THE BICENTENNIAL MAN Read online

  Editors seem to ask me that question frequently. I think they have the idea that I have trouble telling lies, so that if I can’t work up prompt and cheerful enthusiasm, there’s something wrong with the story.

  Judy-Lynn certainly thought so, She handed it back with a few paragraphs of caustic commentary which boiled down to the fact that I had trapped myself into an involuted set of flashbacks. [I am frequently asked if I ever get rejections and the questioner is invariably flabbergasted when I say, “Certainly I do.” Here is an example. Not only was this story rejected once, but it was, as I go on to explain, rejected twice.]

  I passed it on to Ben Bova, the editor of Analog Science Fiction, and he rejected it that same day. It seemed to him, he said, that I was trying to pack too much background into a ten-thousand-word story. I had a novel there and he wanted me to write that novel.

  That disheartened me. There was absolutely no way in which I could get to work on a novel at that moment, so I just retired the story. [Incidentally, some people have the feeling that there is a great advantage in “knowing” editors, Both Judy-Lynn and Ben are among my very closest friends, but neither one hesitates a minute when it comes to rejecting my stories if they think that is the thing to do, Fortunately, such rejections don’t affect the friendship.]

  Meanwhile, however, Galaxy had gained a new editor, a very pleasant young man named James Baen, He called me and asked if I might possibly have a story for him and I said that the only thing I had on hand was a novelette called STRANGER IN PARADISE. However, I said, it had been rejected by Judy-Lynn and by Ben so I hesitated to send it to him.

  He said, quite properly, that every editor had the right to decide for himself, so I sent the manuscript over-and he liked it. It appeared in the May-June 1974 issue of Galaxy’s sister magazine, If, which has since, alas, ceased publication. (If it occurs to any Gentle Reader that this is an example of cause and effect, it isn’t.)

  Stranger in Paradise

  1.

  They were brothers. Not in the sense that they were both human beings, or that they were fellow children of a creche. Not at all! They were brothers in the actual biological sense of the word. They were kin, to use a term that had grown faintly archaic even centuries before, prior to the Catastrophe, when that tribal phenomenon, the family, still had some validity.

  How embarrassing it was! Over the years since childhood, Anthony had almost forgotten. There were times when he hadn't given it even the slightest thought for months at a time. But now, ever since he had been inextricably thrown together with William, he had found himself living through an agonizing time.

  It might not have been so bad if circumstances had made it obvious all along; if, as in the pre-Catastrophe days-- Anthony had at one time been a great reader of history-- they had shared the second name and in that way alone flaunted the relationship.

  Nowadays, of course, one adopted one's second name to suit oneself and changed it as often as desired. After all, the symbol chain was what really counted, and that was encoded and made yours from birth.

  William called himself Anti-Aut. That was what he insisted on with a kind of sober professionalism. His own business, surely, but what an advertisement of personal poor taste. Anthony had decided on Smith when he had turned thirteen and had never had the impulse to change it. It was simple, easily spelled, and quite distinctive, since he had never met anyone else who had chosen that name. It was once very common--among the pre-Cats--which explained its rareness now perhaps.

  But the difference in names meant nothing when the two were together. They looked alike.

  If they had been twins-- but then one of a pair of twin-fertilized ova was never allowed to come to term. It was just that physical similarity occasionally happened in the non-twin situation, especially when the relationship was on both sides. Anthony Smith was five years younger, but both had the beaky nose, the heavy eyelids, the just noticeable cleft in the chin-- that damned luck of the genetic draw. It was just asking for it when, out of some passion for monotony, parents repeated.

  At first, now that they were together, they drew that startled glance followed by an elaborate silence. Anthony tried to ignore the matter, but out of sheer perversity--or perversion--William was as likely as not to say. “We’re brothers...

  “Oh?” the other would say, hanging in there for just a moment as though he wanted to ask if they were full blood brothers. And then good manners would win the day and he would turn away as though it were a matter of no interest. That happened only rarely, of course. Most of the people in the Project knew--how could it be prevented? --and avoided the situation.

  Not that William was a bad fellow. Not at all. If he hadn’t been Anthony’s brother; or if they had been, but looked sufficiently different to be able to mask the fact, they would have gotten along famously.

  As it was--It didn't make it easier that they had played together as youngsters, and had shared the earlier stages of education in the same creche through some successful maneuvering on the part of Mother. Having borne two sons by the same father and having, in this fashion, reached her limit (for she had not fulfilled the stringent requirements for a third), she conceived the notion of being able to visit both at a single trip. She was a strange woman.

  William had left the creche first, naturally, since he was the elder. He had gone into science-genetic engineering. Anthony had heard that, while he was still in the creche, through a letter from his mother. He was old enough by then to speak firmly to the matron, and those letters stopped. But he always remembered the last one for the agony of shame it had brought him.

