"Yes. I--I think it will work."
"So do the biologists," Thurmon told him. "A generation of normal
infants, reared to maturity, would restore mankind to its former
stature, in every sense of the word. And now, knowing the lessons of
the past, we could prepare for the change to come. We could rebuild
the world for them to live in, rebuild it psychically as well as
physically. We'd plan to eliminate the rivalry between the large and
the small, the strong and the weak. It wouldn't be difficult because
there's plenty for all. There'd be no trouble as there was in the old
days. We've learned to be psychologically flexible."
Littlejohn smiled. "Then that _is_ the solution?" he asked.
"Yes. Eliminating the Leffingwell injections will give us a good
proportion of normal children again. _But where do we find the normal
women to bear them?_"
"Normal women?"
Thurmon sighed, then reached over and placed a scroll in the scanner.
"I have already gone into that question with research technicians," he
said. "And I have the figures here." He switched on the scanner and
began to read.
"The average nubile female, aged thirteen to twenty-one, is two feet,
ten inches high and weighs forty-eight pounds." Thurmon flicked the
switch again and peered up. "I don't think I'll bother with pelvic
measurements," he said. "You can already see that giving birth to a
six or seven-pound infant is a physical impossibility under the
circumstances. It cannot be done."
"But surely there must be _some_ larger females! Perhaps a system of
selective breeding, on a gradual basis--"
"You're talking in terms of generations. We haven't got that much
time." Thurmon shook his head. "No, we're stopped right here. We can't
get normal babies without normal women, and the only normal women are
those who began life as normal babies."
"Which comes first?" Littlejohn murmured. "The chicken or the egg?"
"What's that?"
"Nothing. Just an old saying. From history."
Thurmon frowned. "Apparently, then, that's all you can offer in your
professional capacity as an historian. Just some old sayings." He
sighed. "Too bad you don't know some old prayers. Because we need them
now."
He bowed his head, signifying the end of the interview.
Littlejohn rolled out of the room.
His 'copter took him back to his own dwelling, back across the
rooftops of New Chicagee. Ordinarily, Littlejohn avoided looking down.
He dreaded heights, and the immensity of the city itself was somehow
appalling. But now he gazed upon the capital and center of
civilization with a certain morbid affection.
New Chicagee had risen on the ashes of the old, after the war's end.
Use of thermo-nucs had been limited, fortunately, so radioactivity did
not linger, and the vast craters hollowed out by ordinary warheads had
been partially filled by rubble and debris. Artificial fill had done
the rest of the job, so that now New Chicagee was merely a flat
prairie as it must have been hundreds of years ago--a flat prairie on
which the city had been resurrected. There were almost fifty thousand
people here in the capital; the largest congregation of population on
the entire continent. They had built well and surely this time, built
for the security and certainty of centuries to come.
Littlejohn sighed. It was hard to accept the fact that they had been
wrong; that all this would end in nothingness. They had eliminated
war, eliminated disease, eliminated famine, eliminated social
inequality, injustice, disorders external and internal--and in so
doing, they had eliminated themselves.
The sun was setting in the west, and long shadows crept over the city
below. Yes, the sun was setting and the shadows were gathering, the
night was coming to claim its own. Darkness was falling, eternal
darkness.
It was quite dark by the time Littlejohn's 'copter landed on the
rooftop of his own dwelling; so dark, in fact, that for a moment he
didn't see the strange vehicle already standing there. Not until he
had settled into his coasterchair did he notice the presence of the
other 'copter, and then it was too late. Too late to do anything
except sit and stare as the gigantic shadow loomed out of the night,
silhouetted against the sky.
The shadow shambled forward, and Littlejohn gaped, gaped in terror at
the titanic figure. He opened his mouth to speak, but words did not
form; there were no words to form, for how does one address an
apparition?
Instead, it was the apparition which spoke.
"I have been waiting for you," it said.
"Y-yes--"
"I want to talk to you." The voice was deep, menacing.
Littlejohn shifted in his coasterchair. There was nowhere to go, no
escape. He gazed up at the shadow. Finally he summoned a response.
"Shall we go inside?" he asked.
The figure shook its head. "Where? Down into that dollhouse of yours?
It isn't big enough. I've already been there. What I have to say can
be said right here."
"W-who are you?"
The figure stepped forward, so that its face was illuminated by the
fluorescence streaming from the open door which led to the inclined
chairway descending to Littlejohn's dwelling.
Littlejohn could see the face, now--the gigantic, wrinkled face,
scarred and seared and seamed. It was a human face, but utterly alien
to the humanity Littlejohn knew. Faces such as this one had
disappeared from the earth a lifetime ago. At least, history had
taught him that. History had not prepared him for the actual living
presence of a--
"Naturalist!" Littlejohn gasped. "You're a Naturalist! Yes, that's
what you are!"
The apparition scowled.
"I am not a Naturalist. I am a man."
"But you can't be! The war--"
"I am very old. I lived through your war. I have lived through your
peace. Soon I shall die. But before I do, there is something else
which must be done."
"You've come here to kill me?"
"Perhaps." The looming figure moved closer and stared down. "No, don't
try to summon help. When your servants saw me, they fled. You're alone
now, Littlejohn."
"You know my name."
"Yes, I know your name. I know the names of everyone on the council.
Each of them has a visitor tonight."
"Then it is a plot, a conspiracy?"
"We have planned this very carefully, through the long years. It's all
we lived for, those few of us who survived the war."
"But the council wasn't responsible for the war! Most of us weren't
even alive, then. Believe me, we weren't to blame--"
"I know." The gigantic face creased in senile simulation of a smile.
"Nobody was ever to blame for anything, nobody was ever responsible.
That's what they always told me. I mustn't hate mankind for
multiplying, even though population created pressure and pressure
created panic that drove me mad. I mustn't blame Leffingwell for
solving the overpopulation problem, even though he used me as a
guinea-pig in his experiments. I mustn't blame the Yardsticks for
penning me up in prison until revolution broke out, and I mustn't
blame the Naturalists for bombing the place where I took refuge. So
whose fault was it that I've gone through eighty years of assorted
hell? Why did I, Harry Collins, get singled out for a lifetime of
misery and misfortune?" The huge old man bent over Littlejohn's
huddled form. "Maybe it was all a means to an end. A way of bringing
me here, at this moment, to do what must be done."
"Don't harm me--you're not well, you're--"
"Crazy?" The old man shook his head. "No, I'm not crazy. Not now. But
I _have_ been, at times, during my life. Perhaps we all are, when we
attempt to face up to the complications of an average existence, try
to confront the problems which are too big for a single consciousness
to cope with in a single life-span. I've been crazy in the city, and
crazy in the isolation of a cell, and crazy in the welter of war. And
perhaps the worst time of all was when I lost my son.
"Yes, I had a son, Littlejohn. He was one of the first, one of
Leffingwell's original mutations, and I never knew him very well until
the revolution came and we went away together. He was a doctor, my
boy, and a good one. We spent almost five years together and I learned
a lot from him. About medicine, but that wasn't important then. I'm
thinking of what I learned about love. I'd always hated Yardsticks,
but my son was one, and I came to love him. He had plans for
rebuilding the world, he and I and the rest of us. We were going to
wait until the revolution ended and then help restore sanity in
civilization.
"But the Naturalists flew over and dropped their bomb, and my boy
died. Over four hundred of our group died there in the canyon--four
hundred who might have changed the fate of the world. Do you think I
can forget that? Do you think I and the few others who survived have
ever forgotten? Can you blame us if we did go crazy? If we hid away
out there in the western wilderness, hid away from a world that had
offered us nothing but death and destruction, and plotted to bring
death and destruction to that world in return?
"Think about it for a moment, Littlejohn. We were old men, all of us,
and the world had given us only its misery to bear during our
lifetimes. The world we wanted to save was destroying itself; why
should we be concerned with its fate or future?
"So we changed our plans, Littlejohn. Perhaps the shock had been too
much. Instead of plotting to rebuild the world, we turned our thoughts
to completing its destruction. Our tools and texts were gone, buried
in the rubble with the bodies of fine young men. But we had our minds.
Crazed minds, you'd call them--but aware of reality. The grim reality
of the post-revolutionary years.
