And while the Six Directors of the San Pennatus Fault College were discussing their intimations of saltations for their project, several younger persons were visiting the same female Anaconda Hermione whom the directors had been discussing. “Anaconda Hermione has dreams in which she has one red eye and one green eye,” Irene Jordan said. “She dreams that she has such eyes now, and the people who see her dreaming also believe that she has one red eye and one green eye. These may be the most convincing dreams that any snake ever had. You'd convince me that your eyes really did look like that, Hermione, if I didn't know better. Oh, Snake Dreams!”
“Hoke joke, Ire,” the Anaconda snake Hermione said.
“Anatole says that we should call it ‘Quantum Eideticism,’ rather than ‘Snake Dreams,’ Irene,” Dobzhansky Hilltop said. “ ‘Quantum Eideticism’ is more scientifically acceptable than is ‘Snake Dreams’.”
“Right-O. Oh, Right-O,” Irene Jordan said.
“Right-O,” repeated Hermione the Anaconda snake. Well, ‘right-o’ was one of the forty-nine words in Hermione's vocabulary. Irene Jordan, Dobzhansky Hilltop, and Hermione the Anaconda were all of them twelve years old and were very close friends.
Back to the six-directors-in-serious-talk again.
“Maybe the quake-and-break came as early as yesterday,” Godwin Dropforge said. “One hundred kilos of estrogen-gel has disappeared; and an undisclosed number (but it runs into the billions) of blank helices. Also forty-four different chemicals and agars. It is either biotechnic thieves at work around here, or else it is the biotechnic-oriented offspring of some of us. I hope it's thieves. They're less disastrous. That special estrogen-gel costs a thousand dollars a kilo (but it's a good general-purpose matrix), and we've been having multiple thefts of that magnitude every day. Oh, it's costly, costly! But all shortages and thefts are reported as ‘usage,’ and that makes us seem busier than we are.”
These six were all intelligent and innovative gentlemen, the Directors of the San Pennatus Fault College. Five of them, Josef Prorok, Anselm Saito, Masterman Jordan, Isidore Merriman, and Godwin Dropforge, were neo-neo-Darwinians. And the sixth of them, Merald Hilltop, was neo-neo-neo-Darwinian. Theirs was a well-funded establishment, made up entirely of graduate students, all of them laboratory-smart and prone to speculation.
These six intelligent and innovative directors of the College-Institute lived with their families in six houses on San Pennatus Fault Crest. To the South, below them, was the whole spread of the College with its botanical and zoological gardens, and the attendant town, all running down to a rough ocean shore and reefs beyond. Above them, to the North, was the ‘World Outside,’ the happy hills of Weaver County and of other counties, states, and realms.
And these six leaders-and-directors were secure in their positions.
“We are the vanguard,” Isidore Merriman said. “Our chosen field is the most important in the world. It answers the question ‘Where is the World going?’ And ours are the most important minds in our field. Really, I don't believe that there is any higher intelligence anywhere than right here in our group.”
“I'm not sure of that,” Godwin Dropforge dissented. “I have an uncanny feeling that there is a higher and unearthly intelligence all around us every day.”
“Please don't get deistic on us, Godwin,” Josef Prorok spoke sharply and frostily. “That is quite unacceptable as well as being in bad taste.”
“I am not getting deistic. I wasn't referring to a Deus. I was thinking of the minds of our closely knit, biotechnic-oriented offspring, our own eerie sons and daughters. They are completely unearthly in some of the things they come up with, and they have us totally surrounded.”
The closely knit, biotechnic-oriented offspring were twelve young teen-people: Anatole and Judy Prorok, Job and Cecilia Salto, Darwin and Irene Jordan, Cracraft and Davoreen Merriman, Chardin and Roxanna Dropforge, Dobzhansky and Maryethyl Hilltop, a full dozen of them. Their capsule description above is not quite correct, seven of them not yet being teenagers, strictly speaking; four of them being just twelve years old, one eleven, one ten, and one — Maryethyl Hilltop — eight years old. But these were balanced by Anatole Prorok being eighteen, Cecilia Salto being nineteen, and Darwin Jordan being sixteen.
