Limits, p.23
Limits, page 23
“As individuals they’re something like a short grasshopper. As individuals, they hide or sleep in the daytime and come out at night. In open country you can hear them chirping after dusk, but otherwise nobody notices them. But they’re out there, eating and breeding and breeding and eating, getting more numerous over a period of years, until one day there are too many for the environment to produce enough food.
“Then comes the change. On Earth it hasn’t happened in a long time because they aren’t allowed to get that numerous. But it used to be that when there were enough of them, they’d grow bigger and darker and more aggressive. They’d come out in the daytime. They’d eat everything in sight, and when all the food was gone, and when there were enough of them, they’d suddenly take off all at once.
“That’s when you’d get your plague of locusts. They’d drop from the air in a cloud thick enough and broad enough to darken the sky, and when they landed in a farmer’s field he could kiss his crops goodbye. They’d raze it to the soil, then take off again, leaving nothing.”
Jase took off his glasses and wiped them. “I don’t see what it is you’re getting at.”
“Why do they do it? Why were locusts built that way?”
“Evolution, I guess. After the big flight they’d be spread over a lot of territory. I’d say they’d have a much bigger potential food supply.”
“Right. Now consider this. Take a biped that’s man shaped, enough so to use a tool, but without intelligence. Plant him on a world and watch him grow. Say he’s adaptable; say he eventually spread over most of the fertile land masses of the planet. Now what?
“Now an actual physical change takes place. The brain expands. The body hair drops away. Evolution had adapted him to his climate, but that was when he had hair. Now he’s got to use his intelligence to keep from freezing to death. He’ll discover fire. He’ll move out into areas he couldn’t live in before. Eventually he’ll cover the whole planet, and he’ll build spacecraft and head for the stars.”
Jase shook his head. “But why would they change back, Doc?”
“Something in the genes, maybe. Something that didn’t mutate.”
“Not how, Doc. We know it’s possible. Why?”
“We’re going back to being grasshoppers. Maybe we’ve reached our evolutionary peak. Natural selection stops when we start protecting the weak ones, instead of allowing those with defective genes to die a natural death.”
He paused, smiling. “I mean, look at us, Jase. You walk with a cane now. I haven’t been able to read for five years, my eyes have weakened so. And we were the best Earth had to offer; the best minds, the finest bodies. Chris only squeaked by with his glasses because he was such a damn good meteorologist.”
Jase’s face held a flash of long-forgotten pain. “And I guess they still didn’t choose carefully enough.”
“No,” Doc agreed soberly. “They didn’t. On Earth we protected the sick, allowed them to breed, instead of letting them die…with pacemakers, with insulin, artificial kidneys and plastic hip joints and trusses. The mentally ill and retarded fought in the courts for the right to reproduce. Okay, it’s humane. Nature isn’t humane. The infirm will do their job by dying, and no morality or humane court rulings or medical advances will change the natural course of things for a long, long time.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know how stable they are. It could be millions of years, or…?” Doc shrugged. “We’ve changed the course of our own development. Perhaps a simpler creature is needed to colonize a world. Something that has no choice but to change or die. Jase, remember the Cold War?”
“I read about it.”
“And the Belt Embargo? Remember diseromide, and smog, and the spray-can thing, and the day the fusion seawater distillery at San Francisco went up and took the Bay area with it, and four states had to have their water flown in for a month?”
“So?”
“A dozen times we could have wiped out all life on Earth. As soon as we’ve used our intelligence to build spacecraft and seed another world, intelligence becomes a liability. Some old anthropologist even had a theory that a species needs abstract intelligence before it can prey on its own kind. The development of fire gave Man time to sit back and dream up ways to take things he hadn’t earned. You know how gentle the children are, and you can remember how the carefully chosen citizens of Ridgeback acted the night we voted on the children’s right to reproduce.”
“So you gave that to them, Doc. They are reproducing. And when we’re gone they’ll spread all over the world. But are they human?”
Doc pondered, wondering what to say. For many years he had talked only to the children. The children never interrupted, never disagreed…“I had to know that too. Yes. They’re human.”
Jase looked closely at the man he had called friend so many years ago. Doc was so sure. He didn’t discuss; he lectured. Jase felt an alienness in him that was deeper than the mere passage of time.
“Are you going to stay here now?”
“I don’t know. The children don’t need me anymore, though they’ve treated me like a god. I can’t pass anything on to them. I think our culture has to die before theirs can grow.”
Jase fidgeted, uncomfortable. “Doc. Something I’ve got to tell you. I haven’t told anyone. It’s thirty years now, and nobody knows but me.”
Doc frowned. “Go on.”
“Remember the day Roy died? Something in the Orion blew all the motors at once? Well, he talked to Cynnie first. And she talked to me, before she disappeared. Doc, he got a laser message from Earth, and he knew he couldn’t ever send it down. It would have destroyed us. So he blew the motors.”
Doc waited, listening intently.
“It seems that every child being born on Earth nowadays bears an uncanny resemblance to Pithecanthropus erectus. They were begging us to make the Ridgeback colony work. Because Earth is doomed.”
“I’m glad nobody knew that.”
