Damon Knight: Orbit 17

It was late the following night before he found the pack. A few tricephs awoke and moved over, leaving room for him to join the group. Exhausted, he took his place, and the creatures huddling around him made him feel warm and safe. Like the pouch? He fell asleep. And he was in a blue-grey sea, drowning. He opened his eyes. It was dawn. He stepped out of the group, and as he did so, the triceph next to him opened its eyes. It didn’t move in, as they usually did when someone left, to close in the warmth. It seemed to him that the triceph was waiting. Robert looked away, dreading his decision. How far was the base camp? Three days? Was Layton badly hurt? Robert suspected that the same laws which could not protect him, could execute him. He looked back at the huddle. The gap was still open. Dawn, he thought, is the color of loneliness. With a strange feeling, deeper and more painful than anything he had ever experienced before, Robert removed his baby from himself and placed it in the open space. Without a moment’s hesitation, the triceph picked it up and placed it in its own empty pouch. Already his child seemed indistinguishable from the others.

As Robert left, he turned frequently to look back at the pack. But no one was watching him.

He was a scientist, not an administrator or moneyman—but what if any problem, rightly approached, could be solved by science?

Sam Leighton, Ph.D., had always thought of himself as a scientist, even though his work as a neurophysiologist was predominantly pedagogic. He was an associate professor at a medical school, safely tenured, well established in his field, and with all the overt trappings of upper-middle-class success. He could not track down any particular reasons for a certain restiveness in him, however, and he began to realize that his attitude toward nature was really rather esoteric, and that he had become enchanted by problems of limited scope. For all his intelligence, credentials, and reputation, he had begun to feel a need for some new perspectives, some broader conceptual base for his role—maybe I’m just getting old, he thought.

The restiveness persisted several days, but Sam was reluctant to talk to anyone about it. He knew that if he broached his feelings to any of his colleagues, they would probably eye him suspiciously, and say something like “Why don’t you take it up with Spence, in psychiatry?”

“I’m worried about our self-destructive abilities outrunning our inhibitory controls,” he finally said to Neilson, a tough-minded emergency room surgeon. Neilson was handsome and thick-necked, and something of a body narcissist. He kept the sleeves of his green smocks cut very short, emphasizing his tanned seventeen-inch biceps.

“That’s for philosophers to worry about,” Neilson said quickly, as if to relegate the subject immediately to an obscure niche.

“Do you identify with the role-model of the scientist?” Leighton asked.

“I used to,” Neilson said, “but all that crap about objectivity, control of variables, quantification, measurement, prediction—it all summates to so much shit after a while. And I’ve noted that the tighter, the better the experiment, the smaller the subject matter area, so that many so-called good experiments have very little generalizability.”

“And scientists feel provincial and jurisdictional, even about mundane data, don’t you think?”

“Sure they do, you remember Anders? He turned out mountains of data for about ten years, and he acted like he was cranking out the almighty gospel truth.”

“That’s when he was working on little rg.”

“Right, little rg—the fractional anticipatory goal response.”

“I’m half-surprised you know about that,” Leighton said.

“It got saturate coverage in the journals—big fucking deal— sounded very impressive, very Hullian, very algebraic. But, you know, Sam, I thought, little rg is nothing but a ghost—an elaborate model of syntactics. The only gut-level thing in the whole series was saliva drops.”

“Like harnessed Pavlovian conscripts,” Leighton said, encouraged that Neilson should have such insights.

“And your friend up at College Park, cradling transistor paks in the cortexes of beagles—anyway, Anders used nothing but T-mazes and electroshock in his work. His results have absolutely no generalizability.” Neilson sipped his coffee and his biceps rippled. Leighton found himself flexing his own biceps, thinking its tonus fair enough for a sedentary man forty years old.

“Generalizability always brings up the problem of phylogenetic comparison,” Leighton said. “You know, some strains of laboratory rats are so inbred that it’s risky to generalize from one strain to a sub-strain, much less to humans.”

“But don’t you think Harlow’s monkeys showed true cuddling needs in humans?”

“That paper was called ‘The Nature of Love,’ ” Leighton said. “I know, I know.”

“Sorry. I all but devoured it, expecting some mountaintop profundities. I felt a little cheated reading about the monkeys clinging to burlap mother-surrogates—”

“But you believe him, don’t you?”

I can’t deal with the word “believe,” Leighton thought; time to cut this off. He looked conspicuously at his watch and stood up. “Sorry, I just remembered something I’ve got to do before class. Not to dodge your question, I do think that Harlow’s data have some good generalizability.”

“Absolutely,” Neilson said, standing and looking around the cafeteria. He seemed to bobble his deltoids, like a wrestler circling an opponent. “A good example is how women feel in an embrace. Some are cold fish and some are warm tigers—you know damn well who has been well cuddled as an infant.”

Walking back to his office, Sam thought, how the hell did we get away from scientific philosophizing and into how women feel in an embrace? In the arms of a woman, one may not—one should not—think like a scientist, but this might imply that all scientists think alike. Hey, who would be the better stud, a physical chemist or a chemical physicist? He thought it would be pinnacular to know precisely, exactly, what visual-motor acts of sexual foreplay would yield optimal response in a woman, but, shit, he thought, Neilson has contaminated the orderly nature of my thoughts. I have been trained to think syllogistically, to examine chains of apparent cause-and-effect, to postulate discrete concepts in precise diction configurations: subject, verb, predicate nominative, all in a neat Aristotelian two-valued logic sequence. I am a man, therefore masculinity resides within me. I am incisive, therefore incisiveness must inhere in me. I am a scientist, a neurophysiologist, so what does this point to? Damn it, does matter exist only in sensation? Is consciousness to be found in matter? Surely the world can be divided into mental and material categories, but then, would little e really equal little me squared? What possible difference could there then be between physics and chemistry? Hey, I’m getting bogged down in tedious semantic impasses.

Leighton snapped out of his reverie as he entered the busy main hall. A painfully important-looking man stood by the elevator doors, his white coat heavily starched, tongue depressors showing clearly through the separated starch of his vest pocket. The man looked irritably at the elevator signals, as if they were errant children refusing to defer to him. He held a patient chart in one hand and a small tube of urine in the other. Leighton’s robust twenty-year-old son would have laughed at a man carrying piss in a bottle. Two bearded faculty members walked by, nodding rather affectedly, Leighton thought, their white smocks hanging below their knees. Why do we scientists wear long white robes, he thought. And there were surgeons in green smocks and frampled rubber-soled shoes, tiny green skullcaps, tie-strings askew, face masks around their throats. And lots of bow ties—why the hell do so many physicians wear bow ties? and many nonmedical doctors too, here in this med school? He remembered Dr. Gately at SMU otolaryngology. She was a stiff old bitch who wore incredibly stiff white smocks, two or three credential pins on her lapels, and had a wooden tongue depressor showing in her civvies at the goddamn Christmas party! Leighton found out, after five years of working near Gately, that she had an Ed.D. in speech therapy. She played the doctor role to the hilt. Was she a scientist? She acted like a god.