—
—
Right. Right. If he had any courage, he’d flee. He knows that. But such things have never come easily to Rhodes. He is fiercely retentive, desperately eager to hang on to anything that gives even the promise of some sort of solace.
Eventually Rhodes drifts off into troubled sleep. About five he awakens, kisses the sleeping Isabelle lightly on the tip of her nose, and goes home.
By a couple of minutes after eight he is in the office. The miasma of the night still hovers over him, but he hopes somehow to lift himself out of grim depression through a hard day’s work. At least, Rhodes thinks, in all of last night’s horrors they hadn’t gotten into yet another brawl over his research. But that was a very small comfort at best.
He held off Van Vliet as long as he could, well into mid-morning. Van Vliet gave him a headache in his gut. The authorization for upgrading of Van Vliet’s hemoglobin-research budget had gone along to New Tokyo four days ago, and in all likelihood it would sail through without any objections, given Rhodes’ high standing with upper-level Company management.
Until it did, though, Van Vliet would just have to sit tight. But the kid didn’t seem capable of sitting tight. Two or three times a day he was on the horn to Rhodes, wanting to tell him about this or that exciting new corollary to his preliminary theoretical statement. Rhodes didn’t have much appetite for another dose of that just now, not after last night, at least not so early in the day.
He killed as much time as he could, rummaging doggedly through both his virtual desks and all the clutter on his real one, signing papers without even reading them, flipping some documents down into dead storage unsigned, working mindlessly, shamelessly. Gradually Rhodes began to feel some of the newer abrasions in his soul starting to heal a little.
A couple of drinks helped him get through the bad time. The first one tasted strangely tinny—some residue from the evening before, he thought, damage to his palate from drinking too much of Isabelle’s God-knows-what brand of algae-mash Scotch—but the second drink made things better. And the third went down without any problems at all.
Finally, feeling reasonably well fortified and aware he could duck his meeting with the younger man no longer, Rhodes thumbed the annunciator and said, “I’m available to talk with Dr. Van Vliet, now.”
“Does that mean you’ll be taking calls again, Dr. Rhodes?”
“I suppose. Have there been any for me?”
“Just one,” the android said.
No. Not Isabelle. “A Mr. Nakamura called,” said the android.
“Who?”
“Mr. Nakamura, of East Bay Realty Associates. About the house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.”
Rhodes didn’t know anyone named Nakamura. He wasn’t planning to buy a house in Walnut Creek or anywhere else.
“It must have been a wrong number,” Rhodes said. “He’s looking for some other Nicholas Rhodes.”
“He said that you were likely to think so. But he said to tell you that it was no mistake, that you would understand the terms of the offer right away and would be very pleased by them if you spoke to him.”
Nakamura?
Walnut Creek?
It made no sense. But all consideration of the matter would have to wait. Van Vliet was on the line again, now.
He wanted to bring some new charts to Rhodes’ office, right away. Big surprise, Van Vliet coming up with yet another batch of charts.
Rhodes sighed. “Charts of what?”
“Some new atmospheric extrapolations, the projected hydrogen cyanide levels and how we plan to cope with their special implications.”
“I’m terrifically stacked up here, Van. Can’t this wait a little?”
“But it’s tremendously exciting stuff.”
“Having to breathe hydrogen cyanide is exciting?” Rhodes asked. “Yes, I guess it would be. But not for very long.”
“That’s not what I mean, Nick,” said Van Vliet. He had suddenly begun calling Rhodes “Nick,” ever since the budget requisition had gone up to New Tokyo a few days before. Rhodes didn’t like it much. “You see, Nick, we’ve come up with a really awesome set of equations that indicate the likelihood of oceanic amino-acid formation.
“Okay,” Rhodes said. “Five minutes.”
Van Vliet took fifteen. Mostly that was Rhodes’ fault: he let himself get interested. What Van Vliet’s projections seemed to show was that the upcoming chemical configuration of the ocean might be going to duplicate, to some small and largely unpredictable degree, certain aspects of the nutrient-soup composition of the primordial sea. After hundreds of years of cheerfully filling the whole biosphere with all manner of deadly waste, mankind apparently was about to generate still another terrific surprise for itself that had to do with life instead of death: a mixed package, unexpected biogenesis along with the expectable morbidity, a seaborne reprise of the original chemical forces that had initiated the appearance of Earth’s first living things, a hodgepodge of purines and adenylates and aminos stirring around and rearranging themselves into intricate polymers, some of them self- replicating, out of which might come—
Almost anything.
A shitstorm of random genetic information brewing in the depths of the twenty-fourth century’s seas.
“Do you see it?” Van Vliet cried. “The potential for new life-forms emerging, Nick? Creation starting all over again!”
Rhodes summoned a hearty chuckle from some recess of his soul. “A second chance for the trilobites, eh?”
Van Vliet didn’t seem amused. He gave Rhodes a reproachful look. “I mean one-celled organisms, Nick. Bacteria. Protozoa. An unpredictable pelagic micro-biota spontaneously evolving that could raise hell with the life- forms already present on the planet Such as us.”
Right, Rhodes thought. A load of strange evolutionary garbage hauling itself up out of the waters to plague an already quite adequately plagued planet.
It was an interesting speculative jump, and Rhodes said so, in all sincerity. In all sincerity, though, he didn’t understand what any of this had to do with the work of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, at least not right away. Carefully he said, “I admire the care with which you’re working out all the implications of the situation, Van. But I’m not sure I could get budgetary approval for a study dealing with diseases caused by microorganisms that haven’t evolved yet.”
A cool, almost supercilious grin from Van Vliet. “On the contrary, Nick. If we can project the potential consequences of a quantum jump in natural evolutionary processes, we might be able to build in defenses against new and hostile kinds of—”
“Please, Van. One step at a time, okay? Okay?”
One step at a time, obviously, wasn’t the Van method. And plainly Rhodes’ failure to whoop with enthusiasm over this new angle was, for Van Vliet, one more example of the associate director’s hopeless conservatism. Rhodes pacified him, though, by congratulating him heartily on the new line of work, asking to see further studies, promising to take the topic of renewed biogenesis up at the very next meeting of the directors. And smoothly showed him to the door.
