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one else's.
If you could get over the shock and horror almost every
Lunarian would feel at first sight of the things, they were
actually quite cute. They smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp
your finger in their tiny little hands. Most of them could say
a word or two, things like "candy!" and "Hi!" A few formed
rudimentary sentences. Possibly they could have been trained to
do more, but the children didn't take the time. In spite of
their hands they were not tool users. They were not little
people. And they were cute.
Enough of that. The fact is they made my skin crawl on
some very primitive level. They were bad juju. They were the
forbidden fruit of the Tree of Science. They were faerie
sprites, and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
So the real truth is I couldn't make up my mind about the
damn things. On the one hand, what had attracted me to the
Heinleiners was the fact that they were doing things no one
else was doing. So . . . all reasonable and logical
rationalizations aside . . . why did they have to do that?
While I was still pondering this question, not for the
first time, someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the
farm house. I looked in with him, and we both frowned. The
inside of the structure was furnished with little chairs and
beds, the former tumbled over and the latter not occupied. Half
a dozen kewpies were curled up here and there, sleeping where
the urge had taken them, and there were piles of what you'd
expect from animals where that urge had taken them. It went a
long way toward helping me believe they weren't little people.
It also recalled documentary horror films from the twentieth
century of homes for the insane and the retarded.
The man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for
his children, who came running from where they had been racing
model cars, guilty looks on their faces. He glowered down at
them.
"I told you that if you can't keep your pets clean, you
can't have them," he said.
"We were gonna clean them up, Dad," Hansel said. "Soon as
we finished the race. Isn't that right, Hildy?"
The little bastard. Fearing that my sufferance here was
still very much dependent on these precocious brats, I said,
diplomatically I hope, "I'm sure they would have."
And I said that because I wasn't about to lie to the man
standing beside me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on
whose good graces my continued presence among the Heinleiners
really relied.
This is the man the media has always referred to as
"Merlin," since he would never reveal his real name. I'm not
even sure if I know his real name, and I think he trusts me by
now, as much as he ever will. But I don't like the name of
Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as Mister Smith.
Valentine Michael Smith.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Mister V.M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was a tall
man, ruggedly handsome in the mold of some of our more virile
movie stars, with white, even teeth that flashed with little
points of light when he smiled and blue eyes that twinkled with
wisdom and compassion.
Did I say he was tall? Actually, he was a little shrimp of
a guy. Or, come to think of it, I'd say he was of medium
height. And by golly, maybe his hair was black and curly. Ugly
he was, with a snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the
sunshine. Hell, maybe he was bald.
When you get right down to it, I'm not even going to swear
he was male.
I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he (or
she) thinks differently, so there will not even be a
description of him from me. My portraits of the other
Heinleiners, children included, are deliberately vague and
quite possibly misleading. To picture him, do what I do when
reading a novel: just pick a famous face you like and pretend
he looks like that. Or make your own composite. Try a young
Einstein, with unruly hair and a surprised expression. You'll
be wrong, although I will swear there was a look in his eyes as
if the universe was a much stranger place than he'd ever
imagined.
And that business about leading the Heinleiners . . . if
they had a leader, he was it. It was Smith who had made their
isolated way of life possible with his researches into
forgotten sciences. But the Heinleiners were an independent
bunch. They didn't go in for town meetings, were unlikely to be
found on the rosters of service clubs--didn't really hold much
of a brief for democracy, when you get right down to it.
Democracy, one of them said to me once, means you get to do
whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to
do. Which is not to say they favored dictatorship ("getting to
do what one silly son of a bitch says you have to do." op.
cit.). No, what they liked (if I may quote one more time from
my Heinleiner philosopher) was forgetting about all the silly
sons of bitches and doing what they damn well pleased.
This is a hazardous way of life in a totally urbanized
society, apt to land you in jail--where an embarrassing number
of Heinleiners did live. To live like that you need elbow room.
You need Texas, and I mean the real Texas, before the arrival
of the iron horse, before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards.
Hell, maybe before the Indians. You needed the Dark Continent,
the headwaters of the Amazon, the South Pole, the sound
barrier, Everest, the Seven Lost Cities. Wild places,
unexplored places, not good old stodgy old Luna. You needed
elbow room and adventure.
A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still did
as at least a better alternative to the anthill cities. But it
didn't take long to discover what toy frontiers they actually
were. The asteroid belt and the outer planets had high
concentrations of these crotchety malcontents, too, but it had
been a long time since either place had been a real challenge
to humanity. A lot of ship's captains were Heinleiners, a lot
of solitary miners. None of them were happy-possibly that type
of person can never be happy-but at least they were away from
the masses of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if
offered an intolerable insult--like bad breath, or
inappropriate laughter.
That's unfair. While there were quite a number of
antisocial hotheads among them, most had learned to socialize
with the group, swallow the unpleasantness of daily life, put
up with the thousand small things we each endure every day.
It's called civilization. It's making your needs, your dreams,
subservient to the greater good, and we all do it. Some of us
do it so well we forget we ever had dreams of adventure. The
Heinleiners did it badly; they still remembered. They still
dreamed.
Those dreams and five cents will get you a cup of coffee
anywhere in Luna. The Heinleiners realized that, until Mister
Smith came along and made them think fairy tales can come true,
if you wish upon a star.
I followed Smith out of the farm, where he'd left his
children and Libby hard at work cleaning out the kewpies'
house. We were in one of the long corridors of the R.A.
Heinlein, some of which, like this one, were coated with the
silvery null-field. I was about to go after him when I
remembered Winston. I stuck my head back into the room, snagged
his helmet, and whistled, and he came lumbering out from
beneath the tables. He was licking his chops and I thought I
saw traces of blood around his mouth.
"Have you been eating horses again?" I asked him. He
merely gazed up and licked his nose. He knew he wasn't supposed
to get up on the tables, but there were always some horselets
that had foolishly jumped off and he felt they were fair game.
I didn't know what the kids thought of his hunting, since I
didn't know if they were aware of it; I hadn't told them. But I
know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.
I'd thought I'd have to hurry to catch up with Smith, but
when I looked up I saw he'd paused a little way down the
corridor and was waiting for me.
"So you're still around, eh?" he said. Yessir, my
reputation in the old R.A.H. couldn't have been higher.
"I guess it's because I just love children."
He laughed at that. I'd only met him three times before
and not talked to him very long on any of those occasions, but
he was one of those people good at sizing others up on short
acquaintance. Most of us think we are, but he was.
"I know they're not easy to love," he said. "I probably
wouldn't love them so much if they were." It was a very
Heinleinerish thing to say; these folks cherish perversity, you
understand.
"You're saying only a father could love 'em?"
"Or a mother."
"That's what I'm counting on," I said, and patted my
belly.
"You'll either love him quick, or drown him." We walked on
for a while without saying anything. Every once in a while one
of the null-field safety locks would vanish in front of us and
re-appear behind us. All automatic, and all happening only for
those with null-suits installed.
These people didn't engineer anything any better than they
had to, and the reason was simply that they had this marvelous
back-up system. It's going to be revolutionary, I tell you.
"I get the feeling you don't approve," he said, at last.
"Of what? Your kids? Hey, I was just--"
"Of what they do."
"Well, Winston sure does. I think he's eaten half their
stock."
I was thinking fast. I wanted to learn more from this man,
and the way to do that is not by running down his children and
his way of life. But one of the things I knew about him was
that he didn't like liars, was good at detecting them, and,
though a career in reporting had made me a world-class liar, I
wasn't sure I could get one by him. And I wasn't sure I wanted
to. I had hoped I'd put a lot of that behind me. So instead of
answering his question, I said something else, a technique
familiar to any journalist or politician.
And it seemed to have worked. He just grunted, and reached
down to pet Winston's ugly mug. Once more the hound came
through for me, not taking off the hand at the wrist. Still
digesting the horselet, probably.
#
We came to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it
open for me. You could have driven a golf ball into the room
and never hit a wall, and you could have driven a medium-size
rover race in it. Whether you could drive a spaceship the size
of the Heinlein was very much an open question. But in front of
me were the signs that someone was trying.
Most of the cavernous room was filled with structures
whose precise description I must leave to your imagination,
since the drive room of the Heinlein is still a closely-guarded
secret and certainly will be until long after they get the damn
thing to work. I will say this: whatever you imagine will
surely be far off the mark. It is unexpected, and startling,
like opening the hood of a rover and finding it's powered by a
thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts, or by the
moral power of virginity. And this: though I could hardly
identify anything as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical
mess, it still had the look of Heinleiner engineering, wherein
nothing is ever any better than it has to be. Maybe if they get
time to move beyond prototypes they'll get more elegant and
more careful, but in the meantime it's "Don't bend that wrench.
Get a bigger hammer." Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled with
bubblegum and bobby pins.
