Collected short fiction, p.576
Collected Short Fiction, page 576
Yet that was impossible.
He had accomplished too little. And any attempt at sabotage would destroy his chance to reach the maker or to learn the aims and numbers of the mutants. He saw instantly that he must do his best to grow the mules.
He spent all day sweltering inside that humid incubator, faithfully reading dials and keeping records and turning valves to move the greenish spawn from each vat to the next, on schedule. The others on his crew were at work outside, filling the outdoor tanks.
Late that afternoon, while he was pumping the still-invisible swimmers into the last indoor vat, he heard a knock at the sealed glass door at the rear of the building, and turned to see Nan Sanderson and Messenger outside. Touching his mask, he shook his head and signaled for them to come around to the air-lock.
The girl beckoned him closer.
“You can let us in,” she called through the heavy glass. “No contamination should hurt the swimmers now. They’re ready for the tanks outside, and those aren’t sterile, anyway.”
Grasping for the patient obedience of a lotus-eater, he unsealed the door. Rest had erased the girl’s fatigue, and the financier seemed himself again, carrying his flabby bulk with that old, surprising poise.
He asked anxiously, “How are they growing, Fallon?”
“I’ve followed that memo,” Dane said. “That’s all I know.”
Bending laboriously to study the pale green solution beneath the blazing lamps, Messenger nodded with a massive approval.
“The color’s all right.” He gestured at a low-power microscope on a little bench beside the vat. “Let’s see a sample.”
Dane dipped a little of the solution into a Petri dish, and placed it below the lenses. The mutant creatures were instantly visible: tiny graceful fish-like shapes, swimming with swift undulations of those filmy membranes which would be modified into wing-like organs for photosynthesis in the grown mules. Fascinated, he kept looking until Messenger nudged him anxiously.
“Good!” the fat man whispered. “Potter’s were just like that.”
He gave his place to Nan, who smiled with such eagerness that Dane almost shared her joy. “They seem sound,” she agreed. “They ought to be leaping soon.”
THE SWIMMERS had now come to the stage when their own instincts should begin to drive them on from each vessel to the next. Dane unsealed the slit that would let them leap into the tank outside, while the girl was counting the individuals in the sample.
Messenger glanced at the figures she was setting down.
“Eighty-nine?” Triumph lit his yellow face. “The way Potter used to figure, that means nearly five billion in the batch! Enough to turn all the island back into a garden. And start the dollars and pounds and francs and marks and pesos and rubles to rolling in again!”
“They can save Cadmus,” Nan said. “And more.”
What else they could save, she didn’t say. But Dane dared a glance at her as she stood watching the thin blade of stainless steel the tiny swimmers must jump. He could see her hope like a bright flame along it, and the darkness of her loneliness and her dread all around it, and he understood.
Cadmus was the fortress of her race. The mules had built it, and it had been falling into ruin since as they died. This new generation of those small slaves could make it powerful again—and Dane found it hard not to share her eagerness.
“They’ll make a green mist over the blade,” Messenger was whispering. “The billions of them crossing. I’ve seen it many times.”
Dane adjusted the shining barrier to stand precisely at the level of the liquid. He snapped on the blue light above it, to trigger that phototrophic instinct, and raised the metal hood outside to protect the tiny swimmers as they fell into the tank.
And they waited.
No swimmers leapt, and after a long time Dane saw tiny bubbles beginning to rise through the liquid, leaving an oily, greenish scum where they burst. He leaned to look closer, and caught a faint but sickening stench. Pointing at that foul broth, he turned inquiringly to Messenger.
“Rotting . . . The financier’s lax blue lips framed the word silently, and his puffy face sagged into a dreadful cadaverous emptiness. “Rotting alive. . . .”
He swayed to the microscope bench and lowered his cumbrous bulk to the stool there, clinging to the bench with his swollen hands as frantically as he clutched at life itself. “Still tough—as a mule!” His face twisted queerly, trying to grin. “Just find out—what’s wrong.”
