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narrow afra-wood desk, a fleshly-faced man in the customary bright-blue formal jacket.
Behind him a huge vistaphoto of open fields, fences, white clustered buildings, pasturing
animals. ABBY BULLITT HORSE FARMS cut very large into the gateside panels. The size
of the establishment startled Colin fleetingly. He had no idea that Mrs. Bullitt's interest, and
investment, in horses was so great.
And standing beside the desk, thumping its top with a hard-sounding finger, a short woman,
thick-bodied and dumpy- looking even in the smart green-and-white-striped riding coat and
sleek boots of a Major Hunt.
Harrison Bullitt Colin knew from having seen him in the Dean's office at the University; the
woman turning pale eyes and a querulous mouth toward them as they entered, he assumed
to be Mrs. Bullitt.
"Why didn't you knock," she began without preamble. "Martin, you know I don't like people
walking in on me without knocking."
The little man beside Colin made no answer, but Harrison Bullitt put a hand on his wife's
pudgy arm. "We're not at
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home, dear. This is an office. It's all right for Martin to walk io here without knocking."
Mrs. Bullitt shook off her husband's hand. **I don't like people to walk in on me without
knocking. Martin?" And there was venom in her took, all out of proportion to the incident that
had sparked it.
"Yes ma'am," the little man said and his voice sounded sincere.
There was a long silence while Mrs. Bullitt continued to stare at her hireling, long enough for
Colin to become con- scious of his own heavy breathing. In a reflex of discomfort he cleared
his throat and the woman's eyes snapped to his face.
"You," and again she spoke without preamble, "and you." And her eyes shifted to the space
behind Colin where he knew Ed stood, and back to his with a darting motion of her head
that somehow made him think of a lizard he'd once seen catching flies.
"You are the two young men who call yourselves Animals to Order?"
It was a question, but to Colin it somehow sounded like an accusation. "Yes, ma'am," he
said.
"Speak up, speak up," she said. "I can't hear you. I like people to speak up when they talk to
me."
"Yes, Mrs- Bullitt, we are," Colin said, louder, more than a tittle annoyed with himself at the
way her sharp tone had put him off balance. Angry also that she could bring disaster to his
and Ed's long-held hopes if her objection to their entry in the arena above should stand.
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"Good," the small woman in the striped riding jacket said.
The word of approval startled Colin. "Good? 1... I don't understand."
"What is there to understand?" and her voice was impa- tient sounding. "You say you can
make animals to order. Very well, 1 want you to make one for me. A horse ... a special
horse . . . and after you make it I want you to smash the mold or whatever it is you use. I want
it to be unique . . . mine alone and no one else ever to have another like it.' *
The light that had come into Mrs. Bullitt's eyes as she
THE TRIUMPH OF PEGASUS 249
spoke made Colin think shiveringly of medieval princelings who would have a craftsman's
hands cut off after he'd pro- vided a work of art for them so that he could not surpass it for
another, of architects blinded and put to death so that they could not build for another prince,
in another place, a palace, a castle greater, or even the match of, the one possessed by
their executioner.
Ed's voice in his ear, low, urgent. "Hey, a contract for an exclusive animal with Bullitt Farms.
It may not be NavAir, but from the look of that vistaphoto behind the old man, it's no
small-stake operation either. Don't haggle, man- After all, it's quick money and we've
already done a lot of the ground- work with Ato."
Harrison Bullitt leaned forward. Even sitting he was a big man, and, although he bore no
apparent physical resemblance to his wife, there was a certain flatness about the
expression in his eyes that made the thought skim the surface of Colin's mind that here,
Harrison Bullitt and his wife Abby, were two of a very unpleasant kind.
"Animals to Order," Bullitt said. "What is it that you
do?"
Colin had answered that question dozens of times. He did not need to grope for an analogy
to tell of his and Ed's work with the living germ plasm of animals; of the fascination and the
monotony of charting gene positions; of converting de- sired qualities into intricately
interacting enzyme patterns; of eliminating genetic loads, the stores of harmful genes
carried by all sexually reproducing species.
Of their bio-solutions and the organism growing in its succession of tanks, of the enjoyable
tension of watching it until it could emerge and survive without their direction in the open
world and be, if they were as lucky as they were entitled to be for their chosen profession
was still as much an art as it was a science, be exactly as they had envisioned it at the start.
But Colin's analogy was simple. "Think of a chromosome as a microscopically tiny string of
beads present in every plant and animal cell. Now each head is a gene that deter- mines or
helps to determine some characteristic of its own
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FA. Javor
animal or plant, like 6ie color of its eyes, the structure of its bones, the smoothness or
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