The Masks Of Time Part 14

Does my honesty distress you?"

It did more than that. It appalled me. Unless Vornan's sudden burst of humility was merely a ploy, he was labeling himself a dilettante, a wastrel, an idler-a n.o.body out of time, diverting himself among the sweaty primitives because his own epoch had momentarily ceased to amuse him. His evasiveness, the voids in his knowledge, all seemed comprehensible now. But it was hardly flattering to know that this was our time traveler, that we had merited nothing better than Vornan. And I found it ominous that a self-proclaimed shallow floater had the power over our world that Vornan had effortlessly gained. Where would his quest for amus.e.m.e.nt lead him? And what, if any, restraints would he care to impose on himself?

I said as we walked on, "Why have no other visitors from your era come to us?"

Vornan chuckled. "What makes you think I am the first?"

"We've never-no one has-there hasn't been-" I paused, dithering, once more the victim of Vornan's gift for opening trapdoors in the fabric of the universe.

"I am no pioneer," he said gently. "There have been many here before me."

"Keeping their ident.i.ty secret?"

"Of course. It pleased me to reveal myself. More serious-minded individuals go about things surrept.i.tiously. They do their work in silence and depart."

"How many have there been?"

"I scarcely could guess."

"Visiting all eras?"

"Why not?"

"Living among us under a.s.sumed ident.i.ties?"

"Yes, yes, of course," Vornan said lightly. "Often holding public office, I believe. Poor Leo! Did you think that I was blazing a trail, a miserable fool like me?"

I swayed, more sickened by this than anything. Our world honeycombed by strangers out of time? Our nations perhaps guided by these wanderers? A hundred, a thousand, fifty thousand travelers popping in and out of history? No. No. No. My mind rebelled at that. Vornan was playing with me now. There could be no alternative. I told him I did not believe him. He laughed. He said, "I give you my permission not to believe me. Do you hear that sound?"

I heard a sound, yes. It was a sound like that of a waterfall, coming from the direction of Pers.h.i.+ng Square. There are no waterfalls in Pers.h.i.+ng Square. Vornan sprinted forward. I hurried after him, my heart pounding, my skull throbbing. I could not keep up. He halted after a block and a half to wait for me. He pointed ahead, "Quite a number of them," he said. "I find this very exciting!"

The dispersed mob had regrouped, milling about Pers.h.i.+ng Square and now beginning to overflow. A phalanx of capering humanity rolled toward us, filling the street from edge to edge. I could not tell for a moment which mob it was, the Apocalyptists or those who sought Vornan to wors.h.i.+p him, but then I saw the crazily painted faces, the baleful banners, the zigging metal coils held high overhead as symbols of heavenly fire, and I knew that these were the prophets of doom bearing down on us.

I said, "We've got to get out of here. Back to the hotel!"

"I want to see this."

"We'll be trampled, Vornan!"

"Not if we're careful. Stay with me, Leo. Let the tide sweep over us."

I shook my head. The vanguard of the Apocalyptist mob was only a block from us. Wielding flares and sirens, the rioters were streaming in a wild rush toward us, screams and shrieks puncturing the air. Merely as bystanders, we might suffer at the hands of the mob; if we were recognized through our masks, we were dead. I caught Vornan's wrist and tugged in anguish, trying to drag him down a side street that led to the hotel. For the first time I felt his electrical powers. A low-voltage jolt made my hand leap back. I clamped it to him again, and this time he transmitted a burst of stunning energy that sent me reeling away, muscles twitching in a dislocated dance. I dropped to my knees and crouched half dazed while Vornan gaily raced toward the Apocalyptists, his arms spread wide.

The bosom of the mob enfolded him. I saw him slip between two of the front runners and vanish into the core of the surging, shouting ma.s.s. He was gone. I struggled dizzily to my feet, knowing that I had to find him, and took three or four uncertain steps forward. An instant later the Apocalyptists were upon me.

