The observers, p.1
The Observers, page 1
part #2 of CV Series
12-08-2024
Conversion from an IA scan
Everyone believed that the mysterious plague which surfaced on board the huge oceangoing habitat Sea Venture had been stopped dead in the middle of the ocean. Nobody reckoned with Julie Prescott’s unborn baby - nobody even thought about whether pregnant women could bring the parasite back to shore.
Julie herself didn’t reckon with what kind of man she’d fallen in love. John Stevens wasn’t your average guy, although that’s how he seemed. Actually, he was a highly-skilled, greatly sought after hired killer. McNulty’s disease (as the plague came to be called) changed his life and changed his values - but it didn’t take away any of his skills.
John and Julie settled down quietly to raise their daughter. Randy Geller and Yvonne Barlow, two of the very first McNulty’s survivors, married and set up a way to jointly pursue their careers. Wallace McNulty happily became an expert on the parasite that bore his name. But McNulty’s victims found that they sought out each other’s company, that they suffered fools less gladly than they had before, that they were less willing to settle for lives they didn’t enjoy.
When McNulty’s symptoms started showing up in the population on land, panic ensued. Despite the fact that McNulty’s was not fatal, and recovering patients seemed to show no ill effects, much scientific and popular opinion held that too little was known, and the disease must be curbed at all cost. Quarantine of all known McNulty’s survivors was the only solution-and what better place to hold such a large group of people comfortably hostage than Sea Venture itself?
But John Stevens was not the kind of man to be quiet while his wife and daughter were imprisoned…
In The Observers, Damon Knight has skillfully combined a gripping tale of suspense with a thoughtful examination of contemporary social values.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
THE OBSERVERS
Copyright © 1988 by Damon Knight
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
First Edition: June 1988
A TOR Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
49 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10010
ISBN: 0-312-93074-7
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-51446
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
LAURA MIXON and CAROL DEPPE
Man without culture is not man: but every culture is crazy.
—Edward T. Hall
1
By the time he was forty-two, Anthony L. K. Ridenour had written eighteen books, none of which had been published under his own name. Even the “as-told-to’s” were signed by Andrew Laurance, Kenneth Coltrain, or Ronald Malvern. Wraithlike and discreet, Ridenour had ghosted memoirs for film stars, undersea explorers, ex-Prime Ministers (two), and one Nobel Prize winner (German, very difficult).
In the flower of his maturity, that is to say in the last two decades of the twentieth century, Ridenour had witnessed the completion of a process that had begun much earlier: the place of general fiction had been taken over by a rather repellent growth called sci-fi. The former categories of fiction had now been almost entirely absorbed: for example, there was Jewish family sci-fi (not including shtetl sci-fi, a separate genre), historical sci-fi, spy sci-fi, and so on, including an academic variant not much read by the public, dealing principally with extraordinary mental powers and referred to as psi-fi. Earlier forms were the subjects of study in the remaining English departments of universities; Ridenour had a young friend, for example, who had just done his dissertation on Sidney Sheldon.
Ridenour himself had written a little poetry of an unassuming sort while at school, but there was no money in that, and he could not write sci-fi: it simply was not in him. He had turned, then, quite naturally to the kind of nonfiction which still engaged the attention of the public—informative, breezy narratives having to do usually with the scandalous doings of the rich and famous.
Ridenour was a slender little man, rabbity of feature, who lived alone in an untidy subcondo in the West End. His tastes were simple; he liked what he called “plain food,” and suffered anguish when, as sometimes happened, he was obliged to take someone to lunch or dinner at a gourmet restaurant.
Just now he was engaged on a book about Sea Venture, the floating city that had been devastated by an epidemic in the Pacific a month ago. Other publishers, with deeper pockets, had already gobbled up the principal actors in the drama, Stanley Bliss, the Chief of Operations, and Dr. Wallace McNulty, the resident physician, but as Ridenour had pointed out to his editor at Boone & Slayton, there was room for a cartload of other books as well, and the best of them might be an overview, telling the story from many viewpoints.
By now, a month after the events he was to chronicle, the passengers and crew of Sea Venture were scattered over the globe, but Ridenour, a transatlantic sort, didn’t mind that. His first step had been to start a cuttings file, and his second to get copies of the passenger, crew, and permanent resident lists of Sea Venture, an embarras de richesse, but working from press cuttings and news reports he had narrowed the list to one hundred and fifty, all in the States, to whom he had sent a letter soliciting the favor of an interview. Seventy-odd of these had responded, and he had laid down an itinerary accordingly. He expected to spend the rest of the summer at this, then clean up the European interviews in the autumn, after which, probably, a second round of interviews would be necessary, and he could start writing in March.
He had had one stroke of luck straight away: Dr. McNulty had consented to be interviewed even though he was under contract for a ghost-written work of his own. Either they had not pinned the doctor down about that or he did not realize that he had sold exclusive rights; at all events, Ridenour took the Concorde to San Francisco, and on the following afternoon he was palming McNulty’s doorplate in Santa Barbara.
