Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

Lea was wearing a hostess suit, flowing sheer panels of pale blue net over a skin-tight leotard that was midnight blue. Darin wondered if she realized that she had gained weight in the past few years. He thought not.

“Oh, that man is getting impossible,” she said when the MG blasted away from their house. “Two years now, and he still doesn’t want to put my things on show.”

Looking at her, Darin wondered how much more her things could be on show.

“Don’t dawdle too long with your martini,” she said. “We’re due at the Ritters’ at seven for clams.”

The telephone rang for him while he was showering. It was Stu Evers. Darin stood dripping water while he listened.

“Have you seen the evening paper yet? That , broad made the statement that conditions are extreme at the station, that our animals are made to suffer unnecessarily.”

Darin groaned softly. Stu went on, “She is bringing her entire women’s group out tomorrow to show proof of her claims. She’s a bigwig in the SPCA, or something.”

Darin began to laugh then. Mrs. Whoosis had her face pressed against one of the windows, other fat women in flowered dresses had their faces against the rest. None of them breathed or moved. Inside the compound Adam laid Hortense, then moved on to Esmeralda, to Hilda. . .

“God damn it, Darin, it isn’t funny!” Stu said.

“But it is. It is.”

Clams at the Ritters’ were delicious. Clams, hammers, buckets of butter, a mountainous salad, beer, and finally coffee liberally laced with brandy. Darin felt cheerful and contented when the evening was over. Ritter was in Med. Eng. Lit. but he didn’t talk about it, which was merciful. He was sympathetic about the stink with the SPCA. He thought scientists had no imagination. Darin agreed with him and soon he and Lea were on their way home.

“I am so glad that you didn’t decide to stay late,” Lea said, passing over the yellow line with a blast of the horn. “There is a movie on tonight that I am dying to see.”

She talked, but he didn’t listen, training of twelve years drawing out an occasional grunt at what must have been appropriate times. “Ritter is such a bore,” she said. They were nearly home. “As if you had anything to do with that incredible statement in tonight’s paper.”

“What statement?”

“Didn’t you even read the article? For heaven’s sake, why not? Everyone will be talking about it . . .” She sighed theatrically. “Someone quoted a reliable source who said that within the foreseeable future, simply by developing the leads you now have, you will be able to produce monkeys that are as smart as normal human beings.” She laughed, a brittle meaningless sound.

“I’ll read the article when we get home,” he said. She didn’t ask about the statement, didn’t care if it was true or false, if he had made it or not. He read the article while she settled down before the television. Then he went for a swim. The water was warm, the breeze cool on his skin. Mosquitoes found him as soon as he got out of the pool, so he sat behind the screening of the verandah. The bluish light from the living room went off after a time and there was only the dark night. Lea didn’t call him when she went to bed. He knew she went very softly, closing the door with care so that the click of the latch wouldn’t disturb him if he was dozing on the verandah.

He knew why he didn’t break it off. Pity. The most corrosive emotion endogenous to man. She was the product of the doll school that taught that the trip down the aisle was the end, the fulfillment of a maiden’s dreams; shocked and horrified to learn that it was another beginning, some of them never recovered. Lea never had. Never would. At sixty she would purse her lips at the sexual display of uncivilized animals, whether human or not, and she would be disgusted and help formulate laws to ban such activities. Long ago he had hoped a child would be the answer, but the school did something to them on the inside too. They didn’t conceive, or if conception took place, they didn’t carry the fruit, and if they carried it, the birth was of a stillborn thing. The ones that did live were usually the ones to be pitied more than those who fought and were defeated in utero.

A bat swooped low over the quiet pool and was gone again against the black of the azaleas. Soon the moon would appear, and the chimps would stir restlessly for a while, then return to deep untroubled slumber. The chimps slept companionably close to one another, without thought of sex. Only the nocturnal creatures, and the human creatures, performed coitus in the dark. He wondered if Adam remembered his human captors. The colony in the compound had been started almost twenty years ago, and since then none of the chimps had seen a human being. When it was necessary to enter the grounds, the chimps were fed narcotics in the evening to insure against their waking. Props were changed then, new obstacles added to the old conquered ones. Now and then a chimp was removed for study, usually ending up in dissection. But not Adam. He was father of the world. Darin grinned in the darkness.

Adam took his bride aside from the other beasts and knew that she was lovely. She was his own true bride, created for him, intelligence to match his own burning intelligence. Together they scaled the smooth walls and glimpsed the great world that lay beyond their garden. Together they found the opening that led to the world that was to be theirs, and they left behind them the lesser beings. And the god searched for them and finding them not, cursed them and sealed the opening so that none of the others could follow. So it was that Adam and his bride became the first man and woman and from them flowed the progeny that was to inhabit the entire world. And one day Adam said, for shame woman, seest thou that thou art naked? And the woman answered, so are you, big boy, so are you. So they covered their nakedness with leaves from the trees, and thereafter they performed their sexual act in the dark of night so that man could not look on his woman, nor she on him. And they were thus cleansed of shame. Forever and ever. Amen. Hallelujah.

Darin shivered. He had drowsed after all, and the night wind had grown chill. He went to bed. Lea drew away from him in her sleep. She felt hot to his touch. He turned to his left side, his back to her, and he slept.

“There is potential x,” Darin said to Lea the next morning at breakfast. “We don’t know where x is actually. It represents the highest intellectual achievement possible for the monkeys, for example. We test each new batch of monkeys that we get and sort them— x-1, x-2, x-3, suppose, and then we breed for more x-l’s. Also we feed the other two groups the sRNA that we extract from the original x-l’s. Eventually we get a monkey that is higher than our original x-1, and we reclassify right down the line and start over, using his sRNA to bring the others up to his level. We make constant checks to make sure we aren’t allowing inferior strains to mingle with our highest achievers, and we keep control groups that are given the same training, the same food, the same sorting process, but no sRNA. We test them against each other.”

Lea was watching his face with some interest as he talked. He thought he had got through, until she said, “Did you realize that your hair is almost solid white at the temples? All at once it is turning white.”

Carefully he put his cup back on the saucer. He smiled at her and got up. “See you tonight,” he said.

They also had two separate compounds of chimps that had started out identically. Neither had received any training whatever through the years; they had been kept isolated from each other and from man. Adam’s group had been fed sRNA daily from the most intelligent chimps they had found. The control group had been fed none. The control-group chimps had yet to master the intricacies of the fountain with its ice-cold water; they used the small stream that flowed through the compound. The control group had yet to learn that fruit on the high, fragile branches could be had, if one used the telescoping sticks to knock them down. The control group huddled without protection, or under the scant cover of palm-trees when it rained and the dome was opened. Adam long ago had led his group in the construction of a rude but functional hut where they gathered when it rained.