Rhodes sighed. “Charts of what?”
“Some new atmospheric extrapolations, the projected hydrogen cyanide levels and how we plan to cope with their special implications.”
“I’m terrifically stacked up here, Van. Can’t this wait a little?”
“But it’s tremendously exciting stuff.”
“Having to breathe hydrogen cyanide is exciting?” Rhodes asked. “Yes, I guess it would be. But not for very long.”
“That’s not what I mean, Nick,” said Van Vliet. He had suddenly begun calling Rhodes “Nick,” ever since the budget requisition had gone up to New Tokyo a few days before. Rhodes didn’t like it much. “You see, Nick, we’ve come up with a really awesome set of equations that indicate the likelihood of oceanic amino-acid formation. New amino acids. If I could just have five minutes to show you what I’m talking about—”
“Okay,” Rhodes said. “Five minutes.”
Van Vliet took fifteen. Mostly that was Rhodes’ fault: he let himself get interested. What Van Vliet’s projections seemed to show was that the upcoming chemical configuration of the ocean might be going to duplicate, to some small and largely unpredictable degree, certain aspects of the nutrient-soup composition of the primordial sea. After hundreds of years of cheerfully filling the whole biosphere with all manner of deadly waste, mankind apparently was about to generate still another terrific surprise for itself that had to do with life instead of death: a mixed package, unexpected biogenesis along with the expectable morbidity, a seaborne reprise of the original chemical forces that had initiated the appearance of Earth’s first living things, a hodgepodge of purines and adenylates and aminos stirring around and rearranging themselves into intricate polymers, some of them self-replicating, out of which might come—
Almost anything.
A shitstorm of random genetic information brewing in the depths of the twenty-fourth century’s seas.
“Do you see it?” Van Vliet cried. “The potential for new life-forms emerging, Nick? Creation starting all over again!”
Rhodes summoned a hearty chuckle from some recess of his soul. “A second chance for the trilobites, eh?”
Van Vliet didn’t seem amused. He gave Rhodes a reproachful look. “I mean one-celled organisms, Nick. Bacteria. Protozoa. An unpredictable pelagic micro-biota spontaneously evolving that could raise hell with the life-forms already present on the planet Such as us.”
Right, Rhodes thought. A load of strange evolutionary garbage hauling itself up out of the waters to plague an already quite adequately plagued planet.
It was an interesting speculative jump, and Rhodes said so, in all sincerity. In all sincerity, though, he didn’t understand what any of this had to do with the work of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, at least not right away. Carefully he said, “I admire the care with which you’re working out all the implications of the situation, Van. But I’m not sure I could get budgetary approval for a study dealing with diseases caused by microorganisms that haven’t evolved yet.”
A cool, almost supercilious grin from Van Vliet. “On the contrary, Nick. If we can project the potential consequences of a quantum jump in natural evolutionary processes, we might be able to build in defenses against new and hostile kinds of—”
“Please, Van. One step at a time, okay? Okay?”
One step at a time, obviously, wasn’t the Van method. And plainly Rhodes’ failure to whoop with enthusiasm over this new angle was, for Van Vliet, one more example of the associate director’s hopeless conservatism. Rhodes pacified him, though, by congratulating him heartily on the new line of work, asking to see further studies, promising to take the topic of renewed biogenesis up at the very next meeting of the directors. And smoothly showed him to the door.
When Van Vliet was gone, Rhodes had one more drink, just a small one, to ease him through the transition into the day’s next problem.
Which was to ponder the Nakamura call again. Rhodes was still certain that Mr. Nakamura, whoever he might be, had called the wrong number. But how odd that Nakamura would have thrown in that business about there being no mistake, exactly as though he was anticipating Rhodes’ puzzled response. Something in that nagged at him, demanding resolution.
About that house in Walnut Creek that you are interested in buying.
The thought flashed through Rhodes’ mind that that might be some sort of code phrase—that it referred to some secret enterprise into which Nakamura meant to inveigle him, the sale of corporate secrets, or an intricate counterespionage ploy, something like that. Things like that went on in the megacorp world all the time, Rhodes knew. Though he had never had any firsthand experience of them.
Rhodes put through a call to Ned Svoboda in Imaging and Schematics.
Svoboda was an occasional after-hours drinking companion of his, who had the rare distinction of having worked for three different megacorps in a dozen years or so: not only Samurai Industries but also Kyocera-Merck and before that the somewhat less formidable IBM/Toshiba bunch. Svoboda was shrewd, Svoboda was about as trustworthy as anyone Rhodes could think of, and Svoboda had been around the block a couple of times. If anybody knew about corporate codes, industrial espionage, whatever, Svoboda was the one.
“You mind if I cruise over and talk to you for a couple of minutes?” Rhodes asked. “Something odd has come up and I need a little advice.” And, Rhodes did not explicitly need to add, it was something best not discussed over the Company communications net. The wires had ears. That was common knowledge.
Svoboda didn’t mind. Rhodes descended eight floors to Imaging and met Svoboda on the bubble-enclosed leisure terrace outside his office. He was a short, heavyset man of about forty, with dark rumpled hair and emphatic Slavic features.
Rhodes said, “I had a peculiar phone call this morning. Fellow with a Japanese name out of Walnut Creek—a realtor, he says. Says he’d like to talk to me about the house I’m interested in buying out there.”
“I didn’t know you were planning to move over the hill.”
“I’m not. I don’t know this Jap from Adam.”
“Ah so.”
“But he realizes that. When he phoned, he went out of his way to tell my annunciator that regardless of what I might think, this wasn’t a mistaken call, that I was the Rhodes he was trying to reach and that I would really be interested in the property he had to offer. So I began to wonder, Ned—”
Svoboda’s eyes widened. “Yeah, I bet you did.”
“And I thought maybe it’s more complicated than it appears at first glance—something that you might be able to explain to me, some kind of cryptic message that I ought to understand but don’t quite see the—”
“Shhh!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Just don’t say anything more, okay?” Svoboda held his left arm out and let his right hand go crawling quickly across the back of it in the funny little crab-walk gesture that universally meant, There probably are bugs here. The Company had its spy eyes everywhere—even on leisure terraces, it seemed. Svoboda said, “You have a pen and a piece of paper on you?”
“Sure. Here.”
It was a very small piece, but it was all that Rhodes could find. Svoboda clamped his lips together and wrote with exaggerated care, running his words across and down the side of the page in his effort to get down everything he wanted to say. He kept it covered with his other hand as he wrote, to prevent any hidden camera from seeing. When he was done he folded the piece in half, and in half again, and pressed it into the palm of Rhodes’ hand.