Oslett said, “Anybody, seeing a picture of an identical twin he never knew he had, would be curious enough to look into it—except Alfie. Whereas an ordinary person has the freedom to pursue a thing like that, Alfie doesn’t. He’s tightly focused.”
“Aimed like a bullet.”
“Exactly. He broke training here, which required a monumental trauma. Hell, it’s more than training. That’s a euphemism. It’s indoctrination, brainwashing—”
“He’s programmed.”
“Yes. Programmed. He’s the next thing to a machine, and just seeing a photograph of Stillwater wouldn’t send him spinning out of control any more than the personal computer in your office would start producing sperm and grow hair on its back just because you scanned a photograph of Marilyn Monroe onto its hard disk.”
Waxhill laughed softly. “I like the analogy. I think I’ll use it to change some minds, though of course I’ll credit it to you.”
Oslett was pleased by Waxhill’s approval.
“Excellent bacon,” said Waxhill.
“Yes, isn’t it.”
Clocker just kept eating.
“The second and smaller faction,” Waxhill continued, “proposes a more exotic—but, at least to me, more credible—hypothesis to the effect that Alfie has a secret ability of which we’re not aware and which he may not fully understand or control himself.”
“Secret ability?”
“Rudimentary psychic perception perhaps. Very primitive . . . but strong enough to make a connection between him and Stillwater, draw them together because of . . . well, because of all they share.”
“Isn’t that a bit far out?”
Waxhill smiled and nodded. “I’ll admit it sounds like something out of a Star Trek movie—”
Oslett cringed and glanced at Clocker, but the big man’s eyes didn’t shift from the food heaped on his plate.
“—though the whole project smacks of science fiction, doesn’t it?” Waxhill concluded.
“I guess so,” Oslett conceded.
“The fact is, the genetic engineers have given Alfie some truly exceptional abilities. Intentionally. So doesn’t it seem possible they’ve unintentionally, inadvertently given him other superhuman qualities?”
“Even inhuman qualities,” Clocker said.
“Well, now, you’ve just shown me a more unpleasant way to look at it,” Waxhill said, regarding Karl Clocker soberly, “and all too possibly a more accurate view.” Turning to Oslett: “Some psychic link, some strange mental connection, might have shattered Alfie’s conditioning, erased his program or caused him to override it.”
“Our boy was in Kansas City, and Stillwater was in southern California, for God’s sake.”
Waxhill shrugged. “A TV broadcast goes on forever, to the end of the universe. Beam a laser from Chicago toward the far end of the galaxy, and that light will get there someday, thousands of years from now, after Chicago is dust—and it’ll keep on going. So maybe distance is meaningless when you’re dealing with thought waves, too, or whatever it was that connected Alfie to this writer.”
Oslett had lost his appetite.
Clocker seemed to have found it and added it to his own.
Pointing to the basket of croissants, Waxhill said, “These are excellent—and in case you didn’t realize, there are two kinds here, some plain and some with almond paste inside.”
“Almond croissants are my favorite,” Oslett said, but didn’t reach for one.
Waxhill said, “The best croissants in the world—”
“—are in Paris,” Oslett interjected, “in a quaint café less than a block off—”
“—the Champs Elysées,” Waxhill finished, surprising Oslett.
“The proprietor, Alfonse—”
“—and his wife, Mirielle—”
“—are culinary geniuses and hosts without equal.”
“Charming people,” Waxhill agreed.
They smiled at each other.
Clocker served himself more sausages, and Oslett wanted to knock that stupid hat off his head.
“If there’s any chance that our boy has extraordinary powers, however feeble, which we never intended to give him,” Waxhill said, “then we must consider the possibility that some qualities we did intend to give him didn’t turn out quite as we thought they did.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Oslett said.
“Essentially, I’m talking about sex.”
Oslett was surprised. “He has no interest in it.”
“We’re sure of that, are we?”
“He’s apparently male, of course, but he’s impotent.”
Waxhill said nothing.
“He was engineered to be impotent,” Oslett stressed.
“A man can be impotent yet have a keen interest in sex. Indeed, one might make a good argument for the case that his very inability to attain an erection frustrates him, and that his frustration leads him to be obsessed with sex, with what he cannot have.”
Oslett had been shaking his head the entire time Waxhill had been speaking. “No. Again, it’s not that simple. He’s not only impotent. He’s received hundreds of hours of intense psychological conditioning to eliminate sexual interest, some of it when he’s been in deep hypnosis, some under the influence of drugs that make the subconscious susceptible to any suggestion, some through virtual-reality subliminal feeds during sedative-induced sleep. To this boy, the primary difference between men and women is the way they dress.”
Unimpressed with Oslett’s argument, spreading orange marmalade on a slice of toast, Waxhill said, “Brainwashing, even at its most sophisticated, can fail. Would you agree with that?”
“Yes, but with an ordinary subject, you have problems because you’ve got to counter a lifetime of experience to install a new attitude or false memory. But Alfie was different. He was a blank slate, a beautiful blank slate, so there wasn’t any resistance to whatever attitudes, memories, or feelings we wanted to stuff in his nice empty head. There was nothing in his brain to wash out first.”
“Maybe mind-control failed with Alfie precisely because we were so confident that he was an easy mark.”
“The mind is its own control,” Clocker said.
Waxhill gave him an odd look.
“I don’t think it failed,” Oslett insisted. “Anyway, there’s still the little matter of his engineered impotence to get around.”
Waxhill took time to chew and swallow a bite of toast, and then washed it down with coffee. “Maybe his body got around it for him.”
“Say again?”
“His incredible body with its superhuman recuperative powers.”
Oslett twitched as if the idea had pierced like a pin. “Wait a minute, now. His wounds heal exceptionally fast, yes. Punctures, gashes, broken bones. Once damaged, his body can restore itself to its original engineered condition in miraculously short order. But that’s the key. To its original engineered condition. It can’t start to remake itself on any fundamental level, can’t mutate, for God’s sake.”
“We’re sure of that, are we?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Well . . . because . . . otherwise . . . it’s unthinkable. ”
“Imagine,” Waxhill said, “if Alfie is potent. And interested in sex. The boy’s been engineered to have a tremendous potential for violence, a biological killing machine, without compunctions or remorse, capable of any savagery. Imagine that bestiality coupled with a sex drive, and consider how sexual compulsions and violent impulses can feed on each other and amplify each other when they’re not tempered by a civilized and moral spirit.”