Damon Knight - Orbit 16

The debate went on, but there was a marked increase of support for Lucus. By seven, when the final ballot was taken, he sat content, watching the other men and women folding their slips of paper. There was a sense of camaraderie, of common purpose, that he had never felt before with the Institute personnel. It was much like serving on the Honor Code Committee in college: the shared duty, the secret debates, and the final pride in the satisfying justice of the verdict, a day very well spent creeping, creeping to a close.

It was the consensus of the Executive Board that Something Must Be Done, and with that most of them could entirely forget the problem in good conscience. For Lucus, however, there were more meetings with the Director and Sociology, conferences in Washington, and an eventual temporary advisory post in an agency of the executive branch.

He returned to his work at the Institute, allotting a few hours a week to his new advisory position, the few hours he used to devote to research, research which seemed to lose some of its insistent appeal now that he had other important duties. The fall Quarterly came out only two weeks late, minus David’s article, with a brief editorial apology for the delay. Letters had to be written, editors conferred with to assure the difficulty of David’s publishing his article elsewhere in the near future. Meanwhile, the foundation was laid for the discrediting of any publication he eventually managed to achieve. The strategy was all laid out by experts in Washington who had handled similar cases, and Lucus had only to implement a few of the moves which required the prestige of his position in his field. Fortunately, David was up for tenure at his university that year. When it was not granted, he had immense difficulty obtaining a position elsewhere. He was quite a meek man, and certainly not paranoid enough to accuse anyone of being involved in a conspiracy against him. He ended up turning to high school teaching, which allowed him less and less time for any serious research.

The whole problem was neatly and efficiently disposed of, and Lucus could not help admiring the simplicity of the plan of action. He had carried out his own part of the program carefully and professionally. No one could reproach him. He had represented his profession admirably.

“You’re a creep!” said Hans, coming up behind him on his way back to the dorm after class.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked without turning, gripping his books tighter, feeling the strength in his fingers against them.

“You’re a creep, Lucus, that’s what!” Hans held up the morning’s edition of the school paper. “Look at this, you creepy bastard! That was really a rotten thing to do.”

“Look, the whole committee voted on Jonathan!” Don left the brick walk and cut across the lawn, anxious to be rid of Kaefig.

“And I know how you voted too, you creep!” Hans insisted. “And now the poor kid’ll be expelled, just because he got caught cribbing on one little exam . . . and you can be smug about it. Can’t you find a better way to save the honor of your precious code?”

“It wasn’t one little exam, Hans, and besides—let go of me!— and besides, it wasn’t just Jonathan we had to think of; it was the integrity of the whole school and the Honor Code. How long do you—I said let go of me!—how long do you think the faculty would let us keep the Honor Code if we let everybody off who broke it? Hey, get away! I’ve got to go to lunch!”

He dropped all his books as Hans wrestled him to the ground. It wasn’t much of a match; Don was a skinny kid, and he was more worried about keeping his glasses from slipping off than in putting up a fight. He was soon on his back with Hans on top. Hans swiftly pulled off his glasses and slapped him twice, hard. He lay still, his face stinging and wet, as Hans got up.

“I had to do that, Donnie, because of the rotten thing you did to Jonathan. You understand that, don’t you? I mean, we don’t have to talk about it anymore. That was all I wanted to say.” He held up the palm of his right hand. “You okay now?”

Don nodded. His face was hot with fear, his eyes turned upward, away from Hans.

“See you tonight for a beer?”

Don nodded. He closed his eyes and dug the fingers of one hand into the cool soil. But Hans still waited, out of his field of vision, tired and afraid; unsure, Hans waited for an answer.

“Kaefig, you’re crazy!” he whispered.

He lay there, not moving, long after Hans had gone. The tree above was blurred, but he could trace the pattern of its larger branches, and the smaller ones seemed to wink in and out of existence. If he concentrated and squinted, he could follow even those, tracing the patterns over and over with his eyes and his mind. He often looked at trees, never tired of looking at trees, sliding along the limbs with his eyes, absorbing the whole of the latticework.

Every year there were new branches on the tree outside his window. Even this year, strange as it might seem, new green branches on the tree outside the window of the elephants’ graveyard. To lose himself on these branches. To reach up and out with his mind. To lie prone on earth and cease to ponder on himself, the while he stared at nothing, drawn nowhere. His breath came with more difficulty these days, his hands would not close with ease and pained him when they did. Walking was an effort and all chairs too hard and wrongly proportioned. He longed to—what was the verse?—to

seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

But he was no hero. What lay on his desk was merely dry and inevitable. The morning’s mail, a cup of coffee, the laughing icosahedron. He had thumbed through the journals marked for his attention by Bibliography late in the morning. And there it was, in a Polish journal of logic, to be sure. In German, yes, but there could be no mistake: “ Die Widerspruchlichkeit der Logikgrundsatze als Folge eines geometrischen Beweises , “ by Kalman Kodaly of the University of Budapest.

Of course, it had to happen; anyone should have known. He placed one hand on the icosahedron, no longer needing to look at it, and raised himself to his feet. He walked slowly to the window, knowing he would find something there, the vision of order and neutrality, of “light anatomized.” It was waiting for him, soft and green and easy on his eyes. And for long minutes that morning, Donald Lucus stood at his window, tracing the lines, the beautiful lines of the tree, and wept for the death of his dear friend Hans.

Joan D. Vinge (“Mother and Child”) wrote this story after dreaming that she was reading the second half of it in an anthology. (“Maybe I time-travel in my sleep!”) She reports that she and her husband Vernor are a second-generation writing team— Vernor’s parents were co-authors of two books on geography.

We wrote to a friend in February, “I think you can conveniently divide s.f. from straight fiction and fantasy by using the three bins you mention (actuality, possibility, impossibility), but if you try to be precise you find unfortunately that some stories don’t fall into the right bin. What about stories taking place in the contemporary world in which the vice president has been assassinated or a new breakfast food called Freebies is on the market, etc.? Anybody would say these are straight stories, but you have to put them in the possibility bin because they deal with something that could happen but hasn’t. If in trying to be precise you have to abandon the three bins and call some things s.f. that have not been called that before, I think that’s okay if only because it dissolves an artificial barrier and calls attention to places we have not been going because the maps all say ‘That’s not s.f.’ And I think this is happening or about to happen, and that’s why all the ferment about defining science fiction.”