Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (10 page)

“Herb here,” the judge explained, “is the young fellow whose wife swatted the thing—the first one we had. Now we got a round dozen of them.”

Channing took a flat wooden box out of his pocket—about six inches square. He opened it and exhibited a series of slides, upon each of which one of the tiny folk was neatly pressed. Cooke glanced at it, felt his stomach rise, and fought to control himself.

“In addition to which,” the judge continued, “Herb has a damn good head on his shoulders. He'll be our candidate for the House one of these days and a damn important man in the country I thought he should be here.”

“You must understand,” said the FBI man, “that we've already had our discussions on the highest level. The Governor and a number of people from the state. Thank God it's still a local matter, and that's what we're getting at here.”

“The point is,” said Channing, “that this whole phenomenon is no more than a few years old. We have more or less mapped the beginning place of origin as somewhere in the woods near the Saugatuck Reservoir. Since then they've spread out six or seven miles in every direction. That may not seem like a lot, but if you accept their stride as a quarter inch compared to man's stride of three feet, you must multiply by one hundred and forty-four times. In our terms, they have already occupied a land area roughly circular and more than fifteen hundred miles in diameter. That's a dynamic force of terrifying implications.”

“What the devil are they?” Bradley asked.

“A mutation—an evolutionary deviation, a freak of nature—who knows?”

“Are they men?” the judge asked.

“No, no, no, of course they're not men. Structurally, they appear to be very similar to men, but we've dissected them, and internally there are very important points of difference. Entirely different relationships of heart, liver, and lungs. They also have a sort of antenna structure over their ears, not unlike what insects have.”

“Yet they're intelligent, aren't they?” Herbert Cooke asked. “The bows and arrows—”

“Precisely, and for that reason very dangerous.”

“And doesn't the intelligence make them human?” the judge asked.

“Does it? The size and structure of a dolphin's brain indicate that it is as intelligent as we are, but does it make it human?”

Channing looked from face to face. He had a short beard and heavy spectacles, and a didactic manner of certainty that Herbert Cooke found reassuring.

“Why are they dangerous?” Cooke asked, suspecting that Channing was inviting the question.

“Because they came into being a year or two ago, no more, and they already have the bow and arrow. Our best educated guess is that they exist under a different subjective time sense than we do. We believe the same to hold true of insects. A day can be a lifetime for an insect, even a few hours, but to the insect it's his whole span of existence and possibly subjectively as long as our own lives. If that's the case with these creatures, there could be a hundred generations in the past few years. In that time, from their beginning to the bow and arrow. Another six months—guns. How long before something like the atomic bomb does away with the handicap of size? And take the question of population—you remember the checkerboard story. Put a grain of sand on the first box, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, eight grains on the fourth—when you come to the final box, there's not enough sand on all the beaches to satisfy it.”

The discussion went on, and Herbert Cooke squirmed uneasily. His eyes constantly strayed to the slides on the table.

“Once it gets out …” the judge was saying.

“It can't get out,” the FBI man said flatly. “They already decided that. When you think of what the kids and the hippies could do with this one—no, it's a question of time. When? That's up to you people.”

“As soon as possible,” Channing put in.

“What are you going to do?” Herbert asked.

“DDT's been outlawed, but this will be an exception. We've already experimented with a concentration of DDT—”

“Experimented?”

“We trapped about eighteen of them alive. The DDT is incredibly effective. With even a moderate concentration, they die within fifteen minutes.”

“We'll have forty helicopters,” the FBI man explained. “Spray from the air and do the whole thing between three and four
A.M.
People will be asleep, and most of them will never know it happened. Saturation spraying.”

“It's rough on the bees and some of the animals, but we have no choice.”

“Just consider the damn kids,” Chief Bradley pointed out to Herbert. “Do you know they're having peace demonstrations in a place like New Milford? It's one thing to have the hippies out every half hour in New York and Washington and Los Angeles—but now we got it in our own backyard. Do you know what we'd have if the kids got wind that we're spraying these bugs?”

“How do they die?” Herbert asked. “I mean, when you spray them, how do they die?”

“The point is, Herb,” Judge Billings put in, “that we need your image. There have been times when it's been a damn provoking image—I mean your wife riding around with that
Mother for Peace
sticker on her bumper and holding the vigils and all that kind of thing, not to mention that petition she's been circulating on this ecology business—it's just dynamite, this ecology thing—so I'll be frank to tell you it has been a mighty provoking image. But I suppose there's two sides to every coin, and I'm the first one to say that you can't wipe out a whole generation of kids; damn it, you can't even lock them up. You got to deal with them, and that's one of your virtues, Herb. You can deal with them, you have the image, and it's an honest image and it's worth its weight in gold to us. There'll be trouble, but we want to keep it at a low level. Those crazy Unitarians are already stirring up things, and I'm a Congregationalist myself, but I could name you two or three Congregationalist ministers who would stir up a hornet's nest if they were sitting here. There are others too, and I think you can deal with them.”

“I was just wondering how they die when you spray them,” Herbert said.

“That's just it,” Channing said eagerly. “There may not be much explaining to do. The DDT appears to paralyze them almost instantly, even when it's not direct, even when it's only a drift. They stop movement and then they turn brown and wither. What's left is shapeless and shriveled and absolutely beyond any identification. Have a look at this slide.”

He took one of the slides and held a magnifying glass over it. The men crowded close to see, and Herbert found himself joining them.

“It looks like last season's dead cockroach,” said Bradley.

“We want you to set the time,” Dobson, the FBI man, told them. “It's your turf and your show.”

“What about the dangers of DDT?”

