“It’s a creative art and it’s a pleasure to pay for it. Don’t worry about it. You know I can’t help making money.” “Yes, I know. I never could understand why you take so much interest in games. Of course, it pays well.”
“You don’t understand me. I’m not interested in games. Have you ever seen me waste a slug or a credit on one of my own gadgets-or any other? I haven’t played a game since I was a boy. For me, it is already well established that one horse can run faster than mother, that the ball falls either on red or on black, and that three of a kind beats two pair. It’s that I can’t see the silly toys that people play with without thinking of one a little more complicated and mysterious. If I am bored with nothing better to do, I may sketch one and dispatch it to my agent. Presently in comes some more money.” He shrugged.
“What are you interested in?” “People. Eat your soup.”
Monroe-Alpha tasted the mess cautiously, looked surprised, and really went to work on it. Hamilton looked pleased, and undertook to catch up. “Felix — ”
“Yes, Cliff.”
“Why did you group me in the ninety-eight?”
“The ninety-eight? Oh, you mean the sourpuss survey. Shucks, pal, you rated it. If you are gay and merry-merry be-behind that death mask, you conceal it well.”
“I’ve nothing to be unhappy about.” “No, not to my knowledge. But you don’t look happy.” They ate in silence for a few minutes more. Monroe-Alpha spoke again. ‘It’s true, you know. I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“Not happy.”
“So? Mmmm…why not?”
“I don’t know. If I did I could do something about it. My family psychiatrist doesn’t seem to be able to find the reason.”
“You’re on the wrong frequency. A psychiatrist is the last man to see about a thing like that. They know everything about a man, except what he is and what makes him tick. Besides, did you ever see a worry-doctor that was sane himself? There aren’t two in the country who can count their own fingers and get the same answer twice running.”
“It’s true that he hasn’t been able to help me much.”
“Of course not. Why? Because he will start with the assumption that there is something wrong with you. He can’t find it, so he’s stuck. It doesn’t occur to him that there might be nothing wrong with you and that might be what was wrong.”
The other man looked weary. “I don’t understand you. But he does claim to be following a clue.”
“What sort?”
“Well…I’m a deviant, you know.”
“Yes, I know, ” Hamilton answered shortly. He was reasonably familiar with his friend’s genetic background, but disliked to hear him mention it. Some contrary strain in Hamilton rebelled against the idea that a man was necessarily and irrevocably the gene pattern handed to him by his genetic planners. Furthermore he was not convinced that Monroe-Alpha should be considered a deviant.
“Deviant” is a question-begging term. When the human zygote resulting from the combination of two carefully selected gametes is different from what the geneticists had predicted but not so different as to be classified with certainty as a mutation that zygote is termed a deviant. It is not, as is generally believed, a specific term for a recognized phenomenon, but a catch-all to cover a lack of complete knowledge.
Monroe-Alpha (this particular Monroe-Alpha-Clifford, 32-847-106 B62) had been an attempt to converge two lines of the original Monroe-Alpha to recapture and reinforce the mathematical genius of his famous ancestor. But mathematical genius is not one gene, nor does it appear to be anything as simple as a particular group of genes. Rather, it is thought to be a complex of genes arranged in a particular order.
Unfortunately this gene complex appears to be close-linked in the Monroe-Alpha line to a neurotic contrasurvival characteristic, exact nature undetermined and not assigned to any set of genes. That it is not necessarily so linked appears to be established, and the genetic technicians who had selected the particular gametes which were to produce Monroe-Alpha Clifford believed that they had eliminated the undesired strain.