And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to
launch the hulk of the old Robert A. Heinlein into interstellar
space. You heard it here first. They were not, however,
planning to do it with an endless stream of nuclear cherry
bombs pooting out the tailpipe. Just what principles were
envisioned is still proprietary information, but I can say it
was a variant technology of the mathematics that produced the
null-field. I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful
of others know what that technology is.
Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to a team of
very large swans, and leave it at that.
"As you can see," Smith was saying as we walked down a
long and fairly rickety flight of metal stairs, "they've just
about frabjulated the primary phase of the osmosifractionating
de-hoodooer. And those guys ratattating the willy-nilly say
they ought to have it whistling Dixie in three days' time."
No secrecy involved here. I'd have written exactly what he
said, if I had any hope of remembering it, and the meaning
would have been the same: nothing. Smith never seemed to mind
if his audience was coming into the clubhouse two or three
holes behind him; he rattled off his own private jargon without
regard to whether or not it was being monitored. Sometimes I
thought it just helped him to think out loud. Sometimes I
thought he was showing off. Probably a little of both.
But I can't get away from the subject of the interstellar
drive without mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put
it in layman's terms. It stuck in my mind, possibly because
Smith had a way of making "layman" rhyme with "retarded."
"There are basically three states of matter," he had said.
"I call them wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity. The universe
of our experience is almost totally composed of dogmatic
matter, just as it's mostly what we call 'matter,' as opposed
to 'anti-matter'--though dogmatic matter includes both types.
Every once in a great while we get evidence of some perverse
matter. It's when you move into the realm of the wacky that you
have to watch out."
"I've known that all my life," I had told him.
"Ah, but the possibilities!" he had said, waving his hand
at the drive taking shape in the engine room of the Heinlein.
As he did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a
director does it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a habit
of waving his hand grandly when coming upon his mighty works.
Hell, he had a right.
"See what can come from the backwaters of science?" he
said. "Physics is a closed book, they all said. Put your
talents to work in something useful."
"'They jeered me at the Sorbonne!'" I suggested.
"They threw eggs when I presented my paper at the
Institute! Eggs!" He leered at me, drywashing his hands,
hunching his shoulders. "The fools! Let them see who has the
last laugh, ha ha HA!" He dropped the mad scientist impression
and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a cowboy gentling
a horse. Smith could have been insufferably stuffy except for
the fact he'd seen almost as many old movies as I had.
"No kidding, Hildy, the fools are going to be impressed
when they see what I've wrung out of the tired old husk of
physics."
"You'll get no argument from me," I said. "What happened
to physics, anyway? Why was it neglected for so long?"
"Diminishing returns. They spent an insane amount of money
on the GSA about a century ago, and when they turned it on they
found out they'd hubbled it up. The repairs would have--"
"The GSA?"
"Global Supercooled Accelerator. You can still find a lot
of it, running right around the Lunar equator."
I remembered it then; I'd followed it part of the way when
I ran in the Equatorial Rover Race.
"They built big instruments out in space, too. They
learned a lot about the universe, cosmologically and
sub-atomically, but very little of it had any practical use. It
got to where learning any more, in the directions physics kept
going, would cost trillions just to tool up. If you did it,
when you were done you'd have learned what went on in the first
billionth of a nanosecond of creation, and then you'd just
naturally want to know what happened in the first thousandth of
a nano-nano-second, only that'd cost ten times as much. People
got tired of paying those kind of bills to answer questions
even less reality-based than theology, and the smart people
noticed that for peanuts you could find out practical things in
biological science."
"So all the original research now is in biology," I said.
"Hah!" he shouted. "There is no original research, unless
you count some of the things the Central Computer does. Oh, a
few people here and there." He waved his hand, dismissing them.
"It's all engineering now. Take well-known principles and find
a way to make a better toothpaste." His eyes lit up. "That's a
perfect example. A few months back, I woke up and my mouth
tasted like peppermint. I looked into it, turns out it's a new
sort of 'bot. Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let it
loose on an unsuspecting public. It's in the water, Hildy! Can
you imagine?"
"It's a crying shame," I muttered, trying not to meet his
eye.
"Well, I got the antidote. Maybe my mouth does taste
rotten in the morning, but at least it tastes like me. Reminds
me who I am." Which I guess is a perfect example of both the
perversity of Heinleiners and the cultural passivity they
rebelled against. And the big reason I liked them, in spite of
their best efforts to thwart my affection.
"It's all handed down from on high now," he went on.
"We're like savages at an altar, waiting for miracles to be
handed down. We don't envision the miracles we might work, if
we set ourselves to it."
"Like little people, eight inches high and smart as lab
rats."
He winced, the first indication I'd had of a moral
uncertainty. Thank god for that; I like people to have
opinions, but people with no doubts scare me.
"You want me to defend that? Okay. I've brought those
children up to think for themselves, and to question authority.
It's not unlimited; me or somebody who knows more about it has
to approve their projects, and we keep an eye on them. We've
created a place where they can be free to make their own rules,
but they're children, they have to follow our rules, and we set
as few as possible. Do you realize this is the only place in
Luna where the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can't look?
Not even the police can come in here."
"I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either."
"I didn't think so. I thought you might have a story to
tell about that, or I'd never have let you in. You'll tell it
when you're ready. Do you know why Libby makes little people?"
"I didn't ask him."
"He might have told you; might not have. It's his solution
to the same problem I'm working on: interstellar travel. His
reasoning is, a smaller human being requires less oxygen, less
food, a smaller spacecraft. If we were all eight inches high,
we could go to Alpha Centauri in a fuel drum."
"That's crazy."
"Not crazy. Ridiculous, probably. Unattainable, almost
certainly. Those kewpies live about three years, and I doubt
they'll ever have much of a brain. But it's an innovative
solution to a problem the rest of Luna isn't even working on.
Why do you think Gretel goes running across the surface in her
birthday suit?"
"You weren't supposed to know about that."
"I've forbidden it. It's dangerous, Hildy, but I know
Gretel, and I know she's still trying it. And the reason is,
she hopes she'll eventually adapt herself to living in vacuum
without any artificial aids."
I thought of the fish stranded on the beach, flopping
around, probably doomed but still flopping.
"That's not how evolution works," I said.
"You know it and I know it. Tell it to Gretel. She's a
child, and a smart one, but with childish stubbornness. She'll
give it up sooner or later. But I can guarantee she'll try
something else."
"I hope it's less hare-brained."
"From your lips to God's ears. Sometimes she . . ." He
rubbed his face, and made a dismissing gesture with his hand.
"The kewpies make me uneasy, I'll admit that. You can't help
wondering how human they are, and if they are human, whether or
not they have any rights, or should have any rights."
"It's experimentation on humans, Michael," I said. "We
have some pretty strong laws on that subject."
"What we have are taboos. We do plenty of experimentation
on human genes. What we're forbidden to do is create new
humans."
"You don't think that's a good idea?"
"It's never that simple. What I object to are blanket bans
on anything. I've done a lot of research into this--I was
against it at first, just like you seem to be. You want to hear
it?"
"I'd be fascinated."
We'd come to an area of the engine room I thought of as
his office, or laboratory. It was the place I'd spent most of
what little time I'd had with him. He liked to put his feet up
on a wooden desk as old as Walter's but a lot more battered,
look off into infinity, and expound. So far, his innate caution
had always stopped him from getting too deeply into anything
when I was around, but I sensed he needed an outsider's
opinion. The lab? Think of it as full of bubbling retorts and
sizzling Jacob's ladders. Omit the hulking body strapped to the
table; that was his children's domain. The place didn't look
anything like that, but it's the proper stage set,
metaphorically.
"It's a question of where to draw the line," he said.
"Lines have to be drawn; even I realize that. But the line is
constantly moving. In a progressing society, the line should be
moving. Did you know it was once illegal to terminate a
pregnancy?"
"I'd heard of it. Seems very strange."
"They'd decided that a fetus was a human. Later, we
changed our minds. Society used to keep dead people hooked up
to something called 'lifesupport,' sometimes for twenty or
thirty years. You couldn't turn the machines off."
"Their brains were dead, you mean."
"They were dead, Hildy, by our standards. Corpses with
blood being pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as hell. You
wonder what they were thinking of, what their reasoning could
possibly have been. When people knew they were dying, when they
knew that death was going to be horribly painful, it was
thought wrong of them to kill themselves."
I looked away; I don't know if he caught it, but I think
he did.
"A doctor couldn't help them die; he'd get prosecuted for
murder. Sometimes they even withheld the drugs that would be
best at stopping the pain. Any drug that dulled the senses, or
heightened them, or altered the consciousness in any way was
viewed as sinful--except for the two most physically harmful
drugs: alcohol and nicotine. Something relative harmless, like
heroin, was completely illegal, because it was addictive, as if
alcohol was not. No one had the right to determine what he put
into his own body, they had no medical bill of rights.
Barbaric, agreed?"
"No argument."
