A REASONABLE WORLD

by Damon Knight

“No, sir. I did not. Anything of that kind would have been falsifying the demonstration. As a scientist, I would never do that, Senator. That would be unprincipled behavior.”

  Harriet Owen got up at six the next morning, an hour before her usual time, and ate her breakfast while she watched the Senate hearings in Washington. Plotkin’s performance the day before had been distasteful but adequate, and he had been excused. Now, apparently, the subcommittee was considering the whole question of parasite containment. A familiar face caught her eye. “Senator,” Dr. Wallace McNulty was saying, “I’d like to comment on some testimony you heard before from Mr. Peebles at NIH. If I understand what they’re saying, they believe the only way to get rid of this thing is to isolate breeding populations of human beings, make sure they’re free of symbionts, and forbid other people to reproduce, period. And then what?”

  “As I understand Mr. Peebles’ testimony,” said the Chairman, “then we would expand slowly out of the quarantined areas into areas of depopulation.”

  “What about livestock?” McNulty asked. “Do you know the thing can go into a goat, or a fish?”

  “I understand that’s your belief, Doctor. If that’s true, then I suppose it would be necessary to sterilize the infected areas, one at a time, before we expand into them again. I want to say that of course we all hope such extreme measures will not be needed.”

  “You know, this is loony,” McNulty said. “You’re talking about human beings as if they were laboratory animals.”

  The chairman was rapping his gavel. “You are out of order, Dr. McNulty.”

  McNulty raised his voice. “You can’t get away with that, and if you could, what for?”

  The chairman said, “Dr. McNulty, your remarks are out of order, and no more such outbursts will be permitted. Nevertheless, before we excuse you, I believe Senator Jergen would like to respond.”

  Jergen said stiffly, “What’s your alternative, Doctor, just to give up and live with this parasite forever? Remember that we don’t know what the long-term effects may be. There is evidence that the parasites are actually killing people in high office already. We don’t know what else they are capable of. A hundred years from now we may be watching the human race go right down the slide.”

  McNulty said, “Senator, I take it you haven’t had the disease yourself?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I thought not.”

  “How did we ever come to this?” said Bliss. “It’s fascism all over again.” They were walking down the street, looking for a Greek restaurant Hartman thought he remembered seeing. Outside the carefully preserved tourist areas, the city had altered dismally since the last time Bliss had been here: plastic panels warping off the sides of buildings, some of them replaced by decaying sheets of particleboard; scabby fluepipes, scumbled blue and red, hanging all anyhow from building faces; filth, grime, rubbish heaped in corners.

  “Plus ça change, the more it’s the same old mess,” Hartman said. “If you look back far enough, what we now call national governments all began as protection rackets, pure and simple.”

  A ragged man lurched toward them out of a doorway. “Spare a fiver, boss? I haven’t ate since yesterday.” Hartman fumbled out a plastic coin and gave it to him.

  “Thanks, boss,” said the man. There was something wrong with his face; it was grey and sweaty. He went away with a stumbling gait.

  “Probably spend it on drugs,” Bliss said.

  “No doubt. Well, as I was saying, you’ve heard about protection? A gangster stops by and tells you that for five hundred dollars a month he’ll protect you against vandalism. If you turn him down, you know somebody will break your windows. So you pay. The same thing happened thousands of years ago, when people stopped hunting and gathering and took up agriculture. As soon as there were large fixed populations of farmers, they became a profit source for bandits. The bandits farmed the farmers. They said, turn over a share of what you produce, and we’ll protect you against other bandits. And they did, you know, but if they hadn’t, the next lot would have been no worse. Then the bandits fought each other for territory, and presently there were warlords and dukes and so on. The imperial palaces in China were built on the rice extorted from peasants. So the peasants, who had had plenty for themselves, were reduced to poverty, and the imperial court got rich. When England and France went to war in the fourteenth century, they were disputing the right to farm the French peasants. We’ve always had the two classes, the one that produces and the one that takes.”

  “Aren’t you a member of the class that takes?”

  “I am not, I’m a working man like yourself. Now mind you, the system produced some marvelous things. The glory that was Greece and so on. But it certainly has altered our moral perceptions. I remember when the controversy over the Aswan Dam was going on, somebody said that the irrigation projects were good on balance because they produced more food. And somebody else replied that it was the people in the cities who got the food, and the peasants who got bilharziasis.”

  “But don’t you think it’s better for some people to be rich, or at least comfortably off, than for everybody to be poor?”

  “That’s my point, the peasants weren’t poor until the gangsters took them over. Nowadays there are no more peasants in this part of the world, and nobody asked for their opinion anyhow, but how many would have agreed to that proposition, do you suppose?”

  “I take your point, but that’s all water under the bridge.”

  “Ah, but it isn’t. The question is being reopened, you see, because the parasites are beginning to kill people who kill other people. Presently the gangsters won’t be able to use force any longer. If everybody agrees that it’s better for some to be rich and the rest to be poor, then nothing will change. But I don’t think so, do you?”

  After a week and a half Bliss and Hartman got on a plane and went home, Bliss to Spain and Hartman to England.

