Orbit 17, p.3
Orbit 17, page 3
“And you only wanted to talk.”
“After all the years and money put into this experiment, did you really think we would give up on the whim of a creature?”
“Is that the imperial ‘we’?”
“Robert, it wouldn’t be as effective, but if we have to, we’ll conduct this experiment without you. If you’re willing to help, you’ll have the opportunity to guide the development of your offspring; if you aren’t, we take over that function. The choice is yours.”
“That’s very considerate of you.”
“More considerate than you’ve been of us.”
“This child is mine, Layton, and no one is going to take it from me.” He wondered if the man realized the intensity of his feeling.
“Cooperate, Robert, and you can keep your child. But fight us and you’ll lose. Fighting is a human prerogative, it’s not in the nature of your species.”
“Like speech, curiosity, intelligence, and aggressiveness?”
“That’s ri—”
Robert leaped at the man. He had forgotten how heavy the child made him, and he fell short. But Layton was stunned by the inconceivable, and Robert had time to leap again. With arms to spare, he pinned him down, grabbed a rock, and knocked him unconscious. He hoped he had done no serious damage, but would not have stayed in any case. The robocontrol was in Layton’s pocket; Robert brought in the sensor and destroyed it. Then he left the river.
That day he concentrated on covering his trail, circling back often to be sure no person or device was following him. He passed the place where three rivers met. There was no sign of the packs, other than the remains of a decaying structure. That night he slept in a perch well above the ground. He awoke before dawn and made his plan. The packs moved slowly. He had only to go back to the place where the rivers met, and follow their trail of decayed structures. He could cover their twelve months’ journey in a day. And then? He felt incapable of thinking beyond that. But he knew he would have to see them once more before he made his decision. “We’ll see,” he told his child.
As he awaited the dawn, his mind moved restlessly across the past day. Layton had been wrong. He had been aggressive, and therefore tricephs had that potential. But he had scored below average on the intelligence tests. Of course, there was as yet no indication of where he stood in relation to other tricephs; he could be a retardate or a genius. Layton had been wrong, and Jamison had been wrong. Might not the tests also have been wrong? He knew enough psychology, now, to guess how his own attitude could have influenced them. And what of feeling? Could a human feel more deeply than he, and not go insane?
Dawn touched the sky with its first cold light.
“Where are you going, Robert?” Susan asked.
For the first time since he had left the pack, he became aware of the full weight of his loneliness. He thought of the camp and its warm light, and of the home of his parents. Where was Susan now? Was she really waiting? For what, a creature who could only be a burden in her life? He dismissed the thought. And his loneliness deepened. Finally he had to admit to the irony of the truth. However much he hated Layton, he needed humankind. His baby moved, and Robert hugged his pouch, whispering softly, “When you look in the mirror, what will you see?” He pictured two suns, and the emptiness between them.
It was late the following night before he found the pack. A few tricephs awoke and moved over, leaving room for him to join the group. Exhausted, he took his place, and the creatures huddling around him made him feel warm and safe. Like the pouch? He fell asleep. And he was in a blue-grey sea, drowning. He opened his eyes. It was dawn. He stepped out of the group, and as he did so, the triceph next to him opened its eyes. It didn’t move in, as they usually did when someone left, to close in the warmth. It seemed to him that the triceph was waiting. Robert looked away, dreading his decision. How far was the base camp? Three days? Was Layton badly hurt? Robert suspected that the same laws which could not protect him, could execute him. He looked back at the huddle. The gap was still open. Dawn, he thought, is the color of loneliness. With a strange feeling, deeper and more painful than anything he had ever experienced before, Robert removed his baby from himself and placed it in the open space. Without a moment’s hesitation, the triceph picked it up and placed it in its own empty pouch. Already his child seemed indistinguishable from the others.
As Robert left, he turned frequently to look back at the pack. But no one was watching him.
THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN RETICULATES
He was a scientist, not an administrator or moneyman—but what if any problem, rightly approached, could be solved by science?
