RULE GOLDEN
Damon Knight
The socially sensitive writers of our time seem to me to have assembled under the banner of science fiction, where they send forth message, after message warning us of our folly and of the Furies we seem about to awake. One of the most devastating devices for showing these follies to us in science-fantasy form is to import a being from another, far-distant civilization, a being that has powers of one sort or another to make us see what horrible fools—what criminal fools— we are. In “Rule Golden,” Damon Knight—one of the most perceptive and astringent of science fiction’s writers and critics—takes the deceptively simple device of inverting the Golden Rule in the hand of an “alien” with strange powers, and putting it to work. Mr. Knight carries out his fable with relentless logic until you fairly squirm with reflected anguish. Believe me, it’s good for you!
This is one unswerving fact about Damon Knight: as a moralist as well as a writer, he is unbendingly honest, relentlessly logical. For this reason he is, and probably always will be, a poor man. Knight was born in Oregon in 1922, and as a young man spent a few unremunerative years as a commercial artist. He then shifted to pulp editing, and then, in his words, “was chained to an oar in a reading-fee literary agency.” He finally began writing full time in 1950. In 1956 Damon received a “Hugo” (science fiction’s imitation of the movie “Oscar”) as the best s-f critic of the year. He has written over sixty stories and two novels, and has fathered three children, all with the same wife.
1
A man in Des Moines kicked his wife when her back was turned. She was taken to the hospital, suffering from a broken coccyx.
So was he.
In Kansas City, Kansas, a youth armed with a .22 killed a schoolmate with one shot through the chest, and instantly dropped dead of heart-failure.
In Decatur two middleweights named Packy Morris and Leo Oshinsky simultaneously knocked each other out.
In St. Louis, a policeman shot down a fleeing bank robber and collapsed. The bank robber died; the policeman’s condition was described as critical.
I read those items in the afternoon editions of the Washington papers, and although I noted the pattern, I wasn’t much impressed. Every newspaperman knows that runs of coincidence are a dime a dozen; everything happens that way—plane crashes, hotel fires, suicide pacts, people running amok with rifles, people giving away all their money; name it and I can show you an epidemic of it in the files.
What I was actually looking for were stories originating in two places: my home town and Chillicothe, Missouri. Stories with those datelines had been carefully cut out of the papers before I got them, so, for lack of anything better, I read everything datelined near either place. And that was how I happened to catch the Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur and St. Louis items—all of those places will fit into a two-hundred-mile circle drawn with Chillicothe as its center.
I had asked for, but hadn’t got, a copy of my own paper. That made it a little tough, because I had to sit there, in a Washington hotel room at night—and if you know a lonelier place and time, tell me—and wonder if they had really shut us down.
I knew it Was unlikely. I knew things hadn’t got that bad in America yet, by a long way. I knew they wanted me to sit there and worry about it, but I couldn’t help it.
Ever since La Prensa, every newspaper publisher on this continent has felt a cold wind blowing down his back.
That’s foolishness, I told myself. Not to wave the flag too much or anything, but the free speech tradition in this country is too strong; we haven’t forgotten Peter Zenger.
And then it occurred to me that a lot of editors must have felt the same way, just before their papers were suppressed on the orders of an American President named Abraham Lincoln.
So I took one more turn around the room and got back into bed, and although I had already read all the papers from bannerlines to box scores, I started leafing through them again, just to make a little noise. Nothing to do.
I had asked for a book, and hadn’t got it. That made sense, too; there was nothing to do in that room, nothing to distract me, nothing to read except newspapers—and how could I look at a newspaper without thinking of the Herald-Star?
My father founded the Herald-Star—the Herald part, that is, the Star came later—ten years before I was born. I inherited it from him, but I want to add that I’m not one of those publishers by right of primogeniture whose only function consists in supplying sophomoric by-lined copy for the front page; I started on the paper as a copy boy and I can still handle any job in a city room.
It was a good newspaper. It wasn’t the biggest paper in the Middle West, or the fastest growing, or the loudest; but we’d had two Pulitzer prizes in the last fifteen years, we kept our political bias on the editorial page, and up to now we had never knuckled under to anybody.
But this was the first time we had picked a fight with the U. S. Department of Defense.
Ten miles outside Chillicothe, Missouri, the Department had a little hundred-acre installation with three laboratory buildings, a small airfield, living quarters for a staff of two hundred and a one-story barracks. It was closed down in 1968 when the Phoenix-bomb program was officially abandoned.
Two years and ten months later, it was opened up again. A new and much bigger barracks went up in place of the old one; a two-company garrison moved in. Who else or what else went into the area, nobody knew for certain; but rumors came out.
We checked the rumors. We found confirmation. We published it, and we followed it up. Within a week we had a full-sized crusade started; we were asking for a congressional investigation, and it looked as if we might get it.
Then the President invited me and the publishers of twenty-odd other anti-administration dailies to Washington. Each of us got a personal interview with The Man; the Secretary of Defense was also present, to evade questions.
They asked me, as a personal favor and in the interests of national security, to kill the Chillicothe series.
After asking a few questions, to which I got the answers I expected, I politely declined.
And here I was.
The door opened. The guard outside looked in, Saw me on the bed, and stepped back out of sight. Another man walked in: stocky build, straight black hair turning gray; about fifty. Confident eyes behind rimless bifocals.
“Mr. Dahl. My name is Carlton Frisbee.”
“I’ve seen your picture,” I told him. Frisbee was the Under Secretary of Defense, a career man, very able; he was said to be the brains of the Department.
He sat down facing me. He didn’t ask permission, and he didn’t offer to shake hands, which was intelligent of him.
“How do you feel about it now?” he asked.
“Just the same.”
He nodded. After a moment he said, “I’m going to try to explain our position to you, Mr. Dahl.”
I grinned at him. “The word you’re groping for is ‘awkward.’ ”
“No. It’s true that we can’t let you go in your present state of mind, but we can keep you. If necessary, you will be killed, Mr. Dahl. That’s how important Chillicothe is.”
“Nothing,” I said, “is that important.”
He cocked his head at me. “If you and your family lived in a community surrounded by hostile savages, who were kept at bay only because you had rifles—and if someone proposed to give them rifles—well?”
“Look,” I said, “let’s get down to cases. You claim that a new weapon is being developed at Chillicothe, is that right? It’s something revolutionary, and if the Russians got it first we would be sunk, and so on. In other words, the Manhattan Project all over again.”