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Unto the Last 
Generation by Juanita 
Coulson 
Chapter I 
"This is as far as I go, mister." 
Richard Parnell forced his mind up out of that discouraging 
sheaf of statistics. He'd spread the charts out, covering his case 
and the taxi's seat. Now, even as he argued, he began collecting 
strewn papers. "What's that supposed to mean?" 
"Don't he ever get any new jokes." The cabbie irritably 
slapped at his blaring radio, overriding a faked laugh-track. 
"Heard that one when I was a kid." 
"We all did. Those comedians have been on the air for 
thirty years, at least. But then there's not an oversupply of young 
entertainers, these days." Parnell slammed shut his case on the 
bulging files and badly-jogged charts. "Why are we stopping 
here? I said the Life Sciences Building on Fleet." 
"Yuck, yuck, yuck!'" The driver sarcastically aped the tinny 
laughter vibrating the radio's speakers. "It ain't funny, chuckie." 
Then he threw a bored glare over his shoulder at Parnell. "Told 
you. This is as far as I go. I ain't requked to go past Eighteenth. 
It's in my license." 
"I see. And you don't make a practice of informing your fares 
of that little fact in advance." Parnell scanned the cabbie's

certificate, reading the legalistic details under the photo ident. 
"Peculiar. There's no such restriction listed here." 
"Well, it's in the the fine print. Anyway, I ain't goin' up to 
Fleet." 
Sighing, Parnell wrestled with the rusted door handle. "As a 
matter of fact, it isn't in the fine print. Or anywhere else. Which 
you'd know if you ever learned how to read. Don't you oil these 
things? Get outside and pull." 
Eager to assist an unhappy customer on his way, the cabbie 
helped Parnell pry open the door. The hinges creaked with 
agony. "Don't make things the way they useta," he complained, 
kicking a corroded rocker panel for emphasis. "Everything's. 
fallin' apart." 
"Including the peopleand the service," Parnell said archly. 
He wondered what the cabbie expected from this pile of junk. 
Taxis were the only non-military vehicles on the streets 
nowand the only ones allowed to use those old, dwindling 
supplies of gasoline. 
"Hey, don't blame me," the cabbie flared. "Listen, I'm only a 
a municipal employee. Yessir. It's you that's crazy, wantin' to go 
down to Fleet. Don't you know it's a disty day?" 
Parnell grimaced. He had forgotten. "And you think it'll be 
safer for me to walk past a dole point than for you to drive me 
there?" 
"Hah! Sure! Food's gettin' scarcer and scarcer. Why, only last 
week they tipped over Fred's cab in one o' them riots. Some o' 
those erects go crazy when they miss out on a dole. Course, Fred 
didn't have much of a cab anyway," the skinny little driver 
conceded. "None o' them are worth much any more. 
Can't get any parts. And they're takin' all the metal and 
makin' replacement parts for tanks and flitters. Army gets 
everything" 
Slapping a couple of units in the man's grimy palm, Parnell

said, "Here. That's all this ride was worth. I've deducted your tip 
and the balance of the fare. If you'll read the fine print on your 
license you'll find I have that option." An excusable lie. How 
could the poor fool catch him in it? He set off hurriedly, ignoring 
the shouted obscenities wishing him mal voyage. 
Parnell dismissed the encounter with contemptuous pity. A 
stupid, inept cab driver. But most of the young people were 
inept, untrained. And too many of them were stupid. Perhaps 
that wasn't fair. Not much could be done with them, or was. 
Statistically they were one of the smallest segments of the 
population. And illiterate. That had been true since the school 
systems started disintegrating years ago. Not enough children to 
justify the teaching profession, and eventually there hadn't been 
any teachers, or schools. Or child-sized clothing or furniture or 
toys or 
He could hear the babble from the disty station now. Parnell 
stopped, considering alternatives. He couldn't detour left. The 
block that way was a ten meters' high jumble of debris all the 
way down to the river; last month's marina fire had ruined the 
area. Could he go right? All streets paralleling the lake in that 
direction were a no-man's land. If he tried to reach Fleet by that 
route he'd get brained by a brick. 
Parnell dug out his security lock and clamped the brief case to 
his left wrist. If he held it close to his side the crowd might not 
notice it as he sneaked past them. The charts and graphs the 
case contained were worthless to that mob, but they wouldn't 
know that. 
They'd see an object to grab, something that might contain 
food or other booty. 
Wind tore along the street. It stirred trash to a froth and 
rattled rubbish across the broken pavement. Like a bitter 
comment from the decaying city, a Greek chorus for human 
tragedy. Parnell edged forward slowly, staying close to the wall. 
He was smearing brick dust and smoky residue on his suit, 
annoyed at the necessity; clothing was hard come by. The noisy 
rabble was very intent on the barred door of the disty 
outletand they were facing away from Parnell. Good!

"Watch who you're pushin', you old goat!" 
"No manners at all!" 
"There's enough for everyone, folks. Just be patient." One of 
the government's distributors, shouting from between the bars. 
He had better sense than to open up unless he had a food 
package in his hand, one he could get rid of in a hurry. "Hey, 
turn that thing down, will you?" 
"Aaaaa !" A stuttering howl of derisive refusal from the 
under-30s clustered about a guy with a porta-vid. They 
segregated themselves from the other two groups in the 
crowdthe Olders and a few out of work Middle-Agers. The 
young people were a pocket of belligerence. A whip antenna 
swayed above them and unmuted audio blasted from the 
porta-vid. 
" sent us to foreign lands to die in their wars. They did that 
to us all through history. It's on the tapes, Youngers. Listen and 
learn. And now what do they want? They'll expect us to support 
them in their old age. Well, who's going to support us in our old 
age? You see anybody coming along to take care of us when we're 
old and feeble? Think about it!" 
Parnell gritted his teeth in a silent snarl. Nevin 
Detloff. One couldn't escape that punk politician. The 
porta-vid's screen was hidden by a wall of flesh, but there was no 
mistaking the slick, inflammatory rhetoric. 
I'd like to take that scrawny little demagogue by the scruff of 
the neck, Parnell thought. Bring him out here on the streets. Give 
him an up-close sample of what his speeches do. Especially on 
food disty days. Make him see the friction, the growing hatred 
between generations Detloff's orations caused. 
"Please, young man, that hurts my ears." An old, old woman 
leaning waveringly on a cane. She clutched a lacy pie-plate of a 
hat against the tugging wind. 
"Too loud for ya, huh, granny? Have a real good listen!" A

runty youngster thrust the porta-vid at the old woman's face, 
nearly unbalancing her frail figure. 
"Stop that!" A portly gentleman with a fringe of white hair 
around his bald pate played protector. He caught the woman's 
arm to keep her from falling. 
"Aaaaa, you old creet. Why don't you go somewhere and die?" 
"Hangin' around to use up the food. You had your chance. You 
ate good when you was our age, didn't you?" 
"Go on, grampa! Get out o' here" 
"Dump it! Aaaaa !" 
Parnell was abreast of the rising tumult, beginning to sweat, 
watching the seeds of riot sprouting. The cabbie might have 
been surly, but he'd shown good sense when he refused to drive 
down this street. 
"Watch who you're shovin', chuckie!" came more and more 
from the crowd. 
"Hurry up in there with that food!" 
The mass surged forward. A false alarm. Some slight rattling 
at the bars of the distribution station. The frenzy of movement 
was enough to send a few in the crowd stumbling to the 
pavement. 
"Get back! Give 'em room! Don't step on 'em!" A humane plea 
lost in the excitement. The throng was dividing ever more 
sharply along generational lines. Youngers bumping Olders, the 
Middle-Agers trying to avoid associating with either group. 
Respect for weakness and age was evaporating. Hunger was the 
sole determinant here. 
Finally the barred gate shot upward. Immediately several 
brawny, uniformed government workers blocked the opening. 
They bellowed, "Have your identity cards ready. Blue cards! Blue 
cards! No pushing! There's plenty for everybody!" Behind the

men women assistants unpacked the precious food packages. 
They began an efficient assembly line distribution. 
"Cards! Have your cards!" 
A forest of waving hands clutched idents. The distributors 
gripped automatic punches, validated each card shoved at them. 
Then a box would be thrust into eager hands. The recipient 
would turn aside hastily, leaving a vacancy for the next 
dole-seeker. A good systemif no one got panicky, thinking the 
food supply would run out before they got theirs. 
But that problem arose. Fast. "Leggo, dammit!" one of the 
disty workers yelped. He flailed free of greedy hands. "Take it 
easy! Cards first! No pushing back there! I saidno pushing!" 
He might have been shouting into a thunderstorm, with as 
much effect. A brutal shoving match had started. Gasps and 
cries from those bunched in and cut off from air. A thin, 
middle-aged man leaped up the wall protecting the distributors. 
Deftly, he snatched a package and dropped back into the crowd, 
bulling his way out. 
"Hey, you! Come back here with that!" 
Screams of frustration began at this infractiona rapidly 
building whirlpool of motion and noise. 
"Get off my feet!" 
"Watch it!" 
A woman, perhaps in her late fifties, edged away from the 
crowd. She was gaunt, clad in tatters, clutching a food dole box 
to her sagging breasts. A Younger rushed at her, struck the 
woman down, and stole the package. 
Impulsively, Parnell took a step forward. But his intended 
gallantry wasn't necessary. A horde of hijackers, younger still 
than the thief, bored in. They ran their quarry to earth, using 
fists and feet cruelly. Violence was breeding more violence, and a 
savage fight over the spoils.

Many such miniature combats were taking place now. The 
most helpless and the neediest were the first to fall victim. The 
aged, the women, the half-starvedtheir packages were ripped 
out of their feeble hands. Even when they cowered and offered no 
resistance they suffered. The strong brutalized them despite 
their pleas for mercy. 
The distributors bellowed for calm, and finally realized the 
futility of their attempts. A bit desperately, they struggled to put 
the barred gate back in place at the disty outlet. Things quickly 
got still rougher as the brawlers fought, not wanting the station 
to close. If they could have got their hands on the government 
people, they would have dragged them down to the pavement, 
beaten them senseless. 
Parnell was suddenly very glad he was wearing an 
inconspicuous grey suit. He felt a natural urge to defend the 
helpless prey of the mob, but that would be suicide. This was a 
human jungle now, and survival was the key word. 
He moved slowly toward the tall steel and stone sanctuary at 
the intersection. Yes, he certainly would like to get Nevin Detloff 
out in this crowdlet that little dilettante experience "life" in the 
flesh. Detloffs loyal "followers" would probably tear him to pieces 
in their rage. 
Just a bit further and he'd be clear of the worst of it. All he 
needed to do was make it to the Life Sciences Building, and the 
safety of that impregnable door. He was a lot bigger and 
healthier than most of the rioters. But a pack of jackals could 
bring down a lion. They'd already wreaked such terrible havoc. 
The grim, evidence lay under the mob's feet. A womanher hair 
a piece of white, dusty fluff against the pavement, her pale eyes 
open and sightless. An old mancrawling, seeking a haven, 
half-crazed, blood pouring from his scalp. 
Then Parnell froze, staring in disbelief. A child! Squirming 
between those thrashing legs and staggering bodies. The wild 
little human animal looked about furtively. Then that small form 
was running toward Parnell. 
The quick movement attracted angry eyes. The child was

carrying a packageone of the food dole boxes. 
"Hey! Look what that kid's got!" A broad-shouldered tough 
chased the child. One ham-sized hand reached out for that 
tangled mop of black hair. It wouldn't be much of a contest. The 
man could crush his small target. 
The gamin's face filled with supplication and a bony body 
collided with Parnell's knees. Tiny fingers clutched him, begging 
for protection. 
Reflexively, Parnell swung his brief case in a hard, tight arc. It 
splatted into the man's temple, sending him reeling. The bully 
stumbled sideways drunkenly, into the wall. 
"Look! There! He's got something! Hun and that kid!" 
Instincts Parnell hadn't known he owned took over. He swept 
his free arm about the child and started to run. No point in 
worrying about attracting attention. Nothing for it but to race 
the last twenty meters, gambling on his long legs and strong 
physique. The child was feather light, no burden. But the 
drumbeat of small fists was a distraction. "I dropped my box! Go 
back, go back!" 
"I'll get you another," he growled, loping hard, hounded by 
those bloodthirsty yelps behind them. 
Parnell's heart thundered with atavistic excitement. His 
ancestors must have felt this way, eons before, outrunning an 
enraged beast. The child clung like a leech, abandoning 
arguments over the lost box. The solid haven of a sixteen-gauge 
steel door loomed ahead. Parnell increased his stride, bellowing 
his indent to the voice-print circuits. The door sucked upward 
and he leaped through, simultaneously shouting, "Cancel and 
close." 
In the fortress-strong foyer he whirled to face the oncoming 
horde. The door's action reversed, slamming it down like a 
guillotine blade. But without a victim. The mob was shut 
outside, their howls muffled to incoherency. For a moment 
Parnell felt cheated. He'd half-hoped one or two of those

barbarians might have been trapped inside with him. A couple 
of Detloff's Youngers, cut off from the false courage of their gang. 
He was tempted by the thought of giving them a taste of his 
knuckles. No, that wouldn't solve anything. Joining them in 
gutter tactics was demeaning, and a waste of time and energy. 
He put his jangled nerves into lower gear, regarding the child. 
He still didn't quite believe this. A child. A filthy little face scant 
centimeters from his own. Immense, cunning, dark blue eyes and 
a flower bud of a mouth. And a coolly intelligent young voice. 
"You said you'd get me another box." 
"Yes, I did. And I will. It won't be a dole box, but we have food 
here." He set the child down and pointed toward the elevator 
tube. 
After a moment's hesitation, she walked toward it. Parnell felt 
certain "she" was the proper pronoun. The child moved with an 
immature yet very feminine grace. She studied the interior of the 
tube warily. Then she apparently decided to trust Parnell and got 
in. He stepped up beside her and touched the relays. She inhaled 
sharply as the tube snapped closed and shot upward. 
In retrospect Parnell was incredulous of his own actions. Why 
on earth had he taken that terrible risk out there in the street? 
He knew why. A child, definitely less than ten years old. How 
long had it been since anyone had seen a child that age? Fifteen 
years? At least. No, his behavior hadn't been very rational but 
it had been quite human. 
As they arrived at the second level his impulsive gesture won 
an immediate seconding. Therese had been looking out the wall 
of glass fronting the street. Now she hurried to greet him. 
"Richard, we saw you and" She was smiling wonderingly, 
afraid the child was a dream. 
Parnell brushed the girl's hair. "How old do you estimate she 
is, Ter?" 
"I'm eight," the girl announced proudly. 
Therese gaped in astonishment, as did most of Parnell's staff

now circling the scene. Even Jesse Bliss, a professional cynic, on 
busman's holiday from his own lab, gawked. His shock gave 
Parnell a fresh opinion of the miracle of this child. Jesse 
recovered, scratching his scruffy excuse for a beard. "Imagine, 
the infant can count, too. Better than half those hyenas hi that 
street." 
"Of course she can count," Therese said. She knelt beside the 
child and tugged ragged garments into some semblance of order. 
The girl bore this maternal attention stoically, bored. Therese 
glanced at Parnell, love and gratitude brimming in her hazel 
eyes. 
"He promised me something to eat," the child said, pointing 
at Parnell. "Him. The big man with the yellow hair." 
"Richard saved your life, brat," Jesse put in. "Don't you know 
that? If he hadn't plucked you out of that melee" 
"You probably had bets with my techs on whether I'd make 
it," Parnell said wryly. He looked toward a vid screen. The sound 
was muted by a sharply handsome face shifted through a series 
of sincere, persuasive expressions. Dark, youthfully masculine 
good looks twisting into a theatric mask. "Why the hell have you 
got Detloff on that thing?" he demanded irately. 
As an abashed tech rushed to switch channels Jesse shrugged. 
"They're just studying the competition. We can't plot our 
strategy if we don't know what the enemy's up to. Or don't you 
consider Detloff and his ravening hordes the enemy?" 
"And if I do, what of it? You don't care who wins," Parnell 
said. Therese was fussing over the girl. His wife's obvious delight 
made the near-escape in the streets worthwhile. 
"Well, we all lose in the end," Jesse argued, grinning. The 
man's cheerful misanthropism made him a sticky debater. 
Parnell played verbal games with Bliss, and at the same time was 
annoyed that he let himself be drawn into such time-wasting 
nonsense. 
"And the futility of that entertains you, doesn't it?" he

snapped. 
"I'm not so foolish as your esteemed father-in-law. I have few 
illusions, my boy. Despite General Grigs-by's money and power 
he doesn't see that politics can't stop this death trip we're OH." 
Therese glowered but the chubby scientist smirked and said, "Oh 
yes, my dear. Our beloved military overlord and Nevin Detloff are 
merely branches off the same tree. The only difference is that 
they appeal to opposing segments of our dying civilization." 
"That's enough," Parnell said sharply. "We've heard your 
theories before, Jesse." 
"Not theories. You'll learn that someday, if you survive long 
enough. If any of us does." Bliss toyed with a tabletop vid, cueing 
a newscast. DetlofFs picture sprawled on the screen then, as 
Jesse changed channels, the silver-haired, distinguished 
figurehead of General Grigsby's party spoke to the viewer. The 
contrast in technique was minimal. Jesse Bliss nodded, amused, 
and Parnell shrugged. The clonist was incorrigible. Not in ten 
years had Parnell decided how much of Jesse's personality was 
act and what real. If the man weren't a genius 
"What's your name, sweetheart?" Therese asked. 
An aching female longing underlined her question. 
For the thousandth time Richard Parnell suffered a twinge of 
guilt. Not that it was his fault. Ter wanted a kid so badly, like a 
lot of other women. Unlike most of the others, his wife had a 
good reason; she'd put family plans aside while she pursued a 
brilliant scientific career. Both Richard and Therese Parnell had 
thought the delay was temporary. Who had dreamed, when they 
were young and newly married, that Ms would happen to the 
entire human race? Infertility. Coming on top of other natural 
catastrophes of overwhelming proportions. Plague, war, famine 
and then infertility. No children born anywhere. Two 
generations, and the spread of the immuno-factor was 
completeinto the body of every woman of childbearing age. 
Every woman on earth, including Therese. 
Thirty years ago it had merely seemed puzzling, not yet a

racial disaster. Then the appalling nature of the syndrome 
became apparent. And its worldwide scope. The Parnells weren't 
alone. Not at all. One couple out of millions. The clock of life 
ticked on inexorably, and no children were born. Year after year. 
And society changed, drastically. Began to panic, realizing that it 
was dying. 
"Can't you tell me your name? Would you like a sandwich?" 
Therese offered her own meager lunch to the girl. 
The child gulped down a mammoth bite and said, "My name's 
Ariadne." 
Bliss turned from his vidcast and exclaimed, "Oh, excellent. 
And she shall lead us out of this labyrinth. You, Richard, must be 
Theseus. Come, that can't be her real name." 
"I read it in a book and liked it," Ariadne said simply. "And he 
can't be Theseus; he's too tall," she announced, pointing 
disparagingly at Parnell. Everyone stared at her, stunned. She 
took their silence for skepticism and lifted her chin defiantly. "I 
did so read it in a book." 
"Indeed?" His eyebrows arched and Bliss handed the girl the 
top sheet off a stack of lab reports. 
"Jesse," Parnell began, worried about Therese's reaction. 
But Ariadne had already started. "The form form-u-la does 
not seem to have any re-spon-sive ef-fect on the" She paused, 
frowning over a difficult word. 
"Nucleus," Therese whispered. 
"Ah! No help." 
"Leave her alone," Parnell warned Jesse Bliss. 
Ariadne paid no attention to the exchange. She nodded 
gratefully at Therese and went on, "Nucleus. Stim-u-la-tion does 
not pro-duce re-cep-tiv-i-ty to to sperm. Ov-um remains"

"Impregnable," Jesse finished for her, cackling at his own 
pun. "Quite so, little Younger. One more dead end for that line of 
research. Try what the technicians will in their biolabs, Mrs. 
Ovum firmly refuses to have anything to do with her husband, 
Mr. Sperm. She rejects him. Regards him as an invading, alien 
substance, like a bacterium. Her immunological defenses rush to 
the rescue. And there you have the chorus of a liebestod for the 
entire human race,-Ariadne, my dear." He took the sheet of 
microfiche back from the bewildered girl. "My compliments. You 
can read. You may very well be the most youthfuland lastof 
your generation to possess that skill." 
Therese embraced Ariadne and said, "She reads beautifully!" 
Wherever did you learn how, darling?" 
"Not in school, certainly," Parnell said under his breath. 
After choking down the rest of her sandwich the girl 
answered, "In the big library. Downtown. I live in the basement." 
"But that's been closed for" Jesse protested. 
"With your parents?" Richard Parnell interrupted. The techs 
surrounding them leaned forward, hanging on the girl's 
response. 
Her parents. Man and woman. Husband and wife. And fertile. 
Here was proofa child eight years old. Conceived and born 
during the last decadewhen not a single other living birth had 
been recorded throughout the United States, the Western 
Hemisphere, the entire world. Not population zero. Negative 
growth, in the old terminology, and on a fright-eningly minus 
scale. The graphs had plummeted. No children born to replace 
the inevitable losses from age and accident and disease. For 
nearly twenty years Richard Parnell had headed the Life Sciences 
Project, frantically searching for a way out of this terrible 
dilemma. And now, here was that impossible realitya living 
child. 
"My mother and daddy are dead," Ariadne said. Then, with 
a shy smile, she added, "You can call me Ria."

"Ria. That's such a pretty name." 
Parnell had to look away, deeply touched by Therese's 
undisguised joy. This wasn't the way they'd planned things when 
they'd "put off" having a family. But Ter finally had a childthe 
only way she could. She was still a beautiful woman, but Dr. 
Therese Parnell was forty-three. If by some miracle Life Sciences 
did make a breakthrough, solved the worldwide infertility crisis, 
in all likelihood it would be too late for Therese. Nature had 
crept up on the Parnells. Time, ticking away. No child of love for 
them, ever. Adoption, of course that was a constant hope. But 
there'd been no children to adoptuntil Ria. 
He hated to intrude, yet he must. "Do you live alone at the 
library, Ria?" Parnell was easy, digging gently. "How do you find 
things to eat? Do you have an ident card? No, don't worry; I'm 
not going to turn you in." His assurance was for Therese as much 
as the girl. "Ter, if she's not registered, the government doesn't 
have any records on her. Her life will start now, with us. We have 
the influence to" 
"You mean General Ogden Grigsby does," Jesse laughed. 
"Marvelous how moneyand all that military hardwarewill 
dissolve red tape. Oh, I'm sure the General will arrange the 
adoption. Who's going to argue with that much money and 
power? Ah, if you could put the wealth of Grigsby and Nevin 
Det-loff together, they could rule the worldor what's left of it." 
Parnell tried to blot out Jesse's remarks. Ria's parents. If 
only he'd hoped to use Grigsby's network and resources to 
locate that couple. Ria's mother had escaped the infertility 
syndrome. Or had the critical factor been locked hi the father's 
genes? They needed tissue samplesova and sperm, DNA, 
RNAthe whole gamut of experimentation. Pin down the 
isolating element. The answer. Find why and how that couple 
was uniqueand how to synthesize their secret. That would save 
humanity from biological extinction. But if Ria's parents were 
dead, that left only 
"Can I stay here with you?" Ria begged wistfully. "It's cold in 
the library."

"Downstairs. The juvenile section," Therese said, 
"Children's books. That's how she learned to read. Reference 
materials, maybe even tapes." 
Ria shook her head. "The tape machines won't run any more." 
"Not with the power off," Bliss said. "The municipals won't 
waste precious electricity on an abandoned library." 
"Of course you can stay with us. Richard and I will be your 
daddy and mommy," Therese promised. 
Parnell felt torn. Happy for Therese, for himself. Wanting to 
take care of that cute little waif, make her life well-fed and filled 
with pleasure. And at the same time the scientific challenge here 
gripped him. A chance to break the deadlock that was killing all 
of mankind. There was so much they could learn from Ria's tiny 
body. The secret of her very existence lay in her cell structure. He 
ought not to think of the girl as a guinea pig. But he had tofor 
the sake of humanity's very survival. 
"Call for you, sir," a tech announced. "It's the General." 
"He doesn't give me time to breathe," Parnell said as he 
wended his way to the phone-vid. 
"There you are, Rich. Glad to see you didn't get caught in that 
riot on Nineteenth. We just heard about it," the phone image 
greeted Parnell. General Grigsby's "gladness" seemed a bit 
abstract; he'd hate to lose a valuable, highly trained subordinate. 
Parnell stared at the bluff, craggy face on the screen. He 
hadn't noticed recently, but the General was showing every day 
of his age. Ogden must be seventy or more. "Yes, I made it, with 
the charts. We'll start processing the new data immediately," 
Parnell said. 
"Good, good!" The hearty but not-really-interested tone 
irritated Parnell. He bit off a retort. Grigsby might have his own 
selfish reasons for keeping Life Sciences operating, but his 
bankroll had been its lifes-blood. Grigsby's reasonsa yearning

for an heir to his line, a longing as deep as Therese's for a child. 
Parnell glanced at Ria. 
"Ogden, there's something I'd like you to see" He didn't get 
the chance to reveal his surprise. One of the techs grabbed his 
sleeve, saying, "Getting awfully hot in here, Doctor." 
"What's that?" Grigsby didn't like to be shunted aside. 
Jesse Bliss and a number of others were peering down 
through the wall of glass, toward the street. Now they began to 
retreat. Parnell saw the first upward lickings of flames 
shimmering beyond the glass. "What's going on?" the General 
demanded. "That maniac Detloff's stirred up the whole city with 
his speech this time. The whole North Central district Hundreds 
of people dead and injured in riots." 
"Tell him we soon may join their ranks." Bliss surveyed the 
situation coolly. "It's the rioters. They're trying to burn us out. I 
think you stirred them up as much as Detloff did, Rich." 
Parnell started to counter that with a blistering oath, but a 
tech yelped, "They're piling up the debris! We'll burn to death!" 
"Take it easy," he ordered. "This building's fireproof." 
"Ah, but we are not, Richard," Bliss corrected him. "We can 
indeed sit here, waiting while the temperature reaches the frying 
point. Then poof! Up we'll go. We and all your research. Yours. 
Mine's safe outside the city, at my lab. Of course, /'// be dead, 
but my work will survive." Bliss grinned at the irony. "Those 
idiots. They don't realize the Life Sciences Project is their 
species' only hope of survival. Now they're going to kill us 
without ever knowing what they've done." 
Chapter II 
"What's going on there?" Grigsby repeated plaintively. 
Parnell filled him in, ending with, "Jesse's right. We need 
help. Fast."

"Harris! Get me the Deputy President. Step on it!" the 
General bellowed offscreen to his aide. Bulldog-gishly, he faced 
Parnell once again and said, "Sit tight, Rich. We'll" Then his 
jaw dropped. 
Ria had slipped beneath Parnell's arm, close to the phone-vid. 
She surveyed the panel controls, tongue pinkly caressing her lips 
in childish concentration. Then she raised her sights and gazed 
directly into Grigsby's startled image. "Are you one of those 
soldiers who shoots people?" she asked with sweet candor. 
"Who ?" The General's amazement was pathetically comical. 
"Allow me," Parnell said, smiling. "This is Ariadne Ria, for 
short. Ria, this is General Ogden Grigsby, the man who paid for 
that sandwich. She was at the dole station, Ogden. I brought her 
up here for safety's sake." 
"She's Ria. Ria" The old man probably hadn't used such a 
fatuous tone since Therese had been a small girl. 
"No, you don't look like a mean man," Ria decided. "I'll bet 
you don't shoot people, even if you do have a uniform on." 
For a few moments wealthy, powerful General Grigsby was a 
bemused, doting old man, utterly enchanted. Parnell detected 
shrewdness in Ria's winsome posturings. She was playing the 
tough military governor for a sucker, twining herself around his 
heart, and very adroitly. Reluctantly, Grigsby forced his thoughts 
back to duty, murmuring, "Ria Therese, you there? You take 
good care of that little angel, you hear? Er ah wheels in 
motion now, Rich. I've got some fire fighters on the way to your 
area. And there'll be some mop-up troops behind them. Be there 
soonest." 
As the General moved off to talk to his aides Parnell looked 
around. The danger of the fire was very real, yet the techs 
followed Riamoths drawn to a pretty little flame. And Ria 
wallowed in that adoration. She posed and simpered and 
winked, teasing smiles. Obviously, given any situation short of a 
food dole riot, Ria could use her natural appeal to get her way. 
She probably didn't comprehend why adults turned to mush

when they met her, but she used their reactions. Parnell 
understood very well. He'd felt the same awed wonder his techs 
now displayed. These scientifically trained people who'd been 
working for years on the life-threatening infertility puzzle. They 
saw Ria in intellectual terms, grasped the potential here, in her 
very existence. But they also saw her in quite human and 
emotional terms. 
Parnell sympathized, but Ria's talent for hypnotizing was 
annoying. She was making useless rubber-neckers out of his 
staff. He jerked up an arm and ordered, "Get that equipment 
away from the windows before the heat ruins it." 
"Right away!" Abashed, Ria's spell broken, they sprang to 
obey, pulling at desks, computer consoles, files, moving 
everything that wasn't welded or bolted down. 
"This way !" 
"Lift that end a little." 
"There, that gets most of it!" 
"And the core tapes are in the vaults. The fire can't damage 
those," one of the computer specialists said in relief, 
Parnell eyed him bleakly. The tapessafe? For how long? 
Maybe the fire fighters and Grigsby's shock troops could handle 
the crisis in the streets this time. But what of tomorrow, next 
week? The news reports got worse and worse, civilization 
teetering nearer and nearer complete collapse. At the rate things 
were goingeven with the fresh hope Ria had given them allby 
the time Life Sciences could solve the sterility puzzle there'd be 
no human race left to salvage. 
He exchanged a look with his wife. Ter's attention was split, 
naturally, part of it lingering on the girl. But Therese Parnell was 
a scientist as well as a woman, and her rapport with Richard had 
always been uncanny. "You're right," she said, though he hadn't 
spoken. "We can't take chances. Not now, when we're so close to 
the answer."

"Closer than any of you realizes," Jesse Bliss muttered into his 
beard. But he'd been talking major breakthrough so long neither 
Parnell paid him much heed. 
Richard said, "Yates, start an update feed to the sister labs. 
Everything complete to this hour. I want them to have the full 
package while we've still got some com lines and comp hookups 
operational." 
As the computer techs hurried to comply Richard Parnell felt 
a grim satisfaction. No, that howling mob wasn't going to 
destroy all they'd worked for hi Life Sciences. Burn the building 
if they could, but the subsidiary labs in the project would have 
copies of the data. Viral research, DNA mutation theory, slide 
prints from the bacteriology sectionall fed out. Grigsby's 
military trunk lines protected the Life Sciences' computer feed, 
kept it intact from sabotage. Parnell didn't like being indebted 
constantly to his father-in-law, but if it guaranteed the project 
survived and humanity 
Humanity which didn't appreciate his bone-wearying efforts. 
Therese eyed Richard anxiously, reading his fatigue. He'd been 
up half the night as usual, and then the grueling but necessary 
trip cross-town to pick up that classified material from Grigsby's 
HQ, the aborted cab ride back, the riot and Ria. 
All for the sake of that ravening mob outside, trying to burn 
out his life's work? Their life's work, if only those idiots knew it. 
"Astute, my boy," Jesse sad, tipping an imaginary hat in 
Parnell's direction. "Always carbon-copy one's research. 
Wouldn't it be marvelous if we could duplicate people the same 
way? Solve all our problems." 
Bliss never missed a chance to hammer on his specialty, 
cloning. It was an intriguing possibility, 
Parnell admittedif the snags could be ironed out of the 
technique. So far Bliss and his staff couldn't produce a viable 
clone ex utero , . . and as everyone had learned painfully, in utero 
was out of the question, as unattainable as natural conception 
was, nowadays; the same mutation which spontaneously rejected

all fertilization attempts whether normal or artificial rejected an 
implanted ovum as well. No, cloning wasn't going to be the 
answer unless Jesse Bliss could conquer the big 
hurdlenurturing his embryo to viability. 
"Have you considered what happens if the General's goons 
don't arrive in time?" Bliss was saying pleasantly. "Such a pity if 
all your intelligence and potential went up in smoke." 
Parnell edged close to the heat shimmered glass wall. An 
optical illusion, or could he really see those angry faces below, 
beyond the flames? Youngers, under-thirties down there. The 
middle-aged had screamed off already, to quote the vernacular. 
The crowd feeding the bonfire and howling like banshees were all 
youthful specimensthe ones who stood to benefit most if the 
Life Sciences project solved the infertility riddle. "What's your 
point, Jesse?" Parnell said. "Or do you have one?" 
"Oh, always! I really do have the project's best interests at 
heartsomeday these other blind alleys of research may prove 
useful, I'm sure after cloning saves us from Ragnarok" 
Therese was trying to comb Ria's matted hair, and she grimaced 
at Jesse's boasting. The clonist was unperturbed, going on, "To 
speak plainly, my boy, I'm offering you the hospitality of my lab. 
I have a feeling you're going to need a bolt hole if this rioting 
continues." 
"Northwest Cloning?" Parnell said. "That's sixty kilometers 
out. It'd mean transporting all the equip-ment, specimens, 
ongoing experiments" He considered the prospecthauling 
delicate gear and irreplaceable bio research items through 
chuckholed, riot-torn streets, fires, roving mobs or armed 
toughs. 
"Risky, true," Bliss agreed. "But I'm afraid it's going to get far 
riskier here. Have you seen the latest news? Bad, my boy, very 
bad. Power breakdowns, political upheaval, wildcat strikes 
among those few poor deluded souls who still have 
employment" 
"Yes, yes," Parnell said impatiently.

