Stainless Steel Visions

BRAVE NEWER WORLD

Livermore liked the view from the little white balcony outside his office. Even though the air at this height, at this time of year, had a chill bite to it. He was standing there now, trying to suppress a shiver, looking out at the new spring green on the hillsides and the trees in the old town. Above and below him the white steps of the levels of New Town stretched away in smooth elegance. A great A in space with the base a half-mile wide, rising up almost to a point on top. Every level fringed with a balcony, every balcony with an unobstructed view. Well designed. Livermore shivered again and felt the loud beat of his heart; old valves cheered on by new drugs. His insides were as carefully propped up and as well designed as the New Town building. Though his outside left a lot to be desired. Brown spots, wrinkles, and white hair; he looked as weathered as the homes in Old Town. It was damned cold — and the sun went behind a cloud. He thumbed a button, and when the glass wall slid aside, went back gratefully into the purified and warmed air of the interior.

"Been waiting long?" he asked the old man who sat, scowling, in the chair on the far side of his desk.

"Well, you asked, Doctor. I was never one to complain, but…"

"Then don't start now. Stand up. Open your shirt. Let me have those records. Ahh, Grazer, I remember you. Planted a kidney seed, didn't they? How do you feel?"

"Poorly, that's the only word for it. Off my feed, can't sleep. When I do I wake up with the cold sweats. And the bowels! Let me tell you about the bowels. Hey!"

Livermore slapped the cold pickup of the stethoscope against the bare skin of Grazer's chest. Patients liked Dr. Livermore but hated his stethoscope, swearing that he must keep it specially chilled for them. They were right. There was a thermoelectric cooling plate in the case. Livermore felt that it gave them something to think about. "Hmmrr…" he said, frowning, the earpieces in his ears, hearing nothing. He had plugged the stethoscope with wax a year earlier. The systolic, diastolic murmurs disturbed his concentration; he heard enough of that from his own chest. Everything was in the records in any case, since the analysis machines did a far better job than he could ever do. He flipped through the sheets and graphs.

"Button your shirt, sit down, take two of these right now. Just the thing for this condition."

He shook the large red sugar pills from the jar in his desk drawer and pointed to the plastic cup and water carafe. Grazer reached for them eagerly: this was real medicine. Livermore found the most recent X rays and snapped them into the viewer. Lovely. The new kidney was growing, as sweetly formed as a little bean. Still tiny now beside its elderly brother, but in a year's time they would be identical.

Science conquereth all, or at least almost all; he slammed the file on the table. It had been a difficult morning, and even this afternoon surgery was not as relaxing as it usually was. The old folks, the AKs, his peer group, they appreciated one another. Very early in his career he had taken his M.D.; that was all that they knew about him. A doctor, their age. He sometimes wondered if they connected him at all with the Dr. Rex Livermore in charge of the ectogenetic program. That is, if they had ever heard of the program.

"I'm sure glad for the pills, Doc. I don't like those shots no more. But my bowels—"

"Goddamn and blast your bowels. They're as old as my bowels and in just as good shape. You're just bored, that's your trouble."

Grazer nodded approvingly at the insults — a touch of interest in an otherwise sterile existence. "Bored is the very word, Doc. The hours I spend on the pot—"

"What did you do before you retired?"

"That was a real long time ago."

"Not so long that you can't remember. And if you can't, why then you're just too old to waste food and space on. We'll just have to hook that old brain out of your skull and put it in a bottle with a label saying senile brain on it."

Grazer chuckled; he might have cried if someone younger had talked to him this way. "Said it was a long time ago, didn't say I forgot. Painter. Housepainter, not the artist kind, worked at it eighty years before the union threw me out and made me retire."

"Pretty good at it?"

"The best. They don't have my kind of painter around anymore."

"I can't believe that. I'm getting damn tired of the eggshell off-white superplastic eternal finish on the walls of this office. Think you could repaint it for me?"

"Paint won't stick to that stuff."

"If I find one that will?"

"I'm your man, Doc."

"It'll take time. Sure you won't mind missing all the basket-weaving, social teas, and television?"

Grazer snorted in answer, and he almost smiled.

"All right, I'll get in touch with you. Come back in a month in any case so I can look at that kidney. As for the rest, you're in perfect shape after your geriatric treatments. You're just bored with television and the damned baskets."

"You can say that again. Don't forget about that paint, hear?"

A distant silver bell chimed, and Livermore pointed to the door, picking up the phone as soon as the old man had gone. Leatha Crabb's tiny and distraught image looked up at him from the screen.

"Oh, Dr. Livermore, another bottle failure."

"I know. I was in the lab this morning. I'll be down there at fifteen hundred and we can talk about it then." He hung up and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes until the meeting— he still had time to see another patient or two. Geriatrics was not his field, and he really had very little interest in it. It was the people who interested him. He sometimes wondered if they knew how little they needed him, now that they were on constant monitoring and automated medical attention. Perhaps they just enjoyed seeing and talking to him as he did to them. No harm done in any case.

The next patient was a thin, white-haired woman who began complaining as she came through the door. Did not stop even as she put her crutches aside and sat carefully in the chair. Livermore nodded and made doodles on the pad before him and admired her flow of comment, criticism, and invective over a complaint she had covered so well and so often before. It was just a foot she was talking about, which might seem a limited area of discussion — toes, tendons, and not much else. But she had unusual symptoms, hot flushes and itching in addition to the usual pain, all of which was made even more interesting by the fact that the foot under discussion had been amputated over sixty years earlier. Phantom limbs with phantom symptoms were nothing new — there were even reported cases of completely paralyzed patients with phantom sexual impulses terminating in phantom orgasms — but the longevity of this case was certainly worth noting. He relaxed under the wave of detailed complaint, and when he finally gave her some of the sugar pills and ushered her out, they both felt a good deal better.

Catherine Ruffin and Sturtevant were already waiting in the boardroom when he came in. Sturtevant, impatient as always, was tapping green-stained fingers on the marble tabletop, one of his cancer-free tobacco-substitute cigarettes dangling from his lip. His round and thick glasses and sharp nose made him resemble an owl, but the thin line of his mouth was more like that of a turtle. It was a veritable bestiary of a face. His ears could be those of a moose, Livermore thought, then sniffed and rubbed his nose.

"Those so-called cigarettes of yours smell like burning garbage, Sturtevant, do you know that?"

"You have told him that before," Catherine Ruffin said in her slow, careful English. She had emigrated in her youth from South Africa, to marry the long-dead Mr. Ruffin, and still had the accents of her Boer youth. Full-bosomed and round in a very Dutch-housewife manner, she was nevertheless a senior administrator with a mind like a computer.

"Never mind my cigarettes." Sturtevant grubbed the butt out and instantly groped for a fresh one. "Can't you be on time just once for one of these meetings?"

Catherine Ruffin rapped with her knuckles on the table and switched on the recorder.

"Minutes of the meeting of the Genetic Guidance Council, Syracuse New Town, Tuesday, January 14, 2025. Present— Ruffin, Sturtevant, Livermore. Ruffin chairman."

"What's this I hear about more bottle failures?" Sturtevant asked.

Livermore dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand. "A few bottle failures are taken for granted. I'll look into these latest ones and have a full report for our next meeting. Just a mechanical foul-up and nothing to bother us here. What does bother me is our genetic priorities. I have a list."

He searched the pockets of his jacket, one after another, while Sturtevant frowned his snapping-turtle frown at him.

"You and your lists, Livermore. We've read enough of them. Priorities are a thing of the past. We now have a prepared program that we need only follow."

