KIRK Matthews cherished the simple life. No matter that he was in charge of a secret Vanguard Corporation base buried far out in Mare Imbrium. No matter that neither he nor the three dozen technicians living in the base knew what the hell was being created in the gigantic vat at the heart of the underground complex. The simple life was what he sought.
Back on Earth there were complexities. An ex-wife seeking every penny he earned. Lawyers hounding him. One of them nursing a broken jaw and several cracked ribs as the result of accosting him once too often.
Here on the Moon life should be simple. All he had to do was supervise thirty-six technicians whose job was to make certain the mysterious twenty-story-high crystalline vat was fed the prescribed chemicals and maintained at certain temperatures and pressures. The technicians were educated, well-balanced, eminently stable men and women. The pay was good, and it was piling up nicely, since there was no place to spend it. Living conditions were somewhat spartan, but much more comfortable than an Earthside courtroom. Or jail cell.
Liaisons among the men and women living in the underground complex were casual and easygoing. They all had signed up for the duration of the experiment at this remote site, knowing that it would take at least two years, they were all consenting adults who preferred not to make permanent attachments.
Matthews clasped his gnarled hands behind his graying crew cut and leaned far back in his desk chair. The simple life. Until this goddamned Latino wandered in.
Paulino Alvarado, as far as Matthews could tell, was neither a spy from another corporation nor a snoop from the International Astronautical Council. He seemed to be a genuinely lost soul, a Vanguard employee who got dangerously lost up there on the lunar surface and would have died if he hadn't stumbled onto Delphi base.
But now that he was here and had seen whatever the hell it was bubbling away inside the vat, Paulino could not be allowed to leave and blab to the outside world.
Worse still, the kid had a pocket full of Moondust pills. Matthews didn't believe that Paulino had the guts or personality to be a pusher. But a user was just as bad.
The simple life Matthews had bucked the whole problem up the chain of command in a carefully coded message to his bosses, back at Archimedes. For days he had waited for a response, while Paulino wandered around the base, not exactly getting in anybody's way, but he sure enough made people nervous.
Apparently the problem had been directed all the way back to corporate headquarters, because Hilo was where the message resting on Matthews's desk had come from. The mono-molecular-thin slip of reusable plastic bore a mere seven words, plus the name of the sender. An explosive seven words
HOLD THE INTRUDER UNTIL I GET THERE
JO CAMERATA
* * *
Stoner sat impassively through all the medical tests that
the two tall, many-armed robots put him through. His mind, though, spent the whole morning probing the massive machine guarding the door to his room, tracing the pathways of its computer brain's programming For hours he allowed the robots to take blood samples, test his reflexes, run him on the treadmill, check his eyesight and hearing
They sprayed electrodes onto the skin of his chest, back, and legs. They minutely examined the charred stump of his little finger They fitted a helmet over his tangled thick hair and connected it to a muJtzchanneJ brainwave recorder.
Not a word from the ceiling speakers. The robots had been precisely programmed for these tests, no human direction was necessary. I could finagle these machines, Stoner said to himself. Their networks are complex enough to allow me to slip in and plant changes They're not pre-programmed inflexible tin soldiers like the robot guarding the door.
Maybe I could even get one of them to turn off the guard robot, if I had enough time to tinker. Time. It always comes down to a matter of time.
Stoner could sense the presence of Zoltan Janos watching, could feel the tension of the Hungarian scientist as he studied the curves flickering across the display screens, taste the perspiration beading his lip
He could not sense Ilona. She was not in the room with the monitoring equipment, where Janos was Stoner could not feel her presence anywhere
He returned his attention to the guard robot outside the door. The robot's computer was hard-wired, it contained one set of instructions and one only. It could not be reprogrammed unless you got inside and changed the wiring The only way to prevent the robot from doing its job was to physically reach the circuit breakers on its back and shut off its power
Stoner actually smiled, even though he saw nothing humorous. The robot was like the Varangian guards that Byzantine emperors hired foreigners who understood only their duty to the emperor and nothing else, not even the language of the
land they lived in Utterly loyal because they knew nothing else.
At last the medical robots picked up all their equipment and trundled out of the room. As the lock clicked behind them, Stoner looked up to the ceiling speaker and asked, "When do I get some food?"
Janos's voice replied, "You feel hunger?"
"Damned right I do!"
A few moments of hesitation. Then, "Tonight, perhaps More likely tomorrow morning. I must analyze the data from these tests first."
"And then what, another finger?"
"Perhaps Perhaps not."
Stoner caught a fleeting impression of the robots clamping his head in their steel fingers while a laser beam deftly excised one of his eyes.
An electric current of fear shocked through him even before his star brother could damp it down He felt his innards calm even while his mind screamed with outraged fury.
And he heard himself say coldly, "If you're thinking of injecting some of my blood into your own veins, remember what happened to Novotny."
