Schruille glanced at her. Calapine's voice had sounded so strange then. He found himself filled.with a sudden disquiet.
Glisson's Cyborg eyes moved, heavy-lidded, coldly probing, glistening with their lensed alterations that expanded his spectrum of visibility.
'Do you see it, Durant?' he asked, his voice chopped into bits by the necessity of short breaths.
Harvey found his voice. 'I... can't... believe... it'
They are talking,' Calapine said, her voice bright. She looked at the Durant male, surprised a look of loathing and pity in his eyes.
Pity? she wondered.
A glance at the tiny repeater bracelet on her wrist, confirmed the assessment of the Survey Globe. Pity. Pity! How dare he pity me!
'Har... vey,' Lizbeth whispered.
Frustrated rage contorted Harvey's face. He moved his eyes, could not quite swing them far enough to see her. 'Liz,' he muttered. 'Liz, I love you.'
'This is a time for hate, not love,' Glisson said, his detached tone giving the words an air of unreality. 'Hate and revenge,' Glisson said.
'What are you saying?' Svengaard asked. He'd listened with mounting amazement to their words. For a time, he'd thought of pleading with the Optimen that he'd been a prisoner, held against his will, but a sixth sense told him the attempt would be useless. He was nothing to these lordly creatures. He was foam in the backwash of a wave at a cliff base. They were the cliff.
'Look at them as a doctor,' Glisson said. They are dying.'
'It's true,' Harvey said.
Lizbeth had pressed her eyes closed against tears. Now, her eyes sprang open and she stared up at the people around her, seeing them through Harvey's eyes and Glisson's.
They are dying,' she breathed.
It was there for the trained eye of an Underground courier to read. Mortality on the faces of the immortals! Glisson had seen it, of course, through his Cyborg abilities to see and respond, read-and-reflect.
The Folk are so disgusting at times,' Calapine said.
They can't be,' Svengaard said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice and Lizbeth wondered at it. The voice lacked the despair she could have expected.
'I say they are disgusting!' Calapine intoned. 'No mere pharmacist should contradict me.'
Boumour stirred out of a profound lethargy. The as-yet alien computer logic within him had recorded the conversation, replayed it, derived corollary meanings. He looked up now as a new and partial Cyborg, read the subtle betrayals in Optiman flesh. The thing was there! Something had gone wrong with the live-forevers. The shock of it left Boumour with a half- formed feeling of emptiness, as though he ought to respond with some emotions for which he no longer had the capacity.
Their words,' Nourse said. 'I find their conversation mostly meaningless. What is it they're saying, Schruille?'
'Let us ask them now about the self-viables,' Calapine said. 'And the substitute embryo. Don't forget the substitute embryo.'
'Look up there in the top row,' Glisson said. The tall one. See the wrinkles on his face?'
'He looks so old,' Lizbeth whispered. She felt a curiously empty feeling. As long as the Optimen were there - unchangeable, eternal - her world contained a foundation that could never tremble. Even as she'd opposed them, she'd felt this. Cyborgs died... eventually. The Folk died. But Optimen went on and on and on...
'What is it?' Svengaard asked. 'What's happening to them?'
'Second row on the left,' Glisson said. The woman with red hair, See the sunken eyes, the stare?'
Boumour moved his eyes to see the woman. Flaws in Optician flesh leaped out as his gaze traversed the short arc permitted him.
'What're they saying?' Calapine demanded. 'What is this?' Her voice sounded querulous even to her own ears. She felt fretful, annoyed by vague aches.
A muttering sound of discontent moved upward through the benches. There were little pockets of giggling and bursts of peevish anger, laughter.
We're supposed to interrogate these criminals, Calapine thought. When will it start? Must I begin it?
She looked at Schruille. He had scrunched down in his seat, glaring at Harvey Durant. She turned to Nourse, encountered a supercilious half-smile on his face, a remote look in his eyes. There was a throbbing at Nourse's neck she had never noticed before, a mottled patch of red veins stood out on his cheek.
They leave everything to me, she thought.
With a fretful movement of her shoulders, she touched her bracelet controls. Lambent purple light washed over the giant globe at the side of the hall. A beam of the light spilled out from the globe's top as though decanted onto the floor. It reached out toward the prisoners.
