This Crowded Earth by Robert Bloch
12. Littlejohn--2065
The helicopter landed on the roof, and the attendants wheeled it overto one side. They propped the ladder up, and Littlejohn descendedslowly, panting.
They had a coasterchair waiting and he sank into it, grateful for therest. Hardy fellows, these attendants, but then they were almost threefeet tall. More stamina, that was the secret. Common stock, of course,but they served a purpose. Somebody had to carry out orders.
When they wheeled the coasterchair into the elevator, Littlejohndescended. The elevator halted on the first floor and he breathed asigh of relief. Great heights always made him faint and dizzy, andeven a short helicopter trip took its toll--the mere thought ofsoaring two hundred feet above the ground was enough to paralyze him.
But this journey was vital. Thurmon was waiting for him.
Yes, Thurmon was waiting for him here in the council chamber. Thecoasterchair rolled forward into the room and again Littlejohn felt atwinge of apprehension. The room was vast--too big for comfort. Itmust be all of fifty feet long, and over ten feet in height. How couldThurmon stand it, working here?
But he had to endure it, Littlejohn reminded himself. He was head ofthe council.
Thurmon was lying on the couch when Littlejohn rolled in, but he satup and smiled.
"I greet you," he said.
"I greet you," Littlejohn answered. "No, don't bother to stay seated.Surely we don't need to be ceremonious."
Thurmon pricked up his ears at the sound of the unfamiliar word. Hewasn't the scholarly type, like Littlejohn. But he appreciatedLittlejohn's learning and knew he was important to the council. Theyneeded scholars these days, and antiquarians too. One has to look tothe past when rebuilding a world.
"You sent for me?" Littlejohn asked. The question was purelyrhetorical, but he wanted to break the silence. Thurmon lookedtroubled as he replied.
"Yes. It is a matter of confidence between us."
"So be it. You may speak in trust."
Thurmon eyed the door. "Come nearer," he said.
Littlejohn pressed a lever and rolled up to the couchside. Thurmon'seyes peered at him through the thick contact lenses. Littlejohn notedthe deep wrinkles around his mouth, but without surprise. After all,Thurmon was an old man--he must be over thirty.
"I have been thinking," Thurmon said, abruptly. "We have failed."
"Failed?"
Thurmon nodded. "Need I explain? You have been close to the councilfor many years. You have seen what we've attempted, ever since theclose of the Naturalist wars."
"A magnificent effort," Littlejohn answered politely. "In less thanthirty years an entire new world has risen from the ruins of the old.Civilization has been restored, snatched from the very brink of abarbarism that threatened to engulf us."
"Nonsense," Thurmon murmured.
"What?"
"Sheer nonsense, Littlejohn. You're talking like a pedant."
"But I _am_ a pedant." Littlejohn nodded. "And it's true. When theNaturalists were exterminated, this nation and other nations wereliterally destroyed. Worse than physical destruction was the threat ofmental and moral collapse. But the Yardstick councils arose to takeover. The concept of small government came into being and saved us. Webegan to rebuild on a sensible scale, with local, limited control. Thelittle community arose--"
"Spare me the history lesson," said Thurmon, dryly. "We rebuilt, yes.We survived. In a sense, perhaps, we even made certain advances. Thereis no longer any economic rivalry, no social distinctions, no externalpressure. I think I can safely assume that the danger of futurewarfare is forever banished. The balance of power is no longer afactor. The balance of Nature has been partially restored. And onlyone problem remains to plague mankind."
"What is that?"
"We face extinction," Thurmon said.
"But that's not true," Littlejohn interrupted. "Look at history and--"
"Look at us." Thurmon sighed. "You needn't bother with history. Theanswer is written in our faces, in our own bodies. I've searched thepast very little, compared to your scholarship, but enough to knowthat things were different in the old days. The Naturalists, whateverelse they might have been, were strong men. They walked freely in theland, they lived lustily and long.
"Do you know what our average life-expectancy is today, Littlejohn? Ashade under forty years. And that only if one is fortunate enough tolead a sheltered existence, as we do. In the mines, in the fields, inthe radioactive areas, they die before the age of thirty."
