[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction November 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Perhaps there have been causes for slaughter
just as silly as this was--but try to find one!
The rain pours down chill out of a sullen sky. My pace quickens as I
try to regain the relative warmth and shelter of the cavern before I
become thoroughly drenched. I cannot afford to catch a cold. All alone
as I am and with no medicine, I would stand too great a chance of a
quick death. These lowering Oregon skies still hold traces of nameless
disease in their writhing cloud tendrils. I am not just afraid of
a cold. That would only be the key for some other malady to use and
strike me down forever.
I see the cave up ahead and feel a sense of contentment as I draw near
and then duck inside its stony mouth. The rain hisses without, but
inside it is dry. There is a heavy cow-hide hanging on a peg in the
wall and I take it down and wrap it around me. Soon I will be warm.
Once more I may stave off my ultimate end.
Sometimes I wonder why I wish to put it off. Certainly, according to my
old standards, there is no point in living. But somehow I feel that the
mere fact of living is justification in itself. Even for such a life as
mine.
I didn't always feel this way. But then circumstances change and people
change with them. I changed my circumstances more than myself, but I
had no alternative. So now I exist.
I suppose I should be content. After all, I am alive and, in my own
simple way, I enjoy life. I can remember people who asked nothing more
than to be allowed to live--to exist. Ironically enough, I always
considered them sub-normal. I felt that a man should strive to do
something that would not only perpetuate the happiness of his own
life but that of his fellow-men. Something that would make life more
beautiful, and easier, and more kind.
* * * * *
It was with this feeling that I applied myself as a student of
philosophy at Stanford University. And the strengthening of this same
belief led me to take up teaching and embrace it as the only way of
obtaining genuine happiness. My personal philosophy was simple. I
would learn about life in all its real and symbolic meanings and then
teach it to my pupils, each of whom, I felt sure, were thirsting for
the knowledge that I was extracting from my cultural environment. I
would show them the meaning behind things. That, I felt, was the key to
successful living.
Now it seems strangely pathetic that I should have essayed such an
impossible task. But even a professor of philosophy can be mistaken and
become confused.
I remember when I first became aware of the movement. For years, we had
been drilling certain precepts into the soft, impressionable heads of
those students who came under our influence. Liberalism, some called
it, the right to take the values accumulated by society over a period
of hundreds of years and bend them to fit whatever idea or act was
contemplated. By such methods, it was possible to fit the mores to the
deed, not the deed to the mores. Oh, it was a wonderful theory, one
that promised to project all human activities entirely beyond good and
evil.
However, I digress. It was a spring morning at Berkeley, California,
when I had my first inkling of the movement. I was sitting in my office
gazing out the window and considering life in my usual contemplative
fashion. I might say I was being rather smug. I was thinking how
fortunate I was to have been graduated from Stanford with such high
honors, and how my good luck had stayed with me until I received my
doctor's degree in a famous Eastern university and came out to take an
associate professorship at the Berkeley campus.
I was watching the hurrying figures below on the crosswalks and idly
noting the brilliant green of the shrubbery and the trees and the lawn.
I was mixing up Keats with a bit of philosophy and thoroughly enjoying
myself. Knowledge is truth, truth beauty, I mused, that is all we know
on Earth, and all we need to know.
There was a knock on my door and I said come in, reluctantly abandoning
my train of thought which had just picked up Shakespeare, whom I was
going to consider as two-thirds philosopher and one-third poet. I
have never felt that the field of literature had the sole claim to
Shakespeare's greatness.
* * * * *
Professor Lillick came in, visibly perturbed. Lillick was a somewhat
erratic individual (for a professor, at least) and he was often
perturbed. Once he became excited about the possibilities of the campus
shrubbery being stunted and discolored by the actions of certain dogs
living on campus. He was not a philosophy professor, of course, but a
member of the political science group.
"Carlson," he asked nervously, "have you heard about it yet?"
"I have no idea," I returned good-naturedly. "Heard about what?"
He looked behind him as if he thought he might be followed. Then
he whirled around, his sharp-featured face alight with feeling.
"Carlson--the Wistick dufels the Moraddy!" And he stared at me
intently, his gimlet eyes almost blazing.