Orbit 3 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Night

  “Hubert was at a loss. He fell back on a true and tried tactic. He said, ‘What have I done?’

  “ ‘Nothing. I’ve failedyou. Ever since you enlisted,’ she said, scratching, ‘I’ve made out our income tax. I work on it a little every week in the year.’ She scratched again. ‘But I’m still only on the seventy-third page. I’m lying here blind. And the returns are due on April 15.’

  “ ‘Let it go,’ Hubert cried. ‘I can afford the penalty.’

  “ ‘You’ve forgotten, Hubert. Oh!’ Lila refrained from scratching but the effort hurt. ‘Congress amended the penalty clause when you were overseas. It carries a jail sentence now. Optional with the IRS, but it is there.’

  “ ‘Don’t worry. I’ll make it out the way I used to.’

  “ ‘I’ll have to let you.’

  “He kissed her—a beautiful and reverential kiss. A smile curved her mouth. She murmured, ‘I think I can open my eye a little way.’

  * * * *

  “Hubert took a week’s leave without pay from his office. He worked nineteen hours out of the twenty-four. At noon on April 15 every complexity in the forms had had full attention. The return was checked. Double-checked. Lila bloomed like a rose. For the first time Hubert could knock off and think of himself for a moment. His right ear had an ache that had crept up on him while he worked the desk computer.

  “Lila was all sympathy. She gathered up the bills that proved their medical expenses were legitimately deductible. She filed these neatly with their financial records, with Hubert’s vouchers dealing with his expense account, with the canceled monthly checks to her indigent cousin who was classed as .7002 of a dependent. Then she tried what her sister Helen had used under curiously similar conditions. The trouble switched to his left ear.

  “She tried remedies used by her friends. Finally a combination of honey, wine vinegar, and ground-up cardamon revived Hubert—somewhat. When Lila added hot olive oil to the mixture, his pain subsided to occasional twinges. When he took tranquilizers every hour on the hour around the clock, he became again his healthy, heroic self.

  “But a mind like Hubert’s had not been idle. He made an old-fashioned door-to-door survey of the block with an old-fashioned pen and notebook. Everything was written since he could hardly hear. Then he tabulated results. He enlarged his field, tabulated again and came up with a startling hypothesis. Symptoms like his and Lila’s were subject to seasonal maxima—intensest in the first half of April. An income tax connection was the inescapable conclusion. Everyone was allergic to the income tax!

  “He brought his study to the attention of doctors and scientists. He expected ridicule. But everywhere Hubert commanded respect. He postulated that the condition of half the population of the United States went from bad to worse during most of the year. Exceptions were sections of the country where it was customary for husbands and wives to work together on their tax forms. Symptoms in these places were less severe but more widespread. The Army, he found, was seriously concerned for fear not enough continuously healthy men could be found to put a force of any size in the field, if it should ever again be necessary.

  “Hubert knew opportunity when he met it. With top personnel, civil and military, of the Defense Department supporting him, not to mention the AMA, he felt he could spearhead a movement to abolish Income Tax returns. Since he and Lila shared each other’s every thought, he hurried home to tell his wife.

  “ ‘Hubert,’ she cried, exalted, ‘run for President with this as your platform.’

  * * * *

  “Hubert realized he was working for the whole nation. He enjoyed every minute of his campaign, for his heart was wide enough to stretch from sea to shining sea. His slogan was simple, ‘Down with ITA (Income Tax Allergy).’ His campaign speech was short: ‘Supercomputers check our returns, now let them prepare returns.’ He swept the sixty-seven states. The Thirtieth Constitutional Amendment, enacted by House and Senate with the speed of light and ratified in weeks, put Hubert in office on November 10. That let him begin immediately on the Great Repeal.

  “In a few short weeks, the land blossomed with carefree minds in sound bodies. Every man, woman, and tax consultant with old records dumped statistics hugger-mugger into the hands of computer-tenders who fed them into giant machines. IBM trebled in size. Government demand for new computers was so overwhelming, it affected the entire economy. No one remembered anything like the computer boom except a few sesquicentenarians who recalled the heyday of the major automobile companies.

  “The one cloudlet on the horizon was the occasional malfunctioning of a machine at some critical point. Not till half the output of the machines showed errors due to internal faults did anyone take notice. Soon horrible blotches appeared on answer tapes though nothing had been wrong when the paper was put in. Bonded connections gave way—and again investigation showed nothing amiss originally. Circuits got fouled up. Snafus multiplied. Manufacturers even went back to old models with a couple of hundred components long ago made obsolete by a single chip. But the condition failed to improve.

  “ ‘Do you think,’ the President asked the First Lady, ‘that our machines are grow—’ He cleared his throat. ‘They couldn’t be developing allergies?’

  “ ‘Oh no,’ she said in alarm.

  “Four days after that the first machine in industrial history had its rustproof metal apparently rust out. One of those things that couldn’t be. But was.

  “The President addressed a special joint session of Congress. ‘If our supersensitive, highly educated machines are suffering to the destruction point,’ he told the legislators, we must revise our policy. Men and women, even occasional children, will have to work on their income tax blanks.’