"Priorities are not outdated. And by saying that, you show a sociologist's typical ignorance of the realities of genetics."

"You're insulting!"

"It's the truth. Too bad if it hurts." He found a crumpled piece of paper in an inside pocket and smoothed it out on the table before him. "You're so used to your damn charts and graphs, demographic curves and projections that you think they are really a description of the real world — instead of being rough approximations well after the fact. I'm not going to trouble you with figures. They're so huge as to be meaningless. But I want you to consider for a moment the incredible complexity of our genetic pool. Mankind as we know it has been around about a half-million years, mutating, changing, and interbreeding. Every death in all those generations was a selection of some kind, as was every mating. Good and bad traits, pro- and anti-survival mutations, big brains and hemophilia, hairy armpits and agile fingers. Everything happened and all this was stirred up and spread through the human race. Now we say we are going to improve that race by gene selection. We have an endless reservoir of traits to draw from, ova from every woman, sperm from every man. We can analyze these for genetic composition, then feed the results to the computer to work out favorable combinations. After that we combine the sperm and ova and grow the fetus ectogenetically. If all goes well, nine months later we decant the infant of our selection and the human race has been improved by that small increment. But what is an improvement, what is a favorable combination? Dark skin is a survival trait in the tropics, but dark skin in the northern hemisphere cuts off too much ultraviolet so the body cannot manufacture vitamin D, and rickets follows. Everything is relative."

"We have been over this ground before," Catherine Ruffin said.

"But not often enough. If we don't constantly renew and review our goals, we are going to start down a one-way road. Once genetic traits have been discarded they are gone forever. In a way the team in San Diego New City have an easier job. They have a specific goal. They are out to build new breeds of men, specific types for different environments. Like the spacemen who can live without physical or mental breakdowns during the decade-long trips to the outer planets. Or the low-temperature- and low-pressure-resistant types for Mars settlers. They can discard genes ruthlessly and aim for a clear and well-established goal. We simply aim to improve — and what a vague ambition that is. But while we are making this new race of supermen what will we lose? Will new-man be pink, and if so, what has happened to the Oriental and the Negro—"

"For God's sake, Livermore, let us not start on that again," Sturtevant shouted. "We have fixed charts, rules, regulations, everything carefully mapped out for all the operations."

"I said you had no real knowledge of genetics and that proves it once again. You simply can't get it through your head that genetic selection does not work that way. With each selection the game starts completely over again. As they say in the historical 3V's, it's a brand-new ball game. The entire world is born anew with every child."

"I think you tend to overdramatize," Catherine Ruffin said stolidly.

"Not in the slightest. Genes are not bricks. We can't use them to build a desired structure to order. We just aim for optimum, then see what we have and try again. No directives can lay down the details of every choice or control every random combination. Every technician is a small god, making real decisions of life and death. And some of these decisions are questionable in the long run."

"Impossible," Sturtevant said, and Catherine Ruffin nodded agreement.

"No, it's just going to be very expensive. We must find a closer examination of every change made and get some predictions of where we are going."

"You are out of order, Dr. Livermore," Catherine Ruffin broke in. "Your proposal has been made in the past, a budget forecast was estimated, and the entire matter was then turned down because of cost. This was not our decision you will recall, but came down from Genguidecounchief. We accomplish nothing by raking over these well-raked coals yet another time. There is new business we must consider that I wish to place before this council."

Livermore had the beginnings of a headache, and he fumbled a pill from the carrier in his pocket. The other two were talking, and he paid them no attention at all.

When Leatha Crabb hung up the phone after talking with Dr. Livermore, she felt as though she wanted to cry. She had been working long hours for weeks and not getting enough sleep. Her eyes stung, and she was a little ashamed of this unaccustomed weakness: she was the sort of person who simply did not cry, woman or no. But seventeen bottle failures, seventeen deaths. Seventeen tiny lives snuffed out before they had barely begun to live. It hurt, almost as though they had been real children.

"So small you can't hardly see it," Veazy said. The laboratory assistant held one of the disconnected bottles up to the light and gave it a shake to swish the liquid about inside it. "You sure it's dead?"

"Stop that!" Leatha snapped, then curbed her temper: she had always prided herself on the way that she treated those who worked beneath her. "Yes, they are all dead, I've checked that. Decant, freeze, and label them. I'll want to do examinations later."

Veazy nodded and took the bottle away. She wondered what had possessed her thinking of them as lives, children. She must be tired. They were groups of growing cells with no more personality than the cells grouped in the wart on the back of her hand. She rubbed at it, reminding herself again that she ought to have it taken care of. A handsome, well-formed girl in her early thirties, with hair the color of honey and tanned skin to match. But her hair was cropped short, close to her head, and she wore not the slightest trace of makeup, while the richness of her figure was lost in the heavy folds of her white laboratory smock. She was too young for it, but a line of worry was already beginning to form between her eyes. When she bent over her microscope, peering at the stained slide, the furrow deepened.

The bottle failures troubled her, deeply, more than she liked to admit. The program had gone so well the past few years that she was beginning to take it for granted, already looking ahead to the genetic possibilities of the second generation. It took a decided effort to forget all this and turn back to the simple mechanical problems of ectogenesis.

Strong arms wrapped about her from behind; the hands pressed firmly against the roundness of her body below the waist; hard lips kissed the nape of her neck.

"Don't!" she said, surprised, pulling away. She look around. Her husband. Gust dropped his arms at once, stepping back from her.

"You don't have to get angry," he said. "We're married you know, and no one is watching."

"It's not your pawing me I don't like. But I'm working, can't you see that?"

Leatha turned to face him, angry at his physical touch despite her words. He stood dumbly before her, a solid black-haired and dark-complexioned man with slightly protruding lower lip that made him look, now, as though he were pouting.

"You needn't look so put out. It's work time, not play time."

"Damn little playtime anymore." He glanced quickly around to see if anyone was within earshot. "Not the way it was when we were first married. You were pretty affectionate then." He reached out a slow finger and pressed it to his midriff.

"Don't do that." She drew away, raising her hands to cover herself. "It's been absolute hell here today. A defective valve in one of the hormone feed lines, discovered too late. We lost seventeen bottles. In an early stage, luckily."

"So what's the loss? There must be a couple of billion sperm and ova in the freezers. They'll pair some more and put you back in business."

"Think of the work and labor in gene-matching, all wasted."

"That's what technicians are paid for. It will give them something to do. Look, can we forget work for a while, take off an evening? Go to Old Town. There's a place there I heard about, Sharm's. They have real cult cooking and entertainment."

"Can't we talk about it later? This really isn't the time…."

"By Christ, it never is. I'll be back here at seventeen thirty. See if you can't possibly make your mind up by then."

He pushed angrily out of the door, but the automatic closing mechanism prevented him from slamming it behind him. Something had gone out of life, he wasn't sure just what. He loved Leatha and she loved him, he was sure of that, but something was missing. They both had their work to do, but it had never caused trouble before. They were used to it, even staying up all night sometimes, working in the same room in quiet companionship. Then coffee, perhaps as dawn was breaking, a drowsy pleasant fatigue, falling into bed, making love.

It just wasn't that way anymore and he couldn't think why. At the elevators he entered the nearest and called out, "Fifty." The doors closed, and the car fell smoothly away. They would go out tonight: he was resolved that this evening would be different.

