“Hamsters.
“Now I’ve heard everything,” Jensen said, again aloud but to himself. “Hamsters? Those little furry things? How did he come up with hamsters?”
“That’s the beauty part,” Bailey said. “My cousin, Floyd, breeds hamsters and guinea pigs commercially. Labs use them as experimental animals. You viruses can, too.”
“But can you supply them in sufficient quantity?”
“I’m sure of it. We’ve got the hamster ranches. I can even dope them for you.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“To make it easier for you to feed on them.”
“No need,” Ching said. “Hamsters don’t present us viruses with much of a problem, and we enjoy a bit of a chase. Makes for health-enhancing activity.”
“Thank God this conversation is being recorded,” Jensen said. “I’m going to play the tape later and laugh. Can’t laugh now, though. This is too serious.”
“OK, it’s a deal,” Ching said. “When do we see the hamsters?”
“I’ll have to phone the ranch,” Bailey said. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Sounds good. Catch you later.”
Bailey said to Jensen, “OK, you can turn off the DNA computer now.”
Jensen turned a switch.
“And reach me the phone, will you?”
“You’re going to call your cousin at the hamster ranch?”
“Later. First I want to tell my wife that her PH.D. is practically assured.”
But when connected with Evelyn a few moments later, he had no chance to tell his news. First he had to listen to her news that someone or something called Hamster United had delivered a message to the Center. Hamster United said that they had received word that humans planned to turn the West Nile virus against them. This was unacceptable. Any attempt to infect hamsters would call forth reprisals, not from the hamsters, who were pacific enough, but from their collateral cousins and allies.
Bailey said, “Word gets around fast. What language was the message in?”
“English, of course. Did you think we lived in Cuba? What’s going on with you, anyhow?”
“I’ll tell you when you get home,” Bailey said. “We’ve both got a lot of catching up to do.”
“The misstatement of the century,” Jensen muttered under his breath. But he wasn’t entirely unprepared when Bailey said to him, “I wonder if there are any animal groups without collateral cousins or allies.”
“Lungfish, maybe,” Jenkins said.
“Yes, but how are mosquitoes supposed to infect lungfish?”
“Good question,” Jensen said. “Let’s take it up tomorrow.”
Because it was already after six and Jensen had a date that night.
Read Part Two in the January, 2003 issue of BIGnews.
We left our story of the West Nile virus with the threat from Hamster United, the hamster consciousness that had learned of the deal to substitute hamsters for humans as West Nile’s new victims.
The hamsters needed to show us at once that their threat was real. Since the hamsters had collateral links with dogs, they appealed to the canine universal consciousness, reminding the dogs that they had been having it easy for too long, living off humans. It was time they did something for the species.
The dog consciousness agreed, and started sending down orders to individual dogs. Seeing eye dogs started running their people into cars and phone poles. Sniffer dogs used by the ATF and police departments, begin to sniff out only thyme. Cuddlesome home pets begin to attack when addressed as “Cuddley-po,” or “Dweat Big Dog.”
›t took a special agreement by the Universal Congress of Group-Consciousnesses to permit the Hamsters United to install the necessary reactions to produce these effects. It was objected that this would give the dogs intelligence. But this was quickly refuted by a video of Dignity puppies, as they came to be called, chasing their tails in the same silly way puppies always have. This convinced the council that a modicum of intelligence need not be fatal to levity of spirit.
Bailey had a hell of a time convincing his wife of the truth and urgency of all that he was telling her. The only way they could imagine convincing her superiors was by making a training film. They called it “Group Consciousnesses Unleashed! The Next big Threat to Mankind.”
It took time and money, but they got it done with assistance from a famous director who liked what he called “weird projects.” The Signal Corps gave the film their stamp; of approval, and this, coupled with the increase in dog attacks, convinced the government powers.
The need for action became more apparent when the President was convinced that, unless something was changed soon, they would have to order all household pets destroyed.
An order like that would be unpopular and would lose him the next election. But, as the virulence and frequency of dog-owner attacks increased, it became apparent that to let this go on would also lose him the election.
A search was mounted to find a new host for the West Nile virus and the mosquitoes who carried it. The lungfish, as a possible host, was examined and found wanting: too much trouble to program the lungfish to swim close to the surface, or to equip the virus-carrying mosquitoes to adapt to a life spent at least part of the time under water. The problems of arranging so that the mosquito’s proboscis would not become too soggy were difficult, enough.
An attempt was made to get the mosquitoes to infect each other. This proved a failure: there seems to be some kind of difficulty in producing death by auto-intoxication among the unintelligent.
Finally American scientists found a suitable substitute host animal. It was a small, blind mole—the leaf-nosed bat mole—living in its native Guatemala on corn husks, and bothering no one. It was not even a true mole. It had fewer links with other species than any other creature found. It was even believed that this mole might be Martian in origin, that bits of its DNA traveled from Mars to Earth on meteorites or by some means not yet determined, and that the mole set itself up in blind independence from all the other species of Earth—a creature without an enemy, subsistent only on corn husks which existed in Guatemala in great quantity—a crime of self-sufficient hubris which would be paid for now.
