Collected Short Fiction, page 575
“Potter grew each crop of mules from a single mutant cell,” she began briskly. “He let it multiply in a sterile food-solution until he had as many billion germ cells as he wanted. Then he added a reagent to stop the fission, and start each cell developing into a mature mule . . . But you won’t be concerned with that.”
Numb with disappointment, Belfast turned with a careful show of expectation toward the building above the empty vats.
“Here’s where we’ll bring you the swimmers—the microscopic embryonic mules. Your job is to keep them alive. Though the grown mules are hardy enough, the swimmers are quite delicate. The last ones we made died in the tanks—killed, I think, by some blunder. With your skill, perhaps, we can grow them to maturity.”
Dane looked at her doubtfully. “I’m afraid those books didn’t say anything about growing swimmers.”
“I’ll bring you a memo on the process.” Her voice was intense, her blue eyes dark and grave; her loveliness caught him so painfully that he had to turn away.
“The first stages are critical,” she added. “The vat solutions must be kept uncontaminated, exactly balanced chemically, and irradiated with just the right intensity of light—since the swimmers live on light, even a few moments of darkness can kill them, by stopping photosynthesis. An exacting job, you see.” She looked at him keenly. “Can you do it?”
“I think so.” He tried desperately to mold his face into the stolid good humor of a lotus-eater. “I know I can!”
“Good.” She gave him a quick smile of confidence. “The larger swimmers aren’t quite so delicate. When they’re old enough to leave the sterile vats inside, they develop an instinct which guides them on through the growing tanks outside. There, they need only sunlight and a few days of time to become adults, ready to climb out and dry their swimming membranes and go to work for the company.”
Belfast mopped at the sweat on his face and studied the empty tanks again. Perhaps this elaborate process for the manufacture of intelligent slaves shouldn’t seem remarkable to a man who remembered nothing else, but he found it hard to hide his dazed amazement. He felt grateful for the interruption, when another jeep came splashing up behind them.
“It’s Vic Van Doon.” And the girl called gladly, “Hi, Vic!”
A muscular, sun-browned man in faded shorts and shapeless pith helmet came wading through the mud to shake hands with her and the panting financier.
“Nan! J.D.! Good to see you!” His voice was bluff and vigorous, and his broad face was smooth with oblivion. “I wanted to meet you at the plane,” he said, “but the jeep got stuck in a washout, up in the hills.”
“The mines?” Messenger asked. “Did you get them running?”
Momentarily grave, Van Doon shook his head. “I took the best mules I had up there, but they’re all too weak and old to do the work. And dying like flies.”
“We’ll soon have more.” Nan turned. “Vic, this is Don Fallon. Our newest lotus-eater. He’s to be in charge of the production section.”
“Hello, Fallon.” Van Doon caught his hand with a bone-cracking grip. “You’ll never be sorry you came. I’ve been with the company three years, and never a regret. That virus is a sure cure for trouble-makers.” He chuckled genially. “I believe I came to murder Mr. Potter and break the company—right, J.D.?”
“Right,” Messenger said. “Nearly did it, too.”
Belfast looked away from Van Doon’s smiling pride in that conversion, trying not to shiver. It made him sick to see how that virus had turned such a determined enemy of the company into this loyal slave, and for a moment his own plans seemed hopeless.
“No time to squander.” Messenger straightened impatiently. “Let’s get to work!”
DANE nodded, trying feebly to smile again. No matter how many before him had failed, his purpose was still undetected. Though he was disappointed to be shut out of the mutation lab, the products of it might tell him something about the process. And—in spite of Messenger’s taboo—he still hoped to find a way inside.
“I’ll bring you that memo, as soon as I can,” Nan told him. “But you might start looking over the plant right away. We ought to have the first batch of swimmers ready by morning. You’ll have to have everything sterile, and fresh solutions mixed.”
“Wait here, Fallon,” Van Doon added. “I’ll send your assistants out with the keys.” He turned to Messenger and the girl. “I’ve got the old Potter house ready for you. Nan, won’t you ride over with me?”
