If folks had all been like Scharber, there would have been no
obstruction of progress. If they had all been like Bowhart, there would
at least have been no danger. But as always, there were other types.
Among them were those who like to speak out against something.
* * * * *
Among these, now, was an old classmate of mine, whom I have mentioned
before, one Armand Cope. Already he was becoming minorly famous, laying
down the "facts" with a definite oratorical talent. I think that he
was, in the main, honest in his beliefs. But pledged and prejudiced to
one point of view, he was blindly violent toward its opposite number.
Cope was a fanatic. And now, with the smokes of fear curling in many
minds, nothing could have been more dangerous than his activities, and
the activities of the numerous individuals who were like him.
I heard him speak over the radio and television. Always his words
drummed on the same points:
"Friends, the craze for gadgets has become a folly, an insult to man's
dignity. The proof has become brutally plain today. All we ever wanted
was to live an uncomplex life--having houses that we build, and crops
that we raise, with simple materials and simple work of our muscles,
as nature intended. Science? Much of it should have stopped before it
ever started. It was a trap from the first, offering its benefits as
bait, not letting us know that it led to this mechanical abomination,
which seeks to sully our own natural being with a hideous slime of the
laboratory! The prospect makes one's nerves crawl; death is better than
the triumph of such a thing! We must fight and fall, if necessary! Let
the maniacs and fools know the real strength of humanity!"
Plenty of people were eager to listen to Cope, and to cheer him on.
I gulped, and then grinned at Doc rather wanly. Jan and I were in his
house that particular evening.
"It's like we thought it would be, before anyone on Earth even knew
about what we were bringing them," Jan said.
"You're going to talk back, Shane," Irma, Doc's wife, commented, with a
thread of steel in her voice.
"Of course I'm going to talk back," he answered. "But I'm afraid that
that could never do enough good. There'll always be enough point to
what Cope and his kind say, for scared, furious souls to cling to. I
wish mightily that it could be different; but I suspect that what I say
will only help to consolidate another fierce belief, to oppose Cope's
believers. Yes, like two mighty armies being drawn up for battle. That
is the real danger! Well, anyway I've got to try."
And so Dr. Lanvin was on television the following evening, speaking
from the Civic Center of Chicago. Jan and I left to run the lab,
listened from my office. It was a good speech:
"... I've never liked cheap, showy gadgets, performing some small
function that a person might do as well, and as easily, and with less
affectation, with his own head and hands. There, perhaps Mr. Cope and
I agree, as, no doubt we do about a pastoral simplicity when it is
possible--the smells of rain and woods and gardens. But Cope forgets
that, crowded as the Earth is, with its billions of mouths to feed,
such beautiful, rustic inefficiency is no longer possible, and hence
beyond being argued for, reasonably, unless the starship brings us to
other habitable worlds.
"Which presents the subject of inventions--natural products of natural
minds which are too sublime to be called gadgets. The starship, for
one. The android process, for another. Does Mr. Cope suppose that the
benefits the latter represents, would ever encourage mankind as a whole
to suppress it? It couldn't be suppressed, by law or by anyone, as long
as there are people left to dream of vigor going on and on.
"Mr. Cope says further that his nerves crawl. This is nothing more
than the mistrust of the new and unknown, which time will take away.
Yet, worst of all, he speaks of fighting and falling. I hope that he
does not mean it. For today, that can truly be a thing of horror, and
final silence. Therefore, I plead that he, and all those who have been
tempted to think in this manner, review their reasoning, and correct
its defects."
I visited Cope at his home. "Look, Cope," I said, "we used to be
friendly enough to live and let each other live. Don't you see that
what you're doing now can end all that has been built, and finish the
human race--natural and android--entirely? You're bucking a logic and a
need for betterment that's far too big for anyone--the death of death,
you might say. What do you want in its place? The death of everyone?
You've got to stop talking as you do, Cope, pounding on the detonator
of a world!"
His intellectual face went white with rage at what I had said.
"_You_--Harver!" he growled softly. "You dare to talk to me like that!