For once Bliss seemed genuinely altruistic. "Face it, Richard. 
How long can you maintain power to this building? Even 
Grigsby's clout can't make the electricity flow if you haven't got 
enough technicians to man the generators. Look, my lab's smack 
in the middle of the SDP Agricultural District. We've got our 
own solar panel installation, and we're surrounded night and day 
by Grigsby's finest bully boys. Of course they're protecting the 
crops from raiders, the waste recycling plants from theft. But 
their cordon also protects us. And I might add food's no problem 
out there in the sticks; always a little black market bartering in 
algae and soy concentrates, if you know who to talk to, and we 
do."
Ria perked up noticeably at those words. A child of the 
streets, very alert to any possibility of a food source. 
"Your lab's too small," Parnell objected. But mentally he 
envisioned Bliss's setup at the fringe of the metropolis. He'd been 
to the cloning complex numerous times, of course, as project 
coordinator. Now he debated: could Jesse's facility house all the 
extra personnel and research material? 
"A small thing but mine own," Jesse said theatrically, 
scratching his beard. "It'd do you temporarily and isn't that all 
any of us can hope for, these days?" 
"No," Therese countered, and her glance moved meaningfully 
toward Ria. 
Suddenly excited, the girl skipped across to the glass wall, 
crying, "Hey, look! Fire flitters!" 
Through the haze of smoke and flames Parnell saw an 
oncoming airborne parade. The flitters banked gracefully 
between buildings, heading for Life Sciences. They wheeled and 
slowed, hovering above the fire and the rioters. 
"Look! Look!" Ria bounced with joy. "I never saw them this 
close! They're they're like big bugs! Dragonflies!" 
Parnell stared at the child. Ria couldn't have seen dragonflies. 
Those lovely creatures might still exist, a thousand kilometers

from the cities and the massive chemically-forced food process 
enclaves. But Ria might have seen pictures of the insects in 
library books. And she remembered. Such a bright, retentive 
young mind! 
"When will they start?" Ria was asking shrilly. Therese 
explained the fire flitters' operation while the girl kept her eyes 
on the drama outside the window. 
The heliflitters hovered for several minutes, studying the 
situation below. Then the crafts' bellies seemed to zip open, 
dumping fire-dousing fog through the smoke-filled air. The 
odorous and suffocating miasma was yellowish, falling on flames 
and rioters alike. Jesse Bliss laughed and put his impressions of 
the scene into a pungent scatalogical phrase. 
"Jesse!" Therese complained. "Not in front of Ria. Have a little 
decency." 
"Be realistic, my dear. That urchin's heard far worse if she's 
been scrounging a living on the streets," Bliss said. 
He was probably right. Ria ignored this exchange, engrossed 
by the fire fighters' maneuverings, giggling at the outrage of the 
frustrated Younger Party rioters. The flames were dying rapidly 
to a guttering mess. Sizzling, soggy embers seeped black streaks 
onto the cracked pavement. 
"Can't last much longer," a tech chuckled. "Go on, give up, you 
cretins!" 
"They will," another said. "They don't relish getting wet for 
nothing" 
Some of the rioters were slinking away. They were wiser than 
their more stubborn fellows. A new element was entering the 
picture now. Military vehicles grumbled around a distant corner, 
rolling down Nineteenth, heading for the disgruntled mass of 
would-be arsonists. 
Ria's holiday attitude melted. She clutched the cooled window 
sill, apprehensively watching the mini-tanks approach. Therese

bent close to the child, whispering, "It's all right. They'll just 
chase the Youngers away." 
She was protesting too much. General Grigsby's daughter 
knew what her father's orders must be and how thoroughly his 
men would carry out his commands. Maintain order in the 
North Central District. For order, read suppression. And Grigsby 
was likely to be more ruthless than usual, since this particular 
riot had been aimed at the General's personal pet projectLife 
Sciences Research. 
"Uhmmm," and Ria bit her lip, pressing her nose against the 
glass. 
Half a dozen mini-tanks scuttled nimbly over the debris left 
from the food riot. None of the ineffective municipal 
government's "screamer" cars, here. The soldiers inside the tanks 
were equipped with sonic stunners. 
Parnell and his people were insulated by glass and steel. They 
couldn't hearor feelthe sonic waves' impact. But they saw 
their effect. The trapped rioters flailed at heads and ears, mouths 
open as they screamed in pain. 
Those wedged at the front of the crowd couldn't flee. They 
took the brunt of those invisible waves. One by one they 
staggered and fell. 
Overhead, the heliflitters swung in narrow circles. Parnell 
thought of vultures waiting to pick over the victims of a battle. 
But he knew the fire fighters were surveying the remains of the 
barricade against Life Sciences' doors, looking for sparks. 
Apparently the pilots were satisfied with their work. The 
mechanical dragonflies lined up and headed lakeward, 
presumably for their base and a new assignment. 
Therese was speaking to the men in the tanks, anguish 
spilling into helpless words. "Please. That's enough. Quit it. 
They're running now. Please stop" 
But the mini-tanks' drivers mercilessly bracketed the panicky 
rioters. Again and again weapons operators sprayed unseen pain

into the struggling melee. Those who'd been imprudent, too slow 
to run were reduced to writhing, crawling agony, clawing their 
way amid the rubble. 
"The General's boys are impressively thorough." 
Jesse Bliss said. The misanthrope was a trifle pale, shaken by 
the scene of carnage despite his avowed cynicism. "Well, at least 
sonics are cleaner than old-style firearms. Won't kill those poor 
fools." 
"Sometimes it kills them," Ria said, her big eyes accusing the 
clonist. "The loud guns hurt old people, and sick people. 
Sometimes their heads hurt awful, and then they start to bleed 
and sometimes they die." 
 Therese shuddered violently and hid her face in her 
long-fingered hands for a heartbeat. Then she gathered Ria into 
her arms, cuddling the child close. The woman scientist wept 
apologies for the cruelty of her father's troops. 
And at that instant the phone-vid hummed to fresh life. 
Ogden Grigsby bellowing, "Rich, you there? Harris tells me our 
people should be on the line now. Situation look well in hand?" 
Tensing, her breast rising with angry breathing, Therese 
readied a retort. Parnell said softly, "Don't. You know you can't 
reach himnot that way." The fury in his wife's eyes died, 
replaced by tears. 
"Rich?" the old man paged again. 
Parnell bent over the com unit. "I'm here. You can call off your 
dogs. The riot's finished. Anything further is overkill." 
Grigsby didn't bother to answer, his interest shifting, his voice 
softening. "Is where's the little girl? Ria? Are you there, 
honey?" 
After studying Therese's sorrow-creased face, Ria came to the 
phone-vid, confronting Grigsby's image. "What do you want?"

"Those those ruffians didn't hurt you, did they, sweetheart?" 
the General cooed. The adoring, hoped-to-be grandfather. Only 
very recently had Ogden Grigsby at last accepted the bitter 
truththat The-rese, his daughter, like all other women in the 
world was barren. There would be no grandchildren of his flesh, 
none to comfort his old age. That hurt Grigsby, badly. He was a 
man who'd treasured his individuality, his "line"; immortality to 
him meant survival of his seed through his daughter, her 
children, her children's children. Learning he too was 
condemned to family-line extinction had been a body blow for 
old Grigsby. 
Ria had been looking him over at some length, and now she 
said, "You're the man who has the food?" 
"What T Grigsby mumbled. 
Tolerant with adult thickheadedness, Ria explained, "You 
paid for my sandwich. And the hairy man told me your soldiers 
won't let anyone touch the place where the food comes from." 
Cutting through Grigsby's obvious confusion, Par-nell 
repeated Jesse's remarksthe troops in the SDP Agricultural 
District surrounding the clonist's lab. "Oh," the General said. "I 
guess if you put it that way I am the man in charge." 
"Do you have lots of food?" Ria asked eagerly. 
"Sweetheart, it isn't mine." Grigsby launched into an account 
of supply and demand, the difficulties of algae synthesis, the lack 
of literate workmen, and power failures. Ria was a good 
audience, nodding in all the right places, very 
appreciativegetting further and further under the General's 
tough hide. Finally Grigsby broke off and stared at Ria as if 
seeing her for the first tune. "Where on earth did you come from, 
you little angel? Why, you're just a baby!" 
Ria began to pout and Parnell said hastily, "She's eight, 
Ogden. Not an infant. You do understand the significance of her 
presence, don't you?" 
That aging warrior wasn't a scientist. Grigsby always called

himself a working soldierthough one who'd been the behind 
the scenes power manipulating a strong political wing. During 
the past decades Grigsby had grown quite wealthy from trusts 
and secret investments, one of the few winners in a decaying 
economy. Yet his motives weren't entirely selfish. He'd personally 
bankrolled his son-in-law's Life Sciences Research and rammed 
appropriations through what remained of a federal legislature. 
And his interest was genuine; he read every report of progress 
or lack of same. "A child," he said, thunderstruck at the reality. 
"Eight years old. That means" 
"That she was conceived and born since the sterility factor 
occurred," Parnell concluded. "Her parents were immune from 
the mutation." 
"And, Father, Ria may also be immune," Therese added. She 
put her outrage over the street fight out of her mind, backing up 
her husband with logic and family ties. "Ria's the break we've 
been praying for." Across the room Jesse Bliss was shaking his 
head dubiously, still convinced cloning was the answer, not this 
scrap of a girl. 
Parnell smirked at him, then said, "Ogden, if one child was 
conceived in that time period, there are quite possibly others. 
And hopefully their parents might be alive. Ria's aren't. If we can 
find just one pair of humans who can reproduce one woman 
whose ova won't reject all sperm" 
"But we've already searched exhaustively," Grigsby protested. 
"Yet somehow we overlooked Ria. She wasn't recorded on any 
census," Parnell said. "Understandable, under conditions these 
past years" 
"I'll get Vanoort on this right away," the General said, 
scribbling on a notepad. "We'll find 'em, if they exist." 
"Good! And in the meantime we have to get to the library." 
The old man gaped at him as Parnell said, "Ria says she's been 
living there. We might find some clue to her parents' 
background. Where they came from, possible genetic patterns. 
Everything is important"

"What is it, darling?" Ter interrupted, concerned with Ria. 
The girl trembled with alarm. "No, there's nothing at the 
library," she said. Too loudly. Almost desperately. 
Parnell considered her behavior, then said, "Why don't you 
want us to go there, Ria?" 
She flinched away from his scrutiny, but Therese held her fast. 
The girl was on the verge of tears, but the woman's soothing 
gentled her agitation. Finally Ria dared ask, "You you won't 
hurt anybody if I tell you?" 
"Tell us what?" Parnell was grateful that for once Grigsby 
didn't butt in with overbearing demands. The child had to be 
prompted, led along slowly. 
Or did she? Ria grew sly, looking as crafty as Jesse Bliss ever 
did. A cunning, wary little animal, ready to drive a hard bargain. 
"If I tell you what'll you give me?" 
"Why, anything you want, sweetheart," Grigsby said 
impulsively. Parnell sighed. In a way it was a good thing he and 
Ter hadn't been able to give the old man grandchildren; he'd 
have spoiled them rotten. 
"Food?" Ria said, pouncing. 
Grigsby didn't hesitate a second. "Yes, that could be 
arranged." Not a light promise, these days. 
"How much?" The girl's greed would have been disgusting 
under other circumstances. But that scrawny little form, the 
too-large eyes, the too-white skin this child had known hunger. 
Parnell felt guilty for his strong body, for a boyhood spent in 
years when food was still readily available. 
"Well, I" the General began. 
Ria stepped into her miniature actress skin, nobly saying, "It's 
not for me, you know. It's for them." She was a natural ham. 
Parnell had seen similar melodrama and pathos on vid

performances, but Ria wouldn't have much experience with 
those. 
"Who are you talking about?" Therese put in a bit sternly, 
injecting some maternal discipline in this developing farce. 
Deciding she'd milked for effect long enough, Ria confessed, 
"The Olders. Emmett and Delores and the others." As the 
adults waited for details Ria lowered her head and mumbled, 
"They they live at the library too." 
"Foster parents," Parnell said, snapping his fingers. "Or foster 
grandparents." 
"All a sham!" Jesse Bliss said with a sarcastic chuckle. "All 
that heartrending business of a poor, abandoned waif, alone, 
alone in the world!" 
"No, she wasn't alone, luckily." Parnell thoughtfully ran a 
hand through his sandy hair. "Olders. Retirees, maybe. They'd be 
literate. They must have taught her. Oh, she's still a bright kid, 
Ter. No argument. But she'd learn a lot faster with help, agreed? 
Oldersteaching her to read, and how much else?" 
Grigsby was nodding, following his son-in-law's speculation. 
Appropriate, since Grigsby was the unofficial head of what 
passed for the old people's political partythe Olders, a corollary 
to Nevin Detloff's Younger Party. 
Squatters, refugees, old timers, hiding in a library, raising one 
of the last children born to humanity. What dying skills and 
knowledge did those Olders possess? With the human race on its 
last legs every piece of information, every rapidly-vanishing 
talent became more precious. In this case, critical. 
"Ria's tutors," Therese said, beaming at the prospect. "They 
may have known her parents, Richard!" 
"Keep hoping," he said, clinging to the same idea. 
"Library?" the General muttered, dazed.

"Ria said it was downtown, and that there was no power for 
the tape machines. Undoubtedly she's talking about the 
Carnegie," Parnell explained. Ria's large eyes agreed. Now that 
her secret was revealed she seemed to be throwing herselfand 
her elderly guardianson the mercy of the adults surrounding 
her. "She couldn't have walked all the way from a suburban 
branch. No, it has to be the Carnegie. Ogden, we've got to get 
there and interview those Oldersnow." 
Grigsby blinked, shifting mental gears. "Let let me check my 
maps. Harris ! Mmm twenty blocks, crosstown. You'll need 
troops." 
"Hell, no!" Parnell shouted. "At least not in sight of the 
building. If these Olders are there, they'll think they're being 
attacked. You want to trigger wholesale heart failures? No, this 
is going to require trained specialistsmedicine, sociology I'll 
start assembling a team." 
"You'll never make it, Rich," Grigsby said solemnly. 
Ria had been listening, very intent. Now she grabbed the edge 
of the phone-vid. "Oh, please! I promised them I'd bring them 
some food" 
Jesse Bliss grew arch. "And what happened to all those pitiful 
appeals to remain here with us forever and forever? Hmm? 
Another sham. Sharpen up, my boy. This pretty little urchin 
planned all along to weasel her way into our hearts. Use us. Find 
out where the bonesand attached algae concentrates were 
buried. Then most likely she'd steal it for her dotard guardians 
back at the library and tomorrow we'd find her gone. Richard, 
you've been had." 
"No, not yet," Parnell said. "Ogden, what about that food you 
promised Ria? We'll need enough to supply how many?" 
"Twelve," Ria said in a tiny voice. 
"All right. Twelve Olders. And I'll want them put on your 
permanent food supply lists. If we're going to be pumping them 
for information, we've got to keep them healthy."

Grigsby blustered, never happy taking orders from anyone. 
But this wasn't the first timeby farthat he and Parnell had 
bumped heads. And as usual, when the argument ranged for Life 
Sciences, the old officer conceded. Grudgingly, he said, "I I 
suppose I can arrange for some commodities. Things are tight, 
but but see here, Richyou can't make it to that library on 
your own. The Deputy President's just declared martial law 
throughout the North Central District" 
"Oh, Detloff will spit nails over that!" Jesse chortled. 
"All the more reason to get to the library before a fire or a riot 
wipes out those Olders," Parnell insisted. Therese was worried, 
but she kept her arguments locked up. He threw her a consoling 
wink then said, "Ogden, how about some heliflitters? Land 'em 
on our roof like you always do." 
"Wish I could! I've had to assign them all to Masterson. He's 
got a dock firethree full boatloads of algae concentrates. We 
can't afford to lose those.'" Grigsby's jowls and pendulous lower 
lip jiggled, his gaze shifting from his son-in-law to his daughter 
to Ria. "There's no option?" 
"None." Parnell verbally underlined and italicized. 
"Well, perhaps I could arrange an escort" 
"As long as you keep your troops away from the library itself," 
Parnell said heavily. "The techs and I can walk the last block or 
so."
"The food," Ria nagged. 
Nodding, amused, Parnell said, "Yes, don't forget the food by 
all means. Let's give those Olders a good motive for cooperating 
with us." 
"And you have to take me along with you," Ria announced. 
"It's too dangerous!" Therese cried. 
The girl glanced at the window where the fire had danced a

quarter of an hour earlier. She knew the street jungle far better 
than any of Parnell's pampered scientists and techs, and plainly 
the child didn't look forward to venturing out again. But she said 
stubbornly, "The Olders won't let you in if I'm not with you. 
There's there's a password." Parnell cocked a skeptical eyebrow 
and Ria added, "There is! I I always bring them back food. I'm 
supposed to. They're too old to go to the disty stations now. They 
walk too slow. Somebody would knock them down" 
"Richard," Therese said anxiously. 
"We will have better entree with Ria as our guide," he said. 
He empathized deeply with his wife's nightmarea mirror of his 
own. Gently, he promised, "Nothing will happen to her. I swear." 
Much more ominously, Grigsby backed him up. "No, 
nothing's going to happen to that child, Therese. You can count 
on that. Harris ! Give me about an hour, Rich" 
Now that the decision was made the wait seemed 
interminable. Richard Parnell fought depression, imagining a 
dozen tragic things which could turn this plan to futility. Riots. 
Martial law. Roving mobs of Detloff's Younger Party minions, 
angry at their hunger, their illiteracy, the blank wall of sterility, 
of non-existence which rode them like harpies. 
Twenty blocks crosstown to the library. And when Parnell was 
in his teens that would have been no more than a half-hour's cab 
ride, less if the traffic was light. But now 
He busied himself picking a team to accompany him on this 
expedition. Assigning work during his absence. Ter could handle 
the broader details, but he hated to dump it all on her, as he was 
forced to much too often. The second Dr. Parnell at Life Sciences 
had the seniority and capability to handle directorship, but 
Richard preferred that Ter not be burdened with administration. 
She had her bio-medical research to pursueand she'd already 
given up a lot for her career. Delaying her natural instincts 
toward family until it was too late. 
Just his weariness and pique, or were his techs less 
enterprising than they used to be? Parnell's staff drew on the

cream of the nation's brains. But this decades' long scientific 
searcha seemingly deadend, literally, streetwas getting them 
down. They all were developing a what's-the-use? syndrome. Like 
the entire human race, sinking beneath ennui and defeatism. If 
there wasn't to be another generation to inherit their labors 
"You won't forget my offer of hospitality?" Jesse Bliss 
reminded Parnell as he put the finishing touches on 
preparations. The clonist had been watching a shifting telecast, 
amused at the melange of street-fighting, speeches from 
Grigsby's Older Party spokesman intoning platitudes of peace 
and calm intermingled with fulminations against the Youngers, 
and speeches from Detloffaccusing the military of grinding 
down his followers, insisting that the martial law order was a 
plot of the Older-controlled establishment and the Middle-Aged 
Employables Party 
Snorting at the propaganda, the brainless loggerhead quality 
of the media, Parnell turned''away, nodding a silent assent to 
Bliss' invitation. 
"Hmm," Jesse said, eyeing the debacle of a street war. "I 
believe I'll spend the night, at least. Catch me trying to get back 
to my own lab in that!" 
"I don't blame you. You're welcome as long as you care to stay, 
Jesse," Parnell said, checking his chrono. "Tune," and his aides 
scrambled to collect their porta-corders and other equipment. 
"I I found Ria some warmer clothes," Therese said. She'd 
buttoned the girl snugly into castoffs all too large. Ria looked 
up trustfully at Richard Parnell. She was an appealing waif 
swathed in out-sized gifts of affection. Therese's manner was 
that of a mother seeing her only child off to a new school in a bad 
neighborhood. 
"Hold the fort," he said lightly, and Ter snapped him a mock 
salute. Their ritual was for the benefit of subordinates. The Drs. 
Parnell, a leadership team. He was quietly proud he could leave 
the project in her hands without any qualms. Not many men had 
that much woman.

He allowed himself one tantalizing caress along her shoulder, 
touching Ter's white throat. Never enough time. They'd 
sacrificed their privacy to the project, the fight against race 
extinction. Ter's closeness made him ache. The most natural 
need in the world, that drive which had created all of humanity's 
next generations. But there wouldn't be any more generations 
unless 
Grigsby himself showed up with a convoy of mini-tanks and 
thirty crack infantrymen armed both with stunners and old-style 
rifles. Tough men, thoroughly professional. Theoretically they 
remained the tool of civilian authority. But in practice they were 
Grigsby's personal armyprotecting or destroying as the General 
commanded. 
"You ready to take on Detloffs staff?" Parnell said archly, 
counting the military array. "He's not likely to come out here in 
the streets." 
"Where's the food?" Ria cut in, demanding proof of good 
faith. 
Grigsby had been staring at the girl, plainly longing to dandle 
the child on his knee. Only the presence of his men kept him hi 
line. He tugged at his blouse and cleared his throat.- "See for 
yourself." 
At his gesture one of the soldiers yanked open a weapons bay 
on the lead mini-tank. Other enlisted men imitated his action, 
revealing that all the vehicles held crates, boxes, and plasticene 
containers. Algae, soy concentrates, even precious wheat-stuff. 
The biggest hoard Parnell had seen in months. It had to have 
cost Grigsby a small fortune. 
Ria selected a container and wrenched at the lid. She handed 
it to the soldier beside her. The man grinned oafishly, a flash of 
ivory-yellow teeth in a black face. He twisted the cap free and Ria 
dipped a finger into the contents, licked a sample. "Okay. There's 
really something in all those others? You're not fooling?" 
Grigsby was pained. "I promise you. They're all full." Under 
Ria's steady, calculating gaze he grew uneasy, roaring, "All right!

Ramirez, let's move 'em out!" 
Surprised to learn Grigsby intended to accompany themthe 
commander in chief of the North Central District, on a minor 
mission like this?Parnell climbed into the lead tank. Then he 
considered. Was this a minor mission? Or thanks to Ria and 
those Olders might it be the most important undertaking 
Grigsby could endorse? Yes, it just might. 
He wedged his long legs into position, perched Ria on his lap. 
His techs were finding seats elsewhere in the caravan and the 
infantrymen scrambled atop the convoy's metal aprons and 
turretsa bristling, living encrustation of armed might. 
The lead tank jerked into gear and lurched forward, its 
batteries growling. Ria tensed, huddling against Parnell. 
Leisurely, the tank pirouetted over the debris of the rioters, 
passed the locked food distribution station. 
Parnell leaned forward, peered through the narrow steering 
port, out at the littered and deserted street. Give Grigsby's shock 
troops their duethey'd been neat; not a single body left to 
clutter the grey city-scape. But there were a few dark stains on 
the broken pavementstains which looked very much Uke blood. 
Chapter III 
As the convoy neared the intersection of Canal and 
Nineteenth Parnell noticed the operating building-screen filling 
three stories of a distant Media Center. Nevin Detloff's 
handsome visage nodded and mouthed to the world below. But 
whatever the wealthy young politician said was garbled to 
unin-telligibility by five intervening city blocks. 
Ria too had seen the broadcast screen. "Oh, look! There's 
Detloff," she said brightly. 
"You know him?" Grigsby was glowering at the child's 
reference to the Older Party's chief nemesis. 
"Uhmm, I see him on the big screens. He talks nice, and he's

so pretty." Ria craned her neck and looked up at Parnell, 
giggling. "You're pretty, too." 
Parnell darted a warning glare at his father-in-law and the 
driver, quashing any retort. But the driver snickered as he said, 
"Spotter's report, sir." Grigsby took the mini-corn headset and 
hunched over, listening, scowling. Parnell suspected he knew the 
cause. Up aheadthe old central expressway was lined by 
figures. People, milling about on the slidewalk abutting the 
expressway's retaining wall. 
"May be trouble," Grigsby grumbled. 
"They're blocking our route?" Parnell said. 
"Not yet. But we'll have to swing past them." The General was 
thumbing the talk button. "Ramirez, alert. Everybody at the 
ready." The staticky response was enthusiastic, almost 
bloodthirsty, and Ria whimpered, burrowing against Parnell's 
broad chest. Grigsby eyed her concernedly, then amended his 
orders. "Ramirez, stunners on a Low Two Setting. That clear? I 
don't want anybody injured. Just discourage them if they try to 
stop us." 
This time the "Yessir!" came just as quickly, but lacked the 
former bone-in-the-teeth tone. 
The mini-tanks had been trundling through the decaying city 
for half a mile. Now they rumbled down a ramp marked "Wrong 
Way" onto the old interstate. The riotersand that Media 
Building carrying Detloff's broadcastwere directly across the 
highway. Filtered, echoing with distortion, Det-loff was 
exhorting his party followers. " Martial law, now. They've taken 
away our jobs, our schools, our money, our hope of the future I 
ask you, friends, what else can they find to take away from us? 
Except our freedom I" 
"Younger Party scum," Grigsby said, assessing the crowd as 
the lead tank paralleled it. The enlisted man driving was 
obviously the same age as the rioting Youngers. He kept his 
mouth shut, though. He knew where his loyaltiesand his meal 
ticketlay.

Parnell fervently hoped the mob would keep their eyes on 
Detloff's image. For once he was happy that rich young 
demogogue was such a mesmerizer. But somebody had a short 
attention span, looked away from the screen, spotted the 
mini-tank convoy creeping past on the expressway. 
Immediately brickbats sailed out into the road. 
The range was too long, but a few makeshift missiles bounced 
and skittered across the pavement toward the tanks. 
A burst of commands crackled over the com unit, and back 
along the convoy the soldiers riding shotgun cut loose with their 
stunners. Parnell wasn't shielded from the effect, this time. The 
sound was too high pitched for human ears, but his viscera 
squirmed as the sonic weapons operated. Concrete dust 
spattered off the retaining wall under the rioters' feet, up into 
their eyes. 
" Aaaaa!" that litany of the Youngers, a stuttering battle 
cry rising from several hundred throats. 
"Low Two Setting!" Grigsby was shouting into his mike. 
"Steady now! Ramirez, keep it moving!" 
And in Parnell's arms Ria shivered. 
The troops raised their sights, and a few bodies toppled over 
the low retaining wall onto the expressway. Still others in the 
mob took the initiative, daring the long jump from slidewalk to 
chuckholed roadbed. Shrieking wordlessly, they charged the 
convoy. The scooped up shortball brickbats, heaving them at the 
minitanks. 
"They're all mad!" the General said, his burly face twisting 
with outrage. "Cretins!" Unconsciously he slipped into a slangish 
derogation popular among the Youngers themselves. 
"Get back in there, chuckie," the driver growled, arguing with 
his controls. He tried to force the tank over a heap of rubble and 
the battery pack whined protests. Panel warnings flared red. 
Cursing, the driver punched relays, swiveling the vehicle, starting

a detour. "Have to go around it, sir" 
"Hurry, man, hurry!" and Grigsby pounded the man's 
shoulder encouragingly. 
Parnell stared out the viewport. Several dozen howling 
Youngers were rushing the convoy, though sonic pain struck 
down random victims among them. 
Six or seven of them made it through the barrage to Grigsby's 
lead tank. The raving attackers dragged enlisted men off the 
tank's apron, pummeling them with clubs, fists, feet. "Stop!" the 
General roared to the driver. 
Parnell shoved Ria off his lap, into a narrow crevice between 
seats, warned her to keep her head down. Then he jerked up the 
door handle and thrust it outward sharplyinto the bodies of the 
attacking Youngers. While one soldier helped a buddy to his feet 
a third retrieved his sonic weapon and sprayed the dazed 
civilians. 
"Up top!" Grigsby was yelling, waving at his troops. 
Parnell clenched a fist, ready to repel a further attempt from 
the Youngers. But that final burst of sonicsnot on Setting 
Twohad done its work. The Youngers, three men and four 
women in their twenties, lay on the pavement, twitching 
spasmodically and moaning. 
He pulled his head back inside and dogged the tank's door. 
Behind them, puffing to catch up, several more soldiers galloped 
after the accelerating tank. They scrambled aboard, clung to the 
apron once more. 
"Women," Grigsby was saying in an oddly constrained voice. 
"No more than girls." 
"And how, chuckie," the driver sotto voced. The General took 
no notice. He was on the com, angry, " Unit Five? Why haven't 
we got somebody on Tenth, outside the Media Building? Well, 
you move it, Colonel! I want some action! This isn't a game!" 
Then he put down the com set, muttering. "Girls. Insane. Like

animals, charging us that way." 
"As Detloff constantly reminds them, they haven't anything to 
live formen or women." Ria had wriggled out of her hidey-hole, 
clinging to Parnell again and sniffling. Not weeping. She'd seen 
stunners hi action before, was somewhat inured to their effect. 
Parnell reached forward and cued the tank's rear periscreen. 
The driver nodded respectfully at the gesture. Parnell wasn't 
certain if the man had forgotten that optional equipment, or if 
he were disinterested in the fate of the rest of the convoy. Or 
perhaps he'd never been taught how to activate the screen. Or 
how to read, or 
The other tanks were shaking free of their rabid pursuers, 
using their sonics freely, leaving a wake of limp bodies. And 
fading from sight now, that immense image of Detloff, relayed 
from a studio somewhere. The Younger Party leader, urging his 
followers to take heartwhile dozens of them lay unconscious as 
a result of too much foolhardy courage. 
Abruptly, as if seeking distraction from the massacre, Ria 
asked, "Is this road specially for for tanks?" 
"Gracious no, honey," Grigsby smiled. "It was designed for 
carsautomobiles. Do you know what an automobile is? Like 
like a taxi." The girl smiled, unconvinced. 
No sense hi elaborating, in telling her cars used to run on 
gasolineand that there used to be mil-lions of the things, 
jamming this same expressway. Gasoline, the family carthe 
family all things of the past. Parnell recalled the Nineties, when 
he was a boy, sitting in an expensive, highpowered automobile in 
bumper to bumper traffic. Going nowhere fast. No one had 
realized that was a prediction of humanity's future, then. 
The driver reached his designated map point, an off ramp 
guarded by several uniformed detachments. The officer in charge 
saluted Grigsby's tank, waved them through. Parnell was 
impressed, and disturbed. Usually Grigsby opted for a low 
profile. The display of weaponry and troop strength was unusual, 
speaking of deeper trouble than normal in the streets. But what

