Doing their mutant tricks. They can fly, you know. Oh, it isn’t really flying, it’s more a kind of jumping and soaring, but they can go twenty, thirty feet in the air and float up there about three or four minutes. Levitation, they call it. A bunch of them are levitating right out over the ocean, hanging high above the breakers. It would serve them right to drop and get a soaking. But they don’t ever lose control. And look, two of them are having a snowball fight without using their hands, just picking up the snow with their minds and wadding it into balls and tossing it around. Telekinesis, that’s called.
I learn these terms from my older daughter Ellen. She’s seventeen. She spends a lot of time hanging around with one of the mutant kids. I wish she’d stay away from him.
Levitation. Telekinesis. Mutants renting beach houses. It’s a crazy world these days.
Look at them jumping around. They look happy, don’t they?
It’s three weeks since they came. Cindy, my younger girl—she’s nine—asked me today about mutants. What they are. Why they exist.
I said, There are all different kinds of human beings. Some have brown skins and woolly hair, some have yellow skins and slanted eyes, some have—
Those are the races, she said. I know about races. The races look different outside but inside they’re pretty much all the same. But the mutants are really different. They have special powers and some of them have strange bodies. They’re more different from us than other races are, and that’s what I don’t understand.
They’re a special kind of people, I told her. They were born different from everybody else.
Why?
You know what genes are, Cindy?
Sort of, she said. We’re just starting to study about them.
Genes are what determine how our children will look. Your eyes are brown because I have the gene for brown eyes, see? But sometimes there are sudden changes in a family’s genes. Something strange gets in. Yellow eyes, maybe. That would be a mutation. The mutants are people who had something strange happen to their genes some time back, fifty, a hundred, three hundred years ago, and the change in the genes became permanent and was handed down from parents to children. Like the gene for the floating they do. Or the gene for their shiny skin. There are all sorts of different mutant genes.
Where did the mutants come from?
They’ve always been here, I said.
But why didn’t anybody ever talk about them? Why isn’t there anything about the mutants in my schoolbooks?
It takes time for things to get into schoolbooks, Cindy. Your books were written ten or fifteen years ago. People didn’t know much about mutants then and not much was said about them, especially to children your age. The mutants were still in hiding. They lived in out-of-the-way places and disguised themselves and concealed their powers.
Why don’t they hide any more?
Because they don’t need to, I said. Things have changed. The normal people accept them. We’ve been getting rid of a lot of prejudices in the last hundred years. Once upon a time anybody who was even a little strange made other people uncomfortable. Any sort of difference—skin color, religion, language—caused trouble, Cindy. Well, we learned to accept people who aren’t like ourselves. We even accept people who aren’t quite human, now. Like the mutants.
If you accept them, she said, why do you get angry when Ellen goes walking on the beach with what’s-his-name?
Ellen’s friend went back to college right after the Christmas holidays. Tim, his name is. He’s a junior at Cornell. I think she’s spending too much time writing long letters to him, but what can I do?
My wife thinks we ought to be more sociable toward them. They’ve been here a month and a half and we’ve just exchanged the usual token greetings—friendly nods, smiles, nothing more. We don’t even know their names. I could get along without knowing them, I said. But all right. Let’s go over and invite them to have drinks with us tonight.
We went across to the place Tim’s family is renting. A man who might have been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five answered the door. It was the first time I ever saw any of them up close. His features were flat and his eyes were set oddly far apart, and his skin was so glossy it looked like it had been waxed. He didn’t ask us in. I was able to see odd things going on behind him in the house—people floating near the ceiling, stuff like that. Standing there at the door, feeling very uneasy and awkward, we hemmed and hawed and finally said what we had come to say. He wasn’t interested. You can tell when people aren’t interested in being mixed with. Very coolly he said they were busy now, expecting guests, and couldn’t drop by. But they’d be in touch.
I bet that’s the last we hear of them. A standoffish bunch, keeping to themselves, setting up their own ghetto.
