The Two Worlds (26 page)

"She's downstairs. I got called away." Pacey stared at the inside of the doors for a second. "Sobroskin's been in touch via the Soviet Embassy here. He wants me to meet him in London to talk about something."

Caldwell raised his eyebrows in surprise. "You're going?"

"I'll know later. I just called Packard, and I'm going to his place right now to tell him about it. I've arranged to meet somebody later tonight to let them know." He shook his head. "And I thought this would be a quiet night."

They came out of the elevator and walked through the arcade to where Pacey had left Lyn. The alcove was empty. They looked around, but she was nowhere in sight.

"Maybe she went to the little girls' room," Caldwell suggested.

"Probably."

They stood for a while talking and waiting, but there was no sign of Lyn. Eventually Pacey said, "Maybe she wanted another drink, couldn't get served out here, and went into the bar. She might still be in there."

"I'll check it out," Caldwell said. He about-faced and stumped away across the lobby.

A minute later he returned, wearing the expression of somebody who had been hit from behind by a tramcar while minding his own business in the middle of the Hilton. "She's in there," he announced in a dull voice, slumping down into one of the empty seats. "She's got company. Go see for yourself, but stay back from the door. Then come back and tell me if it's who I think it is."

A minute later Pacey thudded down into the chair opposite. He looked as if he had been hit by the same tram on its return trip. "It's him," he said numbly. A long time seemed to pass. Then Pacey murmured, "He's got a place up in Connecticut somewhere. He must have stopped off in D.C. for a few days on his way back from Bruno. We should have picked some other place."

"How'd she look?" Caldwell asked.

Pacey shrugged. "Fine. She seemed to be doing most of the talking, and looked quite at home. If I hadn't known any better, I'd have said it was some guy swallowing a line and well on his way to ending up a few hundred poorer. She looks as if she can take care of herself okay."

"But what the hell does she think she's trying to do?"

"You tell me. You're her boss. I hardly know her."

"But we can't just leave her there."

"What can we do? She walked in there, and she's old enough to drink. Anyhow, I can't go in there because he knows me, and there's no point in making problems. That leaves you. What are you going to do—make like the boss who can't see when he's being a wet blanket, or what?" Caldwell scowled irritably at the table but seemed stuck for a reply. After a short silence Pacey stood up and spread his hands apologetically. "Look, Gregg, I know this sounds kind of bad, but I'm going to have to leave you to handle it in whatever way you want. Packard's waiting for me right now, and it's important. I have to go."

"Yeah, okay, okay." Caldwell waved a hand vaguely. "Call me when you get back and let me know what's happening."

Pacey left, using a side entrance to avoid crossing the lobby in front of the bar. Caldwell sat brooding for a while, then shrugged, shook his head perplexedly, and went back up to his room to catch up on some reading while he waited for a call from Pacey.

Danchekker gazed for a long time at the two solid images being displayed side by side in a laboratory in Thurien. They were highly magnified reproductions of a pair of organic cells obtained from a species of bottom-dwelling worm from an ocean on one of the Ganymean worlds, and showed the internal structures color-enhanced for easy identification of the nuclei and other components. Eventually he shook his head and looked up. "I'm afraid I am obliged to concede defeat. They both appear identical to me. And you are saying that one of them does not belong to this species at all?" He sounded incredulous.

Shilohin smiled from a short distance behind him. "The one on the left is a single-cell microorganism that contains enzymes programmed to dismantle the DNA of its own nucleus and reassemble the pieces into a copy of the host organism's DNA," she said. "When that process is complete, the whole structure is rapidly transformed into a duplicate of whatever type of cell the parasite happens to be residing in. From then on the parasite has literally become a part of the host, indistinguishable from the host's own naturally produced cells and therefore immune to its antibodies and rejection mechanisms. It evolved on a planet subject to intense ultraviolet radiation from a fairly hot, blue star, probably from a cell-repair mechanism that stabilized the species against extreme mutation. As far as we know it's a unique adaptation. I thought you'd be interested in seeing it."

