Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“ ‘I feel awful,’ the computer moaned almost in a child’s voice. ‘Everything inside me itches. I want to scratch.’

“For a lull half minute the entire U.S.A, held its breath. In the silence, four plaintive words came from the squawk box. ‘How do you scratch?’

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, that you have seen the site where the White House once stood, we take you to our next stop, the Lincoln Memorial.”

Leonardo da Vinci defined science as “knowledge of all things possible in the future, of the present, and of the past.” This admirable definition is broad enough to include what Arthur Koestler calls “the reality of the third order”—the reality which contradicts the conceptual world but underlies it and gives it meaning, as the conceptual world gives meaning to “the absurd patchiness of the sensory world.”

Bearing this in mind, you will readily see that the following story is not a mixture of science fiction and fantasy, as it may appear, but science fiction all the way through; and that certain people and events in it, which do not belong to the first or second order of reality, are nevertheless frighteningly real.

Rae stopped before the one-way glass, stooped and peered at the gibbon infant in the cage. Darin watched her bitterly. She straightened after a moment, hands in smock pockets, face innocent of any expression what-so-goddam-ever, and continued to saunter toward him through the aisle between the cages.

“You still think it is cruel, and worthless?”

“Do you, Dr. Darin?”

“Why do you always do that? Answer my question with one of your own?”

“Does it infuriate you?”

He shrugged and turned away. His lab coat was on the chair where he had tossed it. He pulled it on over his sky-blue sport shirt.

“How is the Driscoll boy?” Rae asked.

He stiffened, then relaxed again. Still not facing her, he said, “Same as last week, last year. Same as he’ll be until he dies.”

The hall door opened and a very large, very homely face appeared. Stu Evers looked past Darin, down the aisle. “You alone? Thought I heard voices.”

“Talking to myself,” Darin said. “The committee ready yet?”

“Just about. Dr. Jacobsen is stalling with his nosethroat spray routine, as usual.” He hesitated a moment, glancing again down the row of cages, then at Darin. “Wouldn’t you think a guy allergic to monkeys would find some other line of research?”

Darin looked, but Rae was gone. What had it been this time: the Driscoll boy, the trend of the project itself? He wondered if she had a life of her own when she was away. “I’ll be out at the compound,” he said. He passed Stu in the doorway and headed toward the livid greenery of Florida forests.

The cacophony hit him at the door. There were four hundred sixty-nine monkeys on the thirty-six acres of wooded ground the research department was using. Each monkey was screeching, howling, singing, cursing, or otherwise making its presence known. Darin grunted and headed toward the compound. The Happiest Monkeys in the World, a newspaper article had called them. Singing Monkeys, a subhead announced, monkeys given smartness pills, the most enterprising paper had proclaimed. Cruelty Charged, added another in subdued, sorrowful tones.

The compound was three acres of carefully planned and maintained wilderness, completely enclosed with thirty-foot-high, smooth plastic walls. A transparent dome covered the area. There were one-way windows at intervals along the wall. A small group stood before one of the windows: the committee.

Darin stopped and gazed over the interior of the compound through one of the windows. He saw Heloise and Skitter contentedly picking nonexistent fleas from one another. Adam was munching on a banana; Homer was lying on his back idly touching his feet to his nose. A couple of the chimps were at the water fountain, not drinking, merely pressing the pedal and watching the fountain, now and then immersing a head or hand in the bowl of cold water. Dr. Jacobsen appeared and Darin joined the group.

“Good morning, Mrs. Bellbottom,” Darin said politely. “Did you know your skirt has fallen off?” He turned from her to Major Dormouse. “Ah, Major, and how many of the enemy have you swatted to death today with your pretty little yellow rag?” He smiled pleasantly at a pimply young man with a camera. “Major, you’ve brought a professional peeping tom. More stories in the paper, with pictures this time?” The pimply young man shifted his position, fidgeted with the camera. The major was fiery; Mrs. Bellbottom was on her knees peering under a bush, looking for her skirt. Darin blinked. None of them had on any clothing. He turned toward the window. The chimps were drawing up a table, laden with tea things, silver, china, tiny finger sandwiches. The chimps were all wearing flowered shirts and dresses. Hortense had on a ridiculous flop-brimmed sun hat of pale green straw. Darin leaned against the fence to control his laughter.

“Soluble ribonucleic acid,” Dr. Jacobsen was saying when Darin recovered, “sRNA for short. So from the gross beginnings when entire worms were trained and fed to other worms that seemed to benefit from the original training, we have come to these more refined methods. We now extract the sRNA molecule from the trained animals and feed it, the sRNA molecules in solution, to untrained specimens and observe the results.”

The young man was snapping pictures as Jacobsen talked. Mrs. Whoosis was making notes, her mouth a lipless line, the sun hat tinging her skin with green. The sun on her patterned red and yellow dress made it appear to jiggle, giving her fleshy hips a constant rippling motion. Darin watched, fascinated. She was about sixty.

. . my colleague, who proposed this line of experimentation, Dr. Darin,” Jacobsen said finally, and Darin bowed slightly. He wondered what Jacobsen had said about him, decided to wait for any questions before he said anything.

“Dr. Darin, is it true that you also extract this substance from people?”

“Every time you scratch yourself, you lose this substance,” Darin said. “Every time you lose a drop of blood, you lose it. It is in every cell of your body. Sometimes we take a sample of human blood for study, yes.”

“And inject it into those animals?”

“Sometimes we do that,” Darin said. He waited for the next, the inevitable question, wondering how he would answer it. Jacobsen had briefed them on what to answer, but he couldn’t remember what Jacobsen had said. The question didn’t come. Mrs. Whoosis stepped forward, staring at the window.

Darin turned his attention to her; she averted her eyes, quickly fixed her stare again on the chimps in the compound. “Yes, Mrs. uh . . . Ma’am?” Darin prompted her. She didn’t look at him.

“Why? What is the purpose of all this?” she asked. Her voice sounded strangled. The pimpled young man was inching toward the next window.

“Well,” Darin said, “our theory is simple. We believe that learning ability can be improved drastically in nearly every species. The learning curve is the normal, expected bell-shaped curve, with a few at one end who have the ability to learn quite rapidly, with the majority in the center who learn at an average rate, and a few at the other end who learn quite slowly. With our experiments we are able to increase the ability of those in the broad middle, as well as those in the deficient end of the curve so that their learning abilities match those of the fastest learners of any given group. . . .”

No one was listening to him. It didn’t matter. They would be given the press release he had prepared for them, written in simple language, no polysyllables, no complicated sentences. They were all watching the chimps through the windows. He said, “So we gabbled the gazooka three times wretchedly until the spirit of camping fired the girls.” One of the committee members glanced at him. ‘‘Whether intravenously or orally, it seems to be equally effective,” Darin said, and the perspiring man turned again to the window. “Injections every morning . . . rejections, planned diet, planned parenthood, planned plans planning plans.” Jacobsen eyed him suspiciously. Darin stopped talking and lighted a cigarette. The woman with the unquiet hips turned from the window, her face very red. “I’ve seen enough,” she said. “This sun is too hot out here. May we see the inside laboratories now?”