Under the alias of J. J. Coupling, John R. Pierce is the well-known author of too few, yet exceedingly good, science fiction stories. Perhaps because, as Dr. Pierce, he is slightly busy as Executive Director, Research Communications Sciences Division of Bell Telephone Laboratories. In both personas he is a student of science fiction, and an admirer of the late, great, Stanley G. Weinbaum. This story is a tribute to that author, another tale from the saga of that scientific genius, Haskel van Manderpootz. It can be read—and enjoyed—without any knowledge of the earlier stories. But the hard-core readers will, 1 know, experience a particular extra thrill when they meet, for one last time, the indefatigable van Manderpootz…
I hadn't seen Haskel van Manderpootz in years. In fact, I hadn't intended to see him at all. When I arrived at Nixon spaceport on Long Island by rocket from Tibet, I was sure that I had coded the shuttle pod for the Malcolm Hilton on Manhattan, but when I stepped out the sign said UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, STONY BROOK CAMPUS.
My eidetic memory plays tricks like that. I'll never forget a bitter night my astral body spent on the top of Mount Everest. My guru had sent me to commune with a chela in Nepal. I had remembered the sutra perfectly, but it had been the wrong one.
I have learned to accept the tricks of my memory. It is all I can do, anyway. And as much good as bad comes of it. It was really lucky that I once arrived in San Trattorio on the day my cousin Dixon Wells was late for his execution. I was able to convince the Minister of Justice that Dixon had arrived during the riot and assassination only because he had meant to attend a dedication six hours earlier.
Something, I thought, had sent me to Stony Brook. What could it be but van Manderpootz? I stepped into the nearest Picture-phone® booth and dialed his home number. Inevitably, I got his office.
A horrible shriek emerged from the speaker before I could focus my eyes on the screen. The image was frightening. A battered and bloodied young woman, crumpled in a corner of the room, shuddered once convulsively and then lay still. A heavy, brutish, sinister figure rose from bending over her and approached the camera tube, so that his frenzied, maniacal features filled the screen. It was van Manderpootz.
"Office hours two to four, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays," he roared. "When would you like to see me?"
Could this be the van Manderpootz I knew? I wondered. Assertive, egotistical, yes. But a sadistic, homicidal maniac? I just couldn't believe it. I stared into his eyes. His face glared silently from the screen. So, I thought, and sat and waited.
About five minutes later an impatient voice said. "All right, what do you want?" The madman on the screen still stared at me, lips unmoving. It was, as I had about decided, a tri-di recording.
"It's me," I said, "Jimmy Wells."
The voice became genial.
"Good, good, Jimmy," it said. I hope you don't mind my little recording."
"It startled me," I replied. "Can I come up to your office?"
"No, no, Jimmy," van Manderpootz replied. "Nobody goes to my office any more. That's what the recordings are for. The machine has a half-dozen in it. Nobody signs up for courses. The faculty won't speak to me. And so," he said, "I get time to work on a little project at home. Come around and see—and you can tell me what has happened to your cousin Dixon," he added.
I got into a shuttle and coded for his home—of course I remembered the number. When I got out I was at the yacht club. I've always liked to watch boats, and I knew the address of the club. After visiting several other spots that nostalgia put between my fingers and the control buttons, I finally arrived at van Manderpootz's home, an old wooden house set among cold, impersonal glassy twentieth-century buildings which van Manderpootz calls "late refrigerator." I rang the front door bell, but there was no answer. Apparently the woman who cooks his meals, takes care of the kitchen and carefully avoids dusting his apparatus was out. As I heard a steady thumping somewhere within, I walked toward it.
My path toward the thumping sounds took me through a loom filled with what looked like abandoned hydroponic tanks, some of whose contents had met a smelly death. I then passed an elaborate apparatus which seemed to be a modification of a subjunctivisor and which looked, as well as I can describe it, like a dentist's chair complete with equipment and anesthetic mask. Finally, I came to the cellar stairs and, as the sounds were louder here, I went down to a large room in the basement.
