Pan Satyrus

CHAPTER SEVEN

Once again they were rolling north. But this time there was a different air to the procession. A security man rode with them, and there was little doubt that the driver was an officer, too; in his light tropical worsteds it was impossible to hide a gun. Happy Bronstein was in the front car, Ape Bates in the rear one, and only Dr. Bedoian, of his friends, remained with Pan Satyrus.

As before, a car went ahead of them and another car behind them, but now the first car used its siren, and they didn't stop for anything.

"Am I under arrest?" Pan Satyrus asked.

The man beside the driver said, "You are not to talk."

"But I have to. I retrogressed — or devoluted — and I have a compulsion to talk. Like a human being."

The security man reached into his coat. "This is a revolver, a.38. This other gun has a narcotic in it, a powerful one. I am under orders to shoot you with the narcotic, and if that does not stop you, I am allowed to use a lead bullet. Do not talk."

"Wait a minute," Dr. Bedoian said. "This is my patient".

"Is he sick?"

"No."

"Then he is not your patient. And do not talk."

Pan Satyrus reached out and took the doctor's hand, gently, in his own big one. He clung to it as though he were frightened, but how could he be, a big chimpanzee who had flown faster than light?

The cars rolled on, the siren moaning monotonously.

Eventually the little motorcade left the main highway, and followed a paved road off into non-coastal Florida, a land of sandhills and swamps and small, muggy lakes, cattle and poor farms and the rich mucklands of the commercial tomato men.

Pan Satyrus looked out at the green and red globes on the plants, and said, "I am getting hungry."

The security man glowered.

Dr. Bedoian said, "He requires several meals a day."

"That's right," Pan said. "Because I'm a vegetarian. Even the legumes Jack the concentration of energy of the animal proteins."

The security man looked frustrated. "You're not supposed to talk," he said.

Dr. Bedoian said, "Pan, you have read the strangest things."

"I have been tended by some very strange people. Night watchmen in the Primate House, or in an animal laboratory, are very often studying to be something else. Better, you men would say. And then, when I've been ill, I've been nursed by medical students."

"Please stop talking," the security man said.

"Not until I am fed," Pan Satyrus answered. "Talking takes my mind off my stomach."

"Well be — where we're going — in half an hour."

Then I shall talk for half an hour."

The security man said, "Oh, all right. What can I do about it?"

"Shoot a capsule into me," Pan Satyrus said. "Queer. Yesterday I was in a capsule, today a capsule may be in me. Dr. Bedoian, your language lacks definition."

"I am a doctor, not a linguist. And call me Aram. It makes me feel comforted in a world that is about to go bleak and grim. Couldn't you have picked some other time to be subversive?"

Pan Satyrus said, "You have handled chimpanzees before. At a certain age don't they all become difficult, no, impossible to handle? No, not impossible; positively perverse. Maybe I'm reaching that age."

"Oh, lay off," Dr. Bedoian said.

"Alone in a friendless world. Do you think I could join the FBI?"

Both the men in the front seat chuckled. "You have to have a law degree," the driver said, over his shoulder.

"You had to go to law school to be a chauffeur to an ape?" Pan Satyrus asked.

"Sometimes I do other things," the driver said.

"We're not supposed to talk, or let them talk," his companion said.

"I could always get a job in a filling station," the driver said.

Dr. Bedoian sighed. "There's something about you, Pan. You make friends easier than anyone I ever met."

"Everybody loves chimpanzees," Pan Satyrus said, "Chimpanzees, however, do not love everyone. That's the trouble with the human world. Everybody goes around trying to make everybody else love him. When a chimpanzee comes along, people are refreshed."

The senior man in the front seat spoke up. "By God, you're right. When I pinch anybody, nine times out of ten he'd never get convicted if he didn't talk. But he wants to make me like him. He has to tell me why he did it, so I'll forgive him. So I'll like him. And he can't tell why he did it without saying he did it, so I nail him. What's wrong with people?"

"Not completely evoluted," Pan Satyrus said. "There's a theory called teleology, which maintains that evolution has a purpose, and when the ideal being is created, evolution will cease. The chimpanzee? I don't know too much about teleology, as the keeper who had the book got bored and never looked at it after the first night, and then only for a few minutes."

