A TALE OF THE FAR FUTURE.

Part Three.

Concluding the story that began here.

Rebecca must have sounded urgent, or the members of the board must not have had any real work to do, because it didn’t take them long at all to assemble in the lab. Rebecca had arranged chairs and stools in a circle, and the meeting was promptly called to order.

“We called in Mr. Wright and Mr. Pulaski for a fresh perspective on why we couldn’t beat Mr. Kulundu’s infection,” Rebecca began. “Mr. Wright, could you explain what you’ve found?”

“You created a new form of intelligent life and now we have to kill it,” Wright said.

Including the four techs who were sitting over in the corner of the room looking bored until that moment, there were only eleven of us; but there was enough low murmuring for a considerable crowd.

“Well,” Rebecca said over the murmuring, “that’s what we’re here to decide. Mr. Wright, do you think you could explain how you came to your conclusion?”

She had just invited him to give his favorite lecture: How T. A. Wright Is Smarter Than You. “It was obvious, really,” he said, implying “obvious to a genius like me”: “in fact I suspected it from the moment I got your first inquiry. You designed your bacteria to work together by means of binary values and a simple instruction set. In a mouse they multiplied as you planned and formed a small biological computer that was completely adequate to its task. But in a human subject, of course, they had the opportunity to multiply into a computer that was more complex by orders of magnitude. Although our modern computers use much more exten­sive instruction sets for the sake of efficiency, we’ve known for centuries that, in theory, binary values and a simple instruction set can create infinite complexity. Your mistake was in not designing any barriers to that complexity. In a sense, you trusted your bugs too much. Now they’ve formed not just a brain but a mind. The mind is intelligent enough to meet the challenge of any treat­ment you’ve tried so far, and it’s becoming curious. It recognizes that there is an outside world where some other intelligence lives—maybe a malicious intelligence, but an intelligence—and it wants to communicate.”

“That’s the reason for the glowing line,” Rebecca said. Obviously the connection had just occurred to her.

Here an elderly man with a grey beard halfway down to his waist spoke up: “What glowing line?”

So Rebecca explained, with help from Wright, all about the experiments we’d made so far, playing the recorded conversation with the bugs. With a few more technical explanations, the four members of the board were convinced. Even I felt as though I under­stood what was going on.

Rebecca turned and called the medical tech over to the circle. “How long can Mr. Kulundu’s body be kept alive?”

“The body? Years. But the brain won’t keep functioning forever. You’d have to ask the doctors how long, but…two weeks, maybe.”

“After that,” Rebecca said, “we’ve got a live body but a dead person.”

“Pretty much,” the tech agreed.

“So,” Rebecca continued, “we have two persons that both need the same body, and only one can have it.”

A woman on the ethics committee asked, “Can’t we just take some of the bacteria and grow them in a culture?”

“Can’t we just kill you and clone you from your fingernail?” Wright returned. I glowered at him, but he wasn’t looking in my direction.

Rebecca noticed the rather bludgeoned look on the committee member’s face (a common reaction to meeting Wright for the first time), and she explained in a con­cili­atory tone, “Mr. Wright has pointed out, quite graphically, the flaw in that idea—and, believe me, it was the first thing I thought of—which is that it wouldn’t be the same person. This intel­ligence, however we think of it, is made up of all the bac­teria, con­stantly changing, dividing, dying, and experiencing. It’s murder to kill you even if you have clone children, because you’re a distinct person. It’s not your genetic makeup—it’s the combination of that and all you’ve learned, all you’ve felt, all you remem­ber, all you’ve made of yourself. Another intel­ligent biological computer grown from the same stock would be a different…person. I can’t avoid that word ‘person.’ ”

The man with the remarkable beard said, “I think the answer is obvious here. The body belongs to Mr. Kulundu. It is Mr. Kulundu. No matter how inno­cently it happened, this other thing is an invader. Sometimes we have to defend ourselves.”

“But this is a new species,” Rebecca said. “And it’s unique. And it’s intelligent. How can we deliberately…” She paused to choose the exact word. “How can we deliberately murder it?”

“Dr. Witterman, you of all people—”

“Of all people I’m the one who hates this decision most,” she said with a bit of steel in her voice that I hadn’t heard before. It was very attractive. “I think you know me well enough to believe that. But we’ll make it together, and we’ll make it as dis­pas­sionately as we can. Today we’re going to learn what we can learn, and then we can think about our decision. Mr. Wright, if we decided to kill the… the infection, do you think it could be done?”

“Easily,” Wright said.

“We haven’t been able to do it,” the beard grumbled.

“That’s because you tried to beat it with a club,” Wright said. “It’s an intelligence. First you have to distract it. Then you beat it with a club.”

“Distract it?” Rebecca asked. And then I could almost hear something click in her brain. “Oh, you mean—”

“It thinks in chemicals,” Wright explained, not giving even the divine Rebecca a chance to be clever in the same room. “Chemical quantities repre­sent binary states—that’s how the individual cells make up one brain. Flood the body with those proteins, and the brain disappears. You’ve killed it. Then you just have to mop up a bunch of indi­vidual bacteria.”

“Simple,” one of the committee members said.

“But brilliant,” Rebecca added quite unnecessarily. Although I suppose if she hadn’t said it Wright would have.