Well, never mind. I don’t need to socialize with them. They’ll be leaving in another couple of weeks anyway.
How fast the cycle of the months goes around. First snowstorm of the season today, a light one, but it’s not really winter yet. I guess our weird friends will be coming back to the seashore soon.
Three of the families moved in on Friday and the other three came today. Cindy’s already been over visiting. She says this year Tim’s family has a pet, a mutant dog, no less, a kind of poodle only with scaly skin and bright red eyes, like marbles. Gives me the shivers. I didn’t know there were mutant dogs.
I was hoping Tim had gone into the army or something. No such luck. He’ll be here for two weeks at Christmastime. Ellen’s already counting the days.
I saw the mutant dog out on the beach. If you ask me, that’s no dog, that’s some kind of giant lizard. But it barks. It does bark. And wags its tail. I saw Cindy hugging it. She plays with the younger mutant kids just as though they’re normals. She accepts them and they accept her. I suppose it’s healthy. I suppose their attitudes are right and mine are wrong. But I can’t help my conditioning, can I? I don’t want to be prejudiced. But some things are ingrained when we’re very young.
Ellen stayed out way past midnight tonight with Tim.
Tim at our house for dinner this evening. He’s a nice kid, have to admit. But so strange-looking. And Ellen made him show off levitation for us. He frowns a little and floats right up off the ground. A freak, a circus freak. And my daughter’s in love with him.
His winter vacation will be over tomorrow. Not a moment too soon, either.
Another winter nearing its end. The mutants clear out this week. On Saturday they had a bunch of guests—mutants of some other type, no less! A different tribe. The visitors were tall and thin, like walking skeletons, very pale, very solemn. They don’t speak out loud: Cindy says they talk with their minds. Telepaths. They seem harmless enough, but I find this whole thing very scary. I imagine dozens of bizarre strains existing within mankind, alongside mankind, all kinds of grotesque mutant types breeding true and multiplying. Now that they’ve finally surfaced, now that we’ve discovered how many of them there really are, I started to wonder what new surprises lie ahead for us so-called normals. Will we find ourselves in a minority in another couple of generations? Will those of us who lack superpowers become third-class citizens?
I’m worried.
Summer. Fall. Winter. And here they come again. Maybe we can be friendlier with them this year.
Last year, seven houses. This year they’ve rented nine. It’s good to have so many people around, I guess. Before they started coming it was pretty lonesome here in the winters.
Looks like snow. Soon they’ll be here. Letter from Ellen, saying to get her old room ready. Time passes. It always does. Things change. They always do. Winter comes round in its season, and with it come our strange friends. Their ninth straight year here. Can’t wait to see Ellen.
Ellen and Tim arrived yesterday. You see them down on the beach? Yes, they’re a good-looking young couple. That’s my grandson with them. The one in the blue snowsuit. Look at him floating—bet he’s nine feet off the ground! Precocious, that’s him. Not old enough to
walk yet. But he can levitate pretty well, let me tell you.
CAUGHT IN THE ORGAN DRAFT
One big issue during the turbulent period of American life that we remember as the Vietnam era—from 1965 to 1972, roughly—was the question of the citizen’s responsibilities to his government at a time when the government is engaged in activities of which the citizen strongly disapproves. The war that the United States then was waging in Southeast Asia, to the bewilderment and fury of many of its people, was the specific stimulus for the reexamination of civic duties that was going on. Our entanglement in Vietnam and neighboring countries had pretty much wound down by the time I wrote this story, in February of 1972, but the sociopolitical effects of the conflict still were very much in evidence, as indeed they continue to be even now, a generation later.
