by Chad Oliver
Maybe the new medicine had helped, maybe not.
It didn’t matter.
She had told Larry that she would accept one of the Lab babies but she knew that she would never do it. The Lab babies hardly ever lived more than a month or two, and that would be too terrible. She couldn’t face it. She couldn’t ask Larry to go through that. She had been enough trouble for Larry.
It was no good.
She sat on the small bed with the blue cover. She looked around the room, fixing it in her mind. She tried to remember how it had been, the few times when Bobby had played with his toys. She touched the soft brown bear next to the pillow.
She got up, very quietly, and walked through the silent apartment. So many rooms, she thought. So many empty rooms …
She went into the study and switched on the recorder. She set it for both voice and picture. Her hand was steady. She looked straight into the recorder and spoke in a firm, clear voice. “I am Helen Sanderson,” she said. “Being of sound mind and body, I have this night exercised my right of free will. I accept the sole responsibility for my action and for my decision. I do swear and affirm that no coercion has been employed against me, either mental or physical.” She paused, and then finished: “I was Helen Sanderson.”
She turned off the recorder. It would supply the time and the date automatically.
It was only a formula, of course, but it would save Larry any possible trouble.
She slipped through the darkened bedroom and into the bathroom. She took the black box from the top shelf of the medicine cabinet and opened it. There were two red capsules inside.
She took one, washed it down with water, and replaced the black box neatly on the shelf.
She felt nothing yet. She knew there would be no pain. It was, they said, just like going to sleep.
She went into the bedroom and got into bed. She leaned over and kissed her sleeping husband.
He stirred but did not wake up.
“Goodbye, Larry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes and waited. It didn’t take long.
Alex Norfolk sat alone in his office, thinking.
He was a man who had spent much of his life alone, and he usually preferred it that way. Tonight, however, it was different.
He wanted to talk to Earl Stuart.
It was impossible, of course. There were some things that even the head of the Science Institute could not do, and visiting a convicted prisoner on the eve of his treatment was definitely one of them.
Earl Stuart still had some rights. Tomorrow, he wouldn’t be Earl Stuart any longer. He would be someone—or something—else. He wouldn’t want to spend his last night talking to Alex Norfolk.
Alex had put him where he was.
It was no use blaming the Directive, or the police, or the irony of fate, whatever that might be. Alex was the one who implemented the Directive. He was responsible.
He could never explain to Earl Stuart. Even if he managed to make him understand, that would only make it worse for Earl. It would make his last night a hell on earth.
Earl Stuart, of course, had been born a savage. Alex had known it as soon as he had seen his picture. Those high, flaring cheekbones, those almost-black eyes—they gave him away. A close examination of Earl’s faked birth records had confirmed it. Earl had been stolen from the caves while he was a baby and sold to Graham Stuart. He had spent his adult life butchering his own people—quite likely, his own brothers and sisters.
How could he tell Earl that?
Alex got his pipe going. He shivered and pulled his cloak more closely about him. He had lost some weight; he was down to one hundred and seventy-five pounds. He felt old tonight, old and tired.
It was hard to live with uncertainty. If only he could be sure. But he could never achieve that. Uncertainty was the curse of the civilized man. No final answers, no freedom from doubt, no pipeline to Olympus. Earl Stuart had been sure, but he had been wrong, tragically wrong. The savages, prowling the wastelands with their spears and stones, were sure….
Alex thought it through.
Had he forgotten anything?
Reviewing the problem was like walking down an old, familiar street. Alex Norfolk had walked that street many, many times. It held no surprises for him.
Still, Alex was old-fashioned in some respects.
He had to go on trying until he passed the responsibility on to someone else.
The basic problem could be stated succinctly enough: the human animal was fast becoming extinct. It was as simple as that, really. Like most of man’s simple problems—love, hate, war, general pig-headedness—it had no simple solution.
For a very long time, it had looked as though it had no solution at all.
The whole thing had come as a terrible surprise, a kind of cosmic kick in the pants. For centuries, man had operated on three fundamental assumptions. He had been so sure of them that he hadn’t bothered to think about them; he had taken them for granted and gone blithely on his way. He had believed that his immediate problem was one of overpopulation. Where, the wise men asked, would all the people live on this crowded planet? He had believed that technology could solve any problem. If there wasn’t enough food to go around, he could harvest the sea or colonize other planets, couldn’t he? And one day, he believed, man would give rise to something better. The superman, his awesome brain bulging, was always lurking just around the corner. Wasn’t that what evolution was all about? Man looked in the mirror and concluded that he was very hot stuff indeed. He couldn’t be only a dead end, could he?
His three basic assumptions had joined a long list of their predecessors in history’s commodious junk-pile. In a scant few hundred years, man had found himself in the same situation he had been in at the beginning: he was a comparatively rare animal. Technology had gone on producing its magic—but like other magics it had failed in the clutch. And superman had been unavoidably detained. He had not come to the rescue on schedule. He had not come at all.
