Alchemist by Peter James Page B

dedicated to the Bendix Schere ethos. With a few exceptions within his own department, Group Patents and Agreements, almost all the employees he’d met seemed to be sharply dressed males and females who greeted him with power handshakes accompanied by piercing eyeball contact, and glib phrases of welcome delivered like a foreign language learned by rote.
    He noticed also that there seemed to be no unattractive, handicapped or overweight employees, and that the only non-whites were either in Security or menial jobs. There was a uniformity, as if everyone had been hired from a restricted intellectual, personality and appearance band. Or maybe it was the artifice of the building’s interior that had this effect on employees after a length of time?
    Although just at the start of his second day, Conor had already begun to doubt whether anyone other than Charley Rowley, and a long-haired lab technician called Jake Seals, had any spark of individuality about them. If the science of cloningwere more advanced, it wouldn’t take a big leap of imagination for him to believe almost everyone else had been cultured in a laboratory from a specific formula.
    Conformity
, Conor thought as he buttoned his coat against the biting wind and hurried across the lot. Science was about discipline; about systematic observation, experiment and measurement. And yet medicine was always acknowledged as being such an inexact science. By dressing the company up with strange rules and tough procedures, perhaps Bendix Schere felt it could convey the impression to the world that its particular knowledge of medicine was more exact than it really was.
    He glanced up at the sculpted windowless edifice of the building, and felt a certain respect despite himself. Then he walked up the marble steps, through the electronic doors and into the white marble interior of the lobby atrium, which was almost deserted. He showed his ID to another guard, swiped his smart-card on a security turnstile and walked across to the lifts.
    They were all in use, and as he stood waiting he tried to make out his reflection in the burnished copperplate of a lift door, and checked the knot of his paisley tie.
    He was dressed smartly but conservatively, in a plain navy double-breasted suit, white shirt, and navy Crombie greatcoat. His hair had been rearranged by the wind and a couple of gelled locks were standing vertically. As he smoothed them down with his hands, he was suddenly conscious of being stared at by a young woman in her late twenties. She was standing beside him, watching him with a look of amusement.
    He shuffled his feet and dug a hand in his coat pocket awkwardly. She was quite a bit shorter than him, with a fashionable frizz of long blonde hair and an assertively pretty and intelligent face. A lift announced its arrival and they stepped in; several more people followed. The young woman smiled at him a little triumphantly as if she knew she had caught him out, but there was a hint of interest also. As the crowd jostled them closer together, he smelled the musky scent she was wearing and found it distinctly sensuous.
    He looked at her again. Gorgeous greeny-blue eyes full of warmth and humour. She stood out, she was definitely from a different mould. ‘Rebellion’ was stamped all over her.
    The lift stopped on the fifth floor and two men in white overalls got out. The doors closed again. Conor found himself trying to sneak a glance down at her legs but her trench coat blocked his view. ‘Like it here?’ he asked her.
    â€˜In the lift?’
    He was slow this morning, the jet-lag seemed to be knocking him and it was a second before he got the joke and grinned. ‘Sure – I guess the lift’s pretty special. How about the rest of the place?’
    â€˜So far. We’re still just moving in at the moment. My father and I.’ She had a nice voice, confident, punchy.
    A couple of people frowned at them. Staff were advised not to