Emerald Eyes | Page 4

only moments
after his fellow technicians had left through the other. The doors were
so designed that they could not both be open at the same time. I waited
patiently as the man came through the door leading to the laboratories
proper. There was time for me, despite the poor quality of ultraviolet
light, to puzzle out his name badge, which was mounted on a piece of
dark plastic with a 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