Equality: In the Year 2000

Chapter Sixteen The Year 2, New Calendar

Edith entered and looked at them in mock-suspicion. “What are you two up to now?”

Julian got to his feet and said severely, “Young lady, why aren’t you at work? Somebody has to toil while we who are on Guaranteed Annual Income loll about frittering away our time.”

She made a small curtsey. “I’ve finished my stint, you malingerers. And what’s more, I’m tired of sitting before those console screens. How about a walk, Jule?”

“Nothing would suit me more. Besides, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” Julian turned to her father. “When you tell Mrs. Leete, be sure it’s either in the bath, with the shower turned on, or somewhere out in the open.”

“Very well, Julian.”

He said, “There’s something else I wanted to ask you about… Oh, yes. Why didn’t you inform Security about the two attacks?”

“Because I suspected the attempts were made so that I would complain, so that it would get into the news and focus attention on the rival group which, thus far, has had precious little attention paid to it. They want as much publicity as they can get. Why should I help them?”

“That kind of publicity?”

“They want to play themselves up as rough and tough, a return to the old type of society where men were ruthless and fought their way to the top, rather than being selected by cold machines.”

Julian nodded and turned to Edith. “Shall we go?”

She looked from one to the other. “What’s been going on?”

“I’ll tell you as we walk,” he said. “See you later, Raymond.”

Going down in the elevator, Edith, frowning slightly, asked, “What were you discussing with Father?”

He didn’t really expect the elevator compartment to be bugged, but he shook his head. “Tell you later, Edie.”

“It gets mysteriouser and mysteriouser.”

Once out of the building, they crossed over to the park beyond and ambled along one of the gravel paths. Each of the university city’s high-rise apartment buildings were surrounded by approximately a square mile of parks, pools, woods, and small streams, somewhat reminiscent in Julian’s eye of a combination swank golf course and the gardens of the country estate of a British duke. There were quite a few other pedestrians taking advantage of the superlative day, but the area was large enough that it was in no sense crowded.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

She grinned mischievously. “Somewhere you’ll never believe. To the Mythological and Prehistoric Zoo.”

“Sounds something like Disneyland.” When he saw that struck no chord, he said, “It was the largest of the amusement parks in my day. For kids, actually. At least, so they said.”

“This is for young people too, but also for older scholars.”

“When do we get to it?”

“We’re already there. Look,” she pointed.

His eyes popped. At first, he thought the small herd grazing in an attractive glen to be horses, but then he realized that each had a single horn projecting from its forehead and that they seemed more delicate, more gentle than the average horse.

He laughed at himself, at his surprise, and said,

“What a clever job. Attaching those horns so that they look like unicorns.”

She smiled at him. “They are unicorns. Those are real horns.”

“Come off it! The unicorn was a mythical beast.”

“I told you this is the Mythological and Prehistoric Zoo.”

He looked at her, then the unicorns, then back at her.

She laughed at him in such a way that it was obvious that she had expected to laugh at him at this stage. She said, “Come over this way. We’ll see the mammoths.”

“Mammoths! They’ve been extinct for… for a million years!”

“No. Not really. We have cave paintings depicting Cro-Magnon Man hunting them. Mastadons, too. We’re particularly proud of the job we’ve been able to do on the mammoths. Four were found, frozen in the ice, in Siberia, in almost perfect condition. So perfect that the meat was actually edible. At any rate, the specialists in that branch of biology didn’t have to guess and were able to reconstruct them just about perfectly.”

He stopped in his tracks. “What in the name of everything are you talking about?”

“Jule, Jule, come along. Man has been changing animals around since prehistoric times. Look at the dog. Heaven only knows what he originally looked like. But centuries before we had ever heard of genet-ical engineering, we had bred the dog from the size of a Pekingese to a Great Dane and back again. They’re the same species, of course. You can cross a Peke and a Great Dane.”

“What’s that got to do with a mammoth? This I’ve got to see!”

“Let’s go, then. They’re over here. In actuality, there isn’t much to see. They look like elephants with hair and overgrown tusks.”

“You just let them run around?”

She laughed. “They’re not carnivorous, you know. Now, the saber-toothed tiger is another thing. So is our tyrannosaurus. You’ll be amazed at the size of the pit and cage we’ve had to put him in. The brontosaurus is something else again. Herbivorous, of course, so we have him in a duplication of the environment he must have lived in, sort of a swamp. They had to guess a lot about the dinosaurs; all we have are skeletons to work with. The same with the dragons. The biologists made them herbivorous too, just to make them easier to handle.”

“Dragons! I suppose they breathe fire?” Julian added sarcastically after his initial reaction. “Who are you trying to kid, Edie?”

She had to laugh at that. “Well, no, they don’t breathe fire, much to the disappointment of some of the children. The Pegasus also has the scientists stumped. You simply can’t get enough wingspread on an animal as big as a horse to enable it to fly. There—over there are your mammoths.”

Julian gaped. There were six of them, and Edith had been right. They were about the size of Indian Elephants, had long tusks possibly ten feet in length which curved in a unique spiral, and were covered with yellowish brown woolly hair which reached almost to the ground. They seemed docile enough.