"We burrowed away in the desert. We schemed and we dreamed. From time
to time we sent out spies. We knew what was going on. We knew the
Naturalists were gone, that six-footers had vanished from a Yardstick
world. We knew about the rehabilitation projects. We watched your
people gradually evolve new patterns of living and learning. Some of
the former knowledge was rescued, but not all. Our little group had
far more learning than you've ever dreamed of. Fifty of us, between
ourselves, could have surpassed all your scientists in every field.
"But we watched, and we waited. And some of us died of privation and
some of us died of old age. Until, at last, there were only a dozen of
us to share the dream. The dream of destruction. And we knew that we
must act swiftly, or not at all.
"So we came into the world, cautiously and carefully, moving
unobtrusively and unobserved. We wanted to contemplate the corruption,
seek out the weaknesses in your degenerate civilization. And we found
them, immediately. Those weaknesses are everywhere apparent, for they
are physical. You're one of a dying race, Littlejohn. Mankind's days
are numbered. There's no need for grandiose schemes of reactivating
warheads in buried missile-centers, of loosing thermo-nucs upon the
world. Merely by killing off the central council here in New Chicagee,
we can accomplish our objective. A dozen men die, and there's not
enough initiative left to replace them. It's as simple as that. And as
complicated."
Harry Collins nodded. "Yes, as complicated. Because the only
weaknesses we've observed _are_ physical ones. We've seen enough of
the ways of this new civilization to realize that.
"All of the things I hated during my lifetime have disappeared
now--the crowding, the competition, the sordid self-interest, the
bigotry, intolerance, prejudice. The anti-social aspects of society
are gone. There is only the human race, living much closer to the
concept of Utopia than I ever dreamed possible. You and the other
survivors have done well, Littlejohn."
"And yet you come to kill us."
"We came for that purpose. Because _we_ still retained the flaws and
failings of our former cultures. We looked for targets to blame, for
villains to hate and destroy. Instead, we found this reality.
"No, I'm not crazy, Littlejohn. And I and my fellows aren't here to
execute revenge. We have returned to the original plan; the plan
Leffingwell had, and my son, and all the others who worked in their
own way for their dream of a better world. We come now to help you.
Help you before you die--before we die."
Littlejohn looked up and sighed. "Why couldn't this have happened
before?" he murmured. "It's too late now."
"But it isn't too late. My friends are here. They are telling your
fellow council-members the same thing right now. We may be old, but we
can still impart what we have learned. There are any number of
technological developments to be made. We can help you to increase
your use of atomic power. There's soil reclamation and irrigation
projects and biological techniques--"
"You said it yourself," Littlejohn whispered. "We're a dying race.
That's the primary problem. And it's an insoluble one. Just this
afternoon--" And he told him about the interview with Thurmon.
"Don't you understand?" Littlejohn concluded. "We have no solution for
survival. We're paying the price now because for a while we wouldn't
heed history. We tried to defeat Nature and in the end Nature has
defeated us. Because we would not render unto Caesar the things which
are--"
Harry Collins smiled. "That's it," he said.
"What?"
"Caesar. That's the answer. Your own medical men must have records. I
know, because I learned medicine from my son. There used to be an
operation, in the old days, called a caesarean section--used on normal
women and on dwarfs and midgets too, in childbirth. If your problem is
how to deliver normal children safely, the technique can be revived.
Get hold of some of your people. Let's see what data you have on this.
I'll be glad to furnish instruction--"
There was excitement after that. Too much excitement for Littlejohn.
By the time the council had assembled in emergency session, by the
time plans were formulated and he returned to his own dwelling in the
helicopter, he was completely exhausted. Only the edge of elation
sustained him; the realization that a solution had been found.
As he sank into slumber he knew that he would sleep the clock around.
And so would Harry Collins. The old man and his companions, now guests
of the council, had been temporarily quartered in the council-chambers.
It was the only structure large enough to house them and even so they
had to sleep on the floor. But it was sufficient comfort for the moment.
It was many hours before Harry Collins awoke. His waking was
automatic, for the tiny telescreen at the end of the council room
glowed suddenly, and the traditional voice chirped forth to interrupt
his slumber.
"Good morning," said the voice. "It's a beautiful day in New
Chicagee!"
Harry stared at the screen and then he smiled.
"Yes," he murmured. "But tomorrow will be better."