"You have it. I remember George. Now I want you to take my place and continue my classes."
"Oh, Professor, you'll be—"
"I take it you're on speaking terms with your father now. Learn all you can from him and pass it on to Us. That's an order, James."
"Yes, sir. It won't be easy."
"Nothing is ever easy. Now I'm going to ask from you an act of great courage."
"Sir?"
"I can't linger like this. It's too painful and it's useless."
"Professor, maybe we can—"
"No, no, I'm hopeless. If you hadn't cut my anatomy classes when you fell in love with Paula, you'd—" He hacked again, even more painfully. At last she said, "James, end this for me, as quickly as possible. You know what I mean."
James was stupefied. At last he managed to whisper, "S-sir . . ."
"Yes. I see you understand."
"Sir, I c-couldn't."
"Yes you can."
"B-but I wouldn't know how."
"Science always finds a way."
"At least let me ask my—"
"You will ask no one. You will tell no one."
"But you leave me all alone with this."
"Yes, I do. That's how we grow up."
"Sir, I have to refuse. I can't do it."
"No. You just need time to make up your mind. Isn't there a meeting on the floor?"
"Yes, sir. I asked for it."
"Then go to your meeting. Give them my best. Come back quickly. Quickly." The Professor began to tremble and rustle on the dried grass.
"Have you had anything to eat, sir? I'll bring you something, and then we'll talk it over. You have to advise me."
"No dependence," the White Rat said. "You must decide for yourself."
The Chairman was in the full flood of oratory when James climbed down from the loft and seated himself with his friends, the birds and the beasts, but he came to a close fairly promptly and gave the floor to James who stood up and looked around.
"I'm going to tell you about Them," James began quietly. "I've met Them and lived with Them, and I'm beginning to understand Them. We must, too. Many of Them are damned destroyers—we all know that but what we don't know is that a new breed of Them is rising in revolt against destruction. They're our kind. They live in peace and harmony with the earth; whatever they take from it they return; they do not kill and they fight those who do. But they're young and weak and outnumbered, and they need our help. We must help them. We must!
"Now up to now we've done nothing. We hide from the destroyers and use our intelligence to outwit them. We've just been passive victims. Now we must become activists, militant activists. The Professor won't like this; that great scholar still believes in reason and light. So do I, but I reserve reason and light only for those who also are guided by reason and light. For the rest, militant action. Militant!
"I heard my father once tell a story about Confucius, a very wise sage of many years ago. Although he was one of Them, he was much like our Professor and may have been almost as wise. One of his students came to him and said, 'Master, a new wise man named Christ has appeared in the West. He teaches that we must return good for evil. What is your opinion?' Confucius thought and answered, 'No. If we return good for evil, what then will we return for good? Return good for good; for evil return justice.'"
James' voice began to shake. "They shot the Professor. You knew that, didn't you. They shot him. He's not indisposed. He's up there and he's hurting. They—We must learn to return militant justice for evil. We can't use this barn as a sanctuary any more. We must leave it when we graduate and travel and teach. There is a desperate battle being fought for what little remains of our Earth. We must all join the fight."
"But how?" Moe Mole asked reasonably.
"That will be the subject of my first lesson tomorrow," James answered. "And now, with the permission of our distinguished Chairman, I would like to move that this meeting be adjourned. I have the Professor to look after."
"So moved," the cock pheasant said. "Seconded? Thank you, Miss Plymouth. Moved and seconded. This meeting is adjourned."
"Zunia," James said, "wait here for me, please. I'll need your help. Back in a little while."
James walked to the nearest apple tree, began picking up fallen apples and hurling them into space. His mother glanced out of the kitchen window and smiled at the sight of a small boy lazing away a summer afternoon.
"If I do what the Professor asks, it'll be murder," James thought. "They call it mercy killing, but I've heard my father say it's murder all the same. He says some doctors do it by deliberately neglecting to give certain medicines. He says that's murder all the same, and he doesn't approve. He says religion is against it, and if you do it you go to hell, wherever that is. He says life is sacred.
