Strangely, Killgore had never paid attention to this sort of thing in animal tests. Rats, he imagined, came into season, and when they did, the boy rats and girl rats must have gotten it on, but somehow he'd never noticed. He respected rats as a life-form, but didn't find their sexual congress the least bit interesting, whereas here, he had to admit to himself, he did find his eyes returning to the screen every few seconds. Well, Pretloe, Subject F5, was the cutest of the bunch, and if he'd found her in a singles bar, he might have offered her a drink and said hello and… let things develop. But she was doomed, too, as doomed as white, bred-for-the purpose lab rats. Those cute little pink-eyed creatures were used all over the world because they were genetically identical, and so test results in one country would match the test results generated anywhere else in the world. They probably didn't have the wherewithal to survive in the wild, and that was too bad. But their white color would work against them-cats and dogs would spot them far more easily, and that was not a good thing in the wild, was it? And they were an artificial species anyway, not part of Nature's plan, but a work of Man, and therefore unworthy of continuance. A pity they were cute, but that was a subjective, not objective, observation, and Killgore had long since learned to differentiate between the two. After all, Pretloe, F5, was cute, too, and his pity for her was a lingering atavistic attitude on his part, unworthy of a Project member. But that got him thinking as he watched Chip Smitton screw Anne Pretloe. This was the kind of thing Hitler might have done with Jews, saved a small number of them as human lab rats, maybe as crash-test dummies for auto-safety tests… So, did that make him a Nazi? Killgore thought. They were using F5 and M7 as such… but, no, they didn't discriminate on race or creed, or gender, did they? There were no politics involved, really-well, maybe, depending on how one defined the term, not in the way he defined the term. This was science, after all. The whole Project was about science and love of Nature. Project members included all races and categories of people, though not much in the way of religions, unless you considered love of Nature to be a religion… which in a way it was, the doctor told himself. Yes, surely it was.
What they were doing on his TV screen was natural, or nearly so-as it had been largely instigated by mood depressants-but the mechanics certainly were. So were their instincts, he to spread his seed as far as possible, and she to receive his seed-and his own, Killgore's mind went on, to be a predator, and through his depredations to decide which members of that species would live and which would not.
These two would not live, attractive as both were… like the lab rats with their cute white hair and cute pink eyes and twitching white whiskers. Well, none of them would be around much longer, would they? It was aesthetically troubling, but a valid choice in view of the future that they all beheld.
"So, nothing else from our Russian friend?" Bill Tawney asked.
"Nothing," Cyril Holt confirmed. "Tapes of Kirilenko show that he walks to work the same way every day and at exactly the same time, when the streets are crowded, stops in his pub for a pint four nights out of five, and bumps into all manner of people. But all it takes is a minor attempt at disguise and a little knowledge of trade-craft to outfox us, unless we really tighten our coverage, and there's too great a chance that Ivan Petrovich would notice it and simply upgrade his own efforts to remain covert. It's a chance we'd prefer not to take."
"Quite so," Tawney had to agree, despite his disappointment. "Nothing from other sources?"
"Other sources" meant whomever the Security Service might have working for them inside the Russian Embassy. There almost had to be someone there, but Holt would not discuss it over a telephone line, encrypted or not, because if there was one thing you had to protect in this business, it was the identity of your sources. Not protecting them could get them killed.
"No, Bill, nothing. Vanya hasn't spoken over his phone line to Moscow on this subject. Nor has he used his secure fax line. Whatever discussions developed from this incident, well, we do not have even a confirmed face, just that chap in the pub, and that might well have been nothing Three months ago, I had one of my chaps strike up a conversation with him at the pub, and they talked about football - he's a serious fan, and he knows the game quite well, and never even revealed his nationality. His accent is bloody perfect. So that chap in the photo might well be nothing at all just another coincidence. Kirilenko is a professional, Bill. He doesn't make many mistakes. Whatever information came out of this was doubtless written up and couriered off."