The attack of the viruses was diverted from dogs to leaf nosed bat moles. Teams of scientists, working day and night, found ways to get the moles to reproduce at an unprecedented rate. This broke existing laws against cloning, but they were superceded in the face of the national emergency. Moles were delivered to all parts of the Earth. This was expensive, since several pharmaceutical companies had developed special drugs to enable the moles to live in a variety of climates, from sub-freezing cold to post-boiling hot. The Pharmaceuticals had to be paid their royalties, and mole drugs did not come cheap.
But this turned out to be no solution after all. The universal consciousness of the leaf-nosed bat moles appealed to the Congress of Group-Consciousnesses. The Council, working with what they possessed instead of Intelligence, declared the current state of things intolerable. Unless Earth, in the entity of the United States, immediately ceased and desisted this activity, a universal attack on Humanity by all Consciousnesses would be declared.
Word of this reached the President, causing him to cancel several golf games. Intent on re-election though he was, the possibility of the destruction of mankind worried him. It is reported that he put down his putter and said, “You know, reelection isn’t worth it if it’s going to cost the lives of everybody on the planet. There is a time when the Higher Morality must prevail.”
Millions of high school and college children studied his words in new courses on The Higher Morality. The opposition pointed out that to let mankind perish would be worse than the deeds of all the dictators the President opposed.
“What can we do?” the President asked the Consciousnesses Council.
The Council took a few days to consider the question. Meanwhile, attacks of rabid pugs and frenzied Chihuahuas upon postal workers demanding federal prot
ection went on. The only way to protect the postal workers was to send them out accompanied by at least one guard, armed with an automatic weapon. Given the number of postal workers in the country, this would have been cost-prohibitive. But the President was between a rock and a hard place. Weapons manufacturers tooled up for a big year.
jhe President was in a mood to listen when the Council of Universal Consciousnesses delivered its advice.
They said, “You humans have done a remarkable job with the development of your individual intelligence, and the use of them to improve your individual lots. But an unfortunate bias seems to have accompanied your thinking. That is the notion that the purpose of human life is to enhance said life at the expense of every other form of life. You have taken the position that all creatures large or small are subservient to you, and are there to serve you, to be used, and, if proven unuseful, to be destroyed. This cannot be tolerated any longer. The best we can suggest is that you cease your efforts to destroy the West Nile virus and accept that you must suffer from this disease, and some of you must die, to prevent the worse effects attendant upon destroying or deviating West Nile.”
This was of course an unacceptable alternative for mankind, and their self-appointed representative, the president, ,wrestled with it. A decision had to be made soon.
The Congress of Group Consciousnesses now threatened to unleash other doomsday scenarios on the Earth. For a beginning, and to show that they were indeed serious, they declared that all ice cream was henceforth poisonous, and fatal to humans within three days of ingestion. They even put into place a hasty scenario as to how this could happen scientifically—for they knew that unless the scientists were convinced, they would get nowhere. Their autonomous killer spore theory made good sense, its only weakness being the spontaneous generation of the spores for no scientific reason at all. But a rationalization was found as to how this would be possible, and the scientists, showing an unusual degree of good sense, urged the president to close with the offer.
“It’s only a stopgap,” the more bellicose among them pointed out, in a secret protocol. “We’ll be working on this in secret, biding our time, figuring out how to enforce our knowledge that we humans are the chief ornament of everything in the Universe, that everything else is there to serve us, and that we can kill whatever we please in fulfilling this mandate from our own own innermost nature.”
The President gave the order, though he had grave doubts about it. It seemed to him that he was acting like some dictators in the past he had been opposed to: pretending compliance but secretly putting together his weapons and planning for a great breakout.
His advisors convinced him that this was not the case. He was only doing what any other intelligent, dedicated human would do under similar circumstances.
The president agreed and the order was given. The president won reelection on the platform, “He saved us from the Evil Council,” as the Congress on Universal Consciousnesses was known on Earth.
And to make it all better, there was a brief economic upturn when the president tooled up for war against the Central Asian Confederacy, which had been found guilty of promulgating the doctrine of Communism under the guise of a religious message from the poet Kabir, and of producing and stockpiling atomic weapons for no clear purpose but with clear evil intent.
Americans, as opposed to evil as they always have been, rallied to this war. The rest of the world reluctantly went along. And as a capper and final resolution, the president declared all West Nile Virus sufferers to be Heroes of the Fight For Human Freedom, to be awarded medals, to be given free hospital care and cost of living benefits.
This move was applauded. But Congress proved lax in voting the necessary funds . . .
More important, a top movie entertainer went on tv at her own expense and recited Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall, ending with the stirring lines, “And the gentle Earth shall slumber, wrapped in Universal Law.”
