by Timothy Zahn
"I don't know," Susan said frankly. "What's more, I haven't the foggiest idea of how you'd even begin to test that kind of assumption. It's just the fact that the assumption is being made that concerns me."
"The problem we see," Ron put in, "is that the media isn't bothering with this—to us, at least—very important point, but is preparing the public to expect a clear-cut answer to come out of the experiment. What's worse, every organized group that sees support for their point of view will immediately jump on the bandwagon, reinforcing the media's oversimplification. Do you see what I'm getting at?"
"Yes." Dan pulled at his lower lip. "Iris, have I been clear enough with the media as to exactly what the Lifeline Experiment will and won't show?"
Dan had talked to reporters over a hundred times since the story's first appearance; quickly, I played back the relevant parts. "I think so," I said slowly. "Especially since our trip to Fresno."
"The media's not picking up on it," Ron insisted.
I nodded. "He's right, Dan. I haven't seen any major newspaper or TV report even mention questions like Susans, let alone seriously discuss them."
Dan pondered a moment. "Well, what do you think I should do about it? I could yell a little louder, I suppose, but evidence to date indicates that won't do a lot of good." "I tend to agree," Ron said. "You've been something of a folk hero since you fought the National Academy of Sciences and won, but the extremists—on both sides—have louder voices. I'm afraid yours would probably get lost amid the postexperiment gloatings and denunciations."
"Do you think I should cancel the whole thing, then?" Dan asked bluntly.
For a moment there was silence. Then Susan shook her head. "I almost wish you could, or at least that you could postpone it for a while. But at this late date canceling would probably just start fresh rumors, with each faction trying to persuade people that you'd quit because you'd learned something that supported their particular point of view and conflicted with your own."
Dan's own words the morning the story appeared in the Chronicle came back to me; from the look on his face I knew he was remembering them, too. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah, I guess you're right."
I think we all heard the pain in his voice. Susan was the first one to respond to it. "I'm sorry, Dan—we didn't mean to add to the pressure. We're not blaming you for what other people are doing with your words."
"I know," Dan said. "Don't worry about it—the pressure was there long before tonight." He sighed. "I really wasn't expecting it to be so intense, somehow. It wasn't nearly this bad when I was trying to prove my telepathic ability, not even when they were calling me a criminal fraud on network TV I must be getting soft in my old age."
"I doubt it," Ron said. "The problem is more likely that last time you were the only one under the hatchet, so to speak, whereas this time your actions are going to be affecting the lives of others. You're suffering because, whatever happens, the Lifeline Experiment is likely to hurt some group of people. That's an infinitely heavier burden for someone like you than watching your own name dragged through the mud."
Dan nodded. "I wish I'd thought about that two months ago. If I'd known how I'd react, I'd never have started this whole thing in motion."
"Well, if it makes you feel any better," Susan said gently, "it's only because you're so sensitive that Ron and I aren't more worried about the experiment. We can trust you, at least, to be as honest and fair-minded in what you report as is humanly possible."
"Thanks." Dan took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "Let's change the subject, shall we?"
—
There are films of the Lifeline Experiment itself, of course, films that have been shown endless times over the past twenty years. I have seen them all and do not deny that they adequately portray the physical events that took place on July 25, 1994. But there was more than just a scientific test taking place that day. There was a battle taking place in Dan's own mind, a battle between what his senses told him and what his reason could accept; and it was this unresolved conflict, I know now, that ultimately led to the secret study whose results have only now come to light.
Dan and I arrived at the small lecture room where the experiment was to take place just before one o'clock. The TV and film cameras had long since been set up, and the spectators' gallery was crammed with nearly fifty reporters and representatives of interested groups. I glimpsed Eve Unger, NIFE's handpicked representative, and John Cooper of the Family Alliance sitting several rows apart. Near the front, in seats Dan had had reserved for them, were Ron and Susan Brady.
The front of the room looked uncomfortably like a morgue. Laid out in neat rows were thirty waist-high gurneys, each bearing the form of a sleeping woman. From the neck down each was covered by a pup-tent sort of arrangement designed to give Dan limited access to the area near the uterus while minimizing physical cues that might otherwise influence him. A number was sewn onto each tent, corresponding to a numbered envelope containing the woman's name and length of time she'd been pregnant. At a raised table at one end of the floor sat Jordan, Halladay, and John Cottingham of the Associated Press, who held the stack of envelopes.
"We're all set here, Dan," Jordan said as we reached the table. "You can begin whenever you want."
Dan nodded, and as I slid into my own front-row seat he stepped to the nearest gurney. With a single glance at the cameras, he reached into the tent's access tunnel. Almost immediately he withdrew his hand and silently picked up the number card lying on the gurney beside her. Marking one of the squares on the card, he stepped carefully over the sleep-stimulator wires and walked to the table, placing the card face down in front of Cottingham so that only its number showed. "Is it a boy or a girl, Dr. Staley?" the reporter quipped, sliding the card to one side without turning it over.
