The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

This was the concatenation of events that had slid Peter Jairus Frigate from potentiality into existence. If old William had not decided to take his son along to Kansas City, if James had not been more tempted by a soda than by beer, if the girl hadn’t happened to knock over the Coke, there would have been no Peter Jairus Frigate. At least, not the individual now bearing that name. And if his father had had a wet dream the night before or had used a contraceptive on the wedding night, he, Peter, would not have been born. Or if there had been no mating, if it had been put off for some reason, the egg would have drifted off and out and into a menstruation pad. What was there about that one spermatozoan, one in 300,000,000, that had enabled it to beat all the others out in the race to the egg?

May the best wriggler win. And so it had been. But it had been close, too close for comfort when he thought about it.

And then there was the horde of his brothers and sisters in potentio, unhoarded. They had died, arriving too late or not at all. A waste of flesh and spirit. Had any of the sperm had the potentiality for his imagination and writing talent? Or were those in the egg? Or were they in the fusion of sperm and egg, a combination of genes only possible in that one sperm and that one egg? His three brothers had no creative and little passive Imagination; his sister had a passive imagination, she liked fantasy and science fiction, but she had no inclination to write. What had made the difference?

Environment couldn’t explain it. The others had been exposed to the same influences as he. His father had purchased that library of little red pseudoleather-bound books, what in hell was its name? It was a very popular home library in his childhood. But they hadn’t been fascinated by the stories in them. They hadn’t fallen in love with Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler in A Scandal in Bohemia, or sympathized with the monster in Frankenstein, or battled before the walls of Troy with Achilles, or suffered with Odysseus in his wanderings, or descended the icy depths to seek out Grendel with Beowulf, or journeyed with the Time Traveller of Wells, or visited those wild weird stars of Olive Schneider, or escaped from the Mohegans with Natty Bumppo. Nor had they been interested in the other books his parents bought him, Pilgrim’s Progress, Tom Saw­yer and Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, The Arabian Nights, and Gulliver’s Travels. Nor had they prospected at the little library branch, where he first dug the gold of Frank Baum, Hans Andersen, Andrew Lang, Jack London, A. Oman Doyle, Edgar Rice Bur­roughs, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard. And don’t forget the lesser, the silver, ore: Irving Crump, A.G. Henty, Roy Rock-wood, Oliver Curwood, Jeffrey Famol, Robert Service, Anthony Hope, and A. Hyatt Verrill. After all, in his personal pantheon, the Neanderthal, Og, and Rudolph Rassendyll ranked almost with Tarzan, John Carter of Barsoom, Dorothy Gale of Oz, Odysseus, Holmes and Challenger, Jim Hawkins, Ayesha, Allan Quartermain and Umslopogaas.

It tickled Peter at this moment to think that he was on the same boat with the man who bad furnished the model for the fictional Umslopogaas. And he was also a deckhand for the man who had created Buck and White Fang, Wolf Larsen, the nameless subhu­man narrator of Beyond Adam, and Smoke Belle w. It delighted him also that he talked daily with the great Tom Mix, unequaled in cinema flair and fantastic adventure except by Douglas Fairbanks, Senior. If only Fairbanks were aboard. But then it would also be delightful to have Doyle and Twain and Cervantes and Burton, especially Burton, aboard. And… The boat sure was getting crowded. Be satisfied. But then he never was.

What had he drifted off from? Oh, yes. Chance, another word for destiny.

He didn’t believe, as Mark Twain did, that all events, all charac­ters, were rigidly predetermined. “From the time when the first atom of the great Laurentian sea bumped into the second atom, our fates were fixed.” Twain had said something like that, probably in his depressing What Is Man? That philosophy was an excuse for escaping guilt. Ducking responsibility.