"We've got a few tricks. There's a lot of vets in this bunch."
"It would be suicide."
Fetzer hunched closer to the couch.
"Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't. But a man can't always stop to think of things like that. You do what you got to do."
The words triggered a release, and Lucifer started to talk.
With an eloquence that would have astounded his graduate students at Western University, Lucifer drew a word picture of the psi project and the theory behind it. As he talked, Nina came in quietly and sat on the couch beside him, drawing up her knees inside her short gown.
Lucifer spoke of their own experiments with the babies, and of the sweep of five million years of evolution foreshortened through understanding and application of Hardy's Law. Only when he came to the radiation and chemical phases of the psi project, to the pitiable Goolies, did his flow of words falter. He tried to pick up quickly with analysis of what training would do for their own children. But the nagging awareness of this second dishonesty, the knowledge that Nina knew what he had done and was watching him in the darkness, broke the flow of thought and his explanation trailed off into awkward silence.
Albert Fetzer didn't say anything. He squatted on his heels, a humped blur in the darkness of the room. Lucifer could feel the probe of his eyes and darting mind.
"So that's it," Fetzer said at last. "We guessed some of it, but we couldn't fill in the missing pieces. You learned a lot, Doc."
"There's so much I haven't yet learned."