Anderson, Poul - Tomorrow's Children 02 Read online

  Chain Of Logic

  BY POUL ANDERSON

  Man can think, but there is no evidence whatever that man’s way of thinking is the way to think!

  by Timmins

  —shields are cloven— wind-time and wolf-time., ere the world waneth.

  —Elder Edda

  He was nearly always alone, and even when others were near him, even when he was speaking with them, he seemed to be standing on the far side of an unbridgeable gulf. His only companion was a gaunt gray mongrel with a curiously shaped head and a savage disposition, and the two had traveled far over the empty countryside, the rolling plains and straggling woods and high bluffs several miles down the river. They were an uncanny sight, walking along a ridge against the blood-flaring sunset, the thin, ragged, big-headed boy, like a dwarf from the legends of an irretrievable past, and the shaggy, lumpish animal skulking at his heels.

  Roderick Wayne saw them thus as he walked home along the river. They were trotting rapidly along the other side. He hailed them, and they stopped, and the boy stared curiously, almost wonderingly. Wayne knew that attitude, though Alaric was only a grotesque outline against the fantastically red sky. He knew that his son was looking and looking at him, as if trying to focus, as if trying to remember who the—stranger—was. And the old pain lay deep in him, though he called out loudly enough: “Come on over, Al!”

  Wayne had had a hard day’s work in the shop, and he was tired. Fixing machinery was a long jump down from teaching mathematics in Southvale College, but the whole world had fallen and men survived as best they could in its ruins. He was better off than most—couldn’t complain.

  Of old he had been wont to stroll along the river that traversed the campus, each evening after classes, smoking his pipe and swinging his cane, thinking perhaps of what Karen would have for supper or of the stark impersonal beauty of the latest development in quantum mechanics—two topics not as unrelated as one plight suppose. The quiet summer evenings were not to be spent in worry or petty plans for the next day, there was always too much time for that. He simply walked along in his loose-jointed way, breathing tobacco smoke and the cool still air, watching the tall old trees mirror themselves in the river or the molten gold and copper of sunset. There would be a few students on the broad smooth lawns, who would hail him in a friendly way, for Bugsy Wayne was well liked; otherwise only the river and himself and the evening star.

  But that was sixteen or more years ago, and his memories of that time were dim by now, blurred in a tidal wave of savage, resistless events. The brief, the incredible nightmare of a war that wiped out every important city in the world in a couple of months—its protracted aftermath of disease, starvation, battle, work, woe, and the twisting of human destiny—it covered those earlier experiences, distorted them like rocks seen through a flowing stream. Now the campus stood in ruinous desolation, cattle staked out in the long grass, crumbling empty buildings staring wdth blind eyes at the shards of civilization.

  After the cities went, and the deliberately spread diseases and blights shattered the world’s culture into fratricidal savages fighting for the scraps, there was no more need of professors but a desperate shortage of mechanics and technicians. Southvale, by-passed by war, a college town in the agricultural Midwest, drew into itself a tight communistic dictatorship defending what it had with blood and death. It was cruel, that no-admission policy. There had been open battles with wandering starvelings. But the plagues were kept out, and they had saved enough food for most of them to survive even that first terrible winter after the war-strewn blights and insects had devoured the crops. But farm machinery had to be kept going. It had to be converted to horse, ox, and human power when gasoline gave out. So Wayne was assigned to the machine shop and, somewhat to his own surprise, turned out to be an excellent technician. His talents for robbing now useless tractors and automobiles in search of spare parts for the literally priceless food machines got his nickname changed to Cannibal, and he rose to general superintendent.

  That was a long time ago, and conditions had improved since. The dictatorship was relaxed now, but Southvale still didn’t need professors, and it had enough elementary' teachers for its waning child population. So Wayne was still machine shop boss. In spite of which, he was only a very tired man in patched and greasy overalls, going home to supper, and his thoughts darkened as he saw his child.