How had it happened?
Alex Norfolk wished he knew, to put it mildly.
There were clues, of course. There were those at the Institute who called them theories. At best, though, they were educated guesses.
The answer, if there was one, was hidden somewhere in the record of life on the planet Earth. Extinction was a part of that record; a very big part. Extinction was as much a principle of evolution as mutation or natural selection or survival. Another of man’s happy assumptions was that he was immune to extinction, barring an explosion of the sun or his own carelessness with nuclear weapons.
Extinction was for the dinosaurs, wasn’t it?
The dinosaurs were so specialized, the pundits always pointed out. Not like man. Marvelous, generalized, adaptable man.
Well, consider the dinosaurs. Some of them had tipped in at thirty-five tons, and some had been no bigger than chickens. Some had eaten meat, some had eaten vegetation. Some had lived on the land, others in the sea. Some had flown. The dinosaurs had done pretty well for sixty million years or so, but there weren’t any kicking around now. Why not?
Disease? A change in the weather? Rat-sized mammals with a propensity for sucking eggs?
Maybe.
The plain fact was that nobody knew what had happened to the dinosaurs.
Pity the poor dinosaur? Sixty million years was a long time. Man had been on the scene for less than three million years, and even that was defining man rather broadly. Man was a very young animal. His staying power was anybody’s guess.
Alex was tired of worrying about the dinosaurs. The mammals were more interesting, and a lot closer to home.
The roll-call of extinct mammals was long and impressive. It was also very puzzling. Leaving aside the early ones, the list was still substantial. Mastodon, mammoth, sabre-toothed tiger, dire wolf—there were hundreds of them. Whole species of antelope and rabbits and moose and beaver and bison. Sometimes, it was very peculiar indeed. The ground sloth dies, the tree sloth lives. The horse d
isappears in the New World but survives in the Old. One kind of rabbit perishes and another kind, practically identical, flourishes.
Coming closer to home, look at the primates. Once, the primates had formed a rich and varied mammalian order. Prosimians, monkeys, apes—most of them were known only from fossils. Some, like Parapithecus, were long gone. Some, like the gorilla, had lasted just long enough to be photographed and studied. Many of them—whole groups and clusters and species—had known their day in the sun, and then—pffft.
Sunburn?
Move still closer to home. Look at man himself. His family tree had a lot of deadwood on it. Old man Neanderthal had been clever, big-brained, resourceful. Where had he gone? Sinanthropus had probably been quite pleased with himself, until he disappeared. Australopithecus and Meganthropus and all the other jawbreakers—they were as dead as the dodo.
And Homo sapiens, self crowned King of the World?
He’d certainly gotten off to an impressive start. He had lived for most of his years as a hunter of game and a gatherer of wild plant foods. He had been rare at first, but he had multiplied. He had spread over most of the Earth—deserts and ice sheets and mountains and plains and tropical islands. With the invention of agriculture he had multiplied still further. There had been an explosion of population and man had become a city-dwelling animal. By the time he had made his first atomic bomb, there were more men on Earth than had lived throughout all of recorded and unrecorded history.
Once, there had been a rich diversity of human cultures. Man, collectively, was little more than an idea and a set of similar biological characteristics. In fact, he had been Hopi and Cheyenne, Aztec and Ona, Masai and Zulu, Polynesian and Bushman and Arunta….
Then he had changed. One lifeway—urban, industrialized, specialized—had been more powerful than all the rest. The others had adapted, or they had died. Man moved into the cities, and the cities blanketed the Earth.
Man had seemed omnipotent. He had reached out for the stars—
And, incredibly, he had faltered.
Something had gone wrong.
Something had gone very wrong indeed….
At first, it had been a small thing.
The big families had disappeared, quietly and without fuss. Where once, in Africa and elsewhere, a man had thought nothing of having twenty children, by three or four wives, it became usual for a man to have only two children. Fine, so much better for the kids! And how could a man send twenty children to school? And school lasted for twenty years, then twenty-five, then thirty—
Soon, even two children were a rarity. One child was enough, wasn’t it? There was no time for children.
It got harder to have even one child. Sterile couples were not unusual by any means. Whole fields of medicine and biology went into action. But the children didn’t come …
The cities failed to reproduce themselves.
Why?
Alex Norfolk puffed on his pipe and shook his head. Why?
The plain fact was that nobody knew.
Oh, it was possible to guess. Guesses were cheap. Any fool could guess.
The atomic wars had helped, probably. They had killed millions, wiped out whole cities. There had been a lot of radiation, a lot of strangely distorted children. But all that was over, finished centuries ago. The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with Genus Homo.
“You’re in good shape,” the doctor said, and the patient keeled over on his way out of the office….
The birth control pills had played a part in it, or so some scientists believed. They had been mass produced at one time, and most people had swallowed a lot of them. They worked, despite all the jokes. Quite possibly, they had worked too well.
