Mr. Murder

soberly, "and all too possibly a more accurate view." Turning to Oslett, "Some psychic link, some strange mental connection, might have shattered Alfie's conditioning, erased his program or caused him to override it."
        "Our boy was in Kansas City, and Stillwater was in southern California, for God's sake."
        Waxhill shrugged. "A TV broadcast goes on forever, to the end of the universe. Beam a laser from Chicago toward the far end of the galaxy, and that light will get there someday, thousands of years from now, after Chicago is dust-and it'll keep on going. So maybe distance is meaningless when you're dealing with thought waves, too, or whatever it was that connected Alfie to this writer."
        Oslett had lost his appetite.
        Clocker seemed to have found it and added it to his own.
        Pointing to the basket of croissants, Waxhill said, "These are excellent-and in case you didn't realize, there are two kinds here, some plain and some with almond paste inside."
        "Almond croissants are my favorite," Oslett said, but didn't reach for one.
        Waxhill said, "The best croissants in the world-"
        "-are in Paris," Oslett interjected, "in a quaint cafe less than a block off "-the Champs Elysees," Waxhill finished, surprising Oslett.
        "The proprietor, Alfonse-"
        "-and his wife, Mirielle-"
        " are culinary geniuses and hosts without equal."
        "Charming people," Waxhill agreed.
        They smiled at each other.
        Clocker served himself more sausages, and Oslett wanted to knock that stupid hat off his head.
        "If there's any chance that our boy has extraordinary powers, however feeble, which we never intended to give him," Waxhill said, "then we must consider the possibility that some qualities we did intend to give him didn't turn out quite as we thought they did."
        "I'm afraid I don't follow," Oslett said.
        "Essentially, I'm talking about sex."
        Oslett was surprised. "He has no interest in it."
        "We're sure of that, are we?"
        "He's apparently male, of course, but he's impotent."
        Waxhill said nothing.
        "He was engineered to be impotent," Oslett stressed.
        "A man can be impotent yet have a keen interest in sex. Indeed, one might make a good argument for the case that his very inability to attain an erection frustrates him, and that his frustration leads him to be obsessed with sex, with what he cannot have."
        Oslett had been shaking his head the entire time Waxhill had been speaking. "No. Again, it's not that simple. He's not only impotent He's received hundreds of hours of intense psychological conditioning to eliminate sexual interest, some of it when he's been in deep hypnosis, some under the influence of drugs that make the sub conscious susceptible to any suggestion, some through virtual-reality subliminal feeds during sedative-induced sleep. To this boy, the primary difference between men and women is the way they dress."
        Unimpressed with Oslett's argument, spreading orange marmalade on a slice of toast, Waxhill said, "Brainwashing, even at its most sophisticated, can fail. Would you agree with that?"
        "Yes, but with an ordinary subject, you have problems because you've got to counter a lifetime of experience to install a new attitude or false memory. But Alfie was different. He was a blank slate, a beautiful blank slate, so there wasn't any resistance to whatever attitudes, memories, or feelings we wanted to stuff in his nice empty head.
        There was nothing in his brain to wash out first."
        "Maybe mind-control failed with Alfie precisely because we were so confident that he was an easy mark."

    "The mind is its own control," Clocker said.
        Waxhill gave him an odd look.
        "I don't think it failed," Oslett insisted. "Anyway, there's still the little matter of his engineered impotence to get around."
        Waxhill took time to chew and swallow a bite of toast, and then washed it down with coffee. "Maybe his body got around it for him."
        "Say again?"
        "His incredible body with its superhuman recuperative powers." i Oslett twitched as if the idea had pierced like a pin. "Wait a | minute, now.
        His wounds heal exceptionally fast, yes. Punctures, gashes, broken bones. Once damaged, his body can restore itself to its original engineered condition in miraculously short order. But