The Eyes of Heisenberg by Frank Herbert Page A

primal seashore with life burgeoning in its ooze.
    Svengaard shuddered and reminded himself, I’m a submolecular engineer, a gene surgeon. There’s nothing strange here.
    But the thought failed to convince him.
    He pushed himself away from the door, headed down the line looking for the vat with the Durant embryo. In his mind lay the clear memory of what he had seen in that embryo—the intrusion that had flooded the cells with arginine. Intrusion. Where had it originated? Was Potter correct? Was it an unknown creator of stability? Stability … order … systems. Extended systems … infinite aspects of energy that left all matter insubstantial.
    These suddenly were frightening thoughts here in the whispering gloom.
    He stumbled against a low instrument stand, cursed softly. His stomach felt tight with the urgency of the viapumps and the real urgency in the fact that he had to finish here before the duty nurse made her hourly rounds.
    An insect shape, shadow against shadows, stood out against the wall in front of him. He froze and it took a moment for him to recognize the familiar outlines of the meson microscope.
    Svengaard turned to the luminous numbers on the vats—twelve, thirteen, fourteen … fifteen. Here it was. He checked the name on the tag, reading it in the glow of a gauge bulb: “Durant.”
    Something about this embryo had the Optimen upset and Security in an uproar. His regular computer nurse was gone—where, nobody could say. The replacement walked like a man.
    Svengaard wheeled out the microscope, moving gently in the darkness, positioned the instrument over the vat, made the connections by feel. The vat throbbed against his fingers. He rigged for scanning, bent to the viewer.

    Up out of the swarming cellular mass came a hydrophilic gene segment. He centered on it, the darkness forgotten as he pushed his awareness into the scope-lighted field of the viewer. Meson probes slid down … down into the mitochondrial structure. He found the alphahelices and began checking out polypeptide chains.
    A puzzled frown creased his brow. He switched to another cell. Another.
    The cells were low in arginine—he could see that. Thoughts brushed their way through his mind as he peered and hunted, How could the Durant embryo, of all embryos, be low on arginine? Any normal male would have more sperm protamine than this. How could the ADP-ATP exchange system carry no hint of Optiman? The cut wouldn’t make this much difference .
    Abruptly, Svengaard sent his probes down into the sex identifiers, scanned the overlapping helices.
    Female !
    He straightened, checked number and tag. “Fifteen. Durant.”
    Svengaard bent to the inspection chart, read it in the gauge glow. It showed the duty nurse’s notations for the eighty-first hour. He glanced at his watch: still twenty minutes before she made the eighty-second hour check.
    The Durant embryo could not possibly be female, he thought. Not from Potter’s operation .
    Someone had switched embryos, he realized. One embryo would activate the vat’s life-system responses much like another. Without microscopic examination, the change couldn’t be detected.
    Who?
    In Svengaard’s mind, the most likely candidates were the Optimen. They’d removed the Durant embryo to a safe place and left a substitute.
    Why?
    Bait , he thought. Bait .
    Who are they trying to catch?
    He straightened, mouth dry, heart pumping rapidly. A sound at the wall to his left brought him whirling around.
The vat room’s emergency computer panel had come to life, tapes beginning to turn, lights winking. A read-out board clattered.
    But there was no operator!
    Svengaard whirled to run from the room, collided with a blocky, unmoving shape. Arms and hands gripped him with unmerciful pressure and he saw beyond his captor a section of the vat room wall open with dim light there and movement.
    Then darkness exploded in his skull.

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    S eatac