“So we think we know how to save Mr. Kulundu,” the beard said. “I say the sooner we use that information the better.”

“I agree,” said another member of the board.

“I think,” Rebecca said—and then she paused to consider how she ought to continue. “I think we have a duty to listen to at least one other opinion.”

She looked at Wright, and it was a significant look, which of course meant that Wright was completely oblivious to it. “The box,” I mouthed to him, but he doesn’t read lips.

At last Rebecca figured out that Wright wasn’t going to get it. “Mr. Wright,” she said, “could you please put us in touch with… with the intel­ligence again?”

“Oh,” he said. He picked up the box, which was sitting on the floor beside him. Turning it on, he took a breath to speak, when the box suddenly spoke in its un­settlingly bland female voice:

“Are you there?”

“Uh,” Wright said. We were all a bit startled—even I was, and I’d heard the box talk before. Everyone had probably heard dozens of artificial-voice systems that used this identical voice, but the idea of an infectious disease talking to us was a little spooky.

“Are you there?” the box said again, without varying its expression.

“Answer the nice bugs,” I whispered to Wright.

“Interesting,” he said, looking at the simple display on the box. “It looks as though the intelligence has been sending an ‘Are you there’ message every twelve and a half seconds, roughly speaking.”

“Let me talk to it,” Rebecca said. Wright shrugged and passed the box over to her.

Rebecca pushed the button. “We are here,” she said.

After a short silence, the box said, “We.”

“Yes,” Rebecca responded.

“There are other others,” said the box.

“Yes,” Rebecca said.

“Where?” the box asked.

Rebecca hesitated. She looked at Wright, who was looking at her legs, and then decided to answer, “Outside.”

There was a short silence, and then the box said, “Outside the world.”

Rebecca thought for a moment. “Your world,” she said to the box, “is my friend Pierre Kulundu. We created you to go into his body and heal him, but you became some­thing else. Something new.”

After the usual pause, the box asked, “You are worlds?”

While Rebecca was thinking about that one, it suddenly occurred to me that the thing she was talking to was struggling with its own thoughts as much as she was with hers. “You live in Mr. Kulurdu’s body, but he can’t keep living with you in there. That’s our problem. And if Pierre dies…”

She stopped, let go of the button for a moment, and then pushed it and continued.

“I don’t want to harm you. And I don’t want to lose Pierre. And I don’t know how to save Pierre without harming you. He’ll die if…”

She stopped. Outwardly her face was impassive; but her face wasn’t usually impassive, and I suspected a mighty struggle with her emotions behind the face.

Then the box spoke again. “He will die if I live.”

Rebecca looked down at the box and then back up, glancing around the circle. “Does anyone have the heart to answer that one?”

There was silence for half a minute.

Then the beard spoke up. “My opinion hasn’t changed. I still say we have a duty to save Mr. Kulundu. No matter how sophisti­cated the attack, no matter how innocent the attacker, it’s still an attack. He has a disease, and our duty is to cure it.”

“My opinion has changed,” Rebecca said. “I wasn’t sure, but now I am. I can’t recommend taking an innocent life. There’s a bright line we can’t cross, or we become murderers.”

“But,” the beard objected, “if we fail to save Mr. Kulundu when we know we could, then we murder him.”

“If we look at the question philosophically,” another board member said, “we might be able—”

“Just vote and get it over with,’’ Wright said. Uncertainty annoys him, and he has a violent allergy to philosophy.

After a moment of silence, Rebecca said, “He’s right. We’ll only dither if we spin it out. All stand, and we’ll take a vote.”

We all stood up. Although I wasn’t on the board, I would have felt awkward sitting when everyone else was standing, and in a social situation Wright usually just does what I do if he happens to notice it.

Rebecca posed the question officially: “Shall we apply Mr. Wright’s suggested cure? I’ll start. I vote no.”

“Yes,” the beard said.

“Yes,” said the next board member in the circle.

“No.”

“Yes.”

And then Rebecca looked at me. “We’re missing two members, and…”

The beard said, “Yes, I agree. You and Mr. Wright are our experts. You’re entitled to a vote.”

Ha! I saw where my chance lay. I knew Wright would side with Rebecca, but I had the chance to do it first and earn her grati­tude on my own, not just as Wright’s minion. “No,” I said confidently.

We all turned to Wright. He had the deciding vote. I looked a bit smug, I’m sure: I had stolen his chance to be the first to leap to Rebecca’s defense and take her side.

“Yes,” Wright said.

What? What was he up to? Had he actually developed prin­ciples or something? Was he exhibiting early symptoms of a conscience?

And then Rebecca suddenly fell on him—literally fell on him, her arms around him, tears flooding her cheeks. “Thank you!” she half-whispered, and she actually kissed his filthy cheek. “Thank you! Thank you!”

Well, this was just too much. I had voted with her. I had been on her side. If it had been up to me, the vote would have gone her way. Here Wright casts the deciding vote against her, and somehow he sucks up all the grati­tude. Where is the justice in that?

And of course he was smirking at me over her shoulder. He knew. Somehow he knew it would work out this way.

Wright addressed the rest of the room. “I need a current sample, with a complete chemical analysis to see what the thing has mutated into. We’ll get to work right away.”

Rebecca pulled herself together and let go of him. “I’ll take care of it,” she said; and she started for the door, with the medical tech close behind her.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“So will I,” Wright added immediately.

