Robert Wilson - SCHRODINGER'S CAT TRILOGY

"Oh," Dashwood said. There didn't seem to be any other appropriate comment.

There was a pause, and Dashwood noticed that Tobias Knight looked a bit embarrassed also.

"Well, gentlemen," he said heartily, "what can I do for you?"

"Hrrrmph!" DeAct cleared his throat. "Dr. Dashwood," he said formally, "there are two detectives from the Vice Squad waiting outside. They have a warrant for your arrest um for violating Section 666 of the revised criminal code ah Bestiality." He was actually blushing.

"I see," Dashwood said. He realized that his breath had become shallow and his muscles were tensing; with an effort, he relaxed. "I've known this day might come," he said with icy calm. "Why don't they just come in and arrest me, then?"

DeAct took a chair; Knight remained standing-between Dashwood and the window, although not being conspicuous about how he got himself there.

"Well, ah," DeAct said, lighting a cigarette nervously. "You are ah um an International Celebrity in a sense um people say Freud Kinsey Masters Johnson and Dashwood almost in one breath you might say. Ah there are questions of Scientific Freedom at stake here. Ah there is the matter of our national image ah we don't want you to be called the American Sakharov or anything like that ha-ha right?"

"Do you mean," Dashwood cried, "you might offer me a deal?"

"Well, I can't speak with any authority on that," DeAct said quickly. "What we have in mind is having you ah fill us in on the background details."

"You mean you want me to inform on my colleagues," Dashwood said, not quite making a question of it.

"No, no nothing like that," DeAct said. "It's hardly necessary, anyway. We know who they are and where they are, all sixty-seven of them." He noted Dashwood's reaction. "Yes," he went on, "there is very little we don't know about Project Pan, as you called it."

"Oh, Burger," Knight said suddenly. "Let's stop fiddle-Stewarting around. We've been on this investigation for over a year, Dashwood. We know that you and your friend Blake Williams somehow or other induced sixty-seven top scientific brains to get embroiled with you in this, this, this…" He blanched, and then went on brutally, "We know you've been Lourding animals, dammit! Lourding donkeys and Lourding goats and Lourding God-knows-what-else-whatever your Rehnquists would fit into, evidently. Jesus Christ," he added, "I never heard of such a thing."

"That's enough, Tobias," DeAct said sharply. "You see our problem, Dr. Dashwood. Even in this age of sexual permissiveness and Free Scientific Inquiry, you seem to have crossed a line into very ah controversial territory, as well as being in violation of Section 666, the Bestiality law. What we want to know is"-he paused for a deep breath- "why did you do it, Doctor? And how in hell did you get so many important people involved?"

"My God," Dashwood said. "You really want to know the idea behind it all."

"Yes," DeAct said. "Certainly. That's our problem in a nutshell."

"I don't go along with any of this, DeAct," Knight said. "It's just a case of degeneracy and perversion, and who cares what rationalizations they have?"

"That'll be enough, Tobias," DeAct repeated.

"I always say," Knight went on, " 'Scratch a scientist and you'll find an atheist, and scratch an atheist and you'll find a goddamned Commie.' "

"That will be enough, I said."

Dashwood was thinking. This was the old Mutt-and-Jeff routine: the tough, dumb cop who terrified you, and the smart, sympathetic cop who encouraged you to explain yourself. Still…

"Very well," he said. "I will attempt to explain Project Pan."

"You can call your lawyer before talking to us," DeAct said hurriedly. "You can call a psychiatrist, too, if you want," he added.

"I am a psychiatrist," Dashwood reminded him. Was DeAct worried about the Supreme Court and the international repercussions of putting sixty-eight top scientists on trial, or did he have some intuitive sense of the magnitude of what Project Pan was all about?

"Can you take me seriously," Dashwood spoke directly to DeAct, "if I tell you that what we have discovered here is the summum bonum, the secret of secrets, the key to the mystic powers of the ancients, the medicine of metals, the stone of the wise, the lost art of the Rosicrucians… that what you have been trained to consider most despicable is the central sacrament of existence, the key to higher consciousness and intelligence, the evolutionary imperative, the greatest scientific breakthrough to our epoch? Of course I always knew I would go to jail for it. I regard myself as lucky to live in an age when you won't burn me at the stake."

DeAct lit another cigarette, avoiding Dashwood's eyes. He mumbled, "You sound a bit grandiose, Doctor."

"This guy's a schizo," Knight said, more bluntly.

"Let me begin at the beginning," Dashwood said, ignoring Knight. "We are all primates. Do you understand that, gentlemen?"

"Sure," DeAct said. "Evolution. I had that in college."

"It's just a theory," Knight grumbled. "A man still has the right to believe in God in this country, you know."

Knight was rather overdoing the tough-cop routine, Dashwood thought.

"It's a biochemical fact," Dashwood said, "that ninety-eight percent of our DNA is identical with chimpanzee DNA. Eighty-five percent of our DNA is identical with that of the South American spider monkey, our most distant relative in the primate family. That means, gentlemen, that most of our behavior is genetically programmed to follow the same survival, status, and sex programs as the other primates. We are only two percent different from the chimpanzee, and only fifteen percent different from the spider monkey. Think of that the next time you go to the zoo. Our cousins are looking out at us through the bars.

"Now let me emphasize this, gentlemen. We suffer from certain induced cultural hallucinations. Every tribe brainwashes its children into the island-reality of the adults of the tribe; that's the great discovery of Einstein in her principle of neurological relativism.

"In our tribe-Western Christian civilization, as it's called-we have brainwashed ourselves into not seeing and not thinking about our relationship to the other primates and to life in general. We know we are primates if we have gotten as far as college"-he emphasized the last for Knight-"but we keep forgetting it, ignoring it, losing track of it."

"Bullburger," Knight growled. It was a typical primate reaction in a threat situation, Dashwood thought. "Go on," DeAct said nervously, lighting a third cigarette. "If I were to write a novel of about six hundred pages," Dashwood said, "and mentioned on every one of the first four hundred pages that all of us are primates, we would find it funny or satirical. Even stranger, if I stopped mentioning it for about two hundred pages, the readers would all forget it quickly, and be startled if I mentioned it again on page five hundred fifteen. It's a fact that all educated persons know, but most of us would rather forget or simply not think about.

"Now, what is Bestiality, gentlemen?" Dashwood didn't pause, but answered his own question. "Sexual relations between a human and an animal. But humans are animals, as we keep forgetting, so that definition is culturally biased and self-serving. Bestiality is sex between animals, that's all. Interspecies sex. And any biologist will tell you that is quite common. Insects will Potter Stewart any bug that comes along if they can't find their own species. The ubiquity of the mule, gentlemen, shows how common is the occurrence of interspecies sex-bestiality as our law calls it-between horses and donkeys. Throughout the reptile, bird, and fish kingdoms, the same behavior is commonplace.