Read Online Callahan's Secret by Spider Robinson - Free Book Online

indulging him now?”
    The dust settled, Callahan picked his cigar butt up off the floor and blew sawdust off it, and she cut back to about Force Eight and went on:
    “What is the matter with you morons? A mutt comes in here, a guy you claim is your friend, with a sign on his forehead says, ‘Masochist’, and you people get out the whips and chains, is that it? Txffu’s committed the cardinal sin, eh? He doesn’t love humanity: hang him. And Handsome over there, too, and half the people in this bar, probably
    what the hell is so special about humanity that not loving it is a sin? Finn said his people loved sentient life: I respect that a lot more, and I’m not at all sure that humanity qualifies, on average-“
    (By “Handsome,” she referred to Long-Drink, whose name she didn’t know, and I found time to wonder if Mary was a pervert, too, queer for scrawny men. Long-Drink is even taller and skinnier than me-put him and me and Finn side by side and we look like a pine mountainside…)
    “-How about an analogy: will that strain your brains too much? Say you work for a South American real estate developer; he has you go out into the bush and extenninate tribes of monkeys where he wants to build new condominiums. You don’t like the work, you’d rather quit and jungle up, bi~t the boss has thoughtfully planted a booby-trapped transceiver on you. To make matters worse, you’re a diabetic, and he only gives you a limited supply of insulin for each trip. -
    “One day you run across a tribe of monkeys clever enough to disable the transceiver. It may even be possible to train them to manufacture insulin. Is it necessary that you love them before you can accept their aid? I could maybe, given time, learn to get attached to three or four individual monkeys, maybe as many as a dozen or so-be amused by them, grow fond of them, even respect them in certain ways. I could see being concerned if I learned that their tribe was locked into some kind of suicidal behavior pattern-really concerned, not just on my own account. But love them? Or their kind in general?
    “And should I be ashamed for wanting insulin so that I can live another forty or fifty years-when the monks can only hope for ten or twenty? Oh, you jackasses, I can understand HIM being that dumb, he’s smarter than any of us-but how could you morons be so stupid?”
    Many feet were shuffled. She had opened up our friend’s hidden wound… and we had all picked at it. I was belatedly beginning to realize her technique. Sometimes a mocking voice whispers vile things in a man’s ear, things he can’t shut out because he half-believes they’re true. But if you can personify that voice, and get him to fight it, to reject
    it.
    “He comes from a race so fatheaded noble and’ ethical that-they couldn’t bring themselves to destroy their assassins-perhaps, he says, they made the wrong choice. Naturally he’d feel guilty about exploiting us by trying to keep
    us alive, about his inability to love monkeys. All the years he’s been on this planet, none of you noticed any pattern in the kind of professions he’s followed?”
    I found that I was speaking. “I figured he picked basic, earthy trades as a way of rootijig himself to this planet. Our primal cultural basics: farming, fishing, watching the forest, contemplating the sea-“
    “Solitary, lonely jobs, every one, the way he went about them. Hermit jobs.” She turned to Finn. “You probably find most of us actually repellent, don’t you, Txffu?”
    His face was expressionless again. “Candidly, yes.”
    “Physically disgusting?”
    “Well… deformed, on the average. Your males are all so short… and your females are all so undernourished..
    Her ears grew points. “Really?”
    “Yes. Among my people, you yourself would be considered-well, not emaciated, but almost unfashionably slender. As it happens I have an unconventional taste for slender women… but most human females your size hate themselves so