Only after he had emerged from the elevator did he realize that it had stopped at the wrong floor. Fifteen, not fifty; the number analyzer in the elevator computer always seemed to have trouble with those two. Before he could turn, the doors shut behind him, and he noticed the two old men frowning in his direction. He was on one of the eldster floors. Instead of waiting for another car, he turned away from their angry looks and hurried down the hall. There were other old people about, some shuffling along, others riding powered chairs, and he looked straight ahead so he wouldn't catch their eyes. They resented youngsters coming here.

Well, he resented them occupying his brand-new building. That wasn't a nice thought, and he was sorry at once for even thinking a thing like that. This wasn't his building; he was just one of the men on the design team who had stayed on for construction. The eldsters had as much right here as he did, more so, since this was their home. And a pleasant compromise it had been, too. This building, New Town, was designed for the future, but the future was rather slow coming, since you could accelerate almost everything in the world except fetal growth. Nine months from conception to birth, in either bottle or womb. Then the slow years of childhood, the quick years of puberty. It would be wasteful for the city to stay vacant all those years.

That was where the eldsters came in, the leftover debris of an overpopulated world. Geriatrics propped them up and kept them going. They were growing older together, the last survivors of the greedy generations. They were the parents who had fewer children and even fewer grandchildren as the realities of famine, disease, and the general unwholesomeness of life were driven home to them. Not that they had done this voluntarily. Left alone they would have responded as every other generation of mankind had done: selfishly. If the world is going to be overpopulated — it is going to be overpopulated with my kids. But the breakthrough in geriatric treatment and drugs came along at that moment and provided a far better carrot than had ever been held in front of the human donkey before. The fewer children you had the more treatment you received. The birthrate dived to zero almost overnight. The indifferent over-populators had decided to overpopulate with themselves instead of their children. If life was being granted, they preferred to have granted to them.

The result was that a child of the next generation might have, in addition to his mother and father, a half-dozen surviving relatives who were elders. A married couple might have ten or fifteen older relatives, all of them alone in the world, looking to their only younger kin. There could be no question of this aging horde moving in with the present generation, who had neither room for them nor money to support them. They were a government burden and would remain so. A decreasing burden that required less money every year as old machinery, despite the wonders of medicine, finally ran down. When the new cities were being designed for the future, scientifically planned generations, the wise decision had been made to move the eldsters into them. The best of food, care, and medicine could be provided with the minimum effort and expense. Life in the older cities would be happier, relieved of the weight of the solid block of aging citizenry. And since the geriatric drugs didn't seem to work too well past the middle of the second century, a timetable could be established for what was euphemistically called "phasing out." Dying was a word no one liked to use. So as the present inhabitants were phased out to the phasing place of their choice, the growing generations would move in. All neat. All tidy.

As long as you stayed away from the eldster floors.

Looking straight ahead, Gust went swiftly along the street-like corridor. Ignoring the steam rooms and bathing rooms, tropical gardens and sandy beaches that opened off to either side. And the people. The next bank of elevators was a welcome sight, and this time he very clearly enunciated "fif-tee" as the door closed.

When he reached the end of the unfinished corridor, the work shift was just going off duty. The flooring terminated here, and ahead was just the rough gray of raw cement still showing the mold marks where it had been cast in place; floodlights stood high on wiry legs.

"Been having trouble with the squatter, Mr. Crabb," the shift boss complained. These men had grown up in a world of smoothly operating machines and were hurt when they occasionally proved fallible.

"I'll take a look at it. Anything in the hopper?"

"Half full. Should I empty it out?"

"No, leave it. I'll try a run before I call maintenance."

As the motors on the machines were turned off one by one, an echoing silence fell on the immense and cavernlike area. The men went away, their footsteps loud, calling to each other, until Gust was alone. He climbed the ladder to the top of the hulking squatter and unlocked the computer controls. When he typed a quick condition query the readout revealed nothing wrong. These semi-intelligent machines could analyze most of their own troubles and deliver warnings, but there were still occasional failures beyond their capacity to handle or even recognize. Gust closed the computer and pressed the power button.

There was a far-off rumble and the great bulk of the machine shuddered as it came to life. Most of the indicator lights blinked on red, turning swiftly to green as the motors came to speed. When the operation-ready light also turned green, he squinted at the right-hand television screen, which showed the floor level buried under the squatter. The newly laid flooring ended abruptly where the machine had stopped. He backed it a few feet so the sensors could come into operation, then started it forward again at the crawling pace of working speed.

As soon as the edge was reached the laying began again. The machine guided itself and controlled the mix and pouring. About all the operator had to do was turn the entire apparatus on and off. Gust watched the hypnotically smooth flow of new floor appear and could see nothing wrong. It was pleasant here, doing a simple yet important job like this.

A warning buzzer sounded and a light began flashing red on the controls. He blinked and had a quick glimpse of something black on the screen before it moved swiftly out of sight. He stopped the forward motion and put the squatter into reverse again, backing the huge mass a good ten feet before killing all the power and climbing back down. The newly laid plastic flooring was still hot under his feet and he trod gingerly almost up to the forward edge. There was a cavity in the flooring here, like a bowl or a bubble a foot wide. As though the machine had burped while spewing out its flow. Perhaps it had. The technicians would set it right. He spoke a note to call them in his pocket phone, killed all except the standby lights, then went back to the elevators. Calling out his floor number very carefully.

Dr. Livermore and Leatha were bent over a worktable in the lab, heads lowered as though at a wake. As perhaps they were. Gust came in quietly, listening, not wanting to interrupt.

"There were some of the most promising new strains here," Leatha said. "The Reilly-Stone in particular. I don't know how much computer time was used in the preliminary selection, but the technicians must have put in a hundred hours on this fertilized ovum alone."

"Isn't that a little unusual?" Livermore asked.

"I imagine so, but it was the first application of the Ber-shock multiple-division cross-trait selection, and you know how those things go."

"I do indeed. It will be easier the next time. Send the records back, noting the failures. Get them started on replacements. Hello, Gust, I didn't hear you come in."

"I didn't want to bother you."

"No bother. We are finished in any case. Had some bottle failures today."

"So I heard. Do you know why?"

"If I knew everything, I would be God, wouldn't I?"

Leatha looked at the old man, shocked. "But Doctor, we do know why the embryos were killed. The valve failed on the input—"

"But why did the valve fail? There are reasons beyond reasons in everything."

"We're going to Old Town, Doctor," Gust said, uncomfortable with this kind of abstract conversation and eager to change the subject.

"Don't let me stop you. Don't bring back any infections, hear?"

Livermore turned to leave, but the door opened before he reached it. A man stood there, looking at them without speaking. He entered, and the silence and the severe set of his features struck them silent as well. When the door had closed behind him he called their names in a deep voice, looking at each of them in turn as he spoke.

"Dr. Livermore, Leatha Crabb, Gust Crabb. I am here to see you. My name is Blalock."

It was clear that Livermore did not enjoy being addressed in this manner. "Call my secretary for an appointment. I'm busy now." He started to leave, but Blalock raised his hand, at the same time taking a thin wallet from his pocket.

"I would like to see you now, Doctor. This is my identification."

Livermore could not have left without pushing the man aside. He stopped and blinked at the golden badge.

"FBI. What on earth are you after here?"

"A killer." A stunned silence followed. "I can tell you now, though I would appreciate your not telling anyone else, that one of the technicians working here is an agent from the bureau. He makes regular reports to Washington about conditions on the project."

"Meddling and spying!" Livermore was angry.

"Not at all. The government has a large investment here and believes in protecting it — and in guarding the taxpayers' money. You have had a number of bottle failures here in the first weeks after implanting."

"Accidents, just accidents," Leatha said, then flushed and was silent when Blalock turned his cold, unsmiling gaze on her.