When you helped to turn this hellish development loose on Earth! Make
every human being a snake, and it would not be half as bad. Yes, I was
half your friend. But now get out of my house--out before I kill you!"
* * * * *
Further signs of danger were soon more definite, after that. Several
days after Scharber's emergence from the process, I was walking with
him in a Chicago street. A tactless acquaintance of his, of opposite
inclinations and a dislike of him, previously entertained, ran into us
in a theatre lobby.
"Hi, Scharber," he greeted. "I heard. You were born a robot, so why
bother to change? And why didn't you at least order yourself a better
face?"
Scharber retained a normal capacity for getting sore, and only a normal
amount of self-control. "A robot is a machine, Powers," he said. "So is
the old time protoplasmic man. So is the android. It's silly to make a
distinction, based on silly pride at being what you seem to think of
as exclusively human. And maybe your face could also benefit by some
changes."
Sure, Powers had been brooding, too, and brewing up poison. The
fact that he swung at my companion, proved it. Scharber ducked like
lightning, and responded with a much-pulled return punch--if he'd
given it half of full force, Powers' jaw would have been a mush of
bone-splinters. Powers went flat; and it was some seconds before he
started to scream and curse:
"Tin monsters!" he spat venomously and inaccurately. "Get them--both of
them! Trying to crowd us off the Earth!"
Somebody with sense shouted, "Keep your heads!" But that, to some
others, only represented the challenge of opposition. A half-dozen men
came at us at once. I upset two of them all right; but being still just
ordinary, I wouldn't have had much chance, if it wasn't for Scharber.
Presently, with a pack gathering around us, we had to fight our way
out of there, Scharber sprinting away at last, with me riding him
pickaback. No protoplasmic man could have run a third as fast as he did
then. I suspect that that display of speed scared and infuriated our
attackers, further.
Other androids came up against this same kind of experience, and their
constant victories in such scuffles, sharpened their terrifying aspect
in many minds, and the conviction that there had to be a battle to the
death.
Nor was it only humans of the older order who gave way to outbursts
of fury. Soon it was give and take. Androids retained all of the old
capacities for various emotions. It seemed that each violent incident
would be followed by something worse.
I saw one android blown to bits, his flesh still squirming hours after
he had ceased to exist as a composite entity. One severed arm had
drawn itself along the ground with clutching fingers, almost like a
great slug crawling, for two hundred yards.
There was something demoniac about that, which, for the moment, almost
made me agree with Armand Cope.
The fury of the conflict came to a head one night when our laboratory
went up in a cloud of nuclear fire. Five hundred persons were wiped out
in the blast. It was lucky, indeed, that the lab was outside of Chicago
proper, or the casualty list would have been much longer. Of our inner
circle of friends, only Scharber was in the blast, and he escaped
flying fragments and incandescent heat by dropping behind some heavy
masonry. Radiations couldn't hurt him at all, though for a time he must
keep away from the rest of us. The others of our group were safe in
town.
There was the cold rage in Scharber's face when I first spoke to him
from a little distance at the edge of the ruins.
"Damn them all, Charlie!" he growled. "Stupid, thick-headed, backward
fools!"
"Easy, Scharb," I said. "The government, and the considerable majority
of saner people, are trying to restore order."
It was true. Police forces were everywhere. Our president pleaded for
calm. A cache of nuclear munitions was discovered and put under guard.
It might even have belonged to androids. Nobody knew. It was in an
old Chicago cellar. But of one thing we were sure--that there had to
be many other caches of hellstuff, undiscovered and available to the
hotheads and jerks, hidden in caves and woods and various other places,
throughout the world.
One thing wasn't done. Armand Cope, and other rabble-rousers like him,
were not put under restraint. It could have been accomplished within
the emergency provisions of democracy, though a willful connection
between the speeches that they had made and the blowup of the lab,
could not be proven. Maybe the government was afraid to restrain
them--afraid that their arrest would make them martyrs--and that this
martyrdom would trigger the bombshell in the taut nerves and frightened
minds of their followers. This belief may well have been the truth.