Two novels of far future.., p.31
Two Novels of Far-Future Apocalypse, page 31
Someone tapped his shoulder. He looked around to see a burly, middle-aged man, roughly clad, weaving a bit on his feet. His face was red and his lip stuck out belligerently. ‘You with that guy?’ he asked, jerking a finger at Ivanovitch’s broad back.
‘Well – yes.’ Collie felt a tightness in his stomach.
‘From up on the hill, huh?’
Collie remembered warnings he’d had, but it was too late now. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We, uh, we wanted to, well, come down an’ make friends.’
‘Friends!’ The drunk lifted his hands. ‘When’d the boss ever make friends with the hired help? I work all day, go home too mucking tired to think, and they take my money for taxes and spend it on you!’
Ivanovitch turned around, narrowing his eyes. ‘We ain’t looking for trobble,’ he said.
‘Nah. I’ll bet you’re not. Why should you? You got all you want already. Live like kings. Now you’re coming down here slumming. Want to throw us a bone, huh, after we kept you so long?’
‘From up on the hill … Supermen … Too good for us …’ There were others now, closing in, a ring of hard faces and angry eyes. Collie tautened, feeling himself tremble.
The bartender leaned over. ‘Look, you fellows better get out. I don’t want no trouble.’
Ivanovitch growled, deep in his throat. ‘We got just as mosh right in here as you,’ he muttered.
‘As much right!’ The drunk who had spoken first laughed unpleasantly. ‘Yeah. I’ll say you do!’
‘My kids ain’t up on the hill,’ said someone else. ‘They ain’t good enough, like this here furriner.
‘I’m not either.’ A mutant shook his hair-covered face. ‘They can’t use me. I’m only good enough to pay these bastards’ keep.’
‘Come on,’ whispered Collie. He plucked urgently at Ivanovitchs sleeve. ‘Come on, Misha, let’s leave.’
‘Hokay, we go,’ said the Russian sourly. He reached out a brawny arm and shoved three men aside. That was when the riot started.
Collie felt something explode in his face. A fist! He struck back, wildly. The crowd yelled and pressed in.
Ivanovitch roared. He knocked two heads together and tossed the victims into the mob. Hands battered at him, ripping his clothes. He surged forward, slapping. Heads rocked on their necks.
Collie braced himself, back to the bar. As the men shoved in against him, he pushed with his feet. Two of them lurched from him. The crowd pushed them back. He slugged hard, into the nearest face. A fist in his belly knocked the wind from him. He sagged, gasping, and they kicked at his ankles. Gulping back air, he crouched low and started to fight.
‘Back to back!’ whooped Ivanovitch. He spread his legs far apart and glared at the mob. Three lay unconscious before him. The rest moved aside, snarling.
A siren howled. Blue uniforms filled the doorway, and nightsticks prodded a way through the turmoil. ‘Awright, awright! Break it up there!’
Collie stood breathing hard. Through the window he saw a neon sign across the street, flashing and flashing, insane, gibberish of light. He retched. It was not a hurt, it was the sick loneliness that rose in him. They hated him. The world roared and stamped and whirled, grinding, eating, hating, and he wanted to run until he was home again. He wanted to cry.
‘You’re all under arrest here,’ shouted one of the policemen. ‘You’re all going down to the station. Now quiet down!’
As they left the bar, Collie saw an automobile drawn up across the way, and a man and a dog standing on its hood and looking over the gathered crowd. It was only a glimpse, and he didn’t think much of it then. The man was a slim young fellow, well-dressed, ordinary looking in his coat and hat. It was the dog that Collie noticed now – a big ungainly creature, shaggy and dark, with too large a head. A mutant dog.
VI
The capitol stood in its own parks and gardens near the center of town. It was a tall building of many columned tiers, rising to a high spire from which fluttered the banner of the North American Union. Above the first-floor colonnade, a dove in relief spread its wings over the globe of Earth. To the irreverent, building, flag, and symbol were the Steeple, the Jack and Stripes, and the Pigeon; to Alaric Wayne they were wistfulness.
