By Any Other Name

by Spider Robinson

  Then I saw the first image in line. Me. A black man just doesn’t bruise spectacularly as a rule, but there was something colorful over my right eye that would do until a bruise came along. I was filthy, I needed a shave, and the long slash running from my left eye to my upper lip looked angry. My black turtleneck was torn in three places that I could see, dirty where it wasn’t torn, and bloodstained where it wasn’t dirty. It might be a long time before I felt any better than I did right now.

  Then I looked down at what was underneath the gauze I’d just peeled off, saw the black streaks on the chocolate brown of my arm, and the temptation to set a spell vanished like an overheated Musky.

  I looked closer, and began whistling “Good Morning Heartache” through my teeth very softly. I had no more neosulfa, damned little bandage for that matter, and it looked like I should save what analgesics I had to smoke on the way home. The best thing I could do for myself was to finish up in the city and get gone, find a Healer before my arm rotted.

  And all at once that was fine with me. I remembered the two sacred duties that had brought me to New York: one to my father and my people, and one to myself. I had nearly died proving to my satisfaction that the latter was impossible; the other would keep me no great long time. New York and I were, as Bierce would say, incompossible.

  One way or another, it would all be over soon.

  I carefully rebandaged the gangrenous arm, hoisted the rucksack and went back outside, popping a foodtab and a very small dosage of speed as I walked. There’s no point in bringing real food to New York—you can’t taste it anyway and it masses so damned much.

  The sun was perceptibly lower in the sky—the day was in catabolism. I shifted my shoulders to settle the pack and continued on up the street, my eyes straining to decipher faded signs.

  Two blocks up I found a shop that had specialized in psychedelia. A ’69 Ford shared the display window with several smashed hookahs and a narghile or two. I paused there, sorely tempted again. A load of pipes and papers would be worth a good bit at home; Techno and Agro alike would pay dearly for fine-tooled smoking goods—more evidence that, as Dad is always saying, technology’s usefulness has outlasted it.

  But that reminded me of my mission again, and I shook my head savagely to drive away the daydreaming that sought to delay me. I was—what was the phrase Dad had used at my arming ceremony?—“The Hand of Man Incarnate,” that was it, the product of two years personal combat training and eighteen years of racial hatred. After I finished the job I could rummage around in crumbling deathtraps for hash pipes and roach clips—my last detour had nearly killed me, miles to the north.

  But I’d had to try. I was only two at the time of the Exodus, too young to retain much but a confused impression of universal terror, of random horror and awful revulsion everywhere. But I remember one incident very clearly. I remember my brother Israfel, all of eight years old, kneeling down in the middle of 116th Street and methodically smashing his head against the pavement. Long after Izzy’s eight-year-old brains had splashed the concrete, his little body continued to slam the shattered skull down again and again in a literally mindless spasm of escape. I saw this over my mother’s shoulder as she ran, screaming her fear, though the chaotically twisting nightmare that for as long as she could remember had been only a quietly throbbing nightmare; as she ran through Harlem.

  Once when I was twelve I watched an Agro slaughter a chicken, and when the headless carcass got up and ran about I heard my mother’s scream again. It was coming from my throat. Dad tells me I was unconscious for four days and woke up screaming.

  Even here, even downtown, where the bones sprawled everywhere were those of strangers, I was wound up tight enough to burst, and ancient reflex fought with modern wisdom as I felt the irrational impulse to lift my head and cast about for an enemy’s scent. I had failed to recover Izzy’s small bones; Grey Brother, who had always lived in Harlem, now ruled it, and sharp indeed were his teeth. I had managed to hold off the chittering pack with incendiaries until I reached the Hudson, and they would not cross the bridge to pursue me. And so I lived—at least until gangrene got me.

  And the only thing between me and Fresh Start was Carlson. I saw again in my mind’s eye the familiar Carlson Poster, the first thing my father ran off when he got access to a mimeograph machine: a remarkably detailed sketch of thin, academic features surrounded by a mass of graying hair, with the legend, “WANTED: FOR THE MURDER OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION—WENDELL MORGAN CARLSON. An unlimited lifetime supply of hot-shot shells will be given to anyone bringing the head to The Council of Fresh Start.”

