by Larry Niven
Something shattered in the bedroom. A window? A wet wind touched us, and the shriek of the storm was louder.
“Then we could live through this,” Leslie said hesitantly.
“I believe you’ve put your finger on the crux of the matter. Skol!” I found my champagne and drank deep. It was past three in the morning, with a hurricane beating at our doors.
“Then shouldn’t we be doing something about it?”
“We are.”
“Something like trying to get up into the hills! Stan, there’re going to be floods!”
“You bet your ass there are, but they won’t rise this high. Fourteen stories. Listen, I’ve thought this through. We’re in a building that was designed to be earthquake proof. You told me so yourself. It’d take more than a hurricane to knock it over.
“As for heading for the hills, what hills? We won’t get far tonight, not with the streets flooded already. Suppose we could get up into the Santa Monica Mountains; then what? Mudslides, that’s what. That area won’t stand up to what’s coming. The flare must have boiled away enough water to make another ocean. It’s going to rain for forty days and forty nights! Love, this is the safest place we could have reached tonight.”
“Suppose the polar caps melt?”
“Yeah…well, we’re pretty high, even for that. Hey, maybe that last flare was what started Noah’s Flood. Maybe it’s happening again. Sure as hell, there’s not a place on Earth that isn’t the middle of a hurricane. Those two great counterrotating hurricanes, by now they must have broken up into hundreds of little storms—”
The glass doors exploded inward. We ducked, and the wind howled about us and dropped rain and glass on us.
“At least we’ve got food!” I shouted. “If the floods maroon us here, we can last it out!”
“But if the power goes, we can’t cook it! And the refrigerator—”
“We’ll cook everything we can. Hardboil all the eggs—”
The wind rose about us. I stopped trying to talk.
Warm rain sprayed us horizontally and left us soaked. Try to cook in a hurricane? I’d been stupid; I’d waited too long. The wind would tip boiling water on us if we tried it. Or hot grease—
Leslie screamed, “We’ll have to use the oven!”
Of course. The oven couldn’t possibly fall on us.
We set it for 400° and put the eggs in, in a pot of water. We took all the meat out of the meat drawer and shoved it on a broiling pan. Two artichokes in another pot. The other vegetables we could eat raw.
What else? I tried to think.
Water. If the electricity went, probably the water and telephone lines would too. I turned on the faucet over the sink and started filling things: pots with lids, Leslie’s thirty-cup percolator that she used for parties, her wash bucket. She clearly thought I was crazy, but I didn’t trust the rain as a water source; I couldn’t control it.
The sound. Already we’d stopped trying to shout through it. Forty days and nights of this and we’d be stone deaf. Cotton? Too late to reach the bathroom. Paper towels! I tore and wadded and made four plugs for our ears.
Sanitary facilities? Another reason for picking Leslie place over mine. When the plumbing stopped, there was always the balcony.
And if the flood rose higher than the fourteenth floor, there was the roof. Twenty stories up. If it went higher than that, there would be damned few people left when it was over.
And if it was a nova?
I held Leslie a bit more closely, and lit another cigarette one-handed. All the wasted planning, if it was a nova. But I’d have been doing it anyway. You don’t stop planning just because there’s no hope.
And when the hurricane turned to live steam, there was always the balcony. At a dead run, and over the railing, in preference to being boiled alive.
But now was not the time to mention it.
Anyway, she’d probably thought of it herself.
The lights went out about four. I turned off the oven, in case the power should come back. Give it an hour to cool down, then I’d put all the food in Baggies.
Leslie was asleep, sitting up in my arms. How could she sleep, not knowing? I piled pillows behind her and let her back easy.
For some time I lay on my back, smoking, watching the lightning make shadows on the ceiling. We had eaten all the foie gras and drunk one bottle of champagne. I thought of opening the brandy, but decided against it, with regret.
A long time passed. I’m not sure what I thought about. I didn’t sleep, but certainly my mind was in idle. It only gradually came to me that the ceiling, between lightning flashes, had turned gray.
I rolled over, gingerly, soggily. Everything was wet.
My watch said it was nine-thirty.
I crawled around the partition into the living room. I’d been ignoring the storm sounds for so long that it took a faceful of warm whipping rain to remind me. There was a hurricane going on. But charcoal-gray light was filtering through the black clouds.
So. I was right to have saved the brandy. Floods, storms, intense radiation, fires lit by the flare—if the toll of destruction was as high as I expected, then money was about to become worthless. We would need trade goods.
I was hungry. I ate two eggs and some bacon—still warm—and started putting the rest of the food away. We had food for a week, maybe…but hardly a balanced diet. Maybe we could trade with other apartments. This was a big building. There must be empty apartments, too, that we could raid for canned soup and the like. And refugees from the lower floors to be taken care of, if the waters rose high enough…
Damn! I missed the nova. Life had been simplicity itself last night. Now…Did we have medicines? Were there doctors in the building? There would be dysentery and other plagues. And hunger. There was a supermarket near here; could we find a scuba rig in the building?
