A REASONABLE WORLD

by Damon Knight

  “Oh—I was on the front porch, and I saw a little green grasshopper, but it jumped away.”

  “How old were you when that happened, do you think?”

  “About two, I guess. In fact, I know that’s right, because we moved to Cleveland when I was three, and we didn’t have a porch.”

  … And there was only one way, but it was terribly dangerous, because she didn’t know how long the electrical connection was between the two devices. Nevertheless, when she saw that they were both energized, she slipped out across the gray space, into the computer, found the peripheral input, and—

  Up through the metal cylinder, into Miss Weinstein’s hand and arm, into her brain.

  Hello! How did you— Oh. Oh.______Later. Let me talk now.

  “All right,” said Italiano, “now I’m going to ask you to describe something that happened on your first birthday. Go ahead.”

  “I can’t remember that.”

  “Never mind.”

  On the screen letters were forming:

  MAN WITH FLOOR MACHINE IS KILLING CHILDREN. HE

  “What is this?” said Italiano. “Is that a movie you saw?”

  DOES IT WITH A POISON RING. SHAKES HANDS WITH THEM. HIS NAME IS CHARLES WILSON.

  “I don’t understand. Are you telling me something that you saw when you were one?”

  NO. NOW.

  “But how do you know it?”

  WAS IN HIM.

  “And you say he has a floor machine? What is that?”

  POLISH FLOORS. MAIN DECK.

  “Here?”

  YES.

  After a moment Italiano said, “Popeye, Security, please.”

  The face of a ruddy young man appeared in the tube. “Security, Matthews. Hello, Dr. Italiano.”

  “Sergeant Matthews, will you send somebody over for Miss Weinstein?”

  “Already? Okay, two minutes. Any problem?”

  “No.” She punched off and said, “Popeye, Trilling.”

  A simulated face appeared. It said pleasantly, “Captain Trilling’s office, can I help you?”

  “Emergency,” said Italiano.

  “One moment.” The tube went blank, but a voice spoke. “Drillig.”

  “Captain, it’s Dorothy Italiano. Are you on the Sports Deck?”

  “Yes. Wad’s the drouble?” His voice sounded as if he needed to blow his nose.

  “I have information that someone has been killing children aboard. Have any children died recently?”

  “Yes, two. One yesterday ad one the day before.” Now there was a honk: he was blowing his nose.

  “All right, then I think we have to assume this is true. The man’s name is Charles Wilson, and he works on the Main Deck as a maintenance person.”

  “I cad check that, adyway. Thags.”

  “Wait, there’s more. He does it with a poison ring.”

  “Are you serious? Where did you get this idformation?”

  “From one of my subjects.”

  “I see. What does this mad look like?”

  “Wait a minute, I’ll ask.” He heard her voice repeating the question; then there was a long pause. Eventually she said, “Young, tall, thin, brown hair.”

  “Okay.” Trilling punched off and looked around. He could see a little group of maintenance people not far away, and one or two others glimpsed between bodies, but the crowd was too thick to see more, and his eyes were watering. This would have to happen on a day when he really ought to be in bed with a hot toddy. He punched for Owen’s office, got a simulation. “This is Drillig. Gimme Mr. Corcorad, blease.”

  “By Corcorad do you mean Corcoran?”

  “Yes, dabbid!”

  “One moment.” He waited, fuming.

  “Corcoran,” said a voice.

  “Jib, we have an ebergency. Ask the computer to flag a maintenance worker named Charles Wilson—got that?” As he spoke, he was working his way back out of the crowd. He spotted two of his own people and beckoned them over.

  “Charles Wilson,” said Corcoran.

  “Right, and tell me where he is dow.”

  “Probably on the Sports Deck.”

  “Hell! I mean exagly where he is. And for God’s sake hurry.”

  19

  The two guards were Murray Siever and Jane Goodwright. Covering the pickup, he said, “A maidedance man named Charles Wilson. He’s been killig children with a poisoned ring, if you can believe it.” Their faces expressed shock and excitement.

  Corcoran’s voice said, “He’s in front of the dais on the left-hand side, near the entrance to the tennis courts. What’s he done?”

  Without bothering to answer, Trilling punched off and said, “Did you get that?”

  Both guards nodded.

  “Okay, let’s get him, and be dabbed careful aboud that ring.”

  As the crowd gathered around the elevators, a man in a blue Maintenance coverall found himself next to a little black girl. He bent down a little. “How old are you, sweetheart?”

  She looked up shyly. “Three and a half.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Marion.”

  “My name is Charlie. Nice to meet you, Marion.” He put out his hand, but before the girl could take it two Wackenhuts grabbed his arms and wrestled them behind his back. They velcroed him, made him kneel with his head down, and then very carefully, using heavy gloves, removed the ring from his finger.