All were the pride of their parents for being inclined towards biotechnic studies, and all of them were the consternation of those elder parents for their antic approaches.
Several other incidents of perhaps saltatory evolution had appeared that day. One duck had begun to sing like a meadowlark. Then all the other ducks had savagely attacked the singing duck in outrage at its unnaturalness, and the singing duck had to be rescued by humans. Well, saltations are not always bloodless. “But what we are looking for are human incidents,” Masterman Jordan said sadly. “It may be that some of the build-up-to-the-brink bio-energy is being bled off to the animals, and we want it to have effect on humans. But how to explain that to the genes of the animals and the people!”
And now, just at dusk of a Tuesday evening, all twelve of the young people were gathered in a copse of small trees known as Merlin's Circle atop the San Pennatus Fault Crest. They had a jug and twelve cups. Nobody seemed to notice them except a rough man of the town below them, Titus Chesty, a bachelor who was both a woman-hater and a man-hater, a man who liked to wander around in the dusk with a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. “What are you hunting for with a rifle in the evening light?” people asked him sometimes.
“For my supper,” Titus would always say. “Maybe I'll shoot me a coon or a colt, or a young badger or a young human, or a calf or a sheep that the owners would hardly miss. The hungrier I get the better I shoot.”
Titus Chesty was not well liked. He was quarrelsome and he had a mordant humor and he turned most people off.
“What if, when we—” began Maryethyl Hilltop, who was the youngest of all of them gathered in the little copse of trees on the crest.
“The time for ‘what ifs’ on this particular thing is past,” said Cecilia Salto who was the oldest of them. “We are all in this project together. It takes twelve of us to make a quantum project out of it.”
“My father Merald Hilltop is all hep on the goal ‘that man may fly’,” said Dobzhansky Hilltop. “He preaches ‘Think flight, think bird, think feathers.’ But I think the concept should be sharpened. You have to pick a bird. Let's ‘think ducks, think ducks, think ducks.’ OK?”
Anatole poured the twelve cups full.
“Is this all of it?” Job Saito asked.
“No, no, I've got a big keg of it,” Anatole said. “And I can always make more.” All of them drank off their brimming cups with slurping gulps. Then all of them smashed their ritual clay cups on a rock. This is a technique that is not in the repertoire of every biotechnician.
“Why are you cutting that big hole in your best dress, Roxanna?” her mother Molly Dropforge asked the next morning. “I'm just asking because mothers are supposed to show an occasional interest in their children.”
“It isn't my best dress; it's my worst dress; it's just my most expensive dress. I'm cutting a hole in it to let my tail feathers come through.”
“Oh? You do have tail feathers today, don't you? And you have feathers on your face and neck also. And you have duck feet. Don't you have any shoes big enough to go over them?”
“No I don't, mama. I don't believe they make shoes big enough.”
“Well, just why do you have all those funny things?”
“Oh, to get used to them for a school play I'm in.”
“What's the name of the play?”
“The play is ‘The Feather-Merchants.’ It's not for a week yet. I just want to get used to these things in plenty of time.”
“Roxanna, those are real! Those are real tail-feathers growing out of your real rump.”
“Oh sure. Modern stagecraft demands reality nowadays.”
There was a slight disturbance a little bit later that morning. Word got out that the twelv
e kids from the houses on the Crest all had feathers growing on their faces, and tail feathers growing out of their tails, and duck-feet. So a group of boys and men (and girls and women) came up from the town to the college-area with the noisy intent of killing all the young people who had blossomed out in feathers and duck-feet during the night. The blind intensity and plain truculence of the mob reminded one of the behavior of that mob of ducks who had tried, the day before, to kill the duck who had begun to sing like a meadowlark. And it was the case this morning that the twelve young people had to be rescued by a platoon of security guards, with a fair amount of bloodshed, just as the singing duck had to be rescued by resolute humans yesterday. The leader of the mob from town was the wrathy man Titus Chesty. He was very often angry, even when there was less than this to be angry about.
