Midnight

Structural genes are transformed into operator genes by a force of will… ."
    Shaddack's voice trailed off as his excitement rose to match his fear and left him breathless. He'd done far more than he'd hoped to do with the Moonhawk Project. The stunning accomplishment was the source of both his sudden joy and escalating fear: joy, because he had given men the ability to control their physical form and, eventually, perhaps all matter, simply by the exercise of will; fear, because he was not sure that the New People could learn to control and properly use their power … or that he could continue to control them.
    "The gift I've given to you—computer-assisted physiology and release from emotion—unleashes the mind's power over matter. It allows consciousness to dictate form."
    Watkins shook his head, clearly appalled by what Shaddack was suggesting. "Maybe Peyser willed himself to become what he did. Maybe Sholnick willed it too. But I'll be damned if I did. When I was overcome by the desire to change, I fought it like an ex-addict sweating out a craving for heroin. I didn't want it. it came over me … the way the force of the full moon comes over a werewolf."
    "No," Shaddack said. "Subconsciously, you did want to change, Loman, and you no doubt partially wanted it even on a conscious level. You must have wanted it to some extent because you spoke so forcefully about how attractive regression was. You resisted using your power of mind over body only because you found metamorphosis marginally more frightening than appealing. If you lose some of your fear of it….. or if an altered state becomes just a little more appealing….. well, then your psychological balance will shift, and you'll remake yourself. But it won't be some outside force at work. It'll be your own mind."
    "Then why couldn't Peyser come back?"
    "As I said, and as you suggested, he didn't want to."
    "He was trapped."
    "Only by his own desire."
    Watkins looked down at the grotesque corpse of the regressive. "What have you done to us, Shaddack?"
    "Haven't you grasped what I've said?"
    "What have you done to us?"
    "This is a great gift!"
    "To have no emotions but fear?"
    "That's what frees your mind and gives you the power to control your very form," Shaddack said excitedly. "What I don't understand is why the regressives have all chosen a subhuman condition. Surely you have the power within you to undergo evolution rather than devolution, to lift yourself up from mere humanity to something higher, cleaner, purer. Perhaps you even have the power to become a being of pure consciousness, intellect without any physical form. Why have all these New People chosen to regress instead?"
    Watkins raised his head, and his eyes had a half-dead look, as if they had absorbed death from the very sight of the corpse. "What good is it to have the power of a god if you can't also experience the simple pleasures of a man?"
    "But you can do and experience anything you want," Shaddack said exasperatedly.
    "Not love."
    "What?"
    "Not love or hate or joy or any emotion but fear."
    "But you don't need them. Not having them has freed you."
    "You're not thick headed," Watkins said, "so I guess you don't understand because you're psychologically … twisted, warped."
    "You must not speak to me like—"
    "I'm trying to tell you why they all choose a subhuman form over a superhuman form. It's because, for a thinking creature of high intellect, there can be no pleasure separate from emotion. If you deny men emotions, you deny them pleasure, so they seek an altered state in which complex emotions and pleasure aren't linked—the life of an unthinking beast."
    "Nonsense. You are—"
    Watkins interrupted him again, sharply. "Listen to me, for God's sake! If I remember, even Moreau listened to his creatures."
    His face was flushed now instead of pale. His eyes no longer looked half dead; a certain wildness had returned to them. He was only a step or two from Shaddack and seemed to loom over him, though he was the shorter of the two. He looked scared, badly scared—and dangerous.
    He said, "Consider sex—a basic human pleasure. For sex to be fully satisfying, it has to be accompanied by love or at least some affection. To a psychologically damaged man, sex can still be good if it's linked to hate or pride of domination; even negative emotions can make the act pleasurable for a twisted man. But done with no emotion at all , —it's pointless, stupid, just the breeding impulse of an