She let him help her out of the jeep. Belfast climbed hastily out on the other side, to-hide his flush of unwilling resentment. Let her go, he advised himself bitterly. She meant nothing to him except alien strangeness and shocking danger. The lotus-eater was welcome to her!
Left alone when the two jeeps lurched away, he walked stiffly out of the driving sun into the hot shade under the eaves of the production building. Waiting there, feeling the drops of sweat creeping like insects down his flanks and legs, he cautiously surveyed the mutation lab across the road.
The two riflemen returned his gaze suspiciously. He swung as casually as possible to examine the slope behind him, where those tiers of empty tanks dropped toward the river bottom. Searching for a back path to that fenced and guarded fortress, he paused abruptly when another riddle challenged him.
The jungle was alive with crocodiles and deadly insects and internal parasites and a hundred other shapes of death, but it had no warning glow of evil!
He frowned at the riddle of that lost danger-sense—or had it been a sense?
Nan Sanderson had been the common factor, it struck him, in all of those baffling experiences. She must have somehow caused those sensations. Had what he felt been her mutant mind, reaching out to read his thoughts and even to influence his actions?
He nodded uneasily. That would explain the absence of those feelings now—she had naturally relaxed her unknown faculties, when she thought the virus had made him her harmless tool. But when those sensations returned, they would mean she had decided to pick his mind again.
He shivered when he recognised her in the jeep, coming back with Messenger from the old Potter house. Her cheerful wave of greeting startled him unpleasantly. He managed to answer it stiffly, but he felt relieved when she drove on past him, into the fenced grounds of the mutation lab.
Four more lotus-eaters came up from the town in a rusty truck, with keys to the production section. Dane went in with his new assistants to explore the building. What he found was a long row of stainless steel vats, each larger than the next, all linked with a bewildering web of pipes and pumps and valves. Before he could finish inspecting the intricate auxiliary equipment of boilers and filters and floodlamps and thermostats and air-conditioning units, one of the men called him back to the door.
“Don?” A thin dread touched him when he heard Nan Sanderson’s voice, but he relaxed a little when he saw the folded papers in her hand. “The memo.” He took it silently.
“Follow it exactly,” she told him. “Remember, an error of one minute or one degree or one percent might be enough to kill the swimmers.”
Memo to Dr. Fallon, the first page was headed, in blue-black ink which had not yet darkened. The hand-printed characters staggered wearily, but they were stubbornly legible. In the first step, he read, the embryonic swimmers must be kept for eight minutes in ten liters of sterile water at 38 degrees Centigrade, under 96 foot-candles of filtered light. In step two—
Dane started, and then tried hard to stop the trembling of the pages in his fingers. For he had seen that same handprinting—neater and more vigorous, but still the same—in letters written long ago. For all that wavering weakness, the slanted bar at the top of the A and the curved oblique stroke across the / and the back-slanted tails of the g and the y made it unmistakable.
The writing was Charles Kendrew’s.
XI
NAN SANDERSON made him come with her down the descending row of vats. Pausing to show him how to operate each one, she let him study the instructions in that memo and then shot rapid questions to be sure he understood.
Dane followed her dazedly. His forced responses seemed painfully mechanical to him, but she appeared not to notice his disturbance. When they left the bottom vat, where the growing swimmers were expected to leap a low barrier to the tanks outside, she turned anxiously. “Think you can do it?”
Huskily, he said he thought he understood everything. He walked with her out to the jeep, and watched her drive back toward that squat building beyond the barbed wire, which had the look of a prison now.
Stumbling slowly back to begin his own task, he studied that unsteady hand-printing again. No, he couldn’t be mistaken—the writing was Kendrew’s. The implications staggered him.
The memo proved that Messenger’s eccentric plant breeder was actually Charles Kendrew—as his father had once suspected, before the financier somehow bribed or tricked him into forgetting the notion. Kendrew was the missing maker of the not-men, whom Gellian was hunting.
