Dr. Henry Lightner’s replicant was present in the basement room to observe the destruction and processing of the hospital’s night-shift personnel, who had been imprisoned there since four o’clock this morning.
Seventeen of them sat on the floor. The silvery caps of brain taps shone brightly on their temples.
The eighteenth, the deceased nurse with eyes full of now-congealed blood, lay on her back on the floor. Dead or alive, she had the same value to the Community.
The Builder was a young man with curly blond hair and hazel eyes. For some reason known only to the Creator, all the Builders were young men and women, and all were uncommonly beautiful by human standards, though beauty mattered not at all to members of the Community.
Having been replaced by replicants, the eighteen members of the former night shift would now be terminated—though they would not merely be killed. Their bodies were evidence of the secret revolution now under way, and they must never be found.
Mass graves were difficult to excavate and conceal. They would sooner or later be discovered.
Cremation pyres produced smoke with a telltale scent that might alarm even placid sheep oblivious of the threat to their existence.
The Builders were the answer to the problem of human debris, exquisitely efficient.
The curly-headed blond young man began to murder and create.
Initially, the cries of the condemned annoyed Henry Lightner, but in less than a minute, he began to enjoy them. Like all others in the Community, he had no interest in music or in any kind of art, for those things promoted leisure, and leisure diminished efficiency. But he felt that these stifled screams and throttled sobs might be a kind of music.
Such swift, clean executions.
When all were dead, the Builder’s work was less than half done. He was no longer anything as ordinary as a handsome young man, and the construction in which he engaged proved to be a spectacle that riveted Henry Lightner.
When eventually the job here was completed, they would move on to the imprisoned day-shift personnel in the next room. And sometime after visiting hours, the patients would be brought down one by one, throughout the evening and into the night.
Such relentless, swift rendering of flesh and bone.
Such a fever of creation.