Littlejohn leaned forward. "Schuyler touches on just that point in his_Psychology of Time_," he said, eagerly. "He posits the relationshipbetween size and duration. Time is relative, you know. Our lives,short as they may be in terms of comparative chronology, neverthelesshave a subjective span equal to that of the Naturalists in theirheyday."
"Nonsense," Thurman said, again. "Did you think that is what concernsme--whether or not we feel that our lives are long or short?"
"What then?"
"I'm talking about the basic elements essential to survival. I'mtalking about strength, stamina, endurance, the ability to function.That's what we're losing, along with the normal span of years. Theworld is soft and flabby. Yardstick children, they tell us, werehealthy at first. But _their_ children are weaker. And theirgrandchildren, weaker still. The effect of the wars, the ravages ofradiation and malnutrition, have taken a terrible toll. The world issoft and flabby today. People can't walk any more, let alone run. Wefind it difficult to lift and bend and work--"
"But we won't have to worry about such matters for long," Littlejohnhazarded. "Think of what's being done in robotics. Those recentexperiments seem to prove--"
"I know." Thurmon nodded. "We can create robots, no doubt. We have alimited amount of raw materials to allocate to the project, and if wecan perfect automatons they'll function quite adequately. Virtuallyindestructible, too, I understand. I imagine they'll still be able tooperate efficiently a hundred or more years from now--if only theylearn to oil and repair one another. Because by that time, the humanrace will be gone."
"Come now, it isn't that serious--"
"Oh, but it is!" Thurmon raised himself again, with an effort. "Yourstudy of history should have taught you one thing, if nothing else.The tempo is quickening. While it took mankind thousands of years tomove from the bow and arrow to the rifle, it took only a few hundredto move from the rifle to the thermonuclear weapon. It took agesbefore men mastered flight, and then in two generations they developedsatellites; in three, they reached the moon and Mars."
"But we're talking about _physical_ development."
"I know. And physically, the human race altered just as drastically inan equally short span of time. As recently as the nineteenth century,the incidence of disease was a thousandfold greater than it is now.Life was short then. In the twentieth century disease lessened andlife-expectancy doubled, in certain areas. Height and weight increasedperceptibly with every passing decade. Then came Leffingwell and hisinjections. Height, weight, life-expectancy have fallen perceptiblyevery decade since then. The war merely hastened the process."
"You appear to have devoted a great deal of time to this question,"Littlejohn observed.
"I have," answered the older man. "And it is not a question. It is afact. The one fact that confronts us all. If we proceed along ourpresent path, we face certain extinction in a very short time. Thestrain is weakening constantly, the vitality is draining away. Wesought to defeat Nature--but the Naturalists were right, in theirway."
"And the solution?"
Thurmon was silent for a long moment. Then, "I have none," he said.
"You have consulted the medical authorities?"
"Naturally. And experiments have been made. Physical conditioning,systems of exercise, experimentation in chemotherapy are still beingundertaken. There's no lack of volunteers, but a great lack ofresults. No, the answer does not lie in that direction."
"But what else is there?"
"That is what I had hoped you might tell
Littlejohn was nodding, but not in agreement. He was trying tocomprehend. For suddenly the conviction came to him clearly; Thurmonwas right. It was happening, had happened, right under their smugnoses. The world was weakening. It was slowing down, and the race isonly to the swift.
He cursed himself for his habit of thinking in platitudes andquotations, but long years of study had unfitted him for less prosaicphraseology. If he could only be practical.
_Practical._
"Thurmon," he said. "There is a way. A way so obvious, we've alloverlooked it--passed right over it."
"And that is--?"
"Stop the Leffingwell injections!"
"But--"
"I know what you'll say. There have been genetic mutations. Very true,but such mutations can't be universal. A certain percentage ofoffspring will be sound, capable of attaining full growth. And wedon't have the population-problem to cope with any more. There's roomfor people again. So why not try it? Stop the injections and allowbabies to be born as they were before." Littlejohn hesitated beforeadding a final word, but he knew he had to add it; he knew it now."Normally," he said.