And for some reason the beard and another board member came along, too, and for some reason they made it to the tube and into the first car with Rebecca well before we got there. Maybe it was because of the way Wright and I kept tripping each other. We had the next car to ourselves.

“You knew, didn’t you?” I said to him as the little car took off.

“Knew what?” he asked in that infuri­atingly smug voice he uses when he knows he’s got the best of me.

I knew he knew what I meant, and I knew he knew I knew it. “The thing I can’t work out is how you knew that Rebecca wanted you to vote against her. I mean, I can see the psychology of it—can’t stand the idea of having the death of a colleague on her conscience, blah blah blah. But how did you know?”

“I asked the medical tech,” he answered smugly.

I was taken aback. I had expected some clever series of deductions. “That’s all?”

“I just said, ‘What does she really want me to do?’ and he said, ‘She’ll wrestle with her conscience, but what she really wants to do is appease her conscience and then be talked out of it.’ Sometimes the cleverest solution is the most straightforward.”

“That’s cheating,” I grumbled, by which I meant, “I wish I’d thought of it.” “So now,” I continued, “you just have to hope your idea works. If it doesn’t, you still lose.”

“Oh, I don’t think I have to worry about that.”

“You never worry, do you? But you’ve failed before. How do you know you can kill the bugs without killing our patient?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s already taken care of,” Wright said, still sounding smug. I had no idea what he meant by that, but I wasn’t in the mood to give him the satisfaction of asking.

We reached the patient’s room to find something of a commotion going on. Rebecca was saying, “Are you sure? It’s not just—” And the tech was inter­rupting her with “Look at the numbers!”

“I thought so,” Wright said. He wasn’t smiling, but I could smell the stench of smugness in the air.

“They’re gone,” Rebecca told him. “They’re just gone.”

“Well,” Wright responded, “that saves us some trouble.”

“Gone?” I felt as though the ship had left without me. “What’s gone? What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“No trace of living bacteria in the patient’s blood­stream,” the medical tech explained. “I mean, you know, manu­factured ones. They just, uh—”

“Killed themselves,” Wright said. “Not surprising.”

“Not surprising?” Rebecca and I asked simultaneously.

“You gave them an ethical problem, and they solved it quite efficiently,” Wright said with that annoying detachment of his.

Rebecca looked stunned. “It was more human than we were willing to be.” She was gazing at me with those marvelous eyes, but I had a strong impression that she was staring into space and I just happened to be in the way. Then she snapped back into her competent-administrator mode. “Get his doctors up here right away. The infection is gone, so we can start reviving Pierre immediately.”

“Well, then,” Wright said cheerfully, “problem solved.” That was his way of reminding them that they owed him a fee.

• • •

It seems that our clients always want to do something to honor us when Wright has solved a thorny problem, and it seems that, pretty much universally, the idea they come up with is dinner. Our dinner was scheduled for two days after the demise of Mr. Kulundu’s infection. By that time the patient had revived wonder­fully, thanks to the excellent facilities of the Institute’s medical department. We had seen him a couple of times, because Rebecca insisted on introducing Wright to him as the genius who had saved his life. After that, Rebecca seemed to be very busy, and I didn’t see much of her. But Wright didn’t either, as far as I could tell.

I got out Wright’s good suit for him, and he spent half an hour making himself look like a clown, which was quite a bit of effort for a man who usually thinks it takes five minutes to dress for a funeral. I think he had it in mind that this dinner would be his last chance to impress Rebecca. I had it in mind, too. I did not look like a clown.

It was as formal a dinner as they could manage in the bland conference room the Institute provided. We were ready to sit down to a meal of appropriately bland institutional food, but we were waiting for Rebecca. She was very uncharacteristically late, as the bearded man remarked to me.

“Where is Dr. Witterman?” I asked him.

“The last I heard, she was in Mr. Kulundu’s room talking to him. She must have got, um, distracted.”

“I’ll go get her,” Wright said, immediately heading for the door.

“So will I,” I said, and I followed. The bearded man was saying something about its not being necessary, but his definition of “necessary” didn’t take into account my desperation.

Wright was almost running in the hall toward the tube. I passed him; he put on some speed. We arrived at the tube simultaneously.

“We’ll go together,” I said. “At the same time.”

“Why?” he asked as we stepped into the car.

“Because it’s undignified to run, but if it comes to that, my legs are longer.”

We did find Rebecca in the much more spacious room Mr. Kulundu was now occupying. She was on the bed with him, and she was—well, mostly dressed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I completely lost track of time. Um, Pierre has recovered marvelously.”

“Well,” Mr. Kulundu said, “I could use a lot more physical therapy.”

She laughed and kissed him. Wright and I looked at each other. The psychology of the situation was suddenly abundantly clear to us. We both wanted to gag.

The next day we didn’t talk much on the crumbling liner as it started out along its long chain of backwater stops. Wright seemed lost in thought. I certainly was. I was thinking about a pair of emerald eyes, and about how unfair it was that they were shining right now on someone else. But at last, after the lighting had dimmed for the night cycle, I said in a low voice, “The one thing that consoles me is that you lost, too. You might have beaten me, but you didn’t get anything out of it.”

“Well,” he said, “I did get one thing.”

“Oh, really? And what would that be?”

He pulled something out of his bag. I recognized the little transparent box of cultured bugs, with the green line still glowing across it.

“But that’s— I mean, do you realize how dangerous that is?” I whispered hoarsely. “What do you plan on doing with it, for heaven’s sake?”

“I’ll think of something,” he replied, slipping the box back into his bag.

And I don’t doubt he will. That’s what worries me.

A TALE OF THE FAR FUTURE.

Part Two.

Continuing the story that began here.

Dr. Witterman’s minions must have worked all night, because by the middle of the next morning, standard time, Wright had the lab he wanted, with all the stuff he had asked for and two techs eagerly awaiting his orders, and the glorious Dr. Witterman herself sitting on a stool, looking even more beautiful than she had looked the day before. Wright had not called me after breakfast, and after a while I had got suspicious and gone looking for him. And sure enough he was there already, discussing something about bacteria with her. There could be only one reason why he had started without me, when ordinarily he thinks he needs me to buckle his shoes.

“Good morning, Mr. Pulaski,” Dr. Witterman said when she saw me come into the room.

“Oh, you can just call me John,” I replied. Whatever advantage in intimacy Wright had gained so far, I was determined to catch up.

Wright looked up at me with a calculating expression. “Oh, you’re here,” he said. “Good.” There was a pause while he calculated some more; and then, “Go up to my room and get my sketch pad.”

What a transparent ploy! “There’s one right next to you,” I pointed out with an oh-no-you-don’t glare.

“I like mine better.”

“Yours doesn’t even have a stylus anymore.”

“I’m used to it.”

He won that round. Without making an ugly scene in front of the love of my life, I had no way of refusing to assist him. “Assistant” was my title, after all. But he would pay for it. All the way up and over in the tube I thought of ways to make him pay for it, but most of them were illegal.

I returned with the sketch pad, and since Rebecca was across the room conferring with one of the techs, I took the opportunity to inform Wright that, if he sent me off for no reason again, I would poison his coffee. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but I think he may have hesitated a bit the next time he took a sip.

One big advantage I had was that Wright couldn’t concentrate on our little rivalry forever. He had to do some actual work, if only to keep Rebecca’s respect; and once he got started on the problem, he actually got interested in it. I, on the other hand, had no real interest in the problem at all. While Wright was scribbling on his sketch pad with his finger, I had the opportunity to talk about nothing in particular with Rebecca. She was easy to talk to once I got her going, and I was thoroughly enjoying myself when Wright suddenly announced, “I need a sample.”

“A sample?” I asked.

“Some of the bugs infecting our patient. I need a current sample, taken from the patient right now, isolated and cultured.”

“I’ll take care of that myself,” Rebecca said.

“I’ll go with her,” I quickly added.

“No, I’ll go,” Wright said.

“Don’t be silly. You have important work to do. I can go.”

“He’s right,” Rebecca said—dear Rebecca! “You don’t need to come with me. That’s why you have an assistant, after all.”

Round two to me. Wright did a very poor job of concealing his annoyance, and I left with Rebecca.

“So anyway,” I continued as we walked toward the tube, picking up our conversation where it had left off, “I’ve always lived in a big city. I’d think a small colony like this would limit your social opportunities.”

“Well, I have to admit, when I was younger I thought I’d be married by this age. But I do love my work, and this is where it is.” We stepped into the tube, and as the door closed and the little car started to move, she continued: “How about you? Do you have a husband or boyfriend waiting for you?”

I laughed. “That’s not my thing, I’m afraid. I’m only into women.”

“Oh! I’m sorry.” She sounded a bit puzzled. “Thomas said you were homosexual.”

He did, did he? “Thomas was mistaken.” And he would pay for it. I wondered whether any of those dumpy little stores sold rat poison.

I suppose there was really very little reason for Wright or me to go along with her, since all I ended up doing was watching while she put on the biohazard suit and went in to draw blood from the patient. It would have been just about as exciting as watching dust settle on the furniture if it had been anyone else doing it, but there was just something poetic about the Rebecca moved, even in the bulky suit and filter hood. And of course I would have loved to be watching when she decontaminated, but the provisions for privacy were disappointingly adequate.

That first day of work was very stressful for Wright and me—at least I know it was for me, and I can infer that it probably was for Wright. He found half a dozen excuses for sending me away on trivial errands that were just useful enough to be plausible, and I found increasingly implausible reasons for following Rebecca every time she left the room. I was exhausted by the time we knocked off for the evening, and then we still had to have dinner with Rebecca and the two techs, which meant that I still had to be bright and cheerful for another two hours. And Wright was making some effort in that direction, too, but he was a bit subdued—a bit more like his normal self. Which could be dangerous. If he solved the problem right away, he might look like the wizard he thinks he is, and that might have some considerable effect on Rebecca’s esteem for him. I would have to watch these developments. It looked as though he was thinking.

I was right about the thinking. In the middle of the night I woke to a thunderous pounding on my door. I incorporated it into my dream of Rebecca for a few seconds, but it became too insistent to sleep through.

“Get Rebecca down to the lab,” Wright told me when I opened the door. “She gave me her thingy, but I lost it. Stupid com. Go get her. She needs to see this.”

