Copernick led her to a small room.
“This elevator is one of my animals. Nonsentient, of course. It’s really little more than a box hanging at the end of a single muscle, with a door at each floor. It works like an ordinary elevator. Press these nubs for the floor you want.” Copernick pressed for the second basement.
Mona ran her fingers through the fur on the wall. “Mink?”
“Pretty close. As I said, these things don’t cost extra. I do most of my work down here. The lights are biolu—minescent. And automatic.”
“But they are on now.”
“Because we are not alone.” Copernick started to lead her to the computer room.
“Ay, boss! Them’s nice tits on that one!” a heavy voice shouted from a strong steel cage. A hulking shape was barely visible.
Mona cringed. “Who was that?”
“One of my failures. I wanted something to do heavy labor and defense work. At the time, modifying a great ape seemed to be the easiest route.”
“He’s so ugly.” The black bull mountain ape had a bulging forehead.
“Them bastard! He don’t make no girls like me!”
“And I’m not going to make any more boys like you, either.” Copernick led Mona away.
“What went wrong?”
“Nothing. And everything. I thought that by increasing his gray matter and giving him an adequate vocal apparatus, I’d get something useful.”
“And that didn’t work?” Mona asked.
“It worked. The problem is that intelligence, in any animal, is the servant of more basic emotions and drives. That ape has the ability to be useful, but not the motivation.”
“But can’t you do something about that?”
“I’ve tried. I’ve chemically taken him apart three times and put him together four. But I’ve never been able to come up with a reliable computer analog of his motivational matrix. It’s as if he takes a perverted joy in confounding me. I’ve wasted two years on him. But no more.
“Anyway, I’ve come up with something better for a labor and defense unit. I’m giving up on that ape; I started the reversion process a week ago.”
“Reversion? What do you mean?” Mona said.
“I built him up and I can tear him down. I’m going to change him back to a normal mountain ape and sell him.”
“You’re going to destroy his brain? Isn’t that like murder?”
“What am I supposed to do with him? I can’t let him out. He’s a killer! It isn’t even safe to keep him in a cage. He’s bright enough to figure a way out of it. No. It’s either kill him or revert him. And as an ape, he’s worth a lot of money to a zoo.”
“But still…”
“He was an animal when I bought him and he’ll be an animal when I sell him. I fail to see where I’ve committed any crime.”
“But there must be something…”
“I’m open to suggestions,” Heinrich said.
Mona was silent. Heinrich took her arm—her skin was so incredibly soft!—and led her into the next hall.
“This is something that I want your help with. If you want to, that is.” Copernick opened the door on a surrealistic scene. One wall was a computer bank with multicolor displays that changed periodically. The wall opposite was a complex array of automated chemical apparatus.
Mona’s eyes locked in on a line of twenty glass cylinders in the center of the room. Each was a yard tall and a foot in diameter. Each contained a small humanoid form floating motionless in the fluid.
“Are they alive?” Mona said.
“Certainly.” Heinrich inhaled. “At present, not one human child in ten is getting a solid basic education. The poorer countries can’t afford to feed their children, let alone send them to school. And things are getting worse, not better. A poor educational level results in a poor allocation of limited resources, and hence more poverty. I’m hoping that these beings will help break that downward spiral. They are to act as tutors and primary school teachers. I call them fauns.”
From the waist down the fauns were covered with fur. They had hoofs rather than feet, and their ears were pointed. Each faun had a large umbilical cord running from her naval to a placenta at the bottom of the cylinder.
“They’re lovely,” Mona said. “But why the mythological appearance?”
“They had to be quite human in appearance, or the human children that they raise might imprint improperly, or turn out autistic. Yet I didn’t want adults to confuse them with people. After all, we don’t want a competing species.
“Since human children normally imprint before they can walk, looking up from their cribs, the kids should see the fauns as human,” Copernick said.
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“Raise them.”
“Raise twenty children at one time?” Mona said. “I couldn’t. I mean that it would be impossible!”
“It’s not that bad. They are not human. They won’t have to go through the repetitive learning processes that a human child does. And they can already speak English.”
“English! But they’re still in those bottle things.”
“I’m using a direct computer interface with them while they are still in their cloning tanks,” Copernick said.
“Then why do you need me to raise them?”
“It’s not just busy work, Mona. True, I could educate the fauns completely by computer. If you don’t want the job, I’ll have to do it. The simulations I’ve run indicate that it will work. But future generations of fauns will have to be raised more naturally by their own parents. If there’s a hitch in the educational process, we’d better know about it before we let fauns raise human children.”
“Well…”
“The fauns won’t be ready for decanting for at least a week. Take your time making up your mind about working with them. Now let me show you the simulation room.”
The room contained two desks covered with lighted buttons. Above each was a television display screen. Behind them, taking up most of the room, were four featureless gray cabinets. Each cabinet was a yard wide, two yards high, and sixty yards long.
“These are the main simulation computers,” Copernick said.
“They’re so big. I thought that computers were little things.”
“Little computers are. These are two of the largest ever built. It requires around six hundred trillion bits of random access memory to keep track of all the chemical processes in a simple animal. A human requires twice that.”
“They must have been awfully expensive.” Mona said.
“They were. The reproduction cost for the equipment here at Pinecroft would be around eighty million dollars. The engineering cost was three times that. And Uncle Martin’s installation was almost as expensive.”
“I didn’t know that you were that rich.”
“I’m not. I never was. Copernicus, Inc., is worth several billion. I founded it. I built it and I ran it. But in order to get the capital I needed for expansion, I had to sell the bulk of my company’s stock to outsiders. By the time I was ready to retire, I owned only a small percent of my own company.”
“Then how did you get all of this stuff?” Mona asked.
“Owning a company is one thing. Controlling it is another. Stockholders usually leave you alone, as long as you declare a dividend. As president, I made sure that we had a large R & D budget. This equipment was all built in my own labs.”
“You mean you stole it?”