“The response of the townspeople was the biologically correct one and the predicted one, of course,” Josef Prorok said. “That's why we have a platoon of security guards here this week. The response was the biologically correct one, and it testifies to the authenticity of the saltation.” “To the authenticity of what?” asked a TV man. Lots of media persons had been gathering all that morning.
“What's the by-word?” Cecilia Salto asked nervously before the duck-footed bunch of them went in to face their six sires, the six directors of the college. And, Oh yes, whole batteries of media persons. “Drink bottled water, drink bottled everything!” Anatole Prorok gave the command. “I poured the rest of the keg into the reservoir last night. It should begin to hit the town and the college today. And I had two more jugs of it that I've been using for quicker results. It should begin to hit the people in the Conference Room very soon. I don't know how long till the effect will leave us or how long it will take over the other people, but for the sake of elegance it should be about the same time. Oh, quite soon.”
“Anatole, leaving out the fancy names of it, what is the stuff?” Roxanna asked.
“Euelpis Elixirion Papia Pedema. It's a Quantum Eidetic Mind-Expander with a special slant.”
“Happy Hopping Duck Elixir, is that it? Duck Dream Dope. Anatole, is this real that has happened to us?” Irene asked.
“No, not strictly real, but it's real in the eyes of all beholders, including ourselves. Things can seem real for many thousands of years and still not be completely real except in the eyes of conditioned observers. One theory is that humans are still eighteen-inch-high creatures scurrying around in a stooped-over position, but that to the eyes of all beholders including themselves they are near four times that tall and straighter and more human. That's the way they have seemed for quite a few millennia, tall and noble and straight. There is only one creature that is not fooled by this tricky assumed appearance. It's a very rare type of African hyena. It will rush in on any human, take it by its fifteen-high-inch throat, and kill it on the spot every time. And then it will immediately devour all the soft parts of it.”
“Anatole, you made that part up just now,” Roxanna Dropforge charged.
“Yes, I suppose I did. But there really isn't any reality, only choices between various groups of metaphors. But I like that one I just made up. I'll polish it up and use it again sometime. Now don't be intimidated before our famous parents or the famous media people in there. Just remember that we'll change places very soon. Then we will be as we used to be, and they'll be feathered and duck-footed very soon. Unless, of course, our condition is indeed real.”
A cheer went up from the crowd in the big banquet-hall-lecture-room when the twelve young persons duck-walked in. “Behold!” cried Anselm Salto, “the final vindication of saltatory evolution! And it's come about just as we predicted that it would, by quantum speciation. As the immortal Stephen Stanley wrote, ‘It is generally agreed that quantum speciation takes place within very small populations — some would say populations involving fewer than ten individuals.’ Well, twelve individuals comes very close to being less than then.”
“Why wouldn't it be much more likely that such an astonishing thing as this, humans suddenly acquiring feathers and acquiring duck-feet overnight, should happen to one person only, and not to ten or twelve?” asked a network person named John Anchorman.
“Such things probably happen to single individuals very frequently and are hushed up,” Anselm Salto explained, “for there could be no issue for the changes. With whom would the single individual mate to preserve the changes? Only with another person who had received such a saltatory mutation as had himself. But now, on the verge of the San Pennatus Fault, the biologic energy is too powerful to be contained in a single individual. And here it is perfect. There are six males and six females. And they will mate and preserve the mutations. What a selective mating of such wonderful stocks! They will mate, they will mate!”
“Right now, papa,” Cecilia Salto asked.
“But doesn't every revolutionary jump serve some advantage?” John Anchorman pursued. “What is the advantage of feathers and duck-feet to humans?”
“Now we can fly. The eternal dream will be realized. Humans will finally fly.”
“But we haven't any wings, father,” Job Salto protested.
“You have feathers, and feathers are certainly an intimation of wings. Some of you even have a few elbow-feathers. I will call them pinion-feathers, and perhaps your elbows will have turned into wing-pinions by tomorrow.”