"I've studied their rationalizations. They make very
little sense now. The reasons for the bans on human
experimentation make a lot of sense. The potential for abuse is
enormous. All genetic research involves hazards. So rules were
evolved . . . and then set in stone. No one has taken a look at
them in over two hundred years. My position is, it's time to
think it over again."
"And what did you come up with?"
"Hell, Hildy, we've barely started. A lot of the
prohibitions on genetic research were made at a time when
something released into the environment could theoretically
have disastrous results. But we've got room to experiment now,
and fool-proof means of isolation. Do the work on an asteroid,
and if something goes wrong, quarantine it, then shove it into
the sun."
I had no problem with that, and told him so.
"But what about the human experiments?"
"They make me queasy, just like you. But that's because we
were raised to view them as evil. My children have no such
inhibitions. I've told them all their lives that they should be
able to ask any question. And they should be able to do any
experiment, as long as they feel they have a reasonable idea of
its outcome. I help them with that part, me, and the other
parents."
I probably had a dubious expression on my face. It would
have made perfect sense, since I was feeling dubious.
"I'm way ahead of you," he said. "You're going to bring up
the old 'superman' argument."
I didn't dispute it.
"I think it's time that one was looked at again. They used
to call it 'playing God.' That term has fallen out of favor,
but it's still there. If we're going to set out to improve
humans genetically, to build a new human, who's going to make
the choices? Well, I can tell you who's making them now, and
I'll bet you know the answer, too."
It didn't take a lot of thought. "The CC?" I ventured.
"Come on," he said, getting up from his desk. "I'm going
to show you something."
#
I had a hard time keeping up with him--would have at the
best of times, but my current state of roly-polytude didn't
help things. He was one of those straight-ahead people, the
sort who, when they've decided where they're going, can't be
easily diverted. All I could do was waddle along in his wake.
Eventually we reached the base of the ship, which I knew
mainly because we left square corridors and right-angle turns
for the haphazard twists of the Great Dump. Not long after that
we descended some stairs and were in a tunnel bored through
solid rock. I still had no idea how far this network extended.
I gathered it was possible to walk all the way to King City
without ever visiting the surface.
We came to an abandoned, dimly-lit tube station. Or it had
been abandoned at one time, but the Heinleiners had restored
it: pushed the trash on the platform to one side, hung a few
lights, homey touches like that. Floating a fraction above a
gleaming silver rail was a sixperson Maglev car of antique
design. It had no doors, peeling paint, and the sign on the
side still read MALL 5-9 SHUTTLE. With stops at all the major
ghost warrens along the way, no doubt: this baby was old.
Random cushions had been spread on the rippedout seats and
we sat on those and Smith pulled on a cord which rang a little
tinkling bell, and the car began to glide down the rail.
"The whole idea of building a superman has acquired a lot
of negative baggage over the years," he said, picking up as if
the intervening walk had never happened. As if he needed
another annoying characteristic. "The German Fascists are the
first ones I'm aware of who seriously proposed it, as part of
an obsolete and foolish racial scheme."
"I've read about them," I said.
"It's nice to talk to someone who knows a little history.
Then you'll know that by the time it became possible to tinker
with genes, a lot more objections had been raised. Many of them
were valid. Some still are."
"Is that something you'd like to see?" I asked. "A
superman?"
"It's the word that throws you off. I don't know if a
'superman' is possible, or desirable. I think an altered human
is an idea worth looking into. When you consider that these
carcasses we're walking around in were evolved to thrive in an
environment we've been evicted from . . ."
Maybe he said more, but I missed it, because just about
then we had a head-on collision with another tram going in the
opposite direction. Obviously, we didn't really. Obviously, it
was just the reflection of the headlights of our own car as we
approached another of those ubiquitous null-fields. And even
more obviously, you weren't there to stand up and shout like a
fool and see your life pass before your eyes, and I'll bet you
would have, too. Or maybe I'm just slow to catch on.
Smith didn't think so. He was very apologetic when he
realized what had happened, and took time to tell me about
another little surprise in store, which happened a minute later
when a nullfield vanished in front of us and, with a little
gust of wind, we entered vacuum and began to really pick up
speed. The tunnel walls blurred in the beam of our headlights,
details snatched away before they could be perceived.
He had more to say on the subject of human engineering. I
didn't get it all because I was concentrating on not breathing,
still learning to wear a null-suit. But I got his main points.
He thought that while Gretel's method was wrong, her goal
was worthwhile, and I couldn't see what was wrong with it,
either. Basically, we either manufacture our environment or
adapt to it. Both have hazards, but it did seem high time we at
least start discussing the second alternative.
Take weightlessness, for example. Most people who spent a
lot of time in free-fall had some body adaptations made, but it
was all surgical. Human legs are too strong; push too hard and
you can fracture your skull. It's handy to have hands instead
of feet at the ends of your ankles. Feet are as useless as
vermiform appendices in freefall. It's also useful to be able
to bend and twist more than the human body normally can.
But the question before the court was this: should humans
be bred to space travel? Should the useful characteristics be
put into the genes, so children are born with hands instead of
feet?
Maybe so, maybe not. We weren't talking radical change
here, or anything that couldn't be done just as easily
surgically, without raising the troublesome issues of more than
one species of human being.
But what about a human adapted to vacuum? I've no idea how
to go about it, but it probably could be done. What would he
look like? Would he feel superior to us? Would we be his
brother, or his cousin, or what? one thing was sure: it would
be a lot easier to do it genetically than with the knife. And I
feel certain the end result would not look very human.
I chewed that one over quite a bit in the coming days,
examining my feelings. I found that most of them came from
prejudice, as Smith had said. I'd been raised to think it was
wrong. But I found myself agreeing that it was at least time to
think it over again.
As long as I didn't have to clean up after kewpies.
#
The train car pulled into a siding at another abandoned
station where somebody had scrawled the word "Minamata" over
whatever had been there before. I had no idea how far we'd
come, or in what direction.
"This is still part of the Delambre dump, more or less,"
Smith said, so at least I had a general idea. We started down a
long, filthy corridor, Smith's flashlight beam bobbing from
wall to wall as we walked. In a movie, rats and other vermin
would have been scuttling out of our way, but a rat would have
needed a null-suit to survive this place; mine was still on,
and I was still thinking about breathing.
"There's really no reason why the stuff in here shouldn't
be spread out over the surface like the rest of the garbage,"
he went on. "I think it's mainly psychological reasons it's all
pumped in here. This is a nasty place. If it's toxic or
radioactive or biochemically hazardous, this is where it
comes."
We reached an air lock of the kind that used to be
standard when I was a child, and he motioned me inside. He
slapped a button, then gestured toward the air fitting on the
side of my chest.
"Turn that counter-clockwise," he said. "They only come on
automatically when there's a vacuum. There's gas where we're
going, but you don't want to breathe it."
The lock cycled and we stepped into Minamata.
The place had no name on the municipal charts of King
City, just Waste Repository #2. The Heinleiners had named it
after a place in Japan that had suffered the first modern-day
big environmental disaster, when industries had pumped mercury
compounds into a bay and produced a lot of twisted babies. So
sorry, mom. That's the breaks.
Minamata Luna was really just a very large, buried storage
tank. By large, I mean you could have parked four starships the
size of the Heinlein without scraping the fenders. Texas is a
lot bigger, but it doesn't feel like being a bug in a bottle
because you can't see the walls. Here you could, and they
curved upward and vanished into a noxious mist. The far end was
invisible.
Maybe there was some artificial light in there. I didn't
see any, but they were hardly necessary. The bottom third of
the horizontal cylinder was full of liquid, and it glowed. Red
here, green there . . . sometimes a ghastly blue. The makers of
horror films would have killed to get that blue.
We had entered at what seemed the axis of the cylinder,
which was rounded off at this end, like a pressure tank. A
ledge, three meters wide and with a railing, curved away from
us in each direction, but to the right was blocked off with a
warning sign. Looking past it, I could see the ledge had
crumbled away in several places. When I looked back Smith was
already moving away from me toward the left. I hurried to catch
up with him.
I never did quite catch him. Every time I got close my eye
was drawn by the luminescent sea off to my right, and a few
hundred meters down.
The thing about that sea . . . it moved.
At first I only saw the swirls of glowing color like an
oil film on water. I'd always thought colorful things were just
naturally pretty things, but Minamata taught me differently. At
first I couldn't explain my queasy reaction. None of the
colors, by themselves, seemed all that hideous (except for that
blue). Surely that same swirl of color, on a shirt or dress,
would be a gorgeous thing. Wouldn't it? I couldn't see why not.
I began walking more slowly, trailing my hand along the top of
the rail, trying to figure why it all disturbed me so.
The side of the cylinder went straight down from the edge
of the ledge we walked on, then gradually curved inward until
it met the fluorescent sea. Waves were rolling sluggishly to
crash against the metal sides of the tank.
