The Games Read Online Free PDF Page A

ideas came up lacking. You couldn’t have won with the codes you had in the scrollers.”
    “How could you know—”
    “You couldn’t have won,” Baskov interrupted. “Our decision wasn’t made lightly.”
    Silas’s face drained of expression as he considered the man sitting before him. He wanted to grab him by the lapels, pull him off his feet, and shake him. He wanted to yell in his face, What have you done?
    But he thought again of broken heads, and by slow degrees managed to put his anger in a place he could shut down. In controlled, clipped words, he said, “I understand. Perhaps I don’t have all the information, but I’m still program head. We still have problems that need to be dealt with.”
    “I’ve heard. We’ve been aware of the problems. Your reports during the last several months didn’t fall on deaf ears.”
    “Then why hasn’t the commission acted?”
    “We just decided to wait and see what happened.”
    “Would you like to see … what’s happened?”
    “I was waiting for you to ask.”
    T HEY SHUFFLED slowly down the narrow corridor, with Silas consciously shortening his strides to accommodate Baskov’s hobbling gait. He wondered at the anticipation the older man must be feeling. Hell, he was feeling it, too, and he’d already seen the organism, inspected it, held it. The newborn was the most beautifully perfect thing Silas had ever seen.
    Baskov broke the silence between them as they turned a corner. “The commission is very troubled by the description we received. It isn’t really humanoid, is it?”
    “Maybe. Not really.”
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “When you see it, you’ll understand.”
    “And what about the hands?”
    “What about them?”
    “Does it really have … well, hands? I mean … it doesn’t have paws or hooves or something like the others?”
    Silas suppressed the urge to laugh. Let the cocky old son of a bitch sweat a little . “I’d have to call them hands. They aren’t like ours, but they’re hands.” His bitter humor abated somewhat. “The similarities are mostly superficial, though.”
    “Are you going to have trouble proving no human DNA was used in the design?”
    Silas looked down at the old man. For a moment, he felt his temper rise again. He took a deep breath. With the competition less than a year away, it was a little late to be asking that question now. “Your guess is as good as mine at this point,” he said. “Chandler’s masterpiece didn’t provide us with any sort of explanation for the data in the scrollers, just raw code. I assumed that since you chose his design overmine, you would have some sort of idea what you were getting. You need to ask him. My reports are accurate, and if you read them, you—”
    “We read them; we just weren’t sure if we could believe them.”
    Silas mulled over several responses to the older man’s statement, but since most of them involved the end of his career and quite possibly his incarceration for battery, he decided to say nothing at all. For the first time, he considered the possibility that the head of the Olympic Commission might be utterly irrational in some aspects of his thinking. Power did that to men sometimes.
    They stepped through a set of steel doors and followed the narrow hall around the corner. “I want to remind you that the sponsor dinner is still on for tomorrow night. I need you to be there,” Baskov said.
    “I’ll send Dr. Nelson.”
    “You’ll be there in person. We need to quell the rumors that have already begun to fly. Image is money in this business. The delegation will leave from the complex at six o’clock.”
    Rumors?
    They came to a second set of steel doors. A large yellow sign read:
    ATTENTION
BADGED PERSONNEL ONLY
BEYOND THIS POINT
    Silas carded them through, and Baskov stopped short, blinking against the white brightness of the nursery. A stout, flame-haired man sat against a console near the far wall. There were no windows, but a