SENATOR HORTON: And you were given clearance?
DR LUKAS: Well, not right away, Space Administration was – well, you might call it reluctant. So finally I took the tack that in a matter a good two centuries old, no clearance was needed. That it no longer was a matter of clearance, but a matter of historical record. I don’t mind telling you that I had a rough time making anyone see the logic of my argument.
SENATOR HORTON: But you finally prevailed?
DR LUKAS: Yes, finally. With considerable competent assistance, I might add. You see, the records at one time had been under the highest top security such material could be given. Technically, this security still applied. It took considerable argument to make it apparent that such a situation was ridiculous…
SENATOR STONE: Now, hold up a minute, doctor. Before you go on, one question. You said you had assistance.
DR LUKAS: Yes, I did.
SENATOR STONE: Could a considerable part of that assistance have come from Senator Horton?
SENATOR HORTON: Since the question concerns me, I’ll answer if Dr Lukas will consent. I am quite happy to admit that I did lend him some assistance.
SENATOR STONE: All right, that’s all I wanted. Just so it’s on the record.
SENATOR HORTON: Dr Lukas, if you’ll please continue.
DR LUKAS: The records showed that two hundred and twenty-one years ago – 2266, to be exact – two synthetic beings had been made. They were in the shape of humans and they had human minds, but they were constructed for a very special purpose. They were to be used in initial contacts with life on other planets, to be carried aboard exploratory and survey ships and used to gather data on the dominant life on whatever new planets might be found.
SENATOR HORTON: Now, Dr Lukas, without going into details at the present moment, can you tell us exactly how it was planned they were to do this sort of job?
DR LUKAS: I’m not sure I can make myself entirely clear, but I’ll try. These synthetic humans were highly adaptable. You might have described them, for want of a better term, as plastic. The concept of open-endedness was employed – it couldn’t have been developed earlier than ten years or so before, and it is unusual, to say the least, to find a concept as intricate as this bent to practical purpose in such a length of time. All the basic components of the constructed human bodies involved open-endedness – completed, you understand, and yet, in a sense, essentially incomplete. The amino acids…
SENATOR HORTON: Perhaps, for the moment, you will only tell us what these bodies were intended to do, without going into the principles involved.
DR LUKAS: You mean simply how they were intended to function?
SENATOR HORTON: If you will, please.
DR LUKAS: The idea was that once an exploratory ship landed on a planet one of the dominant species of that planet would be captured and be scanned. You are familiar, I think, with the biological scanning process. The structure, the chemistry, the metabolic processes – all the data which made the creature what it was – would be determined. This data would be stored in a memory core. Once this was done, the data would be transmitted to the simulated human which, because of the uniqueness of its biological open-endedness, would change into an exact copy of the creature which was described by the data in the tapes. This would not have been a slow process. Any delay would have been fatal. It must have been an uncanny thing to watch – a human being almost instantaneously changing into an alien creature.
SENATOR HORTON: You say the human would have changed into the alien creature. Does that mean in every respect – mental, intellectual, if the term implies, as well as…
DR LUKAS: The human would, in fact, become the creature. Not one of the creatures, you understand, but an exact copy of the creature from which it had been patterned. It would have that creature’s memories and its mind. It would be able to pick up immediately where the other creature had left off. Released from the ship, it could seek out that creature’s fellows and rejoin them and could carry out its investigations.
SENATOR HORTON: You mean it still would retain the human mind as well?
DR LUKAS: Well, that would be hard to say. The human mentality and memory and identity and all the rest of it would still be there, although perhaps deeply sublimated. It would exist as a subconscious that could be triggered to the surface. A compulsion would be planted for the human-turned-creature to return to the ship after a stated interval of time and once returned, it would be induced to revert to its human form. Once back in human form, it would be able to recall the memories of its existence as an alien creature and data which otherwise might have been impossible to obtain would be made available.
SENATOR HORTON: And, may I ask, how did this all work out?
DR LUKAS: That, sir, is hard to say. There are no reports as to results. There are records of them – both of them – having been sent out. But after that there is only silence.
SENATOR HORTON: Your surmise would be that something went wrong?
DR LUKAS: Yes. But I can’t imagine what it might have been.
SENATOR HORTON: Something to do with the simulated men, perhaps.
DR LUKAS: Yes, that could be the case. There is no way of knowing.
SENATOR HORTON: They didn’t work, perhaps.
DR LUKAS: Oh, they would have performed their function. There could have been no reason for them not to perform as they were planned. They would have had to work.
SENATOR HORTON: I ask these questions because I know that if I do not, my distinguished colleague will. Now let me ask you one of my own. Could such a simulated man be constructed today?
DR LUKAS: Yes, with the blueprints in our hands, there would be not a bit of trouble to build another one.
SENATOR HORTON: But no others were ever built, so far as you know, that is.
DR LUKAS: So far as I know.
SENATOR HORTON: Would you care to speculate…
DR LUKAS: No, senator, I would not.
SENATOR STONE: If I may interrupt. Dr Lukas, do you have some sort of descriptive term for the process which was employed to make such men as these?
DR LUKAS: Yes, as a matter of fact, we have. It is called the werewolf principle.
11
In the parking lot across the street a man carried a tub out of the back door of one of the houses and set it on the patio at the edge of the pool. A tree was planted in the tub and when the man had set it down and moved away the tree began to ring – emitting a sound like the happy ringing of many silver bells.
Blake, sitting on a chair and wrapped in a robe of candy-coloured stripes, leaned his elbows on the railing five storeys above the street, and strained his ears, trying to make certain that the ringing really came from the tree. It seemed incredible, but there had been no such silver sound until the tub in which the tree was planted had been set beside the pool. And his ears told him that the sound did, indeed, come from the direction of the house.
Washington dozed in the blue smokiness of a late October afternoon. A few ground cars went past on the boulevard below, their air jet making soft, sighing sounds as they moved along. In the far distance, over the Potomac, a few floaters bobbed along – floating chairs with humans sitting in them. The houses in the parking lot were lined up in orderly rows, each with its bright green lawn, its beds of brightly coloured autumn flowers, the blue shine of the pools. By leaning forward and craning his neck, he could just make out his own house, down the boulevard, third row from the front, squatting on the foundation where it had put down.
His nearest neighbour on the solarium porch was an elderly man, muffled to the ears in a thick red blanket, blank eyes staring out into the space beyond the railing, seeing nothing, mumbling to himself. A short distance away two patients were playing a game that might have been chequers.
An attendant came hurrying across the porch.
‘Mr Blake,’ he said, ‘there is someone here to see you.’
Blake rose and turned around. Standing in the door that led out on to the porch was a woman, tall, dark-haired, wearing a robe of pale rose, a material that had the sheen of silk.
‘Miss Horton,’ said Blake. ‘Yes, please show her in.’
She came across the porch and held out her hand to him. ‘I drove down to your village yesterday afternoon,’ she said, ‘and found that you had left.’