Julian shook his head and turned his stare to her. “All right, at least brief me. Are these things living, or are they just clever robots, like they had in that Disneyland I mentioned?”

“No, they’re living. We’ve come a long way since that immunochemist Oswald Avery came up with deoxyribose nucleic acid, or DNA, and the scientists of your period created life in the laboratory.”

“Nobody had created life in the laboratory in my day. Not to speak of dragons.”

“Oh,” she said, frowning. “My memory was that in 1965 a team at the University of Illinois, under a Professor Sol Spiegelman, succeeded in putting together the non-living nucleic-acid message which produced a virus which would go on and multiply indefinitely. Their artificial virus was completely indistinguishable from a natural virus. Of course, it’s a matter of whether or not you consider a virus alive. At any rate, progress was geometric in the field from then on.”

He said weakly, “Let’s sit down on this bench for awhile. I could use a little breather before being taken to see a Tyrannosaurus. Are you telling me that your modern biologists can create, in the laboratory, just about any type of life form you want?”

“Why, yes. For over ten years now.”

“Even a man?”

“Yes. Though that’s in the way of being a taboo. We tread very carefully in this field, Jule. The scientists are possibly a bit more humble today than they were a third of a century ago. But cloning has become a reality. You see, every cell in the body of any organism carries all the information needed to construct whole organs, or indeed, the body itself. I believe Father told you that we no longer transplant organs. The geneticists simply take a few cells from any part of a sick man and grow duplicates of his defective organs from them. They call it autoplantation. That, of course, is a somewhat different field than the making of new life forms.”

“I’m completely confused. I read a little about this sort of thing in articles in Time and Newsweek and such before I went into hibernation. In fact, I recall an article by some science popularizer—Isaac Asimov, I think his name was—in which he mentioned the possibility of upping the chimp, or some other of the higher apes, to where it could think and even talk to the point where we could make slaves of them. Have them do the drudgery jobs, such as assembly-line work. And he mentioned the possibility of putting a voice box in the dog, so that our pets could talk. Things like that. Has that happened?”

She said, scowling slightly, “It’s all possible, but not usual. For one thing, our cousin the chimpanzee isn’t practical. That is, not as efficient as a robot. He doesn’t have an opposed thumb. And he is shortlived and clumsy. Talking dogs or, say, horses? Who wants to talk to a horse? Dogs? In actuality, I have seen a few talking dogs, but I’ve never been comfortable with them, even those who have also had their intelligence increased. I love dogs the way they have always been, man’s comrade. It always sets me back to have them tell me good morning. However, there are other things that make more sense.”

“Such as?”

“Growing arms and hands on dolphins, so that they can perform underwater tasks.”

He closed his eyes in pain. “Why not just switch man around so that he has gills and can breathe underwater?”

“That too is quite possible. However, man is a land animal, Jule. I told you how much we fear playing God.”

He said, “My mind is reeling. Look, in this mythological zoo things do you have, say mermaids and centaurs?”

“No, nor the sphinx—a man’s head on a lion’s body—though it would be possible to create them. However, we have no desire to make such mockeries of men. Theoretically, I suppose, they could come up with a vampire of the Dracula school.” She thought about it, her mouth twisted in amusement. “The basic requirements would be a man-type creature that was allergic to daylight and who could live on blood.”

“Live on blood! Come on now. No mammal could live on a blood diet.”

“Vampire bats do, don’t they? Those down in the tropics of Mexico. Also that tribe of Africans, the Masai, or whatever their name was… didn’t they live on an exclusive diet of cow’s blood and milk? That’s fairly near to it. Perhaps they’d have to feed our artificially manufactured vampire vitamin and mineral supplements or something.”

Julian attempted to enter into the spirit of the thing. “But sun allergy and living on blood were only two of the requirements. How about killing them by driving a stake through their hearts, or shooting them with a silver bullet?”

“I’d think either method would be effective with just about any human-type creature, vampire or otherwise.”

“Well, how about them being able to turn themselves into either a bat or a wolf?”

It was her turn to laugh. “I surrender. I think science will have to experiment around a bit more before that would be possible.”

“I’d hate to see them turn out even the abbreviated vampire you say is now possible.”

“Good heavens, sir, I didn’t say they would; I simply said they could.”

“I don’t know how we got off this track. But this genetic engineering, as you called it… If your biologists and genetic engineers can mess around with life to this extent, why don’t you, say, double the I.Q.—or triple it, for that matter—of every new child born?”

“It’s been considered. In fact, the debate still goes on, and possibly will for years. I told you they were treading carefully, Jule. You see, we’re a bit leery of having the godhead turned over to the race.”

“Well, certainly, if it were possible to assure that every new child born had an I.Q. of at least one-hundred fifty…”

Edith sighed before interrupting him. “That’s the basic problem, Jule. What would you rather be, smart or happy?”

He regarded her dubiously. “Are they necessarily in conflict with each other?”

“That’s what we don’t know. Let us say that one hundred is the average intelligent quotient. A person with an I.Q. of fifty is most likely an unhappy person. But is a person with an I.Q. of one-hundred fifty also out of step with society? Not to speak of one with an I.Q. of two-hundred or even higher.”