"But the Professor hurts. He hurts bad and he says there's no hope. I don't want him to hurt anymore. I want the boys who shot him to hurt, but not the professor. I could just bring him a little milk and let him die all by himself, but that could take a long time. It wouldn't be fair to him. So—All right—I'll go to hell."
James returned to the house, lisped courteously to his mother and asked for a small cup of warm milk to hold him until dinner time. He received it, climbed upstairs to his room and put the cup down. Then he went to his parents' bathroom. He climbed up on the washstand, opened the medicine cabinet, which had been declared off-limits for him, on pain of frightful punishment, and took a small vial off one of the shelves. It was labeled "Seconal" and was filled with bright orange capsules. James James removed a capsule, returned the vial, closed the cabinet and climbed down from the sink.
"What are you stealing?" the Burmese princess asked.
"Medicine," James answered shortly and returned to his room. He pulled the capsule open and shook its contents into the cup of milk. He stirred gently, with his forefinger.
"Mercy, James, you'll have to put your humor on a diet. It's gaining weight."
"I'm sorry. I'm not feeling funny right now, Princess. In fact I feel damn rotten lousy."
"Why? What's wrong?"
"I can't tell you. I can't tell anybody. Excuse me."
He carried the cup of milk to the Big Red Barn where the Great Zunia was patiently waiting. "Thanks," James said. "Now look, I've got to shinny up that column, and I can't do it and carry this cup. You can, easy. Go up with the cup. Don't spill it. I'll meet you on the beam."
They met on the beam and James received the cup.
"It looks like milk but it tastes funny," Zunia said.
"You didn't drink any!"
"Well, no . . . just stuck my tongue in . . . you know. Curious. It's. . . I well, traditional with us."
"Oh. That's all right. It's medicine for the Professor."
"Sure. Tell him . . . tell him get well soon."
"He'll be well soon," James promised. Zunia flipflopped and catapulted himself to another empty loft. James crossed the beam and knocked at the Professor's study. "It's James again, sir."
He could barely hear the "Come in." He poked his head in. The Professor was trembling. "I brought you a little something, sir. Warm milk." James placed the cup close to the Professor's head. "Please drink a little. It'll give you strength."
"Impossible."
"For me, sir. You owe that much to your best pupil. And then we'll discuss your proposal." James waited until he saw the White Rat begin to drink. He withdrew his head, sat down on the beam and began to chat lightly while tears blurred his eyes.
"Your proposal, Professor, raises an interesting dilemma in the relationship between teacher and pupil. Let me tell you about my lunatic teacher at the remedial school, Dr. Rapp, and my relations with him. I'd value your opinion. How is the milk, sir?"
"Terrible. Did you say lunatic?"
"Drink it anyway. Yes, lunatic. He's a psychiatrist, excessively educated, and—"
"There is no such thing."
"Not for a genius like yourself, sir, but in lesser people
too much education produces alienation from reality. That was Dr. Rapp."
"You must be specific," the White Rat said severely.
"Well, sir, let me contrast him with yourself. You always understand the capacity and potential of your students and treat them accordingly. Dr. Rapp was so crammed with education that he never bothered to understand us; he simply tried to fit us into the textbook cases he'd read."
"Hmmm. What was his school?"
"I was afraid you'd ask that, sir. You won't like the answer. Abigail College."
"What? What?"
"Abigail College, sir. Finished your milk?"
"Yes, and it was disgusting."
"But you sound stronger already, sir."
"Where is Abigail College?"
"In a state called Kansas."
"Hmpl. Fresh-water college. No wonder." The Professor's speech began to slur. James began to rock back and forth in agony.
"What would you do if this . . . this Abigail made same proposal to you, James?"
"Oh sir, that's not a fair question. I don't like or respect Dr. Rapp. I love you."
"No place—f'love—in science."
"No, sir. Always be objective. That's what you taught me."
"Gett'n sleepy . . . James. . . 'bout Zunia."
"What about Zunia, sir?"