"Are they? We don't think so. There are four other New Towns in the United States, all of them with projects working along the same lines as yours. They have had bottle failures as well, but not in the numbers you have here."

"A few more in one place or another means nothing," Livermore said. "The law of averages covers minor differences."

"I'm sure it does. Minor differences, Doctor. But the rate of failure here is ten times higher than that of the other laboratories. For every bottle failure they have, you have ten. For their ten, you have a hundred. I am not here by accident. Since you are in charge of this project, I would like a letter from you giving me permission to go anywhere on the premises and to speak with anyone."

"My secretary will have gone by now. In the morning—"

"I have the letter here, typed on your stationery. It just needs your signature."

Livermore's anger was more forced than real. "I won't have this. Stealing my office supplies. I won't have it."

"Don't be rude, Doctor. Your stationery is printed by the Government Printing Office. They supplied it to me to make my job easier. Don't you make it harder."

There was a coldness in that you that stopped Livermore and sent him fumbling with his pen to sign the letter. Gust and Leatha looked on, not knowing what to do. Blalock folded the letter and put it back into his pocket.

"I'll want to talk to you all later," he said, and left. Livermore waited until he was gone, then went out as well, without a word.

"What an awful man," Leatha said.

"It doesn't matter how awful he is if what he said was right. Bottle sabotage — can that be?"

"Easily enough done."

"But why should it be done?" Gust asked. "That's the real question. It's so meaningless, so wanton. There's simply no reason."

"That's Blalock's worry, what he's getting paid for. Right now I've had a long day, and I'm hungry and more concerned with my dinner. You go ahead to the apartment and defrost something. I won't be a minute finishing up these tests."

He was angry. "The first blush is off our marriage, isn't it? You've completely forgotten that I asked you out to dinner in Old Town."

"It's not that. " Leatha said, then stopped, because it really was. Gust wasn't completely right; the work was so distracting, and then this Blalock person. She tidied up quickly without finishing the tests and took off her smock. Her dress was dark gray and no less severe. It was thin, too, designed for wear in the constant temperature of New Town.

"If it's cold outside, I should get a coat."

"Of course it's cold out. It's still March. I checked out a car earlier and put your heavy coat in it. Mine as well."

They went in silence to the elevator and down to the parking level. The bubble-dome car was at the ready ramp; the top swung up when he turned the handle. They put on their coats before they climbed in, and Gust turned on the heat as he started the car. The battery-powered electric engine hummed strongly as they headed for the exit, the doors opened automatically for them as the car approached. There was a brief wait in the lock while the inner door closed before the outer one opened; then they emerged on the sloping ramp that led up to Old Town.

It had been a long time since their last visit outside the New Town walls, and the difference was striking. The streets were patched and had an unkempt appearance, with dead grass and weeds protruding from the cracks. There were pieces of paper caught against the curbs, and when they passed an empty lot a cloud of dust swirled around them. Leatha sank deeper into her seat and shivered even though the heater was going full on. The buildings had a weathered and even a decayed look about them, the wooden buildings most of all, and the limbs of the gray trees were bare as skeletons in the fading daylight. Gust tried to read the street signs and lost his way once, but finally found a garish spotlit sign that read sharm's. Either they were early or business wasn't booming, because they could park right in front of the door. Leatha didn't wait but ran the few feet through the chill wind while Gust locked up the car. Inside, Sharm himself was waiting to greet them.

"Welcome, welcome," he said with bored professional exuberance. A tall, wide Negro, very black, wearing a brilliant kaftan and red fez. "I've got just the table for you, right at the ringside."

"That will be nice," Gust said.

Sharm's hospitality was easily understood; there was only one other couple in the restaurant. A heavy smell of cooking hung in the air, some of it not too fresh, and the tablecloth was a cartography of ancient stains only partially removed.

"Like a drink?" Sharm asked.

"I guess so. Any suggestions?"

"Bet your life. Bloody Mary with tequila, the house special. I'll fetch a jug."

They must have been premixed, because he was back a moment later with the tray and two menus tucked under his arm. He poured their drinks and then one for himself and pulled up a chair to join them. The atmosphere of Sharm's was nothing if not relaxed.

"Salud," he said, and they drank. Leatha puckered her lips and put her glass down quickly, but Gust liked the sharp bite of the drink.

"Great. Never tasted one before. How about the menu— any house specials there?"

"Everything's special. My wife is great at any kind of cult-food. Black-eyed peas and corn dodgers, kosher hot dogs and Boston baked beans, we got them all. Just take your pick. Music's starting now, and Aikane will be in to dance in about a half an hour. Drink up, folks, these are on the house."

"Very kind," Gust said, sipping his.

"Not at all. I want to pump your brain, Mr. Crabb, and I pay in advance. I saw you on 3V last week talking about New Town. Pretty fancy if I say so myself. What's the chances of opening a restaurant in your place?" He drained his glass and poured himself another one, topping up their glasses at the same time.

"That's not easy to say."

"What's easy? Living on the dole and maybe blowing your brains out from boredom, that's easy. Me, I got bigger plans. Everyone likes cultfood. Eldsters, reminds them of the old days; kids think it's real pit-blasting. But people here in Old Town don't eat out much, not that much loose pesos around. Got to go to where the change is. New Town. What're the odds?"

"I can find out. But you have to realize, Mr. Sharm. "

"Just plain Sharm. A first name."

"You have to realize that the eldsters have special diets, special sanitary regulations on their food."

"This beanery isn't bug-finky. We got plenty of sanitary examinations."

"That's not what I meant, I'm sorry, don't misunderstand me. It's special diets really, to go with the medication. Really special if you understand, practically worked out and cooked in the labs."

A loud drumming interrupted him as a sad-looking American Indian did a quick Indian war beat on the bass drum. He switched on the audio with his toe, then worked rhythm on the traps as the recording played an Israeli folk song. It was all very unimpressive — but loud.

"What about the younger people then?" Sharm shouted to be heard. "Like you folks. You come this far to eat cultfood, why not have it closer to home?"

"There's not enough of us, not yet. Just technicians and construction teams. No more than ten percent of the children who will occupy the city have even been born yet, so I don't know if you even have a big enough group to draw from. Later, perhaps."

"Yeah, later. Big deal. Wait twenty years." Sharm sank down, wrapped in gloom, moving only to empty the jug into his glass. He rose reluctantly when another customer entered, ending the embarrassing interlude.

They both ordered mixed plates of all the specialties and a bottle of wine, since Leatha was not that enthusiastic about the Bloody Marys. While they ate, a slightly dark-skinned girl, of possibly Hawaiian descent, emerged from the rear and did an indifferent hula. Gust looked on with some pleasure, since she wore only a low-slung grass skirt with many tufts missing and was enough overweight to produce a great deal of jiggling that added a certain something to the dance.

"Vulgar," Leatha said, wiping her eyes with her napkin after taking too much horseradish on her gefilte fish.

"I don't think so." He put his hand on her leg under the table, and she pushed it away without changing expression.

"Don't do that in public."

"Or in private either! Damn it, Lea, what's happening to our marriage? We both work, A-OK, that's fine, but what about our life together? What about our raising a newborn?"

"We've talked about this before. "

"You've said no before, that's what has, happened. Look, Lea honey, I'm not trying to push you back to the Middle Ages with one in the hand, one on the hip, and one in the belly. Women have been relieved at last of all the trouble and danger of childbirth, but by God they are still women. Not men with different builds. A lot of couples don't want kids, fine, and I agree that creche-raised babies have all the advantages. But other couples are raising babies, and women can even nurse them after the right injections."