The sight there was puzzling. Looking from the bottom of the steps, I seemed to see a full-sized tennis court, a good deal larger than the basement could possibly be. Over it shone a soft blue sky. There was a queerness about all this, however, as if the scene were part real and part a painted backdrop. And there was van Manderpootz, furiously pounding a tennis ball over the net, where it was returned by a shadowy opponent.
"Professor van Manderpootz!" I called.
He turned. "Jimmy," he said, and a fast return caught him on the side of the head. Calmly, he walked to the wall and touched a switch. The tennis court vanished, and I saw only the basement walls and ceiling smooth and painted white. Somehow, the court and the opponent had been projected onto these optically. I wondered how the ball bad been returned, but then, nothing is beyond van Manderpootz.
What really startled me was the change in his appearance since I had last seen him. He had always been a powerful man, but his waist had been thick. That was gone now. He was cleanshaven. He looked physically hard, and yet, younger. But this was no more surprising than to find van Manderpootz practicing tennis.
"How is Dixon?" van Manderpootz asked, as we shook hands.
"Never on time," I told him. "But he's married now, to a South American heiress. He was late one night for a rendezvous; and her father caught him, with a priest." Then I told him of Dixon's other adventures in San Trattorio.
"And how are you, Jimmy?" he asked.
"Well enough," I replied. "I've been in Tibet, and my guru sent me on a mission to Swaziland. But I seem to be on my way to Carmel," I added. "And so I'm here."
"Good, good, Jimmy. Great things here. Soon I shall be married," he said.
"You, married?" I exclaimed in astonishment.
"Soon, Jimmy," he said. He walked over to a workbench in the corner and picked up a large autographed photograph of a rather pretty girl who held a tennis racket. It was inscribed, "To Mandy, from Joyce."
"Do you like her?" he asked proudly.
"She's very good-looking," I told him. "When will the wedding be?"
"Not until I can beat her at tennis," van Manderpootz said. "You saw my little machine. Already I know more about the game than Tilden, Gonzales, and Kumanga did," he told me. "But I don't play so well yet. It must be something about the coordination."
What had happened to the great van Manderpootz? Marriage! Tennis! He who had discovered the psychon, invented the subjunctivisor and had had a hand in most of the new physics of the early twenty-first century. Chasing after pretty girls! And wasting his talents in building tennis-playing machines! Something had made van Manderpootz into a man I scarcely recognized. I asked him about all this.
"I was on the wrong track, Jimmy," he said. "Physics-hah! The subjunctivisor—useful, yes. But Jimmy, what is the most wonderful thing in the world?"
That was easy.
"Van Manderpootz," I said.
"Of course, Jimmy," he replied. "But there's only one van Manderpootz. I meant, what is the most wonderful thing in the world besides van Manderpootz?"
"Life," I said. "The mysteries of the consciousness—"
"You got it right the first time, Jimmy. Life is the most wonderful thing. Not my machines. Think, Jimmy. An ignorant peasant can grow things that even van Manderpootz can't make in his laboratory. Machines, pooh!"
And then I got the first part of the story. Van Manderpootz had wearied of mechanical contrivances. It had occurred to him that some of them make more trouble than they save. First, he pointed out, technology produces cheaply metal doors too massive for a man to open, and then it supplies electronic door openers. Or, he said, technology destroys old forms of amusement, and then it supplies in their place and at great expense, radio, television and the smellies. Farming becomes an unusual and therefore an unattractive mode of life, and so food is synthesized in tanks. In a peculiar moment of enlightenment, this had struck Haskel van Manderpootz as wrong. In a characteristic flurry of activity, he had abandoned physics for biology.
"Genetic engineering?" I asked. "You've solved the genetic code?"
"Why should I break my trains on the genetic code?" he asked. "Me, van Manderpootz? That's for plodders like Morgan and Watson and Crick and Nierenerg and Mumbwasi. What I did, Jimmy, was to make a genetic visualizer and a genetic manipulator. I froze the chromosomes to absolute zero, and then with a projector, a sort of holographic process, you understand, I could visualize the whole plant. But I made it work backward, Jimmy, so that however I changed the image, the chromosomes changed too. Then, thaw the chromosomes, grow the plants, and there I was."
