Lodge got up and paced up and down the room.
«I said attitude,» he declared, «and it is an attitude—a silly, crazy attitude. There is no reason for the guilt complex. But they coddle it as if it were a thing that kept them human, as if it might be the one last identity they retain with the outside world and the rest of mankind. They come to me and they talk about it—as if I could do something about it. As if I could throw up my hands and say, well, all right, then, let’s quit. As if I didn’t have a job to do.
«They say we’re taking a divine power into our hands, that life came to be by some sort of godly intervention, that it’s blasphemous and sacrilegious for mere man to try to duplicate that feat.
«And there’s an answer to that one—a logical answer, but they can’t see the logic, or won’t listen to it. Can Man do anything divine? If life is divine, then Man cannot create it in his laboratories no matter what he does, cannot put it on a mass production basis. If Man can create life out of his chemicals, out of his knowledge, if he can make one living cell by the virtue of his technique and his knowledge, then that will prove divine intervention was unnecessary to the genesis of life. And if we have that proof—if we know that a divine instrumentality is unnecessary for the creation of life, doesn’t that very proof and fact rob it of divinity?»
«They are seeking an escape,» said Forester, trying to calm him. «Some of them may believe what they say, but there are others of them who are merely afraid of the responsibility—the moral responsibility. They start to thinking how it would be to live with something like that the rest of their life. You had the same situation a thousand years ago when men discovered and developed atomic fission. They did it and they shuddered. They couldn’t sleep at night. They woke up screaming. They knew what they were doing—that they were unloosing terrible powers. And we know what we are doing…»
Lodge went back to his desk and sat down.
«Let me think about it, Kent,» he said. «You may be right. I don’t know. There are so many things that I don’t know.»
«I’ll be back,» said Forester.
He closed the door quietly when he left.
The Play was a never-ending soap opera, the Old Red Barn extended to unheard reaches of the ridiculous. It had a touch of Oz and a dash of alienness and it went on and on and on.
When you put a group of people on an asteroid, when you throw a space patrol around them, when you lead them to their laboratories and point out the problem to be solved, when you keep them at that problem day after endless day, you must likewise do something to preserve their sanity.
To do this there may be books and music, films, games, dancing of an evening—all the old standby entertainment values the race has used for millennia to forget its troubles.
But there comes a time when these amusements fail to serve their purpose, when they are not enough.
Then you hunt for something new and novel—and basic—for something in which each of the isolated group may participate, something with which they can establish close personal identity and lose themselves, forgetting for a time who they are and what may be their purpose.
That’s where the Play came in.
In olden days, many years before, in the cottages of Europe and the pioneer farmsteads of North America, a father would provide an evening’s entertainment for his children by the means of shadow pictures. He would place a lamp or candle on a table opposite a blank wall, and sitting between the lamp and wall, he would use his hands to form the shadows of rabbit and of elephant, of horse and man and bear and many other things. For an hour or more the shadow show would parade across the wall, first one and then another—the rabbit nibbling clover, the elephant waving trunk and ears, the wolf howling on a hilltop. The children would sit quiet and spellbound, for these were wondrous things.
Later, with the advent of movies and of television, of the comic book and the cheap plastic dime-store toy, the shadows were no longer wondrous and were shown no longer, but that is not the point.
Take the principle of the shadow pictures, add a thousand years of know-how, and you have the Play.
Whether the long-forgotten genius who first conceived the Play had ever known of the shadow pictures is something that’s not known. But the principle was there, although the approach was different in that one used his mind and thought instead of just his hands.
And instead of rabbits and elephants appearing in one-dimensional black-and-white, in the Play the characters were as varied as the human mind might make them (since the brain is more facile than the hand) and three-dimensional in full color.
The screen was a triumph in electronic engineering, with its memory banks, its rows of sonic tubes, its color selectors, ESP antennae and other gadgets, but it was the minds of the audience that did the work, supplying the raw material for the Play upon the screen. It was the audience that conceived the characters, that led them through their actions, that supplied the lines they spoke. It was the combined will of the audience that supplied the backdrops and dreamed up the properties.
At first the Play had been a haphazard thing, with the characters only half developed, playing at cross purposes, without personalities and little more than cartoons paraded on the stage. At first the backdrops and the properties were the crazy products of many minds flying off at tangents. At times no less than three moons would be in the sky simultaneously, all in different phases. At times snow would be falling at one end of the stage and bright sunlight would pour down on palm trees at the other end.
But in time the Play developed. The characters grew to full stature, without missing arms and legs; acquired personalities; rounded out into full-blown living beings. The background became the result of a combined effort to achieve effective setting rather than nine different people trying desperately to fill in the blank spots.
In time direction and purpose had been achieved, so that the action flowed smoothly, although there never came a time when any of the nine were sure of what would happen next.
That was the fascination of it. New situations were continually being introduced by one character or another, with the result that the human creators of the other characters were faced with the need of new lines and action to meet the changing situations.
It became in a sense a contest of wills, with each participant seeking advantages for his character, or, on the other hand, forced to backtrack to escape disaster. It became, after a time, a never-ending chess game in which each player pitted himself or herself against the other eight.
And no one knew, of course, to whom any of the characters belonged. Out of this grew up a lively guessing game and many jokes and sallies, and this was to the good, for that was what the Play was for—to lift the minds of the participants out of their daily work and worries.
Each evening after dinner the nine gathered in the theater and the screen sprang into life, and the nine characters performed their parts and spoke their lines—the Defenseless Orphan, the Mustached Villain, the Proper Young Man, the Beautiful Bitch, the Alien Monster and all the others.
Nine of them—nine men and women, and nine characters.
But now there would be only eight, for Henry Griffith had died, slumped against his bench with the notebook at his elbow.