“Something is wrong with either this chair or me,” John Anchorman the TV person protested. “I sure can't sit in it very well. Something is wrong, something is wrong!” John Anchorman downed another glass of ice water.
“Well, there are certainly no disadvantages to humans having feathers and duck-feet,” Isidore Merriman took up the slightly different line of argument. “And where there is no disadvantage in a big change, there will usually be hidden advantages. They should appear any time.”
“There is one disadvantage, father,” Cracraft Merriman said. “With these tail-feathers, we can't sit down at all. And we can't lie down on our backs. That's why I wakened so early this morning in such discomfort. And when we lie on our faces, the face-feathers seem to get in the way of our breathing. We get the duck-feather asthma. I don't like it. I think there are disadvantages.”
“Sitting down was always a temporary and unsatisfactory expedient for humans,” Masterman Jordan said. “No human was ever comfortable sitting down. Some humans sit cross-legged on the ground or the floor to try to find a comfortable way to do it, but in vain. Maybe now you can learn to hunker down on your ankles the way country people sometimes do. Or you could learn to perch on branches the way birds do. You are bird-people now.”
“We're not talon-footed, we're duck-footed. We aren't built for perches. We aren't built for anything,” Darwin Jordan maintained. “Papa, this thing isn't practical.”
“Oh, it's likely only a series of slight discomforts before the full implications of the wonder-changes are apparent,” Merald Hilltop suggested. “This is a great day for the San Pennatus Fault College and for neo-neo-neo-Darwinism.”
“This is the day you get sued for billions, unless you find a way to reverse this nonsense immediately,” a testy media lady said suddenly. “I have feathers growing on my face right now. I have taken my shoes off because they made my feet hurt, and I don't like what I see there. I will never sit in a chair again unless there is some very successful surgery on me. People, you're in trouble, and so are we.”
And then there was old-fashioned bedlam and pandemonium in the big banquet-hall-lecture-room. Almost everybody caught the feathers-and-duck-foot saltations at the same time.
“People, people, people,” Josef Prorok begged. “Give it a chance to work. This is probably the greatest thing that's happened to us since we came down out of the trees.”
“People, people,” Anselm Salto begged. “It isn't as bad as it seems. Maybe it will wear off, if you want it to wear off. Remember that nobody has died of it yet. Just keep saying to yourself ‘Nobody has died from it yet.’ That's bound to mak
e you feel better.”
The platoon of Security Guards was ordered to restore order.
“We will restore order when we are people again,” the platoon Lieutenant said. “We will not restore order while we are a bunch of duck-footed, duck-feathered monstrosities. What is this anyhow, some kind of shaggy-duck joke?”
“Hoke joke, folk, on you,” said Hermione the Anaconda snake who had a vocabulary of forty-nine words. She was in the doorway looking in at the melee. “Right-O,” she said, and slithered away again.
By the next morning, almost everybody in town and college had caught the feathers-and-duck-foot saltations. Everybody except Rory Brandywine the Village Atheist. Rory didn't believe in evolution, and he had other disbeliefs. He didn't believe in drinking water for instance. And somehow he didn't catch the new disease. But everybody else in the area served by the reservoir caught it. But the original twelve, the children of the Prorok, Saito, Jordan, Merriman, Dropforge, and Hilltop families, with them it was greatly diminished by that second day. And by evening they all could wear shoes again, and their feathers were going, going, gone.
“This is horrible!” Josef Prorok cried out. “The greatest treasure offered to mankind in forty thousand years is dribbling away, and how can we stop the dribbling? What can we do, what can we do?”
“You and almost everyone else still have a full case of the feathers-and-duck-foot saltations, father,” Irene Jordan said. “The only ones who've lost it are us twelve kids.”
“But it was only a one-day phenomenon with you. How can it last longer with us? Oh, the loss, the loss, the loss!”
Most of the people in the region had lost their anger of the day before, however, and had begun to see the situation as funny. They couldn't sit down, they couldn't do anything very well, but it seemed funny now that it appeared that it would be temporary. And some of the shaggy-duck jokes that sprang up in the populace were really funny.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 326