Limits (33 page)

“I had to know, Jase,” he said. There was no uncertainty in his voice. In fact, there was an imperious quality he had never had in the old days. “The question was: Would they breed true? Was the Pith effect only temporary?”

“Was it?”

“No. It persisted. I had to know if they were regressing or evolving, and they remained the same in subsequent generations, save for natural selection, and there isn’t much of that.”

Jase watched Lori, her stubby fingers untangling mats in her fur. Her huge brown eyes were alive and vital. She was a lovely creature, he decided. “Doc, what are the children?”

“What do you think?”

“You know what I think. An alien species wants our worlds. In a hundred years they’ll land and take them. What they’ll do with the children is an
y
body’s guess. I—” He couldn’t bring himself to look at Eve. “I wish you’d sterilized them, Doc.”

“Maybe you do, Jase. But, you see, I don’t believe in your aliens.”

Jase’s breath froze in his throat.

“They might want our world,” said Doc, “but why would they want our life forms? Everything but Man is spreading like a plague of locusts. If someone wants Ridgeback, why haven’t they done something about it? By the time they land, terrestrial life will have an unstoppable foothold. Look at all the thousands of years we’ve been trying to stamp out just one life form, the influenza viruses.

“No, I’ve got another idea. Do you know what a locust is?”

“I know what they are. I’ve never seen one.”

“As individuals they’re something like a short grasshopper. As ind
i
viduals, they hide or sleep in the daytime and come out at night. In open country you can hear them chirping after dusk, but otherwise nobody notices them. But they’re out there, eating and breeding and breeding and eating, getting more numerous over a period of years, until one day there are too many for the environment to produce enough food.

“Then
comes
the change. On Earth it hasn’t happened in a long time because they aren’t allowed to get that numerous. But it used to be that when there were enough of them, they’d grow bigger and darker and more a
g
gressive. They’d come out in the daytime. They’d eat everything in sight, and when all the food was gone, and when there were enough of them, they’d suddenly take off all at once.

“That’s when you’d get your plague of locusts. They’d drop from the air in a cloud thick enough and broad enough to darken the sky, and when they landed in a farmer’s field he could kiss his crops goodbye. They’d raze it to the soil,
then
take off again, leaving nothing.”

Jase took off his glasses and wiped them. “I don’t see what it is you’re getting at.”

“Why do they do it? Why were locusts built that way?”

“Evolution, I guess. After the big flight they’d be spread over a lot of territory. I’d say they’d have a much bigger potential food supply.”

“Right.
Now consider this. Take a biped that’s man shaped, enough so to use a tool, but without intelligence. Plant him on a world and watch him grow. Say he’s adaptable; say he eventually spread over most of the fertile
land masses of the planet. Now what?

“Now an actual physical change takes place. The brain expands. The body hair drops away. Evolution had adapted him to his climate, but that was when he had hair. Now he’s got to use his intelligence to keep from freezing to death. He’ll discover fire. He’ll move out into areas he couldn’t live in before. Eventually he’ll cover the whole planet, and he’ll build spacecraft and head for the stars.”

Jase shook his head. “
But why would they change back
, Doc?”

“Something in the genes, maybe.
Something that didn’t mutate.”

“Not
how
, Doc.
We know it’s possible.
Why
?”

“We’re going back to being grasshoppers. Maybe we’ve reached our evolutionary peak. Natural selection stops when we start protecting the weak ones, instead of allowing those with defective genes to die a natural death.”

He paused, smiling. “I mean, look at us, Jase. You walk with a cane now. I haven’t been able to read for five years, my eyes have weakened so. And we were the best Earth had to offer; the best minds, the finest bodies. Chris only squeaked by with his glasses because he was such a damn good meteorol
o
gist.”

Jase’s face held a flash of long-forgotten pain. “And I guess they still didn’t choose carefully enough.”

“No,” Doc agreed soberly. “They didn’t. On Earth we protected the sick, allowed them to breed, instead of letting them die…with pacemakers, with insulin, artificial kidneys and plastic hip joints and trusses. The mentally ill and retarded fought in the courts for the right to reproduce. Okay, it’s h
u
mane. Nature isn’t humane. The infirm will do their job by dying, and no morality or humane court rulings or medical advances will change the natural course of things for a long, long time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know how stable they are. It could be millions of years, or…?” Doc shrugged. “We’ve changed the course of our own development. Perhaps a simpler creature is needed to colonize a world.
Something that has no choice but to change or die.
Jase, remember the Cold War?”

“I read about it.”

“And the Belt Embargo?
Remember diseromide, and smog, and the spray-can thing, and the day the fusion seawater distillery at San Francisco went up and took the Bay area with it, and four states had to have their water
flown in for a month?”

“So?”

“A dozen times we could have wiped out all life on Earth. As soon as we’ve used our intelligence to build spacecraft and seed another world, i
n
telligence becomes a liability. Some old anthropologist even had a theory that a species needs abstract intelligence before it can prey on its own kind. The development of fire gave Man time to sit back and dream up ways to take things he hadn’t earned. You know how gentle the children are, and you can remember how the carefully chosen citizens of Ridgeback acted the night we voted on the children’s right to reproduce.”

“So you gave that to them, Doc. They are reproducing. And when we’re gone they’ll spread all over the world. But are they
human
?”

