That made me feel a little better but not much. I went and dragged out the sled. Mister Pugh put up quite a argument about that.
“I ain’t rid on a sled since I was so high,” he said. “Why should I git on one now? This is some trick. I won’t do it.”
Junior tried to bite me.
“Now Mister Pugh,” I said, “you gotta cooperate or we won’t get nowheres. I know what I’m doing. Just step up here and set down. Junior, there’s room for you in front. That’s fine.”
IF he hadn’t seen how worried I was I don’t think he’d a-done it. But I couldn’t hide how I was feeling.
“Where’s your Grandpaw?” he asked, uneasy. “You’re not going to do this whole trick by yourself, are you? Young ignorant feller like you? I don’t like it. Suppose you made a mistake?”
“We give our word,” I reminded him. “Now just kindly shut up and let me concentrate. Or maybe you don’t want the Pugh line to last forever?”
“That was the promise,” he says, settling himself down. “You gotta do it. Lemme know when you commence.”
“All right, Saunk,” Grandpaw says from the attic, right brisk. “Now you watch. Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two. Look sharp. Focus your eyes down and pick out a gene. Any gene.”
Bad as I felt about the whole thing I couldn’t help being interested. When Grandpaw does a thing he does it up brown. Genes are mighty slippery little critters, spindle-shaped and awful teensy. They’re partners with some skinny guys called chromosomes, and the two of ’em show up everywhere you look, once you’ve got your eyes focused just right.
“A good dose of ultraviolet ought to do the trick,” Grandpaw muttered. “Saunk, you’re closer.”
I said, “All right, Grandpaw,” and sort of twiddled the light as it sifted down through the pines above the Pughs. Ultraviolet’s the color at the other end of the line, where the colors stop having names for most people.
Grandpaw said, “Thanks, son. Hold it for a minute.”
The genes began to twiddle right in time with the light waves. Junior said, “Paw, something’s tickling me.”
Ed Pugh said, “Shut up.”
Grandpaw was muttering to himself. I’m pretty sure he stole the words from that perfesser we keep in the bottle, but you can’t tell, with Grandpaw. Maybe he was the first person to make ’em up in the beginning.
“The euchromatin,” he kept muttering. “That ought to fix it. Ultraviolet gives us hereditary mutation and the euchromatin contains the genes that transmit heredity. Now that other stuff’s heterochromatin and that produces evolutionary change of the cataclysmic variety.
“Very good, very good. We can always use a new species. Hum-m-m. About six bursts of heterochromatinic activity ought to do it.” He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Ich am eldre and ek magti! Okay, Saunk, take it away.”
I LET the ultraviolet go back where it came from.
“The year one, Grandpaw?” I asked, very doubtful.
“That’s close enough,” he said. “Wite thou the way?”
“Oh yes, Grandpaw,” I said. And I bent over and give them the necessary push.
The last thing I heard was Mister Pugh’s howl.
“What’s that you’re doin’?” he hollered at me. “What’s the idea? Look out, there, young Hogben or—what’s this? Where we goin’? Young Saunk, I warn you, if this is some trick I’ll set Junior on you! I’ll send you such a hex as even you-u. . . .
Then the howl got real thin and small and far away until it wasn’t no more than the noise a mosquito makes. After that it was mighty quiet in the dooryard.
I stood there all braced, ready to stop myself from turning into a Pugh if I could. Them little genes is tricky fellers.
I knowed Grandpaw had made a turrible mistake.
The minute them Pughs hit the year one and started to bounce back through time toward now I knowed what would happen.
I ain’t sure how long ago the year one was, but there was plenty of time for the Pughs to populate the whole planet. I put two fingers against my nose to keep my eyes from banging each other when they started to rush together in the middle like all us Pughs’ eyes do—“You ain’t a Pugh yet, son,” Grandpaw said, chuckling. “Kin ye see ’em?”
“No,” I said. “What’s happening?”
“The sled’s starting to siow down,” he said. “Now it’s stopped. Yep, it’s the year one, all right. Look at all them men and women flockin’ outa the caves to greet their new company! My, my, what great big shoulders the men have got. Bigger even than Paw Pugh’s.