“It’s—” I stopped. I was about to tell him it was half past two, and whatever it was could wait until the rest of the world woke up. But then the image of Rebecca in a diaphanous nightgown floated into my mind, and I thought, in the selfish depths of my primitive mind, that there might be some advantage to rousing her from bed in the middle of the night for one of Wright’s whims. What was the worst thing that could happen? She’d be roused in the middle of the night for no good reason, and it would be all Wright’s fault. And I would sympathize, and…

I called Rebecca—the com knew her as “Witterman,” and I suspect that the “thingy” Wright had lost was her last name—and told her what Wright had told me. Then I ran for the tube, which did me no good at all, because I still had to wait two and a half minutes for the next car. Still, though Wright got to the lab first, he didn’t gain anything by it, since Rebecca and I arrived at the same time from opposite directions. I was disappointed in my hope for a diaphanous nightgown, by the way; she was in shorts and a floppy shirt. The shorts at least confirmed that Wright was correct about her legs.

“Come in,” Wright said impatiently. “Over there. The sample on the bench. Go—over there—the sample on the bench.” He was practically pushing us. We walked over to where the little transparent box of bugs in culture was sitting on a lab bench. All I could see was the transparent box with some goo in it. I admit that microbiology isn’t my thing, but a glance at Rebecca told me that she was just as puzzled as I was.

“Ready?” Wright asked. We didn’t answer, because we didn’t know what we were supposed to be ready for. “Lights out.”

The room lighting turned off, leaving us in total darkness. Total, except—there was a glowing green line straight across the sample box.

“How did you do that?” Rebecca’s voice asked in the darkness.

“I didn’t,” Wright answered. “They did. Or I should say it did.”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means I was right,” Wright answered. “It means I need to get you and the techs building the things on my sketch pad. In fact, I need another tech. I need a computer tech. Get me the best you have. Now we can really get to work.”

“Can it wait until morning?” I asked, more than a little annoyed.

Wright was in the middle of a full-blown enthusiasm. “Wait?”

“Lights on,” I said, and the room became blindingly bright. “Have you had any sleep?”

“Sleep?” he repeated, as if it were some foreign slang term that his translator couldn’t parse.

“We won’t do our best work unless we’ve had some rest.”

“Rest?”

Here Rebecca intervened and made me love her even more. “John’s right. We can get started after breakfast. You can explain it all to us then.”

Thanks to her sober thinking, we were all able to get a few more hours’ sleep, to Wright’s great disappointment but no one else’s. After breakfast I made sure to get right to the lab, without waiting for Wright to summon me, and I actually managed to get there before Rebecca did.

“So was it really necessary to wake us up in the middle of the night?” I asked Wright, who was making some last-minute adjustments to one of his drawings.

“Of course it was,” he replied, without adding any other reason than “of course.” He didn’t lift his head from the drawing, either. I looked at one of the techs, and she silently shrugged. She was already learning the first principle of dealing with Wright, which is not to try to figure him out.

Rebecca showed up a little while later with a computer tech in tow. The tech was a no-nonsense middle-aged woman who looked as if she had seen several wars and could deal with any emergency. I figured Wright would have her reduced to tears within an hour.

“We’re building this,” Wright said, showing us a sketch. “You’ll deal with the mechanical parts and the wiring,” he said to me; and to the computer tech, “You’ll deal with the chemo-electronic conversion and plug in some standard two-way speech converter here.”

I had to ask the obvious question: “What will it do?”

“It will talk to the bugs,” Wright answered. “And the bugs will talk back.”

The trouble with asking Wright an obvious question is that even when you get a straight answer it doesn’t make any sense.

We got right to work, requisitioning materials and making notes on Wright’s sketches to show how this would fit into that. The mechanical and electrical parts were simple enough—just a box with switches, connections, and other things needed to hold up and connect whatever mystical apparatus the computer tech was building. She just told me what had to be connected, and I figured out a way to connect it.

And now Wright had the advantage, because I had to be working most of the time, whereas all Wright had to do was look over my shoulder once in a while and tell me I was doing it wrong. So he could spend most of the time chatting over in a corner with Rebecca. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I heard Rebecca laugh twice, and unless she was laughing at his preposterous arrogance those laughs represented two more jokes than I had ever heard Wright make since I’d met him. It was galling, but the only way out I could think of was to get my job done quickly and well, so that I’d be done soon and wouldn’t have to do any of the work over again. It’s a sad day when high-quality work is the only strategy I can come up with.

We had worked past lunch—did I mention that we didn’t stop to eat?—when Wright came over to add what he called a minor alteration, which instantly scrapped the whole interface the computer tech and I had built. The tech’s head flopped down on the counter in resignation and despair. I muttered under my breath, “That took longer than I expected.” And since Wright’s new design called for “some sort of bio-interface thing,” we ended up having to call in a medical tech as well, which took more time. I offered to go with Rebecca to explain things to the medical tech, but she very reasonably pointed out that it would be easier to explain things once the tech was in the lab. So Wright went with her instead. How did that happen? I don’t know, but it was a triumph for him. He would have looked more triumphant if he hadn’t been sticking his tongue out at me as he left with her.

It took us a day and a half, but eventually we had Wright’s thing cobbled together, whatever it was. It was big enough to need a cart of its own—not one of the expensive hovercarts I’m sure Wright would have specified if it had been up to him, but a good old-fashioned cheap cart on wheels, one of which squeaked all the way down the hall to the tube. There wasn’t enough room for all of us and the cart in the little car, so Wright somehow got Rebecca to go with him in the first car and left the tech and me to wait with the cart for the next car.

