He took the plastic-sealed sandwich and coffee back to his office. As he got there, he saw Greg Belsen standing by the computer’s main console, watching the big display viewscreen there as it flashed a series of colored drawings and graphs at eyeblink speed.

“What are you doing in here today?” Lou asked.

Greg turned and grinned at him. “Thought you might be lonesome, old buddy, How’s it going?”

Lou jabbed a finger toward the viewscreen. “See for yourself. We’re still three orders of magnitude off.”

Greg gave a low whistle. “That close?”

“Close? It sounds pretty blinking far to me.”

Greg laughed. He had an infectious giggle, like a ten-year-old boy’s, that was known throughout the Institute. “You’re just sore because there’s still more work to do. But if you stop to think of where we were six months ago, when you started this modeling program…”

“Yeah, maybe,” Lou admitted. “But there’s still a long way to go.”

They walked back into Lou’s office together. Greg Belsen was one of the Institute’s bright, aggressive young biochemists. He was just short of six feet tall, slightly bigger than Lou. He was lean and flat-gutted from playing tennis and handball, two of the favorite, socially useful sports. Like Lou, Greg had straight dark hair. But his face was roundish and his eyes brown. Lou had more angular features and blue eyes.

“Is there anything I can do to help out?” Greg asked, taking the extra straight-backed chair in Lou’s office. “I know you wanted to get to those glider races today—”

Lou sank into the desk chair. “No, there’s nobody around here who can program this stuff into Ramo as fast as I can. And Kaufman wants it for Monday morning.”

Nodding, Greg said, “I know.”

“Is it really that important?”

Greg smiled at him. “I’m not a geneticist, like Kaufman. But I know this—what you’re doing now, this zygote modeling, is a crucial step. Until we have it down cold, there’s no hope of genetic engineering in any practical sense. But once you’ve taught Ramo all the ins and outs of the human genetic code, the way is clear. We can be turning out supermen within a year.”