Felix C. Gotschalk
Sam Leighton, Ph.D., had always thought of himself as a scientist, even though his work as a neurophysiologist was predominantly pedagogic. He was an associate professor at a medical school, safely tenured, well established in his field, and with all the overt trappings of upper-middle-class success. He could not track down any particular reasons for a certain restiveness in him, however, and he began to realize that his attitude toward nature was really rather esoteric, and that he had become enchanted by problems of limited scope. For all his intelligence, credentials, and reputation, he had begun to feel a need for some new perspectives, some broader conceptual base for his role—maybe I’m just getting old, he thought.
The restiveness persisted several days, but Sam was reluctant to talk to anyone about it. He knew that if he broached his feelings to any of his colleagues, they would probably eye him suspiciously, and say something like “Why don’t you take it up with Spence, in psychiatry?”
“I’m worried about our self-destructive abilities outrunning our inhibitory controls,” he finally said to Neilson, a tough-minded emergency room surgeon. Neilson was handsome and thick-necked, and something of a body narcissist. He kept the sleeves of his green smocks cut very short, emphasizing his tanned seventeen-inch biceps.
“That’s for philosophers to worry about,” Neilson said quickly, as if to relegate the subject immediately to an obscure niche.
“Do you identify with the role-model of the scientist?” Leighton asked.
“I used to,” Neilson said, “but all that crap about objectivity, control of variables, quantification, measurement, prediction—it all summates to so much shit after a while. And I’ve noted that the tighter, the better the experiment, the smaller the subject matter area, so that many so-called good experiments have very little generalizability.”
“And scientists feel provincial and jurisdictional, even about mundane data, don’t you think?”
“Sure they do, you remember Anders? He turned out mountains of data for about ten years, and he acted like he was cranking out the almighty gospel truth.”
“That’s when he was working on little rg.”
“Right, little rg—the fractional anticipatory goal response.”
“I’m half-surprised you know about that,” Leighton said.
“It got saturate coverage in the journals—big fucking deal— sounded very impressive, very Hullian, very algebraic. But, you know, Sam, I thought, little rg is nothing but a ghost—an elaborate model of syntactics. The only gut-level thing in the whole series was saliva drops.”
“Like harnessed Pavlovian conscripts,” Leighton said, encouraged that Neilson should have such insights.
“And your friend up at College Park, cradling transistor paks in the cortexes of beagles—anyway, Anders used nothing but T-mazes and electroshock in his work. His results have absolutely no generalizability.” Neilson sipped his coffee and his biceps rippled. Leighton found himself flexing his own biceps, thinking its tonus fair enough for a sedentary man forty years old.
“Generalizability always brings up the problem of phylogenetic comparison,” Leighton said. “You know, some strains of laboratory rats are so inbred that it’s risky to generalize from one strain to a sub-strain, much less to humans.”
“But don’t you think Harlow’s monkeys showed true cuddling needs in humans?”
“That paper was called ‘The Nature of Love,’” Leighton said.
“I know, I know.”
“Sorry. I all but devoured it, expecting some mountaintop profundities. I felt a little cheated reading about the monkeys clinging to burlap mother-surrogates—”
“But you believe him, don’t you?”
I can’t deal with the word “believe,” Leighton thought; time to cut this off. He looked conspicuously at his watch and stood up. “Sorry, I just remembered something I’ve got to do before class. Not to dodge your question, I do think that Harlow’s data have some good generalizability.”
“Absolutely,” Neilson said, standing and looking around the cafeteria. He seemed to bobble his deltoids, like a wrestler circling an opponent. “A good example is how women feel in an embrace. Some are cold fish and some are warm tigers—you know damn well who has been well cuddled as an infant.”
