Theodore Sturgeon
It's very difficult to believe that beings as smart as humans would deliberately maintain societies that destroy the world in which they live. Is there some unknown factor at work that causes such obviously irrational behavior? Theodore Sturgeon suggests an answer.
Sturgeon's is a name to conjure with in science fiction. Though his stories are often strongly philosophical (More Than Human and Venus Plus X are examples), he always puts human reactions foremost in his stories.
I
JOE TRILLING HAD a funny way of making a living. It was a good living, but of course he didn't make anything like the bundle he could have in the city. On the other hand he lived in the moun-tains a half mile away from a picturesque village in clean air and piney-birchy woods along with lots of mountain laurel and he was his own boss. There wasn't much competition for what he did; he had his wife and kids around all the time and more orders than he could fill. He was one of the night people and after the family had gone to bed he could work quietly and uninterruptedly. He was happy as a clam.
One night—very early morning, really—he was interrupted. Bup, bup, bup, bup. Knock at the window, two shorts, two longs. He froze, he whirled, for he knew that knock. He hadn't heard it for years but it had been a part of his life since he was born. He saw the face outside and filled his lungs for a whoop that would have roused them at the fire station on the village green, but then he saw the finger on the lips and let the air out. The finger beckoned and Joe Trilling whirled again, turned down a flame, read a gauge, made a note, threw a switch, and joyfully but silently dove for the outside door. He slid out, closed it carefully, peered into the dark.
"Karl?"
"Shh."
There he was, edge of the woods. Joe Trilling went there and, whispering because Karl had asked for it, they hit each other, cursed, called each other the filthiest possible names. It would not be easy to explain this to an extra-terrestrial; it isn't necessarily a human thing to do. It's a cultural thing. It means, I want to touch you, it means I love you; but they were men and brothers, so they hit each other's arms and shoulders and swore despicable oaths and insults, until at last even those words wouldn't do and they stood in the shadows, holding each other's biceps and grinning and drilling into each other with eyes. Then Karl Trilling moved his head sidewards toward the road and they walked away from the house.
"I don't want Hazel to hear us talking," Karl said. "I don't want her or anyone to know I was here. How is she?"
"Beautiful. Aren't you going to see her at all—or the kids?"
"Yes, but not this trip. There's the car. We can talk there. I really am afraid of that bastard."
"Ah," said Joe. "How is the great man?"
"Po'ly," said Karl. "But we're talking about two different bastards. The great man is only the richest man in the world, but I'm not afraid of him, especially now. I'm talking about Cleveland Wheeler."
"Who's Cleveland Wheeler?"
They got into the car. "It's a rental," said Karl. "Matter of fact, it's the second rental. I got out of the executive jet and took a company car and rented another—and then this. Reasonably sure it's not bugged. That's one kind of answer to your question, who's Cleve Wheeler. Other answers would be the man behind the throne. Next in line. Multifaceted genius. Killer shark."
"Next in line," said Joe, responding to the only clause that made any sense. "The old man is sinking?"
"Officially—and an official secret—his hemoglobin reading is four. That mean anything to you, Doctor?"
"Sure does, Doctor. Malnutritive anemia, if other rumors I hear are true. Richest man in the world—dying of starvation."
"And old age—and stubbornness—and obsession. You want to hear about Wheeler?"
"Tell me."
"Mister Lucky. Born with everything. Greek coin profile. Michelangelo muscles. Discovered early by a bright-eyed elementary school principal, sent to a private school, used to go straight to the teachers' lounge in the morning and say what he'd been reading or thinking about. Then they'd tell off a teacher to work with him or go out with him or whatever. High school at twelve, varsity track, basketball, football, and high diving—three letters for each—yes, he graduated in three years, summa cum. Read all the textbooks at the beginning of each term, never cracked them again. More than anything else he had the habit of success.
"College, the same thing: turned sixteen in his first semester, just ate everything up. Very popular. Graduated at the top again, of course."
Joe Trilling, who had slogged through college and medical school like a hod carrier, grunted enviously. "I've seen one or two like that. Everybody marvels; nobody sees how easy it was for them."
Karl shook his head. "Wasn't quite like that with Cleve Wheeler. If anything was easy for him it was because of the nature of his equipment. He was like a four-hundred-horsepower car moving in sixty-horsepower traffic. When his muscles were called on he used them, I mean really put it down to the floor. A very willing guy. Well—he had his choice of jobs—hell, choice of careers. He went into an architectural firm that could use his math, administrative ability, public presence, knowledge of materials, art. Gravitated right to the top, got a partnership. Picked up a doctorate on the side while he was doing it. Married extremely well."
"Mister Lucky," Joe said.
