Unobserved, Lehmann smiled. I shall send him the painting he admired. Schiele's painting of the fighter.
"Fiihrer!"
Lehmann turned. His Communications Officer stood close by, his head bowed.
"Yes, Lieutenant?"
"It's Soucek, Fiihrer. He says he's got it back."
"Ah . . ." The copy! Soucek has got the copy! He thought a moment. "Tell him to take it to Milan. I'll meet him there. Oh, and Lieutenant?"
"Yes, Fuhrer?"
He looked past the lieutenant at his watching generals, seeing how they huddled together miserably in the falling rain, and knew which ones would live, which die, before the night was out.
"Give the order to send in the reserves. I want Odessa taken within the hour."
KARR STARED AT Surgeon Hu a moment, then roared with laughter.
"They what?" Then, more soberly. "Poor bastard. I hope he doesn't suffer too much when they find out."
"Oh, they'll find out. How, I don't know. But if they made that thing, they'll know the difference"
Karr nodded. So Lehmann tfiought he'd got his copy back. Well, maybe he'd find out the truth afid maybe he wouldn't. Maybe there was no difference—maybe these new^copies were that good. Or, as Hu had suggested, maybe they were clones of some kind, grown from genetic material somehow obtained from the originals. One thing was sure, though, and that was that Lehmann's forces were retreating. For the past hour they had been withdrawing from most of the territory they had taken. Only a small pocket of land surrounding the Odessa garrison now remained in Lehmann's hands.
What does he want? Karr asked himself. Why set such a host in motion and then withdraw with so little achieved? Was it just to test our strength? To weaken us?
If so, then it was certainly successful. Lehmann could throw three armies at them—lose almost a hundred thousand men—and it was nothing to him; against which the destruction of a third of the Plantations would have serious repercussipns over the coming months. If Lehmann were to attack again in that time, then the position could easily deteriorate to the point of untenability.
Karr sat, offering Hu a seat across from him, then drew the investigation file toward him,
"You've heard what's happening?"
"He's here."
"Ward?" Karr looked up. "Why wasn't I told?"
"I believe he's gone to see the old Marshal."
"Ah . . ." Karr pursed his lips, then opened the file. "You'll cooperate fully with him, Hu. Understand me?"
Hu smiled. "It doesn't worry me."
Karr looked at him questioningly.
"That he's Clayborn," Hu clarified. "I know a lot of people find that difficult, but I can't see what the problem is. I've read his papers. There's no one knows the field better."
"Good." Karr smiled tightly. "Then you won't mind if I sit in on your first session."
"Not at all," Hu said urbanely. "If you've the time."
KIM LEANED OVER the corpse and pointed to the exposed cranium, speaking through the surgical mask he wore.
"It's as I thought, the whole limbic system is generally far less developed than in a real human. It's like a human brain—much more than I imagined it would be—but it has the appearance of being damaged, dysfunctional."
He stood back slightly, looking to Hu, whose three assistants stood behind him, scrubbed up and masked as if for surgery.
"If I'm right, the pituitary gland will be undeveloped. Whoever built these wouldn't have cared whether they reproduced or not, so maybe they won't be able to produce those hormones that create sperm or eggs. Nor, I suspect, would they have bothered with creating a fully developed emotional system. The amygdala might be very rudimentary—maybe even absent altogether. From Lehmann's point of view it would be useful if these things felt no fear. Against which, I'd guess there might be increased dopamine activity. We might look for pin-tight pupils in the living copies."
Hu gave a thoughtful nod. "I'll get started, then."
"Good." Kim bowed to him, then came away.
Karr, who had been watching through the window, greeted Kim as he stepped into the anteroom.
"Shih Ward," he said, bowing his head and extending a hand.
Kim looked up at the giant. "General Karr . . . Why, you could put me in your pocket!"
Karr laughed. "Ah, but would you stay there?"
Kim smiled, then took Karr's hand, his own enveloped by it. "If that thing in there is a copy, then it's the best I've ever seen. I didn't think Lehmann was even interested in copies. I thought that was more your old friend DeVore's line."
Karr released his hand, indicated that Kim should take a seat, then sat across from him. He leaned in, speaking confidentially.
"From what we can ascertain, when Lehmann captured the southern City, he took great care not to damage or destroy any of GenSyn's installations there. Our spies report that he's got the main factory at Milan working at twice its former capacity, and a great many of Gen-Syn's former employees are now working for him there. Even so, this latest development surprised us. There's not been a sniff of anything like this."
Kim nodded. "I see. It would have helped to have had some idea of Lehmann's thinking, but I suppose we can make a few assumptions, neh? My own guess is that Lehmann has targeted a group of very normal-seeming, stable men and women. Unemotional types."
"Why's that?"
"Because it makes things simpler. A mind is the most complex of things to create. Anything that streamlines the process has to be a plus. Bearing that in mind, we can make two fairly safe assumptions: one, that he's not planning to breed a new race, and two, that, whatever his scheme is, it's short term rather than long."
Karr sat back slightly. "Why?"
"Because the longer you run a system the more invariables creep in and the more unstable and unpredictable it becomes. In this case, the more copies there are and the longer they remain in place, the greater grows the risk of discovery. As has been proved."
"So what do you mean by short term?"
"A year. Eighteen months at most."
"So what we need to know is how long this has been going on."
"Which we won't know until we discover further copies, if then."
"So what do we do?"
Kim laughed. "Keep looking. It's all we can do. Is there any news on the camera sweep?"
Karr shook his head. "Not yet. But we should know something by tonight."
"I see." Kim looked down, silent a moment, then, more quietly: "Just how bad are things?"
"Bad," Karr confessed. "If he'd wanted, he could have carved us apart. Kicked the legs out from under us and watched us fall. As it is, it looks like we've lost Odessa, and that's a major blow. That whole sector has been destabilized."
Kim nodded. "So why did he stop?"
"I don't know. Maybe he thinks we're stronger than we are. But I doubt that. His spy network has to be as good as ours."
"And yet something stopped him."
Karr met his eyes. His own were troubled.
"I didn't realize," Kim said after a moment. "I've been away too long. Things have changed."
There was an awkward silence between them, then Surgeon Hu came into the room, a broad smile on his unmasked face.
"It's just as you said!" he announced triumphantly, looking to Kim. "The pituitary's a fifth the size it ought to be and the amygdala is missing completely. And there are other differences too. Enough, perhaps, for us to identify one of these things with a simple brain scan."
"Excellent!" Karr said, grinning at Kim. "Then I'll leave you to it. Good day, Shih Ward. I hope we can talk again."