"Chimps are not completely independent," Dr. Bedoian said. "They live a group fife, they need love to be happy."

"We were talking about men, not chimps," Pan Satyrus said with dignity.

The driver laughed again, and then sat up straighter in his seat and turned the car off the secondary road they had been travelling, onto a dirt, or tertiary road that wound between hummocks and through patches of discouraged-looking palmettos.

"Dr. Bedoian, you should have taught me to eat an animal diet," Pan said.

Dr. Bedoian said nothing.

The car bumped along. Occasionally it would pass a raggedy-looking man in blue jeans and a straw hat. They would have been more convincingly bucolic if the straw hats had not all been of the same type and degree of wear. Still, a super straw hat salesman might have passed through there once, about four years before, and never returned.

"I shall refuse to be questioned if you aren't present," Pan Satyrus said.

Dr. Bedoian said nothing.

"Aram," Pan Satyrus asked, "what have I done to make you angry?"

"Who can live without love, who needs no friends?" Dr. Bedoian asked. "I was just trying you out. After all, I am a scientist."

Ahead of them a woven wire gate was marked with a big sign: pumping station, and the name of a natural gas company. But there were no pipelines anywhere around there.

A uniformed man, carrying a rifle, opened the gate, and the three cars bumped through and fined up alongside each other. Some more men with rifles came out, and the passengers disembarked, each car also disgorging its pair of security men.

Mr. MacMahon appeared from somewhere, and took charge. The terms in which he did it were ominous: "Take all four of the prisoners into the office together. They are not to talk."

From the outside the building resembled a corrugated iron shed for the protection of oil drums or pumping machinery. Inside, it was every government office in the country; waist high walls for the lower officers, ceiling high walls for their superiors, two bull pens full of desks for their inferiors.

Mr. MacMahon led the four culprits — prisoners-guests — to what any bureaucrat would have recognized as the most important of the offices.

Inside, a civil-service faced woman was typing. She did not look up as they went through to the inner office, which was marked, simply, private.

There was a huge desk in the office. Three men sat behind it. Though they wore their shirts and flowered ties and pleated slacks, at least two of them had the unmistakable look of military men in what used to be called mufti.

The one in the center had a closely cropped mustache, a deep suntan, and a jaw that rivalled Pan Satyrus'. He said, "Just line the people up, MacMahon, and leave us alone."

MacMahon said, "Sir, as a matter of physical security—"

"We've got two able bodied Navy men here, if we need them."

MacMahon looked unconvinced but he went out.

Pan said, "My name is Satyrus, sir. And yours?"

"You can call me Mr. Armstrong. And your name is Mem, a chimpanzee."

"Quite so, sir, but I do not care for the name of Mem."

Mr. Armstrong stretched his arms up above his head, then brought them down and caressed Ms shoulders with strong fingertips. "This damned air conditioning," he said. "Why, Mem, I do not care what you care for. To me, you are just an ape who is trying to make a monkey out of the United States." He let his stern glance rake the two sailors and the doctor.

"That's pretty good," Pan Satyrus said. "Make a note of it, Happy. Radioman Bronstein is my secretary," he said to Mr. Armstrong.

"I'm Mr. Satyrus' valley," Ape Bates said. Mr. Armstrong stared at them. "This is very funny, I know," he said. "It may cease to be so at any moment. Kindly remember that you are enlisted men to the armed forces, and subject to court-martial." "I don't see no officers present," Ape Bates said. Mr. Armstrong had the grace to blush. "Now, Mem," he said. "Or Satyrus if you prefer. Playtime is over. You did something to the controls of that spaceship, the Mem-sahib. All right, all right, I don't care for the name, either. What you did was not an accident. We — the government of your country—"

"No," Pan Satyrus said. "Not my country. Do primates, other than Homo sapiens, have a vote? Can a gorilla be President, a macaque governor, a rhesus Secretary of State?"

"My God," Mr. Armstrong said, "you're demanding votes for monkeys."