“Overrated—vastly overrated. We sure as hell don't recommend a return to it. The Department of Agriculture has put its foot down on that, but the plain fact of the matter is that we've been using DDT for years. One more spray is not going to make a particle of difference. By the time the sun rises, it's done with.”

“The sooner the better,” Chief Bradley said.

That night Herbert Cook was awakened by the droning beat of the helicopters. He got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at his watch. It was just past three o'clock in the morning. When he returned to bed, Abigail was awake, and she asked him:

“What's that?”

“It sounds like a helicopter.”

“It sounds like a hundred helicopters.”

“Only because it's so still.”

A few minutes later she whispered, “My God, why doesn't it stop?”

Herbert closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

“Why doesn't it stop? Herb, why doesn't it stop?”

“It will. Why don't you try to sleep? It's some army exercise. It's nothing to worry about.”

“They sound like they're on top of us.”

“Try to sleep, Abby.”

Time passed, and presently the sound of the helicopters receded into the distance, faded, and then ceased. The silence was complete—enormous silence. Herbert Cooke lay in bed an listened to the silence.

“Herb?”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I can't sleep. I'm afraid.”

“There's nothing to be afraid of.”

“I was trying to remember how big the universe is.”

“To what end, Abby?”

“Do you remember that book I read by Sir James Jean, the astronomer? I think he said the universe is two hundred million light-years from end to end—”

Herbert listened to the silence.

“How big are we, Herb?” she asked plaintively. “How big are we?”

7
Show Cause

U
nderstandably, it was couched in modern terms; in the United States, on the three great networks in radio and in television, in England on BBC, and in each country according to its most effective wavelength. The millions and millions of people who went burrowing into their Bibles found a reasonable facsimile in Exodus 32,9 and 10: “And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people and behold, it is a stiff-necked people: now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them.”

The radio and television pronouncement said simply, “You must show cause why the people of Earth shall not be destroyed.” And the signature was equally simple and direct: “I am the Lord your God.”

The announcement was made once a day, at eleven
A.M.
in New York City, ten o'clock in Chicago, seven in Honolulu, two in the morning in Tokyo, midnight in Bangkok, and so forth around the globe. The voice was deep, resonant, and in the language of whatever people listened to it, and the signal was of such intensity that it preempted whatever program happened to be on the air at the moment.

The first reaction was inevitable and predictable. The Russians lashed out at the United States, holding that since the United States, by their lights, had committed every sin in the book in the name of God, they would hardly stop short at fouling up radio and television transmission. The United States blamed the Chinese, and the Chinese blamed the Vatican. The Arabs blamed the Jews, and the French blamed Billy Graham, and the English blamed the Russians, and the Vatican held its peace and began a series of discreet inquiries.

The first two weeks of the daily pronouncement were almost entirely devoted to accusation: Every group, body, organization, sect, nation that had access to power was accused, while the radio engineers labored to find the source of the signal. The accusations gradually perished in the worldwide newspaper, television, and radio debate on the subject, and the source of the signal was not found. The public discussions during those first two weeks are a matter of public record; the private ones are not, which makes the following excerpts of some historical interest:

THE KREMLIN

REZNOV:
“I am not a radio engineer. Comrade Grinowski is a radio engineer. If I were Comrade Grinowski, I would go back to school for ten years. It is preferable to ten years in Siberia.”

GRINOWSKI:
“Comrade Reznov speaks, I am sure, as an expert radio engineer.”

BOLOV:
“Insolence, Comrade Grinowski, is no substitute for competence. Comrade Reznov is a Marxist, which allows him to penetrate to the heart of the matter.”

GRINOWSKI:
“You are also a Marxist, Comrade Bolov, and you are also Commissar of Communications. Why haven't you penetrated to the heart of the matter?”

REZNOV:
“Enough of this bickering. You have every resource of Soviet science at your disposal, Comrade Grinowski. This is not merely a matter of jamming our signals; it is an attack upon our basic philosophy.”

GRINOWSKI:
“We have used every resource of Soviet science.”

REZNOV:
“And what have you come up with?”

GRINOWSKI:
“Nothing. We don't know where the signals originate.”

REZNOV:
“Then what do you suggest, Comrade Bolov—in the light of Comrade Grinowski's statement?”

BOLOV:
“You can shoot Comrade Grinowski or you can invite in the Metropolitan or both. The Metropolitan is waiting outside.”

REZNOV:
“Who asked the Metropolitan here?”

GRINOWSKI:
(with a smile)
“I did.”

THE WHITE HOUSE

THE PRESIDENT:
“Where's Billy? I told him we start at two o'clock.

Where is he?”

THE SECRETARY OF STATE:
“I called him myself. We might hear from Professor Foster of MIT meanwhile.”

THE PRESIDENT:
“I want Billy to hear what Professor Foster has to say.”

PROFESSOR FOSTER:
“I have a very short statement. I have several copies. I can give a copy to Billy or I can read it again.”

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL:
“I say CBS is at the bottom of the whole matter. CIA agrees with me.”

THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSIONER
: “CBS is not at the bottom of it. I think we ought to hear from Professor Foster. He has been working with our people.”

THE PRESIDENT:
“Why in hell isn't Billy here?”

THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE:
“We might as well hear it from Professor Foster. If his statement is short, he can read it again for Billy.”

THE PRESIDENT:
“All right. But he reads it again for Billy.”
(The door opens. Enter Billy.)

BILLY:
“Greetings, everyone. God bless you all.”

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL:
“Are you sure you speak for Him?”

THE PRESIDENT:
“Professor Foster has a statement. He has been meeting for the past week with my ad hoc committee of scientists. Would you read your statement, Professor?”