Shadow of the giant

to Volescu
breeding a common-cold virus that would carry genetic alterations."
    "That wouldn't affect adults," said Bean.
    "I shouldn't have said war materials," said
Suriyawong, "but I thought that would stop your little game of
strangulation faster."
    "What is it, then?" asked Bean.
    "It's a project to alter the human genome," said
Suriyawong.
    "We know that's what he worked with," said Petra.
    "But not with viruses as carriers," said Bean.
"What were you doing here, Volescu?"
    Volescu choked out some words. "Fulfilling the terms of
my grants."
    "Grants from whom?"
    "The grant granters," said Volescu.
    "Lock this place down," said Bean to Suriyawong.
"I'll call the Hegemon to request a Rwandan perimeter guard."
    "I think," said Petra, "that our brilliant
scientist friend had some bizarre notion of remaking the human race."
    "We need Anton to look at what this sick little
disciple of his was doing," said Bean.
    "Suri," said Petra. "Bean wasn't really going
to murder him."
    "Yes I was," said Bean.
    "I would have stopped him," said Petra.
    Suri barked out a little laugh. "Sometimes people need
killing. So far, Bean's record is one for one."
     
     
    Petra stopped going along on the interviews with Volescu.
They could hardly be called interrogations—direct questions led nowhere,
threats seemed to mean nothing. It was maddening and stressful and she hated
the way he looked at her. Looked at her belly, which was showing her pregnancy
more and more every day.
    But she still kept on top of what they were calling, for
lack of a better name, the Volescu project. The head of electronic security,
Ferreira, was working most intensely on trying to track down everything Volescu
had been doing with his computer and tracking his various identities through
the nets. But Petra made sure that the database searches and indexes that they
already had under way continued. These babies were out there somewhere,
implanted in surrogate mothers, and at some point they were going to give
birth. Volescu wouldn't risk their lives by forbidding the mothers access to
good medical care—in fact, that was bound to be a minimum. So they would be
born in hospitals, their births registered.
    How they would find these babies in the millions that would
be born in that timeframe, Petra couldn't begin to guess. But they'd collect
the data and index it on every conceivably useful variable so it was there to
work with when they finally figured out some identifying marker.
    Meanwhile, Bean conducted the interviews with Volescu. They
were yielding some information that proved accurate, but it was hard for Bean
to decide whether Volescu was unconsciously letting useful information slip, or
deliberately toying with them by bleeding out little bits of information that
he knew would not be terribly useful in the end.
    When he wasn't with Volescu, Bean was with Anton, who had
come away from retirement and accepted a heavy level of drugs to control his
aversive reaction to working in his field of science. "I tell myself every
day," he said to Bean, "that I'm not doing science, I'm merely
grading a student's assignments. It helps. But I still throw up. This is not
good for me."
    "Don't push any harder than you can."
    "My wife helps me," said Anton. "She's very
patient with this old man. And you know what? She's pregnant. In the natural
way!"
    "Congratulations," Bean said, knowing how hard
this was for Anton, whose sexual desires did not tend in the same direction as
his reproductive plans.
    "My body knows how, even at this old age." He
laughed. "Doing what comes unnaturally."
    But his personal happiness aside, the picture Anton began to
paint looked worse and worse. "His plan was simple enough," said
Anton. "He planned to destroy the human race."
    "Why? That makes no sense. Vengeance?"
    "No, no. Destroy and replace. The virus he chose would
go straight to the reproductive cells in the body. Every sperm, every ovum.
They infest, but they don't kill. They just snip and replace. All kinds of
changes. Strength and speed of an East African. A few changes I don't
understand because nobody's really mapped that part of the genome— not for
function. And some I don't even know where they fit on the human genome. I'd
have to try them out and I can't do that. That would be real science. Someone
else. Later."
    "You're sidestepping the big change," said Bean.
    "My little key," said Anton. "His virus turns
the key."
    "So he has no cure. No way to switch the key