Mankind, spread in dismal hordes across the surface of Earth, had initially seemed little more than a minor irritation. But the first- and second-generation hybrids had proven to be a problem. They were running deficient programs that could not maintain perspective. Some parts of their minds were sentimental and untrustworthy.

The problem was that, fantastically, they were thus far unkillable.

This would end.

The rapidly fleshing skeleton of the new guidance vehicle swarmed with a dozen different types of purpose-built biomachines. Great, prancing spiders exuded the cartilage that bound it together. Yard-long beetles generated chitin in their digestive systems. They laid the armor plates that protected the huge device and fixed them to the bones. Creatures with great, hanging abdomens spit the organic solids that formed the body.

In among them all, in a sepulchre in the center of the device, lay a hybrid that would be its brain. The top of his head had been removed and probes were being inserted into the cortex by two females wearing stiff white uniforms. It would not be possible for any other creature to control this device, and he could never be removed from it.

At present, he was asleep, dreaming that he was inexplicably locked in his office, and nothing he did was successful in attracting the attention of his secretary. He called her again and again, “Miss Fisher, Miss Fisher,” but she did not come. He pounded the door, he rattled the door, finally he kicked it and kicked it and kicked it.

This was because the brain had been removed from Thomas Ford Turner and was still sparking with his personality and his memories.

One of the hybrid nurses noted its agitation on the monitor of the magnetoencephalograph that was being used to track its activity. Her fingers danced on the keys of a computer, and the activity subsided.

Dr. Turner opened the door to his office and found not the anteroom, but his childhood neighbor, Sissy Green, sitting on her bike in dappled sun. He walked out into a perfect day from the summer of his ninth year, into the birdsong and the dancing flowers, toward Sissy in her red T-shirt and blue shorts, and the sunlight making her glow.

Once he was linked into the Hybrid Project, Dr. Turner would become a part of his own creation. It had not been necessary to save him, except for the skin, which had served its purpose—its failed purpose.

They had not succeeded in using “Dr. Turner” to reprogram Mark and Gina—or rather, they had succeeded with Gina, but she had broken the program anyway.

The skin now lay somewhere in the forest near Willoughby, quickly falling victim to speeding ants and busy flies.