Waves, Hildy? What could be causing waves in this foul
soup?
Maybe some agitating mechanism, I thought, though I
couldn't see any use for one. Then I saw a part of the sea hump
itself up, ten or twenty meters high--it was hard to judge the
scale from my vantage point. Then I saw strange shapes on the
borderline between sea and shore, things that moved among the
mineral efflorescences that grew like arthritic fingers along
that metal beach. Then I saw something that, I thought, raised
its head on a spavined neck and looked at me, reached out a
hungry hand . . .
Of course, it was a long way off. I could have been wrong.
Smith took my arm without a word and urged me along. I
didn't look at the Minamata Sea again.
#
We came to a series of circular mirrors standing against
the vertical wall to our left. Each had a number over it. I
realized that tunnels had been bored into the walls here and
each had been sealed off with a null-field barrier.
Smith stopped before the eighth, pointed at it, and
stepped in. I followed him, and found myself in a short tunnel,
maybe twenty meters long, five meters high. Halfway down the
tunnel were metal bars. Beyond that point a level floor had
been built to support a cot, chair, desk, and toilet, all
looking as if they'd been ordered from some cheap mail-order
house. On our side of the bars was a portable air plant, which
seemed to be doing its job, as my suit had vanished as I
stepped through the field. Spare oxygen cylinders and crates of
food were stacked against the wall.
Sitting on the cot and watching a slash-boxing show on the
television, was Andrew MacDonald. He glanced up from the screen
as we entered, but he did not rise.
Possibly this was a new point of etiquette. Should the
dead rise for the living? Be sure to ask at your next seance.
"Hello, Andrew," Smith said. "I've brought someone to see
you."
"Yes?" Andrew said, with no great interest. His eyes
turned to me, lingered for a moment. There was no spark of
recognition. Worse than that, there was none of that
penetrating quality I'd seen on the day he . . . hell, how else
can I say it? On the day he died. For a moment I though this
was just some guy who looked a lot like Andrew. I guess I was
half right.
"Sorry," he said, and shrugged. "Don't know her."
"I'm not surprised," Smith said. He looked at me. I had
the feeling I was supposed to say something perceptive,
intelligent. Maybe I was supposed to have figured it all out.
"What the fuck's going on here?" I said, which was a lot
better than "duuuuh," which was my first reaction, though
neither really qualifies as perceptive.
"Ask him," Andrew said. "He thinks I'm dangerous."
I'd started toward the bars but Smith put his hand on my
arm and shook his head.
"See what I mean?" the prisoner said.
"He is dangerous," Smith told me. "When he first came
here, he nearly killed a man. Would have, but we got to him in
time. Want to tell us about that, Andrew?"
He shrugged. "He stepped on my foot. It wasn't my fault."
"I've had enough of this," I said. "What the hell are you
people doing in here? I saw this man die, or his twin brother."
Smith was about to say something, but I'd finally gotten
Andrew interested. He stood and came to the bars, held on with
one hand while the other played idly with his genitals. You see
that sometimes, in old alkies or voluntary skitzys down in
Bedrock. It's a free planet, right? Nobody can stop them, but
people hurry by, like you don't stop and stare if someone is
vomiting, or picking his nose. I'd never seen an apparently
healthy man masturbating with such utter lack of modesty. What
had they done to him?
"How did I do?" he asked me, tugging and squeezing. "All
they'll tell me is I died in the ring. You were there? Were you
close up? Who was it that got me? Damn, the least they could do
is give me a tape."
"Are you really Andrew MacDonald?"
"That's my name, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."
"It's him," Smith said, quietly. "That's what I've finally
decided, after thinking it over a lot."
"That's not what you said last time," the man said. "You
said I was only part of old Andy. The mean part. I don't think
I'm mean." He lost interest in his penis and stretched a hand
through the bars, gesturing. "Toss me a can of that beef stew,
boss man. I've had my eye on that for days."
"You've got plenty of food in there."
"Yeah, but I want stew."
Smith got a plastic can and lobbed it toward the cell; the
man snagged it and tore off the top. He took a big handful and
crammed it into his mouth, chewing noisily. There was a stove,
a table, and utensils plainly in sight behind him, but he
didn't seem to care.
"I didn't see you fight," I said, at last.
"Shit. You know, I'd like you if you weren't so fat. You
wanna fuck?" A gravy-covered hand went to his groin once again.
"Let's get brown, honey."
I'm going to ignore the rest of his antics. I still
remember them vividly, and still find them disturbing. I'd once
wanted to make love to this man. I'd once found him quite
attractive.
"I was there when they carried you back from the ring," I
said.
"The good old squared circle. The sweet science. All there
is, really, all there is. What's your name, fatty?"
"Hildy. You were mortally injured and you refused
treatment."
"What a jerk I must have been. Live to fight another day,
huh?"
"I'd always thought so. And I thought what you were doing,
risking your life, was stupid. I thought it was unnecessary,
too, but you told me your reasons, and I respect them."
"A jerk," he repeated.
"I guess, when it came time for you to live up to your
bargain, I thought you were stupid, too. But I was impressed. I
was moved. I can't say I thought you were doing the right
thing, but your determination was awesome."
"You're a jerk, too."
"I know."
He continued shoving stew into his face, looking at me
with no real spark of human feeling I could detect. I turned to
Smith.
"It's time you told me what's going on here. What's been
done to this man? If this is an example of what you were
talking about on the way . . ."
"It is."
"Then I don't want anything to do with it. In fact, damn
it, I know I promised not to talk about you and your people,
but--"
"Hang on a minute, Hildy," Smith said. "This is an example
of human experimentation, but we didn't do it."
"The CC," I said, after a long pause. Who else?
"There's something seriously wrong with the CC, Hildy. I
don't know what it is, but I know the results. This man is one.
He's a cloned body, grown from Andrew MacDonald's corpse, or
from a tissue sample. When he's in a mood to talk, he's said
things we've checked against his records, and it seems he
really does have MacDonald's memories. Up to a point. He
remembers things up to about three or four years ago. We
haven't been able to test him thoroughly, but what tests we've
been able to run bear out what we've seen from other specimens
like him. He thinks he is MacDonald."
"Damn right I am," the prisoner chimed in.
"For all practical purposes, he's right. But he doesn't
remember the Kansas Collapse. He doesn't remember Silvio's
assassination. I was certain he wouldn't remember you, and he
didn't. What's happened is that his memories were recorded in
some way, and played back into this clone body."
I thought it over. Smith gave me time to.
"It doesn't work," I said, finally. "There's no way this
thing could have turned into the man I met in only three or
four years. This guy is like a big, spoiled child."
"Big is right, babe," the man said, with the gesture you'd
expect.
"I didn't say the copy was perfect," Smith said. "The
memories seem to be extremely good. But some things didn't
record. He has no social inhibitions whatsoever. No sense of
guilt or shame. He really did try to kill a man who
accidentally stepped on his foot, and he never saw what was so
wrong about it. He's incredibly dangerous, because he's the
best fighter in Luna; that's why we have him here, in the best
prison we can devise. We, who don't even believe in prisons."
I could see it would be a tough one to get out of. If you
got past the null-field, there were the toxic gases of
Minamata. Beyond that, vacuum.
It seemed that "MacDonald" was the most recent of a long
line of abandoned experiments. Smith wouldn't tell me how the
Heinleiners had come to have him, except to say that, in his
case, he'd most likely been sent.
"Early on in this program, we had a pipeline into the
secret lab where this work was going on. The first attempts
were pathetic. We had people who just sat there and drooled,
others who tore at themselves with their teeth. But the CC got
better with practice. Some could pass as normal human beings.
Some of them live with us. They're limited, but what can you
do? I think they're human.
"But lately, we've been getting surprise packages, like
Andrew here. We lock them up, interrogate them. Some of them
are harmless. Others . . . I don't think we can ever let them
free."
"I don't understand. I mean, I see this one could be
dangerous, but--"
"The CC wants in here."
"Into Minamata?"
"No, this is his place. You saw the water down there.
That's his work. He wants into the Heinleiner enclave. He wants
the null-field. He wants to know if I'm successful with the
stardrive. He wants to know other things. He found out about
our access to his forbidden experiments, and we started getting
people like Andrew. Walking time bombs, most of them. After a
few tragic incidents, we had to institute some security
precautions. Now we're careful about the dead people we let in
here."
It was not the first time an action by the CC had turned
my world upside-down. You live in a time and a place and you
think you know what's going on, but you don't. Maybe no one
ever did.
Smith had unloaded too many things on me too quickly. I'd
had some practice at that, with the CC playing games with my
If you could get over the shock and horror almost every
Lunarian would feel at first sight of the things, they were
actually quite cute. They smiled a lot, and were eager to grasp
your finger in their tiny little hands. Most of them could say
a word or two, things like "candy!" and "Hi!" A few formed
rudimentary sentences. Possibly they could have been trained to
do more, but the children didn't take the time. In spite of
their hands they were not tool users. They were not little
people. And they were cute.
