THE FURNITURE OF LIFE’S AMBITION

“Jesus, Jude,” complained William Morris to his wife one night, as they lay cuddling in bed, “I’ve got to get out. I’ve just got to.”

Judy Morris strangled the sigh that rose unbidden to her lips, as it did every time William had one of his moods. She loved him dearly, but he could be very tiresome. She opened her cornflower-blue eyes and passed a tired hand through her silken blonde hair.

“You don’t mean that, dear,” she said. “You’ve just had a bad day, that’s all.”

“Bad day!” said William. “Bad day! Jude, we’re on the threshold of a whole new scientific revolution here. Our entire technological repertoire stands to be transformed in the space of a single lifetime—my lifetime. But all Plasmotech care about is meeting consumer demand! You know what they want me to work on now? Fish, that’s what! I’ve been summoned to see Curtis and Wilberforce tomorrow, and I know exactly what they’re going to say. They’re going to talk about cod fillets and caviar, and make stupid jokes about Moby Dick. It’ll be kids’ stuff, Jude, a five-year-old could do it. It’s just one bloody supermarket novelty after another. Is this the future, Jude? I mean, Jude, Jesus!”

Judy knew that she must at all costs avoid making jokes about loaves and fishes. William, as his finely-chiseled, delicately pre-Raphaelite features implied, was rather oversensitive, and was prone to overreact to any slight, real or imagined. As a child he had been spoiled dreadfully because of his marvelous intelligence and stunning good looks, and in adult life he remained petulant, horribly jealous and prone to outrageous tantrums. Those who loved him had to learn to handle him very delicately.

Most people were willing to learn. After all, one has to make allowances for genius, and William was certainly a genius—possibly the best geneswitcher in the entire world. His employers at Plasmotech were aware of this, and were careful to pay him a very handsome salary. Judy knew it too, and she adored him as much for his fine and reckless mind as for his remarkably beautiful features and lissom body. William was absolutely certain of it, and saw himself as a combination of Albert Einstein and Thomas Alva Edison, without peer as theoretical scientist or practical man.

Plasmotech dealt in factory-produced food: meat and dairy products manufactured biotechnologically, without the aid of animals. Geneticists of an earlier generation than William’s had figured out how the genes in an animal egg-cell provided the blueprint for the structure of a mature animal, and how genes were selectively switched off in different kinds of specialized cells to produce organs and tissues. These discoveries had opened up a scientific Klondike for the geneswitchers whose business it was to design useful organic structures and then to control the switching of genes in developing embryos so as to produce those structures.

It was no longer necessary, in William’s day, to allow a cow’s fertilized egg-cell to develop into another cow, which would have to graze for years in open fields in order to produce milk or beef. Technical control of the geneswitching process meant that a cow’s egg could be instructed to develop into a gargantuan milk-making organ or a single huge muscle. Such entities could easily be kept alive in nutrient baths, fed on an organic cocktail of carbohydrates, proteins and trace compounds that was manufactured in bulk by genetically-engineered fungi.

The earliest food-producing entities had been limited in size. Tissue-cultures, like organisms, age and die; cells cannot keep dividing for ever, and as they become more specialized they age more rapidly. At one time, therefore, a cow’s ovum could only be induced to develop into a lump of solid muscle approximately the same size as an actual cow. William Morris’s first breakthrough had been to find a way to overcome this limitation. He had discovered how to “neotenize” the developing tissue-culture, so that the onset of specialization could be delayed. The early phase of the development of the quasi-embryo could then be extended to produce a huge spherical “superblastula” before the switching of genes need actually begin. This allowed the growth of very large tissue-cultures. The meat-producing ones were quickly nicknamed skyscraper steaks, while the ones that produced milk attracted less dignified titles.