"You don't think I'd do that?"

"I'm not asking you to do that — as you so sweetly put it — though it's nowhere near as shocking as your tone of voice indicates. I would just like you to consider raising a child, a son. He would be with us evenings and weekends. It would be fun."

"Not exactly my idea of fun."

The answer that was on his lips was sharp, bitter, and nasty and would have surely started an even worse fight, but before he could speak she grabbed him by the arm.

"Gust, there in the corner at that back table — isn't that the horrible person who was at the lab?"

"Blalock? Yes, it looks like him. Though it's hard to tell in this over-romantic light. What difference does it make?"

"Don't you realize that if he is here, he followed us and is watching us? He thinks we may have been responsible for the bottle failures."

"You're imagining too much. Maybe he just likes cultfood. He looks the type who might even live on it."

Yet why was he at the restaurant? If he was there to worry them, he succeeded. Leatha pushed her plate away and Gust had little appetite as well. He called for the check and, depressed in spirits, they shrugged into their coats and went outinto the cold night, past the silent and accusing eyes of Sharm, who knew he was not going to live the new life in New Town no matter how much he wanted to.

Many years before, Catherine Ruffin had developed a simple plan to enable her to get her work done, a plan that was not part of her work routine. She had discovered, early in her career, that she had an orderly mind and a highly retentive memory that were great assets in her work. But she had to study facts slowly and deliberately without interruptions, something that was impossible during the routine of a busy office day. Staying after work was not the answer; the phone still rang, and she was often too fatigued to make the most of the opportunity. Nor was it always possible to bring work back to her apartment. Since she had always been an early riser, she found that her colleagues were all slugabeds and would rather do anything than come to work five minutes early. She went to her office now at seven every morning and had the solid core of her work done before anyone else appeared. It was a practical and satisfactory solution to the problem and one that appealed to her. However, she was so used to being alone at these early hours that she looked upon anyone else's presence as an interruption and an annoyance. She found the note on her desk when she came in; it certainly had not been there when she left the previous evening. It was typed and quite clear:

Please see me now in bottlelab. Urgent. R. Livermore.

She was annoyed at the tone and the interruption and, perhaps, the idea that someone had actually come to work before her. Been here all night, more likely; the scientific staff tended to do that unless specifically forbidden. Still it looked urgent, so she had better comply. There would be time for recriminations later if Livermore had overstepped himself. She put her massive purse in the bottom drawer of her desk and went to the elevator.

There was no one in sight on the laboratory floor, nor in the office when she went in. A motion caught her eye, and she turned to look at the door that led into the bottle rooms; it was closed now — yet she had the feeling that it had moved a moment before. Perhaps Livermore had gone through and was waiting for her. As she started forward there was the sharp sound of breaking glass from behind the door, again and again. At the same instant an alarm bell began ringing loudly in the distance. She gasped and stood frozen an instant at the suddenness of it. Someone was in there, breaking the apparatus. The bottles! Running heavily, she threw the door open and rushed inside.

Glass littered the floor; fluids still dripped from the shattered bottles. There was no one there. She looked about her, stunned by the destruction and the suddenness, shocked by the abrupt termination of these carefully plotted lives. The almost invisible masses of cells that were to be the next generation were dying, even while she stood there gaping. And there was nothing she could do about it. It was horrifying, and she could not move. Shards of glass were at her feet and in the midst of the glass and the widening pool of liquid was a hammer. The killer's weapon? She bent down and picked the hammer up and when she stood upright again someone spoke behind her.

"Turn about slowly. Don't do anything you'll regret."

Catherine Ruffin was out of her depth, floundering. Everything was happening too fast, and she could not grasp the reality of it.

"What?" she said. "What?" Turning to look at the stranger in the doorway behind her, who held what appeared to be a revolver.

"Put that hammer down slowly," he said.

"Who are you?" The hammer clattered on the floor.

"I'll ask the same thing of you. I am Blalock, FBI. My identification is here." He held out his badge.

"Catherine Ruffin. I was sent for. By Dr. Livermore. What does this mean?"

"Can you prove that?"

"Of course. This note, read it for yourself."

He pinched it between the tips of his fingers and looked at it briefly before dropping it into an envelope and putting it into his pocket. His gun had vanished.

"Anyone could have typed that," he said. "You could have typed it yourself."

"I don't know what you're talking about. It was on my desk when I came to work a short while ago. I read it, came here, heard the sound of glass being broken, entered. Saw this hammer and picked it up. Nothing else."

Blalock looked at her closely for a long instant, then nodded and waved her after him to the outer office. "Perhaps. We will check that out later. For the moment you will sit here quietly while I make some calls."

He had a list of numbers, and the first one he dialed rang a long time before it was answered. Leatha Crabb's sleep-puffed face finally appeared on the screen.

"What do you want?" she asked, her eyes widening when she saw who the caller was.

"Your husband. I wish to talk to him."

"He's — he's asleep." She looked about uneasily, and Blalock did not miss the hesitation in her voice.

"Is he? Then wake him and bring him to the phone."

"Why? Just tell me why?"

"Then I will be there at once. Would that embarrass you, Mrs. Crabb? Will you either wake your husband — or tell me the truth?"

She lowered her eyes and spoke in a small voice.

"He's not here. He hasn't been here all night."

"Do you know where he is?"

"No. And I don't care. We had a difference of opinion, and he stamped out. And that is all I wish to tell you." The screen went dark. Blalock instantly dialed another number. This time there was no answer. He turned to Catherine Ruffin, who sat, still dazed by the rapid passage of events.

"I want you to take me to Dr. Livermore's office."

Still not sure what had happened, she did exactly as he asked. The door was unlocked. Blalock pushed by her and looked in. The pale early sunlight streamed in through the glass walls. The office was empty. Blalock sniffed at the air, as though searching out a clue, then pointed to the door in the right-hand wall.

"Where does this lead?"

"I'm sure I don't know."

"Stay here."

Catherine Ruffin disliked his tone, but before she could tell him so, he was across the room and standing to one side as he carefully opened the door. Livermore lay asleep on the couch inside, with a thin blanket pulled over him and clutched to his neck by one hand. Blalock went in silently and took him by the wrist, his forefinger inside below the base of the thumb. Livermore opened his eyes at the touch, blinked, and pulled his hand away.

"What the devil are you doing here?"

"Taking your pulse. You don't mind, do you?"

"I certainly do." He sat up and threw the blanket aside. "I'm the doctor here, and I do the pulse-taking. I asked you what you meant by breaking in like this?"

"There has been more sabotage in the bottle room. I had alarms rigged. I found this woman there with a hammer."

"Catherine! Why would you do a foolish thing like that?"

"How dare you! You sent a note, I received it, asking me to go there, to trap me — perhaps you broke those bottles!"

Livermore yawned and rubbed at his eyes, then bent and groped under the couch for his shoes.

"That's what Dick Tracy here thinks." He grunted as he pulled a shoe on. "Finds me sleeping here, doesn't believe that, tries to take my pulse and see if I've been running around with that hammer, faster pulse than a sleeping pulse. Idiot!" He snapped the last word and rose to his feet.

"I am in charge of this project, it's my project. Before you accuse me of sabotaging it, you had better find a better reason than baseless suspicion. Find out who typed that fool note, and maybe you will have a lead."

"I fully intend to," Blalock said, and the phone rang.

"For you," Livermore said, and passed it to the FBI man, who listened silently, then issued a sharp command.

"Bring him here."