White-lipped, Nan read the temperature of the vat and checked the intensity of the light above it and tested the green solution. Her trembling hands spilled one sample, and all he felt at last was pity for her quiet desperation.
“There’s nothing wrong with the solution.” Her bloodless hand pushed the rack of test tubes slowly from her. “Except that the swimmers are dying in it.”
She turned gravely to Dane.
“This is a terrible blow to the company, Dr. Fallon. But you aren’t responsible, in any way.”
“Drain off that slop,” Messenger rasped at him. “Sterilize the vats, and stand by.” He swung ponderously from Dane to the girl. “We’re going to try again tonight.”
Declining any aid, he lumbered heavily away.
MESSENGER and Nan Sanderson returned to the mutation laboratory. The brief, hot dusk had fallen before he saw them emerge again, the man so feeble that he had to try three times before he could climb in the jeep, even with her aid. They drove past him toward the old Potter dwelling without stopping, but Nan glanced at him as they passed. She told him, with a tired shake of her head, that this time they had failed in their attempt to make a satisfactory batch of swimmers. Probably fatigue, Dane thought, as much as anything else.
The men on his night shift brought word from Van Doon that he wouldn’t be needed until morning, and so he went back to the company town with the cheery lotus-eaters of his day crew, trying hard to be one of them. That night, lying in the windy chill of his air-conditioned room in the Cadmus House, he was a long time going to sleep.
“Dr. Fallon! Everybody out!”
He had been asleep at last, when that urgent voice disturbed him. He looked at his watch; it was three in the morning. Somebody began shaking the door of his room, and he got out of bed to open it. The man in the hall was one of the sunburned lotus-eaters he had seen guarding the mutation laboratory.
“What’s up?” He felt too dull and heavy with sleep to face any fresh crisis. “Van Doon sent word they wouldn’t need me—”
“Everybody out!” the brown man broke in sharply. “Go straight to your post, and stand by for orders.”
“To the production section, you mean?”
“If that’s your post.” The guard shrugged impatiently. “And stand by.”
Dane’s breath caught. “Is—is anything wrong?”
“An emergency alert.” Even the lotus-eater looked somewhat upset. “There must be trouble somewhere, but that’s all I know. You’d better get moving.”
The man went on, to shout at the next door.
Dane dressed, trying sleepily to guess what sort of crisis had come up and what he ought to do. Several men ran past his door, but when he came out into the hall the old building seemed already empty.
He hurried out through the abandoned lobby into the warm tropic night. Outside, he found urgent activity. It wasn’t exactly panic—the lotus-eaters were too calm for panic. Yet he caught a sense of frightened desperation.
Jeeps and trucks were jolting along the worn pavement, driven too fast. A bonfire was blazing against the dark two blocks away, in front of the company office building, and he saw hurried men tossing desks and chairs and bundled papers into the flames. From the airstrip across the river, he could hear the muffled thunder of motors being warmed up.
He went back to the parking area behind the building, but the jeep his crew had used was already gone. After a moment of indecision, he started walking out to the production section.
As he approached it, he saw a jeep coming back from the direction of the old Potter house. In the floodlights from the mutation laboratory, he recognized Van Doon and Nan Sanderson. Her luggage was piled in the rear. Van Doon was driving, and he stopped the vehicle across the road, at the gate in the laboratory fence.
Dane was standing in the open, outside the door of his own building, but they gave him no attention. Van Doon called the two guards to the jeep. While he sat talking to them, the girl got out. She was wearing white coveralls. Without a glance at Dane, she ran up the gravel drive and disappeared inside the laboratory.
She was gone perhaps five minutes, Dane thought, though the time seemed longer. After their brief talk with Van Doon, the two riflemen got in the jeep, to sit on the luggage in the back. Waiting at the wheel, Van Doon sat watching the drive impatiently.