William’s second discovery had been just as dramatic. Plasmotech had had profitable meat-producers and milk-producers even before William joined the company, but they had failed to develop a really efficient substitute for actual chickens as producers of eggs. Co-ordination of the different kinds of specialized cells involved in egg-making became very problematic if the egg-making apparatus was not situated within a greater organism equipped with built-in control mechanisms: a nervous system and a hormonal system. William, working with general-purpose silicon chips and standard organo-metallic synapses developed for medical purposes, had managed to fit simple multi-tissue entities with appropriately simple inorganic “brains”, adding just sufficient control to allow the entities to function. He was thus enabled to design an egg-producer the size of a family car, fuelled by a mammoth drip-feed, which could spew out 400 standard eggs an hour. William called it his “Heavyside Layer”.

With achievements like this to his credit, many a lesser man would have been contented, but William’s imagination was of the kind that loved to reach out into vast vistas of half-glimpsed possibility; he had bold dreams and brave ambitions, and he felt that his job was becoming a kind of straitjacket preventing him from fulfilling his true destiny.

He was not a happy man, and Judy had often to listen to the outpourings of his anguish.

“Well, dear,” she said judiciously, in response to William’s complaints, “Plasmotech are a food company. It’s an important job, discovering new ways to make cheap food. There are still two billion people in the world who don’t have enough to eat. You used to find the job exciting.”

William groaned. “That’s because there used to be problems to be solved. Important problems, like superblastularization and silicon-organic integration. Do you have any idea how useful those techniques might be, once their true range of application is explored? Skyscraper steaks and the Heavyside Layer are just scratching the surface...but Curtis can’t see any farther than the next bloody delicacy! A thousand other geneswitchers will be picking up the threads of my discoveries and doing really interesting things, while I’m supposed to fart about with fish.

“The stupid thing is that Plasmotech will make billions in spite of their blindness, because they own the goddamn patents. My patents, Jude! I won’t make as much out of it as Wilberforce and Curtis, and I bet they won’t even give me a Nobel Prize, because I’m just a vulgar commercial engineer. Jesus, Jude, I’ve got to get out. Somehow, I’ve got to go solo, work for myself. I’ve got to.”

“Well dear,” said Judy, caressing him soothingly with her gentle hands, in her own peculiarly distinctive fashion, “I think that’s a wonderful idea, but you’ve said before that it would be very difficult. All that equipment you work with—the DNA-thingumajigs and the advanced electronic doodahs. It’s such a heavy investment just to get started.”

“I know that,” said William, who was beginning to wind down under the palliative pressure of Judy’s stroking, and was gradually becoming plaintive instead of angry, “but I’ve got a first class record, second to none. God knows, I’ve done enough to show my worth. If I lived in America, big-dollar men would be queuing up to finance me—I’ve got American biotech firms headhunting me all the time, although Plasmotech try their level best to keep them away from me. I’d need six or seven million to start up—ten at the most. That’s petty cash in the City. Somebody should be willing to finance me.”

Judy didn’t like the idea of moving to America. She was part of a big, close family, and had an enjoyable job of her own at the BBC. She was also genuinely devoted to England’s countryside and the nation’s sense of history. Her heart sank at the prospect of giving it all up.

“We did a financial documentary last week,” she said, pensively. “There was a rather charming man on it—he had very striking red hair—by the name of Marshall. He’s part of a firm of investment managers and financial consultants. He talked about multimillion dollar deals as if he fixed them up every morning before breakfast. I’ve got his card at the office. Shall I bring it home?”

The stroking was by now having such an effect that William was quite relaxed. He seemed ready to forget the whole matter for the time being, in order to turn his attention to a more pleasant occupation.

Judy permitted herself a discreet sigh of relief, and abandoned herself to passion.

She did remember, though, to keep her promise to fetch home the card, thus helping destiny to point William in the direction of his portentous first meeting with Peter Peregrine Marshall of Marshall & Faulkner.

* * * * * * *

“The trouble is,” said P. P. Marshall, leaning back in his fancy swiveling chair and flicking cigar ash on to the shag-pile carpet, “that you haven’t really thought this through.”