  Late that afternoon, after Owen had dealt with the media and the department, she called Trilling in. “Mac,” she said, “as you certainly know, I’m completely grateful to you. You’re not going to get any medals, I’m afraid, but I’ll put something in your personnel file that will make you blush. Now I think we should put our heads together and try to decide how something like this could happen. What can we do to prevent it in the future?”

  “Not much,” said Trilling. “We have a certain amoud of irreducible turnover in service personnel. If adybody seriously wants to penetrade us, they can do it. The only way to guard against that would be to have a permadent staff and never let adybody else onboard, and even then a deterbid antagonist could do us great harm.”

  “How?”

  “Oh—a dozen ways. Aircraft. Missiles. Frogmen. Poison in food. We’re conspicuous and we’re vulderable. We have this feelig of isolation which perhaps is bad for us, because it gives us a false sense, if you’ll excuse be, of security.”

  “So it could happen again, at any time?”

  “Yes, it could. As a professional matter, I would undertake to do it myself.”

  After a moment Owen said, “What’s gone wrong with us, that we can talk this way about the murder of children?”

  Trilling smiled ruefully. “Whatever it was, dear lady, it took blace a long time ago.”

  “Thank you, Mac. Go home now, and take care of that cold.”

  When he was gone, she told Mitzi to hold her calls and sat with hands folded. What haunted her was the thought that if she had not gathered these children together on CV and made them a target in the first place, the two murdered ones would still be alive.

  Yes, of course, there were unavoidable risks in every experiment. Even in building a bridge or a highway, planners always allowed for a certain percentage of fatalities. If you had to know in advance who those people were going to be; how it would affect their spouses and children, you would never do it. But when they were just a percentage, a statistic in the charts, that was acceptable because it was random. And you wrote letters to the survivors.

  It was true that you had to accept these deaths, or necessary work would never be done. She had faced that years ago and accepted it; why was it giving her so much anguish now?

  She knew, although she couldn’t prove it, that the assassin had been sent to CV under President Draffy’s direction or with his approval. Draffy was no longer entirely sane, of course, but after all he too was trying to destroy a few human lives for the greater benefit of all. It was even possible that he was right. That was wha
t she couldn’t swallow.

  There was a passage in Koestler that she remembered reading as an undergraduate; it had seemed then to sum up all that she believed about human experimentation. She said, “Mitzi, can you find me a passage in Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler? Something about a dog licking the hand of the experimenter.”

  “Is this it?” The paragraph came up on the flatscreen:

  “Have you ever read brochures of an anti-vivisectionist society? They are shattering and heartbreaking; when one reads how some poor cur which has had its liver cut out, whines and licks his tormentor’s hands, one is just as nauseated as you were tonight. But if these people had their way, we would have no serums against cholera, typhoid, or diphtheria…”

  Yes, that was it, and it was reassuring, and yet she still felt uneasy. “Back a page,” she said. She was beginning to remember the novel now; this scene was part of the interrogation of the apostate Rubashov by Ivanov, the inquisitor who wanted to save Rubashov’s life by bringing him back to reason. “What has changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?” he asked. A pointless insult, but then Ivanov was a sexist, and probably Koestler too, both with the same excuse—like all the other sexists, they were the products of their time. Farther down, another passage caught her eye:

  “Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?”

  Good; now that was exactly right. Then another passage:

  “Every year several million people are killed quite pointlessly by epidemics and other natural catastrophes. And we should shrink from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising experiment in history?”

  Wait a minute. Ivanov was talking about the Soviet experiment, a pseudoscientific disaster, she felt intuitively that the argument was wrong, but where was the error?

  Again:

  “Yes, we liquidated the parasitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year—only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?”

  Now she began to see the root of her uneasiness. The argument was a diabolical sophistry; first it personified “Nature,” and then it assumed a “mankind” which could experiment on itself, instead of individual human beings who could experiment on each other.

  Yes, and that word “liquidation,” and the word “sacrifice”! Owen winced.

  Suppose one assumed, never mind why, that painful or destructive experimentation on human beings without their consent was never justified by prospective benefits to other human beings, no matter how few there were in one group or how many in the other. Call it the nonequivalence principle. That would mean the steep decline of biology, sociology, psychiatry, and medicine.

  But there was worse to come. No distinction between human beings and animals was implied by the “nonequivalence principle.” It was religion, not science, that distinguished human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom. If lower animals could not be used in experiments because they could not give consent, that would mean the end of experimental biology.

  She knew what Eliza would say: “What is the general solution to problems of this kind?” And she would reply, “To decide what one believes, and then act accordingly.”

  But she did not believe in religion, and she could no longer bear to act on her belief in science.

  There was a Hindu sect, the Jains, whose reverence for life was such that they would not even kill an ant. Would they take medicine for a tapeworm? Probably not.

