Life Force, page 2
With sixteen billion mouths screaming for food, and even with use of desalinated sea water, demand was straining supply. The Five Powers began to build starships. By the time Andrew Reznor was fifty, a half billion of Earth's surplus population, most of them the cream of the crop, were in space, planting Earth wheat on distant planets and doing their best to make Reznor a god. Of that last he was having no part. He was, after all, just a working man who'd come up with a few new ideas.
Reznor, at fifty-two, took a vacation and traveled on a ship equipped with transdrive and the G.D. to one of the newly settled planets, there to see men and women working, happy, optimistic, ambitious, and breeding like midges. He saw, quickly, that the metallic resources of Earth would not stand the drain of building enough ships to meet the growing clamor, coming now from the backward peoples as well as the so-called not so backward ones. He used most of his not-too-inconsiderable fortune to build an industrial complex on a new world and thus began to drain the resources of that world while ships leaped spaceward from his new shipyards, went to Earth, and groaned back spaceward laden with humans and all their needed paraphernalia, their poodle dogs and pussycats, their children, their milk cows and the assurance that they alone owned the stars and their planets.
True, no intelligent species stood between man and his apparent destiny. There were bugs on the new planets, some of them rather evil bugs that took an instant liking to human blood—and thus had to be exterminated, not a difficult task for a race that had eliminated the screw worm fly, the disease vectors of all insect classes, and the cockroach—except for a few, perhaps, living deep in the dampness of the South American and African jungle preserves. Man had the power. The species had gone quickly through a period of development that saw man fly in a cranky, almost uncontrollable airplane one instant in time and walk on the moon in the next. Now, thanks to the Reznor miracles, humans had the ability to not only negate gravity but to use its force, and the ability, too, to bring two points in space in conjunction in a nanosecond.
Reznor Galactic Enterprises developed a method to deacidify oceans, purify planetary masses of atmosphere. Reznor, it was said, was the Michelangelo of twenty-first century science, the savior of mankind.
He had not, as a young man, set out to save mankind. He'd been interested only in following through on the tickling images of a couple of interesting ideas, and he, like most, had wanted to make a dollar or two. He was still an unassuming man, his natural friendliness not affected by his multi-trillion dollar empire on several planets, and he took every opportunity to state that he knew full well where credit was due for his achievements and his success. In Reznor's Top Secret file held by only two governmental agencies, was a personality profile drawn up by a highly respected psychiatrist in which the opinion was stated that Andrew Reznor represented the almost perfect product of the spiritual revival movement of the late 1900s. This movement was brought about, explained the learned psychiatrist, by a slightly insecure feeling in mankind due to the presence of thousands of nuclear warheads, intricate delivery systems, and Star Wars hardware floating around in the sky above them.
"All I am and all I have achieved," Reznor often said, in public and in private, "I owe to my God."
Once, on a public forum television show, that same learned psychiatrist had tried to belittle Reznor's faith in an old-fashioned, all-powerful God. "You credit your health to God, Dr. Reznor," the psychiatrist had said, "and yet you are alive and almost one hundred years old because of medical science. So is your faith in God or in medical science, for if faith in God alone could do it, how do you explain the early deaths of all those who have gone before us, even those with a strong faith in God?"
"Doctor," Reznor had said with a smile, "I settled all those questions over the coffee table when I was a freshman in college." He held up a hand to halt a quick reply from the psychiatrist. "I know what you're going to say. You're going to say, for I have read the paper you published on the subject, that the miracles that some of us believe in, miraculous healings for example, are explained by our new understanding of the body, and all its complicated systems, and the fact that we have the ability to cure ourselves by positive imaging. True. I agree. However, isn't it just possible, Doctor, that our Maker built this ability into us, and we're just now beginning to understand it? Doctor, if you can look me in the eye and tell me that you honestly believe that life is an accident brought about by the coincidental combination of various amino acids, carbon molecules and the like—if you can explain the termite, for example—he's a miraculous little creature that can digest totally indigestible cellulose only because he harbors another life form in his body, a little microbe that can break cellulose down into the sugar that the termite uses as his fuel—if you can explain how a few molecules got together in some primordial sea and said, 'Hey, fellows, let's combine our talents and make ourselves into a termite'—then I'll listen to you, and that's not even taking into account the amazing variety of life-forms on our Earth, nor the human brain."
Oddly enough, that profession that knew the inner workings of the human body best, the medical profession, showed statistically fewer believers in religion than any other. Among physical scientists, those who were coming nose to nose with the mysteries of the universe, there had been a new and often private questioning leading to an incontrovertible conclusion. It, meaning everything, could not have been an accident. There was a purpose. Man had purpose. Since exploration of a rather large volume of space had turned up nothing like man, no life other than plant life or insects, it seemed, in the opinion of many, that man's purpose was to take dominion of the universe, just as he'd been given dominion over the Earth and all that flew, crept, crawled, walked, ran, slithered, or swam. Since the universe was older than man, and since the definition of purpose indicated that it was something set up as an object or an end to be attained, who had originally set the purpose? Not early man, for he had had no conception of distant stars, of other worlds like the rather dangerous one on which he had had to fight to survive.
