A Case of Conscience

"How do you do," Mike said gravely. "Then you and the Father stand in loco parentis to our Lithian guest. It's a heavy responsibility for a young woman, I should think." The Jesuit felt a thoroughly unchristian impulse to kick the tall chemist in the shins; but there seemed to be no conscious malice in Michelis' voice.

The girl merely looked down at the ground and sucked in her breath between slightly parted lips. "Ah-so-deska," she said, almost inaudibly.

Michelis' eyebrows went up, but in a moment it became obvious that Liu was not going to say anything more, to him, right now. With a slight huff of embarrassment, Michelis addressed himself to the priest, catching him erasing the traces of a smile.

"So I'm all feet," Michelis said, grinning ruefully. "But I won't have time to practice my manners for a while yet. There are lots of loose ends to tie up. Ramon, how soon do you think you can leave Chtexa's child in Dr. Meid's hands? We've been asked to do a non-classified version of the Lithia report — "

"We?"

"Yes. Well, you and I."

"What about Cleaver and Agronski?"

"Cleaver's not available," Michelis said. "I don't offhand know where he is. And for some reason they don't want Agronski; maybe he doesn't have enough letters after his name. It's The Journal of Interstellar Research, and you know how stuffy they are — they're nouveau-riche in terms of prestige, and that makes them more academic than the academicians. But I think it would be worth doing, just to get some of our data out into the open. Can you find the time?"

"I think so," Ruiz-Sanchez said thoughtfully. "Providing it can be sandwiched in between getting Chtexa's child born, and my pilgrimage."

Michelis raised his eyebrows again. "That's right, this is a Holy Year, isn't it?"

"Yes," Ruiz-Sanchez said.

"Well, I think we can work it in," Michelis said. "But, excuse me for prying, Ramon, but you don't strike me as a man in urgent need of the great pardon. Does this mean that you've changed your mind about Lithia?"

"No, I haven't changed my mind," Ruiz-Sanchez said quietly.

"We are all in need of the great pardon, Mike. But I'm not going to Rome for that."

"Then — "

"I expect to be tried there for heresy."

XI

There was light on the mud flat where Egtverchi lay, somewhere eastward of Eden , but day and night had not been created yet, nor was there yet wind or tide to whelm him as he barked the wafer from his itchy lungs and wbooped in the fiery air. Hopefully he squirmed with his new forelimbs, and there was motion; but there was no place to go, and no one and nothing from which to escape. The unvarying, glareless light was comfortingly like that of a perpetually overcast sky, but Somebody had failed to provide for that regular period of darkness and negation during which an animal consolidates its failures and seeks in the depths of its undreaming self for sufficient joy to greet still another morning.

"Animals have no souls," said Descartes, throwing a cat out the window to prove, if not his point, at least his faith in it. The timid genius of mechanism, who threw cats well but Popes badly, had never met a true automaton, and so never saw that what the animal lacks is not a soul, but a mind. A computer which can fill the parameters of the Haertel equations for all possible values and deliver them in two and a half seconds is an intellectual genius but, compared even to a cat, it is an emotional moron.

As an animal which does not think, but instead responds to each minute experience with the fullness of immediately apprehended — and immediately forgotten — emotions which involve its whole body, needs the temporary death of nightfall to protract its life, so the newly emerged animal body requires the battles appointed to the day in order to become, at long last, the somnolent self-confident adult which has been written aforetime in its genes; and here, too, Somebody had failed Egtverchi. There was soap in his mud, a calculated percentage which allowed him to thrash on the floor of his cage without permitting him to make enough progress to bump his head against its walls. This was conservative of his head, but it wasted the muscles of his limbs. When his croaking days were over, and he was transformed into a totally air-breathing, leaping thing, he did not leap well. This too had been arranged, in a sense. There was nothing in this childhood of his from which he needed to leap away in terror, nor was there any place in it to which a small leap could have carried him. Even the smallest jump ended with an invisible bang and a slithering fall for the end of which, harmless though it invariably proved to be, no instinct prepared him, and for which no learning-reflex helped him to cultivate a graceful recovery. Besides, an animal with a perpetually sprained tail cannot be graceful regardless of its instincts.