Steel Beach (64 page)

Most of the cavernous room was filled with structures whose precise description I must leave to your imagination, since the drive room of the
Heinlein
is still a closely-guarded secret and certainly will be until long after they get the damn thing to work. I will say this: whatever you imagine will surely be far off the mark. It is unexpected, and startling, like opening the hood of a rover and finding it’s powered by a thousand mice licking a thousand tiny crankshafts, or by the moral power of virginity. And this: though I could hardly identify anything as basic as a nut and bolt in the fantastical mess, it
still
had the look of Heinleiner engineering, wherein nothing is ever any better than it has to be. Maybe if they get time to move beyond prototypes they’ll get more elegant and more careful, but in the meantime it’s “Don’t bend that wrench. Get a bigger hammer.” Heinleiner toolboxes must be filled with bubblegum and bobby pins.

And yes, O good and faithful reader, they were planning to launch the hulk of the old
Robert A. Heinlein
into interstellar space. You heard it here first. They were
not
, however, planning to do it with an endless stream of nuclear cherry bombs pooting out the tailpipe. Just what principles were envisioned is still proprietary information, but I can say it was a variant technology of the mathematics that produced the null-field. I can say it because no one but Smith and a handful of others know what that technology is.

Just imagine them harnessing the old wreck to a team of very large swans, and leave it at that.

“As you can see,” Smith was saying as we walked down a long and fairly rickety flight of metal stairs, “they’ve just about frabjulated the primary phase of the osmosifractionating de-hoodooer. And those guys ratattating the willy-nilly say they ought to have it whistling Dixie in three days’ time.”

No secrecy involved here. I’d have written exactly what he said, if I had any hope of remembering it, and the meaning would have been the same: nothing. Smith never seemed to mind if his audience was coming into the clubhouse two or three holes behind him; he rattled off his own private jargon without regard to whether or not it was being monitored. Sometimes I thought it just helped him to think out loud. Sometimes I thought he was showing off. Probably a little of both.

But I can’t get away from the subject of the interstellar drive without mentioning the one time he made an attempt to put it in layman’s terms. It stuck in my mind, possibly because Smith had a way of making “layman” rhyme with “retarded.”

“There are basically three states of matter,” he had said. “I call them wackiness, dogmatism, and perversity. The universe of our experience is almost totally composed of dogmatic matter, just as it’s mostly what we call ‘matter,’ as opposed to ‘anti-matter’—though dogmatic matter includes both types. Every once in a great while we get evidence of some perverse matter. It’s when you move into the realm of the wacky that you have to watch out.”

“I’ve known that all my life,” I had told him.

“Ah, but the possibilities!” he had said, waving his hand at the drive taking shape in the engine room of the
Heinlein
.

As he did now, providing the sort of segue I hate when a director does it in a movie, but the fact is Smith had a habit of waving his hand grandly when coming upon his mighty works. Hell, he had a right.

“See what can come from the backwaters of science?” he said. “Physics is a closed book, they all said. Put your talents to work in something useful.”

“ ‘They jeered me at the Sorbonne!’ ” I suggested.

“They threw eggs when I presented my paper at the Institute!
Eggs
!” He leered at me, drywashing his hands, hunching his shoulders. “The
fools
! Let them see who has the last laugh, ha ha
HA
!” He dropped the mad scientist impression and patted a huge machine on its metal flank, a cowboy gentling a horse. Smith could have been insufferably stuffy except for the fact he’d seen almost as many old movies as I had.

“No kidding, Hildy, the fools
are
going to be impressed when they see what I’ve wrung out of the tired old husk of physics.”

“You’ll get no argument from me,” I said. “What happened to physics, anyway? Why was it neglected for so long?”

“Diminishing returns. They spent an insane amount of money on the GSA about a century ago, and when they turned it on they found out they’d hubbled it up. The repairs would have—”

“The GSA?”

“Global Supercooled Accelerator. You can still find a lot of it, running right around the Lunar equator.”

I remembered it then; I’d followed it part of the way when I ran in the Equatorial Rover Race.