“An’ ugh—just look at the women! I declare, little Junior’s positively handsome alongside them folks! He won’t have no trouble finding a wife when the time comes.”
“But Grandpaw, that’s turrible!” I said.
“Don’t sass your elders, Saunk,” Grandpaw chuckled. “Looka there now. Junior’s just pulled a hex. Another little child fell over flat on his ugly face. Now the little child’s mother is knocking Junior endwise. Now his pappy’s sailing into Paw Pugh. Look at that fight! Just look at it! Oh, I guess the Pugh family’s well took care of, Saunk.”
“But what about our family?” I said, almost wailing.
“Don’t you worry,” Grandpaw said. “Time’ll take care of that. Wait a minute, let me watch. Hm-m. A generation don’t take long when you know how to look. My, my, what ugly little critters the ten baby Pughs was! They was just like their pappy and their grandpappy.
“I wish Lily Lou Mutz could see her grandbabies. I shorely do. Well, now, ain’t that cute? Every one of them babies growed up in a flash, seems like, and each of ’em has got ten babies of their own. I like to see my promises working out, Saunk. I said I’d do this, and I done it.”
I just moaned.
“All right,” Grandpaw said. “Let’s jump ahead a couple of centuries. Yep, still there and spreading like crazy. Family likeness is still strong, too. Hum-m. Another thousand years and—well, I declare! If it ain’t Ancient Greece! Hasn’t changed a bit, neither. What do you know, Saunk!” He cackled right out, tickled pink.
“Remember what I said once about Lily Lou putting me in mind of an old friend of mine named Gorgon? No wonder! Perfectly natural. You ought to see Lily Lou’s great-great-great-grandbabies! No, on second thought, it’s lucky you can’t. Well, well, this is shore interesting.”
HE was still about three minutes. Then I heard him laugh.
“Bang,” he said. “First heterochromatinic burst. Now the changes start.”
“What changes, Grandpaw?” I asked, feeling pretty miserable.
“The changes,” he said, “that show your old Grandpaw ain’t such a fool as you thought. I know what I’m doing. They go fast, once they start. Look there now, that’s the second change. Look at them little genes mutate!”
“You mean,” I said, “I ain’t gonna turn into a Pugh after all? But Grandpaw, I thought we’d promised the Pughs their line wouldn’t die out.”
“I’m keeping my promise,” Grandpaw said, dignified. “The genes will carry the Pugh likeness right on to the toot of the judgment horn, just like I said. And the hex power goes right along with it.”
Then he laughed.
“You better brace yourself, Saunk,” he said. “When Paw Pugh went sailing off into the year one seems like he uttered a hex threat, didn’t he? Well, he wasn’t fooling. It’s a-coming at you right now.”
“Oh, Lordy!” I said. “There’ll be a million of ’em by the time they get here! Grandpaw! What’ll I do?”
“Just brace yourself,” Grandpaw said, real unsympathetic. “A million, you think? Oh, no, lots more than a million.”
“How many?” I asked him.
He started in to tell me. You may not believe it but he’s still telling me. It takes that long. There’s that many of ’em.
You see, it was like with that there Jukes family that lived down south of here. The bad ones was always a mite worse than their children and the same dang thing happ
ened to Gene Chromosome and his kin, so to speak. The Pughs stayed Pughs and they kept the hex power—and I guess you might say the Pughs conquered the whole world, after all.
But it could of been worse. The Pughs could of stayed the same size down through the generations. Instead they got smaller—a whole lot smaller. When I knowed ’em they was bigger than most folks—Paw Pugh, anyhow.
But by the time they’d done filtering the generations from the year one, they’d shrunk so much them little pale fellers in the blood was about their size. And many a knock-down drag-out fight they have with ’em, too.
Them Pugh genes took such a beating from the heterochromatinic bursts Grandpaw told me about that they got whopped all outa their proper form. You might call ’em a virus now—and of course a virus is exactly the same thing as a gene, except the virus is friskier. But heavens above, that’s like saying the Jukes boys is exactly the same as George Washington!
The hex hit me—hard.