Enough of that. The fact is they made my skin crawl on
some very primitive level. They were bad juju. They were the
forbidden fruit of the Tree of Science. They were faerie
sprites, and thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
So the real truth is I couldn't make up my mind about the
damn things. On the one hand, what had attracted me to the
Heinleiners was the fact that they were doing things no one
else was doing. So . . . all reasonable and logical
rationalizations aside . . . why did they have to do that?
While I was still pondering this question, not for the
first time, someone came up beside me and lifted the lid of the
farm house. I looked in with him, and we both frowned. The
inside of the structure was furnished with little chairs and
beds, the former tumbled over and the latter not occupied. Half
a dozen kewpies were curled up here and there, sleeping where
the urge had taken them, and there were piles of what you'd
expect from animals where that urge had taken them. It went a
long way toward helping me believe they weren't little people.
It also recalled documentary horror films from the twentieth
century of homes for the insane and the retarded.
The man let the lid drop, looked around, and bellowed for
his children, who came running from where they had been racing
model cars, guilty looks on their faces. He glowered down at
them.
"I told you that if you can't keep your pets clean, you
can't have them," he said.
"We were gonna clean them up, Dad," Hansel said. "Soon as
we finished the race. Isn't that right, Hildy?"
The little bastard. Fearing that my sufferance here was
still very much dependent on these precocious brats, I said,
diplomatically I hope, "I'm sure they would have."
And I said that because I wasn't about to lie to the man
standing beside me, father to Hansel and Gretel, and the man on
whose good graces my continued presence among the Heinleiners
really relied.
This is the man the media has always referred to as
"Merlin," since he would never reveal his real name. I'm not
even sure if I know his real name, and I think he trusts me by
now, as much as he ever will. But I don't like the name of
Merlin, so in this account I will refer to him as Mister Smith.
Valentine Michael Smith.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
Mister V.M. Smith, leader of the Heinleiners, was a tall
man, ruggedly handsome in the mold of some of our more virile
movie stars, with white, even teeth that flashed with little
points of light when he smiled and blue eyes that twinkled with
wisdom and compassion.
Did I say he was tall? Actually, he was a little shrimp of
a guy. Or, come to think of it, I'd say he was of medium
height. And by golly, maybe his hair was black and curly. Ugly
he was, with a snaggled-toothed smile like a dead pig in the
sunshine. Hell, maybe he was bald.
When you get right down to it, I'm not even going to swear
he was male.
I think the heat is largely off of him by now, but he (or
she) thinks differently, so there will not even be a
description of him from me. My portraits of the other
Heinleiners, children included, are deliberately vague and
quite possibly misleading. To picture him, do what I do when
reading a novel: just pick a famous face you like and pretend
he looks like that. Or make your own composite. Try a young
Einstein, with unruly hair and a surprised expression. You'll
be wrong, although I will swear there was a look in his eyes as
if the universe was a much stranger place than he'd ever
imagined.
And that business about leading the Heinleiners . . . if
they had a leader, he was it. It was Smith who had made their
isolated way of life possible with his researches into
forgotten sciences. But the Heinleiners were an independent
bunch. They didn't go in for town meetings, were unlikely to be
found on the rosters of service clubs--didn't really hold much
of a brief for democracy, when you get right down to it.
Democracy, one of them said to me once, means you get to do
whatever the majority of silly sons of bitches says you have to
do. Which is not to say they favored dictatorship ("getting to
do what one silly son of a bitch says you have to do." op.
cit.). No, what they liked (if I may quote one more time from
my Heinleiner philosopher) was forgetting about all the silly
sons of bitches and doing what they damn well pleased.
This is a hazardous way of life in a totally urbanized
society, apt to land you in jail--where an embarrassing number
of Heinleiners did live. To live like that you need elbow room.
You need Texas, and I mean the real Texas, before the arrival
of the iron horse, before the Mexicans, before the Spaniards.
Hell, maybe before the Indians. You needed the Dark Continent,
the headwaters of the Amazon, the South Pole, the sound
barrier, Everest, the Seven Lost Cities. Wild places,
unexplored places, not good old stodgy old Luna. You needed
elbow room and adventure.
A lot of Heinleiners had lived in disneys, some still did
as at least a better alternative to the anthill cities. But it
didn't take long to discover what toy frontiers they actually
were. The asteroid belt and the outer planets had high
concentrations of these crotchety malcontents, too, but it had
been a long time since either place had been a real challenge
to humanity. A lot of ship's captains were Heinleiners, a lot
of solitary miners. None of them were happy-possibly that type
of person can never be happy-but at least they were away from
the masses of humanity and less likely to get into trouble if
offered an intolerable insult--like bad breath, or
inappropriate laughter.
That's unfair. While there were quite a number of
antisocial hotheads among them, most had learned to socialize
with the group, swallow the unpleasantness of daily life, put
up with the thousand small things we each endure every day.
It's called civilization. It's making your needs, your dreams,
subservient to the greater good, and we all do it. Some of us
do it so well we forget we ever had dreams of adventure. The
Heinleiners did it badly; they still remembered. They still
dreamed.
Those dreams and five cents will get you a cup of coffee
anywhere in Luna. The Heinleiners realized that, until Mister
Smith came along and made them think fairy tales can come true,
if you wish upon a star.
I followed Smith out of the farm, where he'd left his
children and Libby hard at work cleaning out the kewpies'
house. We were in one of the long corridors of the R.A.
Heinlein, some of which, like this one, were coated with the
silvery null-field. I was about to go after him when I
remembered Winston. I stuck my head back into the room, snagged
his helmet, and whistled, and he came lumbering out from
beneath the tables. He was licking his chops and I thought I
saw traces of blood around his mouth.
"Have you been eating horses again?" I asked him. He
merely gazed up and licked his nose. He knew he wasn't supposed
to get up on the tables, but there were always some horselets
that had foolishly jumped off and he felt they were fair game.
I didn't know what the kids thought of his hunting, since I
didn't know if they were aware of it; I hadn't told them. But I
know Winston was getting a taste for horsemeat.
I'd thought I'd have to hurry to catch up with Smith, but
when I looked up I saw he'd paused a little way down the
corridor and was waiting for me.
"So you're still around, eh?" he said. Yessir, my
reputation in the old R.A.H. couldn't have been higher.
"I guess it's because I just love children."
He laughed at that. I'd only met him three times before
and not talked to him very long on any of those occasions, but
he was one of those people good at sizing others up on short
acquaintance. Most of us think we are, but he was.
"I know they're not easy to love," he said. "I probably
wouldn't love them so much if they were." It was a very
Heinleinerish thing to say; these folks cherish perversity, you
understand.
"You're saying only a father could love 'em?"
"Or a mother."
"That's what I'm counting on," I said, and patted my
belly.
"You'll either love him quick, or drown him." We walked on
for a while without saying anything. Every once in a while one
of the null-field safety locks would vanish in front of us and
re-appear behind us. All automatic, and all happening only for
those with null-suits installed.
These people didn't engineer anything any better than they
had to, and the reason was simply that they had this marvelous
back-up system. It's going to be revolutionary, I tell you.
"I get the feeling you don't approve," he said, at last.
"Of what? Your kids? Hey, I was just--"
"Of what they do."
"Well, Winston sure does. I think he's eaten half their
stock."
I was thinking fast. I wanted to learn more from this man,
and the way to do that is not by running down his children and
his way of life. But one of the things I knew about him was
that he didn't like liars, was good at detecting them, and,
though a career in reporting had made me a world-class liar, I
wasn't sure I could get one by him. And I wasn't sure I wanted
to. I had hoped I'd put a lot of that behind me. So instead of
answering his question, I said something else, a technique
familiar to any journalist or politician.
And it seemed to have worked. He just grunted, and reached
down to pet Winston's ugly mug. Once more the hound came
through for me, not taking off the hand at the wrist. Still
digesting the horselet, probably.
#
We came to a door marked MAIN DRIVE ROOM, and he held it
open for me. You could have driven a golf ball into the room
and never hit a wall, and you could have driven a medium-size
rover race in it. Whether you could drive a spaceship the size
of the Heinlein was very much an open question. But in front of
me were the signs that someone was trying.
Most of the cavernous room was filled with structures
whose precise description I must leave to your imagination,
since the drive room of the Heinlein is still a closely-guarded
secret and certainly will be until long after they get the damn
thing to work. I will say this: whatever you imagine will
surely be far off the mark. It is unexpected, and startling,
like opening the hood of a rover and finding it's powered by a
thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts, or by the
moral power of virginity. And this: though I could hardly
identify anything as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical
mess, it still had the look of Heinleiner engineering, wherein
nothing is ever any better than it has to be. Maybe if they get
time to move beyond prototypes they'll get more elegant and
more careful, but in the meantime it's "Don't bend that wrench.
