“Six Day” completed the anthropoids’ educations. Each learned the particular sub-trade it would practice, cleaning, digging, and especially agricultural semi-skills such as weeding, thinning, and picking. “One Nisei farmer working three neo-chimpanzees can grow as many vegetables as a dozen old-style farm hands,” Blakesly asserted. “They really like to work-when we get through with them.” They admired the almost incredibly heavy tasks done by modified gorillas and stopped to gaze at the little neo-Capuchins doing high picking on prop trees, then moved on toward “Seventh Day.”
This building was used for the radioactive mutation of genes and therefore located some distance away from the others. They had to walk, as the sidewalk was being repaired; the detour took them past workers’ pens and barracks. Some of the anthropoids crowded up to the wire and began calling to them: “Sigret!
Sigret! Preese, Missy! Preese, Boss!
Sigret!” “What are they saying?” Martha van Vogel inquired.
“They are asking for cigarettes,” Blakesly answered in annoyed tones. “They know better, but they are like children. Here-I’ll put a stop to it.” He stepped up to the wire and shouted to an elderly male, “Hey! Strawboss!” The worker addressed wore, in addition to the usual short canvas kilt, a bedraggled arm band. He turned and shuffled toward the fence. “Strawboss,” ordered Blakesly,
“get those Joes away from here.” “Okay, Boss,” the old fellow acknowledged and started cuffing those nearest him. “Scram, you Joes!
Scram!” “But I have some cigarettes,” protested Mrs. Van Vogel, “and I would gladly have given them some.”
“It doesn’t do to pamper them,” the Manager told her. “They have been taught that luxuries come only from work. I must apologize for my poor children; those in these pens are getting old and forgetting their manners.”
She did not answer but moved further along the fence to where one old neo-chimp was pressed up against the wire, staring at them with soft, tragic eyes, like a child at a bakery window. He had taken no part in the jostling demand for tobacco and had been let alone by the strawboss. “Would you like a cigarette?” she asked him.
“Preese, Missy.”
She struck one which he accepted with fumbling grace, took a long, lung-filling drag, let the smoke trickle out his nostrils, and said shyly, “Sankoo, Missy. Me Jerry.”
“How do you do. Jerry?”
“Howdy, Missy.” He bobbed down, bending his knees, ducking his head, and clasping his hands to his chest, all in one movement.
“Come along, Martha.” Her husband and Blakesly had moved in behind her.
“In a moment,” she answered. “Brownie, meet my friend Jerry. Doesn’t he look just like Uncle Albert? Except that he looks so sad. Why are you unhappy,
Jerry?”
“They don’t understand abstract ideas,” put in Blakesly.
But Jerry surprised him. “Jerry sad,” he announced in tones so doleful that Martha van Vogel did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
“Why, Jerry?” she asked gently. “Why are you so sad?” “No work,” he stated. “No sigret. No candy. No work.”
“These are all old workers who have passed their usefulness,” Blakesly repeated.
“Idleness upsets them, but we have nothing for them to do.”
“Well!” she said. “Then why don’t you have them sort buttons, or something like that, such as the baby ones do?”
“They wouldn’t even do that properly,” Blakesly answered her. “These workers are senile.”
“Jerry isn’t senile! You heard him talk.”
“Well, perhaps not. Just a moment.” He turned to the apeman, who was squatting down in order to scratch Napoleon’s head with a long forefinger thrust through the fence. “You, Joe! Come here.”
Blakesly felt around the worker’s hairy neck and located a thin steel chain to which was attached a small metal tag. He studied it. “You’re right,” he admitted. “He’s not really over age, but his eyes are bad. I remember the lot-cataracts as a result of an unfortunate linked mutation.” He shrugged.
“But that’s no reason to let him grieve his heart out in idleness.”
“Really, Mrs. van Vogel, you should not upset yourself about it. They don’t stay in these pens long-only a few days at the most.”
“Oh,” she answered, somewhat mollified, “you have some other place to retire them to, then. Do you give them something to do there? You should-Jerry wants to work. Don’t you. Jerry?”