me, that I haven’t looked at it from a broader perspective.”
“So they have to get hold of us,” Ben said.
“hey don’t want us blowing the secret till Wildcard’s perfected. If it
were blown first, they couldn’t continue research unhampered.”
“Exactly. Since you’re going to inherit the largest block of stock in
Geneplan, the government might figure you can be persuaded to cooperate
for the good of your country and for your own gain.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t be persuaded. Not about this. For one
thing, if there’s any hope at all of dramatically extending the human
life span and promoting healing through genetic engineering, then the
research shouol be done publicly, and the benefits should he available
to everyone. It’s immoral to handle it any other way.”
“I figured that’s how you’d feel,” he said, pulling the Ford though a
sharp right-hand turn, then sharply to the left again.
“Besides, I couldn’t be persuaded to continue research along the same
avenue the Wildcard group has been following, becaase I’m sure it’s the
wrong route.
“I knew you’d say that”‘ Ben said approvingly.
“Admittedly, I know very little about genetics, but I can see there’s
just too much danger involved in the approach they’re taking. Remember
the mice I told you about And remember… the blood in the trunk of the
car at the house in Villa Park.”
He remembered, which was one reason he had wanted the shotgun.
She said, “If I took control of Geneplan, I might want to fund continued
longevity research, but I’d insist on scrapping Wildcard and starting
fresh from a new direction.”
“I knew you’d say that, too,” Ben told her, “and I figure the government
also has a pretty good idea what you’d say. So I don’t have much hope
that they just want a chance to persuade you. If they know anything
about you-and as Eric’s wife, you’ve got to be in their files-then they
know you couldn’t be bribed or threatened into doing something you
thought was really wrong, couldn’t be corrupted. So they probably won’t
even bother trying.”
“It’s my Catholic upbringing,” she said with a touch of irony. “A very
stern, strict, religious family, you know.”
He didn’t know. This was the first she had ever spoken of it.
Softly she said, “And very early, I was sent to a boarding school for
girls, administrated by nuns. I grew to hate it. . . the endless
Masses. . . the humiliation of the confessional, revealing my pathetic
little sins. But I guess it shaped me for the better, huh? Might not
be so all-fired incorruptible if I hadn’t spent all those years in the
hands of the good sisters.”
He sensed that these revelations were but a twig on an immense and
perhaps ugly tree of grim experience.
He glanced away from the road for a second, wanting to see her
expression. But he was foiled by the constantly, rapidly changing
mosaic of tree shadows and sunlight that came through the windshield and
dappled her countenance. There was an illusion of fire, and her face
was only half revealed to him, half hidden beyond the shifting and
shimmering curtain of those phantom flames.
Sighing, she said, “Okay, so if the government knows it can’t persuade
me, why’s it issuing warrants on a bunch of trumped-up charges and
putting so much manpower into the search for me?”
“They want to kill you,” Ben said bluntly.
“whair’ “They’d father get you out of the picture and deal with Eric’s
panners, Knowis and Seita and the others, because they already know
those men are corruptible.”
She was shocked, and he was not surprised by her shock. She was not
unworldly or terribly naive. But she was, by choice, a prerent-focused
person who had given little thought to the complexities of the changing
world around her, except when that world impinged upon her primara,
desire to wring as much pleasure as possible from the moment. She
accepted a variety of myths as a matter of convenience, as a way of
simplifying her life, and one myth was that her government would always
have her best interests at heart, whether the issue was war, a reform of