"Mister Lucky, yeah. Listen. Wheeler became a partner and he did his work and he knew his stuff—everything he could learn or understand. Learning and understanding are not enough to cope with some things like greed or unexpected stupidity or accident or sheer bad breaks. Two of the other partners got into a deal I won't bother you with—a high-rise apartment complex in the wrong place for the wrong residents and land acquired the wrong way. Wheeler saw it coming, called them in, and talked it over. They said yes-yes and went right ahead and did what they wanted anyway—something that Wheeler never in the world expected. The one thing high capability and straight morals and a good education don't give you is the end of innocence. Cleve Wheeler was an innocent.
"Well, it happened, the disaster that Cleve had predicted, but it happened far worse. Things like that, when they surface, have a way of exposing a lot of other concealed rot. The firm collapsed. Cleve Wheeler had never failed at anything in his whole life. It was the one thing he had no practice in dealing with. Anyone with the most rudimentary intelligence would have seen that this was the time to walk away— lie down, even. Cut his losses. But I don't think these things even occurred to him."
Karl Trilling laughed suddenly. "In one of Philip Wylie's novels is a tremendous description of a forest fire and how the animals run away from it, the foxes and the rabbits running shoulder to shoulder, the owls flying in the daytime to get ahead of the flames. Then there's this beetle, lumbering along on the ground. The beetle comes to a burned patch, the edge of twenty acres of hell. It stops, it wiggles its feelers, it turns to the side, and begins to walk around the fire—" He laughed again. "That's the special thing Cleveland Wheeler has, you see, under all that muscle and brain and brilliance. If he had to—and were a beetle—he wouldn't turn back and he wouldn't quit. If all he could do was walk around it, he'd start walking."
"What happened?" asked Joe.
"He hung on. He used everything he had. He used his brains and his personality and his reputation and all his worldly goods. He also borrowed and promised—and he worked. Oh, he worked. Well, he kept the firm. He cleaned out the rot and built it all up again from the inside, strong and straight this time. But it cost.
"It cost him time—all the hours of every day but the four or so he used for sleeping. And just about when he had it leveled off and starting up, it cost him his wife."
"You said he'd married well."
"He'd married what you marry when you're a young block-buster on top of everything and going higher. She was a nice enough girl, I suppose, and maybe you can't blame her, but she was no more used to failure than he was. Only he could walk around it. He could rent a room and ride the bus. She just didn't know how—and of course with women like that there's always the discarded swain somewhere in the wings."
"How did he take that?"
"Hard. He'd married the way he played ball or took examinations—with everything he had. It did something to him. All this did things to him, I suppose, but that was the biggest chunk of it.
"He didn't let it stop him. He didn't let anything stop him. He went on until all the bills were paid—every cent. All the interest. He kept at it until the net worth was exactly what it had been before his ex-partners had begun to eat out the core. Then he gave it away. Gave it away! Sold all right and title to his interest for a dollar."
"Finally cracked, hm?"
Karl Trilling looked at his brother scornfully. "Cracked. Matter of definition, isn't it? Cleve Wheeler's goal was zero—can you understand that? What is success anyhow? Isn't it making up your mind what you're going to do and then doing it, all the way?"
"In that case," said his brother quietly, "suicide is success."
Karl gave him a long penetrating look. "Right," he said, and thought about it a moment.
"Anyhow," Joe asked, "why zero?"
"I did a lot of research on Cleve Wheeler, but I couldn't get inside his head. I don't know. But I can guess. He meant to owe no man anything. I don't know how he felt about the company he saved, but I can imagine. The man he became—was becoming—wouldn't want to owe it one damned thing. I'd say he just wanted out—but on his own terms, which included leaving nothing behind to work on him."
"Okay," said Joe.
Karl Trilling thought. The nice thing about old Joe is that he'll wait. All these years apart with hardly any communication beyond birthday cards—and not always that—and here he is, just as if we were still together every day. I wouldn't be here if it weren't important; I wouldn't be telling him all this unless he needed to know; he wouldn't need any of it unless he was going to help. All that unsaid—I don't have to ask him a damn thing. What am I interrupting in his life? What am I going to interrupt? I won't have to worry about that. He'll take care of it.
He said, "I'm glad I came here, Joe."
Joe said, "That's all right," which meant all the things Karl had been thinking. Karl grinned and hit him on the shoulder and went on talking.
"Wheeler dropped out. It's not easy to map his trail for that period. It pops up all over. He lived in at least three communes—maybe more, but those three were a mess when he came and a model when he left. He started businesses—all things that had never happened before, like a supermarket with no shelves, no canned music, no games or stamps, just neat stacks of open cases, where the customer took what he wanted and marked it according to the card posted by the case, with a marker hanging on a string. Eggs and frozen meat and fish and the like, and local produce were priced a flat 2 percent over wholesale. People were honest because they could never be sure the checkout counter didn't know the prices of everything—besides, to cheat on the prices listed would have been just too embarrassing. With nothing but a big empty warehouse for overhead and no employees spending thousands of man-hours marking individual items, the prices beat any discount house that ever lived. He sold that one too, and moved on. He started a line of organic baby foods without preservatives, franchised it, and moved on again. He developed a plastic container that would burn without polluting and patented it and sold the patent."