The cart squeaked out of the tube and all the way to the patient’s room. It was loud enough to make conversation difficult. We didn’t really get to talk until the medical tech suited up and squeaked the cart in to start hooking Wright’s thing up to the patient.

“What will it do?” Rebecca asked—not for the first time.

“It will talk to the bugs,” Wright answered—not for the first time. I think Wright actually believes he’s giving straight answers when he talks like that. I decided to fill in what I could:

“Your medical tech says the interface basically becomes part of the patient’s circulatory system. His blood will flow through it, and Mr. Wright’s machine will…do something to it.”

“It varies certain chemical quantities that correspond to binary values,” Wright added, not at all helpfully to me.

But it was apparently helpful to Rebecca. Her gorgeous eyes lit up; I could almost see their emerald glow shining on Wright’s face. “You’ve built a computer terminal!” she exclaimed with dishearteningly obvious admiration.

“Exactly,” Wright agreed, looking smug.

“Well,” I asked a bit testily, “why didn’t you just say that?”

“I didn’t want to get too technical.”

So I had to listen to Rebecca’s unreserved admiration as she interrogated Wright, and he described chemical processes I didn’t understand, and I didn’t realize he understood either. When did he become a chemist?

At last the thing was hooked up, and the tech was decontaminated and back on our side of the window. It was time for a demonstration in the cramped little booth. At least I had managed to maneuver myself so that I was standing right next to Rebecca, and maybe by physical proximity I could give pheromones a chance to operate. Maybe it would have been a good idea to study chemistry.

Wright held the little brown box we had made for him. It had an elementary sound transmission and reception system, and a button to hold in when he wanted to transmit. He held in the button and said, slowly and clearly, “Who are you?”

We waited.

I could hear Rebecca’s soft and shallow expectant breathing. The silence continued.

“Well, that was exciting,” I remarked after half a minute or so. My job is to make Wright look good, but I wasn’t getting much job satisfaction at the moment.

Suddenly—it startled us all—there was an artificial female voice from the box. “I am I,” it said.

There was more silence, but this silence had a certain stunned quality to it.

At last Rebecca asked quietly, “Was that the—”

The box interrupted her: “Are you I?”

Wright pressed the button and said, “No.”

We waited in silence until the box spoke again: “You are other than I.”

“Yes,” Wright responded.

There was more silence, but it was noticeably shorter than the previous silence. Then the box said, “Other than I is I to you.”

“Um,” Wright said, but Rebecca quickly said “Yes!,” so Wright pushed the button and said “Yes” into the box.

That was the end of the conversation for the moment. “Let’s go back to the lab,” Wright said. “I figured out how to talk to it. Now I have to figure out what to say.”

“What exactly were we talking to?” I asked.

“Yes,” Rebecca agreed. “I think I’m beginning to see it, but I need you to tell me what it all means. In the lab—tell me in the lab. I need to think.”

So we all got out of that cramped little booth and headed for the cramped little tube car. This time I managed to get into the first car with Rebecca without too obviously shoving Wright out of the way, so while I was alone in the tube with her I asked her for some clarification.

“What’s it about? I’m afraid I’m not a chemist, so…”

“Thomas is a genius,” she said with obvious admiration—and yet somehow she didn’t sound altogether happy about it.

“Well, that’s what he says, but it’s really more of an advertising slogan.”

“I’m not going to be happy however this turns out.” She sighed a melodramatic sigh. “Somebody’s going to die.”

That didn’t sound very good. I don’t know what you think when you hear “somebody’s going to die,” but one of the first things I think is, “Maybe it’s going to be me.”

“You mean your patient?” I asked.

“Or… somebody else.” And then, almost inaudibly, and not really to me: “And I’ll bet I get to choose.”

When we got back to the lab, Rebecca started making calls right away. Wright walked in while she was on her third call. “There was room for four in that car,” he grumbled.

“I didn’t want to take the risk,” I explained.

“All right,” Rebecca announced. “One more, and then we wait for them to get here.”

“Wait for whom?” Wright and I asked simultaneously.

“The Board of Ethics. At least the ones who aren’t off-colony—we’ll be missing two. I need the best advice I can get.”

She was already back on the com, so I asked Wright, “Advice about what?”

“Don’t ask me,” he replied. “I never understood ethics.”

And would you believe me if I told you I actually kept my mouth shut?

Concludes in Part Three.

A TALE OF THE FAR FUTURE.

Part One.

Well, I suppose I could tell you about the time Wright cheated me out of the love of my life. Yes, I know I told you about that time, but this was the other time. One of the other times, anyway.

It started the way it always seems to start, with Wright saying we were going to take the job and me saying it was a stupid idea. I told him he wasn’t a doctor, and he had no business pretending to know anything about medicine. I told him that if he would put something more specific than “Problems Solved” in his advertisements, we wouldn’t be bothered with jobs we didn’t know how to do.

He told me to pack his good suit, because there might be dinner. “But not the one that makes me look like a clown,” he added, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that all his good suits make him look like a clown.

