And the Play would have to go on with one missing character—the character that had been controlled and motivated by the man who now was dead.
Lodge wondered which character would be the missing one. Not the Defenseless Orphan, certainly, for that would not have been down Henry’s alley. But it might be the Proper Young Man or the Out-At-Elbows Philosopher or the Rustic Slicker.
Wait a minute there, said Lodge. Not the Rustic Slicker. The Rustic Slicker’s me.
He sat idly speculating on which belonged to whom. It would be exactly like Sue Lawrence to dream up the Beautiful Bitch—a character as little like her prim, practical self as one could well imagine. He remembered that he had taunted her once concerning his suspicion and that she had been very cold to him for several days thereafter.
Forester said the Play must go on, and maybe he was right. They might adjust. God knows, they should be able to adjust to anything after participating in the Play each evening for months on end.
It was a zany thing, all right. Never getting anywhere. Not even episodic, for it never had a chance to become episodic. Let one trend develop and some joker was sure to throw in a stumbling block that upset the trend and sent the action angling off in some new direction.
With that kind of goings-on, he thought, the disappearance of a single character shouldn’t throw them off their stride.
He got up from his desk and walked to the great picture window.
He stood there looking out at the bleak loneliness of the asteroid.
The curbed roofs of the research center fell away beneath him, shining in the starlight, to the blackness of the cragged surface. Above the jagged northern horizon lay a flush of light and in a little while it would be dawn, with the weak, watch-sized sun sailing upward to shed its feeble light upon this tiny speck of rock. He watched the flushed horizon, remembering Earth, where dawn was morning and sunset marked the beginning of the night. Here no such scheme was possible, for the days and nights were so erratic and so short that they could not be used to divide one’s time. Here morning came at a certain hour, evening came at another hour, regardless of the sun, and one might sleep out a night with the sun high in the sky.
It would have been different, he thought, if we could have stayed on Earth, for there we would have had normal human contacts. We would not have thought so much, or brooded; we could have rubbed away the guilt on the hides of other people.
But normal human contacts would have meant the start of rumors, would have encouraged leaks, and in a thing of this sort there could be no leaks.
For if the people of the Earth knew what they were doing, or, more correctly, what they were trying to do, they would raise a hubbub that might result in calling off the project.
Even here, he thought—even here, there are those who have their doubts and fears.
A human being must walk upon two legs and have two arms and a pair of eyes, a brace of ears, one nose, one mouth, be not unduly hairy. He must walk; he must not hop or crawl or slither.
A perversion of the human form, they said; a scrapping of human dignity; a going-too-far, farther than Man in all his arrogance was ever meant to go.
There was a rap upon the door.
Lodge turned and called: «Come in.»
It was Dr. Susan Lawrence.
She stood in the open doorway, a stolid, dumpy, dowdy woman with an angular face that had a set of stubbornness and of purpose in it. She did not see him for a moment and stood there, turning her head, trying to find him in the dusky room.
«Over here, Sue,» he called.
She closed the door and crossed the room, and stood by his side looking out the window.
Finally she said, «There was nothing wrong with him, Bayard. Nothing organically wrong. I wonder…»
She stood there, silent, and Lodge could feel the practical bleakness of her thoughts.
«It’s bad enough,» she said, «when they die and you know what killed them. It’s not so bad to lose them if you’ve had a fighting chance to save them. But this is different. He just toppled over. He was dead before he hit the bench.»
«You’ve examined him?»
She nodded. «I put him in the analyzers. I’ve got three reels of stuff. I’ll check it all—later. But I’ll swear there was nothing wrong.»
She reached out a hand and put it on his arm, her pudgy fingers tightening.
«He didn’t want to live,» she said. «He was afraid to live. He thought he was close to finding something and he was afraid to find it.»
«We have to find it, Sue.»
«For what?» she asked. «So we can fashion humans to live on planets where humans in their present form wouldn’t have a chance. So we can take a human mind and spirit and enclose it in a monster’s body, hating itself…»
«It wouldn’t hate itself,» Lodge told her. «You’re thinking in anthropomorphic terms. A thing is never ugly to itself because it knows itself. Have we any proof that bipedal man is any happier than an insect or a toad?»
«But why?» she persisted. «We do not need those planets. We have more now than we can colonize. Enough Earth-type planets to last for centuries. We’ll be lucky if we even colonize them all, let alone develop them, in the next five hundred years.»
«We can’t take the chance,» he said. «We must take control while we have the chance. It was all right when we were safe and snug on Earth, but that is true no longer. We’ve gone out to the stars. Somewhere in the universe there are other intelligences. There have to be. Eventually we’ll meet. We must be in a strong position.»
«And to get into that strong position we plant colonies of human monsters. I know, Bayard—it’s clever. We can design the bodies, the flesh and nerves and muscles, the organs of communication—all designed to exist upon a planet where a normal human being could not live a minute. We are clever, all right, and very good technicians, but we can’t breathe the life into them. There’s more to life than just the colloidal combination of certain elements. There’s something else, and we’ll never get it.»
«We will try,» said Lodge.
«You’ll drive good technicians out of their sanity,» she said. «You’ll kill some of them—not with your hands, but with your insistence. You’ll keep them cooped up for years and you’ll give them a Play so they’ll last the longer—but you won’t find life, for life is not Man’s secret.»
«Want to bet?» he asked, laughing at her fury.
She swung around and faced him.
«There are times,» she said, «when I regret my oath. A little cyanide…»
He caught her by the arm and walked her to the desk.
«Let’s have a drink,» he said. «You can kill me later.»
They dressed for dinner.
That was a rule.
They always dressed for dinner.
It was, like the Play, one of the many little habits that they cultivated to retain their sanity, to not forget that they were a cultured people as well as ruthless seekers after knowledge—a knowledge that any one of them would have happily forsworn.
They laid aside their scalpels and their other tools, they boxed their microscopes, they ranged the culture bottles neatly in place, they put the pans of saline solutions and their varying contents carefully away. They took their aprons off and went out and shut the door. And for a few hours they forgot, or tried to forget, who they were and what their labors were.
They dressed for dinner and assembled in the so-called drawing room for cocktails and then went in to dinner, pretending that they were no more than normal human beings—and no less.
The table was set with exquisite china and fragile glass, and there were flowers and flaming tapers. They began with an entrée and their meal was served in courses by accomplished robots and they ended with cheese and fruit and brandy and there were cigars for those who wanted them.