Ethan of Athos Read Free Page B

strange grey lumps were wrapped like so many packets of lunch meat. His heart sank in terror and bewilderment.
    Wait, wait, don't panic -- maybe it was some new galactic technology he hadn't heard of yet. Gingerly, he searched the box for instructions, even rooting down among the packets themselves. Nothing. Look and guess time.
    He stared at the little lumps, realizing at last that these were not cultured tissue at all, but the raw material itself. He was going to have to do the growth culturing personally. He swallowed. Not impossible, he reassured himself.
    He found a pair of scissors, cut open the top packet, and dropped its contents, plop, into a waiting buffer bath. He contemplated it in some dismay. Perhaps it ought to be segmented, for maximum penetration of the nutrient solution -- no, not yet, that would shatter the cellular structure in its frozen state. Thaw first.
    He poked through the others, driven by growing unease. Strange, strange. Here was one six times the size of the other little ovoids, glassy and round. Here was one that looked revoltingly like a lump of cottage cheese. Suddenly suspicious, he counted packets. Thirty-eight. And those great big ones on the bottom -- once, during his youthful army service, he had volunteered for K. P. in the butcher's department, fascinated by comparative anatomy even then. Recognition dawned like a raging sun.
    “That,” he hissed through clenched teeth, “is a cow's ovary!”
    The examination was intense, and thorough, and took all afternoon. When he was done, his laboratory looked like a first-year zoology class had been doing dissections all over it, but he was quite, quite sure.
    He practically kicked open the door to Desroches' office, and stood hands clenched, trying to control his ragged breathing.
    Desroches was just donning his coat, the light of home in his eye; he never turned off the holocube until he was done for the day. He stared at Ethan's wild, disheveled face. “My God, Ethan, what is it?”
    “Trash from hysterectomies. Leavings from autopsies, for all I know. A quarter of them are clearly cancerous, half are atrophied, five aren't even human for God's sake! And every single one of them is dead.”
    “What?” Desroches gasped, his face draining. “You didn't botch the thawing, did you? Not you -- I”
    “You come look. Just come look,” Ethan sputtered. He spun on his heel, and shot over his shoulder, “I don't know what the Population Council paid for this crud, but we've been screwed.”

Chapter Two
    “Maybe,” the senior Population Council delegate from Las Sands said hopefully, “it was an honest error. Maybe they thought the material was intended for medical students or something.”
    Ethan wondered why Roachie had dragged him along to this emergency session. Expert witness? Another time, he might have been awed by his august surroundings; the deep carpeting, the fine view of the capital, the long polished ripple-wood table and the grave, bearded faces of the elders reflected in it. Now he was so angry he barely noticed them. “That doesn't explain why there were 38 in a box marked 50,” he snapped. “Or those damned cow ovaries -- do they imagine we breed minotaurs here?”
    The junior representative from Deleara remarked wistfully, “Our box was totally empty.”
    “Faugh!” said Ethan. “Nothing so completely screwed up could be either honest or an error -- ' Desroches, looking exasperated, motioned him down, and Ethan subsided. “Gotta be deliberate sabotage,” Ethan continued to him in a whisper.
    “Later,” Desroches promised. “We'll get to that later.”
    The chairman finished recording the official inventory reports from all nine Rep Centers, filed them in his comconsole, and sighed. “How the hell did we pick this supplier, anyway?” he asked, semi-rhetorically.
    The head of the procurement subcommittee dropped two tablets of medication into a glass of water, and laid his head on his arms to watch them fizz.