Chapter Thirteen ” — and the Truth Shall Make You Free!”
The globe still swung around the sun. The seasons came and the seasons went. The sun still shone on the mountainsides, the hills were green, and the valleys lush. The river sought the bosom of the sea, then rode the cloud, and found the hills as rain. The cattle cropped in the brown plains, the fox stalked the hare through the brush. The tides answered the sway of the moon, and the gulls picked at the wet sand in the wake of the tide. The earth was fair and the earth was full; it teemed with life, swarmed with life, overflowed with life-a stream in spate.
Nowhere was man. Seek the high hills; search him in the plains. Hunt for his spoor in the green jungles; call for him; shout for him. Follow where he has been in the bowels of the earth; plumb the dim deeps of the sea.
Man is gone; his house stands empty; the door open.
A great ape, with a brain too big for his need and a spirit that troubled him, left his tribe and sought the quiet of the high place that lay above the jungle.
He climbed it, hour after hour, urged on by a need that he half understood. He reached a resting place, high above the green trees of his home, higher than any of his tribe had ever climbed. There he found a broad flat stone, warm in the sun. He lay down upon it and slept. But his sleep was troubled. He dreamed strange dreams, unlike anything he knew. They woke him and left him with an aching head.
It would be many generations before one of his line could understand what was left there by those who had departed.
JERRY WAS A MAN
DONT BLAME THE MARTIANS. The human race would have developed plasto-biology in any case.
Look at the older registered Kennel Club breeds — glandular giants like the St.
Bernard and the Great Dane, silly little atrocities” like the Chihuahua and the Pekingese. Consider fancy goldfish.
The damage was done when Dr. Morgan produced new breeds of fruit flies by kicking around their chromosomes with X-ray. After that, the third generation of the Hiroshima survivors did not teach us anything new; those luckless monstrosities merely publicized standard genetic knowledge.
Mr. and Mrs. Bronson van Vogel did not have social reform in mind when they went to the Phoenix Breeding Ranch; Mr. van Vogel simply wanted to buy a Pegasus. He had mentioned it at breakfast. “Are you tied up this morning, my dear?”
“Not especially. Why?”
“I’d like to run out to Arizona and order a Pegasus designed.”
“A Pegasus? A flying horse? Why, my sweet?”
He grinned. “Just for fun. Pudgy Dodge was around the Club yesterday with a six-legged dachshund-must have been over a yard long. It was clever, but he swanked so much I want to give him something to stare at. Imagine, Martha-me landing on the Club ‘copter platform on a winged horse. That’ll snap his eyes back!”
She turned her eyes from the Jersey shore to look indulgently at her husband.
She was not fooled; this would be expensive. But Brownie was such a dear! “When do we start?”
They landed two hours earlier than they started. The airsign read, in letters fifty feet high:
PHOENIX BREEDING RANCH Controlled Genetics-licensed Labor Contractors ” ‘Labor Contractors’?” she read, “I thought this place was used just to burbank new animals?”
“They both design and produce,” he explained importantly. “They distribute through the mother corporation ‘Workers.’ You ought to know; you own a big chunk of Workers common.”
“You mean I own a bunch of apes? Really?”
“Perhaps I didn’t tell you. Haskell and I — ” He leaned forward and informed the field that he would land manually; he was a bit proud of his piloting.
He switched off the robot and added, briefly as his attention was taken up by heading the ship down, “Haskell and I have been plowing your General Atomics dividends back into Workers, Inc. Good diversification-still plenty of dirty work for the anthropoids to do.” He slapped the keys; the scream of the nose jets stopped conversation.