"Niven, Larry - What Can You Say About Chocolate Covered Manhole Covers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

WHAT CAN YOU SAY ABOUT CHOCOLATE COVERED MANHOLE COVERS?


It was the last party. Otherwise it was only one of many, so many that they merged in the memory. We all knew each other. George had invited around thirty of us, a heterogeneous group, aged from teen to retirement, in dress that varied from hippie to mod to jeans and sneakers to dark suits, and hair that varied from crew cut to shoulder-length.
It was a divorce party.
Granted that it's been done before, still it was done well. George and Dina had planned it a year earlier, to celebrate the night their Decree became Final. The cake was frosted in black, and was surmounted by the usual wax figures, but facing outward from opposite edges of the cake. Jack Keenan donned a minister's reversed collar to officiate. His makeshift sacrament included part of the funniest prayer in literature: the agnostic's prayer from Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. George and Dina kissed with obvious sincerity, for the last time, and everybody clapped like mad.
Afterward I got coffee and a piece of divorce cake and found a flat place to set them. Without a third hand to handle the plastic fork, I was as good as trapped there; and there it was that Tom Findlay found me.
Tom Findlay was all red hair and beard. The beard was full and thick, the hair long enough to tie in back with a rubber band. Once he had gone to a costume party with his hair combed forward over his eyes and the bridge of his nose, and a placard around his neck that read NOT A SHEEP DOG. He generally wore knee-length socks and leather shorts. His legs too were thickly covered with red hair. He spoke in a slow midwestern drawl, and grinned constantly, as if he were watching very funny pictures inside his head.
He was always part of these groups. Once a month he held a BYOB party of his own. He had a tendency to monopolize a conversation; but even those who avoided him on that account had to admit that he gave fair warning. He would walk up to any friend or stranger he found standing alone and open conversation with, "Hey. Would a Muslim vampire be terrified of a copy of the Koran?" Or, "It seems to me that anarchy would be a very unstable form of government, don't you think?" Or, "What about chocolate covered manhole covers?"
That one fell pretty flat, I remember. What can anyone say about chocolate covered manhole covers? Most of Findlay's ideas were at least worth discussing. Vampires, for instance. What significance has the vampire's religion? Or the victim's blood type? Could you hold off a vampire with a sunlamp, or kill him with a stake of grained plastic wood? If a bullet won't kill a vampire, what about a revolver loaded with a blank cartridge and a wooden pencil?
And one night someone had come running in to interrupt the poker game in the other room. "What do you think Findlay just came up with?" And it was a new form of ice skating. You strap blocks of ice to your feet, see, and you skate over a field of razor blades set on edge.
Wild? Consider the ramifications! Straps will be cut, unless you embed them in the ice itself. God help you if you take a spill, or let the ice melt too far. And the blades have to be lined up. So how can you change directions? The only answer to that one is to lay the blades in a loop, like a skating rink.
That night, the night of the divorce party, Findlay perched on the edge of the table I was using for my cup and plate, and said, "Hey. Suppose all the Adam and Eve legends were true?"
I could have gotten away, but it would have meant finding another flat spot. I said, "That story's been done to death. A rocket ship crashes on Earth, see, with two people aboard-"
"No, no, you don't take my meaning. Every big and little group in the world, past and present, has a creation myth." Findlay's Midwest accent did odd things to the two-dollar words he was fond of using. "They all involve one man and one woman. In every case all of humanity sprang from that one couple. Suppose they were all true?"
My wife moved up from behind me and slid one arm around my waist. "You mean five hundred different Edens? That wouldn't make sense." She nestled against me, unobtrusively, feeling warm and silky in a loose, flowing pant dress.
Findlay turned to her eagerly. "Carol, do you know anything about breeding horses? Or cattle?"
I said, "Dogs. My mother raises keeshonden."
We didn't see where he was going, but Findlay seemed to sense we were hooked. He settled himself more comfortably on the table. "There's a stock method of improving a breed. It always works, but it takes a long time. How long depends on what you're trying to improve, of course.
"Suppose you're working with horses, just for argument. You've got a hundred horses for base stock. What you do is, you fence them off into say twenty-five corrals of four horses each. A large number of small groups. You make them breed within the group.
