King of the Hill Page 2

  There are other problems, human problems. How do you build a bridge between people? How do you send a better man to Mars? How do you construct an anthill city that is not a bughouse? Money will not solve those problems. Rhetoric will not solve them. Technology will not solve them.

  Therefore, Sam did not fool with them. He used them for protective coloration, but he did not kid himself.

  He stuck to the art of the possible.

  Oh yes, he had a dream.

  There was justice in it, of a sort. But human beings care nothing for justice. They look out for Number One.

  Number One?

  Sam permitted himself a brief, cold smile.

  They would tear him apart if they knew, all those billions of Number Ones…

  A day came when all the bits and pieces fell into place. The data came back, coded across the empty hundreds of millions of miles. The columns added up. The light turned green.

  Sam was exultant, in a quiet sort of way. He had expected it to work, of course. He had checked it all out countless times. But that was theory, and Sam was a skeptic about theories.

  This was fact.

  It was ready. Not perfect, no—but that too had been anticipated.

  Ain’t science wunnerful?

  He could not stay inside, not when he was this close. He had to get outside, taste what was left of freedom. At times like these, it was not enough to know that it was there. He had to see it.

  He walked on the Estate.

  Lois joined him, which was a pain in the clavicle but Sam did not allow her presence to destroy his mood. Lois had on one of her cunning Outdoor Suits. She always professed to adore what she called Nature, but she walked as though every blade of grass were poison ivy.

  (Poison ivy had been extinct for decades. Lois would soon follow suit.)

  “It’s so peaceful,” Lois said. She usually said that here.

  Rather to his own surprise, Sam answered her. He wanted to talk to somebody, to celebrate. Failing that, he talked to Lois. “No,” he said. “Not really. It only seems peaceful because we are observers, not part of it. And it is controlled, to some extent.”

  Lois looked at him sharply. It had been one of his longer speeches.

  “See that cedar?” Sam pointed to it, knowing that she did not know a cedar from a cottonwood. “Tough little tree. It’ll grow in poor soil, it doesn’t take much water. See how the roots come up near the surface? It’s brittle, though. Won’t last long. That oak is crowding it, and it’s got a century or two to play with. See that little willow—there, the droopy one? It needs too much water and the drainage is wrong. It’ll never make it. Am I boring you?”

  “No,” Lois said truthfully. She was too amazed to be bored.

  “See the bunny rabbit?” Sam’s voice lapsed into parody. “See bunny run! He’d better run. Lots of things eat bunny rabbits. Hawks, bobcats, wolves. Snakes eat little bunnies—”

  “Oh, Sam.”

  As if to prove his point, a beagle hound stuck his wet nose out of the brush. His white-tipped tail wagged tentatively. His liquid eyes were pools of adoration. (Beagles were originally bred as hunters. Remember?)

  Sam turned his back on the dog. “Man’s best friend. The supreme opportunist. He figured the odds twenty thousand years ago and threw in with us. K-9, Secret Agent. Con. Fink. Surplus now. Dear old pal.”

  “I don’t understand you sometimes,” Lois said with rare perception.

  I don’t understand them, either, Sam thought. Animals, not women. Little Forest Friends. Nobody understands them. We were too busy. There wasn’t even a decent field study of the chimpanzee until around 1930. Seventy years later there were no chimpanzees. We didn’t bother with the animals that were not like men; who cared? We learned exactly nothing about kudus and bears, coons and possums, badgers and buffalo. Too late now. They are gone or going, and so is their world.

  Sam Gregg was not a sentimental man. He was a realist. Still, the facts bothered him. It was hard not to know. He would never know, and that was that. There was no way.

  They walked along the trail together. (Arm in arm, lovely couple, backbone of empire.) Sam was a little nervous. It had been a long fight and—as they used to say—victory was at hand.

  He felt a little like God and a lot like an old man.

  From the branches of a gnarled oak, a masked mother and three small bandits watched them pass.

  There were ancient raccoon thoughts in the air.

  You are ready.

  So do it. Don’t wobble.

  Sam did it.

  Sound dramatic?

  It was (in the very long run) and it wasn’t (here and now). An extremely well-balanced, insulated, innocuous conveyor left the main lab and hissed gently to the spaceport. A large gray metallic box was loaded into a shuttle ship and locked into place. The box was ten feet square, and it was heavy. It could have been much smaller and lighter—about the size of a jigger glass—except for the refrigeration units, the electronic circuits, the separation cubicles, and the protective layers.

  The shuttle lifted to the space station. Strictly routine.

  The gray cube of metal was transferred very gingerly to a larger ship. She (that was surely the proper pronoun) was a special ship, a swimmer of deep space. She was crammed with expensive gear. Say, a billion dollars worth. Maybe more.

  She took off. She was completely automated, controlled by computers, powered by atomics.

  There were no men on board.

  The ship was never coming back.

  Sam?

  He stayed home.

  There was nowhere for him to go.

  Remember?

  It is curious how a small gesture will offend some people.

  There was no more capital punishment, unless living on earth was it, but good men and true were willing to make an exception in Sam’s case.