William was not in the least disturbed by the other man’s casual savoir-faire. He stared into Marshall’s brilliant blue eyes, noticing how like his wife’s they were. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’m the only person in the world—or at least the only person in Britain—who has thought it through. I’ve just explained to you that these techniques are the basis for a whole new industrial revolution. Do you know how many scientific breakthroughs have been made here, then blocked and mishandled by the obtuseness of the financiers, so that the Americans and Japanese stole all the thunder?”

“That’s an old story, Dr. Morris,” Marshall replied, “and you’d be surprised how many people try to tell it to me. Don’t mistake my meaning. Marshall & Faulkner do have access to the kind of money you need, and would be happy to put it into the kind of industrial enterprise that you’re talking about. When I say that you haven’t thought it through, I don’t mean that you lack vision—far from it; you can see the far horizons very clearly indeed. What you can’t quite see, it seems to me, is the road that will take us there.

“You’ve said yourself that the difficulty with this kind of research and development is the high cost of the equipment you require. DNA manipulation is so difficult and so delicate that the technology Plasmotech have laid on for you is phenomenally expensive to purchase and run. You might be able to work scientific miracles, Dr. Morris, but you need a very costly magic wand. Plasmotech might seem narrow and unimaginative in the range of applications to which they put your discoveries, but in order to generate the income they need to sustain your research, they have to have products they can sell on a very large scale.

“You’ve talked to me about some amazing possibilities—kinds of organic machines that you might be able to build one day. You’ve talked about new kinds of houses, new methods of mining, new transport systems. I don’t doubt that, in the fullness of time, you might be able to make those dreams come true, but you can’t move to those levels of complexity in the short term. In order to keep your project going for 30 or 40 years you have to make it show a return in two or three years, four at the most. I can understand why you want to work for yourself, and why you’re contemptuous of the idea of using your talent to make cheaper fish fingers, but you can’t really afford that kind of contempt. If you’re to start a new company, you need a product, and it has to be a product that you can start to manufacture quickly and sell to a mass market. That won’t be easy, especially as Plasmotech hold the patents on your research work; they won’t let you set up in competition to them without a very hard fight, which means that the food market is effectively closed to us.

“So what can you make, Dr. Morris. . .not in twenty years’ time, but tomorrow?”

William smiled. He had not been taken by surprise by the line of argument. He was, after all, a genius, and he understood something of the wicked ways of the capitalist world.

“Furniture,” he said.

“Furniture?” Marshall echoed.

“Chairs, sofas. . .that sort of thing.”

Marshall raised a quizzical copper-colored eyebrow, assuming an annoyingly contemptuous expression that caused William to writhe inwardly with resentment.

William did not approve of P. P. Marshall. He knew that the man was deemed by some to be a genius in his own field—Marshall was known in the City as the “copper-crowned certainty”—but William could not bring himself to accept that the field of finance was a proper arena for the deployment of true genius. He detested casual smoothness and polish, and he despised people who made fortunes by playing games with other people’s money. He knew full well, though, that he needed someone of Marshall’s kind, and that he could only win his scientific independence by tying himself to such a man.

He knew that he simply had to grit his teeth and get on with what he had come here to do.

“We don’t just get beef from cattle,” William explained, patiently. “I’ve been looking at the price of leather. The Americans have begun producing it in sheets for the clothing and furnishing industries, the way they produce furs. They’ve helped to sustain the fashionability of leather upholstery. But their leather-upholstered furniture is just ordinary furniture with a biotechnologically-produced covering. It’s not so cheap, despite the cheapness of the leather, and it’s crude. I can design a superblastula that will mature into a single armchair or couch, with its own leather skin. An elementary silicon chip connected to a primitive nervous and circulatory system—simpler than the ones in my chicken substitute—would allow the chair to alter its shape to accommodate a particular sitter, to recline as desired, and vary its softness and its temperature. The ultimate in home comfort: adaptable furniture with inbuilt central heating.”

William could see that P. P. Marshall was impressed. He was pleased with himself for keeping this trump card up his sleeve, and felt that he had chosen the right psychological moment to play it.

“This would use existing technology?” Marshall queried.

