A Case of Conscience

"Mike," Liu said, turning to him with a kind of desperate earnestness, "what do you think you're doing? He won't answer you, he can't answer you, especially when you speak to him like that! He's only a child, whatever you think when you have to look up at him! Obviously he learns many of these things by rote. Sometimes he says them when they seem to be apposite, but when we question him, he never carries it any farther. Why don't you give him a chance? He didn't ask you to bring any citizenship committee here!"

"Why don't you give me a chance?" Michelis said raggedly.

Then he turned white-on-white. After a moment, so did Liu. Ruiz looked up again at the slumbering Lithian and, as assured as he could be that Egtverchi was truly asleep, pressed the button which brought the rumbling metal curtain down in front of the transparent door. To the last, Egtverchi did not seem to move. Now they were isolated and away from him; Ruiz did not know whether this would make any difference, but he had his doubts about the innocence of Egtverchi's responses. To be sure, he had not overtly done anything but make an enigmatic statement, ask a simple question, quote from his reading — yet somehow everything he said had helped matters to go more badly than before.

"Why did you do that?" Liu said.

"I wanted to clear the air," Ruiz said quietly. "He's asleep, anyhow. Besides, we don't have any argument with Egtverchi yet. He may not be equipped to argue with us. But we've got to talk to each other — you too, Mike."

"Haven't you had enough of that already, Ramon?" Michelis said, in a voice a little more like his own.

"Preaching is my vocation," Ruiz said. "If I make a vice of it, I expect to atone for that somewhere else than here. But in the meantime — Liu, part of our trouble is the quarrel that I mentioned to you. Mike and I sharply disagreed on what Lithia means to the human race, indeed we disagreed on whether Lithia poses us any philosophical question at all. I think the planet is a time bomb; Mike thinks that's nonsense. And he thought that a general article for a scientific audience was no place to raise such questions, especially since this particular question has been posed officially and hasn't been adjudicated yet. And that's one reason why we're all snarling at each other right now, without any surface reason for it."

"What a cold thing to be heated about!" Liu said. "Men are so exasperating. How could a problem like that matter now?"

"I can't tell you," Ruiz said helplessly. "I can't be specific — the whole issue is under security seal. Mike thinks even the general issues I wanted to raise are graveyarded for the time being."

"But what we're waiting for is to find out what's going to happen to Egtverchi," Liu said. "The UN examining group must be already on its way. What business do you have to be hatching philosophical mandrake's-eggs when the life of a — of a human being, there's no other way to put it — is hanging on the next half hour?"

"Liu," Ruiz said gently, "forgive me, but are you so convinced that Egtverchi is what you mean by a human being — a hnau, a rational soul? Does he talk like one? You were complaining yourself that he won't answer questions, and that very often when he speaks he doesn't make much sense. I've talked to adult Lithians, I knew Egtverchi's father well, and Egtverchi isn't much like them, let alone much like a human being. Hasn't anything that's happened in the past hour changed your mind?"

"Oh, no," Liu said warmly, reaching out her hands for the Jesuit's.

"Ramon, you've heard him talk yourself, as much as I have — you've tended him with me — you know he's not just an animal! He can be brilliant when he wants to be!"

"You're right, the mandrake's eggs have nothing to do with the case," Michelis said, turning and looking at Liu with dark, astonishingly pain-haunted eyes. "But I can't make Ramon listen to me. He's becoming more and more bound in some rarefied theological torture of his own. I'm sorry Egtverchi isn't as far along as I'd thought, but I foresaw almost from the beginning, I think, that he was going to be a serious embarrassment to us all, the closer he approaches his full intelligence.

"And I didn't get all my information from Ramon. I've seen the protocol on the progressive intelligence tests. Either they're reports on something phenomenal, or else we have no really trustworthy way of measuring Egtverchi's intelligence at all — and that may add up to the same thing in the end. If the tests are right, what's going to happen when Egtverchi finally does grow up? He's the son of a highly intelligent inhuman culture, and he's turning out to be a genius to boot — and his present status is that of an animal in a zoo! Or far worse than that, he's an experimental animal; that's how most of the public tends to think of him. The Lithians aren't going to like that, and furthermore the public won't like it when it learns the facts.