But I’d get some sleep first. Later we could start exploring the building. The day had become a lighter charcoal-gray. Things could be worse, far worse. I thought of the radiation that must have sleeted over the far side of the world, and wondered if our children would colonize Europe, or Asia, or Africa.
I’m extremely pleased with this tale. I’ve written too few love stories. This one was for Marilyn. The characters were our earlier selves, and the settings are in West Los Angeles, where we lived. I had written most of the story before we married.
But I couldn’t finish it until I showed it to Jerry Pournelle. Jerry gave me the ending: he simply reminded me that I am an optimist. I do not normally write stories in which there is no hope.
From time to time someone tries to turn “Inconstant Moon” into a movie. I grant that it’s a little short; we’d have to follow a few more characters. But the locations are easily available, and there aren’t any of the fantastically expensive special effects one tends to find in my novels.
Then again, I remember having to explain what a “nova” is to a “producer.” Maybe that’s the real problem.
• • •
• • •
“Luke, if flatlanders need thought police to keep them alive, they shouldn’t stay alive. You’re trying to hold back evolution.”
“We are not thought police! What we police is technology…”
WORLD OF PTAVVS, 1966
WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT CHOCOLATE COVERED MANHOLE COVERS?
It was the last party. Otherwise it was only one of many, so many that they merged in the memory. We all knew each other. George had invited around thirty of us, a heterogeneous group, aged from teen to retirement, in dress that varied from hippie to mod to jeans and sneakers to dark suits, and hair that varied from crew cut to shoulder-length.
It was a divorce party.
Granted that it’s been done before, still it was done well. George and Dina had planned it a year earlier, to celebrate the night their Decree became Final. The cake was frosted in black, and was surmounted by the usual wax figures, but facing outward from opposite edges of the cake. Jack Keenan donned a min
ister’s reversed collar to officiate. His makeshift sacrament included part of the funniest prayer in literature: the agnostic’s prayer from Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness. George and Dina kissed with obvious sincerity, for the last time, and everybody clapped like mad.
Afterward I got coffee and a piece of divorce cake and found a flat place to set them. Without a third hand to handle the plastic fork, I was as good as trapped there; and there it was that Tom Findlay found me.
Tom Findlay was all red hair and beard. The beard was full and thick, the hair long enough to tie in back with a rubber band. Once he had gone to a costume party with his hair combed forward over his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and a placard around his neck that read NOT A SHEEP DOG. He generally wore knee-length socks and leather shorts. His legs too were thickly covered with red hair. He spoke in a slow midwestern drawl, and grinned constantly, as if he were watching very funny pictures inside his head.
He was always part of these groups. Once a month he held a BYOB party of his own. He had a tendency to monopolize a conversation; but even those who avoided him on that account had to admit that he gave fair warning. He would walk up to any friend or stranger he found standing alone and open conversation with, “Hey. Would a Muslim vampire be terrified of a copy of the Koran?”
Or, “It seems to me that anarchy would be a very unstable form of government, don’t you think?”
Or, “What about chocolate covered manhole covers?”
That one fell pretty flat, I remember. What can anyone say about chocolate covered manhole covers? Most of Findlay’s ideas were at least worth discussing. Vampires, for instance. What significance has the vampire’s religion? Or the victim’s blood type? Could you hold off a vampire with a sunlamp, or kill him with a stake of grained plastic wood? If a bullet won’t kill a vampire, what about a revolver loaded with a blank cartridge and a wooden pencil?
And one night someone had come running in to interrupt the poker game in the other room. “What do you think Findlay just came up with?” And it was a new form of ice skating. You strap blocks of ice to your feet, see, and you skate over a field of razor blades set on edge.
Wild? Consider the ramifications! Straps will be cut, unless you embed them in the ice itself. God help you if you take a spill, or let the ice melt too far. And the blades have to be lined up. So how can you change directions? The only answer to that one is to lay the blades in a loop, like a skating rink.
That night, the night of the divorce party, Findlay perched on the edge of the table I was using for my cup and plate, and said, “Hey. Suppose all the Adam and Eve legends were true?”
I could have gotten away, but it would have meant finding another flat spot. I said, “That story’s been done to death. A rocket ship crashes on Earth, see, with two people aboard—”
“No, no, you don’t take my meaning. Every big and little group in the world, past and present, has a creation myth.” Findlay’s Midwest accent did odd things to the two-dollar words he was fond of using. “They all involve one man and one woman. In every case all of humanity sprang from that one couple. Suppose they were all true?”
My wife moved up from behind me and slid one arm around my waist. “You mean five hundred different Edens? That wouldn’t make sense.” She nestled against me, unobtrusively, feeling warm and silky in a loose, flowing pant dress.
Findlay turned to her eagerly. “Carol, do you know anything about breeding horses? Or cattle?”
I said, “Dogs. My mother raises keeshonden.”
We didn’t see where he was going, but Findlay seemed to sense we were hooked. He settled himself more comfortably on the table. “There’s a stock method of improving a breed. It always works, but it takes a long time. How long depends on what you’re trying to improve, of course.
“Suppose you’re working with horses, just for argument. You’ve got a hundred horses for base stock. What you do is, you fence them off into say twenty-five corrals of four horses each. A large number of small groups. You make them breed within the group.
