Read Online Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon - Free Book Online Page B

chocolate cake. That, he said, is a statement which must stand as a truth because it cannot be scientifically disproved. Damn him!” he roared, and then went on, as softly as before, “Another explained away every evidence of malformed creatures by talking eclectic twaddle about fruit-flies, x-rays, and mutation. It’s that blind, stubborn, damnable attitude that brought such masses of evidence to prove that planes wouldn’t fly (for if ships needed power to keep them afloat as well as to drive them, we’d have no ships) or that trains were impractical (because the weight of the cars on the tracks would overcome the friction of the locomotives’ wheels, and the train would never start.) Volumes of logical, observer’s proof showed the world was flat. Mutations? Of course there are natural mutations. But why must one answer be the only answer? Hard radiation mutations—demonstrable. Purely biochemical mutations—very probable. And the crystals’ dreams…”
    From the deep drawer he drew a labelled crystal. He took his silver cigarette lighter from the desk, thumbed it alight, and stroked the yellow flame across the crystal.
    Out of the blackness came a faint, agonized scream.
    “Please don’t,” said Zena.
    He looked sharply at her drawn face. “That’s Moppet,” he said. “Have you now bestowed your affections on a two-legged cat, Zena?”
    “You didn’t have to hurt her.”
    “Have to?” He brushed the crystal with the flame again, and again the scream drifted to them from the animal tent. “I had to develop my point.” He snapped the lighter out, and Zena visibly relaxed. Monetre dropped lighter and crystal on the desk and went on calmly, “Evidence. I could bring that fool with his celestial chocolate cake here to this trailer, and show him what I just showed you, and he’d tell me the cat was having a stomach ache. I could show him electron photomicrographs of a giant molecule inside that cat’s red corpuscles actually transmuting elements—and he’d accuse me of doctoring the films. Humanity has been accursed for all its history by its insistence that what it already knows must be right, and all that differs from that must be wrong. I add my curse to the curse of history, with all my heart. Zena…”
    “Yes, Maneater.” His abrupt change in tone startled her; she had never gotten used to it.
    “The complex things—mammals, birds, plants—the crystals only duplicate them if they want to—or if I flog them half to death. But some things are easy.”
    He rose, and drew drapes aside from the shelves behind and above him. He lifted down a rack on which was a row of chemist’s watch-glasses. Setting it under the light, he touched the glass covers fondly. “Cultures,” he said, in a lover’s voice. “Simple, harmless ones, now. Rod bacilli in this one, and spirilla here. The cocci are coming along slowly, but coming for all that. I’ll plant glanders, Zena, if I like, or the plague. I’ll carry nuisance-value epidemics up and down this country—or wipe out whole cities. All I need to be sure of it is that middle-man—that fulfilled dream of the crystals that can teach me how they think. I’ll find that middle-man, Zee, or make one. And when I do, I’ll do what I like with mankind, in my own time, in my own way.”
    She looked up at his dark face and said nothing.
    “Why do you come here and listen to me, Zena?”
    “Because you call. Because you’ll hurt me if I don’t,” she said candidly. Then, “Why do you talk to me?”
    Suddenly, he laughed. “You never asked me that before, in all these years. Zena, thoughts are formless, coded… impulses without shape or substance or direction—until you convey them to someone else. Then they precipitate, and become ideas that you can put out on the table and examine. You don’t know what you think until you tell someone else about it. That’s why I talk to you. That’s what you’re for. You didn’t drink your wine.”
    “I’m