Exiled from Earth

12

Lou felt physically staggered. He stared at Marcus, who was smiling easily at him.

“Me? What are you talking about?”

“It’s very simple,” Marcus explained. “All of the world’s top geneticists and biochemists have been put into exile. They’re being shipped up to their satellite prison right now. Of all the top men working on genetic engineering, you’re the only one we’ve been able to save.”

“But…”

“Oh, sure, we’ve rounded up a few of the second-string people, and we’ve brought in a couple of young pups, bright boys, but the ink is still wet on their diplomas. You’re the only experienced top-flight man we have.”

“But I’m only a computer engineer.”

Nodding, “Maybe, but your work is the key to the whole project. You’ve got the computer coding system in your hands. Unless we can get the computer to handle all of the thousand of variables that are involved in any tinkering with the genes, we don’t dare try to do anything. It would be too dangerous.”

Lou agreed, “Yeah … you’ve got to have the computer plot out all the possible side effects of any change you make. Otherwise you’d never know if you were making the zygote better or worse.”

“Right,” Marcus said. “And you’re the only man who was close enough to the geneticists to really understand what the computer coding system must be. We’ve checked all across the world, believe me. None of the other labs were as close to success as your Institute. And none of them had a computer system as sophisticated as yours. So that makes you the key man. The fate of your friends—the fate of the whole world—is in your hands.”

Grinning foolishly, Lou said, “Well… it’s really in Ramo’s hands. Ramo’s got the whole thing wrapped up in his memory banks.”

Marcus tensed in his chair. “The whole thing?”

Lou nodded. “All I’ve got to do is run through the programs and de-bug them. Then we’ll be ready for the first experiments. Take me a few weeks, at most.”

“This is critically important to us,” Marcus said. “I don’t want you to rush it. I want it done right.”

Feeling a little irritated, Lou said, “It’s almost finished. In a few weeks, we’ll be ready.”

“You’ll be able to scan the zygote’s genetic structure, spot any defects, plot out the proper corrective steps, and predict the results?”

“To twenty decimal places,” Lou insisted. “And it’ll all be done in less than a minute of computer time.”

“If you can do that…”

“When we can do that,” Lou corrected, “we’ll be able to mend any genetic defects in the zygote and make each embryo genetically perfect. Ultimately, we’ll be able to produce a race of people with no physical defects and an intelligence level way beyond the genius class.”

“Yes,” Marcus said. “Ultimately.”

Lou sat back, Marcus smiled pleasantly and sipped his drink. Then Lou noticed, through the chirping of the songbirds, the drone of a jet high overhead. Marcus heard it too. He looked up at the silvery speck with its pencil-thin line of white contrail speeding along behind it.

Glancing down at his wristwatch, Marcus said, “That’s our next supply shipment. Your programmer friend should be on that plane.”

“Bonnie?”

Marcus nodded. “I understand she’s quite a lovely girl.” He grinned at Lou.

Pushing his chair from the table, Lou got up. “I’ll go down to meet her at the landing pad.”

“Sure, go right ahead. Her quarters are in the same building as yours. She’s on the second floor.”

“Okay. Fine.” Lou started toward the front of the house. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be bothered by Marcus or anyone else. He just wanted to see Bonnie.

“I’m afraid the car’s already down there,” Marcus said, trailing along behind Lou. “You’ll have to walk it.”

“That’s okay. See you later.”

He left Marcus standing in front of the house and started down the dirt road toward the harbor area. The jet sounded closer now, and Lou could see it circling, stilt pretty high out over the sea.

From behind him he heard the whine of another turbo-wagon. Turning, he saw Kori jouncing in the back seat as the wagon worked slowly down the rutted road toward the harbor. Lou waved and Kori yelled for the driver to stop. They lurched off together toward the landing pad.

“Going to meet the plane?” Lou asked.

“Yes. They’re bringing some equipment in for me. And some data tapes from Starfarer that came in just before I was arrested.”

“The interstellar probe?”

The road leveled out and they picked up speed. Light and shadows flickered across Kori’s face as they drove past a stand of tall palms.

“Yes. If everything was working right, these tapes might have close-up pictures of Alpha Centauri on them.”

“Really? But I didn’t see anything in the newscasts about it—”

The road wound along the edge of the harbor now, and the driver pushed the turbine to top speed. There was no other traffic. The wind tore at Kori and Lou in the back seat.

“The government kept it quiet,” Kori hollered back. “Remember what Cobryn said, back in Sicily? Alpha Centauri is a threat to the stability of the world,” Kori laughed bitterly.

The car screeched to a halt alongside the landing pad. Billowing dust enveloped them for a moment. Blinking and coughing, Lou jumped out of the car and walked clear of the slowly-settling dust cloud. Kori came up beside him, walking in a slow gangling gait.

“Are you going to be working on the probe data? Is that what Marcus wants you to do?”