Schruille watched the play of light. Soon the prisoners would be raw, shrieking creatures, he knew, spilling out all their knowledge for the Tuyere's instruments to analyze. Nothing would remain of them except nerve fibers along which the burning light would spread, drinking memories, experiences, knowledge.
'Wait!' Nourse said.
He studied the light. It had stopped its reaching movement toward the prisoners at his command. He felt they were making some gross error known only to himself and he looked around the abruptly silent hall wondering if any of the others could identify the error or speak it. Here was all the secret machinery of their government, everything planned, ordained. Somehow, the inelegant unexpectedness of naked Life had entered here. It was an error. 'Why do we wait?' Calapine asked.
Nourse tried to remember. He knew he had opposed this action. Why?
Pain!
'We must not cause pain,' he said. 'We must give them the chance to speak without duress.'
They've gone mad,' Lizbeth whispered.
'And we've won,' Glisson said. Through my eyes, all my fellows can see - we've won.'
They're going to destroy us,' Boumour said.
'But we've won,' Glisson said.
'How?' Svengaard asked. And louder: 'How?'
'We offered them Potter as bait and gave them a taste of violence,' Glisson said. 'We knew they'd look. They had to look.'
'Why?' Svengaard whispered.
'Because we've changed the environment,' Glisson said. 'Little things, a pressure here, a shocking Cyborg there. And we gave them a taste for war.'
'How?' Svengaard asked. 'How?'
'Instinct,' Glisson said. The word carried a computed finality, a 'sense of inhuman logic from which there was no escape. 'War's an instinct with humans. Battle. Violence. But their systems have been maintained in delicate balance for so many thousands of years. Ah, the price they paid - tranquillity, detachment, boredom. Comes now violence with its demands and their ability to change has atrophied. They're heterodyning, swaying farther and farther from that line of perpetual life. Soon they'll die.'
'War?' Svengaard had heard the stories of the violence from which the Optimen preserved the Folk. 'It can't be,' he said. There's some new disease or-'
'I have stated the fact as computed to its ultimate decimal of logic,' Glisson said.
Calapine screamed. 'What're they saying?'
She could hear the prisoners' words distinctly, but their meaning eluded her. They were speaking obscenities. She heard a word, registered it, but the next word replaced it in her awareness without linkage. There was no intelligent sequence. Only obscenities. She rapped Schruille's arm. 'What are they saying?'
'In a moment we will question them and discover,' Schruille said.
'Yes,' Calapine said. 'The very thing.'
'How is it possible?' Svengaard breathed. He could see two couples dancing on the benches high up at the back of the hall. There were couples embracing, making love. Two Optimen began shouting at each other on his right - nose to nose. Svengaard felt that he was watching buildings fall, the earth open and spew forth flames.
'Watch them!' Glisson said.
'Why can't they just compensate for this... change?' Svengaard demanded.
'Their ability to compensate is atrophied,' Glisson said. 'And you must understand that compensation itself is a new environment. It creates even greater demands. Look at them! They're oscillating out of control right now.'
'Make them shut up!' Calapine shouted. She leaped to her feet, advanced on the prisoners.
Harvey watched, fascinated, terrified. There was a disjointed quality in her movement, in every response - except her anger. Rage burned at him from her eyes. A violent trembling swept through his body. 'You!' Calapine said, pointing at Harvey. 'Why do you stare at me and mumble? Answer!'
Harvey found himself frozen in silence, not by his fear of her anger, but by a sudden overwhelming awareness of Calapine's age. How old was she? Thirty thousand years? Forty thousand? Was she one of the originals - eighty thousand or more years old?
'Speak up and say what you will,' Calapine commanded. 'I,
Calapine, order it. Show honor now and perhaps we will be lenient.'
Harvey stared, mute. She seemed unaware of the growing uproar all round.
'Durant,' Glisson said, 'you must remember there are subterranean things called instincts which direct destiny with the inexorable flow of a river. This is change. See it around us. Change is the only constant.
'But she's dying,' Harvey said.
Calapine couldn't make sense of his words, but she found herself touched by the tone of concern for her in his voice. She consulted her bracelet linkage with the globe. Concern! He was worried about her, about Calapine, not about himself or his futile mate!
