The crowd thinned here as the step-down walk rounded a corner into a byway canyon between two towering windowless buildings. There was dust in this cavernous street rising up and almost concealing a distant tracery of bridges. Potter wondered at the dust. It was as though the director of local weather allowed dust here in an unconscious passion for naturalness.
A bulky man hurried past them and Potter was caught by the look of his hands—thick wrists, bulging knuckles, horned callouses. He had no idea what work could cause such deformity.
The guide steered them now onto a succession of drop walks and into the cave of an alley. The swarm was left behind. A feeling of detachment seized Potter. He felt he was reliving an old and familiar experience.
Why did I come with this person? he wondered.
The guide wore the wheeled blazon of a transport driver on his shoulder, but he’d said right out he was from the Parents Underground.
“I know what you did for us,” he’d said. “Now, we will do something for you.” A turn of the head. “Come.”
They’d talked only briefly after that, but Potter had known from the first the guide had correctly identified himself. This was no trick.
Then why did I accept the invitation? Potter asked himself. Certainly it wasn’t for the veiled promises of extended life and instant knowledge. There were Cyborgs behind this, of course, and he suspected this guide might be one of them. Most of the Optimen and Servant Uppers tended to discount the Folk rumors that Cyborgs did exist, but Potter had never joined the cynics and scoffers. He could no more explain why than he could explain his presence here in this alley cave walking between dark plasmeld walls illuminated by the ghost flicker of overhead glowtubes.
Potter suspected he had at last rebelled against one of the three curses of their age—moderation, drugs and alcohol. Narco-pleasures and alcohol had tempted him in their time… and finally moderation. He knew it wasn’t normal for the times. Better to take up with one of the wild sex cults. But pointless sex without even the faint hope of issue had palled on him, although he knew this for a sign of final dissolution.
The alley opened into one of the lost squares of the megalopolis—a triangular paving and fountain that looked to be real stone, green with the slime of ages.
The Optimen don’t know about this place, Potter thought. They despised stone which eroded and wore away—in their time. Regenerative plasmeld was the thing. It stood unmoved and unmoving for all time.
The guide slowed as they reached the open air. Potter noted a faint smell of chemicals about the man, oily sweetness, and a tiny scar running diagonally down the back of his neck into his collar.
Why didn’t he try to blackmail me into coming? Potter wondered. Could he be that sure? Could anyone know me that well?
“We have a job for you,” the guide had said. “An operation you must perform.”
Curiosity is my weakness, Potter thought. That’s why I’m here.
The guide put a hand on Potter’s arm, said, “Stop. Wait without moving.”
The tone was conversational, calm, but Potter felt hidden tensions. He looked up and around. The buildings were windowless, faceless. A wide door stood out in the angle of another alleyway ahead. They had come almost around the fountain without encountering another person. Nothing stirred or moved around them. There was only the faint rumbling of distant machinery.
“What is it?” Potter whispered. “Why’re we waiting?”
“Nothing,” the guide said. “Wait.”
Potter shrugged.
His mind veered back to the first encounter with this creature. How could they know what I achieved with that embryo? It must be the computer nurse. She’s one of them.
The guide had refused to say.
I came because I hoped they could help me solve the mystery of the Durant embryo, he thought. They were the source of the arginine intrusion—that’s what I suspect.
He thought of Svengaard’s description—a contrail-like intrusion. It had deposited arginine-rich sperm protamine through the coiled alpha-helices of the embryo’s cells. Then had come the operation—the cysteine masked, neutralized with sulfhydryl and the ATP phase… oligomycin and azide… the exchange reaction inhibited.
Potter stared up at the patch of blue sky framed by the buildings around the square. His mind, concentrated on the Durant cutting, had encountered a new idea. He no longer saw the sky. His awareness was back within the swarming cell structure, following the mitochondrial systems like an undersea hunter.
“It could be repeated,” Potter whispered.
“Silence,” the guide hissed.
Potter nodded. On any embryo at all, he thought. The key’s the arginine flooding. I could duplicate that myself on the basis of Sven’s description. Gods! We could make billions of Durant embryos! And every one of them self-viable!
He took a deep breath, dismayed by the realization that—with the record tape erased—his memory might be the only container of that entire operation and its implications. Svengaard and the computer nurse could have only part of it. They hadn’t been in there, immersed in the heart of the cell.
A brilliant surgeon might deduce what had happened and be able to reproduce the operation from the partial records, but only if he were set the problem. Who would ever take up this problem? Not the Optimen. Not that dolt Svengaard.
The guide tugged at Potter’s arm.
Potter looked down into that flat, chill-eyed face with its lack of genetic identification.
“We are observed,” the guide said in an oddly depersonalized tone. “Listen to me very carefully. Your life depends on it.”
Potter shook his head, blinked. He felt removed from his own person, become only a set of senses to record this man’s words and actions.
“You will go through that door ahead of us,” the guide said.
Potter turned, looked at the door. Two men carrying paper-wrapped parcels emerged from the alley in front of it, hurried around the square opposite them. The guide ignored them. Potter heard a babble of young voices growing louder in the alley. The guide ignored these, too.
“Inside that building, you will take the first door on your left,” he said. “You will see a woman there operating a voicebox. You will say to her: ‘My shoe pinches.’ She will say: ‘Everyone has troubles.’ She will take care of you from there.”
Potter found his voice: “What if… she’s not there?”
“Then go through the door behind her desk and out through the adjoining office into a rear hall. Turn left and go to the rear of the building. You will find there a man in a loader supervisor’s uniform, striped gray and black. You will repeat the procedure with him.”
“What about you?” Potter asked.
That is not your concern. Quickly, now!” The guide gave him a push.
Potter stumbled toward the door just as a woman in a teacher’s uniform emerged from the alley leading a file of children between him and the bolt hole.
Potter’s, shocked senses took in the scene—children, all dressed in tight shorts that revealed their long flamingo legs. They were all around him suddenly and he was bulling his way through toward the door.
Behind him, someone screamed.
Potter lurched against the door, found the handle, looked back.
His guide had gone around to the opposite side of the fountain which concealed him now from the waist down, but what remained visible was enough to make Potter gasp and freeze. The man’s chest was bare revealing a single milky white dome from which blazed a searing light.