"I've heard of that one. Haven't seen it around, though."
"Maybe you will," Karl said in a guarded tone. "Maybe you will.
Anyway, he had a CPA in Pasadena handling details, and just did his thing all over. I never heard of a failure in anything he tried."
"Sounds like a junior edition of the great man himself, your honored boss."
"You're not the only one who realized that. The boss may be a ding-a-ling in many ways, but nobody ever faulted his business sense. He has always had his tentacles out for wandering pieces of very special manpower. For all I know he had drawn a bead on Cleveland Wheeler years back. I wouldn't doubt that he'd made offers from time to time, only during that period Cleve Wheeler wasn't about to go to work for anyone that big. His whole pattern is to ran things his way, and you don't do that in an established empire."
"Heir apparent," said Joe, reminding him of something he had said earlier.
"Right," nodded Karl. "I knew you'd begin to get the idea before I was finished."
"But finish," said Joe.
"Right. Now what I'm going to tell you, I just want you to know. I don't expect you to understand it or what it means or what it has all done to Cleve Wheeler. I need your help, and you can't really help me unless you know the whole story."
"Shoot."
Karl Trilling shot: "Wheeler found a girl. Her name was Clara Prieta and her folks came from Sonora. She was bright as hell—in her way, I suppose, as bright as Cleve, though with a tenth of his schooling—and pretty as well, and it was Cleve she wanted, not what he might get for her. She fell for him when he had nothing—when he really wanted nothing. They were a daily, hourly joy to each other. I guess that was about the time he started building this business and that, making something again. He bought a little house and a car. He bought two cars, one for her. I don't think she wanted it, but he couldn't do enough—he was always looking for more things to do for her. They went out for an evening to some friends' house, she from shopping, he from whatever it was he was working on then, so they had both cars. He followed her on the way home and had to watch her lose control and spin out. She died in his arms."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Mister Lucky. Listen: a week later he turned a comer downtown and found himself looking at a bank robbery. He caught a stray bullet— grazed the back of his neck. He had seven months to lie still and think about things. When he got out he was told his business manager had embezzled everything and headed south with his secretary. Everything."
"What did he do?"
"Went to work and paid his hospital bill."
They sat in the car in the dark for a long time, until Joe said, "Was he paralyzed, there in the hospital?"
"For nearly five months."
"Wonder what he thought about."
Karl Trilling said, "I can imagine what he thought about. What I can't imagine is what he decided. What he concluded. What he determined to be. Damn it, there are no accurate words for it. We all do the best we can with what we've got, or try to. Or should. He did—and with the best possible material to start out with. He played it straight; he worked hard; he was honest and lawful and fair; he was fit; he was bright. He came out of the hospital with those last two qualities intact. God alone knows what's happened to the rest of it."
"So he went to work for the old man."
"He did—and somehow that frightens me. It was as if all his qualifications were not enough to suit both of them until these things happened to him—until they made him become what he is."
"And what is that?"
"There isn't a short answer to that, Joe. The old man has become a modern nymph. Nobody ever sees him. Nobody can predict what he's going to do or why. Cleveland Wheeler stepped into his shadow and disappeared almost as completely as the boss. There are very few things you can say for certain. The boss has always been a recluse and in the ten years Cleve Wheeler has been with him he has become more so. It's been business as usual with him, of course—which means the constantly unusual—long periods of quiet, and then these spectacular unexpected wheelings and dealings. You assume that the old man dreams these things up and some high-powered genius on his staff gets them done. But it could be the genius that instigates the moves—who can know? Only the people closest to him—Wheeler, Epstein, me. And I don't know."
"But Epstein died."
Karl Trilling nodded in the dark. "Epstein died. Which leaves only Wheeler to watch the store. I'm the old man's personal physician, not Wheeler's and there's no guarantee that I ever will be Wheeler's."
Joe Trilling recrossed his legs and leaned back, looking out into the whispering dark. "It begins to take shape," he murmured. "The old man's on the way out, you very well might be, and there's nobody to take over but this Wheeler."
"Yes, and I don't know what he is or what he'll do. I do know he will command more power than any single human being on Earth. He'll have so much that he'll be above any kind of cupidity that you or I could imagine—you or I can't think in that order of magnitude. But you see, he's a man who, you might say, has had it proved to him that being good and smart and strong and honest doesn't particularly pay off. Where will he go with all this? And hypothesizing that he's been making more and more of the decisions lately, and extrapolating from that—where is he going? All you can be sure of is that he will succeed in anything he tries. That is his habit."