was "normal", lately? 
They were near the lakefront now, a quieter, nearly desolate 
area of the old city. This hadn't been a residential section for fifty 
years, and Parnell saw few civilians abroad. Those he did see 
were well aware of the martial law; they scurried when they 
spotted the tanks, diving into the shadows like rats. The streets 
were an empty vista of boarded-up store fronts and drooping 
marquees from grander days long past. 
This had been the city's cultural heartand now it lay in 
cardiac arrest. Who cared about museums, theatres, schools of 
the arts when there was too little to eat, power failed, water 
supplies were polluted or non-existent? No work, no food, no 
hope 
"Up ahead, sir," the driver announced. 
"Park on State," Grigsby said, and Parnell allowed himself to 
relax. The old man had remembered the conditions of this 
expedition. 
The tank convoy mumbled to a halt and infantrymen leaped 
down, rifles at ready, surveying door-ways and rooftops for 
assassins. Not until they'd checked things out thoroughly did 
Grigsby open the door. Ria scrambled out and the two men 
followed. They emerged onto a deserted thoroughfare lined by 
limestone monuments to mankind's ideals. 
"Kinda eerie." It was one of Parnell's techs. They'd 
dismounted from their carriers and clustered around Parnell. 
Safety in numbers? That was certainly their attitude, and he 
sympathized. Few of his staff ventured out afoot these days; they 
requisitioned a heliflitter or cab when it was necessary to leave 
Life Sciences. 
Grigsby's troops were unloading the food, stacking it into a 
pile. Ria grabbed a parcel and began walking toward a columned 
building. Parnell watched her a moment, amused; the box was 
nearly as large as Ria. Her greed was showing, again. He hefted a 
crate to his shoulder and signaled his techs to tote their share, 
too. Even Grigsby was playing beast of burden. His junior officer

was appalled, unwillingly yessiring to an order to "stand by." 
Ria climbed straight up the library's front steps. In her wake 
Parnell stared in nostalgic wonder. The place was surprisingly 
intact, a relic from happier days. He passed sculptured stone 
lions, kicking his way through wind-blown litter. No, the library 
seemed basically unchanged. Probably books hadn't held much 
appeal for roving gangs hunting food. No food distribution 
stations in non-residential areas, either. Nothing to attract 
looters. 
"Emmett?" Ria was scratching at the big oaken front door. 
"I thought you said you lived in the basement," Parnell said. 
"We do, but those doors are all barricadedfrom the Bad 
Time," Ria explained, scratching again. She must refer to the 
first wave of serious civil disturbances, years agowhen the 
moribund Federals had officially admitted the sterility problem 
was true, not a rumor. Again, Ria could have no memory of the 
Bad Time, but Olders might. 
"Emmett? Come on! Quin quintessence!" Ria said 
loudly, petulantly, presumably speaking the "password" she'd 
mentioned. 
And after a long wait, the door creaked open a few 
centimeters. A terribly wrinkled face peeped out at Ria. A beaked 
nose, rheumy blue eyes, a thatch of white hair, a quavery voice 
asking, "Is that you, child?" 
Then the elderly doorkeeper seemed to recognize Ria wasn't 
alone. He reacted with fright, particularly to Grigsby's uniform. 
The ancient tried simultaneously to yank Ria within the building 
and slam the door. 
"No, no!" Ria said irritably, stamping her foot. "It's okay! 
They're friends. Really! I brought food lots of food. See? Come 
on. Open up." 
Parnell suspected Emmett lacked the muscle to keep them 
out. He appeared quite frail. Plainly unsure he was doing the

right thing, Emmett eased open the heavy door. He struggled 
with impulse, a reflexive old-fashioned courtesy. "Won't won't 
you come in? It's not often we have visitors. But if you're truly 
friends of Ria's" 
The library's interior swept away the years. Memories of 
Parnell's boyhood rose. He'd never been in this particular 
building, but libraries shared a common aura. Footsteps echoed 
off a high, domed ceiling where traces of ornate gilt clung to 
peeling wainscotting. Faded murals decorated several walls, and 
startlingly new-looking ones filled others. Pale light sifted 
through tall windows at the north and south ends of the library; 
fortunately the panes didn't face the street and had escaped 
vandalism. The place had a faintly dusty odor. Not unpleasant. It 
was a scent suggesting honorable age and objects no longer used 
much. 
"What a perfect state of preservation!" one of the techs 
marveled. 
"Absolutely intact," Lynn, another tech, agreed. She was 
Parnell's socio-pattern expert. Naturally Lynn would be chafing 
at the bit to examine the library, a living slice from the past. 
Emmett himself was a museum piece, but his state of 
preservation was poor. His wrinkled face was pinched with cold 
despite the several threadbare jackets he was wearing and he 
hobbled arthritically. Somehow the old man looked familiar, as if 
Parnell might have seen Emmett's picture in a newspaper 
when the library's doorkeeper was much younger, of course. 
Then Parnell pulled his thoughts up short. Newspaper? Grigsby 
wasn't the only one feeling his years! How long had it been since 
anyone had seen a newspaper? Seen any form of news except the 
confusing blur which melted and shifted across vid screens? 
"If you'll come this way," Emmett said, clutching a worn stair 
raih'ng, shuffling down steps behind what had been the library's 
main checkout desk. "Watch your footing. Rather dark here, I'm 
afraid." 
Tactlessly, one of the techs asked, "But why don't you stay up 
here where there's some natural lighting? You could build a fire,

stay comfortable" 
"And get smoke on the books? Sacrilege!" Emmett exclaimed. 
Lynn and the other techs glowered at the offender, but Emmett 
had already forgotten the gaffe. He hailed the dim corners of the 
basement. "Delores Leland everybody! Look here! Ria's back, 
and she's brought us some company." 
Parnell heard a scratching, as of someone trying to light an 
old-time match. No igniters? No mini-celled torches? In the 
gloomy basement a tiny golden flame warmed to feeble life. 
They'd been sitting in the darklike the unused books lining 
the library's shelves. Sitting, waiting waiting to die. There 
were, counting Emmett, twelve of them, as Ria had said. One 
stub of a candle for illumination, sharing a few rags that could 
have been called blankets twenty years ago. On an empty shelf 
behind them Parnell saw the glint of glasspreserves! Antique 
canning jars! Only a few of them, obviously a precious horde, a 
desperation supply to hold off starvation in case the worst 
happened. Parnell hadn't seen canned vegetables since he felt 
as if he'd stepped into a time machine. 
The old faces! Washed by a wavering glow from a single 
candle, underlighted, wrinkles, sunken cheeks, pouchy eyelids 
unflatteringly accented. They winked and rustled among 
themselves, elderly hermits hiding in their book-filled cave. 
"Lynn, turn on a torch," Parnell said. "Just one, and a low 
setting, for now." He didn't want to give eyes unaccustomed to 
artificial lighting pain. Even so they winced, rubbed at tears. 
"Who who is it? Is it robbers?" 
"Oh, mercy! They've found us found us!" one of the old 
people wailed. 
"Hush! Now you know Ria wouldn't do that," a strong-voiced 
woman growled, dragging herself up from her seat on the tiled 
floor. 
"I brought you some food," Ria said, prying open her package,

proudly handing out soy patties. "You can mash 'em up pretty 
good. They're not hard, like those pills." 
Toothless old gums gnawed at the gifts. Several of the Olders 
were senile, past anything but the simplest understanding. 
Others, like Emmett, a gaunt, skeletal man named Leland, and 
the loud speaking womanDeloreswere hardier, more alert. 
They could force themselves to wait on the food, more interested 
in Ria's new-found "friends." 
"A soldier!" Delores said, her snappish dark eyes narrowing at 
Grigsby. "Did you forget what we told you about soldiers?" 
"Wipe us all out!" one of those living mummies whined. 
"Madam, I assure you" Grigsby began. 
"Oh, he's okay," Ria said disdainfully. "This time it was 
Youngers tried to keep us away. You don't have to worry about 
him." 
"Quite right." Grigsby was staring at the human wreckage 
revealed by the beam of the mini-cell torch. The hard-bitten 
General was moved as he said, "No, my people won't hurt you. 
Any of you. As a matter of fact, I'd like your permission to bring 
hi some more food." 
At that several Olders looked up, intrigued. Ria was patient 
beyond her years, making sure everyone had food, guiding 
crippled hands to trembling lips. Who here was the child, and 
who the guardian? Ria confirmed, "Oh, yes, he has lots of food. 
Lots and lots. He can bring it in, can't he, Emmett?" 
"Why, I suppose" 
With that lame concession Grigsby hurried out, fumbling his 
way up the dark steps. As if his emotions were on the ragged 
edge and he wanted to escape before he showed too much of 
them. 
Delores said thoughtfully, "My memory's not what it was, but 
he seemed familiar."

"No doubt," Parnell said. "General Ogden Grigsby, the 
Federals' boycott-breaker during the Wheat Burnings of 
Ninety-Five. That's where he made his first reputation, but he's 
gone on from there." 
"Grigsby. Of course!" Emmett exclaimed, and he and the 
skinny man called Leland bobbed acknowledgement at each 
other. "That was the same year you opened the Art School, 
wasn't it?" 
Suddenly Parnell knew that he had seen Emmett's picture in a 
newspaper, years ago. He'd also seen Leland's, and probably 
others in this group. Their photos had appeared accompanying 
articles on culture: the library opening a new branch, an art 
school enlarging its staff, an institute of music beginning a new 
term. Emmett and Leland and the rest were at one time cultural 
celebrities of the city. 
"And who are you, young man?" Delores asked abruptly. 
He grinned and said, "Richard Parnell, and these are some 
members of my staff." After a few quick introductions, he added, 
"I'm director of Life Sciences Project." 
"Oh, the infertility problem," Delores said, nodding. 
Parnell was surprised she'd heard of the situation, isolated 
here in this book mausoleum. "Yes, the Project's purpose is to 
find an answer to this worldwide infertility" 
"And the reason for it?" Leland put in curiously. 
"Reasonsplural," Lynn said. She was switching on a few 
more mini-cell torches, lighting up the basement. The medical 
technician was starting an examination of some of the Olders, 
and other specialists recorded the immediate surroundings. 
Therese Parnell had guessed right; this was the juvenile section 
of the library. Part of the furnishings were gone, possibly burned 
during the long winters. Maybe Emmett wasn't quite so fussy 
about committing smoke-damage sacrilege to mere children's 
books.

Delores leaned against a partially empty shelf and demanded, 
"But you do have some theories about how that all happened, 
surely? It seems so incredible after years of worrying about too 
many people." 
"Yes, ironic, isn't it?" Lynn agreed. She was Therese's closest 
friend, and the two women undoubtedly shared many thoughts 
and emotions. Including their lost chances for maternity. With a 
sad, guilty smile she said, "Too many people, too little land to 
grow food for all those mouthsthat used to be the story. Now 
there are too few people, and still not enough food; climate 
changes, dying agricultural skills, loss of processing knowhow, 
distribution problems all ends up the same." 
"But how could it have started?" Emmett wondered. 
"No simple answers. I mean," Lynn said, "it was one of those 
impossible happenings where everything went wrong at once. 
The famines, the plagues, the weather disasters, and a dozen 
brushfire wars occurring simultaneously. But really, it. started 
with us with women." The other technicians looked up from 
their work, staring at Lynn, and Parnell frowned. He read her 
bitterness, considered interrupting her, decided not to. She 
squared her shoulders and confessed, "Yes, with us women. We 
succumbed to the heady thrill of being free, unfettered by our 
bodies, our hormones, our ova." 
"You had help," Parnell said. "That was an achievement of 
science and technology, and men were definitely involved." 
Lynn laughed and said, "But the decision to use the results of 
that science were ours. No man could have understood our 
feelings. It was a miracle. After millenniano, after millions of 
yearsto say yes ,or no, when we chose, to our own bodies. That 
was very intoxicating!" 
She grew silent and introspective, a woman mourning her 
sex's myopia. Parnell said, "That wasn't it, Lynn. At no time did 
every woman in the world use contraceptives. And remember 
overpopulation. That was a genuine and terrifying problem. 
You're the one who's always reminding us there are no simple 
answers. Now you're offering one."

Emmett and the others were fascinated, listening to an 
engrossing story. Ria was fussing through a box of antique 
stereopticon cards, trying to look bored; but every now and then 
she glanced up puzzling over the adults' words. 
Lynn sighed heavily and smiled. "True. I'm 
exaggeratingbecause it's a personal thing, maybe. But, the 
global adoption of contraception was critical. We didn't realize 
how critical at the time. It was a disguising agent, hiding the 
truth until it was too late." 
"The catastrophes helped," Parnell insisted. 
"Human history is full of catastrophes, but these were special. 
All the graphs coming together at once even though the 
'experts' said that couldn't happen. It did. Deaths from war, 
disease, starvation, on a scale no one had seen for centuries. It 
hit particularly hard at children and peoplewomenof 
reproductive age." 
"And then along came the virus." It was the medical 
technician. He was wrapping a blood pressure cuff around one of 
the Older's arms. Absently, as if lecturing, he said, "We're not 
even sure where the little beastie originated. We think it 
mutated during bacteriological warfare in the Belem Crisis, in 
the Nineties.. Very insidious, it was. Masqueraded as just one 
more flu virus, and a relatively benign one at that. No fatalities. 
Not sufficiently dangerous to warrant developing a vaccine." 
"So it spread, through the entire world," Lynn finished for 
him. "Didn't take as long as you'd think it was incredibly 
contagious. We calculate that by ten years later, turn of the 
century, it had affected every female in the world." 
"Except for immunes," Parnell said, eyeing Ria. 
"But we didn't know there were any immunes, till now." 
Lynn's voice had a tinge of anger hi it. "We didn't realize until it 
was too late that a world-wide option to procreate had become a 
global inability to procreate." 't 
Delores was shaking her head sadly, sympathizing. "How

awful! To" 
"Yes," Lynn said sharply, not wanting pity. "Such a tiny 
alteration in the body's chemistry, a blending of two semi-related 
facts. A woman's immuno-system, her antibodies to fight 
diseaselinking up with an automatic, reproductive reflex; when 
the first, fertilizing sperm reaches a fertile ovum, th,e ovum 
rejects all other sperm. Simple, understandable, logical. Preserve 
the genetic integrity. Every human being is allowed forty-six 
chromosomes, no more. Except that after a female had the 
virusand we all didher body rejected all sperm. And even the 
few who didn't have the mutation full strength and could 
conceive, aborted almost immediately upon conception. Oh, 
Mother Nature played a cruel, cruel joke on us, no mistake!" 
"Not to be able" Delores began, read Lynn's stricken 
expression, and didn't continue. Wisely, she shifted her approach 
and said, "That must have been a terrible come-down for the 
machismo types. No matter how much a man bragged he 
couldn't" 
Parnell kept his face straight, endured Lynn's nasty laughter. 
"That's true!" Then she sobered and said, "But that's even worse. 
Not so much here, or in Europe. But in countries where children 
and procreation were a life-style the effect was crushing. The 
mutation took away their their hearts. The riots, the mass 
suicides, the countless little wars so much of that can be traced 
to the spread of the infertility factor. Life wasn't beginning any 
more, and for too many people that meant there was no point in 
anythingexcept violence, killing, hedonistic satisfactions." 
There was a loud thumping, a startling intrusion into 
everyone's bleak thoughts. Boots, stomping down the stairs. 
Grigsby's troops, every man carrying a food package. 
The Olders tensed, seeing the uniforms, then relaxed as the 
soldiers paid them no attention. The sergeant directed 
proceedings, and the human conveyor belt piled food in an 
ever-growing heap. 
"Is is all that for us?" Leland said incredulously.

"So much of it!" Emmett was shocked. "Ria, how on earth did 
you ? Where is all this coming from? Didn't you use our ident 
cards at the station? You told us you wouldn't steal, this time." 
Ria shrugged and said, "I didn't get a chance to use the 
cards." 
Parnell hastily described the circumstances, Emmett and the 
others hanging on his narration. And when he had finished 
Delores exclaimed, "Why, you saved Ria's life! I knew we 
shouldn't let her risk it. She's too young. And all this is from 
General Grigsby? And here we thought" 
"We were wrong," Leland said simply. "Maybe Jeremy and 
Karyl were too. But they were so naive, so prejudiced about 
thingslike the military." 
Alertly, Parnell homed on those remarks. Jeremy and Karyl? 
Were? Past tense. People who were prejudiced, naive. Who? 
"However can we repay the Generaland you?" Emmett said. 
Cutting direct, Parnell suggested, "By answering some 
questions about Ria's parents." He wished the soldiers weren't so 
noisy. Their clatter was distracting. But as the mound of food 
grew, so did the gratitude hi those old eyes. Parnell filled in 
details, trimming away scientific fat, going to the heart. He 
concentrated on Emmett, Leland, and Delores; they were most 
likely to help, most able to. 
Emmett was appalled, murmuring, "We didn't know just how 
bad it wasout there. Oh, Ria brought us stories, but" 
"It's a global disaster,"-Parnell confirmed. "A species disaster. 
Even now that we've found Ria, time is critical. We must start 
the turn-round soon. If the situation gets much worse, it won't 
make any difference if Ria and a few other children are immune; 
there won't be any civilization left for them to inherit." 
The pile of food now filled the center of the library's basement. 
The soldiers were tiring, moving more and more slowly, setting 
boxes down hard, climbing back up the steps instead of running.

"Anything we can do to help," Emmett said earnestly. 
"Anything," and Lynn nudged a porta-corder mike in close, ready 
to pick up whatever anyone said. 
Delores stared lovingly at Ria. "Her parentsa young couple, 
very young, hardly old enough to have a babe in arms. They 
hadn't named Ria. They said she should choose her own name. 
That's the way Jeremy and Karyl thought." Parnell waited for a 
further identification, but the old woman said, "I'm sorry. They 
never told us who they were or where they came from. Just sort 
of drifted in one day. They said the trappings of the world 
weren't important. To them it was the free spiritthat's what 
they called it." 
"You saw those new murals upstairs?" Leland asked 
enthusiastically. "Jeremy's work. He was a fine young talent. 
Very promising." 
"And Karyla voice like an angel," Emmett said, sighing 
nostalgically. "And she was so clever with her hands. She helped 
me repair books and put together broken shelves. Sewed coats 
for us out of of nothing, really! So resourceful. They both were. 
They said they could have fixed the tape machines, too, but of 
course there was no point without electricity. I wish for Ria's 
sake she could have learned so much more if we'd had tapes. 
We have thousands of them in the files. Not the quality of our 
books" 
Delores handed a cylindrical carton to Parnell. He blinked, 
turned it about in his hands curiously. Ria pouted a moment, 
then looked away, pretending not to care if Parnell opened the 
little box. 
Mystified, Parnell pried the lid off the carton. A rotting label 
reading "library paste" clung to its side. And insidetwo lives. 
Greeting sheets from years ago: "Happy Birthday to Jerry!" 
"The Best Year-End Day Ever, Karyl!" A man's old-fashioned 
digital chronometer inscribed "From Dad". A heart-shaped 
locket sealed in plexispray and an accompanying card reading, 
"Aunt Debbie's high school grad present, 1968." A few other 
poignant odds and ends and one item which made Parnell

pounce. 
He hefted a solidopic cube and activated the viewing surface. 
In the space between him and Ria two seemingly 
thfSe-dimensional forms took shape. A man and a woman, 
young, holding hands, smiling. 
"Is that?" Grigsby was standing at Richard ParnelFs elbow. 
The General's eyes were wide at this vivid recreation of Ria's 
parents. 
"I assume so," and Parnell carefully studied the holographic 
images. Jeremy and Karyl sported deliberately torn clothes, 
shaven, scalplocked heads, their eyebrows plucked outa visual 
slice from the infancy of the Younger Party. 
"Hippies," Grigsby snarled. Parnell recalled the term from 
something he'd read. He'd forgotten the slang word's definition, 
but knew it was pejorative. 
"Youngers, from the Wild Fringe, I believe," Par-nell said. "As 
I recall they were dedicated completely to art and the free 
spirit" 
"Exactly their words!" Leland agreed. "Jeremy's muralhe 
called it 'The Last and Best Days of Mankind'." 
Lynn ducked her head, hiding tears, and Parnell said, "The 
last, possibly. May I?" and he handed the de-activated cube to 
his graphics analyst. "Run that through. I want origin point on 
everything, this stuff in the carton, too. Special emphasis on 
parents and siblings, if any." He turned back to Emmett and said 
gently, "Jeremy and Karyl, they're dead?" 
Delores' shoulders jerked with muffled sobs. "Don't know why 
it couldn't have been some of us. It wouldn't have mattered" 
She couldn't go on, so Leland took over. "Jeremy was 
intrigued by the decorations on the library dome. We warned 
him of the dangers, but there's a catwalk in the attic. He 
insisted on going up and he fell." At that memory several of the 
Older women daubed their eyes.

"Such a waste!" Emmett lamented. "A terrible waste! And 
Karyl, why she went a little mad, I think. Poor child! She never 
should have gone out on the streets while she was hi that state. 
We we tried to stop her. No use. Never never saw her again." 
Grigsby scraped the floor with the edge of his boot and 
Parnell fought depression. Emmett was right. A terrible 
wastemore terrible than the old librarian realized. If Karyl and 
Jeremy had been the last reproducing couple on earth" 
No! He couldn't accept that. If there had been two immunes, 
one fertile woman, there were others. They'd find them. And in 
the meantime there was Ria. 
"You want to take the child with you, don't you?" Delores said 
flatly. A few of the Olders gasped pro-testingly. Emmett and 
Leland were morose as the woman went on, "It had to come. I 
knew it. And it's right. We're too old. Just too old to take care 
of her anymore." 
Ria's big eyes misted with tears. A bright young mind, and 
maturity far beyond her years. The erratic genius of her Wild 
Fringe parents had blended with the gentle, bookish tutelage of 
Emmett and the other Olders, custodians of knowledge. Ria was 
a survival type par excellence. She wouldn't have reached eight 
years in this chaotic world otherwise. She could adapt, and 
would again. 
"Yes, if you agree. My wife and I would adopt Ria, care for her 
as our own daughter." He hesitated, decided to be honest. "There 
is the scientific aspect. Ria's the key to humanity's future. But I 
swear she'll be loved, protectednot just a guinea 
Pig-" 
The Olders looked at each other numbly and Emmett held up 
a shaking hand. "Would you let us talk it over?" 
Parnell nodded and stepped back. Lynn's mikes would pick up 
the whispered conference. Science couldn't afford to feel guilty 
about eavesdropping, and who knew what tidbits of precious 
information the Olders might let out?

"I'm tired, Richgetting old." Startled, Parnell turned to his 
father-in-law. Grigsby's voice was heavy with too many 
campaigns and disappointments. "Time's running out for me. 
Like it is for them. I keep telling myself I'm just as fit as I was at 
Belem, on the Co-Op Insurrection Front. But then" 
"You've got some good years left," Parnell murmured kindly. 
"Damned few. And what kind of world will 1 leave when I die? 
That haunts me, Rich. Not knowing if" He stared at the 
conferring Olders, their bobbing heads and uncertain 
movements. "And what's going to happen to them?" 
"This is their home." Ria had been listening, and now she said 
anxiously, "You won't make them move? Emmett has to take 
care of the books." 
"The art and idealism of mankind," Parnell said. "Their trust 
from the past. They're all trying to keep the candle of knowledge 
and beauty lit." Grigsby was eyeing him thoughtfully, inspiration 
in his beefy face. Parnell nodded, encouraging him. "They've 
been custodians for all of us. They shouldn't be made to change 
now. I think they've earned a right to some help, don't you?" 
Grigsby tried to think of an argument, plainly seeing that he 
was going to be hit in the bankroll again. Lamely, he said, 
"Now see here, Rich, just because you married my daughter 
doesn't" 
"They need a steady food supply, medical care from my 
people, military protectionand of course we'll be able to tape all 
the invaluable information they've accumulated over the years." 
The General sighed, defeat already hi his manner. "Perhaps. 
We'll have to discuss it." 
Not fair, maybe, hitting Grigsby in the emotions. He couldn't 
deny fellow Olders, his own empathy, no matter how he resisted. 
The hero of the Near Eastern Third Front Crisis was caving in, 
slowly. Parnell winked at Ria and to his delight the girl picked up 
the cue, winked back. "Of course," he said, hiding a smile. "We'll 
discuss it."

Chapter IV 
Parnell shifted impatiently from one foot to another. Would 
Grigsby never finish talking and let the heliflitter clear the roof? 
The General's orderly had already scurried over to the shelter of 
the stair alcove, waiting beside Parnell. If the enlisted man 
disliked cooling his heels while Grigsby handed out last minute 
instructions to junior officers he didn't show it. 
Finally! Grigsby stepped clear of the rotors, waved, trotted 
across the roof to join Parnell. "What's the problem with our 
power feed, Ogden?" Parnell shouted against the heliflitter's 
rising noise. "We've had to shut down five floors of lab" 
"I know, I know," Grigsby nodded. "Have to talk to you about 
that." 
Parnell eyed the lifting flitter. "They aren't waiting on you?" 
"Have to drop some staff off at Masterson's HQ," Grigsby said 
absently. He gestured to the enlisted man's backpack com set. 
"Get a patchthrough to Harris. I've got some new orders." Then 
he looked wearily at Parnell, trying to orient himself in the midst 
of several on-going assignments. Yes, the 
General was showing his age these days. "They'll be back to 
pick me up after" 
"That doesn't sound right," the soldier muttered, staring past 
his superior's shoulder. 
Both Grigsby and Parnell turned, and Parnell's gut tightened 
with apprehension. The heliflitter seemed to be in trouble, not 
moving away as fast as it should. Not at a proper angle. Was she 
overloaded? A crew and three or four junior officers ought not to 
tax a heavy-duty military craft 
But something was very wrong. 
The angle was much too steep. The flitter slewed across 
rooftops, trying to rise, dangerously close to the forest of

buildings. 
"She's not going to clear the old Stock Exchange," Grigsby 
said, gasping in horror. "Sergeant, can you ?" 
"Get it up level, you erects," the sergeant was muttering with 
the helpless desperation of a spectator. 
Even had the flitter crew heard him, it was too late. Lazily the 
craft brushed against the sheer glass face of the Exchange half a 
city block away. 
She didn't seem to hit hard, but the rotors and tail assembly 
instantly came to pieces. Explosively, shattering the Exchange's 
wall into thousands of tiny particles, dancing like diamonds in 
the sunset. 
Instinctively, the three watchers on the Life Sciences roof 
dropped flat, shielding themselves. 
Sound battered against Parnell's ears for a few almost 
unbearable moments, and then it was over as quickly as it began. 
Cautiously, he raised his head. Not much outward vectoring. No 
pieces of glass falling on his roof. 
He got to his feet, staring. Shards of wall and air-craft were 
arcing down toward the street. Tumbling, cartwheeling, a grim 
ballet of metal and plasticene. And bodies falling like broken 
dolls, beyond help. 
Grigsby clutched the roof ledge, breathing hard. "Dammit! 
Dammit!" His voice was surprisingly soft, haunted. "She was 
obsolete. Maintenance has been can't get parts. I told the 
Subcommittee we had to have new equipment. Can't get through 
to them, those nearsighted murderers! That's what they are! 
Killing my men with their stupidity" 
Very little of the wreck was still airborne. Parnell gazed down 
at those shattered remains, thinking of the hundreds of times he 
trusted his life, Therese's, his staff to the heliflitter's reliability. 
He grew cold.

The General softly hammered his fists against the ledge. "Just 
plain obsolete, all of my materiel." He forced himself to turn 
away from the sight. "But at least when it's a land vehicle that 
fails the poor bastards don't fall twelve stories. Sergeant, contact 
Major Harrisimmediately. Fill him in. Come on, Rich. Let's 
go to the lab." 
"We'll have to take the stairs," Parnell warned him. "The 
power's fluctuating too much to risk the tube. Unless you want to 
gamble?" 
Grigsby saved his energy, not retorting. But all the way down 
ten flights he muttered about the wreck, the continuing riots in 
the street, a cavalcade of increasing social chaos. "It won't even 
ram," he complained as they neared the main lab level. "If the 
weather would just turn bad, chase all of them off the streets" 
"No! I won't do it any more! You're just mean!" greeted them 
as they stepped onto the second floor. 
Ria was screaming, crawling under a desk, trying to elude a 
med-technician and a hypo syringe. 
She escaped capture and ran toward Parnell. Then the girl 
swerved, into Grigsby's welcoming arms. "Don't let her!" 
"Of course not!" the General growled. 
"Ria, now stop that." Therese came out of the biosciences 
section and glared at her father. "She's using you, as she would 
all of us. If we don't put a stop to it she'll end up a spoiled brat." 
"There's no need to torture the child, is there?" Grigsby 
snapped. "Why, look. Her little arm's black and blue from your 
needles." 
Ria aggrievedly rubbed her chest. "Here too. They stick me all 
over," and she launched into her woebegone ragamuffin routine. 
She'd barely lived a week in the lab, and already she'd enlarged 
her routine, thanks to heavy use of the drama-vid tapes. By now 
Parnell was weary of imitative melodramatics and trite comedy 
patter.

