Read The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) for Free Online Page B

your sweatshirt, darling? Thanx, M.’), and took long walks, at times avoiding all meaningful places, at times haunting them. He began to feel he might become a dedicated scientist, a seeker after truth.
    Most of the hundred foundations, academies and labs to which he applied for a research grant replied that they had no need for holders of the rather special degree, Bachelor of Biophysics Arts. The Wompler Research Laboratory, however, sent a letter expressing interest and an IBM card to fill out and return. In the tiny box on the card where he was to write the name of his school, there was only room for the abbreviation ‘MIT’. He was hired by return mail.
    The MIT Worker’s Torch
kept up its morality campaign (now directed against its editor and his fiancée) to the last day. Dr. Trivian gave a stirring Commencement speech to his four new graduates, though most of it was drowned out by the hiss of steam from below, where the shirts lived.
    * * *
    ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Cal said. It seemed to him that he was still trying to pick up the runaway cell, but bright white clouds kept getting in his way. Steam?
    All at once he realized the clouds were real; he was looking at the sky. He rolled over and sat up, hands buried in cool grass.
    A file drawer marked ‘Secret’ scooted past, pursued by a mob of people in white coats. ‘Stop it ! Catch it !’
    How odd, he thought with a tolerant smile. Chasing file drawers. He began to walk around the building. Other boxes, made of garbage cans, cabinets, bent signs, swarmed over the green, pursuing and pursued by human figures. Near the fence a group of marines had set up a light machine gun. Now they were defending it desperately against the slow, blunt, methodical attacks of a kiln and a small safe, in tandem. Finally a fork-lift truck rushed in, seized the gun and apparently digested it.
    Chuckling, Cal strode around another corner of the building. The helicopter lay on its side as the swarming boxes picked it clean. It was beginning to look like the skeleton of a beached whale.
    The general was no longer laughing; he was screaming at the twin brothers, ‘Somebody is gonna have to pay for this ! That is government property your toy is tearing up !’
    ‘Government property hell !’ Grandison roared. ‘That gizmo is tearing up
my
property ! If you can’t shut it off—’
    ‘Mr. Wompler, General Grawk,’ said Karl solemnly, ‘there seems to be no safe way to shut it off—without jeopardizing the whole experiment, that is. We simply cannot permit it.’
    Grandison caught sight of Cal. ‘So you finally came to, eh?’ he said. ‘Just in time, too. I guess one of them Endymions musta give you a little electric
shot
, eh boy? Well, I hope you can shut that thing off—Kurt and Karl here are chicken.’
    ‘There should be nothing easier than shutting it off,’ Cal said, ‘Every cell is equipped with a sympathetic, tuned switch that—’
    ‘Not any more,’ said Karl with a condescending smile. ‘That was last week. The more sophisticated mutations of the system have shed that apparatus long ago.’
    ‘Well then, I’ll shut off the ones that haven’t, and we’ll smash the rest.’
    ‘No, you don’t !’ Kurt said, bridling. ‘If you go in that lab and tamper, you’re fired !’
    Grandison wavered, less sure of himself now. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t—’
    ‘I’m not worried about protecting property,’ said Cal quietly. ‘I’m worried about protecting a few lives. None of you seem to realize how dangerous this thing is.’
    ‘What are a few lives, in comparison to—’ Karl began, but Cal did not stay around to listen. He dashed around the corner to the main entrance and back to the lab.
    It was scarcely recognizable. Larger and larger cells had formed, some viable, some not, which forced themselves into the corners of the room and ate away at the very structure of the building. Festoons of insulation hung above, where once there had been a fluorescent