“He’s a sick man,” said Kralick. “All this traveling—”

“It’s a useful function.”

“But he isn’t being useful any more,” Kralick pointed out. “He hasn’t contributed anything in weeks. He just sits there playing with those copies of the book. Helen, I can’t take the responsibility. He belongs in a hospital.”

“He belongs with us.”

“Even if it kills him?”

“Even if it kills him,” Helen said vigorously. “Better to die in harness than to creep away thinking you’re an old fool.”

Kralick let her win the round, but we were fearful, for we could see the inward rot spreading through old Lloyd day by day. Each morning I expected to be told that he had slipped away in his sleep; but each morning he was there, gaunt, gray-skinned, his nose now jutting like a pyramid in his diminished face. We journeyed to Michigan so that Vornan could see Aster’s life-synthesis project; and as we walked the aisles of that eerie laboratory, Kolff clumped along behind us, a delegate from the walking dead witnessing thc spawning of artificial life.

Aster said, “This was one of our earliest successes, if you can call it a success. We never could figure out what phylum to put it in, but there’s no doubt that it’s alive and that it breeds true, so in that sense the experiment was successful.”

We peered into a huge tank in which a variety of underwater plants grew. Between the green fronds swam slender azure creatures, six to eight inches long; they were eyeless, propelled themselves by ripplings of a dorsal fin that ran their entire length, and were crowned by gaping mouths rimmed with agile translucent tentacles. At least a hundred of them were in the tank. A few appeared to be budding; smaller representatives of their kind protruded from their sides.

“We intended to manufacture coelenterates,” Aster explained. “Basically, that’s what we have here; a giant free-swimming anemone. But coelenterates don’t have fins, and this one does, and knows how to use it. We didn’t engineer that fin. It developed spontaneously. There’s the phantom of a segmented body structure, too, which is an attribute belonging to a higher phylum. Metabolically, the thing is capable of adapting to its environment far more satisfactorily than most invertebrates; it lives in fresh or salt water, gets along in a temperature spectrum of about a hundred degrees, and handles any sort of food. So we’ve got a super-coelenterate. We’d like to test it in natural conditions, perhaps dump a few in a pond nearby, but frankly we’re afraid to let the thing loose.” Aster smiled self-consciously. “We’ve also been trying vertebrate synthesis lately, with rather less to show for it. Here…”

She indicated a tank in which a small brown creature lay limply on the bottom, moving in an occasional random twitch. It had two boneless-looking arms and a single leg; the missing leg did not seem ever to have been there. A whiplike tail drifted feebly about. To me it looked like a sad salamander. Aster seemed quite proud of it, though, for it had a well-developed skeletal structure, a decent nervous system, a surprisingly good set of eyes, and a full complement of internal organs. It did not, however, reproduce itself. They were still working on that. In the meantime, each of these synthetic vertebrates had to be built up cell by cell from the basic genetic material, which very much limited the scope of the experiment. But this was awesome enough.

Aster was in her element, now, and she led us on tirelessly, down one avenue of the long, brightly lit room and up the next, past giant frosted flasks and looming, sinister centrifuges, along alcoves occupied by fractionating columns, into annexes where mechanical agitators chuttered busily in reaction vats containing somber iridescent amber fluids. We peered through long fiber telescopes to spy on sealed rooms in which light, temperature, radiation, and pressure were meticulously controlled. We saw blowups of electron photomicrographs and garnet holograms that showed us the internal structures of mysterious cellular groups. Aster sprinkled her running commentary liberally with words laden with symbolic significance, a lab jargon that had its own mystic rhythm; we heard of photometric titrators, platinum crucibles, hydraulic plethysmographs, rotary microtomes, densitometers, electrophoresis cells, collodion bags, infrared microscopes, flowmeters, piston burettes, cardiotachometers: an incomprehensible and wonderful vocabulary. Painstakingly Aster revealed how the protein chains of life were put together and made to replicate themselves; she spelled everything out simply and beautifully, and there were the wriggling mock-coelenterates and the flabby pseudosalamanders to tell us of achievement. It was altogether marvelous.

As she drew us along, Aster fished for what concerned her most: Vornan’s comments. She knew that some sort of not-quite-human life existed in Vornan’s time, for he had spoken in ambiguous terms at one of our early meetings of “servitors,” which did not have full human status because they were genetically unhuman, life-forms built out of “lesser life.” From what he had said, these servitors did not seem to be synthetic creations, but rather some kind of composites constructed of humbler germ plasm drawn from living things: dog-people, cat-people, gnu-people. Naturally Aster wished to know more, and she had just as naturally learned not a shred more from Vornan-19. Now she probed again, getting nowhere. Vornan remained distantly polite. He asked a few questions: How soon, he wanted to know, would Aster be able to synthesize imitation humans? Aster looked hazy. “Five, ten, fifteen years,” she said.

“If the world lasts that long,” said Vornan slyly.

We all laughed, more an explosion of tensions than any real show of amusement. Even Aster, who had never displayed anything like a sense of humor, flashed a thin, mechanical smile. She turned away and indicated a tank mounted in a pressure capsule.

“This is our latest project,” she said. “I’m not quite sure how it stands now, since as you all know I’ve been away from the laboratory since January. You see here an effort to synthesize a mammalian embryo. We have several embryos in various stages of development. If you’ll come closer…”

I looked and saw a number of fishlike things coiled within small membrane-bounded cells. My stomach tightened in nervous response to the sight of these big-headed little creatures, born from a mess of amino acids, ripening toward who knew what kind of maturity. Even Vornan looked impressed.

Lloyd Kolff grunted something in a language I did not understand: three or four words, thick, harsh, guttural. His voice carried an undertone of anguish. I looked toward him and saw him standing rigid, one arm brought up at an acute angle across his chest, the other pointing straight out from his side. He seemed to be performing some extremely complex ballet step and had become frozen in mid-pirouette. His face was deep blue, the color of Ming porcelain; his red-rimmed eyes were wide and frightful. He stood that way a long moment. Then he made a little chittering noise in the back of his throat and pitched forward onto the stone top of a laboratory table. He clutched convulsively; flasks and burners went sliding and crashing to the floor. His thick hands seized the rim of a small tank and pulled it over, spilling a dozen sleek little synthetic coelenterates. They flapped and quivered at our feet. Lloyd sagged slowly, losing his grip on the table and toppling in several stages, landing flat on his back. His eyes were still open. He uttered one sentence, with marvelously distinct diction: Lloyd Kolff’s valedictory to the world. It was in some ancient language, perhaps. None of us could identify it afterward or repeat even a syllable. Then he died.

“Life support!” Aster yelled. “Hurry!”

Two laboratory assistants came scuttling up almost at once with a life-support rig. Kralick, meanwhile, had dropped beside Kolff and was trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Aster got him away, and crouching efficiently beside Kolff’s bulky, motionless form, ripped open his clothing to reveal the deep chest matted with gray hair. She gestured and one of her assistants handed her a pair of electrodes. She put them in place and gave Kolff’s heart a jolt. The other assistant was already uncapping a hypodermic and pushing it against Kolff’s arm. We heard the whirr of the ultrasonic snout while it rose through the frequencies to the functional level. Kolff’s big body shivered as the hormones and the electricity hit it simultaneously; his right hand rose a few inches, fist clenched, and dropped back again. “Galvanic response,” Aster muttered. “Nothing more.”