I knew what had happened, of course. Our new clients had posed him an intellectual puzzle, and Wright thought he already had the solution. And he must have thought it was a clever solution that would give him a chance to show off how clever he was in front of a new and more appreciative audience. More appreciative than I am, that is. Our greatest triumphs always begin with Wright coming up with some instant intuition like that. So do our worst fiascos.

“You realize,” I said, “that if you’re wrong about whatever your pet theory is, our client will be dead, and we’ll get the blame.”

“The Institute is our client,” Wright replied, as if that settled all possible objections.

So I’ll skip over all the indignities of traveling in the cheapest possible seats in a crusty old local that should have been retired decades ago. If you looked at his bank account, you’d think that Wright was quite wealthy. But if you judged by the way he spends money, you’d have to conclude that he doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from. People look at him and wonder whether they should drop something in his hat, but he’s usually wearing it.

The Institute for Applied Research is in one of those boring middle-sized stopover colonies they used to build along the main routes, back when travel was a lot slower and it was a lot more useful to have boring places to stop. The colony orbits a stable but otherwise useless dwarf star, with no habitable planets or more interesting colonies around it. About half the population works for the Institute. And since the population is only about 12,000 (I think that’s what I heard), that leaves only 6,000 people to do something interesting with the place.

I could tell as soon as we arrived that those 6,000 weren’t nearly enough.

“What a backwater,” I grumbled as I surveyed the little core of run-down shops and cheap diners that was grandiosely labeled “Downtown” on the map.

“The Institute for Applied Research has been behind some of the most important advances in technology for the past 175 years,” Wright replied. He was repeating almost verbatim a sentence from the visitor brochure.

“I was hoping to meet some women,” I said.

“Our contact is a woman. At least to judge by her name.”

“I meant for fun.”

”They might have a whorehouse. You could ask.”

I didn’t dignify that with a response.

It was a very short walk from “Downtown” to the Institute’s main entrance, and as soon as we presented ourselves at the front desk we were made to feel very important. I do wish Wright would take the trouble to introduce me sometimes, instead of leaving me to explain myself; but all I had to say was “I’m John Pulaski, Mr. Wright’s assistant,” and I caught the full gleam of his reflected glory.

“Wait right here,” the suddenly nervous-looking receptionist said with her best attempt at an ingratiating smile. “Dr. Witterman will be right down.” And she scurried off to the tube, while Wright and I sat on a bench in front of the reception desk.

“That was a woman,” Wright pointed out helpfully.

“She’s about three times my age.”

”Oh, you have age requirements,” Wright said in that tone he uses when he thinks I’m being inexplicably unreasonable.

So I was sitting there thinking how boring this job was going to be, and grumbling at the utter boringness of the stark and boring lobby which I guessed was about fifty years old, dating from the boringest period of boring colonial architecture, and how fitting the style was as an emblem of the boredom I felt right at the moment—

—and suddenly the tube doors opened, and there she was: the love of my life.

Have you ever looked across a room and seen a woman and known, just known, that she was the love of your life, the one and only woman in the universe for you? It’s happened to me at least half a dozen times, so I recognize it when it happens. This was it.

I wish I could describe her to you, but some kinds of beauty are too transcendent to yield to mere words. You may take it for granted that, even in her sensible work outfit, her figure was perfect. Her cascading auburn hair—oh, I could get lost in that hair! Her face could have launched a thousand ships, or ten thousand moldy old liners like the one we came in on. But it was those eyes, eyes of the most transfixingly rich emerald color—the eyes were what pierced straight through to my soul. And yes, I know that deep emerald irises like those are almost always implants. And yes, hers were. And I didn’t care. It was what she did with those eyes that was the magic. She turned them toward me, and I felt hot and cold and tense and limp all at the same time.

“Mr. Wright?” she asked as she stepped out of the tube car, walking toward us.

I stood at once, and Wright rose after I kicked his ankle.

“Thomas Aquinas Wright,” he said automatically as he stood. After years of training, I had finally taught him to respond to a greeting in at least a minimal way.

“I’m Rebecca Witterman,” the vision of glory announced, holding out her hand as she approached. I kicked Wright again, and his hand rose to meet hers.

“And I’m John Pulaski,” I said, wanting, needing, a touch, however brief, from that perfect hand.

She turned her eyes toward mine, and I took her hand, and I felt the whole colony spinning—which of course it does: I mean, that’s how we get gravity, isn’t it? But it was all spinning around her eyes, and I felt my whole body melting into her hand.

But she had finished saying “Pleased to meet you,” and I had to let her hand go unless I was going to propose to her on the spot—which I seriously considered before deciding that it was probably premature.

“I was impressed by your work with the Pevunghian cult artifacts,” the vision said, apparently to both of us. “Such a surprising answer to a difficult problem. No one else had thought of it.”

“I figured out how to make them talk,” Wright said. “Any genius could probably have done it.”

“Mr. Wright is characteristically modest,” I said quickly, lying through my teeth. Part of my job is to make Wright look good to the client without letting him make too much of an arrogant twit of himself.

“But no other genius did find the answer. You did. I’ve come to the conclusion that our own problem here needs some sort of genius that we don’t have.”

“You have us now,” I told her, and I was rewarded by a glance from those eyes.

”Would you like to start by seeing the patient?” she asked us.