Before she left, Catherine Ruffin made a sworn statement, and it was recorded on Livermore's office machine. Then Livermore did the same thing. Yes, he had not been in his apartment. He had worked late in his office, and as he did many times, he had slept on the couch in the adjoining room. He had gone to sleep around 0300 hours and had neither seen nor heard anything since that time, not until Blalock had wakened him. Yes, it was possible to get from the bottle room by way of the rear door, and through the business office to this office, but he had not done that. He was just finishing the statement when a stranger, with the same dour expression and conservative cut of clothes as Blalock, brought Gust Crabb in. Blalock dismissed the man and turned the full power of his attention on Gust.

"You were not in your apartment all night. Where were you?"

"Go to hell."

"Your attitude is not appreciated. Your whereabouts are unknown — up to a few minutes ago when you arrived at your office. During the time in question someone broke into the bottle room and sabotaged this project with a hammer. I ask you again. Where were you?"

Gust, who was a simple man in all except his work, now enacted a pantomime of worry, guilt, and unhappiness complete with averted eyes and a fine beading of sweat on his forehead. Livermore felt sorry for him and turned away and harrumphed and found his tie and busied himself knotting it.

"Talk," Blalock said loudly, using all the pressure he could to increase the other's discomfort.

"It's not what you think," Gust said in a hollow voice.

"Give me a complete statement or I'll arrest you now for willful sabotage of a government project."

The silence lengthened uncomfortably. It was Livermore who broke it.

"For God's sake, Gust, tell him. You couldn't have done a thing like this. What is it — a girl?" He snorted through his nose at the sudden flushing of Gust's face. "It is. Spill it out, it won't go beyond this room. The government doesn't care about your sex life, and I'm well past the age where these things have much importance."

"No one's business," Gust muttered.

"Crime is the government's business—" Blalock said but was cut off by Livermore.

"But love affairs aren't, so will you shut up? Tell him the truth, Gust, tell him or you'll be in trouble. It was a girl?"

"Yes," Gust said most reluctantly, staring down at the floor.

"Good. You stayed the night with her. A few details would be appreciated, and then you will no longer be a suspect."

Under painful prodding Gust managed to mumble these details. The girl was a secretary with the engineering commission; he had known her a long time. She liked him, but he stayed away from her until last night, a fight with Leatha, he had stamped out, found himself at Georgette's door — you won't tell anyone? — and she took him in, one thing led to another. There it was.

"There it is," Livermore said. "Do your work, Blalock, Gust will be here with me if you want him. Find the girl, get her story, then leave us alone. Investigate the mysterious note, take fingerprints from the hammer, and do whatever you do in this kind of thing. But leave us be. Unless you have some evidence and want to arrest me, get out of my office."

When they were alone, Livermore made some coffee in his anteroom and brought a cup to Gust. Who stood looking out at the hillside now shaded by clouds and curtained with rain.

"You think I'm a fool," Gust said.

"Not at all. I think there's trouble between you and Leatha and that you're making it worse instead of better."

"But what can I do!"

Livermore ignored the note of pleading in the man's voice and stirred his coffee to cool it. "You know what to do without bothering me. It's your problem. You're an adult. Solve it. With your wife or family counseling or whatever. Right now I have something slightly more important to think about with this sabotage and the FBI and the rest of it."

Gust sat up straighter and almost smiled. "You're right. My problem isn't that world-shaking and I'll take care of it. Do you realize that you and I and Leatha seem to be the FBI's prime suspects? He must have called the apartment if he knew I wasn't there. And he followed us to the restaurant last night. Why us?"

"Propinquity, I imagine. We and the technicians are the only ones who go in and out of the bottle rooms at will. And one of the technicians is a plant, he told us that, so they are being watched from their own ranks. Which leaves us."

"I don't understand it at all. Why should anyone want to sabotage the bottles?"

Livermore nodded slowly.

"That's the question that Blalock should be asking. Until he finds out the why of this business he's never going to find who is doing it."

Leatha came silently into the office and said nothing as she closed the door behind her. Gust looked up from the papers on his desk, surprised; she had never been in his office before.

"Why did you do it, why?" she said in a hoarse voice, her face drawn, ugly with the strain of her emotions. He was stunned into silence.

"Don't think I don't know — that Blalock came to see me and told me everything. Where you were last night, about her, so don't try to deny it. He wasn't lying, I could tell."

Gust was tired and not up to playing a role in a bitter exchange. "Why would he tell you these things?" he asked.

"Why? That's fairly obvious. He doesn't care about you or me, just his job. He suspects me, I could tell that, thinks I could sabotage the bottles. He wanted me to lose my temper, and I did, not that it did any good. Now answer me — pig— why did you do it? That's all I want to know, why?"

Gust looked at his fists clenched on the desk before him. "I wanted to, I suppose."

"You wanted to!" Leatha shrieked the words. "That's the kind of man you are, you wanted to, so you just went there. I suppose I don't have to bother asking you what happened— my imagination is good enough for that."

"Lea, this isn't the time or place to talk about this—"

"Oh, isn't it? It doesn't take any special place for me to tell you what I think of you, you. traitor!"

His fixed and silent face only angered her more, beyond words. On the table close by was a cutaway model of New Town, prepared when it was still in the design stage. She seized it in both hands, raised it over her head, and hurled it at him. But it was too light, and it spun end over end in the air, striking him harmlessly on the arm and falling to the floor where it broke, shedding small chunks of plastic.

"You shouldn't have done that," Gust said, bending to retrieve the model. "Here you've broken it and it costs money. I'm responsible for it."

The only response was a slam, and he looked up to see that Leatha was gone.

Anger filled her, stronger than anything she had ever experienced before in her life. Her chest hurt and she had trouble breathing. How could he have done this to her? She walked fast, until she had to gasp for breath, through the corridors of New Town. Aimlessly, she thought, until she looked at the entrance to the nearby offices and realized that she had had a goal all the time. centengcom, the sign read, an unattractive acronym for the Central Engineering Commission. Could she enter here, and if she did, what could she say? A man came out and held the door for her; she couldn't begin to explain why she was standing there so she went in. There was a floor plan on the facing wall, and she pressed the button labeled secretarial pool, then turned in the indicated direction.

It really proved quite easy to do. A number of girls worked in the large room surrounded by the hum of office machines and typers. People were going in and out, and she stood for a minute until a young man carrying a sheaf of papers emerged. He stopped when she spoke to him.

"Could you help me? I'm looking for a… Miss Georgette Booker. I understand she works here."

"Georgy, sure. Over there at that desk against the far wall, wearing the white shirt or whatever you call it. Want me to tell her you're here?"

"No, that's fine, thank you very much. I'll talk to her myself."

Leatha waited until he had gone, then looked over the bent heads to the desk against the far wall and gasped. Yes, it had to be that girl, white blouse and dark hair, rich chocolate-colored skin. Leatha pushed on into the office and took a roundabout path through the aisles between the desks that would enable her to pass by the girl, slowing as she came close. She was pretty, no denying that, she was pretty. A nicely sculptured face, thin-bridged nose, but too heavily made up with the purple lipstick that was in now. And tiny silver stars dusted across one cheek and onto her chest. There was enough of that, and most of it showing too in the new peekie-look thin fabric, almost completely transparent. The large breasts rose halfway out of the blouse, and through it the black circles of her nipples could be seen. Feeling the eyes on her, Georgette looked up and smiled warmly at Leatha, who turned away and walked past her, faster and faster.