And he was still alive!
Messenger and Nan Sanderson must have lied about “Potter’s” illness and death, to discourage inquiries about him. That fresh ink and the words Memo to Fallon were sufficient evidence that the maker was not only still alive, but well and sane enough today to write these elaborate instructions for the care of his creations.
Alive—but the helpless prisoner, obviously, of the man who had been his friend and the inhuman creatures he had made. Somehow, Dane decided, they had compelled him to write this paper. Right now, no doubt, they were trying to make him create that mutant cell they needed so desperately.
Whatever the truth, the maker must be rescued. The present plight of his captors seemed to prove that they had not yet fully learned his arts. He must be set free before the not-men had extorted knowledge enough to make them forever invincible.
He went to work. All that breathless day and half the stifling night, he toiled with his crew to prepare the vats for those mutant cells. His mind was busier—turning over shadowy surmises and unsure conclusions, trying to imagine the maker’s present situation and to plan a rescue.
The production unit was air-conditioned—but not, he found, for human comfort. The sterile, humid, superheated atmosphere required by the growing mules was even more distressing than the fitful breath of the dying monsoon outside. By midnight, when at last the vats were ready to receive those strange seeds, he was limp and reeling with fatigue.
He picked one man from his cheerful crew to watch the instruments inside that steamy incubator, and posted another on guard inside the air-lock that kept out contaminated breezes. The others he sent back to their quarters in the river village.
“Stand by,” he told the guard. “I’m going to catch a nap in the stock-room. Call me if anything comes from the mutation lab.”
The dark stock-room, outside the airlock, seemed incredibly cool and dry and comfortable. Lying on a cot, he heard the truck depart. The blowers of the air system droned softly, and rain hissed ceaselessly on the sheet metal roof. Occasional faint strange cries came from some jungle bird, and he could hear the muted steady thudding of the diesel plant down by the town.
Those quiet sounds encouraged him. After a long half-hour of listening, he rolled silently off the cot, selected a pair of wire-cutting pliers from the tool-bins beside the door, and walked cautiously back into the dim hallway.
Silently, yet trying not to seem furtive, he let himself out of the building into the rain. Pouring straight down from a windless black sky, drumming on the metal roof, it fell with a surprising cold force that took his breath and made his teeth chatter for a moment.
LIGHTS on four tall steel masts flooded the fenced laboratory beyond the road, silhouetting the two motionless riflemen at the gate. He retreated from them quickly, into the long black shadow of the production building, which reached back to the straggling fringe of tall grass that edged the plateau.
That screened his path to a point on the other side of the clearing, where he was shielded from the guards by the low bulk of the mutation lab itself. He caught his breath there, and ran crouching out to the barbed wire.
For a moment, sprawled cautiously flat in the rain-beaten mud and reaching for the wire-cutters, he felt almost victorious. In his mind, he was already past the fence and the concrete walls ahead, inside the maker’s prison.
He could see no lights within that windowless building, but the jeep parked outside assured him that Nan Sanderson and Messenger were still there, and his hot imagination saw them busy wringing the secret of creation from the man they had betrayed.
Creeping forward to cut the wire, he weighed the heavy pliers thoughtfully. Not much of a weapon—but he hoped to come silently upon those two; he must learn all he could before he struck. Messenger was a feeble old man. Nan, for all her unknown gifts, was still a girl. With a reasonable run of luck—
Alarm struck him.
The shock of it came when he touched the barbed wire, so abrupt that he thought for an instant that he had been hit by high voltage current. He recoiled, gasping for breath. The taste of danger bit his tongue again, and the sweetish jungle smell of wet decay was drowned under bitter deadliness.
He lay still in the cold muck, too stunned to move. But the wires were not insulated to carry current: that shock had been something else. It had lighted a dark blaze of jeopardy all around the building ahead, and it had chilled the rain on his back with the icy finality of death.
