-Cut it out, said Changer, sharply. The question isn’t which one of us he smelled. It is what do we do now. Thinker, can you change into something thin and flat, a shape that will give no profile, and creep out of here and up the hill?
-I doubt it. The planet’s far too cold. I’m losing energy too fast. If I extended my body surface I’d lose it that much faster.
-That’s a problem we have to face, said Quester. The problem of retaining sufficient energy. Changer will have to eat for us. He’ll have to supply the energy, ingesting in his own body form the foods that are available. And staying in his body’s form long enough for the food to be digested. There are few energy sources for Thinker and probably no food that I could eat and that my bodily apparatus would be able to handle. I would suspect…
-This all is true, said Changer. But let’s consider it some other time. For the moment, let’s go back to our present problem. Can you take over, Quester? They’d spot me. My body would show up white.
-Certainly I can, said Quester.
-Good. Crawl out of the cave and up the hill. Go easily, go quietly. But as swiftly as you can. We’ve got the searching party all together and if they don’t hear you, it’s unlikely we’ll run into any of them.
-Over the hill, asked Quester, and then what?
-Up on one of the drives, said Changer, we should find a public telephone.
19
‘If what you believe is true,’ Chandler Horton said, ‘then we must lose no time in contacting Blake.’
‘What makes you think it’s Blake any longer?’ asked the chief of staff. ‘It wasn’t Blake that ran off from this hospital. If Daniels is right, it was an alien creature.’
‘But Blake was there, too,’ protested Horton. ‘It might have been in an alien’s body, but it could change back to Blake.’
Senator Stone, hunched up in the big chair, sneered at Horton. ‘If you want to know what I think,’ he said, ‘this all is poppycock.’
‘We are interested in your thoughts, of course,’ said Horton. ‘But I do wish, Solomon, that for once your thinking could be a bit constructive.’
‘What is there to be constructive about?’ yelled Stone. ‘This is some sort of childish, put-up job. I haven’t got it figured out yet, but I know that is what it is. And I’ll wager you’re at the bottom of it, Chandler. You’re always up to tricks. You’ve got this deal rigged up to prove something, more than likely, but so far I don’t quite see what it is. I knew there was something going on when you got this Lukas joker to testify.’
‘Dr Lukas, if you don’t mind, senator,’ said Horton.
‘Well, all right then, Dr Lukas. What does he know about it?’
‘Let’s find out,’ said Horton. ‘Dr Lukas, what do you know about it?’
Lukas grinned drily. ‘As to what happened in this hospital, not a thing at all. As to whether it could happen as Dr Daniels believes it could – why, I must agree with him.’
‘But it’s supposition,’ Stone pointed out. ‘Nothing but supposition. Dr Daniels got it figured out. Fine! Good! Bully for him! He’s got a good imagination. But it doesn’t mean that what he thinks is actually what happened.’
‘I must point out to you,’ said the chief of staff, ‘that Blake was Dr Daniels’ patient.’
‘Which means you believe what he thinks?’
‘Not necessarily. I don’t know what to think. But if anyone is entitled to any opinion, it is Daniels here.’
‘Now let’s all calm down a bit,’ suggested Horton, ‘and take a look at what we have. I scarcely think it’s necessary to dignify the senator’s charges that this is a put-up job with any sort of answer, but I think we must all agree that something most unusual did happen here tonight. I also doubt that the decision by Dr Winston to call us all together was one that was lightly made. He now says he can form no solid opinion, but certainly he must have felt there was some reason for concern.’
‘I still think there is,’ said the chief of staff.
‘I understand the wolf, or whatever it was…’
Solomon Stone gave an explosive snort.
Horton stared at him icily. ‘Or whatever it was,’ he continued, ‘ran across the street into the park and the police gave chase.’
‘That’s right,’ said Daniels. ‘They’re out there now, trying to hunt it down. Some damn fool of a motorist caught it in his headlights when it crossed the road and tried to run it down.’
‘Don’t you see,’ said Horton, ‘that this is the sort of thing we have to stop. Everyone around here apparently went off half-cocked…’
‘You must understand,’ explained the chief of staff. ‘that it all was fairly frantic No one was thinking straight.’
‘If Blake is what Daniels thinks he is,’ said Horton, ‘we have to get him back. We lost two centuries of progress in human bioengineering because it was believed the Space Administration project failed and because of that the project was hushed up. Hushed up so effectively, I might point out, that it was forgotten. All that remained of it was a myth and legend. But now it appears that it didn’t fail. We may have evidence of its success out there in the woods right now.’
‘Oh, it failed, all right,’ said Lukas. ‘It didn’t work the way that Space had meant it to. I think Daniels has the right hunch. Once the characteristics of an alien were fed into the android, they couldn’t be erased. They became a permanent feature of the android itself. He became two creatures – the human and an alien. In everything. In bodily characteristics and in mental setup.’
‘This mental situation, sir,’ asked the chief of staff. ‘Would the android’s mentality have been synthetic? By that I mean a carefully worked-out mentality that was synthesized and fed into it.’
Lukas shook his head. ‘I would doubt that, doctor. It would have been a crude method, a rather silly way to go about it. The records, or at least the ones I’ve seen, make no mention of it, but I would presume that the pattern of an actual human mind was impressed upon its brain. Even then they would have had the technique for it. The mind banks were created how long ago?’
‘A bit over three hundred years ago,’ said Horton.
‘Then they would have had the technique for such a transfer. And this business of building up a synthetic mind would be difficult today, let alone two hundred years ago. Even now I would doubt that we’d know all the ingredients to provide a balanced mind – one that would be human. There is so much that goes to make a human mind. We could synthesize a mind – yes, I suppose we could – but a strange one, giving rise to strange actions, strange emotions, not entirely human, something less than human, perhaps something more than human.’
‘So you think,’ said Horton, ‘that Blake carries around in his brain the duplication of the mind of a man who lived at the time he was fabricated.’
‘I would be almost positive of it,’ said Lukas.
‘So would I,’ said the chief of staff.
‘So then,’ said Horton, ‘he really is a human – or, at least, he has a human mind?’
‘I see no other way,’ said Lukas, ‘in which they could have provided him a mind.’
‘It’s all poppycock,’ said Senator Stone. ‘I’ve never heard so much damn foolishness in all my born days.’
No one paid attention to him.
The chief of staff looked at Horton. ‘You believe it’s vital that we get Blake back?’
‘I do,’ said Horton. ‘Before the police kill him or it or whatever body he may be occupying. Before they drive him into so deep a hole to hide that it will take months to find him, if we ever do.’
‘I agree,’ said Lukas. ‘Think of all he’d have to tell us. Think of what we could learn by a study of him. If the Earth expects to embark on a programme of human engineering, either now or at some future time, what we could learn from Blake would be invaluable.’
The chief of staff shook his head, bewildered. ‘But Blake’s a special case. An open-ended specimen. As I understand it, the proposed bioengineering programme did not envision such a creature.’
‘Doctor,’ said Lukas, ‘what you say is true, but any kind of android, any kind of organized synthetic…’
‘You gentlemen are wasting your time,’ said Stone. ‘There isn’t going to be a human bioengineering programme. I and some of my colleagues are about to see to that.’
‘Solomon,’ said Horton, patiently, ‘let’s you and I worry about the politics of the issue later. Right now we have a frightened man out there in the woods and we have to find some way to let him know we don’t mean him any harm.’