“Caught in the Organ Draft” is not explicitly a Vietnam story—I don’t think I ever actually wrote one—but it does explore, along with various other things, the idea of conscription for an unpopular cause, and tries to avoid the obvious conclusions while nevertheless addressing the inescapable realities. I wrote it for a book called And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire, edited by the then-ubiquitous Roger Elwood. Some of Elwood’s dozens of collections of science-fiction stories were superb, some were mediocre, some were execrable. This was one of the better ones, calling forth fine work by Philip Jose Farmer, Barry Malzberg, R.A. Lafferty, and half a dozen others. The ostensible theme of the book was biochemistry and its impact on the human condition, but Vietnam, unsurprisingly, provided a secret subtext for most of the stories.
——————
Look there, Kate, down by the promenade. Two splendid seniors, walking side by side near the water’s edge. They radiate power, authority, wealth, assurance. He’s a judge, a senator, a corporation president, no doubt, and she’s—what?—a professor emeritus of international law, let’s say. There they go toward the plaza, moving serenely, smiling, nodding graciously to passersby. How the sunlight gleams in their white hair! I can barely stand the brilliance of that reflected aura: it blinds me, it stings my eyes. What are they—eighty, ninety, a hundred years old? At this distance they seem much younger—they hold themselves upright, their backs are straight, they might pass for being only fifty or sixty. But I can tell. Their confidence, their poise, mark them for what they are. And when they were nearer I could see their withered cheeks, their sunken eyes. No cosmetics can hide that. These two are old enough to be our great-grandparents. They were well past sixty before we were even born, Kate. How superbly their bodies function! But why not? We can guess at their medical histories. She’s had at least three hearts, he’s working on his fourth set of lungs, they apply for new kidneys every five years, their brittle bones are reinforced with hundreds of skeletal snips from the arms and legs of hapless younger folk, their dimming sensory apparatus is aided by countless nerve grafts obtained the same way, their ancient arteries are freshly sheathed with sleek teflon. Ambulatory assemblages of second-hand human parts, spliced here and there with synthetic or mechanical organ substitutes, that’s all they are. And what am I, then, or you? Nineteen years old and vulnerable. In their eyes I’m nothing but a ready stockpile of healthy organs, waiting to serve their needs. Come here, son. What a fine strapping young man you are! Can you spare a kidney for me? A lung? A choice little segment of intestine? Ten centimeters of your ulnar nerve? I need a few pieces of you, lad. You won’t deny a distinguished elder like me what I ask, will you? Will you?
Today my draft notice, a small crisp document, very official looking, came shooting out of the data slot when I punched for my morning mail. I’ve been expecting it all spring; no surprise, no shock, actually rather an anticlimax now that it’s finally here. In six weeks I am to report to Transplant House for my final physical exam—only a formality, they wouldn’t have drafted me if I didn’t already rate top marks as organ reservoir potential—and then I go on call. The average call time is about two months. By autumn they’ll be carving me up. Eat, drink, and be merry, for soon comes the surgeon to my door.
A straggly band of senior citizens is picketing the central headquarters of the League for Bodily Sanctity. It’s a counterdemonstration, an anti-anti-transplant protest, the worst kind of political statement, feeding on the ugliest of negative emotions. The demonstrators carry glowing signs that say:
BODILY SANCTITY—OR BODILY SELFISHNESS?
And:
YOU OWE YOUR LEADERS YOUR VERY LIVES
And:
LISTEN TO THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE
The picketers are low-echelon seniors, barely across the qualifying line, the ones who can’t really be sure of getting transplants. No wonder they’re edgy about the League. Some of them are in wheelchairs and some are encased right up to the eyebrows in portable life support systems. They croak and shout bitter invective and shake their fists. Watching the show from an upper window of the League building, I shiver with fear and dismay. These people don’t just want my kidneys or my lungs. They’d take my eyes, my liver, my pancreas, my heart, anything they might happen to need.