  “One lone and unidentified voice interrupted, ‘Mr. President, don’t be absurd.’

  “ ‘Of course I hope such a drastic measure will be unnecessary. I hardly believe in the possibility of a suffering machine. But if such a thing can be, if we are putting more on our machines than machines can bear, if we are treating intelligent entities as chattels, I hereby solemnly swear by the Constitution of the United States that I shall declare our computers wards of the Government. I shall do all in my power to protect them. I shall call on my country to protect them. I shall call for sacrifice.’

  “The Senate tried to stifle its laughter. Members of the House openly hissed.

  “No change came over the President’s dedicated face.

  “The Speaker of the House said thickly, ‘Has anybody ever considered the welfare of a machine, Mr. President? Why should you?’

  “ ‘Because my vision has grown to match my office,’ Hubert said simply.

  * * * *

  “The Machine Test was arranged on the South Balcony of the White House. A nation watched on its omniviz screens. It saw a megatruckload of data brought on and stacked beside the shrouded computer in the center. It saw the President and his wife come, escorted by double the usual number of security guards. Occasionally the screens of the omnivizes showed the crowds outside, the marchers, the placards with wisecracks, the placards with threats.

  “Gradually a tense seriousness gripped the watching and sovereign state. Perhaps it was the President’s expression of high courage and deep gravity. Perhaps it was the slight trembling of Lila’s hands. They appeared for just a moment, monumental in their enlargement but not their repose. Everyone felt that once again the President was making history.

  “Yet it was all very simple. The hidden computer had been equipped with a voice box. Inventors said it could not talk and express independent opinions. A few fanatics, including the President, disagreed.

  “Then, dramatically, the Head of the FBI and the nation’s top-ranking electronics expert threw back the computer’s plastic hood. The machine gleamed with a beauty of its own. Data were read into it. The country, to its horror, saw the clean metal of the mechanical calculator start to spot with irregular patches: crimson, pea-green, mauve, chrome yellow. Their tints and sizes varie
d before the eyes of the audience.

  “ ‘I feel awful,’ the computer moaned almost in a child’s voice. ‘Everything inside me itches. I want to scratch.’

  “For a full half minute the entire U.S.A. held its breath. In the silence, four plaintive words came from the squawk box. ‘How do you scratch?’

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen, that you have seen the site where the White House once stood, we take you to our next stop, the Lincoln Memorial.”

  <>

  * * * *

  Leonardo da Vinci defined science as “knowledge of all things possible in the future, of the present, and of the past.” This admirable definition is broad enough to include what Arthur Koestler calls “the reality of the third order”—the reality which contradicts the conceptual world but underlies it and gives it meaning, as the conceptual world gives meaning to “the absurd patchiness of the sensory world.”

  Bearing this in mind, you will readily see that the following story is not a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, as it may appear, but science fiction all the way through; and that certain people and events in it, which do not belong to the first or second order of reality, are nevertheless frighteningly real.

  * * * *

  The Planners

  by Kate Wilhelm

  Rae stopped before the one-way glass, stooped and peered at the gibbon infant in the cage. Darin watched her bitterly. She straightened after a moment, hands in smock pockets, face innocent of any expression what-so-goddam-ever, and continued to saunter toward him through the aisle between the cages.

  “You still think it is cruel, and worthless?”

  “Do you, Dr. Darin?”

  “Why do you always do that? Answer my question with one of your own?”

  “Does it infuriate you?”

  He shrugged and turned away. His lab coat was on the chair where he had tossed it. He pulled it on over his sky-blue sport shirt.

  “How is the Driscoll boy?” Rae asked.

  He stiffened, then relaxed again. Still not facing her, he said, “Same as last week, last year. Same as he’ll be until he dies.”

  The hall door opened and a very large, very homely face appeared. Stu Evers looked past Darin, down the aisle. “You alone? Thought I heard voices.”

  “Talking to myself,” Darin said. “The committee ready yet?”

  “Just about. Dr. Jacobsen is stalling with his nose-throat spray routine, as usual.” He hesitated a moment, glancing again down the row of cages, then at Darin.

  “Wouldn’t you think a guy allergic to monkeys would find some other fine of research?”

  Darin looked, but Rae was gone. What had it been this time: the Driscoll boy, the trend of the project itself? He wondered if she had a life of her own when she was away. “I’ll be out at the compound,” he said. He passed Stu in the doorway and headed toward the livid greenery of Florida forests.

  The cacophony hit him at the door. There were four hundred sixty-nine monkeys on the thirty-six acres of wooded ground the research department was using. Each monkey was screeching, howling, singing, cursing, or otherwise making its presence known. Darin grunted and headed toward the compound. The Happiest Monkeys in the World, a newspaper article had called them. Singing Monkeys, a subhead announced, monkeys given smartness pills, the most enterprising paper had proclaimed. Cruelty Charged, added another in subdued, sorrowful tones.

  The compound was three acres of carefully planned and maintained wilderness, completely enclosed with thirty-foot-high, smooth plastic walls. A transparent dome covered the area. There were one-way windows at intervals along the wall. A small group stood before one of the windows: the committee.

