Slow Sculpture (35 page)

“I presumed it was because he had an obsession with germs.”

“It was because his normal body temperature was a hundred and seven.”

Wheeler touched one of his own hands with the other and said nothing.

When Karl felt that the wedge of silence was thick enough he asked lightly, “Well, boss, where do we go from here?”

Cleveland Wheeler turned away from the corpse and to Karl slowly, as if diverting his mind with an effort.

“What did you call me?”

“Figure of speech,” said Karl and smiled. “Actually, I’m working for the company—and that’s you. I’m under orders, which have been finally and completely discharged when I push that button—I have no others. So it really is up to you.”

Wheeler’s eyes fell again to the corpse. “You mean about him? This? What we should do?”

“That, yes. Whether to burn it up and forget it—or call in top management and an echelon of scientists. Or scare the living hell out of everyone on Earth by phoning the papers. Sure, that has to be decided, but I was thinking on a much wider spectrum than that.”

“Such as—”

Karl gestured toward the box with his head. “What was he doing here, anyway? What has he done? What was he trying to do?”

“You’d better go on,” said Wheeler; and for the very first time said something in a way that suggested diffidence. “You’ve had a while to think about all this. I—” and almost helplessly, he spread his hands.

“I can understand that,” Karl said gently. “Up to now I’ve been coming on like a hired lecturer and I know it. I’m not going to embarrass you with personalities except to say that you’ve absorbed all
this with less buckling of the knees than anyone in the world I could think of.”

“I’ll buckle when I have time for it. Just now I’m looking for a way to think this out.”

“Right. Well, there’s a simple technique you learn in elementary algebra. It has to do with the construction of graphs. You place a dot on the graph where known data put it. You get more data, you put down another dot and then a third. With just three dots—of course, the more the better, but it can be done with three—you can connect them and establish a curve. This curve has certain characteristics and it’s fair to extend the curve a little farther with the assumption that later data will bear you out.”

“Extrapolation.”

“Extrapolation. X-axis, the fortunes of our late boss. Y-axis, time. The curve is his fortunes—that is to say, his influence.”

“Pretty tall graph.”

“Over thirty years.”

“Still pretty tall.”

“All right,” said Karl. “Now, over the same thirty years, another curve: change in the environment.” He held up a hand. “I’m not going to read you a treatise on ecology. Let’s be more objective than that. Let’s just say changes. Okay: a measurable rise in the mean temperature because of CO
₂
and the greenhouse effect. Draw the curve. Incidence of heavy metals, mercury and lithium, in organic tissue. Draw a curve. Likewise chlorinated hydrocarbons, hypertrophy of algae due to phosphates, incidence of coronaries … All right, let’s superimpose all these curves on the same graph.”

“I see what you’re getting at. But you have to be careful with that kind of statistics game. Like, the increase of traffic fatalities coincides with the increased use of aluminum cans and plastic-tipped baby pins.”

“Right. I don’t think I’m falling into that trap. I just want to find reasonable answers to a couple of otherwise unreasonable situations. One is this: if the changes occurring in our planet are the result of mere carelessness—a more or less random thing, carelessness—then how come nobody is being careless in a way that
benefits the environment? Strike that. I promised, no ecology lessons. Rephrase: how come all these carelessnesses promote a change and not a preservation?

“Next question: What is the direction of the change? You’ve seen speculative writing about ‘terraforming’—altering other planets to make them habitable by humans. Suppose an effort were being made to change this planet to suit someone else? Suppose they wanted more water and were willing to melt the polar caps by the greenhouse effect? Increase the oxides of sulfur, eliminate certain marine forms from plankton to whales? Reduce the population by increases in lung cancer, emphysema, heart attacks and even war?”

Both men found themselves looking down at the sleeping face in the coffin. Karl said softly. “Look what he was into—petrochemicals, fossil fuels, food processing, advertising, all the things that made the changes or helped the changers—”

“You’re not blaming him for all of it.”

“Certainly not. He found willing helpers by the million.”

“You don’t think he was trying to change a whole planet just so he could be comfortable in it.”

