nicholas, you know Lex personally and he trusts you. You could go backstage after services, find out what’s bothering him and personally relay the message to me—if it’s something important. Would you mind?”
“I’d be honored,” Nick said.
IV
After lunching at the Mutagen commissary—Hali hardly touched her food—Nick decided to shorten what remained of the tour as much as possible. Having little understanding of Alta-Ty psychology, he could not know if Hali was getting depressed about the destiny of her people, or if she was suffering what certain humans suffered while touring Mutagen: vague feelings of uneasiness over man’s tampering with cellular stuff. Either way, she did not look well.
They strolled through a central garden, past fountains and a grazing unicorn. The afternoon was cooler: the buildings surrounding them cast squat mushroom shadows, and far away the towers of Averyville sparkled like rock sugar.
‘‘There’s not much else to see,” Nick lied.
‘‘I’ve seen so much already my head is spinning—oh!” They had come across a bed of violets and daffodils.
“Do you think.” Hali asked, “anyone would mind?”
“I don’t think so.”
She plucked a violet and bit off a petal. Immediately she looked happier. Nick made a mental note for next time.
“See that building over there?”
Hali nodded.
“That’s where we do cloning.”
“What is that?”
“A clone is made by removing the nucleus of a human cell—any cell, practically—and inserting it in an egg cell in which the nucleus has been destroyed. The egg cell grows into a perfect copy of the donor of the nucleus. In other words, you could take a scraping of my skin and grow a whole army of Nick Harmons from it. I don’t know why you’d want to. They wouldn’t be very good fighters.”
“But they would be cute,” Hali murmured.
Nick glanced at her; then he looked at his feet and colored slightly.
“Anyway, you get the idea. Cloning is prohibited by law, except in special circumstances—otherwise it would stagnate the gene pool. For example, thirty years ago a man named Harry Peretz was generally considered the greatest rocket polo player who ever lived. We cloned an entire team from him, seventeen men. In addition to being fabulous athletes, they seem to be able to read each other’s minds, the way identical twins sometimes do (like identical twins, they’re all grown from the same cell), and that’s why we’ve won the Olympics for the last six years.
“And over there is the brain building. Despite breakthroughs in microminiaturization, cyberneticists never have been able to build a brain as cheap and efficient as an organic one. Instead we grow brains that can be interfaced with traditional computer hardware. Of course they're not like our brains—they’re not conscious, not in the human sense. Among other projects, we’re working on a guidance system for the new starships that will be entirely organic and self-repairing. Maybe someday we’ll be able to grow a whole starship from scratch!
“Those low buildings to the left are storage for the donor doubles. For centuries doctors have had trouble doing transplants because of the body’s tendency to reject foreign tissue. Since Mutagen began offering the service, parents-to-be have had the option of twinning the zygote—turning the fertilized ova into identical twins. One grows up as a normal human being, the other is put into storage to serve as a donor double. A source of spare parts, to put it crudely. Organs, limbs and tissue are, naturally, the correct size and shape, and since they grow from the same cell, the body won’t reject them.’’
Hali was looking at him strangely. “Do you have a . . . donor double?’’