“Tasty” wasn’t the first word that would have occurred to Ryan.
There were printed menus spaced along the table, and the food, already in individual portions on rectangular green plastic dishes, was served by unarmed sec men.
“Soup of the Day” turned out to be a pale green liquid that matched the bowls and had a faint taste of dried peas and too much salt.
“Fish pat and salad.” The former was a pinkish gray color, with a watery constitution, and the latter was a single irradiated tomato and three shredded leaves of reconstituted lettuce that had neither flavor nor texture.
The main course was “Meat and three vegetables.”
“What kind of meat is it?” Mildred asked.
The elderly woman whitecoat sitting next to her didn’t know, but she thought it might once have been pork. The younger man opposite, with a hearing aid, decided after being asked six times that he believed that it was beef. A sec man, who was serving, suggested bone-stripped veal.
In the end, not one of the scientists could answer the question, though Crichton gallantly offered to send a message to the kitchens to try to find out.
“Don’t bother,” Mildred replied. “I guess it’s still going to taste absolutely like nothing, even when I know that it’s really something.”
The vegetables were three dollops of mush, precisely the same size for everyone. Buford pointed out proudly that the machines in the kitchens were accurate to an eighth of a milligram in doling it out.
One dollop was pale yellow, one was off-white and one was dark green.
The desserts were a straight choice between cheese or fruit cobbler.
To Ryan’s surprise, the cheese actually looked and tasted like cheese. The cobbler looked like crimson mush, reduced to the texture of watery porridge.
“The cheese keeps well, and we have not found a way, after all these years, to successfully deconstruct and then reconstitute it.” Crichton smiled.
“Well,” Trader said, “I guess that’s one thing for us all to be grateful for.”
The conversation was stilted. The men and women in their lab coats seemed to have little idea of the world beyond the rocky walls of the valley that held the institute at its center, like a powerful oyster gripping a pearl.
They asked a little about the fishing village that Ryan and the others had claimed to come from. But the inquiries were desultory and didn’t show true interest.
The one subject that undoubtedly did interest them all was Krysty Wroth.
Every one of the outlanders was quizzed intensively by his, or her, neighbors.
“Where does she come from?”
“Who is she?”
“Are her parents muties?”
“Is it true that she has phenomenal powers, as Ladrow Buford claims?”
“When can we see her?”
The old man at the head of the table was persistent with Ryan. “We are true inquirers after all scientific truths, as was my father and his mother before him. There are so many tests that we could carry out on the woman in question.”
Ryan didn’t much like David Crichton, Sitting next to him made his flesh crawl. It wasn’t the whitecoat’s age. He’d seen, and liked, enough elderly people in his life.
Crichton was like an evil child. His skin was soft, like a newborn reptile’s, his eyes milky and pale. He ate the food with a strange, infantile sucking action, dribbling a great deal. When he was speaking he sometimes forgot that he was also eating, and the food simply plopped back onto his dish.
“What do you actually do here?” Ryan asked. “What’s the research you work on?”
Buford answered very quickly, as if he didn’t trust his leader to be discreet. “Very secret, Cawdor. Known only to a few of us around this table. The second-stage workers and sec men, and the auxiliaries, of course, have no idea at all what we do. We are most careful about that.”
Doc heard part of the conversation. “Little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, when in the hands of the wrong people, Buford? So we make sure that the right hands are our hands. Is that the basic idea?”
“Yes, it is,” Crichton said so excitedly that his gleaming false teeth shifted and nearly followed the regurgitated food onto the table. “You are obviously a person of wisdom, Tanner. After we have finished what we have started, then there might be something for you to do here with us if you so wished.”