"Pretty quick you get severe inbreeding. All the little deadly recessive traits start to come out, and combine. You lose a lot of each generation. You help it along by weeding out the traits you don't like, like blindness or early senility.
"You keep it up for as many generations as you've got time for. Then you run them all together. You know how hybrid vigor works?"
"It's a mathematical thing, really," someone muttered deprecatingly. I realized that we'd acquired an audience. Four or five male teens were standing around listening, attracted either by Findlay's carrying voice or by my wife, who is uncommonly pretty. They were looking puzzled but interested, except for the one who had spoken.
Hal Grant was a small, dark fifteen-year-old with an astonishing vocabulary. With his full black beard and collar-length hair he looked like a young baron out of the Middle Ages; but he talked like a college professor. People tended to see him as an adult, and to react with astonishment on the rare occasions when he acted like a fifteen-year-old.
When nobody tried to stop him, he went on. "Say you've got a strain of horses that has a dominant for weak eyes, and another that has weak hindquarters. You breed a stallion from one strain to a mare from the other strain until you get four colts. In general one colt won't have either of the bad traits, one will have the weak eyes, one will have weak hindquarters, and one will have both. That's straight Mendelian genetics. Where the hybrid vigor comes in is, the one with both of the bad traits can't compete. He dies. That leaves three colts, and one is an improvement over both his parents. The average quality goes up."
Findlay was nodding his approval. "Right. That's how it works. So you run all the horses together. A lot of the weak traits that didn't get killed off in the interbreeding phase, combine and kill their owners. You wind up with a superior strain of horses."
"It wouldn't work with dogs," said Carol. "Mongrels don't win dog shows."
"But in a fair fight they tend to kill the winners," Hal pointed out.
"The technique works on just about anything," said Findlay. "Horses, dogs, cattle, chinchillas. Split the base stock into small groups, make them interbreed for several generations, then run them all together. Now keep it in mind, and we'll make some assumptions.
"We assume an alien race, and we assume they've got a pet that's almost bright enough to make a good servant. Its hands can hold a serving tray. They could almost repair machinery-"
"Homo habilis," said somebody.
"Right. You have to assume the overlord race had a lot of time, and endless patience-"
"And cheap space travel."
"Wouldn't have to be faster than light, though. Not if they had all that endless patience." We could see where Findlay was going now, and everyone wanted to get there first. Hence the interruptions.
Findlay said, "So they pick out about a thousand of the brightest of their animals, and they split them up into pairs, male and female. They find an Earthlike world and set down five hundred couples in five hundred locations."
"Then the Noah legend-"
"Came first," I said. "And you get five hundred Edens. Beautiful."
"Right. Now look at how it works. Each of the little groups undergoes severe inbreeding. They're all cut off from each other by fences of one kind or another, mountains, rivers, deserts. The recessive traits come out, and some of the groups die off completely. Others spread out.
"Remember, it's the most successful ones that are spreading. They infringe on other groups. The genes start to mix. The quality of the mix goes up, partly because of hybrid vigor. If they're going to develop intelligence, this is where it starts."
"Hah! They'd start inventing ways around the fences," said an older kid. Short blond hair, pale fringe of mustache, knitted sailing cap surgically attached to his head; I forget his name. "Bridges across the rivers, canteens for the deserts-"
"And camels."
"Passes across the mountains. Ways to tell each other how to find them."
"Ships!"
"Right," said Findlay, his blue eyes glowing with pleasure. "Now notice that the most intelligent groups are the ones that spread their genes around the most, because they're the ones that do all the traveling. Also, the more inventions you get, the easier it is to mix; the more mixing you get, the higher the intelligence goes; and that makes for more inventions, like paved roads and better rigging for the ships and better breeds of horses. Eventually you get airplanes, buses, guided tours and printed language guides and international credit organizations."
"And tourist traps."
"And multilingual whores."
"Not to put a damper on any of this fun stuff," said Hal Grant, the dark youth with the very adult vocabulary, "but eventually they'll be coming back to see how we're doing."
"How would they know when we're ready?" Someone wondered.