Masters of Evolution

by Damon Knight

  Production blinked at him wearily. “Bribes are no good any more, Harry. You know that as well as I do. They’re out.”

  “Well, then what are we going to do?”

  Production shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear to God, I don’t know.”

  Over in Metals Reclamation Four, in Under and Middle Jersey, the night shift was just beginning. In the blue-lit cavern of Ferrous, this involved two men, one bald and flabby, the other gray and gnarled. They exchanged a silent look, then each in turn put his face into the time clock’s retinoscope mask. The clock, which had been emitting a shrill irritating sound, gurgled its satisfaction and shut up.

  “Well, that’s it,” said the gray one. “I’ll be your work gang and you be mine, huh?”

  The flabby one spat. “Wonder what happened to Turk.”

  “Who cares? I never liked him.”

  “Just wondering. Yesterday he’s here, today where is he? Labor pool, army—” he spat again, with care—“repair, maintenance … He was fifteen years in this department. I was just wondering.”

  “Scooping sewage, probably. That’s about his speed.” The gray man shambled over to the control bench opposite and looked at the indicators. Then he lighted a cigarette.

  “Nothing in the hoppers?” the flabby one asked.

  “Nah. They ought to put Turk in the hoppers. He had metal in his goddam teeth. Actual metal!”

  “Turk wasn’t old,” the flabby one said reproachfully. “No more than sixty.”

  “I never liked him.”

  “First it was the kid—you know, Pimples. Then, lessee, the next one was that big guy, the realie actor—”

  “Gustad. The hell with him.”

  “Yeah, Gustad. What I mean is, where do they go to? It’s the same thing on my three-to-seven shift, over in Yeasts. Guys I know for ten, fifteen, twenty years on the same job. All of a sudden, they’re gone and you never see them. Must be a hell of a thing, starting all over again somewhere else—guys like that—I mean you get set in your ways, kind of.”

  His eyes were patient and bewildered in their watery pouches. “Guys like me—no kids, nobody that gives a damn about ‘em. Kind of gives you the jumps to think about it. You know what I mean?”

  The gray one looked embarrassed, then irritated, then defiant. “Aah,” he said, and produced a deck of cards from his kit—the grimy coating on the creaseless, frayless plastic as lovingly built and preserved as the patina in a meerschaum. “Cut for deal. Come on! Let’s play.”

  “I’ll have to know what you going to exhibit,” the girl said. “For the Fair records.”

  “Labor-saving devices,” Alvah told her, “the latest and best products of human ingenuity, designed to—”

  “Machines,” she said, writing. She added, looking up, “There’s a fee for the use of the fairground space. Since you only going to have it for a day, we’ll call it twenty twains.”

  Alvah hesitated. He had no idea what a twain might be— it had sounded like “twain.” Evidently it was some sort of crude Muckfoot coinage.

  “Afraid I haven’t got any of your money,” he said, producing a handful of steels from his belt change-meter. “I don’t suppose these would do?”

  The girl looked at him steadily. “Gold?” she said. “Precious stones, platinum, anything of that kind?” Alvah shook his head. “Sure?” Alvah shrugged despairingly. “Well,” she said after a moment, “maybe something can be arranged. I’ll let you talk to Doc about it, anyhow. He’ll have to decide. Come on.”

  “Just a minute,” Alvah said, and ducked back into the floater. He found what he was looking for and trotted outside again.

  “What’s that?” asked the girl, looking at the bulky kit at his waist.

  “Just a few things I like to have with me.”

  “Mind showing me?”

  “Well—no.” He opened the kit. “Cigarette lighter, flashlight, shaver, raincoat, heater, a few medicines over here, jujubes, food concentrates, things like that. Uh, I don’t know why I put this in here—it’s a distress signal for people who get lost in the subway.”

  “You never can tell,” said the girl, “when a thing like that will come in handy.”

  “That’s true. Uh, this thing that looks like two dumbbells and a corkscrew …”

  “Never mind,” said the girl. “Come along.”

