“Well, you should,” said Sheila.
“Sheila, my dear, Sheila, my sweet,” Evgeny said lightly, “the reason descendants are forgetful is that ancestors aren’t touchy. Take me for example—the first person ever born on Mars. Who knows about that?” He took her in his arms and started to kiss her. There was a knock at the door and Evgeny said with annoyance, “Wouldn’t you know it!”
“Come in!” called Sheila.
The door opened a bit, and the voice of their neighbor Yurii the waste-disposal engineer asked, “Am I interrupting something?”
“Come in, Yurii, come on in,” said Sheila.
“Well, if I’m interrupting, I’ve already interrupted,” Yurii said, and came in. “Let’s go into the garden,” he requested.
“What is there new to see in the garden?” asked Evgeny, surprised. “Let’s watch stereovision instead.”
“I have a stereovision set of my own at home,” said Yurii. “Come on, Evgeny, tell Sheila and me something about Louis Pasteur.”
“Which disposal station do you work at?” Evgeny asked in turn.
“Disposal station? What’s that?”
“Just a disposal station. They bring all sorts of garbage, slop, and process it, and dump it. Into the sewer.”
“Ah!” the waste-disposal engineer cried happily. “I’ve just remembered. Disposal towers. But there haven’t been any disposal towers on the Planet for a long time, Evgeny!”
“Well, I was born a full century and a half after Pasteur,” said Evgeny.
“All right, then tell us about Doctor Morganau.”
“Doctor Morganau, as I understand it, was born a year after the takeoff of the Taimyr,” Evgeny replied tiredly.
“In short, let’s go into the garden,” said Yurii. “Sheila, bring him.”
They went out into the garden and sat on a bench under an apple tree. It was quite dark, and the trees in the garden looked black. Sheila shivered a bit from the chill, and Evgeny dashed back into the house for her jacket. For some time everyone was silent. Then a large apple broke off a branch and hit the ground with a muffled thunk.
“Apples still fall,” said Evgeny. “But somehow I don’t see any Newtons.”
“Polymaths, you mean?” Sheila asked seriously.
“Yes,” said Evgeny, who had only wanted to make a joke.
“In the first place, today we’re all polymaths,” Yurii said with unexpected warmth. “From your antediluvian perspective, of course. Because there is no biologist who does not know mathematics and physics, and a linguist like Sheila, for example, would be in real trouble without psychophysics and the theory of historical procession. But I know what you mean! There are, you say, no Newtons! Show me, you say, an encyclopedic mind! Everyone works in a narrow field, you say. When it comes down to the wire, Sheila is still only a linguist, and I’m still only a waste-disposal specialist, and Okada is still only an oceanographer. Why not, you say, all of them at once, in one person?”
“Help!” shouted Evgeny. “I didn’t want to upset anybody. I was just joking.”
“Well, do you know, Evgeny, about what we call the ‘narrow problem’? You chew it over all your life and there’s still no end in sight. It’s a tangle of the most unexpected complications. Take that same apple, for instance. Why was it that that apple in particular fell? Why at that particular moment? The mechanics of the contact of the apple with the ground. The process of the transference of momentum. The conditions of the fall. A quantum-mechanical picture of the fall. Finally, how, given the existence of the fall, to get some use out of it?”
“The last part is simple,” Evgeny said soothingly. He bent over, groped on the ground, and picked up the apple. “I’ll eat it.”
“It’s still unclear whether that would be the optimum utilization,” Yurii said irritably.
“Then I’ll eat it,” said Sheila, grabbing the apple away from Evgeny.
“And anyhow, about use,” Evgeny said. “You, Yurii, like to talk about optimum use all the time. Meanwhile, unimaginably complicated litter robots, gardener robots, moth-and-caterpillar-eating robots, and ham-and-cheese-sandwich-making robots are running all over the place. That’s crazy. It’s even worse than killing flies with a sledge hammer, as we said in my day. It’s building single-occupant studio apartments for ants. It’s sybaritism of the first water.”
“Evgeny!” protested Sheila.
Yurii laughed gaily. “It’s not sybaritism at all,” he said. “Quite the opposite. It’s the liberation of thought, it’s comfort, it’s economy. After all, who wants to pick up trash? And even if you did find some such garbage fancier, he’d still work more slowly and less thoroughly than the cybers. And then these robots are by no means as difficult to produce as you think. It’s true that they were a bit hard to invent. They were difficult to perfect. But as soon as they had reached mass production, they were much less trouble to make than… uh… what did they call shoes in your day? Buskins?”
“Shoes,” Evgeny said briefly.
“And the main thing is that nowadays no one makes single-purpose machines. So you’re quite wrong to distinguish between litter robots and gardener robots in the first place. They’re the same gadget.”
“Well, pardon me,” said Evgeny, “but I’ve seen them. Litter robots have these scoop things, and vacuum cleaners. And gardener robots—”
“It’s just a question of changing their manipulator attachments. And even that isn’t the point. The point is that all these robots, and all sorts of everyday machines and appliances in general, are magnificent ozonizers. They eat garbage, dry twigs and leaves, the grease from dirty dishes, and all that stuff serves them as fuel. You’ve got to understand, Evgeny, these aren’t the crude mechanisms of your time. In essence, they’re quasi-organisms. And in the process of their quasi-life they also ozonize and vitaminize the air, and saturate it with light ions. These are good little soldiers in the enormous, glorious army of waste disposal.”
“I surrender,” said Evgeny.
“Modern waste disposal, Evgeny, isn’t disposal towers. We don’t simply annihilate garbage, and we don’t pile up disgusting dumps on the seabed. We turn garbage into fresh air and sunlight.”
“I surrender, I surrender,” said Evgeny. “Long live waste-disposal specialists! Convert me into sunlight.”
Yurii stretched with pleasure. “It’s nice to meet someone who doesn’t know anything. The best recreation of all is to blab on about things everybody knows.”
“Well, I’m sick of being the man people recreate on,” said Evgeny.
Sheila took his hand, and he fell silent.
The thin squeal of a radiophone sounded.
“It’s mine,” Yurii whispered, and then said, “Hello.”
“Where are you?” inquired an angry voice.
“In the garden with Slavin and Sheila. I’m sitting and recreating.”
“Have you thought of anything?”
“No.”
“What a guy! He’s sitting and recreating! I’m going out of my mind, and he’s recreating! Comrade Slavin, Sheila, throw him out!”
“I’m going, I’m going, you don’t have to shout!” said Yurii, getting up.
“Get right to a screen. And listen to this: now I’m completely sure that the benzene processes are not the answer.”
“What did I tell you!” shouted Yurii, and with much crackling he crawled through the bushes toward his own cottage.
Sheila and Evgeny went back inside.
“Shall we go have supper?” Evgeny asked.
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s how it always is! You fill up on apples and then you’re not hungry.”