I sneezed something tumble. Then I heard Uncle Lem sneezing in his sleep, lying back there in the yaller car. Grandpaw was still droning on about how many Pughs was a-coming at me right that minute, so there wasn’t no use asking questions. I fixed my eyes different and looked right down into the middle of that sneeze to see what had tickled me—
WELL, you never seen so many Junior Pughs in all your born days!
It was the hex, all right. Likewise, them Pughs is still busy, hexing everybody on earth, off and on. They’ll do it for quite a time, too, since the Pugh line has got to go on forever, account of Grandpaw’s promise.
They tell me even the microscopes ain’t never yet got a good look at certain viruses. The scientists are sure in for a surprise someday when they focus down real close and see all them pasty-faced little devils, ugly as sin, with their eyes set real close together, wiggling around hexing everybody in sight.
It took a long time—since the year one, that is—but Gene Chromosome fixed it up, with Grandpaw’s help. So Junior Pugh ain’t a pain in the neck no more, so to speak.
But I got to admit he’s an awful cold in the haid.
1950
PROMISED LAND
Man has learned many tricks to make his environment fit his needs. There is another approach—better, perhaps, but full of blind alleys . . .
People got out of Fenton’s way as he walked scowling through the palace, heading for the great steel doors that only half a dozen men in the Unit knew how to open. Fenton was one of the half dozen. The pale scar that made a zigzag like lightning across his dark cheek pulled his face awry a little as he snapped an angry command into the intercom.
A voice murmured apologetically out of it: “Sorry, he’s busy right now. If you’ll—”
Fenton slapped his palm with ringing fury against the metal beside the intercom. The echoing metallic boom rang like thunder down the hall behind him, where courtiers, diplomats and politicians waited their chance for an audience with the Protector of Ganymede.
“Open these doors!”
There was another pause. Then the voice murmured something again, and the great steel doors slid softly apart a few feet. Fenton stalked through, hearing them thud together behind him, shutting off the sound of whispering, angry and curious, that had begun to fill the hall.
He went through an antechamber and into a tall-columned room shaped like a well, with a dome of starry sky very far overhead. (It was day outside, on Ganymede, and thick, eternal clouds shut out the sky, but if a man is wealthy enough he can arrange to have the stars reflected into his palace if he wants them.)
In the center of the room, under the sky dome, stood the Protector’s water bed where his five-hundred-pound bulk wallowed luxuriantly. Like truth, the monstrous man floated at the bottom of his well and watched the stars.
He was not looking at them now. Great billows of lax flesh stirred on his cheeks as he grinned cavernously at the newcomer.
“Patience, Ben, patience,” he said in his deep rumble. “You’ll inherit Ganymede in due time—when it’s habitable. Be patient, even—” Fenton’s angry glance dropped to the man sitting on the raised chair beside the water bed.
“Get out,” he said.
The man stood up, smiling. He stooped a little, standing or sitting, as though his big-boned frame found even the scanty weight of flesh it carried burdensome. Or maybe it was the responsibilities he carried. He had a gaunt face and his eyes, like his hair, were pale.
“Wait,” the monster in the tank said. “Bryne’s not finished with me yet, Ben. Sit down. Patience, son, patience!”
Fenton’s right hand jerked doorward. He gave Bryne a cold glance.
“Get out,” he said again.
“I’m no fool,” Bryne remarked, turning away from the water bed. “Apologies, Protector, and so on. But I’d rather not be in the middle. Ben seems upset about something. Call me when it’s safe.” He shambled off, was lost behind the pillars. The sound of his footsteps died.
Fenton drew a deep breath to speak, his dark face flushing. Then he shrugged, sighed and said flatly: “I’m through, Torren. I’m leaving.” The Protector wallowed as he raised an enormous hand. Gasping with the effort, he let it fall back into the dense, oily liquid of his bath. “Wait,” he said, panting. “Wait.” The edge of the bath was studded with colored buttons just under the water level. Torren’s gross fingers moved beneath the surface, touching buttons deftly. On a tilted screen above the tank snow fields flickered into view, a road threading them, cars sliding flatly along the road.
“You’ve just come from the village,” Torren said. “You’ve talked to Kristin, I suppose. You know I lied to you. Surprised, Ben?” Fenton shook his head impatiently. “I’m leaving,” he said. “Find yourself another heir, Torren.” He turned away. “That’s all.”
