“Well, sure. I mean, I realize you must have all kinds of work to offer us … but that’s not what I’m driving at. I want to know what the hell supports this community.”
The three Precipicians smiled at one another. Mayor Dellinger said, “Shall I tell them?”
“Sure, it’s a job for the mayor,” Compton answered.
“Okay.” She turned to face Kate and Sandy. “We run an operation with no capital, no shareholders and scarcely any plant. Yet we receive a donated income fifteen times as large as our collective avoidance grants.”
“What?”
“That’s right.” Her tone was sober. “We provide a service which some people—some very rich people indeed—have found so precious that they’ve done things like covenant to pay us a tithe of their salary for life. Once we were left the income on an estate of sixty million, and though the family tried like hell to overturn the will in the courts … I believe you just recognized us, didn’t you?”
Shaking, fists clenched, mouth so dry he was almost unable to shape the proper words, Sandy blurted out his guess.
“There’s only one thing you could be. But— Oh, my God. Are you really Hearing Aid?”
CROSS TALK
“After which I immediately wanted to ask how they managed to keep that incredible promise of theirs, but—”
“Wait, wait!” Freeman was half out of his chair, peering closely at his data console as though shortening the range could alter what the instrument display was reporting.
“Is something wrong?”
“I … No, nothing’s wrong. I merely observed a rather remarkable event.” Freeman sank back in his chair, and with an air of guilt produced a handkerchief to mop his face. All of a sudden sweat had burst out in rivers on his forehead.
There was a brief silence. Then:
“Damn, you’re right. This is the first time you ever transferred me from regressed to present mode and I didn’t have to be steered back to the same subject. Ve-ery interesting! Don’t bother telling me this indicates how deeply I was affected; I know, and I still am. What I learned from that first conversation at Precipice left me with a weird tip-of-the-tongue sensation, as though I’d realized the people there had the answer to some desperately urgent problem, only I couldn’t work out what problem the answer belonged with. … Incidentally, please tell me something. I think I deserve it. After all, I can’t prevent you from making me tell you everything, can I?”
Freeman’s face was glistening as though he were being roasted on a spit before an immensely hot fire. He mopped away more perspiration before he replied.
“Go ahead and ask.”
“If it had become known that I’d called Hearing Aid and talked for an hour about Miranda and myself and Tarnover … would I have been expelled via an operating theater?”
Freeman hesitated, folding and refolding his handkerchief prior to returning it to his pocket. At long last he did so, and with reluctance spoke.
“Yes. With an IQ of 85 if you were lucky.”
As calmly as before: “What about Hearing Aid?”
“Nothing would have been done to them.” The admission was almost inaudible. “You must know why.”
“Oh, sure. Sorry—I admit I only asked to see you squirm with embarrassment. But there’s such a David-and-Goliath pattern about Precipice versus the U.S. government. Want me to continue?”
“Do you feel up to it?”
“I think so. Whether or not Precipice will work for everybody, it worked for me. And it’s high time I faced the reason why my stay there ended in a disaster, when if I hadn’t been a fool it need have been no worse than a minor setback.”
THE MESH OF A RIDDLE
“This is the most incredible place. I never dreamed—”
Walking uphill on the aptly named Drunkard’s Walk, Kate interrupted him.
“Sandy, that dog. Natty Bumppo.”
“He gave you quite a fright, didn’t he? I’m sorry.”
“No!”
“But you—”
“I know, I know. I was startled. But I wasn’t scared. I simply didn’t believe it. I thought none of Dad’s dogs was left.”
“What?” He almost stumbled, turning to stare at her. “What on earth could he have to do with your father?”
“Well, I never heard of anybody else who did such marvelous things with animals. Bagheera was one of Dad’s too, you know. Almost the last.”
He drew a deep breath. “Kate dear, would you please begin at the beginning?”
Eyes troubled and full of sadness, she said, “I guess I ought to. I remember asking if you knew about my father, and you said sure, he was Henry Lilleberg the neurophysiologist, and I left it at that. But it was a prime example of what you said only an hour ago Precipice is designed to cure. Slap a label on and forget about it. Say ‘neurophysiologist’ and you conjure up a stock picture of the sort of person who will dissect out a nervous system, analyze it in vitro, publish the findings and go away content, forgetting that the rest of the animal ever existed. That isn’t a definition of my father! When I was a little girl he used to bring me amazing pets, which never lasted long because they were already old. But they’d been of service at his labs, and as a result he couldn’t bear to throw them down the incinerator chute. He used to say he owed them a bit of fun because he’d cheated them of it when they were young.”
“What kind of animals?”
“Oh, little ones at first, when I was five or six—rats, hamsters, gerbils. Later on there were squirrels and gophers, cats and raccoons. Remember I mentioned he had a license to move protected species interstate? And finally, in the last couple of years before he was taken so ill he had to retire, he was working with some real big ones: dogs like Natty Bumppo and mountain lions like Bagheera.”
“Did he do any research with aquatic mammals—dolphins, porpoises?”
“I don’t believe so. At any rate he couldn’t have brought those home for me.” A touch of her normal wry humor returned with the words. “We lived in an apt. We didn’t have a pool to keep them in. Why do you ask?”
“I was wondering whether he might have been involved with—hell, I don’t know which of several names you might recognize. They kept changing designations as they ran into one dead end after another. But it was a project based in Georgia intended to device animals capable of defeating an invasion. Originally they thought of small creatures as disease-vectors and saboteurs, like they conditioned rats to gnaw compulsively on tire rubber and electrical insulation. Later there was all this hot air generated about surrogate armies, with animals substituted for infantry. Wars would still be fought, with lots of blood and noise, but no soldiers would be killed—not permanently.”
“I knew the project under the name of Parsimony. But Dad never worked on it. They kept asking him to join, and he kept declining because they’d never tell him all the details of what he’d have to do. It wasn’t until he’d contracted his terminal myelitis that he was able to find out how right he’d been.”
“The project was discontinued, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, and I know why. They’d been living off Dad’s back for years. He was the only man in the country, maybe the world, who was consistently successful in making superintelligent animals breed true.”
“Literally the only one?”
“Oh, even he scarcely believed it. He published his data and always swore he wasn’t holding anything back, but other researchers found they couldn’t get the same results. In the end it became a joke for him. He used to say, ‘I just have red fingers.’ ”
“I see. Like a gardener has green ones.”
“Exactly.”
“What were his methods?” The question was more rhetorical than literal. But she answered anyway.