  Anthony had eventually entered science, too. He had shown talent in that direction and had been urged to. He remembered having had the wild--and prophetic, he now realized--fear he might meet his brother and he ended in telemetrics, which was as far removed from genetic engineering as one could imagine....Or so one would have thought.

  Then, through all the elaborate development of the Mercury Project, circumstance waited.

  The time came, as it happened, when the Project appeared to be facing a dead end; and a suggestion had been made which saved the situation, and at the same time dragged Anthony into the dilemma his parents had prepared for him. And the best and most sardonic part of the whole thing was that it was Anthony who, in all innocence, made the suggestion.

  2.

  William Anti-Aut knew of the Mercury Project, but only in the way he knew of the long-drawn-out Stellar Probe that had been on its way long before he was born and would still be on its way after his death; and the way he knew of the Martian colony and of the continuing attempts to establish similar colonies on the asteroids.

  Such things were on the distant periphery of his mind and of no real importance. No part of the space effort had ever swirled inward closer to the center of his interests, as far as he could remember, till the day when the printout included photographs of some of the men engaged in the Mercury Project.

  William's attention was caught first by the fact that one of them had been identified as Anthony Smith. He remembered the odd name his brother had chosen, and he remembered the Anthony. Surely there could not be two Anthony Smiths.

  He had then looked at the photograph itself and there was no mistaking the face. He looked in the mirror in a sudden whimsical gesture at checking the matter. No mistaking the face.

  He felt amused, but uneasily so, for he did not fail to recognize the potentiality for embarrassment. Full blood brothers, to use the disgusting phrase. But what was there to do about it? How correct the fact that neither his father nor his mother had imagination?

  He must have put the printout in his pocket, absently, when he was getting ready to leave for work, for he came across it at the lunch hour. He stared at it again. Anthony looked keen. It was quite a good reproduction-- the printouts were of enormously good quality these days.

  His lunch partner, Marco Whatever-his-name-was-that-week, said curiously, “What are you looking at, William?”
>
  On impulse, William passed him the printout and said, “That's my brother.” It was like grasping the nettle.

  Marco studied it, frowning, and said, “Who? The man standing next to you?”

  “No, the man who is me. I mean the man who looks like me. He's my brother.”

  There was a longer pause this time. Marco handed it back and said with a careful levelness to his voice, “Same-parents brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Father and mother both.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ridiculous!”

  “I suppose so.” William sighed. “Well, according to this, he's in telemetrics over in Texas and I'm doing work in autistics up here. So what difference does it make?”

  William did not keep it in his mind and later that day he threw the printout away. He did not want his current bedmate to come across it. She had a ribald sense of humor that William was finding increasingly wearying. He was rather glad she was not in the mood for a child. He himself had had one a few years back anyway. That little brunette, Laura or Linda, one or the other name, had collaborated.

  It was quite a time after that, at least a year, that the matter of Randall had come up. If William had given no further thought to his brother--and he hadn't--before that, he certainly had no time for it afterward.

  Randall was sixteen when William first received word of him. He had lived a life that was increasingly seclusive and the Kentucky creche in which he was being brought up decided to cancel him and of course it was only some eight or ten days before cancellation that it occurred to anyone to report him to the New York Institute for the Science of Man. (The Homological Institute was its common name.)

  William received the report along with reports of several others and there was nothing in the description of Randall that particularly attracted his notice. Still it was time for one of his tedious masstransport trips to the creches and there was one likely possibility in West Virginia. He went there-- and was disappointed into swearing for the fiftieth time that he would thereafter make these visits by TV image-- and then, having dragged himself there, thought he might as well take in the Kentucky creche before returning home.

  He expected nothing.

  Yet he hadn't studied Randall's gene pattern for more than ten minutes before he was calling the Institute for a computer calculation. Then he sat back and perspired slightly at the thought that only a last-minute impulse had brought him, and that without that impulse, Randall would have been quietly canceled in a week or less. To put it into the fine detail, a drug would have soaked painlessly through his skin and into his bloodstream and he would have sunk into a peaceful sleep that deepened gradually to death. The drug had a twenty-three-syllable official name, but William called it “nirvanamine,” as did everyone else.

  William said, “What is his full name, matron?”

  The creche matron said, “Randall Nowan, scholar.”

  “No one!” said William explosively.

  “Nowan.” The matron spelled it. “He chose it last year.”

  “And it meant nothing to you? It is pronounced No one! It didn't occur to you to report this young man last year?”

  “It didn't seem--” began the matron, flustered.

  William waved her to silence. What was the use? How was she to know? There was nothing in the gene pattern to give warning by any of the usual textbook criteria. It was a subtle combination that William and his staff had worked out over a period of twenty years through experiments on autistic children-- and a combination they had never actually seen in life.

  So close to canceling!

  Marco, who was the hardhead of the group, complained that the creches were too eager to abort before term and to cancel after term. He maintained that all gene patterns should be allowed to develop for purpose of initial screening and there should be no cancellation at all without consultation with a homologist.

