“Again,” Avogadro says. “That last bit.”

—I’ll destroy him. The bloodsucker. He holds us all for—

“Do you recognize those voices, Doctor?”

“Mine. Buckmaster’s.”

“Thank you. The identification is important. Who was it who said, ‘I’ll destroy him’?”

“Buckmaster.”

“Yes. Thank you. Buckmaster, was that your voice?”

“You know it was.”

“Making a threat against the life of Genghis Mao?”

“I was overwrought. I was making a rhetorical point.”

“Yes,” Shadrach Mordecai says. “That’s how it seemed to me, I urged him not to shout nonsense. I can’t see it as any kind of serious threat. You have a tape of the whole conversation?”

“The whole thing,” Avogadro says. “Many conversations are taped, you know. And automatically screened for subversion. The computers brought this to our attention early this morning. The voiceprints told us it was you and Buckmaster, but of course direct corroboration is useful—”

“As though you’ll have a trial, a jury, lawyers,” Buckmaster says bitterly. “As though I won’t be meat by nightfall!”

“He didn’t say anything about Mangu to me last night, did he?” Shadrach asks.

“No. Nothing on the tape.”

“As I thought. Then why hold him?”

“Why defend him, Doctor? According to the tape, he was insulting and offensive to you.”

“I haven’t forgotten. Nevertheless, I hold no grudges. He was a nuisance to me last night, but being a nuisance shouldn’t be enough to make me want to see him sent to the organ farms.”

“Tell him again!” Buckmaster cries. “Oh, God, tell him!”

“Please,” Avogadro says. Buckmaster’s outburst appears to give him pain. He signals to his man, and Buckmaster is unstrapped, freed of the electrodes, helped to his feet, led from the room. At the door Buckmaster pauses and looks back, face bleary, distorted with fear. His lips tremble; in a moment he will be sobbing. “I’m not the one!” he cries, and the security aides haul him away.

“He isn’t,” Shadrach says. “I’m sure of that. He was out of his mind last night, ranting and screaming, but he’s no assassin. A malcontent, maybe. But no assassin.”

Avogadro, sinking limply into the interrogation chair, plays with the electrodes, winding the snaky leads around his fingers. “I know that,” he says.

“What will happen to him?”

“The organ farm. Probably before morning.”

“But why?”

“Genghis Mao’s reviewed the tape. He regards Buckmaster as dangerous.”

“Christ!”

“Go argue with Genghis Mao.”

“You sound so calm about it,” Shadrach says.

“It’s out of my hands. Doctor.”

“We can’t just let him be murdered!”

“We can’t?”

“I can’t.”

“If you want to try to save him, go ahead. I wish you well.”

“I might try. I might just.”

“The man called you a black bastard,” Avogadro says. “And a Judas.”

“For that I should let him be vivisected?”

“You aren’t letting anything. It’s just happening. It’s Buckmaster’s problem. Not mine, not yours.”

“No man’s an island, Avogadro.”

“Haven’t I heard that before somewhere?”

Shadrach stares. “Aren’t you at all concerned? Don’t you give a damn about justice?”

“Justice is for lawyers. Lawyers are an extinct species. I’m only a security officer.”

“You don’t believe that, Avogadro.”

“Don’t I?”

“Christ. Christ. Don’t come on with that I’m-just-a-cop routine. You’re too intelligent to mean it. And I’m too intelligent to take it at face value.”

Avogadro sits up. He has coiled two of the leads around his throat in a bizarre clownish way, and his head is tilted to one side, like that of a hanged man. “Do you want me to play you the Buckmaster tape? There’s a place on it where you tell him that it’s not our fault the world is the way it is, that we accept our karma, that we all serve Genghis Mao because he’s the only game in town. The alternative is organ-rot, nez-pah? Therefore we dance to the Khan’s tune, and we don’t ask questions of morality, neither do we unduly search our souls over matters of guilt and responsibility.”

“I—”

“Wait. You said it. It’s on tape, Dottore. Now I say to you. I’ve forfeited the luxury of having personal feelings about the righteousness of sending Bucky to the organ farm. By entering the Khan’s service I’ve given up the privilege of having qualms.”

“Have you ever seen an organ farm?”

“No,” Avogadro says. “But I hear—”

“I’ve seen them. Long quiet room, like a hospital ward, but very quiet. Except for the burble of the life-support machinery. Double row of open tanks, wide aisle between them. One body in each tank, floating in warm blue-green fluid, a nutrient bath. Intravenous tubes all over the floor, like pink spaghetti. Dialysis machines between each pair of tanks. Before they put a body in its tank, they kill the brain — spike through the foramen magnum, zap — but the rest stays alive, Avogadro. Vegetable in animal form. God knows what it perceives, but it lives, it needs to be fed, it digests and excretes, the hair grows, the fingernails, the nurses shave and groom the bodies every few weeks, and there they lie, arranged neatly by blood type and tissue type, available, gradually being stripped of limbs and organs, a kidney this week, a lung the next, sliced down to torsos in easy stages, the eyes, the fingers, the genitalia, eventually the heart, the liver—”

“So? What’s your point, Doctor? That organ farms aren’t pretty places? I know that. But it’s an efficient way to maintain organs awaiting transplant. Isn’t it better to recycle bodies than to waste them?”

“And turn an innocent man into a zombie? Whose only purpose is to be a living storage depot for spare organs?”

“Buckmaster isn’t innocent.”

“What’s he guilty of?”

“Guilty of bad judgment. Guilty of bad luck. His number’s up, Doctor.” Avogadro, rising, lays his hand lightly on Shadrach’s arm. “You’re a man of conscience, aren’t you, Dottore? Buckmaster thought you were a cynical fiend, a soulless servant of the Antichrist, but no, no, you’re a decent sort, caught in a nasty time, doing your best. Well, Doctor, so am I. I quote your own words of last night: Guilt is a luxury we can’t afford. Amen! Now go. Stop worrying about Buckmaster. Buckmaster’s done himself in. If you hear the bell tolling, remember, it tolls for him, and it doesn’t diminish you or me at all, because we’ve already diminished ourselves as much as possible.” Avogadro’s smile is warm, almost pitying. “Go, Doctor. Go and relax. I have work to do. I have a dozen more suspects to question before dinner.”

“And the real murderer of Mangu—”

“Was Mangu himself, nine to one. What’s that to me? I’ll continue to find his killer and interrogate him and ship him to the organ farms until I’m told to stop. Go, now. Go. Go.”

Word circulates, the next day, that thirteen conspirators have been sent to the organ farms, including Roger Buckmaster, the ringleader. Such rumors generally have a way of being accurate, but Shadrach Mordecai, still finding the idea unpalatable, goes to the extent of keying into the master personnel register to find out where Buckmaster is. He tries the engineering department code, but is told by the master computer that Buckmaster has been reassigned to Department 111. Shadrach tries that code next, though he knows what it is likely to be, and yes. Department 111 is the euphemism for the organ farms. Buckmaster has joined the human stockpile. Spike through the foramen magnum, zap. Poor silly red-faced fool.

Dr. Mordecai chooses not to bring up the subject of Buckmaster when he pays his morning call on the Chairman. Buckmaster’s fate seems beside the point now.

“The conspiracy is crushed!” Genghis Mao declares vehemently as Shadrach enters. “The guilty have been punished. The threat to our regime has been met. The principles of centripetal depolarization will not be challenged.” His eyes gleam with lunatic satisfaction. His ancient patchwork body throbs with triumphant good health, reverberating in Shadrach’s implants as furious freshets of resurgent energy.