  “So you sunk twenty billion into it over a ten-year period,” his chief lawyer said. He said it the same way he might have asked, “So you think you’re a kumquat, eh?”

  “Give or take a few million. Of course, some of the basic research goes back more than ten years. If you figure all that in, it might go to twenty-two billion. Maybe twenty-three.”

  “Never mind that.” The lawyer groaned. He really did.

  Lois was not happy and developed a case of severe frigidity. She was not only married to a man confronting bankruptcy, but she was also the wife of a Master Criminal. It does imperil one’s social position.

  (There was no way to keep it quiet, naturally. Sam had known that. Too many people were involved.)

  They had a great time, the venom-spewers: senators and editorialists, presidents and kings, cops and commissions, professors and assorted hotshots. All the Good People.

  Sam had, to put it mildly, violated a public trust. (Translation: he hadn’t spent his money on what they wanted.)

  He was guilty of a crime against humanity. (Judge and jury, definer of crime? Humanity. All heart.)

  It did not matter in the least that twenty billion dollars (or twenty-two, or twenty-three, or a hundred) could not have saved the earth. Earth was finished, smothered by her most illustrious spawn. It would take a few years yet, while she gasped for breath and filled the bedpan. But she was through.

  Man had never cared overmuch for facts.

  He believed what he wanted to believe.

  (“Things may be bad, but they are getting better. All we have to do is like be relevant, you know? Enforce the Law. Consult the swami. Have a hearing. Salvation through architecture. When the going gets tough the tough get going. All problems have solutions.”)

  There was one other thing that made Sam’s sin inexcusable.

  You see, animals have no votes.

  The defense?

  It was clear, simple, correct, and beyond dispute. It was therefore doomed.

  (“We’ll give him a fair trial, then hang him.”)

  Way down deep where convictions solidify, Big Man had expected to mee
t his counterpart on other worlds. (“Ah, Earthling, you surprise I speak your language so good.”) He had failed. He had found only barren rocks at the end of the road.

  From this, he had drawn a characteristically modest conclusion.

  Man, he decided, was alone in the accessible universe.

  This was a slight error. There were primitive men who would not have made it, but there were no more primitive men.

  The plain truth was that it was Earth that was unique and alone. Earth had produced life. Not just self-styled Number One, not just Superprimate. No. He was a late arrival, the final guest.

  (“All these goodies just for me!”)

  Alone? Man?

  Well, not quite.

  There were a million different species of insects. (Get the spray-gun, Henry.) Twenty thousand kinds of fish. (I got one, I got one!) Nine thousand types of birds. (You can still see a stuffed owl in a museum.) Fifteen thousand species of mammals. (You take this arrow, see, and fit the string into the notch…)

  Alone? Sure, except for the kangaroos and bandicoots, shrews and skunks, bats and elephants, armadillos and rabbits, pigs and foxes, raccoons and whales, beavers and lions, moose and mice, oryx and otter and opossum—

  Oh well, them.

  Yes.

  They too had come from the earth. Incredible, each of them. Important? Only if you happened to think that the only known life in the universe was important.

  Man didn’t think so. Not him.

  Not the old perfected end-product of evolution.

  He didn’t kill them all, of course. He hadn’t been around that long. The dinosaurs had managed to become extinct without his help. There were others.

  He did pretty well, though. He could be efficient, give him that.

  He started early. Remember the ground sloth, the mammoth, the mastodon? You don’t? Odd.

  He kept at it. He was remarkably objective about it, really. He murdered his own kin as readily as the others. The orang had gone down the tube when Sam was a boy, the gorilla and the chimp and the gibbon a little later.

  Sorry about that, gang.

  In time, he got them all. It was better than in the old days. He took no risks, dug no traps, fired no guns. He simply crowded them out. When there were billions upon billions of naked apes stacked in layers over the earth, there was no room for anything else.

  Goodbye, Old Paint.

  So long, Rover.

  Farewell, Kitty-cat.

  Nothing personal, you understand.

  All in the name of humanity. What higher motive can there be?

  This is a defense?

  What in hell did Sam do?

  In hell, he did this:

  Sam Gregg decided that mankind could not be saved. Not should not (although Sam, it must be confessed, did not get all choked up at the thought of human flesh) but could not. It was too late, too late when Sam was born. Man had poisoned his world and there were no fresh Earths.

  Man could not survive on other planets, not without drastic genetic modifications.

  And man would not change, not voluntarily.

  After all, he was perfect, wasn’t he?

  That left the animals. Earth’s other children, the ones pushed aside. The dumb ones. The losers. The powerless.

  You might call it the art of the possible.

  Did they matter? If they were the only life in the universe? Who knew? Who decided?

  Well, there was Sam. A nut, probably. Still, he could play God as well as the next man. He had the money.

  Pick a world, then. Not Mars. Too close, and there were still those ex-human beings running around there. Don’t want to interfere with them.

  Sam chose Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. It was plenty big enough; it had a diameter of 3550 miles. It had an atmosphere of sorts, mostly methane. He liked the name.