“Elementary,” William assured him. “But the application is sufficiently novel for us to be able to establish a new set of patents. Plasmotech couldn’t touch us. Only I know my methods well enough to do it. We’d have six or eight years’ clear start on any possible opposition.”

“These things would need nutrition.”

“Minimal. Once-a-month injection.”

“I don’t want to be a wet blanket,” said Marshall, “but I have to play the part of devil’s advocate. Is the world really ready for living furniture? Mightn’t it make people uneasy? A whale-sized piece of meat in a factory is one thing—all that the consumer sees is the same old package on the supermarket shelf, and she doesn’t have to think about superblastulas any more than her mother had to think about abattoirs. But to have something like this in your living-room, to sit on...that might be scary.”

“If it’s properly marketed,” said William, firmly, ‘it won’t be. If we have an advertising agency with imagination, we can put it across. My furniture would have a lot of selling points. The ultimate in comfort, utterly safe. Do you know how many people still have furniture stuffed with foam that gives off toxic gases in a house-fire, because they begrudge the expense of replacing it?”

Marshall looked at him ruminatively. “How expensive would this stuff be?”

William shrugged. “To develop. . .well, you’ve already looked closely at the cost of equipment, sites, manufacturing capacity. To produce, once the groundwork is done. . .I can do for the price of chairs what the Heavyside Layer did for the price of eggs.”

The russet eyebrows ascended again toward the remarkable fringe. “That cheap?” said P. P. Marshall. He had the air of one who had scented a proposition as copper-bottomed as he was copper-crowned, and William knew that he was hooked.

Marshall fingered the arm-rest of his own high-tech executive chair, speculatively. “Everyone sits on chairs, don’t they?” he mused.

“First the chair,” said William. “In time, the entire environment. Do I get my 20 million?”

P. P. Marshall stubbed out the butt of his cigar.

“I think I can arrange that, Dr Morris,” he replied. “In fact, I’m certain that you and I can do business.” He stood up and offered his hand.

William rose, too, and reached out to clasp it.

Thus began one of the most remarkable partnerships ever forged between scientific and financial genius.

Even as the two men looked one another so frankly in the eye, though, it was plain from their manner that the relationship would never develop into a genuine friendship. In some ways, they were too different, and in others, too similar.

William despised the financier for his cupidity, but he could tell that Marshall, in his turn, despised him for his assumed unworldliness. That was a presumption he found deeply offensive. P. P. Marshall was one of the few men in the world who was almost as handsome as he was, and one of the few who was every bit as competitive and ambitious; these factors served to compound the insult.

On one level, William knew that he would hate working with Marshall, but on another level, he was rather looking forward to finding out which of them would come out on top in what was bound to turn into a personal struggle to be top dog.

* * * * * * *

The firm of Morris, Marshall & Faulkner (Furniture Manufacturers) started small, but soon grew very considerably. P. P. Marshall’s anxiety as to whether the public was ready for superblastular entities in the home proved to be fortunately unfounded. The world, with a little help from an advertising agency with imagination, proved quite willing to welcome the new biotechnology into the inner sanctum of the home.

The new Morris chair passed rapidly through the classic stages of product evolution. At first it was a novelty. Soon it became a status symbol—not of wealth-contrived status, because it was so cheap, but of cultural with-it-ness, of biotech chic, of futurist foresight. In remarkably quick time it became a standard fitment. It so caught the popular imagination that it seemed to be a perfect embodiment of the spirit of the age.

With the arrival of the Morris chair, biotechnology crossed the threshold of social intimacy. The move from factory to salon was one small step for a chair, one giant leap for superblastulakind.

William Morris became his own boss, the steersman of his own researches. He reveled in his self-appointed status as an unfettered pioneer. His name became a household word. The public delighted in the fortuitous combination of circumstances that allowed him to echo, on so dramatically amplified a scale, the achievement of an earlier William Morris, who had also lent his name to an adaptable chair. That earlier Morris, it was recalled, had been a Utopian, who had brought News from Nowhere of a finer and happier world to come. The new William Morris, it was widely said, was a Utopian in a more impressive sense, who was actually helping to bring a finer and happier world into being.

