The Eyes of Heisenberg Read Online Free PDF

… a joke on all the ladies.”
    He heard a distinct chuckle from the computer nurse, glanced at her, but she had her back to him and her face already hidden by hood and mask.
    The vat nurse said, “Microphone working, Doctor.”
    He couldn’t see her lips moving behind her mask, but her cheeks rippled as she spoke.
    Svengaard flexed his fingers in their gloves, took a deep breath. It smelled faintly of ammonia. He wondered why
Potter always joked with the nurses. It seemed demeaning, somehow.
    Potter moved across to the vat. His sterile suit crinkled with a familiar snapping hiss as he walked. He glanced up at the wall screen, the replay monitor which showed approximately what the surgeon saw and which was the view watched by the parents. The screen presented him with a view of itself as he turned his forehead pickup lens toward it.
    Damn’ parents, he thought. They make me feel guilty … all of them.
    He returned his attention to the crystal vat now bristling with instruments. The pump’s churgling annoyed him.
    Svengaard moved to the other side of the vat, waiting. The breather mask hid the lower half of his face, but his eyes appeared calm. He radiated a sense of steadiness, reliability.
    How does he really feel? Potter wondered. And he reminded himself that in an emergency there wasn’t a better cutting-room assistant than Sven.
    â€œYou can begin increasing the pyruvic acid,” Potter said.
    Svengaard nodded, depressed the feeder key.
    The computer nurse started her reels turning.
    They watched the gauges as the Krebs cycle began rising—87. 0 … 87.3 … 87.8 … 88.5 … 89.4 … 90.5 … 91.9 …
    Now, Potter told himself, the irreversible movement of growth has started. Only death can stop it. “Tell me when the Krebs cycle reaches one hundred and ten,” he said.
    He swung the scope and micromanipulators into place, leaned into the rests. Will I see what Sven saw? he wondered. He knew it wasn’t likely. The lightning from outside had never struck twice in the same place. It came. It did what no human hand could do. It went away.
    Where? Potter wondered.
    The inter-ribosomal gaps swam into focus. He scanned them, boosted amplification and went down into the DNA spirals. Yes—there was the situation Sven had described. The Durant embryo was one of those that could cross over
into the more-than-human land of Central … if the surgeon succeeded.
    The confirmation left Potter oddly shaken. He shifted his attention to the mitochondrial structures, saw the evidence of the arginine intrusion. It squared precisely with Sven’s description. Alpha-helices had begun firming up, revealing the telltale striations at the aneurin shifts. This one was going to resist the surgeon. This was going to be a tough one.
    Potter straightened.
    â€œWell?” Svengaard asked.
    â€œPretty much as you described it,” Potter said. “A straightforward job.” That was for the watching parents.
    He wondered then what Security was discovering about the Durants. Would this pair be loaded down with search and probe devices disguised as conventional artifacts? Possibly. But there were rumors of new techniques being introduced by the Parents Underground … and of Cyborgs moving out of the dark shadows which had hidden them for centuries—if there were Cyborgs at all. Potter was not convinced.
    Svengaard spoke to the computer nurse, “Start backing off the pyruvic.”
    â€œBacking off pyruvic,” she said.
    Potter swung his attention to the priority rack beside him, checked the presentation—in the first row the pyrimidines, nucleic acids and proteins, then aneurin, riboflavin, pyridoxin, pantothenic acid, folic acid, choline, inositol, sulfhydryl …
    He cleared his throat, lining up his plan for the attack on the morula’s defenses. “I will attempt to find a pilot cell by masking the cysteine at a single