He came up the long flight of stairs, and the guards saluted and let him and the dog pass without challenge. Down a marbled corridor to an automatic elevator, and then up toward the tenth-floor conference room. Alaric Wayne fumbled out a cigaret and lit it and puffed in nervous jerks. Always there was this tightening inside him, the fear of meeting the men whom he dominated. What words would they understand? He sighed, and reached down to ruffle the dog’s misshapen head. The wish to be liked, to be accepted as an anonymous member of the group, was strong within him. He recognized it and fought it down, but he could never get rid of it. Because what psychiatrist could help a brain unlike anything ever seen on Earth before?
Another guard outside the chamber snapped to attention as he approached. He winced, inwardly, and passed by with a nod. He was not much to look at, this young man with strangeness inside his skull: medium height, slender-boned awkward body, thin straight features and large light eyes under rumpled brown hair. The suit and coat disguised his short body and long legs and big head. They were not so different from the human as to be a deformity, or even very noticeable, but he felt his shape as another mark on him.
The door opened automatically, and he walked into the long, quiet room. At its farther end, the wall was clear plastic, overlooking the city and the mountains and the nightfall. There were half a dozen men gathered around the table, waiting for him. They were all human, being in their forties, fifties, and sixties, and they ruled the continent, but they had been waiting for him.
Robert Boyd, President of North America, turned a weary face toward Wayne as he entered. ‘Hello, Alaric,’ he said. His voice was toneless, flat and discouraged. The others nodded and murmured greetings: Nason, the chief of staff; Ramorez, majority leader in Congress; Winkelreid, minister of foreign affairs; de Guise, minister of health and genetics; Cunningham, McKenna, Giovanni, assistants.
Wayne paused. His lips opened, but for a moment no words would come out, a sudden wall in his head. ‘I – 1 – I—’ He closed his mouth and tried again. They waited, patient with his speech impediment. ‘Sorry I’m late. There was a riot downtown and I s-stayed to watch because w-w-w-one of your hill dwellers was involved.’
‘Eh?’ De Guise leaned forward, his voice sharpening. ‘Which one? What trouble?’
‘That big Russian, what’s his name, Ivanovitch. Bar, null-bad, arre – Sorry!’ Wayne snapped his thin fingers in annoyance. Damn it, wouldn’t he ever get used to ordinary speech? Even if his mind didn’t work the way theirs did, he ought to be able to talk intelligibly, He paused, sorting the one thread out of the web of his thoughts. ‘No one seemed badly hurt. The police were arresting everybody. It was in a bar downtown.’
De Guise smiled without much humor. ‘I’ll let him wait till morning before having him bailed out. The big ox! He should know better by now than to mingle with townspeople.’
‘It’s not so good,’ said Ramorez. ‘I’ve told you again and again, all of you, it can’t go on. You can’t segregate a special class, give it special privileges, and expect to fit it into a democratic society.’
‘We’ll have to, that’s all,’ shrugged Boyd.
‘If necessary, we can change the society, said Nason. ‘The human race as a whole is more important than a particular form of government.’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ said Ramorez.
‘Hell, man,’ snorted Nason, ‘if there isn’t a human race, there won’t be a government of any kind.’
‘We’ve been through all this before,’ said Boyd. ‘There’s another item on the agenda today. Unless—’ He looked at Wayne, who had seated himself.
The mutant shook his head, smiling faintly. ‘Sorry. I’ve tried to work out an ideal political solution for you, but human beings aren’t my forte. I think too differently. Much easier to work with electrons and potential fields, I assure you.’
‘Which may be why the world blew up in our faces, thirty years ago,’ said Boyd. ‘And why it’s getting set to blow up again.’
Wayne looked at him with a surprised blankness. It was a curiously innocent look, like a child’s. ‘It’s that bad?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t heard the news in a long time.’
No, thought Boyd, you’ve immured yourself in that incredible nest up on the Continental Divide, you’ve locked yourself away like a sorcerer from a world that doesn’t understand you. Now and then you come down from Sinai with something for us – the atomic motor, the power-transmitting beam, the complete mathematical theory of turbulence, oh, a hundred things that are going to transform our whole civilization. But why do you do it? What have you got in common with us?
