Blood Music by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online Page A

being up front with you, because there shouldn’t be any misunderstanding. I will deny saying any of these things if pressed. My real reason for not hiring you is your psychological profile. Your drawings are spaced too far apart and indicate an unwholesome predilection for self-isolation.” She handed back his records. “Fair enough?”
    Vergil nodded. He took his records and stood up. “You don’t even know Rothwild,” he said. “This has happened to me six times.”
    “Yes, well, Mr. Ulam, ours is a fledgling industry, barely fifteen years old. Companies still rely on each other when it comes to certain things. Cutthroat out front, and supportive behind the scenes. It’s been interesting talking with you, Mr. Ulam. Good day.”
    He blinked in the sunshine outside the white concrete front of Codon Research. So much for recovery, he thought.
    The whole experiment would soon fade away to nothing. Perhaps it was just as well.
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    He drove north through white-gold hills dotted with twisted oaks, past cerulean lakes deep and dear with the past winter’s rains. The summer had been mild so far, and even inland, the temperature hadn’t gone over ninety.
    The Volvo hummed over the endless stretch of Highway 5 through fields given over to cotton, then through green nut groves. Vergil cut across 580 along the outskirts of Tracy, his mind almost blank, the driving a panacea against his worries. Forests of pylon-mounted propellers turned in harmony on both sides of the highway, each great swinging arm two thirds as wide as a football field.
    He had never felt better in his life, and he was worried. He had not sneezed for two weeks, in the middle of a champion allergy season. The last time he had seen Candice, to tell her he was going to Livermore to visit his mother, she had commented on his skin color, which had changed from pallid to a healthy peach-pink, and his freedom from sniffles.
    “You’re looking better each time I see you, Vergil,” she had said, smiling and kissing him. “Come back soon. I’ll miss you. And maybe we’ll find more spice.”
    Looking better, feeling better—and no excuse for it. He wasn’t sentimental enough to believe that love cured all, even calling what he felt for Candice love. Was it?
    Something else.
    He didn’t like thinking about it, so he drove. After ten hours, he felt vaguely disappointed as he turned onto South Vasco Road and motored south. He hung a right on East Avenue and drove into downtown Livermore, a small California burg with old stone and brick buildings, old wooden farmhouses now surrounded by suburbs, shopping centers not unlike those in every other town in California…and just outside of town, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where, among many other researches, nuclear weapons were designed.
    He stopped at Guinevere’s Pizza Parlor and forced himself to order a medium garbage pizza and a salad and Coke. As he sat down to wait in the pseudo-medieval dining area, he wondered idly whether the Livermore Labs had any facilities he could use. Who was the more Strangelovian—the weapons folks, or good ol’ Vergil I. Ulam?
    The pizza arrived and he looked down on the cheese and condiments and greasy sausage. “You used to like this stuff,” he said under his breath. He picked at the pizza and finished the salad. That seemed to be enough. Leaving most of his meal on the table, he wiped his mouth, smiled at the young girl behind the cash register, and returned to his car.
    Vergil did not look forward to visits with his mother. He needed them, in some uncertain and irritating way, but he did not enjoy them.
    April Ulam lived in a well-maintained century-old two-story house just off First Street. The house was painted forest green and had a Mansard roof. Two little gardens fenced in with wrought iron flanked the steep front steps—one garden for flowers and herbs, the other for vegetables. The porch was screened-in, with a wood-frame screen door