Get a bigger hammer." Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled with
bubblegum and bobby pins.
And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to
launch the hulk of the old Robert A. Heinlein into interstellar
space. You heard it here first. They were not, however,
planning to do it with an endless stream of nuclear cherry
bombs pooting out the tailpipe. Just what principles were
envisioned is still proprietary information, but I can say it
was a variant technology of the mathematics that produced the
null-field. I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful
of others know what that technology is.
Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to a team of
very large swans, and leave it at that.
"As you can see," Smith was saying as we walked down a
long and fairly rickety flight of metal stairs, "they've just
about frabjulated the primary phase of the osmosifractionating
de-hoodooer. And those guys ratattating the willy-nilly say
they ought to have it whistling Dixie in three days' time."
No secrecy involved here. I'd have written exactly what he
said, if I had any hope of remembering it, and the meaning
would have been the same: nothing. Smith never seemed to mind
if his audience was coming into the clubhouse two or three
holes behind him; he rattled off his own private jargon without
regard to whether or not it was being monitored. Sometimes I
thought it just helped him to think out loud. Sometimes I
thought he was showing off. Probably a little of both.
But I can't get away from the subject of the interstellar
drive without mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put
it in layman's terms. It stuck in my mind, possibly because
Smith had a way of making "layman" rhyme with "retarded."
"There are basically three states of matter," he had said.
"I call them wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity. The universe
of our experience is almost totally composed of dogmatic
matter, just as it's mostly what we call 'matter,' as opposed
to 'anti-matter'--though dogmatic matter includes both types.
Every once in a great while we get evidence of some perverse
matter. It's when you move into the realm of the wacky that you
have to watch out."
"I've known that all my life," I had told him.
"Ah, but the possibilities!" he had said, waving his hand
at the drive taking shape in the engine room of the Heinlein.
As he did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a
director does it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a habit
of waving his hand grandly when coming upon his mighty works.
Hell, he had a right.
"See what can come from the backwaters of science?" he
said. "Physics is a closed book, they all said. Put your
talents to work in something useful."
"'They jeered me at the Sorbonne!'" I suggested.
"They threw eggs when I presented my paper at the
Institute! Eggs!" He leered at me, drywashing his hands,
hunching his shoulders. "The fools! Let them see who has the
last laugh, ha ha HA!" He dropped the mad scientist impression
and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a cowboy gentling
a horse. Smith could have been insufferably stuffy except for
the fact he'd seen almost as many old movies as I had.
"No kidding, Hildy, the fools are going to be impressed
when they see what I've wrung out of the tired old husk of
physics."
"You'll get no argument from me," I said. "What happened
to physics, anyway? Why was it neglected for so long?"
"Diminishing returns. They spent an insane amount of money
on the GSA about a century ago, and when they turned it on they
found out they'd hubbled it up. The repairs would have--"
"The GSA?"
"Global Supercooled Accelerator. You can still find a lot
of it, running right around the Lunar equator."
I remembered it then; I'd followed it part of the way when
I ran in the Equatorial Rover Race.
"They built big instruments out in space, too. They
learned a lot about the universe, cosmologically and
sub-atomically, but very little of it had any practical use. It
got to where learning any more, in the directions physics kept
going, would cost trillions just to tool up. If you did it,
when you were done you'd have learned what went on in the first
billionth of a nanosecond of creation, and then you'd just
naturally want to know what happened in the first thousandth of
a nano-nano-second, only that'd cost ten times as much. People
got tired of paying those kind of bills to answer questions
even less reality-based than theology, and the smart people
noticed that for peanuts you could find out practical things in
biological science."
"So all the original research now is in biology," I said.
"Hah!" he shouted. "There is no original research, unless
you count some of the things the Central Computer does. Oh, a
few people here and there." He waved his hand, dismissing them.
"It's all engineering now. Take well-known principles and find
a way to make a better toothpaste." His eyes lit up. "That's a
perfect example. A few months back, I woke up and my mouth
tasted like peppermint. I looked into it, turns out it's a new
sort of 'bot. Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let it
loose on an unsuspecting public. It's in the water, Hildy! Can
you imagine?"
"It's a crying shame," I muttered, trying not to meet his
eye.
"Well, I got the antidote. Maybe my mouth does taste
rotten in the morning, but at least it tastes like me. Reminds
me who I am." Which I guess is a perfect example of both the
perversity of Heinleiners and the cultural passivity they
rebelled against. And the big reason I liked them, in spite of
their best efforts to thwart my affection.
"It's all handed down from on high now," he went on.
"We're like savages at an altar, waiting for miracles to be
handed down. We don't envision the miracles we might work, if
we set ourselves to it."
"Like little people, eight inches high and smart as lab
rats."
He winced, the first indication I'd had of a moral
uncertainty. Thank god for that; I like people to have
opinions, but people with no doubts scare me.
"You want me to defend that? Okay. I've brought those
children up to think for themselves, and to question authority.
It's not unlimited; me or somebody who knows more about it has
to approve their projects, and we keep an eye on them. We've
created a place where they can be free to make their own rules,
but they're children, they have to follow our rules, and we set
as few as possible. Do you realize this is the only place in
Luna where the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can't look?
Not even the police can come in here."
"I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either."
"I didn't think so. I thought you might have a story to
tell about that, or I'd never have let you in. You'll tell it
when you're ready. Do you know why Libby makes little people?"
"I didn't ask him."
"He might have told you; might not have. It's his solution
to the same problem I'm working on: interstellar travel. His
reasoning is, a smaller human being requires less oxygen, less
food, a smaller spacecraft. If we were all eight inches high,
we could go to Alpha Centauri in a fuel drum."
"That's crazy."
"Not crazy. Ridiculous, probably. Unattainable, almost
certainly. Those kewpies live about three years, and I doubt
they'll ever have much of a brain. But it's an innovative
solution to a problem the rest of Luna isn't even working on.
Why do you think Gretel goes running across the surface in her
birthday suit?"
"You weren't supposed to know about that."
"I've forbidden it. It's dangerous, Hildy, but I know
Gretel, and I know she's still trying it. And the reason is,
she hopes she'll eventually adapt herself to living in vacuum
without any artificial aids."
I thought of the fish stranded on the beach, flopping
around, probably doomed but still flopping.
"That's not how evolution works," I said.
"You know it and I know it. Tell it to Gretel. She's a
child, and a smart one, but with childish stubbornness. She'll
give it up sooner or later. But I can guarantee she'll try
something else."
"I hope it's less hare-brained."
"From your lips to God's ears. Sometimes she . . ." He
rubbed his face, and made a dismissing gesture with his hand.
"The kewpies make me uneasy, I'll admit that. You can't help
wondering how human they are, and if they are human, whether or
not they have any rights, or should have any rights."
"It's experimentation on humans, Michael," I said. "We
have some pretty strong laws on that subject."
"What we have are taboos. We do plenty of experimentation
on human genes. What we're forbidden to do is create new
humans."
"You don't think that's a good idea?"
"It's never that simple. What I object to are blanket bans
on anything. I've done a lot of research into this--I was
against it at first, just like you seem to be. You want to hear
it?"
"I'd be fascinated."
We'd come to an area of the engine room I thought of as
his office, or laboratory. It was the place I'd spent most of
what little time I'd had with him. He liked to put his feet up
on a wooden desk as old as Walter's but a lot more battered,
look off into infinity, and expound. So far, his innate caution
had always stopped him from getting too deeply into anything
when I was around, but I sensed he needed an outsider's
opinion. The lab? Think of it as full of bubbling retorts and
sizzling Jacob's ladders. Omit the hulking body strapped to the
table; that was his children's domain. The place didn't look
anything like that, but it's the proper stage set,
metaphorically.
"It's a question of where to draw the line," he said.
"Lines have to be drawn; even I realize that. But the line is
constantly moving. In a progressing society, the line should be
moving. Did you know it was once illegal to terminate a
pregnancy?"
"I'd heard of it. Seems very strange."
"They'd decided that a fetus was a human. Later, we
changed our minds. Society used to keep dead people hooked up
to something called 'lifesupport,' sometimes for twenty or
thirty years. You couldn't turn the machines off."
"Their brains were dead, you mean."
"They were dead, Hildy, by our standards. Corpses with
blood being pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as hell. You
wonder what they were thinking of, what their reasoning could
possibly have been. When people knew they were dying, when they
knew that death was going to be horribly painful, it was
thought wrong of them to kill themselves."
I looked away; I don't know if he caught it, but I think
he did.
"A doctor couldn't help them die; he'd get prosecuted for
murder. Sometimes they even withheld the drugs that would be
best at stopping the pain. Any drug that dulled the senses, or
heightened them, or altered the consciousness in any way was
viewed as sinful--except for the two most physically harmful
drugs: alcohol and nicotine. Something relative harmless, like
heroin, was completely illegal, because it was addictive, as if
alcohol was not. No one had the right to determine what he put
into his own body, they had no medical bill of rights.