Thurmon nodded. "So that is your answer."
"Yes. I--I think it will work."
"So do the biologists," Thurmon told him. "A generation of normalinfants, reared to maturity, would restore mankind to its formerstature, in every sense of the word. And now, knowing the lessons ofthe past, we could prepare for the change to come. We could rebuildthe world for them to live in, rebuild it psychically as well asphysically. We'd plan to eliminate the rivalry between the large andthe small, the strong and the weak. It wouldn't be difficult becausethere's plenty for all. There'd be no trouble as there was in the olddays. We've learned to be psychologically flexible."
Littlejohn smiled. "Then that _is_ the solution?" he asked.
"Yes. Eliminating the Leffingwell injections will give us a goodproportion of normal children again. _But where do we find the normalwomen to bear them?_"
"Normal women?"
Thurmon sighed, then reached over and placed a scroll in the scanner."I have already gone into that question with research technicians," hesaid. "And I have the figures here." He switched on the scanner andbegan to read.
"The average nubile female, aged thirteen to twenty-one, is two feet,ten inches high and weighs forty-eight pounds." Thurmon flicked theswitch again and peered up. "I don't think I'll bother with pelvicmeasurements," he said. "You can already see that giving birth to asix or seven-pound infant is a physical impossibility under thecircumstances. It cannot be done."
"But surely there must be _some_ larger females! Perhaps a system ofselective breeding, on a gradual basis--"
"You're talking in terms of generations. We haven't got that muchtime." Thurmon shook his head. "No, we're stopped right here. We can'tget normal babies without normal women, and the only normal women arethose who began life as normal babies."
"Which comes first?" Littlejohn murmured. "The chicken or the egg?"
"What's that?"
"Nothing. Just an old saying. From history."
Thurmon frowned. "Apparently, then, that's all you can offer in yourprofessional capacity as an historian. Just some old sayings." Hesighed. "Too bad you don't know some old prayers. Because we need themnow."
He bowed his head, signifying the end of the interview.
Littlejohn rolled out of the room.
His 'copter took him back to his own dwelling, back across therooftops of New Chicagee. Ordinarily, Littlejohn avoided looking down.He dreaded heights, and the immensity of the city itself was somehowappalling. But now he gazed upon the capital and center ofcivilization with a certain morbid affection.
New Chicagee had risen on the ashes of the old, after the war's end.Use of thermo-nucs had been limited, fortunately, so radioactivity didnot linger, and the vast craters hollowed out by ordinary warheads hadbeen partially filled by rubble and debris. Artificial fill had donethe rest of the job, so that now New Chicagee was merely a flatprairie as it must have been hundreds of years ago--a flat prairie onwhich the city had been resurrected. There were almost fifty thousandpeople here in the capital; the largest congregation of population onthe entire continent. They had built well and surely this time, builtfor the security and certainty of centuries to come.
Littlejohn sighed. It was hard to accept the fact that they had beenwrong; that all this would end in nothingness. They had eliminatedwar, eliminated disease, eliminated famine, eliminated socialinequality, injustice, disorders external and internal--and in sodoing, they had eliminated themselves.
The sun was setting in the west, and long shadows crept over the citybelow. Yes, the sun was setting and the shadows were gathering, thenight was coming to claim its own. Darkness was falling, eternaldarkness.
It was quite dark by the time Littlejohn's 'copter landed on therooftop of his own dwelling; so dark, in fact, that for a moment hedidn't see the strange vehicle already standing there. Not until hehad settled into his coasterchair did he notice the presence of theother 'copter, and then it was too late. Too late to do anythingexcept sit and stare as the gigantic shadow loomed out of the night,silhouetted against the sky.
The shadow shambled forward, and Littlejohn gaped, gaped in terror atthe titanic figure. He opened his mouth to speak, but words did notform; there were no words to form, for how does one address anapparition?
Instead, it was the apparition which spoke.
"I have been waiting for you," it said.
"Y-yes--"
"I want to talk to you." The voice was deep, menacing.
Littlejohn shifted in his coasterchair. There was nowhere to go, noescape. He gazed up at the shadow. Finally he summoned a response."Shall we go inside?" he asked.
