Captive Universe

by Harry Harrison

  DNA CHAINS, complex intertwined helixes with infinite permutations. Builders of life, controllers of life, with every detail from the hair on the leg to the flea on the body of the twenty ton whale locked into their convolutions. Billions of years developing, unraveled in short centuries. Is this the code for red hair? Replace it with that and the child will have black hair. Gene surgery, gene selection, delicate operations with the smallest building blocks of life, rearranging, ordering, producing…

  GENIUS, exceptional natural capacity for creative and original conceptions, high intelligence quotient. Natural capacity, that means in the genes, and DNA. In a world population there are a goodly number of geniuses in every generation, and their DNA can be collected. And combined to produce children of genius. Guaranteed. Every time. Unless this genius is masked. For every capacity and condition in the genes there is a dominant and a recessive. Father dog is black and black is dominant and white is recessive, and he has that too. Mother is all black too. So they are BW and BW and, as the good Mendell taught, these factors can be plotted on the square named after him. If there are four pups they will be BB, BW, BW and WW, or a white dog where none was before. But is it possible to take a dominant and make it artificially recessive? Yes, it is possible. Take genius, for instance. They did take genius. And they tied it down to stupidity. Dimness. Subnormality. Passivity. Prison it in slightly different ways in two different groups of people and keep them apart. Let them have children, generation after generation of obedient, accepting children. And each child will carry that tied-down dominant, untouched and waiting. Then, some day, the right day, let the two groups meet and mingle and marry. The bonds are then released. The tied-down dominant is no longer recessive, it is dominant. The children are — children of different parents than their parents? Yes, perhaps they are. They are genius children.

  There was so much to be learned. At any point in the recorded lecture Chimal could press the question button and the pictures and voices would halt while the machine printed a list of references about the material then being covered. Some of these were recorded visual lectures that the viewer would play for him, others were specific volumes in the library. The library itself was a galaxy unexplored. Most of the books were photorecordings, though there were bound volumes of all the basic reference texts. When his head and his eyes ached from too much study and concentration, he would go through the library at random, picking up volumes and flicking through their pages. How complex the human body: the transparent pages of the anatomy text turned one by one to reveal the organs in vivid color. And the stars, they were giant burning spheres of gas after all, for here were charts with their temperatures and sizes. Page after page of photographs of nebulae, clusters, gas clouds. The universe was gigantic beyond comprehension — and he had once thought it was made of solid rock!

  Leaving the astronomy book open on the table before him, Chimal leaned back and stretched, then rubbed at the soreness around his eyes. He had brought a thermos of tea with him and he poured a cup and sipped at it. The book had fallen open to a plate of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, a gigantic wheel of light against the star-pricked night. Stars. There was one star he should be interested in, the one he had been welcomed to when the process of education began. What was its name? — there were so many new things to remember — Proxima Centauri. It would still be far ahead, but he had a sudden desire to see the destination of his captive universe. There were detailed star charts of the sky, he had seen them, so it should not be too hard to pick out this individual star. And he could stretch his legs: his body ached from unaccustomed sitting for so many hours at a time.

  It was a relief to walk briskly again, even run a few paces down the long passageway. How many days had it been since he had first entered the observation room? Memory fogged; he had kept no record. Maybe he should carry a deus like the others, but that was a bloody and painful way to mark the passing of a day. This rite seemed senseless to. him, like so much of the Watchers’ activities, but it was important to them. They seemed to actually enjoy this ritual infliction of pain. Once more he pushed open the massive doors and looked out at interstellar space, as boldly impressive as the first time he had seen it.

  Matching the stars to the chart was difficult. For one thing the stars did not remain in relatively fixed positions as they did in the sky above the valley, but instead swept by in majestic parade. In a few minutes the cycle would go from summer to winter constellations and back again. As soon as he thought he had plotted a constellation it would vanish from sight and new stars would appear. When the Master Observer came in he was grateful for the interruption.

  “I regret having to bother you…”

  “No, not at all, I’m getting nowhere with this chart and it only makes my head ache more.”

  “Then, might I ask you to aid us?”

  “Of course. What is it?”

  “You will see at once if you will accompany me.”

  The Master Observer’s face was pulled into deeper lines of brooding seriousness: Chimal had not thought this was possible. When he tried to make conversation he received courteous but brief answers. Something was bothering the old man, and just what it was he would find out shortly.

  They went downstairs to a level that Chimal had never visited and found a car waiting for them. It was a long ride, longer than he had ever taken before, and it was made in silence. Chimal looked at the walls moving steadily by and asked, “Are we going far?”

  The Master Observer nodded. “Yes, to the stern, near the engine room.”

  Though Chimal had studied diagrams of their world, he still thought of it in relation to his valley. What they called the bow was where the observation room was, well beyond the swamp. The stern, then, was south of the waterfall, at the end of the valley. He wondered what they would find there.