No answer, but Stoner could sense the surprise and sudden fear that hit Janos
"Once those symbiotes are in your blood," Stoner went on, "you can't look out at the world as you did before. You realize, every moment of every day, awake or asleep, that you are not alone It's more than having another presence within your body and your mind. You begin to understand that you are not merely an individual You start to see that you, as a single unit, are part of an entirety, a link between past and future, a member of a family."
Still Janos said nothing. He was listening, and Stoner could sense the tangle of curiosity and fear and burning ambition that swirled within him.
"That understanding drove Novotny into a collapse. What will it do to you? How do you think you'll feel about the
experiments you've been doing on me, once you and I are linked as firmly as two cells of the same creature? What do you think it'll be like when you can feel what I feel, when you can sense my pain and anguish?"
"Thank you, Dr. Stoner," said Janos, in a very subdued voice. "Thank you for the warning I was indeed tempted to inject myself to obtain your powers I thought that what happened to Novotny was due to his age, perhaps, or his own psychological weaknesses."
Shaking his head, Stoner replied, "Novotny saw himself as a member of the human family for the first time since he'd been weaned "
"And have you led such a blameless life, that the alien symbiotes did not drive you insane?"
"Hardly," Stoner said to the ceiling speaker. "But I was aboard their ship for years, frozen in cryonic suspension They had a long time to assimilate my memories, to make my unconscious mind grow accustomed to their presence."
"I see," said Janos thoughtfully "I see."
"So you're out here to help that stupid ape get laid. That's cute "
Lela sat by the campfire, silently watching her five captors as they prepared their dinner The utter darkness of the moonless night and the foliage pressing all around their simple camp made her feel terribly cut off from all civilization, all possible help. She felt the chill of the rising mist on her back and the heat of the licking flames on her face. Cold and hot, two kinds of fear that made her tremble and sweat at the same time
"You must be some kind of sex pervert," the white man jeered at her He was short, stocky, red-haired. "You have fantasies about making it with a gorilla, eh?"
"I can put on its head and skin, after we kill it. You like it that way" one of the black men said.
The others all laughed
So far they had not harmed her So far Their leader, the
blond one with the English accent, had made them keep their hands off Lela. But he could not stop their joking threats.
He came up to her now and sat on the rough log beside her, handing her a tin of stew.
"fust pull the top off," he said softly. "It heats by itself."
Sitting cross-legged, Lela kept her hands pressed firmly against the heavy twill of her trousers. She was afraid to let the men see how her hands would shake.
The blond placed the can before her, muttering, "Got to eat sometime, y'know."
"Why are you here?" Lela asked. "Why are you hunting the gorillas? No zoo will buy them from you; we have international agreements. No research laboratory will accept a grown primate."
The blond smiled sadly. "We're not hired to sell them, lady. We're just supposed to kill them. All of them."
Despite herself Lela clutched at the man. "Kill them? Kill them all? Why? Why}"
He held her wrists while the other men stared. "Calm down! Calm yourself."
"Why do you kill them?" Lela demanded.
"If the gorillas are gone, then there's no further purpose for this reserve, is there? The land can be sold to developers."
"Developers? To develop what?"
The blond shrugged. "New cities, I imagine. Kampala, Ruhengeri, Bukavu--all the old cities are bursting at their seams, aren't they? There's no place to put all the people. They're spreading out all across the countryside."
"But not here!" Lela snapped. "Not this far away . . ."
Patiently, almost like a schoolteacher, the blond explained, "There are people--powerful people--who want to build whole new cities. Cut down the forests and make more farmland. Build roads and airports and even spaceports."
"But the gorillas are protected by international agreement! They can't build here!"
"They can if the apes are all gone. In a few months they will be."
Lela was aghast. "You can't . . . the rangers . . . the World Court ..."
The blond gave her a pitying look. "I told you, we're dealing with very powerful people here. Why do you think we can have a fire each night without the satellites reporting us to your rangers? We know you've got a locator beacon imbedded in your skin; the satellites are tracking you okay but the information isn't going to the rangers either."
"No! It cannot be!"
"Why not?" He pulled a slim dark brown cigar from the pocket of his shirt, clamped it in his teeth and lit it. Lela stared at its glowing tip, her mind racing.
"What you do is wrong," she said. "It is evil."
He blew a puff of gray smoke into the night. "Why should anybody care more about your stupid apes than they do about people? Human beings who need homes and jobs?"
"You don't have to wipe out the gorillas to make homes and jobs for people," Lela answered.
"That's a university graduate talking. My older brother went to university. I worked like a dog to help support him. Now he's off saving the bleeding whales somewhere up in the Arctic and I'm here, hunting down the last of the gorillas. Queer world, isn't it?"
Lela stared at him. He puffed on his cigar for a while, then started to look uncomfortable. Without another word he hauled himself to his feet and walked slowly to the four other men sitting close to the fire, grinning at Lela.
They're going to kill me, Lela realized. They can't let me go, not after what he's told me. They're going to kill me. When they're finished with me.