  Alaric Wayne crossed the ruinous bridge a few yards upriver and joined his father. They were an odd contrast, the man tall and stooped with grayed hair and a long, lined face; the boy small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged, his fraillooking body too short for his long legs, his head too big for both. Under ruffled brown hair his face w’as thin, almost intense in its straight-lined, delicately cut pensiveness, but his huge light-blue eyes were vacant and unfocused.

  “Where’ve you been all day, son?” asked Wayne. He didn’t really expect an answer, and got none. Alaric rarely spoke, didn’t even seem to hear most questions. He was looking blankly ahead now, like a blind creature, but for all his gawky appearance moved wfith a certain grace.

  Wayne’s glance held only pity, his mind only an infinite weariness. And this is the future. The war, loading air and earth with radioactive colloids, dust, which won’t burn out for a century. Not enough radioactivity to be lethal to any but highly susceptible individuals—but enough to saturate our organisms and environment, enough to start an explosion of mutations in every living creature. This was man’s decision, to sell his birthright, his racial existence, for the sovereign prerogatives of nations existing today only in name and memory. And what will come of it, nobody can know.

  They walked up a hill and onto the street. Grass had grown between paving blocks, and tumble-down houses stood vacantly in weed-covered lots. A little farther on, though, they came into the district still inhabited. The population had fallen to about half the prewar, through'privation and battle as well as causes which had once been more usual. At first glance, Southvale had a human, almost medieval look. A horsedrawn wagon creaked by. Folk went down toward the market place in rude homespun clothes, carrying torches and clumsy lanterns. Candlelight shone warmly through the windows of tenanted houses.

  Then one saw the dogs and horses and cattle more closely—and the children. And knew what an irrevocable step had been taken, knew that man would, in a racial sense, no longer be human.

  A small pack of grimy urchins raced by, normal by the old standards, normal too in their shouting spire: “Mutie! Mutie! Yaaah, mutantl” Alarc did not seem to notice them, but his dog bristled and growled. In the dusk the animal’s high round head, hardly canine, seemed demoniac, and his eyes gleamed red.

  Then another band of children went by, as dirty and tattered as the first, but—not human. Mutant. No two alike. A muzzled beast face. An extra finger or more, or a deficiency. Feet like toeless, horny-skinned hoofs. Twisted skeletons, grotesque limping gait. Pattering dwarfs. Acromegalic giants, seven feet tall at twelve years of age. A bearded six-year-old. Things even worse—

  Not all were obviously deformed. Most mutations were, of course, unfavorable, but none in that group were cripplingly handicapped. Several looked entirely normal, and their internal differences had been discovered more or less accidentally. Probably many of the “human” children had some such variation, unsuspected, or a latent mutation that would show up later. Nor were all the deviations deformities. Extremely long legs or an abnormally high metabolism, for instance, had advantages as well as disadvantages.

  Those were the two kinds of children in Southvale and, by report, the world. A third pitiful group hardly counted, that of hopelessly crippled mutants, born with some h
andicap of mind or body which usually killed them in a few years.

  At first, the tide of abnormal births following the war had brought only horror and despair. Infanticide had run rampant, but today, there were asylums for unwanted children. People knew their child had about three chances in four of being mutant to a greater or less degree—but, after all, there could be a human, if not this time then next— or even a genuinely favorable mutation.

  But Wayne had not seen or heard of any such, and doubted that he ever would. There were so many ways of not doing something, and even ait unquestionably good characteristic seemed to involve some loss elsewhere. Like the Martin kid, with his eagle-keen eyes and. total deafness.

  He waved to that boy, running along with the mutant band, and got an answer. The rest ignored him.

