Masters of Evolution

by Damon Knight

  They followed the same route, past the things that chirruped, croaked, rumbled, rustled. The main thing, he recalled, was to keep your mind off it.

  “Tell me something,” he said to her trim back. “If I hadn’t got myself mixed up with that farmer and his market basket, do you still think I wouldn’t have sold anything?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, why not? Why all this resistance to machinery? Is it a taboo of some kind?”

  She said nothing for a moment. “Is it because you’re afraid the Cities will get a hold on you?” Alvah insisted. “Because that’s foolish. Our interests are really the same as yours. We don’t just want to sell you stuff—we want to help you help yourselves. The more prosperous you get, the better for us.”

  “It’s not that,” she said.

  “Well, what then? It’s been bothering me. You’ve got all these raw materials, all this land. You wouldn’t have to wait for us—you could have built your own factories, made your own machines. But you never have. I can’t understand why.”

  “It’s not worth the trouble.”

  He choked. “Anything is worth the trouble, if it helps you do the same work more efficiently, more intel—”

  “Wait a minute.” She stopped a woman who was passing in the aisle between the cages. “Marge, where’s Doc?”

  “Down in roundworms, I think.”

  “Tell him I have to see him, will you? It’s urgent. Well wait in here.” She led the way into a windowless room, as small and cluttered as any Alvah had seen.

  “Now,” she said. “We don’t make a fuss about machines because most people simply haven’t any need for them.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Alvah argued. “You may think—”

  “Be quiet and let me finish. We haven’t got centralized industries or power installations. Why do you think the Cities have never beaten us in a war, as often as they’ve tried? Why do you think we’ve taken over the whole world, except for twenty-two Cities? You’ve got to face this sooner or later— in every single respect, our plants and animals are more efficient than any machine you could build.”

  Alvah inspected her closely. Her eyes were intent and brilliant. Her bosom indicated deep and steady breathing. To all appearance, she was perfectly serious.

  “Nuts,” he replied with dignity.

  B.J. shook her head impatiently. “I know you’ve got a brain. Use it. What’s the most expensive item that goes into a machine?”

  “Metal. We’re a little short of it, to tell the truth.”

  “Think again. What are all your gadgets supposed to save?”

  “Well, labor.”

  “Human labor. If metal is expensive, it’s because it costs a lot of man-hours.”

  “If you want to look at it that way—”

  “It’s true, isn’t it? Why is a complicated thing more expensive than a simple one? More man-hours to make it. Why is a rare thing more expensive than a common one? More man-hours to find it. Why is a—”

  “All right, what’s your point?”

  “Take your runabout. You saw that was the thing that interested people most, but I’ll show you why you never could have sold one. How many man-hours went into manufacturing it?”

  Alvah shifted restlessly. “It isn’t in production. It’s a trade item.”

  She sniffed. “Suppose it was in production. Make an honest guess. Figure in everything—amortization on the plant and equipment, materials, labor and so on. You can check your answer against wages and prices in your own money—you’ll come pretty close.”

  Alvah reflected. “Between seven-fifty and a thousand.”

  “Compare that with Swifty’s Morgan Gamma—the thing you raced against. Two man-hours—just two, and I’m being generous.”

  “Interesting,” said Alvah, “if true.” He suppressed an uneasy belch.

  “Figure it out. An hour for the vet when he was foaled. Call it another hour for amortization on the stable where it happened, but that’s too much. It isn’t hard to grow a stable and they last a long time.”

  Alvah, who had been holding his own as long as machines were the topic, wasn’t sure he could keep it up—or, more correctly, down. “All right, two hours,” he said. “The animals feed themselves and water themselves, no doubt.”

