Alternating Currents Read Online Free PDF Page A

if I have glossed lightly over what I felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious.
     
    Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population weren’t put back as shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings, they even pulled at mine; and every time a foster-parent’s neighbour, or a casual passer-by on the street, felt that heartstring tug he would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this.
     
    For after killing the potentially dangerous adults they had caged the tractable small ones as valuable research specimens.
     
    And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets!
     
    Whitling was all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in his voice the sound of what I was up against; because he loved and pitied those kids. ‘Hi, Terry,’ he said on the sun deck, bending over a bed and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him. ‘Can’t hear us, of course,’ said Whitling. ‘We grafted in new auditory nerves four weeks ago - I did it myself - but they’re not surviving. Third try, too. And of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before: antibodies.’
     
    I said, ‘He doesn’t look more than five years old.’ Whitling nodded. ‘But the attack on the colony was—’
     
    ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ said Whitling. ‘The Arcturans were, of course, interested in reproduction too. Ellen - she left us a couple of weeks ago - was only thirteen, but she’d had six children. Now, this is Nancy.’
     
    Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped and regarded me with dislike and suspicion. ‘Nancy’s one of our cures,’ Whitling said proudly. He followed my eyes. ‘Oh, nothing wrong there,’ he said. ‘Mars-bred. She hasn’t adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn’t slow, the ball’s bouncing too fast. Here’s Sam.’
     
    Sam was a near-teenager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress. A candy-striped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back, grinning. ‘Sam’s central nervous system was almost gone,’ Whitling said fondly. ‘But we’re making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is awfully—’ I wasn’t listening; I was looking at Sam’s grin, which showed black and broken teeth. ‘Diet deficiency,’ said Whitling, following my look again.
     
    ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen enough, now I want to get out of here before they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whitling. I think I thank you. Which is the way out?’
     
    ~ * ~
     
    4
     
    I didn’t want to go back to Haber’s office. I was afraid of what the conversation might be like. But I had to get a fill-in on what had been happening with our work and I had to eat.
     
    So I took Candace back to my room and ordered lunch from room service.
     
    I stood at the thermal window looking out at the city while Candace checked with the office. I didn’t even listen, because Candace knew what I would want to know, I just watched Belport cycle through an average dull Monday at my feet. Belport was a radial town, with an urban centre-cluster of the mushroom-shaped buildings that were popular twenty years ago. The hotel we were in was one, in fact, and from my window I could see three others looming above and below me, to right and left, and beyond them the cathedral spires of the apartment condominia of the residential districts. I could see a creeping serpent of gaily coloured cars moving along one of the trafficways, pinpointed with sparks of our pro-referendum campaign parades. Or one of the opposition’s. From four hundred feet it didn’t seem to matter.
     
    ‘You know, honey,’ I said as she clicked off the 3-V, ‘there isn’t any