THE FOREST ON THE ASTEROID
Now that we’ve got a bibliography of our first fifty years on our Website, it shouldn’t be too hard to confirm the theory that we have published more fiction by writers named Robert than by storytellers of any other name. It’s just a hunch, but when you add up the many contributions by Bobs (such as Messrs. Reed, Leman, Young, Abernathy, Silverberg, Aickman, and Heinlein), they probably outnumber all the Toms, Lisas, Sonyas, and even the Isaacs in our pages. Of course there’s also this guy Sheckley, who has graced our pages with a slew of sly and funny stories over the years. His latest takes us to outer space, which remains one of the few places where a person can go to find some solitude.
NOW THAT YOU HAVE COME all this great distance to my little world, I beg of you, ladies and gentlemen, sit down and relax. After all, what is the rush? The ship will wait for you, believe me. You have paid well for this chance to meet me, and the ship will be there when you want to leave. But what if it isn’t? Does it really matter? Are you really in such a rush to get to the next place? What lies at the end of any of these hectic enterprises of the human spirit but a chance to spend some time in this gray, cool, soundless place of mine? When a man is not going anywhere, on a journey that has no end, he can afford to take his time!
Now, not for the first time, I regret the lack of any busy-work to keep my fingers occupied. How clever the old wives were, to have a bit of sewing always beside them. Penelope must have given herself many pleasant hours, spinning the great web that occupied her days. And was she regretful when she unraveled it at night? I don’t think so. Spinning the web by day and undoing it at night, it was all busy-work.
Forgive me. My thoughts sometimes take a melancholy turn as I sit here in the dusty old house, in my writing room, looking out over the unweeded garden, with the white light coming out of a white sky, all of it a tabula rasa resembling my mind. But not much in the way of pictures form there. For lack of stimulation, my mind remains as blank as the translucent sky that looms over this place.
There on the wall are Arthur’s guns, his fishing rods, and several steel-jawed traps. He used to enjoy these sports, back in what seems another age, when there was energy to burn and time to burn it in. I can even remember, so dimly as to make it more a matter of faith than of recollection, a time when I was eager to get up each morning, when I could hardly wait to finish breakfast and rush out to see what marvels the new day held. That was before I had exhausted the possibilities of this little world. When all the world seemed fresh and promising. Before time and grief took their toll. Back in a day and age that has passed unconsidered, a time when love and adventure seemed possible.
None of that is quite true, of course. But sometimes I like to imagine I was born here, rather than inheriting the place after Arthur’s unfortunate demise.
But what can I do about it? Nothing seems possible now except what was done and done to death in all the yesterdays that I have lived here.
I hope you find all this more than a little charming, and curiously quaint. I live alone on a tiny asteroid. You think, what joy! Here’s a man who has it all. A tiny world he can walk around in less than a day! An entire world to itself, an asteroid with its own atmosphere, with its ancient house, placed here god knows how or by whom, with its unkempt garden, its self-replenishing larder, its silent robot servants who do what is required and speak not, its forest that covers the entire surface of this little world. You say to yourself, this place is perfect, except that one might want a woman to share it with. But then you think, it would have to be a perfect relationship or it would become intolerable.
You think again how perfect for one with a hermit turn of mind, one who is not attracted to bars and shows and movies and rude entertainment.
But, you wonder, is it possible there is nothing to do here? Perhaps this man telling the story is lazy. Surely, somewhere in the forest in which this house resides, there is something, some mystery, a recondite matter worthy of investigation.
I assure you, gentlemen, there is none. Or if there is one, a single
unique feature, be assured that I, and you, too, if you lived in my place, avoid it like the plague. I embrace the usualness of my daily round instead of stumbling once again over that thing which was not planned, not put here by the architects and builders.
Yet such a thing did happen here. Such a circumstance did occur. But not to me. I did not live here then. This asteroid world belonged to my friend and benefactor, Arthur.
I see that I have piqued your curiosity. But I assure you, I had no intention of doing so. I was but making a point, not proposing an adventure.
Anyhow, it was Arthur’s asteroid, you see, and at the time of this story I was just a guy on Earth, in e-mail correspondence with him. Arthur and I had been schoolmates at Black Sycamore University in Vermont. Arthur had soon made the discoveries that made his name famous, and brought him in a lot of money. He didn’t care about money until he conceived the idea of living on his own planetoid.
It was not a plan that would appeal to everyone. Most of us like a bit of company every now and then. Not everyone! Not Arthur. Arthur used to envy the anchorites, those early fanatics of Christianity who went out to waste places in the desert, and there lived alone and unloved, rapt in their religious contemplation.
Arthur was not a religious person, but he did have some things he wanted to think about, and wanted that thinking to be pleasurable and without interruption.
Arthur wanted to live in a state of rapture. He didn’t think rapture was reserved only for the religious—like a supernatural present from their hypothetic God. No, rapture was for anyone with the guts to do what they had to do to get it.
Thus, after he had patented his unique formula for actualizing an imaginary Rhiemann set—or something like that—I’m not much on science, myself—or perhaps it was his invention of the self-replenishing electrical circuit. After he had done these things, and began reaping the profit, he bought himself an asteroid. It was not too hard to find one for sale. The biggest difficulty, he told me in his e-mails, was finding the correct agency to pay the money to.
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