overambitious scheme that was beyond any imaginable technical capacity Santachiara might be able to develop and which would, if carried somehow to a successful conclusion despite the apparent difficulties, transform the human race beyond all recognition.
Which is exactly the thing, Rhodes thought, that we have been brought together here to come up with, is it not? Which I am paid, and paid well, to achieve. Which I have hired young Alex Van Vliet to help me bring about.
He looked at his hands. They were trembling a little. He spread the fingers wide to regain control over them. Then he hit the button and started Van Vliet over, this time from the actual beginning.
Van Vliet, cocky, self-possessed, grinning at him like an old pal. Twenty-four years old, wasn’t he? Young enough to be Rhodes’ son, almost. Rhodes, at forty, had never before felt the thunder of the oncoming generation, and he didn’t like it.
“What I propose to do in this initial presentation,” Van Vliet said, “is to offer a fundamental reevaluation of our adapto efforts thus far, working from the premise that when we are given an extreme situation to deal with, extreme measures are the only appropriate response.”
Van Vliet disappeared and was replaced by the virtual image of a lovely female figure in airy robes, a fragile girl, tripping through a forest against a backdrop of bilious green sky thick as soup. She was dainty, elegantly slender, Pre-Raphaelitely Caucasian, with a stunning complexion: the archetypical generic lovely little girl. And all around her the ghastly air was closing in, fetid, clotted, pockmarked with clusters of what looked like aerial turds. She didn’t seem to care a damn about that. It didn’t trouble her at all. Rhodes saw her precious little nostrils daintily inputting lungful after lungful of muckosphere as she danced playfully about, happily singing some sweet little song.
This was, Rhodes knew, by way of being an advertisement for the New Human Race that Van Vliet meant to create. Would the new and loathsome Earth to come really be populated by a race of beautiful faery-maidens like this?
“There can be no significant disagreement with our projection,” Van Vliet continued, “that within four to five generations, six as a maximally favorable estimate, the air of this planet will become unbreathable for the human race as it is presently constituted. Despite all corrective measures it is clear that the buildup of greenhouse gases reached a condition of irreversibility some time ago and that it is inevitable now that as outgassing of previously stored pollutants continues we will pass below the oxygenation threshold within the lifetime of the grandchildren of the children now being born.
“Since we do not have the capability of macro-managing our atmosphere to return it to its pre-industrial-age mix, in view of the unavoidable ongoing release into the atmosphere of hydrocarbons that were locked up in the Earth’s oceans and solid matter during the irresponsible nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have chosen instead, here at Santachi-ara, to attempt to micro-manage the human genome to meet the coming changes. Various adapto schemes of differing degrees of complexity are being studied, but it is my considered opinion, after a thoroughgoing analysis of the entire Santachiara program as it is presently conceived, that we have allowed ourselves to settle for a program of half measures which are inevitably doomed to failure and—”
Jesus Christ, Rhodes thought. He says it right to my face, and grins!
Rhodes had had about all that he could take, for the moment. He hit the button. Van Vliet disappeared.
“Ms. Martine calling on Line One,” the annunciator said instantly.
Grateful for the interruption, Rhodes brought her on visor. Isabelle—head-and-shoulders image—hovered before him, a slim, intense woman with oddly complex and conflicting features. Fierce glittering gray-violet eyes; a delicate, finely structured nose; soft, full lips: nothing quite went with anything else. Last spring Isabelle had had her hair turned a volcanic red and Rhodes still was not used to it.
She started right in, her usual brusque headlong approach: “What’s this about dinner with some Israeli tonight, Nick? I thought we were going to go to Sausalito and—” Isabelle paused abruptly. “Nick? You look so funny, Nick!”
“Do I? Funny how?”
“Your face is unusually tight. Your pupils are dilated. There’s trouble, isn’t there?”
Isabelle was always quick to pick up his somatic changes. But that was her business, after all: she was a kinetic therapist. She spoke body language like a native. There was never any sense trying to hide things from her. She and Rhodes had been seeing each other for two and a half years. People were starting to ask him when they would be getting married.
She gave him one of her sensitive, caring therapist looks: Mama Isabelle, eager to relieve him of his anguish. Talk to me, sweet. Tell me about it and you’ll feel better.
Rhodes said, “It’s been a bad morning, lady. Couple of days ago one of the kids here handed me the goddamnedest far-reaching adapto proposal I’ve ever seen. A really revolutionary idea. Today’s the first chance I’ve had to play the virtuals he gave me, and I’m halfway through and too upset to go on.”
“Why is that?”
“Partly because it’s so radical. It would mean the sort of extreme measures you’ve always been worried about, human somatic adaptation right from the bottom up, not just some kind of quick fix. And partly because his approach is so snotty. He opens it by saying, essentially, that the rest of us are all so hopelessly conservative here that we might as well just quit and let him take over the lab.”
“You? Conservative?”
“Around here, yes. Anyway, I’m not yet ready to hear a kid half my age telling me in just about so many words that it’s time for old farts like me to step aside and stop obstructing the solution of the problem.”
“A solution which he can provide?”
“I didn’t get that far. Maybe he can, maybe he can’t. I’m inclined to believe that he can’t, because what he’s proposing is so far out that I don’t think it’s achievable. There are some built-in technical problems that seem inherently unsolvable to me. But what do I know? I’m only an old fart. He wants us to try a sulfur-based hemoglobin instead of iron-based, so that we can get along without oxygen when push comes to shove a couple of hundred years from now.”
“Would that be possible, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it very much. But if it turns out that it is, he’ll own this whole lab inside of a year and I’ll be out on my ear.” Rhodes managed an uneasy smile. “Maybe I ought to have him killed right now, just on the off chance that he’s really onto something.”
Her expression darkened as he spoke. Her eyes grew steely. The therapist was gone and the face on the screen now was that of the dedicated political activist. Rhodes began to worry. He dreaded that look.
“Is that all you can think about, Nick? That this kid will push you out of your job? What about the human race, for God’s sake? Transformation from the bottom up? What does that mean, anyway? Is he going to turn us all into some kind of science-fiction monsters?”
“Isabelle—”
“Sulfur in the blood? It sounds disgusting.”
“Yes. Yes, it is. It makes me want to puke, just thinking about it.” Rhodes wished he hadn’t gone into such detail with her: he had no business sharing company business with anyone on the outside, especially not Isabelle. She had connections to half a dozen reactionary San Francisco humanist groups. She could, if she chose, make real trouble for him. “Listen, let’s not get into all that now, okay? Especially over the phone. I’m aware that this is not a proposal you’re likely to think highly of. But we can discuss it some other time, all right? About this evening —”
“The Israeli.”
“Right.” Thinking of the upcoming meeting with Enron, Rhodes regretted more and more having opened up to Isabelle, now. “He’s a journalist, he says. Doing one of those uplifting features on the future of the human race, more or less—you know, the Frightening Challenges That We Face, and What Our Finest Minds Mean to Do About Them—for some big slick magazine that has about a billion readers in the Israeli-Arab world, and he wants to quiz me on the current state of American gene-splicing research. I think he’s a spy.”
“Of course he is. They all are, those Israelis. Everybody knows that. I’m surprised you’ve agreed to talk to him.”