"Extraordinary," Danchekker murmured. He walked across to the device of gleaming metal and glass from which the data to generate the image originated, and stooped to peer into the tiny chamber containing the tissue sample. "I would be most interested in conducting some experiments of my own on this organism when I get back. Er . . . do you think the Thuriens might let me take a sample of it?"

Shilohin laughed. "I'm sure you'd be welcome to, Professor, but how do you propose carrying it back to Houston? You're forgetting that you're not really here."

"Tch! Stupid of me." Danchekker shook his head and stepped back to gaze at the apparatus around them, the function of most of which he still failed to comprehend. "So much to learn," he murmured half to himself. "So much to learn . . ." He thought for a while, and his expression changed to a frown. Eventually he turned to face Shilohin again. "There's something about this whole Thurien civilization that has been puzzling me. I wonder if you can help."

"I'll try. What's the problem?"

Danchekker sighed. "Well . . . I don't know . . . after twenty-five
million
years, it should be even
more
advanced than it is, I would have thought. It is far ahead of Earth, to be sure, but I can't see Earth requiring anywhere near that amount of time to reach a level comparable to Thurien's today. It seems . . . strange."

"The same thought occurred to me," Shilohin said. "I talked to Eesyan about it."

"Did he offer a reason?"

"Yes." Shilohin paused for a long time while Danchekker looked at her curiously. Then she said, "The civilization of Thurien came to a halt for a very long time. Paradoxically it was as a result of its advanced sciences."

Danchekker blinked uncertainly through his spectacles. "How could that be?"

"You have studied Ganymean genetic-engineering techniques extensively," Shilohin replied. "After the migration to Thurien, they were taken even further."

"I'm not sure I see the connection."

"The Thuriens perfected a capability that they had been dreaming of for generations—the ability to program their own genes to offset the effects of bodily aging and wasting . . . indefinitely."

A moment or two went by before Danchekker grasped what she was saying. Then he gasped. "Do you mean immortality?"

"Exactly. For a long time it seemed that Utopia had been achieved."

"Seemed?"

"Not all the consequences were foreseen. After a while all their progress, their innovation, and their creativity ceased. The Thuriens became too wise and knew too much. In particular they knew all the reasons why things were impossible and why nothing more could be achieved."

"You mean they ceased to dream." Danchekker shook his head sadly. "How unfortunate. Everything that we take for granted began with somebody dreaming of something that couldn't be done."

Shilohin nodded. "And in the past it had always been the younger generations, too naive and inexperienced to recognize the impossible when they saw it, who had been foolish enough to make the attempt. It was surprising how often they succeeded. But now, of course, there were no more younger generations."

Danchekker was nodding slowly as he listened. "They turned into a society of mental geriatrics."

"Exactly. And when they realized what was happening, they went back to the old ways. But their civilization had stagnated for a very long time, and as a result most of their spectacular breakthroughs have occurred only comparatively recently. The instant-transfer technology was developed barely in time for them to be able to intervene at the end of the Lunarian war. And things like the h-space power-distribution grid, direct neural coupling into machines, and, eventually, visar came much later."

"I can imagine the problem," Danchekker murmured absently. "People complain that life is too short for the things they want to do, but without that restriction perhaps they would never do anything. The pressure of finite time is surely the greatest motivator. I've often suspected that if the dream of immortality were ever realized, the outcome would be something like that."

"Well, if the Thuriens' experience was anything to go by, you were right," Shilohin told him.

They talked about the Thuriens for a while longer, and then Shilohin had to return to the
Shapieron
for a meeting with Garuth and Monchar. Danchekker remained in the laboratory to observe some more examples of Thurien biological science presented by visar. After spending some time at this he decided he would like to discuss some of what he had seen with Hunt while the details were fresh in his mind, and asked visar if Hunt was currently coupled into the system.

"No, he's not," visar informed him. "He boarded a plane that took off from McClusky about fifteen minutes ago. If you want, I could put you through to the control room there."

"Oh, er . . . yes, if you would," Danchekker said.

An image of a communications screen appeared in mid-air a couple of feet in front of Danchekker's face, framing the features of the duty controller at McClusky. "Hello, Professor," the controller acknowledged. "What can I do for you?"

"visar just told me that Vic has left for somewhere," Danchekker replied. "I wondered what was happening."

"He left a message for you saying he's gone to Houston for the morning. It doesn't go into any details, though."

"Is that Chris Danchekker? Let me talk to him." Karen Heller's voice sounded distantly from somewhere in the background. A few seconds later the controller moved off one side of the screen, and she came into view. "Hello, Professor. Vic got fed up waiting for Lyn to get back from Washington with some news, so he called Houston. Gregg is back there, but Lyn isn't. Vic's gone to find out what's going on. That's really about all I can tell you."

"Oh, I see," Danchekker said. "How strange."

"There was something else that I wanted to talk to you about," Heller went on. "I've been doing a lot of looking into some parts of Lunarian history with Calazar and Showm, and it's becoming rather interesting. We've some questions I'd like your answers to. How soon do you think you'll be back?"

Danchekker muttered under his breath and looked wistfully around the Ganymean laboratory, then realized that he was getting signals through visar that his body was getting hungry again. "Actually, I'll be coming back now," he replied. "Perhaps I could talk to you in the canteen, ten minutes from now, say?"

"I'll see you there," Heller agreed and disappeared with the image of the screen.

Ten minutes later Danchekker was demolishing a plate of bacon, eggs, sausage, and hash browns at McClusky while Heller talked over a sandwich from the opposite side of the table. Most of the UNSA people were busy refitting one of the other buildings to afford more permanent storage facilities, and apart from some clatterings and bangings from the adjoining kitchen there were no signs of life in their immediate vicinity.

"We've been analyzing the rates of development of the Lunarian civilization and Earth's," she said. "The difference is staggering. They were into steam power and machines in a matter of a few thousand years after starting to use stone tools. We took something like ten times as long. Why do you think that was?"

Danchekker frowned while he finished chewing. "I thought that the factors responsible for the accelerated advancement of the Lunarians were already quite obvious," he replied. "For one thing, they were closer chronologically to the original Ganymean genetic experiments. Therefore they possessed a great genetic instability, and with it a tendency to a more extreme form of mutation. The sudden emergence of the Lambians is doubtless a case in point."

"I'm not convinced that it explains it," Heller replied slowly. "You've said yourself a few times that tens of thousands of years isn't enough to make a lot of difference. I got visar to do some calculations based on human genetic data that zorac acquired when the
Shapieron
was on Earth. The results seem to bear it out. And the pattern was already established long before the Lambians appeared. That was only two hundred years before the war."

Danchekker sniffed as he buttered a piece of toast. Politicians had no business playing at being scientists. "The Lunar- ians would have found a profusion of remnants of the earlier Ganymean civilization on Minerva," he suggested. "The knowledge gained from sources of that nature gave them a flying start over Earth."

"But the Cerians who came to Earth were from a civilization that was already advanced," Heller pointed out. "So that balances. What else made the difference?"

Danchekker wrinkled his nose up and scowled.
Female
politicians playing at being scientists were intolerable. "The Lunarians' culture developed during the deteriorating environmental conditions of the approaching Ice Age," he said. "That provided additional pressures."

"The Ice Age was here when the Cerians arrived, and it lasted for a long time afterward," Heller reminded him. "So that balances too. So again—what caused the difference?"

Danchekker stabbed his fork into his meal in a show of exasperation. "If you wish to doubt my word as a biologist and an anthropologist, you have of course every right to do so, madam," he said airily. "For my part, I see no justification whatsoever for elaborating any hypothesis beyond the simple minimum required to account for the facts. And what we already know is perfectly adequate for that purpose."

Heller seemed to have been expecting something like that, and didn't react. "Maybe you're thinking too much like a biologist," she suggested. "Try looking at it from a sociological angle, and asking the question the other way around."