  Besides, think of the view.

  It was beyond human engineering skill to convert Titan into a replica of Mother Earth in her better days. Tough, but that’s the way the spheroid rebounds.

  However, with atomic power generated on Titan a great deal could be done. It was, in fact, titanic.

  The life-support pods—enormous energy shields—made it possible to create pockets in which breathable air could be born. It just required heat and water and chemical triggers and doctored plants—

  A few little things.

  A bit of the old technological razzle-dazzle.

  Men could not live there, even under the pods. Neither could the animals that had once roamed the earth.

  Sam’s animals were different, though. He cut them to fit. That was one thing about genetics. When you knew enough about it, you could make alterations. Not many, perhaps. But enough.

  Getting the picture?

  Sam did not line the critters up two by two and load them into the Ark. (Noah, indeed.) He could not save them all. Some were totally gone, some were too delicate, some were outside the range of Sam’s compassion. (Who needs a million kinds of bugs?) He did what he could, within the time he had.

  He sent sex cells, sperm and ova, one hundred sets for each species. (Was that what was in the box? Yes, Junior.) Animals learn some things, some more than others, but most of what they do is born into them. Instinct, if you like. There was a staggering amount of information in that little box.

  The problem was to get it out.

  Parents have their uses, sometimes.

  But robots will do, if you build them right. You can build a long, long program into a computer. You can stockpile food for a few years.

  So—get the joint ready. Then bring down the ship and reseal the pods. Activate the mechanisms. Fertilize the eggs. Subdivide the zygotes. Put out the incubators. Fill the pens.

  And turn ’em loose.

  Look out, world.

  That was what Sam Gregg did with his money.

  They didn’t actually execute him, the good people of Earth. There was not even a formal trial. They just confiscated what was left of his money and put him away in a Nice Place with the other crazies.

  It would be pleasant to report that Sam died happy and that his dust was peaceful in its urn. In fact, Sam was sorry to go and he was even a little bitter.

  If he could have known somehow, he might—or might not—have been more pleased.

  Millions of lonely miles from the dead earth, she floated there in the great nothing. Beneath the shimmering pods that would last for thousands of years, a part of her was cool rather than cold, softer than the naked rocks, flushed with green.

  Saturn hovered near the horizon, white and frozen and moonlike.

  The ancient lifeways acted out their tiny dramas, strange under an alien sky. They had changed little, most of them.

  There was one exception.

  It might have been the radiation.

  Then again, the raccoon had always been a clever animal. He had adroit hands, and he could use them. He had alert eyes, a quick intelligence. He could learn things, and on occasion he could pass on what he knew.

  Within ten generations, he had fashioned a crude chopping tool out of flaked stone.

  Within twenty, he had built a fire.

  That beat man’s record by a considerable margin, and the point was not lost on those who watched.

  A short time later, the dog showed up, out in the shadows cast by the firelight. He whined. He thumped his shaggy tail. He oozed friendship.

  The raccoons ignored him for a few nights. They huddled together, dimly proud of what they had done. They thought it over.

  Eventually, one of the raccoons threw him a bloody bone, and the dog came in.

  Don’t like the ending?

  A trifle stark?

  Is there no way we can communicate with them from out of the past? Can’t we say something, a few words, now that we are finished?

  Ah, man. Ever the wishful thinker.

  Still talking.

  Sam had tried. He was human; he made the gesture.

  There was a small plaque still
visible on the outside of the silent ship that had brought them here. It was traditional in spaceflights, but Sam had done it anyhow.

  It could not be read, of course.

  It could not be deciphered, ever.

  But it was there.

  It said the only words that had seemed appropriate to Sam:

  Good luck, old friends.

  Afterword

  I won’t write an editorial. I have already cheerfully sinned: there is a message in my story. If you didn’t receive it, look out your window. Or pry open the lid on your coffin.

  What triggers a story? Harlan triggered this one. If he had not asked for it, I probably would not have written it, at least not now. So he is to blame.

  But why this particular story? I can’t explain, of course. No writer can. You might be interested in a few personal notes:

  It is early in September, 1969. I’ve just come back from a month in the mountains of Colorado. I consider myself a trout fisherman, dry flies only. (I don’t keep many of them; I return them to the streams. Cheers.) I walked a lot, through country that was almost deserted twenty years ago. I can testify that there are few streams so remote that someone has not tossed a beer can into them. Trailers are everywhere, a pox on the land. Kleenex hangs from the bushes, the final mark of man. Beaver dams are ripped apart for sport. Trees are slashed with initials. There are even, so help me, Development Schemes. Ain’t nature keen?

  When I was in Kenya a few years ago, I did a little demographic work with just one tribe. Back in 1850, the first explorer in the area (a missionary type named Krapf) estimated that there were about 70,000 Kamba. A bit later, in 1911, the British took a kind of a census. There were 230,000 Kamba. As of right now, the figure is pushing 900,000. This, mind you, is on the same land area. You should see it.

  I saw the pictures from Mars. You did too. It does not look one hell of a lot like Barsoom.