Kori made a little shrug. “He said I can work on analyzing the data. But what he really wants me to do is to make some nuclear explosives for him.”

“Explosives? You mean bombs?”

“No, no, nothing so big,” Kon answered, grinning. “Just little things, toys, really. The kind that engineers use on construction jobs. Why, if you exploded one of them in a city, it would hardly take out a building.”

The plane was circling low now, its jets roaring in their ears. Lou watched as its wings spread straight out for landing and the jet pods swiveled to the vertical position. Slowly the plane settled on its screaming exhaust of hot gases, flattening the grass beneath it Through shimmering heat waves Lou saw the plane’s wheels touch the ground and the weight of the jet settle on them. Then the turbine’s bellowing whine died off, like some supernatural demon melting away.

Lou took his hands down from his ears; they were ringing slightly.

The hatch of the jet popped open, and a three-step metal ladder slid to the ground. A broad-shouldered young man stepped out first, then turned around and reached up to help the next passenger. It was Bonnie.

She was wearing shorts and a sleeveless blouse. Her hair was pinned up the way she usually wore it at work. Her face looked grave, utterly serious, perhaps a little scared.

Lou felt something jump inside of him, and then he was running toward her, calling to her.

“Bonnie! Bonnie!”

She looked up, saw him, and smiled. Lou ran up to her, past the guy who had helped her down the steps. He wrapped her in his arms and swung her around off her feet.

“Am I glad to see you! You came! You did come.”

She looked surprised and happy and worried, all at the same time “Lou … you’re all right. They didn’t hurt you or anything …”

“I’m fine, now that you’re here…”

Without ever letting go of her arm, Lou took Bonnie’s one travel bag from the Chinese guard who was unloading the baggage and started walking her back toward the car. Kori was still standing beside the wagon, so Lou introduced them.

Kori said, “Why don’t you two drive back to the dormitory?

I’m sure you’ll want to get unpacked and settled in your room, Miss Sterne It’ll be some time before all my junk is unloaded from the plane. Lou, if you’ll just send the car back here…”

“Fine, fine, I’ll do that.” Lou was grinning broadly as he helped Bonnie into the back seat of the car and got in beside her.

She was very quiet as they drove away from the pad and the harbor Lou chattered about what a beautiful island it was, and how good it was to see her again. All Bonnie did was to nod once in a while. By the time Lou had carried her travel bag up to the door of her room, his own joy at being with her had simmered down to the point where he could see that something was wrong.

There were no locks on the dormitory doors, only latches that could be pushed home from the inside So Lou opened her door and gestured her into the room.

Bonnie walked in and looked around.

“This will be my room?”

“Right. It’s not much, I know, but…”

She went to the window and looked out. Turning back to him, she asked, “And your room is in the same building?”

“Downstairs.”

“How many other women are in this building?”

Lou shrugged. “This whole second floor is for women, I think. And there are a few married couples living on the island. They’ve got their own houses, though.”

“I see.”

“Look, Bonnie, you’re not sore about what I said when those Federal marshals arrested me, are you? I was scared, and surprised …”

Her face softened a little. “No, it’s not that, Lou.”

He walked over to her. “Then what’s wrong? Why’d you come if you didn’t.”

“Why’d I come?” She almost laughed at him “I didn’t get much choice Two men picked me up at the office where I had just started working and packed me off. That was it No questions, no explanations. Just enough time to pack one bag. That’s all.”

“They didn’t tell you…”

“Nothing In fact, I’m still not sure of what’s going on.”

Lou sank down into the nearest chair. “But Bernard must have…”

Bonnie knelt down beside him and put her hands in his.

“Lou, I’m sorry. When I saw you there by the plane, all of a sudden I thought it was you that had me kidnapped.”

“You haven’t been kidnapped!”

“I haven’t been invited to the prince’s ball.”

He laughed at her.

“Lou, what’s going on? Is everything going crazy?”

Shaking his head, he tried to explain it as carefully as he could. The exile. Minister Bernard’s offer to help. The work that was going to be done on this island.

Finally, she understood. “You mean we’re going to stay here… indefinitely? As long as they want us to? We can’t get off?”

He looked into her pearl gray eyes and really didn’t care about politics or exilements or science or anything else. But he forced him self to answer, “We stay until we’ve finished the work that was going on at the Institute. When we show the world that genetic engineering can be done, then there’s no more point in keeping Kaufman and the others in exile.”

“But that could take years,” Bonnie said.

“It won’t take that long.”

She looked away from him, off toward the window, like a prisoner who’s suddenly realized that the outside world is forever barred away.

“I shouldn’t have asked them to bring you here,” Lou said.

She didn’t answer.

“Bonnie… if you had known… if they told you that you’d have to live on this island until the project is finished … with me… would you have come?”

She turned back to look at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “I don’t know, Lou. I just don’t know.”