“Does the government realise this?”
“I have said it openly and often, and they answered that they were the best judges of political expediency, I should go back to my laboratories and do as I was told.” Sugaiguntung hesitated. “In this country, as I’m sure is true for yours also, one inclines to believe the specialist. But to specialise is to be ignorant, and there are certain inflexible facts…”
“If they run into those facts,” Donald suggested, “they’re likely to soft-pedal the first part of the programme, and emphasise the second—mount a crash project to produce modified and improved human beings!”
“Which they must not!” Sugaiguntung said, marking each word by pounding fist into palm. “Out of my five apes four killed themselves. We took very great care. But for our precautions they might have killed a man. You can pen and guard a super-ape. Which among us humans will try to control a super-human? It will not be stopped from killing if it desires to kill.”
Almost inaudibly he added, “You of all people should understand. It is only a few hours since you yourself killed.”
* * *
He should not have said that. Donald had been within arm’s reach of his old self: accustomed to accepting information dispassionately, organising it like pieces of a puzzle until new patterns emerged. He had barely even worried about the fact that he was not recording—like a genuine reporter—what the scientist said to him; he relied on his long training to sift and absorb the salient points.
Faced with a reminder of what he had done, however, there was only one way he could digest the circumstances and remain rational—to accept himself anew as Donald Hogan Mark II, the eptified killer to whom murder was all in the day’s work.
He knew he must exploit the vital and unique admissions Sugaiguntung had made. Against that, he felt pity for the genius scientist whose love of country had led him to complicity in a lie, blessing a propaganda stunt, and infringement of his most dearly held ideals. The strain of reconciling them was intolerable. Part of him folded away to the subconscious level, like atoms in a strained molecule awaiting the opportunity to release their stored energy at the compound’s flashpoint.
He said, “What do you think of your government now, Professor?” His tone lent barbs to the words.
“I am afraid for my country if it remains in power,” Sugaiguntung whispered.
“What do you want? What would you most like?”
“What would I like?” Sugaiguntung blinked. “I should like—I should like to be free of this pressure. I am becoming set in my ways, I am fifty-four years old, but I have ideas I’ve not yet tried, I can teach younger people what I know and cannot write down … I should like to be what I trained to be, a scientist, instead of a political figure-head!”
“Do you see any chance of getting what you want so long as this government remains in power in Yatakang?”
There was a long silence. At last Sugaiguntung said, “I have hoped, and gone on hoping. Now … Now I have to pretend that there is still hope.”
“You must give me a letter of authority,” Donald said after some thought. “You must write that I can come to your private address for an interview—put down where I have to go. You can have what you want. I swear it, I will make sure that you can have what you want.”
context (22)
MOTHER AND BABY DOING WELL?
“Hello, you out there, furious at the Eugenics Processing Board for denying you the right to parenthood! Wouldn’t be so bad if paternalism were out of fashion altogether, would it? But it’s inner than in. You put up with a hundred and one things that are forbidden ‘for your own good’, and if there’s anything you are allowed to do it’s probably for the good of the people who could forbid it and don’t.
“I’m lucky, since they tell me I have a couple of good healthy prodgies—matter of fact, they’ve both called me recently since they learned I hadn’t returned my phosphorus to the planetary pool. Their calls set me thinking about the chances I took when I started them on their merry way, and some of the facts I’ve dug up are kind of scary. I mean, without a computer analysis would you ordinarily do something that gave eight chances out of a hundred of saddling you for ten, fifteen years—maybe for life—with a greedy, demanding and stupid animal?
“Right. I’m talking about a subnormal child.
“Digging around, I came up with an estimate given to a reporter in Stockholm in 1959 by Professor Linus Pauling, the man who hung a name and identity on a disease called phenylketonuria. That’s the earliest place I’ve found the hard, cold figure of eight per cent, and I’m too lazy to look any further right now.
“Pauling said: approximately two of every hundred babies born in communities for which records existed suffered from some kind of congenital disorder, and the few studies which had at that time been continued to puberty suggested the eventual total might run as high as eight. This would include speech defects, alexia, colour-blindness and assorted other handicaps not detectible by inspection of a new-born infant.
“Not all these, naturally, were hereditary. Many were the result of intrauterine or natal trauma. The genotype of a spastic might be admirable.
“However, a barrel of dreck has been thrown down over the neat dividing line between hereditary, due to the genes, and congenital, due to accident. None of the experts, let alone members of the lay public, that I’ve talked to has been able to agree on the cause of the difficult cases without an expensive and time-consuming study of the parental germ-plasm.
“You see, traumata—which is Greek for ‘bruises’ but means outside interference in this case—include the consequence of excessive exposure to X-rays in the womb, infection of the mother with German measles, ingestion of a carcinogenic or mutagenic substance which gets to the gonads, hitripping on Yaginol while you’re pregnant—and that’s so addictive there are some mothers-to-be you could write on with a hot iron, ‘It’ll deform your baby!’ and they’d say get off my orbit, you’re crowding me down—and additionally the gradual deposition in body-tissue of long-life radioactives such as radio-strontium, radio-iodine, radio-caesium and radio-carbon … et caetera.
“And these things have just about counteracted the advances in medical science which have eliminated the traditional causes of spasticism. You decide to have that kid, you’re still bucking an eight per cent risk that if he reaches puberty he’ll suffer from a congenital disorder.
“Mark you, some of them are pretty minor. For instance, pollen-allergy is hereditary, not congenital even, but modern antidotes make it possible for a child with pollen-asthma to lead a fairly normal life. Sounds like nothing, doesn’t it—these days?
“Except that before he dies that child will likely have spent seventy-five thousand bucks on antidotes!
“Now if you’ve been turned down by the Eugenic Processing Board, what’s happened is that they’ve assessed the risk of you having a handicapped child not at eight but at eighty per cent. You may disagree with them on the definition of a handicap—this recent row over dichromatism, for example. They have solid achievements to their credit, though. Fifty years ago Pauling said it would take twenty generations for all the recessives due to radioactive fallout to appear; now, they have tabs on enough of them to say they’ll be eliminated in fewer than twelve. That ought to cheer up your ten-times-great-grandchildren, if any!
“But I tell you this, having looked at you for a good many years with the maximum cynicism I could contrive. There’s nothing so good about you that it deserves to be physically perpetuated in the body of your own born child. You’re hiding behind that Eugenics Board decision to conceal the fact that you’re really evading the responsibility of looking after a person who’s eventually got to go and face the world alone. You don’t want to risk him coming back and saying it was your fault he didn’t emerge a winner in the game of life. I know some people, even, who are lying about their clean genotype, pretending to a hereditary handicap to excuse their childless state.