  Later that year the Senate subcommittee returned a report declaring that the detention of McNulty’s victims, and the pain experiments thereon, were justified under the powers of the Emergency Civil Control Authority, but requesting the President to instruct the experimenters to use more humane methods in future, whenever possible. Sea Venture, with its complement of scientists, security people and detainees, went to sea in November.

  2

  In her kindergarten classroom on the Main Deck, Andrea Ottenburg said, “Story time! Let’s make a big circle.” She waited for the scraping of red and blue chairs to stop. When the children were quiet and attentive, she began, “Once there was a marvelous big boat that thousands of people could live on and float around and around the Pacific Ocean. The boat could float on top of the water or underneath it. And do you know what the boat was called?”

  “CV!” a dozen voices chorused.

  “Yes! And we’re all on that marvelous boat right now. But something funny happened on CV a few years ago. This was before any of you were here. An invisible fairy got on board the boat, and it could get into people’s minds and make them think differently. And people were frightened at first because when the fairy left them to go to somebody else, the people fell into a deep sleep.”

  “Like Snow White,” said Linda.

  “Exactly! But they woke up again after about a week, and so people weren’t so frightened anymore. But they still didn’t know if it was a good fairy or a bad fairy, so they fooled it with a goat dressed up in a person’s clothes. And the fairy went into the goat, and then do you know what?”

  Peter’s hand was raised. “They put it in a box.”

  “Yes, and what did they do with the box?”

  Three hands were up. “Yes, Sylvia?”

  “They sunk it in the ocean.”

  “Yes, they sank it in the ocean. But that wasn’t the last of the fairies, was it?”

  Heads were shaking.

  “No, because when the next baby was born, another fairy was born with it. And then other babies were born and other fair
ies.”

  Linda’s hand was up. “Does everybody have a fairy?”

  “No, there aren’t that many fairies.”

  Another hand. “Mrs. Ottenburg, are they good fairies or bad fairies?”

  “Well, we don’t know that yet for sure. That’s why we’re all here on CV, because we want to find out.”

  There was a little silence. Then Peter, the bravest, said, “If they’re good fairies, why do they want to kill them?”

  “They don’t want to kill them, just put them to sleep.” Oh. She saw the look of comprehension in their faces. They were buying it, for now: but all this hypocrisy would have to be undone later—at what cost?

  Andrea Ottenburg, who liked to speak her mind even though she was a detainee, expressed her concerns to Melanie Kurtz, the chief of kindergarten and preschool education. Kurtz agreed with her and brought the matter up at a conference later that week.

  “What Andrea and some of the other teachers are concerned about,” said Kurtz, “is that this program runs counter to our commitment to teach children as early as possible to distinguish fantasy from reality. There are some things we have to shield them from, of course, but it really is disturbing that we’re introducing imaginary entities, which we’re going to have to tell them later don’t exist. Pedagogically this is a very counterproductive thing, and I just wonder if we’ve looked hard enough for another solution.”

  “It really isn’t possible to discuss the parasite realistically, at that age, though, is it?” Harriet Owen asked. “What do you think, Dwayne?”

  “No, of course we can’t do that, and it is necessary to tell them something that will tend to quiet their anxieties,” Dwayne Swarts said. “Fortunately or unfortunately, they all know what fairies are, and so that seems like the obvious way to go about it.”

  “I don’t agree,” Dorothy Italiano said. “I don’t think fantasy is bad for children.”

  Kurtz turned to her. “Do you want to teach them to believe in Santa Claus?”

  “Not especially, but I think I really understand why parents want to deceive their children in that way, and other ways. They sense that fantasy is important; they want the children to have the feeling that there are wonderful things in the world. Maybe they have to stop believing in fairies later, although there are places in the world where grown people still do, but at least they’ll have had that sense of wonder, of magic.”

  “I can’t agree with that. I think children should be taught the truth.”

  “Even if it makes them cry themselves to sleep?”

  Kurtz said nothing. The conference came to no conclusion, and the kindergarten teachers went on telling their children about fairies.

  In the R&D section on “K” Deck, Rick Adams, a new assistant, was getting an orientation lecture from his boss. Adams was skimpy and dark, Glen Cunningham tall and blond. Both of them wore white lab coats, but Adams had more pens in his pocket.

  “Let’s look at what we know about the parasite,” Glen Cunningham said. “One, it can’t pass through a solid object. We know that by experiment and inference—the original parasite came out of a capsule that was found at the bottom of the ocean, and apparently had been there for a long time, but it came out only when the capsule was broken.

  “So that brings us to the second point. The parasite can’t leave an unconscious person. The fact that totally blind people seem to be immune to McNulty’s suggests a reason why—the parasite has to have some sensory input from its host about the location of another possible host. When the host’s eyes are closed, well, it can’t get that information. We have one trial in which it appears that the parasite can use other sensory information such as touch—the parasite apparently didn’t pass through the space between the two hosts, but they were touching at the time, and we think it may have moved along the nerves of one host until it reached the other. Normally, though, we think the parasite is resident in the brain. In every other trial it has come out of the host’s skull and entered the same way.”

