Lakesh nodded miserably, his seamed face collapsing in pain. He saw the horrified realization reflected in her eyes, on her suddenly stark and stricken face. Gently he said, “Chromosomal damage, due to the effects of the radiation and the Tushe Gun’s devilish device. To what extent and to what degree of permanency is still undetermined.”
Her tongue felt like a dry twig, but she managed to ask, “How long have you known?”
“Only a short time. DeFore discovered the condition after examining you upon your return from the Irish mission. As you recall, she was too busy treating Domi and myself to perform a thorough test immediately. When she did, she was still hesitant to make an extended prognosis.”
Brigid’s shoulders slumped. She squeezed her eyelids shut against the hot sting of tears. Despising the quavery catch in her voice, she said, ‘ ‘You brought in Rouch a week after we returned from the Black Gobi. You and DeFore knew then.”
“No. DeFore suspected you might have suffered some sort of damage, but her early tests were inconclusive. The plan to spirit Rouch away had begun a full month before you went to Mongolia. You know how far in advance I like to work. Remember, you were contacted a year before you arrived here.”
Brigid ran her hands through her hair, sitting up straighten “You’ll bring in more women like Rouch, won’t you?”
“If necessary.” Lakesh leaned forward, elbows on his desk, voice pitched low. “Everything I do, everything I plan, is geared toward our survival. As much as I may wish otherwise, I cannot allow an individual’s personal situationno matter how much I empathize with itto take precedence over the good of the many.”
Dully Brigid asked, “And Domi? Is she also un-suited for procreation?”
“Perhaps not emotionally or biologically. But genetically is an open question. Her years spent in the Outlands, living near hot spots, may have negatively altered her ability to bear normal offspring. I don’t want to take the chance that she might give birth to a mutant or a child with injurious mental or physical abnormalities.”
“What about the potency of the other men here?”
Lakesh shifted in his chair uncomfortably. “What about it?”
“For example, Kane and Grant traipsed all over hell-zones in the performance of their Mag duties.”
“I can’t be sure of Grant,” Lakesh replied wearily. “But as you know, I took a personal hand in breeding into Kane a number of superior adaptive traits. Resistance to disease, to rad poisoning are some of them.”
“And,” Brigid said in a quiet, uninflected tone, “his seed is strong. Did you take a personal hand in that?”
“I did,” declared Lakesh flatly. “And it should be passed on.”
“But only to a partner who hasto quote Rouch’exceptionally strong female drives’?”
“If you view the situation objectively, you must agree.” He waited a beat and inquired, “Don’t you?”
Flatly Brigid said, “I view the situation as yet another one of your arrogant assumptions.”
Lakesh’s eyebrows rose, then curved down. The intercom on the desk suddenly blared with Bry’s tight, agitated voice. “Sir?”
Lakesh poked a button, knowing he couldn’t conceal the relief he felt at the interruption. “What is it?”
The speaker accurately conveyed Bry’s tension. “We’ve got activity on the anomalous mat-trans-inducer signature.”
Lakesh threw Brigid a forced apologetic smile before levering himself out of his chair. She followed him out of the office, down the corridor and into the control center. Bry’s eyes were fixed on the wall map. As they watched, the bright light indicating the Redoubt Papa gateway unit winked out.
Gesturing to a computer terminal, Bry said, “The autosequencer read is a definite dematerialization.”
Lakesh crossed his arms over his chest and fingered his chin musingly. “Then we should, by all rights, re-ceive a rematerialization signal from the destination unit.”
They stood and waited and stared at the map. And waited. Brigid knew the transit process was not necessarily instantaneous, despite the perceptions of those in quantum interphase transition. She really didn’t understand more than the basics of mat-trans operations and sometimes she wondered if Lakesh, despite his former position as Project Cerberus overseer, knew as much as he claimed.
As one of the major components of the Totality Concept’s Overproject Whisper, the quantum interphase mat-trans inducers opened a rift in the hyperdimen-sional quantum stream, between a relativistic here and there. She knew the mat-trans units required a mind-boggling number of insanely intricate electronic procedures, all occurring within milliseconds of one another, to minimize the margins for error. The actual matter-to-energy conversion process was automated for this reason, sequenced by an array of computers and microprocessors. According to Lakesh, Cerberus technology did more than beam matter from one spot in linear space to another. It reduced organic and inorganic material to digital information and transmitted it along hyperdimensional pathways on a carrier wave.