"Cut it out, Ria," he said sternly. "You know it's necessary, and 
we made a bargain. Stop this nonsense or you won't watch the 
Monk and Chuckie Show." 
Unoffended, sighing, swallowing the beginnings of sniffles, Ria 
wriggled out of Grigsby's embrace. Meekly, she went back to the 
tech, took the woman's hand and walked into the biolab. The 
General gaped, protesting, "You've done something to force that 
child to" 
"Threatened to cut off her favorite pastime," Therese said. 
"Isn't that what you used to do when I was young? Of course, if 
you'd prefer that we abandon the project" 
Grigsby winced and reddened as Parnell smiled wisely. "No, 
no, I didn't mean that. It's just that" 
"We're not being cruel. Every biopsy specimen we take from 
Ria is vitally important. And time is so short" Therese 
explained. 
Suddenly an entire bank of the lab's lights went dark. 
Profanity erupted from the techs and maintenance people ran to 
correct the problemor try to. 
"Just like our feed to Viral Research an hour ago," Parnell 
said. "Plug in those auxiliaries!" 
"There's no response, Doctor," a tech shouted back. 
"No, not likely." Grigsby was grim-faced, a man with a secret. 
Parnell's suspicions were aroused and he linked thumbs into 
his pockets and said, "All right, let's have the bad news." 
"It is bad. I've just come from the Deputy President. We're 
evacuating his quarters this minute. Rich, that's a full-scale 
insurrection out in those streets. It's been going on for a week 
now, with no sign of let-up." The General paused, ran a worried 
hand along his jowls. "Nothing seems to help. I've had our party 
leader on the air as often as possible, asking for calm"

"Detloff's last speechthat I heardwas low-key," Parnell 
said. "As if he's trying to get his Youngers to scream off too." 
"Well, he's not having any effect then," Grigsby countered 
sourly. He glanced toward the bio-lab, apparently thinking of Ria 
and his daughter. "It's not just Youngers and Olders. We've got 
strikes." 
Several techs within earshot turned, gawking. 
Parnell himself was startled. Strikes? There was so little 
workso few people to do itand units, money so meaningless 
what in the world could anyone with a job strike for? 
Grigsby read his questions. "It's the Middle-Aged Employable 
Party shutting down the nuke power plants that hurts the worst. 
Cracking the whip on us, showing we can't dump it without 
them." He smiled crookedly and added, "They're right, too. Rich, 
I hate like hell to do this, but you're going to have to pull your 
people out of here." 
"What?" Parnell's dismay was duplicated throughout the lab. 
The prospect appalled everyone. There were protests for 
individual experiments, delicate test specimens, the difficulties 
of transporting research animals-,a chorus of arguments. 
Parnell felt as if the floor had disappeared. He'd directed the 
Life Sciences Project so long, breathed hope into a dejected staff, 
kept things goingsomehow. And now, when they'd found Ria, 
began to believe they really could make it, Grigsby was saying 
they had to yank up their roots. "You're giving up? Letting the 
mobs have the building?" he asked testily. 
"Rich, we'll do everything possible to keep it secure," Grigsby 
said, taut with apology. "But we can't maintain your supplies. 
Not now. Maybe after we get things under control, the riots 
quashed. At the moment I simply haven't the manpower. We're 
stretched so thin that" Parnell thought of the heliflitter crash. 
Junior officers and a skilled crew, dead. How many more such 
losses was General Grigsby suffering? He started to see his 
father-in-law's dilemma a dilemma that was becoming his. 
"The Udette Sub Station's been shut down for four hours. I got

you an emergency feed from North Lake Nuclear, but I can't tell 
how long it'll last." 
Shaken, Parnell said, "What about the library? The Olders, 
and my techs?" He didn't mention Grigsby's troops now 
guarding the ancient facility; he knew the General took care of 
his own. 
"They're all right. Totally on batteries, and the riots aren't 
anywhere near them. Low profile, don't attract attention. Believe 
me, Rich, they'll be safe." Before Parnell could relax Grigsby 
threw his cruncher. "But what you've got hereover fifty people, 
all the power you need just can't be done." 
The sergeant puffed into the lab, holding out a com headset 
for the General's attention. Urgent communique from Major 
Harris, perhaps. 
For a moment Parnell stewed alone, rilled with dire 
speculations. Then Therese's hand touched his arm. She looked 
up at him with a smile, feeding his strength. "We'll make it," she 
said. "We always have." 
"Right. Start a close-down, Ter. Strip us to the bone. Nothing 
except essentials," he said decisively. 
"Should we pack for heliflitters?" 
"No," he said. "I imagine Ogden will get us surface vehicles. 
Cheer up. That means we'll be able to transport more." 
"Yessir," Therese mocked a military response. He watched her 
hurry away, stirred by errant, untimely impulses. He'd been a 
monk for daysor had it been weeks? Down to the ragged edge, 
his nerves sharply honed, difficult to sheath. 
"Rich" Grigsby began, finishing with his radio conversation. 
"Ter's starting to pack." 
"Tell her to hurry." Something in the General's tone made 
Parnell eye him sharply. If that old war-horse was this

concerned, things must be bad out on the streets. "Can can you 
be ready in an hour?" 
For a heartbeat Parnell was speechless. Then he attempted 
some humor. "How about two? We've got a hell of a lot of stuff to 
move." 
Grigsby's smile was wan. "Very welltwo hours. But no more. 
I can't guarantee the perimeter longer than that." 
Clearing his mind to tackle the problem headlong, Parnell 
snapped, "What kind of vehicles can you give me? How much 
carrier space?" 
The sergeant offered a small calculator and Grigsby ran a 
quick total. "Make it ten no, twelve Centipede transports, two 
segments eachone cargo, one passenger, and a guard force. 
Believe me, if I had more, they'd be yours." 
"Thanks. I didn't expect that many," Parnell said, meaning it. 
Centipede transports. Grigsby's tough, foolproof backbone 
transports. The old man was being exceedingly generous, 
considering the circumstances. But Parnell couldn't overlook the 
fact that they would be leaving the building at night sneaking 
away like thieves. To avoid attracting attention. Grigsby's army 
was really spread thin. "Centipedes," Parnell mused. "That 
means no temperature controls. We'll have to jettison some of 
our bio experiments." 
"I'm sorrier than hell, Rich," Grigsby said. Plainly he regarded 
himself as a failure. "Now, about des-tination. Takes a big place 
to house all these people. How about the Canal Barracks ?" 
Parnell shook his head. "Big but unusable for our purposes." A 
good director thought of such contingencies in advance, of 
course. But Parnell had always hoped he'd have longer to make 
up his mind. "Can you get us as far as the SDP District? 
Northwest Cloning?" 
The General did some blinking, then brightened. "You've got 
another lab out there, right? Certainly! That's what you need, 
you'll get through. Sergeant, clear me a channel to Routing. We

can use the slide-roads" 
"But sir, Masterson's people have only got a few of those 
operational," the sergeant protested, already cranking up his 
corn-unit. "They said only for emergency use" 
"Which this is!" Grigsby roared. "Put that through. Now!" 
As Grigsby bent over the speaker Parnell looked around him. 
Darkened alcoves and moribund computer banks. Staff starting 
to pack. When you tore up roots it hurt, especially if those roots 
had been firmly embedded for a couple of decades. "Ogden, when 
you get a line clear, I'd like a patch through to Jesse Bliss. Maybe 
I should warn him he's going to be invaded." 
"Soon as I can," Grigsby muttered, busy. 
Parnell was busy too, helping his techs pack and stack. 
Donkey work, and a lot of them weren't used to it. He'd been lax 
enforcing the physical fitness rule; but it had seemed pushy 
when humanity's very survival was at stake and the techs didn't 
dare leave their work. 
Momentarily, surrounded by feverish activity, Par-nell was 
pocketed by the window. A box seat looking out on a once-great 
city, and one still potentially great. But the panorama of lights 
he'd known as a boy was gone, winked out. The Middle-Aged 
Employables were striking, and one of the few remaining vestiges 
of civilizationelectric powerwas switched off. They had cut off 
their electrical life-blood in order to spite an Establishment itself 
sinking into chaos. 
No, the city wasn't completely dark. There were spots of 
lightuneven, flickering patches here and there. Fires. Buildings 
and debris put to the torch by roving mobs mobs loose in the 
streets for nearly a week now. Ever since the disty riot when he'd 
saved Ria 
Anger was an acid taste in ParnelTs throat. This madness had 
to end! Didn't those fools know they were killing themselves, 
their only hope? Every man and woman out there was unique, a 
precious and irreplaceable genetic entity. Even the most savage

rioters might carry the seeds of genius within his DNA 
molecules. And if, through Ria, Life Sciences could unlock 
reproduction, getting humanity advancing once more How 
many future da Vincis, Beethovens, Edisons, Einsteins were 
dying in those streets? 
But how tell a soldier not to fire on someone charging him 
with an upraised club? How tell a frustrated, unthinking civilian 
that fire and rapine and looting were futile, self-defeating in the 
long run? 
A small hand slid into Parnell's large palm. He looked down at 
Ria. "Where are we going?" Not apprehensive, just curious. The 
child of the streets, sensing she was about to be uprootedagain. 
"You remember Jesse, the chubby little man with the beard?" 
"The one who talks funny?" Ria said candidly. 
"Yes. We're going to his laboratory," Parnell explained. 
"Out where all the food is?" A very bright and very retentive 
mind! Ria never forgot the important thingslike survival. 
"There'll be plenty of food," he said reassuringly. 
Suddenly Ria demanded, "What about Emmett and the 
others?" Then she answered her own question, morose. "They 
wouldn't leave the library, though. They said they never would. 
They talk about how they're just about to die." 
"Everyone dies, Ria," Parnell said. "But they won't be 
disturbed. The General will protect them. You must understand 
that somedaymaybe not for yearsbut someday they will die." 
Ria lifted her pointed chin, stubbornly refusing that truth. 
"Well, I'm not going to die. I'm going to live forever and be an 
artist and singer and fix things, just like Jeremy and Karyl." 
He smiled at her childish determination. Indeed, her genes 
were right, and in preliminary tests she'd exhibited genuine 
creativity. Given loving training and education she should

develop into a gifted adult, capable of bringing pleasure to 
humanity. If there were anyone else alive when Ria reached 
maturity. 
"I wish you could live forever," he said. "I wish everyone could, 
or at least live out a normal life-span. But unless this rioting 
stops" 
Ria's rosebud mouth formed an O of surprise and 
Parnell turned to see what she saw. One of the fires in the city 
had flared into a globular dome. An immense explosion, 
somewhere in the heart of the metropolis. 
"It's not the library," he said quickly. Not a lie. The blast had 
been far west of the lake. But someonemany someonesmight 
well have died in that explosion. 
"Sir?" It was Grigsby's sergeant, holding out a headset. "I've 
got Dr. Bliss. It's not a very clear circuit, I'm afraid; Had to go 
through ten junction relays, halfway to Springfield and back." 
Parnell nodded his understanding, putting the receiver to his 
ear. "Jesse?" 
Through a tidal wave of static the clonist's normally acid 
tones were reduced to comical squeaks. "Right here, m'boy. I 
have better sense than to wander into Rome when it's 
collapsing." 
"Very wise. I agree. We're moving in with you." 
Parnell's announcement took Bliss off-balance. "That's that's 
superb. I didn't know you when will you be here?" 
The sergeant silently mouthed "seven hours" and Parnell said, 
"Call it dawn." 
"Oh, how appropriate!" Bliss cackled. "We shall await you all 
with open arms." 
As Parnell signed off Grigsby came up, presenting a rough

map. He was very deferential, apparently still feeling guilty that 
he'd been forced to evacuate his son-in-law's project. "This'll give 
you an idea of our route, Rich. We'll send your transports out one 
at a timeless conspicuous. But don't worry. The area is secure 
to this line here. Now you'll link with L Leg of the old slideroad 
at this point here. 
Harris got a solid confirm from Masterson. It is operational 
and they have a feed from Cross-State, independent of the 
striker's stations. No problems." 
Parnell wasn't as confident as the General, but military setups 
weren't his department. He concentrated on salvaging as much 
as possible from the labs. Not easy. Racks of fragile Petri dishes, 
frightened animals in cages, test dewars, a vast assortment of 
paraphernalia. Some of his choices had to be ruthless. Grigsby 
might promise to guard the building's integrity but Parnell had 
few illusions. Even if the place wasn't vandalized it would become 
cold without power, and a lot of the experiments would shrivel 
and die without heat. Science fed science, relying on 
technologyand that technology was currently on strike. 
"So hard to leave some of this behind," Therese said, brushing 
a lock of auburn hair off her forehead. "But we have to 
compromise." 
Grigsby's sergeant jerked a thumb toward the window. "Tell 
that to those howlers out there." 
Time. Not enough of it, ever. Especially not now. They 
couldn't rely on the tube, not with erratic power. So Parnell and 
his staff made trip after exhausting trip up and down stairs to 
the foyer. 
Once down to ground level Grigsby's troops could help load 
the Centipede transportswith supervision. Parnell didn't trust 
the soldiers to appreciate the delicacy of certain equipment. 
That left the heaviest chores to his people. 
By the tune the first transport rolled away into the night the 
Life Sciences Building was becoming icy, visibly dying. Only 
power celled emergency panels lit the final teardown.

The procedure called for efficiency and stealth. Parnell was 
expert at the former and fast learning the latter. Tough, because 
now they had to work in almost total darkness. Fumbling, 
stepping on one another's feet, muffling curses. Like thieves, 
escaping from the city with their scientific booty. It seemed such 
a haphazard method of rescuing decades of researchresearch 
that could spell survival for the entire human race. 
There were no convoys. Each transportcargo tightly packed, 
passenger section filled with technicians, specialists, and crack, 
well-armed troops waggled on its way alone. The Centipede 
was so named because an impregnably armored drive cab towed 
twoin this situationcarrier segments. In the darkness the 
effect was rather like watching an alien, bulbous insect creeping 
away. 
And as each loaded Centipede crawled off Parnell felt more 
and more isolated. He wasn't helped by whispered words from 
departing techs, hopefully promising to rendezvous out at Jesse 
Bliss's lab. Hopefully. Parnell didn't like operating in the dark 
in more ways than one. He had to rely completely on Grigsby's 
forces, on Grigsby's staff and logistics. Not a comfortable 
sensation. 
Finally there was only one Centipede transport left. He'd 
supervised the loading of the cargo segment, Grigsby's men were 
wraiths, climbing into the outrigger guard-slots framing the 
transport's carrier sections. Twice as many soldiers as had 
accompanied any of the other Centipedes. But then Ria was to be 
on this journey, and General Grigsby was taking no chances with 
her safety. 
Parnell squinted into the night, toward the Life 
Sciences Building. What had he said about Emmett and the 
Olders tending a candle of knowledge? Against the long night of 
ignorance, and oblivion. His own temple of science was 
darkened, all power gone. He had a peculiar urge to wavd 
good-bye to an old friend. 
"Everyone's out?" Grigsby was asking, somewhere to Parnell's 
left.

Before Parnell could reply Major Harris's voice came sharply, 
"Checked every level personally, sir. She's clean." 
And dead, abandoned. Like the city might be before too many 
more days. 
He met Therese and Ria near the rear seal gate of the 
Centipede's passenger segment. Scooping the child up, he set her 
inside the high carrier. "Here we go!" he said softly, lightly, 
making it a game. 
"Mommy Therese?" Ria called uncertainly, groping. The girl 
was torn between excitement at this adventure and fear of the 
unknown. She'd learned, this past week, not to dread uniformed 
men as enemies, yet 
Parnell lifted Therese in beside the child, saw them move 
forward together in the carrier. There was a faint light up front, 
from the monitor screens, enough illumination so that he could 
see his wife and Ria settle down in seats close to the monitor 
operator. 
"Kill those lights," Grigsby snarled, and the blackout curtain 
dropped across the rear seal portaL "Rich ?" 
"Here," Parnell responded, keeping his voice low. The General 
caught his elbow, pressed it encouragingly. The old man was 
unbending a lot recently, perhaps because of Ria. Or perhaps the 
grim reality of his seventy years, the approach of death, made 
him want to savor human company. 
"Major Harris?" As the officer answered Parnell recalled 
Grigsby rarely addressed his chief aide by rank. Was Grigsby 
being courteous, or reminding everyone of who was boss? "Now 
you have your route, Major. I expect you to rendezvous with the 
other units at five-hundred" 
"Yessir." 
"And this is Dr. Parnell's project. Don't forget that. The 
safety of'his people and materiel is paramount. And he's the one 
to decide how it's handled. You have that straight, Major?" He

didn't wait for the man's response but drove the point home. 
"Any questions, Dr. Parnell has the last word." 
A rotten assignment for the Major, Parnell thought. And he 
wagered if anything went wrong Harris would get the 
blameeven if Parnell made the bad decision. 
"I understand, sir," Harris agreed. Smoothly, no arguments. 
Whatever his private feelings. 
Grigsby's hand sought Parnell's, gripping it hard. Parnell felt 
a trembling in the old man, emotion. Grigsby was military 
governor, weighted down with a hundred tactical crises. He'd 
been in and out of the Life Sciences Building constantly while the 
staff prepared to leave. And now the press of duties elsewhere 
forced Grigsby to put the Parnells under another officer's wing. 
Parnell knew a wrenching empathy, closer to his father-in-law 
than he'd been in years. 
Then he and Harris were aboard the transport and the rear 
seal portal slid shut noiselessly. The monitor operator cued his 
lights up again. And as the Centi-pede began to grumble and 
move the soldiers relaxed, joking softly. 
Parnell found a narrow, uncomfortable seat facing Therese. 
She'd nestled Ria on her lap and the child was already nodding 
sleepily. Excitement or not, it was late, and she was very young. 
Harris edged in between the Parnells, perching beside the 
monitor operator. "Have we got a steady homer?" the Major 
asked anxiously. He activated a tie-in with the Centipede's 
driver, two units forward. 
And from the cab came a guttural reply. "Right on target, sir. 
ETA at L Leg of the slideroad forty-five minutes." 
The monitor operator cued his multi-screened console. Views 
from the world outside shifted with zoom lens scans of the 
Centipede's equipmentthe motors powering the cargo and 
passenger sections' individually operated wheels, radar tracking 
systems, all the other military hardware that kept the vehicle 
moving and tough. Their own path was marked by a blip on a

graph, crawling west by southwest toward the old Western 
Slideroad. 
Parnell watched the blip and snorted. "Sonascan tracking. 
That's irony." Major Harris looked over his shoulder curiously 
and Parnell explained, tapping the screen. "That device was 
invented to help guide the blind." 
The scene outside, pictured on the screens, was Stygian. 
Harris laughed hoarsely and said, "We sure as hell would be 
blind, without our monitors." 
Verbal hash crackled from the com, messages from all over 
the city, coming in on the military net. "We gotta get some help 
out here, chuckle!" 
"Unidentified intruders at Lake and Thirtieth. Do you read? 
Anybody?" And frantically a shriek from a heliflitter pilot, 
"Mayday at Thayston Station! No steerage control! Mayday!" 
The cry stopped abruptly and Parnell envisioned death raining 
from the skies, piece by piece. 
Ria tensed, tossing her head fretfully. Under Therese's 
soothing whispers she quieted once more. Parnell and his wife 
stared at each other, total rapport, steeling themselves for 
whatever might lie ahead. 
There was a glow on one of the exterior screens. Parnell 
checked the directional setting. Right. North of them. A fire. 
"Planning any detours?" he asked Major Harris. 
Harris was youngish, but not too young. Thirtyish, somewhat 
unbending. Very aware of his heavy responsibilities and Parnell's 
authority over him. "Not if we can avoid it, Doctor. Our route's 
carefully plotted to stay in a secure area." 
"You really think they'll have a slideroad operational when we 
get there?" Parnell said skeptically. 
He'd unintentionally given the Major's ego a boost. The man 
smiled superiorly. "As a matter of fact" and he nudged the 
playback switch on a communications tape. One of Parnell's

chief techs spoke from the recorder: "This is Langsam, 
confirming arrival at Northwest Cloning. Time, ten p.m. Er 
twentytwo hundred. Did did I say that right?" There was a 
muffled, amused off-mike conversation between Langsam and 
the unknown radio operator female and male laughter 
intertwining. 
Parnell nodded, reassured, and Harris's smile widened into a 
smug grin. 
The view outside seemed sharper. Wavering black and gold 
shadows danced across the Centipede's path along the street. 
The scene was oddly like something out of a horror story, 
pregnant with mystery and menace. Even Parnell felt uneasy, 
and he suspected the poorly educated and superstitious enlisted 
men seated along the gunners' ports were imagining the worst. 
"Somebody's birthday?" he said jocularly. "There's a bonfire 
to celebrate the occasion." 
It broke the ice. The troops laughed hi relief, dark faces 
beaded with sweat. "Right! Gonna be a hot time tonight, 
chuckie!" 
"We'll take care o' them fires, don't worry!" 
"Have us a party !" 
Parnell and Harris both tolerated this hilarity, encouraging 
the men to loosen up. They eyed each other speculatively, and for 
Parnell's part he wondered how far his authority would extend, 
in a pinch. He hoped there'd be no need to find out. 
The Centipede lurched slightly, her independently powered 
wheels working their ways over an obstruction. The monitor 
operator cued a key view forward, tracking across the street. 
"Lotta walls caved in ahead," he commented. "Better take it slow 
up front, Lennox. Looks like a bunch of dumpy old places." 
"Very old," Parnell agreed. The soldier was too young to 
appreciate architectural antiques. The rubbleand the buildings 
it had fallen fromdated back before the Big Fires. Genuine

Twentieth Century relics. Therese's sociologist friend, Lynn, 
would love to see this. Parnell made a mental note to show off 
these ruins, once the trouble had died down. 
One of Grigsby's people was on the corn-set. The monitor 
operator reported, "Confirm, we are approaching South Haven 
now. Should cross the bridge at about" 
"What's that?" Harris said tensely, interrupting. He overrode 
the specialist's controls, punching up an exterior view on the 
screen. 
The Centipede was almost to an intersection. Great jagged 
streaks of firelight rippled surrealistic shadows across the walls 
and shattered windows ahead. Wherever that fire off north was, 
it was huge. But in all other respects the scene was normala 
deserted, debris-strewn old street. 
Then Parnell heard what Harris must have detectedan odd 
pattering noise, like the beginnings of rain or hail. Hail? That 
thought took him back years, to his boyhood in a rural area a 
hundred kilometers from the city. No, the noise had started as a 
gentle tapping. But it was increasing in volume and intensity by 
microseconds. 
An exterior lens homed in on a falling chunk of masonry, a big 
chunk. It bounced off the Centipede cab. No damage to that 
durasteel fortress on wheels. But that was only the first assault. 
Other pieces of limestone and masonry were falling now, too fast 
for the scanners to focus on them. Liters of rocks, no tons! 
The monitor operator flinched, reflexively pulling away from 
that visual avalanche. 
"Watch it, soldier!" Harris ordered. "Watch your controls!" 
Thunder pounded against the passenger compartment's roof 
and walls. The troopers edged away from the gun ports as the 
entire vehicle rocked dangerously. The buffeting grew stronger 
and stronger, a roar of falling rubble washing against the 
Centipede. Men clutched handholds, growling fearfully. Ria 
woke, gasping, burrowing into Therese's protective embrace.

Parnell hurled himself toward his wife and the child, sweeping 
his arms about both of them. Desperately, he wedged between 
two main bracings of the transport's frame. If those went, it 
didn't matter anyway 
The Centipede rocked sideways in an arc, tilting wildly, losing 
it. The wall surface was denting beneath relentless battering. 
Again and again granitic missiles smashed into the now 
immobilized transport, starting to batter it to pieces. 
Chapter V 
"Look out !" 
The tilt became unbearable, too much. Gravity won. 
The world dissolved into howls of fright and a tumbling 
confusion of tossing bodies and boxes. 
Parnell's knuckles scraped painfully against a hard surface. He 
braced himself, cushioning the impact for Ter and Ria. His 
shoulders slammed into an obstruction and for a moment 
illusionary stars danced in his eyes. 
As motion ended and everyone lay stunned, they heard the 
fading noise of smaller and smaller pieces of rubble hitting the 
disabled transport. 
Then, nothing. 
For a split second there was silence. Then groaning and 
curses, men trying to get to their feet, find their weapons, 
explore bruises. 
"My arm!" 
"Dammit, get offa me, you creet!" 
"Hey, BUI! You okay, chuckie?" 
"Somebody over here. Help me move this crate!"

Parnell's senses were clearing, the ringing in his ears 
dissipating. "Ter? You all right? Ria ?" 
"We're we're okay," Therese assured him breathlessly. "Ria? 
Honey?" 
The girl squirmed free of their too-tight embrace. "What 
happened? Did the big tank fall over?" 
"Something like that," Parnell said calmly. Therese had 
satisfied herself Ria was unhurt, and now she gently examined 
her husband's scrapes. He shrugged off her attentions. "That's 
not important. We'll look at them later. Stay here." 
He disentangled himself and struggled to his feet. He was 
standing on one of the carrier's walls, now aslant. Some of the 
monitor screens still worked, providing an eerie green light over 
a scene of disorder. A miasma wafted through the transport's 
interioroverloaded circuity frying, most likely. Major Harris 
and several others were choking on the noxious fumes. 
Fighting nausea himself, Parnell climbed over the jumble to 
the monitor controls. The operator seemed unhurt, but too dazed 
to think. "We need fresh air, manquickly!" Parnell snapped. 
When the soldier didn't react he located the door switch himself, 
sliding open the seal. 
An "Ah!" of relief swept through the carrier. Cold air sucked 
out the acrid smoke, cleared cobwebby brains. Hurriedly the 
men staggered outside. Parnell picked up Ria, had Therese cling 
to his elbow, helping them to the portal. Harris had enough 
presence of mind to assist the woman safely down to the 
pavement. 
"Would you look at that, chuckie!" one of the men exclaimed 
amid a babble of similar awed comments. 
"We we almost screamed off for good, that time," another 
murmured. Parnell scorned the current slang, but agreed. 
The entire wall of a five-story building had given way directly 
in front of the Centipede transport. Perhaps the week of fire and

explosions raging through the city had weakened old 
foundations. Now tons of brick, masonry, and lumber had 
toppled into the street, forming a three-meters high barricade. 
Part of the debris had mashed the Centipede's cargo segment to 
junk, and the rear segmentas the Par-nells could witnesshad 
been knocked completely off its wheels. 
He gave Harris credit. The Major knew his business. Once 
he'd finished coughing smoke out of his lungs he started issuing 
commands. "Kelley, get up front and see if Lennox is okay." A 
formality. The driver couldn't be hurt short of a point blank shell 
burst, not while he was inside that durasteel cab. "Prentiss, 
check the wheel mounts. Montoya communications!" As the 
soldiers scampered to obey Harris turned to Parnell. The two of 
them regarded the wall of rubble blocking the street and Harris 
said, "We came off well, considering." 
"I doubt if my lab specimens did," Parnell muttered. "I'm glad 
I sent the animals and more fragile stuff out hi the earlier 
shipments." 
"We'll see what can be salvaged," Major Harris said lamely. 
Would losing the cargo earn him a black mark from General 
Grigsby? 
Parnell shrugged. "It couldn't be helped, and at least everyone 
seems intact." He studied the side-tilted rear section of the 
Centipede transport. "Can we get moving again? And what does 
this do to our timetable?" 
The questions didn't make Harris any happier. "First things 
first, Doctor Parnell. I've got men checking. I believe we can 
uncouple the cab and hook on directly to the passenger segment. 
Probably have to abandon the cargo sectionunusable." He 
ordered a passing non-com, "Sergeant, get some lines. We'll have 
to put on the muscle-power to right her." 
Grigsby had promised Parnell these would be his best troops, 
and apparently he meant it. Parnell was impressed with their 
efficiency, once Harris got them organized. The men labored 
feverishly to dig out of the debris and get the Centipede 
operational again and somehow they managed to do it quietly.

That was a tip-off. Secure area or not, the military was still wary 
of attracting attention. Parnell eyed the darkness, thinking of 
roving gangs of strikers and Youngers. 
The monitor operator was toting a backpack com now, 
offering the mike to Harris. The officer's tension came through 
his voice as he said, "You got a patch through to the General's 
HQ?" 
"Yessir! Coming in" 
Grigsby, imperious and worried, spoke from the other end of 
the signal. "Operation Survival? Rich? Harris? What's the 
problem out there? We lost our blip on you." 
At least they were being watched by friendly eyes, though 
somewhat at a distance, obviously. Parnell suspected Grigsby 
and back-up troops were much too far away to be of help in this 
situation. 
Harris filled the General in on the Centipede's predicament, 
painting a much more sanguine picture than Parnell would have. 
A bit of cross-talk, and he could imagine electronic wall maps 
and computer printouts shifting, chewing up this new, 
unexpected data. Calculating the risks for Parnell's party. 
Modern techniques, but in the end wasn't it going to boil down 
to individual human beings and their efforts? 
"We have a linkage at" Grigsby broke off momentarily, 
conferring with his experts at HQ. " at Kentucky." 
Parnell read the Major's unhappy grunt. Apparently Kentucky 
was a bad option. The monitor operator tapped a hand comp, 
plugging in a new graph map. A line snaked northward from the 
Centipede's present, stalled position. 
Counting grid intersections Parnell said, "Sixteen blocks? 
That's a hell of a long way, Ogden." He wasn't sure, but he 
thought he heard Harris mutter 'longer than you think'. Ignoring 
that, he went on. "And what's at Kentucky? I see, another 
slideroad. It's marked non-operational"

Grigsby's answer was almost too quick, too heartily confident. 
"We've got people at the Cicero end right now. They'll have it 
working by the time you reach it." 
This time Parnell wasn't mistaken. Harris growled softly, "// 
we reach it" Then the Major spoke aloud, "Could we cut south, 
sir? Down to the Reed Station interchange?" 
"That went out an hour ago," the General said curtly. Not 
allowing his aide any argument. Like most non-scientists 
Grigsby had a terror of nuclear power stations like Reed. The 
dangers from an A20 Model were minimal, Parnell knew, but in 
another sense he approved the old man's attitude; no sense 
gambling. 
Grigsby had dumped the authority on him, and he decided to 
exercise it, since Harris was dragging his feet. "All right, Ogden. 
We'll have to try your Kentucky alternate route. The K Leg 
slideroad, correct? And it had damned well better be operational 
when we get there." His father-in-law started a ques-tion about 
Therese and Ria and Parnell shut him off. "No serious 
injuriesso far. Now sign off. We've got work to do." He shoved 
the dead mike at the monitor operator and headed toward the 
Centipede. 
Therese had set up a makeshift first aid station, spray 
bandaging cuts, doling out acetyls for aching heads. Ria was 
trying to play student nurse. But the girl kept yawning, nodding 
off.
"Better move over here, Ter," Parnell suggested. He helped her 
collect her medical supplies, shifting the aid station further from 
the tipped over transport. She watched the soldiers rigging lines, 
preparing to haul the Centipede segment back onto its wheels. 
Then she cautioned Parnell, "Better take it easy, Richard. You 
haven't got the callouses for that sort of work." 
He tweaked her ear teasingly, glad of the opportunity to hit a 
light note. "Nag, nag, nag. Mind your business, woman. Can't a 
man have a little fun?" 
She cocked her head and said archly, "Fun?" But she was

smiling indulgently. 
Parnell joined the enlisted men on the drag lines, pretending 
not to notice Major Harris off to one side. Playing officer. No 
manual labor. Parnell thought one more set of muscles would be 
welcome, but didn't waste his breath telling Harris so. 
He spit on his smooth palms, ignored his scraped knuckles 
and put his weight on the plasticene cable. 
"Lean into it, you creets!" the sergeant chanted, with fine 
disregard for the civilian's presence. 
They got a rhythm going, at first to little effect. 
"Heave! C'mon! All together now !" 
Nearly all the men were on the lines. Only the motor techs 
were, excused. They crawled around beside the wheel housings, 
goosing solenoids, as if there were no danger should the segment 
abruptly tip back upright. 
As it began to do but slowly. The techs had time to get clear, 
still reaching in to prod the whining motors. Mechanical energy 
joined human, the wheels getting traction, starting to dig in. 
"Once more!" the sergeant exhorted. "Hit it!" 
Yes, the carrier was moving, swinging to its stable one 
position. Finally, after rocking unsteadily for several long 
moments she settled drunkenly on her independent suspensions. 
Harris, now that the donkey work was done, donned his 
command suit. "Kelley, cue those motors. Roll her down here on 
the flat, off that rubble. Get the cab coupled on. We haven't got 
all night." 
The sergeant yessired, started past Parnell. He rolled his eyes 
sympathetically at the men, including the scientistone of the 
gang. Parnell grinned with the rest of them. 
But there were other things to check. Cargo. Not a lot worth

saving, as he'd guessed. He commandeered a few men to help 
him haul crates to the up-righted passenger segment. Harris was 
plotting route changes with the monitor operator as Parnell 
began loading the boxes in the already crowded carrier. "Doctor, 
I'm not sure we'll have room to" 
"You can make it. These specimens are irreplaceable," Parnell 
said firmly. Therese and Ria were back on board, and his wife 
shook her head warningly, suggesting tact. Parnell frowned, 
thinking of delays, unknown dangers out in the streets. 
With the additional cargo there wasn't space for all the 
troops. Five or six were assigned to ride the cab. Parnell noticed 
they carried heavy-duty stunners, power packs fully charged. "I 
gather the terri-tory ahead is rough?" he asked Harris. 
The Major was stiff, possibly smarting from usurped 
authority. But he said, "It is indeed. Not the slipper we hoped to 
take." 
Slipper. More slang from vid comedies. Parnell resolved to 
take Ria off her heavy diet of filmed entertainment. He wasn't 
being loyal to Emmett's love of books and all the tender tutelage 
those Olders had lavished on the child, teaching her to read. And 
besides, Parnell was glutted with bad comics and slapstick 
humor, including slang like "slipper". He thought the Major was 
a little old to be using such terms, but kept the comment to 
himself. 
They were underway once more, bumping back the Way 
they'd come for a block, then northward. Into dangerous 
territory. 
Perhaps unstable walls and crushing masonry falls didn't 
qualify as dangerous? 
"Doctor" Parnell had been watching the screens, studying 
the view ahead of the Centipede. Now he looked around. Major 
Harris was offering him a stunner sidearm. "I think you'd better 
take this, sir." The officer glanced significantly at Therese and 
the child.