He spoke slowly: ‘Well, it isn’t an acute crisis – yet. It may not be for a long time. The Siberian government is too canny for that. But they plan a long ways ahead – their eugenics program is only one case of that – and we know they’re working against us.’ He gestured to the map which hung on one wall, below the lined, moody face of the late great President Drummond. ‘The geopolitical facts of life haven’t changed. Anyone who can unite the Eurasia-African heartland against us, will turn the Americas into an outlying island which can be gobbled up at leisure. And Siberia is working toward that aim.’
‘Why, we’ve got our bases on the moon, haven’t we?’ asked Wayne. The surprised look was still on him. ‘We can bombard them from s-s-s-space.’
‘They’ve got bases up there too, don’t forget.’
They have?’
‘You didn’t know?’ Boyd pulled his jaw up again. ‘Yes, they do. We were too weak to prevent their establishing them, fifteen years ago. The two sets of bases simply cancel: in case of war, they’ll wreck each other. Unless you can think up something.’
‘Well,’ said Wayne, ‘there might be possibilities of making a force-screen. I’ll have to think about it.’
They accepted the statement casually, all but Nason, who muttered a delighted oath. They had come to expect the impossible from Wayne – the impossibly good and the impossibly bad.
‘You know,’ said Nason after a while, ‘I’m not too happy about your staying alone up in the mountains, Al. Even if you do have defenses, still, I wish you’d at least permit me to send up a guard.’
Wayne looked down at his hands. He didn’t answer, he couldn’t bring himself to do so, but they knew it was a refusal.
De Guise thrust out an aggressive chin. ‘For that matter, if you’ll excuse a well-worn and personal subject, you ought to be on the hill, in my colony. At the very least, you ought to be having children, or giving us a gamete deposit. Your chromosomes are unique. You can’t let them die with you.’
Wayne flushed, and the dog growled, ever so faintly. He tried to answer this time. ‘N-n-n-n—No!’ It came out shrilly.
De Guise relapsed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘What we asked you to come here about,’ said Boyd hastily, ‘was this Mars expedition.’
‘Mars – Oh, yes. That you got my designs for the spaceship, didn’t you?’
‘The complete report. Of course. But why do you want us to go to Mars? You forgot to mention that fact.’
Wayne blinked. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he replied. ‘It’s the answer to your problem of mutation. The radiation is still around. It will be for decades yet. It will keep on distorting genes, making heredity ever more unpredictable.’ He was speaking fast now, without hesitation. The subject was the kind he liked, big and complex and wholly impersonal. ‘Before the war, it wasn’t thought that much mutation would be produced by atomic indiscretions. The level of resistance to change seemed high among mammals, judging by experiments. It seemed obvious that an amount of change such as had actually occurred, could not happen without a radiation intensity which would kill off all life anyway.
‘But they didn’t foresee the pervasiveness of it. Dust particles, irradiated air molecules, irradiated atoms in the food we eat and the water we drink – radiation everywhere. The intensity was not high enough to do serious damage to most organisms, but it was everywhere, in all the body, between the cells, in the protoplasm itself. So naturally the nucleoproteins in the genes went crazy.’
Boyd lifted his hand, trying to stem the rush, but Wayne’s eyes were bright and blank, not noticing him, the strange mind had gone off into its own world again. Boyd sat back with a sigh, preparing himself for a lecture on the obvious. That was Wayne’s style of talk – starting from the elements and covering everything. At that, this speech was fairly coherent; sometimes he wove in and out between topics so that nobody could unscramble what he said.
‘Now of course we’re working on techniques of direct observation and manipulation of genes. We’ve got to have them, and I think eventually we will. But it may take a long time, generations perhaps. There are some tremendous difficulties in the way: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is one of them, setting a theoretical limit which, somehow, we must get around. Meanwhile, life on Earth is choked with distorted genes. Only a fraction of them can have appeared overtly as yet, in spite of the enormous incidence of mutants.
