or not is to give his proposal a proper checking out. Okay, so that’s what we’re going to do. I dithered around for a couple of days and then this morning I called Van Vliet in to see me and I told him that I was going to requisition an expansion of his research funds.”
“The only honorable course,” Carpenter said.
“But if it turns out that he’s actually got something workable, and Santachiara successfully develops it, it’ll give Samurai Industries essential control over all human survival on Earth. A monopoly on staying alive, Paul, do you see that?”
“Jesus.”
“You want to go on breathing, you get yourself retrofitted by Samurai. You want to bring kids into the world that are capable of surviving outside of a sealed room, you get your genes remodeled by Samurai. It’ll be a world empire, Paul. Absolute control. And here I am taking the first steps toward wrapping the package up and delivering it to New Tokyo. How do you think I feel about that, with or without Isabelle’s rhetoric ringing in my ears?”
“And if you quit the Company now?” Carpenter asked. “Wouldn’t it turn out just the same? Someone else would deliver the package instead of you.”
“It would be someone else. That’s the whole point.”
“And what would you do?”
“I could get a job anywhere. With Kyocera, with IBM/Toshiba, with one of the Swiss megacorps.”
“And four generations from now Samurai Industries will own the world.”
“I won’t be here in four generations. And at least nobody will curse my name for having helped hand the world over to them.”
“You sound like one of those twentieth-century physicists who refused to work on developing the atomic bomb, because it was a weapon too deadly to use. But it got developed anyway, without their help. There were other people willing enough to work on it. In the long run, what difference did it make whether Scientist A had moral qualms or not, if the thing was needed and Scientist B and C were available to do the work?”
“It might have made a difference to Scientist A,” Rhodes said. “How he slept at night. How he saw himself in the mirror. But it’s a false analogy, Paul. There was a war going on then, wasn’t there? You had to be loyal to your country.”
“There’s a war going on now,” Carpenter said. “A different kind of war, but a war nonetheless. And we’re likely to lose it if we don’t do something drastic. You said so yourself.”
Rhodes stared at him sadly. Interference waves somewhere high above the Earth carved blurry gray streaks across his face.
“I’m not very tough, Paul. You know that. Maybe I just can’t face the moral responsibility of being the man who gives Samurai Industries that much power over the world. If we have to transform the whole human race, it shouldn’t be done for the profit of a single megacorp.”
“So you’re really going to quit, then, Nick?”
“I don’t know. This whole too-much-power-for-Samurai angle is tremendously confusing. I’ve never had to deal with stuff like this before. And I love my work I love being at Santachiara. Most of the time I think what we’re doing is important and necessary. But of course Isabelle’s turning terrible pressure on me, and it’s messing up my head. And if she understood what I’m really worried about here, she’d never let up on me for a minute. She already thinks the megacorps are menaces. Especially Samurai.”
“She’s a disturbed woman, Nick.”
“No, she’s simply deeply committed to—”
“Listen to me. She’s emotionally disturbed. So is her friend Jolanda, who you were kind enough to toss into my bed the other night. These are very sexually gifted women, and we who wander around looking for the solace of a little nookie are highly vulnerable to the mysterious mojo that throbs out at us from between their legs, but their
“I’m unable to see how that justifies your calling her emotionally disturbed,” Rhodes said stiffly.
“Of course you’re unable to see it. You’re in love with her and she can do no wrong. Well, if Isabelle loved you she’d be capable of meeting the implications of your work halfway instead of handing you all this paranoid jealousy of it, this hatred of your devotion to the cause of saving the human race. Instead she loves the power she holds over you and hopes to enjoy the sublime thrill of rescuing you from grave error. She’s incapable of grasping the inherent contradictions in her loathing of adapto research, and she’s succeeding now in exporting those contradictions into your own head. You’ve entangled yourself with an extremely inappropriate person, Nick. If I were you I’d walk away from her in two seconds flat.”
“I keep hoping she’ll come around to my viewpoint.”
“Right. Reason will triumph, as it always does. Except in my experience reason hardly ever triumphs, really. And what is your viewpoint, anyway? You want to succeed in your work but you’re uneasy about Van Vliet and you’re terrified that you’ll ultimately hand Samurai the key to world dominion.” Carpenter took a deep breath. He wondered if he was bearing down too hard on Rhodes. “You want some quick and cheap advice? Don’t leave genetic engineering. You fundamentally believe in the importance and necessity of what you do. Don’t you?”
“Well—”
“Of course you do. You may have some doubts about handing all this power to Samurai Industries, and I can certainly understand where you’re coming from there; but you basically believe that adapting the human race to the coming changes in the atmosphere is the only way to keep civilization alive on Earth.”
“Yes. I do believe that.”
“Damned right you do. Your work is the one thing that keeps you sane in this crazy miserable greenhouse of a world. Don’t even think of abandoning it. Immerse yourself in it as deeply as you can, and if Isabelle won’t put up with it, get yourself a different girlfriend. I mean it. You’ll feel like you’ve been through an amputation for a little while, and then you’ll meet someone else—people always do—and maybe it won’t be quite as magical as it was with Isabelle, but it’ll be okay, and after a time you’ll wonder what the magic was all about anyway.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I—”
“Don’t think.
“I couldn’t do that. It would violate my contract. They’d hunt me down and kill me.”
“People have been known to change companies and survive, Nick. You could get protection. Just go public with your desire to see that more than one megacorp has the secret of human adapto work. And then—”
“Look, this conversation is getting pretty dangerous, Paul.”
“Yes. I know.”
“We’d better stop. I need to think about everything you’ve said.”
“I’m sailing tomorrow. I’ll be out in the Pacific for weeks.”
“Give me a number where I can reach you aboard the ship.”
Carpenter thought about that a little. “No. Ungood idea. Samurai ship, Samurai radio channels. We’ll talk when I get back to Frisco.”
“Okay. Fine.” Rhodes sounded very nervous, as though he had begun to imagine this conversation already being discussed on the highest Company levels. “Hey, Paul, thanks for everything you’ve said. I know that you were telling me things that it was important for me to hear. I just don’t know if I can act on them.”
“That’s up to you, isn’t it, fellow?”
“I suppose it is.” A wan smile crossed Rhodes’ face. “Listen, take care of yourself out there on the high seas. Bring back an iceberg for me, will you? A little one.”
“This big,” Carpenter said. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a couple of inches apart. “Good luck to you, Nick.”
“Thanks,” said Rhodes. “For everything.”
The visor went blank. Carpenter shrugged, shook his head. A burst of pity for Nick Rhodes suffused him, and an inexorable sense of the futility of all he had just said. Rhodes was suffering, yes; but he was too weak, really,
