Authors: John Brunner
Stand on Zanzibar (8 page)
There was a pause. They looked around at the apartment. On the wall between the windows there was a pale patch, the same colour as the paint had been originally when they moved in. The picture which had occupied the pale area was in the red plastic crate near the door. Next to the red plastic crate were five green ones (may be tubed with padding); next to them were a dozen black ones (may be tubed without padding); and there were also two white ones which were a moderately convenient height for sitting on—the purpose Frank and Sheena were putting them to.
There was nothing in the drinks cabinet. Except a little dust and some dried spilt wine.
There was nothing in the icebox except a thin frosting on the deepfreeze section which would automatically be melted off the next time the comptroller cycled to “defrost.”
There were no clothes in the bedroom closet. The disposall was grinding quietly to itself, half-choking on a batch of disposable paper garments and the twenty-odd pounds of unused perishables from the freeze.
The auto-seals had clicked across the power sockets; no child had ever lived here, but it was against the law for any socket not to be auto-sealed when the appliance connected to it was removed.
There was a file of documents lying on the floor at Frank’s feet. It included a two-person tourist-class ticket for Puerto Rico; two ID cards of which one was stamped HEREDICHRO and the other SUSTOHEREDICHRO; twenty thousand dollars’ worth of travellers’ cheques; and a report from the New York State Eugenic Processing Board which began “Dear Mr. Potter, I regret to have to inform you that inception of pregnancy by your wife with or without you as the father is punishable under Para. 12, Section V, of the New York State Parenthood Code as at present enforced…”
* * *
“How did I know the J-but-O’s were going to ban me? The baby-farming lobby must be worth trillions of dollars and that amount of money talks!”
He was a vaguely good-looking man, rather lean, rather dark, his air and bearing older than one would expect from his chronological age of thirty.
“Well, I’ve always said I’d be willing to adopt! We could get on an adoption list and have an unwanted child in less than five years for sure!”
She was an exceptionally lovely natural blonde, plumper than her husband, dieted to the currently fashionable dimensions, and aged twenty-three.
“What’s the point of going?” she added.
“Well, we can’t stay here! We’ve sold the apt and spent some of the money!”
“Can’t we go somewhere else?”
“Of course we can’t go somewhere else! You heard about the people they shot last week trying to sneak into Louisiana—and how far would twenty thousand bucks go in Nevada?”
“We could go there and get pregnant and come home—”
“To what? We’ve
sold the apartment
, don’t you understand? And if we’re here past six poppa-momma they can
jail
us!” He slapped his thigh with his open palm. “No, we’ve got to make the best of it. We’ll have to go to Puerto Rico and save up enough to make it over to Nevada, or maybe bribe someone to give us a passport for Peru, or Chile, or—”
There was a clang from the front door.
He looked at her, not moving. At last he said, “Sheena, I love you.”
She nodded, and eventually managed a smile. “I love you desperately,” she said. “I don’t want somebody else’s secondhand child. Even if it didn’t have any legs, I’d love it because it was yours.”
“And I’d love it because it was yours.”
Another clang. He rose to his feet. On the way past her, to let the moving gang in, he kissed her lightly on the forehead.
Emerging from the library, Donald Hogan looked first north, then south, along Fifth Avenue, debating which of half a dozen nearby restaurants he should go to for lunch. The decision seemed unreachable for a moment. He had been holding down his present job for ten years, almost; sooner or later he was bound to go stale.
Perhaps one shouldn’t have one’s greatest ambition realised in full at the age of twenty-four…?
He had, very probably, another fifty years to go; he had a calculable chance of a decade beyond that. And when he accepted the offer they’d made him he hadn’t raised the matter of retirement, or even resignation.
Oh, they’d have to let him retire eventually. But he had no idea whether he’d be permitted to resign.
Lately, several of his acquaintances—he made a policy of not having friends—had noticed that he was looking older than his age and had developed a tendency to lapse into brown studies. They had wondered what on earth could be the matter with him. But if someone had been in a position to say, “Donald’s wondering if he can quit his job,” even the most intimate of all those acquaintances, the man with whom he shared an apartment and an endless string of shiggies, would have looked blank.
