THIRTEEN

It was warm in Washington, far too warm, and the president wished he were back in the Western White House in California. If it were left to him he’d move the whole government out there, except it couldn’t really be done. All those bureaus and bureaucrats—of course, he could do without a lot of them, but not without the embassies. He sighed again thinking about California, then buzzed his secretary.

“Who’s next, Mary Lynn?”

“Dr. Hasslein, Mister President.”

“Oh.” He sighed again. What would Victor want this time? He seemed so upset about the chimpanzees. “All right. Send him in.”

Hasslein came, into the oval office and stood, straight and still, in front of the president’s desk. Except for the military people, Hasslein was the only man who stood quite that way, and the president often wondered if the scientist were a frustrated soldier.

“What can I do for you, Victor?”

“I made a tape last week, Mister President. While I interviewed the female chimpanzee. I’d like you to listen to it.”

“All right.” The president got up from behind the big desk and came around to the couch on the other side. He motioned Hasslein to a chair. “Can I get you anything, Victor? A beer, perhaps? I’ll have one myself.”

“No, thank you, sir.” He set the small tape recorder/player on the coffee table and waited until the president had opened the beer he took from the refrigerator under the end table.

“Just how did you get that tape?”

“With a clandestine recorder the CIA people gave me. A cigarette case.” Hasslein started the tape. It began with his own voice—“How long have you known you were—uh, going to have a child?” Zira answered. Eventually it ended.

The president drank the last of his beer. “So?”

“So?” Hasslein stood and paced angrily. “So Mister President, we have evidence that some day talking apes will dominate the earth. They will live in a civilization, if you can call it that, with very little science and no technology. Humans will be dumb animals, probably mistreated. And in less than two thousand years those apes will destroy the earth, killing themselves and all humans as well.”

“I doubt we will be in office then,” the president said.

“Really, sir, I am serious.”

“So am I, Victor. I have an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and to preserve and protect the people and nation. I don’t see how these apes are much of a threat to that oath—or, for that matter, what I am supposed to do about a theoretical threat to the earth that doesn’t mature for almost two thousand years.”

Hasslein continued to pace. He said nothing.

“Come now,” the president said. “Victor, what the devil do you expect me to do about it? What can we do about it?”

“Mister President, can apes talk now?”

“Eh? Of course not, Victor.”

“After thousands—millions—of years of evolution, they can’t talk and don’t appear to be able to learn,” Hasslein said. “Had you asked me before those three appeared in that capsule, I would have said it was absolutely impossible for apes to learn to talk at any time within the foreseeable future. That it would be at least hundreds of thousands of years before they learn.”

“Yet we have two who can.”

“Precisely!” Hasslein smacked his left fist into his open right hand. “Because these two apes are genetically different! Yet, I expect, they can interbreed with other apes. They can transmit that distinguishing characteristic, the ability to learn speech, to their progeny. If that gene is distributed among apes, then all apes will eventually have the ability to speak.”

“Oh, come now, Victor, that’s a paradox! You’re saying that they come from the future to our present; they interbreed with other apes; and by interbreeding with them, they create their own future! That if they didn’t come here to be their own great-great grandparents, they couldn’t exist at all! You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Yes, sir, I’m afraid that’s precisely what I believe.”

“Impossible! Rubbish!”

“No, sir.” Hasslein’s eyes blazed as he glared at the president. “I can prove it. What you think of as a paradox, as a violation of the laws of causality, only appears that way because you have a very distorted view of causality to begin with. Now, let me show you.” He took a sheaf of papers from his pocket and laid them on the table. “Look here—”

“Oh, no,” the president protested. “Victor, I never got past college algebra! You take those equations and put them back in your pocket.”

“But I can’t prove it to you without them.”

“We’ll assume you prove it, all right? But what do you want me to do?” He looked at the pale blazing eyes. “No! You really think we can alter the course of the future?”

“Yes, sir. Their future is not necessarily our future. Even though it is just as real. I can—”

“I heard you on the Big News show. Not that I understood you. So you want me to alter what you believe may be the future by slaughtering two innocents. Three, now that one of them’s pregnant.” The president nodded grimly to himself. “It’s an old tradition with kings, isn’t it? Herod tried it. He wasn’t successful, either. Christ survived.”

“Herod lacked the facilities we have,” Hasslein said grimly. “And we have only two apes to deal with.”

“Victor, have you any idea how unpopular such a thing would be?” the president demanded. “I’d go down in history as another Herod. No, thank you. I’ve a good record, and I don’t need that on it.”

“You are putting your sentiments for these apes ahead of your duty to the people.”

The president half stood, his mouth a grim, tight line of anger. “I do not need you to remind me of my duties to the people, Doctor Hasslein!”

“I beg your pardon,” Hasslein said formally.

“You beg it, but you aren’t sorry,” the president said. He sighed and sat down again. This interview wasn’t going well at all. “Victor, I’ve seen the chimpanzees on television, I’ve met them briefly—they seem very charming, very harmless, and very popular with the voters. You speak of my duties to the people. One of those duties is to carry out the popular will, and I think being courteous to those chimpanzees is very much what the people want.”

“Not all of them,” Hasslein said. “The Gallup poll shows a lot of undecided. Especially when they’re asked about Colonel Taylor—”

“Yes. But the fact remains, they’ve done nothing to us, and have made no threats. In God’s name, Victor, how would we justify anything like that?”

“It would look like a tragic accident,” Hasslein said. “The CIA could arrange it.”

“They could, eh? How do you know?”

“Well, sir, I assumed—”

“You can keep your assumptions to yourself, Dr. Hasslein. No. We will have no tragic accidents.”

“My God, Mister President, do you want them and their progeny to dominate the world?”

The president smiled again. He went to his big chair behind the desk and sat, his eyes not focused but staring idly outside at the White House lawn. One of his children was playing out there. “Not just yet, certainly,” he said. “And not at the next election, either. But if their progeny turn out to be as pleasant as they are, maybe they’ll make a better job than we have. We haven’t done all that well, Victor.”

“They destroyed the earth!”

The president shrugged. “Are you sure that was our earth she saw destroyed?”

“Are you sure it wasn’t, Mister President?”

“Of course not.”

‘And it is a reasonable assumption. They believed it was the earth. It certainly sounded like it. These animals are native to Earth. They therefore came from our earth—”

“Oh, spare me the long-winded logical arguments, Victor. You may be right . . .”