“Damned if I know, but if everyone was upped to an I.Q. of two-hundred, they’d all be in the same boat.”

She nodded. “That’s the way the argument goes. But there are ramifications. For instance, when I was a young girl, for some reason not clear to me now, everybody wanted to be tall. Especially men wanted to be at least six feet. A man six-feet-four, or taller, was particularly admired. Why? Why was the Swede with an average height of something like six feet considered superior to, say, a Japanese, whose average was a bit over five feet? At the time of their conquest, the Aztecs averaged less than five feet, their women about four feet, eight inches. It didn’t seem to be a handicap.”

He shook his head. “I never thought about it.”

She said, “The world is still overpopulated. Why don’t we let our genetic engineers breed down the size of our people to three feet? It would save both food and room. Our houses, our cars, everything could become one half the size, use one half the materials to construct.”

“Why three feet?” he complained. “Why not one foot?”

“Why not? That’s the question. When man issued forth from the caves a few thousand years ago, it was necessary for him to be as big as possible to fight off his animal enemies, and as smart as possible to solve the problems that confronted him. It seems unlikely that the very earliest man was much smarter than, say, the chimpanzee and probably not too much larger. He upgraded himself through natural selection. Those who were smaller were killed off, both by animals and by his fellow man. He was also eliminated from breeding, because the larger males took all the desirable, healthy females. The same applied to I.Q. The more stupid fell by the wayside, leaving the more intelligent to breed and pass on their genes.”

“That’s pretty basic—and obvious.”

“Very well, Jule. The question now becomes, in this age, why should being either big, or more intelligent, be desirable?”

“This is the damnedest debate I think I’ve ever been in. Ever since I was a child, 1 wanted to be a good physical specimen and as smart as possible.”

“I didn’t say anything against being a good physical specimen. Size has nothing to do with that. But there’s your basic question. Would man be happier if he had an average I.Q. of two-hundred, or three-thousand, or whatever? And that is one of the big questions being argued by our best authorities on the matter.”

“And what answers do they come up with?”

“None, so far. We are in no hurry. As I told you, we have become more humble of recent decades. We are very cold-bloodedly deciding where we want to go, and trying to decide whether future generations will agree with the path we choose. We are very humble, Jule.”

He said, “Every day that passes, I come up against things that flabbergast me. What do you say we go on? Not only do I want to see a saber-toothed tiger, but I’m just dying to examine what your biologists have cooked up in the way of a dragon.” He added, grinning, “By the way, they haven’t come up with a Push-You-Pull-Me, have they? A mythical beast out of Doctor Doolittle?”

“I’m sorry. That one escapes me.”

“You’ve neglected some required childhood reading. It was an animal that looked somewhat like a horse, and had a head on each end.”

It was her turn to look blank. “How did it—”

“Damned if I know. I never figured it out.”

She smiled. “Well, let’s go see the sabertooth.”

He said, “Just a moment. First, possibly we should talk about that discussion I was having with your Father.”

She settled back into her seat on the bench. “I forgot. It’s always so fascinating to bring these new things to you.”

He said very deliberately, “Your apartment and mine have been bugged. That is, someone has tapped both our TV phones, and has installed electronic devices that enable them to hear every conversation that takes place in your apartment. I’ve gimmicked the one bug they had in my place, but I assume they’ll either try to repair it or put a new one in shortly.”

She eyed him. “But… who?”

“I’m not sure, but I have my suspicions. Your father is evidently knee-deep in what we would have called ‘politics’ in my time.”

Her eyes turned thoughtful.

Julian said softly, “I lied to young Sean the other day.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “How do you mean?”

“I know of at least ten persons I have killed. At least. Men, women, and… one child. In the last case, we were racing through a small hamlet, scared to death, anything that moved…”

“What are you talking about? You sound half out of your mind.”

“I’m talking about the fact that for some reason which I don’t understand, because I’m out of my depth in this world of yours, somebody is making an attempt on your father’s life. And, so far as I know, I am probably the most competent bodyguard alive in United America.”

“You’re insane!”

“Yes, you said that. Now, this is what I need. You say you are a student of anthropology and archaeology. I assume you have access to museums. I want a high-calibered handgun, a nine-millimeter Luger or a .45 Colt. I want at least twenty rounds of ammunition for it and two clips, magazines, the things that hold the cartridges. I also need a combat knife… a trench knife, they sometimes call them. I don’t know what you’ll be able to steal out of the museums in this immediate vicinity. If you can get more than one trench knife, try to do so, so I can have a choice. The German ones can be used as throwing knives, as well as a close-combat weapon. That’s the one I would prefer, but do the best you can.”

“You’re mad!”

“Yes, of course. And your fathers life, and mine, and possibly yours are in immediate danger. I haven’t the vaguest idea in hell why.”

“But if someone hated my father so much, why haven’t they already killed him?”

“Possibly they’ve already tried and were too inept. In the past few days he’s been mugged and an attempt made to wreck his car while he was going at high speed. Get the gun and trench knife, Edith. Immediately. And now let’s go see that sabertooth, and the dragons. I still can’t believe it.”