Dark Benediction

“It’s sort of a sub-atomic surgical instrument—for doing ‘plastic surgery’ to reproductive cells—Here! Grab this chimp! Got him by the leg.”

“Oop! Got him…. Go ahead, Terry.”

“Using an evolvotron on the gene-structure of an ovum is likeplaying microscopic billiards—with protons and deuterons and alpha particles for cue-balls. The operator takes the living ovum, mounts it in the device, gets a tremendously magnified image of it with the slow-neutrino shadowscope, compares the image with a gene-map, starts gouging out submolecular tidbits with single-particle shots. He juggles them around, hammers chunks in where nothing was before, plugs up gaps, makes new gaps. Catch?”

She looked thoughtful, nodded. “Catch. And the Lord Man made neutroid from the slime of an ape,” she murmured.

“Heh? Here, catch this critter! Snare’s choking him!”

“Okay—come to Mamma… Well, go on—tell me about Delmont.”

“Delmont was a green evolvotron operator. Takes years of training, months of practice.”

“Practice?”

“It’s an art more than a science. Speed’s the thing. You’ve got to perform the whole operation from start to finish in a few seconds. Ovum dies if you take too long.”

“About Delmont—”

“Got through training and practice tryouts okay. Good rating, in fact. But he was just one of those people that blow up when rehearsals stop and the act begins. He spoiled over a hundred ova the first week. That’s to be expected. One success out of ten tries is a good average. But he didn’t get any successes.”

“Why didn’t they fire him?”

“Threatened to. Guess he got hysterical. Anyhow, he reported one success the next day. It was faked. The ovum had a couple of flaws—something wrong in the nervous system’s determinants, and in the endocrinal setup. Not a standard neutroid ovum. He passed it on to the incubators to get a credit, knowing it wouldn’t be caught until after birth.”

“It wasn’t caught at all?”

“Heh. He was afraid it might not be caught. So he suppressed the testosterone flow to its incubator so that it would be—later on.”

“Why that?”

“All the neutroids are potential females, you know. But male hormone is pumped to the foetus as it develops. Keeps female sexuality from developing, results in a neuter. He decided that the inspectors would surely catch a female, and that would be blamed on a malfunction of the incubator, not on him.”

“So?”

Norris shrugged. “So inspectors are human. So maybe a guy came on the job with a hangover and missed a trick or two. Besides, they all look female. Anyhow, she didn’t get caught.”

“How did they ever find out Delmont did it?”

“He got caught last month—trying it again. Confessed to doing it once before. No telling how many times he really did it.”

Norris held up the final kicking, squealing, tassel-haired doll from the back of the kennel-truck. He grinned down at Anne.

“Now take this little yeep, for instance. Might be a potential she. Might also be a potential murderer. All these kiddos from the truck came from the machines in the section where Delmont worked last year when he passed that fake. Can’t have non-standard models on the loose. Can’t have sexed models either—then they’d breed, get out of hand. The evolvotron could be shut down any time it became necessary, and when that generation of mutants died off… “ He shrugged.

Anne caught the struggling baby-creature in her arms. It struggled and tried to bite, but subsided a little when she disentangled it from the snare.

“Kkr-r-reeee!” it cooed nervously. “Kree Kkr-r-reeee!”

“You tell him you’re no murderer,” she purred to it.

He watched disapprovingly while she fondled it. One code he had accepted: steer clear of emotional attachments. It was eight months old and looked like a child of two years—a year short of its age-set. And it was designed to be as affectionate as a human child.

“Put it in the cage, Anne,” he said quietly.

She looked up and shook her head.

“It belongs to somebody else. Suppose it transfers its fixation to you? You’d be robbing its owners. They can’t love many people at once.”

She snorted, but installed the thing in its cage.

“Anne—” Norris hesitated, knowing that it was a bad time to approach the subject, but thinking about Slade’s pseudoparty tonight, and wondering why she had accepted.

“What, Terry?”

He leaned on the snare pole and watched her. “Do you want one of them for yourself? I can sign an unclaimed one over to you. Wouldn’t cost anything.”

She stared at him evenly for a moment, glanced down at her feet, paced slowly to the window to stand hugging her arms and looking out into the twilight.

“With a pseudoparty, Terry?”

He swallowed a lump of anxiety, found his voice. “Whatever you want.”

“I hear the phone ringing in the house.”

He waited.

“It stopped,” she said after a moment.

“Well, babe?”

“Whatever I want, Terry?” She turned slowly to lean back against a patch of gray light and look at him.

He nodded. “Whatever you want.”

“I want your child.”

He stiffened with hurt, stared at her open-mouthed. “I want your child.”

He thrust his hand slowly in his hip pocket.

“Oh, don’t reach for your social security card. I don’t care if it’s got ‘Genetic triple-Z’ on it. I want your child.”

“Uncle Federal says ‘no,’ babe.”

“To hell with Uncle Federal! They can’t send a human through your Room 3! Not yet, anyhow! If it’s born, the world’s stuck with it!”

“And the parents are forcibly separated, reduced to common-labor status. Remember?”

She stamped her foot and whirled to the window again. “Damn the whole hellish world!” she snarled.

Norris sighed heavily. He was sorry she felt that way. She was probably right in feeling that way, but he was still sorry. Righteous anger, frustrated, was no less searing a psychic acid than the unrighteous sort, nor did a stomach pause to weigh the moral worth of the wrath that drenched it before giving birth to an ulcer.

“Hey, babe, if we’re going to the Slade affair—”

She nodded grimly and turned to walk with him toward the house. At least it was better having her direct her anger at the world rather than at him, he thought.

The expectant mother played three games of badminton before sundown, then went inside to shower and dress before the guests arrived. Her face was wreathed in a merry smile as she trotted downstairs in a fresh smock, her neck still pink from the hot water, her wake fragrant with faint perfume. There was no apparent need for the smock, nor was there any pregnant caution in the way she threw her arms around John’s neck and kicked her heels up behind.

“Darling!” she chirped. “There’ll be plenty of milk. I never believed in bottle-feeding. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Great. The injections are working, I guess.”

She looked around. “It’s a lovely resort-hospital. I’m glad you didn’t pick Angel’s Haven.”

“So am I,” he grunted. “We’ll have the reception room all to ourselves tonight.”

“What time is it?”