William became rich. Then he became very rich. It was rumored that it could only be a matter of time before he received his knighthood. His phenomenally handsome face grew even more finely-chiseled with age, and was—in spite of his love of privacy—to be found on magazine covers everywhere. The snatched snapshots of the paparazzi showed him often in the company of his equally-handsome wife, who was perennially pestered for the “secrets” of her milky complexion and silky, honey-blonde hair.

Despite the closeness of their financial relationship, though, William was very rarely seen in the company of Peter Peregrine Marshall, the flame-haired golden boy of the City.

Marshall was just as famous as William; he was fêted as the entrepreneur extraordinary, and was universally regarded as England’s most eligible bachelor, not even excluding the princes of the realm. But William always considered Marshall’s fame to be undeserved, because it was essentially parasitic upon his own. He was resentful—although never in public—of the fact that Marshall often gathered applause which ought to have been his, simply because he had perforce to spend so much time in his beloved laboratory, while Marshall was always abroad in the world.

Although William would not play to the crowd, he still loved being a celebrity, after his own fashion. So did Judy.

William did not allow his celebrity to distract him from his work. Indeed, he threw himself into his researches with ever-greater zeal. He wanted to be the Isaac Newton of genetic science—the man whose efforts paved the way for the building of a new world. He was fearful that his intellectual prime would not last for ever, and was determined to exploit it to the full before the inevitable decline set in.

While the Morris chair went through the phases of its success, therefore, William worked longer and longer hours on more advanced techniques of genetic manipulation. Morris, Marshall & Faulkner hired dozens of brilliant young men to work out commercial applications for the basic techniques derived from his patents, while he did his best to operate on an entirely different level, paying as little heed as circumstances would allow to issues of immediate applicability. William was committed boldly to do what no man had done before in the usurpation of godlike power.

“A century ago,” William told a reporter, in one of his rare interviews, “people looked at the wonders of nature, and were awed by the power of the hypothetical being who might have wrought such marvels. Now, the intelligent individual can only wonder at the poverty and narrowness of that Creation, and must reserve his awe for contemplation of the things that human beings will make, given their mastery of DNA.” William never actually claimed, when he indulged in such reveries, that DNA had no other master as virtuous, as adept or as ingenious as himself, but no one who heard him speak doubted that it was true.

And yet, in spite of everything, William was not altogether happy. Resentment and dissatisfaction had not yet been banished from his everyday existence.

“Jesus, Jude,” complained William one night, as they lay side by side in bed, “I’ve got to get out. I’ve got to.”

“You don’t mean that, dear,” said Judy, stifling that same old sigh. “You’ve just had a bad day.”

“Bad day!” William retorted. “I’ll say I’ve had a bad day! You wouldn’t believe the way they keep trying to drown me in paperwork. They want me in on everything: planning committees, product development, public relations, foreign buyers, franchises. I mean, for Christ’s sake, what does a man have to do to get rid of that kind of crap? What’s the point of being the boss if the pressure from underneath is even greater than the pressure from on top used to be? I’m trying to run a bloody scientific revolution here, and I keep getting tangled in red tape. It’s all around me, tying my hands and strangling me. I lock the door...I don’t even have a phone in the inner sanctum...but they lie in wait for me outside the door like a flock of vultures. I mean, Jude, Jesus!”

Judy knew that she had to refrain from making jokes about disciples and the hazards of being worshipped, and must at all costs refrain from colorful word-play featuring crucifixion or other styles of martyrdom. William was as sensitive as ever, and reacted badly if he suspected that she was not taking his anguish sufficiently seriously. If anything, success had made him even more of a prima donna. He had recently taken to making camera-smashing assaults upon the paparazzi—a well-known badge of unstable temperament.

“Well, dear,” she said, ‘it is your company, and everyone in it does rely to such an extent on your methods and your ideas. They depend on you, and you can’t blame them for wanting to consult you when you get so angry if they do anything wrong, or anything you don’t like. You do have a responsibility to them, you know.”

