Marianne shrugged. “I don’t know. But I always thought that we humans would someday transform ourselves with genetic engineering. What if the opposite is true—if microbes are the dominant force? If genetic engineering, at which microbes are expert, transforms us? It always has created new life-forms, from the moment the first fermenting bacterium merged with a swimming bacterium. But—there’s still a strand missing!”
“A strand of what?”
“Something I haven’t figured out. Damn it, I don’t have the math!”
“Math? What has math got to do with it?”
All at once Marianne’s vision blurred and she sagged in her chair. “I am tired. I think I better rest now.”
Colin powered his chair to the door, opened it, and shouted down the corridor. “Hey! Anybody! Will somebody help my grandmother back to her room?”
A civilian on janitorial duty stuck her head from a doorway, a plump older woman with hair like electrified wire and a cheerful smile. “Just a sec!”
“Thank you,” Marianne said.
“Grandma, just one quick question. Why are you telling all this to me, instead of to the brain-change scientists? Especially the ones with enhanced intelligence?”
“I will tell them. But they all want to know how the virophage changed the v-coma victims’ brains. I want to know why.”
Now Colin looked totally bewildered. “Is there a why? Doesn’t evolution just happen?”
“Yes. But there’s a missing piece, and I don’t have the math—Jason!”
“Are you all right?” Her other grandson, tall and stern in his uniform, the cheerful janitor hovering behind him. He scowled at Marianne and Colin. “I was coming to see you—what are you doing out of bed?”
“Take me back, please,” she managed to get out. Again her vision had blurred; exhaustion felt like a physical weight on her shoulders, her chest, her brain. But she heard Colin repeat his question, and even as Jason lifted her in strong arms and half carried her from the room, she smiled at Colin.
“Grandma, why me?”
She said over Jason’s shoulder, “Because scientists think in performable and replicable experiments, and you drew elephants.”
CHAPTER 21
“Sir? Permission to have a word with you?”
Private McNally, one of the awakened, saluted. Jason was on his way to the mess in Lab Dome. He had resolved to have a larger presence at the other dome. Although he would never have Hillson’s intel network—and didn’t need to, as long as he had Hillson—he could at least walk around and see more for himself. And be seen. Also, perhaps the scientists would be less formal with him, less guarded, if he went to them instead of either summoning them to the command post or staging formal presentations.
And maybe he would happen to run into Lindy.
McNally stopped him in a crowded corridor. Beyond lay an open area, or what passed for an open area in the crowded dome, where three shouting Settler children played a game with a ball. The ball bounced off crates, most empty, off chairs where two Settlers sat talking, off a nurse hurrying to the infirmary. McNally’s salute had been a halfhearted swipe at his forehead. Or maybe not halfhearted as much as preoccupied.
McNally said, “I want to show you something, sir. I don’t have nothing on me but if you come with me to the armory…”
A trap? How unpopular was Jason with his own troops? And McNally was not an ordinary soldier; his brain had been tampered with by the virophage. Dr. Sullivan had said that the tampering could have different effects on different people. And why did McNally seem so hesitant?
Jason said curtly, “No. Tell me what you have to show.”
“It’s a weapon, sir. An A15. I modified it.”
“Who gave you permission to do that?”
“Nobody, sir. That’s how come I want to show it to you.”
Which made no sense. But looking at McNally’s thin, serious face, Jason saw that it made sense to McNally, that some kind of reasoning Jason didn’t understand was going on in that semi-alien brain. How alien?
Two off-duty members of J Squad, privates Tarrant and Kandiss, walked through the shrieking children toward the mess. Jason called to them. They stopped, surprised, and immediately came to him.
“Sir?”
“Private McNally has a modified weapon he would like to show me. You will accompany him to the armory and then to Lab Dome’s conference room, with the weapon. Lieutenant Jones is on duty at the armory. I will arrange clearance.”
They understood instantly; that’s why they were J Squad. Unlike McNally, both carried sidearms. If this was a trap, conspirators would have to be very good to take out Tarrant and Kandiss. McNally smiled faintly.
The conference room was empty, although copious crumbs and three dirty cups of what passed for coffee littered the table. Scientists. If it had been soldiers, their squad leader would have roasted them. The stuff was undrinkable, anyway.
Jason waited, studying formulae and diagrams scrawled on the whiteboard. None of them was intelligible to him, but he could tell that none looked biological. Jason needed to find time to interview Major Farouk, the physicist, about his theories on the Return. Not that Jason had understood Farouk’s specialty even before the physicist had gone into v-coma.
A lab tech ambled in, spotted Jason, and retreated hastily.
Eventually Tarrant and Kandiss arrived with McNally, who carried a canvas weapon sling. Tarrant gave Jason a faint nod: All okay, sir. McNally laid the sling on the table, unzipped it, and stood back. Kandiss removed an A15 with odd mountings on the underside of the barrel.
McNally gave the impression of hunting carefully for the right words—or maybe it was for words simple enough. “I modified it so it can be fired remotely, sir. If a soldier falls and drops the rifle, this device here, it automatically orients the weapon in the direction of the last shots. Then the controller—this doohickey here—can keep the weapon laying down fire in bursts, if you want to. The rounds probably might not hit nothing, but if the down soldier isn’t visible, maybe it’ll convince the enemy that the position is still being held.”
Kandiss stared at the A15 beside the coffee mugs as if it were a snake. Lena Tarrant said, “Sir, we tested the weapon. It performs as described.”
Jason said to McNally, “Private, have you had ordnance training?”
“No, sir.”
“Were you an engineer of any type before the Collapse?”
“No, sir. Didn’t finish high school.”
“Have you ever studied mechanical engineering or weapons manufacture, or received any kind of advanced training in those areas?”
“I been reading on the computer in the enlisted library, sir. Since I waked up.”
“And that reading taught you to invent this?”
“No, sir. This isn’t in any reading.”
“How did you invent it?”
For the first time, an emotion flitted across the private’s face, gone in a nanosecond: disgust. He said, “I looked at the A15, sir. And I thought about it. And I experimented.”
“Did you have permission for these experiments?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you have permission to be in the armory, removing weapons?”
“I belonged there, sir. I was on armory guard.”
“Which did not include any form of removing, and certainly not of modifying, an A15 without an OPORD to do so.”
Now McNally looked Jason straight in the eyes. “No, sir. But I thought you might find it pretty useful, sir. That’s how come I brought it to you.”
The unsaid words were: And risked disciplinary action to do so.
Beside Jason, Tarrant shifted uneasily. Kandiss stiffened. Jason knew without looking at them, what each was thinking. Tarrant was impressed with the weapon. Kandiss, the spit-and-polish ex-Ranger, was focused on the breach of regulations. But McNally had brought this to Jason voluntarily, at personal risk, because he thought it would be valuable to the Army.