“Job? What job? Donald doesn’t work. He’s a self-employed dilettante!”
Approximately five people, and a Washington computer, knew otherwise.
* * *
“Sit down, Donald,” the Dean said, waving an elegant hand. Donald complied, his attention on the stranger who was also present: a woman of early middle age possessed of delicate bone-structure, good taste in clothes and a warm smile.
He was a trifle nervous. In the last issue of the university’s student journal he had published some remarks which he later regretted making public, though if pressed honesty would compel him to admit that he had meant them and still did mean them.
“This is Dr. Jean Foden,” the Dean said. “From Washington.”
The alarming possibility of having his post-graduate grant discontinued on the grounds that he was an ungrateful subversive loomed up in Donald’s mind. He gave the visitor a chilly and rather insincere nod.
“Well, I’ll leave you to get on with it, then,” the Dean said, rising. That confused Donald even more. He would have expected the old bastard to want to sit in on the discussion and giggle silently—here’s one more intransigent pupil up for the axe. His mind was therefore barren of possible reasons for summoning him when Dr. Foden produced and displayed the student journal in question.
“I was very struck by the article of yours in here,” she said briskly. “You feel there’s something wrong with our teaching methods, don’t you, Don? Mind if I call you Don?”
“Not if you don’t mind my calling you Jean,” Donald said in a sullen tone.
Musing, she looked him over. Four-fifths of the contemporary population of North America counted as handsome or beautiful; balanced diet and adequate inexpensive medical care had finally seen to that. And now that the first eugenic legislation was beginning to bite, the proportion was liable to increase. Nonetheless, there was something out of the ordinary about Donald Hogan. His women usually said it was “character”. Once an English exchange student had told him it was “bloody-mindedness”, and he had accepted the term as a compliment.
He had brown hair and beard, he was a little below average height, he was well-muscled, he wore the typical clothes of a turn-of-the-century student. Externally, then, he conformed. But somewhere underneath …
Dr. Foden said, “I’d like to hear your views.”
“They’re on the page for you to read.”
“Rephrase them for me. Seeing something in print often helps one to make a fresh assessment.”
Donald hesitated. “I haven’t changed my mind, if that’s what you’re getting at,” he said at length. The stench and crackle of burning boats was vivid to him.
“I’m not asking for that. I’m asking for maximum concision instead of this—this rather rambling complaint.”
“All right. My education has turned me, and practically everyone else I know, into an efficient examination-passing machine. I wouldn’t know how to be original outside the limited field of my own speciality, and the only reason I can make that an exception is that apparently most of my predecessors have been even more blinkered than I am. I know a thousand per cent more about evolution than Darwin did, that’s taken for granted. But where between now and the day I die is there room for me to do something that’s
mine
and not a gloss on someone else’s work? Sure, when I get my doctorate the spiel that comes with it will include something about presenting a quote original unquote thesis, but what it’ll mean is the words are in a different order from last time!”
“You have a fairly high opinion of your own ability,” Dr. Foden commented.
“You mean I sound conceited? I guess I probably do. But what I’m trying to say is I don’t want to take credit for being massively ignorant. You see—”
“What are you going to do for a career?”
Diverted from his orbit, Donald binked. “Well, something which uses up a minimum of my time, I imagine. So I can use the rest to mortar up the gaps in my education.”
“Ah-hah. Interested in a salary of fifty thousand per to do—essentially—nothing
but
complete your education?”
There was one talent Donald Hogan did possess which the majority of people didn’t: the gift of making right guesses. Some mechanism at the back of his mind seemed ceaselessly to be shifting around factors from the surrounding world, hunting for patterns in them, and when such a pattern arose a silent bell would ring inside his skull.
Factors: Washington, the absence of the Dean, the offer of a salary competitive with what he could hope to earn in industry, but for studying, not for working … There were people, extremely top people, whom specialists tended to refer to disparagingly as dilettanti but who dignified themselves with the title “synthesist”, and who spent their entire working lives doing nothing but making cross-references from one enclosed corner of research to another.
