Masters of Evolution

by Damon Knight

  Nothing happened for a little over an hour. Then, half dozing in his control chair, Alvah saw two figures coming toward him across the field.

  Alvah’s ego, which had been taking a beating all day, began to expand. He stepped out onto the platform and waited.

  The two figures kept coming, taking their time. The tall one was a skinny loose-jointed oldster with a conical hat on the back of his head. The little one ambling along in front of him was some sort of four-footed animal.

  In effect, an audience of one—at any rate, it was Alvah’s best showing so far. He mentally rehearsed his opening lines. There was no point, he thought, in bothering with the magic tricks or the comic monologue. He might as well go straight into the sales talk.

  The odd pair was now much closer, and Gustad recognized the animal half of it. It was a so-called watchdog, one of the incredibly destructive beasts the Muckfeet trained to do their fighting for them. It had a slender, supple body, a long feline tail and a head that looked something like a terrier’s and something like a housecat’s. However, it was not half as large or as frightening in appearance as the pictures Alvah had seen. It must, he decided, be a pup.

  Two yards from the platform, the oldster came to a halt. The watchdog sat down beside him, tongue lolling wetly. Alvah turned off the loudspeakers and the color displays.

  “Friend,” he began, “I’m here to show you things that will astound you, marvels that you wouldn’t believe unless you saw them with your own—”

  “You a Yazoo?”

  Thrown off stride, Alvah gaped. “What was that, friend?**

  “Ah said—you a Yazoo?”

  “No,” said Alvah, feeling reasonably positive.

  “Any kin to a Yazoo?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Git,” said the old man.

  Unlikely as it seemed, a Yazoo was apparently a good thing to be. “Wait a second,” said Alvah. “Did you say Yazoo? I didn’t understand you there at first. Am I a Yazoo! Why, man, my whole family on both sides has been—” what was the plural of Yazoo?

  “Ah’ll count to two,” said the old man. “One.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Alvah, feeling his ears getting hot. The watchdog, he noticed, had hoisted its rump a fraction of an inch and was staring at him in a marked manner. He flexed his right forearm slightly and felt the reassuring pressure of the pistol in its pop-out holster. “What makes you Muckfeet think you can—”

  “Two,” said the oldster, and the watchdog was a spread-eagled blur in midair, seven feet straight up from the ground.

  Instinct took over. Instinct had nothing to do with pistols or holsters, or with the probable size of a full-grown Muck-foot watchdog. It launched Alvah’s body into a backward standing broad jump through the open floater door, and followed that with an economical underhand punch at the control button inside.

  The door slammed shut. It then bulged visibly inward and rang like a gong. Sprawled on the floor, Gustad stared at it incredulously There were further sounds—a thunderous growling and a series of hackle-raising skreeks, as of hard metal being gouged by something even harder. The whole floater shook.

  Alvah made the control chair in one leap, slammed on the power switch and yanked at the steering bar. At an altitude of about a hundred feet, he saw the dark shape of the watchdog leap clear and fall, twisting.

  A few seconds later, he put the bar into neutral and looked down. Man and watchdog were moving slowly back across the field toward the settlement. As far as Alvah could tell, the beast was not even limping.

  Alvah’s orders were reasonably elastic, but he had already stretched them badly in covering the southward leg of his route in one day. Still, there seemed to be nothing else to do. Either there was an area somewhere on the circuit where he could get the Muckfeet to listen to him, or there wasn’t. If there was, it would make more sense to hop around until he found it, and then work outward to its limits, than to blunder straight along, collecting bruises mid insults.

  And if there wasn’t—and this did not bear thinking about —then the whole trip was a bust.

  Alvah switched on his communicator and tapped out the coded clicks that meant, “Proceeding on schedule”—which was a lie—“no results yet—“which was true. Then he headed north.