“Responsibility!” groaned William. “If Prometheus had had as much to cope with as I have, the fire of the gods would still be in Heaven. Marshall, who ought to protect me from the flak, is the biggest battery firing at me. I’ve made that red-haired bastard a multi-millionaire, but he thinks he has a mortgage on my bloody brain, and he always takes first place in the pestering line. Jesus, Jude, sometimes I think I ought to get out of Morris, Marshall & Faulkner and set up a nice little research establishment in the middle of the Arizona desert. I’ve got the money, you know. I could do it.”

This was an idea of which Judy disapproved very strongly. She would still quote all the old reasons for wanting to stay in England—family ties, her work in broadcasting, her sense of belonging—but nowadays there was even more to it than that. She had done everything possible to conceal it from William, whom she still loved very dearly, but she had come to treasure exactly what he had come to loathe: the attentions of Peter Peregrine Marshall. Marshall and Judy had been enjoying a passionate love affair for some years, aided and abetted by the nobility of commitment that kept William out of the way in his laboratory for such long hours.

In consequence of the strain that keeping this secret placed on Judy, her patience was not quite as endless as it once had been. Her sex-life with William had lost much of its old magic, especially when it was compared with her more romantically energetic encounters with her lover. Nevertheless, whenever she began to stroke him in her own distinctive fashion with her uniquely gentle hands, William’s anxieties still ebbed gradually away.

She stroked him now, to soothe away his pain.

There was something a bit mechanical about the way her hands moved but she was certain that William was too wrapped up in himself to notice. The tokens of her love for him had, inevitably, become matters of routine, which no longer engaged her full consciousness, and no longer carried the meaning they once had had—but he would surely never know the difference, even if he was a genius.

“You mustn’t worry so much, dear,” she told him. “I’ll speak to Peter for you, if you like. I’ll explain to him how desperately important it is that you shouldn’t be bothered while you’re working. But you mustn’t fret, because that’s hurting you just as much as all the pressures on your time.”

* * * * * * *

“The trouble is,” said Marshall, leaning back against a workbench in William’s laboratory suite, “that you haven’t really thought this through.”

William stared into those frank blue eyes, reflecting on the incompetence of nature, which allowed such an innocent expression to mask chicanery and double-dealing. Here, he thought, was a man who could betray his best friend without a flicker of conscience. (His private detective had handed in a very full report, and William had read every word of it several times over.)

“Actually, Peter,” he said, “I’ve thought it through very carefully. I want to retire from this kind of life, so that I can concentrate entirely on pure research. No more chairs, no more waste-disposal units, no more living light systems, no more biotech batteries. In fact, no more products at all. No more rat race. I shall continue to work for the scientific revolution in my laboratories, but I shall no longer man the barricades.”

Marshall spread his hands wide, as if he were about to embrace his colleague in a spirit of pure camaraderie, and favored him with the kind of look that had melted many a heart.

“Billy,” he said, “I understand how you feel. Believe me, I do. I know that your eyes have always fixed on those far horizons. I know how the everyday business of Morris, Marshall & Faulkner gets you down, how sordid it all seems to you. I do my best to protect you—far more than you can possibly realize. I’ve kept a lot of weight off your back, shielded you from so much hassle, stood in for you in every way that I could, although I don’t really understand the nuts and bolts of biotech at all.

“I know you’re a genius, Billy, and I also know that, because you’re not like ordinary men. you don’t really know what’s good for you, what you really need. Judy knows, Billy, and we’ve talked about it. Trust her, Billy. Trust me. We can take care of things for you, and together we can bring about this fabulous revolution of yours. Side by side, each with our part to play. Together we can do it, but apart...each of us amounts to less than we’d like to think. We’re not as young as we once were, you know—we’re both past our best. All the City whizzkids I started out with have burned out, and all the geneswitching geniuses of your day are on the downhill side now. We still have a great thing going here, Billy, if we can just keep it on the rails, but it needs work. Trust me.”