  They stopped at another tunnel opening and the Master Observer led the way to one of a number of identical doorways, outside of which was waiting a red-garbed observer. Silently, he opened the door for them. Inside was a sleeping cell. A man in Watcher’s black was hanging from a rope that had been passed through the bar of the air vent in the ceiling. The loop of rope about his neck had choked him to death, slowly and painfully, rather than snapping his spine, but in the end it had done its job. He must have been hanging for days because his body had stretched so that his toes almost touched the floor, next to the overturned chair that he had jumped from. The observers turned away, but Chimal, no stranger to death, looked on calmly enough.

  “What do you want me to do?” Chimal asked. For a moment he wondered if he had been brought as a burial party.

  “He was the Air Tender and he worked alone because the Master Air Tender died recently and a new one has not been appointed as yet. His breviary is there on the desk. There seems to be something wrong and he was unable to correct it. He was a foolish man and instead of reporting it he took his own life.”

  Chimal picked up the well-thumbed and grease-stained book and flipped through it. There were pages of diagrams, charts for entering readings, and simple lists of instructions to be followed. He wondered what had troubled the man. The Master Observer beckoned him into the next room where a buzzer sounded continuously and a red light flashed on and off.

  “This is a warning that something is wrong. The Air Tender’s duty when the alarm sounds is to make the corrections at once, and then to make a written report to me. I received no such report.”

  “And the alarm is still going. I have a strong suspicion that your man could not fix the trouble, panicked and killed himself.”

  The Master Observer nodded in intensified gloom. “The same unharmonious thought is what came upon me when a report reached me that this had happened. I have been worried ever since the Master Air Tender was struck down in his youth, barely 110 years old, and this other one left in charge. The Master never thought well of him and we were preparing to train a new tender when this happened.”

  Chimal suddenly realized what this me
ant “Then you have nobody who knows anything about repairing this equipment? And it is the air machinery you are talking about, that supplies the breathing air for us all?”

  “Yes,” the Master Observer said and led the way through thick, double-locked doors to a vast and echoing chamber.

  Tall tanks lined the walls with shining apparatus at their bases. Heavy ducts dived down and there was an all-pervading hum and the whine of motors.

  “This supplies the air for everyone?” Chimal asked.

  “No, nothing like that. You will read about it there, but most of the air has something to do with green plants. There are great chambers of them in constant growth. This apparatus does other important things with the air, just what I am not sure.”

  “I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help, but I’ll do my best At the same time I suggest you get whoever else might be able to work with this.”

  “There is no one, of course. No man would think of doing other than his assigned work. I alone am responsible and I have looked at this book before. Many of the things are beyond me. I am an old man,, too old to learn a new discipline. A young man is now being taught the air tender’s craft, but it will be years before he is able to work in here. That may be too late.”

  With a new weight of responsibility Chimal opened the book. The first part was an outline of air purification theory which he skimmed over quickly. He would read that in detail after he had a more general knowledge of the function of the machinery. Under apparatus there were 12 different sections, each headed with a large red number. These numbers were repeated on large signs down the wall and he assumed, with some justification, that they related to the numbers in the book. When he glanced up at them he noticed that a red light under 5 was blinking on and off. He walked over to it and saw the word emergency printed under the bulb: he opened the book to section 5.

  “Purification Tower, Trace Pollutants. Many things such as machinery, paint and the breath of living people give off gaseous and particulate matter. There are not many of these pollutants, but they do collect over the years and can become concentrated. This machine removes from our air those certain fractions that may be dangerous after many, many years. Air is forced through a chemical that absorbs them…”

  Chimal read on, interested now, until he had finished section 5. This tower seemed to be designed to function for centuries without attention; nevertheless provision had still been made to have it watched and monitored. There was a bank of instruments at its base and he went to look at them. Another light was flashing over a large dial, blinking letters that spelled out REPLACE CHEMICAL. Yet on the dial itself the reading was right at the top of the activity scale, just where the book said it should be for correct operation.

  “But who am I to argue with this machine,” Chimal told the Master Observer, who had been following him in silence. “The recharging seems simple enough. There is an automatic cycle that the machine does when this button is depressed. If it doesn’t work the valves can be worked by hand. Let’s see what happens.” He pushed the button.

  Operation lights flashed on, flickering in response to the cycle, and hidden switches closed. A muffled, sighing sound issued from the column before them and, at the same time the needle on the activity scale moved into the red danger zone, dropping toward the bottom. The Master Observer squinted at it, spelling out the letters with his lips, then looked up, horrified.

  “Can this be right? It gets worse not better. Something terrible is happening.”

  “I don’t think so,” Chimal said, frowning in concentration over the breviary. “It says the chemical needs replacing. So first I imagine the old chemical is pumped out, and this removal is what gives that false reading on the scale. Certainly the absence of a chemical will give the same reading as a bad chemical.”

  “Your argument is abstract, hard to follow. I am glad you are here with us, First Arriver, and I can see the workings of the Great Designer in this. We could do nothing about this without you.”

  “Let’s see how this comes out, first. So far I’ve just followed the book and there has been no real problem. There, the new chemical must be coming in, the needle’s going back up again to fully charged. That seems to be all there is to it.”

  The Master Observer pointed, horrified, at the blinking warning light. “Yet — that goes on. There is something terrible here. There is something wrong with our air!”

  “There is nothing wrong with our air. But there is something wrong with this machine. It has been recharged, the new chemical is working perfectly — yet the alarm goes on. The only thing I can think of is that there is something wrong with the alarm.” He slipped through the sections of the book until he found the one he wanted, then read through it quickly. “This may be it. Is there a storeroom here? I want something called 167-R.”

  “It is this way.”

  The storeroom contained rows of shelves, all numbered in order, and Chimal had no trouble locating part 167-R which was a sturdy cannister with a handle on the end and a warning message printed in red. CONTAINS PRESSURIZED GAS — POINT AWAY FROM FACE WHEN OPENING. He did as it advised and turned the handle. There was a loud hissing, and when it had died away the end came free in his hand. He reached in and drew out a glittering metal box, shaped like a large book. It had a handle where the spine would be and a number of copper-colored studs on the opposite edge. He had not the slightest idea what its function might be.

  “Now let’s see what this does.”

  The breviary directed him to the right spot and he found the handle in the face of the machine that was marked 167-R, as was the new one he had just obtained. When he pulled on the handle the container slid out as easily as a book from a shelf. He threw it aside and inserted the new part in its place.

  “The light is gone, the emergency is over,” the Master Observer called out in a voice cracking with emotion. “You have succeeded even where the Air Tender failed.”

  Chimal picked up the discarded part and wondered what had broken inside it. “It seemed obvious enough. The machinery appeared to work fine, so the trouble had to be in the alarm circuit, here. It’s described in the book, in the right section. Something turned on and would not turn off, so the emergency sounded even after the correction had been made. The tender should have seen that.”

  He must have been very stupid not to have figured it out, he continued, to himself. Do not speak ill of the dead, but it was a fact. The poor man had panicked and killed himself when the problem had proven insoluble. This was proof of what he had suspected for a long time now.

  In their own way the Watchers were just as slow-witted as the Aztecs. They had been fitted to a certain function just as the people in the valley had.

  3

  “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand it,” Watchman Steel said, frowning over the diagram on the piece of paper, turning it around in the futile hope that a different angle would make everything clear.

  “I’ll show you another way then,” Chimal said, going into his ablutory for the apparatus he had prepared. His observer’s quarters were large and well appointed. He brought out the plastic container to which he had fastened a length of strong cord. “What do you see in here?” he asked, and she dutifully bent to look.

  “Water. It is half filled with water.”

  “Correct. Now what will happen if I should turn it on its side?”

  “Why… the water would spill out. Of course.”

  “Correct!”

  She smiled happily at her success. Chimal stretched out a length of cord and picked up the container by it. “You said it would spill. Would you believe that I can turn this bucket on its side without spilling a drop?”

  Steel just gaped in awe, believing anything possible of him. Chimal began to spin the bucket in a small circle, faster and faster, lifting it at the same time, until it was swinging in a circle straight up into the air, upside down at the summit of its loop… The water stayed in; not a drop was spilled. Then, slowly, he de
creased the speed, until the container was once again on the floor.

  “Now, one more question,” he said, picking up a book. “If I were to open my hand and let go of this book — what would happen?”

  “It would fall to the floor,” she told him, intensely proud to have answered so many questions correctly.

  “Right again. Now follow closely. The force that pulls the book to the floor and one that holds the water in the bucket is the same force, and its name is centrifugal force. There is another force on large planets called gravity that seems to act the same way, though I do not understand it. The important thing to remember is that centrifugal force also holds us down, so we don’t fly up into the air, and is also the reason why we could walk across the sky and look up at the valley over our heads.”

  “I don’t understand any of that,” she admitted.

  “It’s simple. Say that instead of a cord I had a spinning wheel. If the container were hung from the rim of the wheel the water would stay inside of it just as it did when I spun it on the cord. And I could fasten two containers to the wheel, opposite each other, and the water would stay in each one. The bottom of each container would be down for the water it held — yet the direction down would be directly opposite for each of them. The same thing is true for us, because this world of rock is spinning too. So down in the village is below your feet — and down on the sky is toward the sky. Do you follow all of this?”