Walking back to his office, Sam thought, how the hell did we get away from scientific philosophizing and into how women feel in an embrace? In the arms of a woman, one may not—one should not—think like a scientist, but this might imply that all scientists think alike. Hey, who would be the better stud, a physical chemist or a chemical physicist? He thought it would be pinnacular to know precisely, exactly, what visual-motor acts of sexual foreplay would yield optimal response in a woman, but, shit, he thought, Neilson has contaminated the orderly nature of my thoughts. I have been trained to think syllogistically, to examine chains of apparent cause-and-effect, to postulate discrete concepts in precise diction configurations: subject, verb, predicate nominative, all in a neat Aristotelian two-valued logic sequence. I am a man, therefore masculinity resides within me. I am incisive, therefore incisiveness must inhere in me. I am a scientist, a neurophysiologist, so what does this point to? Damn it, does matter exist only in sensation? Is consciousness to be found in matter? Surely the world can be divided into mental and material categories, but then, would little e really equal little me squared? What possible difference could there then be between physics and chemistry? Hey, I’m getting bogged down in tedious semantic impasses.
Leighton snapped out of his reverie as he entered the busy main hall. A painfully important-looking man stood by the elevator doors, his white coat heavily starched, tongue depressors showing clearly through the separated starch of his vest pocket. The man looked irritably at the elevator signals, as if they were errant children refusing to defer to him. He held a patient chart in one hand and a small tube of urine in the other. Leighton’s robust twenty-year-old son would have laughed at a man carrying piss in a bottle. Two bearded faculty members walked by, nodding rather affectedly, Leighton thought, their white smocks hanging below their knees. Why do we scientists wear long white robes, he thought. And there were surgeons in green smocks and trampled rubber-soled shoes, tiny green skullcaps, tie-strings askew, face masks around their throats. And lots of bow ties—why the hell do so many physicians wear bow ties? and many nonmedical doctors too, here in this med school? He remembered Dr. Gately at SMU otolaryngology. She was a stiff old bitch who wore incredibly stiff white smocks, two or three credential pins on her lapels, and had a wooden tongue depressor showing in her civvies at the goddamn Christmas party! Leighton found out, after five years of working near Gately, that she had an Ed.D. in speech therapy. She played the doctor role to the hilt. Was she a scientist? She acted like a god.
Sam was slipping back into basic reverie. Hey, Eureka! he thought, scientific experiments are fetishes! little rg is reified and deified! Anders simply made himself an idol, he plain invented the whole idea, and aside from verbalization and calligraphy, there is no such thing as the fractional-fucking-anticipatory-goal-response! But Dr. Anders can take the concept and stroke it, polish it, fondle it, tighten it up, plane it, use pumice, sanding sealer, intellective varnish, wax, safecracker finger-pads on the beautiful flow of variables—wow! what spurious shit! And, as a neurophysiologist, I am concerned with the waking brain. My measurement indices are neurons and neuronal systems. Oh, Descartes, where is the antidote to thy sting? you have deified the pineal and made the body-temple an automaton of hydraulic channels! And Newton, so early in seeing macrocosm and microcosm, how could you propose that neuronal transmissions were accomplished through cosmic aethers!
The flow of people grew quite secondary to Leighton’s thoughts. I am a doctor, he subvocalized—what a magical pronouncement! I am a scientist, a Ph.D., scholar, academician, perhaps a dry pedant, perhaps a sifter of convoluted flecks of nit! I am humanoid: skin, fat, muscles, bone, organs, tissue, molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos—I am infinitely regressive. Galaxies whirl in my viscera, and I may be whirling in a galaxy in somebody else’s viscera. And, at the very bottom of the regress, Leighton thought, smiling reflexively at a favorite student, is IONIZATION: specific neurochemical (facilitatory or inhibitory) transmitter substances. But, he thought, this is just jargon. For all I know, there may be dominoes falling against each other in there—
“Is there anything wrong, Sam?” Brenda asked. She had been his secretary for ten years, called him Dr. Leighton at the right times, and knew him better than his wife did. Sam closed the door absentmindedly, and realized that he had not sought routine eye contact with Brenda. “No, baby,” he said, then looked around the room, realizing he should be more careful what he called her. They had had liaisons over the years, but knew their lives were too canalized to justify marrying each other.
