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Chapter 15
In his
career as a police official, Felix Buckman had used this shuck each time
he had come up against a six. He relied on it especially when, as with
this, the encounter was sudden. There had been four of them. All,
eventually, had believed him. This he found amusing. The sixes, eugenic
experiments themselves, and secret ones, seemed unusually gullible when
confronted with the assertion that there existed an additional project as
classified as their own.
Without this
shuck he would be, to a six, merely an "ordinary." He could not properly
handle a six under such a disadvantage. Hence the ploy. Through it his
relationship to a six inverted itself. And, under such recreated
conditions, he could deal successfully with an otherwise unmanageable
human being.
The actual
psychological superiority over him which a six possessed was abolished by
an unreal fact. He liked this very much.
Once, in an
off moment, he had said to Alys, "I can out-think a six for roughly ten to
fifteen minutes. But if it goes on any longer -" He had made a gesture,
crumpling up a black-market cigarette package. With two cigarettes in it.
" After that their overamped field wins out. What I need is a pry bar by
which I can jack open their haughty damn minds." And, at last, he had
found it.
"Why a
'seven'?" Alys had said. "As long as you're shucking them why not say
eight or thirty-eight?"
"The sin of
vainglory. Reaching too far." He had not wanted to make that legendary
mistake. "I will tell them," he had told her grimly, "what I think they'll
believe." And, in the end, he had proved out right.
"They won't
believe you," Alys had said.
"Oh, hell,
will they!" he had retorted. "It's their secret fear, their bete noire.
They're the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems and they know
that if it could be done to them it could be done to others in a more
advanced degree."
Alys,
uninterested, had said faintly, "You should be an announcer on TV selling
soap." And that constituted the totality of her reaction. If Alys did not
give a damn about something, that something, for her, ceased to exist.
Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had
... but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come:
reality denied comes back to haunt. To overtake the person without
warning and make him insane.
And Alys, he
had a number of times thought, was in some odd sense, in some unusual
clinical way, pathological.
He sensed it
but could not pin it down. However, many of his hunches were like that. It
did not bother him, as much as he loved her. He knew he was right.
Now, facing
Jason Taverner, a six, he developed his shuck ploy.
"There were
very few of us," Buckman said, now seating himself at his oversize
oak desk. "Only four in all. One is already dead, so that leaves three. I
don't have the slightest idea where they are; we retain even less contact
among ourselves than do you sixes. Which is little enough."
"Who was
your muter?" Jason asked.
"Dill Temko.
Same as yours. He controlled groups five through seven and then he
retired. As you certainly know, he's dead now."
"Yes," Jason
said. "It shocked us all."
"Us, too,"
Buckman said, in his most somber voice. "Dill Temko was our parent.
Our only parent. Did you know that at the time of his death he had begun
to prepare schema on an eighth group?"
"What would
they have been like?"
"Only Dill
Temko knew, " Buckman said, and felt his superiority over the six facing
him grow. And yet - how fragile his psychological edge. One wrong
statement, one statement too much, and it would vanish. Once lost, he
would never regain it.
It was the
risk he took. But he enjoyed it; he had always liked betting against the
odds, gambling in the dark. He had in him, at times like this, a great
sense of his own ability. And he did not consider it imagined ... despite
what a six that knew him to be an ordinary would say. That did not bother
him one bit.
Touching a
button, he said, "Peggy, bring us a pot of coffee, cream and the rest.
Thanks." He then leaned back with studied leisure. And surveyed Jason
Taverner.
Anyone who
had met a six would recognize Taverner. The strong torso, the massive
confirmation of his arms and back. His powerful, ramlike head. But most
ordinaries had never knowingly come up against a six. They did not have
his experience. Nor his carefully synthesized knowledge of them.
To Alys he
had once said, "They will never take over and run my world."
"You don't
have a world. You have an office."
At that
point he terminated the discussion.
"Mr.
Taverner," he said bluntly, "how have you managed to get documents, cards,
microfilm, even complete files out of data banks allover the planet? I've
tried to imagine how it could be done, but I come up with a blank." He
fixed his attention on the handsome-but aging-face of the six and waited.
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