Krysty smiled. “I see that. But what do they want from me? Make another Krysty who hasn’t got the Gaia powers? That wouldn’t make any sense at all. Unless they could alter it in some way. Don’t like the thought of that.”
They had stopped for a break. Sec men had brought in trays of different colored drinks, pink, green and violet. The trouble was that all of them tasted the same.
“Mixed fruits,” Buford stated. “Pulped and spun dried in a vacuum rotator, then reconned and liquefied with preservatives and color additives. Delicious, aren’t they?”
Trader was the only one in the group to actively disagree with the whitecoat.
“Well, let me think about that. I recall being down in the Mojave having had a disagreement with a breed baron. Very much in my young and unwise days.” Ryan knew the story, having heard it a dozen times, and he saw the point that Trader was about to make. “He taught me a lesson in manners. Chained me naked in a cell that was five-by-five with an old rippled-iron roof. Was one-ten outside. Must’ve been one-fifty inside. Nothing to eat or drink for a week. Had to do a kind of backroll and piss in my own mouth. Not a pretty thought, Buford. But I lived through all that and lived to see that baron choke on his own bloodied lungs. Now,” he said, grinning at the others, “given the choice, I’d take my own piss rather than these sickly brews.”
THEY’D COVERED MOST of the first floor of the long wing of the institute, visiting lab after lab, with benches and all kinds of arcane scientific equipment.
“We’ll go up the stairs to the top floor,” Buford told them.
“What’s along there?” Ryan asked, pointing to the end double sec doors.
Buford looked up at the ceiling, as if he were trying to read the solution to an ageless riddle among the strips of neon lights.
“That’s sort of secret,” he finally said. “Professor Crichton said he was sorry, but he didn’t feel able to include that in the guided tour.”
“Why?” Mildred asked. “All you’ve shown us so far is standard advanced genetic engineering. Carried a bit farther than anything I’d heard of. Grant you all of that. But it’s still not much more than tampering with elongated DNA chains, using your supercomputers to ease calculations.”
“Here in the Melissa Crichton Institute, Mildred, we all believe in making yesterday’s impossibilities tomorrow’s possibilities.”
Doc clapped his veined bands together, slowly and sarcastically. “Jolly, jolly good,” he drawled in an exaggerated accent. “That’s the sort of jolly phrase that my dear grandmother would have insisted on embroidering into a sampler. The sort of jolly phrase that echoes around the mouth like an overripe plum and means precisely nothing.”
“Mock not,” Buford said with an effort at dignity. “The last tear of sorrow is the one that counts.”
He was adamant on not allowing them access, and there were sec guards there to back him up. Ryan had seen nothing in the place to make him feel particularly suspicious and could find no reason to push the matter.
As Buford led the rest of them up the stairs, Ryan remained a few moments, staring at the wall above the sec doors, where an old sign had been painted over.
AFTER THEY’D SEEN ALL that they were allowed to see, which Ryan calculated at about sixty percent of the closed wing of the institute, Ladrow Buford invited them to eat a little lunch with him.
A couple of the other scientists joined them and, without warning, the tottering figure of David Crichton appeared, taking a seat at one end of the long table.
The food laid before them was no better than before, a variety of mushed-up slops in several different colors and with several different names.
Dean put his spoon down halfway through the main course. “Don’t you ever have any real food here,” he asked Buford, “like meat or fruit or anything?”
Crichton gave them his croaking laugh. “I hear you’ve dug out our lack of real medical skills. It’s a miracle I’ve lived this long. But we have this baby diet for several reasons. One of them is this.” He put his palsied hand into his mouth and took out a full set of false teeth, laying them, trailing spittle, on the table alongside his plate.
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