Potter turned left, saw a line of men emerging from another alley to be crisped and burned down by that searing light. The children were shouting, crying, falling back into the alley from which they had emerged, but Potter ignored them, fascinated by this slaughter-machine which he’d thought was a human being.
One of the guide’s arms lifted, pointed overhead. From the extended fingers, lancets of searing blue stabbed upward. Where the light terminated, aircars tumbled from the sky. The air all around had become an ozone-crackling inferno punctuated by explosions, screams, hoarse shouts.
Potter stood there watching, unable to move, forgetful of his instructions or the door or his hand upon the door’s handle.
Return fire was coming now at the guide. His clothing shriveled, vanished in smoke to reveal an armored body with muscles that had to be plasmeld fibers. The ravening beams continued to blaze from his hands and chest.
Potter found he no longer could bear to watch. He wrenched the door open, stumbled through into the relative gloom of a yellow-walled foyer. He slammed the door behind him as an explosion rocked the building. The door rattled behind him.
On his left, a door was flung open. A tiny blue-eyed blonde woman stood there staring at him. Potter found himself oddly recognizing the markers of her genetic cut, reassured by the touch of humanity in these tiny betrayals. He could see the cabinet of a voicebox in the room behind her.
“My shoe pinches,” Potter said.
She gulped. “Everyone has troubles.”
“I am Dr. Potter,” he said. “I think my escort has just been killed.”
She stepped aside, said, “In here.”
Potter lurched past her into an office with lines of empty desks. His mind was a turmoil. He felt shaken to his roots by the implications of the violence he had just witnessed.
The woman took his arm, herded him toward another door. “Through here,” she said. “We’ll have to go into the service tubes. That’s the only way. They’ll have this place surrounded in minutes.”
Potter stopped, figuratively dug in his heels. He hadn’t counted on violence. He didn’t know what he had expected, but not that.
“Where’re we going?” he demanded. “Why do you want me?”
“Don’t you know?” she asked.
“He… never said.”
“Everything’ll be explained,” she said. “Hurry.”
“I don’t move a millimeter until you tell me,” he said.
A raw street oath escaped her lips. She said, “If I must I must. You’re to implant the Durant embryo in its mother. It’s the only way we can get it out of here.”
“In the mother?”
“In the ancient way,” she said. “I know it’s disgusting, but it’s the only way. Now, hurry!”
Potter allowed himself to be herded through the door.
11.
In the control center, their red Survey Globe, the Tuyere occupied the thrones on the pivoting triangle, reviewing data and reviewing data—correlating, deducing, commanding. The 120-degree scan of curved wall available to each of them flashed with data in numerous modes—pictorially in the spying screens, as probability function in mathematical read-outs, as depth-module decision analogues, as superior/inferior unit apportionments pictured in free-flowing pyramids, as visual reports reduced to cubed grids of binaries according to relative values, as motivational curves weighted for action/reaction and presented in flowing green lines…
In the upper quadrants, scanner eyes glittered to show how many of the Optimen were sitting in on the globe’s activity—over a thousand this morning.
Calapine worried the prescription ring on her left thumb, felt the abortive hum of power in it as she twisted and slid it along her skin. She was restless, full of demands for which she could find no names. The duties of the globe were becoming repellent, her companions hateful. In here, time settled into more of a continuous blur without days or nights. Every companion she had ever known grew to be the same companion, merged, endlessly merged.
“Once more have I studied the protein synthesis tape on the Durant embryo,” Nourse said. He glanced at Calapine in the reflector beside his head, drummed the arm of his throne with fingers that moved back and forth, back and forth on the carved plasmeld.
“Something we’ve missed, something we’ve missed,” Calapine mocked. She looked at Schruille, caught him rubbing his hands along his robe at his thighs, a motion that seemed filled with stark betrayal of nervousness.
“Now it happens I’ve discovered the thing we missed,” Nourse said.
A movement of Schruille’s head caught Nourse’s attention. He turned. For a moment, they stared at each other in the prisms. Nourse found it interesting that Schruille betrayed a tiny skin blemish beside his nose.
Odd, Nourse thought. How could one of us have a blemish such as that? Surely there could be no enzymic imbalance.
“Well, what is it?” Schruille demanded.
“You’ve a blemish beside your nose,” Nourse said.
Schruille stared at him.
“You deduce this from the embryo’s tape?” Calapine asked.
“Eh? Oh… no, of course not.”
“Then what is it you’ve discovered?”
“Yes. Well… it seems rather obvious now that the operation Potter performed may be repeatable—given that general type of embryo and proper administration of sperm protamine.”
Schruille shuddered.
“Have you deduced the course of the operation?” Calapine asked.
“Not precisely, but in outline, yes.”
“Potter could repeat it?” she asked.
“Perhaps even Svengaard.”
“Guard and preserve us,” Calapine muttered. It was a ritual formula whose words seldom caught an Optiman’s conscious attention, but she heard herself this time and the word “preserve” stood out as though outlined in fire.
She whirled away.
“Where is Max?” Schruille asked.
The whine in Schruille’s voice brought a sneer to Nourse’s lips.
“Max is working,” Nourse said. “He is busy.”
Schruille looked up at the watching scanners, thinking of all their fellows behind those lensed eyes—the Actionists seeing events as a new demand upon their talents, not realizing what violence might be unleashed here; the Emotionals, fearful and complaining, rendered almost ineffective by guilt feelings; the Cynics, interested by the new game (most of the watchers, Schruille felt, were Cynics); the Hedonists, angered by the current sense of urgent emergency, worried because such matters interfered with their enjoyments; and the Effetes, looking in all this for something new at which to sneer.
Will we now develop a new party? Schruille asked himself. Will we now have the Brutals, all sensitivity immured by the needs of self-preservation? Nourse and Calapine haven’t faced this as yet.
Again, he shuddered.
“Max calls,” Calapine said. “I have him in my transient screen.”
Schruille and Nourse flicked their channel duplicators, looked down at Allgood’s swarthy, solid, muscular figure in the transient screen.
“I report,” Allgood said.
Calapine watched the Security chiefs face. He appeared oddly distracted, fearful.
“What of Potter?” Nourse asked.
Allgood blinked.
“Why does he delay his answer?” Schruille asked.
“It’s because he worships us,” Calapine said.
“Worship is a product of fear,” Schruille said. “Perhaps there’s something he wishes to show us, a projection or an evidential sub-datum. Is that it, Max?”