“You think this isn’t frightening?”
“There’s something called Turner’s syndrome. It’s not what you have, but it’s similar. In Turner’s, you only have one X chromosome instead of two, and the ovaries never form.”
“Are you saying I can’t have any kids? Because I don’t care about that. Why should I want to have kids?”
Molly shook her head.“No.You’ve got both X chromosomes, but they’re full of what they call nonautonomous elements that inactivate the genes.When you get to puberty—” Molly started to cry. She tried to make the words come out, but they couldn’t get past the blockage in her throat. I’ve been holding them back so long, she thought, and now they just won’t come.
“Tell me,” she said to Curtis.
“It’s going to kill you,” Curtis said.“High blood pressure, edema, protein in the urine. Convulsions. Coma. Death.”
Verb nodded. She was still staring at Molly and Molly couldn’t look away from her. React, she ordered her silently. Cry, hit me, for God’s sake do something.
“We’ve known since you were three or four,” Molly said.The tears ran down her face and neck past the collar of her suit and down the channel between her breasts.“It’s...it’s like a part of whatever it was that gave you your intellect. It’s like prodigy burnout or one of those things where...you just burn all of yourself up at once.”
“You could have told me.”
“I know,” Molly said.“But there was nothing you could do.”
“What the hell,”Verb said, her face suddenly red, her fists clenched, “does that have to do with it? I know it’s hopeless, I’ve known for three years.”
Molly looked at Curtis, whose expression seemed frozen in place. “You...knew?” she said.
“Of course I knew. I’ve been into all the medical records, even the ones you tried to hide. How do you think it felt to learn it that way, sitting alone up here, watching it come up in little green letters on a black screen? And then after I tried to give you chances to tell me, I did everything but bring it up myself, because I wanted to hear it from you.
“But you never told me, and you know why? Because you don’t care about me. I’m not really human to you, I never have been. If your dog has a terminal disease, well, you just give her a warm place to sleep and all the food she wants and then you cry when she goes.”
“Sarah...” Molly held out her hand but the girl looked at it with contempt.Was it true? Molly wondered. If Sarah had been more loving, more...normal looking, would it have made a difference? Would she have fought harder when Curtis said not to tell her?
Verb turned her back on both of them, silent sobs moving through her curved back and wattled neck. Molly felt herself slipping into the mindset of despair: if I ever get out of this...She and Curtis were finished; the truce that had been in effect since that afternoon was over. She thought she could kill him now, if she had to.
At that moment Curtis stooped and picked something off the floor. It was the gun that Reese had been shot with, the one he’d brought with him from the dome. She saw how seductively the weapon fit into Curtis’s hand.
Verb faced them again, her tears gone, her emotions back in harness. Her eyes registered the gun in Curtis’s hand, then moved slowly back to his face.
“You won’t need that,”she said.“I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
He says it’s important,”Valentin told her. Mayakenska shook her head, trying to come completely awake. So, she thought, I could sleep after all.“All right,” she said.“I’m coming.”
She pulled on a pair of coveralls, wincing at their stale smell, and walked carefully into the living room. Her visitor was short, Japanese, wearing a sleeveless shirt that showed off his physique.
“Do I know you?” she asked.
“No,” he said.“My name is Takahashi and I work for Chairman Morgan.”He frowned and corrected himself.“For Pulsystems,I should say.”
“And what do you want with me?”
“Curtis is not going to deal with you,”Takahashi said.“If your threats are genuine, that means I am scheduled to die with the rest of this settlement at midnight tonight.”
“I see news travels quickly here.”
Takahashi shrugged.“We both want the same thing. I’ve spent most of the day inside the main computer, and I’ve located the main source of computer time usage.That means I know what the project is and where it is. On the other hand, you can call off that laser.What say we make our own deal and cut Curtis out entirely?”
She remembered who this Takahashi was, now. He didn’t just work for Pulsystems, he was a junior vice president and sat on the Board, representing the interests of the zaibatsu that controlled Pulsystems Tokyo.
She distrusted him, in particular, and the Japanese in general. Ever since the Japanese sneak attack on Port Arthur in 1904, Russia and Japan had been enemies, Japan even choosing to side with America after World War II, despite the fact that American bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“And your part in this would entitle you to a share in the knowledge, is that right?”
“Of course.”
“I fail to see why we need you.”
“If you could locate the equipment—and even that is not going to be as easy as you might think—you don’t even know how to run it or what to do with it.”
“And you do?”
“The answers I don’t have, I can get.”
The phone rang.
“It seems to me you are trying to sell me your self-confidence and little else.” She held up her hand before Takahashi could answer her. “Excuse me.”
She crossed the room and picked up the kitchen extension. “Mayakenska.”
“This is Curtis. Can we talk?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Let’s get some basic terms squared away, then, okay? Because a lot of this is new to me, too.The machine you’re interested in is a transporter, am I correct? Straight-line transmission and recovery of material at or near the speed of light?”
She felt the first tinglings of a flood of relief and excitement.“Ah, yes, correct, that sounds like the equipment.”
“Good.You should probably know that we also have the ability to produce rather large quantities of antimatter—in fact the power for the machine in question comes from antimatter.”
Mayakenska glanced over at Takahashi and repressed a smile.“Curtis, if you want, we can wait and go over this with my people...”
“I think you should hear me out.The antimatter is stored in Liedenfrost jars that use the energy of the antimatter decay to contain the antimatter itself.Are you with me so far?”
“Yes.” She had to pull her right hand away from her mouth to answer him; she had found herself gnawing on the thumbnail without realizing it.
“This decay is mediated by an electromagnetic field.That field may be turned off as the container is sent through that matter transmitter that we were just talking about. In that case the material of the container will be quickly eaten away.An explosion is the result.The explosion can be quite large, as I’m sure you can imagine.Are you still with me?”
“Yes,” she said.
“My first thought was that we would drop a canister of this stuff into your Salyut and blow them out of the sky. But it occurred to me that the message might not be clear enough if I did that. So what I’m going to do is send a rather larger canister through the machine and deposit it in Red Square, just outside the walls of the Kremlin.”
“No,” Mayakenska whispered.
“I make it to be about ten minutes before ten, let’s see, that’s 21 hours 50 minutes.Your deadline was midnight, so I’m going to make mine a half hour earlier. I want to see your Salyut performing a Transearth Injection burn by 23:30 hours or you lose Moscow.”