Designer Genes. Brian Stableford
the hope of reducing the nuisance level slightly, but it was a futile gesture.
“I know one thing,” said Dieter, raising his voice above the din. “Whatever it is and however it got into our systems, this thing is dangerous. It has weapon-potential. They want to tame it before they stop it—that’s why they’re beavering away in there under the protection of a full-scale security shield.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Chloe. “If it’s organic, it must be dextro-rotatory. It can’t hurt anything living—not really living. It can only affect right-handed proteins.”
“Chloe, darling,” said Dieter, with uncharacteristically bitter sarcasm. “Half the world lives in houses made from dr-wood, and dresses in dr-clothes. There are dr-components in virtually every machine our factories produce. A virus that could eat its way through dr-materials would be the ideal humane weapon. It could wreck a nation’s property without actually killing anyone.”
“You’re being silly,” said Rosa, shortly. “There aren’t any lr-viruses that destroy all laevo-rotatory materials, even after three billion years of lr-evolution. Why should a universally-destructive dr-virus suddenly turn up out of the blue? And if it did, why on earth would it make its first appearance in our nursery? Rick, can’t you keep the poor little mite quiet for a while.”
Rick interrupted the murmurous stream of soothing noises that he was emitting into Steven’s ear in order to say “No.” Then he added, “Oh, pollution!” as he realized to his discomfort that the ultrawoolly had suffered a sudden attack of stinking stickiness.
He moved rapidly to the disposal chute, hitting the control-button with his elbow because his hands were over-full with the bottle and the wrapped-up baby. The lid failed to respond to his signal. He jabbed it again, and then again, but nothing happened.
He turned round to complain but saw that Rosa was now busy giving Dieter an extended, if inexpert, lecture on the elements of dextro-rotatory organic chemistry. Dieter, obviously resentful of being treated as if he were one of her primary ed counseling cases, was busy going red in the face. Rick knew that if he called their attention to what had happened, they would merely point out with some asperity that the chute’s systems must have fallen prey to the side-effects of the probings being carried out by the investigators in the nursery.
The door to the staircase that led down to the cellar was only a couple of feet away, and Rick kicked the control panel, probably a little bit harder than was necessary. He sighed with relief when it opened, and he went swiftly through it. He glanced back as the door slid shut behind him, but only Chloe was taking any notice, and her expression showed profound relief that the crying baby was being taken away.
Rick figured that it would probably be possible to dispose of the polluted ultrawoolly into the cellar chute, and that, even if it turned out not to be possible, he could at least abandon the horrid thing, sluice Steven down, and then have another go at persuading him to take the bottle without having to suffer the censorious glares of his co-parents. He took the six steps two at a time, and made his way along the narrow corridor between the massed root-ridges to the portal set in the basal trunk.
The portal opened readily enough, and he sighed with relief. He had thrown the ultra-woolly in before he realized that all was not well within the chute.
Instead of falling away through empty space to the reclamation-chamber, the soiled garment landed in a pool of turbid water whose surface was only a couple of centimeters below the opening. Because of the odiferous nature of the stain on the shawl, Rick did not at first notice that the water was also rather noisome, but when he leaned over to take a closer look, the fact became abundantly clear.
He also noticed that the level of the water was slowly rising. The house was evidently experiencing difficulties in the waterworks.
Rick’s first supposition was that the three investigators in the nursery must already know about this problem, given that they had taken over all the house’s systems, but then he remembered that the lar had stubbornly insisted that nothing was wrong in the nursery. Perhaps, given Mr. Murgatroyd’s declared allegiance to the philosophy of better-be-safe, they should be told.
Rick climbed back up to the cellar door, which had closed automatically behind him, and brought his knee up to tap the control panel.
The door didn’t open.
Rick cursed. He hung the loudly-squalling Steven over his shoulder, switched the feeding-bottle from his left hand to his right, and tapped the panel again with his fingers.
The door still failed to respond.
Rick turned to the screen beside the door and poked the keyboard beneath it. The screen remained dead, as he had expected. The men in the nursery had presumably switched off the circuitry for some arcane purpose of their own.
He turned around to look back at the waste-chute. The portal was still open, and the water level had now reached its rim. Water began to spill over. While Rick watched, the floating ultrawoolly was carried over the lip of the precipice, and fell soggily to the floor, where it sat lumpenly in a rapidly-spreading pool of discolored liquid.
“Pollution!” said Rick, with feeling. “Pollution, corrosion and copulating corruption!” The obscenities seemed oddly ineffective, given their incipient literality.
He knew that there was no point at all in shouting for help. The house was well-designed, and the walls and ceiling were far too efficient at damping out sounds.
He realized that he was trapped.
* * * *
Even though he knew there was no point, Rick yelled for help; there seemed no harm in trying. In the meantime, he struggled to think of something more likely to get results.
Steven responded to the unexpected competition with a moment’s startled silence, but then began to compete with a will, increasing his own efforts to be heard. Within seconds he began to hit that note. The din was too appalling to be tolerated, and Rick shut up.
Steven didn’t. Rick gritted his teeth and tried to shut out the sound, but the screams went deep into the core of his brain.
Rick went to the top of the cellar steps and kicked the door, very hard. Nothing happened, and he kicked it again, even harder. Then, holding Steven carefully at arm’s length, he rammed it with his shoulder.
The door absorbed the brutal mistreatment with dignified ease, swallowing the sound of the impacts. The blows had discharged a little of Rick’s frustration, but he wasn’t sufficiently masochistic to keep going until he did himself an injury.
“Shut up, you little bastard,” he said to Steven, with asperity. He had never before dared speak aloud to the baby in such hostile terms, but he felt that he might as well take what meager advantage he could of the fact that no one could hear him. He didn’t mean it, of course—not really.
He looked down at the floor, which was now covered by a thin scum of something horrible. The scum was slowly being elevated by the water on which it floated. He watched it for a minute or so, watching the meniscus climb the knobbly walls of the root-complex. He estimated that the level was now rising by about a centimeter per minute, and noted that the flow seemed to be increasing. His feet were less than a meter above the surface, and he knew that he wasn’t much more than a meter-and-a-half tall. His mental arithmetic could do the simple averaging well enough, but he didn’t know how to figure in the possible effects of the accelerating flow.
“Shut up!” he said to Steven, in a low but fierce tone. “This is serious. If we aren’t out of here soon.…”
At a centimeter a minute, he knew, they would have four hours. Four hours, looked at dispassionately, was a long time, but Rick already knew that it was the highest possible figure. The faster the rate of flow was increasing, the quicker that four hours would become three, and then two…and all the while, it was also being eroded by actual elapsed time. Rick looked about him at the cellar, whose narrow passages and dim lighting had always made him feel slightly claustrophobic. His mental arithmetic wasn’t up to calculating the actual cubic