“You’re not mad, then?” she asked.
“Of course not!”
“I’m glad. I’ve been worried all these days I’ve waited for the machine to finish its chores with you.”
“Now,” he said, feeling the joy of life bounding in him like the stimulating fingers of some booster drug, “we are not only free and unhunted, but we have the fortress with which to work and plan; we don’t have to be barbarians, living without conveniences and without hope. There’s so much to study and accomplish that it’s hard to know where to start.”
“How about going flying with me for beginners?” she asked.
It took him a moment to realize that she meant flying and was not using a euphemism for lovemaking. He stood, mouth open, and looked down to his now small feet, up his powerful but thin legs, at a body that had been constructed for travel through the air. Carefully, he unfolded his great, blue wings behind him . . .
XII
DAVIS SAT in the richly padded maroon easy chair behind the ornate desk which seemed very large and blocky and Comfortably solid before him but which was, by human standards, a mite too small to do business from. It had been a little more than two weeks now since he had awakened under the hand of the mechanical surgeon in the genetic chambers in the bottom floor of the subterranean fortress and had discovered that he no longer possessed the body of an Earthman, and still he continued to compare the sensations and the time-space judgments he made with those he would have made in the much different human shell he had been born with. More often than not, the Demosian body came out the winner in such comparisons, for it was more compact, more muscular, considering the fine tuning of what muscle it did possess, and quicker than the looming hulk of the old-Stauffer Davis.
He found that, unlike a man of Earth, a Demosian moved in a fluid, catlike manner so natural and rhythmical that he was not aware of his body in any conscious plane. He never tripped over a seam in the floor. He never bent to pick something up and found his stomach in his way. He never cracked head or hips against doorways, never fumbled something he was attempting to pick up. He was one with his environment, as a human could never be, and met and coped with it on a subconscious level that freed his mind for almost continual deep thought on the things he had learned in these past several days.
He turned off the tapeviewer on the desk, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes, letting his mind wander. The tape concerned the operation of the genetic wombs and the theories advanced to explain their inability to produce beings with serviceable brains inside their skulls. He still did not understand two-thirds of the technical language, but he was learning with the aid of sleep-teach machines that fed the data into his own brain at a hundred times the speed he could have learned it under normal classroom circumstances. The theory that most interested him was the one constructed by Dr. Mi’nella—who was now dead, slaughtered in the senseless Alliance takeover of Demos. Mi’nella believed that the problem with the mindlessness of the artificial men did not lie in. the genetic engineering at all, but, instead, in the time-ratio chamber where the untouched fetus was put and—in ten days subjective time—aged twenty years objectively. Thus, Mi’nella argued, they were producing twenty-year-olds with the minds of newborn babies and the sensory equipment of the adult body—which was sexually complete—the most devasting blew to the confused, blank mind was shorting out the seeking brain of the infant, bringing insanity in the first few moments of life outside the time-ratio chamber. Mi’nella wanted to work out a retooling of the process on the main computer in Fortress Two as soon as possible and see if the bugs could be ironed out of the time-ratio chambers or whether it was worthwhile to produce infant Demosians who could not be ready for battle for at least a dozen years.
The war had ended without Mi’nella being given that chance.