“No, I don’t think so—and that’s the central point I have to make. I don’t know if there are any more around like him and Epstein, but I can suppose this: if the changes now going on keep on—and accelerate—then we can expect them.”

Wheeler said, “So what would you like to do? Mobilize the world against the invader?”

“Nothing like that. I think I’d slowly and quietly reverse the changes. If this planet is normally unsuitable to them, then I’d keep it so. I don’t think they’d have to be driven back. I think they just wouldn’t come.”

“Or they’d try some other way.”

“I don’t think so,” said Karl. “Because they tried this one. If they thought they could do it with fleets of spaceships and super-zap guns, they’d be doing it. No—this is their way and if it doesn’t work, they can try somewhere else.”

Wheeler began pulling thoughtfully at his lip. Karl said softly, “All it would take is someone who knew what he was doing, who
could command enough clout and who had the wit to make it pay. They might even arrange a man’s life—to get the kind of man they need.”

And before Wheeler could answer, Karl took up his scalpel.

“I want you to do something for me,” he said sharply in a new, commanding tone—actually Wheeler’s own. “I want you to do it because I’ve done it and I’ll be damned if I want to be the only man in the world who has.”

Leaning over the head of the casket, he made an incision along the hairline from temple to temple. Then, bracing his elbows against the edge of the box and steadying one hand with the other, he drew the scalpel straight down the center of the forehead and down on to the nose, splitting it exactly in two. Down he went through the upper lip and then the lower, around the point of the chin and under it to the throat. Then be stood up.

“Put your hands on his cheeks,” he ordered. Wheeler frowned briefly (how long had it been since anyone had spoken to him that way?), hesitated, then did as he was told.

“Now press your hands together and down.”

The incision widened slightly under the pressure, then abruptly the flesh gave and the entire skin of the face slipped off. The unexpected lack of resistance brought Wheeler’s hands to the bottom of the coffin and he found himself face to face, inches away, with the corpse.

Like the lungs and kidneys, the eyes—eye? —passed the median, very slightly reduced at the center. The pupil was oval, its long axis transverse. The skin was pale lavender with yellow vessels and in place of a nose was a thread-fringed hole. The mouth was circular, the teeth not quite radially placed; there was little chin.

Without moving, Wheeler closed his eyes, held them shut for one second, two, and then courageously opened them again. Karl whipped around the end of the coffin and got an arm around Wheeler’s chest. Wheeler leaned on it heavily for a moment, then stood up quickly and brushed the arm away.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did,” said Karl. “Would you want to be the only man in
the world who’d gone through that—with nobody to tell it to?”

And after all, Wheeler could laugh. When he had finished he said, “Push that button.”

“Hand me that cover.”

Most obediently Cleveland Wheeler brought the coffin lid and they placed it.

Karl pushed the button and they watched the coffin slide into the square of flame. Then they left.

Joe Trilling had a funny way of making a living. It was a good living, but of course he didn’t make anything like the bundle he could have made in the city. On the other hand, he lived in the mountains a half-mile away from a picturesque village, in clean air and piney-birchy woods along with lots of mountain laurel and he was his own boss. There wasn’t much competition for what he did.

What he did was to make simulacra of medical specimens, mostly for the armed forces, although he had plenty of orders from medical schools, film producers and an occasional individual, no questions asked. He could make a model of anything inside, affixed to or penetrating a body or any part of it. He could make models to be looked at, models to be felt, smelled and palpated. He could give you gangrene that stunk or dewy thyroids with real dew on them. He could make one-of-a-kind or he could set up a production line. Dr. Joe Trilling was, to put it briefly, the best there was at what he did.

“The clincher,” Karl told him (in much more relaxed circumstances than their previous ones; daytime now, with beer), “the real clincher was the face bit. God, Joe, that was a beautiful piece of work.”