  “They do, but that comes under upkeep. Our animals forage, most of them—all the big ones. The rest are cheap and easy to feed. Your machines have to be fueled. Our animals repair themselves, like any living organism, only better and faster. Your machines have to be repaired and serviced. More man-hours. Incidentally, if you and Swifty took a ten-hour trip, you in your runabout, him on his Morgan, you’d spend just ten hours steering. Swifty would spend maybe fifteen minutes all told. And now we come to the payoff—”

  “Some other time,” said Alvah irritably.

  “This is important. When your runabout—”

  “I’d rather not talk about it any more,” said Alvah, raising his voice. “Do you mind?”

  “When your runabout breaks down and can’t be fixed,” she said firmly, “you have to buy another. Swifty’s mare drops twins every year. There. Think about it.”

  The door opened and Bither came in, looking more disheveled than ever. “Hello, Beej, Alvah. Beej, I think we shoulda used annelid stock for this job. These F3 batches no good at—you two arguing?”

  Alvah recovered himself with an effort. “Rhodopalladium,” he said thickly. “I need about a gram. Have you got it?”

  “Not a scrap,” said Bither cheerfully. “Except in the nests, of course.”

  “I told him I didn’t think so,” B.J. said.

  Alvah closed his eyes for a second. “Where,” he asked carefully, “are the nests?”

  “Wish I knew,” Bither admitted. “It’s frustrating as hell. You see, we had to make them awful small and quick, the metallophage. Once you let them out of the sacs, there’s no holding them. We did so good a job, we can’t check to see how good a job we did.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Of course, that’s beside the point. Even if we had the metals, how would you get the alloy you need?”

  “Palladium,” said the girl, “melts at fifteen fifty-three Centigrade. I asked the hand bird.”

  “Best we can get out of a salamander is about six hundred,” Bither added. “Isn’t good for them, either—they get esophagitis.”

  “And necrosis,” the girl said, watching Alvah intently. His eyes were watering. It was hard to see. “Are you telling—”

  “We’re trying to tell you,” she said, “that you can’t go back. You’ve got to start getting used to the idea. There isn’t a thing you can do except settle down here and learn to live with us.”

  Alvah could feel his jaw working, but no words were coming out. The bulge of nausea in his middle was squeezing its way inexorably upward.

  Somebody grabbed his arm. “In there!” said Bither urgently.

  A door opened and closed behind him, and he found himself facing a hideous white-porcelain antique with a pool of water in it. There was a roaring in his ears, but before the first spasm took him, he could hear the girl’s and Bither’s voices faintly from the other room:

  “Eight minutes that time.”

  “Beej, I don’t know.”

  “We can do it!”

  “Well, I suppose we can, but can we do it before he starves?”

  There was a sink in the room, but Alvah would sooner have drunk poison. He fumbled in his disordered kit until he found the condenser canteen. He rinsed out his mouth, took a tonus capsule and a mint lozenge. He opened the door.

  “Feeling better?” asked the girl.

  Alvah stared at her, retched feebly and fled back into the washroom.

  When he came out again, Bither said, “He’s had enough, Beej. Let’s take him out in the courtyard rill he gets his strength back.”

  They moved toward him. Alvah said weakly, but with feeling, “Keep your itchy hands off me.” He walked unsteadily past them, turn
ed when he reached the doorway. “I hate to urp and run, but I’ll never forget your hospitality. If there’s ever anything I can do for you—anything at all —please hesitate to call on me.”

  He heard muttering voices and an odd scraping sound behind him, but he didn’t look back. He was halfway down the aisle between the cages when something furry and gray scuttled into view and sat up, grinning at him.

  It looked like an ordinary capuchin monkey except for its head, which was grotesquely large. “Go away,” said Alvah. He advanced with threatening gestures. The thing chattered at him and stayed where it was.

  The aisle behind him was deserted. Very well, there were other exits. Alvah followed his nose back into the plant section and turned right.

  There was the monkey-thing again.

  At the next intersection of aisles, there were two of them.

  Alvah turned left. And right. And left.

  And emerged into a large empty space enclosed by buildings.