“Well,” said William, carefully, “I’ve trusted you for a long time, Peter. I know how much I owe you; I really do. And to show you how much I appreciate all we’ve meant to one another, I’ve got something I’d like you to look at, which will demonstrate to you exactly where I’m up to right now...to make it clearer what I’ve been working on, and what the fruit of my labors has been. It’s in my inner sanctum.”

William’s inner sanctum was the very heart of his private empire, inviolate even to his most intimate co-workers. Marshall had never been inside, and William knew how much it would surprise him to be invited now. Surely, he thought, even P. P. Marshall would deign to feel a little bit proud as he stepped across this strange threshold.

Marshall went through, and William followed him.

The inner sanctum was quite cramped, because of the vast quantity of equipment that had been crammed into it over the years. William knew that to Marshall, as to Judy, it was simply an array of “DNA-thingumajigs” and “electronic doodahs”.

In the middle of the room was a Morris chair.

“Sit down, Peter,” said William, amiably.

Marshall sat, relaxing into the chair. It was warm and, of course, supremely comfortable. William watched while Marshall’s fingers ran appreciatively over the armrests. The chair accommodated itself to its occupant’s shape, molding itself snugly to his contours.

“Nice texture,” Marshall commented. “New, isn’t it?” He continued to stroke it with his fingertips, testing its quality. “It’s got a really nice feel to it—it should do well as next year’s model. How long have you been hoarding it away in here?”

“Oh, it’s new all right,” William told him blandly. “I only made it this week. Entirely new design—tricky, in its way, although I’d practiced the basic techniques a lot. Programming the chip wasn’t too difficult, but any manufacturing process is delicate when you use new raw material for the first time.”

“New material?” queried Marshall, interestedly. “It’s not grown from a cowball, then?”

William had never liked the way that Marshall referred to superblastulas as cowballs. “I didn’t grow it at all,” he said. “You see, I’ve progressed quite a bit in the matter of making superblastulas. I’ve found a method of producing them, as it were, the other way round. I can now switch on the genes of specialized cells, neotenizing a mature tissue by reducing its cells to the undifferentiated embryonic stage. A superblastula made from a mature organism doesn’t have quite the same capacity to grow, of course, but it can be redifferentiated into an entirely different structure.”

“My God!” said Marshall. “You mean that you made this thing from a mature cow? You reduced an actual carcass to protoplasm and then reshaped it?”

“Oh no!” said William, permitting himself a tiny smile. “I didn’t use a cow.”

“Good,” said Marshall, shifting his position slightly. “That would have been rather too macabre. Another chair, then?”

“It wasn’t a chair,” William told him, calmly, “It was Judy.”

There was a moment’s deadly silence.

William watched those familiar ruddy eyebrows lift, as the alarmed realization dawned on Peter Peregrine Marshall that this might not be a joke.

Marshall tried to stand up, but found that the chair, which had so conveniently modified itself to accommodate him, had actually folded its flesh about him rather tightly, not to say intimately. He began to struggle, but the more he struggled the tighter the grip of the chair became. His arms gripped the rests more tightly, and William watched his face change as he realized that the chair’s color was the delicate hue of Judy’s wonderful complexion, and that the tiny silken hairs with which it was covered were honey-blonde in color.

William waited calmly for P. P. Marshall to stop writhing, and to start remembering Judy’s embraces, and the special texture of her flesh.

Eventually, Marshall was forced to accept that he was not to be allowed to rise to his feet, and he looked up at William, with horrific questions trembling on his tongue.

William smiled, angelically.

“This is a very advanced Morris chair,” he said, quietly. “If you pay careful attention, you might be able to discern a slight pulse. This is a chair with a heart. It has a more complex nervous system than the standard model, better circulation, and—as you’ve probably realized—much better musculature. But the chip—oh, my dear Peter, you can’t imagine the cleverness of that tiny, tiny brain!”

