“This is our latest project,” she said. “I’m not quite sure how it stands now, since as you all know I’ve been away from the laboratory since January. You see here an effort to synthesize a mammalian embryo. We have several embryos in various stages of development. If you’ll come closer…”
I looked and saw a number of fishlike things coiled within small membrane-bounded cells. My stomach tightened in nervous response to the sight of these big-headed little creatures, born from a mess of amino acids, ripening toward who knew what kind of maturity. Even Vornan looked impressed.
Lloyd Kolff grunted something in a language I did not understand: three or four words, thick, harsh, guttural. His voice carried an undertone of anguish. I looked toward him and saw him standing rigid, one arm brought up at an acute angle across his chest, the other pointing straight out from his side. He seemed to be performing some extremely complex ballet step and had become frozen in mid-pirouette. His face was deep blue, the color of Ming porcelain; his red-rimmed eyes were wide and frightful. He stood that way a long moment. Then he made a little chittering noise in the back of his throat and pitched forward onto the stone top of a laboratory table. He clutched convulsively; flasks and burners went sliding and crashing to the floor. His thick hands seized the rim of a small tank and pulled it over, spilling a dozen sleek little synthetic coelenterates. They flapped and quivered at our feet. Lloyd sagged slowly, losing his grip on the table and toppling in several stages, landing flat on his back. His eyes were still open. He uttered one sentence, with marvelously distinct diction: Lloyd Kolff’s valedictory to the world. It was in some ancient language, perhaps. None of us could identify it afterward or repeat even a syllable. Then he died.
“Life support!” Aster yelled. “Hurry!”
Two laboratory assistants came scuttling up almost at once with a life-support rig. Kralick, meanwhile, had dropped beside Kolff and was trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Aster got him away, and crouching efficiently beside Kolff’s bulky, motionless form, ripped open his clothing to reveal the deep chest matted with gray hair. She gestured and one of her assistants handed her a pair of electrodes. She put them in place and gave Kolff’s heart a jolt. The other assistant was already uncapping a hypodermic and pushing it against Kolff’s arm. We heard the whirr of the ultrasonic snout while it rose through the frequencies to the functional level. Kolff’s big body shivered as the hormones and the electricity hit it simultaneously; his right hand rose a few inches, fist clenched, and dropped back again. “Galvanic response,” Aster muttered. “Nothing more.”
But she didn’t give up. The life-support rig had a full complement of emergency devices, and she put them all into use. A chest compressor carried on artificial respiration; she injected refrigerants into his bloodstream to prevent brain decay; the electrodes rhythmically assaulted the valves of his heart. Kolff was nearly concealed by the assortment of first-aid equipment covering him.
Vornan knelt and peered intently into Kolff’s staring eyes. He observed the slackness of the features. He put a tentative hand forth to touch Kolff’s mottled cheek. He noted the mechanisms that pumped and squeezed and throbbed on top of the fallen man. Then he rose and said quietly to me, “What are they trying to do to him, please?”
“Bring him back to life.”
“This is death, then?”
“Death, yes.”
“What happened to him?”
“His heart stopped working, Vornan. Do you know what the heart is?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Kolff’s heart was tired. It stopped. Aster’s trying to start it again. She won’t succeed.”
“Does this happen often, this thing of death?”
“Once at least in everybody’s lifetime,” I said bitterly. A doctor had been summoned now. He pulled more apparatus from the life-support rig and began making an incision in Kolff’s chest. I said to Vornan, “How does death come in your time?”
“Never suddenly. Never like this. I know very little about it.”
He seemed more fascinated with the presence of death even than he had been with the creation of life in this same room. The doctor toiled; but Kolff did not respond, and the rest of us stood in a ring like statues. Only Aster moved, picking up the creatures that Kolff in his last convulsion had spilled. Some of them too were dead, a few from exposure to air, the others from being crushed by heedless feet. But some survived. She put them back in a tank.
At length the doctor rose, shaking his head.
I looked at Kralick. He was weeping.
FIFTEEN
Kolff was buried in New York with high academic honors. Out of respect we halted our tour for a few days. Vornan attended the funeral; he was vastly curious about our customs of interment. His presence at the ceremony nearly caused a crisis, for the gowned academics pressed close to get a glimpse of him, and at one point I thought the coffin itself would be overturned in the confusion. Three books went into Kolff’s grave with him. Two were works of his own; the third was the Hebrew translation of The New Revelation. I was enraged by that, but Kralick told me it had been Kolff’s own idea. Three or four days before the end he had given Helen McIlwain a sealed tape that turned out to contain burial instructions.
After the period of mourning we headed west again to continue Vornan’s tour. It was surprising how fast the death of Kolff ceased to matter to us; we were five now instead of six, but the shock of his collapse dwindled and shortly we were back to routine. As the season warmed, though, certain quiet changes in mood became apparent. Distribution of The New Revelation seemed complete, since virtually everyone in the country had a copy, and the crowds that attended Vornan’s movements were larger every day. Subsidiary prophets were springing up, interpreters of Vornan’s message to humanity. The focus for much of this activity was in California, as usual, and Kralick took good care to keep Vornan out of that state. He was perturbed by this gathering cult, as was I, as were all of us. Vornan alone seemed to enjoy the presence of his flock. Even he sometimes seemed a bit apprehensive, as when he landed at an airport to find a sea of red-covered volumes gleaming in the sunlight. At least it was my impression that the really huge mobs made him ill at ease; but most of the time he seemed to revel in the attention he gained. One California newspaper had suggested quite seriously that Vornan be nominated to run for the Senate in the next election. I found Kralick gagging over the facsim of that one when it came in. “If Vornan ever sees this,” he said, “we could be in a mess.”
There was to be no Senator Vornan, luckily. In a calmer moment we persuaded ourselves that he could not meet the residence requirements; and, too, we doubted that the courts would accept a member of the Centrality as a citizen of the United States, unless Vornan had some way of demonstrating the Centrality to be the legally constituted successor-in-fact to the sovereignty of the United States.
The schedule called for Vornan to be taken to the Moon at the end of May to see the recently developed resort there. I begged off from this; I had no real wish to visit the pleasure palaces of Copernicus, and it seemed to me that I could use the extra time to get my personal affairs in order at Irvine as the semester ended. Kralick wanted me to go, especially since I had already had one leave of absence; but he had no practical way of compelling me, and in the end he let me have another leave. A committee of four could manage Vornan as well as a committee of five, he decided.