  The first shed they passed was occupied by things that looked like turtles with glittery four-foot shells. In the nearest stall, a man was peeling off from one of the beasts successive thin layers of this shell-stuff, which turned out to be colorless and transparent. He passed them to a woman, who dipped them into a basin and then laid them on a board to dry. The ones at the far end of the row, Alvah noticed, had flattened into discs.

  The girl apparently misread his expression as curiosity. “Glass tortoise,” she told him. “For windows and so on. The young ones have more hump to their shells—almost spherical to start with. Those are for bottles and bowls and things.”

  Alvah blinked noncommittally.

  They passed a counter on which metal tools were displayed—knives, axes and the like. Similar objects, Alvah noted automatically, had only approximately similar outlines. There seemed to be no standardization at all.

  “These are local,” the girl said. “The metal comes from Iron Pits, just a few miles south of here.”

  In the next shed was a long row of upright rectangular frames, most of them empty. One near the end, however, was filled with some sort of insubstantial film or fabric. A tiny scarlet creature was crawling rapidly up and down this gossamer substance, working its way gradually from left to right.

  “Squareweb,” the girl informed him. “This dress I’m wearing was made that way.”

  Alvah verified his previous impression that the dress was opaque. Rather a pity, since it was also quite handsomely filled out. Not, he assured himself, that it made any difference—the girl was a Muckfoot, after all.

  Next came a large cleared space. In it were half a dozen animals that resembled nothing in nature or nightmare except each other. They were wide and squat and at least six feet high at the shoulder. They had vaguely reptilian heads, and their scaly hides were patterned in orange and blue, rust and vermilion, yellow and poppy-red.

  The oddest thing about them, barring the fact that each had three sets of legs, was the extraordinary series of protuberances that sprouted from their backs. First came an upright, slightly hollow shield sort of thing, set cross-ways behind the first pair of shoulders. Behind that, something that looked preposterously like an armchair—it even had a bright-colored cushion—and then a double row of upright spines with a wide space between them.

  “Trucks,” said the girl.

  Alvah cleared his throat. “Look, Miss—”

  “Betty Jane Hofmeyer. Call me B.J. Everybody does.”

  “All right—uh—B.J. I wonder if you could explain something to me. What’s wrong with metal? And plastic, and things like that. I mean why should you people want to go to so much trouble and—and mess, when there are easier ways to do things better?”

  “Each,” she said, “to his own taste. We turn here.”

  A few yards ahead, the Fair ended and the settlement proper began with an unusually large building—large enough, Alvah estimated, to fill almost an entire wing of a third-class hotel in New York. Unlike the hovels he had seen farther south—which looked as if they had been excreted—it was built of some regular, smooth-surfaced material, seamless and fairly well shaped.

  Alvah was so engrossed in these and other considerations that it wasn’t until the girl turned three steps inside the doorway, impatiently waiting, that he realized a minor crisis was at hand—he was being invited to enter a Muckfoot dwelling.

  “Well, come on,” said B.J.

  Refuse any offers of food, transportation, etc., said the handbook, firmly, but as diplomatically as possible. Employ whatever subterfuge the situation may suggest, such as, “Thank you, but my doctor has
forbidden me to touch fur,” or, “Pardon me, but I have a sore throat and aim unable to eat.”

  Alvah cleared his throat frantically. The situation did not suggest anything at all. Luckily, however, his stomach did.

  “Maybe I’d better not come in,” he said. “I don’t feel very well. Maybe if I, just sit down here quietly—”

  “You can sit down inside,” said the girl briskly. “If there’s anything wrong with you, Doc will look you over.”

  “Well,” Alvah asked desperately, “couldn’t you bring him out here for a minute? I really don’t think—”

  “Doc is a busy man. Are you coming or not?”

  Alvah hesitated. There were, he told himself, only two possibilities, after all: (a) he would somehow manage to keep his breakfast, and (b) he wouldn’t.

  The nausea began as a faint, premonitory twinge when he stepped through the doorway. It increased steadily as he followed B.J. past cages filled with things that chirruped, croaked, rumbled, rustled or simply stared at him. The girl didn’t invite comment on any of them, for which Alvah was grateful. He was too busy concentrating on trying not to concentrate on his misery.

