The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) Read Free

guess,’ he muttered. ‘But hey, Pop, how about a robot, though? Huh, how about—’
    Grandison reached over and cracked the jar with his gavel. The spring grip device leapt out, scattering glass and brown pills, and releasing the thick fingers of Louie the Womp from captivity.
    ‘Motion carried.’

ANOMALIES
     
    ‘$u¢¢e$$!’
    Sign on wall at Wompler Research Laboratories
    ‘I, too, am a failure,’ murmured Cal, staring at the jellyfish thing in the tank. It was supposed to be bright pink and right-side up. ‘This is the end for me too, old
Plagyodus
. I’ve ruined my last experiment.’
    He did not deem it necessary to add that it was his first experiment at Wompler Research, or that he had only been hired through the wonderful mistake of an IBM machine. The grey, deflated mass in the tank did not seem to be listening, anyway. A twisted rope of multicoloured wires rose from it to a panel of dials. The dials were all at zero.
    Sighing, Cal began to write on the chart hanging next to the tank, ‘Biomech. arrgt. 173b aborted 1750 hours’.
    It was more than a job he would be losing; it was a chance to do work leading to a doctorate.
Everything I touchy
, he thought,
turns to failure
. As if bearing out his words, the ballpoint pen ran dry.
    Experimenting, he found that it would write on his hand perfectly, but not on the wall chart. He covered his palm with blue scrawls and trial signatures : ‘Calvin Codman Potter, Ph.D’.
    ‘It’s the angle,’ said Hamuro Hita, the project statistician. ‘It
    won’t feed ink uphill.’
    Cal blushed, corrected the angle of the pen and signed the chart. ‘Thanks. I guess I’m not very observant for an experimenter. In fact, I’ve just ruined this experiment. I suppose you won’t be seeing much of me around here from now on.’
    ‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll can you for one mistake. What happened, anyway?’ Hita spoke without pausing in his work, summing figures on an adding machine.
    ‘I forgot to put the temperature control on automatic last night.’ Ripping loose the wires from their instruments, Cal hauled up the grey, dripping lump. ‘It—it poached, or something.’ Lifting the lid of a garbage can, he plumped in the jellyfish and stuffed in the bright stiff wires after it. Hita nodded at a chair by his desk, and Cal flopped into it.
    ‘That’s what’ll happen to me, when they find out all about me,’ he said, indicating the garbage can. ‘The way they saw it, I was a bright, promising lad, having graduated at the top of my class at MIT. They expected me to set the world on fire. Whereas—’
    ‘Whereas—?’
    ‘I guess I’d rather not talk about it after all. Let’s say I was hired by mistake, and I’m scared that any minute they’ll realize it.’
    Hita nodded, and the two men lapsed into moody silence. Finishing his addition, the mathematician began cleaning his briar pipe with one blade of a pair of black-handled scissors. Cal stared about the lab, unable to conquer the feeling that he was saying goodbye to it all. Goodbye, QUIDNAC modular computer; goodbye, maze for phototropic ‘rats’; goodbye, solution in which grew a green crystalline tree, every branch of which formed part of an electronic circuit; goodbye, miniature automatic forge. He did not forget a goodbye to the main entrance, guarded by a stiff, humourless adolescent in the uniform of the Marine Corps.
    ‘We’re all flying under false colours here,’ said Hita, sliding a paperback book out of his desk drawer. ‘Do you know why the Womplers hired me? Because Louie wanted to learn Origami. The way he saw it, I’m Japanese,
ergo
…’
    ‘I don’t believe it !’
    ‘But you’ve only been here a week. You hardly know the Womplers, father and son. You haven’t even met the project head, Dr. Smilax. I assume your main dealings have been with
    them
.’
    ‘Meaning the Mackintosh brothers?’
    Hita smiled. ‘Or as some of us call them, the brothers