“Just nuts and bolts. The beautiful part was your idea—his hands on it.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking back to that,” Joe said. “I don’t think you yourself realize how brilliant a stroke that was. It’s all very well to set up a show for the guy, but to make him put his hands as well as his eyes and brains on it—that was the stroke of genius. It’s like—well,
I can remember when I was a kid coming home from school and putting my hand on a fence rail and somebody had spat on it.” He displayed his hand, shook it. “All these years I can remember how that felt. All these years couldn’t wear it away, all those scrubbings couldn’t wash it away. It’s more than a cerebral or psychic thing, Karl—more than the memory of an episode. I think there’s a kind of memory mechanism in the cells themselves, especially on the hands, that can be invoked. What I’m getting to is that no matter how long he lives, Cleve Wheeler is going to feel that skin slip under his palms and that is going to bring him nose to nose with that face. No, you’re the genius, not me.”

“Na. You knew what you were doing. I didn’t.”

“Hell you didn’t.” Joe leaned far back in his lawn chaise—so far he could hold up his beer and look at the sun through it from the underside. Watching the receding bubbles defy perspective (because they swell as they rise), he murmured, “Karl?”

“Yuh.”

“Ever hear of Occam’s Razor?”

“Um. Long time back. Philosophical principle. Or logic or something. Let’s see. Given an effect and a choice of possible causes, the simplest cause is always the one most likely to be true. Is that it?”

“Not too close, but close enough,” said Joe Trilling lazily. “Hm. You’re the one who used to proclaim that logic is sufficient unto itself and need have nothing to do with truth.”

“I still proclaim it.”

“Okay. Now, you and I know that human greed and carelessness are quite enough all by themselves to wreck this planet. We didn’t think that was enough for the likes of Cleve Wheeler, who can really do something about it, so we constructed him a smog-breathing extra-terrestrial. I mean, he hadn’t done anything about saving the world for our reasons, so we gave him a whizzer of a reason of his own. Right out of our heads.”

“Dictated by all available factors. Yes. What are you getting at, Joe?”

“Oh—just that our complicated hoax is simple, really, in the sense that it brought everything down to a single cause. Occam’s
Razor slices things down to simplest causes. Single causes have a fair chance of being right.”

Karl put down his beer with a bump. “I never thought of that. I’ve been too busy to think of that.
Suppose we were right?
”

They looked at each other, shaken.

At last Karl said, “What do we look for now, Joe—space ships?”

I work for a stockbroker on the twenty-first floor. Things have not been good for stockbrokers recently, what with tight money and hysterical reaction to the news and all that. When business gets really bad for a brokerage it often doesn’t fail—it merges. This has something to do with the public image. The company I work for is going through the agony. For the lower echelons—me—that means detail you wouldn’t believe, with a reduced staff. In other words, night work. Last night I worked without looking up until my whole body was the shape of the chair and there was a blue haze around the edges of everything I could see. I finished a stack and peered at the row of stacks still to be done and tried to get up. It took three tries before my hips and knees would straighten enough to let me totter into the hall and down to the men’s room. It never occurred to me to close the office door and I guess the confusion, all the strange faces coming and going for the past few days, extending to the security man downstairs. However it happened, there was a dazed man in my office when I came back a moment later.

He was well dressed—I guess that, too, helped him pass the guards—in a brown sharkskin suit with funny lapels, what you might call up-to-the-minute camp. He wore an orange knitted tie the like of which you only see in a new boutique or an old movie. I’d say he was in his twenties—not yet twenty-five. And dazed.

When I walked in and stopped dead he gave me a lost look and said, “This is my office.”

I said the only thing I could think of. “Oh?”

He pivoted slowly all the way around, looking at the desk, the shelves, the files.

When he came around to face me again he said, “This isn’t my office.”

He had to be with the big five-name brokerage house that was gobbling up my company in its time of need. I asked him.

“No,” he said, “I work for
Fortune
.”

“Look,” I said, “you’re not only in the wrong office, you’re in the wrong building. Time-Life is on Sixth Avenue—been there since nineteen fifty-two.”

“Fifty-
two
—” He looked around the room again. “But I—but it’s—”

He sat down on the settle. I had the idea he’d have collapsed on the floor if the settle hadn’t been there. He asked me what day it was. I think I misunderstood.