It seemed like too much to hope for, coming on top of his expectation, moments back, that his grant was to be discontinued. He had to put his hands together to stop them trembling.
“You’re talking about synthesis, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m from the Dilettante Dept—or more officially, from the Office of Research Co-ordination. But I doubt if you have in mind exactly what I’m going to propose. I’ve seen the graphs of your scholastic career, and I get the impression that you could make yourself into a synthesist if you wanted to badly enough, with or without a doctorate.” Dr. Foden leaned back in her chair.
“So the fact that you’re still here—griping, but putting up with things—makes me suspect you
don’t
want to badly enough. It’ll take a good fat bribe to make you opt for it. I think nonetheless you may be honest enough to stay bribed. Tell me, given the chance, what would you do to round out your education?”
Donald stammered over his answer, turning crimson at his own inability to utter crisp, decisive plans. “Well—uh—I guess … History, particularly recent history; nobody’s taught me about anything nearer to home than World War II without loading it full of biased dreck. All the fields which touch on my own, like crystallography and ecology. Not omitting human ecology. And to document that I’d like to delve into the written record of our species, which is now about eight thousand years deep. I ought to learn at least one non-Indo-European language. Then—”
“Stop. You’ve defined an area of knowledge greater than an individual can cover in a lifetime.”
“Not
true!
” Donald was gathering confidence by the moment. “Of course you can’t if you’ve been taught the way I have, on the basis of memorising facts, but what one ought to learn is how to extract
patterns!
You don’t bother to memorise the literature—you learn to read and keep a shelf of books. You don’t memorise log and sine tables; you buy a slide-rule or learn to punch a public computer!” A helpless gesture. “You don’t have to know everything. You simply need to know where to find it when necessary.”
Dr. Foden was nodding. “You seem to have the right basic attitude,” she acknowledged. “However, I must put on my Mephistopheles hat at this point and explain the conditions that attach to the offer I’m making. First, you’d be required to read and write fluent Yatakangi.”
Donald blanched slightly. A friend of his had once started on that language and switched to Mandarin Chinese as an easier alternative. However …
He shrugged. “I’d be willing to shoot for that,” he said.
“And the rest of it I can’t tell you until you’ve been to Washington with me.”
Where a man called Colonel—Donald was not told if he had a name of his own—said, “Raise your right hand and repeat after me: ‘I Donald Orville Hogan … do solemnly declare and attest…’”
* * *
Donald sighed. Back then, it had seemed like the fulfilment of his wildest dreams. Five mornings a week doing nothing but read, under no compulsion to produce any kind of results—merely requested to mention by mail any association or connection he spotted which he had reason to believe might prove helpful to somebody: advise an astronomer that a market research organisation had a new statistical sampling technique, for instance, or suggest that an entomologist be informed about a new air-pollution problem. It sounded like paradise, especially since his employers not only did not care what he did with the rest of his time but suggested he make his experience as varied as possible to keep himself alert.
And in under ten years—he had to face the truth—he was getting bored. He could almost wish that they’d pull the second string attached to his work, the one which had caused him so much heart-searching.
Lieutenant Donald Orville Hogan, you are hereby activated and ordered to report immediately repeat IMMEDIATELY to—
“Oh, no!”
“Something wrong with you, blockbottom?” a harsh voice rasped inches from his ear. A sharp elbow jostled him and a scowling face stared into his. Confused, he discovered that without realising he must have made his decision about what restaurant to patronise today, and wandered down into the milling crowd that streamed the whole length of Fifth Avenue.
“What? Oh—no, I’m all right.”
“Then stop acting like you’re off your gyros! Look where you’re going!”
The angry man he’d collided with pushed past. Mechanically, Donald put one foot in front of the other, still rather dazed. After a few moments, he concluded that the advice was worth taking. Perhaps part of his trouble was that he’d fallen into such an automatic routine he had lost the alertness and interest in the world around which had attracted Dr. Foden to him ten years back, in which case he was unlikely to get the option of resigning his job. More probable was what he’d half-feared when with a flourish of trumpets and a ruffle of drums they declassified Shalmaneser, and he’d foreseen automation making even synthesists obsolete.