“You’ve got something on your mind,” she said.
“Just some ruminating. I want to go make some notes on it before it slips my mind.”
“Dean Guglielmo called.”
“What did he want?”
“Sounded testy, he—”
“That’s the Corsican in him.”
“He’s calling a meeting of some sort, but he said he’d pop by to see you.”
Sam walked into his office and sat down. He could rarely sit in the rich black leather chair without remembering Brenda standing there so many years ago, bending to kiss his cheek tentatively, then sliding onto his lap, an exquisite blend of flower and panther. Half his age, she had fulfilled his incest tropisms, as he had hers. It was natural enough to think about sex, but frontal lobe cathexis on it was the quickest way to bring on detumescence. Sex is surely hydraulic, Leighton thought, and began to write.
I am a scientist, he wrote slowly, am I therefore mechanistic in my devotion? Are my own thoughts and feelings amenable to the energy concept? Matter is primary, primary, primary—come quickly, ghost of Pavlov, show me how to objectify mental processes. Lower your cortical mantle on my bowed head, and I will rise, neuronally knighted and anointed, to mediate new and raging hypothalamic amperages, and to relate as a supreme diplomat to all men. If the pineal is an energy cell, Descartes, then issue me one with high kilovolt-ampere rating, a surging nuclear powerpak homology—then, what the hell, Sam thought, nearly every concept in neurophysiology has been revised in the last decade—or have we simply invented new verbal models, new jargonese, new bows and wows? How many years did I preach the “all or nothing” principle of neuronal excitation before graded responses were discovered? I was dispensing erroneous information. How many of my students have committed professional blunders because of this—ha, that’s the enigma, the kicker, almost a sad joke, because it doesn’t matter anyway. Life seems to be idiot-proof. Remission rates hover around chance levels no matter what. Neuron membranes are not uniform throughout— how the hell could a limenal stimulus set off a full-sized action? You don’t light a segmented fuse and get steady combustion. If I were a jellyfish I’d need all-or-nothing systems, but I am a man, I am a scientist, and I am graded, gradated, infinitely plastic, and, damn it all, I’m beginning to stew and fret in my own circular pondering again—
“Brenda,” Sam spoke into the phone.
“Yessir.”
“Who’s out there?”
“Dean Guglielmo is here.”
“Send him right in.”
“He’s on his way,” Brenda said in a tight whisper.
Dr. Victor Guglielmo was about fifty years old, short, dark, ethnically stereotyped. With any caprice of time-warp, he might have remained in Corsica, married a lovely dark beauty, and watched her body-weight double in five years. Instead, he had come to the big city, where his father became a nationally known piano builder and voicer. Young Vic was all but coerced through med school. He tried pediatrics for a while, but found that he had a disquietingly active dislike for children. He took psychiatry boards, and discovered that he didn’t like adults much better. He began to gravitate toward administration, showed some good abilities in this fuzzy area, and had developed a reputation as a fiscal planning wizard.
“We’ve got to do some belt tightening, Sam,” he said, sitting heavily in a chair. He crossed his legs and looked steadily at Leighton.
“Any big crises?” Sam asked, not in the least certain why Guglielmo was here.
“We’ve had a forty-two percent cost overrun on the new patient wing—keep this under your hat—I’m afraid to leak it, the young lion administrators want my job bad enough to nail me to any wall. All departments are going to have to generate more fees. I want you and your staff to start doing neurologicals.”
“You can’t mean routine neurological exams—on patients?”
“I’m afraid I do.”
“But I’m not a physician, Vic.”
“Neither are most of the people who do neurologicals. Most of ours are done by senior students, interns, residents; it’s pretty tame stuff.” Guglielmo looked uneasy, but held onto a controlled gruffness. Sam felt vulnerable, and could feel autonomic mechanisms seeping endocrine fires in his viscera.
“This is bound to get out, Vic. I’m a teacher, a scientist, not a practitioner. And you know I can’t sign insurance forms for medical services.”
