Read Online Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One by Kate Wilhelm - Free Book Online Page A

woman, nor she on him. And they were thus cleansed of shame. Forever and ever. Amen. Hallelujah.
    Darin shivered. He had drowsed after all, and the night wind had grown chill. He went to bed. Lea drew away from him in her sleep. She felt hot to his touch. He turned to his left side, his back to her, and he slept.
    “There is potential x ,” Darin said to Lea the next morning at breakfast. “We don’t know where x is actually. It represents the highest intellectual achievement possible for the monkeys, for example. We test each new batch of monkeys that we get and sort them— x -1, x -2, x -3, suppose, and then we breed for more x -1’s. Also we feed the other two groups the sRNA that we extract from the original x -l’s. Eventually we get a monkey that is higher than our original x -1, and we reclassify right down the line and start over, using his sRNA to bring the others up to his level. We make constant checks to be sure we aren’t allowing inferior strains to mingle with our highest achievers, and we keep control groups that are given the same training, the same food, the same sorting process, but no sRNA. We test them against each other.”
    Lea was watching his face with some interest as he talked. He thought he had got through, until she said, “Did you realize that your hair is almost solid white at the temples? All at once it is turning white.”
    Carefully he put his cup back on the saucer. He smiled at her and got up. “See you tonight,” he said.
    They also had two separate compounds of chimps that had started out identically. Neither had received any training whatever through the years; they had been kept isolated from each other and from man. Adam’s group had been fed sRNA daily from the most intelligent chimps they had found. The control group had been fed none. The control-group chimps had yet to master the intricacies of the fountain with its ice-cold water; they used the small stream that flowed through the compound. The control group had yet to learn that fruit on the high, fragile branches could be had, if one used the telescoping sticks to knock them down. The control group huddled without protection, or under the scant cover of palm-trees when it rained and the dome was opened. Adam long ago had led his group in the construction of a rude but functional hut where they gathered when it rained.
    Darin saw the women’s committee filing past the compound when he parked his car. He went straight to the console in his office, flicked on a switch and manipulated buttons and dials, leading the group through the paths, opening one, closing another to them, until he led them to the newest of the compounds, where he opened the gate and let them inside. Quickly he closed the gate again and watched their frantic efforts to get out. Later he turned the chimps loose on them, and his grin grew broader as he watched the new-men ravage the old women. Some of the offspring were black and hairy, others pink and hairless, some intermediate. They grew rapidly, lined up with arms extended to receive their daily doses, stood before a machine that tested them instantaneously, and were sorted. Some of them went into a disintegration room, others out into the world.
    A car horn blasted in his ears. He switched off his ignition and he got out as Stu Evers parked next to his car. “I see the old bats got here,” Stu said. He walked toward the lab with Darin. “How’s the Driscoll kid coming along?”
    “Negative,” Darin said. Stu knew they had tried using human sRNA on the boy, and failed consistently. It was too big a step for his body to cope with. “So far he has shown total intolerance to A-127. “Throws it off almost instantly.”
    Stuart was sympathetic and noncommittal. No one else had any faith whatever in Darin’s own experiment. A-127 might be too great a step upward, Darin thought. “The Ateles spider monkey from Brazil was too bright.
    He called Kelly from his office and asked about the newly