  “What about the solid object rule there?” Adams asked.

  “The skull isn’t a totally closed object. There’s a direct route to the brain through the nasal passages, for instance. Anyway, number three, we know the parasite reproduces in human females, apparently at the time of conception, and we know by experiment that it can also reproduce in laboratory animals. Experiments with fish are inconclusive so far, but there is some reason to believe that the parasite needs a host with a fairly complex nervous system—it couldn’t invade a plant, for instance, and probably not an insect or arachnid.

  “Fourth, we know the parasite can’t travel more than about four feet between hosts. That might be a limitation of time instead of distance, we don’t know yet, but the fact is well established.

  “So these are the limitations we know the parasite has, and it’s our job to exploit them in any way we can. And if we can find any others, we’ll hit them too. Sound interesting?”

  “Sure does. One question?”

  “Okay.”

  “It sounds like the parasite is ahead so far. What happens if we don’t catch up?”

  “Oh, little things like the end of Western civilization.”

  3

  In a house on a quiet street in Brussels, a little girl named Marie-Claude was standing on a chair to reach a sugarbowl on the counter. The observer was fascinated by the brightness of the image of sugar in her mind, the memory of piercing sweetness, as compelling as sex was for an adult. She took the lid off and put her fingers in, but the bowl tipped and spilled sugar, sparkling white grains heaped on the counter. A sound made her turn. There was Maman, a red-faced giant. “I told you not to do that!”

  Fear was like an electric current that crisped her body. “I didn’t mean to!”

  The woman’s hand closed around her wrist, yanked her off the chair. “Now you’re going to be punished!”

  Hot tears blurred her vision; the catastrophe was unattended, unthought of, a reality that blotted out all else. She was being dragged across the floor, held upright by the painful grip on her arm, across the kitchen into the bathroom. Then she was bent across the woman’s lap, and she slipped out across the grey space and in again, and felt the ungoverned fury as she brought the hairbrush down on the child’s buttocks, paf! and again, and again.

  In a cold schoolroom in Leeds, Miss McDevitt said, “Quentin, you’re to stay after.”

  The rest of them trooped out, some with knowing backward glances, and he was alone with Miss McDevitt. She picked up a paper from her desk. “This was the question,” she said. “ ‘How do you know you have a country?’ And you wrote, ‘Same way I know the world is round.’”

  Quentin Morris said nothing. He was eleven, skinny in a ragged sweater.

  “How dare you!” Miss McDevitt picked up another paper and another. “Sally answered the question without being insolent, and so did Brian, and so did Malcolm and Nigel and all the others.” Her mouth was flecked with spittle. “What makes you so very exceptional? I’d like to hear.”

  Quentin mumbled something.

  “What? Speak up.”

  “I just meant it was hearsay.”

  “What do you mean, hearsay?”

  “I have a country, and the world is round. I know it because other people tell me.”

  Miss McDevitt put the papers down and looked at him. “You know very well that isn’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about patriotism, and pride, and love of king and country. But I suppose you wouldn’t know about any of those things, would you, Quentin? All right, you can go.”

  As he turned, the observer felt the tears stinging his eyelids, and he slipped out across the grey space and in again, feeling the familiar shock. She watched the boy close the door behind him. He was intelligent, talented no doubt, in a degenerate way—and he was mocking her. The idea infuriated her again, and she thought of all the things she would like to do to the little beast, if the school code did not forbid. Make him sit in a corner
with a dunce cap on his head. Cane him.

  The room was very still. She thought of her lonely supper, and the papers to be corrected. Moving slowly, she gathered her things, put on her weather shoes, hat and coat, picked up her umbrella, turned out the lights and locked the door behind her. The corridor shone slick and empty, still echoing with the clatter of voices.

  Out in the street, the rain was persistent, drenching and cold; it was June, but spring had not yet come. She put up her umbrella and walked past the noisy pupils waiting to board the school buses. She glimpsed Quentin at the end of the queue; he did not look up.

  She kept on, past the tobacconist’s and the cube shop, down to the municipal bus shelter beyond the next crossing. In her mind there was a fantasy picture, quite bright and detailed: she had bent the boy over a chair and tied his hands. Now she pulled his trousers down, exposing the piteous pale buttocks. She let him wait awhile. Then she drew the cane back for the first stroke: whack! The bus drew up, spraying sick yellow light from its windows; the doors rattled open. As she climbed aboard, she slipped out with relief and into the driver as she put her card in the slot: he was a Jamaican who hated the country and the weather, and as he closed the door and pushed the drive button he was thinking with hatred of his wife and her eternal fried bangers. At the next stop he slipped out again into a passenger, an elderly accountant named Elkins; there was something wrong with his back, an old injury, and he was belching the essence of the bad fish he had eaten at lunch.

  From Leeds the observer went to London by rail in a banker named Forrester, whose recollections of duck-hunting as a boy were very interesting; then he found an attractive young woman who wanted to be pregnant, and stayed in her until that was accomplished. Her next host was an elderly painter traveling by Chunnel to Paris; although she was physically frail, her perceptions of color and light were much more vivid than any the observer had yet known, and she cherished them to give to others.