  “This is the courtyard,” said Bither, coming forward with the girl behind him. “Now be reasonable, Alvah. You want to get back to New York, don’t you?”

  This did not seem to call for comment. Alvah stared at him in silence.

  “Well,” said Bither, “there’s just one way you can do it. It won’t be easy—I don’t even say you got more than a fighting chance. One thing, though—it’s up to you just how hard you make it for yourself.”

  “Get to the point,” Alvah said.

  “You got to let us decondition you so you can eat our food, ride on our animals. Now think about it, don’t just—”

  Alvah swung around, looking for the fastest and most direct exit. Before he had time to find it, a dizzying thought struck him and he turned back.

  “Is that what this whole thing has been about?” he demanded. He glared at Bither, then at B.J. “Is that the reason you were so helpful? Did you engineer that fight?”

  Bither clucked unhappily. “Would we admit it if we did? Alvah, I’ll admit this much—of course we interested in you for our own reasons. This is the first time in thirty years we had a chance to study a City man. But what I just told you is true. If you want to get back home, this is your only chance.”

  “Then I’m a dead man,” said Alvah. “You is if you think you is,” Bither told him. “Beej, you try.”

  She looked at Alvah levelly. “You think what we suggesting isn’t possible. Right? Of course, we could do it.

  But I guess you already realize that your people are backward compared to us.”

  Half angry, half curious, Alvah demanded, “Just how do you figure that?”

  “Easy. You probably don’t know much biology, but you must know this much. What’s the one quality that makes human beings the dominant race on this planet?”

  Alvah snorted. “Are you trying to tell me I’m not as bright as a Muckfoot?”

  “Not intelligence. Try again. Something more general-intelligence is only a special phase of it.”

  Alvah’s patience was narrowing to a brittle thread. “You tell me.”

  “All right. We like to think intelligence is important, but you can’t argue that way. It’s special pleading—the way a whale might argue that size is the measuring stick, or a microbe might say numbers. But—”

  “Control of environment,” Alvah said.

  “Right. Another name for it is adaptability. No other organism is so independent of environment, so adaptable as Man. And we could live in New York if we had to, just as we can live in the Arctic Circle or the tropics. And since you don’t dare even try to live here …”

  “All right,” Alvah said bitterly, after a moment. “When do we start?”

  VI

  He refused to be hypnotized.

  “You promised to help,” B.J. said in annoyance. “We can’t break the conditioning till we find out how it was done, you big oaf!”

  “The whole thing is ridiculous anyhow,” Alvah pointed out. “I said I’d let you try and I will—you can prod me around to your heart’s content—but not that. I’ve put in a lot of Required Contribution time in restricted laboratories. Military secrets. How do I know you wouldn’t ask me about those if you got me under?”

  “We’re not interested in—” B.J. began furiously, but Bither cut her off.

  “We is, though, Beej. Might be important for us to know what kind of defenses New York has built up, and I was going to ask him if I got the chance.” He sighed. “Well, there is other ways to skin a glovebeast. Lean back and relax, Alvah.”

  “No tricks?” Alvah asked suspiciously.

  “No, we just going to try to improve your conscious recall. Relax now; close your eyes. Now think of a room, one that’s familiar to you, and describe it to me. Take your time … Now we going further back—further back. You three years old and you just dropped something on the floor. What is it?”

  Bither seemed to know what he was doing, Alvah had to admit. Day after day they dredged up bits and scraps of memory from his childhood, events he had forgotten so completely that he would almost have sworn they had never happened. At first, all of them seemed trivial and irrelevant, but even so, Alvah found, there was an unexpected fascination in this search through the dusty attics of his mind. Once they hit something that made Bither sit up sharply —a dark figure holding something furry, and an accompanying remembered stench.

  Whether or not it had been as important as Bither seemed to think, they never got it back again. But they did get other things—an obscene couplet about the Muckfeet that had been popular in P. S. 9073 when Alvah was ten; a scene from a realie feature called Nix on the Stix; a whispered horror story; a frightening stereo picture in a magazine.