I talked it over with my father. He’s forty-five years old—too old to have been personally affected by the organ draft, too young to have needed any transplants yet. That puts him in a neutral position, so to speak, except for one minor factor: his transplant status is 5-G. That’s quite high on the eligibility list, not the top priority class but close enough. If he fell ill tomorrow and the Transplant Board ruled that his life would be endangered if he didn’t get a new heart or lung or kidney, he’d be given one practically immediately. Status like that simply has to influence his objectivity on the whole organ issue. Anyway, I told him I was planning to appeal and maybe even to resist. “Be reasonable,” he said, “be rational, don’t let your emotions run away with you. Is it worth jeopardizing your whole future over a thing like this? After all, not everybody who’s drafted loses vital organs.”
“Show me the statistics,” I said. “Show me.”
He didn’t know the statistics. It was his impression that only about a quarter or a fifth of the draftees actually got an organ call. That tells you how closely the older generation keeps in touch with the situation—and my father’s an educated man, articulate, well informed. Nobody over the age of thirty-five that I talked to could show me any statistics. So I showed them. Out of a League brochure, it’s true, but based on certified National Institute of Health reports. Nobody escapes. They always clip you, once you qualify. The need for young organs inexorably expands to match the pool of available organpower. In the long run they’ll get us all and chop us to bits. That’s probably what they want, anyway. To rid themselves of the younger members of the species, always so troublesome, by cannibalizing us for spare parts, and recycling us, lung by lung, pancreas by pancreas, through their own deteriorating bodies.
Fig. 4. On March 23, 1964, this dog’s own liver was removed and replaced with the liver of a non-related mongrel donor. The animal was treated with azathioprine for four months and all therapy then stopped. He remains in perfect health 6⅔ years after transplantation.
The war goes on. This is, I think, its fourteenth year. Of course they’re beyond the business of killing now. They haven’t had any field engagements since ’93 or so, certainly none since the organ draft legislation went into effect. The old ones can’t afford to waste precious young bodies on the battlefield. So robots wage our territorial struggles for us, butting heads with a great metallic clank, laying land mines and twitching their sensors at the enemy’s mines, digging tunnels beneath his screens, et cetera, et cetera. Plus, of course, the quasi-military activity—economic sanctions, third-power blockades, propaganda telecasts beamed as overrides from merciless orbital satellites, and stuff like that. It’s a subtler war than the kind they used to wage: nobody dies. Still, it drains national resources. Taxes are going up again this year, the fifth or sixth year in a row, and they’ve just slapped a special Peace Surcharge on all metal-containing goods, on account of the c
opper shortage. There once was a time when we could hope that our crazy old leaders would die off or at least retire for reasons of health, stumbling away to their country villas with ulcers or shingles or scabies or scruples and allowing new young peacemakers to take office. But now they just go on and on, immortal and insane, our senators, our cabinet members, our generals, our planners. And their war goes on and on too, their absurd, incomprehensible, diabolical, self-gratifying war.
I know people my age or a little older who have taken asylum in Belgium or Sweden or Paraguay or one of the other countries where Bodily Sanctity laws have been passed. There are about twenty such countries, half of them the most progressive nations in the world and half of them the most reactionary. But what’s the sense of running away? I don’t want to live in exile. I’ll stay here and fight.
Naturally they don’t ask a draftee to give up his heart or his liver or some other organ essential to life, say his medulla oblongata. We haven’t yet reached that stage of political enlightenment at which the government feels capable of legislating fatal conscription. Kidneys and lungs, the paired organs, the dispensable organs, are the chief targets so far. But if you study the history of conscription over the ages you see that it can always be projected on a curve rising from rational necessity to absolute lunacy. Give them a fingertip, they’ll take an arm. Give them an inch of bowel, they’ll take your guts. In another fifty years they’ll be drafting hearts and stomachs and maybe even brains, mark my words; let them get the technology of brain transplants together and nobody’s skull will be safe. It’ll be human sacrifice all over again. The only difference between us and the Aztecs is one of method: we have anesthesia, we have antisepsis and asepsis, we use scalpels instead of obsidian blades to cut out the hearts of our victims.
The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3: Something Wild Is Loose: 1969-72 Page 43