Dane was taut with a troubled expectation. Aircraft engines still thundered dully in the night; he saw the lifting lights of one plane taking off. Nan’s luggage, with all those other signs of hurried departure, made him think the mutants must be retreating again, even from this hidden fastness.
He tried for a moment to imagine where they might be going, but that puzzle was swept from his mind by a quick concern for the maker. He had seen men burning papers outside the company office building, but surely that creative brain was a record too precious to be destroyed. He waited with a painful anxiety for Nan to emerge with her prisoner—and he felt sick when he saw her come running back alone.
SHE GOT into the jeep with Van Doon and the two riflemen. The idling motor roared instantly. The little vehicle skidded back into the muddy ruts, and the red tail lamps fled into the dark with what seemed a guilty haste. Dane turned back toward the now unguarded laboratory, afraid to wonder what her errand there had been. He made a sick effort to stop his mind from seeing the beheaded body of Nicholas Venn. A raucous horn called him back. Another jeep was jolting back from the old Potter dwelling. It pulled to a halt.
“Here, Fallon!” Messenger called faintly from the rear seat. His face looked gray and cadaverous when Dane saw him in the dimness.
“We’re closing the production section,” he whispered asthmatically. “Before you leave, I want you to burn all your papers. That technical memo. All your records on the swimmers you processed. Any notes you’ve made. I’ll send a jeep back for you.”
Dane asked, “Is something wrong?”
“Everything.” Messenger’s voice was husky with despair. “We’ve an enemy—a man who thinks we’ve misused the art of mutation. We’ve stood him off for years. Fought his influence with company money, and captured his agents with the virus. His name is Gellian.”
“Gellian?” Dane tried to speak as if he had never heard the name. “What can he do?”
“Plenty!” Messenger said bitterly. “He’s managed to convince a group of political and military leaders that we are manufacturing superhuman mutants that are dangerous to mankind. They’re sending a military expedition to destroy us.”
Dane waited, while the sick man struggled to breathe.
“The code name for it is Operation Survival,” Messenger went on at last. “Men from several nations are taking part. Most of them have been told that they’re wiping out an illicit private atomic research center—a lie evidently intended to confuse people who might oppose genocide. Van Doon says military aircraft are already headed this way from several Australian and island bases. We’re trying to evacuate everybody before they arrive.”
Dane wet his lips. “Where—where are we going?”
“You„ lotus-eaters will be scattered here and there about our other New Guinea installations,” Messenger said. “Van Doon has given the orders for that—but the less any of you remember, when Gellian gets hold of you, the better.”
He nudged the driver impatiently and the jeep shot forward.
“Burn your papers,” Messenger called back. “And wait here.”
Dane crumpled all the notes and records he had made into a quick little blaze on the concrete floor of the stock-room, but he saved that memo in the writing of Charles Kendrew.
Back at the door, he peered cautiously up and down those muddy ruts. The smoky glare of that dying fire still shone above the jungle, and busy traffic still crawled along the road between the airstrip and the town, but he saw no nearer lights. He caught his breath, and ran across the road to the mutation laboratory.
This time nothing stopped him. No shock of danger dazed him. He saw no dark blaze of evil, and met no dusty deadliness, and felt no chill of warning. If any mutant cysts or spores were taking root in his flesh, he was not aware of them.
Surprisingly, Nan Sanderson had left the door unlocked. It opened to his trembling touch. Darkness met him, and empty silence. He wanted to call out, but his throat was suddenly too dry. He groped beside the door, and found a switch. Light struck him, cruel as a blow.
For it showed him no prisoner, but a shocking riddle instead. The whole building was only one long room. Stumbling out to the center of it, he peered around him at the naked concrete walls. He gulped and wet his lips and shook his head.
He saw no bars to hold the aged prisoner of his imagination. No chairs; no sign of violence; no arrangements for any sort of long-continued occupancy. It gave him an irrational relief to know that Nan Sanderson had not come back to kill the maker—because obviously there had been nobody here to kill.