A primitive emotion tightened ParneU's gut. Dangerous, yes. 
He didn't think Harris was exaggerating, either. Would it come 
down to kill or be killed? 
Reluctantly, he took the weapon. It was set on Four, Medium 
Sweep. Lethal. Harris glowered as Parnell jogged the setting 
down to Low Two. Defensively, Parnell said, "If I have to use it, I 
believe a low profile is called for. And I'd appreciate it if you'd 
relay that suggestion to your men." 
For a heartbeat Harris resisted. Parnell hadn't exactly made it 
a command. But Grigsby's carte 
blanche had its effect. Sourly, he did as Parnell asked. 
There wasn't a lot to see on the screens. More dark streets, 
more rubble. Data spewed out via graphs, tracking grids, a 
moving record of the Centipede's slow, cautious progress into 
insecure areas. Not just natural rubble clogged these streets. 
Burned hulks of buildings, rags, pried up pavementindications 
there had been riots here, and recently. Now and then the 
temperature scanners jumped as the Centipede crawled past a 
still smoldering ruin. 
Other scanners swept rooftops and doorways and alleys, 
hunting human body heat or any other sign of strangers. 
Grigsby's experts hadn't pre-scouted this route. None of 
Parnell's staff, riding the Centipedes which left earlier, had been 
forced to go this way. A jungle of masonry and steeland 
perhaps inhabited by human predators. Youngers and strikers 
on the prowl. Maybe even a few hardy Olders, scrounging for 
food; in the last week's turmoil there hadn't been any dole 
distributions, and some people must be near starving by now. 
Desperate, all of them, beyond hope. No thoughts for anything 
but their bellies and their pain. 
Parnell glanced at Therese. Ria was asleep, her cheek pillowed 
on his wife's breast. Therese smiled at him, then at the child. A 
family picture as old as mankind, one to arouse the protective 
instinct in any man more than a brute animal.

But hadn't those gangs on the streets been reduced to that 
stage? 
Parnell's nerves were drawn taut. The Centipede's cab was 
virtually indestructible. But they'd just had ample proof the 
carrier segments weren't. Nor were those soldiers riding shotgun 
on the cab's roof and bumpguards. A well-placed brick thrown 
by a hidden marauder and 
What? The response would be stunners. Until the weapons 
were emptied, as they might well be. Then they'd all be back in 
the jungle, hand to hand. There was plenty of free ammunition in 
the streets. Anyone could heft a piece of skull-crushing stone, 
make a club out of a broken hunk of wood. 
Humanity had a grisly history. For centuries they'd tried to 
tame their baser urges, reaching for idealism. Learned table 
manners, played politics, refined slaughter and caged it with 
rules. Mankind had dreamed of rising above itself, developing a 
permanently gentled nature, but 
Grigsby called the rioters animals. But a better term occurred 
to Parnell: feral. That which was once domesticated but through 
need has reverted to its wild state. 
"Up ahead," he said suddenly. The monitor operator tightened 
focus and Harris leaned forward. Parnell seized the initiative, 
ordering into the mike, "Driver, stop!" 
Inertia dictated they rolled six meters before the Centipede 
and attached segment could be halted. Parnell intently watched 
the screen showing the view directly before the vehicle. 
They'd traveled several blocks north along their altered route, 
nearly to Polk Plaza. In calmer days this was a major military 
check point. Now it was no-man's land. 
Further progress was blocked by people. Parnell and the 
others couldn't see them, but their shadows shifted across the 
Plaza and out into the bisecting street. Elongated and eerie 
shadows, and a lot of them. A great many people must be inside 
the Plaza, ahead and to the Centipede's left.

"The fire must be casting the shadows," Harris said. Then 
more uncertainly, "I wonder if" 
"We'd better find out what we've got before we try to get by 
them," Parnell warned. 
The Major was in full agreement, ordering the driver to park 
in the deepest shelter possible. Then he and Parnell started 
toward the door. Therese looked up worriedly and Parnell 
nodded and winked. She didn't nag, this time. 
They edged alongside the Centipede carefully, very alert. 
Whispering, Harris collected his sergeant and three troopers 
who were riding the cab. The six man scouting squad slunk 
across the street, hiding in boarded-up doorways, quietly 
leapfrogging toward the Plaza. Parnell almost rated it as a game, 
something copied from a vid drama. Then he reminded himself 
the dangers were very realas real as the stunner pistol in his 
fist, charged and ready. 
A pile of debris formed a low shield abutting the Plaza. The 
men crouched behind it, peeking over. 
Parnell's first startled impression was that he was seeing an 
old-time carnival, a rally. Not rioters. In fact a rather relaxed 
crowd, all facing away from the hidden troops. 
"Hundreds of them!" Major Harris breathed. His comment 
slid under the crowd's soft murmuring and reverberations from 
a public address system. The hundreds of people were facing a 
jerry-built platform, listening to an orator up on the stage. 
"Youngers," Parnell pointed out. "And if I'm not mistaken 
that's Nevin Detloff pontificating to them." 
"You you're right!" Harris was flabbergasted. 
"What's he doing out here? We've got martial law in effect. 
There's a curfew" 
"Then all of them are breaking it," Parnell observed dryly. "I 
wouldn't recommend trying to arrest the whole crowd."

One of the soldiers volunteered, "I could pick him off easy 
from here, Major," and he thumbed the setting on his target 
stunner all the way back. 
Parnell clamped his hand around the barrel, forcing it down. 
"You want to make a martyr of Detloff? Start a real riot? The 
General would have your hide." The man paled, realizing this 
truth. 
Harris was still marveling. "Detloff. Here. Just like" 
"Real people," Parnell summed up. But not quite. Detloff 
wasn't alone. The young politician's wealth was legend, and it 
bought him staff and protection. No uniforms, but nattily 
dressed guards mingled with the crowd, lined the platform's 
front, ready to protect their leader. And several cameraman 
panned the scene constantly, recording. Detloff never wasted a 
speech or an opportunity. He had a sense of history mixed with 
his foolhardy rabble rousing. 
But he wasn't rabble rousing now. 
"What have we been doing to ourselves, friends?" his 
amplified voice pleaded. "We're tearing our own world apart, 
making it a living hell. This isn't the way. No, this isn't the way! 
It gives the enemy a joy-jump. The Olders, and the 
Employables they're letting us wreck ourselves. Laughing at us! 
Calling us irresponsible!" 
Parnell cocked his head, listening critically, divorcing his 
prejudices from his intelligence. The young speaker was a true 
spellbinder, one of the most hypnotic orators Parnell had ever 
heard. Grigsby's paid front, that silver-haired mannequin, was 
pallid in comparison. 
"He shoulda been a hypnotizer on the vid," one of the soldiers 
said, spitting scornfully. 
"And he would have made a success of it," Parnell agreed. 
"Listen to him. He's got the secret of effective speechmakinghe 
believes what he's saying. And that crowd knows it."

Detloff paced the platform, and the cameras swung to capture 
every lithe movement. Out front, an enraptured audience. 
Behind Detloff, half a dozen of his personal aides, young men 
doing their utmost to ape Nevin Detloff's mannerisms, clothes, 
hair style, his cocksure notilesse oblige. But the crowd's attention 
was riveted on Detloff, inhaling his words believing. 
It was the first time Richard Parnell had seen the Younger 
demagogue in the flesh and at reasonably close range. He had to 
admit he was impressed. Physically, the man was attractive. Ria 
said he was "pretty" and older females felt the same. To men 
Detloff had the sort of clean-cut, open face that inspired 
confidence, and an amateur athlete's stride. And topping it all 
that superbly modulated, masculine voice, full of fire and 
sincerity. No wonder the politician worked such magic on 
crowds! 
"He's got them in the palm of his hand," Harris acknowledged 
grudgingly. "And I'll bet an hour ago they were running around 
looting and burning everything in sightbefore he started 
talking. Look at that." The officer indicated a mammoth bonfire, 
obviously the source of light they'd all been seeing; an old hotel 
flanking the Plaza, now put to the torch, serving as flaming 
illumination for Detloff's rally. 
"They're not burning now. They're listening," Par-nell said. 
Nothing between the Younger Party leader and the audience but 
a thin line of volunteers. If for any reason he lost this crowd, if 
they turned ugly nothing would save him. "He's certainly got 
guts." 
Detloff was everything the mob longed for wealthy, 
physically attractive. A small man, but wiry and agile, a compact 
gladiator type. A stylish one-piecer fitted the slim, muscular 
body tautly, revealing surprisingly broad shoulders. Detloff 
apparently wasn't a traditional flabby rich man. He kept his 
mind and body equally sharp. Perhaps he saw himself as the 
beau ideal of his generation. The Youngers. No one over thirty 
years need apply. 
"So what have we got now, friends?" Detloff was asking, in 
that intimate tone few public speakers' could use successfully.

The crowd was his confidant, a collective comrade. Parnell had 
no love for the man, yet he gave him points. How much more 
must an already adoring audience dote on Detloff? Their 
demi-god, their paragon. 
"A whole week of this rioting. And you've got nothing to show 
for it. Nothing! Except your own misery, friends. Think!" 
As Detloff held the crowd some of his people were circulating 
through the throng. Sling pouches over their shoulders. They 
were handing out what? Printed fliers? Ridiculous. Most of this 
mob couldn't read. The recipients didn't even look down, intent 
on Detloff. 
"What are those men doing?" Major Harris said, narrow-eyed. 
"Passing out something. Food, probably," Parnell replied. 
"Slickest operation I ever saw. When they finally learn what he's 
given them it'll seem like a gift from heaven. Or from Detloff." 
"Bribery," Harris sneered. "Feed them and they'll do whatever 
he wants." 
Parnell smirked, forebearing to mention the obvious. Harris 
was a career officer, but the rest of these troops not working 
for Grigsby for the money. Money didn't mean much, these days. 
Food, that's what counted. And Grigsby had plenty. Like Detloff's 
family, Grigsby invested in agricultural land back when it was 
available. And now hunger was a very potent weapon, and a 
very strong bond to purchase loyalty. From a uniformed soldier, 
or a rioting Younger Party member. 
"Every single one of you is important," Detloff said, stabbing a 
moving finger at the audience. Somehow he seemed to be 
picking out each individual there. "It's our world, Youngers. 
We'll have to live in it a long, long time. But think! What are we 
going to have if we burn it all down? If we let them tear it down." 
" And here comes the slander," Harris growled. 
Parnell was tempted to recite an old maxim about a shoe 
fitting. But Detloff's "them" was rhetorical. He was welding the

mob into a docile, obedient gestalt. Controlling them. And for 
once his motives seemed to be completely non-political. 
"Don't you see what he's doing?" Parnell asked. "He's working 
up to a 'go-home' pitch. And I think he'll make it. Get them off 
the streets. Stop the rioting. Or their part of it, anyway." 
"Well, if he can pull it off" Harris was dubious. "It would 
certainly help if we had one less faction to fight." 
Yes, civil order must be maintained. But Parnell was thinking 
of lives. Precious, scarce lives. Young people. A living gene pool. 
Now, with Ria, there was hope of breaking the infertility riddle. 
And those healthy Youngers in that crowd needn't be the last 
generation. They'd be the parents of all the generations to come. 
Detloff didn't strut. He was too schooled in mob psychology to 
do that. Rather his movements were a shifting beacon, avoiding 
boredom, holding the crowd. Heads swiveled, following him from 
one end of the platform to the other. 
He pounded a fist into cupped palm. A carefully calculated 
showman's gesturepower under control, performed with grace. 
"We must use our heads, friends. Think! We've got the strength, 
but have we got the numbers? No. That's the sad truth. You 
don't batter yourself into a wall. That's only a way to dump it 
fast. The wall will win. The army? They've got the stunners, the 
tanks, all their machines. You can't kill a machine, friends." 
"No, but you just try killin' me, chuckie, and see how long you 
last," one of the soldiers threatened softly, hefting his rifle. 
Detloff couldn't hear that challenge, fortunately. Parnell 
approved Detloff's tactics. He didn't want to disrupt the effect by 
letting the audience know the military was eavesdropping. 
"Nowwhat are we going to do, friends?" Detloff demanded, 
the puppeteer. 
"Aaaaa! We gotta keep it together!" 
"And how do we do that, friends?"

"Aaaaa! We gotta work together for the Youngers!" 
"That's right! But to do that you must have the strength to 
carry through." Detloff was speaking very rapidly and forcefully, 
a blazing comet carrying his adoring followers with him. "You 
must build yourselves in spirit and body" 
Parnell shut it out, momentarily. He felt a burst of insight. 
Detloff had touched a sensitive area. And he had a right to. The 
food shortages affected everyone. But the severest economic 
problems, the collapse of distribution had occurred during the 
lifetimes of these young persons. Nearly all of them were thinner, 
shorter than their parents had been. Small-boned, scrawny 
people who'd never known enough to eat. Like Ria, acquiring 
food occupied a lot of their thoughts. 
A bountiful nation's seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia had 
finally run out. Crop failures, no fertilizer, no fuel to power food 
processing machines, no way to distribute what little came 
through to the starving populace. 
The Youngers, possibly mankind's last generation. Not going 
out with a bang, but with a sickly, emaciated whimper. 
Detloff's assistants by now had been through the entire crowd, 
shoving those mysterious little packages into every hand. Good 
workmen. Parnell suspected fewer than a dozen people had been 
overlooked, and the assistants were scattered amid the mass, 
ready to take care of anyone shortchanged. 
Harris leaned close to Parnell and whispered, "Maybe we 
should try to sneak past." 
"No, not yet." Parnell nodded. The crowd was so large it 
overflowed the Plaza. No way to get past them with a Centipede 
without attracting someone's attention. "Wait. He's leading up 
to those food packages. And I'm betting he'll be able to get them 
to break up after that." 
"Mmm, and leave us a clear field," Harris said. "Throws our 
timetable off, but I agree. Better safe than stoned."

"Now, friends," and Detloff smiled boyishly, and feminine 
sighs rippled through the audience. "None of us have had too 
many presents these years, have we? Here it is almost 
springtime, the end of a long hard winter don't you think that 
calls for a feast?" 
The cameramen were panning the crowd, zoom lensing, ready 
to catch delighted reactions. Detloff sprang his surprise and the 
people behaved as expectedgushing pleasure, cries of 
enthusiasm. 
"Hey, food!" 
"I got one too!" 
"So did I !" 
"Top grade concentrates !" 
Detloff pressed the mike close to his lips, rising above the 
tumult. "Enough for everyone of you. Anyone get missed? Sing 
out! Lots more where that came from. Nobody goes hungry 
tonight, friends!" 
It was a promise, and a threat, the demi-god demanding good 
behavior from his cowering worshippers. And getting it. Yes, he 
just might be able to pull the whole thing off peacefully 
A movement at the edge of Parnell's vision made him glance 
away from Detloff's performance. Something in the darkness, up 
the street, beyond the Plaza. "Watch it," he cautioned Harris. 
"Those might be latecomers. Could be squabbles until they get 
their share." 
"Chavez, can you make it out?" Harris asked his sharpshooter. 
"Not Youngers," the man said, flexing fingers around the 
trigger guard of his stunner rifle. "And a lot more than one." 
Harris motioned his men back further into the sheltering 
shadows. "On your toes. It may be strikers"

Parnell could distinguish a few of the leading figures in the 
approaching group. Wide shoulders, beefy arms. Taller than 
Youngers. The sharpshooter was right. 
The newcomers paused at the fringe of the light, studying the 
scene within the Plaza. Parnell seemed to sense tangible waves of 
hate boiling from the men. Harris had out his officer's glasses 
and now handed them to Parnell. As he raised the binocs faces 
leaped into focushard, angry faces from his own generation. 
Men in their forties and fifties, wearing workmen's blues. And 
each one of them carried a club. 
"You're right. Strikers. Detloff's got trouble" 
"And so have we," Harris said tensely. "I almost wish damn! 
Just a few more minutes and Detloff might have had this crowd't 
disbanding peacefully. Why couldn't those troublemakers have 
waited?" 
"Because they're hunting a fight" 
At that instant the gang charged, bursting upon the youthful 
crowd like a shock wave. It was a berserk, thundering attack, 
loud with threatening roars, punctuated by those ugly, 
murderous clubs. 
Chapter VI 
The marauders crashed into the outermost Youn-gers. Clubs 
came down on the backs of heads, catching the hapless audience 
completely off guard. 
"This will be a slaughter," Harris assessed. Quite apart from 
his military tone, he seemed appalled. "They won't have a 
chance." 
"No, listen!" Detloff screamed into his mike. "There's enough 
food for everyone!" 
The attackers hadn't come to listen. In their rush they 
trampled food packages underfoot. Not food they wanted, but

blood and revenge. Revenge on youth, on approaching old age 
and death, on a disintegrating society. They wielded their clubs 
mercilessly wading into the panicky mass. 
The sharpshooter said, "Permission to spray 'em, sir?" 
Which faction did he refer to? It would be hard to pick targets 
in this mess. But he guessed the young soldiergiven a 
choicewould turn his weapon on the Middle-Aged 
Employables. 
"No," Harris said sensibly. "Don't do anything to attract 
attention. They outnumber us ten to one, at least." 
Parnell shuffled a few centimeters forward, peering around 
the corner, into the Plaza. The Youngers on the far side weren't 
yet sure what was happening. But they scented danger, looked 
for a way out. The burning hotel blocked their exit. Some of 
them began scrambling across Detloff's stage and onto the 
mound of debris barricading the west route out of the Plaza. 
Harris was on a hand-corn, speaking to the monitor operator 
back hi the Centipede. "Got any other human-heat blips?" As 
Parnell came up beside him Harris sighed and said, "It's an 
isolated swarm of strikers. Maybe we can jog east, around the 
Plaza." 
He wasn't happy about the prospect, and neither was Parnell. 
But staying where they were looked riskier by the second. He 
nodded and Harris relayed orders. "Scan shows an alley, half a 
block south. It'll be tight, but we can make it I think." 
The howls from the Plaza nearly drowned his words. Detloff 
was stiu't audible though, his voice boosted by amplifiers. But 
plainly it was a losing battle. Chaos was taking over. 
Parnell and the soldiers retreated slowly, weapons ready. For a 
heartstopping moment Parnell feared they'd been spotted. A 
Younger, one of Detloff's cameramen, pelted out of the Plaza and 
started running their way. The recording pack was still slung 
over the young man's shoulder, but the severed wires of a lens 
unit flapped at his thigh.

Then one of the strikers charged after him, roaring curses and 
waving a blood-stained club. He was taller and longer-legged 
than his quarry. Parnell rooted silently for the underdog, praying 
the kid would win free. 
But the club came down, driving the victim to the pavement. 
The striker hit again and again, in a frenzy of bloodlust. 
"You" and the sharpshooter started to lift his weapon. 
"No," Parnell said, practically in the man's ear. "I know how 
you feelbut we can't take the chance." 
The striker hadn't seen them, fortunately. He stormed back 
toward the Plaza, seeking fresh prey. The cameraman lay in his 
own blood, still. Parnell knew not even Ter's medical training 
could help the Younger. He swung away, hastened to the 
Centipede, trying to blot the carnage from his thoughts. 
Therese stared as he climbed in and sat down heavily beside 
her. The transport was warming to softly whining life, reversing, 
hunting for that elusive alley. Parnell thrust his unused sidearm 
through his belt. The monitors were picking up the screams now. 
At the terrible cries Ria stirred in Therese's arms, then snuggled 
down once more. 
Shaken, Parnell caressed the girl's dark hair, smiling thinly at 
his wife. The nearness of the agony and death out in the streets, 
ripped at him. He couldn't let that happen to Therese and Ria. 
He wouldn't, no matter the cost. 
"Richard, what is it?" Therese said gently. 
It was several minutes before he regained his composure 
sufficiently to tell her what had happened. 
"We caught a little of it, on the monitors," she said, 
commiserating. "Not Youngers, this time." Was she thinking of 
her father's party, and his military watchdogs? Who was the 
enemy, who the victim in this ongoing disaster? 
"I'm afraid Detloffs wealth won't do him any good at the

moment," Parnell said. To his own surprise he felt a pang of 
regret. Too bad. He just gotten a glimpse of a deeper, more 
sincere Nevin Detloff tonight, and now 
Ill 
He stared at the monitor screens. The Centipede's tracking 
devices had located the alley, and now they were traveling along 
it. Turning, paralleling the riot-torn Plaza. Intervening buildings 
guarded them from most of the screams, but flame-light rose 
into the sky. The Centipede's overhead scanners picked up the 
glow, and some of the verbal debacle a block away. 
"Just listen to that!" Parnell exclaimed bitterly. "Are they 
worth trying to save? All our work" 
Therese closed a hand over his, then bent over his knuckles in 
concern. A moment later and she was treating his scrapes, 
taking his mind away from pessimism and disgust. He'd been 
hasty. No need to write off the whole human race. That included 
Ter, and Ria, and a lot of other good people. He smiled, watching 
her fuss overxhis minor injury. Her high cheekbone was 
smudged^and her hair tousled. She wasn't the type to worry 
about primping, or need to. 
"I changed my mind," he said lightly. "I'll see that they're 
saved in spite of themselves. That's good enough. I want to check 
outside." 
The Centipede was creeping. Parnell had no trouble dropping 
out the rear gate and dogtrotting forward to hitch a ride on the 
cab's bump guard. He joined the sharpshooter, a sergeant, and 
Major Harris. 
"We're about a block north of them now," Harris said by way 
of update. He kept his voice low. Certainly no one would hear 
them, but probably caution was a good habit to cultivate, these 
days. 
"Good thing. We'll have to veer west again, won't we?" Parnell 
commented. "Didn't the map show a dead end?''

Harris nodded. They'd already reached the alley's junction 
with a cross outlet. The Centipede carefully jogged left, hesitated 
to scan, then eased onto the main street. 
The Plaza was behind them now, and so was the rioting. 
Flight and pursuit seemed to have headed the other direction. 
Harris spoke into the com. "Pick it up a bit more, Lennox. 
They're not likely to hear the motors now." 
Parnell absently stared into the darkness, alert for any 
movement, but not expecting any. Why were these mobs so 
cretinous? How long would it be before the victorious strikers 
started squabbling among themselves? Over food, over women, 
over nothing but their hatred. The senselessness of it! 
He tried to keep the wider view. Ria. Research. Put the world 
back together again. Tell them all this wouldn't be the end of 
humanity after all. Not the last generation, but the beginning of 
a new era, hopefully one better than the last. That would make 
the mobs use the brains they'd forgotten they had. 
If he could just get out to Jesse's lab, get organized for a fresh 
push, analyzing the samples from Ria 
"Sir!" The sharpshooter pointed, swung his weapon. 
Four men staggered out of the shadows from the left. Two 
men supporting a third, another stumbling along behind them. 
There was a muted whine from the marksman's 
weaponsonic primers keying up. "Hold it, soldier," Harris 
ordered, taking the words out of Parnell's mouth. "Till we make 
an identification." 
The foursome halted, gapipg at the truck. Plainly they were 
near the end of their strength, fearful this was the endone more 
attack they couldn't defend against 
The real danger was to their rear, though. 
Three more men, taller than the first fourand armedran 
out from the stygian fringes of the street. "Here's one for you, you

dirty Younger bastard!" one panted, lifting a club. 
Even as he brought it down Parnell and the soldiers were 
jumping down to the pavement. Harris was ordering the driver 
to stop as they hurried to counter. 
One of the Youngers was down, and the other three were 
barely fending off the assault. Two tried to protect the third with 
their bodies, but the match was cruelly uneven. 
Parnell caught the shoulder of the nearest striker, brushed off 
the clumsy swing with the club. Then he used the man's own 
momentum to send him spinning into a wall. 
"What the hell who you pushin', chuckle?" 
Parnell spared a glance down. The young man who'd been 
struck lay at his feet. The dim light picked out close-cropped 
blond hair and pale, unseeing eyes. A sickening smear of blood 
along the back of the neck. Young. Just a kid. 
As the middle-aged tough lumbered forward again Parnell 
reacted instinctively. This time he wrenched the club out of the 
man's fist. Not as difficult as he thought. The striker wasn't 
expecting it, and Parnell found he topped the man half a head 
and a few pounds. 
He slammed a knee into the striker's solar plexus, then used 
the club to pole him backwards into a sprawl. 
He didn't put as much beef into it as he could have. At the last 
moment he pulled his punch, half-horrified by his own vicious 
urges. Even so the man lost all fight, clutching a bloody nose, 
crawling into the darkness. 
The other attackers hadn't been so lucky. Harris's men turned 
loose their weapons, sent them down. One of them was still 
twitching from the blast of the sonics. 
Major Harris was smiling slyly. "Rather impulsive of you, 
Doctor. But glad to have you on our team. Next time try using 
your sidearm?"

Before Parnell could frame a retort a young voice cried, "Ian! 
They they killed him!" 
One of the fugitives knelt over his dead friend. The other two 
begged, "We have to get out. There may be more of them." All of 
them were bloodied and bruised, their natty onepiecers torn. 
"We can't just leave him like this," the leader wailed, 
anguished, lifting his head. 
Startled by recognition, Parnell gasped, "Detloff?" 
It was the chieftain of the Youngers. Detloff had undergone a 
severe transformation since his performance. Clothing ripped, 
his handsome face dabbled with dirt and bloodspots, a nasty 
bruise swelling over his right temple. In the wavering light the 
young man's dark eyes were glittering, fiery with shock and pain. 
"Get out!" he raged, close to hysteria. "I won't abandon him! 
Won't abandon any of them!" 
"I'll be damned," Major Harris said, reaching the 
identification Parnell had. "Detloff." 
One of the other fugitives flared, "Yes, he's Nevin Detloff. He 
doesn't walk on air. Can't you have some pity? He's been 
broadcasting without letup nearly four days. No sleep, no food, 
and now this" The youthful aide paused, sneering at the 
uniforms. "But I wouldn't expect you to appreciate thator what 
he's done to abort these riots." 
The second man leaped into the argument. "Trying to blame 
everything on us. It's Grigsby's goons who stir up the worst 
trouble. You! And that silver-haired puppet of the General's. 
Shoving those lies at the Olders and Employables, telling them to 
hang onto a world they've already ruined!" 
Detloff wasn't alone in his exhaustion. All three men were 
injured on the edge of collapse. The soldiers didn't like being 
called goons, and Parnell hastily stepped between the factions. 
"Easy," he warned the Youngers. "This isn't the best time or 
place."

Shakily, Detloff lifted 'his hand, gingerly palpating the bruise 
at his hairline. "'Can't can't think" 
"No wonder." Simple humanitarianism pushed at Parnell. 
"Where were you headed? Any of your people nearby?" 
"These Youngers are breaking curfew," Major Harris began, 
but Parnell silenced him with a glare. It held momentarily, then 
the officer snapped, "There's a need for martial law right now. 
Do you want more proof than what happened back in the Plaza? 
With those strikers on the loose no one's safe. The curfew's for 
their own protection" 
"We we lost most of our people, there," one of Detloff's aides 
said, nodding toward the Plaza. "They ran over us. I I'm afraid 
the guards were killed. And they burned the media cars, 
smashed cameras" And cameramen, Parnell added mentally. 
"Smashed everything! They're animals!" 
He sounded like a young version of General Grigsby. Parnell 
didn't linger over the irony. "No, they're just human beingsat 
their worst. The Major's right. You're not safe here. You'd better 
come with us." Harris blinked, taken aback by the use of his own 
logic. 
"Nevin?" one of the aides asked tentatively. 
"I don't have we been reduced to?" Detloff stared at the 
body of his dead comrade, conceding bitterly, "What choice have 
we, Lew? What's that old phrase about out of the the" 
"Frying pan and into the fire," Parnell finished for him. "I can 
guarantee there'll be no summary executions among us." He 
didn't look at the fallen Younger but at least Harris caught the 
clue, nodded assurances. 
Detloff mourned the dead man once more, protesting he 
wouldn't leave his followers. The aides appealed to Parnell, past 
marshaling arguments. 
"It wouldn't be wise," Parnell said gently. "And you said 
yourself there are others. At times like these the deepest honor

you can offer your dead is to live, carry on their ideals." 
Almost out on his feet, Detloff mulled Parnell's words, spoke a 
half-concession. "That's that's true." His companions seized 
that, supporting him, half dragging him toward the Centipede. 
Parnell cut off Major Harris's sotto voce complaints, trailing 
the Youngers to the transport. Getting the three men aboard 
wasn't easy. At first the soldiers didn't want to assist at all. But 
when they saw Detloff, clinging to consciousness, determinedly 
attempting to pull himself up the high gate, they were shamed. 
Half a dozen men lifted the spent refugees into the safety of the 
carrier. 
That accomplished, Parnell rounded on Harris. "If we intend 
to hit K Leg tonight, we'd better get moving." 
"Very well, Doctor. But I intend to report" 
"Report anything you damned well please. But get us out of 
here, before we end up in a confrontation with more strikers," 
Parnell said heavily. He hadn't thought he'd need to pull rank, 
wave Grigsby's authority at the officer. Perhaps it wasn't 
necessary. Perhaps he was tired. They all were. 
The Centipede was starting to roll again by the time Parnell 
knelt beside Therese. She was caring for the Youngers' injuries, 
and the troops were back at their gunports, pretending none of 
this had happened. Detlofl and his aides were age 
contemporaries of the soldiers, but a sharp line divided their 
loyalties. 
An autohypo hissed against DetlofFs bared bicep and Therese 
said, "Thafshould make you feel better. Just sit quietly until I fix 
these cuts. There don't seem to be any broken bones." 
"Th thank you," Detloff murmured. He gazed wonderingly at 
Therese, then at Parnell, intelligently making the linkage. 
Despite his pain he was courteous. "I'm sorry for my earlier 
remarks, sir. I didn't realize your wife was" 
Then he broke off, dumbfounded. Ria had wakened, yawning

loudly. Therese smiled, and as the girl immediately wanted to 
play student nurse Therese indulged her. She guided small hands 
around the sterile spray. "Press evenly. There! We made a nice 
clean bandage." 
Ria made a face. "Keep out the germs. Mean germs. They 
make you sick!" 
"That's right," Therese agreed, rummaging in her med kit. 
Detlofl raised himself on one elbow, a risky effort in his 
weakened condition. Wide-eyed, he touched fingertips under 
Ria's chin. The girl was annoyed, shaking him off. Then she did a 
double-take. "Heeeey! I know you!" Innocently, she asked Parnell, 
"Is he really Detloff?" 
Before Parnell could reply the young man whispered, "A a 
little girl! Lew, I think I got hit worse than I thought." 
"No, she's real." Parnell grinned conspiratorially at his wife. 
The Youngers gaped disbelievingly at Ria, and the child was 
somewhat unnerved by their scrutiny. She decided to return 
Detloff's stare, growing sly. "I thought you'd be as tall as Richard 
is. You look tall, on the screens." 
That shook Detloff out of his trance. He met Par-Hell's eyes, 
astutely pegging the scientist as "Richard". Good-naturedly he 
laughed, amused at himself. "No, I'm not tall. And I'm sure a 
psychiatristif there are any of them leftwould rattle off 
theories about over-compensation. No matter. Maybe if I'd 
grown as tall as your father did, love, I wouldn't have this urge to 
lead my Youngers to their deaths." 
Not letting him succumb to fresh gloom, Parnell said, 
"Compensation can come in a lot of forms, Detloff. I'm not Ria's 
father, though I wish I were." 
Ria shook her head, confiding to Therese, "They're silly." 
Therese smirked, very feminine, treating Ria as should an 
adult confidante. "All men are, sometimes. Hand me those

alco-swabs, honey." 
Parnell sympathized with Detloff's awe, recalling his own 
when he'd first encountered Ria. At this moment the young 
politician was very vulnerable, genuinely likable. Injuries hadn't 
marred his dark good looks, nor the sensitivity in those sharp 
brown eyes. Further, Detloff had proved amply his courage, and 
his loyalty to his people. Four days and nights^ on the media, 
trying to stop the carnage in the streets. Now risking his life, 
going out to speak in person, daring anything to help his 
followers. There was a core of altruism under the political 
manipulation 
As there was with General Ogden Grigsby's dealings. 
If there was a way to strike a truce between Det-loff's 
Youngers and the older people Grigsby could influence 
The prize was certainly worth the attempt. 
"She's not your child?" Detloff said. He looked from Parnell 
to Therese thoughtfully. His expression was peculiar. Hungry. 
Not his belly. Something else. 
Therese smiled gently at Ria and explained, "I wish we were 
her biological parents. But they're dead." 
Suddenly Parnell saw the truth behind that rapacious greed in 
Detloff's eyes. This young nabob had everythingwealth, 
breeding, power, intelligence. He was from the cream of human 
society, the elite. But like Richard Parnell and every other man 
on earth now Detloff couldn't sire a son or daughter. No child to 
carry on that illustrious line. All Detloff's many gifts and 
privileges would die with him. 
Parnell was selfless enough to concede that would be a loss to 
the human race. The young man's genetic structure was 
important. His potential children would undoubtedly be 
contributors to mankind's progress. The type of people the world 
would need in the future, people who could think, help put 
tottering civilization back on its feet.