"What does he want? Isn't that what you're trying to figure out? What would a man like that want, if he knew he could get it?"
"I knew I'd come to the right place," said Karl almost happily. "That's it exactly. As for me, I have all I need now and there are plenty of other places I could go. I wish Epstein were still around, but he's dead and cremated."
"Cremated?"
"That's right—you wouldn't know about that. Old man's instructions. I handled it myself. You've heard of the hot and cold private swimming pools—but I bet you never heard of a man with his own private crematorium in the second sub-basement."
Joe threw up his hands "I guess if you can reach into your pocket and pull out two billion real dollars, you can have anything you want. By the way, was that legal?"
"Like you said—if you have two billion. Actually, the county medical examiner was present and signed the papers. And he'll be there when the old man pushes off too—it's all in the final instructions. Hey—wait, I don't want to cast any aspersions on the M.E. He wasn't bought. He did a very competent examination on Epstein."
"Okay—we know what to expect when the time comes. It's afterward you're worried about."
"Right. What has the old man—I'm speaking of the corporate old man now—what has he been doing all along? What has he been doing in the last ten years, since he got Wheeler—and is it any different from what he was doing before? How much of this difference, if any, is more Wheeler than boss? That's all we have to go on, Joe, and from it we have to extrapolate what Wheeler's going to do with the biggest private economic force this world has ever known."
"Let's talk about that," said Joe, beginning to smile-Karl Trilling knew the signs, so he began to simile a little, too. They talked about it.
II
The crematorium in the second sub-basement was purely functional, as if all concessions to sentiment and ritual had been made elsewhere, or canceled. The latter most accurately describes what had happened when at last, at long long last, the old man died. Everything was done precisely according to his instructions immediately after he was certifiably dead and before any public announcements were made—right up to and including the moment when the square mouth of the furnace opened with a startling clang, a blare of heat, a flare of light—the hue the old-time blacksmiths called straw color. The simple coffin slid rapidly in, small flames exploding into being on its corners, and the door banged shut. It took a moment for the eyes to adjust to the bare room, the empty greased track, the closed door. It took the same moment for the conditioners to whisk away the sudden smell of scorched soft pine.
The medical examiner leaned over the small table and signed his name twice. Karl Trilling and Cleveland Wheeler did the same. The M.E. tore off copies and folded them and put them away in his breast pocket. He looked at the closed square iron door, opened his mouth, closed it again, and shrugged. He held out his hand.
"Goodnight, Doctor."
"Good night, Doctor. Rugosi's outside—he'll show you out."
The M.E. shook hands wordlessly with Cleveland Wheeler and left.
"I know just what he's feeling," Karl said. "Something ought to be said. Something memorable—end of an era. Like 'One small step for man—'"
Cleveland Wheeler smiled the bright smile of the college hero, fifteen years after—a little less wide, a little less even, a great deal less in the eyes. He said in the voice that commanded, whatever he said, "If you think you're quoting the first words from an astronaut on the moon, you're not. What he said was from the ladder, when he poked his boot down. He said, 'It's some kind of soft stuff. I can kick it around with my foot.' I've always liked that much better. It was real; it wasn't rehearsed or memorized or thought out and it had to do with that moment and the next. The M.E. said good night and you told him the chauffeur was waiting outside. I like that better than anything anyone could say. I think he would, too," Wheeler added, barely gesturing, with a very strong, slightly cleft chin, toward the hot black door.
"But he wasn't exactly human."
"So they say." Wheeler half smiled and, even as he turned away, Karl could sense himself tuned out, the room itself become of secondary importance—the next thing Wheeler was to do, and the next and the one after, becoming more real than the here and now.
Karl put a fast end to that.
He said levelly, "I meant what I just said, Wheeler."
It couldn't have been the words, which by themselves might have elicited another half smile and a forgetting It was the tone, and perhaps the "Wheeler." There is a ritual about these things. To those few on his own level, and those on the level below, he was Cleve Below that he was mister to his face and Wheeler behind his back No one of his peers would call him mister unless it was meant as the herald of an insult; no one of his peers or immediate underlings would call him Wheeler at all, ever. Whatever the component, it removed Cleveland Wheeler's hand from the knob and turned him. His face was completely alert and interested. "You'd best tell me what you mean, Doctor."
Karl said, "I'll do better than that. Come." Without gestures, suggestions, or explanations he walked to the left rear of the room, leaving it up to Wheeler to decide whether or not to follow Wheeler followed.
In the corner Karl rounded on him. "If you ever say anything about this to anyone—even me—when we leave here, I'll just deny it. If you ever get in here again, you won't find anything to back up your story." He took a complex four-inch blade of machine stainless steel from his belt and slid it between the big masonry blocks. Silently, massively, the course of blocks in the corner began to move upward Looking up at them in the dim light from the narrow corridor they revealed, anyone could see that they were real blocks and that to get through them without that key and the precise knowledge of where to put it would be a long-term project.
Again Karl proceeded without looking around, leaving go, no-go as a matter for Wheeler to decide. Wheeler followed Karl heard his footsteps behind him and noticed with pleasure and something like admiration that when the heavy blocks whooshed down and seated themselves solidly behind them, Wheeler may have looked over his shoulder but did not pause.
"You've noticed we're alongside the furnace," Karl said, like a guided-tour bus driver. "And now, behind it."
He stood aside to let Wheeler pass him and see the small room
It was just large enough for the tracks which protruded from the back of the furnace and a little standing space on each side. On the far side was a small table with a black suitcase standing on it. On the track stood the coffin, its corners carboned, its top and sides wet and slightly steaming
"Sorry to have to close that stone gate that way," Karl said matter-of-factly. "I don't expect anyone down here at all, but I wouldn't want to explain any of this to persons other than yourself "
Wheeler was staring at the coffin He seemed perfectly composed, but it was a seeming. Karl was quite aware of what it was costing him.
Wheeler said, "I wish you'd explain it to me." And he laughed. It was the first time Karl had ever seen this man do anything badly.
"I will. I am." He clicked open the suitcase and laid it open and flat on the little table. There was a glisten of chrome and steel and small vials in little pockets. The first tool he removed was a screwdriver. "No need to use screws when you're cremating "em," he said cheerfully and placed the tip under one corner of the lid. He struck the handle smartly with the heel of one hand and the lid popped loose. "Stand this up against the wall behind you, will you?"
Silently Cleveland Wheeler did as he was told. It gave him something to do with his muscles; it gave him the chance to turn his head away for a moment; it gave him a chance to think—and it gave Karl the opportunity for a quick glance at his steady countenance.
He's a mensch, Karl thought. He really is…
Wheeler set up the lid neatly and carefully and they stood, one on each side, looking down into the coffin.
"He—got a lot older," Wheeler said at last.
"You haven't seen him recently."
"Here and in there," said the executive. "I've spent more time in the same room with him during the past month than I have in the last eight, nine years. Still, it was a matter of minutes, each time "
Karl nodded understandingly. "I'd heard that Phone calls, any time of the day or night, and then those long silences two days, three, not calling out, not having anyone in—"
"Are you going to tell me about the phony oven?"
"Oven? Furnace? It's not a phony at all. When we've finished here it'll do the job, all right."
"Then why the theatricals?"
"That was for the M.E. Those papers he signed are in sort of a never-never country just now. When we slide this back in and turn on the heat they'll become as legal as he thinks they are."
"Then why—"
"Because there are some things you have to know."
Karl reached into the coffin and unfolded the gnarled hands. They came apart reluctantly and he pressed them down at the sides of the body. He unbuttoned the jacket, laid it back, unbuttoned the shirt, unzipped the trousers. When he had finished with this he looked up and found Wheeler's sharp gaze, not on the old man's corpse, but on him.
"I have the feeling," said Cleveland Wheeler, "that I have never seen you before."
Silently Karl Trilling responded: But you do now. And, Thanks, Joey. You were dead right Joe had known the answer to that one plaguing question, How should I act?
Talk just the way he talks, Joe had said Be what he is, the whole time.
Be what he is. A man without illusions (they don't work) and without hope (who needs it?), who has the unbreakable habit of succeeding. And who can say it's a nice day in such a way that everyone around snaps to attention and says, Yes, SIR'
"You've been busy," Karl responded shortly. He took off his jacket, folded it, and put it on the table beside the kit. He put on surgeon's gloves and slipped the sterile sleeve off a new scalpel. "Some people scream and faint the first time they watch a dissection."
Wheeler smiled thinly "I don't scream and faint." But it was not lost on Karl Trilling that only then, at the last possible moment, did Wheeler actually view the old man's body. When he did he neither screamed nor fainted; he uttered an astonished grunt.
"Thought that would surprise you," Karl said easily. "In case you were wondering, though, he really was a male The species seems to be oviparous. Mammals too, but it has to be oviparous. I'd sure like a look at a female. That isn't a vagina It's a cloaca."
"Until this moment," said Wheeler in a hypnotized voice, "I thought that 'not human' remark of yours was a figure of speech."
"No, you didn't," Karl responded shortly
Leaving the words to hang in the air, as words will if a speaker has the wit to isolate them with wedges of silence, he deftly slit the corpse from the sternum to the pubic symphysis. For the first-time viewer this was always the difficult moment. It's hard not to realize viscerally that the cadaver does not feel anything and will not protest. Nerve-alive to Wheeler, Karl looked for a gasp or a shudder; Wheeler merely held his breath.
