that his genetic structure had run amok and that it was conveying him
toward a form and consciousness that had nothing to do with the human
race. He was becoming something else, something beyond reptile or ape
or Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon man or modern European man, something so
strange that he did not have the courage or the curiosity to confront
it.
Henceforth, when he glanced in the mirror, he would be certain that it
provided a view only of the roadway behind and revealed no slightest
aspect of his own altered countenance.
He switched on the headlights and drove away from the rest area onto the
highway.
The steering wheel felt odd in his malformed, monstrous hands.
Driving, which should have been as familiar to him as walking, seemed
like a singularly exotic actand difficult, too, almost beyond his
capabilities. He clutched the wheel and concentrated on the rainy
highway ahead.
The whispering tires and metronomic thump of the windshield wipers
seemed to pull him on through the storm and the gathering darkness,
toward a special destiny. Once, when his full intellect returned to him
for a brief moment, he thought of William Butler Yeats and remembered a
fitting scrap of the great man’s poetry, 32
FLAMINGO PINK Tuesday afternoon, after their meeting with Dr. Easton
Solberg at UCI, Detectives Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom, still on
sick leave, had driven to Tustin, where the main offices of Shadway
Realty were located in a suite on the ground floor of a three-story
Spanishstyle building with a blue tile roof. Julio had spotted the
stakeout car on the first pass. It was an unmarked muck-green Ford,
sitting at the curb half a block from Shadway Realty, where the
occupants had a good view of those offices and of the driveway that
serviced the parking lot alongside the building. Two men in blue suits
were in the Ford, One was reading a newspaper and the other was keeping
watch.
“Feds,” Julio said as he cruised by the stakeout.
“Sharp’s men? D.S.A?” Reese wondered.
“Must be.”
“A little obvious, aren’t they?”
“I guess they don’t really expect Shadway to turn up here,” Julio said.
“But they have to go through the motions.”
Julio parked half a block behind the stakeout, putting several cars
between him and the D.S.A’s Ford, so it was And what rough beast, its
hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
possible to watch the watchers without being seen.
Reese had participated in scores of stakeouts with Julio, and
surveillance duty had never been the ordeal it might have been with
another partner. Julio was a complex man whose conversation was
interesting hour after hour. But when one or both of them did not feel
up to conversation, they could sit through long silences in comfort,
without awkwardnessne of the surest tests of friendship.
Tuesday afternoon, while they watched the watchers and also watched the
offices of Shadway Realty, they talked about Eric Leben, genetic
engineering, and the dream of immortality. That dream was by no means
Leben’s private obsession. A deep longing for immortality, for
commutation of the death sentence, had surely filled humankind since the
first members of the species had acquired self-awareness and a crude
intelligence.
The subject had a special poignancy for Reese and Julio because both had
witnessed the deaths of much-loved wives and had never fully recovered
from their losses.
Reese could sympathize with Leben’s dream and even understand the
scientist’s reasons for subjecting himself to a dangerous genetic
experiment. It had gone wrong, yes, the two murders and the hideous
crucifixion of the one dead girl were proof that Leben had come back
from the grave as something less than human, and he must be stopped.
But the deadly result of his experiments-and the folly of themHIid not
entirely foreclose sympathy.
Against the rapacious hunger of the grave, all men and women were
united, brothers and sisters.
As the sunny summer day grew dreary under an incoming marine layer of
ash-gray clouds, Reese felt a cloak of melancholy settle upon him. He
might have been overwhelmed by it if he had not been on the job, but he
was on the job in spite of also being on sick leave.