Barbaric, agreed?"
"No argument."
"I've studied their rationalizations. They make very
little sense now. The reasons for the bans on human
experimentation make a lot of sense. The potential for abuse is
enormous. All genetic research involves hazards. So rules were
evolved . . . and then set in stone. No one has taken a look at
them in over two hundred years. My position is, it's time to
think it over again."
"And what did you come up with?"
"Hell, Hildy, we've barely started. A lot of the
prohibitions on genetic research were made at a time when
something released into the environment could theoretically
have disastrous results. But we've got room to experiment now,
and fool-proof means of isolation. Do the work on an asteroid,
and if something goes wrong, quarantine it, then shove it into
the sun."
I had no problem with that, and told him so.
"But what about the human experiments?"
"They make me queasy, just like you. But that's because we
were raised to view them as evil. My children have no such
inhibitions. I've told them all their lives that they should be
able to ask any question. And they should be able to do any
experiment, as long as they feel they have a reasonable idea of
its outcome. I help them with that part, me, and the other
parents."
I probably had a dubious expression on my face. It would
have made perfect sense, since I was feeling dubious.
"I'm way ahead of you," he said. "You're going to bring up
the old 'superman' argument."
I didn't dispute it.
"I think it's time that one was looked at again. They used
to call it 'playing God.' That term has fallen out of favor,
but it's still there. If we're going to set out to improve
humans genetically, to build a new human, who's going to make
the choices? Well, I can tell you who's making them now, and
I'll bet you know the answer, too."
It didn't take a lot of thought. "The CC?" I ventured.
"Come on," he said, getting up from his desk. "I'm going
to show you something."
#
I had a hard time keeping up with him--would have at the
best of times, but my current state of roly-polytude didn't
help things. He was one of those straight-ahead people, the
sort who, when they've decided where they're going, can't be
easily diverted. All I could do was waddle along in his wake.
Eventually we reached the base of the ship, which I knew
mainly because we left square corridors and right-angle turns
for the haphazard twists of the Great Dump. Not long after that
we descended some stairs and were in a tunnel bored through
solid rock. I still had no idea how far this network extended.
I gathered it was possible to walk all the way to King City
without ever visiting the surface.
We came to an abandoned, dimly-lit tube station. Or it had
been abandoned at one time, but the Heinleiners had restored
it: pushed the trash on the platform to one side, hung a few
lights, homey touches like that. Floating a fraction above a
gleaming silver rail was a sixperson Maglev car of antique
design. It had no doors, peeling paint, and the sign on the
side still read MALL 5-9 SHUTTLE. With stops at all the major
ghost warrens along the way, no doubt: this baby was old.
Random cushions had been spread on the rippedout seats and
we sat on those and Smith pulled on a cord which rang a little
tinkling bell, and the car began to glide down the rail.
"The whole idea of building a superman has acquired a lot
of negative baggage over the years," he said, picking up as if
the intervening walk had never happened. As if he needed
another annoying characteristic. "The German Fascists are the
first ones I'm aware of who seriously proposed it, as part of
an obsolete and foolish racial scheme."
"I've read about them," I said.
"It's nice to talk to someone who knows a little history.
Then you'll know that by the time it became possible to tinker
with genes, a lot more objections had been raised. Many of them
were valid. Some still are."
"Is that something you'd like to see?" I asked. "A
superman?"
"It's the word that throws you off. I don't know if a
'superman' is possible, or desirable. I think an altered human
is an idea worth looking into. When you consider that these
carcasses we're walking around in were evolved to thrive in an
environment we've been evicted from . . ."
Maybe he said more, but I missed it, because just about
then we had a head-on collision with another tram going in the
opposite direction. Obviously, we didn't really. Obviously, it
was just the reflection of the headlights of our own car as we
approached another of those ubiquitous null-fields. And even
more obviously, you weren't there to stand up and shout like a
fool and see your life pass before your eyes, and I'll bet you
would have, too. Or maybe I'm just slow to catch on.
Smith didn't think so. He was very apologetic when he
realized what had happened, and took time to tell me about
another little surprise in store, which happened a minute later
when a nullfield vanished in front of us and, with a little
gust of wind, we entered vacuum and began to really pick up
speed. The tunnel walls blurred in the beam of our headlights,
details snatched away before they could be perceived.
He had more to say on the subject of human engineering. I
didn't get it all because I was concentrating on not breathing,
still learning to wear a null-suit. But I got his main points.
He thought that while Gretel's method was wrong, her goal
was worthwhile, and I couldn't see what was wrong with it,
either. Basically, we either manufacture our environment or
adapt to it. Both have hazards, but it did seem high time we at
least start discussing the second alternative.
Take weightlessness, for example. Most people who spent a
lot of time in free-fall had some body adaptations made, but it
was all surgical. Human legs are too strong; push too hard and
you can fracture your skull. It's handy to have hands instead
of feet at the ends of your ankles. Feet are as useless as
vermiform appendices in freefall. It's also useful to be able
to bend and twist more than the human body normally can.
But the question before the court was this: should humans
be bred to space travel? Should the useful characteristics be
put into the genes, so children are born with hands instead of
feet?
Maybe so, maybe not. We weren't talking radical change
here, or anything that couldn't be done just as easily
surgically, without raising the troublesome issues of more than
one species of human being.
But what about a human adapted to vacuum? I've no idea how
to go about it, but it probably could be done. What would he
look like? Would he feel superior to us? Would we be his
brother, or his cousin, or what? one thing was sure: it would
be a lot easier to do it genetically than with the knife. And I
feel certain the end result would not look very human.
I chewed that one over quite a bit in the coming days,
examining my feelings. I found that most of them came from
prejudice, as Smith had said. I'd been raised to think it was
wrong. But I found myself agreeing that it was at least time to
think it over again.
As long as I didn't have to clean up after kewpies.
#
The train car pulled into a siding at another abandoned
station where somebody had scrawled the word "Minamata" over
whatever had been there before. I had no idea how far we'd
come, or in what direction.
"This is still part of the Delambre dump, more or less,"
Smith said, so at least I had a general idea. We started down a
long, filthy corridor, Smith's flashlight beam bobbing from
wall to wall as we walked. In a movie, rats and other vermin
would have been scuttling out of our way, but a rat would have
needed a null-suit to survive this place; mine was still on,
and I was still thinking about breathing.
"There's really no reason why the stuff in here shouldn't
be spread out over the surface like the rest of the garbage,"
he went on. "I think it's mainly psychological reasons it's all
pumped in here. This is a nasty place. If it's toxic or
radioactive or biochemically hazardous, this is where it
comes."
We reached an air lock of the kind that used to be
standard when I was a child, and he motioned me inside. He
slapped a button, then gestured toward the air fitting on the
side of my chest.
"Turn that counter-clockwise," he said. "They only come on
automatically when there's a vacuum. There's gas where we're
going, but you don't want to breathe it."
The lock cycled and we stepped into Minamata.
The place had no name on the municipal charts of King
City, just Waste Repository #2. The Heinleiners had named it
after a place in Japan that had suffered the first modern-day
big environmental disaster, when industries had pumped mercury
compounds into a bay and produced a lot of twisted babies. So
sorry, mom. That's the breaks.
Minamata Luna was really just a very large, buried storage
tank. By large, I mean you could have parked four starships the
size of the Heinlein without scraping the fenders. Texas is a
lot bigger, but it doesn't feel like being a bug in a bottle
because you can't see the walls. Here you could, and they
curved upward and vanished into a noxious mist. The far end was
invisible.
Maybe there was some artificial light in there. I didn't
see any, but they were hardly necessary. The bottom third of
the horizontal cylinder was full of liquid, and it glowed. Red
here, green there . . . sometimes a ghastly blue. The makers of
horror films would have killed to get that blue.
We had entered at what seemed the axis of the cylinder,
which was rounded off at this end, like a pressure tank. A
ledge, three meters wide and with a railing, curved away from
us in each direction, but to the right was blocked off with a
warning sign. Looking past it, I could see the ledge had
crumbled away in several places. When I looked back Smith was
already moving away from me toward the left. I hurried to catch
up with him.
I never did quite catch him. Every time I got close my eye
was drawn by the luminescent sea off to my right, and a few
hundred meters down.
The thing about that sea . . . it moved.
At first I only saw the swirls of glowing color like an
oil film on water. I'd always thought colorful things were just
naturally pretty things, but Minamata taught me differently. At
first I couldn't explain my queasy reaction. None of the
colors, by themselves, seemed all that hideous (except for that
blue). Surely that same swirl of color, on a shirt or dress,
would be a gorgeous thing. Wouldn't it? I couldn't see why not.
