Savant

ever since he left. I'm looking at him at the moment—as we speak.' Dr. Norman allowed a tiny coloring of satisfaction in his tone. 'He could be extinguished at a single command from me.'

'But for God's sake, man, why haven't you given the command?'

'The plan is not to destroy subject, sir. The plan is to observe him. It was never just to observe him killing our preselected targets and targets of opportunity. We want to see how he thinks, schemes, plans, how and why he chooses the targets he does, how he improvises in the field, how he—'

'But why wasn't anyone else within the directorship of SAUCOG or Clandestine Services told about what was involved here so that it, could be—properly contained?' For once Sieh was at a loss for words.

'I can only say that we—the director and myself, as head of the program—decided that the need to know did not exist. Not in this special case. It was my feeling, and I continue to believe, that the fewer who knew of the real plan the greater the chance for its success. The more one understands our subject and his capabilities the more one would concur as to the need for total security, even within the unit.'

'What did you mean—you were looking at him at the moment?'

'I'm surveilling him electronically, just as other—um-assets are. On the OMEGASTAR system. The movement detection monitor. His implant mechanism makes it impossible for him to conceal his location. We've been with him every step of the way.'

'I'm familiar with your mobile tracker unit, but didn't that malfunction? I was told that's how he got loose.'

'The fabled 'bobble in the power' I believe it was called? Hmm. No. I'm afraid we engineered that, as well.'

'Umm.' The line was quiet for a second. 'And you can have this subject disposed of when the program's goal has been achieved—you're certain of that?'

'He's in one of our asset's crosshairs every second of the day and night.' The doctor had begun to improvise. But he had work to do. He couldn't sit and chat on the phone all day long.

'Where is the subject now?' Sieh asked. There was a brief pause while Norman prepared his dissembling response, but it was enough time for Sieh to understand that he'd asked a question whose answer he had no need to know. 'Yes—all right,' he said softly, as if Dr. Norman had responded. 'It sounds like you've been on top of this all along.'

There were a few more assurances on Norman's part, and without further amenities the call ended. The doctor returned the telephone to its locked cupboard, and resumed working on his paper, the title of which was 'Demystifying the Physical Precognate,' which he would one day publish as part of his Man and Mythology series. He wrote a sentence and read it back:

'The Easy-Option/Quick-Fix Generation is a world choking on the quicksand of its own stupidity and arrogance.' The telephone call had irritated him. He crossed the sentence out and began anew.

Far from Marion, Illinois, M. R. Sieh, Jr., had turned to a report from one of his EMARCY TRANSCO troubleshooters. He read a sentence that began 'American Barrick, Chelsea Metals, Echo Bay, Homestake Mining, Newmont Gold, Pegasus, Placer Dome—' He caught himself reading the same names over and over, not really seeing the sentence. He had found the call both terribly upsetting and, in another way, at least partially reassuring. Overall, it was a troubling and horrifying business, and one that he was certain was doomed to failure, yet he felt powerless to act on his hunch, and he was a man who found the feeling of powerlessness to be an alien one.

He tried making notes for his memo. He wrote: 'Short pos. in subordinated bank debentures, LDC paper. Long pos. in cyclicals.' He capped his pen. He felt old and suddenly very tired. Perhaps he'd take an early nap today and put all this nasty business out of his mind. He stared out at the beautiful view of countless cherry blossoms in bloom.

The call had upset Dr. Norman equally. He looked over at the large green screen. There was a tiny, white, glowing blip dead center. He watched Daniel, whom he knew was in Kansas City, through the miracle of the OMEGASTAR, the Omni DF MEGAplex Secure Transceiver Auto-Lock Locator Relay unit and movement detection monitor.

Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was alive and well. In the nation's capital, M. R. Sieh, Jr., wondered what sort of a world it was in which scientists held human life in such cheap regard, and then he realized that science hadn't changed all that much.

In Marion Federal Penitentiary over in Maximum Security, Dr. Norman was capping his own pen.

Neither man was trivial enough to consider that the word 'capping' was a euphemism for pulling a trigger.

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5

Fort Worth, Texas

To the little boy who peers down into the heart of the immense cathedral, it is as if he views a sea. A sea of humanity. Into this sea it has begun to rain rich, full, vibrating organ notes, notes that fall slanting through the stained-glass sunlight that pierces the body of crucified Christ, washing over the sea with throbbing music, drenching it in a flood of spine-tingling sounds. 'Know the fear of God!' the voice intones.

Seven lamp stands, he sees. One like a son of man, clothed in a long robe and with a golden girdle around his breast. 'His feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters; in his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth issued a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength.'

The apparition of the Deity speaks. 'Behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.' The child trembles with dread. A pervasive sense of fear shakes his body as he is pulled to his feet and propelled forward, down through the vibrating sea of faces.

'Bobby Price.' The man speaks to him from the pulpit in a voice of concentrated thunder. 'Bobby.'

Pressure on his arm. His hand caught in a hard clenched fist that pulls him along, drags him down the center aisle toward the mouth of the river of sound. He has never known such terror.

'Bobby!' he says again. Motes of dust sparkle like dying stars in the angled rays, wheels of blinding color lance his eyes from dying Christ imprisoned in stained panels high above. 'Do you renounce Satan?'

The Price mansion reeked of old money, serious money, which in the Metroplex generally meant cattle or oil. The Price fortune had been built on black gold: petrodollars, and lots of them. Two petroleum tycoons' heirs merged, via marriage, into one—the Tinnon/Price consortium.

John R. Price and the illustrious Olivia Tinnon of Dallas, Curacao, and Barbados, leveraged their way into one another's lives. It was a loveless marriage from the beginning, a union that pregnant Olivia described to a sister on her wedding day as being 'just like the oil bidness. John is light, sweet, crude and dirty.'

Bobby Price seldom saw his preposterously rich jet-set petroheir-and-heiress parents. Pampered and spoiled by nannies, given everything, he was simply one of those sick aberrations for which there appears to be no scientific explanation.

But the little child would long remember standing naked on the front-hall stairs, where two women teased him, promising him he would never be a complete man. He would often recall the bitterness of his tears as he stood beneath the dark oil portraits of stern ancestors, listening to the taunts of the maid and the nanny who had found him nude on the stairway.

Later, he would also fix on the moment when the nanny had caught him trying to peer up her skirt, and had opened large, fleshy legs to reveal the frightening black cavern hidden in her bush, telling the boy he'd fall in that hole and nobody would ever find him.

Funny how little it sometimes takes to change a child into what will someday become a twisted sociopathic menace.