“They built big instruments out in space, too. They learned a lot about the universe, cosmologically and sub-atomically, but very little of it had any practical use. It got to where learning any more, in the directions physics kept going, would cost trillions just to tool up. If you did it, when you were done you’d have learned what went on in the first billionth of a nanosecond of creation, and then you’d just naturally want to know what happened in the first
thousandth
of a nano-nano-second, only that’d cost ten times as much. People got tired of paying those kind of bills to answer questions even less reality-based than theology, and the smart people noticed that for peanuts you could find out practical things in biological science.”

“So all the original research now is in biology,” I said.

“Hah!” he shouted. “There
is
no original research, unless you count some of the things the Central Computer does. Oh, a few people here and there.” He waved his hand, dismissing them. “It’s all engineering now. Take well-known principles and find a way to make a better toothpaste.” His eyes lit up. “That’s a
perfect
example. A few months back, I woke up and my mouth tasted like peppermint. I looked into it, turns out it’s a new sort of ’bot. Some idiot thought this up, built it, and let it loose on an unsuspecting public.
It’s in the water
, Hildy! Can you imagine?”

“It’s a crying shame,” I muttered, trying not to meet his eye.

“Well, I got the antidote. Maybe my mouth does taste rotten in the morning, but at least it tastes like
me
. Reminds me who I am.” Which I guess
is
a perfect example of both the perversity of Heinleiners and the cultural passivity they rebelled against. And the big reason I liked them, in spite of their best efforts to thwart my affection.

“It’s all handed down from on high now,” he went on. “We’re like savages at an altar, waiting for miracles to be handed down. We don’t envision the miracles
we
might work, if we set ourselves to it.”

“Like little people, eight inches high and smart as lab rats.”

He winced, the first indication I’d had of a moral uncertainty. Thank god for that; I like people to have opinions, but people with no doubts scare me.

“You want me to defend that? Okay. I’ve brought those children up to think for themselves, and to question authority. It’s not unlimited; me or somebody who knows more about it has to approve their projects, and we keep an eye on them. We’ve created a place where they
can
be free to make their own rules, but they’re children, they have to follow
our
rules, and we set as few as possible. Do you realize this is the only place in Luna where the eyes of our mechanical Big Brother can’t look? Not even the
police
can come in here.”

“I have no reason to love the Central Computer, either.”

“I didn’t think so. I thought you might have a story to tell about that, or I’d never have let you in. You’ll tell it when you’re ready. Do you know
why
Libby makes little people?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“He might have told you; might not have. It’s his solution to the same problem I’m working on: interstellar travel. His reasoning is, a smaller human being requires less oxygen, less food, a smaller spacecraft. If we were all eight inches high, we could go to Alpha Centauri in a fuel drum.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Not crazy. Ridiculous, probably. Unattainable, almost certainly. Those kewpies live about three years, and I doubt they’ll ever have much of a brain. But it’s an innovative solution to a problem the
rest
of Luna isn’t even working on. Why do you think Gretel goes running across the surface in her birthday suit?”

“You weren’t supposed to know about that.”

“I’ve forbidden it. It’s
dangerous
, Hildy, but I know Gretel, and I know she’s still trying it. And the reason is, she hopes she’ll eventually adapt herself to living in vacuum without any artificial aids.”

I thought of the fish stranded on the beach, flopping around, probably doomed but still flopping.

“That’s not how evolution works,” I said.

“You know it and I know it. Tell it to Gretel. She’s a
child
, and a smart one, but with childish stubbornness. She’ll give it up sooner or later. But I can guarantee she’ll try something else.”

“I hope it’s less hare-brained.”

“From your lips to God’s ears. Sometimes she…  ” He rubbed his face, and made a dismissing gesture with his hand. “The kewpies make me uneasy, I’ll admit that. You can’t help wondering how human they are, and if they are human, whether or not they have any rights, or
should
have any rights.”

“It’s experimentation on humans, Michael,” I said. “We have some pretty strong laws on that subject.”