The figure shook its head. "Where? Down into that dollhouse of yours?It isn't big enough. I've already been there. What I have to say canbe said right here."
"W-who are you?"
The figure stepped forward, so that its face was illuminated by thefluorescence streaming from the open door which led to the inclinedchairway descending to Littlejohn's dwelling.
Littlejohn could see the face, now--the gigantic, wrinkled face,scarred and seared and seamed. It was a human face, but utterly aliento the humanity Littlejohn knew. Faces such as this one haddisappeared from the earth a lifetime ago. At least, history hadtaught him that. History had not prepared him for the actual livingpresence of a--
"Naturalist!" Littlejohn gasped. "You're a Naturalist! Yes, that'swhat you are!"
The apparition scowled.
"I am not a Naturalist. I am a man."
"But you can't be! The war--"
"I am very old. I lived through your war. I have lived through yourpeace. Soon I shall die. But before I do, there is something elsewhich must be done."
"You've come here to kill me?"
"Perhaps." The looming figure moved closer and stared down. "No, don'ttry to summon help. When your servants saw me, they fled. You're alonenow, Littlejohn."
"You know my name."
"Yes, I know your name. I know the names of everyone on the council.Each of them has a visitor tonight."
"Then it is a plot, a conspiracy?"
"We have planned this very carefully, through the long years. It's allwe lived for, those few of us who survived the war."
"But the council wasn't responsible for the war! Most of us weren'teven alive, then. Believe me, we weren't to blame--"
"I know." The gigantic face creased in senile simulation of a smile."Nobody was ever to blame for anything, nobody was ever responsible.That's what they always told me. I mustn't hate mankind formultiplying, even though population created pressure and pressurecreated panic that drove me mad. I mustn't blame Leffingwell forsolving the overpopulation problem, even though he used me as aguinea-pig in his experiments. I mustn't blame the Yardsticks forpenning me up in prison until revoluti
"Don't harm me--you're not well, you're--"
"Crazy?" The old man shook his head. "No, I'm not crazy. Not now. ButI _have_ been, at times, during my life. Perhaps we all are, when weattempt to face up to the complications of an average existence, tryto confront the problems which are too big for a single consciousnessto cope with in a single life-span. I've been crazy in the city, andcrazy in the isolation of a cell, and crazy in the welter of war. Andperhaps the worst time of all was when I lost my son.
"Yes, I had a son, Littlejohn. He was one of the first, one ofLeffingwell's original mutations, and I never knew him very well untilthe revolution came and we went away together. He was a doctor, myboy, and a good one. We spent almost five years together and I learneda lot from him. About medicine, but that wasn't important then. I'mthinking of what I learned about love. I'd always hated Yardsticks,but my son was one, and I came to love him. He had plans forrebuilding the world, he and I and the rest of us. We were going towait until the revolution ended and then help restore sanity incivilization.
"But the Naturalists flew over and dropped their bomb, and my boydied. Over four hundred of our group died there in the canyon--fourhundred who might have changed the fate of the world. Do you think Ican forget that? Do you think I and the few others who survived haveever forgotten? Can you blame us if we did go crazy? If we hid awayout there in the western wilderness, hid away from a world that hadoffered us nothing but death and destruction, and plotted to bringdeath and destruction to that world in return?
"Think about it for a moment, Littlejohn. We were old men, all of us,and the world had given us only its misery to bear during ourlifetimes. The world we wanted to save was destroying itself; whyshould we be concerned with its fate or future?
"So we changed our plans, Littlejohn. Perhaps the shock had been toomuch. Instead of plotting to rebuild the world, we turned our thoughtsto completing its destruction. Our tools and texts were gone, buriedin the rubble with the bodies of fine young men. But we had our minds.Crazed minds, you'd call them--but aware of reality. The grim realityof the post-revolutionary years.
"We burrowed away in the desert. We schemed and we dreamed. From timeto time we sent out spies. We knew what was going on. We knew theNaturalists were gone, that six-footers had vanished from a Yardstickworld. We knew about the rehabilitation projects. We watched yourpeople gradually evolve new patterns of living and learning. Some ofthe former knowledge was rescued, but not all. Our little group hadfar more learning than you've ever dreamed of. Fifty of us, betweenourselves, could have surpassed all your scientists in every field.