"I'm not even going to try to guess, Mr. Cottingham," Dan said. A slightly nervous chuckle rippled through the spectators; but I could see that Dan hadn't meant the comment to be funny. Not even a hint of a smile made it to his face as he walked back to the next gurney. He held the contact a little longer this time, but there was no hesitation I could detect as he picked up her card and marked it. Cottingham didn't try any jokes this time, and Dan went on to the third woman.
All the reports I've ever seen refer to the tension in the room that afternoon; what they don't usually mention is the strangely uneven quality the experimental setup imposed on it. Dan had expected—correctly, as it turned out—that the younger the fetus, the harder it would be to make both the initial contact and the determination of its humanness. But with the random order and the camouflaging tents it was impossible for anyone watching to tell how far along a given mother was. With some, the spectators would barely have settled into a watchful silence before Dan was walking away with the card; but with others, he would stand motionlessly for minutes at a time as the tension slowly grew more and more oppressive. At those times, his movement toward the card was like a lifting of Medusas curse, and there would be a brief flurry of noise as people shifted in their seats and whispered comments to each other. The reprieve would last until Dan started his next contact, and the tension would then begin its slow rise again.
The first forty-five minutes went smoothly enough, both Dan and the spectators quickly growing more or less accustomed to the emotional roller coaster ride we were on. Dan made decisions on seventeen fetuses during that time, and while he was clearly not having fun up there, I could tell from his face that he was holding up reasonably well against the pressure.
The eighteenth subject changed all that.
Dan stood by her for nearly five minutes, his face rigid with concentration and something else. Finally, leaving her card untouched on the gurney, he stepped over to the table. "There's something wrong," he said, his voice low but audible from where I was sitting. "I can't find any life at all in there. I think the fetus must be dead. I... please don't release the moth—the woman's name. It's going to be hard enough on her as it is."
Jordan ta
pped Cottingham's arm and muttered something. The reporter grimaced slightly, but gamely shuffled out the proper envelope and opened it. His frown vanished as he read the contents and he smiled wryly. "Number twenty- eight. Linda Smith; not pregnant. Control."
There was a collective sigh of released tension. An unreadable expression flickered across Dan's face as he glanced at Jordan and Halladay. Then, clamping his jaw tightly, he walked back to the gurneys. To others in the room he may have simply looked determined—but I knew better. He was flustered, and flustered badly. He'd counseled several women in the past who'd given birth to stillborn children, and dropping the memory of that trauma into the middle of an already emotional experience must have been like a kick in the head. The fact that he obviously hadn't even considered the possibility of a control was clear evidence of his overwrought state. I wondered briefly if he would call for a break, but I already knew that he wouldn't permit himself that luxury. He had fought hard these past few weeks to portray himself as a calm, dispassionate scientist who could make the Lifeline Experiment a genuinely impartial search for truth, and he would turn his stomach into a massive ulcer before he would undermine that effort with even a suggestion of weakness.
From that point on, Dan's face was a granite mask, and for the next forty minutes I sat helplessly by, grinding my fingernails into my palms.
The silence in the room as Dan handed Cottingham the last card was so complete that I could clearly hear the ticking of Jordan's antique wristwatch. Picking up the first of his envelopes, Cottingham opened it. "Number twenty- three," he read into the microphone, enunciating his words carefully. "Alice Grant; nine months pregnant." Reaching to the line of cards in front of him, he turned the corresponding one over. "Human," he read. Card and envelope went to one side, and as he opened the second envelope I shifted my attention to Dan. He had stepped back among the gurneys and was watching Cottingham, his expression calm but with a strange, brittle quality to it that sent a sudden shiver up my back. "Number one. Vicki Thuma; eight and a half months pregnant," Cottingham read. Pause. "Human."
One by one he worked his way down the stack, finishing with the third- trimester mothers and starting on those in their second three months... and as each card he picked up identified the child as fully human, the silence began to give way to a buzz of unsure conversation. Cottingham read on; and as he reached the first-trimester women the buzz took on edges of both triumphant and angry disbelief. No one, I sensed, had really expected the result that was unfolding.
He reached the last envelope, and as he tore it open the room suddenly became quiet again. "Number fourteen. Barbara Remington: five weeks pregnant." His hand was trembling just slightly as he turned over the final card. "Human. Human," he repeated, as if not quite believing it.
"That's impossible!" Eve Unger's clear voice cut through the silence, a fraction of a second before the whole room exploded into pandemonium. "A fetus's brain has hardly started development at five weeks," she shouted over the din. "It's a fraud—Staley's been bought by the Family Alliance!"
Dan didn't reply, though anything he said would have been inaudible anyway through the accusations, claims, and counterclaims filling the air like opposing mortar barrages. He just stood there, looking up at the NIFE representative, his expression still calm. He knew what he'd seen and would not be moved from his testimony. And yet, as I look back on his face now, I can see the faintest hint of the uneasiness—the knowledge that what she said made sense—that I now know must have haunted the last fifteen years of his life.