The room was queerly bare, neither prison nor fortress nor even laboratory. A white-enameled kitchen table stood near the center of the clean concrete floor, with two kitchen chairs beside it. Arranged on the table were half a dozen empty test tubes in a small wooden rack, a tiny alcohol burner, a few sealed ampules of sterile water, and a stain of green slime drying in a Petri dish—a culture of that alga, perhaps, from which the green mules had been mutated.
Near the table was a little pile of ashes, where papers had been burned—that, he thought, must have been what Nan came back to do.
But he found no equipment for the unknown art of genetic engineering. No sterile incubators. No carboys of chemicals. No centrifuges or electron microscopes or X-ray machines. He knew a dozen methods of causing useless random mutations, but he saw no apparatus even for those inadequte processes.
“Well, Dane?”
He thought he had closed the door, and he hadn’t heard it open, but Nan was standing in it when he turned. Framed against the dark, she looked slim but not boyish in the white coveralls. Her face was haggard. Her level voice seemed disarming, but he thought she had come to kill him.
XIII
DANE HAD picked up a scrap of fragile ash, from where the papers had been burned on the floor. He was peering at it when she spoke, trying to read the traces of writing. His fingers crushed it with a sudden tension of alarm, but he tried to recover his mask of forgetfulness.
“Mr. Messenger told me to burn all our papers.” He grinned feebly, with a sick imitation of a lotus-eater. “I just came across the road to see—”
His voice shuddered to a stop, for he realized then that she had called him Dane. That meant she knew he had his memory back. He retreated a little, absently wiping the black ash from his fingers, watching her bleakly.
Her ivory hands hung open and empty, but that was not reassuring when he recalled the inconspicuous weapon with which she had knocked him out before. No doubt she was adequately armed, but still she made no threatening gesture, and it struck him that she wasn’t ready to kill him, yet.
His presence here was enough to prove him no faithful slave of the company. But she would want to know how much he knew and what else he had done, before she erased his memory again—and this time surely his life.
She was asking quietly, “What were you doing here?”
He straightened defiantly. No deception was likely to succeed again, and he said evenly, “I came to look for Charles Kendrew.”
Her nostrils flared slightly, as she caught her breath. Her face tightened, but her eyes told him nothing. She nodded at the empty room around them, and her low-voiced question was a challenge.
“Did you find him?”
“I—I don’t know.”
He stiffened, and looked at her searchingly. For that faintly mocking query had set his mind to work at last, on the new fact of this empty room. Although this was not the maker’s prison, and obviously had never been, she had brought the mutant cells from here, and that memo—
“I’m not quite sure I found Kendrew.” He spoke slowly, watching her pale hostility, waiting to see her reaction. “But I’d like to see a sample of Mr. Messenger’s writing.”
“So you think he is Charles Kendrew?” She was frowning at him as if with a troubled astonishment, but still she had revealed no weapon. “Why?”
“I know Kendrew’s alive,” he said. “Because I recognized his writing on that Memo to Fallon. You brought it from this building, and the only man here was Messenger. He’s about the right age, when you come to think of it. Though he doesn’t resemble the pictures I’ve seen of Kendrew as a young man, you’d hardly expect him to. Kendrew was disfigured by burns about the time he disappeared—and Messenger’s face is scarred!”
She shook her head. “Pretty inadequate evidence.”
“There’s more than that.” Conviction steadied his voice. “A great deal more, when you come to see it. Messenger has always controlled Kendrew’s discoveries. He was unexpectedly generous to my father—who had been Kendrew’s friend. He is still fighting with all his cunning to defend Kendrew’s creations. Isn’t he?”
HE PAUSED again, watching the girl, but she failed to answer. Her troubled eyes seemed to weigh him, narrowing with doubt. Waiting for her to decide when to erase his inconvenient recollections, he returned to the logical consequences of this empty room—and they startled him.
“Nan!” He caught his breath. “When I accused you of murdering Nicholas Venn—why didn’t you deny it?”