  No one ever took Dad up on it—at least, no one who survived to collect. And so it looked like it was up to me to settle the score for a shattered era and a planetful of corpses. The speed was taking hold now; I felt an exalted sense of destiny and a fever to be about it. I was the duly chosen instrument for mankind’s revenge, and that reckoning was long overdue.

  I unclipped one of the remaining incendiary grenades from my belt—it comforted me to hold that much raw power in my hand—and kept on walking uptown, feeling infinitely more than twenty years old. And as I stalked my prey through concrete canyons and brownstone foothills, I found myself thinking of his crime, of the twisted motives that had produced this barren jungle and countless hundreds like it. I remembered my father’s eyewitness account of Carlson’s actions, repeated so many times during my youth that I could almost recite it verbatim, heard again the Genesis of the world I knew from its first historian—my father, Jacob Stone. Yes, that Stone, the one man Carlson never expected to survive, to shout across a smashed planet the name of its unknown assassin. Jacob Stone, who first cried the name that became a curse, a blasphemy and a scream of rage in the throats of all humankind. Jacob Stone, who named our betrayer: Wendell Morgan Carlson!

  And as I reviewed that grim story, I kept my hand near the rifle with which I hoped to write its happy ending…

  CHAPTER TWO

  Excerpts from I WORKED WITH CARLSON,

  by Jacob Stone, Ph.D., authorized version:

  Fresh Start Press 1986 (Mimeo).

  …The sense of smell is a curious phenomenon, oddly resistant to measurement or rigorous analysis. Each life form on Earth appears to have as much of it as they need to survive, plus a little. The natural human sense of smell, for instance, was always more efficient than most people realized, so much so that in the 1880s the delightfully eccentric Sir Francis Galton had actually succeeded, by associating numbers with certain scents, in training himself to add and subtract by smell, apparently just for the intellectual exercise.

  But through a sort of neurological suppressor circuit of which next to nothing is known, most people contrived to ignore all but the most pleasing or disturbing of the messages their noses brought them, perhaps by way of reaction to a changing world in which a finely-tuned olfactory apparatus became a nuisance rather than a survival aid. The level of sensitivity which a wolf requires to find food would be a hindrance to a civilized human packed into a city of his fellows.

  By 1983, Professor Wendell Morgan Carlson had raised olfactometry to the level of a precise science. In the course of testing the theories of Beck and Miles, Carlson almost absently-mindedly perfected the classic “blast-injection” technique of measuring differential sensitivity in olfaction, without regard for the subjective impressions of the test subject. This not only refined his data, but also enabled him to work with life forms other than human, a singular advantage when one considers how much of the human brain is terra incognita.

  His first subsequent experiments indicated that the average wolf utilized his sense of smell on the order of a thousand times more efficiently than a human. Carlson perceived that wolves lived in a world of scents, as rich and intricate as our human worlds of sight and word. To his surprise, however, he discovered that the potential sensitivity of the human olfactory apparatus far outstripped that of any known species.

  This intrigued him…

 
; …Wendell Morgan Carlson, the greatest biochemist Columbia—and perhaps the world—had ever seen, was living proof of the truism that a genius can be a damned fool outside his own specialty.

  Genius he unquestionably was; it was not serendipity that brought him the Nobel Prize for isolating a cure for the entire spectrum of virus infections called “the common cold.” Rather it was the sort of inspired accident that comes only to those brilliant enough to perceive it, fanatic seekers like Pasteur.

  But Pasteur was a boor and a braggart, who frittered away valuable time in childish feuds with men unfit to wash out his test tubes. Genius is seldom a good character reference.

  Carlson was a left-wing radical.

  Worse, he was the type of radical who dreams of romantic exploits in a celluloid underground: grim-eyed rebels planting homemade bombs, assassinating the bloated oppressors in their very strongholds and (although he certainly knew what hydrogen sulfide was) escaping through the city sewers.