It was a hunger Parnell knew well. He felt the same 
deprivation. Childlessnessknowing his intelligence, his being 
would die utterly when he didwas a festering wound Parnell 
had learned to live with. Detloff hadn't yet. 
The drug Therese had given Detloff was having some effect 
now. He was sloughing off lack of sleep and physical and 
emotional stress. Driving himself, mental wheels turning busily. 
Parnell had seen Ogden Grigsby push himself the same way, 
often. Neither the General nor Detloff was scientifically trained, 
but both men had plenty of brains and natural cunning. 
"Ria's being here changes the situation, doesn't it?" Parnell 
said craftily. 
"You you know who her real parents were?" Hope 
underlined Detloff's question. The child-buyer. And if one 
woman was fertile, mightn't there be others? Others who 
Detloff's charm could 
"We're backtracking their ancestry." Parnell was way ahead of 
the younger man. "So far it seems to be a unique case. But we're 
testing Ria's genetic structure. In a few years" Therese eyed 
him thoughtfully. Parnell felt strangely dispassionate. Disparity 
of age wouldn't matter. Could he think of Detloff as a possible 
mate for a nubile Ria? Difficult, but not impossible. 
Detloff studied all of them. Yes, a very good mind inside that 
handsome head. "You're scientists. Both of you." They weren't 
wearing lab smocks, but Detloff had placed them anyway. 
"Haven't I seen your pictures on a fact-sheet? Lew, Brent?" His 
aides were groggy, not as swift on the uptake. 
"I'll save you the trouble. I'm Richard Parnell, and this is my 
wife, Therese. We direct the Life Sciences Project." 
"Of course!" Detloff said, chagrined he hadn't made the 
connection. 
"That's one of Grigsby's pets," Lew muttered, suspicious. 
"If you want to put it in those terms. Ogden partially bankrolls

us, but our work is completely independent." Parnell was holding 
Detloff's interest, and that was what counted. A paradoxthe 
media's best crowd-pleaser playing audience to a tired and 
disheveled immunologist. "For nearly twenty years we've been 
trying to find a method of making human beings fertile once 
again." 
For several minutes Detloff sat silent, thinking. Therese 
completed her first aid and Ria helped her repack the kit. Then 
she took the child onto her lap, cuddling her to sleep. Detloff's 
exciting presence had already lost its appeal for the drowsy girl. 
Detloff stared at foster mother and child. In a seeming 
non-sequitur he asked Parnell, "You're what about thirty-five?" 
"Thanks for the compliment. You're ten years short." 
"The point is when you were my age you believed you had the 
rightand the abilityto 'start a family'. Or however the quaint 
term went. No matter that biology was even then proving you 
wrong," Detloff said. "You believed it, didn't you?" 
Therese looked pained. Parnell shook his head, making 
excuses for the young man's lack of tact. Detloff was tired, hurt, 
not up to par. 
Even as he thought that Detloff realized his error. "I I'm 
sorry. That was terribly gauche of me." 
Ria blinked sleepily, interested, craning her neck to ask 
Therese, "What's 'gauche'?" The woman bent her head, 
whispering the answer, and Ria promptly dozed off again. 
Detloff was fascinated by the girl's question, her obvious 
brightness. With difficulty he picked up his thread. "I meant 
the two of you are older. You had hope, however briefly. I never 
did. Even when I was barely pubescent I knew I was a member of 
the last generation." 
"Nevin" It was Lew, the less injured of the two aides. He 
seemed concerned for his chief's emotions. More than an 
employer and subordinate relationship. Detloff held his men's

hearts. 
"No, I'm all right," Detloff said absently. His fiery gaze bored 
questingly at Parnell. 
And Parnell knew what haunted the young man. "There may 
be other children besides Ria. We think there are. Grigsby's 
people will conduct a searchif they can ever stop trying to 
control riots. Understandably, the General can only reach certain 
segments of the population though. And those aren't the 
segments where we're likely to find young parents. They'll 
respond to Nevin Detloff, but" 
Detloff nodded, instantly grasping the possibilities. "I'm not 
sure how much help I could be. You see me at a disadvantage, 
sir," he said, chuckling wryly. "Cut off from my staff and 
operations" 
"The riots will be over, eventually," Parnell countered. "Do 
what you were telling that crowd to do think long range. Every 
person hi this city, in the worldeven your enemiesis vitally 
important, genetically. We're working on a lot of alternates. 
Sperm banks, some success with ova banks, cloning's an outside 
chance. You see, until we learn if Ria is going to be fertile, we're 
on borrowed time. And the interest rates are incredible," he 
finished sourly. 
"I've always tried to stop the violence," Detloff defended 
himself. "That's not my way. But so many of the Youngers believe 
they've nothing to live for" 
"Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow everyone will be dead. 
But you can convince them otherwise. 
I'll let you film Ria, if that will help. Look at her. 
She's eight years old," Parnell said, very intent, using his best 
persuasion. "You needn't be the last generation, not unless you 
choose suicide. Think what this means. To you, to me, to 
everybody. Even to Ogden Grigsby." 
Detloff and his aides looked at the soldiers, listened to the soft

whine of the Centipede's motors, reminded of where they were, 
whose hospitality they were enjoying. "The General ?" 
"Is protecting our projectand Ria," Parnell explained. "The 
riots killed our power at the downtown lab. We're relocating to a 
sister lab, out in the SDP." 
Therese drew Detloff's attention, lifting her lovely head 
proudly. "Richard's not being completely honest, Mr. Detloff. We 
have a bit of additional clout. General Grigsby's my father. But 
he's sincerely dedicated to our research. You must believe that." 
She paused, then added a clincher. "You and he share 
something. The same feelings. Yes, you do. He wants a 
grandchild desperately and I can't give him one." 
Detloff flushed, sympathetic, moved. Again Parnell began to 
hope there might be hope for compromise. A coalition. A 
combining of resources and talents Grigsby's and Detloff's. 
Jesse had put his finger on it, a week ago. The clonist had been 
sarcastic, but hi this case absolutely right. Between them Ogden 
Grigsby and Nevin Detloff controlled an awesome amount of the 
country's remaining potential. Was there any limit to what they 
might accomplish if they became allies instead of enemies? Both 
men wielded tremendous power. Now if Richard Parnell could 
only aim that instrument 
The Younger Party leader fingered the transparent spray 
bandage over his bruised temple. "I it's hard to organize my 
thoughts tonight. Gets blurry when you've cranked out too much 
oratory on demand." 
A big admission, though possibly inadvertent. "Whose 
demand?" Parnell asked. "Yours? Or the crowd's?" 
Detloff bit his lip. "I'm not entirely to blame for what's been 
happening" 
"No, all the political leaders share that burden, including 
powers behind the faces, like my father-in-law. Every politician 
and string-puller manipulating a special faction, fanning 
frustrations," Parnell said bitterly.

"They're genuine frustrations!" 
"Agreed, but we all have them," Parnell insisted. "With the 
possible exception of a few rare types like Ria's parents. They 
were Wild Fringers, free spirits, and they were immune to the 
infertility factor." 
He let that sink in, then hammered Detloff with his own logic 
and catch phrases. "Think! Maybe there are others like Ria's 
parents. Fertile women. Men whose sperm won't trigger that 
immuno reaction from the ova. Those are the people we've been 
hunting for two decades and more. Immunes! But we're never 
going to crack this problem if those people are afraid to reveal 
themselves, reveal their children." 
Parnell glanced at his wife and Therese nodded encouragingly. 
He waded in deeper. "Would you reveal your immunity, in their 
position? Seeing society disintegrating, tearing itself to bits, 
generation fighting generation. Youngers, Olders, Middle-Aged 
Employables killing themselves and each other." 
Suddenly abashed by his own glibness, Parnell stopped, 
sheepishly raking the stubble of beard on his jaw. Detloff grinned 
admiringly. "You'd have made a fair media orator yourself, 
Doctor." But be-hirid the humor lay more serious consideration. 
Plainly Detloff was following Parnell's lead, weighing the 
argument. "I think we just might" 
Marksmen shifted at their posts and the monitor operator 
leaned back in his seat, sighing. Parnell became aware the 
Centipede had stopped. 
The rear seal snapped open and Major Harris climbed in. He 
stood arms akimbo, frowning at Detloff and the other Youngers. 
Parnell braced himself for one more militaristic and 
narrow-minded tirade. 
But Harris had something else on his mind. "We've reached 
the K Leg, Parnell." 
Not missing the disrespect in the tone, Parnell asked, 
"Blockaded? Rioters?"

"No, fortunately the area seems totally deserted." Harris 
didn't let the listeners enjoy his announcement. "With good 
reason. Nothing here for them. The road isn't operational. And 
we can't get through to the General's HQ. Radiation interference 
from the nuke stations, maybe." 
Parnell snorted at that uniformed fear. "Not likely. Well, if the 
slideroad isn't moving, why don't you use it like a conventional 
road?" 
He thought Harris would start yelling. The officer reddened, 
fighting anger. "Do you think I'm so short of brains, Parnell?" 
"My apologies. Obviously the same reasoning occurred to you, 
and you have very good grounds for rejecting it" 
The Major wasn't as triumphant as Parnell anticipated. He 
seemed, rather, defeated, dejected. "We haven't the battery 
reserve to even start the attempt. Used it up getting this far. 
We've got just about enough power to jog her down onto the 
slideroad." Parnell noted the monitor operator was shutting 
down his viewscreens, dropping to lowest possible amperage. 
The sight was ominous, preparing him for Harris's finale. "And 
then we're through. Dead on the concrete." 
Chapter VII 
One of the soldiers guarding the Centipede shifted nervously. 
"Gonna be sunup soon. Hope they get that thing workin' by 
then." 
"You bet, chuckle," another agreed. 
Tired of cooling his heels inside the transport, Parnell had 
come out for some air. He inhaled deeply, stretching, easing the 
kinks out of cramped muscles. His senses seemed drawn taut by 
fatigue. Too many crises, too little sleep. 
In the east the faintest suggestion of greying light streaked the 
sky above the metropolis. That cold, eerie time just before dawn, 
when all the world slept. A preternatural silence surrounded the

Centipede. Only this military vehicle and the troops guarding it. 
Nothing else anywhere but stone and steel. 
The stillness and the glow of approaching dawn recalled a 
scene from Parnell's past. He was young then, starting his 
science career, perhaps on some early morning errand. "The sky 
above the city used to look like that all night, every night," he 
reminisced, indicating the pale eastern horizon. 
The soldiers glanced at him quizzically. Not sure why he 
bothered to go on, Parnell pointed at a scattering of fading stars. 
"We had to travel into the country to see those. The city's lights 
blotted them out." 
Now the young men were openly skeptical. They didn't believe 
him. Why should they? It had been decades since humanity 
could afford to be prodigal with electric power. 
Ruefully, Parnell murmured to himself, "But it was true. And 
the growing season in this latitude was five months long, then. 
Before the climate shifts. Before the plagues, and the famines." 
He was getting as bad as Grigsby. Wallowing in nostalgia for the 
old days. 
"Well?" Major Harris was complaining softly. "Come on. 
You're supposed to be the specialist, Prentiss." 
Prentiss was the Centipede's top mechanic. For nearly an hour 
he'd been laboring over the slideroad control box. And spitting 
obscenities in frustration. "Can't dump it, sir. Ain't built like the 
one on the Southwest Leg." 
Parnell shook his head sadly. He didn't blame the soldier. The 
man was probably illiterate, or knew a few simple mechanical 
symbols. If he hadn't been checked out on this particular system, 
he was out of luck. And so were the troops and civilians 
depending on him. 
Impatient, aware of their exposed position, the threat of 
roving mobs, Parnell surveyed their surroundings. Still quiet. So 
far. How long? How much longer could they risk being stalled 
here?

Major Harris had been huffy, his toes stepped on earlier. He'd 
take care of the slideroad problem. A military situation. 
Slideroads were under North Central Divisional jurisdiction, and 
this was martial law. 
But he'd said that an hour ago, and Parnell saw no progress at 
all.
"They seem to have problems." Parnell turned. Detloff and his 
aide, Lew. He thought they'd been sleeping. Perhaps they too 
were bored, apprehensive at the wait. Detloff was limping badly, 
shouldn't have been on his feet. Too stubborn to stay put. 
"You might say their problems are ours," Parnell reminded 
the Youngers. "I happen to know Grigsby's forces are stretched 
to the breaking point. I doubt he can spare any to search for us. 
As long as the weather stays clear those strikers will be on the 
prowl, keeping the army busy." 
"Oh, I wouldn't worry," Lew sneered. "With those sonic 
cannons our friends are carrying" 
"Those aren't inexhaustible. And until they are, how many 
people will be hurt or die? You want more of that?" 
Detloff and his aide considered that, abashed. The young 
politician looked bleak. "I agree, Doctor. Your wife says Brent's 
in worse shape than we thought. Needs a hospital. If we can find 
one still operational." Concerned for his people, he added 
vehemently, "We've got to." 
Parnell started toward the slideroad controls. Lew piped up, 
"Going to offer the Major some intelligent advice?" 
"Something like that." 
"For Brent's sake, thanks," Detloff said gratefully. 
"Don't celebrate yet. I'll see what I can do." Parnell got a chilly 
reception from Harris, ignored it. He leaned over the tech's 
shoulder and said, "May I be of assistance?"

"Thank you, no," the officer answered. "We'll manage." 
"You aren't doing too well so far. Have you checked time, 
Major? I think you're due for another opinion. What's the 
trouble, Corporal?" Parnell said. He used the same tone he would 
have hi asserting his authority in a science lab. It worked in 
these circumstances, too. 
After a brief glance at Harris the tech sat back on his heels 
and sighed. "No idea, sir. I been checked out on an O'Neill 
model, but this one's different." 
"Of course it is!" Harris exclaimed. "It was built in the 
Nineties, never put into use." 
"Then or now," Parnell agreed. He tentatively nudged a few 
controls, found them stiff with corrosion. "This road must have 
been the ultimate hi bad timing. They completed it just as the 
worst catastrophes in millennia hit simultaneously. No more 
cars. Who could waste petrochemicals in an auto engine? This 
thing's filthy, Corporal." 
"Sure is. She was sealed up tight. Controls should have been 
as good as new" 
"Vandals didn't do the damage. Time and weather did," 
Parnell explained, studying the schematic on the control cover. 
"Y'make anything o' that, chuckie?" 
Parnell winced at the abhorred slang. "Basically there's not 
much that can go wrong here, except natural decay. Thing 
should have had maintenance," he said absently, tracing the 
circuitry. This wasn't precisely his field, but he could read, and 
the setup looked reasonably simple. If the integral circuits and 
relays hadn't rusted out completely, there was a quick way to 
clean it up, give it a test. 
He drew the sidearm Harris had given him. The Major tensed 
and Detloff and Lew eyed one another curiously. Parnell chuckled 
at their fears. "What

what are you going to do, Doctor?" Harris demanded 
uncertainly. 
"Hopefully, get your slideroad moving." Parnell let the dawn 
light fall over his shoulder, on the weapon's controls. He frowned 
and said, "I'll need hypersonics on a tightly coherent beam. 
What's the setting, Corporal?" 
"Now what is that supposed to ?" 
Parnell didn't let Harris get a good start on his protest. "It's a 
cleaning technique, Major. We've used it in scientific 
laboratories since at least the 1960s. Take my word for it, it's 
nothing very unusual. As far as I can see the main thing wrong 
with these controls is corrosion. And the quickest way to get rid 
of the surface crud is hypersonics. Now do you tell me how to set 
this thing, or do I guess at itand possibly overload?" 
Grumpily, Harris nudged a couple of glide switches on the 
sidearm. "There. That's what you asked for. But I don't see" 
"Have a little patience. You had me growing moss, waiting 
inside that carrier. I think you can stand a minute or two of 
suspense." Parnell paced off a few meters, waved Harris and the 
corporal out of firing range. He trained the sonic weapon on the 
control box and pressed the trigger. 
Clean sound. Used for good purposes. The gun was well 
designed; no sonic backlash at all when you were behind it. 
Parnell lowered the weapon, gestured to the enlisted man. 
"Check it. See if she's loosening." A positive report. Parnell tried 
two more fifteen-second bursts. That's about what he would have 
used in the lab on dirty equipment. Though he'd never 
encountered quite this much corrosion. 
He shoved the sidearm in his belt as the tech wiggled the 
controls. Parnell felt a subsurface quivering, as of machinery 
stirring out of years of dormancy. He looked expectantly toward 
the slideroad. A beckoning light winked on at the nearby entry 
slot. Welcoming the traveler. He hoped that wasn't an idle 
promise.

Jerkily at first, the gridstrips and rollers out in the main road 
began to shift. The technician played with the controls for a 
moment, doing arcane things to the relays. The operation of the 
mechanical highway smoothed. Then it obediently notched to 
"hold". Waiting for passengers. 
"Y'did it, chuckie!" the corporal exulted. 
Detloff and Lew nodded approvingly. Their heads were 
together, a hasty whispered conference going on. More Younger 
politics? What were they up to? 
"Good work, Corporal," Harris said, pointedly snubbing the 
civilian who'd done the work. 
Detloff interrupted, "Major, we've got a badly injured man in 
your carrier. Could we take him to our headquarters? He 
needs" 
"You violated curfew, Mr. Detloff. You and your party are 
under arrest." Harris was maddeningly officious, the sort of prig 
who invited a punch in the nose. 
"I'm talking about a man's life, you cretin!" Detloff flared, 
none too diplomatically. Plainly the crowd-pleaser was tired, 
worn thin by strain and injury and in no mood to put up with 
Major Harris's thickheadedness. 
Harris didn't give a centimeter, knowing he had the 
manpower and weapons to back his orders. 
"Frankly, sir, with conditions the way they are now, one life 
more or less doesn't seem to matter much." 
"You mean a Younger's life doesn't matter," Detloff corrected 
him, coldly angry. 
"Read it any way you want," the officer said, brushing off. the 
politician. "Kelley, let's get organized." 
As Harris turned away Detloff started to lunge for him. 
Parnell had to interpose. "Easy. You don't look suicidal to me,

Detloff. You tackle him and you'll draw half a dozen sonic bursts 
before you know what hit you." , 
"Brent you heard that bastard! He doesn't give a damn if 
Brent dies" 
Tactfully, shunting the subject, Parnell asked, "What were you 
going to do for your man if you could get to Younger HQ? 
Hospitals aren't what they used to be. All of them will be 
swamped, too, thanks to the riots. And really good doctors are 
scarce these days." 
"That's we've got to do something," Detloff said helplessly. 
"Okay." Parnell seized the chance to put his proposition. "I've 
got some very competent people on my staff. You might be doing 
your friend a kindness if you did accept the Major's 'protective 
custody.' Let him call it 'arrest' if he wants. It'll get Brent to some 
good doctors. Better than you could hope for most other 
placesand sooner." 
"You're very generous, Doctor Parnell. I thank you," the 
Younger said, obviously thinking hard, mulling the alternatives. 
Pressing it home, Parnell added, "With any luck we'll be at 
Northwest Cloning in less than an hour. Unless you've got 
resources I can't imagine, that's better than you could do 
heading back east, isn't it?" 
Grudgingly, Detloff nodded, buried in logic. And by fatigue. 
Lew slapped his chieftain's shoulder and said cheerfully, "He's 
making sense, Nevin. Best deal Brent could hope for." 
"Besides," Parnell added slyly, "that'll give you a chance to 
stick close to Ria. Unless I read you wrong, that appeals." 
"You read me very well," Detloff said, smiling. He cocked his 
head, eyeing Parnell thoughtfully. "Ever think about going into 
politics? YouVe got the knack. Finding the right buttons to push, 
and making people think it was their idea all along." 
"Oh? That's not the way my father-in-law runs his party. But

maybe he leaves the psychology to the party mouthpiece" 
"You're definitely a leader-type, Parnell," Detloff insisted. 
Parnell wondered if it was a recruitment pitch. Ludicrous. He 
was much too old to join Det-loff's Youngers. 
"Genetics." Lew was nodding solemnly. Again Parnell felt an 
unspoken bond between the two young men. "And compromise." 
There was a lot of activity among the soldiers now. Trying to 
be as quiet as possible. Inevitably there were barked shins and 
elbows in ribs and bitten-off curses. The Centipede had stopped 
short of the slide-road's entry slot. The heavy transport was 
pushing its last reserves of battery power, and needed help. 
Muscles. The cab lurched like a drunken metal elephant, power 
packs whining. 
"A little more little more," Sergeant Kelley was saying, 
circling his hand hi a come-ahead signal. 
The troops had slung their weapons, put shoulders against the 
transport. Parnell too grabbed a handhold, added his strength. 
To the uniformed men beside him this was one more hard job. 
Parnell saw the larger picturelife and death. It was vital they 
get the transport, and Ria, out of the city to safety. 
Still no radio contact. Maybe a failure in the Centipede's 
systems. Maybe some slopover from nuke stations. Whatever the 
cause Grigsby would have had no word from them for hours. 
Parnell empathized with the old man's worry. If the General's 
heart failed, if his iron control holding back utter chaos 
faltered 
"Hey, you! Stop!" 
Parnell twisted around. Someone was running away from the 
slideroadtoward the nearby buildings. 
It was Lew, DetlofFs aide. Nevin Detloff wasn't exactly 
cheering his friend on, but he was smiling broadly. This had 
been planned.

A few of the soldiers were raising their rifles, taking aim on 
the fleeing Younger. 
"Hold your fire!" Parnell snapped. 
His unexpected commandeven though it came from a 
civilianwas the deciding factor. The troops hesitated for a 
fraction of a second. Long enough for Lew to dart into the 
shadows, out of range. Detloff threw Parnell a grateful nod. 
"You told him to make a break for it," Harris growled, 
advancing on Detloff. 
"He's gone now, Major. Drop it." 
"Because of you, Parnell." Harris shifted his anger to the 
scientist. Meeting Parnell's unflinching gaze, he ordered, 
"Sergeant, I want Mr. Detloff tied and watched at all times from 
now on." 
Completely unperturbed, Detloff offered his wrists to the 
non-com. Not resisting at all. Parnell guessed that wasn't 
necessary. Whatever Detloff wanted done, 
Lew would carry out. Detloff was content to stay here, a 
prisoneraccompanying Ria and seeing that his friend Brent 
had proper care. 
Harris was wrestling, none too successfully, with a boiling 
rage. "I've had just about enough interference from you, 
Parnell" 
"Then spill your guts to Ogdenwhen we link up with him. At 
the moment the only thing that counts is moving," Parnell felt an 
abstract responsibility to the unconscious Younger in the 
transport; he'd promised Detloff the man would have medical 
care, and he'd keep his word. But Therese and Ria deserved 
more. He wouldn't let Harris's temper jeopardize their safety. 
Sergeant Kelley and his work gang were already back on the 
Centipede, pushing hard. With a final, rocking whisper the 
vehicle slid into the entry slot grooves. "Okay, that's it!" Kelley

said hoarsely. 
Technician Prentiss was setting up their pre-plotted route. 
Westward, out of the city. Not the way they'd originally planned, 
but Grigsby would track them down once they were clear of the 
radio interference. The Centipede and carrier segment took up 
two of the slideroad's gridstrips. Two more strips fore and aft 
would ride along for the troops. 
The strips were slightly less than three meters wide, barely 
sufficient to accommodate the Centipede's bulk. The slideroad 
had never been intended to carry military vehicles. But it was 
well built, tough. Parnell knew weight was no problem. The 
automatic sequences coupled the four strips together with 
magnetic pull, a mechanical floating carpet. 
They'd travel over an endless succession of fric-tionless rollers. 
None of the other lanes need operate. 
Not that power was a problem, here. The slideroad was 
constructed to soak up and use solar energy. A 
very efficient, self-contained operation. Virtually foolproof. 
The gridstrips were easing through the entry slot, into the 
main road. Technician Prentiss had finished the programming, 
resealed the control box. He hopped on the rear panel beside his 
fellow soldiers. Everyone on board. 
The Centipede and her accompanying troops rode out onto 
the slideroad and began to accelerate. Det-loff, his hands tied, 
awkwardly levered himself down to a sitting positionlike a 
tourist settling in to enjoy the ride. Harris and Sergeant Kelley 
stood a few feet away, by the carrier's rear door. They were 
watching the politician closely, alert for any further breaks. But 
Detloff obviously had no such plan in mind. 
Parnell climbed into the transport. Therese was kneeling 
beside the injured Younger, mopping sweat from the man's face. 
Brent didn't look well. Therese said unhappily. "He's gotten 
worse. Possible concussion. We'll need X-rays"

"Soon as we get to Jesse's lab." 
"What was going on out there a while ago?" his wife asked. "I 
heard shouting." 
"Lew made a break for it," Parnell said, studying the 
unconscious man's pale face. "Got away, too. Thanks to me. I 
couldn't see letting Harris's men shoot him down." 
"You're hoping all that talk about compromise soaked in, 
aren't you?" She glanced at Ria. The child had curled up and 
gone to sleep atop some specimen crates. Ria was a picture of 
lovely innocence, her cheek pillowed on an army blanket. "It 
would be wonderful if Father and Detloff quit going at each 
other's throats" 
"They've got to. It's the only long range answer, Ter." 
She combed her hair with her fingers absently, still looking at 
Ria. "Our little angel really got to Detloff, didn't she?" Then 
Therese stared at the injured man. "They're not what we 
expectedI mean, DetlofFs Youngers. Not the idiotic puppet 
master and his mindless hordes Father's always said they were. 
Does he really believe his own propaganda, Richard?" 
"He's not the only one who's prejudiced," Parnell reminded his 
wife. "DetlofFs a seething mass of them. That's going to be the 
big hurdle in both cases getting them to admit each side's been 
blind." 
"You really think you can pull that off? I thought," Therese 
paused, seeking a phrase, "you were just distracting Detloff and 
the others from their injuries." 
"It's time for peacemaking, Ter. Now, while there's a chance 
someone will benefit from it in the future," Parnell said, nodding 
toward Ria. 
"After so many years of hate. Older, Middle-Ager, Younger 
all hating" 
"At least Detloff hasn't had as long to build up his hate,"

Parnell said. "He claims he's twenty-five, but I doubt that. 
Frankly, I think he pretends to be older than he isfor the 
leadership aura. Which is ironic, considering. But I remember a 
few old news items. The dates .~. . as I recall, Detloff's father died 
when the boy was about twelve" 
"Leaving young Nevin Detloff a very wealthy kid," Therese 
finished sourly, very much her father's daughter. 
"Well, you should appreciate that, my American princess," 
Parnell teased. "The Detloffs were thinking along the same lines 
Ogden was, back in the 
Twentieth Century; they invested in landagriculture. 
Certainly paid off." 
She relented, seeing how much the two families had in 
common. Her soft smile stirred impulses Par-nell thought he was 
too tired to feel. He wished they were alone. But there was the 
monitor operator, working with his darkened communications 
equipment. And Ria, and the injured Younger. It seemed like he 
and Ter were never alone, lately. Additionally there was the soft 
rumble, the greasy feel of the slide-road's operation, a constant 
sound beneath them. 
Not the time or the place, as he'd told Detloff earlier. He 
returned her tender look, saying, "Princess Ter, think you can 
help me twist King Ogden's arm?" 
"What?" 
"When we get where we're going, I imagine Ogden will be 
waiting for us. Worried sick and ready to explode," Parnell 
explained. "And it won't help when he learns we've got Nevin 
Detloff as a guest." 
Therese leaned back against one of the gunner's ports, 
shaking her head. "If only you wouldn't rush in, being so 
generous. I'll try, but I don't know what I can do. You know what 
Father's like once he" 
"This time the results are worth it. Wheedle. Play on his

heartstrings, use Ria as a weapon, Ter. Whatever it takes," he 
said. 
She was mildly irritated. "I'm a scientist, not an actress. 
Soft-soaping Father's not my specialty." 
"Make it yours, this time. You're his daughter. Make him 
remember that" 
Therese coyly poked a finger into the corner of her mouth, 
imitating a dimple. "Like this?" 
He indulged himself in a quick embrace, chuckling. "Keep 
that up and you can start your own vid show." 
"Now stop that," and Therese landed a gentle, mock-slap on 
Parnell's jaw. "Or I will stand back and watch Father tear Detloff 
to shredsand not lift a finger." 
He'd already started for the rear door. Now he paused and 
looked back at Therese. "No, you won't. You care too much. 
About Ria and about the future of humanity. You've always been 
kind to small animals and bad-tempered men." 
Therese rolled her eyes hammily. "As Ria says you're all 
silly." 
Shaking with silent laughter, he went to the door, pulled back 
the blackout curtain. No need for it now, except warmth. 
The slideroad lane was moving. Not the familiar, rumbling 
waggle of the Centipede. A slithering, somewhat unsettling 
motion. He knelt at the carrier's gate, gauging the rate of 
acceleration, getting his timing. 
Parnell dropped to the gridstrip, teetered on the balls of his 
feet a moment, regaining his balance. He noticed the soldiers 
riding on the gridstrip following the Centipede's were relaxing, 
letting down their guard now that they were moving. Detloff was 
still sitting by a rear wheel, amused by Harris's watchfulness. 
Parnell hunkered down next to the politician.

"It's pretty chilly out here," he said lightly. "I could probably 
persuade the Major to let you go inside. You could grab some 
sleep. 
"Thanks, but I'm doing fine," Detloff replied, loudly enough to 
be certain Harris overheard. Then, more softly, he said, "You 
look like you could use some sleep yourself, Doctor." 
It was true. Parnell envied the twenty years Detloff had on 
him. The Younger was shaking off exhaustionor at least 
holding it at bayvery well. 
"I wouldn't miss this scenery, either," Detloff added, waving to 
the view on either side of die slide-road. "Glorious, isn't it? The 
very flower of Western civilization. Only thing that cheers me up 
is knowing it's worse other places in the world." 
They were traveling at approximately sixty kilometers an hour 
now. The sun had topped the skyline, spilling its golden radiance 
impartially across the city-scape. After a solid week of riots, 
strikes, and martial law, the effect wasn't attractive. 
To Parnell, the best part of any city was always the sense of 
humanity in concert. The bustle, the hive of activity. But his 
memories ran back before the Bad Times, before everything 
started to come to pieces. Things hadn't been that good in the 
cities for a long while. Robbed of over more than half the 
population, urban America withered. 
What was left was cold, impersonal ugliness, nearly devoid of 
life. The tall buildings and all the marvels of modern architecture 
were, without people, merely dead monuments. Cold, inanimate 
relics of a once-great culture. 
Not all of a city was steel and stone. The mobs had found a 
few things which weren't fireproof though they'd had to hunt. 
Lazy drifts of smoke marred the skyline north and south and east 
of the slideroad. Parnell shielded his eyes against the sun. Now 
and then he thought he saw a few people moving about in the 
streets. He remembered his concern for the dwindling human 
gene pool. Every person out therea walking bank of potential 
future greatness.