"Like him?"
"Very much, sir. You'll enjoy teaching him."
"Don't. . . d'not le'him . . . came to us f'm Princeton, you know . . . don't let'm talk you into going Princeton. Yes?"
"Never, sir. Rutgers forever."
There was a long, long pause. The painful rustling in the study stopped. James poked his head in. The cup of milk was empty. The Professor was peacefully dead. James reached in, picked him up, carried him across the beam and skinned down the oak column with the body in one hand. On the main floor he stamped his foot hard, three times. He repeated the signal three times. At last Moe Mole appeared from the depths.
"That you, James?"
"Please come with me, Uncle Moe. I need your help."
Moe shuffled alongside James James, blinking in the twilight. "Trouble, James?"
"The Professor's dead. We've got to bury him."
"Now that's a shame. And we never started my astronomy lessons. Where's the body?"
"Right here. I'm carrying him." James led Moe to the sundial on the south lawn. "Dig here, Uncle Moe. I want to bury the Professor under the center of the pedestal."
"Easy," Moe said. He tunneled down and disappeared, little flurries of earth sprayed out of the tunnel mouth. Presently Moe reappeared. "All set. Got a nice little chamber dead center. Where is he now?"
James placed the body at the mouth of the tunnel. Moe pushed it before him and was again lost from sight. He reappeared in another flurry of soil. "Just filling in," he explained apologetically. "Got to pack it solid. Don't want any grave robbers nosing around, do we?"
"No," James said. "Bury him for keeps."
Moe finished the job, mumbled a few words of condolence and shambled off. James stared hard at the sundial. "Militant," he said at, last and turned away. The weathered bronze plate of the sundial was engraved with a line from the immortal Thomas Henry Huxley: "The great end of life is not knowledge but action."
Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1972
Something Up There Likes Me
There were these three lunatics, and two of them were human. I could talk to all of them because I speak English, metric, and binary. The first time I ran into the clowns was when they wanted to know all about Herostratus, and I told them. The next time it was Conus gloria maris. I told them. The third time it was where to hide. I told them, and we've been in touch ever since.
He was Jake Madigan (James Jacob Madigan, Ph.D., University of Virginia) chief of the Exobiology Section at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which hopes to study extraterrestrial lifeforms, if they can ever get hold of any. To give you some idea of his sanity, he once programmed the IBM 704 computer with a deck of cards that would print out lemons, oranges, plums, and so on. Then he played slot-machine against it and lost his shirt. The boy was real loose.
She was Florinda Pot, pronounced "Poe." It's a Flemish name. She was a pretty towhead, but freckled all over; up to the hemline and down into the cleavage. She was an M.E. from Sheffield University and had a machine-gun English voice. She'd been in the Sounding Rocket Division until she blew up an Aerobee with an electric blanket. It seems that solid fuel doesn't give maximum acceleration if it gets too cold, so this little Mother's Helper warmed her rockets at White Sands with electric blankets before ignition time. A blanket caught fire and Voom.
Their son was S-333. At NASA they label them "S" for scientific satellites and "A" for application satellites. After the launch they give them public acronyms like IMP, SYNCOM, OSO and so on. S-333 was to become OBO, which stands for Orbiting Biological Observatory, and how those two clowns ever got that third clown into space I will never understand. I suspect the director handed them the mission because no one with any sense wanted to touch it.
As Project Scientist, Madigan was in charge of the experiment packages that were to be flown, and they were a spaced-out lot. He called his own ELECTROLUX, after the vacuum cleaner. Scientist-type joke. It was an intake system that would suck in dust particles and deposit them in a flask containing a culture medium. A light shone through the flask into a photomultiplier. If any of the dust proved to be spore forms, and if they took in the medium, their growth would cloud the flask, and the obscuration of light would register on the photomultiplier. They call that Detection by Extinction.
