Infinite Dreams
I realized that I don’t know Pamela well enough to decide whether she brought the other man, Hill Beaumont, in order to provoke jealousy in me (consciously or otherwise). I understand jealousy, of course, from my reading, but I have never felt it and believe myself immune. Besides, Beaumont is a rather stupid fellow.
3 May.
Beaumont dropped in alone today, saying that he had read the essay and complimenting me at some length on it. He is still a dull oaf, but I can’t help now feeling more kindly disposed toward him. He wanted to take me out and chatter over a bottle of wine, but I pleaded lack of time. Which was true; Greek test tomorrow evening and I have neglected it lately. Much reading to do.
I asked about Pamela and Beaumont said he hadn’t seen her since they left me yesterday.
4 May.
Greek. Stayed in my room all day, studying, but accepted an invitation to eat with Chatham and Beaumont after the test. Quite a lot happened, and even though it’s after two I think I’ll stay up and record it while it’s still fresh in my memory.
We met at Luigi’s for a light supper and wine. Chatham, of course, is always interesting, but the evening was almost spoiled for me when Beaumont revealed with a conversational flourish that he, also, was mutandis. In fact, he is an elected officer in a local club, the membership of which is restricted to “us.” There was a meeting of the club that night, and Beaumont invited me to come and speak to them, mainly on the subject of the essay about animals. He had his copy of the essay with him. Chatham said he had a previous engagement but urged me to go along, saying the meetings were always amusing. I didn’t see any way I could gracefully decline; figured it might even be fun as long as they weren’t all like Beaumont. We left Chatham to finish off the wine—an office for which he has singular talent—and slid a couple of blocks to the meeting place.
Some of Beaumont’s friends have the oddest ideas about what it means to be mutandis. The gathering was one of the strangest things I’ve experienced on Earth.
First a man got up and demonstrated a construct which was a poem, in Latin, written in the form of an eight-by-eight matrix. He showed how you could perform semantic analogues of the normal reduction transformations to get various intermediate poems—none of which made much sense—and arrive finally at a matrix which was null throughout except for sum-sum-sum-sum all down the main diagonal. A puerile exercise, bad poetry and naive mathematics, but everybody seemed dutifully impressed.
Then a woman showed a “sculpture” she had made by synthesizing a large cube of piezoelectric crystal and fracturing it, in what she felt to be an artistic way, by applying various charges to different parts of the surface. That she could have arrived at a similar end by merely dropping the thing on a hard floor did not diminish audience appreciation.
So it went for an hour and a half. My presentation was the last one, and I’m sure nine-tenths of the applause I got was due to that fact, rather than for any intrinsic merit of the composition.
The disturbing part of the evening, though, was a roundtable discussion about sapiens and what eventually would have to be done about them. Some of the reasoning was so fuzzy that it wouldn’t have done justice to a child in first-form Creche.
One thing I learned, one very surprising thing, was that mutandi make up only about 1% of the Earth’s population. Why did they hide this fact from us in Creche? At any rate, the irrational nature of some of their proposals tonight might possibly be excused as simple “minority paranoia.”
One idea which met with a good deal of approval struck me as both sneaky and foolish. There is agitation from various groups concerned with population control to make the practice of host-mothership universal, and require that all people be sterilized soon after puberty, once having filed a sample of sperm or ovum with the government. Thus the size of every family could be absolutely regulated by the government.
It was pointed out that this would inevitably lead to universal manipulation of all of humanity’s genetic material—reasoning that mutandis being manifestly superior to the rest of humanity, it is only a question of time before they hold all important governmental positions. Thus assured of freedom from bureaucratic interference, they would of course institute a program of universal genetic manipulation. For the benefit of all humanity.
Somebody brought up Pamela’s argument, that it will take many generations before we are sure that genetic manipulation is totally safe. Most felt that it would be sufficiently proven by the time “we” have taken over.
I told them that the weakness in the idea had nothing to do with manipulation; that the universal storage of genetic material was in itself a questionable idea. For the convenience of the government, all of it would probably be stored near government centers which, like any large concentration of people, get power from one source: microwaves beamed down from the orbital solar stations. The fact that they have functioned continuously for over a century doesn’t mean they are immune to breakdown; in fact, it’s quite likely that if they go, it will be because of some powerful solar event, which would affect all of them simultaneously. No power, no refrigeration. The genetic material, at least most of it, would thaw out and die, and humanity would have to depend on the current crop of children to reach sexual maturity and replenish the race. That crop might be small indeed if there were stringent controls on family size. There might not be enough breeders to bring the next generation up to a size sufficient to carry on civilization as we live it now.
And it wouldn’t even require a solar catastrophe. It’s possible that some people wouldn’t like the idea of us changing all of humankind into mutandis, and would sabotage the sperm and ovum banks without thinking or caring about the consequences.
They listened politely to my counter-arguments, but I don’t think many of them were convinced. They take electrical power too much for granted, here on Earth. They have had local failures all their lives, which meant little more than having to walk down still slidewalks for a few hours. There has of course been only one power failure on Luna.