  Nightfall overtook him as he was crossing the Ozark !!broken!! He set the floater’s controls to hover at a thousand feet, went to bed and slept badly until just before dawn. With a cup of kaffe in his hand, he watched this phenomenon in surprised disapproval: The scattered lights winking out below, the first colorless hint of radiance, which illuminated nothing, but simply made the Universe seem more senselessly vast and formless than before; finally, after an interminable progression of insignificant changes, the rinds of orange and scarlet, and the dim Sun bulging up at the rim of the turning Earth. It was lousy theater.

  How, Alvah asked himself, could any human being keep himself from dying of sheer irrelevance and boredom against a background like that? He was aware that billions had done so, but his general impression of history was that people who didn’t have a city always got busy improving themselves until they could build one or take one away from somebody else. All but the Muckfeet …

  Once their interest has been engaged, said the handbook at one point, you will lay principal stress upon the competitive advantages of each product. It will be your aim to create a situation in which ownership of one or more of our products win be net not only an economic advantage, but a mark of social distinction. In this way, communities which have accepted the innovations will, in order to preserve and extend the recognition of their own status, be forced to convert members of neighboring communities.

  Well, maybe so.

  Alvah ate a Spartan breakfast of protein jelly and citron cakes, called in the coordinates and the time to the frog-voiced operator in New York, and headed the floater northward again.

  The landscape unrolled itself. If there were any major differences between this country and the districts he had seen yesterday, Alvah was unable to discern them. In the air, he saw an occasional huge flapping shape, ridden by human figures. He avoided them, and they ignored him. Below, tracts of dark-green forest alternated predictably with the pale green, red or violet of cultivated fields. Here and there across the whole visible expanse, isolated buildings stood. At intervals, these huddled closer and closer together and became a settlement. There were perhaps more roads as he moved northward, dustier ones. That was all.

  The dustiness of these roads, it occurred to Alvah, was a matter that required investigation. The day was cloudless and clear; there was no wind at Alvah’s level, and nothing in the behavior of the trees or cultivated plants to suggest that there was any farther down.

  He slowed the floater and lowered it toward the nearest road. As he approached, the thread of ocher resolved itself into an irregular series of expanding puffs, each preceded by a black dot, the overall effect being that of a line of black-and-tan exclamation points. They seemed to be moving just perceptibly, but were actually, Alvah guessed, traveling at a fairly respectable clip.

  He transferred his attention to another road. It, too, was filled with hurrying dots, as was the next—and all the traffic was heading in approximately the same direction, westward of Alvah’s course.

  He swung the control bar over. The movement below, he was able to determine after twenty minutes’ flying, converged upon a settlement larger than any he had yet seen. It sprawled for ten miles or more along the southern shore of a long and exceedingly narrow lake. Most of it looked normal enough—a haphazard arrangement of cone-roofed buildings—but on the side away from the lake, there was a fairly extensive area filled with what seemed to be long, narrow sheds. This, in turn, was bounded on two sides by a strip of fenced-in plots in which, as nearly as Alvah could make out through the dust, animals of all sizes and shapes were penned. It was this area which appeared to be the goal of every Muckfoot in the central Plains.

  The din was
tremendous as Alvah floated down. There were shouts, cries, animal bellowings, sounds of hammering, occasional blurts of something that might be intended to be music, explosions of laughter. The newcomers, he noted, were being herded with much confusion to one or another of the fenced areas, where they left their mounts. Afterward, they straggled across to join the sluggish river of bodies in the avenues between the sheds.

  No one looked up or noticed the dim shadow of the floater. Everyone was preoccupied, shouting, elbowing, blowing an instrument, climbing a pole. Alvah found a clear space at some distance from the sheds—as far as he could conveniently get from the penned animals—and landed.

  He had no idea what this gathering was about. For all he knew, it might be a war council or some kind of religious observance, in which case his presence might be distinctly unwelcome. But in any case, there were customers here.

  He looked dubiously at the stud that controlled his attention-catchers. If he used them, he would only be following directives, but he had a strong feeling that it would be a faux pas. At the other extreme, the obvious thing to do was to get out and go look for- someone in authority. This would involve abandoning the protection of the floater, however, and he might blunder into some taboo place or ceremony.

  Evidently his proper course was to wait unobtrusively until he was discovered. On the other hand, if he stayed inside the floater with the door shut, the Muckfeet might take more alarm than if he showed himself. Still, wasn’t it possible that they would be merely puzzled by a floater, whereas they would be angered by a floater with a man on its platform? Or, taking it from another angle …

  The hell with it.

  Alvah ran the platform out, opened the door and stepped out. He was relieved when, as he was” considering the delicate problem of whether or not-to lower the stair, a small group of men and urchins came into view around the comer of the nearest shed, a dozen yards away from him.

  They stopped when they saw him, and two or three of the smallest children scuttled behind their elders. They exchanged looks and a few words that Alvah couldn’t hear. Then a pudgy little man with a fussed expression crowded forward, and the rest followed him at a discreet distance.

  “Hello,” said Alvah tentatively.

  The little man came to a halt a yard or so from the platform. He had a white badge of some kind pinned to his shapeless brown jacket, and carried a sheaf of papers in his hand. “Who might you be?” he asked irritably.

  “Alvah Gustad is my name. I hope I’m not putting you people out, parking in your area like this, Mr.—”

  “Well, I should hope to spit you is, though. Supposed to be a tent go up right there. Got to be one by noon. What did you say your name was, Gus what?”

  “Gustad. I don’t believe I caught your name, Mr.—”

  “Don’t signify what my name is. We talking about you. What clan you belong to?”

  “Uh—Flatbush,” said Alvah at random. “Look, as long as I’m in the way here, you just tell me where to move to and—”

  “Some little backwoods clan, I never even heard of it,” said the pudgy man. “I’ll tell you where you can move to. You can just haul that thing back where you come from. Gustad—Flatbush! You ain’t on my list, I know that.”

  The other Muckfeet had moved up gradually to surround the little man. One of them, a lanky sad-faced youngster, nudged him with his elbow. “Might just check and see, Jake.”

  “Well, I ought to know. My land, Artie, I got my work to do. I can’t spend all day standing here.”

  Artie’s long face grew more mournful. ‘You thought them Keokuks wasn’t on the list, either.”

  “Well-all right then, rot it.” To Alvah: “What’s your marks?”

  Alvah blinked. “I don’t—”

  “Come down offa there.” Jake turned impatiently to n man behind him. “Give’m a stake.” As Alvah came hesitantly down the stair, he found he was being offered a sharpened length of wood by a seamy-faced brown man, who carried a bundle of others like it under his arm.

  Alvah took it, without the least idea of what to do next. The brown man watched him alertly. “You c’n make your marks with that,” he volunteered and pointed to the ground between them.

  The others closed in a little.

  “Marks?” said Alvah worriedly.

  The brown man hesitated, then took another stake from his bundle. “Like these here,” he said. “These is mine.” He drew a shaky circle and put a dot in the center of it. “George.” A figure four. “Allister— that’s me.” A long rectangle with a loop at each end. “Coffin—that’s m’ clan.”

  Jake burst out, “Well, crying in a bucket, he know that! You know how to sign your name, don’t you?”

  “Well,” said Alvah, “yes.” He wrote Alvah Gustad and, as an afterthought, added Flatbush.

  There were surprised whistles. “Wrote it just as slick as Doc!” said a ten-year-old tow-headed male, bug-eyed with awe.

  Jake stared at Alvah, then spun half around to wave his papers under Artie’s nose. “Well, you satisfied now, Artie Brumbacher? I guess that ain’t on my list, is it?”

  “No,” Artie admitted, “I guess it ain’t—not if you can read the list, that is.”

