The Edge of Space by Robert Silverberg (ed.)

Author:Robert Silverberg (ed.) [Silverberg, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Elsevier/Nelson Books
Published: 1979-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

“Maybe there’s only one way,” I told Anna. “Go to Lacklund, retrace the old man’s steps. Whoever it is might find it a golden opportunity to make history repeat itself.”

“That sounds too extreme to me,” she said, her face worried. “You’d just be inviting danger.”

“Exactly. But what else is there? Security hasn’t turned up much, and it seems I’m the vector for all this recent violence. No use causing any more unnecessary deaths here.”

“And yours is necessary?”

“Well, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said.

We were walking though the analytical labs in EQ, beyond all those stalwart secretaries, Anna giving me a guided tour. Surrounding us on all those benches were the chromatographs, gel-electrophoresis platforms, combustion modules, mass spectrometers, and other esoteric equipment; against the far walls were the more massive pieces of instrumentation: magnetic-resonance spectrometers, isotope detectors, other things I didn’t recognize.

“I have some private lab space in here,” Anna said, and we walked through a passageway into a smaller cubicle with four lab benches, looking as cluttered as the big room outside.

“Keep yourself busy, do you?” I said casually.

“A bit.” She walked to the small desk at the end of one of the benches and shuffled some papers and notebooks about.

I touched a few bottles and flasks gingerly, tried to remember the names of the pieces of glassware and equipment. “What’s this?” I said, lifting a canister from the floor. “Cute footrest. Deuterium oxide, hey?”

“Oh, that.” She glanced at it distractedly. “We use it for densimetry. For checking geological samples—mix a set of water standards, get the density of the sample in each one, plot the data. More accurate that way.”

“Use a lot of it, then.” She nodded. “Must be expensive.”

“Not too bad. Cheaper now than when nuclear energy was the going fad. Of course, since the heavy-water reactors were discontinued along with everything else, we use much less—mostly for research. You should see how much the fusion people over in what used to be New Mexico use.”

“It all comes back to me,” I said, “though very’ slowly. You’ve got the chemistry knack. I’m afraid the old man lost the codons for it when he made me.”

“You can joke about it?” she said sharply.

Her tone surprised me. “We can’t exactly do anything about it, can we?” I said.

“More’s the pity,” she replied. She folded her arms about herself and looked away.

“Hey, look,” I said. I moved closer to her. “We are what we are. We have to live with it. What are you going to do—change the genotype in every cell of your body? Maybe it was an error in judgment on his part, but who says we have to follow in his exact footsteps? We haven’t really done so anyway, have we?”

“Our lives aren’t over yet.”

“Besides, we surely aren’t the only ones. I can’t believe everyone obeyed the Tampering Ban.”

“But we were the first ones. The marked ones.” She looked at me, her face tense and taut-lipped. “You can say he couldn’t help it—that he did what

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