  It never occurred to him that it takes a very special kind of man to be a guerilla. He was convinced that the moral indignation he had acquired at Washington in ’71 (during his undergraduate days) would see him through hardships and privation, and he would have been horrified if someone had pointed out to him that Che Guevara seldom had access to toilet paper. Never having experienced hunger, he thought it a glamorous state. He lived a compartmentalized life, and his wild talent for biochemistry had the thickest walls: only within them was he capable of logic or true intuition. He had spent a disastrous adolescent year in a seminary, enlisted as a “storm trooper of Mary,” and had come out of it apostate but still saddled with a relentless need to Serve A Cause—and it chanced that the cry in 1982 was, once again, “Revolution Now!”

  He left the cloistered halls of Columbia in July of that year, and applied to the smaller branch—the so-called “Action-Faction”—of the New Weathermen for a position as assassin. Fortunately he was taken for crazy and thrown out. The African Liberation Front was somewhat less discerning—they broke his leg in three places. In the Emergency Room of Jacobi Hospital Carlson came to the conclusion that the trouble with Serving A Cause was that it involved associating with unperceptive and dangerously unpredictable people. What he needed was a One-Man Cause.

  And then, at the age of thirty-two, his emotions noticed his intellect for the first time.

  When the two parts of him came together, they achieved critical mass—and that was a sad day for the world. I myself bear part of the blame for that coming-together—unwittingly I provided one of the final sparks, put forward the idea which sent Carlson on the most dangerous intuitive leap of his life. My own feelings of guilt for this will plague me to my dying day—and yet it might have been anyone. Or no one.

  Fresh from a three-year stint doing biowar research for the Defense Department, I was a very minor colleague of Carlson’s, but quickly found myself becoming a close friend. Frankly I was flattered that a man of his stature would speak to me, and I suspect Carlson was overjoyed to find a black man who would treat him as an equal.

  But for reasons which are very difficult to explain to anyone who did not live through that period—and which need no explanation for those who did—I was reluctant to discuss the ALF with a honky, however “enlightened.” And so when I went to visit Carlson in Jacobi Hospital and the conversation turned to the self-defeating nature of uncontrollable rage, I attempted to distract the patient with a hasty change of subject.

  “The Movement’s turning rancid, Jake,” Carlson had just muttered, and an excellent digression occurred to me.

  “Wendell,” I said heedlessly, “do you realize that you personally are in a position to make this a better world?”

  His eyes lit up. “How’s that?”

  “You are probably the world’s greatest authority on olfactometry and the human olfactory apparatus, among other things—right?”

  “As far as there is one, I suppose so. What of it?” He shifted uneasily within his traction gear: wearing his radical persona, he was made uncomfortable by reference to his scientist-mode. He felt it had little to do with the Realities of Life—like nightsticks and grand juries.

  “Has it ever occurred to you,” I persisted to my everlasting regret, “that nearly all the undesirable by-products of twentieth-century living, Technological Man’s most unlovable aspects, quite literally stink? The whole world’s going rancid, Wendell, not just the Movement. Automobiles, factory pollution, crowded cities—Wendell, why couldn’t you develop a selective suppressant for the sense of smell—controlled anosmia? Oh, I know a snort of formaldehyde will do the trick, and having your adenoids removed sometimes works. But a man oughtn’t to have to give up the smell of frying bacon just to survive in New York. And you know we’re reaching that pass—in the past few years it hasn’t been necessary to leave the city and then return to be aware of how evil it smells. The natural suppressor-mechanism in the brain—whatever it is—has gone about as far as it can go. Why don’t you devise a small-spectrum filter to aid it? It would be welcomed by sanitation workers, engineers—why, it would be a godsend to the man on the street!”

  Carlson was mildly interested. Such an anosmic filter would be both a mordant political statement and a genuine boon to Mankind. He had been vaguely pleased by the success of his cold-cure, and I believe he sincerely wished to make the world a happier place—however perverted his methods tended to be. We discussed the idea at some length, and I left.