‘I predict a sharp decline of the birth rate within the next few years, a decline which will accelerate as more and more lethal or sterilizing recessives chance to find their mates. And moreover, Earth’s whole ecology, which supports all life including man, is going to go out of kilter as its delicate balance is upset. Just try living if nitrogen-fixing bacteria, to give one example, become extinct! All higher forms of life may disappear if the situation isn’t remedied by man; and as yet, we don’t know how to remedy it.
‘Things are already bad; but the radiation is still there, with lessened intensity but strong enough to make matters worse. No type is stable. Not even mutants will breed true. How can we even study genetics under such conditions? And if the problem of heredity-control takes a hundred years to solve, there may be nobody left to use the solution.
‘Attempts have been made to build sealed-off laboratories. They haven’t worked well – there is just too much radioactivity around. The background count is too high for precision work, no matter how much you seal and purify and decontaminate. Moreover, many specimens, I mean many at a time, will be needed for thorough study. You can’t build a sealed chamber big enough to hold them.
‘It has been proposed to set up colonies on Luna. The idea is sound in principle, but in practice it has flaws. It would be too difficult to make the moon self-supporting, and too expensive to support it from Earth. Then, too, I gather that there are hostile bases on the moon, which could make trouble.
‘But no one has yet gone beyond the Earth-Luna system. I propose to do so. Venus, we know by astronomy, is a hellish place, even worse than Luna. Mars is not too hospitable, either, but it has possibilities. There is oxygen enough for an efficient compressor to keep men alive. There is a little water – probably a good deal locked up in minerals. There must be heavy metals in fair abundance which are scarce on the moon. There is life of some sort, we know, which would furnish invaluable subjects and controls for the genetic studies, as well as, possibly, food. The cold is not a great problem when we have atomic energy. The rocket fuel required to get there is not much more than that required for Luna. And there is plenty of surface area. I am convinced that self-supporting colonies could be established there.
‘By this we would gain – well, first, suitable laboratory conditions. Second, the colonists would no longer be mutating, and if the research fails would have a better prospect of survival than life on Earth. Third, they would be a select group, which would accomplish your purpose of eugenics without the friction involved in your present segregation policy which looks as if it will break down soon anyway.’
Wayne stopped. De Guise nodded gloomily. ‘I know it is,’ he said. ‘If the hill dwellers aren’t mobbed first, they’ll leave in disgust. But what else could we do, I ask you?’
‘Hm – Mars.’ Winkelreid looked out of the window at the darkening sky ‘Yes. I have information that the Siberians are thinking along similar lines. Perhaps we had better get to work on your ship.’
Cunningham cleared his throat. ‘My engineers have looked at your plans already,’ he said, ‘and have several objections to make. The instruments and controls—’
‘I know,’ said Wayne. ‘It’s all right. I appreciated the need for haste, and so designed a very simplified ship. The crew will be able to take over the functions of many things you would ordinarily leave to machines.’
‘The crew?’
‘Your supermen, of course. The hill dwellers. And I will be the captain.’
That brought the storm down on Wayne.
Boyd sat on the edge of the quarrel, taking no part in it. He knew who was going to win. His eyes strayed out to the window and the early night and the thousand twinkling lights of homes. On such summer evenings, once during a long-buried year, he had been wont to sit in the Café Flores, watching life go by. There would be an aperitif in his hand, which was not to be drunk but to be savored, as part of the dusk and the city and the thousand human faces passing. There had been a little Finnish girl studying in the same classes as he, they’d seen a lot of each other, for they were young and this was Paris and all the world lay before them.
It was funny how often he thought of that year. And the Winged Victory. He liked to go to the Louvre when it was open at night. You came up a long flight of stairs, and there she was at the head of them, limned against darkness, straining into the wind, and you could see the surge frozen in her, hear the streaming wind and the wild blowing of trumpets and the great thunder of wings. It would be a sea wind, he thought. It couldn’t be anything else flowing and crying around that striding triumph.