  For the same reason, he did not notice at what precise point the cages gave way to long rows of potted green plants. Alvah was just beginning to wonder if he would five to see the end of them when, still following B.J., he turned a corner and came upon a cleared space with half a dozen people in it.

  One of them was the sad-faced youth, Artie. Another was a stocky man, all chest and paunch and no neck at all, who was talking to Artie while the others stood and listened. B.J. stopped and waited quietly. Alvah, perforce, did the same.

  “—just a few seedlings and a couple of one-year-olds for now—we’ll see how they go. If you have more room later on … What else was I going to tell you?” The stocky man rumpled his hair nervously. “Oh, look, Artie, I had a copy of the specifications for you, but the fool bird got into a fight with a mirror and broke his … Wait a second.” He turned abruptly. “Hello, Beej. Come along to the library for a second, will you?”

  He turned again and strode off, with Artie, BJ. and Alvah in his wake.

  The room they entered was, from Alvah’s point of view, the worst he had struck yet. It was a hundred feet long, by fifty wide, and everywhere—perched on the walls and on multi-leveled racks that ran the length of the room, darting through the air in flutters of brilliance—were tiny raucous birds, feathered in every prismatic shade, green, electric-blue, violet, screaming red.

  “Mark seven one-oh-three!” Bither shouted. The roomful of birds took it up in a hideous echoing chorus. An instant later, a sudden flapping sound turned itself into an explosion of color and alighted on the stocky man’s shoulder, preening its feathers with a blunt green beak. “Rrk,” it said and then, quite clearly, “Mark seven one-oh-three.”

  The stocky man made a perch of one forefinger and handed the thing across to Artie’s shoulder. “I can’t give you this one. It’s the only copy I got. You’ll have to listen to it and remember what you need.”

  “I’ll remember.” Artie glanced at the bird on his shoulder and said, “Magnus utility tree.”

  The stocky man looked around, saw B.J. “Now, Beej, is it important? Because—”

  “Magnus utility tree,” the bird was saying. “Thrive in all soils, over ninety-one per cent resistant to most rusts, scales and other infestations. Edible from root to branch. Young shoots and leaves excellent for salads. Self-fertilizing. Sap can be drawn in second year for—”

  “Doc,” said the girl clearly, “this is Alvah Gustad. From New York. Alvah, meet Doc Bither.”

  “—golden oranges in spring and early summer, Bither berries in late summer and fall. Will crossbreed with—”

  “New York, huh?” said Bither. “You a long way from home, young—Excuse me. Artie?”

  “—series five to one hundred fifteen. Trunks guaranteed straight and rectilinear, two-by-four at end of second year, four-by-six at—”

  “I all set, Doc.”

  “—mealie pods and winterberries—”

  “Fine, all right.” He took B.J.‘s arm. “Let’s go someplace we can talk.”

  “—absorb fireproofing and stiffening solution freely through roots …”

  Bither led the way into a small, crowded room. “Now,” he said, peering intently at Alvah, “what’s the problem?”

  B.J. explained briefly. Then they both stared at Alvah. Sweat was beaded coldly on his brow and his knees were trembling, but he seemed to have stabilized the nausea just below the critical point. The idea, he told himself, was to convince yourself that the whole building was a realie stage and all the objects in it props. Wasn’t there a line to that effect in one of the classics—The Manager of Copenhagen, or perhaps Have It Your Own Way?

  “What do you think?” Bither asked.

  “Might try him out.”

  “Um. Damn it, I wish we hadn’t run out of birds. Can you take this down for me, Beej? I’ll arrange for the Fair rental fee, Alvah, if you just answer a few questions.”

  It sounded innocuous enough but Alvah felt a twinge of suspicion. “What kind of questions?”

  “Just personal questions, like how old, what you do for a living.”

  “Twenty-six. I’m an actor.”

  “Always been an actor?”

  “No.”

  “What else you done?”

  “Labor.”

  “What kind?” B.J. asked.

  “Worked with his hands, Tie means,” Bither told her. “Parents laborers, too?”

  “Yes.”