“What we have are taboos. We do plenty of experimentation on human genes. What we’re forbidden to do is create new humans.”

“You don’t think that’s a good idea?”

“It’s never that simple. What I object to are blanket bans on
anything
. I’ve done a lot of research into this—I was against it at first, just like you seem to be. You want to hear it?”

“I’d be fascinated.”

We’d come to an area of the engine room I thought of as his office, or laboratory. It was the place I’d spent most of what little time I’d had with him. He liked to put his feet up on a wooden desk as old as Walter’s but a lot more battered, look off into infinity, and expound. So far, his innate caution had always stopped him from getting too deeply into anything when I was around, but I sensed he needed an outsider’s opinion. The lab? Think of it as full of bubbling retorts and sizzling Jacob’s ladders. Omit the hulking body strapped to the table; that was his children’s domain. The place didn’t look anything like that, but it’s the proper stage set, metaphorically.

“It’s a question of where to draw the line,” he said. “Lines have to be drawn; even I realize that. But the line is constantly moving. In a progressing society, the line
should
be moving. Did you know it was once illegal to terminate a pregnancy?”

“I’d heard of it. Seems very strange.”

“They’d decided that a fetus was a human. Later, we changed our minds. Society used to keep dead people hooked up to something called ‘life-support,’ sometimes for twenty or thirty years. You couldn’t turn the machines off.”

“Their brains were dead, you mean.”

“They were
dead
, Hildy, by our standards. Corpses with blood being pumped through them. Bizarre, creepy as hell. You wonder what they were
thinking
of, what their reasoning could possibly have been. When people
knew
they were dying, when they knew that death was going to be horribly painful, it was thought wrong of them to kill themselves.”

I looked away; I don’t know if he caught it, but I think he did.

“A doctor couldn’t help them die; he’d get prosecuted for murder. Sometimes they even withheld the drugs that would be best at stopping the pain. Any drug that dulled the senses, or heightened them, or altered the consciousness in any way was viewed as sinful—except for the two most physically harmful drugs: alcohol and nicotine. Something relatively harmless, like heroin, was completely illegal, because it was addictive, as if alcohol was not. No one had the right to determine what he put into his own body, they had no medical bill of rights. Barbaric, agreed?”

“No argument.”

“I’ve studied their rationalizations. They make very little sense now. The reasons for the bans on human experimentation make a
lot
of sense. The potential for abuse is enormous. All genetic research involves hazards. So rules were evolved…  and then set in stone. No one has taken a look at them in over two hundred years. My position is, it’s time to think it over again.”

“And what did you come up with?”

“Hell, Hildy, we’ve barely started. A lot of the prohibitions on genetic research were made at a time when something released into the environment could theoretically have disastrous results. But we’ve got room to experiment now, and fool-proof means of isolation. Do the work on an asteroid, and if something goes wrong, quarantine it, then shove it into the sun.”

I had no problem with that, and told him so.

“But what about the human experiments?”

“They make me queasy, just like you. But that’s because we were raised to view them as evil. My children have no such inhibitions. I’ve told them all their lives that they should be able to ask any question. And they should be able to do any experiment, as long as they feel they have a reasonable idea of its outcome. I help them with that part, me, and the other parents.”

I probably had a dubious expression on my face. It would have made perfect sense, since I was feeling dubious.

“I’m way ahead of you,” he said. “You’re going to bring up the old ‘superman’ argument.”

I didn’t dispute it.

“I think it’s time that one was looked at again. They used to call it ‘playing God.’ That term has fallen out of favor, but it’s still there. If we’re going to set out to improve humans genetically, to build a new human, who’s going to make the choices? Well, I can tell you who’s making them now, and I’ll bet you know the answer, too.”

It didn’t take a lot of thought. “The CC?” I ventured.

“Come on,” he said, getting up from his desk. “I’m going to show you something.”

I had a hard time keeping up with him—would have at the best of times, but my current state of roly-polytude didn’t help things. He was one of those straight-ahead people, the sort who, when they’ve decided where they’re going, can’t be easily diverted. All I could do was waddle along in his wake.