Cal Tech had an RNA experiment to investigate whether RNA molecules could encode an organism's environmental experience. They were using nerve cells from the mollusk, sea hare. Harvard was planning a package to investigate the circa-dian effect. Pennsylvania wanted to examine the effect of the Earth's magnetic field on iron bacteria, and had to be put out on a boom to prevent magnetic interface with the satellite's electronic system. Ohio State was sending up lichens to test the effect of space on their symbiotic relationship to molds and algae. Michigan was flying a terrarium containing one (1) carrot which required forty-seven (47) separate commands for performance. All in all, S-333 was strictly Rube Goldberg.
Florinda was the Project Manager, supervising the construction of the satellite and the packages; the Project Manager is more or less the foreman of the mission. Although she was pretty and interestingly lunatic, she was gung-ho on her job and displayed the disposition of a freckle-faced tarantula when she was crossed. This didn't get her loved.
She was determined to wipe out the White Sands goof, and her demand for perfection delayed the schedule by eighteen months and increased the cost by three-quarters of a million. She fought with everyone and even had the temerity to tangle, with Harvard. When Harvard gets sore, they don't beef to NASA, they go straight to the White House. So Florinda got called on the carpet by a congressional committee. First they wanted to know why S-333 was costing more than the original estimate.
"S-333 is still the cheapest mission in NASA," she snapped. "It'll come to ten million, including the launch. My God! We're practically giving away green stamps."
Then they wanted to know why it was taking so much longer to build than the original estimate.
"Because," she replied, "no one's ever built an Orbiting Biological Observatory before."
There was no answering that, so they had to let her go. Actually all this was routine crisis, but OBO was Florinda's and Jake's first satellite, so they didn't know. They took their tensions out on each other, never realizing that it was their baby who was responsible.
Florinda got S-333 buttoned up and delivered to the Cape by December 1st, which would give them plenty of time to launch well before Christmas. (The Cape crews get a little casual during the holidays.) But the satellite began to display its own lunacy, and in the terminal tests everything went haywire. The launch had to be postponed. They spent a month taking S-333 ap
art and spreading it all over the hangar floor.
There were two critical problems. Ohio State was using a type of Invar, which is a nickel-steel alloy, for the structure of their package. The alloy suddenly began to creep, which meant they could never get the experiment calibrated. There was no point in flying it, so Florinda ordered it scrubbed and gave Madigan one month to come up with a replacement, which was ridiculous. Nevertheless Jake performed a miracle. He took the Cal Tech back-up package and converted it into a yeast experiment. Yeast produces adaptive enzymes in answer to changes in environment, and this was an investigation of what enzymes it would produce in space.
A more serious problem was the satellite radio transmitter which was producing "birdies" or whoops when the antenna was withdrawn into its launch position. The danger was that the whoops might be picked up by the satellite radio receiver, and the pulses might result in a destruct command. NASA suspects that's what happened to SYNCOM I, which disappeared shortly after its launch and has never been heard from since. Florinda decided to launch with the transmitter off and activate it later in space. Madigan fought the idea.
"It means we'll be launching a mute bird," he protested. "We won't know where to look for it."
"We can trust the Johannesburg tracking station to get a fix on the first pass," Florinda answered. "We've got excellent cable communications with Joburg."
"Suppose they don't get a fix. Then what?"
"Well, if they don't know where OBO is, the Russians will."
"Hearty-har-har."
"What d'you want me to do, scrub the entire mission?" Florinda demanded. "It's either that or launch with the transmitter off." She glared at Madigan. "This is my first satellite, and d'you know what it's taught me? There's just one component in any spacecraft that's guaranteed to give trouble all the time. Scientists!"
"Women!" Madigan snorted, and they got into a ferocious argument about the feminine mystique.
They got S-333 through the terminal tests and onto the launch pad by January 14th. No electric blankets. The craft was to be injected into orbit a thousand miles downrange exactly at noon, so ignition was scheduled for 11:50 A.M., January 15th. They watched the launch on the blockhouse TV screen, and it was agonizing. The perimeters of TV tubes are curved, so as the rocket went up and approached the edge of the screen, there was optical distortion and it seemed to topple over and break in half.