The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology]
Page 34
“It’s mighty friendly of you to feel that way,” Fats said, “but right now I got to rush.”
Space Marines Sergeant Gombert, satellite police chief, drew Fats aside and said, “I don’t know why you’re giving research a false impression of what’s happening, but they’ll find out the truth soon enough and I suppose you have your own sweet insidious reasons. Meanwhile I’m here to tell you that I can’t spare the men to police your exodus. As you know, you old corner-cutter, this place is run more like a national park than a military post, in spite of its theoretical high security status. I’m going to have to ask you to handle the show yourself, using your best judgment.”
“We’ll certainly work hard at it, Chief,” Fats said. “Hey, everybody, get cracking!”
“Understand,” Gombert continued, his expression very fierce, “I’m wholly on the side of officialdom. I’ll be officially overjoyed to see the last of you floaters. It just so happens that at the moment I’m short-handed.”
“I understand,” Fats said softly, then bellowed, “On the jump, everybody!”
But at sunset the new A’s proctor was again facing him, rightside-up this time, in the Big Igloo.
“Your first fifty were due at the boarding tube an hour ago,” the proctor began ominously.
“That’s right,” Fats assured him. “It just turns out we’re going to need a little more time.”
“What’s holding you up?”
“We’re getting ready, Mr. Proctor,” Fats said. “See how busy everybody is?”
A half dozen figures were rhythmically diving around the Big Igloo, folding the sun-quilt. The sun’s disk had dipped behind the Earth and only its wild corona showed, pale hair streaming across the star-fields. The Earth had gone into its dark phase, except for the faint unbalanced halo of sunlight bent by the atmosphere and for the faint dot-dot-dot of glows that were the Los Angeles-Chicago-New York line. Soft yellow lights sprang up here and there in the Cluster as it prepared for its short night. The transparent balloons seemed to vanish, leaving a band of people camped among the stars.
The proctor said, “We know you’ve been getting some unofficial sympathy from research and even the MPs. Don’t depend on it. The new Administrator can create special deputies to enforce the deportation orders.”
“He certainly can,” Fats agreed earnestly, “but he don’t need to. We’re going ahead with it all, Mr. Proctor, as fast as we’re able. F’rinstance, our groundclothes ain’t sewed yet. You wouldn’t want us arriving downside half naked an’ givin’ the sat’ a bad reputation. So just let us work an’ don’t joggle our elbow.”
The proctor snorted. He said, “Let’s not waste each other’s time. You know, if you force us to do it, we can cut off your oxygen.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then from the side Trace Davis said loudly, “Listen to that! Listen to a man who’d solve the groundside housing problem by cutting off the water to the slums.”
But Fats frowned at Trace and said quietly only, “If Mr. Proctor shut down on our air, he’d only be doing the satellite a disservice. Right now our algae are producing a shade more oxy than we burn. We’ve upped the guk production. If you don’t believe me, Mr. Proctor, you can ask the atmosphere boys to check.”
“Even if you do have enough oxygen,” the proctor retorted, “you need our forced ventilation to keep your air moving. Lacking gravity convection, you’d suffocate in your own exhaled breath.”
“We got our fans ready, battery driven,” Fats told him.
“You’ve got no place to mount them, no rigid framework,” the proctor objected.
“They’ll mount on harnesses near each tunnel mouth,” Fats said impertubably. “Without gravity they’ll climb away from the tunnel mouths and ride the taut harness. Besides, we’re not above hand labor if it’s necessary. We could use punkahs.”
“Air’s not the only problem,” the proctor interjected. “We can cut off your food. You’ve been living on handouts.”
“Right now,” Fats said softly, “we’re living half on yeasts grown from our own personal garbage. Living well, as you can see by a look at me. And if necessary we can do as much better than half as we have to. We’re farmers, man.”
“We can seal off the Cluster,” the proctor snapped back, “and set you adrift. The orders allow it.”
Fats replied, “Why not? It would make a very interesting day-to-day drama for the groundside public and for the food chemists—seeing just how long we can maintain a flourishing ecology.”
The proctor grabbed at his nylon line. “I’m going to report your attitude to the new Administrator as hostile,” he sputtered. “You’ll hear from us again shortly.”
“Give him our greetings when you do,” Fats said. “We haven’t had opportunity to offer them. And there’s one other thing,” he called after the proctor, “I notice you hold your nose mighty rigid in here. It’s a waste of energy. If you’d just steel yourself and take three deep breaths you’d never notice our stink again.”
The proctor bumped into the tunnel side in his haste to be gone. Nobody laughed, which doubled the embarrassment. If they’d have laughed he could have cursed. Now he had to bottle up his indignation until he could discharge it in his report to the new Administrator.
But even this outlet was denied him.
“Don’t tell me a word,” the new Administrator snapped at his proctor as the latter zipped into the aluminum office. ‘The deportation is canceled. I’ll tell you about it, but if you tell anybody else I’ll down-jump you. In the last twenty minutes I’ve had messages direct from the Space Marshal and the President. We must not disturb the Beat Cluster because of public opinion and because, although they don’t know it, they’re a pilot experiment in the free migration of people into space.” (“Where else, Joel,” the President had said, “do you think we’re going to get people to go willingly off the Earth and achieve a balanced existence, using their own waste products? Besides, they’re a floating labor pool for the satellites. And Joel, do you realize Jordan’s broadcast is getting as much attention as the Russian landings on Ganymede?”) The new Administrator groaned softly and asked the Unseen, “Why don’t they tell a new man these things before he makes a fool of himself?”
Back in the Beat Cluster, Fats struck the last chord of “Glow Little Glow Worm.” Slowly the full moon rose over the satellite, dimming the soft yellow lights that seemed to float in free space. The immemorial white globe of Luna was a little bit bigger than when viewed from Earth and its surface markings were more sharply etched. The craters of Tycho and Copernicus stood out by reason of the bright ray systems shooting out from them and the little dark smudge of the Mare Crisium looked like a curled black kitten. Fats led those around him into a new song:
“Gonna be a pang
Leavin’ space,
Gonna be a pang!
Gonna be a pang
Leavin’ space,
So we won’t go!”
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* * * *
IN TOMORROW’S LITTLE BLACK BAG
by James Blish
An observer of the s-f scene once commented that science fiction-writing was less a means of livelihood than a way of life. It could as easily be said that s-f is not so much a kind of reading as a way of thinking.
Reginald Bretnor and Robert Heinlein (notably, in The Science Fiction Novel) have advanced the proposition that this identifying fundamental of science fiction is not the specific science content, but the writer’s awareness of science, and in particular of the scientific method.
To utilize this discipline—(observation, hypothesis, experimentation)—in fiction it is necessary, first, to get the best reliable information whether on weather, whales, witches, or whatever; then, to relate data and drama in such a way as to obtain a story line; finally, to devise the most useful environmental situation against which to play out the drama.
One might approach the same area of definition from another viewpoint, and say that the id
entifying factor in s-f is the interaction between man and his environment. “Mainstream” writing ordinarily confines itself to situations resulting from man’s reaction to only one phase of environment: his fellow-men. “Straight fantasy,” by definition, deals with unreal—fantastic—environmental factors. S-f, specifically, considers the effect on/of a human being of/on a realistically modern or logically predictable future environment (physical, technical, natural, or manmade).
Part of that physical environment for each man is the body his subjective self inhabits. Mr. Blish, who writes science fiction by night (as a way of life), is by day (for a livelihood) a public relations man specializing in the highly esoteric field of institutional drug promotion. Out of this combined background, he considers some of the possibilities inherent in our persistent efforts to modify, amend, and improve our own fleshly surroundings.
* * * *
With a few notable exceptions, science-fiction authors talk very little about the biological sciences, and still fewer ever mention medicine. This is odd, for the history of modern science fiction coincides almost year for year with the world’s most spectacular medical revolution.
During this period, the contents of the doctor’s little black bag changed completely, and so did the nature of his practice. In 1926, that bag contained nothing that was curative, and the doctor’s practice was limited largely to relieving symptoms and hoping that Nature would do the rest. (That in itself was a revolutionary change; in the Gay Nineties, the bag contained poisons like calomel and the practice consisted in killing the patients with drastically applied ignorance.)
Today, curative drugs are so common and so potent that even physicians find it difficult to keep up with them. (As for science-fiction authors, one had a physician character remark, “If penicillin won’t cure it, I’m afraid nothing will,” although penicillin is, and was then, a “narrow-spectrum” antibiotic, effective against about 20 diseases—as opposed to at least four others that were, and are, effective against more than 100.)
In all civilized countries, infectious disease has been reduced to the category of a nuisance. Of course, it will never be eliminated completely, because bacteria are enormously prolific, and enormously necessary as the organisms of natural decay; furthermore, the natural habitat of many of the most virulent of them is the soil, with man as only a secondary host. Nevertheless, once they find their way into the body, it is possible to knock them out quite quickly. Yet, I am unable to think of a science-fiction writer who predicted this, or anything like it.
The virus diseases are next on the list. They are enormously tough, but a number of them are already no longer important; even polio has been licked in posse, and measles —which is no joke in adults, for it can be permanently disabling—is about to be.
The whole clouded area of mental disease, too, has been cracked wide open in two areas: chemistry and electroencephalography. The tranquillizing drugs are emptying state mental hospitals at a phenomenal rate; the BEG men are providing us with our first concrete clues about how the brain as an organ actually works. Nothing quite like this has happened since the days of Vesalius. The early anatomists, who laid the foundations of scientific medicine, were primarily artists; the early psychotherapists, like Freud, were primarily poets. Neither group ever cured anything, but each opened up a previously forbidden area of investigation. Both were retired to the sidelines when really hardcore knowledge began to be available, and that is happening to all the “talk” psychotherapies now, from pure Freudian-ism to splinter Scientology.