Doc pondered, wondering what to say. For many years he had talked only to the children. The children never interrupted, never disagreed…“I had to know that too. Yes. They’re human.”

Jase looked closely at the man he had called friend so many years ago. Doc was so sure. He didn’t discuss; he lectured. Jase felt an alienness in him that was deeper than the mere passage of time.

“Are you going to stay here now?”

“I don’t know. The children don’t need me anymore, though they’ve treated me like a god. I can’t pass anything on to them. I think our culture has to die before theirs can grow.”

Jase fidgeted, uncomfortable. “Doc. Something I’ve got to tell you. I haven’t told anyone.
It’s
thirty years now, and nobody knows but me.”

Doc frowned. “Go on.”

“Remember the day Roy died? Something in the Orion blew all the motors at once? Well, he talked to Cynnie first. And she talked to me, before
she
disappeared. Doc, he got a laser message from Earth, and he knew he couldn’t ever send it down. It would have destroyed us. So he blew the motors.”

Doc waited, listening intently.

“It seems that every child being born on Earth nowadays bears an u
n
canny resemblance to Pithecanthropus erectus. They were begging us to make the Ridgeback colony work.
Because Earth is doomed.”

“I’m glad nobody knew that.”

Jase nodded. “If intelligence is bad for us, it’s bad for Earth. They’ve
fired their starships. Now they’re ready for another cycle.”

“Most of them’ll die. They’re too crowded.”

“Some will survive. If not there, then, thanks to you, here.” He smiled.
A touch of the old Jase in his eyes.
“They’ll
have
to become men, you know.”

“Why do you put it like that?”

“Because Jill uncrated the wolves, to help thin out the herds.”

“They’ll cull the children, too,” Doc nodded. “I couldn’t help them b
e
come men, but I think that will do it. They will have to band together, and find tools, and fire.” His voice took on a dreamy quality. “Eventually, the wolves will come out of the darkness to join them at their campfires, and Man will have dogs again.” He smiled. “I hope they don’t overbreed them like we did on earth. I doubt if chihuahuas have ever forgotten what we did to them.”

“Doc,” Jase said, urgently, “will you trust me? Will you wait for a minute while I leave? I…I want to try something. If you decide to go there may never be another chance.”

Doc looked at him, mystified. “Alright, I’ll wait.”

Jase limped out of the door. Doc sat, watching his charges, proud of their alertness and flexibility, their potential for growth in the new land.

There was a creaking as the door swung open.

The woman’s hair had been blond, once. Now it was white, heavy wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, years of hardship and disappointment souring what had once been beauty.

She blinked, at first seeing only Doc.

“Hello, Nat,” he said to her.

She frowned. “What…?” Then she saw Eve.

Their eyes locked, and Nat would have drawn back save for Jase’s i
n
sistent hand at her back.

Eve drew close, peering into her mother’s face as if trying to remember her.

The old woman stuttered, then said, “Eve?” The Pith cocked her head and came closer, touching her mother’s hand. Nat pulled it back, eyes wide.

Eve cooed, smiling, holding her baby out to Nat.

At first she flinched,
then
looked at the child, so much like Eve had been, so much…and slowly, without words or visible emotion, she took the child from Eve and cradled it, held it, and began to tremble. Her hand stretched out
helplessly, and Eve came closer, took her mother’s hand and the three of them, mother, child and grandchild, children of different worlds, held each other. Nat cried for the pain that had driven them apart, the love that had brought them together.

Doc stood at the edge of the woods, looking back at the colonists who waved to them, asking for a swift return.

Perhaps so.
Perhaps they could, now. Enough time had passed that u
n
derstanding was a thing to be sought rather than avoided. And he missed the company of his own kind.

No, he corrected himself, the children
were
his kind. As he had told Jase, without explaining, he knew that they were human. He had tested it the only way he could, by the only means available.

Eve walked beside him, her hand seeking his. “Doc,” she
cooed,
her birdlike singsong voice loving. He gently took their child from her arms, kissing it.

At over sixty years of age, it felt odd to be a new father, but if his lover had her way, as she usually did, his strange family might grow larger still.

Together, the five of them headed into the forest, and home.

It happened around the time of World War I. The Director of Research for Standard Oil was told, “There’s all this goo left over when we refine oil. It’s terrible stuff. It ruins the landscape, and covering it with dirt only gets the dirt gooey. Find something to do with it.”

So he created the plastics industry.

He turned useless, offensive goo into wealth. He was not the first in history to do so. Consider oil itself: useless, offensive goo, until it was needed to lubricate machinery, and later to fuel it. Consider some of the horrid substances that go into cosmetics: mud, organic goop of all kinds, and stuff that comes out of a sick whale’s head. Consider sturgeon caviar: American fishermen are still throwing it away! And the Japanese consider cheese to be what it always started out to be: sour milk.

Now: present plans for disposal of expended nuclear fuel involve such strategies as

1)
             
Diluting and burying it.

2)
             
Pouring it into old, abandoned oil wells. The Soviets tell us that it ought to be safe; after all, the
oil
stayed there for millions of years. We may question their sincerity: the depleted oil wells they use for this purpose are all in Poland.

3)
             
The Pournelle method. The No Nukes types tell us that stretches of American desert have already been rendered useless for thousands of years because thermonuclear bombs were tested there. Let us take them at their word. Cart the nuclear wastes out into a patch of cratered desert. Put several miles of fence around it, and signs on the fence: