Midnight

body to create wholly new amino-acid compounds that keep your blood vessels scoured and free of plaque and clots, kill cancerous cells the moment they appear, and perform a double score of other chores, keeping you far healthier than ordinary men, no doubt dramatically lengthening your life-span.'

Shaddack had expected the healing process to be accelerated in New People, but he had been surprised at the almost miraculous speed with which their wounds closed. He still could not entirely understand how new tissue could be formed so quickly, and his current work on Moonhawk was focused on discovering an explanation for that effect. The healing was not accomplished without a price, for the metabolism was fantastically accelerated; stored body fat was burned prodigiously in order to close a wound in seconds or minutes, leaving the healed man pounds lighter, sweat-drenched, and fiercely hungry.

Watkins frowned and wiped one shaky hand across his sweaty face. 'I can maybe see that healing would be speeded up, but what gives us the ability to so completely reshape ourselves, to regress to another form? Surely not even buckets of these biological chemicals could tear down our bodies and rebuild them in just a minute or two. How can that be?'

For a moment Shaddack met the other man's gaze, then looked away, coughed, and said, 'Listen, I can explain all of this to you later. Right now I want to see Peyser. I hope you were able to restrain him without doing much damage.'

As Shaddack reached toward the door to push it open, Watkins seized his wrist, staying his hand. Shaddack was shocked. He did not allow himself to be touched.

'Take your hand off me.'

'How can the body be so suddenly reshaped?'

'I told you, we'll discuss it later.'

'Now.' Watkins's determination was so strong that it carved deep lines in his face. 'Now. I'm so scared I can't think straight. I can't function at this level of fear, Shaddack. Look at me. I'm shaking. I feel like I'm going to blow apart. A million pieces. You don't know what happened here tonight, or you'd feel the same way. I've got to know How can our bodies change so suddenly?'

Shaddack hesitated. 'I'm working on that.'

Surprised, Watkins let go of his wrist and said, 'You … you mean you don't know?'

'It's an unexpected effect. I'm beginning to understand it' — which was a lie—'but I've got a lot more work to do.' First he had to understand the New People's phenomenal healing powers, which were no doubt an aspect of the same process that allowed them to completely metamorphose into subhuman forms.

'You subjected us to this without knowing what all it might do to us?'

'I knew it would be a benefit, a great gift,' Shaddack said impatiently, 'No scientist can ever predict all the side effects. He has to proceed with the confidence that whatever side effects arise will not outweigh the benefits.'

'But they do outweigh the benefits,' Watkins said, as close to anger as a New Man could get. 'My God, how could you have done this to us?'

'I did this for you.'

Watkins stared at him, then pushed open the bedroom door and said, 'Have a look.'

Shaddack stepped into the room, where the carpet was damp and some of the walls festooned — with blood. He grimaced at the stink. He found all biological odors unusually repellent, perhaps because they were a reminder that human beings were far less efficient and clean than machines. After stopping at the first corpse which lay facedown near the door — and studying it, he looked across the room at the second body. 'Two of them? Two regressives, and you killed both? Two chances to study the psychology of these degenerates, and you threw away both opportunities?'

Watkins was unbowed by the criticism. 'It was a life-or-death situation here. It couldn't have been handled differently.'

He seemed angry to a degree inconsistent with the personality of a New Man, though perhaps the emotion sustaining his icy demeanor was less rage than fear. Fear was acceptable.

'Peyser was regressed when we got here,' Watkins continued. 'We searched the house, confronted him in this room.'

As Watkins described that confrontation in detail, Shaddack was gripped by an apprehension that he tried not to reveal and to which he did not even want to admit. When he spoke he let only anger touch his voice, not fear 'You're telling me that your men, both Sholnick and Penniworth, are regressives, that even you are a regressive?'

'Sholnick was a regressive, yes. In my book Penniworth isn't — not yet anyway — because he successfully resisted the urge. Just as I resisted it.' Watkins boldly maintained eye contact, not once glancing away, which further disturbed Shaddack. 'What I'm telling you is the same thing I told you in so many words a few hours ago at your place Each of us, every damned one of us, is potentially a regressive. It's not a rare sickness among the New People. It's in all of us. You've not created new and better men any more than Hitler's policies of genetic breeding could've created a master race. You're not God; you're Dr. Moreau.'

'You will not speak to me like this,' Shaddack said, wondering who this Moreau was. The name was vaguely familiar, but he could not place it. 'When you talk to me, I'd suggest you remember who I am.'

Watkins lowered his voice, perhaps realizing anew that Shaddack could extinguish the New People almost as easily as snuffing out a candle. But he continued to speak forcefully and with too little respect. 'You still haven't responded to the worst of this news.'

'And what's that?'

'Didn't you hear me? I said that Peyser was stuck. He couldn't remake himself.'

'I doubt very much that he was trapped in an altered state. New Men have complete control of their bodies, more control than I ever anticipated. If he could not return to human form, that was strictly a psychological block. He didn't really want to return.'

For a moment Watkins stared at him, then shook his head and said, 'You aren't really that dense, are you? It's the same thing. Hell, it doesn't matter whether something went wrong with the microsphere network inside him or whether it was strictly psychological. Either way, the effect was the same, the result was the same He was stuck, trapped, locked into that degenerate form.'

'You will not speak to me like this,' Shaddack repeated firmly, as if repetition of the command would work the same way it did when training a dog.

For all their physiological superiority and potential for mental superiority, New People were still dismayingly people, and to the degree they were people, they were that much less effective machines. With a computer, you only had to program a command once. The computer retained it and acted upon it always. Shaddack wondered if he would ever be able to perfect the New People to the point at which future generations functioned as smoothly and reliably as the average IBM PC.

Damp with sweat, pale, his eyes strange and haunted, Watkins was an intimidating figure. When the cop took two steps to reduce the gap between them, Shaddack was afraid and wanted to retreat, but he held his ground and continued to meet Watkins's eyes the way he would have defiantly met those of a dangerous German shepherd if he had been cornered by one.

'Look at Sholnick,' Watkins said, indicating the corpse at their feet. He used the toe of his shoe to turn the dead man over.

Even riddled with shotgun pellets and soaked in blood, Sholnick's bizarre mutation was unmistakable. His sightlessly staring eyes were perhaps the most frightful thing about him yellow with black irises, not the round irises of the human eye but elongated ovals as in the eyes of a snake.

Outside, thunder rolled across the night, a louder peal than the one Shaddack had heard when he'd been crossing Peyser's front lawn.

Watkins said, 'The way you explained it to me — these degenerates undergo willful devolution.'

'That's right.'

'You said the whole history of human evolution is carried in our genes, that we still have in us traces of what the species once was, and that the regressives somehow tap that genetic material and devolve into creatures somewhere farther back on the evolutionary ladder.'

'What's your point?'