By the middle of the afternoon Dr. Livermore was very tired. He had had little sleep the previous night, and the FBI man's visit had disturbed him. Then he had to put the technicians to work clearing up the mess in the bottle room, and while they could be trusted to do a good job, he nevertheless wanted to check it out for himself when they were done. He would do that and then perhaps take a nap. He pushed the elaborate scrawled codes of the gene charts away from him and rose stiffly. He was beginning to feel his years. Perhaps it was time to consider joining his patients in the warm comfort of the geriatric levels. He smiled at the thought and started for the labs.

There was little formality among his staff, and he never thought to knock on the door of Leatha's private office when he found it closed. His thoughts were on the bottles. He pushed the door open and found her bent over the desk, her face in her hands, crying.

"What is wrong?" he called out before he realized that it might have been wiser to leave quietly. He had a sudden insight as to what the trouble might be.

She raised a tear-dampened and reddened face, and he closed the door behind him.

"I'm sorry to walk in like this. I should have knocked."

"No, Dr. Livermore, that's all right." She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "I'm sorry you have to see me like this."

"Perfectly normal. I think I understand."

"No, it has nothing to do with bottles."

"I know. It's that girl, isn't it? I had hoped you wouldn't find out."

Leatha was too distraught to ask him how he knew but began sobbing again at this reminder. Livermore wanted to leave but could think of no way to do it gracefully. At the present moment he just could not be interested in this domestic tragedy.

"I saw her," Leatha said. "I went there, God knows why, driven, I suppose. To see just what he preferred to me was so humiliating. A blowsy thing, vulgar, the obvious kind of thing a man might like. And she's colored. How could he have done this….."

The sobbing began again and Livermore stopped, his hand on the knob. He had wanted to leave before he became involved himself. Now he was involved.

"I remember your talking to me about it once," he said. "Where you come from. Somewhere in the South, isn't it?"

The complete irrelevancy of the question stopped Leatha, even slowed her tears. "Yes, Mississippi. A little fishing town near Biloxi."

"I thought so. And you grew up with a good jolt of racial bias. The worst thing you have against this girl is the fact that she is black."

"I never said that. But there are things. "

"No, there are not things, if you mean races or colors or religions or anything like that. I am shocked to hear you, a geneticist, even suggest an idea like that. Deeply shocked. Though, unhappily, I'm not surprised."

"I don't care about her. It's him, Gust, what he did to me."

"He did nothing at all. My God, woman, you want equality and equal pay and freedom from childbearing — and you have all these things. So you can't very well complain if you throw a man out of your bed, and he goes to someone else."

"What do you mean?" she gasped, shocked.

"I'm sorry. It's not my place to talk like this. I became angry. You're an adult; you'll have to make your own decisions about your marriage."

"No. You can't leave it like that. You said something, and you're going to tell me exactly what you meant."

Livermore was still angry. He dropped into a chair and ordered his thoughts before he spoke again.

"I'm an old-fashioned M.D., so perhaps I had better talk from a doctor's point of view. You're a young woman in good health in the prime of your life. If you came to me for marriage counseling I would tell you that your marriage appears to be in trouble and you are probably the cause, the original cause, that is. Though it has gone far enough now so that you both have a good deal to be responsible for. It appears that in your involvement in your work, your major interests outside your marriage, you have lost your sexuality. You have no time for it. And I am not talking about sex now but all the things that make a woman feminine. The way you dress, apply makeup, carry yourself, think about yourself. Your work has come to occupy the central portion of your life, and your husband has to take second best. You must realize that some of the freedom women gained deprived the men of certain things. A married man now has no children or a mother for his children. He has no one who is primarily interested in him and his needs. I don't insist that all marriages must exist on a master-and-slave relationship, but there should be a deal more give and take in a marriage than yours appears to offer. Just ask yourself — what does your husband get out of this marriage other than sexual frustration? If it's just a sometime companion, he would be far better off with a male roommate, an engineer he could talk shop with."

The silence lengthened, and Livermore finally coughed and cleared his throat and stood. "If I have interfered unreasonably, I'm sorry." He went out and saw Blalock stamping determinedly down the hall. After scowling at the man's receding back for a moment he entered the laboratory to check the bottle installations.

The FBI man let himself into Catherine Ruffin's office without knocking. She looked up at him, her face cold, then back at her work.

"I'm busy now, and I don't wish to talk to you."

"I've come to you for some help."

"Me?" Her laugh had no humor in it. "You accused me of breaking those bottles, so how can you ask for aid?"

"You are the only one who can supply the information I need. If you are as innocent as you insist, you should be pleased to help."

It was an argument that appealed to her ordered mind. She had no good reason — other than the fact that she disliked him — for refusing the man. And he was the agent officially sent here to investigate the sabotage.

"What can I do?" she asked.

"Help me to uncover a motive for the crimes."

"I have no suspicions, no information that you don't have."

"Yes, you do. You have access to all the records and to the computer — and you know how to program it. I want you to get all the data you can on the contents of those bottles. I have been looking at the records of losses, and there seems to be a pattern, but not one that is necessarily obvious. The fact that certain bottles were broken, three out of five, or that all the bottles in a certain rank on a certain day had their contents destroyed. There must be a key to this information in the records."

"This will not be a small job."

"I can get you all the authorization you need."

"Then I will do it. I can make the comparisons and checks and program the computer to look for relevant information. But I cannot promise you that there will be the answer you seek. The destruction could be random, and if it is, this will be of no help."

"I have my own reasons for thinking that it is not random. Do this and call me as soon as you have the results."

It took two days of concentrated effort. Catherine Ruffin was very satisfied with the job that she had done. Not with the results themselves; she could see no clues to any form of organization in any of the figures. But the federal agent might. She put in a call to him, then went through the results again until he arrived.

"I can see nothing indicative," she said, passing over the computer readouts.

"That's for me to decide. Can you explain these to me?"

"This is a list of the destroyed or damaged bottles." She handed him the top sheet. "Code number in the first column, then identification by name."

"What does that mean?"

"Surname of the donors, an easy way to remember and identify certain strains. Here, for instance, Wilson-Smith; sperm Wilson, ovum Smith. The remaining columns are details about the selections, which traits were selected and information of that kind. Instead of the index numbers, I have used the names of the strains for identification in the processing. These are the remaining sheets which are the results of various attempts to extract meaningful relationships. I could find none. The names themselves convey more."

He looked up from the figures. "What do you mean?"

"Nothing at all. A foolish habit of my own. I am by birth a Boer, and I grew up on one of the white reservations in South Africa after the revolution. Until we emigrated here, when I was eleven, I spoke only Afrikaans. So I have an emotional tie to the people — the ethnic group, you would call it — in which I was born. It was a small group, and it is very rare to meet a Boer in this country. So I look at lists of names, an old habit, to see if I recognize any Boers among them. I have met a few people that way in my lifetime. For some talk about the old days behind barbed wire. That is what I meant."

"How does that apply to these lists?"

"There are no Boers among them."

Blalock shrugged and turned his attention back to the paper. Catherine Ruffin, born Katerina Bekink, held the list of names before her and pursed her lips over it.

"No Afrikaaners at all. All of them Anglo-Irish names, if anything."

Blalock looked up sharply. "Please repeat that," he said.

She was correct. He went through the list of names twice and found only sternly Anglo-Saxon or Irish surnames. It appeared to make no sense, nor did the fact, uncovered by Catherine Ruffin with the name relationship as a clue, that there were no Negroes either.

"It makes no sense, no sense at all," Blalock said, shaking the papers angrily. "What possible reason could there be for this kind of deliberate action?"