God lived. His book was on board every ship that left the Earth, beginning with the first exploration ships. A man who is venturing out into the big black had to have something, and that something, for the majority of space explorers, was faith in something greater than themselves. Generally it was not a militant faith, not a faith that spouted the type of religious jargon which alienated many. It was a quiet, sure, rather beautiful faith and it was strong enough to overcome the early tragedies when ships failed to return.
Still, in spite of his sincere faith, Andrew Reznor had not set out to save mankind. He thought it was rather neat that God had inspired him to invent gadgets that were rapidly relieving the intolerable overcrowding of Earth, and he was thankful for the opportunity to serve his fellow man. But deep in his heart—although, mind you, he obeyed the biblical injunction to love his fellows—he believed that love and like were two different things and that it was not necessarily a sin to think that, in general, mankind was a sorry lot. In short, the older he got the more sure Reznor was that most dogs were nicer than most people.
On Reznor's office wall, directly in front of his desk so that he could see it day after day, was a quotation from a poet who had died before the twentieth century began.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd.
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
No one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things.
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
One of Reznor's greatest sorrows was the knowledge that he belonged to a species that had been directly or inadvertently responsible for the elimination of thousands of species of animals. He didn't concern himself with amoebas, paramecia, mesozoa parasites (some species, such as the malaria parasite, deserved extermination), with flat worms, comb jellies, ribbon worms, spiny-headed worms, the Rotifera, Nematoda, Nematomorpha, Entoprocta, Annelida. He knew the Class Insecta was man's only possible rival for continued domination of the universe. He did question the wisdom of the almost total extermination of several species of mosquito not only on emotional grounds—God had created the mosquito, too, and who was to know whether the lowly mosquito had a purpose? He was not on firm scientific grounds when he wondered if the mosquito just might have had some part to play in the miracle of evolution, somehow contributing by his habit of biting warm-blooded animals, thus spreading blood and those more minute and mysterious things that make up a living cell from animal to animal, but he questioned it.
Generally, although he found certain species of Mollusca to be admirable, and edible, Reznor's favorite creatures fell into five classes, the conglomerate of classes that took in all fish; the Amphibia; Class Aves; Class Reptilia; and, of course, Class Mammalia. He admitted that he was not totally rational in preferring something that flew or had warm blood, hair, and mammary glands, but that was the way it was. He couldn't begin to name all three thousand, five hundred or so species of Mammalia, but he could thrill to an old documentary showing a cheetah in pursuit of prey, even while sorrowing for the terrified, defenseless, sweet-fleshed little antelope or wildebeast calf that was trying so desperately to live, to delay for a little longer its inevitable contribution to a food chain that had, long since, been totally disrupted by man.
When he had been twenty-one, Reznor had married a certain member of Class Mammalia, who, incidentally, was equipped with one sweet set of the glands that shared the class name, and she had given him five sons and two daughters, all of whom had gone into the family business in various capacities. Andrew Reznor, Jr. was now in titular control of all Reznor enterprises, and he was a chip off the old man's unquestioningly superior DNA block, running the complicated operations as if he were playing a noncompetitive game of chess.
Yes, God had been good to Reznor in the matter of children. Not a dud in the whole lucky seven, and the girls had chosen well, both marrying men who held responsible positions in the family business. With things running so smoothly, and with the assurance that the prolific Reznor clan would do its share of that odd and mysterious reproductive ceremony of the Mammalia, Reznor, at the age of one hundred and two, was, at last, free to devote himself to a project that had been forming in his mind since his early years. In those days he had witnessed—via television—the death of the last California condor in the wild, and the whooping crane, and on and on through species after species. He had begun even while in college, when money was definitely scarce, to contribute to organizations which defended wildlife. As his fortunes grew, he had become the owner of no less than eleven U.S. Senators and a bevy of Congressmen who liked Reznor money well enough to divert themselves from such important activities as giving away money created by producers to non-producers long enough to, among other things, establish the International Gene Bank. Here were stored the materials necessary to imitate God—but not equal, of course, for twenty-first century science had yet to create so much as a termite, or a blade of grass—by recreating from frozen sperm and eggs nearly all of the three thousand five hundred species of Mammalia, over eight thousand species of Aves, some six thousand Reptilia, over two thousand Amphibia, and a representative portion of the twenty thousand (plus or minus a few thousand) species of fishes.
"Great God-a-mighty, Dad," Andrew, Jr. had said. That was when the old man had revealed, now that the family firm was in good hands, that he intended to withdraw from day to day decisions and devote the remaining years of his life to a pet project he'd been thinking about for eighty years or so. "You're talking billions."