I could go on like this for quite a while, but I am more interested by another question: Where do we go from here?
The guesses that follow ought to be read only as those of a modestly informed layman; I am not a physician or a research scientist. I was trained as a biologist and have worked in or around the pharmaceutical industry for fifteen years, but these are nevertheless the guesses of an observer, not a participant.
First of all, then, it seems to me that some factor has already snapped off the switch on the fountain of “wonder drugs.” Since 1950, the pace of new drug discovery has slackened almost by half. This is true even in the United States, which since World War II has led all the rest of the world combined by about three to one in this field. No research director that I talk to is optimistic about reversing this trend.
One good reason for this is that all the obvious leads have been exhausted, and all the easy discoveries made. After penicillin, for example, showed that micro-organisms manufactured chemical weapons against each other, it was an obvious step for Waksman and his associates at Rutgers to set up a screening program to find another such productive microbe. In four years they had streptomycin, working with a very limited staff and a small stipend from Merck. When a large company puts its whole organization and a million dollars into such a screening program, this happens faster: Pfizer found, tested, and marketed Terramycin all inside a single year.
Several hundred antibiotics are now known, but only about a score have any medical significance, and of these the most recent five are chemists’ modifications of a 1946 discovery. The soil-screening system worked beautifully, but nothing further of startling importance can reasonably be expected of it now. In the meantime, the expenses involved in such research have risen in inverse proportion to its fruitfulness, so that one important company has now spent more than five million dollars on it without coming up with any antibiotic it thought worth marketing. It seems safe to predict that this company, and probably others, will shortly shut the whole project down for good.
This is not to say that the industry as a whole is quitting. Far from it. Last year more than $238 million (exact figures aren’t in yet) was spent in pharmaceutical company laboratories, and that’s more than a quarter of the country’s total budget for medical research.
But the questions now confronting the scientists are far tougher: cancer, heart and vascular disease, the arthritides, functional diseases like diabetes, and other illnesses of the kind generally lumped under the category, “degenerative” —including old age itself. Nobody yet knows what causes any of these, and so they are all being attacked more or less at random. The complexity of the life processes being what it is, this random attack is very much like trying to figure out how to play the piano by the noise it makes when you push it down the back stairs.
It is more than possible that most of these mysterious breakdowns of the human organism are the result, in one way or a dozen ways, of wear and tear—or, in short, old age itself. A year ago, G. Harry Stine, riding a trend-curve well beyond Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, predicted that after the year 2000 everyone then alive would live forever, but this, to put the matter kindly, is nonsense.
Nobody can live forever, because: (1) The longer you live, the more likely you are to meet with an accident; (2) The Second Law of Thermodynamics decrees that all things run down eventually; and (3) The universe itself is wholly unlikely to last forever. (Besides, what would we all eat?)
This writer was extrapolating from the increase in life expectancy at birth which has undoubtedly taken place. A baby born A.D. 1214 couldn’t hope to live beyond the age of 30; the same baby today could expect to live to the age of 70. But it’s important to note that the reason why the figure for the Middle Ages was so low is that so many babies did, in fact, die in early infancy. The age to which a man could live was as great then as it is today; Roger Bacon, who was born in 1214, lived to be 84, and he spent 14 of those years in the bowels of a medieval prison!
Nothing medicine has accomplished so far has raised the possible lifespan of one single man, not by so much as a year. It has raised the probable lifespan of large masses of men, which is a very different thing.
I incline to believe that the possible lifetime of a single man can be extended, at least to 150 years. No mammal but man has so long a childhood and so short an adult life; there is doubtless a findable physiological reason for this, and if it can be found, it can be corrected. (The means may have t
o be social; some very tentative recent research suggests that it may depend upon the age of the mother when the child is born. If this turns out to be true, the teen-agers will love it.)
But there is never going to be such a thing as an immortal man (I am talking now about the body, not the soul, about which I have no opinion). Everything wears out, without exception—and in challenging the degenerative diseases, medical research may well find itself attempting to give aspirin to the second law of thermodynamics.
I hope nobody will interpret this as pessimism, for I remain perfectly prepared to predict for men a possible lifetime of several thousand years. (In fact, I’ve written four novels from this assumption.) It seems to me that several trends in current research, now being actively prosecuted by both industry and government, point in this direction. They are:
(1) Permanent protection against all forms of infectious disease—and possibly against some forms of non-infectious ones, such as cancer—may be achievable with a drug which provokes the body into generating a non-specific immunity, This is necessary for true longevity because it obviates the possibility that a man’s life might hang from the thread of the availability of some specific anti-infective drug at some specific time. Several such drugs are already known; their common drawback is that they are highly toxic in themselves. It is only a matter of time before that drawback is eliminated.