And probably present danger. He was glad they were moving 
too fast for roving mobs to attack. Every minute the slideroad 
carried them further and further from the decaying city's heart. 
"Appalling, isn't it?" Detloff murmured. Parnell mutely 
agreed. The Younger was becoming adept at gesturing despite 
his bound hands. "See them? How many others have died this 
past week, I wonder? Oh, we've had bad times before, but 
nothing like this. The end of winterfood's critically short. I've 
scraped all my sources, trying to come up with something extra 
to distribute." 
"That's generous," Parnell commented. "Believe it or not, 
Grigsby does the same for charity cases among the Olders. 
Philanthropy works whoever's on the receiving end." 
"But how much longer can Grigsby and I keep this up?" 
Detloff said sharply. "It gets worse and worse. Getting so hard to 
tell them to keep hoping. Hoping that little girl." 
Parnell saw that hunger hi the young politician's eyes again 
and warned, "Ria's not for sale." 
"I know. Not General Grigsby's grandchild" 
"The General's seventy. He's not going to be around to enjoy 
her much longer. But Therese and I will. I think our 
qualifications as parents just might compete with yours," Parnell 
said levelly. 
"Do you?" 
"If you're thinking about moneyOgden will leave Therese a 
fortune. And as for the rest of it, your own publicity shoots you 
down, Detloff. No wife, no mistress you keep long enough to act 
as a mother for a child. Ria's had too much adjusting to do in 
her life. From now on she deserves a stable, nuclear family." 
"Which is the Parnells." Detloff tried to sneer, but the 
wistfulness in his expression canceled it out. 
"We're not just Ria's parents," Parnell added. "We're

scientists, trying to find the glue to hold the world together. For 
Ria's sake. We're thinking what's best for her. Are you?" 
The younger man gazed bleakly at the smoke hovering over 
the city. "I'm trying my damndest." 
Major Harris and Sergeant Kelley were eavesdropping. Not 
making a production of it, but rather obvious. Parnell rather 
hoped they'd report this whole conversation to Grigsby, in time. 
Detloff rested his manacles across his knees. "Put yourself in 
my place, Doctor. I've always been used to wealth and power. 
Family tradition. Father taught me to regard the Detloff holdings 
as a trust, a tool to be used for the good of the people." 
"I know the attitude, secondhand, from Grigsby," Parnell said, 
nodding. "But concern for the public's welfare isn't worth much 
if there isn't going to be any public left to serve. And that's what 
we're coming down to, unless" 
"We bury the hatchet." As Parnell stared Detloff shrugged and 
said, "I read that phrase somewhere. It's an old-fashioned slang 
term, I think." 
"In which event Ria will probably shove it at me eventually," 
Parnell said with a sigh. "Once she discovers it on those back-file 
book tapes." 
DetlofFs jaw dropped. "She she can read?" 
"She didn't have your wealth, or your tutors. But she most 
definitely can read." Parnell painted a sketchy picture of the 
girl's background at the library. 
Fascinated, the Younger exclaimed, "Why, she's a little 
genius!" 
"That's not a term Ter and I like to toss around," Parnell said. 
"Not in Ria's hearing. We don't want her becoming a 
swelled-head brat." 
"Little chance of that. If she were only mine"

Detloff saw the scientist's frown and said hastily, "No, I realize 
she needs your influence. You're right. It'd be all wrong for me to 
try to take her away, even if I could. Just knowing there are 
childrenthat some people can reproduce themselves" 
"The Detloff line shouldn't die out with you," Par-nell summed 
up. Not sarcastically. Reading Detloff's thoughts, and agreeing 
with them. 
A glint came into Detloff's dark eyes. "Did I hear you right? 
Earlier, hi the transport. You were talking about your scientific 
research, different methods of attacking the infertility problem. 
Did you mention something about cloning?" 
"Matter of fact, we're heading for Northwest Cloning right 
now," Parnell confirmed. "One of our sister labs." 
"Cloning," Detloff mused aloud. "What success have you had 
so far? Could you use any money, special supplies? I might have 
a few resources Ogden Grigsby doesn't." 
Parnell wished Jesse Bliss were riding along with them. He'd 
have enjoyed watching the clonist try to conceal his greed. 
Detloff was exactly the target Jesse's experiments aimed fora 
young, healthy, prime specimen. Good genetic background. 
Intelligent. A sliver of Detloff's cells, a sample of his DNA pattern 
would be Jesse Bliss's dream come true. "Are you volunteering as 
a guinea pig?" he asked the Younger. 
He wasn't prepared for DetlofFs eagerness. "You think I have 
a chance? I'd certainly be willing to cooperate. To the fullest. 
What are your results, so far?" 
"Promising," Parnell said cautiously. "I warn you. 
The clonist in charge wouldn't give you any favored treatment. 
Before he got through taking cell samples you'd think you were 
being skinned alive." 
"That's a small sacrifice, if it works" 
A son or daughter for Nevin Detloff. Or rather a carbon copy

of Nevin Detloff. His genetic structure implanted on a 
de-nucleized ova. Assuming Jesse Bliss ever got the lumps ironed 
out of his research. 
"Theoretically, it should work," Parnell said, not wanting to 
raise Detloff's hopes too high. "It's a slow process. And, as you've 
guessed, extremely costly. But you're young enough. You might 
live to see your own clone reach viability." 
"Then we've got a deal." 
"I said, 'might'," Parnell cut in. "Cloning's been successful in 
lower life forms. But the experiments with humans have been 
less encouraging. We learned immediately that we can't implant 
a cloned ova into a living host. The woman's immuno-factor 
mutation works just as strongly against a clone as it would 
against a naturally fertilized egg. She'll abort it, every time." 
Detloff grasped the science more quickly than Parnell 
anticipated. "That means you've got to nurture the fetus 
outside the human body." 
"Or a risky amount of chemo-therapy," Parnell said. "If you do 
that, the woman may develop any one of a hundred fatal 
diseases. As you say, the best chance is what we call ex utero. A 
test tube baby, if you will." 
"The mind boggles" 
"Bliss, our clonist, thinks it'll work. In time." Parnell added 
wryly, "And he's certainly plowed enough money into the 
attempt." 
"I can help you there, if you'll let me." Detloff stared into 
nothing. "Long rangecloning. For the present, there's Ria. And 
other immune children. You said there must be some, among the 
Youngers. Hiding out there in the city" 
"It's a strong possibility," Parnell said carefully. He had a 
suspicion he knew why Lew had taken that desperate chance, 
running away. On an errand for Nevin Detloff. Dare Parnell hope 
that errand was laying the groundwork for a search? Hunting

out parents and children immunes. Stepbrothers and 
stepsisters for Ria. 
Jesse Bliss's research aside, Ria was still the most important 
element in the search for human survival. She was the next 
generation, right now. And she hadn't cost a fortune in research 
materialsonly to end in failure after failure, as Jesse's clones 
did.
A muffled boom sounded far to the rear of the slideroad. 
Parnell blinked, looking that way. They'd traveled quite a 
distance from the city, into the abandoned suburbs. There were 
a few remaining trees here, and the beginnings of open 
farmland. Back in the direction of the city a massive smoke cloud 
climbed into the sky. An explosion. More people dead, more 
property destroyed. 
Detloff pounded his fists against his thighs. "It's got to stop! 
Before it's too late. They're killing themselves." 
"All ages and all generations," Parnell said, delivering a 
symbolic punch to Detloff's gut. 
"That's true. The Olders and Middle-Agers are suffering too, 
as much as we are." He was big enough to admit that. If only 
Parnell could persuade Ogden Grigsby to come the other 
halfway. 
Open country stretched out on every side. Three-meters high 
electric fences bordered the wintry fields. Some parts of the 
complex were covered by vast sheets of plexihundreds of 
square panes fending off the weather, shutting in the warmth of 
the sun. Immense greenhouses, nurturing soy products. A few 
open fields were beginning to green with sprouting winter wheat. 
Some of the new Canadian hybrids, perhaps. 
Promise of food for the future. The fences, the guards 
patrolling the perimeter would make sure the crops reached 
maturity. In the Bad Times starving city dwellers had roamed 
into the farmlands, searching for food. In their ignorance they'd 
trampled immature crops, made things worse for themselves as 
well as the farmers.

The land. Still the source of bounty. Ogden Grigs-by owned a 
lot of land. So did Nevin Detloff. Wise investment, for now and 
for the future. 
After the Bad Times the military had taken charge, under 
General Grigsby's aegis. Ogden Grigsby's army protecting Ogden 
Grigsby's propertya nice balance, that. It had been one more 
campaign to the General who'd been in action ever since he 
stepped out of the Academy. But certainly none of his campaigns 
had been more important than protecting an entire geographic 
district's food supply. 
"Sir!" It was the monitor operating, poking his head out the 
rear door of the transport. "I've got radio contact." He stabbed a 
thumb toward the sky overhead. 
Parnell heard it. A heliflitter. Circling in the overcast. 
Greyness creeping in from the west, overriding the sunlight. 
Obviously the pilot was keeping an eye on the slideroad, 
paralleling the Centipede's progress. 
The monitor operator tapped the headset he wore. "They say 
the General's waiting up ahead, at the Three Zero Nine 
off-ramp." 
Major Harris asked crisply, "What's our ETA?" 
"I make it about fifteen minutes" 
"That's not going to help them much," Detloff whispered, 
gazing at the smoke on the horizon, thinking of his friends and 
followers trapped in the city. 
Commiserating, Parnell said, "The army couldn't stop it. It's 
fed itself. Just have to burn itself out, I'm afraid. If only it 
happens soon" 
He jerked his head reflexively, then analyzed why. Instinct. A 
drop of water had splashed on his forehead. And another. 
Splatters appearing on the slide-road's surface, leaving streaking 
trails.

Detloff craned his neck, looking skyward. "Is it ?" 
"Rain," Parnell announced. "That's what Grigsby wanted. He 
said if it'd rainif the weather would turn badit'd send the 
strikers and rioters for their holes." Harris was nodding his 
approval. Maybe there was hope for the man after all. 
"Yes, that's what the General's experts said we needed. A good 
all-day soaker of a rain. It'll put out the fires and give us time to 
breathe, put things together," the Major speculated. 
"And when the strikers sit around for a day or two being cold 
and wet and miserable, they might think about going into work," 
Parnell went on. "Firing up those nukies and getting the power 
flowing again." 
Rivulets of rain were trickling inside ParnelTs collar, his shirt 
beginning to stick to his back. He helped Detloff to his feet, 
boosted the Younger inside the carrier. Harris didn't protest, too 
busy getting out of the increasing downpour himself. 
As many of the troops as could crowded into the Centipede 
carrier. A few of them had to remain outside, but for the 
moment they didn't grouse too much. The men knew what the 
rain meant, too. 
A cold spring rain, building to a steady mist which drenched 
the countryside. A downpour, settling in for a long stay. Putting 
out the fires of destruction. 
Chapter VIII 
Parnell assumed the heliflitter was tracking them, relaying 
info to Grigsby. At least now the old man needn't imagine 
terrible tragedies. Fifteen minutes. That would seem like an 
eternity to Grigsby. 
It wasn't too comfortable inside the Centipede, come to that. 
Very crowded. A lot of wet and grumpy and tired peoplethough 
not as wet and grumpy and tired as the lot losers who had to 
stand outside. Rain pattering on their helmets and puddling

about their boots. 
Their slideroad gridstrips were decelerating now. They were 
riding up a ramp and into an off-slot. At their destinationor 
the one they'd had to choose after the detour. 
The soft hum of the slideroad had purred beneath the 
Centipede for almost an hour, audible even during the storm. 
Now it stopped. The monitor operator shut down his 
communications unitthe only one he'd dared risk power for. 
For a moment they all sat in the dark, listening to the irregular 
rhythm of the rain. 
Parnell felt strangely shut off from the real world. Huddling in 
a metal cave with his wife and daughter and a lot of unknowns. 
The rain was lulling, sooth-ing him toward sleep, and he had to 
fight that seductive noise. 
"I'm cold," Ria grumbled, shivering against Therese. 
Then the rear seal slid open, admitting still more chilly air. A 
familiar bellowing. "Rich? Ter? You in there?" Several enlisted 
men crouching near Parnell stiffened to attention when they 
heard Grigsby. 
"That's the General!" Ria cried, hurrying toward the carrier's 
gate. "We must be home!" The adaptable child. 'Home' was 
wherever Ria's family were. That used to mean Emmett and 
Delores and Leland and the other Olders. Now it was the Parnells 
and Grigsby. 
Nevin Detloff watched the family group enviously. But he said 
nothing. When Parnell offered to help the "prisoner" off the 
Centipede Detloff waved him ahead. He'd manage. 
No way to avoid a boisterous reunion. This time Grigsby 
ignored the surroundings, the fact that his men were looking on. 
He was the fond grandfather, welcoming his beloved grandchild, 
and Therese. Parnell was touched. He'd told Detloff Grigsby 
couldn't hope for many more years, and it was true. Did he 
begrudge the old man his joy?

They'd been standing in the pelting rain for so long he was 
afraid Grigsby had forgotten the amenities. Finally the General 
raised his voice against a peal of thunder. "We couldn't get the 
damned slide-road controls operating on this end! Good thing 
your people were on top of it." Parnell nodded, smirked at Major 
Harris. 
Then General Grigsby saw Nevin Detloff. The Younger was 
bedraggled, curly hair dripping. But his face and form were 
unmistakable. Too many vid-casts. Ogden Grigsby's worst 
enemy, in the middle of his family reunion! 
Seeing a fuse sputtering toward an explosion, Parnell said 
loudly, "Come on, Ogden. Let's get out of this downpour. Ria will 
catch pneumonia." That was the one approach that might cut 
short the rising conflict. 
They made a dash for a nearby buildingan old railroad 
terminal Grigsby's men had taken out of mothballs. The ancient 
depot was surprisingly cozy. Someone had unearthed a 
pot-bellied stove and chopped up some remaining waiting-room 
furniture for fuel. No one complained about an inadequate flue 
and a bit of smoke hovering near the high ceiling. 
A lot of boot stamping and shaking rain off jackets, wringing 
it out of cuffs. Some of the soldiers carried in the lab crates and 
Therese sat Ria atop one, making sure the child kept warm. 
"Put him down here. Easy." A couple of enlisted men had 
toted in a makeshift stretcher bearing the injured Younger. As 
they laid him on the floor near the stove Therese hurried to 
check on her patient. 
Then Parnell noticed an on-going drama. Major Harris off to 
one side of the room, reporting. His head and Grigsby's close 
together, and much whispering. And side glancing. Growing 
outrage on the General's craggy face. Detloff, understandably, 
was concerned for his man, Brent. But he too was aware of 
Grigsby's scrutiny, and returned it. 
Part of the General's wrath was reserved for his son-in-law. 
He dismissed Harris with a mumbled order, then lumbered

toward Parnell. "What the hell possessed you, Rich? Bringing 
this scum along like a guest." 
"I had my reasons. Good ones," Parnell began. "If you'll take 
the time to listen" 
Therese didn't allow either of them that luxury. "Father, this 
man needs medical attention immediately. Are we going to stand 
here talking?" Her hair was plastered in soggy auburn strands 
and her clothing soddenly outlined a still attractive figure. But 
the scientist, the doctor, held the stage, not the woman. 
"If you don't intend to act, I do. Where's a vehicle we can use 
for an ambulance?" 
"Now just a minute, honey," Grigsby said. 
"She's right," Parnell cut in, warning the General. After all 
these years he ought to know his own daughter. Ter had a 
temper to rival Grigsby's. 
"Have you lost all your humanity?" Therese was a tigress, 
brooking no argument. Parnell proudly egged her on, 
underlining the emergency. 
Under that barrage, Grigsby backed down. "All right! 
Sergeant, let's get things moving here." 
In a matter of seconds they were carrying Brent to a waiting 
hover-van on the far side of the depot. There were other vehicles 
nearby, standard military transports. For the troops. But 
Grigsby's party was to ride in style. Apparently the General had 
commandeered one of the last of the plush hover-vans for Ria 
and her escorts. 
As they slid the stretcher into the cargo bay Grigsby grasped 
Parnell's shoulder. Hard. "We're going to have this out, Rich." 
"No doubt. But later," Parnell said. "Maybe by then you'll be 
cooled down enough to hear what I've got to say. Come on, Ria." 
The girl scampered into Parnell's arms. He swung her up into

the hover-van's snug interior, helped Therese in beside her. 
Grigsby was pained. Ria tied the old man's heartstrings in knots, 
yet it was his son-in-law the child obeyed. He was sufficiently 
irked that he stood out in the cold rain a long moment before he 
got onto the seat beside Parnell. 
The enlisted man at the driver's console waited patiently, 
knowing his place. The General snapped, "You have the route! 
Take off!" 
"Yessir" 
Parnell looked over his shoulder. Therese and Ria sat in the 
second seat and Detloff in the cargo bay, beside the strether. All 
of them were an interested audience for the expected 
confrontation between Parnell and Grigsby. 
Parnell knew from the General's bulldog countenance very 
little kept him from pitching Detloff out bodily. Best to give the 
old man some time to stew in his pique. 
The air rotors under the van reached their proper pitch, 
lifting the vehicle on a column of air. A cushiony sensation very 
comfortable. The driver swung the van's nose, pointing it 
southwestward. Smoothly, they drifted across the rain-swept 
stubble fields. 
After a few minutes travel, shrouded in mist, Grigsby unbent 
a trifle. "It'll take us about twenty minutes to get to the lab. You 
know you exited quite a bit north of where we'd originally 
planned." 
"Unfortunately nobody planned the building's collapse," 
Parnell said. "We appreciate your being right here when we 
needed it, Ogden." 
Therese and Detloff were conferring on Brent's condition, the 
time factor. His wife tried to be comforting, none too 
convincingly. 
"Well, after I had to move you out of your HQ on such short 
notice least I could do." Grigsby was beginning to thaw, now.

He eyed Parnell wor-riedly. "How was it out there, after you 
detoured? Rough? I only get the bare facts from Harris. Good 
man, but he's seen too little of the world I'm afraid." 
A more charitable assessment than Parnell would have made. 
Presumably the Major had his uses, militarily. Parnell tried to be 
conciliatory. "There were bad moments. Could have been worse. 
Detloff was trying to cool a crowd of Youngers, get them to 
scream off back to their homes." He wasn't above using the 
vernacular, if it would help drive the point home. Parnell went 
on, "But some strikers hit them, turned it into a massacre. If 
they hadn't been distractedit was carnage for the Youngers. 
And it could have been for us." 
"We saw what went on out there, Father, "Therese put in. 
"Awful! The Youngers weren't rioting, and still and you've had 
to cope with that sort of insanity. How do you manage?" 
The soft-soap was lathering, and Grigsby was succumbing, bit 
by bit. Ria grinned at him, giggled, winding the General in her 
web. In that mood Grigsby would forgive anythingeven Nevin 
Det-loff's presence. 
He stared over his daughter's head at the Younger. Rain 
dashed against the hover-van's windows. On every side 
winter-dead farmland stretched to the horizon. It was an odd 
place to begin a peace conference, but Parnell wouldn't quibble 
about locale as long as it came off. 
"That true?" Grigsby said. "What Rich says about you trying 
to send those Youngers home, get 'em off the streets?" 
"It's true. They weren't rioting. They were hunting food. 
None's been distributed for over a week," Detloff said, forcibly 
restraining his anger. "I 
realize the government's problems. They don't dare open the 
disty stations, of course. But I had to get my Youngers something 
to eat. They were starving." 
"You broke curfew"

"To save lives! I could import the food, with my resources. I 
couldn't wait until the riots were over," Detloff said earnestly. 
"They needed it then." 
That evangelistic fervor was creeping into his tone. On screen, 
it had always sounded like an act. But in person it was apparent 
Detloff meant and believed what he said. "I had to tell them 
things would get bettereven if I couldn't be sure how. I had to 
give them something to fill their bellies. Was that wrong?" 
"But you didn't save their lives, Mr. Detloff," Grigsby said. "A 
lot of them died" 
"That's unfair, Ogden," Parnell countered. "Not his fault." 
"Mmm. From what Harris said, if they hadn't been gathered 
there listening to his speech, they wouldn't have been such easy 
targets," Grigsby said. 
Detloff flinched, acknowledging a hit. "Maybe there's truth on 
both sides, Grigsby. Maybe in your terms I was trying to buy 
loyalty, nothing more. But I swear my motives were clean. I 
wasn't worrying about votes" 
"Neither was I. You think I like sending my troops out onto 
those streets, risking their lives?" the General flared. "You any 
idea how many men I've lost in flitter crashes, skirmishes with 
those strikers?" 
Parnell stopped that wind-up short. "So you both have axes to 
grind, and you've both suffered losses. Not statistics. People. At 
least this time you were attacking the same problemending the 
riots. Perhaps if you did that more often there wouldn't be 
any riots," Parnell suggested, driving a wedge into a minute 
opening. 
Ria whispered in Therese's earfeminine secrets. Parnell's 
wife nodded and said bitterly, "You're arguing theories, Father. 
And you too, Mr. Detloff. Drop the politics for once" 
"Look at the broad picture," Parnell agreed. "Survival."

"There's the matter of your man escaping," Grigsby 
muttered, unwilling to just let it go. But he did. "We'll discuss 
that later." 
When the General temporized, there was always a possible 
opening. Parnell actually began to feel hopeful. Even more so 
when he saw the introspective expression on Detloffs face. 
Get the two giants thinking. Grigsby and Detloff and their 
power. Get them together. 
The hover-van's motors whispered, a more soothing lullaby 
than the slideroad had been. Parnell wondered how much 
further he could push his body. When he got to Jesse's lab he'd 
have to take some stimulants. He couldn't afford to let down yet. 
Not yet. Too much to do, and time running out. 
For one thing he didn't dare sleep until he was sure Grigsby 
and Detloff wouldn't end up at each other's throats. 
"Read you loud and clear," the driver was saying into a mike. 
"Two minutes. Keep that homer beam on. Can't see a thing in 
this rain." 
Parnell's memory threw up a horrifying image. A heliflitter, 
crashing and falling. Her dead crew tumbling twelve stories to a 
street. The hover-van moved no more than a couple of meters off 
the ground. But she was traveling at a fair clip. The potential for 
disaster was there. 
Or was he seeing menace everywhere now? 
Northwest Cloning sat amid a cluster of long-unused 
factories, an old exurban industrial park. Parnell squinted 
through the rain-dotted windshield. That was the complex, 
ahead of them. The cloning lab wasn't the only building lighted 
against the grey Midwestern overcast. Jesse Bliss always bragged 
he had power to burn. Apparently he was flaunting the fact 
today. 
Arrival was chaos. They didn't pull in at Northwest Cloning 
but at an adjoining factory. Grigsby's peoplethe ones he could

sparehad done a hasty job of converting the place into living 
quarters and jerry-rigged labs to house the influx of Life Sciences 
staff. Not comfortable, but adequate. The hover-van parked in 
what had been a warehouse loading dock, decades ago. 
The usual babble erupted. Parnell's staff had worried too 
when the last Centipede in the caravan had been delayed, 
detoured. Like the General, they'd envisioned the worst. Now 
they collected around Richard and Therese and Ria, sighing with 
relief and shouting cheery welcomes. 
"Not bad, eh, Doctor?" 
"The General certainly pulled out all the stops. Isn't this place 
big?" 
"We'll get along fine. Might even move in with Jesse 
permanently" 
"You might consult Jesse first," an arch voice said. "Glad to 
see you, m'boy. Better late than never." A chubby set of fingers 
wrapped themselves around Parnell's. Jesse's bearded mug 
leered up at him jovially. 
Around him the mingled staff of Northwest Cloning and Life 
Sciences still exchanged greetings. The natural impulse of 
human beings who'd worked and lived together so long. 
"Please, someone give us a hand with this stretcher," Therese 
pleaded. "We've got serious injuries here." In seconds she'd been 
shunted aside, a dozen pairs of willing hands lifting Brent out of 
the hover-van. Detloff, awkwardly with his manacles, tried to 
help. 
"Take those things off him, Ogden," Parnell said tiredly. "You 
know he's not going to try to escape." 
Grigsby dug in his heels. "I know nothing of the sort. One of 
his people already made a break for it" 
"You have my parole, sir," Detloff offered. He was striving to 
be polite, but his attention was on his wounded aide. He wanted

to accompany Therese and the medics to the infirmary. "I swear 
I won't take a walk, General." 
"Besides," Parnell said, "it's a long way back to the city." 
Disgruntled but conceding the merits of the case, Grigsby 
used an officer's override key, releasing the Younger politician. 
Detloff murmured his gratitude, then ran after his friend. 
Jesse Bliss was bemused. "Was that ?" 
"Nevin Detloff? Yes. It's a long story," Parnell said, hoping 
Jesse wouldn't ask for it right now. Lack of sleep was catching up 
with him faster than he'd thought. 
"And a stretcher case. That'll be a thrill for Morrison and 
some of the others. They love to work on live bodies, but rarely 
get the opportunity." As Grigsby stared at the clonist in shock 
Jesse grinned and said, "Most of our surgeons specialize in 
autopsies. Somehow we don't get a lot of volunteers in our line of 
work; so few people these days are willing to let anyone slice into 
their organs for DNA samples" 
"I notice you don't have a lot of operation scars," Parnell 
watched Grigsby and Ria. With Therese gone and Parnell talking 
to Bliss the old man had a clear field with his adored 
granddaughter. Hevused it. The General led the child to a nearby 
vid console and cued a tape. 
"Emmett! And there's Delores!" Ria squealed. Her friends at 
the library waved to her from the taped image, sent messages. 
"They're all on the tape," Grigsby said fondly. "You'll get to see 
them. Just wait, sweetheart. And then I've got some Monk and 
Chuckie Shows" 
Parnell shook his head. In the middle of a civil insurrection 
General Ogden Grigsby had thought to get a recording tape from 
the libraryto please the light of his life, Ria. She might deserve 
a bit of spoiling after her grim infancy, but so much? 
Yet if Ria would inherit the world, what wouldn't be enough to

nurture her, give her pleasure? Dare he quibble over details? 
Succeeding generations might have robbed Ria's of all the 
history of humanity. She might someday be the only person left 
alive if 
"How was your trip?" Jesse asked, and Parnell forced his 
attention away from Ria and the General. The clonist's question 
was studiedly casual. Not what was really on Bliss's mind. 
"If we ever get moving again, the slideroads will come in 
handy," Parnell said. "Not for automobile traffic, though." 
"Ah, autos. Who remembers those?" Jesse said. "Those taxis 
are a pale imitation of what used to be." He was making 
conversation, not listening to his own words. Very unlike Jesse 
Bliss. Parnell tried to figure out what was eating the pudgy 
scientist. 
For the moment the two of them were on a little island, 
surrounded by activityunpacking, getting settled in new 
quartersbut not part of it. Jesse said, "Can you spare a minute, 
m'boy? I can show you to your new domicile of course. But 
there's something I" 
Jji all the years Parnell had known him Jesse had never been 
furtive. He was now. The effect was intriguing at the least. 
"What's this all about, Jesse?" 
Bliss crooked a finger, then led the way down a cluttered aisle 
between animal cages. He traded offhand quips with techs as he 
passed, and Parnell did the same. The meaningless social chatter 
of a close-knit operation. 
There was an extruded plasticene tunnel connecting the 
factory with Jesse's own Northwest Cloning. Parnell gave the 
engineering marvel a quick glance as he and Bliss walked 
through it. Grigsby's staff must have run the tunnel up in a 
hurry. Plasticene was fastermuchthan lumber or metal, and 
it didn't rust. Everything here had been done in a hurry, but 
reasonably well. The ozone odor of electro-scouring had clung to 
the factory, evidence that the conversion from abandoned factory 
to livable building was very recent. Within hours. Grigsby was

organized. 
Like Detloff, his cameraman, his food distributors, slipping 
through a crowd of Youngers. 
He had to get those two working together. 
Jesse was still leading the way, through Northwest Cloning. 
Parnell had been to this lab dozens of times over the years. 
Collecting data, checking on progress or lack of same, taking 
Jesse's requisitions for more money or materials. But he'd never 
before been in this section of the lab. Jesse had always dismissed 
it as living area. 
"What are you up to?" Parnell demanded. 
Jesse dramatically laid a finger against his lips. He was 
fumbling in his pocket, fishing out a key. They'd halted before a 
door, and Jesse was unlocking it. 
No identification plate beside the door. "Jesse, what is this?" 
Parnell said, mystified and somewhat annoyed. 
"Patience. All shall be revealed." 
Bliss ushered Parnell into the room. A woman technician was 
on duty, sitting before a bank of monitoring controlsan 
impressively large bank. A great deal of money had gone into 
that series of consoles. 
Parnell recognized the woman as one of Bliss's top staff 
people. And one of the most devoted to Bliss personally. She'd 
been an early volunteer in the most painful and dangerous 
experiments. Offering herself as a host for de-nucleized and 
clone-implanted ovumand for all the chemotherapy that 
entailed. She'd almost died when her body rebelled, succumbed 
to a succession of increasingly deadly infections. Her own 
immuno-systems lulled to inactivity by potent drugs. In the end, 
the cloned fetus was aborted. 
Now she was monitoring a secret experiment. What?

Everyone under the Life Sciences Project aegis had agreed 
from the start there'd be no secrets. All research would be 
shared. Everyone kept informed of everyone else's work. 
But Jesse Bliss had never revealed the existence of this room 
and this experiment to Parnell. Or, Par-nell suspected, to anyone 
else but the loyal woman technician. 
Nothing had prepared Richard Parnell for this shock. 
The room was large, its walls filled by the most intricate and 
advanced monitoring boards available. Obviously this was where 
a lot of the money Jesse requested had gone. A lot of it. And 
Jesse asked for a lot often. 
Some of the stuff must have been cannibalized from other 
equipment, so the results wouldn't show on inventories. 
Everything in the room pointed to sacrifice. For the sake of the 
room's centerpiece, its main experiment. 
An ex utero cloning chamber occupied the middle of the 
room. Parnell had seen other such chambers. He'd commiserated 
with Jesse when other experiments had failed. Failure after 
failure. 
This time Jesse Bliss had done much better. 
A fetus floated in the chamber's nutrient solution. A wizened, 
funny-faced little human being. The features seemed strangely 
familiar. Male. A scrap of flesh, possibly weighing well over two 
kilos. Well-formed. 
And alive! 
The eyes were closed but the lips pursed and sucked. Tiny, 
perfectly shaped fingers flexed and curled. Now and then a little 
foot jerked. The fetus lived, bobbing at the end of a synthetic 
umbilical, drifting in artificial amniotic fluid. 
Alive! 
Not an embryo. This fetus was viable. If the chamber should

for any reason fail and force this tiny human into the world there 
would be peril, of course. Hyaline membrane problems, 
protection from all manner of disease, all the challenges 
associated with premature birth. But the infant would have a 
chance, a good one. Jesse's staff was expert, his medical 
technicians possibly the best in the world in this particular area. 
Jesse Bliss had pulled off a scientific miracle. 
With luck, the infant floating in that plasticene case would, 
soon, fill his lungs and stomach. 
A living human child, brought to the point of birth ex utero. 
No womb to nourish him. A mother composed of plastic and 
tubing and electric circuitry. 
A baby, ready to be born into a world where conception and 
live birth were merely memories. A world in which Ria had 
stunned every thinking adult who met hersimply because she 
existed. 
Now, in a sense, here was a sibling for Ria. A baby 
stepbrother. Another inheritor of mankind's future. 
Incredible! And real.
Chapter IX 
When Parnell found his voice he said, "So you finally pulled it 
off after all these years" 
"You remember Ines? Of course you do." Bliss nodded to the 
woman technician. She barely acknowledged Parnell's presence. 
In fact she seemed rather miffed that Bliss had let in an outsider. 
Parnell was an invader on a private precincteven though he 
was the director of the overall Life Sciences Project. 
That was a tip-off. Quite possibly Bliss and Ines were the only 
ones fully informed of this particular experiment, Parnell had 
every right to know.

But he wasn't about to pull a Major Harris and chew Jesse 
out. He was too awed and pleased by this scientific achievement. 
"Ines," he said absently to the technician. Then he gave her a 
second look. "You supplied the ovum for this clone?" 
Quietly proud, Ines lifted her head. No question she'd been 
willing to donate to Bliss's project. Just as she had to earlier 
experiments. But this enterprise had proved far more successful. 
"He's doing quite well, wouldn't you say?" In a different social 
climate, fifty years in the past, Jesse Bliss would have been 
passing out cigars. The proud new papaor almost. 
Pamell circled the cloning chamber, studying the fetus. "I 
want to see your data, Jesse. This is absolutely fascinating. 
Unfair of you to keep it under wraps." 
"I didn't want to spring it on you too soon. There was always 
the chance it'd fail. And I've had enough failures," Jesse said 
bitterly. 
Yes, the clone-child did look familiar. Parnell peered intently 
at that round-cheeked little gnome in the tank. "That's your 
clone, Jesse. I'd recognize that smirk anywhere. Your DNA 
implanted on one of Ines' ova." 
"It's only fitting," Ines spoke up, gazing admiringly at Bliss. 
More than a subordinate to her superior. Affection as well. A 
strangely asexual relationship, but a lot of a marriage in it. 
"Oh, it's my DNA all right," Jesse laughed. "I never considered 
any other possibility." He postured before the chamber, 
scratching his beard, doting on his handiwork. "I told you 
cloning was the answer, Richard. Told you that for years. Just 
needed the right combination of factors" 
"And the secrecy?" 
Bliss shrugged off the comment. "This time I wanted to be 
absolutely sure."

