Frank Herbert - The Eyes of Heisenberg

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Say, why are we so interested in that embryo?”

“You don’t need to know, sweetie. Get back to work and let me get some sleep.”

She broke the connection, still wondering about the noise she had heard. It had sounded like something being hit.

Allgood sat staring at the blank screen after the nurse signed off. Noise? Commotion? He formed a circle with his mouth, exhaled slowly. Crazy damn’ female!

Abruptly, he stood up, turned back to his bed. The doxie playmate he’d brought in for the night lay there in the rosy light of a gloom dispeller, half awake, looking at him. Her eyes under long lashes filled him with sudden rage. “Get the hell out of here!” he roared.

She sat upright in the bed, wide awake, staring.

“Out!” he said, pointing to the door.

She tumbled out of bed, grabbed her clothing and ran out the door, a flash of pink flesh.

Only when she’d gone did Allgood realize who she’d reminded him of—Calapine, a dull Calapine. He wondered at himself then. The Cyborg had said the adjustments they made, the instruments they’d implanted, would help him control his emotions, permit him to lie with impunity even to Optimen. This outburst now—it frightened him. He stared down at one of his slippers abandoned on the gray rug, its mate vanished somewhere. He kicked the slipper, began pacing back and forth.

Something was wrong. He could feel it. He’d lived almost four hundred lovely years, most of them in Optiman service. He had a well-trained instinct for rightness and wrongness. It was survival.

Something was wrong.

Had the Cyborg lied to him? Was he being used for some trick of their own?

He stumbled over the slipper, ignored it.

Noise. Commotion.

With a low curse, he returned to the hot line, got his duty agent. The man’s face on the screen looked like an infant’s—puffy lips and big, eager eyes.

“Go down to that vat room and inspect it,” Allgood said. “The fine tooth. Look for signs of a commotion.”

“But if anybody sees us -”

“Damn it to hell! Do as I say!”

“Yes, sir!”

The agent clicked off.

Allgood threw off his robe, all thought of sleep forgotten, ran through a quick shower and began dressing.

Something was wrong. He could feel it. Before leaving his quarters he put out a call to have Svengaard picked up and brought in for questioning.

By eight a.m., the streets and speedwalks of Seatac’s industrial district-north swarmed with machine and foot traffic—the jostling impersonals of people following the little strung-out channels of their private concerns. Weather control had said the day would be held to a comfortable seventy-eight Fahrenheit with no clouds. An hour from now as the day settled into its working tempo, traffic would become more sparse. Dr. Potter had seen the city at that pace many times, but he had never before been immersed in the shift-break swarm.

He was aware that the Parents Underground had chosen this time for its natural concealment. He and his guide were just two more impersonals here. Who would notice them? This didn’t subtract, though, from his fascinated interest in a scene that was new to him.

A big female Sterrie in the green-white striped uniform of a machine-press operator in the heavy industry complex pushed past him. She looked to Potter like a B2022419 KG8 cut with cream skin and heavy features. In a gold loop in her right ear she wore a dancing doll breeder fetish.

Almost in lock step behind her trotted a short man with hunched-up shoulders carrying a short brass rod. He flashed an impish grin at Potter as they passed, as much as to say: “Here’s the only way to get through a crowd like this.”

Porter’s guide turned Potter aside onto the step-down walk and then into a side street. The guide was an enigma to Potter, who couldn’t place the cut. The man wore a plain brown service suit, coveralls. He appeared reasonably normal except for a pale, almost sickly skin. His deeply set eyes glittered almost like lenses. A skull cap concealed his hair except for a few dark brown strands that looked almost artificial. His hands when they touched Potter to guide him felt cold and faintly repellent.

The crowd thinned here as the step-down walk rounded a corner into a byway canyon between two towering windowless buildings. There was dust in this cavernous street rising up and almost concealing a distant tracery of bridges. Potter wondered at the dust. It was as though the director of local weather allowed dust here in an unconscious passion for naturalness.

A bulky man hurried past them and Potter was caught by the look of his hands—thick wrists, bulging knuckles, horned callouses. He had no idea what work could cause such deformity.

The guide steered them now onto a succession of drop walks and into the cave of an alley. The swarm was left behind. A feeling of detachment seized Potter. He felt he was reliving an old and familiar experience.

Why did I come with this person? he wondered.

The guide wore the wheeled blazon of a transport driver on his shoulder, but he’d said right out he was from the Parents Underground.

“I know what you did for us,” he’d said. “Now, we will do something for you.” A turn of the head. “Come.”

They’d talked only briefly after that, but Potter had known from the first the guide had correctly identified himself. This was no trick.

Then why did I accept the invitation? Potter asked himself. Certainly it wasn’t for the veiled promises of extended life and instant knowledge. There were Cyborgs behind this, of course, and he suspected this guide might be one of them. Most of the Optimen and Servant Uppers tended to discount the Folk rumors that Cyborgs did exist, but Potter had never joined the cynics and scoffers. He could no more explain why than he could explain his presence here in this alley cave walking between dark plasmeld walls illuminated by the ghost flicker of overhead glowtubes.

Potter suspected he had at last rebelled against one of the three curses of their age—moderation, drugs and alcohol. Narco-pleasures and alcohol had tempted him in their time… and finally moderation. He knew it wasn’t normal for the times. Better to take up with one of the wild sex cults. But pointless sex without even the faint hope of issue had palled on him, although he knew this for a sign of final dissolution.

The alley opened into one of the lost squares of the megalopolis—a triangular paving and fountain that looked to be real stone, green with the slime of ages.

The Optimen don’t know about this place, Potter thought. They despised stone which eroded and wore away—in their time. Regenerative plasmeld was the thing. It stood unmoved and unmoving for all time.

The guide slowed as they reached the open air. Potter noted a faint smell of chemicals about the man, oily sweetness, and a tiny scar running diagonally down the back of his neck into his collar.

Why didn’t he try to blackmail me into coming? Potter wondered. Could he be that sure? Could anyone know me that well?

“We have a job for you,” the guide had said. “An operation you must perform.”

Curiosity is my weakness, Potter thought. That’s why I’m here.

The guide put a hand on Potter’s arm, said, “Stop. Wait without moving.”

The tone was conversational, calm, but Potter felt hidden tensions. He looked up and around. The buildings were windowless, faceless. A wide door stood out in the angle of another alleyway ahead. They had come almost around the fountain without encountering another person. Nothing stirred or moved around them. There was only the faint rumbling of distant machinery.