  Mutants were shy of humans, often resentful and suspicious. And one could hardly blame them. This first generation had been hounded unmercifully by the normal children as it grew up, and had had to endure a lot of abuse and discrimination on the part of adults. No wonder tney drew together, and said little to anyone except their fellows. Today, with most of their persecutors grown up, the mutants were a majority among the children, but they still had nothing to do with humans of their generation beyond a few fights. The older ones generally realized that they would inherit the earth, and were content to wait. Old age and death were their allies.

  But Alaric—The old uncertain pain stirred in Wayne. He didn’t know. Certainly the boy was mutant ; an Xray, taken when the town machine had recently been put back into service, had shown his internal organs to be reversed in position. And apparently the mutation involved moronic traits, for he spoke so little and so poorly, had flunked out of elementary school, and seemed wholly remote from the world outside him. But—well, the kid read omnivorously, and at tremendous speed if he wasn’t just idly turning pages. He tinkered with apparatus Wayne had salvaged from the abandoned college labs, though there seemed to be no particular purpose to his actions. And every now and then he made some remark which might be queerly significant— unless, of course, that was only his parents’ wishful thinking.

  Well, Alaric was all they had now.

  Little Ike, born before the war, had died of hunger the first winter. Since Al’s birth they’d had no more children. The radioactivity seemed to have a slow sterilizing effect on many people.

  Karen met them at the door. The mere sight of her blond vivacity lifted Wayne’s spirits. “Hello, gentlemen,” she said. “Guess what?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” answered Wayne.

  “Government jet was here today. We're going to get regular air service.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Honest Injun, I have it straight from the pilot, a colonel no less. I was down by the port, on the way to market, about noon, when it landed, and of course forced my way into the conversation.”

  “You wouldn’t have to,” said Wayne admiringly.

  “Flatterer! Anyway, he was informing the mayor officially, and a few passers-by like myself threw in their two bits’ worth.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Wayne entered the house. “Of course, I knew the government was starting an airline, but I never thought we’d get a place on it even if we do have a cleared area euphemistically termed an airport.”

  “Anyway, think of it. We'll get clothes, fuel, machinery, food—no. I suppose we’ll be shipping that ourselves. Apropos which, soup’s on.” It was a good meal, plain ingredients but imaginative preparation. Wayne attacked it vigorously, but his mind was restless. “Funny,” he mused, “how our culture overreached itself. It grew top-heavy and collapsed in a war so great we had to start almost over again. But we had some machines and enough knowledge to rebuild without too many intervening steps. Our railroads and highways, for instance, are gone, but now we’re replacing them with a national airline. We’ll likewise go later directly from foot and horseback to private planes.”

  “And we won’t be isolated any more, contacting the outside maybe four times a year. We’ll be part of the world again.”

  “Mm-nwn—what’s left of it, and that isn’t much. Europe and most of Asia, they tell me, are too far gone to make intercourse worthwhile or even possible. The southern parts of this country and the greater part of Latin America are still pretty savage. Most people who survived the war migrated there later, to escape cold and hunger. Result—overcrowding, more famine, fighting and general lawlessness. Those who stuck it out here in the north and stayed alive came out better in the end.”

  “It’ll be a curious new culture,” said Karen thoughtfully. “Scattered towns and villages, connected by airlines so fast that cities probably won’t need to grow up again. Stretches of wild country between, and—well, it’ll be strange.”

  “Certainly that. But we can hardly extrapolate at this stage of the game. Look, we here in Southvale, and a lot of similarly circumstanced places, have been able to relax for some ten years now. Blights and bugs and plagues pretty well licked, outlaws roundea up or gone into remote areas—Well, we’ve been back on our feet that long. Since then, the process of reintegrating the country has gone ahead pretty steadily. We’re no longer isolated, as you said. With the government center in Oregon as a sort of central exchange, we’ve been able to trade some of the things we have for what we need, and now this regular airline service will be the way to a national economy. Martial law was . . . ah , . . undeclared nine years ago, and the formal unification of the United States, Canada, and Alaska carried out then. You and I helped elect Drummond to President last time, when the poll plane came around.”

