Emerald Eyes | Page 4

strip of a clear film upon it. He entered as the door had just opened, and then stood in the doorway, preventing my passage, as the door slid shut again. It should not have been a problem; he would continue through the next door, and I would open the door to the laboratories after he was gone. It would appear to those inside as if the door had slid aside of its own accord; unusual, but given the relatively primitive stage of their technology, not be so strange as to cause excitement. A glitch, they would call it.
But Jorge Rodriguez did not leave immediately. As long minutes fled by on my personal time scale, Rodriguez slumped back against the door to the laboratories. With excruciating slowness he reached inside his coat and withdrew a small cylinder, which he placed within his mouth. As far away as the small room would allow me to get, I paced slowly back and forth to prevent my image from flickering into an instant of appearance. It must have raised ever so faint a breeze.
Rodriguez puffed on the cylinder, his back to the door through which I desperately needed to pass. It was likely tobacco or marijuana, two preeminent inhalants of the period. I could not recall how long a typical cylinder of either inhalant should have taken to be consumed, but it was soon apparent that whatever the period was would be far longer than I had available.
I came down into Time.
It was instantaneous for me; for Rodriguez I appeared as a frozen statue for most of a second. His eyes were opened wide in a surprise that would soon be terror, and he was drawing in air to shout. I reached past the rising wave of fear, into his forebrain, and sent him into sleep as gently as I was able. His body sagged and his breath exhaled in a loud sigh as he fell. I caught him before he had struck the ground, and carried him out through the door into the corridor. In Time I erased his memories of me, and in Time I returned to the small room where I had killed Jorge Rodriguez. I touched the pressure pad that opened the door into the laboratories, and as it opened I ascended into fast time once more.
The small badge Jorge Rodriguez wore had turned from clear to black while he stood in that room with me. I had lived a thousand times as fast as he; the heat of my body had struck him as gamma rays for more than long enough.
"A remarkably impersonal room, this." Amnier stood in front of her bookcase, ran one finger down the spine of a text by de Nostri on fine neural structure. "No paintings, no holos..." He watched her as he spoke. She held herself like a man, shoulders squared back.
Montignet moved by him, to seat herself behind her desk. She pressed her thumb against the lock and slid open the filing drawer. "I'm rarely here. I generally work downstairs at the lab. I have a desk there, and there are cots for when we draw night duty." From the filing drawer she took two folders, and closed the drawer again. The drawer locked automatically. "The books are mostly gifts." Amnier turned back to her. "The de Nostri was from de Nostri; the man's an incredible egotist."
"Ah," said Amnier, and Suzanne had to repress a grin at how eagerly he leapt upon the opening, "an egotist, yes, but a successful egotist."
Suzanne Montignet did smile then, and watched as her smile struck Amnier. His features grew still. So he was not, as Malko thought, attracted only to boys. "I would not say that our work here has been a failure."
"But neither has it produced a clear success. De Nostri has--children, if that is the correct word--who are nearly two years of age."
"Children," said Suzanne Montignet with some anger, "is not the correct word. Mister, any fool can produce monsters. Mixing variant gene sets is not so very difficult. Slapping together genes from humans and leopards, among reputable scientists, that's known as playing mix and match. What we're doing is more difficult, and you know it. The foeti we have designed here, from the ground up, are human. They will be human children."
"But they do not live."
"Not--" Not yet, she had started to say; Suzanne Montignet clamped down upon her anger. It was almost as though Malko were there in the room with her, whispering in her ear. Amnier delighted in argument; directness was the way to handle him. "Did you," she asked slowly, "come here to shut us down?"
"I have come," said the small man, "to decide."
They were still staring at each other when the alarms went off.
It was strange, looking down upon the