She turned into an oddly enfolding darkness, collapsed full length on the floor with her arms outstretched toward the benches.
A mirthless chuckle escaped Glisson's lips.
'We have to do something for them,' Harvey said. 'They have to understand what they're doing to themselves!'
Schruille stirred suddenly, looked up at the opposite wall, saw dark patches where scanners had been deactivated, abandoned by the Optimen who couldn't jam into the hall. He felt an abrupt alarm at the eddies of movement in the crowd all around. Some of the people were leaving - swaying, drifting, running, laughing, giggling....
But we came to question the prisoners, Schruille thought.
The hysteria in the hall slowly impressed itself on Schruille's senses. He looked at Nourse.
Nourse sat with eyes closed, mumbling to himself. 'Boiling oil,' Nourse said. 'But that's too sudden. We need something more subtle, more enduring.'
Schruille leaned forward. T have a question for the man Harvey Durant.'
'What is it?' Nourse asked. He opened his eyes, pushed forward, subsided.
'What did he hope to gain by his actions?' Schruille asked.
'Very good,' Nourse said. 'Answer the question, Harvey Durant.'
Nourse touched his own bracelet. The purple beam of light inched closer to the prisoners.
'I didn't want you to die,' Harvey said. 'Not this.'
'Answer the question!' Schruille blared.
Harvey swallowed. 'I wanted to- '
'We wanted to have a family,' Lizbeth said. She spoke clearly, reasonably. That's all. We wanted to be a family.' Tears started in her eyes and she wondered then what her child would have been like. Certainly, none of them were going to survive this madness.
'What is this?' Schruille asked. 'What is this family nonsense?'
'Where did you get the substitute embryo?' Nourse asked. 'Answer and we may be lenient.' Again the burning light moved toward the prisoners.
'We have self-viables immune to the contraceptive gas,' Glisson said. 'Many of them.'
'You see?' Schruille said. 'I told you so.'
'Where are these self-viables?' Nourse asked. He felt his right hand trembling, looked at it wonderingly.
'Right under your noses,' Glisson said. 'Scattered through the population. And don't ask me to identify them. I don't know them all. No one does.'
'None will escape us,' Schruille said.
'None!' Nourse echoed.
'If we must,' Schruille said, 'we'll sterilize all but Central and start over.' 'With what will you start over?' Glisson asked.
'What?' Schruille screamed the word at the Cyborg.
'Where will you find the genetic pool from which to start over?' Glisson asked. 'You are sterile - and terminating.'
'We need but one cell to duplicate the original,' Schruille said, his voice sneering.
Then why haven't you duplicated yourselves?' Glisson asked.
'You dare question us?' Nourse demanded.
'I will answer for you then,' Glisson said. 'You've not chosen duplication because the doppelganger is unstable. The trend of the duplicates is downward - extinction.'
Calapine heard scattered words - 'Sterile... terminating
... unstable... extinction...' They were hideous words that crept down into the depths where she lay watching a string of fat sausages parade in glowing order before her awareness. They were like seeds with a lambent radiance moving against a background of oiled black velvet. Sausages. Seeds. She saw them then not precisely as seeds, but as encapsulated life - walled in, shielded, bridging a period unfavorable to life. It made the idea of seeds less repellent to her. They were life... always life.
'We don't need the genetic pool,' Schruille said. Calapine heard his voice clearly, felt she could read his thoughts. Words out of one of the glowing sausages forced themselves upon her: We have our millions in Central. We are enough by ourselves. Feeble, short-lived Folk are a disgusting reminder of our past. They are pets and we no longer need pets.
'I've decided what we can do to these criminals,' Nourse said. He spoke loudly to force his voice over the growing hubbub in the hall. 'We will apply nerve excitation a micron at a time. The pain will be exquisite and can be drawn out for centuries.'
'But you said you didn't want to cause pain,' Schruille shouted.
'Didn't I?' Nourse's voice sounded worried. I don't feel -well, Calapine thought. I need a long session in the pharmacy. Pharmacy. The word was a switch that turned on her consciousness. She felt her body stretched out on the floor, pain and wetness at her nose where it had struck the floor in her fall.