I managed to stay on my feet long enough to throw off the effects of the shock Vornan had given me.

About me moved the cultists, faces thick with red and green paint; the acrid tang of sweat was in the air, and mysteriously, I spied one Apocalyptist to whose chest was strapped the hissing little globe of an ion-dispersal deodorant; this was strange territory for the fastidious. I was whirled around. A girl with bare jiggling b.r.e.a.s.t.s, whose nipples glowed with luminescence, hugged me. "The end is coming!" she shrilled. "Live while you can!" She clawed at my hands and pressed them to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I clutched warm flesh for a moment, before the current of the mob whirled her away from me; when I looked down at my palms I saw the luminescent imprints gleaming in them, like watchful eyes. Musical instruments of indeterminate ancestry honked and blared. Three high-stepping boys, arms locked, paraded before me, kicking at anyone who came close. A towering man in a goat's mask exposed his maleness jubilantly, and a heavy-thighed woman rushed toward him, offered herself, and clung tight. An arm snaked around my shoulders. I whirled and saw a gaunt, bony, grinning figure leaning toward me; a girl, I thought, from the costume and the long snarled silken hair, but then "her" blouse fell open and I saw the flat s.h.i.+ning hairless chest with the two small dark circlets.

"Have a drink," the boy said, and thrust a squeezeflask at me. I could not refuse. The snout of the flask went between my lips and I tasted something bitter and thin. Turning away, I spat it out, but the flavor remained like a stain on my tongue.

We were marching fifteen or twenty abreast in several directions at once, though the prevailing movement was back toward the hotel. I fought my way against the tide, hunting for Vornan. Hands clutched at me again and again. I stumbled over a couple locked in l.u.s.t on the sidewalk; they were inviting destruction and did not seem to mind. It was like a carnival, but there were no floats, and the costumes were wildly individualistic.

"Vornan!" I bellowed. And the mob took it up, magnifying the cry. "Vornan . . . Vornan . . . Vornan . . .

kill . . . Vornan . . . doom . . . flame . . . doom . . . Vornan . . ." It was the dance of death. A figure loomed before me, face marked with pustulent sores, dripping lesions, gaping cavities; a woman's hand rose to caress it and the makeup smeared so that I could see the handsome unmarred face beneath the artificial horrors.

Here came a young man nearly seven feet high, waving a smoky torch and yelling of the Apocalypse; there was a flat-nosed girl drenched in sweat, rending her garments; two pomaded young men tweaked her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, laughed, kissed one another, and catapulted on. I called out again, "Vornan!"

Then I caught sight of him. He was standing quite still, like a boulder in a flowing stream, and curiously the rampaging mob was pa.s.sing on either side of him as it roared forward. Several feet of open s.p.a.ce remained inviolate around him, as though he had carved a private pocket in the throng. He stood with arms folded, surveying the madness about him. His mask had been ripped, so that his cheek showed through it, and he was daubed with paint and glowing substances. I struggled toward him, was carried away by a sudden inner surge within the main flow, and fought my way back to him with elbows and knees, hammering a route through tons of flesh. When I was within a few feet of him I understood why the rioters were bypa.s.sing him. Vornan had created a little dike all around himself out of stacked human bodies, piling them two or three high on each side. They seemed dead, but as I watched, a girl who had been lying to Vornan's left stumbled to her feet and went reeling away. Vornan promptly reached toward the next Apocalyptist to come along, a cadaverous man whose bald skull was stained deep blue. A touch of Vornan's hand and the man collapsed, falling neatly into place to restore the rampart. Vornan had built a living wall with his electricity. I jumped over it and thrust my face close to his.

"For G.o.d's sake let's get out of here!" I yelled.

"We are in no danger, Leo. Keep calm."

"Your mask's ripped. What if you're recognized?"

"I have my defenses." He laughed. "What delight this is!"

I knew better than to try to seize him again. In his careless rapture he would stun me a second time and add me to his rampart, and I might not survive the experience. So I stood beside him, helpless. I watched a heavy foot descend on the hand of an unconscious girl who lay near me; when the foot moved on, the shattered fingers quivered convulsively, bending at the joints in a way that human hands do not normally bend. Vornan turned in a full circle, taking everything in.

He said to me, "What makes them believe the world is going to end?"

"How would I know? It's irrational. They're insane."

"Can so many people be insane at once?"

"Of course."

"And do they know the day the world ends?"

"January 1, 2000."

"Quite close. Why that day in particular?"

"It's the beginning of a new century," I said, "of a new millennium. Somehow people expect extraordinary things to happen then."

With lunatic pedantry Vornan said, "But the new century does not begin until 2001. Heyman has explained it to me. It is not correct to say that the century starts when-"

"I know all that. But no one pays attention to it. d.a.m.n you. Vornan, let's not stand here debating calendrics! I want to get away from here!"

"Then go."

"With you."

"I'm enjoying this. Look there, Leo!"

I looked. A nearly naked girl garbed as a witch rode on the shoulders of a man with horns sprouting from his forehead. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were painted glossy black, the nipples orange. But the sight of such grotesquerie did nothing to me now. I did not even trust Vornan's improvised barricade. If things got any wilder- Police copters appeared abruptly. Long overdue, too. They hovered between the buildings, no more than a hundred feet up and the whirr of their rotors sent a chilling draft upon us. I watched the dull gray nozzles extrude from the white globular bellies above us; then came the first spurts of the antiriot foam.

The Apocalyptists seemed to welcome it. They rushed forward, trying to get into position under the nozzles; some of them stripped off what few garments they wore and bathed in it. The foam came bubbling down, expanding as it met the air, forming a thick viscous soapiness that filled the street and made movement almost impossible. Moving now in angular jerks like machines running down, the demonstrators lurched to and fro, fighting their way through the layers of foam. Its taste was oddly sweet.

I saw a girl get a jolt of it in the face and stumble, blinded, mouth and nostrils engulfed in the stuff. She fell to the pavement and disappeared totally, for by now at least three feet of foam rose from the ground, cool, sticky, cutting all of us off at our thighs. Vornan knelt and drew the girl back into view, although she would not suffocate where she was. He cleared the foam tenderly from her face and ran his hands over her moist, slippery flesh. When he gripped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, her eyes opened and he said quietly to her, "I am Vornan-19." His lips went to hers. When he released her, she scrambled away on her knees, burrowing through the foam. To my horror I saw Vornan was without his mask.

We could scarcely move at all, now. Police robots were in the street, great s.h.i.+ning domes of metal that buzzed easily through the foam, seizing the trapped demonstrators and hustling them into groups of ten or twelve. Sanitation mechs were already out to suck up the excess foam. Vornan and I stood near the outer border of the scene; slowly we sloshed through the foam and reached an open street. No one seemed to notice us. I said to Vornan, "Will you listen to reason now? Here's our chance to get back to the hotel without any more trouble."

"We have had little trouble so far."

"There'll be big trouble if Kralick finds out what you've been up to. He'll restrict your freedom, Vornan.

He'll keep an army of guards outside your door and put a triple seal on it."

"Wait," he said. "I want something. Then we can go."

He darted back into the mob. By now the foam had hardened to a doughy consistency, and those in it were wallowing precariously. In a moment Vornan returned. He was dragging a girl of about seventeen who seemed dazed and terrified. Her costume was of transparent plastic, but flecks of foam were clinging to it, conveying a probably unwanted modesty. "Now we can go to the hotel," he said to me.

And to the girl he whispered, "I am Vornan-19. The world does not end in January. Before dawn I will prove it to you."

FOURTEEN.

We did not have to sneak back into the hotel. A cordon of searchers had spread out for blocks around it; within moments after we had escaped from the foam, Vornan tripped an ident.i.ty signal and some of Kralick's men picked us up. Kralick was in the hotel lobby, monitoring the detector screens and looking half berserk with anxiety. When Vornan strode up to him, still tugging the quivering Apocalyptist girl, I thought Kralick would have a fit. Blandly Vornan apologized for any trouble he might have caused and asked to be conducted to his room. The girl accompanied him. I had an uncomfortable session with Kralick when they were out of sight.

"How did he get out?" he demanded.

"I don't know. He gimmicked the seal on his room, I suppose." I tried to persuade Kralick that I had meant to give an alarm when Vornan left the hotel, but had been prevented by circ.u.mstances beyond my control. I doubt that I convinced him, but at least I got across to him the fact that I had done my best to keep Vornan from becoming involved with the Apocalyptists, and that the entire exploit had been none of my doing.

There was a noticeable tightening of security in the weeks that followed. In effect, Vornan-19 became the prisoner and not merely the guest of the United States Government. Vornan had been more or less an honored prisoner all along, for Kralick had suspected it was unwise to let him move about freely; but aside from sealing his room at night and posting guards, no attempt had been made to exert physical restraint on him. Somehow he had coped with the seal and drugged his guards, but Kralick prevented a repet.i.tion by using better seals, self-tripping alarms, and more guards.

It worked, in the sense that Vornan did not go on any further unauthorized expeditions. But I think that that was more a matter of Vornan's own choice than of Kralick's added precautions. After his experience with the Apocalyptists, Vornan seemed to subside considerably; he became a more orthodox tourist, looking at this and that but holding back his more demoniacal comments. I feared this subdued version of our guest the way I would fear a quiescent volcano. But in fact he committed no new outrageous transgressions of propriety, stepped on no toes, was in many ways the model of tact. I wondered what he was storing up for us.

And so the weeks of the tour dragged on. We looked at Disneyland with Vornan, and although the place had been visibly refurbished, it plainly bored him. He was not interested in seeing synthetic reconstructions of other times and other places; he wanted to experience the United States of 1999 at first hand. At Disneyland he paid more attention to the other customers than to the amus.e.m.e.nts themselves. We swept him through the park unheralded, moving in a small close-knit group, and for once he attracted little attention. It was as if anyone who saw Vornan at Disneyland a.s.sumed that what he saw was part of the park, a clever plastic imitation of the man out of time, and pa.s.sed by with no more than a nod and a smile.

We took him to Irvine and showed him the trillion-volt accelerator. That was my idea: I wanted a chance to get back to the campus for a few days, to visit my office and my house and be sure that all was still well. Letting Vornan near the accelerator was something of a calculated risk, I thought, remembering the havoc he had produced at Wesley Bruton's villa; but we saw to it that Vornan never came within reach of any of the control equipment. He stood beside me, gravely watching the screens, as I smashed atoms for him. He seemed interested, but it was the superficial interest a child might have shown: he liked the pretty patterns.

For a moment I forgot everything except the joy of manipulating the huge machine. I stood at the operating panel, with billions of dollars of equipment stretching above and before me, pulling switches and levers with the same glee Wesley Bruton had displayed while making his house work wonders. I pulverized atoms of iron and sent neutrons spraying madly about. I sent a stream of protons along the track and cut in the neutron injector so that the screen was spattered with the bright bursts of demolition lines. I conjured up quarks and antiquarks. I went through my entire repertoire, and Vornan nodded innocently, smiling, pointing. He could have deflated me as he had done the Stock Exchange man, simply by asking what the point of all this c.u.mbersome apparatus might be, but he did not. I am not sure if his restraint was a matter of courtesy toward me-for I flattered myself that Vornan was closer to me than to any of the others who traveled with him-or if it was simply that for the moment his vein of impishness was played out, and he was content to stand and watch respectfully.

We took him next to the fusion plant on the coast. Again, this was my doing, though Kralick agreed it might be useful. I still had hopes, however flickering, of squeezing from Vornan some data on the energy sources of his era. Jack Bryant's too-sensitive conscience spurred me on. But the attempt was a failure.