“Pretty quick you get severe inbreeding. All the little deadly recessive traits start to come out, and combine. You lose a lot of each generation. You help it along by weeding out the traits you don’t like, like blindness or early senility.
“You keep it up for as many generations as you’ve got time for. Then you run them all together. You know how hybrid vigor works?”
“It’s a mathematical thing, really,” someone muttered deprecatingly. I realized that we’d acquired an audience. Four or five male teens were standing around listening, attracted either by Findlay’s carrying voice or by my wife, who is uncommonly pretty. They were looking puzzled but interested, except for the one who had spoken.
Hal Grant was a small, dark fifteen-year-old with an astonishing vocabulary. With his full black beard and collar-length hair he looked like a young baron out of the Middle Ages; but he talked like a college professor. People tended to see him as an adult, and to react with astonishment on the rare occasions when he acted like a fifteen-year-old.
When nobody tried to stop him, he went on. “Say you’ve got a strain of horses that has a dominant for weak eyes, and another that has weak hindquarters. You breed a stallion from one strain to a mare from the other strain until you get four colts. In general one colt won’t have either of the bad traits, one will have the weak eyes, one will have weak hindquarters, and one will have both. That’s straight Mendelian genetics. Where the hybrid vigor comes in is, the one with both of the bad traits can’t compete. He dies. That leaves three colts, and one is an improvement over both his parents. The average quality goes up.”
Findlay was nodding his approval. “Right. That’s how it works. So you run all the horses together. A lot of the weak traits that didn’t get killed off in the interbreeding phase, combine and kill their owners. You wind up with a superior strain of horses.”
“It wouldn’t work with dogs,” said Carol. “Mongrels don’t win dog shows.”
“But in a fair fight they tend to kill the winners,” Hal pointed out.
“The technique works on just about anything,” said Findlay. “Horses, dogs, cattle, chinchillas. Split the base stock into small groups, make them interbreed for several generations, then run them all together. Now keep it in mind, and we’ll make some assumptions.
“We assume an alien race, and we assume they’ve got a pet that’s almost bright enough to make a good servant. Its hands can hold a serving tray. They could almost repair machinery—”
“Homo habilis,” said somebody.
“Right. You have to assume the overlord race had a lot of time, and endless patience—”
“And cheap space travel.”
“Wouldn’t have to be faster than light, though. Not if they had all that endless patience.” We could see where Findlay was going now, and everyone wanted to get there first. Hence the interruptions.
Findlay said, “So they pick out about a thousand of the brightest of their animals, and they split them up into pairs, male and female. They find an Earthlike world and set down five hundred couples in five hundred locations.”
“Then the Noah legend—”
“Came first,” I said. “And you get five hundred Edens. Beautiful.”
“Right. Now look at how it works. Each of the little groups undergoes severe inbreeding. They’re all cut off from each other by fences of one kind or another, mountains, rivers, deserts. The recessive traits come out, and some of the groups die off completely. Others spread out.
“Remember, it’s the most successful ones that are spreading. They infringe on other groups. The genes start to mix. The quality of the mix goes up, partly because of hybrid vigor. If they’re going to develop intelligence, this is where it starts.”
“Hah! They’d start inventing ways around the fences,” said an older kid. Short blond hair, pale fringe of mustache, knitted sailing cap surgically attached to his head; I forget his name. “Bridges across the rivers,
canteens for the deserts—”
“And camels.”
“Passes across the mountains. Ways to tell each other how to find them.”
“Ships!”
“Right,” said Findlay, his blue eyes glowing with pleasure. “Now notice that the most intelligent groups are the ones that spread their genes around the most, because they’re the ones that do all the traveling. Also, the more inventions you get, the easier it is to mix; the more mixing you get, the higher the intelligence goes; and that makes for more inventions, like paved roads and better rigging for the ships and better breeds of horses. Eventually you get airplanes, buses, guided tours and printed language guides and international credit organizations.”
“And tourist traps.”
“And multilingual whores.”
“Not to put a damper on any of this fun stuff,” said Hal Grant, the dark youth with the very adult vocabulary, “but eventually they’ll be coming back to see how we’re doing.”
“How would they know when we’re ready?” Someone wondered.
“Just stop by for a look every thousand years?”
Hal said, “Not good enough. Look how far we’ve come in the last five hundred years. Give us another five hundred and we’ll be competitors, not slaves.”
“Or dead of pollution.”
“But they wouldn’t have to check. They just wait until—”
“Project Ozma!”
“But how could they be sure we’d signal them?”
“They must be in one of the nearby stellar systems. Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti—”
“Or they left signal devices in all the likely systems—”
“Wouldn’t it depend on how intelligent they want us? Maybe we’re supposed to be repairmen for a starship motor. Then they—”
“They’d damn well wait for us to come to them, wouldn’t they? To prove we can build a starship!”
Jack Keenan tapped me on the shoulder. He was still wearing his clerical collar. He spoke low, near my ear. “There’s a place at the poker table. They sent me to tell you.”