The man on his right had been busily cleaning a pipe. Now he laid it on the table. "Okay. Any monkeys or apes that get to be twenty-one and can pass 3 literacy test, they vote." "Very funny," Pan Satyrus said. The man took up his pipe and another cleaner. "But that is what we are here for," Mr. Armstrong said. "To find out your price for disclosing this very important secret to us, and to get it for you, if it is within reason." "Chimpanzees are not subject to human desires."

"Then we are prepared to fill some chimpanzee desires. A cage full of luscious young females? A daily carload of bananas? Name it."

Pan Satyrus laughed his alarming laugh.

"You may also — since you seem quite intelligent-have sensed that the atmosphere in this room is not quite like that of some other places where you have been. We are neither security guards nor politicians here. If it is clear, in our opinion, that you are not, at any price, going to cooperate, we are prepared to dispose of you, as humanely as possible, but as finally as possible, too. In other words, a gas chamber, a bullet, whatever is feasible."

"Hold on, mister," Ape Bates exclaimed.

The one of the three men who had not yet spoken spoke now. He barked, "'Ten-shun, Chief!"

Ape Bates came to attention; so did Happy Bronstein.

Pan Satyrus said, slowly, "I have seen your face, sir. In the papers. You are the admiral the Navy hates."

The third man chuckled slightly, and then was still.

"But you are intelligent," Pan said. "And nice looking. Given a little makeup you could pass for some species of giant gibbon. Do you think men ought to have the secret of faster-than-light travel?"

"I think, by and large, they'll have it sooner or later; much sooner, now that we know it is possible. And I think that if anybody is going to have it, our side should. Period."

"Satyrus, you can talk," Mr. Armstrong said. "We cannot let you loose, or even confined to a cage, with this knowledge unless we are sure you are cooperative. At the level of animal keeper, security becomes improbable, if not impossible."

"Has my spaceship been well examined?" Satyrus asked. "Have you had a metallurgist go over it?"

Mr. Armstrong kept his steady eyes on Pan's. The admiral and the pipe cleaner looked up.

"You'll find Mendelev's law confirmed in a new way," Pan went on. "Each of the metals has moved up one notch in his scale. Alchemy, gents, alchemy."

The unpopular admiral frowned. "Better check, Armstrong," he said.

Mr. Armstrong opened a drawer, took a microphone out of it, and held it to the corner of his mouth. He talked, apparently, but not a sound came out into the room. Then he put the microphone away.

"I think I know what this means, but someone fill me in, to be sure," he said.

The man with the mustache said, "Shoot up a load of copper, get back a load of gold."

"I was up there quite a while," Pan said. "I had to do something to occupy myself. Weightlessness and idleness don't go together in the chimpanzee's cosmos. I did not, however, expect to retrogress, or devolute, or devolve. Or I wouldn't have been so damned playful."

"You're not amusing us," Mr, Armstrong said.

"No," the admiral put in. "If this gets out, gold isn't worth anything at all."

Pan Satyrus sat down on the floor and began grooming himself. "I'm hungry."

"Too bad," Armstrong said. He began to grin, slightly.

Dr. Bedoian pushed forward. "If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, forget it. I have been handling chimpanzees — and other primates — quite a while. There comes a point where that sort of thing only makes them more rebellious. To the point of suicide."

The man with the mustache said, "Young man, just which side are you on, anyway?"

"Oh, I'm loyal enough. But Pan Satyrus is my patient. And I don't believe anyone else here is a primate expert."

"And you are?"

"Mr. Armstrong, if I'm not, the government wasted several years of salary on me. Believe me, there comes a time in a chimpanzee's life when he rebels. And Pan Satyrus here is mighty close to it."

"Then you advise — extinction."

The croaking bellow of Chief Bates filled the room. "That's murder."

The admiral said, coldly, "As you were, Chief. The disposal of an animal — government property — is hardly murder."

The old chief stood his ground. 'Pan ain't an animal."

Happy Bronstein took his cue from the chief. "I wasn't brought up to be a sea lawyer, but I'd sure hate to shoot a chimpanzee who talked. You'd be in the brig for years, while the lawyers tried to decide was it murder or not. Pan, here, is a person."

Pan Satyrus pulled himself to his full four feet six. "I am not," he said.

Silence fell across the star chamber.