  Or something closer to home, the Christian Scientists (“neither Christian nor scientists,” her mother had said with icy scorn). There had been a family of them in the neighborhood, and she remembered her father saying that they had changed their attitude when the son fell ill with leukemia. Yes, and had he been cured? She seemed to remember that there had been a cure or a remission, but he had died anyhow a few years later, and what did that prove?

  Surely there had to be some middle ground, a way to avoid being absurd or cruel? Perhaps from one point of view mosquitoes had as much right to exist as she did, but whenever she got a chance she traded their lives for her comfort. And she would kill an internal parasite that was making her ill: yes, even an intelligent parasite. That was the way things were. The lion did not lie down with the lamb in this world, not until the lamb was dead.

  For that matter, why shouldn’t vegetables have souls? There was that group in England that worshiped plants, and grew gigantic cabbages. Did they eat the vegetables? Presumably, but no doubt they apologized first. Would it be all right to kill a mosquito if she apologized?

  Well then, what about a human subject, would an apology do the trick? Wasn’t that a little too easy? “I’m sorry, Ms. Weinstein, but we’re going to kill you now.” That was the trouble: logic led you straight to the gas ovens in one direction, or to nakedness and grass-eating in the other.

  Wouldn’t it be simpler and more honest to say, “Yes, life is unfair, but I happen to be on top and I like it here, and in order to stay on top I will kill you, with or without an apology”? Then at least everybody would know where they stood. And if people on the bottom didn’t like it, they could overturn society, as, in fact, they were doing right now.

  But, O God, that was social darwinism again, “Nature red in tooth and claw.” Surely there had to be something better? More sensible, more stable? Something that would let her sleep at night?

  20

  Through his own attorney Stevens found a legal firm that specialized in the affairs of organizations like the one he had in mind. He made an appointment, talked to a senior partner, and was assigned to a somewhat more junior member of the firm, a sleek blond man named Rinaldo Edwards who spoke perfect English.

  “The money in these things comes mainly from five sources,” Signor Edwards told him. “First the seminars, typically three days but sometimes as much as a week. Then initiation fees and dues. Then advanced training, where you teach people to conduct seminars and training sessions themselves. You can have as many levels as you want—people training the people who train other people, and so on, and of course each time they advance to another level, they pay a progressively higher fee. Then major contributions, grants and bequests. Then publications—holos, newsletters, books, pamphlets, all that sort of thing. As a rule of thumb, I would say that the seminars account for forty percent of the total, initiation fees twenty percent, contributions twenty, advanced training maybe ten, publications ten. Dues are negligible at first, but become important as the organization matures.”

  “What about costs?”

  “Usually quite small at first, although there isn’t any rule about that. The seminars pay for themselves, and that includes all the clerical work, publicity, and so on. The people who have taken the advanced training are paid out of the earnings of the seminars they conduct. You have to pay some people salaries, of course, but that money comes out of the seminars too. I can show you some tables of seminar costs and expenses. The optimal fee for a three-day seminar would probably be in the neighborhood of twelve hundred new lire. Above that, attendance tends to drop off, but it also drops off below that figure—people won’t go to a seminar if it is too cheap, because they think it can’t be worth anything.”

  “And legal costs?”

  “Well, that depends on what you want to do, of course, but I would recommend setting up at least two corporations right away: one an educational corporation, which under Italian law can do pretty much whatever it wants to, and another for publications. Our time and costs for that will run you somewhere around two thousand lire. If we defend you in a lawsuit, there isn’t any way of predicting the cost, but I’d say it would be prudent to se
t aside, as soon as possible, a legal fund of at least a million lire.”

  “What sort of lawsuits would you anticipate?”

  “Oh, people claiming they haven’t benefited from the instruction or have been somehow damaged by it, or have been induced to turn over assets by fraud. You have to expect that sort of thing. It may never happen, but it’s best to be prepared.”

  That summer in Paris, members of an organization called Le Comité d’Action Contre l’Abomination stormed the entrances of governmental and corporate buildings and tore down detect-and-destroy devices. As fast as new devices were installed, they were demolished too. A spokeswoman said, “Why do our masters hide behind these machines? Is it because they know that if they come out, they will be killed for their abominable crimes? Come out, you butchers, and let us see your faces before you die!”

  During the next few weeks, a number of unexplained deaths took place among high officials and officers of large corporations; government, finance and industry were in turmoil. Similar actions spread to the rest of Europe, then the United States, South and Central America, Africa, and the Far East.

  In July five members of an organization calling itself Citizens Revolting Against Politicians forced their way into a control room at UBS in New York while a talk-show host was interviewing Harold W. Geiger, the president of General Motors and a Republican candidate for nomination to the presidency of the United States. “Mr. Geiger,” the host was heard to say, “is it true that you are a well-known asshole?”

  “Well, Jim, that’s an interesting question,” said Geiger comfortably. “I think I can truthfully say, that in my thirty years as a corporate executive…”