Of the aftermath there is little that isn't common knowledge. Though the Lifeline Experiment carried no legal weight whatsoever, it was very clearly the rallying point for the final successful drive that established the Fetal Rights Amendment in the Constitution. But the bitter struggle that surrounded the issue made it a Pyrrhic victory at best, threatening at times to tear the country apart as had no issue since the Vietnam War. It was too much for Dan to bear at close range, and for eight years after the experiment he remained outside the country, living in self-imposed seclusion in Australia. I think that the only thing that got him through that period was the knowledge that he had seen humanity in those tiny bits of new life, and that whatever the cost he had done the right thing. Eventually things settled down, the proabortion forces gradually losing strength as grudging acceptance of the new law grew, until they became the vocal but powerless minority of the present day. And I wish with all my heart the controversy could be left alone to continue its slow death.
But it can't.
—
I enclose the following excerpt from Dan's papers with a feeling of dread, remembering the agony of the past two decades as few others remember it and knowing that my action is likely to rekindle the fires again. But above all other things Dan prized his reputation for honesty, and it is solely because of this that I quote here the last entry from his private journal, made just two days before the car accident that took his life. I believe that, given the time, he would have come to the same conclusion.
October 18, 2009: I have been sitting here since the sky first began to show the colors of sunset, wondering how to write this. The stars now shine brightly where I watched the sun go down, and I am no nearer to finding a way to ease the shock of what my seven- year study has shown me... to finding a less brutal way to confess what I have unwittingly done to all the people who trusted me.
There can be no further doubt as to what I have done. Linda
Grant, whose mother was nine months pregnant at the experiment,
shows virtually none of the traits I myself showed as a teenager; at
the other end of the scale Tom Remington, whose mother was only
five weeks along, is so like me it is agonizing to watch him. Only
today I learned that, while he has my passionate love of basketball,
he does not intend to try out for the school team, despite his skill
and height. There is no reason why he would not do well at the
game... except that I was a mere five foot six at his age and
convinced I could never play. All the rest of them fell somewhere
between these two extremes, their individual degrees of mimicry
directly correlated with their ages at the experiment... and for what
I've done to these children alone I owe a debt I'll never be able to
repay. What I've done to the country and the millions of women
whose lives my naivete had changed—I can't even comprehend the
enormity of my crime.
My crime. The word is harsh, unforgiving. But I can't justify it as anything else. In my foolish arrogance I assumed the universe was simple, that its secrets were absolute and could be had for the asking. Worse yet, I assumed it would bend its own rules just for my convenience.
The experimenter influences his experiment. How long has that truth been known? Close to a hundred years, I'm sure, at least since the earliest beginnings of quantum mechanics. Such a simple thing... and yet neither I nor any of those I worked with ever even bothered to consider what it might mean to us.
The Lifeline Experiment was doomed from the very beginning. Young minds, their development barely started—how could they fail to be overwhelmed as I touched them with what must have been the delicacy of an elephant? That flicker of humanness I saw in each fetus—how much of that was innate and how much merely my own imposed reflection? I'll never know. No one ever will. My very presence obliterated the line I was trying to find.
And in the meantime I have helped to force what is essentially an arbitrary decision on the country. What should I do with this knowledge? Do I keep it to myself and allow the lie to continue, or do I speak out and risk tearing the society apart once again?
I wish I knew the answer.
Afterword
The abortion issue is one of a growing list of topics these days in which middle ground is increasingly hard to find. Both extremes are vocal, organized, and of
ten—in my opinion—inconsistent in their overall world views, and I had little doubt that "Lifeline" would generate a minor avalanche of hate mail from both ends of the target range.
And I was wrong. I got a couple of letters, Analog printed a couple more, and all of them were polite enough as they springboarded off the story to state their own views on the topic.
Heartening? Certainly. It may imply that SF readers tend to be, by and large, reasonable people; less inclined than the average American, perhaps, to let emotions or national spokespersons define their thoughts for them. But then again, people who like idea- oriented literature are, almost by definition, more likely to try and treat abortion as an intellectual problem. An intellectual problem, with an intellectual solution.
So did I default on my own responsibility as a writer of idea- oriented fiction by, in effect, straddling the fence? I don't think so. The abortion issue simply has too much of a philosophical, religious nature embedded in it to yield to a simple, logical solution, much as I might wish otherwise.
Cascade Point
In retrospect, I suppose I should have realized my number had come up on the universe's list right from the very start, right from the moment it became clear that I was going to be stuck with the job of welcoming the Aura Dancer's latest batch of passengers aboard. Still, I suppose it's just as well it was me and not Tobbar who let Rik Bradley and his psychiatrist onto my ship. There are some things that a captain should have no one to blame for but himself, and this was definitely in that category.
Right away I suppose that generates a lot of false impressions. A star liner captain, resplendent in white and gold, smiling toothily at elegantly dressed men and women as the ramp carries them through the polished entry portal—forget all of that. A tramp starmer isn't polished anywhere it doesn't absolutely have to be, the captain is lucky if he's got a clean jumpsuit—let alone some pseudo-military Christmas tree frippery—and the passengers we get are the steerage of the star- traveling community. And look it.
