“I don’t feel adequate to deal with this.”
“It’s a police matter.”
“No, it isn’t, really.”
“It’s no different than if you were tracking down an ordinary killer,” Shaddack said irritably. “You’ll apply the same techniques.”
“But…”
“What is it?”
“Regressives could be among the men you assign me.”
“There won’t be any…”
“But … how can you be sure?”
“I told you there won’t be,” Shaddack said sharply, still facing the window, the fog, the night.
They were both silent a moment.
Then Shaddack said, “You’ve got to put everything into finding these damned deviants. Everything, you hear me? I want at least one of them to examine by the time we’ve taken all of Moonlight Cove through the Change.”
“I thought …”
“Yes?”
“Well, I thought …”
“Come on, come on. You thought what?”
“Well … just that maybe you’d suspend the conversions until we understand what’s happening here.”
“Hell, no!” Shaddack turned from the window and glared at the police chief, who flinched satisfactorily.
“These regressives are a minor problem, very minor. What the shit do you know about it? You’re not the one who designed a new race, a new world. I am. The dream was mine, the vision mine. I had the brains and nerve to make the dream real. And I know this is an anomaly indicative of nothing. So the Change will take place according to schedule.”
Watkins looked down at his white-knuckled hands.
As he spoke, Shaddack paced barefoot along the curved glass wall, then back again. “We now have more than enough doses to deal with the remaining townspeople. In fact, we’ve initiated a new round of conversions this evening. Hundreds will be brought into the fold by dawn, the rest by midnight. Until everyone in town is with us, there’s a chance we’ll be found out, a risk of someone carrying a warning to the outside world. Now that we’ve overcome the problems with the production of the biochips, we’ve got to take Moonlight Cove quickly, so we can proceed with the confidence that comes from having a secure home base. Understand?”
Watkins nodded.
“Understand?” Shaddack repeated.
“Yes. Yes, sir.”
Shaddack returned to his chair and sat down. “Now what’s this other thing you called me about earlier, this Valdoski business?”
“Eddie Valdoski, eight years old,” Watkins said, looking at his hands, which he was now virtually wringing, as if trying to squeeze something from them in the way he might have squeezed water from a rag. “He was found dead a few minutes past eight. in a ditch along the country road. He’d been … tortured … bitten, gutted.”
“You think one of the regressives did it?”
“Definitely.”
“Who found the body?”
“Eddie’s folks. His dad. The boy had been playing in the backyard, and then he … disappeared near sunset. They started searching, couldn’t find him, got scared, called us, continued to search while we were on our way … and found the body just before my men got there.”
“Evidently the Valdoskis aren’t converted?”
“They weren’t. But they are now.”
Shaddack sighed. “There won’t be any trouble about the boy if they’ve been brought into the fold.”
The police chief raised his head and found the courage to look directly at Shaddack again. “But the boy’s still dead.” His voice was rough.
Shaddack said, “That’s a tragedy, of course. This regressive element among the New People could not have been foreseen. But no great advancement in human history has been without its victims.”
“He was a fine boy,” the policeman said.
“You knew him?”
Watkins blinked. “I went to high school with his father, George Valdoski. I was Eddie’s godfather.”
Considering his words carefully, Shaddack said, “It’s a terrible thing. And we’ll find the regressive who did it. We’ll find all of them and eliminate them. Meanwhile, we can take some comfort in the fact that Eddie died in a great cause.”
Watkins regarded Shaddack with unconcealed astonishment. “Great cause? What did Eddie know of a great cause? He was eight years old.”
“Nevertheless,” Shaddack said, hardening his voice, “Eddie was caught up in an unexpected side effect of the conversion of Moonlight Cove, which makes him part of this wonderful, historical event.” He knew that Watkins had been a patriot, absurdly proud of his flag and country, and he supposed that some of that sentiment still reposed in the man, even subsequent to conversion, so he said “Listen to me, Loman. During the Revolutionary War, when the colonists were fighting for independence, some innocent bystanders died, women and children, not just combatants, and those people did not die in vain. They were martyrs every bit as much as the soldiers who perished in the field. It’s the same in any revolution. The important thing is that justice prevail and that those who die can be said to have given their lives for a noble purpose.”