"We could spend hours—weeks, I imagine, going into the details," Karl said, deftly making a transverse incision in the ensiform area, almost around to the trapezoid on each side, "but this is the thing I wanted you to see." Grasping the flesh at the juncture of the cross he had cut, on the left side, he pulled upward and to the left. The cutaneous layers came away easily, with the fat under them. They were not pinkish, but an off-white lavender shade. Now the muscular striations over the ribs were in view. "If you'd palpated the old man's chest," he said, demonstrating on the right side, "you'd have felt what seemed to be normal human ribs. But look at this."
With a few deft strokes he separated the muscle fibers from the bone on a mid-costal area about four inches square, and scraped. A rib emerged and, as he widened the area and scraped between it and the next one, it became clear that the ribs were joined by a thin flexible layer of bone or chitin.
"It's like baleen—whalebone," said Karl "See this?" He sectioned out a piece, flexed it. "My God."
Ill
"Now look at this." Karl took surgical shears from the kit, snipped through the sternum right up to the clavicle and then across the lower margin of the ribs. Slipping his fingers under them, he pulled upward. With a dull snap the entire ribcage opened like a door, exposing the lung.
The lung was not pink, nor the liverish-brownish-black of a smoker, but yellow—the clear, bright yellow of pure sulfur.
"His metabolism," Karl said, straightening up at last and flexing the tension out of his shoulder, "is fantastic. Or was. He lived on oxygen, same as us, but he broke it out of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and trioxide, and carbon dioxide mostly. I'm not saying he could—I mean he had to. When he was forced to breathe what we call clean air, he could take just so much of it and then had to duck out and find a few breaths of his own atmosphere. When he was younger he could take it for hours at a time, but as the years went by he had to spend more and more time in the kind of smog he could breathe Those long disappearances of his and that reclusiveness—they weren't as kinky as people supposed "
Wheeler made a gesture toward the corpse "But—what is he? Where—'"
"I can't tell you. Except for a good deal of medical and biochemical details, you now know as much as I do. Somehow, somewhere, he arrived. He came, he saw, he began to make his moves. Look at this."
He opened the other side of the chest and then broke the sternum up and away. He pointed. The lung tissue was not in two discrete parts, but extended across the median line. "One lung, all the way across, though it has these two lobes. The kidneys and gonads show the same right-left fusion "
"I'll take your word for it," said Wheeler a little hoarsely "Damn it, what is it?"
"A featherless biped, as Plato once described homo sap. I don't know what it is. I just know that it is—and I thought you ought to know. That's all "
"But you've seen one before. That's obvious "
"Sure. Epstein "
"Epstein?"
"Sure. The old man had to have a go-between—someone who could, without suspicion, spend long hours with him and hours away. The old man could do a lot over the phone, but not everything. Epstein was, you might say, a right arm that could hold its breath a little longer than he could. It got to him in the end, though, and he died of it."
"Why didn't you say something long before this?"
"First of all, I value my own skin. I could say reputation, but skin is the word. I signed a contract as his personal physician because he needed a personal physician—another bit of window dressing. But I did precious little doctoring—except over the phone—and nine-tenths of that was, I realized quite recently, purely diversionary. Even a doctor, I suppose, can be a trusting soul. One or the other would call and give a set of symptoms and I'd cautiously suggest and prescribe. Then I'd get another call that the patient was improving and that was that. Why, I even got specimens—blood, urine, stools—and did the pathology on them and never realized that they were from the same source as what the medical examiner checked out and signed for."
"What do you mean, same source?"
Karl shrugged. "He could get anything he wanted—anything."
"Then—what the M.E. examined wasn't—" he waved a hand at the casket.
"Of course not. That's why the crematorium has a back door. There's a little pocket sleight-of-hand trick you can buy for fifty cents that operates the same way. This body here was inside the furnace. The ringer—a look-alike that came from God knows where; I swear to you I don't—was lying out there waiting for the M.E. When the button was pushed the fires started up and that coffin slid in—pushing this one out and at the same time drenching it with water as it came through. While we've been in here, the human body is turning to ashes. My personal, private secret instructions, both for Epstein and for the boss, were to wait until I was certain I was alone and then come in here after an hour and push the second button, which would slide this one back into the fire. I was to do no investigations, ask no questions, make no reports. It came through as logical but not reasonable, like so many of his orders." He laughed suddenly "Do you know why the old man—and Epstein too, for that matter, in case you never noticed—wouldn't shake hands with anyone?"
"I presumed it was because he had an obsession with germs."
"It was because his normal body temperature was a hundred and seven."
Wheeler touched one of his own hands with the other and said nothing.
When Karl felt that the wedge of silence was thick enough he asked lightly, "Well, boss, where do we go from here?"
Cleveland Wheeler turned away from the corpse and to Karl slowly, as if diverting his mind with an effort.
