World in a Bottle by Allen Kim Lang (8 ebook reader txt) ๐
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- Author: Allen Kim Lang
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"One evening we drove down to the beach at Hudson Lake. As we lay there on the sand, I pointed out for Anne the red disk of Mars. I told her about the men up there, at New Caanan and Bing City and Bitterwater, working to uncover one world while they built a new one. I told her about the mystery of the Immermann skull, and what it might mean. I pointed to the stars and named them for her. All the time, Chief, I knew that I could touch Betelgeuse or Phobos as easily as I could touch Anne.
"Anyway, we went swimming together, just like we were in Technicolor and Vista Vision. I screwed the cap on my air-filter and breathed from the reserve tank. Anne wore a bikini. I might as well have been aboard a midget submarine. After that evening, we decided not to go swimming any more; and Anne started wearing strict and conservative clothes."
"What happened today, Johnny?" McQueen asked me.
"What could happen?" I demanded. "We broke up. She's contaminated, poor girl. She's been aswarm with bacteria and yeasts and molds and miscellaneous protista ever since the obstetrician slapped her on the rump, while I'm Boy Galahad, fifty-six one-hundredths percent purer than Ivory Soap. My strength is as the strength of ten, so I told Anne at noon today that she'll have to find herself a new boy friend. She needs a guy who can eat the other half of the pizza with her, someone who can lend her his comb and breathe the air she breathes. It took me weeks to steel my soul to the prospect of kissing Anne offโthere's an ironic metaphor for you, Chiefโbut I did it."
"I'm sorry, Johnny," McQueen said.
"I'm afraid I've diluted the antiseptic with my tears," I said. "Just singing those old formaldehyde blues."
I'd soaked for the regulation half-hour now, and the gage of my reserve tank was on red, so I got up to go. "I can see myself at ninety-five," I said. "I'll be patriarch of the Big Tank. The oldest male virgin on campus. See you inside, Chief."
I climbed up the ladder through the second manhole over the formaldehyde sump and stepped out into the sterile precincts of the Big Tank. Home.
I stepped into a shower-booth, let the water blast the formaldehyde off my chastity-suit, popped off my helmet and stripped. Air against sweat-steamed skin felt good. I showered again, naked. I blotted myself dry and dressed in fresh shorts, all the clothing a man needed in the air-conditioned Elysium of the Big Tank. I carried my suit into the locker room to refit it for my next trip outside. Snapping its collar to the bushing of the compressed-air supply and turning on the pressure, I inflated my suit so that it stood on its headless shoulders, ready for inspection.
The wet air-filter that had almost asphyxiated me had been caused, I discovered, by a break in the moisture-trap of the unit. Careful checking assured me that the filter had failed-safe bacteriologically. No outside bugs were in my suit. I might have suffocated, but my corpse would have remained uncorrupted. Such a comfort.
I replaced the trap and filter with a fresh unit and fit a charged bottle of air onto the back of the suit. Then I gave every inch of my chastity-suit an inspection for worn spots, for bubbles forming on its moist surfaceโan inspection as painstaking and as sure as a window washer's check of his working harness, or an exhibition jumper's folding of his parachute. Satisfied that the suit was all set for my next adventure into the world of normal, septic human beings, I racked it and the helmet in my locker and walked out into the garden.
There I stretched out on the grass under the ultra-violets, refreshing my tan while I waited for Dr. McQueen to come up from the sump.
The garden was my favorite room in the Big Tank. It was in establishing the garden that I'd discovered that my Machiavellian mind is articulated to a pair of green thumbs. The crafty bit came over coffee in the cafeteria. I, of course, just sat there to listen and talk; not even C.U. Cafeteria coffee is aseptic enough for a Lapin to drink, even if there were some way to get a cup of the stuff inside the helmet of a sterility-suit. Anyway, I chided these two graduate students from the botany department about the research possibilities they were missing by not growing any gnotobiotic green stuff. I gave them the Boom-Food pitch. Would cabbages, grown in an environment free of bacteria, grow large as king farouks? I hit them with the Advance the Frontiers of the Biological Science line: could soil-nitrates be utilized by legumes in the absolute absence of Nitrobacteriaceae?
The two botanists leaped to my vegetable bait like a brace of starving aphids. A couple days after I'd commenced my con, three tons of quartz sand were shipped through the Big Tank's main autoclave. The lifeless stuff was poured over a grill of perforated pipes. The pipes were connected to a brew-tank of hydroponic juices, and the wet sand was planted with germ-free seeds of grass, tomatoes, carrots, and other useful herbs. We Lapins had a ball, planting the aseptic seeds in the dirtless dirt eagerly as a band of ribbon-hungry 4-H'ers. What had been our sun-room blossomed, after a decent period of germination, into our lawn and garden.
For some reason, the garden of our Eden never got an apple-tree. But we did have lettuce on our sterile sandwiches now, and fresh tomatoes, infinitely superior in texture and taste to the "radared" fruitโalmost pureed by the high-energy beams that made it germ-freeโthat we'd grown up on.
The lesser mammals with whom we twenty-nine Lapins shared the Big Tank, the rabbits and guinea-pigs and hamsters and like small fowl, didn't go much for fresh vegetables, having developed a palate for an autoclaved diet. The monkeys, though, proved to be real competitors for carrots and raw sweet corn. They had to be locked out of the garden, rather as certain of their disobedient relatives had been.