The camera tilted to look at him. A voice said, “Mr. Ridenour?”
“Yes. How do you do, Doctor?”
“I’m fine. Come on in.”
The door clicked open into a pleasantly cluttered living room. The rug was a faded Oriental, the chairs deep and comfortable.
Dr. McNulty came forward and shook hands. He was a gray-haired man, a little smaller than Ridenour had imagined from his pictures; laugh wrinkles fanned out from the comers of his eyes, but at the same time, Ridenour thought, there was an ingrained sadness there that made him more interesting. “Sit down,” McNulty said. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, no thanks.” In fact Ridenour would have liked a cup of tea, but he knew what he was likely to get in the States. He set up his recorder and said, “Doctor, could we begin by asking when was the first time you became aware that anything untoward was going on in Sea Venture?” McNulty clasped his hands between his knees. “That would be when Randy Geller collapsed down in the marine lab. Then we started getting others, four and five a day. The symptoms were always the same—sudden collapse, stupor. There wasn’t a thing to account for it, and we didn’t know then that the patients would come out of it in nine or ten days.”
“That must have been an anxious time for you. And then?”
“When Randy came to, he told me about something that happened the day before. He was operating the dredge that takes samples from the ocean floor, and he brought up a little glass sphere. When he broke it open, he felt faint for a minute, and we know now that’s the first symptom of invasion by the parasite. The stupor comes when the parasite leaves—then somebody else feels faint, and so on.”
“Yes, tell me about that, please,” said Ridenour. “There have been so many sensational reports, one doesn’t know what to believe.”
“The thing was intelligent,” McNulty said. “It knew what we were up to, and it outsmarted us every time. We tried to trap it, and we couldn’t.”
“Until, of course, you finally did—by tricking it into going into the body of a goat.”
“Yes. That was Yetta Bernstein’s idea.”
“But earlier, I understand, a passenger died as a result of one of these attempts?”
The lines in McNulty’s face deepened a bit. “I can’t talk about that; it’s in the courts,” he said.
“I understand. But could you give me some clue as to how you learned that the thing was an intelligent creature? Where do you suppose it came from, by the way?”
“Geller and Barlow thought it came from space—fell in the ocean and sank to the bottom, nobody knows how long ago.”
“Barlow is the other marine scientist, the one who was stricken after Geller?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Ridenour looked at his notes. “I’ve not been able to reach them at their previous addresses,” he said. “Do you happen to know where they are?”
“Yes, I do. I’ll give you the address before you leave.” Ridenour made a note. “Then,” he continued, “there was that curious business with Professor Newland, the L-Five guru. He turned up dead in a lifeboat that got launched somehow from Sea Venture—any idea how that could have happened?”
“Nope.”
Ridenour ticked off an item in his notebook. “Now, Doctor,” he said, “I believe you’ve said that recovered patients of the disease they’ve named after you showed some personality changes?”
“And you yourself contracted the disease, or were invaded by the parasite, whichever way one likes to put it. So you’re in a unique position to evaluate these aftereffects. What would you say they are, in your own case?”
“I think it made me smarter.”
“Smarter?”
“Yes—at least when I look back now, it seems to me that I was pretty dumb.”
“I see.”
Ridenour had heard all this before, in a general way, but it was different to hearing it from McNulty. What was one to make of this tale of an invisible intelligent parasite that came from the bottom of the ocean, or from outer space, and made people smarter? McNulty had seemed a perfectly sober and well-balanced fellow, but then many lunatics did.
Ridenour talked to two dozen other people in the Southwest and Midwest, working his way across the country, and although they were all quite different, they told much the same sort of story. One man had quit his job at General Electric and had taken up rabbit farming in Arkansas; three of the women had left their husbands, one for another woman.
In July Ridenour found himself at the end of a dirt road in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A ten-year-old Mitsubishi pickup was parked across the clearing beside a white trailer on blocks, from which washing was strung to the nearest tree.
Ridenour went to the trailer and knocked. Presently the door opened.
“Mr. Geller, I’m Tony Ridenour—we talked on the phone yesterday.”
“Uh-huh. Come on in.” Geller was a tall, red-bearded man in his thirties. He ushered Ridenour into a narrow dining room with a vinyl-topped table, covered at the moment by socks in the process of seeking their mates. “Sit down. Coffee?”
“No, thanks, I breakfasted an hour ago.” He looked around. “Is your wife here?”
“She’s nursing some data—she’ll be along in a minute. Start with me.”
Ridenour opened his notebook. “You and Ms. Bar-low were both members of the Sea Venture marine science staff, is that correct?”
“Right. She was my boss.”
“And you were among the earliest victims of the epidemic?”
“Number one and number three. Number two was a fish.”
Ridenour raised an eyebrow. “That’s one of the points I wanted to mention. You realize that it would be almost unheard of for the same disease to affect human beings and fish.”
“Uh-huh. And a goat, too.”