"Perhaps you ask the wrong question. Instead of asking why certain names appear to be eliminated, perhaps you should ask why others do not appear on the list. Afrikaaners, for instance."

"Are there Afrikaans names on any of the bottle lists?"

"Of course. Italian names, German names, that kind of thing."

"Yes, let us ask that question," Blalock said, bending over the lists again.

It was the right question to ask.

The emergency meeting of the Genetic Guidance Council was called for 2300 hours. As always, Livermore was late. An extra chair had been placed at the foot of the big marble table, and Blalock was sitting there with the computer printouts arranged neatly before him. Catherine Ruffin switched on the recorder and called the meeting to order when Livermore arrived. Sturtevant coughed, then grubbed out his vegetable cigarette and immediately lit another one.

"Those burning compost heaps will kill you yet," Livermore said.

Catherine Ruffin interrupted the traditional disagreement before it could get under way.

"This meeting has been called at the request of Mr. Blalock, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who is here investigating the bottle failures and apparent sabotage. He is now ready to make a report."

"About time," Livermore said. "Find out yet who is the saboteur?"

"Yes," Blalock said tonelessly. "You are, Dr. Livermore."

"Well, well, big talk from little man. But you'll have to come up with some evidence before you wring a confession out of me."

"I think I can do that. Since the sabotage began and even before it was recognized as sabotage, one out of every ten bottles was a failure. This percentage is known as a tithe, which is indicative of a certain attitude or state of mind. It is also ten times the average failure ratio at other laboratories, which is normally about one percent. As further evidence the bottles sabotaged all had Irish or English surnamed donors."

Livermore sniffed loudly. "Pretty flimsy evidence. And what does it have to do with me?"

"I have here a number of transcripts of meetings of this council where you have gone on record against what you call discrimination in selection. You seem to have set yourself up as a protector of minorities, claiming at different times that Negroes, Jews, Italians, Indians, and other groups have been discriminated against. The records reveal that no bottles bearing names of donors belonging to any of these groups have ever been lost by apparent accident or deliberate sabotage. The connection with you seems obvious, as well as the fact that you are one of the few people with access to the bottles as well as the specific knowledge that would enable you to commit the sabotage."

"Sounds more like circumstantial evidence, not facts, to me. Are you planning to bring these figures out in a public hearing or trial or whatever you call it?"

"I am."

"Then your figures will also show the unconscious and conscious discrimination that is being practiced by the genetic-selection techniques now being used. Because it will reveal just how many of these minority groups are not being represented in the selection."

"I know nothing about that."

"Well I do. With these facts in mind I then admit to all the acts you have accused me of. I did it all."

A shocked silence followed his words. Catherine Ruffin shook her head, trying to understand.

"Why? I don't understand why you did it," she said.

"You still don't know, Catherine? I thought you were more intelligent than that. I did everything within my power to change the errant policies of this board and all the other boards throughout the country. I got exactly nowhere. With natural childbirth almost completely a thing of the past, the future citizens of this country will all come from the gene pool represented by the stored sperm and ova. With the selection techniques existing now, minority after minority will be eliminated. With their elimination countless genes that we simply cannot lose will be lost forever. Perhaps a world of fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blond, and muscular Anglo-Saxon Protestants is your idea of an ideal society. It is not mine — nor is it very attractive to the tinted-skin people with the funny foreign ways, odd names, and strangely shaped noses. They deserve to survive just as much as we do — and to survive right here in their country. Which is the United States of America. So don't tell me about Italian and Israeli gene pools in their native lands. The only real Americans here with an original claim to that name are the American Indians, and they are being dropped out of the gene pool as well. A crime is being committed. I was aware of it and could convince no one else of its existence. Until I chose this highly dramatic way of pointing out the situation. During my coming trial these facts will be publicized, and after that the policy will have to be re-examined and changed."

"You foolish old man," Catherine Ruffin said, but the warmth in her voice belied the harshness of her words. "You've ruined yourself. You will be fined, you may go to jail, at the least you will be relieved of your position, forced into retirement. You will never work again."

"Catherine my dear, I did what I had to do. Retirement at my age holds no fears. In fact I have been considering it and rather looking forward to it. Leave genetics and practice medicine as a hobby with my old fossils. I doubt the courts will be too hard on me. Compulsory retirement, I imagine, no more. Well worth it to get the facts out before the public."

"In that you have failed," Blalock said coldly, putting the papers together and dropping them into his case. "There will be no public trial, simply a dismissal, better for all concerned that way. Since you have admitted guilt, your superiors can make a decision in camera as to what to do."

"That's not fair!" Sturtevant said. "He only did these things to publicize what was happening. You can't take that away from him. It's not fair…"

"Fair has nothing to do with it, Mr. Sturtevant. The genetic program will continue unchanged."

Blalock seemed almost ready to smile at the thought. Livermore looked at him with distaste.

"You would like that, wouldn't you? Don't rock the boat. Get rid of disloyal employees — and at the same time rid this country of dissident minorities."

"You said it, Doctor, I didn't. And since you have admitted guilt, there is nothing you can do about it."

Livermore rose slowly and started from the room, turning before he reached the door.

"Quite the contrary, Blalock, because I shall insist upon a full public hearing. You have accused me of a crime before my associates, and I wish my name cleared, since I am innocent of all charges."

"It won't wash." Blalock was smiling now. "Your statement of guilt is on tape, recorded in the minutes of this meeting."

"I don't think it is. I did one final bit of sabotage earlier today. On that recorder. The tape is blank."

"That will do you no good. There are witnesses to your words."

"Are there? My two associates on the council are two committed human beings, no matter what our differences. If what I have said is true I think they will want the facts to come out. Am I right, Catherine?"

"I never heard you admit guilt, Dr. Livermore."

"Nor I," Sturtevant said. "I shall insist on a full departmental hearing to clear your name."

"See you in court, Blalock," Livermore said, and went out.

"I thought you would be at work. I didn't expect to see you here," Gust said to Leatha, who was sitting, looking out of the window of their living room. "I just came back to pack a bag, take my things out."

"Don't do that."

"I'm sorry what happened the other night, I just. "

"We'll talk about that some other time."

There was almost an embarrassed silence then, and he noticed her clothes for the first time. She was wearing a dress he had never seen before, a colorful print, sheer and low-cut. And her hair was different somehow, and her lipstick, more than she usually wore, he thought. She looked very nice, and he wondered if he should tell her that.

"Why don't we go out to that restaurant in Old Town," Leatha said. "I think that might be fun."

"It will be fun, I know it will," he answered suddenly, unreasonably, happier than he had ever been before.

Georgette Booker looked up at the clock and saw that it was almost time to quit. Good. Dave was taking her out again tonight, which meant that he would propose again. He was so sweet. She might even marry him, but not now. Life was too relaxed, too much fun, and she enjoyed people. Marriage was always there when you wanted it, but right now she just didn't want it. She smiled. She was quite happy.

Sharm smiled and ate another piece of the ring-shaped roll. "Top-pit," he said. "Really good. What is it called?" "A bagel," his wife said. "You're supposed to eat them with smoked salmon and white cheese. I found it in this old cult-food book. I think they're nice."

"I think they're a lot better than nice. We're going to bake a whole lot of them, and I'm going to sell them in New Town because they got bread tastes like wet paper there. People will love them. They have to love them. Because you and I are going to move to New Town. They are going to love these bagels or something else we are going to sell them. Because you and I, we are going to live in that new place."

"You tell them, Sharm."

"I'm telling them. Old Sharm is going to get his cut of that good life, too."