I began walking more slowly, trailing my hand along the top of
the rail, trying to figure why it all disturbed me so.
The side of the cylinder went straight down from the edge
of the ledge we walked on, then gradually curved inward until
it met the fluorescent sea. Waves were rolling sluggishly to
crash against the metal sides of the tank.
Waves, Hildy? What could be causing waves in this foul
soup?
Maybe some agitating mechanism, I thought, though I
couldn't see any use for one. Then I saw a part of the sea hump
itself up, ten or twenty meters high--it was hard to judge the
scale from my vantage point. Then I saw strange shapes on the
borderline between sea and shore, things that moved among the
mineral efflorescences that grew like arthritic fingers along
that metal beach. Then I saw something that, I thought, raised
its head on a spavined neck and looked at me, reached out a
hungry hand . . .
Of course, it was a long way off. I could have been wrong.
Smith took my arm without a word and urged me along. I
didn't look at the Minamata Sea again.
#
We came to a series of circular mirrors standing against
the vertical wall to our left. Each had a number over it. I
realized that tunnels had been bored into the walls here and
each had been sealed off with a null-field barrier.
Smith stopped before the eighth, pointed at it, and
stepped in. I followed him, and found myself in a short tunnel,
maybe twenty meters long, five meters high. Halfway down the
tunnel were metal bars. Beyond that point a level floor had
been built to support a cot, chair, desk, and toilet, all
looking as if they'd been ordered from some cheap mail-order
house. On our side of the bars was a portable air plant, which
seemed to be doing its job, as my suit had vanished as I
stepped through the field. Spare oxygen cylinders and crates of
food were stacked against the wall.
Sitting on the cot and watching a slash-boxing show on the
television, was Andrew MacDonald. He glanced up from the screen
as we entered, but he did not rise.
Possibly this was a new point of etiquette. Should the
dead rise for the living? Be sure to ask at your next seance.
"Hello, Andrew," Smith said. "I've brought someone to see
you."
"Yes?" Andrew said, with no great interest. His eyes
turned to me, lingered for a moment. There was no spark of
recognition. Worse than that, there was none of that
penetrating quality I'd seen on the day he . . . hell, how else
can I say it? On the day he died. For a moment I though this
was just some guy who looked a lot like Andrew. I guess I was
half right.
"Sorry," he said, and shrugged. "Don't know her."
"I'm not surprised," Smith said. He looked at me. I had
the feeling I was supposed to say something perceptive,
intelligent. Maybe I was supposed to have figured it all out.
"What the fuck's going on here?" I said, which was a lot
better than "duuuuh," which was my first reaction, though
neither really qualifies as perceptive.
"Ask him," Andrew said. "He thinks I'm dangerous."
I'd started toward the bars but Smith put his hand on my
arm and shook his head.
"See what I mean?" the prisoner said.
"He is dangerous," Smith told me. "When he first came
here, he nearly killed a man. Would have, but we got to him in
time. Want to tell us about that, Andrew?"
He shrugged. "He stepped on my foot. It wasn't my fault."
"I've had enough of this," I said. "What the hell are you
people doing in here? I saw this man die, or his twin brother."
Smith was about to say something, but I'd finally gotten
Andrew interested. He stood and came to the bars, held on with
one hand while the other played idly with his genitals. You see
that sometimes, in old alkies or voluntary skitzys down in
Bedrock. It's a free planet, right? Nobody can stop them, but
people hurry by, like you don't stop and stare if someone is
vomiting, or picking his nose. I'd never seen an apparently
healthy man masturbating with such utter lack of modesty. What
had they done to him?
"How did I do?" he asked me, tugging and squeezing. "All
they'll tell me is I died in the ring. You were there? Were you
close up? Who was it that got me? Damn, the least they could do
is give me a tape."
"Are you really Andrew MacDonald?"
"That's my name, ask me again and I'll tell you the same."
"It's him," Smith said, quietly. "That's what I've finally
decided, after thinking it over a lot."
"That's not what you said last time," the man said. "You
said I was only part of old Andy. The mean part. I don't think
I'm mean." He lost interest in his penis and stretched a hand
through the bars, gesturing. "Toss me a can of that beef stew,
boss man. I've had my eye on that for days."
"You've got plenty of food in there."
"Yeah, but I want stew."
Smith got a plastic can and lobbed it toward the cell; the
man snagged it and tore off the top. He took a big handful and
crammed it into his mouth, chewing noisily. There was a stove,
a table, and utensils plainly in sight behind him, but he
didn't seem to care.
"I didn't see you fight," I said, at last.
"Shit. You know, I'd like you if you weren't so fat. You
wanna fuck?" A gravy-covered hand went to his groin once again.
"Let's get brown, honey."
I'm going to ignore the rest of his antics. I still
remember them vividly, and still find them disturbing. I'd once
wanted to make love to this man. I'd once found him quite
attractive.
"I was there when they carried you back from the ring," I
said.
"The good old squared circle. The sweet science. All there
is, really, all there is. What's your name, fatty?"
"Hildy. You were mortally injured and you refused
treatment."
"What a jerk I must have been. Live to fight another day,
huh?"
"I'd always thought so. And I thought what you were doing,
risking your life, was stupid. I thought it was unnecessary,
too, but you told me your reasons, and I respect them."
"A jerk," he repeated.
"I guess, when it came time for you to live up to your
bargain, I thought you were stupid, too. But I was impressed. I
was moved. I can't say I thought you were doing the right
thing, but your determination was awesome."
"You're a jerk, too."
"I know."
He continued shoving stew into his face, looking at me
with no real spark of human feeling I could detect. I turned to
Smith.
"It's time you told me what's going on here. What's been
done to this man? If this is an example of what you were
talking about on the way . . ."
"It is."
"Then I don't want anything to do with it. In fact, damn
it, I know I promised not to talk about you and your people,
but--"
"Hang on a minute, Hildy," Smith said. "This is an example
of human experimentation, but we didn't do it."
"The CC," I said, after a long pause. Who else?
"There's something seriously wrong with the CC, Hildy. I
don't know what it is, but I know the results. This man is one.
He's a cloned body, grown from Andrew MacDonald's corpse, or
from a tissue sample. When he's in a mood to talk, he's said
things we've checked against his records, and it seems he
really does have MacDonald's memories. Up to a point. He
remembers things up to about three or four years ago. We
haven't been able to test him thoroughly, but what tests we've
been able to run bear out what we've seen from other specimens
like him. He thinks he is MacDonald."
"Damn right I am," the prisoner chimed in.
"For all practical purposes, he's right. But he doesn't
remember the Kansas Collapse. He doesn't remember Silvio's
assassination. I was certain he wouldn't remember you, and he
didn't. What's happened is that his memories were recorded in
some way, and played back into this clone body."
I thought it over. Smith gave me time to.
"It doesn't work," I said, finally. "There's no way this
thing could have turned into the man I met in only three or
four years. This guy is like a big, spoiled child."
"Big is right, babe," the man said, with the gesture you'd
expect.
"I didn't say the copy was perfect," Smith said. "The
memories seem to be extremely good. But some things didn't
record. He has no social inhibitions whatsoever. No sense of
guilt or shame. He really did try to kill a man who
accidentally stepped on his foot, and he never saw what was so
wrong about it. He's incredibly dangerous, because he's the
best fighter in Luna; that's why we have him here, in the best
prison we can devise. We, who don't even believe in prisons."
I could see it would be a tough one to get out of. If you
got past the null-field, there were the toxic gases of
Minamata. Beyond that, vacuum.
It seemed that "MacDonald" was the most recent of a long
line of abandoned experiments. Smith wouldn't tell me how the
Heinleiners had come to have him, except to say that, in his
case, he'd most likely been sent.
"Early on in this program, we had a pipeline into the
secret lab where this work was going on. The first attempts
were pathetic. We had people who just sat there and drooled,
others who tore at themselves with their teeth. But the CC got
better with practice. Some could pass as normal human beings.
Some of them live with us. They're limited, but what can you
do? I think they're human.
"But lately, we've been getting surprise packages, like
Andrew here. We lock them up, interrogate them. Some of them
are harmless. Others . . . I don't think we can ever let them
free."
"I don't understand. I mean, I see this one could be
dangerous, but--"
"The CC wants in here."
"Into Minamata?"
"No, this is his place. You saw the water down there.
That's his work. He wants into the Heinleiner enclave. He wants
the null-field. He wants to know if I'm successful with the
stardrive. He wants to know other things. He found out about
our access to his forbidden experiments, and we started getting
people like Andrew. Walking time bombs, most of them. After a
few tragic incidents, we had to institute some security
precautions. Now we're careful about the dead people we let in
here."
It was not the first time an action by the CC had turned
my world upside-down. You live in a time and a place and you
think you know what's going on, but you don't. Maybe no one
ever did.
Smith had unloaded too many things on me too quickly. I'd
had some practice at that, with the CC playing games with my