Wright looked at me. Usually, left to himself, he would just go into a room and start building something that would test his hypothesis. But I had lectured him enough on the human side of the business that he was willing to spend a little extra time at the beginning of a job pretending to be human if I thought it was necessary. And I wanted to spend a few extra hours or years with Dr. Witterman, so of course I said yes. To be precise, I said, “That sounds like a good idea.”

So Dr. Witterman led us to the tube—oh, she was perfect from every angle—and we squeezed into the little car, which was delightfully cramped, which meant that I was standing near enough to Dr. Witterman to feel the warmth radiating from her body. I hoped the ride would last forever, but we went up a few levels and then over for a minute, and we stopped when the display read “HOSPITAL.”

The Institute’s research hospital looked pretty much like any other hospital—a bit blander, perhaps, but that was the era: it looked as though the whole institute complex was rebuilt at the same nadir of colonial architecture. We walked through a quiet hall, past mostly empty rooms, until we came to a door marked “DANGER—QUARANTINE—AUTHORIZED PERSONS ONLY.”

“We can go in as far as the observation room,” Dr. Wilterman told us, waving her hand over the lock. “We can’t go into the patient room without suiting up.”

She opened the door and led us into a little room—more like a booth, and again it necessitated standing very close to her—with an entire wall of window overlooking another small room. In that room beyond was a bed, and on the bed was a body—presumably still living, since there were monitors in the booth measuring heart rate and temperature and other things that cease to be interesting after the patient is dead. But the man could have been a plaster statue for all the signs of life he showed to my unscientific eye.

“He’s still being kept in a coma,” Dr. Witterman explained. “I, um, don’t know how much of what we sent you you’ve had a chance to read…”

Wright and I had both read the whole file. I’d read it twice just on the trip, because there was nothing else to do while the rumbling old local lurched from one godforsaken backwater to the next. But I wanted to hear more of her voice, and to stand there right next to her and inhale the ethereal but intoxicating fragrance of her, so I decided to suggest, “Why don’t you give us a more informal summary, so we can understand it from your perspective?”

“Well,” she said, and I was in heaven just listening to the music of her voice, “it should be a basic bacterial infection, but those aren’t basic bacteria. They come from a strain we were modifying genetically to fight against other infections.”

“You said they were like primitive computers,” I mentioned just to show that I had actually done my homework, and with the hope that she would turn those eyes back to me for a moment.

“Very primitive,” she confirmed—and yes! the eyes! “Simple binary machines, slow and limited, but implemented biochemically. They were supposed to be able to react to changing conditions with a few simple if-then instructions. And that may be the problem. No matter what we throw at it, the infection just adapts.”

“’How do you get the output from them?” Wright asked.

“Output?”

“Status, data collected…”

“Oh. We don’t. They weren’t designed to collect data. They were just supposed to go in, do their job, and then be flushed out.”

“Mm,” Wright said. It was a disapproving “mm.”

“So they don’t have something like an expiration date?” I asked. “You know, like some way of automatically shutting down when they’re done?”

“They should die when the infection they’re fighting is gone, because that’s their food, so to speak. That didn’t happen. Failing that, we should be able to get rid of them with a standard antibiotic treatment. That didn’t happen either.”

“And you’ve never had this problem before?” I asked.

“This was our first experiment on a human subject,” she answered. I apparently hadn’t quite done all my homework. But at least I got a flash of those eyes. “It worked perfectly in mice.”

“I’ll need a big room,” Wright told her, “with all the equipment for working on your bugs. I’ll need two of your top lab techs who know this project. I’ll need access to every file, including the ones you don’t want to show me because you think they’re trade secrets. And I’ll need you.”

“Me?”

“You’re obviously in charge here, so you can get things done. I need you to drop whatever else you’re doing and be available for me all day, every day, until this problem is solved.”

That was an unusual demand from Wright, whose usual demands were more like “Give me what I want and leave me alone.” But my soul danced a jig that I could barely keep out of my feet when Dr. Witterman cheerfully agreed. Yes! I would be working all day with the love of my life! This would be the best job we’d ever had.

“That went well,” I said cheerfully as I helped Wright unpack his things in the bland but spacious guest room he’d been assigned. “Dr. Witterman gave you everything you wanted, and you didn’t even have to throw a tantrum.”

“And did you ever see legs like those in your life?” Wright added.

A little alarm bell rang in my brain. “What?”

“Rebecca. She has perfect legs.”

“She was wearing pants.”

“They were tight. You could see the shape of her legs. Did you like the way I made sure she’d be with me all day? I’m looking forward to that, I can tell you.”

“Wait a minute. Are you saying you got Dr. Witterman to work with us just so you could gawk at her legs all day?”

“Well, eventually I’m hoping to see a lot more than her legs.”

“You— but— What’s got into you? You never chase women when we’re working. You never chase women when we’re not working.”

“I never met one with legs like those before.” He was smiling and looking past me, as if his mind was filled with pleasant images.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no, no. You can’t do this to me. How can you talk about her legs when…

“When what?”

“When… those eyes?”

“Oh, so you’re an eye man. I’m a leg man. Well, may the best man win, then.”

I slammed a drawer shut and turned to stomp out of the room.

“Just remember,” Wright added, “I’m the genius.”

Because I couldn’t think of a comeback for that, Wright had the last word, which ruined my dramatic exit.

Continues in Part Two.