Jase nodded. “If intelligence is bad for us, it’s bad for Earth. They’ve fired their starships. Now they’re ready for another cycle.”
“Most of them’ll die. They’re too crowded.”
“Some will survive. If not there, then, thanks to you, here.” He smiled. A touch of the old Jase in his eyes. “They’ll have to become men, you know.”
“Why do you put it like that?”
“Because Jill uncrated the wolves, to help thin out the herds.”
“They’ll cull the children, too,” Doc nodded. “I couldn’t help them become men, but I think that will do it. They will have to band together, and find tools, and fire.” His voice took on a dreamy quality. “Eventually, the wolves will come out of the darkness to join them at their campfires, and Man will have dogs again.” He smiled. “I hope they don’t overbreed them like we did on earth. I doubt if chihuahuas have ever forgotten what we did to them.”
“Doc,” Jase said, urgently, “will you trust me? Will you wait for a minute while I leave? I…I want to try something. If you decide to go there may never be another chance.”
Doc looked at him, mystified. “Alright, I’ll wait.”
Jase limped out of the door. Doc sat, watching his charges, proud of their alertness and flexibility, their potential for growth in the new land.
There was a creaking as the door swung open.
The woman’s hair had been blond, once. Now it was white, heavy wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, years of hardship and disappointment souring what had once been beauty.
She blinked, at first seeing only Doc.
“Hello, Nat,” he said to her.
She frowned. “What…?” Then she saw Eve.
Their eyes locked, and Nat would have drawn back save for Jase’s insistent hand at her back.
Eve drew close, peering into her mother’s face as if trying to remember her.
The old woman stuttered, then said, “Eve?” The Pith cocked her head and came closer, touching her mother’s hand. Nat pulled it back, eyes wide.
Eve cooed, smiling, holding her baby out to Nat.
At first she flinched, then looked at the child, so much like Eve had been, so much…and slowly, without words or visible emotion, she took the child from Eve and cradled it, held it, and began to tremble. Her hand stretched out helplessly, and Eve came closer, took her mother’s hand and the three of them, mother, child and grandchild, children of different worlds, held each other. Nat cried for the pain that had driven them apart, the love that had brought them together.
Doc stood at the edge of the woods, looking back at the colonists who waved to them, asking for a swift return.
Perhaps so. Perhaps they could, now. Enough time had passed that understanding was a thing to be sought rather than avoided. And he missed the company of his own kind.
No, he corrected himself, the children were his kind. As he had told Jase, without explaining, he knew that they were human. He had tested it the only way he could, by the only means available.
Eve walked beside him, her hand seeking his. “Doc,” she cooed, her birdlike singsong voice loving. He gently took their child from her arms, kissing it.
At over sixty years of age, it felt odd to be a new father, but if his lover had her way, as she usually did, his strange family might grow larger still.
Together, the five of them headed into the forest, and home.
YET ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL:
The Roentgen Standard
It happened around the time of World War I. The Director of Research for Standard Oil was told, “There’s all this goo left over when we refine oil. It’s terrible stuff. It ruins the landscape, and covering it with dirt only gets the dirt gooey. Find something to do with it.”
So he created the plastics industry.
He turned useless, offensive goo into wealth. He was not the first in history to do so. Consider oil itself: useless, offensive goo, until it was needed to lubricate machinery, and later to fuel it. Consider some of the horrid substances that go into cosmetics: mud, organic goop of all kinds, and stuff that comes out of a sick whale’s head. Consider sturgeon caviar: American fishermen are still throwing it away! And the Japanese consider cheese to be what it always started out to be: sour milk.
Now: present plans for disposal of expended nuclear fuel involve such strategies as
1) Diluting and burying it.
2) Pouring it into old, abandoned oil wells. The Soviets tell us that it ought to be safe; after all, the oil stayed there for millions of years. We may question their sincerity: the depleted oil wells they use for this purpose are all in Poland.
3) The Pournelle method. The No Nukes types tell us that stretches of American desert have already been rendered useless for thousands of years because thermonuclear bombs were tested there. Let us take them at their word. Cart the nuclear wastes out into a patch of cratered desert. Put several miles of fence around it, and signs on the fence:
IF YOU CROSS THIS FENCE YOU WILL DIE
Granted, there will be people willing to cross the fence. Think of it as evolution in action. Average human intelligence goes up by a fraction of a percent.
4) Drop the radioactive wastes, in canisters, into the seabed folds where the continental plates are sliding under each other. The radioactives would disappear back into the magma from which they came.
Each of these solutions gets rid of the stuff; but at some expense, and no profit. What the world needs now is another genius. We need a way to turn radioactive wastes into wealth.
And I believe I know the way.
Directly. Make coins out of it.
Radioactive money has certain obvious advantages.
A healthy economy depends on money circulating fast. Make it radioactive and it will certainly circulate.
Verifying the authenticity of money would become easy. Geiger counters, like pocket calculators before them, would become both tiny and cheap due to mass production. You would hear their rapid clicking at every ticket window. A particle accelerator is too expensive for a counterfeiter; counterfeiting would become a lost art.
The economy would be boosted in a number of ways. Lead would become extremely valuable. Even the collection plates in a church would have to be made of lead (or gold). Bank vaults would have to be lead lined, and the coins separated by dampers. Styles of clothing would be affected. Every purse, and one pocket in every pair of pants, would need to be shielded in lead. Even so, the concept of “money burning a hole in your pocket” would take on new meaning.
Gold would still be the mark of wealth. Gold blocks radiation as easily as lead. It would be used to shield the wealthy from their money.
The profession of tax collector would carry its own, well deserved penalty. So would certain other professions. An Arab oil sheik might still grow obscenely rich, but at least we could count on his spending it as fast as it comes in, lest it go up in a fireball. A crooked politician would have to take bribes by credit card, making it easier to convict him. A bank robber would be conspicuous, staggering up to the teller’s window in his heavy lead-shielding clothing. The successful pickpocket would also stand out in a crowd. A thick lead-lined glove would be a dead giveaway; but without it, he could be identified by his sickly, faintly glowing hands. Society might even have to revive an ancient practice, amputating the felon’s hand as a therapeutic measure, before it kills him.
Foreign aid could be delivered by ICBM.
Is this just another crazy utopian scheme? Or could the American people be brought to accept the radioactive standard as money? Perhaps we could. It’s got to be better than watching green paper approach its intrinsic value. The cost of making and printing a dollar bill, which used to be one and a half cents, is rising inexorably toward one dollar. (If only we could count on its stopping there! But it costs the same to print a twenty…)
At least the radioactive money would have intrinsic value. What we have been calling “nuclear waste,” our descendants may well refer to as “fuel.” It is dangerous precisely because it undergoes fission…because it delivers power. Unfortunately, the stuff doesn’t last “thousands of years.” In six hundred years, the expended fuel is no more radioactive than the ore it was mined from.
Dropping radioactives into the sea is wasteful. We can ensure that they will still be around when the Earth’s oil and coal and plutonium have been used up, by turning them into money, now.
MORE TALES FROM
THE DRACO TAVERN…
TABLE MANNERS
A lot of what comes out of Xenobiology these days is classified, and it doesn’t come out. The Graduate Studies Complex is in the Mojave Desert. It makes security easier.
Sireen Burke’s smile and honest blue retina prints and the microcircuitry in her badge got her past the gate. I was ordered out of the car. A soldier offered me coffee and a bench in the shade of the guard post. Another searched my luggage.
He found a canteen, a sizable hunting knife in a locking sheath, and a microwave beamer. He became coldly polite. He didn’t thaw much when I said that he could hold them for awhile.
I waited.
Presently Sireen came back for me. “I got you an interview with Dr. McPhee,” she told me on the way up the drive. “Now it’s your baby. He’ll listen as long as you can keep his interest.”
Graduate Studies looked like soap bubbles: foamcrete sprayed over inflation frames. There was little of military flavor inside. More like a museum. The reception room was gigantic, with a variety of chairs and couches and swings and resting pits for aliens and humans: designs borrowed from the Draco Tavern without my permission.
The corridors were roomy too. Three chirpsithra passed us, eleven feet tall and walking comfortably upright. One may have known me, because she nodded. A dark glass sphere rolled through, nearly filling the corridor, and we had to step into what looked like a classroom to let it pass.
McPhee’s office was closet-sized. He certainly didn’t interview aliens here, at least not large aliens. Yet he was a mountainous man, six feet four and barrel-shaped and covered with black hair: shaggy brows, full beard, a black mat showing through the V of his blouse. He extended a huge hand across the small desk and said, “Rick Schumann? You’re a long way from Siberia.”
“I came for advice,” I said, and then I recognized him. “B-beam McPhee?”
“Walter, but yes.”
The Beta Beam satellite had never been used in war; but when I was seven years old, the Pentagon had arranged a demonstration. They’d turned it loose on a Perseid meteor shower. Lines of light had filled the sky one summer night, a glorious display, the first time I’d ever been allowed up past midnight. The Beta Beam had shot down over a thousand rocks.
Newscasters had named Walter McPhee for the Beta Beam when he played offensive guard for Washburn University.
B-beam was twenty-two years older, and bigger than life, since I’d last seen him on a television set. There were scars around his right eye, and scarring distorted the lay of his beard. “I was at Washburn on an athletic scholarship,” he told me. “I switched to Xeno when the first chirpsithra ships landed. Got my doctorate six years ago. And I’ve never been in the Draco Tavern because it would have felt too much like goofing off, but I’ve started to wonder if that isn’t a mistake. You get everything in there, don’t you?”
I said it proudly. “Everything that lands on Earth visits the Draco Tavern.”
“Folk too?”
“Yes. Not often. Four times in fifteen years. The first time, I thought they’d want to talk. After all, they came a long way—”
He shook his head vigorously, “They’d rather associate with other carnivores. I’ve talked with them, but it’s damn clear they’re not here to have fun. Talking to local study groups is a guest-host obligation. What do you know about them?”
“Just what I see. They come in groups, four to six. They’ll talk to glig, and of course they get along with chirpsithra. Everything does. This latest group was thin as opposed to skeletal, though I’ve seen both—”