  Everybody but Alvah laughed, Jake louder than anyone. “All right,” he said, turning back to Alvah, “you just hitch up your brutes and get that thing out of here. If you ain’t gone by the time I—”

  “Jake!” called a businesslike female voice, and a small figure came shouldering through the crowd. “They need you over in the salamander shed—the Quincies is ready to move in, but there’s some Sullivans ahead of them.” She glanced at Alvah, then at the floater behind him. “You having any trouble here?”

  “All settled now,” Jake told her. “This feller ain’t on the list. I just give him his marching orders.”

  “Look, if I can say something—” Alvah began.

  The girl interrupted him. “Did you want to exhibit something at the Fair?”

  “That’s right,” said Alvah gratefully. “I was just trying to explain—”

  “Well, you late, but maybe we can squeeze you in. You won’t sell anything, though, if it’s what I think it is. Let me see that list, Jake.”

  “Now wait a minute,” said Jake indignantly. “You know we ain’t got room for nobody that ain’t on the list. We got enough trouble—”

  “The Earth-movers won’t be here from Butler till tomorrow,” said the girl, examining the papers. “We can put him in there and move him out again when they get here. You need any equipment besides what you brought?”

  “No,” said Alvah. “That would be fine, thanks. All I need is a place—”

  “All right. Before you go, Jake, did you tell those Sullivans they could have red, green and yellow in the salamander shed?”

  “Well, sure I did. That what it say right there.”

  She handed him back the papers and pointed to a line. “That Quincy, see? Dot instead of a cross. Sullivans is supposed to have that comer in the garden truck shed, keep the place warm for the seedlings, but they won’t budge till you tell them it was a mistake. Babbishes and Stranahans is fit to be tied. You get over there and straighten them out, will you? And don’t worry too much about him.”

  Jake snorted and moved away, still looking ruffled. The girl turned to Alvah. “All right, let’s go.”

  Unhappy but game, Alvah turned and climbed back into the floater with the girl close behind him. The conditioning he’d had just before he left helped when he was, in the open air, but in the tiny closed cabin of the floater the girl’s triply compounded stench was overpowering.

  How did they live with themselves?

  She leaned over the control chair, pointing. “Over there,” she said. “See that empty space I’m pointing at?”

  Alvah saw it and put the floater there as fast as the generator would push it. The space was not quite empty-there were a few very oddly assorted Muckfeet and animals in it, but they straggled out when they s
aw him hovering, and he set the floater down.

  To his immense relief, the girl got out immediately. Alvah followed her as far as the platform.

  III

  In the tailor shop back in Middle Queens, the proprietors, two brothers named Wynn, whose sole livelihood was the shop, stared glumly at the bedplate where the two-hundred-thousand-gallon Klenomatic ought to have been.

  “He say anything when he took it away?” Clyde asked.

  Morton shrugged and made a sour face.

  “Yeah,” said Clyde. He looked distastefully at a dead cigar and tossed it at the nearest oubliette. He missed.

  “He said a month, two months,” Morton told him. “You know what that means.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I’ll call up the factory,” Morton said violently. “But I know what they’re gonna tell me. Give us a deposit and well put you on a waiting list. Waiting list!”

  “Yeah,” said Clyde.

  In a factory in Under Bronnix, the vice president in charge of sales shoved a thick folder of coded plastic slips under the nose of the vice president in charge of production. “Look at those orders,” he said. 1 “Uh-huh,” said Production.

  “You know how far back they go? Three years. You know how much money this company’s lost in unfilled orders? Over two million—”

  “I know. What do you expect? Every fabricator in this place is too old. We’re holding them together with spit and string. Don’t bother me, will you, Harry. I got my own—”

  “Listen,” said Sales. “This can’t go on much longer. It’s up to us to tell the Old Man that he’s got to try a bigger bribe on the Metals people. Mortgage the plant if we have to—it’s the only thing to do.”

  “We have more mortgages now than the plant is worth.”

  Sales reddened. “Nick, this is serious. Last fall, it looked like we might squeeze through another year, but now … You know what’s going to happen in another eight, ten months?” He snapped his fingers. “Right down the drain.”