5 May.
Knowing that Pamela has a course in Sociometrics, I contrived to spend a few hours down at the social sciences computing facility, supposedly checking out an algorithm that simulated a Turing machine. Actually, I knew that it worked, having run it successfully over at the mathematics facility, but I kept putting glitches in it in order to remain at the console.
She did show up, after four hours. Luckily, she was only there to pick up a printout. It was dinner time, so I escorted her down to the Union. We each got a plate of small sandwiches and talked.
I told her about the experience with Beaumont’s crowd. She was amused, which for some reason made me angry at first—just because she was sapiens, I guess—but she jostled me about it so much that I wound up laughing too. She admitted that this had been her purpose when she first introduced Beaumont to me: to demonstrate that not all mutandi were a priori superior examples of humanity.
In the dining hall I said hello to one of the girls who had been at last night’s meeting, the one with the piezoelectric sculpture. She stared right through me and didn’t miss a bite.
6 May.
What a long and disturbing day. This morning, I found this note in my box:
IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO OUR ATTENTION THAT YOU ARE SEEKING A SEXUAL LIAISON WITH ONE PAMELA ANDERSON, A HOMO SAPIENS FRANKLY, WE ARE DISGUSTED FROM OUR POINT OF VIEW THIS IS AN ACT OF SODOMY; BESTIALITY HOMO SAPIENS IS OUR ONLY NATURAL ENEMY, THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO THE CONTINUING PROGRESS OF HUMANITY THEY ARE A DIFFERENT CREATURE AND TO US A DANGEROUS ONE WE DO NOT FRATERNIZE WITH THEM IF YOU CONTINUE THIS OBSCENE RELATIONSHIP WITH PAMELA ANDERSON, BOTH OF YOU WILL BE IN PROFOUND TROUBLE WE WILL BE IN TOUCH STECOM
I sought out Beaumont and, yes, he had heard of “STECOM,” the Steering Committee for Humanity, but never to his knowledge had they ever caused anyone “profound trouble.” They served mainly to protect the interests of Mutandi in legislation, commerce and so on. He said that the organizati
on’s public stance is much milder than that represented by my note, but that he knew many of the members to hold similar views privately.
He gave me the number of the local STECOM chairman, and I contacted him. He denied any connection with the note; said that whoever signed it did so without authority; asked that I keep him apprised of further developments; told me not to worry. It was just the work of an extremist. Somehow that gave me very little comfort.
I left word with Pamela’s roommate, asking that Pamela call as soon as she returned from classes. She called and we arranged to meet for dinner.
We sat at a back table in Luigi’s and she read the note; first amused, then alarmed. She didn’t think they would dare do anything to her, but they might try to harrass me.
She said she thought it would be best if we didn’t see each other for a while. I protested that that would be a cowardly action, in response to what was already the act of a coward, hiding behind anonymity. We argued. In the course of the argument she said I was wasting my efforts anyhow, as our relationship could never be anything besides casual and platonic. We finished our meals in silence and she asked me not to walk her home.
On my way back to the dormitory, right after getting off the South Quadrant Westbound slidewalk, I had to walk by a dense stand of shrubbery which threw a deep shadow over the walk. I probably wouldn’t have seen my assailants even had I not been lost in brooding thought.
One slipped behind me and threw a fabric bag over my head and shoulders, and then pinioned my arms behind me. The other hit me once in the solar plexus and twice on the face, then reached under the bag and tore off my respirator. They fled and I half-walked, half-crawled to the nearest dormitory. The medic there gave me some oxygen and pasted up my one serious-looking wound, a nasty cut over my left eye. He gave me a voucher for the materials he had used, so I could return them from my dormitory’s supply, loaned me a respirator and sent me on my way. A classmate walked over with me to help forestall a recurrence.
As I write this, my throat still hurts from breathing the sulfurous air. Good thing the attack didn’t happen downtown, nearer the Industrial Park.
I’ll take an extra Pain-go and retire.
7 May.
I went to the campus police and they told me that since there were no witnesses, and I couldn’t identify my assailants, an investigation would be a waste of time. I recognized the chief as having been at the meeting the other night, and didn’t press him.
Another note in my box. This one simply said RETURN TO LUNA STECOM . I called up the Steering Committee chairman again and informed him of this new note and of last night’s assault. He got very flustered but offered no worthwhile advice.
Somebody had forced his way into my room and poured soya all over my books and papers. When they were completely dry, I took them down to the laundry and used the ultrasonic dry-cleaner on them. It worked after a fashion. I hope he read this diary before dousing it, and saw that Pamela is not enthusiastic about my “seeking a sexual liaison” with her. Now maybe all of this will stop.
Work goes on, of course. Tree theory and yet more non-Virgil.
I toyed with the idea of trying to trace the person or persons behind all this through the notes. They are, of course, simple computer printouts, so the person would first have had to encode a crystal. The crystal would have to be re-filed and, if it hadn’t yet been erased for another use, it would be a simple matter to find out who had last checked it out.
Simple in theory, at least. There must be five or six computing facilities on campus, each with several thousand crystals.
And for that matter, it wouldn’t be difficult to have the message printed out and then code something new over that domain of the crystal, as if it had been a glitch.