"What did you call me?"
"Figure of speech," said Karl and smiled "Actually, I'm working for the company—and that's you. I'm under orders, which have been finally and completely discharged when I push that button—I have no others. So it really is up to you."
Wheeler's eyes fell again to the corpse "You mean about him? This? What we should do?"
"That, yes. Whether to burn it up and forget it—or call in top management and an echelon of scientists. Or scare the living hell out of everyone on Earth by phoning the papers Sure, that has to be decided, but I was thinking on a much wider spectrum than that."
"Such as—"
Karl gestured toward the box with his head "What was he doing here, anyway? What has he done? What was he trying to do?"
"You'd better go on," said Wheeler, and for the very first time said something in a way that suggested diffidence "You've had a while to think about all this, I—" and almost helplessly, he spread his hands.
"I can understand that," Karl said gently "Up to now I've been coming on like a hired lecturer and I know it I'm not going to embarrass you with personalities except to say that you've absorbed all this with less buckling of the knees than anyone in the world I could think of "
"Right. Well, there's a simple technique you learn in elementary algebra. It has to do with the construction of graphs. You place a dot on the graph where known data put it You get more data, you put down another dot and then a third. With just three dots—of course, the more the better, but it can be done with three—you can connect them and establish a curve This curve has certain characteristics and it's fair to extend the curve a little farther with the assumption that later data will bear you out."
"Extrapolation "
"Extrapolation X axis, the fortunes of our late boss Y axis, time The curve is his fortunes—that is to say, his influence "
"Pretty tall graph."
"Over thirty years "
"Still pretty tall."
"All right," said Karl "Now, over the same thirty years, another curve: change in the environment " He held up a hand. "I'm not going to read you a treatise on ecology Let's be more objective than that Let's just say changes. Okay a measurable rise in the mean temperature because of CO2 and the greenhouse effect. Draw the curve. Incidence of heavy metals, mercury, and lithium in organic tissue. Draw a curve Likewise chlorinated hydrocarbons, hypertrophy of algae due to phosphates, incidence of coronaries All right, let's superimpose all these curves on the same graph.
"I see what you're getting at But you have to be careful with that kind of statistics game. Like, the increase of traffic fatalities coincides with the increased use of aluminum cans and plastic-tipped baby pins."
"Right I don't think I'm falling into that trap. I just want to find reasonable answers to a couple of otherwise unreasonable situations. One is this: if the changes occurring in our planet are the result of mere carelessness—a more or less random thing, carelessness—then how come nobody is being careless in a way that benefits the environment? Strike that. I promised, no ecology lessons. Rephrase: how come all these carelessnesses promote a change and not a preservation?
"Next question. What is the direction of the change? You've seen speculative writing about 'terra-forming'—altering other planets to make them habitable by humans. Suppose an effort were being made to change this planet to suit someone else? Suppose they wanted more water and were willing to melt the polar caps by the greenhouse effect? Increase the oxides of sulfur, eliminate certain marine forms from plankton to whales? Reduce the population by increases in lung cancer, emphysema, heart attacks, and even war?"
Both men found themselves looking down at the sleeping face in the coffin. Karl said softly, "Look what he was into—petrochemicals, fossil fuels, food processing, advertising, all the things that made the changes or helped the changers—"
"You're not blaming him for all of it."
"Certainly not. He found willing helpers by the million."
"You don't think he was trying to change a whole planet just so he could be comfortable in it."
"No, I don't think so—and that's the central point I have to make. I don't know if there are any more around like him and Epstein, but I can suppose this, if the changes now going on keep on—and accelerate— then we can expect them."
Wheeler said, "So what would you like to do? Mobilize the world against the invader?"
"Nothing like that. I think I'd slowly and quietly reverse the changes If this planet is normally unsuitable to them, then I'd keep it so. I don't think they'd have to be driven back. I think they just wouldn't come."
"Or they'd try some other way "
"I don't think so," said Karl. "Because they tried this one. If they thought they could do it with fleets of spaceships and super-zap guns, they'd be doing it. No—this is their way and if it doesn't work, they can try somewhere else "
Wheeler began pulling thoughtfully at his lip. Karl said softly, "All it would take is someone who knew what he was doing, who could com-mand enough clout, and who had the wit to make it pay. They might even arrange a man's life—to get the kind of man they need."
And before Wheeler could answer, Karl took up his scalpel.
"I want you to do something for me," he said sharply in a new, commanding tone—actually, Wheeler's own "I want you to do it because I've done it and I'll be damned if I want to be the only man in the world who has."
Leaning over the head of the casket, he made an incision along the hairline from temple to temple Then, bracing his elbows against the edge of the box and steadying one hand with the other, he drew the scalpel straight down the center of the forehead and down on to the nose, splitting it exactly in two. Down he went through the upper lip and then the lower, around the point of the chin and under it to the throat. Then he stood up.
"Put your hands on his cheeks," he ordered. Wheeler frowned briefly (how long had it been since anyone had spoken to him that way?), hesitated, then did as he was told.
"Now press your hands together and down."
The incision widened slightly under the pressure, then abruptly the flesh gave and the entire skin of the face stopped off. The unexpected lack of resistance brought Wheeler's hands to the bottom of the coffin and he found himself face to face, inches away, with the corpse.
Like the lungs and kidneys, the eyes—eye?—passed the median, very slightly reduced at the center. The pupil was oval, its long axis transverse. The skin was pale lavender with yellow vessels and in place of a nose was a thread-fringed hole. The mouth was circular, the teeth not quite radially placed, there was little chin.
Without moving, Wheeler closed his eyes, held them shut for one second, two, and then courageously opened them again. Karl whipped around the end of the coffin and got an arm around Wheeler's chest. Wheeler leaned on it heavily for a moment, then stood up quickly and brushed the arm away.
"You didn't have to do that "
"Yes, I did," said Karl. "Would you want to be the only man in the world who'd gone through that—with nobody to tell it to?"
And after all, Wheeler could laugh. When he had finished he said, "Push that button "
"Hand me that cover."
Most obediently Cleveland Wheeler brought the coffin lid and they placed it.
Karl pushed the button and they watched the coffin slide into the square of flame Then they left.
Joe Trilling had a funny way of making a living It was a good living, but of course he didn't make anything like the bundle he could have made in the city On the other hand, he lived in the mountains a half mile away from a picturesque village, in clean air and piney-birchy woods along with lots of mountain laurel, and he was his own boss. There wasn't much competition for what he did.
What he did was to make simulacra of medical specimens, mostly for the armed forces, although he had plenty of orders from medical schools, film producers, and an occasional individual, no questions asked. He could make a model of anything inside, affixed to or penetrating a body or any part of it. He could make models to be looked at, models to be felt, smelled, and palpated. He could give you gangrene that stunk or dewy thyroids with real dew on them. He could make one-of-a-kind or he could set up a production line. Dr. Joe Trilling was, to put it briefly, the best there was at what he did.
"The clincher," Karl told him (in much more relaxed circumstances than their previous ones; daytime now, with beer), "the real clincher was the face bit. God, Joe, that was a beautiful piece of work."
"Just nuts and bolts. The beautiful part was your idea—his hands on it."
"How do you mean?"
"I've been thinking back to that," Joe said. "I don't think you yourself realize how brilliant a stroke that was. It's all very well to set up a show for the guy, but to make him put his hands as well as his eyes and brains on it—that was the stroke of genius. It's like—well, 1 can remember when I was a kid coming home from school and putting my hand on a fence rail and somebody had spat on it." He displayed his hand, shook it. "All these years I can remember how that felt. All these years couldn't wear it away, all those scrubbings couldn't wash it away It's more than a cerebral or psychic thing, Karl—more than the memory of an episode. I think there's a kind of memory mechanism in the cells themselves, especially on the hands, that can be invoked. What I'm getting to is that no matter how long he lives, Cleve Wheeler is going to feel that skin slip under his palms and that is going to bring him nose to nose with that face. No, you're the genius, not me."
"Na. You knew what you were doing. I didn't."
"Hell you didn't." Joe leaned far back in his lawn chaise—so far he could hold up his beer and look at the sun through it from the underside. Watching the receding bubbles defy perspective (because they swell as they rise), he murmured, "Karl?"
"Yuh."
"Ever hear of Occam's Razor?"
"Urn. Long time back Philosophical principle. Or logic or some-thing. Let's see. Given an effect and a choice of possible causes, the simplest cause is always the one most likely to be true. Is that it?"
"Not too close, but close enough," said Joe Trilling lazily. "Hm. You're the one who used to proclaim that logic is sufficient unto itself and need have nothing to do with truth."
"I still proclaim it."
"Okay. Now, you and I know that human greed and carelessness are quite enough all by themselves to wreck this planet. We didn't think that was enough for the likes of Cleve Wheeler, who can really do something about it, so we constructed him a smog-breathing extraterrestrial. I mean, he hadn't done anything about saving the world for our reasons, so we gave him a whizzer of a reason of his own. Right out of our heads."
"Dictated by all available factors. Yes. What are you getting at, Joe?"
"Oh—just that our complicated hoax is simple, really, in the sense that it brought everything down to a single cause. Occam's Razor slices things down to simplest causes. Single causes have a fair chance of being right."
Karl put down his beer with a bump. "I never thought of that. I've been too busy to think of that. Suppose we were right?"
They looked at each other, shaken.
At last Karl said, "What do we look for now, Joe—space ships?"