Poppy giggled once more and Roger, flushing with embarrassment, led her out.
On the street, she flung her arms around him and jumped up and down.
“Roger, we’re going to make it, we’re going to make it!”
“I hope so,” he said with less enthusiasm.
“Oh, you’re an old pessimist. Must be because you’re down on the surface. Got anything with you?”
“I have some Skulbustium gum. But isn’t that one of the things you’re supposed to avoid?”
“No, the doc said it was only Yaginol that was likely to harm the kid.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely. I asked him specially and that’s what he told me.”
“Okay, then.”
He extracted the pack from his pocket and together they chomped on the vaguely aniseed-flavoured chicle lumps, waiting for the lift to catch them. They stared at their surroundings in search of clues. At the far end of the grimy London street barriers had been erected with big signs on them stating that the road was closed for development; as at many places in the metropolis the plan was to build over the original roadway and leave only pedestrian passages.
Bit by bit the red and white poles of the barriers began to seem like the stems of exotic plants, the red in particular glowing hot as fire. The memory of the drab official waiting-room, of the unpleasant bureaucrat who had interviewed them, receded into a dream-like distant past. Poppy, one hand on her belly to bless the miracle taking place there with a willed contact, grew round-eyed in awe.
“He’s going to see this world, isn’t he?” she whispered. “Not that one—not that shit-floored dingy horrible kind of world, but a beautiful place that never stops being exciting. Roger, which of the lifters comes out in the milk? I’ve got to make sure he never sees the ugly world at all!”
“We’ll have to ask the doc,” Roger said. His face had settled into an expression of tranquil certainty. “The doc’s helped lots of others besides us and he’s bound to know.”
He took her hand and they walked, the only two real people in the universe, down a street paved with jewels toward a land of love.
context (10)
THE BABY AND THE BATHWATER
“All right, I’ll grant you that it’s ridiculous to spend years training highly qualified medical personnel and psychologists and so on and then set them to a job that’s going to show no tangible results because the material they’re working with is hopeless from the beginning, like imbeciles. I’ll even concede the bit about such people having a nasty power complex and liking to lord it over helpless human vegetables, though that’s something I really need to be convinced about before I’ll swallow it entirely. And I certainly won’t contest the fact that there are too many of us—the news is evidence enough for me, what with all these famines they’re having in Asia and plague still cropping up in Latin America and the development of this seasonal nomadism in Africa because half the year the land won’t support the people who are on it. All this I’m giving you without argument.
“But are we adopting the right measures to cope? Look at haemophilia, for example; it didn’t stop victims of it being the crowned heads of Europe, and most of them showed up pretty well compared to some of the right bleeders who’d kept their thrones warm before the gene put in an appearance. You’re not going to tell me that Henry VIII of England or Ivan the Terrible was a descendant of Queen Victoria. Or take the way some of the states have banned people with web-fingers and web-toes; you’ll find plenty of doctors to argue that’s no more than an adaptation that got started in the days when men were beach-creatures inhabiting swamps and shallows and living mostly off weed and shell-fish.
“And how about schizophrenia? They’re still trying to settle it for sure whether the chemical symptoms are due to a stress reaction or whether they’re innate and some people are merely more prone to it but can be kept safe in the correct environment. I don’t believe there’s a genuine hereditary effect at all—I think it’s just that we tend to copy the behaviour-patterns of our family, and it’s one of these in-group extended responses like infanticide being higher among the children and grandchildren of bad, affectionless families regardless of their genotype. You have schizoid-prone parents, you learn the action pattern, and that’s that.
“And how about diabetes? It’s crippling, admittedly, and you have to lean on a chemical crutch. But—well, my own name’s Drinkwater, which almost certainly means that some of my ancestors, like French people named Boileau and Germans named Trinkwasser, must have been hereditary diabetic polydipsomaniacs.
“And if there’d been eugenic legislation back in the days when people were adopting surnames, they’d have been forbidden to have children and I wouldn’t be here now.
“Don’t you understand? I wouldn’t be here!”
continuity (9)
DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF
Like the monstrous shaped negative-plate of an explosive forming press the environment clamped itself on the personality of Donald Hogan, as a hand clenched around a lump of putty will leave the ridges between fingers, the imprint of the cuticular pattern. He felt his individuality squirt away from him into the darkness, carrying off in solution his power to conceive and act on decisions, reducing him to a reactive husk at the mercy of external events.
Some social theorists had argued that urban man was now at the point of unstable equilibrium; the camel’s back of his rationality was vulnerable to a straw. Gadarene swine rooting and grunting at the top of a hill overlooking the sea, people sensed this, said the theorists, and therefore when there was an option to do otherwise they did not venture to crowd themselves still further into the already crammed cities. In countries such as India there was no alternative; starvation was slower in an urban community because people were closer to the distribution points for subsistence rations, and mere lethargy induced by hunger reduced friction and outbursts of violence to a sporadic level. But comparatively well-nourished American and European populations might be tipped over the precipice with no more warning than the sort of aura of irritability for which one carried a pack of tranks.
The last coherent thought Donald was capable of formulating declared that it was one thing to have read of this risk, another altogether to watch it being proved real.
Then the world took over and he was lost.
* * *
FOCUS: the prowlie. White-painted, trapezoidal vehicle thirteen feet long by seven wide, its wheels out of sight underneath for protection against shots, dispersed around the flat slab tank of the fuel-cell powering it, its forward cabin for four men windowed with armour-glass and additionally screened with retractable wire grilles, its rear section designed for carrying off arrestees and if necessary the injured having a solid metal drop-down tailgate with stretcher rails and a sleepy-gas air-circulation system. On the nose, two brilliant white lights with a field of 150°, one extinguished because the driver had waited too long to roll up the wire screen and protect it; on each corner of the roof other lights with adjustable beam-spread; revolving in a small turret on the roof, a gas-gun shooting fragmenting glass grenades to a distance of sixty yards; under the skirt, for ultimate emergency use only, oil-jets that could flood the adjacent street with a small sea of fire to keep back attackers while the occupants waited out the period till help arrived, breathing through masks from a stored-air system. It was vulnerable to mines, to three successive hand-gun bolts striking within about two inches of each other on the shell, or to the collapse of a building, but to nothing else encountered during an average urban riot. However, its fuel-cell was inadequate to push out of the way either the stationary cab ahead, whose brakes were automatically set because its door was open, or the lamp-post dropped across its stern, which had now been wedged in position with much sweating and swearing against its own stump on the one side, and a well-anchored mailbox on the other.