I reached out from my supine, sun-drenched position to pull a turnip. I shook off the moist sand and wiped the hydroponic wetness off my shorts, to munch grittily while I waited for the Chief to join me.
As soon as he'd soaked in the formaldehyde mixture for half an hour, Dr. McQueen came up through the manhole. Under the shower he squirted the chemical B.O. off his modified sterility-unit, then came out into the garden to join me, dragging his air-hose. We sat side by side on the park bench I'd built beside the onion-patch. (I was fond of my onions. They were the only living things in the Big Tank with the honest stink of life to them). "Where did you plant the marijuana, Johnny?" the Chief asked me. His voice was muffled by the wetness of his suit-speaker.
"Now, there's a pregnant idea," I said. "We won't plant muggles, Chief. We'll plant tobacco. All we Lapins need to keep us happy is a good solid vice like smoking." I looked at the Chief. "Why'd you follow me here, Dr. McQueen? I know I've been naughty."
"Self-pity doesn't become a man, Johnny," he said.
"And why the hell not?" I demanded, my blood-pressure ready to challenge any manometer in sight. "If I can feel compassion for some poor joker on TV, why can't I hurt a little for myselfโfor John Bogardus, swaddled from his darling by a damned plastic diving-suit? I wasโI amโin love with Anne, Doctor."
"Your marriage-night would kill you, John," he said.
I jumped up with ready-made fists, then flopped down onto the grass, laughing at the picture I saw. Battle of the Century. In this corner, wearing helmet, chastity-suit, and thirty-five feet of air-hose Roy McQueen, Ph. D. In the far corner, clad only in brown trunks (grass-stained on the seat, folks), John Bogardus, M.D. "It makes a grand old dirty joke, doesn't it?"
"It makes a painful reality," Dr. McQueen said. "I know how you must lie awake nights, thinking about gradually acclimatizing yourself to the contaminated world in which Anne lives. You know, though, that the death-rate with the lower animals who've tried this acclimatization is steep. Even the survivors don't survive very long, because of their low gut-tone and their tardy antibody response. I suppose, though, that the imminence of death is as helpless before love as the locksmith." Dr. McQueen sighed. "If it's what you want, Johnny, I'll ignore everything we both know about the probable consequences and help you break out of here.... Think how embarrassed you'd feel, though, if you died of a B. subtilis septicemia or a fulminant chicken-pox the day before the wedding."
"I could have married Anne, and made her either an unkissed bride or an early widow," I said. "Neither of these alternatives struck me as an attractive career for the woman I love, so I left her. It's so logical it's practically simple arithmetic. Anne put up a fight to keep me, Chief; it was most warming to my amour-propre. Women aren't logical like us men of science. What a stinking situation!"
"It is," Dr. McQueen said. "But remember, John, lovers outside the Big Tank often get just as star-crossed as you and Anne."
"And they have dental caries to contend with, which we don't," I said. "Somehow, Chief, we'll get this experiment into its second generation, past the miseries of the gnotobiotic first-born, we Adams and Eves who were delivered into purity by aseptic Caesarian section. Maybe we'll have to toss coins or draw cards to pair up for parent-hood. But any kids we raise will be spared that indignity. Know how I've got it figured, Chief? We've got to make provision for exogamous matings, right? Novelty, in other words, is essential to romance. Here's the way we'll work it. We'll set half the babies, boys and girls together, on one side of a wall, half on the other side. We'll have established two tribes of kids, each growing up in ignorance of the other; and we'll keep them strictly apart till they're in their middle teens. Then, maybe the night of the Junior Prom, we'll cut a door-way in that wall and introduce them to each other."
Dr. McQueen smiled. "That will be a splendid evening, John. And a situation to make an anthropologist's mouth water. You may have found the answer to one of your children's major problems. I only wish we had as simple a solution to the current troubles of John Bogardus."
"Don't blame yourself for what's happened to me," I said. "I've carried on pretty bad today, but that doesn't mean that I or any of the other Lapins blame you for causing us to be birthed into the Big Tank. It had to be done. Once Dr. Reyniers had made gnotobiotics possible, a colony of germ-free humans became available. You did a good and honest job of bringing us colonists up, Chief. As good a job as anyone could do."
"Thank you, John," he said. "I often wonder, though, whether the Nuremberg Principles really gave us the right to build and populate this germless microcosm. We told your mothers when they volunteered that the results of raising humans gnotobiotically would be important. They have indeed. Thousands of lives have been saved by what we've learned here. We saw to it, as we'd also promised your mothers, that your health hasn't suffered by reason of experiments, that you've been given the education you need to earn a good living, and especially that your dignity as human beings has always been respected. The core question is, did we have the right to involve fellow humans, not yet born, in a process the end of which we couldn't entirely predict? Enough of this, though. My conscience is my own problem. For your immediate relief I can offer only: keep busy."
"Work is dandy, but liquor's quicker," I said. "A wound of the heart calls for a therapeutic drunk."
"I'll honor your prescription, Doctor," the Chief said. "The moment I get outside, I'll Seitz you some of my own Scotch." He stood up and caught hold of his air-hose. "Forgive me for behaving so like Pollyanna, John," he said. "I wish I could offer you relief more potent than Scotch and sympathy."
"Such spiritual Band-aids are all the help there is, Chief. Thank you for them."
He slapped me on the shoulder with his gloved right hand, then walked through the shower-room, trailing his black air-hose, and dropped down the manhole into the formaldehyde sump on his way back out into the world.
I sat on my bench in my artificial garden in the middle of the great steel womb I'd
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