Not begrudging the man that, Parnell remained enthralled. 
He was eager to learn every detail. With Jesse's notes he could 
follow the clonist's steps, look over his shoulder, figuratively. 
The reality still was amazing. Jesse had done it! Since 
science's techniques had started to approximate its imagination, 
man had been dreaming of producing a viable clone. And now 
Jesse Bliss had accomplished the impossible. Sustained a human 
clone ex utero to a point where birthand survivalwere within 
reach. If a Nobel committee had outlasted the Twentieth Century 
and the Bad Tunes, Bliss undoubtedly would have won the 
Medicine Award for this! 
Test tube baby. Not a theory. Alive. Here in this room. 
Jesse was unsufferably smug, with reason. "Impressive, isn't 
he?" 
"Oh, you've scored. No arguments." Parnell could have echoed 
Nevin Detloff's complaint; he was so tired he couldn't think 
clearly, couldn't come up with a proper compliment for Jesse's 
genius. "Okay. Now what? Can you duplicate this?" 
"I see no obstacle." Bliss tapped the data banks. "The 
procedure's in here. Ready to go whenever you say." 
Parnell ran a hand through his hair. "And why pick today of 
all days to show it off to me? Why didn't you wait till you were 
ready to uncase your infant?" 
Jesse tried to make a joke of it. "Perhaps a present for you. 
A token of my appreciation. There were a few hours there, my 
boy, when we didn't know if you were alive or dead. Since you 
are" 
"It's quite a reward for making it through a riot," Parnell 
agreed. 'Thanks!" 
"And I wanted a second opinion. Someone with an overall 
view to help me make a decision." Jesse's tone put Parnell on the 
alert. He knew the misanthrope too well. What outrageous 
statement was Jesse leading up to?

"Decision?" 
Bliss waved at the clone infant. "He's reached a stage where 
we have options. Shall we let him con-tinue to birth? Or shall we 
do a dissect? Autopsy to check for anomalies. Must make sure all 
developed as it should. Aim for perfection. That's the motto" 
This was news to Ines. She was first flabbergasted, then 
furious. "You can't! I won't let you! He's our baby!" 
"My dear, we're scientists," Jesse said, imperturbable. 
"Sentiment has no place in our" 
"Noooo !" / 
Ines flung herself on Bliss, a hurricane of female wrath. Her 
pointed plastic shoes and sharp nails assaulted the clonist. 
Jesse was taken completely unprepared, not defending himself 
at all. And Ines had never learned the rules of fair play. She 
didn't wait for Jesse to protect himself. 
Hastily, Parnell pinioned the woman's arms, dragging her 
away from Bliss. Just in time to save the clonisfs eyes. Ines' nail 
had left deep, bleeding scratches down both of Jesse's cheeks. 
Her rage was titanic, but uncoordinated. Now, held in check 
by Parnell, she collapsed into hysterical sobbing. "Our baby! Our 
baby! I won't let you!" 
Jesse was mopping at his cheeks, gaping at the blood on his 
fingers. "I never said" 
"You did! You did!" Ines wailed. Parnell sensed the danger 
was past and released her. Gulping tears, choking on her 
anguish, the woman ran from the room. 
There was a long, embarrassed silence. Jesse gingerly prodded 
his shins and groin. Tried to dry the blood dabbling into his 
beard. He was utterly bewildered by events of the past few 
moments. "Where where in the world did she get that insane 
idea?" he wondered aloud, distraught. "I never gave her the

impression this clone was our our love child!" 
Parnell smiled wryly. "Jesse, you're a genius about cloning, 
but you don't know a thing about women. Or about human 
beings, come to that." Then he sobered, looking toward the 
transparent chamber. "Ines is right. It is her child as well as 
yours." 
Contemptuous, Jesse snorted. "That's my clone my 
DNAmy genetic pattern to the last molecule." 
"Imposed and nurtured on one of Ines' ova," Parnell reminded 
him. "I've seen your past experimentsand failures. You haven't 
got the beginnings of producing a clone from your tissue alone. 
Ines contributed, and her contribution was a big one, Jesse." 
"A scientific contribution. I don't deny that," Jesse said, 
offended. "You can call me a lot of things, Richard, but not 
petty." 
"Not very wise, either. Particularly about human emotions. 
Part of Ines' heart went into this experiment. Part of yours too, if 
you'd admit it." Again Parnell marveled at the reality of the 
clone. "He's a human infant, Jesse. Not something you can carve 
up for tissue specimens." 
"We do it all the time to monkeys and rabbits and rats," Bliss 
argued aggrievedly. He was using a corner of his lab smock to 
remove the worst of the gore from his face. 
"He's a human infant," Parnell repeated. 
"I am not prey to quaint philosophy." Bliss grew huffy. "This is 
my experiment. You promised me autonomy" 
"A living human infant. Not an embryo, not a non-viable 
fetus," Parnell particularized. "If bora now, this child has a 
damned good chance to survive. That gives him legal rights. And 
I'll point out to you, Jesseunlike monkeys, rabbits, and rats, 
human beings are currently in grave danger of becoming extinct. 
We can't waste one of them while you play games in a dissection 
room."

"Now don't quote" 
"I'm pointing out the basic problem, which you seem to have 
forgotten," Parnell said, cutting Jesse's protest cold. "Humanity's 
fighting for its life." 
"That clone is mine!" Jesse shrilled, an oversized adolescent 
about to revert and throw a temper tantrum. "I produced it, and 
I can do what I wish with" 
The door banged open and Ines stood on the threshold. 
Vengefully, she pointed to the clone chamber and exclaimed, 
"There! What did I tell you?" 
A small crowd gathered outside the room. Apparently Ines 
had staged a Paul Revere ride throughout Northwest Cloning, 
spilling the secret to all and sundry. And most of them seemed to 
have followed her back here, curious to see the truth. 
A few people wriggled past Ines, entering Jesse's sanctuary. 
Therese. Grigsby. Nevin Detloff. Ria peered around Ines, eyes 
wide, wondering if she would be permitted in this adult 
province. 
"This is treason!" Bliss thundered, exaggerating ludicrously. 
He shifted his tantrum from Parnell to Ines. 
The woman stood her ground. "I told them all. You can't do 
anything to him now," she said, looking tenderly toward the 
infant in the chamber. They won't let you. If you kill him it'll be 
murder." 
"You narrow-minded" Jesse's voice faded as he realized he 
was the center of a great deal of attention. Ines' attack had left 
him a mess. Face scratched, smock tqrn, his hair in more than 
usual disarray. 
Therese approached the cloning case, touching the 
transparent wall reverently, gazing at the infant. Oh, Ines! It's 
true! You really did it. You must be so proud of him, Jesse." 
That derailed Bliss completely, and put him back on his

original course. Willing to accept the plaudits of his colleagues. 
DetloflE, like Therese, was rapt with awe. "You said this was 
possible, Doctor. I didn't dare believe you. But this" 
"I didn't know we'd come this far myself, until a short while 
ago," Parnell confessed. He eyed Ines warily. But now that 
she'd'done her worst to Jesse Bliss, she wept with relief. No 
longer violent. A mother who'd saved her child from destruction. 
Jesse was at a loss. Things were out of his hands. He'd wanted 
appreciation for his scientific genius and gotten more than 
he'd bargained for. Now that he'd achieved his goal, Ines 
wouldn't let him do as he pleased with the results. Such a thing 
had never happened to Bliss. His secret was out. And he had no 
choice in its disposition. 
Nevin Detloff caressed the cloning chamber's wall. "A son. 
Your son, Bliss. You don't know how I envy you" 
"It's obscene." Grigsby's face was working with revulsion. 
"Father!" Therese reddened with chagrin. "You knew what 
Jesse was working on. You read all the reports." 
"That's different." The General was appalled to comprehend 
he'd participated in this project. "All that money. Is this what it's 
come to? That thing." 
"A human baby," Parnell said firmly. He drew attention from 
everyone, not merely Grigsby. "Get it through your head. This 
can mean survival for the human race. Ria needn't spend her 
future alone, even if it develops there aren't any more immune 
children." 
His seventy years suddenly weighed on Ogden Grigsby. 
ParnelFs words forcibly pointed out that no one was immortal. 
Death would come, and for Grigsby that appointment wouldn't 
be far off. With the exception of the clone, Nevin Detloff and Ria 
were the youngest persons in the room. And probably fifteen 
years separated those two. When Ria was Ogden Grigsby's 
present age what? Who'd be her heir?

"What if we can't find any more immunes?" Parnell stressed. 
He nodded to the clone infant. "This may be our only answer. 
Survival for our species." 
Ines whispered through her tears, "Yes, yes, our son. Yes" 
Detloff pounced on Jesse Bliss. "Can you make other clones? 
Can you use anyone's genetic pattern? For instancemine?" Like 
Ogden Grigsby, the Younger Party leader wasn't a scientist, but 
he was intelligent. He immediately grasped the implications, and 
grasped them firmly. 
Reticent, cunning, Jesse said, "A lot of things can go wrong. 
So many problems." 
Grigsby seconded him roundly. "You won't believe the expense 
involved. Astronomical. You aren't seriously thinking of this 
mustn't be repeated. It's it's unnatural." 
Therese looked ceilingward, exasperated. "Quit being so 
medieval. God gave us brains so we could  use them." 
"Extinction is a natural process, Ogden," Parnell snapped. 
"Are you suggesting humanity should simply lie down and go the 
way of the dinosaurs?" 
"You you said Ria may be immune from this this infertility 
mutation," Grigsby stammered, growing desperate. 
"And if she is? Even supposing there are others. There won't 
be many, Ogden. There aren't that many people left alive in the 
world. The race is going to need every new member it can get." 
Parnell hammered verbally at the old man. "We've had this out 
before. I thought I'd made it clear. Except for the 
immuneshowever few those may beall the genetic inheritance 
of the human race exists in the people who are living now. We 
have to preserve their DNA patterns for the future. And that 
means cloning." 
Softly, adding the final note, Therese said, "quite apart from 
the science of it, Fatherthey're people. They deserve to survive. 
They want to know their seed won't end with them. Isn't that

what you've wanted?" 
The room was still. Nevin Detloff stared at the floor a few 
seconds, then looked up at Grigsby. Two men of great 
powerwith the same aching need. Family line. Therese had just 
reminded them they weren't unique. They shared their hunger 
with humanity. The drive to reproduce. 
Parnell broke the silence. "There's a thing called the gene pool. 
We need it. Eventually, given enough immunes, the infertility 
factor can be bred out. Then they'll need a genetic intermix. 
Believe me, Ogden. Cloning is vital." 
"A backup system for the immunes," Nevin Det-loff said 
suddenly, putting the problem into technological terms. 
"Exactly!" 
"Well, you're not spending any more of my money on those 
those robots!" Grigsby vowed, stomping out. 
Parnell stared after him. He couldn't envision Life Sciences 
without Ogden Grigsby backing it. One of the techs murmured, 
"Do you think he meant it?" 
"Oh, he meant it," Therese said. "At least for now." She smiled 
at Ria, sharing a feminine secret. The two of themOgden 
Grigsby's vulnerable point. Parnell knew the General could be 
wheedled into line, and would be. 
"Maybe you don't need this money," Detloff said. His dark 
eyes glittered with that fire seen so often during his telecasts. "If 
you can duplicate the process, make a clone from my DNA" 
"I might. If I chose." Jesse Bliss was aloof, nursing his anger. 
"I know the process, Mr. Detloff," Ines. Dragging herself out of 
emotional trauma. Challenging Jesse. "I was with him every step 
of the way. And we've got the tapes." 
"You you wouldn't!" Jesse was horrified.

"Every step of the way," Ines said heavily. She turned to 
Detloff. "If you'll back the project, I'll help you produce your 
clone. I know everything required. The nutrient formula, the 
necessary current balances." Triumphantly, she glared at Bliss 
and said, "And it starts with a donor ovum." 
The truth lay in the clonist's scratched face. Ines might have 
pushed her qualifications, but she wasn't far wrong. She had a 
reputation in the field nearly as impressive as Jesse Bliss's. If 
anyone could copy his research, she could. She'd had the world's 
best cloju'st for a teacher, hadn't she? 
"You'd better compromise, Jesse, while you can," Parnell 
warned him. "At this stage it's still your babyand Ines'. If you 
want to keep things that way I advise you what was that phrase 
you used, Nevin?" 
"Bury the hatchet," Detloff supplied, grinning. 
If either Bliss or Ines had possessed such a weapon, they'd 
have been most likely to bury it in the other's skull. Parnell hoped 
this was a lover's quarrel. The future needed both their skills. 
He glanced at Detloff, thinking of the problems of cloning. 
"Jesse, what are your tissue specs? Can you clone from any age 
tissue?" 
Bliss shoved his hands deep into his pockets and said 
grumpily, "The younger the better. Humans age at different 
rates, of course. But sixty's certainly a top limit. Much younger. 
That's what's needed." 
No clone for the General. But possibly one each for Richard 
and Therese Parnell. Not a child of their love, but duplicates of 
the originals. Better than nothing. Much better. And Grigsby just 
might change his tune if he could be made to realize he might 
indeed have a grandchild someday. Therese's genetic structure, 
impressed on a clone. Ogden Grigsby and his wife, their genes 
recreated, going into the future. 
Jesse felt constrained to make things sound difficult. "And as 
the General pointed out, the cost is enormous."

"Worth it," Detloff said without hesitation. 
"Is it?" Therese countered. "All those people who are starving. 
So many things wrong with the world right now. Where do we 
pick priorities for the future? Have we any right to spend so 
many precious resources on cloning?" 
"One question at a time," Parnell cautioned her. "Jesse, a 
while back you suggested if Nevin and Grigsby forgot politics 
and pooled their wealth, they could save what's left of the world. 
If that can be pulled offthere'd be surplus resources for cloning 
research." 
Jesse Bliss and Ines regarded each other. Two might-be 
enemies. "Well" Jesse said dubiously. "In any project, you can 
save money if you conduct simultaneous research. The same 
amount of work to do a lot more producing." 
"Good!" Parnell approved. "You're thinking straighter. How 
can we cut costs and still" 
"Shhh!" Ria pressed her nose against the glass of the cloning 
chamber. "You might wake him up." 
Touched, Therese said, "He can't hear us, darling. But he will, 
once he's born." 
"When will he be born?" the girl wondered, as if the event 
would be a holiday. 
"Soon, love. Soon." 
Parnell winked at Bliss, startling the clonist. "Before that time 
you and Ines had better pick out a name. Something totally and 
completely from your own. A clone infant will have enough 
burdens to bear without going through life with a name like 
'Junior'. Besides, I don't think we could cope with yet another 
Jesse Bliss." 
Chapter X

"It still doesn't seem quite decent." Grigsby strolled alongside 
Richard Parnell. The General was pretending to be an 
unenthusiastic reviewer of the newly-opened wing of Northwest 
Cloning. 
"Why are you complaining? None of it came out of your 
pocket," Parnell said. He noted considerable progress in building 
additional cloning-chamber rooms, nodded encouragement to 
the techs. "Everything you see is Detloff's treat. He's bankrolled 
us to the hilt these past few weeks." 
"You didn't need to go to him," Grigsby numbled unhappily. 
"I would have helped you. Haven't I angeled the project from 
the beginning?" 
"We thought you wanted to be included out on cloning. How's 
it going, Ines?" Parnell waved to the departmental supervisor. 
Ines has been brighter, more outgoing since her blowup with 
Jesse. The confrontation had done them both good, in Parnell's 
opinion. 
Grigsby heaved a sigh. "Well, I guess I gave you that 
impression. But you know how I am, Rich. Therese made me see 
how bullheaded I've been. Just these new ideas. To radical for 
me. Maybe I can't dump it anymore, as the kids say." 
The General talked that way more and more frequently. 
Reminiscing. Wallowing in nostalgia, complaining things had 
changed since the good old days. At times he sounded exactly 
like Emmett and the others at the library. Their tapes to Ria 
were parroting the General's everyday conversation. Including 
the gloomy mutterings about age and death. 
Time made that inevitable. But Parnell hated to see it happen. 
"We still need your experience and advice, Og-den," he said. 
He tried to put the sincerity he felt into those words. 
"What does it matter? Bliss can't duplicate me in one of those 
infernal chambers of his," Grigsby said. He stared at his 
son-in-law and demanded, "Can he?"

"No. Even Therese and I are at the top age limit for usable 
cloning tissue." 
"Thanks, for leveling with me," the General said huskily. 
"Always liked you for that, Richard. Smartest thing my daughter 
ever didmarrying you. Won't be so bad going, knowing you're 
on tap to take care of her, and Ria." 
The original cloning chamber was more crowded than it had 
been the day Ines had exploded Jesse Bliss's secret. Cameras and 
sound equipment were squeezed in beside monitoring consoles 
and the central chamber. The last was the feature attraction for 
Nevin Detloff's in-progress telecast. 
Detloff and Ria were standing by the chamber, and the 
cameramen panned to include all three in their shots. 
" the result of self-sacrifice and dedication, friends," Nevin 
was saying. "People who work for your future. For me, for you, 
for all of us. You didn't know these people existed, or that they 
were slaving away. All this tune they've been trying to save the 
world. Find a way to make sure we aren't the last generation on 
earth. Think about that, friends! Think about that kind of 
dedication!" 
Parnell had been a spectator at a dozen similar broadcasts 
throughout these past few weeks. The material was nothing new, 
but Detloff's delivery retained its freshness. His eagerness was 
infectious, sparking both the viewers and the scientists he 
praised. Grigsby had the gift of commandhad used it well all 
his military career. Nevin Detloff's talent was hypnotismthe 
ability to bring his ideas to life for multitudes. 
After several initial clashes, the two men had struck a truce. It 
wasn't peace. And it wasn't always amicable. But Detloff was no 
longer under arrest and he'd started aiming his messages at all 
generations, usurping the stale speechmaking of Grigsby's party 
spokesman. 
Detloff smiled into the camera and brushed at Ria's hair 
gently. Big brother introducing his beloved little sister. 
"Remember friendsRia was almost killed in a disty riot. Just

one close call she had. Look at her. Imagine her terror. Imagine 
what it was like for her. And thinkwhat we could have lost if 
anything had happened to her. Part of our future. Think about it. 
Think hard! All of us have to share tomorrow. All of us. You and 
me, and Ria." 
"And that includes Youngers and Middle-Agers and Olders. 
All of us," he segued expertly. "We aren't enemies. We're all 
living in the same world. That's the same future up ahead for all 
of us. Let's not be so cretinous we rob ourselves of it" 
Sensing what came next, the cameramen widened focus. 
Grigsby crooked his neck nervously and straightened his uniform 
blouse. Brightly, Detloff grinned a welcome. "And speaking of a 
better future for all of us, here's General Ogden Grigsby to fill us 
in on the new food distribution plan. How's it coming, General?" 
A bit broad, but Grigsby lapped it up. He'd always let his 
puppet do the orating for him. Now Nevin Detloff insisted the 
General tell his own story. Clever psychology in the campaign to 
draw the generations together. Detloff and Grigsby, sharing a 
camera. Side by side, like a man and his grandson. The past and 
the future" 
"The main problem has always been processing and 
distribution," Grigsby explained to the unseen audience. "The 
food's available. The trick is getting it to you. We've had trouble 
getting help at our processing factories. Loading the product. 
Transporting it to the cities. You don't have to read to do these 
jobs, either." 
"Hear that, friends?" Nevin said, instantly picking up the ball, 
bringing it home to the listeners. Anybody can pitch in. All you 
need is a willingness to work. You'll not only do yourself a favor, 
you'll be helping others. And that's a good feeling. Why don't you 
try it?" 
"We're open for volunteers," Grigsby chimed in, reciting a 
series of addresses. Three. One for Young-ers, one for 
out-of-work Middle-Agers, one for still healthy Olders. The 
divisions hadn't evaporated completely yet. But Detloff and 
Grigsby were hacking away at the walls.

"And I'd like to thank everyone who cooperated with the 
Deputy President's new census," Grigsby added. "We have to 
knew where we've been so we'll know where we're going." 
"That's right," Detloff said, putting his talent into high gear. 
"Cooperation: That's the key to the future, friends. Everyone 
wants to survive. A natural life span. Everyone's right. Including 
the next generation's." He gestured to Ria and the infant clone. 
"We have to live together and work together. Now remember" 
Parnell mentally switched off Detloff's summation. That 
skillful reprise, telling the public what it must do to survive. 
What it was doing. A few weeks ago no one had dreamed civil 
order was possible. The military beat heads and fired sonic 
weapons. A civilian's job was to resist and riot. 
That was before Detloff and Grigsby combined their resources 
and media outlets. They'd brought the populationvia the magic 
of the telecastright into Northwest Cloning. Showed everyone 
Ria and the clone. Told the people there would be a next 
generation, and told them why and how, on a simplistic level. 
It worked. Not all at once. But the shake-up was enough to 
cause a lot of regrouping. And while people regrouped, they 
rethought. And when they were thinking they weren't rioting. 
The breather gave the military and municipal authorities the 
chance they needed to get organizedget food distribution back 
on a reasonable basis. 
Parnell had been amazed when he'd gone into the city a few 
days ago. Not as quiet as things were twenty years ago, of course. 
But a vast improvement over recent debacles. 
Detloff raised a questioning eyebrow at Parnell. Did he want 
air time? Any tidbit of information the doctor wanted to share 
with a panting public? Parnell, no publicity seeker, shook his 
head. 
Signing off, Nevin Detloff, Grigsby, and Ria postured hammily 
for the cameras.

"They make quite a combination, don't they?" Therese 
whispered in Parnell's ear. 
ITie chief cameraman was saying, "That's a wrap!" Parnell felt 
it was safe to talk out loud now. "Frankly, I think your Father 
finally found his proper niche. A seventy-year old matinee idol." 
The cameraman was ordering, "Okay, let's get this junk 
cleaned up and out of here. You know Dr. Bliss doesn't like us 
cluttering the place for these vidcasts." 
Parnell accosted the man before he could leave. "Glad to see 
you back in action, Brent. How's the head?" 
"Oh, I feel finethanks to Doctor Parnell," and Brent nodded 
gratefully to Therese. 
"Not me," she corrected modestly. "All I did was turn you over 
to the experts. A few spinal taps and a lot of medication and 
here you are. Good as new." 
"I sure feel lucky," the young man said. 
"You should," Detloff interrupted. He slapped his friend's 
bicep. That current of camaraderie which ran between Detloff 
and his aides was strong. Everyone who saw the men knew how 
much Detloff had worried about the cameraman. 
"How grateful are you?" Parnell asked slyly. They stared at 
him quizzically. "Our medical department could use some 
trainees. Be a good chance for some 
Youngers to get started in a profession. One that's rather 
important." 
"Doctors," Nevin murmured, mulling the prospects. "That's a 
great idea! You mean would your people really have the time to 
mess with" 
"A bunch of illiterate Youngers?" Therese filled in, saving the 
politician the embarrassment of downgrading his followers. 
"Maybe by the time we got through with them they wouldn't be

illiterate. If we teach them to be interns and surgeons, I think we 
just might teach them how to read along the way." 
Parnell himself added a clincher. "We wouldn't have to 
confine the course to medicine. Life Sciences is a college in 
miniature. Some of our staff have other specialties. Music, 
literature and we can tap the library's shelves for material." 
"Sounds great! When can we get on it?" No one ever faulted 
Nevin Detloff for being slow on the uptake. 
"I'll ask around," Parnell said, amused. But intrigued by the 
possibilities. "We will need doctors." 
He turned to look at the clone infant. Very soon now the tiny 
human would be ready to come out into the world. Ria was 
counting the days. To her it was a game, but to Parnell the 
clone's emergence from the tank would signal a new start for the 
human race. A backup system for survival, as Detloff put it. 
Detloff had been taking a radio message, a receiver hurriedly 
shoved into his hands. He listened a moment, then laid the set 
down. His expression was a study. "Richard" 
"Bad news?" Parnell said apprehensively. 
"N no." Detloff was a man surprised beyond no. 
his wildest expectations. "Come Therese and the General" 
on. You and 
"Me too!" Ria insisted, bouncing up and down, yanking on 
Grigsby's hand. The old man bore the abuse stolidly, smiling at 
the girl. 
"Yes, Ria too. Hurry!" 
Detloff led them out of the building onto a meadow fronting 
the industrial complex. A late spring breeze whipped at them 
warmly and clouds scudded across a pale blue sky. 
"Is it a surprise?" Ria demanded excitedly.

"Yes and no." Detloff was maddeningly uniforma-tive, hands 
shielding his eyes as he gazed eastward. 
Parnell heard it now. Not heliflitters. These weren't military 
aircraft. Some of those expensive replicas DetlofFs people had 
hand-made from old patterns. Copters, cobbled out of salvaged 
machine parts and a lot of ingenuity. Nevin Detloff's private air 
force. 
Two of them, sidling in toward the meadow. "Have they got 
permission to land here?" Grigsby began. 
"Next you'll be telling me I'm still under arrest," Nevin said, 
and the old man actually blushed. The Younger went on, "You 
might say as General Grigs-bys' civilian liaison I've ordered a 
VIP delivery." 
"VIP ?" 
Further questions were drowned in noise and windy backlash 
from the copters' rotors. The reception committee squinted their 
eyes and hunched shoulders until the long blades spun to a stop, 
Then stared curiously at the landed craft. 
The man who got out first seemed familiar to Parnell. He 
hadn't seen the face for several weeks, and only briefly then. 
"Isn't that" 
"Lew!" Detloff cried, waving a greeting. "You made good 
time." 
"I didn't want you to wait for this," Lew shouted back. 
Grigsby was stewing, uncertain whether to make a protest. An 
escaped prisoner. But so many things had changed since the 
night of the riots and the flight from the city. He wisely decided 
to let the matter drop. 
Lew was helping a child from the lead copter. A girl, not as old 
as Ria. 
All the watchers were stupefied. Even Nevin. As if he'd taken

Lew's call and hadn't dared believe it. 
More children got out of the copters. Lew and several other 
Younger aides and pilots assisted them down to the grass. There 
were also some adults. Shy, uncertain about their welcome here. 
Young in their twenties. 
The passengers huddled together, gazing warily at the people 
by the lab. Ria was already on her way to break the ice. She 
skipped up to the new arrivals, asking the children their names, 
telling them hers. 
Parnell stared. Coloring, facial structureit was obvious these 
were children and their parents. 
The immunes they'd hoped to find! 
Four women and three men and five children. Some families 
were broken, one child was an orphan. But plainly they were 
immunes. The infertility factor had passed them by. None of the 
children was as old as Ria. All these children had been conceived 
and born within the past ten years, possibly within the last five. 
Lew sauntered past Ria and the new arrivals, waving jauntily 
to Nevin. "Here they are, all safe and sound." 
Detloff inhaled deeply, darting a glance at Parnell. "I hope this 
is just a first installment on the future. These are the people you 
wanted to findthe immunes and their children. We've coaxed 
them out of hiding, persuaded them you could be trusted." 
Richard and Therese Parnell looked at each other, 
incredulous. Then Parnell said, "Five children. Four fertile female 
adults. Do you realize what you've done for the world, Nevin?" 
"Given it one extra chance for the future, I hope." 
"Maybe now you'll jettison that obscenity in the lab," Grigsby 
muttered. 
"No! Don't you understand, Ogden? Backup systems. When 
you've got a risky undertaking, you don't let prejudice cancel out

any avenue to the final goal. The clones are necessary to 
mankind's ultimate survival." 
Therese put it in more human terms. "Father, those women 
are fertilebut I'm not. Very few women are or will be for years 
to come. Consider the numbers. If humanity's going to avoid 
extinction, it needs as many people as possible. Unless we 
produce clones, twenty years from now the human race will be 
down to a bare handful. And the gene pool will be wiped out, 
virtually." 
"It doesn't seem" But Grigsby shook his head, conceding the 
logic of arguments he could no longer keep up with. "If if you 
say so." 
"Believe me, that's the way it is," Parnell assured the old man. 
"Thank you, Nevin. How long did it take you to find these 
immunes?" 
"Ever since Lew made that break." Detloff was apologetic. 
"I'm sorry there aren't more" 
"I'm grateful. I'm just thinking it would have been to high a 
price to pay if Lew had been shot making his getaway," Parnell 
said. 
"I appreciate the compliment, Doctor. I won't take that kind 
of chance again," Lew said with an amiable smile. 
"Let's hope it's never required again." Parnell studied the little 
group of immunes. "How much terri-troy did you have to cover 
to locate that many?" 
Lew and Detloff exchanged glances. "The whole North Central 
District," Lew confessed. "I hate to admit it, but I suspect this is 
about all we'll get in this region. If there are any more of 'em out 
there either they didn't get the word, or they aren't coming 
forward. 
"Yet," Detloff corrected him hopefully. 
Parnell didn't share his optimism. Five children from this

district. A few more in the Eastern, Mountain, and Western 
Districts, probably. A few more fertile females. That just might 
be it for the nation which dominated a good chunk of the world. 
The odds weren't as good as he'd hoped. They really did need 
the clones. Hang onto every scrap of life they could. He and 
Therese and Detloff had already contributed DNA samples to a 
tissue bank, for use in cloning sometime in the future. So had 
every other scientist and specialist in Life Sciencesthose who 
were young enough to qualify. A lot of Detlofi's Youngers would 
also be good cloning models. 
Ria and five other naturally-born children. It was a start. 
"Richard," Therese said softly. She was reading his mind 
agairi. "We're going to make it, aren't we?" 
He pulled her into the crook of his arm. "You sounded like you 
doubted it." 
"There were times" 
"Not any more. There's too much to do from now on." They 
looked toward the newcomers. 
Ria was the senior in this school of the future. "We live here," 
she told the other children. "You can tooyou and your 
mommies and daddies." 
"Do you have food to eat?" one asked timorously. 
"Oh, lots! Grampa and Nevin see about that. Oh, and there's 
learning tapes and books and" She paused and surveyed her 
youthful audience. "You know how to read, don't you?" 
She was shocked by the negative response from both parents 
and children. 
"Well I'll teach you. My mommy will help. And there's an 
awful lot to learn." Ria was amusingly pontifical. The expert, 
showing the new kids the ropes. "You'll have to work hard, but 
it's a lot of fun"

Ria took a couple of the children by the hands, led the entire 
group toward Northwest Cloning's door. Her chatter was Pied 
Piper's tune. They followed her without question. 
"I'll show you the clones, too," Ria promised. "You can watch a 
baby growingright inside the tank." 
The door closed behind Ria's description of a library, and how 
one was crammed with thousands of booksall of which she 
could read. And someday the other children could too. 
"Better watch it, Nevin," Lew chuckled. "She'll be taking your 
job away from you one of these days." 
Quite seriously Detloff replied, "I won't mind stepping aside 
for Ria." 
"We all have to step aside for the next generation," Parnell 
said. He was watching Ogden Grigsby. The old man was 
woebegone, abandoned. Then he perked up and trailed after Ria, 
obviously going to help out as tour guide. The leader demoted to 
a doting assistant for a small girl. 
Detloff and Parnell eyed each other thoughtfully. 
Parnell nodded. "But we aren't going to be stepping aside for 
some time yet. There's too much work to do. 
Right now it's showing those newcomers they made the right 
decisioncoming out in the open with their children." 
Familiar eagerness sparkled in Nevin Detloffs eyes. "Well, 
come on! What are you waiting for?"