The manager of the plant explained to Vornan how we had captured the fury of the sun itself, setting up a proton-proton reaction within a magnetic pinch, and tapping power from the trans.m.u.tation of hydrogen to helium. Vornan was permitted to enter the relay room where the plasma was regulated by sensors operating above the visible spectrum. What we were seeing was not the raging plasma itself-direct viewing of that was impossible-but a simulation, a re-creation, a curve following peak for peak every fluctuation of the soup of stripped-down nuclei within the pinch tank. It had been years since I had visited the plant myself, and I was awed. Vornan kept his own counsel. We waited for disparaging remarks; none came. He did not bother to compare our medieval scientific accomplishments with the technology of his own age. This new Vornan lacked bite.

Next we doubled back through New Mexico, where Pueblo Indians dwell in a living museum of anthropology. This was Helen McIlwain's big moment. She led us through the dusty mud village trailing anthropological data. Here in early spring the regular tourist season had not yet begun, and so we had the pueblo to ourselves; Kralick had arranged with the local authorities to close the reservation to outsiders for the day, so that no Vornan-seekers would come up from Albuquerque or down from Santa Fe to make trouble. The Indians themselves came shuffling out of their flat-roofed adobes to stare, but I doubt that many of them knew who Vornan was, and I doubt that any of them cared. They were pudgy people, round-faced, flat-nosed, not at all the hawk-featured Indians of legend. I felt sorry for them. They were Federal employees, in a sense, paid to stay here and live in squalor. Although they are permitted television and automobiles and electricity, they may not build houses in the modern styles, and must continue to grind corn meal, perform their ceremonial dances, and turn out pottery for sale to visitors.

Thus we guard our past.

Helen introduced us to the leaders of the village: the governor, the chief, and the heads of two of the so-called secret societies. They seemed like sharp, sophisticated men, who could just as easily be running automobile agencies in Albuquerque. We were taken around, into a few of the houses, even down into the kiva, the town religious center, formerly sacrosanct. Some children did a ragged dance for us. In a shop at the edge of the plaza we were shown the pottery and turquoise-and-silver jewelry that the women of the village produced. One case held older pottery, made in the first half of the twentieth century, handsome stuff with a smooth finish and elegant semi-abstract patterns of birds and deer; but these pieces were priced at hundreds of dollars apiece, and from the look on the face of the salesgirl I gathered that they were not really for sale at all; they were tribal treasures, souvenirs of happier times.

The real stock-in-trade consisted of cheap, flimsy little jugs. Helen said with scorn, "You see how they put the paint onafter the pot's been fired, now? It's deplorable. Any child can do it. The University of New Mexico is trying to revive the old ways, but the people here argue that the tourists like the fake stuff better. It's brighter, livelier-and cheaper." Vornan drew a sour glare from Helen when he expressed his opinion that the so-called touristware was more attractive than the earlier pottery. I think he said it only to tease her, but I am not sure; Vornan's esthetic standards were always unfathomable, and probably to him the debased current work seemed as authentic a product of the remote past as the really fine pottery in the display case.

We had only one minor Vornan incident at the pueblo. The girl running the showroom was a slim adolescent beauty with long soft s.h.i.+ning black hair and fine features that looked more Chinese than Indian; we were all quite taken by her, and Vornan seemed eager to add her to his collection of conquests. I don't know what would have happened if he had asked the girl to stage a command performance in his bed that night. Luckily, he never got that far. He was eyeing the girl in obvious l.u.s.t as she moved about the showroom; I saw it, and so did Helen. When we left the building, Vornan turned as if to go back in and announce his desire. Helen blocked his way, looking more like a witch than ever, her eyes blazing against her flaming mop of red hair.

"No,"she said fiercely. "Youcan't!"

That was all. And Vornan obeyed. He smiled and bowed to Helen and walked away. I hadn't expected him to do that.

