by Matt Ruff
The manhattoe’s head was heavy in his lap. It was snuggling in, making itself comfortable. Preparing for a long nap, possibly. Gant turned his own head to see if there was anyone back on the wharf who might be noticing this. No such luck; traffic was moving along Twelfth Avenue, but there were no pedestrians close enough to pay any attention to him.
“Huh. Well.” The alligator’s chin lay on the open newspaper; Harry thought that if it really did take a nap, he might be able to slide his legs out from under it. Maybe. But the gator didn’t go to sleep; it just lay there. Harry, not sure what else to do, lowered his right hand until his palm touched the top of the manhattoe’s snout. The gator blinked but didn’t object; Harry moved his hand in a tentative stroking motion.
A mewling sound issued from the back of the alligator’s throat, like the purring of a big cat with a mouthful of swamp water. Encouraged, Harry kept stroking it; the gator’s eyelids fluttered and closed. It seemed to snore. As an experiment, Harry shifted his right leg a fraction of an inch.
The alligator stopped snoring. Its eyes snapped open again. It looked unhappy.
“Right,” Harry Gant said, and went on petting it.
He passed the time by studying his new friend. It really was a little fellow, no more than four feet from nose to tail. A strange black box had been grafted onto its head; a crude mind-control device, the box was broken now, battered into silence by the same torrent that had flushed the gator from its sewer nest into the river.
The pale leather hide was covered with scars. The albinism had made the alligator’s skin seem delicate at first, but Gant saw now that that wasn’t true at all: the poor little guy had clearly been through a lot. As he studied the manhattoe’s hind foot, which had had a chunk torn out of it, Harry heard his father’s voice again, telling him a story about evolution. Alligators and crocodiles, his father said, were ancient creatures who’d come into being hundreds of millions of years ago, in the time of the first dinosaurs; and their line had endured, long after the fall of the terrible lizards. Not even humankind had been able to stamp them out completely. Not yet.
“Survivor,” Harry said, warming to the reptile. “You little survivor, you.”
And the thought came to him then: you know, if there were some way to domesticate these things, train them not to bite, maybe grow them just a bit smaller, they really would make nifty pets. Exciting for kids, and with a great sales hook, too: a kind of at-home save-the-endangered-species project. Barely had he thought that when a complete line of tie-in merchandise began parading through his imagination: manhattoe pet supplies and veterinary services; manhattoe obedience schools; “I ♥ my manhattoe” coffee mugs; manhattoe designer polo shirts with the albino alligator on the pocket. . .
Hey.
Hey.
“What a neat idea,” Harry Gant said. As his brain got busy he could feel further inspirations coming on, bubbling up out of that place in the subconscious that plastic lawn flamingos come from.
The morning sun rose above the fractured towers of the city, bringing new light and new hope. It really was turning out to be a wonderful day, Gant reflected; and he could hardly wait to see what he would think of next.
Boston / Blairsville, Georgia / Portland, Maine
February 1990-September 1994
Acknowledgments
No one helped me . . .
—Ayn Rand, postscript to Atlas Shrugged
No one finishes a long novel alone, and this one took longer than most; a lot of people helped me.
First, heartfelt thanks to my father, whose faith and trust meant a lot, and whose generosity spared me from the pursuit of a more practical line of work. Melanie Jackson, Sue Dinan, Robbs Lippert, Mary Winifred Hood, Jeff Schwaner, Lisa Vodra, Sonja Trent and the Trent family, and Jeanne Wells all offered moral support when I needed it most; Lisa Gold was a constant friend and an unfailing source of aid, advice, and comfort. Tony Mulieri helped me out in a pinch; Josh Spin answered my questions about race-specific viruses without getting flustered; John Piccolini and Nick Humez shored up my French and Latin; and Morgan Entrekin forgave deadline after deadline, as what was supposed to be a two-year project stretched to four and change.
The characterization of Ayn Rand and the description of her philosophy contained in these pages is based on my own reading of We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, Nathaniel Branden’s Judgment Day, Barbara Branden’s The Passion of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff’s Objectivism, and Harry Binswanger’s The Ayn Rand Lexicon; Walter Truett Anderson’s Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be was also extremely useful to me at a point where I knew what I wanted to say but not quite how to put it. Most of the details about Walt Disney’s life and work come from Leonard Mosley’s biography Disney’s World—but the character of John Hoover is entirely fictional, based on no real scientist, mad or otherwise, that Disney ever employed. Likewise, the G.A.S. supercomputer bears no intentional resemblance to any piece of machinery ever built, owned, leased, or operated by Walt Disney, Roy Disney, or the benevolent, law-abiding Disney corporation.
“Adoxography” means “good writing about trivial subjects,” and for my encyclopedic knowledge of such things as George Washington’s submarine fleet, I am indebted to the tireless documentary work of adoxographers like Robert Daley, William Poundstone, Cecil Adams, Neil Steinberg, Hal Morgan, Kerry Tucker, David Wallechinsky, and Irving and Amy Wallace.
Thanks also to the New York Times, newspaper of record, for confirming that even in a rational universe, “far-fetched” is a relative term. In an article dated February 10, 1935, the Times recounts the story of a group of teenagers who found a seven-and-a-half-foot alligator in a Harlem sewer, dragged it up onto the street, and beat it to death with shovels. Public Works officials have since denied the existence of any reptile larger than a turtle in the New York underground, but we know the truth.
M.R.
1996