  B.J. and Bither exchanged glances. Alvah shifted uncomfortably. “If that’s all …”

  “One or two more. I want you to tell me, near as you can, when was the first time you remember knowing that our clothes and our animals and us and all the things we make smelled bad?”

  It was too much. Alvah turned and lurched blindly out the door. He heard their voices behind him:

  “… minutes.”

  “… alley door!”

  Then there were hands on him, steering him from behind as he stumbled forward at a half-run. They turned him right, then left and finally he was out in the cool air, not a moment too soon.

  When he straightened, wiping tears away, he was alone, but a moment later the girl appeared m the doorway.

  ‘That’s all,” she said distantly. “You can start your exhibition whenever you want.”

  IV

  The magic tricks went over fairly well—at least nobody yawned. The comic monologue, however, was a flat failure, even though the piece had been expertly slanted for a rural audience and, by all the laws of psychostatics, should have rated at least half a dozen boffs. (“So the little boy came moseying back up the road, and his grandpa said to him, ‘Why didn’t you drive them hogs out of the corn like I told you?* And the little fellow piped up, ‘Them ain’t hogs—them’s shoats!’”)

  Alvah launched hopefully into his sales talks and demonstrations.

  The all-purpose fireless lifetime cooker was received with blank stares. When Alvah fried up a savory batch of protein-paste fritters and offered to hand them out, nobody responded but one small boy, and his mother hauled him down off the platform stair by the slack of his pants.

  Smiling doggedly, Alvah brought out the pocket-workshop power tools and accessories. This it appeared, was more like it. An interested hum went up as he drilled three holes of various sizes in a bar of duroplast, then sawed through it from end to end and finally cut a mortise in one piece, a tenon in the other, and fitted them together. A few more people drifted in.

  “And now, friends,” said Alvah, “if you’ll continue to give me your kind attention …”

  The next item was the little giant power-plant for the home, shop or office. Blank stares again. Alvah picked out one Muckfoot in the front row—a blear-eyed, open-mouthed fellow, with hair over his forehead and a basket under his arm, who seemed typical—and spoke directly to him. He o
utdid himself about the safety, economy, efficiency and un-obtrusiveness of a little giant power-plant. He explained its operation in words a backward two-year-old could understand.

  “A little giant,” he concluded, leaning over the platform rail to stare hypnotically into the Muckfoot’s eyes, “is the power-plant for you!”

  The fellow blinked, slowly produced a dark-brown lump of something from his pocket, slowly put it into his inattentive mouth, and as slowly began to chew.

  Alvah breathed deeply and clutched the rail. “And now,” he said, giving the clincher, “the marvel of the age—the super-speed runabout!” He pressed the button that popped open a segment of the floater’s hull and lowered the gleaming little two-wheeled car into view.

  “Now, friends,” he said, “just to demonstrate the amazing qualities of this miracle of modem science—is there any gentleman in the crowd who has an animal he fancies for speed?”

  For the first time, the Muckfeet reacted according to the charts. Shouts rocketed up: “Me, by damn!”

  “Me!”

  “Right here, mister!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Friends, friends!” said Alvah, spreading his hands. “There won’t be time to accommodate you all. Choose one of you to represent the rest!”

  “Swifty!” somebody yelped, and other voices took up the cry. A red-haired young man began working his way back out of the crowd, propelled by gleeful shouts and slaps on the back.

  Alvah took an indicator and began pointing out the salient features of the runabout. He had not got more than a quarter of the way through when the redhead reappeared, mounted astride an animal which, to Alvah’s revolted gaze, looked to be part horse, part lynx, part camel and part pure horror.

  To the crowd, evidently, it was one of nature’s finest efforts. Alvah swallowed bile and raised his voice again. “Clear a space now, friends—all the way around!”

  It took time, but eventually self-appointed deputies began to get the crowd moving. Alvah descended, carrying two bright marker poles, and, followed by the inquisitive redhead set one up at either side of the enclosure, a few yards short of the boundary.

  “This will be the course,” he told Swifty. “Around these markers and the floater—that thing I was standing on. We’ll do ten laps, starting and finishing here. Is that all right?”