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She said, slowly, "No, I can't. What are you talking about?"
"It's all very well to say that if we could remove the parasite, we would have eternal growth and life if we wanted it; or at least until we got tired of being too big or of living too long, and did away with ourselves neatly. But how many millions of years has it been since the human body has had occasion to grow in such an unrestrained fashion? Can it do so any longer? Is the chemistry of the body adjusted to that? Has it got the proper whatchamacallits?"
"Enzymes," Rose supplied in a whisper.
"Yes, enzymes. It's impossible for us. If for any reason the parasitic intelligence, as Harg Tholan calls it, does leave the human body, or if its relationship to the human mind is in any way impaired, growth does take place, but not in any orderly fashion. We call the growth cancer. And there you have it. There's no way of getting rid of the parasite. We're together for all eternity. To get rid of their inhibition Death, extraterrestrials must first wipe out all vertebrate life on Earth. There is no other solution for them, and so we must keep knowledge of it from them. Do you understand?"
Her mouth was dry and it was difficult to talk. "I understand, Drake." She noticed that his forehead was damp and that there was a line of perspiration down each cheek. "And now you'll have to get it out of the apartment."
"It's late at night and I'll be able to get the body out of the building. From there on-" He turned to her. "I don't know when I'll be back."
"I understand, Drake," she said again.
Harg Tholan was heavy. Drake had to drag him through the apartment. Rose turned away, retching. She hid her eyes until she heard the front door close. She whispered to herself, "I understand, Drake."
It was 3 a.m. Nearly an hour had passed since she had heard the front door click gently into place behind Drake and his burden. She didn't know where he was going, what he intended doing- She sat there numbly. There was no desire to sleep; no desire to move. She kept her mind traveling in tight circles, away from the thing she knew and which she wanted not to know.
Parasitic minds! Was it only a coincidence or was it some queer racial memory, some tenuous long-sustained wisp of tradition or insight, stretching back through incredible mille
Yet, despite her efforts, the circle of her thoughts expanded and returned to Drake. She shoved and it returned; she counted to herself, she recited the names of the objects in her field of vision, she cried, "No, no, no," and it returned. It kept returning.
Drake had lied to her. It had been a plausible story. It would have held good under most circumstances; but Drake was not a biologist. Cancer could not be, as Drake had said, a disease that was an expression of a lost ability for normal growth. Cancer attacked children while they were still growing; it could even attack embryonic tissue. It attacked fish, which, like extraterrestrials, never stopped growing while they lived, and died only by disease or accident. It attacked plants which had no minds and could not be parasitized. Cancer had nothing to do with the presence or absence of normal growth; it was the general disease of life, to which no tissue of no multicellular organism was completely immune.
He should not have bothered lying. He should not have allowed some obscure sentimental weakness to persuade him to avoid the necessity of killing her in that ma
She put her hands over her eyes. The young men who disappeared were usually in the first year of their marriage. Whatever the process of reproduction of the parasite intelligences, it must involve close association with another parasite-the type of close and continuous association that might only be possible if their respective hosts were in equally close relationship. As in the case of newly married couples.
She could feel her thoughts slowly disco
She wanted to weep, but couldn't; she was dry-eyed and it was painful.
And then she began to giggle and couldn't stop. It was very fu
She had finally learned why Drake had married her.
The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable. Once the horror at Hiroshima took place, anyone could see that science fiction writers were not merely dreamers and crackpots after all, and that many of the motifs of that class of literature were now permanently part of the newspaper headlines.
I suppose that science fiction writer and reader were, on the whole, pleased-if not at the effect of the atom bomb itself, then at least at the crystallization into fact of something that had been so science fictional.
I myself was ambivalent. Quite apart from the frightening aspects of nuclear explosions and the mildly irrational feeling that such things as atom bombs belonged to us and not to the real world, I also felt that reality might have a stultifying effect on the field.
And I think it did to a certain extent. There was a tendency for the new reality to nail the science fiction writer to the ground. Prior to 1945, science fiction had been wild and free. An its motifs and plot varieties remained in the realm of fantasy and we could do as we pleased. After 1945, there came the increasing need to talk about the AEC and to mold all the infinite scope of our thoughts to the small bit of them that had become real.
In fact, there was the birth of something I called "tomorrow fiction"; the science fiction story that was no more new than tomorrow's headlines.
Believe me, there can be nothing duller than tomorrow's headlines in science fiction. As an example, consider Nevil Shute's On the Beach. Surely to the science fiction fan-as opposed to the general public-this must seem very milk-and-watery. So there's a nuclear war to start the story with-and what else is new?
I resisted the temptation to base a story slavishly on the present until I could think of a way to do so without making myself a minion of the headlines and of topicality. I wanted to write a story that would deal with the things of tomorrow without becoming outdated the day after tomorrow.
The result was "Breeds There a Man…?" which, despite all its topicality, is as much science fiction now as it was in 1951 when it was written.
First appearance-Astounding Science Fiction, June 1951. Copyright, 1951, by Street amp; Smith Publications, Inc.