[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction May 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Poor Butcher suffered more than any dictator
in history: everybody gave in to him because
he was so puny and they were so impregnable!
From the other end of the Avenue of Wisdom that led across the Peace
Park, a gray, hairless, heavily built dog was barking soundlessly at
the towering crystal glory of the Time Theater. For a moment, the
effect was almost frightening: a silent picture of the beginning of
civilization challenging the end of it. Then a small boy caught up
with the dog and it rolled over enthusiastically at his feet and the
scene was normal again.
The small boy, however, seemed definitely pre-civilization. He studied
the dog coldly and then inserted a thin metal tube under its eyelid and
poked. The dog wagged its stumpy tail. The boy frowned, tightened his
grip on the tube and jabbed hard. The dog's tail thumped the cushiony
pavement and the four paws beat the air. The boy shortened his grip
and suddenly jabbed the dog several times in the stomach. The stiff
tube rebounded from the gray, hairless hide. The dog's face split in an
upside-down grin, revealing formidable ivory fangs across which a long
black tongue lolled.
The boy regarded the tongue speculatively and pocketed the metal tube
with a grimace of utter disgust. He did not look up when someone
called: "Hi, Butch! Sic 'em, Darter, sic 'em!"
A larger small boy and a somewhat older one were approaching across the
luxurious, neatly cropped grass, preceded by a hurtling shape that,
except for a black hide, was a replica of Butch's gray dog.
Butch shrugged his shoulders resignedly and said in a bored voice:
"Kill 'em, Brute."
* * * * *
The gray dog hurled itself on Darter. Jaws gaped to get a hold on necks
so short and thick as to be mere courtesy terms. They whirled like a
fanged merry-go-round. Three more dogs, one white, one slate blue and
one pink, hurried up and tried to climb aboard.
Butch yawned.
"What's the matter?" inquired Darter's master. "I thought you liked dog
fights, Butch."
"I do like dog fights," Butch said somberly, without looking around. "I
don't like uninj fights. They're just a pretend, like everything else.
Nobody gets hurt. And look here, Joggy--and you, too, Hal--when you
talk to me, don't just say Butch. It's the Butcher, see?"
"That's not exactly a functional name," Hal observed with the
judiciousness of budding maturity, while Joggy said agreeably: "All
right, Butcher, I suppose you'd like to have lived way back when people
were hurting each other all the time so the blood came out?"
"I certainly would," the Butcher replied. As Joggy and Hal turned back
skeptically to watch the fight, he took out the metal tube, screwed
up his face in a dreadful frown and jabbed himself in the hand. He
squeaked with pain and whisked the tube out of sight.
"A kid can't do anything any more," he announced dramatically. "Can't
break anything except the breakables they give him to break on purpose.
Can't get dirty except in the dirt-pen--and they graduate him from that
when he's two. Can't even be bitten by an uninj--it's contraprogrammed."
"Where'd you ever get so fixated on dirt?" Hal asked in a gentle voice
acquired from a robot adolescer.
"I've been reading a book about a kid called Huckleberry Finn," the
Butcher replied airily. "A swell book. That guy got dirtier than
anything." His eyes became dreamy. "He even ate out of a garbage pail."
"What's a garbage pail?"
"I don't know, but it sounds great."
The battling uninjes careened into them. Brute had Darter by the ear
and was whirling him around hilariously.
"Aw, _quit_ it, Brute," the Butcher said in annoyance.
Brute obediently loosed his hold and returned to his master, paying no
attention to his adversary's efforts to renew the fight.
The Butcher looked Brute squarely in the eyes. "You're making too much
of a rumpus," he said. "I want to think."
* * * * *
He kicked Brute in the face. The dog squirmed joyously at his feet.
"Look," Joggy said, "you wouldn't hurt an uninj, for instance, would
you?"
"How can you hurt something that's uninjurable?" the Butcher demanded
scathingly. "An uninj isn't really a dog. It's just a lot of circuits
and a micropack bedded in hyperplastic." He looked at Brute with
guarded wistfulness.
"I don't know about that," Hal put in. "I've heard an uninj is
programmed with so many genuine canine reactions that it practically
has racial memory."
"I mean if you _could_ hurt an uninj," Joggy amended.
"Well, maybe I wouldn't," the Butcher admitted grudgingly. "But shut
up--I want to think."
"About what?" Hal asked with saintly reasonableness.
The Butcher achieved a fearful frown. "When I'm World Director," he
said slowly, "I'm going to have warfare again."
"You think so now," Hal told him. "We all do at your age."
"We do not," the Butcher retorted. "I bet _you_ didn't."
"Oh, yes, I was foolish, too," the older boy confessed readily. "All
newborn organisms are self-centered and inconsiderate and ruthless.
They have to be. That's why we have uninjes to work out on, and death
games and fear houses, so that our emotions are cleared for adult
conditioning. And it's just the same with newborn civilizations. Why,
long after atom power and the space drive were discovered, people
kept having wars and revolutions. It took ages to condition them
differently. Of course, you can't appreciate it this year, but Man's
greatest achievement was when he learned to automatically reject all
violent solutions to problems. You'll realize that when you're older."
"I will not!" the Butcher countered hotly. "I'm not going to be a
sissy." Hal and Joggy blinked at the unfamiliar word. "And what if we
were attacked by bloodthirsty monsters from outside the Solar System?"
"The Space Fleet would take care of them," Hal replied calmly. "That's
what it's for. Adults aren't conditioned to reject violent solutions to
problems where non-human enemies are concerned. Look at what we did to
viruses."
"But what if somebody got at us through the Time Bubble?"
"They can't. It's impossible."
"Yes, but suppose they did all the same."
"You've never been inside the Time Theater--you're not old enough
yet--so you just can't know anything about it or about the reasons
why it's impossible," Hal replied with friendly factuality. "The Time
Bubble is just a viewer. You can only look through it, and just into
the past, at that. But you can't travel through it because you can't
change the past. Time traveling is a lot of kid stuff."
"I don't care," the Butcher asserted obstinately. "I'm still going to
have warfare when I'm World Director."
"They'll condition you out of the idea," Hal assured him.
"They will not. I won't let 'em."
"It doesn't matter what you think now," Hal said with finality. "You'll
have an altogether different opinion when you're six."
"Well, what if I will?" the Butcher snapped back. "You don't have to
keep _telling_ me about it, do you?"
* * * * *
The others were silent. Joggy began to bounce up and down abstractedly
on the resilient pavement. Hal called in his three uninjes and said
in soothing tones: "Joggy and I are going to swim over to the Time
Theater. Want to walk us there, Butch?"
Butch scowled.
"How about it, Butch?"
Still Butch did not seem to hear.