  “What we have to do,” B.J. told him at one point, “is to make you realize that none of this was your own idea. They made you feel this way. They did it to you.”

  “Well, I know that,” said Alvah.

  She stared at him in astonishment. “You knew it all along— and you don’t care?”

  “No.” Alvah felt puzzled and irritated. “Why should I?”

  “Don’t you think they should have let you make up your own mind?”

  Alvah considered this. “You have to make your children see things the way you do, otherwise there wouldn’t be any continuity from one generation to the next. You couldn’t keep any kind of civilization going. Where would we be if we let people wander off into the Sticks and become Muck-feet?”

  He finished triumphantly, but she didn’t look crushed. She merely grinned with an exasperating air of satisfaction and said, “Why should they want to—unless we can give them a better life than the Cities can?”

  This was absurd, but Alvah couldn’t find the one answer that would flatten her, no matter how long and often he mulled it over. Meanwhile, his tolerance of Muckfoot dwellings progressed from ten minutes to thirty, to an hour, to a full day. He didn’t like it and nothing,’ he knew could ever make him like it, but he could stand it. He was able to ride for short distances on Muckfoot animals, and he was even training himself to wear an animal-hide belt for longer and longer periods each day. But he still couldn’t eat Muckfoot food—the bare thought of it still nauseated him —and his own supplies were running short.

  Oddly, he didn’t feel as anxious about it as he should have. He could sense the resistance within him softening day by day. He was irrationally sure that that last obstacle would go, too, when the time came. Something else was bothering him, something he couldn’t even name—but he dreamed of it at night and its symbol was the threatening vast arch of the sky.

  Gradually, from Bither and B.J. and occasionally from some of the other lab workers, Alvah got a picture of the way Muckfoot biogenetics had developed. He had never spent much time wondering how the Muckfeet created their obscene animals and plants; it wasn’t something you enjoyed thinking about. He still didn’t like it; but, he discovered, there was more to it than you would expect.

  Working with exact gene charts and with the Jenkins-
Scripture surgical techniques, Muckfoot geneticists could combine or alter characteristics at will. They could overcome the incompatibility of widely different organisms, producing unlikely hybrids of ant and lobster, cat and dog, elm and asparagus. By these methods, and by controlled mutation, they were able to tailor living organisms for any use. In just under a century, they had created a whole new biota, from soil bacteria to draught animals.

  Bither thought the science was still in its infancy. He forecast a day when the present rural existence of the Muck-feet would give way to a sort of garden city pattern: when even such farm labor as the Muckfeet did would be eliminated, and highly versatile and sophisticated living organisms would serve every need.

  “No reason why you got to have two different plants for shelter and food,” he said. “Some day we’ll eat fruit from the walls of our houses. Another thing, there’s nothing in the plasm that say you can’t restructure the adult zygote. We might be able to build in trigger responses that would change part of an organism into something else when we need it. Save all the development and growth time. We just beginning now, Alvah. You wait and see, twenty, thirty years from now.”

  It all had a sort of horrid fascination. He couldn’t help being interested in the fine structure that disclosed itself as he got deeper into the subject. But he didn’t like it, and he never would.

  After the Fair was over, it seemed that B.J. had very little work to do. As far as Alvah could make out, the same was true of everybody. The settlement grew mortuary-still. For an hour or so every morning, lackadaisical trading went on in the central market place. In the evenings, sometimes, there was music of a sort and a species of complicated ungainly folk-dancing. The rest of the time, children raced through the streets and across the pastures, playing incomprehensible games. Their elders, when they were visible, sat—on doorsteps by ones and twos, grouped on porches and lawns—their hands busy, oftener than not, with some trifle of carving or needlework, but their faces as blank and sleepy as a frog’s in the Sim.

  “What do you do for excitement around here?” he asked B.J. in a dither of boredom.