  Had Carlson not been bored silly in the hospital, he would never have rented a television set. It was extremely unfortunate that the Late Show (ed. note: a television show of the period) on that particular evening featured the film version of Alistair MacLean’s The Satan Bug. Watching this absurd production, Carlson was intellectually repelled by the notion that a virus could be isolated so hellishly virulent that “a teaspoon of it would sweep the earth of life in a few days.”

  But it gave him a wild idea—a fancy, a fantasy, and a tasty one.

  He checked with me by phone the next day, very casually, and I assured him from my experiences with advances in virus-vectoring that MacLean had not been whistling in the dark. In fact, I said, modern so-called “bacterial warfare” made the Satan Bug look like child’s play. Carlson thanked me and changed the subject.

  On his release from the hospital, he came to my office and asked me to work with him for a full year, to the exclusion of all else, on a project whose nature he was reluctant to discuss. “Why do you need me?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Because,” he finally told me, “you know how to make a Satan Bug. I intend to make a God Bug. And you could help me.”

  “Eh?”

  “Listen, Jake,” he said with that delightful informality of his. “I’ve licked the common cold—and there are still herds of people with the sniffles. All I could think of to do with the cure was to turn it over to the pharmaceuticals people, and I did all I could to make sure they didn’t milk it, but there are still suffering folks who can’t afford the damned stuff. Well, there’s no need for that. Jake, a cold will kill someone sufficiently weakened by hunger—I can’t help the hunger, but I could eliminate colds from the planet in forty-eight hours…with your help.”

  “A benevolent virus-vector…” I was flabbergasted, as much by the notion of decommercializing medicine as by the specific nostrum involved.

  “It’d be a lot of work,” Carlson went on. “In its present form my stuff isn’t compatible with such a delivery system—I simply wasn’t thinking along those lines. But I’ll bet it could be made so, with your help. Jake, I haven’t got time to learn your field—throw in with me. Those pharmaceuticals goniffs have made me rich enough to pay you twice what Columbia does, and we’re both due for sabbatical anyway. What do you say?”

  I thought it over, but not enough. The notion of collaborating with a Nobel Prize winner was simply too tempting. “All right, Wendell.”

  We set up operations in Carlson’s laboratory-home on Long Island,
he in the basement and myself on the main floor. There we worked like men possessed for the better part of a year, cherishing private dreams and slaughtering guinea pigs by the tens of thousands. Carlson was a stern if somewhat slapdash taskmaster, and as our work progressed he began “looking over my shoulder,” learning my field while discouraging inquiries about his own progress. I assumed that he simply knew his field too well to converse intelligently about it with anyone but himself. And yet he absorbed all my own expertise with fluid rapidity, until eventually it seemed that he knew as much about virology as I did myself. One day he disappeared with no explanation, and returned a week or two later with what seemed to me a more nasal voice.

  And near the end of the year there came a day when he called me on the telephone. I was spending the weekend, as always, with my wife and two sons in Harlem. Christmas was approaching, and Barbara and I were discussing the relative merits of plastic and natural trees when the phone rang. I was not at all surprised to hear Carlson’s reedy voice, so reminiscent of an oboe lately—the only wonder was that he had called during conventional waking hours.

  “Jake,” he began without preamble, “I haven’t the time or inclination to argue, so shut up and listen, right? Right. I advise and strongly urge you to take your family and leave New York at once—steal a car if you have to, or hijack a Greyhound (ed. note: a public transportation conveyance) for all of me, but be at least twenty miles away by midnight.”

  “But…”

  “…head north if you want my advice, and for God’s sake stay away from all cities, towns, and people in any number. If you possibly can, get upwind of all nearby industry, and bring along all the formaldehyde you can—a gun too, if you own one. Goodbye, my friend, and remember I do this for the greater good of mankind. I don’t know if you’ll understand that, but I hope so.”