  “I know a little of that already, O omniscient one. What is all this leading up to?”

  “Simply that in spite of all which has been accomplished, there’s still a long ways to go. South of us is anarchic barbarism. We have precarious contact with some towns in Latin America, Russia, China, Australia, and South Africa, otherwise we’re an island of, shall I say, civilization in a planetary sea of savagery and desolation. What will come of that? Or still more important— what will come of the mutants?”

  Karen’s eyes were haggard as they searched Alaric’s unheeding face. “Perhaps at last—the superman,” she whispered.

  “Not at all probable, dear. You read the official book explaining this thing. Since most mutations are recessive, though they do tend to follow certain patterns, there must have been an incredible totality of altered genes for so many to find their mates and show up in the first generation. Even after the radioactivity is gone, there’ll be all those unmatched genes, waiting for a complement to become manifest. For several centuries, there'll be no way to tell what sort of children any couple will have, unless the geneticists figure out some system we don’t even suspect at present. Even then, the mutated genes would still be there; we couldn’t do anything about that. God only knows what the end result will be—but it won’t be human.”

  “There may be other senses of that word.”

  “There will be, inevitably. But they won’t be today’s.”

  “Still—if all the favorable characteristics showed up in one individual, he’d be a superman.”

  “You assume no unfavorable ones, possibly linked, will appear. And the odds against it are unguessable. Anyway, what is a superman? Is he a bulletproof organism of a thousand horsepower? Is he a macrocephalic dwarf talking in calculus? I suppose you mean a godlike being, a greatly refined and improved human. I grant you, a few minor changes in human physique would be desirable though not at all necessary. But any semanticist will tell you Homo sapiens are a million miles from realizing his full mental capacities. He needs training right now, not evolution.

  “In any case,” finished Wayne grayly, “we’re arguing a dead issue. Homo sapiens have committed race suicide. The mutants will be man.”

  “Yes—I suppose so. What do you think of the steak?”

  Wayne settled down in his easy-chair after supper. Tobacco and newspapers were not being produced, and the government was still taki
ng all the radios made in its new or revived factories. But he had a vast library, his own books and those he had salvaged from the college, and most of them were timeless. He opened a well-thumbed little volume and glanced at lines he knew by heart.

  “For a' that an a’ that,

  It’s earnin’ yet for a’ that.

  When men to men, the whole world o’er,

  Shall brothers be for a' that.”

  I wonder. How often I’ve won-dered! And even if Burns was right, will the plowman’s common sense apply to nonhumanness? Let’s see what another has to say—

  “And we, that now make merry in the Room

  They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom,

  Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth

  Descend—ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?”

  His gaze descended to Alaric. The boy Sprawled on the floor in a litter of open books. His eyes darted from one to another, skipping crazily, their blankness become a weird blue flicker. The books— “Theory of Functions,” “Nuclear Mechanics.” “Handbook of Chemistry and Physics,” “Principles of Psychology,” "Rocket Engineering,” “Biochemistry.” None of it could be skimmed through, or alternated that way. The greatest genius of history couldn’t do it. And a senseless jumble like that—No, Alaric was just turning pages. He must be—a moron?

  Well, I’m tired. Might as well go to bed. Tomorrow’s Sunday— good thing we can take holidays again, and sleep late.

  There were a good fifty men in Richard Hammer’s gang, and about ten women equally gaunt and furtive and dangerous. They moved slowly along the riverbank, cursing the rocks they stumbled on, but in a ferocious whisper. Overhead a half moon gave vague light from a cloudy sky. The river sped on its way, moonlight shimmering fitfully, off its darkness, and an uncertain wind ghosted through soughing trees. Somewhere a dog howled, and a wild cow bellowed alarm for her calf—descendants of domestic animals that ran free when their masters fled or died. And most savage of all the creatures moving through that night were the humans who had likewise been thrust back into wildness.