“But that’s not the whole story!” Nole rapped. “The
computer was hesitant about assigning these locations.
The correspondence is marginal. And the direction in
which the variations are significant is ridiculous! I could
print the information if you want, but it’s highly techni-
cal.”
“We’ll take your word,” Langenschmidt said. “Just
make it a bit clearer, will you?”
“Welluhone could say that the direction of the
anomalies is away from the human.”
There was a puzzled silence. Maddalena broke it. “It
couldn’t be a synthesised prosthetic, could it? I’ve never
heard of such a thing, but it seems a reasonable sugges-
tion.”
Impressed, Nole gave a nod. “Yon mean a limb syn-
thesised to an approximate specification, instead of regen-
erated to make a match with the opposite limb? It could
be, it just conid.”
“But is there anywhere to your knowledge where such
a technique is employed?” Langenschmidt asked.
“No . . . Though with the log)am we have in scien-
tific communication these days, that’s not conclusive. If
you like, I’ll have the data sifted and give you a verdict
jn the morning.”
“You do that,” Langenschmidt sighed. “Right now, I
want to call it a day. I’m sorry I fouled up your first
evening here, Maddalena, because I was really intending
to give you a good time.”
“What? Oh!” Maddalena had clearly not been listen-
ing. “That doesn’t matter, Gus. But before we go, can I
just check out another idea I had a moment ago?”
“Why not?”
Maddalena looked at Nole. “Can you fix an Earthside
location with your equipment? In other words, can you
determine the areas where the correspondence is closest?”
“Earth’s population is pretty damned mixed,” Nole
said, staring. “After all, every single gene-type in the
galaxy is found there, barring a few late mutations.”
“I’m pretty mixed myself,” Maddalena agreed impa-
tiently. “Iberian, Amerind, and who knows what? But
check, will you?”
Nole shrugged and put the question to the machine.
“Below the limit of acceptable probability,” he an-
nounced. The closest approach isuh how do you pro-
nounce that? Iran, would it be?”
“Gus,” Maddalena said, barely audible, “there was a
second language on Zarathustra, wasn’t there?”
“Of course there was! You’ve been speaking a bastard
cross between Irani and Galactic for the past twenty”
Langenschmidt broke off, his face going milk-pale.
“Dr Nole,” Maddalena pursued, “did you compute
your findings with non-civilised gene-types as well as
civilised? I’ll wager you didn’t!” A trifle maliciously, she
added, “I’m referring, of course, to the ZRP’s.”
Nole gave a strangled gasp and revised his instructions
to the machine. Almost instantly there was a fresh
print-out.
“Probability seventy per cent plus or minus two,” he
reported. “No, I’m afraid you’re wrong, in that case
which is a relief. The reading would have to exceed
eighty to be actionable.”
“Even if we turn out to be dealing with ZRP Number
Twenty-two?” Maddalena said softly.
There was a frozen pause. Then Langenschmidt
clapped his hands and exploded. “Maddalena, how have I
managed without you for all this time? Nole, where the
hell is the nearest communicator? Maddalena, you’re a
geniusdamn you!”
xn
Looldng slightly- dazed, Nole stared at Maddalena
while Langenschmidt waited for his communicator con-
nection to be made.
“NumberTwenty-two,” he said, as though weighing
the statement for some elusive additional meaning. “I’m
sorry, but I’m not yet sure what you mean.”
“Oh, come now!” Maddalena snapped. “If you weren’t
so worried about Gus’s threat to have your hide for let-
ting the fisherboy get loose, you’d have seen it before I
did. That leg of Kolb isn’t regenerated and it isn’t origi-
nal. So it’s got to be either a graft or a synthesised pros-
thetic. You said yourself you didn’t know of anywhere
the latter technique was being applied, though it’s per-
fectly feasible. So it’s almost certainly a graft.
“You saidagainyou don’t know of any nearby
worlds where they make graft material available. More-
over, the computer virtually rules out the chance of a
gene-type corresponding to the tissue of the leg occur-
ring on any planet near Cyclops. But it does suggest that
the ultimate origin of the ancestral strain might well