William took a small gadget from a nearby drawer. It looked rather like the kind of remote-control device issued with TV sets and other automata. William began pressing the buttons, and the chair began to grow hands. One pair grew by Marshall’s wrists, and promptly gripped them; two pairs grew on either side of his torso and began to run their fingers lightly over his ribs and belly; a further pair grasped his calves and more fingers began groping about in his crotch. William could see, although his prisoner could not, that more hands were emerging beside Marshall’s head.

P. P. Marshall, golden boy of the City, wet his pants.

“Don’t worry about that, Peter,” said William, lightly. “The chair can take care of it.”

The hands set about undressing Marshall, and being many, made light work of it. He was soon stark naked.

“I understand that you’ve frequently benefited from my wife’s caresses,” remarked William, in a strangely abstracted tone of voice. “I’ve always felt that her touch has its own quite distinctive quality. No doubt you agree. I’ve treasured that talent of hers, and I assume that you do too. We two are the only connoisseurs, I think—the only people in the world who would appreciate this particular Morris chair. What wonderful opportunities this new Judy presents, don’t you think? I’ve tried her out, and found her really quite exquisite. An experience to be savored. I think you’re going to find this a real privilege, don’t you?”

Marshall made no reply to that. In fact, if appearances could be trusted, he was feeling rather sick when the chair began its foreplay, making love to him with all the mechanical tenderness of which it was capable.

P. P. Marshall, flame-haired darling of the media, began to scream.

Nobody could hear him. William’s inner sanctum was soundproof.

After a minute or so, however, the screams began to distress William, so he directed one of the hands to clamp itself tightly over Marshall’s mouth.

Marshall resisted this stifling clutch fiercely, biting at the hand and making it bleed terribly. But the chair had no mouth or throat, and could not cry out in pain; it could only quiver. It continued, though, with its insistent caresses and its lascivious appreciation of the naked body which it held captive.

William watched the orgy for some time, with mixed feelings. He was glad that his victim didn’t seem to be enjoying himself much—although Marshall did manage eventually to demonstrate that he was the last man in the world who needed to worry about the humiliations of impotence.

“Can you see the product potential, Peter?” asked William, earnestly. “Can you see the kind of market that this opens up? We have the seed of a sexual revolution here, you know.”

P. P. Marshall was unfortunately past the stage where he could give this line of thought his full attention. He was sobbing desperately. William could only presume that he was suffering from a rather extreme case of post-coital triste.

William’s delicate fingers brushed the buttons of his remote-control device once again, and the hands relaxed their grip on Marshall. The one that had clamped shut his mouth withdrew, throwing off blood and saliva with a contemptuous flick of its fingers.

“Damn you, Morris,” grated the copper-crowned certainty, retreating into cliché as if he were an actor in some tired old sci-fi movie. “You’ll never get away with this!”

Marshall was right, of course, as he usually was. William didn’t get away with it.

People of the social standing of Peter Peregrine Marshall and Judy Morris cannot simply disappear without questions being asked. When it came to the consideration of motive and opportunity, it did not require a Sherlock Holmes to figure out who was responsible. Eventually, the police obtained a search warrant and invaded William’s inner sanctum, where they found sufficient evidence to prosecute.

The Crown versus William Morris became one of the longest and most confused criminal trials on record, bogged down by unprecedented problems of definition as the jury struggled to decide whether his victims were legally dead.

In the end, William was found guilty, but only of Grievous Bodily Harm—a verdict that many observers thought eccentric. Cynics concluded that the jury—which included eight women—had been swayed by the defendant’s amazing good looks, and had sympathized with his jealousy. Optimists pointed out that the light sentence he had received would allow him to resume in a matter of months the daring and brilliant research that might easily lead to future benefits for all mankind.

When it was all over, however, the conscientious officials who sheltered beneath the grand title of “The Crown” found themselves faced with an altogether unprecedented problem: what on earth were they to do with Exhibit A?

Exhibit A was an entirely new design of Morris chair, resembling two armchairs facing in different directions but intimately fused together: a “love-seat”. Half of the love-seat was decorated most gloriously with silken blonde hair; the other half was upholstered in a remarkable shade of coppery red.

And somewhere deep inside it were two hearts, beating as one.