The new meek Vornan was a revelation to us all, but the public at large preferred the revelations of the Vornan it had come to know in January and February. Against all likelihood, interest in Vornan's deeds and words grew more pa.s.sionate with each pa.s.sing week; what might have been a nine-days' wonder was on its way toward becoming the sensation of the age. Some clever huckster a.s.sembled a quick, flimsy book about Vornan and called itThe New Revelation. It contained transcripts of all of Vornan-19's press conferences and media appearances since his arrival at Christmastime, with some choppy commentary tying everything together. The book appeared in the middle of March, and some measure of its significance can be gathered from the fact that it came out not only in tape, cube, and facsim editions, but also in a printed text-a book, that is, in the old sense. A California publisher produced it as a slim paperbound volume with a bright red jacket and the t.i.tle in incandescent ebony letters; an edition of a million copies sold out within a week. Very shortly, pirated editions were emerging from underground presses everywhere, despite the frantic attempts of the copyright owner to protect his property. Uncountable millions ofThe New Revelation flooded the land. I bought one myself, as a keepsake. I saw Vornan reading a copy. Both the genuine edition and the various ersatz ones had the same black-on-red color scheme, so that at a glance they were indistinguishable, and in the early weeks of spring those paperbound books covered the nation like a strange red snowfall.

The new creed had its prophet, and now it had its gospel too. I find it hard to see what sort of spiritual comfort could be derived fromThe New Revelation, and so I suppose the book was more of a talisman than a scripture; one did not take counsel from it, one merely carried it about, drawing sustenance from the feel of the s.h.i.+ny covers against the hands. Whenever we traveled with Vornan and a crowd a.s.sembled, copies of the book were held aloft like flashcards at a college football game, creating a solid red backdrop speckled with the dark letters of the t.i.tle.

There were translations. The Germans, the Poles, the Swedes, the Portuguese, the French, the Russians, all had their own versions ofThe New Revelation. Someone on Kralick's staff was collecting the things and forwarding them to us wherever we went. Kralick usually turned them over to Kolff, who showed a weird bitter interest in each new edition. The book made its way into Asia, and reached us in j.a.panese, in several of the languages of India, in Mandarin, and in Korean. Appropriately, a Hebrew edition appeared, the right language for any holy book. Kolff liked to arrange the little red books in rows, s.h.i.+fting the patterns about. He spoke dreamily of making a translation of his own, into Sanskrit or perhaps Old Persian; I am not sure if he was serious.

Since the episode of his interview with Vornan, Kolff had been slipping into some kind of senile decay.

He had been badly shocked by the computer's views on Vornan's speech sample; the ambiguity of that report had punctured his own buoyant conviction that he had heard the voice of the future, and now, chastened and humiliated, he had fallen back from his first enthusiastic verdict. He was not at all sure that Vornan was genuine or that he had really heard the ghosts of words in the liquid flow of Vornan's prattle.

Kolff had lost faith in his own judgment, his own expertise, and we could see him crumbling now. This great Falstaff of a man was at least partly a humbug, as we had discovered during our tour; though his gifts were great and his learning was vast, he knew that his lofty reputation had been undeserved for decades, and abruptly he stood exposed as an uncertain maunderer. In pity for him I asked Vornan to grant Kolff a second interview and to repeat whatever it was he had recited the first time. Vornan would not do it.

"It is useless," he said, and, refused to be prodded.

Kolff subdued seemed hardly to be Kolff at all. He ate little, said less, and by the beginning of April had lost so much weight that he seemed unrecognizable. His clothes and his skin itself hung slack on his shrunken frame. He moved along with us from place to place, but he was shambling blindly, hardly aware of what was happening about him. Kralick, concerned, wanted to relieve Kolff of his a.s.signment and send him home. He discussed the matter with the rest of us, but Helen's opinion was decisive. "It'll kill him," she said. "He'll think he's being fired for incompetence."

"He's a sick man," said Kralick. "All this traveling-"

"It's a useful function."