"I don't see you or your kids or your kids' kids going hungry," the old man had said.
"Actually," Andrew, Jr. had said, after thinking it over, "I think it's sorta neat. Maybe you can get your name legally changed to Noah Reznor."
Chapter Four
Tinker's Belle had a lovely trip home. Matt and Tedra had spent a lot of time studying the vision tapes taken by Belle's cameras, and Teddy was more sure than ever that there was only one name for their planet.
Belle growled down to the Earth on G.D. after more than two years away. When they landed near the Arbuckle complex, Teddy was dressed in a sweet little one-piece shift dress. Fashions during the past decade had done one of their periodic flip-flops, reaching back into the middle twentieth century for simplicity of line and designs that emphasized the feminine figure. Matt put on a fresh set of white company coveralls, decorated with the various brightly colored patches which symbolized his position and service. He was at the console, bringing Belle's systems down to shutoff in preparation for the usual all-over maintenance received by any ship just in from transing among the far stars. Belle's systems purred and whined and clicked and quieted.
"Matt," Teddy said, "the old man's out there."
"Who? Reznor?" Matt asked.
"Himself," Teddy said. "He's riding a goat."
"Naw," Matt said.
"Come see for yourself."
He stood beside her at one of Belle's ports and, sure enough, there was the old man sitting on the padded seat of a little hydrogen-powered vehicle used for handy transportation around the complex. It was called a goat because it could go just about anywhere on or off road. Reznor had one leg pulled up and crossed over the seat and looked quite at ease, his spectacular white hair blowing in a slight Oklahoma breeze.
They had each seen Andrew Reznor face to face only when they were hired. Matt had wondered, at the time, how a man as important as Reznor had time to personally interview all new employees. Although he hadn't actually asked the question, he'd gotten the impression that he was to take part in a special project under Reznor's personal supervision. In that he'd been right.
They had sent a signal ahead of them from Earth-zone space, using a company code that, it was said, could not be broken even by the Pax Five spy shops.
"Is he that interested in our planet?" Teddy asked.
"Who knows?" Matt said. "Let's go find out."
When the Belle's hatch opened, Reznor threw his leg down off the seat, dismounted, and walked spryly to meet the two returning space explorers, hand outthrust, taking Teddy's hand first and then Matt's, making small talk as he welcomed them home. Then he looked into Matt's eyes with his own startlingly clear, amber ones and said, "I want to know all about this planet of yours."
"Yes, sir," Matt said.
Reznor turned, motioned to a crew chief. "Have all this ship's data brought over to my office as quickly as possible." He smiled at Teddy. "You two have done well. Do you have any idea of how much your bonus is going to be if this planet is all you say it is?"
In fact, Matt had some idea. That had been one of the fun things they did, just one, on the way home, figuring the bonus about eleventeen different ways and making it come out bigger each time based on habitable land areas, land productivity, the potential usefulness of Beauty's vegetation, etc.
"Well, sir," Teddy said, "we'll leave that up to you."
"You people tired or anything?" Reznor asked.
"No, sir," Matt said.
"Hungry?"
"I could use some planetside food," Teddy said, "after two years of ship's rations."
"Grab a couple of those mules and follow me," Reznor said.
Reznor drove into an open bay, up a ramp, parked on a landing and waited while Matt and Teddy joined him, then he led them into a maze of corridors and emerged into a living complex where a dining room looked out on the little sea of grass that flowed down from the complex to Sheep Creek. The view included a little clump of American bison, a few pronghorns, a tall and stately giraffe, and a pair of cute little South African springboks. Two girls started putting food on the table the minute Reznor entered the room and soon the three of them were seated, Matt and Teddy side by side across the table from Reznor.
"I don't care if you talk with your mouth full," Reznor said. "Tell me about it."
"Sir," Teddy began, "I think I can best give you an idea by telling you what we'd like to name it. We want to call it Beauty."
Reznor's amber eyes seemed to look into far distances.
"We tried our best to find something wrong with it," Teddy said, "so that they wouldn't try to claim it for colonization, and we couldn't."
Matt spoke then, giving some facts and figures as he remembered them. Reznor forked a bite of sliced, barbecued pork and chewed thoughtfully. "That good, huh?" he asked, as Matt paused.
"A habitat for almost everything," Teddy said. "Jungles and deserts, forests and plains, mountains, lakes, streams, oceans."
"I wanta see it for myself," Reznor said. "How soon can you have your ship ready for a turnaround?"
Matt looked at Teddy. They'd been talking about spending some of their wages and bonus money in Rio de Janeiro, where there was a current revival of an old musical form that featured soft guitars, a catchy, running rhythm, and soft voices singing of love. Matt thought that Rio might be a very good place to do the pleasant groundwork leading to the first of what they had agreed would be three children.