  Darin stopped and gazed over the interior of the compound through one of the windows. He saw Heloise and Skitter contentedly picking nonexistent fleas from one another. Adam was munching on a banana; Homer was lying on his back idly touching his feet to his nose. A couple of the chimps were at the water fountain, not drinking, merely pressing the pedal and watching the fountain, now and then immersing a head or hand in the bowl of cold water. Dr. Jacobsen appeared and Darin joined the group.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Bellbottom,” Darin said politely. “Did you know your skirt has fallen off?” He turned from her to Major Dormouse. “Ah, Major, and how many of the enemy have you swatted to death today with your pretty little yellow rag?” He smiled pleasantly at a pimply young man with a camera. “Major, you’ve brought a professional peeping tom. More stories in the paper, with pictures this time?” The pimply young man shifted his position, fidgeted with the camera. The major was fiery; Mrs. Bellbottom was on her knees peering under a bush, looking for her skirt. Darin blinked. None of them had on any clothing. He turned toward the window. The chimps were drawing up a table, laden with tea things, silver, china, tiny finger sandwiches. The chimps were all wearing flowered shirts and dresses. Hortense had on a ridiculous flop-brimmed sun hat of pale green straw. Darin leaned against the fence to control his laughter.

  “Soluble ribonucleic acid,” Dr. Jacobsen was saying when Darin recovered, “sRNA for short. So from the gross beginnings when entire worms were trained and fed to other worms that seemed to benefit from the original training, we have come to these more refined methods. We now extract the sRNA molecule from the trained animals and feed it, the sRNA molecules in solution, to untrained specimens and observe the results.”

  The young man was snapping pictures as Jacobsen talked. Mrs. Whoosis was making notes, her mouth a lip-less line, the sun hat tinging her skin with green. The sun on her patterned red and yellow dress made it appear to jiggle, giving her fleshy hips a constant rippling motion. Darin watched, fascinated. She was about sixty.

  “. . . my colleague, who proposed this line of experimentation, Dr. Darin,” Jacobsen said finally, and Darin bowed slightly. He wondered what Jacobsen had said about him, decided to wait for any questions before he said anything.

  “Dr. Darin, is it true that you also extract this substance from people?”

  “Every time you scratch yourself, you lose this substance,” Darin said. “Every time you lose a drop of blood, you lose it. It is in every cell of your body. Sometimes we take a sample of human blood for study, yes.”

  “And inject it into those animals?”

  “Sometimes we do that,” Darin said. He waited for the next, the inevitable question, wondering how he would answer it. Jacobsen had briefed them on what to answer, but he couldn’t remember what Jacobsen had said. The question didn’t come. Mrs. Whoosis stepped forward, staring at the window.

  Darin turned his attention to her; she averted her eyes, quickly fixed her stare again on the chimps in the compound. “Yes, Mrs. uh . . . Ma’am?” Darin prompted her. She didn’t look at him.

  “Why? What is the purpose of all this?” she asked. Her voice sounded strangled. The pimpled young man was inching toward the next window.

  “Well,” Darin said, “our theory is simple. We believe that learning ability can be improved drastically in nearly every species. The learning curve is the normal, expected bell-shaped curve, with a few at one end who have the ability to learn quite rapidly, with the majority in the center who learn at an average rate, and a few at the other end who learn quite slowly. With our experiments we are able to increase the ability of those in the broad middle, as well as those in the deficient end of the curve so that their learning abilities match those of the fastest learners of any given group. . . .”

  No one was listening to him. It didn’t matter. They would be given the press release he had prepared for them, written in simple language, no polysyllables, no complicated sentences. They were all watching the chimps through the windows. He said, “So we gabbled the gazooka three times wretchedly until the spirit of camping fired the girls.” One of the committee members glanced at him. “Whether intravenously or orally, it seems to be equally effective,” Darin said, and the perspiring man turned again to the window. “Injections every morning . . . rejections, planne
d diet, planned parenthood, planned plans planning plans.” Jacobsen eyed him suspiciously. Darin stopped talking and lighted a cigarette. The woman with the unquiet hips turned from the window, her face very red. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. “This sun is too hot out here. May we see the inside laboratories now?”

  Darin turned them over to Stu Evers inside the building. He walked back slowly to the compound. There was a grin on his lips when he spotted Adam on the far side, swaggering triumphantly, paying no attention to Hortense who was rocking back and forth on her haunches, looking very dazed. Darin saluted Adam, then, whistling, returned to his office. Mrs. Driscoll was due with Sonny at1 p.m.

  Sonny Driscoll was fourteen. He was five feet nine inches, weighed one hundred sixty pounds. His male nurse was six feet two inches and weighed two hundred twenty-seven pounds. Sonny had broken his mother’s arm when he was twelve; he had broken his father’s arm and leg when he was thirteen. So far the male nurse was intact. Every morning Mrs. Driscoll lovingly washed and dressed her baby, fed him, walked him in the yard, spoke happily to him of plans for the coming months, or sang nursery songs to him. He never seemed to see her. The male nurse, Johnny, was never farther than three feet from his charge when he was on duty.