“Well then,” Glisson said, “the sooner you can turn things over to us, the sooner things will settle down into -”
“To you?” Calapine asked scornfully. She looked out into the quick contrasts of the hall’s glaring light. How black and white it all was. “I’d sooner condemn us all,” she said.
“But you’re dying!”
“So are you,” Calapine said.
Svengaard swallowed. He could see that the old animosities would not be suppressed easily. And he wondered at himself, a second-rater surgeon who had suddenly found himself as a doctor, ministering to people who needed him. Durant had seen that—the need to be needed.
“I may have a plan we could accept, Calapine,” Svengaard said.
“To you we will listen,” Calapine said, and there was affection in her voice. She studied Svengaard as he searched for words, remembering that this man had saved the lives of Nourse and many others.
We made no plans for the unthinkable, she thought. Is it possible that this nobody who was once a target for kindly sneers can save us? She dared not let herself hope.
“The Cyborgs have techniques for bringing the emotions into a more or less manageable stasis,” Svengaard said. “Once that’s done, I believe I know a way to dampen the enzymic oscillations in most of you.”
Calapine swallowed. The scanner-eye lights above her began to flash as the watchers signaled for her to let them into the communications channels. They had questions, of course. She had questions of her own, but she didn’t know that she could speak them. She caught a reflection of her own face in one of the prisms, was reminded of the look in Lizbeth’s eyes as the woman had pleaded from the tumbril.
“I can’t promise infinite life,” Svengaard said, “but I believe many of you can have many more thousands of years.”
“Why should we agree to help them?” Glisson demanded. There was a measuring quality in his voice, a hint of the querulous.
“You’re failures, too!” Svengaard said. “Can’t you see that?” He realized he had shouted with the full power of his disillusionment.
“Don’t shout at me!” Glisson snapped.
So they do have emotions, Svengaard thought. Pride… anger…
“Are you still suffering under the delusion that you’re in control of this situation?” Svengaard asked. He pointed to Calapine. “That one woman up there could still exterminate every non-Optiman on earth.”
“Listen to him, you Cyborg fool,” Calapine said.
“Let’s not be too free with that word ‘fool’,” Svengaard said. He stared up at Calapine.
“Watch your tongue, Svengaard,” Calapine said. “Our patience is not infinite.”
“Nor is your gratitude, eh?” Svengaard said.
A bitter smile touched her mouth. “We were talking about survival,” she said.
Svengaard sighed. He wondered then if the patterns of thought conditioned by the illusion of infinite life could ever be truly broken. She had spoken there like the old Tuyere. But her resiliency had surprised him before.
The outburst had touched Harvey’s fears for Lizbeth. He glared at Svengaard and Glisson, tried to control his terror and rage. This hall awed him with its immensity and its remembered bedlam. The globe towered over him, a monstrous force that could crush them.
“Survival, then,” Svengaard said.
“Let us understand each other,” Calapine said. “There are those among us who will say that your help was merely our due. You are still our captives. There are those who’ll demand you submit and reveal your entire Underground to us.”
“Yes, let us understand each other,” Svengaard said. “Who are your prisoners? Myself, a person who was not a member of the Underground and knows little about it. You have Glisson, who knows more, but assuredly not all. You have Boumour, one of your escaped pharmacists, who knows even less than Glisson. You have the Durants, whose knowledge probably goes little beyond their own cell group. What will you gain even if you milk us dry?”
“Your plan to save us,” Calapine said.
“My plan requires co-operation, not coercion,” Svengaard said.
“And it will only give us a continuation, not restore us to our original condition, is that it?” Calapine asked.
“You should welcome that,” Svengaard said. “It would give you a chance to mature, become useful.” He waved a hand to indicate their surroundings. “You’ve frozen yourselves in immaturity here! You’ve played with toys! I’m offering you a chance to live!”
Is that it? Calapine wondered. Is this new aliveness a by-product of the knowledge that we must die?
“I’m not at all sure we’ll co-operate,” Glisson said.
Harvey had had enough. He leaped to his feet, glared at Glisson. “You want the human race to die, you robot! You! You’re another dead end!”
“Prattle!” Glisson said.
“Listen,” Calapine said. She began sampling the communications channels. Bits of sentences poured out into the halclass="underline"
“We can restore enzymic balance with our own resources!"… “Eliminate these creatures!"… “What’s his plan? What’s his plan?"… “Begin the sterilization!"… “… his plan?"… “How long do we have if…"… “There’s no doubt we can…”
Calapine silenced the voices with a flick of a switch. “It will be put to a vote,” she said. “I remind you of that.”
“You will die, and soon, if we don’t co-operate,” Glisson said. “I want that fully understood.”
“You know Svengaard’s plan?” Calapine asked.
“His thought patterns are transparent,” Glisson said.
“I think not,” Calapine said. “I saw him work on Nourse. He manipulated a dispensary to produce a dangerous overdose of aneurin and inostol. Remembering that, I ask myself how many of us will die in the attempt to arrest this process we can all feel within ourselves? Would I have risked such an overdose upon myself? How does this relate to the excitement we feel? Will any of us, having tasted excitement, wish to sink back into a non-emotional… boredom?” She looked at Svengaard. “These are some of my questions.”
“I know his plan,” Glisson sneered. “Quell your emotions and implant an enzymic dispensary within each of you. Make Cyborgs of you.” A tight grin etched a line of teeth in Glisson’s face. “It’s your only hope. Accepting it, you will have lost to us at last.”
Calapine glared down at him, shocked.
Harvey was caught by the carping meanness in Glisson’s voice. His own schism from the Underground had always known the Cyborgs were too calculating and narrow-minded to be trusted with purely human decisions, but he had never before seen the fact so clearly demonstrated.
“Is that your plan, Svengaard?” Calapine demanded.
Harvey jumped up. “No! That’s not his plan!”
Svengaard nodded to himself. Of course! A fellow human, and a father would know.
“You pretend to know what I, a Cyborg, do not know?” Glisson asked.
Svengaard looked at Harvey with raised eyebrows.
“Embryos,” Harvey said.
Svengaard nodded, looked up at Calapine. “I propose to keep you continually implanted with living embryos,” he said. “Living monitors that will make you adjust to your own needs. You will regain your emotions, your… zest for life, this excitement you prize.”
“You propose to make of us living vats for embryos?” Calapine asked, wonder in her voice.
“The gestation process can be delayed for hundreds of years,” Svengaard said. “With proper hormone adjustment, this can be applied even to men. Caesarian delivery, of course, but it need not be painful… or frequent.”