A handsome dark-haired woman came in and put her hand on Geller’s shoulder. “Yvonne, Tony Ridenour,” said Geller. “My better half.”
“Very pleased to know you, Mrs. Geller.”
“Ms. Barlow,” she said. She took his hand briefly and sat down.
“Ah, yes.” Maiden name. Unusual—the pendulum had been swinging back the other way. “Ms. Barlow, we were just talking about the epidemic on Sea Venture. Would you say, both of you, that your outlook was different in any way after you contracted the disease?”
“Of course,” said Barlow.
“Being as objective as you can, what were the outstanding changes in yourself and others that you observed?”
“We gave up believing in the Tooth Fairy,” Geller said.
“I’m sorry?”
“We stopped buying all the various grades of bullshit.”
Ridenour took a moment to absorb this. “When you refer to bullshit, do you mean idealistic or altruistic viewpoints in general?”
“No, only the ones that are packaged to get some- thing out of people for nothing. What I was doing on Sea Venture wasn’t science, it was bottle-washing, and I was so dumb that I didn’t realize it. Yvonne and I got out and said the hell with that, and I think you’ll find that a lot of McNulty patients did the same.”
“Yes, I have found that, in fact. Mr. Geller, you mentioned the goat just now. Leaving aside the various interpretations of that story, do you think it was a mistake? Would it have been better if more people caught the disease?”
“Some ways better, some ways worse. If the thing had got to the mainland they never would have stopped it. By now, I guess, a lot of us would be too smart to piss in our pants.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve heard of algae blooms? Population explosions in rats, water lilies?”
“Yes, I believe I have.”
“And you’ve also heard that we can keep on increasing the human population indefinitely—that there are no limits to growth?”
“Yes, well, human beings aren’t—”
“Aren’t like other organisms, right? That’s bullshit.”
“The issue is,” said Barlow after a moment, “who does a woman’s body belong to, herself or somebody else? It’s not true that people won’t limit their families voluntarily. Every culture we know about has practiced some form of population control, right up to modem times.” “Wasn’t it usually infanticide?” Ridenour asked delicately.
“Yes, of course—that was all they had.”
“But wouldn’t you say that was criminal, in some sense?”
“Sure it was,” said Geller. “Infanticide is a crime, and so is abortion. The interesting thing is that if you look close, everything that works is either a crime, a sin, or an act of God. Well, people would rather have the acts of God, because at least they can say it isn’t their fault. Infanticide? No, no. But let the kids starve to death? Okay. So that’s why we’ve got famine and plague right now, because famine and plague work, but they’re nobody’s fault.”
“So what’s the answer then, in your opinion, Mr. Geller?”
“There isn’t any answer, because people are too stupid.”
“Forgive me, but what if they weren’t too stupid—what would they do then?”
Geller looked pleased. “Okay. Number one, recognize that if you eliminate natural controls on population, you’ve got to put something in their place. There are various ways to do it. Every time there’s an excess of births over deaths, we could send out a hit squad to zap that many people at random. Snipers in shopping malls. Or slip a little poison in their coffee.”
“Randy—” said Ms. Barlow.
“Or,”Geller went on, holding up a finger, “you could control it just by regulating the environment in various ways. Raise the speed limit, for instance, or loosen up the regulations on toxic emissions, which in fact we’re doing now. Cut back on the child nutrition program, Medicall, things like that. That’s more anonymous, but it’s also harder to regulate, because you never know exactly what you’re doing. The hit squads are better, because then you get guilt and conscience working for you. A woman has to want a kid a whole lot before she’ll get pregnant knowing that some other human being has to die when it’s bom.”
“What he means, Mr. Ridenour,” said Barlow, “is that we can use contraception, sterilization, and abortion, which are sensible methods that work, or if we’re too dumb to do that, we might as well talk about something really crazy.”
Geller turned to her. “Well, what are you calling crazy? Here’s another thought. Sterilize every other female child at birth. That would cut the next cohort of breeding women in half.”
“How about sterilizing the males?” Barlow demanded.
“Nothing wrong with it except that it wouldn’t work. A woman can give birth to one child a year. A man can impregnate a thousand.”
“Randy, this isn’t amusing.”
“True.”
“You know, I’m beginning to think human beings really are dumb.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Come on, Yvonne—” He looked angry, and so did she.
“Thank you, Mr. Geller and Ms. Barlow,” said Ridenour delicately.
In Rye, New York, Ridenour interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Lionel Prescott and their daughter Julie. Julie had been a victim of the epidemic, and had also, it seemed, been a fairly close acquaintance of Professor Newland, the L-5 guru. Ridenour tried to draw her out about that, without much success. There had also apparently been a young man, John Stevens, of whom the parents thought highly; he had not been heard of since. A shipboard romance, perhaps; that might add a bit of spice, but nobody seemed to know Stevens’ present whereabouts. Ridenour had the impression that Julie could say more if she would, and he put her down for a follow-up interview in the autumn.