“It isn’t all.” The Protector’s deep voice had command in it. “Come back here, Ben. Patience is what you want, my boy. Patience. Spend thirty years in a water bed and you learn patience. So you want to walk out, do you? Nobody walks out on Torren, son. You ought to know that. Not even my inheritor walks out. I’m surprised at you. After I’ve taken so much trouble to change a whole world to suit your convenience.” The vast cheeks wrinkled in a smile. “It isn’t thoughtful of you, Ben. After all I’ve done for you, too.”
“You’ve done nothing for me,” Fenton told him, still in the flat voice. “You picked me out of an orphanage when I was too young to protect myself. There’s nothing you can give me I want, Torren.”
“Getting dainty, aren’t you?” the man in the water demanded with what sounded like perfect good humor. “I’m surprised at you, Ben. So you don’t want the Torren empire, eh? Ganymede wouldn’t be good enough for you, even when I make it habitable, eh? Oh, Ben, come to your senses. I never thought you’d go soft on me. Not after what you’ve been through.”
“You put me through plenty,” Fenton said. “I grew up the hard way. It wasn’t worth it, Torren. You wasted your time. I tell you I’m finished.”
“The tenderizing light of a good woman’s eyes has reformed you,” Torren mocked. “Pretty little Kristin changed your mind, I suppose. A charming creature, Kristin. Only a foot taller than you, too, my boy. Only a hundred pounds heavier, I expect. But then she’s young. She’ll grow. Ah, what a pity I never met a really good woman when I was your age. Still, she’d have had to weigh five hundred pounds, to understand me, and such women never really appealed to my aesthetic tastes. You should have seen the charming little things in the Centrifuge, Ben. They’re still there, you know—the ones who haven’t died. I’m the only Centrifuge baby who got out and stayed out. I made good. I earned enough to stay out.” The monstrous head fell back and Torren opened his vast mouth and roared with laughter. The oily liquid in the bath heaved in rhythmic tides and echoes of his mirth rolled along the pillars and up the well toward the stars, rolled up the walls that had imprisoned Torren since his birth. They were walls he himself had burst apart against odds no man had ever before encount
ered.
“You grew up in a hard school,” Torren laughed. “You!”
Fenton stood silent, looking at the monstrous being in the bath, and the anger in his eyes softened a little in spite of himself. The old respect for Torren stirred in his mind. Tyrant the man might be, ruthless autocrat—but had ever man such reason to be pitiless before? Perhaps in very ancient times when, for profit, skilled practitioners warped and broke the bodies of children to make them valuable freaks and monsters for the entertainment of royalty. Perhaps then, but not again, until the planets were opened for colonization three hundred years ago.
Fenton had seen the Threshold Planetaria, back on Earth, the fantastic conditioning units where eugenics, working through generation after generation of selected stock, bred humans who could sustain themselves in the ecology of other worlds. He knew little about these remarkable experiments in living flesh. But he did know that some of them had failed, and one such Planetarium had held Torren—thirty years ago.
“Thirteen generations,” Torren said deliberately, drawing the familiar picture for him again, relentlessly as always. “Thirteen generations one after another, living and dying in a Centrifuge that increased its rotation year after year. All those treatments, all those operations, all that time under altered radiations, breathing altered air, moving against altered gravity—until they found out they simply couldn’t breed men who could live on Jupiter, if they took a thousand generations. There was a point beyond which they couldn’t mutate the body and keep intelligence. So they apologized.” He laughed again, briefly, the water surging around him in the tank.
“They said they were sorry. And we could leave the Centrifuge any time we wanted—they’d even give us a pension. Five hundred a month. It takes a thousand a day to keep me alive outside the Centrifuge!”
He lay back, spent, the laughter dying. He moved one vast arm slowly in the fluid.
“All right,” he said. “Hand me a cigarette, Ben. Thanks. Light—”
Holding the igniter for him, Fenton realized too late that Torren could have got his own cigarette. There was every possible convenience, every luxury, available to the water bed. Angrily Fenton swung away, paced to and fro beneath the screen upon which the snow fields were reflected. His fingers beat a tattoo on his thigh. Torren waited, watching him.
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