"But we watched, and we waited. And some of us died of privation andsome of us died of old age. Until, at last, there were only a dozen ofus to share the dream. The dream of destruction. And we knew that wemust act swiftly, or not at all.
"So we came into the world, cautiously and carefully, movingunobtrusively and unobserved. We wanted to contemplate the corruption,seek out the weaknesses in your degenerate civilization. And we foundthem, immediately. Those weaknesses are everywhere apparent, for theyare physical. You're one of a dying race, Littlejohn. Mankind's daysare numbered. There's no need for grandiose schemes of reactivatingwarheads in buried missile-centers, of loosing thermo-nucs upon theworld. Merely by killing off the central council here in New Chicagee,we can accomplish our objective. A dozen men die, and there's notenough initiative left to replace them. It's as simple as that. And ascomplicated."
Harry Collins nodded. "Yes, as complicated. Because the onlyweaknesses we've observed _are_ physical ones. We've seen enough ofthe ways of this new civilization to realize that.
"All of the things I hated during my lifetime have disappearednow--the crowding, the competition, the sordid self-interest, thebigotry, intolerance, prejudice. The anti-social aspects of societyare gone. There is only the human race, living much closer to theconcept of Utopia than I ever dreamed possible. You and the othersurvivors have done well, Littlejohn."
"And yet you come to kill us."
"We came for that purpose. Because _we_ still retained the flaws andfailings of our former cultures. We looked for targets to blame, forvillains to hate and destroy. Instead, we found this reality.
"No, I'm not crazy, Littlejohn. And I and my fellows aren't here toexecute revenge. We have returned to the original plan; the planLeffingwell had, and my son, and all the others who worked in theirown way for their dream of a better world. We come now to help you.Help you before you die--before we die."
Littlejohn looked up and sighed. "Why couldn't this have happenedbefore?" he murmured. "It's too late now."
"But it isn't too late. My friends are here. They are telling yourfellow council-members the same thing right now. We may be old, but wecan still impart what we have learned. There are any number oftechnological developments to be made. We can help you to increaseyour use of atomic power. There's soil reclamation and irrigationprojects and biological techniques--"
"You said it yourself," Littlejohn whispered. "We're a dying race.That's the primary problem. And it's an insoluble one. Just thisafternoon--" And he told him about the interview with Thurmon.
"Don't you understand?" Littlejohn concluded. "We have no solution forsurvival. We're paying the price now because for a while we wouldn'theed history. We tried to defeat Nature and in the end Nature hasdefeated us. Because we would not render unto Caesar the things whichare--"
Harry Collins smiled. "That's it," he said.
"What?"
"Caesar. That's the answer. Your own medical men must have records. Iknow, because I learned medicine from my son. There used to be anoperation, in the old days, called a caesarean section--used on normalwomen and on dwarfs and midgets too, in childbirth. If your problem ishow to deliver normal children safely, the technique can be revived.Get hold of some of your people. Let's see what data you have on this.I'll be glad to furnish instruction--"
There was excitement after that. Too much excitement for Littlejohn.By the time the council had assembled in emergency session, by thetime plans were formulated and he returned to his own dwelling in thehelicopter, he was completely exhausted. Only the edge of elationsustained him; the realization that a solution had been found.
As he sank into slumber he knew that he would sleep the clock around.
And so would Harry Collins. The old man and his companions, now guestsof the council, had been temporarily quartered in the council-chambers.It was the only structure large enough to house them and even so theyhad to sleep on the floor. But it was sufficient comfort for the moment.
It was many hours before Harry Collins awoke. His waking wasautomatic, for the tiny telescreen at the end of the council roomglowed suddenly, and the traditional voice chirped forth to interrupthis slumber.
"Good morning," said the voice. "It's a beautiful day in NewChicagee!"
Harry stared at the screen and then he smiled.
"Yes," he murmured. "But tomorrow will be better."
THE END
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