I tried to think of how I might set a trap, without using Pamela as bait. My mind just isn’t devious enough-or perhaps it doesn’t have enough information. Since Chatham has more deviousness and information at his disposal, I tried to contact him. He was out, though; had been gone since yesterday. I settled for Beaumont.
Over a bottle of wine in the lounge of his dormitory, we roughed out a plan. He knew most of the mutandi on campus, and knew which ones were the most extreme in their views. He would meet some of them socially and bring the conversation around to Pamela and me; if the person showed any interest, Beaumont would pretend to sympathize with the idea that mutandi should mate with their own kind—as if the characteristics could be inherited!—and since I was the one person on campus most obviously a mutandis, I was setting a terribly bad example. Then see whether the other would suggest some sort of action.
He said he would start right away and contact me as soon as he had some results.
8 May.
Solved.
Beaumont called this morning with the good news that he had found the person responsible. No one I knew, he said; the person was an agitator who had been out of school for years and rarely showed up at club meetings. The three of us were going to meet at 8:00 tonight, by the sheds on the athletic field.
I told him that I didn’t like it. At least two people had attacked me before, and there might be even more. I was still too weak to be of any help if it came to violence, and the athletic field was dangerously isolated. I wanted to just call the police and have him apprehended, but Beaumont raised the good point that, without evidence, it would just be Beaumont’s word against the other’s … and the campus police were not noted for respecting the testimony of students.
He said he could get his hands on a stunner, to even out the odds, and would bring a recorder to catch the person in damaging statements, even if he couldn’t be goaded into action. Personally, I hoped he couldn’t.
Beaumont had a regular script worked out, things for me to say to the man which were at once perfectly innocuous and calculated to make him lose his temper. Beaumont, of course, would be pretending to be on his side, which would tend to make him reckless. I agreed, with the private reservation that I would tone down some of my side of the dialogue.
I went to my morning classes as usual but found I couldn’t concentrate for worrying. Anything could happen. This time of year, the athletic field was only airco’ed over weekends, and I wasn’t sure I could make it back to a building in time, if they overpowered us as they did me last time, taking our respirators. There was no guarantee that the man would show up alone, or with just one accomplice. The more I thought about it, the more nervous I became. Finally, around noon, I went to the police.
The chief was monumentally unimpressed. He said the whole thing sounded like a prank, an initiation into the club. He knew Beaumont and expressed the opinion that he had been manipulated, the initiators playing on his exaggerated sense of drama.
I insisted that they had tried to harm me seriously night before last, but the chief pointed out that I was never in real danger, and the blows seemed calculated to do only superficial harm. They could have more easily incapacitated me and left me to suffocate.
Besides, he doubted that he could spare a man at 8:00, at which time most of them were patrolling the taverns and dopeshops off-campus, preventing trouble. He kept looking at the clock—I shouldn’t have come at lunchtime—and finally said he’d see whether he could find a man to meet me there.
Some time later, the chilling thought occurred to me that the chief could possibly be in on it too, and if I was the focus of some ruthless anti-sapiens plot, my action had only put Beaumont and me in even greater danger.
I tried to reach Beaumont all day, after that thought, to tell him the whole thing was off, but he was never home. After a good deal of internal debate, about 7:00 I got up and headed for the field. After all, I had chastized Pamela for suggesting cowardly action. I stopped in a general-merchandise store on the way, and bought the biggest clasp-knife they had. I hadn’t fought anybody since I was a little boy, and didn’t know whether, should the time come to use it, I would have nerve or wit enough to even take it out of my pocket. But its weight was some
small comfort.
When it happened, everything happened very fast. I went out onto the field and saw Beaumont standing by the sheds, chatting with another man. I approached them and waited for Beaumont to start the charade. They stopped talking as I came closer and suddenly Beaumont began to laugh hysterically. The other, muscular older man only slightly shorter than me—probably the tallest Earthie I’d seen—smiled and drew a short wooden club out of his tunic.
I had the knife out and was trying to get my thumbnail into the little depression when Beaumont, still laughing, raised a stunner at me and fired.
It was very painful. A stunner confuses the neural signals to and from the part of your brain that controls motor functions. As a side effect it makes you feel as if your skin is being punctured by thousands of tiny needles. I fell to the ground, twitching spasmodically. My face was down, so I couldn’t see, but I heard Beaumont tell the big man to use the knife instead; it would be more impressive.
Then absolutely nothing happened for a long couple of minutes. Suddenly I was turned over roughly and steeled myself for the first blow of the knife—and found myself looking into the face of the police chief.
He sprayed an aerosol into my face that made the pain go away, and said they’d take me to the infirmary, to a “pattern blocker,” to cure the paralysis. He apologized for using me as bait and said he’d had a man hiding in the far shed since early this afternoon, waiting for Beaumont and the other man, who had been suspected in a similar assault case some months before.
Both of them were lying on the ground, twitching as badly as I was. A large police floater drifted onto the field and two men with stretchers came out.
They loaded up the others first, and by the time my stretcher was secure, the chief was interrogating Beaumont, evidently with the aid of some hypnotic. His confession was very disjointed and childishly vituperative, but the gist of it was this: