“Mutagen desensitizer!” Potter repeated.
“Dosage?” Svengaard asked.
“Half minim on fractional-minim feed. I’ll control it from here.”
Svengaard shifted the feeder keys, his eyes on the Krebs-cycle repeater. He’d never heard of applying such drastic treatment this close to the borderline. Mutagens usually were reserved for the partly-flawed Sterrie embryo, a move that sometimes produced dramatic results. It was like shaking a bucket of sand to level the grains. Sometimes the germ plasm presented with a mutagen sought a better level on its own. They’d even produced an occasional viable this way… but never an Optiman.
Potter reduced amplification, studied the flow of movement in the embryo. Gently, he depressed the feeder key, searched for Optiman signs. The cellular action remained unsteady, partly blurred.
“Krebs cycle twenty-two eight,” the computer nurse said.
Climbing a bit, Potter thought.
“Very slow,” Svengaard said.
Potter maintained his vigil within the morula. It was growing, expanding in fits and starts, fighting with all the enormous power contracted in its tiny domain.
“Krebs cycle thirty point four,” Svengaard said.
“I am withdrawing mutagens,” Potter said. He backed off the microscope to a peripheral cell, desensitized the nucleoproteins, searched for the flawed configurations.
The cell was clean.
Potter traced down into the coiled-coil helices of the DNA chains with a dawning wonder.
“Krebs cycle thirty-six eight and climbing,” Svengaard said. “Shall I start the choline and aneurin?”
Potter spoke automatically, his attention fixed on the cell’s gene structure. “Yes, start them.” He completed the scope tracing, shifted to another peripheral cell.
Identical.
Another cell—the same.
The altered gene pattern held true, but it was a pattern, Porter realized, which hadn’t been seen in humankind since the second century of gene shaping. He thought of calling for a comparison to be sure. The computer would have it, of course. No record was ever lost or thrown away. But he dared not… there was too much at stake in this. He knew he didn’t need the comparison, though. This was a classic form, a classroom norm which he had stared at almost daily all through his medical education.
The super-genius pattern that had caused Sven to call in a Central specialist was there, firmed up by the cutting-room adjustments. It was close-coupled, though, with a fully stable fertility pattern. The longevity basics lay locked in the configurations of the gene structure.
If this embryo reached maturity and encountered a fertile mate, it could breed healthy, living children without the interference of the gene surgeon. It needed no enzyme prescription to survive. It would outlive ten standard humans without that prescription… and with a few delicate enzymic adjustments might join the ranks of the immortals.
The Durant embryo could father a new race—like the live-forevers of Central, but dramatically unlike them. This embryo’s progeny might fit themselves into the rhythms of natural selectivity… completely outside Optiman control.
It was the template pattern from which no human could deviate too far and live, yet it was the single thing feared most by Central.
Every gene surgeon had this drummed into him during his education, “Natural selectivity is a madness that sends its human victims groping blindly through empty lives.”
Optiman reason and Optiman logic must do the selecting.
As though he straddled Time, Potter felt the profound certainty that the Durant embryo, if it matured, would encounter a fertile mate. This embryo had received a gift from outside—a wealth of sperm-arginine, the key to its fertility pattern. In the flood of mutagen which opened the active centers of the DNA, this embryo’s gene patterns had shaken down into a stable form no human dared attempt.
Why did I introduce the mutagens just then? Potter wondered. I knew it was the needed thing. How did I know? Was I an instrument of some other force?
“Krebs cycle fifty-eight and climbing steadily,” Svengaard said.
Potter longed for the freedom to discuss this problem with Svengaard… but there were the damnable parents and the Security people… watching. Was it possible anyone else had seen enough and knew enough of this pattern to realize what had happened here? he wondered.
Why did I introduce the mutagens?
“Can you see the pattern yet?” Svengaard asked.
“Not yet,” Potter lied.
The embryo was growing rapidly now. Potter studied the proliferation of stable cells. It was beautiful.
“Krebs cycle sixty-four seven,” Svengaard said.
I’ve waited too long, Potter thought. The bigdomes of Central will ask why I waited so long to kill this embryo. I cannot kill it! It’s too beautiful.
Central maintained its power by keeping the world at large in ignorance of the ruling fist, by doling out living time in the form of precious enzyme prescriptions to its half-alive slaves.
The Folk had a saying: “In this world there are two worlds—one that works not and lives forever; one that lives not and works forever.”
Here in a crystal vat lay a tiny ball of cells, a living creature less than six-tenths of a millimeter in diameter, and it carried the full potential of living out its life beyond Central’s control.
This morula had to die.
They’ll order it killed, Potter thought. And I will be suspect… finished. And if this thing did get loose in the world, what then? What would happen to gene surgery? Would we go back to correcting minor defects… the way it was before we started shaping supermen?
Supermen!
In his mind, he did what no voice could do: he cursed the Optimen. They were enormous power, instant life or death. Many were geniuses. But they were as dependent on the enzymic fractions as any clod of the Sterries or Breeders. There were men as brilliant among the Sterries and Breeders… and among the surgeons.
But none of these could live forever, secure in that ultimate, brutal power.
“Krebs cycle one hundred even,” Svengaard said.
“We’re over the top now,” Potter said. He risked a glance at the computer nurse, but she had her back to him, fussing with her board. Without that computer record, it might be possible to conceal what had happened here. With that record open to examination by Security and by the Optimen, it could not be hidden. Svengaard had not seen enough. The forehead lens only approximated the full field vision. The vat nurses couldn’t even guess at it. Only the computer nurse with her tiny monitor screen might know… and the full record lay in her machine now—a pattern of magnetic waves on strips of tape.
“That’s the lowest I’ve ever seen it go without killing the embryo,” Svengaard said.
“How low?” Potter asked.
“Twenty-one nine,” Svengaard said. “Twenty’s bottom, of course, but I’ve never heard of an embryo coming back from below twenty-five before, have you, Doctor?”
“No,” Potter said.
“Is it the pattern we want?” Svengaard asked.
“I don’t want to interfere too much yet,” Potter said.