"But he isn't being useful any more," Kralick pointed out. "He hasn't contributed anything in weeks. He just sits there playing with those copies of the book. Helen, I can't take the responsibility. He belongs in a hospital."

"He belongs with us."

"Even if it kills him?"

"Even if it kills him," Helen said vigorously. "Better to die in harness than to creep away thinking you're an old fool."

Kralick let her win the round, but we were fearful, for we could see the inward rot spreading through old Lloyd day by day. Each morning I expected to be told that he had slipped away in his sleep; but each morning he was there, gaunt, gray-skinned, his nose now jutting like a pyramid in his diminished face. We journeyed to Michigan so that Vornan could see Aster's life-synthesis project; and as we walked the aisles of that eerie laboratory, Kolff clumped along behind us, a delegate from the walking dead witnessing thc sp.a.w.ning of artificial life.

Aster said, "This was one of our earliest successes, if you can call it a success. We never could figure out what phylum to put it in, but there's no doubt that it's alive and that it breeds true, so in that sense the experiment was successful."

We peered into a huge tank in which a variety of underwater plants grew. Between the green fronds swam slender azure creatures, six to eight inches long; they were eyeless, propelled themselves by ripplings of a dorsal fin that ran their entire length, and were crowned by gaping mouths rimmed with agile translucent tentacles. At least a hundred of them were in the tank. A few appeared to be budding; smaller representatives of their kind protruded from their sides.

"We intended to manufacture coelenterates," Aster explained. "Basically, that's what we have here; a giant free-swimming anemone. But coelenterates don't have fins, and this one does, and knows how to use it. We didn't engineer that fin. It developed spontaneously. There's the phantom of a segmented body structure, too, which is an attribute belonging to a higher phylum. Metabolically, the thing is capable of adapting to its environment far more satisfactorily than most invertebrates; it lives in fresh or salt water, gets along in a temperature spectrum of about a hundred degrees, and handles any sort of food. So we've got a super-coelenterate. We'd like to test it in natural conditions, perhaps dump a few in a pond nearby, but frankly we're afraid to let the thing loose." Aster smiled self-consciously. "We've also been trying vertebrate synthesis lately, with rather less to show for it. Here . . ."

She indicated a tank in which a small brown creature lay limply on the bottom, moving in an occasional random twitch. It had two boneless-looking arms and a single leg; the missing leg did not seem ever to have been there. A whiplike tail drifted feebly about. To me it looked like a sad salamander. Aster seemed quite proud of it, though, for it had a well-developed skeletal structure, a decent nervous system, a surprisingly good set of eyes, and a full complement of internal organs. It did not, however, reproduce itself. They were still working on that. In the meantime, each of these synthetic vertebrates had to be built up cell by cell from the basic genetic material, which very much limited the scope of the experiment. But this was awesome enough.

Aster was in her element, now, and she led us on tirelessly, down one avenue of the long, brightly lit room and up the next, past giant frosted flasks and looming, sinister centrifuges, along alcoves occupied by fractionating columns, into annexes where mechanical agitators chuttered busily in reaction vats containing somber iridescent amber fluids. We peered through long fiber telescopes to spy on sealed rooms in which light, temperature, radiation, and pressure were meticulously controlled. We saw blowups of electron photomicrographs and garnet holograms that showed us the internal structures of mysterious cellular groups. Aster sprinkled her running commentary liberally with words laden with symbolic significance, a lab jargon that had its own mystic rhythm; we heard of photometric t.i.trators, platinum crucibles, hydraulic plethysmographs, rotary microtomes, densitometers, electroph.o.r.esis cells, collodion bags, infrared microscopes, flowmeters, piston burettes, cardiotachometers: an incomprehensible and wonderful vocabulary. Painstakingly Aster revealed how the protein chains of life were put together and made to replicate themselves; she spelled everything out simply and beautifully, and there were the wriggling mock-coelenterates and the flabby pseudosalamanders to tell us of achievement. It was altogether marvelous.