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of the Chief's comconsole desk. The other corner was occupied by a holocube of
two dark-haired young boys riding a spotted pony. Ethan scarcely glanced at
either, his attention instantly overwhelmed by the large white refrigeration
container squarely in the center. Its control panel lights burned a steady,
reassuring green.
"L. Bharaputra & Sons Biological Supply House, Jackson's Whole", the shipping
label read. "Contents: Frozen Tissue, Human, Ovarian, 50 units. Stack with
heat exchange unit clear of obstruction. This End Up."
"We got them!" Ethan cried in delight and instant recognition, clapping his
hands.
"At last." Desroches grinned. "The Population Council's going to have one hell
of a party tonight, I'll bet what a relief! When I think of the hunt for
suppliers the scramble for foreign exchange for a while I thought we were
going to have to send some poor son out there personally to get them."
Ethan shuddered, and laughed. "Whew! Thank the Father nobody had to go through
that." He ran a hand over the big plastic box, eagerly, reverently. "Going to
be some new faces around here."
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Desroches smiled, reflective and content. "Indeed. Well they're all yours, Dr.
Urquhart. Turn your routine lab work over to your techs and get them settled
in their new homes. Priority."
"I should say so!"
* * *
Ethan set the carton tenderly on a bench in the Culture Lab, and adjusted the
controls to bring the internal temperature up somewhat. There would be a wait.
He would only thaw twelve today, to fill the culture support units waiting,
cold and empty, for new life. Soberly, he touched the darkened panel behind
which the CJB-9 had dwelt so long and fruitfully. It made him feel sad, and
strangely adrift.
The rest of the tissue must wait for thawing until Engineering installed the
bank of new units along the other wall. He grinned, thinking of the frantic
activity that must now be disrupting that department's placid routine of
cleaning and repairs. Some exercise would be good for them.
While he waited, he carried his new journals to the comconsole for a scan. He
hesitated. Since his promotion to department head last year, his censorship
status had been raised to Clearance Level A. This was the first occasion he'd
had to take advantage of it; the first chance to test the maturity and
judgment supposed necessary to handle totally uncut, uncensored galactic
publications. He moistened his lips, and nerved himself to prove that trust
not misplaced.
He chose a disk at random, stuck it into the read-slot, and called up the
table of contents. Most of the two dozen or so articles dwelt, predictably but
disappointingly, on problems of reproduction in vivo in the human female,
hardly apropos. Virtuously, he fought down an impulse to peek at them. But
there was one article on early diagnosis of an obscure cancer of the vas
deferens, and better still one encouragingly titled, "On an Improvement in
Permeability of Exchange Membrances in the Uterine Replicator." The uterine
replicator had originally been invented on Beta Colony long famous for its
leading-edge technologies for use in medical emergencies. Most of its
refinements still seemed to come from there, even at this late date, a fact
not widely appreciated on Athos.
Ethan called up the entry and read it eagerly. It mostly seemed to involve
some fiendishly clever molecular meshing of lipoproteins and polymers that
delighted Ethan's geometric reason, at least on the second reading when he
finally grasped it. He lost himself for a while in calculations about what it
would take to duplicate the work here at Sevarin. He would have to talk to the
head of Engineering. . . .
Idly, as he mentally inventoried resources, he called up the author's page.
"On An Improvement . . ." came from a university hospital at some city named
Silica Ethan knew little of off-planet geography, but it sounded appropriately
Betan. What ordered minds and clever hands must have come up with that idea. .
. .
"Kara Burton, M.D., Ph.D., and Elizabeth Naismith, M.S. Bioengineering . . ."
He found himself looking suddenly, on screen, at two of the strangest faces he
had ever seen.
Beardless, like men without sons, or boys, but devoid of a boy's bloom of
youth. Pale soft faces, thin-boned, yet lined and time-scored; the engineer's
hair was nearly white. The other was thick-bodied, lumpy in a pale blue lab
smock.
Ethan trembled, waiting for the insanity to strike him from their level,
medusan gazes. Nothing happened. After a moment, he unclutched the desk edge.
Perhaps then the madness that possessed galactic men, slaves to these
creatures, was something only transmitted in the flesh. Some incalculable
telepathic aura? Bravely, he raised his eyes again to the figures in the
screen.
So. That was a woman two women, in fact. He sought his own reaction; to his
immense relief, he seemed to be profoundly unaffected. Indifference, even mild
revulsion. The Sink of Sin did not appear to be draining his soul to perdition
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on sight, always presuming he had a soul. He switched off the screen with no
more emotion than frustrated curiosity. As a test of his resolution, he would
not indulge it further today. He put the data disk carefully away with the
others.
The freezer box was nearly up to temperature. He readied the fresh buffer
solution baths and set them super-cooling to match the current temperature of
the box's contents. He donned insulated gloves, broke the seals, lifted the
lid.
Shrink wrap? Shrink wrap?
He peered down into the box in astonishment. Each tissue sample should have
been individually containerized in its own nitrogen bath, surely. These
strange gray lumps were wrapped like so many packets of lunch meat. His heart
sank in terror and bewilderment.
Wait, wait, don't panic maybe it was some new galactic technology he hadn't
heard of yet. Gingerly, searched the box for instructions, even rooting down
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