The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert Read Free Book Online Page B

the agent said. “How was the tape erased?”
    â€œAccident,” Potter said. “Worn equipment. We’ll have the technical report for you shortly.”
    â€œLeave the worn equipment thing out of your report,” the agent said. “I’ll take that verbally. Allgood has to show every report to the Tuyere now.”
    Potter permitted himself an understanding nod. “Of course.” The men who worked out of Central knew about such things. One concealed personally disquieting items from the Optimen.
    The agent glanced around the cutting room, said, “Someday we won’t have to use all this secrecy. Won’t come any too soon for me.” He turned away.
    Potter watched the retreating back, thinking how neatly the agent fitted into the demands of his profession. A superb cut with just one flaw—too neat a fit, too much cold logic, not enough imaginative curiosity and readiness to explore the avenues of chance.
    If he’d pressed me, he’d have had me, Potter thought. He should’ve been more curious about the accident. But we tend to copy our masters—even in their blind spots.
    Potter began to have more confidence of success in his impetuous venture. He turned back to help Svengaard with the final details, wondering, How do I know the agent’s
satisfied with my explanation. No feeling of disquiet accompanied the question. I know he’s satisfied, but how do I know it? Potter asked himself.
    He realized then that his mind had been absorbing correlated gene information—the inner workings of the cells and their exterior manifestations—for so many years that this weight of data had fused into a new level of understanding. He was reading the tiny betrayals in gene-type reactions.
    I can read people!
    It was a staggering realization. He looked around the room at the nurses helping with the tie-off. When his eyes found the computer nurse, he knew she had deliberately destroyed the record tape. He knew it.

4
    L izbeth and Harvey Durant walked hand in hand from the hospital after their interview with the Doctors Potter and Svengaard. They smiled and swung their clasped hands like children off on a picnic—which in a sense they were.
    The morning’s rain had been shut off and the clouds were being packed off to the east, toward the tall peaks that looked down on Seatac Megalopolis. The overhead sky showed a clear cerulean blue with a goblin sun riding high in it.
    A mob of people in loose marching order was coming through the park across the way, obviously the exercise period for some factory team or labor group. Their uniformed sameness was broken by flashes of color—an orange scarf on a woman’s head, a yellow sash across a man’s chest, the scarlet of a fertility fetish dangling on a gold loop from a woman’s ear. One man had equipped himself bright green shoes.
    The pathetic attempts at individuality in a world of gene-stamped sameness stabbed through Lizbeth’s defenses. She turned away lest the scene tear the smile from her lips, asked, “Where’ll we go?”

    â€œHmmm?” Harvey held her back, waiting on the walk for the group to pass.
    Among the marchers, faces turned to stare enviously at Harvey and Lizbeth. All knew why the Durants were here. The hospital, a great pile of plasmeld behind them, the fact that they were man and woman together, the casual dress, the smiles—all said the Durants were on breeder-leave from their appointed labors.
    Each individual in that mob hoped with a lost desperation for this same escape from the routine that bound them all. Viable gametes, breeder leave—it was the universal dream. Even the known Sterries hoped, and patronized the breeder quacks and the manufacturers of doombah fetishes.
    They have no pasts , Lizbeth thought, focusing abruptly on the common observation of the Folk philosophers. They’re all people without pasts and only the hope for a future to