Frank Herbert - The Eyes of Heisenberg

I can read people!

It was a staggering realization. He looked around the room at the nurses helping with the tie-off. When his eyes found the computer nurse, he knew she had deliberately destroyed the record tape. He knew it.

Lizbeth and Harvey Durant walked hand in hand from the hospital after their interview with the Doctors Potter and Svengaard. They smiled and swung their clasped hands like children off on a picnic—which in a sense they were.

The morning’s rain had been shut off and the clouds were being packed off to the east, toward the tall peaks that looked down on Seatac Megalopolis. The overhead sky showed a clear cerulean blue with a goblin sun riding high in it.

A mob of people in loose marching order was coming through the park across the way, obviously the exercise period for some factory team or labor group. Their uniformed sameness was broken by flashes of color—an orange scarf on a woman’s head, a yellow sash across a man’s chest, the scarlet of a fertility fetish dangling on a gold loop from a woman’s ear. One man had equipped himself bright green shoes.

The pathetic attempts at individuality in a world of gene-stamped sameness stabbed through Lizbeth’s defenses. She turned away lest the scene tear the smile from her lips, asked, “Where’ll we go?”

“Hmmm?” Harvey held her back, waiting on the walk for the group to pass.

Among the marchers, faces turned to stare enviously at Harvey and Lizbeth. All knew why the Durants were here. The hospital, a great pile of plasmeld behind them, the fact that they were man and woman together, the casual dress, the smiles—all said the Durants were on breeder-leave from their appointed labors.

Each individual in that mob hoped with a lost desperation for this same escape from the routine that bound them all. Viable gametes, breeder leave—it was the universal dream. Even the known Sterries hoped, and patronized the breeder quacks and the manufacturers of doombah fetishes.

They have no pasts, Lizbeth thought, focusing abruptly on the common observation of the Folk philosophers. They’re all people without pasts and only the hope for a future to cling to. Somewhere our past was lost in an ocean of darkness. The Optimen and their gene surgeons have extinguished our past.

Even their own breeder-leave lost its special glow in the face of this. The Durants might not be constrained to leap up at the rising bell and hurry apart to their labors, but they were still people without a past… and their future might be lost in an instant. The child being formed in the hospital vat… in some small way it might still be part of them, but the surgeons had changed it. They had cut it off sharply from its past.

Lizbeth recalled her own parents, the feeling of estrangement from them, of differences which went deeper than blood.

They were only partly my parents, she thought. They knew it… and I knew it.

She felt the beginnings of estrangement from her own unformed son then, an emotion that colored present necessities. What’s the use? she wondered. But she knew what the use was—to end forever all this amputation of pasts.

The last envious face passed. The mob became moving backs, bits of color. They turned a corner and were gone, cut off.

Is it a corner we’ve turned and no coming back? Lizbeth wondered.

“Let’s walk to the cross-town shuttle tube,” Harvey said.

“Through the park?” she asked.

“Yes,” Harvey said. “Just think—ten months.”

“And we can take our son home,” she said. “We’re very lucky.”

“It seems like a long time—ten months,” Harvey said.

Lizbeth answered as they crossed the street and entered the park. “Yes, but we can come see him every week when they shift him to the big vat—and that’s only three months away.”

“You’re right,” Harvey said. “It’ll be over before we know it. And thank the powers he’s not a specialist or anything else. We can raise him at home. Our work time’ll be reduced.”

“That Doctor Potter’s wonderful,” she said.

As they talked, their clasped hands moved with the subtle pressures and finger shifts of the secret conversation—the No-Spoken-Word hand code that classified them as couriers of the Parents Underground.

“They’re still watching us,” Harvey signaled.

“I know.”

“Svengaard is out — a slave of the power structure.”

“Obviously. You know, I had no idea the computer nurse was one of us.”

“You saw that, too?”

“Potter was looking at her when she tripped the switch.”

“Do you think the Security people saw her?”

“Not a chance. They were all concentrated on us.”

“Maybe she’s not one of us,” Harvey signaled. And he spoke aloud, “Isn’t it a beautiful day. Let’s take the floral path.”

Lizbeth’s finger pressures answered, “ You think that nurse is an accidental?”

“Could be. Perhaps she saw what Potter’d accomplished and knew there was only one way to save the embryo.”

“Someone will have to contact her immediately then.”

“Cautiously. She might be unstable, emotional — a breeder neurotic.”

“What about Potter?”

“We’ll have to get people to him right away. We’ll need his help getting the embryo out of there.”

“That’ll give us nine of Central’s surgeons,” she said.

“ If he goes along,” Harvey signaled.

She looked at him with a smile that completely masked her sudden worry. “ You have doubts?”

“It’s only that I think he was reading me at the same time I read him.”

“Oh, he was,” she said. “ But he was slow and lame about it compared to us.”

“That’s how I read him. He was like a first reader, an amateur stumbling along, gaining confidence as he went.”

“He’s untrained,” she said. “ That’s obvious. I was worried you’d read something in him that escaped me.”

“I guess you’re right.”

Across the park, dust had shattered the sunlight into countless pillars that stood up through an arboretum. Lizabeth stared at the scene as she answered, “ No doubt of it, darling. He’s a natural, someone who’s stumbled onto the talent accidentally. They do occur, you know—have to. Nothing can keep us from communicating.”

“But they certainly try.”

“Yes,” she signaled. “ They were very intent on it there today, probing and scanning us in that lounge. But people who think mechanically will never guess — I mean that our weapons are people and not things.”

“It’s their fatal blind spot,” he agreed. “ Central’s carved out the genetic ruts with logic — and logic keeps digging the ruts deeper and deeper. They’re so deep now they can’t see over the edges to the outside.”

“And that wide, wide universe out there calling to us,” she signaled.

Max Allgood, Central’s chief of Tachy-Security, climbed Administration’s plasmeld steps slightly ahead of his two surgeon companions as befitted the director of the Optimen’s swift and terrible hand of power.

The morning sun behind the trio sent their shadows darting across the white building’s angles and planes.

They were admitted to the silver shadows of the entrance portico where a barrier dropped for the inevitable delay. Quarantine scanners searched and probed them for inimical microbes.