  “There aren't enough homologists,” William said tranquilly.

  “We can at least run all gene patterns through the computer,” said Marco.

  “To save anything we can get for our use?”

  “For any homological use, here or elsewhere. We must study gene patterns in action if we're to understand ourselves properly, and it is the abnormal and monstrous patterns that give us most information. Our experiments on autism have taught us more about homology than the sum total existing on the day we began.”

  William, who still liked the roll of the phrase “the genetic physiology of man” rather than “homology,” shook his head. “Just the same, we've got to play it carefully. However useful we can claim our experiments to be, we live on bare social permission, reluctantly given. We're playing with lives.”

  “Useless lives. Fit for canceling.”

  “ A quick and pleasant canceling is one thing. Our experiments, usually long drawn out and sometimes unavoidably unpleasant, are another.”

  “We help them sometimes.”

  “ And we don't help them sometimes.”

  It was a pointless argument, really, for there was no way of settling it. What it amounted to was that too few interesting abnormalities were available for homologists and there was no way of urging mankind to encourage a greater production. The trauma of the Catastrophe would never vanish in a dozen ways, including that one.

  The hectic push toward space exploration could be traced back (and was, by some sociologists) to the knowledge of the fragility of the life skein on the planet, thanks to the Catastrophe.

  Well, never mind

  There had never been anything like Randall Nowan. Not for William. The slow onset of autism characteristic of that totally rare gene pattern meant that more was known about Randall than about any equivalent patient before him. They even caught some last faint glimmers of his way of thought in the laboratory before he closed off altogether and shrank finally within the wall of his skin--unconcerned, unreachable.

  Then they began the slow process whereby Randall, subjected for increasing lengths of time to artificial stimuli, yielded up the inner workings of his brain and gave clues thereby to the inner workings of all brains, those that were called normal as well as those like his own.

  So vastly great was the data they were gathering that William began to feel his dream of reversing autism was more than merely a dream. He felt a warm gladness at having chosen the name Anti-Aut.

  And it was at almost the height of the euphoria induced by the work on Randall that he received the call from Dallas and that the heavy pressure began-- now, of all times-- to abandon his work and take on a new problem.

  Looking back on it later, he could never work out just what it was that finally led him to agree to visit Dallas. In the end, of course, he could see how fortunate it was-- but what had persuaded him to do so? Could he, even at the start, have had a dim unrealized notion of what it might come to? Surely, impossible.

  Was it the unrealized memory of that printout, that photograph of his brother? Surely, impossible.

  But he let himself be argued into that visit and it was only when the micro-pile power unit changed the pitch of its soft hum and the agrav unit took over for the final descent that he remembered that photograph--or at least that it moved into the conscious part of his memory.

  Anthony worked at Dallas and, William remembered now, at the Mercury Project. That was what the caption had referred to. He swallowed, as the soft jar told him the journey was over. This would be uncomfortable.

  3.

  Anthony was waiting on the roof reception area to greet the incoming expert. Not he by himself, of course. He was part of a sizable delegation--the size itself a rather grim indication of the desperation to which they had been reduced--and he was among the lower echelons. That he was there at all was only because it was he who had made the original suggestion.

  He felt a slight, but continuing, uneasiness at the thought of that. He had put himself on the line. He had received considerable approval for it, but there had been the faint insistence al
ways that it was his suggestion; and if it turned out to be a fiasco, every one of them would move out of the line of fire and leave him at point-zero.

  There were occasions, later, when he brooded over the possibility that the dim memory of a brother in homology had suggested his thought. That might have been, but it didn't have to be. The suggestion was so sensibly inevitable, really, that surely he would have had the same thought if his brother had been something as innocuous as a fantasy writer, or if he had had no brother of his own.

  The problem was the inner planets--The Moon and Mars were colonized. The larger asteroids and the satellites of Jupiter had been reached, and plans were in progress for a manned voyage to Titan, Saturn's large satellite, by way of an accelerating whirl about Jupiter. Yet even with plans in action for sending men on a seven-year round trip to the outer Solar System, there was still no chance of a manned approach to the inner planets, for fear of the Sun.

  Venus itself was the less attractive of the two worlds within Earth's orbit. Mercury, on the other hand

  Anthony had not yet joined the team when Dmitri Large (he was quite short, actually) had given the talk that had moved the World Congress sufficiently to grant the appropriation that made the Mercury Project possible.

  Anthony had listened to the tapes, and had heard Dmitri's presentation. Tradition was firm to the effect that it had been extemporaneous, and perhaps it was, but it was perfectly constructed and it held within it, in essence, every guideline followed by the Mercury Project since.

  And the chief point made was that it would be wrong to wait until the technology had advanced to the point where a manned expedition through the rigors of Solar radiation could become feasible. Mercury was a unique environment that could teach much, and from Mercury's surface sustained observations could be made of the Sun that could not be made in any other way.

  --Provided a man substitute-- a robot, in short-- could be placed on the planet.