Of all the theories, ranging from the fantastic to the plausible, Alex was inclined to accept the most subtle. There was a clear correlation between life in the cities and certain types of illness—heart disease, ulcers, nervous breakdowns, high blood pressure. Even cancer, ultimately, had been linked with stress situations.
The lifeway that man had fashioned for himself was fast, nervous, taut. It was a driven culture, a high pressure culture. It was a culture a man had to get away from occasionally in order to stay sane. And there was nowhere to go. A man took his culture with him. Play became more frantic than work—
Maybe man was a low pressure guy. He had evolved in a world of great distances, a world of quiet, a world of small social units. Yes, even a world of leisure—for a hunter spent more of his time sitting around the fire than he did hunting. There had been time for telling stories, time for dancing, time for dozing with an empty head….
Stress could affect fertility. Stress could affect children. Stress could tie a man in knots so tight he could never escape from them.
Whatever it was—and nobody knew the answer—man stopped breeding. There were few children born. The children who were born seldom lived to be adults.
The great cities contracted. There weren’t many left now.
Man, who had covered the Earth, was a rare animal again. He was getting scarce.
There were forms of life—clams, for instance—that seemed to be virtually immortal. Man wasn’t a clam.
He was faced with extinction.
He had tried everything. He had attempted to seed other planets, but his colonies had not survived. The other worlds of the solar system were not well suited to man, and the planets of other stars could not be reached. He had established utopian communities on Earth—there had been a desperate exodus from the cities at one time. Back to the good old days and the natural life! Utopian communities never worked; they were infinitely more artificial than the cities, and the people in them always brought their culture with them. A farmer who had lived most of his life in the city was apt to be one hell of a farmer….
The geneticists grew babies in the labs, babies by the hundreds and the thousands. They selected the strains, tinkered with them, improved them. The babies were fine, fat, and healthy. But they could not and did not grow up in the labs, and when they were given to childless couples they lived a few years and died.
There was only one thing to do.
The scientists could not save a particular culture, barring a miracle. They could not save a city, a civilization, a way of life. They could not save their friends.
They had a chance to save their species.
That was all.
Important? Alex Norfolk smiled to himself. It was important if you happened to be a member of that species.
It was important to him.
More than two hundred years ago, the Institute had selected thousands of babies from the labs. They had taken them outside, into the wastelands beyond the cities. They had been very careful with those babies. They had nursed them along with all the skill they could command. They had taught them only a few simple techniques for survival—how to hunt, how to fish, how to find edible roots and berries.
Some of them had lived.
When they had been able to fend for themselves—when the oldest men were in their twenties—the scientists had abandoned them.
The savages—and they were savages—had lived.
More than that, they multiplied.
There weren’t many of them. They developed a fairly distinct physical type. They were dirty and ignorant and cruel and infested with bugs.
They had no science. Their technology was pitiful. Their shamans were laughable.
But they had something that no man in the City had.
They had a future.
They had a chance.
They might not make it, of course. The path they walked was long, long and dangerous. But man had walked that path before, against the same odds. He could do it again.
It wouldn’t be the same path, not exactly. Man would make different mistakes, he would have different successes. His path would be different enough so that it might lead to—something else.
If he ever got that far, the Archives would be waiting.
He would have
time to consider.
Alex Norfolk refilled his pipe. It would have helped him if he could have talked to Earl Stuart. Earl would be going in for treatment soon. If he could have explained—
The expeditions were deadly, they were fatal. A few of the babies they brought back would have survived in the City, as Earl himself had done. But not enough to make any real difference. And every savage killed, every baby stolen, cut down on the chance the savages had to survive.
The expeditions robbed man of his future.
And the people of the City could not join the savages, even if they wanted to. That was fantastic. A horde of civilized men and women running out to the caves—
Both would perish.
Earl Stuart wouldn’t care, probably. He was what he was. But it would have eased Alex’s mind, lifted the load a little.
Well, that was impossible.
Alex Norfolk stood up, wrapping his cloak around him.
His job was nearly done. He was an old man, and Randall Wade was waiting to take over. Randy was ready. He could do the job.
The job would end with Randy, very likely.
There might be one more after him.
Alex shrugged. It was none of his concern now.
He had done his best.
He walked out of his office, into the City.
The headman of the Little River band of the People sat on a rock. He was on the plateau above the caves and he was soaking up the sun. His left leg had been lanced by a stone splinter in the raid and it had stiffened up on him. The sun felt good on his leg, and it was important to the headman that he be able to walk without a limp.
If he were not strong, he would not be headman any longer. The People would not listen to him, no matter how wise his words might be. They would listen to someone else, and thus there would be a new headman.
He had been lucky. The band had suffered heavy losses in the raid, but it could have been worse. There had been much grumbling, but then the five babies had come back.
It had been very strange. The five babies had been stolen by the Strong Ones. They had been taken away; he had seen them go. And then, one morning they had returned. The band had awakened to the sound of their crying outside the caves.