Sunday is Three Thousand Years Raymond F. Jones

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wall at the end of Mayview Drive. You managed to beat yourself up a little so
it wouldn't be too suspicious looking. And if the wreckage hadn't been spotted
within a few minutes you might have succeeded in your plan."
The thing that she had feared was here, and with its coming the fear
dwindled. Her heavy breathing slowed, and her face recovered from its
whiteness.
"You mean this for blackmail?" she asked.
For a moment she believed that Dr. Vixen was going to hurl himself upon
her, and the rage she incited within him was curiously pleasant to her.
"I want David," he said evenly, at last. "I want him alive and well. In
return, David will certainly be willing to be relieved of your presence for
the rest of his life."
"So he has lied to all of you about me!"
"We'll let that go," said Dr. Vixen. "You agree?"
She nodded quickly, again like a cat, striking for what seemed a
precious offer of freedom from punishment, and security from the thing that
she had loathed. She was going to be free at last of the incredible, alien
world in which David Mantell lived, to which she had been bound by fifteen
long years of marriage to him. For a time he had dragged her along like a
small child at a fair that displayed things beyond her comprehension, and then
he had abandoned her because she had failed to understand.
She relaxed in spite of Dr. Vixen's awareness of her evil, partly,
even, because of it. "Do you think I'm _bad?_"she said suddenly.
He shook his head. "There are no bad people. Only sick ones, stupid
ones, ignorant ones. David would have told you that. He would have let you go
long before now if he had been sure that you wanted to."
"But I did want to! Surely he has told you that if he has told you
anything."
"He always seemed to think there was a chance. You see, he loved you."
He was sorry when he had said it, for in the presence of this woman it
was as if he had exposed his friend's nakedness to an obscene gaze.
But Alice Mantell startled him. Her eyes softened and the catlike
tension of her body relaxed for just an instant. "I loved him, too," she said,
"once -- "
"Perhaps you can remember that, then, in giving the assistance that we
need."
"You have my permission to perform the Synthesis! What more do I have
to pay for freedom?"
"You have misunderstood because neither you nor they"-he nodded towards
the closed door-"are aware of all the facts. Your permission to perform the
Synthesis on your husband is relatively unimportant. Lack of it would be just
one more illegality that would not have stood in our way.
"More important, Dr. Dodge, the Institute president, notified David
only this morning that the Synthesis was banned, and the operation is now
illegal with or without your permission.
"Those youngsters out there don't know it yet, but our careers and
professional freedom are at stake as well as David's life. I'll tell them, of
course, before we go ahead."
"What are you talking about? Why is the Synthesis forbidden?"
"The _others_-the first hundred Synthesis patients you mentioned a
moment ago. The group who have made the Mantell Synthesis a one hundred
percent failure so far. The public and the politicians have decided there are
to be no more like them, regardless of possible benefits."
"Will David's be a failure, too?"
"We have no reason to believe otherwise."
"You're insane!" She rose and backed away as if in sudden fear of his
madness. "Why will you persist in a deliberate failure that will turn him into
an idiot?"
"Because-he is wholly lost to us otherwise. This way, he will at least
be alive. As long as he is alive there is hope. And, finally, because he would
have wanted it this way."
"You're devils of the same litter."
He took her from the office into the Synthesis laboratory. There, her
fear returned. She had been afraid all her married life of the world in which
David walked. He could tear apart the brain of a man, cell by cell, and
reconstruct it in the image of a living human being.
But she never had believed it could be anything but dead. David had
penetrated to the very core of life-and had found nothing there that she could
embrace. Sometimes-long ago-he had tried to tell her of the vast and intricate
molecules that were the essence of a man. He told her the long and
incomprehensible names of those protein structures that held the memory and
intelligence of man. He could show her, he said, the exact cluster of
molecules that held his love for her-and that, she thought, was the moment in
which she stopped loving him.
The room was full of compact masses of equipment and long panels that
ranged the entire length of the laboratory. Overhead, great cables and
high-frequency pipes wove in intricate streams to knit the masses together.
Like the interior of a great, expanded skull, this would be the kind of
creation that David would build, she thought bitterly.
"Will I ... see him?" she asked.
"No, that will not be necessary. We require what is termed a neural
analogue so that those factors of David's life involving you may be
reconstructed. Some patterns are inevitably lost, of course, but for the most [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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