Was it Nan Sanderson’s mind? He felt suddenly sure it was—and panic shook him. If he could feel the unknown power of her mutant brain, reaching out to guard the laboratory, she could doubtless sense his presence too. Once she found him here at the fence she wouldn’t need to read his thoughts to learn that he was no true lotus-eater. A word to those riflemen would send him back into oblivion, to stay.
As soon as he could move, he started crawling away. For he had failed—and thrown his life away for nothing, if this venture were discovered. Whatever the nature of that barrier, it was impregnable.
He knelt once in a shallow rain-torrent to wash most of the clinging mud from his hands and knees and shoes. And he hurried on again, hoping now to get back unseen to the stock-room. He had almost reached the production lab, running silently up the black shadow behind it, when that feel of menace challenged him again.
Pausing to listen, he heard a door slam. Feet splashed in the rain-puddles. A starter growled, and a motor coughed, and gears clashed. He swung to run for the jungle, but the cold touch of danger froze him where he stood. The sweeping headlamps found him.
He was grateful then for the warning that had restrained his impulse to run, for he couldn’t have reached any cover in time. The slightest false movement could destroy him now. He could only stride on toward the blinding lights, trying not to scowl too painfully, striving to recover his thin mask of forgetfulness.
“Well, Fallon.” The loud voice of Van Doon halted him. “Where’ve you been?”
“Walking.” He tried to shrug. “Just up the road.”
“Weren’t you trying to spy on the mutation lab?”
“What makes you think that?” He let resentment tinge his tone. “Mr. Messenger told me it’s taboo.”
“Sorry, Fallon.” A surprising mildness softened that bleak voice. “You see, I woke up half an hour ago, feeling that something was wrong. When I called from town, the men found you gone. I was naturally upset, don’t you see?”
Squinting against the headlamps, Dane quivered to a stab of suspicion. Real lotus-eaters were unlikely to be awakened by worry, it occurred to him.
And this sudden conciliatory calm was overdone—as if Van Doon were another pretender, reminding himself to act like a slave of the virus. Too serenely, he was asking now:
“Do you know the reason for that taboo?”
“To protect the secret of mutation—”
“To save our lives,” Van Doon said softly. “That fenced area has been infected, you see, with a hundred kinds of deadly mutant organisms. Mr. Potter immunized Miss Sanderson and Mr. Messenger against them, but no intruder could get back outside that fence alive. Do you see why I was so upset about you?”
That was probably a lie, Dane thought, invented to keep people away from the mutation lab.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll stay away.”
The jeep lurched away at last, and Dane stumbled heavily back into the production lab. He was chilled, and his knees felt weak, and failure lay heavy on him. Mutant or not, Van Doon was unlikely to let him make another attempt to reach the mutation lab. The maker seemed as remote from him as a man already dead.
XII
HE WAS waiting at the door next morning when Nan Sanderson and Messenger came across from the mutation lab, where they must have been all night.
“Ready, Don?” Nan waded through pools of yellow water, gingerly carrying a vacuum bottle. Fatigue had hollowed her cheeks, but her eyes had a burning expectation.
“We’re ready,” Dane nodded.
She put on a surgical mask and sterile gloves and boots and gown, and came with him through the air-lock into the main room. Frowning against the painful bluish glare of the germicidal lamps, she carefully opened the vacuum bottle to remove a stoppered, gauze-wrapped test tube.
“The next crop of mules.” She handed Dane the test tube, half full of a greenish liquid. “Steady. You’re holding the company’s future—and your own.”
He poured the liquid carefully into the solution ready in the first vat, and methodically set down the time and temperature. She stood watching silently, her eyes dark and anxious above the white mask.
The first eight minutes passed slowly. He opened a valve and started a pump to lift the solution into the larger second vat. Watching his deliberate care, the girl smiled approvingly. “Take good care of the mules!”
“I will,” he promised.
Letting the girl out through the airlock, he found himself trembling. She had left the future of Cadmus in his hands. The act of sabotage would be quite simple. He could kill the young swimmers by simply turning off a light for two or three minutes.
