They tried goggles, but the goggles cracked and clouded in the desert storms. Snakes die in captivity—but they are plentiful. Snakes are available in the desert—and apparently the Arabs do not share our (Western) “instinctive” prejudice against snakes.
Which brings us to the twin questions posed in the next “arena” variant: How many of our instincts are cultural products? How many of our limitations are cultural prejudices? Or, if you take everything away from a man except the faculties contained inside his skin, what has he got going for him that is still available?
I warn you beforehand, this is not the kind of story I usually publish—not the kind anyone usually publishes, it would seem. The author says he collected 113 rejection slips, over thirteen years, before it sold—not, as one might have expected, to an adventure magazine, but to The Colorado Quarterly.
That was where Larry Ashmead, Doubleday’s new s-f editor, saw it. Ashmead sent me a copy. Both of us wrote to Malec, asking what else he had done.
It seems this was his first published story, but he had lots more that hadn’t sold. And I know why: Malec does everything wrong— only it comes out right.
There is a Jack London kind of Tightness to his wrongness.
You probably won’t like it—right away. (And then you find it doesn’t go away.)
Anyhow, here is the first one; Doubleday will publish a collection, Extrapolus, in the spring.
PROJECT INHUMANE
ALEXANDER B. MALEC
Biev wasn’t exactly made into a laughing stock. The ones in power, the Directorates of Financing, weren’t quite sure whether to limit his funds altogether on the experiment in question, therefore killing any future efforts, or to extend to him the fiat of a blank check, or simply to liquidate him, his associates, and the whole endeavor on the contention that the project was mad, fruitless, pointless, undecipherable, a waste of the People’s money, and ... a mite dangerous to all.
Said the Prime Factor on the Directorate of Financing, “It would appear that Friend Biev has a tiger by the tail.”
Biev was the kind of person that in a Western society would be termed a screwball and doomed to menial garbage-emptying and ditchdigging chores, since he didn’t conform to the proper behavior-personality-interest pattern of an overlaid, rectangular-hole-punched pasteboard computer card. Instead, Biev was in a society where his kind were looked upon as crude ore to be assayed and appreciated. A tongue-in-cheek appreciation, it was true, but appreciation nonetheless, with a bit of eyebrow-raising and tongue-wagging as kind of a price to pay for being unorthodox. And more than just different, he was the epitome of the Different. Persons less individual than Biev cast envious eyes upon him—where in a Western society they threw stones—and thanked their gods that they didn’t have to be like him since the world already had a Biev. If homage was in the coin of envy, you might say Biev was the Unorthodox’s Unorthodox.
The education of Biev had been a tossed salad of unrelated subjects, from Sanskrit to what’s the bee really saying when it buzzes, from refractory properties of the Ionosphere in January to the PSI pressure in Mindanao Deep. All these having the sole commonality of being contained in the cranium of one Pierre Biev, scientist.
How Biev climbed up the technological hierarchy was by methods as random as the subjects he had studied. A piece of work published in Pro-Scientific, a bit of hornblowing here, a bit of pushing there, a child’s tantrum now and then when he didn’t get his way, and a bit of fawning and flattering of superiors—the latter method, while useful to his move upward, also showed chinks in his personality, the very human happenstance of a shoddy character trait or two. He was something of a salesman too, a one-track salesman, who managed to make his point of view prevail over the doubts and resistance of those who held the purse strings. Little could these exchequers be blamed, however, for their stone-hard reluctance being transmuted into semi-rotten squash before the freshness of approach, the originality of the man, which left them agog.
So he got his money, his work sites, and personnel.
And he succeeded. Not often; more like one out of five tries in any given project, which in scientific circles is a batting average close to astonishing.
It was enough to assure him of a larger allocation of money, more technicians at his disposal, of a say in the exclusive Presidium Scientific.
Biev couldn’t say how many projects he was at any instant conducting. Some were in the idea stage, some in seminar discussion, some already in fund endowment, and the early data of some were even now being correlated by computer. At any time he was immersed in at least six projects in full swing, and at any time projects were being phased out due to utter failure; some were phased out prior to a wait-and-see unsureness of results, and there were the hang-fire ones that couldn’t as yet be labeled anything and that awaited some new light cast upon them either through independent inspiration or a new approach to appraisal of their data.
So Biev was busy. And happy, too. That is, until Project SC 109A PB exploded and fragmented the whole of his scientific circle into a round of arguing, philosophizing, and what have you. SC 109A PB, incidentally, stood for Scientific, the 109th such try, the first change or addition to that try (A), and the Projecteer’s initials—Biev’s own conceit and insistence.
For scientists argue. They love to argue. The meat and gist of any question scientific is just a plain lot of discourse, a good chunk of disagreement, some quarreling, and maybe even a clipboard thrown in a rage. This is the method. And they argued anywhere; at lunch, in the corridors, even in the men’s room. Time was, some recalcitrant—Biev’s opinion—wrote a chemical formula of impossible structure on the bathroom mirror in soap. In turn, Biev wrote his own notation below, also in soap, which said in effect: go refer to your high school chemistry primer. A little later that day, that same formula was reproduced at the tail-end of a string of equations proving that that same formula could indeed occur. The author even took the trouble to mark down some bibliography. After some looking through this bibliography in the local library, Biev made his way back to the men’s-room mirror and wrote—in small print—congratulations!
They argued anytime, over almost anything, even unrelated topics, which included one time a preposterous discourse from an impish biochemist named Gargarin that beer was conceivably better than milk for children. What’s more, the others believed it
Among some forty technicians, engineers, and scientists who were in Biev’s domain was a running argument about each one’s pet topic, and, depending upon what chance combination brought who together, wills and opinions would clash constantly.
In this manner they kept their mental faculties honed down fine, though privately Biev had to admit he had a headache sometimes at the end of the day.
They argued anywhere, as was happening right now, near the conclusion of Project SC 109A PB.
“The wonderful adaptability of a human being,” said Biev and held up the hand-woven shirt.