“I’m Felix Buckman,” the police general said. He indicated the open door and hallway behind him. “Come into the office.” Turning, he ushered Jason ahead of him, into a vast pastel blue-and-gray suite; Jason blinked: he had never seen this aspect of a police agency before. He had never imagined that quality like this existed.

With incredulity, Jason a moment later found himself seated in a leather-covered chair, leaning back into the softness of styroflex. Buckman, however, did not sit down behind his top-heavy, almost clumsily bulky oak desk; instead he busied himself at a closet, putting away his topcoat.

“I intended to meet you on the roof,” he explained. “But the Santana wind blows like hell up there this time of night. It affects my sinus passages.” He turned, then, to face Jason. “I see something about you that didn’t show up in your 4-D photo. It never does. It’s always a complete surprise, at least to me. You’re a six, aren’t you?”

Waking to full alertness, Jason half rose, said, “You’re also a six, General?”

Smiling, showing his gold-capped teeth—an expensive anachronism—Felix Buckman held up seven fingers.

15

In his career as a police official, Felix Buckman had used this shuck each time he had come up against a six. He relied on it especially when, as with this, the encounter was sudden. There had been four of them. All, eventually, had believed him. This he found amusing. The sixes, eugenic experiments themselves, and secret ones, seemed unusually gullible when confronted with the assertion that there existed an additional project as classified as their own.

Without this shuck he would be, to a six, merely an “ordinary.” He could not properly handle a six under such a disadvantage. Hence the ploy. Through it his relationship to a six inverted itself. And, under such recreated conditions, he could deal successfully with an otherwise unmanageable human being.

The actual psychological superiority over him which a six possessed was abolished by an unreal fact. He liked this very much.

Once, in an off moment, he had said to Alys, “I can outthink a six for roughly ten to fifteen minutes. But if it goes on any longer—” He had made a gesture, crumpling up a black-market cigarette package. With two cigarettes in it. “After that their overamped field wins out. What I need is a pry bar by which I can jack open their haughty damn minds.” And, at last, he had found it.

“Why a ‘seven’?” Alys had said. “As long as you’re shucking them why not say eight or thirty-eight?”

“The sin of vainglory. Reaching too far.” He had not wanted to make that legendary mistake. “I will tell them,” he had told her grimly, “what I think they’ll believe.” And, in the end, he had proved out right.

“They won’t believe you,” Alys had said.

“Oh, hell, will they!” he had retorted. “It’s their secret fear, their bête noire. They’re the sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems and they know that if it could be done to them it could be done to others in a more advanced degree.”

Alys, uninterested, had said faintly, “You should be an announcer on TV selling soap.” And that constituted the totality of her reaction. If Alys did not give a damn about something, that something, for her, ceased to exist. Probably she should not have gotten away with it for as long as she had … but sometime, he had often thought, the retribution will come: reality denied comes back to haunt. To overtake the person without warning and make him insane.

And Alys, he had a number of times thought, was in some odd sense, in some unusual clinical way, pathological.

He sensed it but could not pin it down. However, many of his hunches were like that. It did not bother him, as much as he loved her. He knew he was right.

Now, facing Jason Taverner, a six, he developed his shuck ploy.

“There were very few of us,” Buckman said, now seating himself at his oversize oak desk. “Only four in all. One is already dead, so that leaves three. I don’t have the slightest idea where they are; we retain even less contact among ourselves than do you sixes. Which is little enough.”

“Who was your muter?” Jason asked.

“Dill-Temko. Same as yours. He controlled groups five through seven and then he retired. As you certainly know, he’s dead now.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “It shocked us all.”

“Us, too,” Buckman said, in his most somber voice. “Dill-Temko was our parent. Our only parent. Did you know that at the time of his death he had begun to prepare schema on an eighth group?”

“What would they have been like?”

“Only Dill-Temko knew,” Buckman said, and felt his superiority over the six facing him grow. And yet—how fragile his psychological edge. One wrong statement, one statement too much, and it would vanish. Once lost, he would never regain it.

It was the risk he took. But he enjoyed it; he had always liked betting against the odds, gambling in the dark. He had in him, at times like this, a great sense of his own ability. And he did not consider it imagined … despite what a six that knew him to be an ordinary would say. That did not bother him one bit.

Touching a button, he said, “Peggy, bring us a pot of coffee, cream and the rest. Thanks.” He then leaned back with studied leisure. And surveyed Jason Taverner.

Anyone who had met a six would recognize Taverner. The strong torso, the massive confirmation of his arms and back. His powerful, ramlike head. But most ordinaries had never knowingly come up against a six. They did not have his experience. Nor his carefully synthesized knowledge of them.

To Alys he had once said, “They will never take over and run my world.”

“You don’t have a world. You have an office.”

At that point he terminated the discussion.

“Mr. Taverner,” he said bluntly, “how have you managed to get documents, cards, microfilm, even complete files out of data banks all over the planet? I’ve tried to imagine how it could be done, but I come up with a blank.” He fixed his attention on the handsome—but aging—face of the six and waited.

16

What can I tell him? Jason Taverner asked himself as he sat mutely facing the police general. The total reality as I know it? That is hard to do, he realized, because I really do not comprehend it myself.

But perhaps a seven could—well, God knew what it could do. I’ll opt, he decided, on a complete explanation.

But when he started to answer, something blocked his speech. I don’t want to tell him anything, he realized. There is no theoretical limit to what he can do to me; he has his generalship, his authority, and if he’s a seven … for him, the sky may be the limit. At least for my self-preservation if for nothing else I ought to operate on that assumption.

“Your being a six,” Buckman said, after an interval of silence, “makes me see this in a different light. It’s other sixes that you’re working with, is it?” He kept his eyes rigidly fixed on Jason’s face; Jason found it uncomfortable and disconcerting. “I think what we have here,” Buckman said, “is the first concrete evidence that sixes are—”

“No,” Jason said.

“‘No’?” Buckman continued to stare fixedly at him.

“You’re not involved with other sixes in this?”

Jason said, “I know one other six. Heather Hart. And she considers me a twerp fan.” He ground out the words bitterly.

That interested Buckman; he had not been aware that the well-known singer Heather Hart was a six. But, thinking about it, it seemed reasonable. He had never, however, come up against a female six in his career; his contacts with them were just not that frequent.

“If Miss Hart is a six,” Buckman said aloud, “maybe we should ask her to come in too and consult with us.” A police euphemism that rolled easily off his tongue.