"But what would you make that way?" I asked.
"Jimmy, Jimmy, haven't you got imagination at all, just a little?" he asked. And then he told me.
He had achieved self-sowing crops with weed-combating abilities inbred. He produced a fine, bushy growth which trained itself in the form of an armchair, and had only to be cut and dried to be of service (he still used one of these; it was remarkably comfortable, although a little asymmetrical). He had dwarf grass that needed no cutting, and which by a peculiar secretion digested and disposed of the leaves which fell on it in the fall. He was working on a biological house, complete with plumbing, when curiosity overcame him. In fact, it had looked as if he might put man well on the road to having nothing to do but enjoy his natural surroundings and contemplate his—inmost thoughts.
Despite all of his certainty that he was about to change the face of the earth and the habits of the human race, van Manderpootz was impatient to know the result. So, with one last fling at the mechanical, he revised his subjunctivisor to give a telepathic view of the truly far future.
"You understand," he said, "that it isn't really physical time-travel. It wasn't a unique world I visited. It was sideways in time, just boring a little into the fourth dimension. It was a world of if. And I didn't visit even that physically. I visited it telepathically. I could see and hear only what some person in it could see and hear. This caused me some puzzlement, as you shall see."
Anyway, this is the story:
"At first, Jimmy, I went only a little way ahead, about fifty years. I began to realize how wise I had been to use the machine. People are such dolts. I had to go to remote and uncivilized regions to find any evidences of what I had done. But someone, a United Nations Commission, maybe, had introduced my weed-fighting crops into the jungle. Out-of-the-way places were beginning to blossom like a rose. The natives spent their time sitting in my bush chairs and gazing out over my self-tending lawns, or dancing their tribal dances in the new clearings. They were just beginning to get the bugs out of my self-growing house, you understand. But I was encouraged to see that curious travelers from 'civilization' began to appreciate these conditions. A few resident Europeans had gone completely native—that is, they were years ahead of the times.
"Well, Jimmy, I sampled the world ahead a lot of places and for about a hundred and fifty years before I saw any substantial progress. The exploration took a lot of my time. Human nature is so inflexible. It organizes what it has learned to deal with, but it can't change. Finally, though, about A.D. 2165, in Great Britain of all places, I found some attempt at a civilization along the new lines. And, Jimmy, the great van Manderpootz had some unpleasant surprises in store for himself. That was on the mental side, mostly.
"I had thought of freeing man for contemplation, for the creation of philosophy and art and mathematics. By this time, man had become pretty nearly free. Oh, there were some gaps to be filled with human labor—some digging and carrying, so to speak. But how had man used his leisure? How, Jimmy?
I suppose that you may have been puzzled that men—in the here and now, I mean, and not in the time I'm talking about—write such endless numbers of books and make so many smellies, each just a little different from the others. The point is, people don't want to read the same book over and over again. They want something almost the same, which will excite the same sensations, but just enough different so that it will seem new. The names are changed from book to book, and the contents are reshuffled a bit, but the books are really the same, and that's the way people want them.
"Well, here in the future, in Britain, can you imagine what I found? Picture if you can, Jimmy, the prettiest self-growing house you can think of, set in the middle of a sloping lawn of beautiful green self-tending grass. Out beyond are rolling fields, separated into irregular patches by self-pruning hedges. A path winds down beyond the nearest hedge to the house's own self-tending field, which grows I don't know what good things to eat. And here is the family, a man, his wife and a child of about twelve. What are they doing, Jimmy? They are reading dog-eared mystery stones.
"Well, I looked in on this house at various hours for several days, and, when the family wasn't eating, or wandering down to gather food, the scene was always the same. They were reading mystery stories. As far as I could see, they never came into contact with anyone else. This puzzled me, for I wondered where the new mystery stories were coming from. I saw none delivered, and, as well as I could examine the house through the eyes of its occupants, I couldn't find any others in it. So far I had looked at things externally, using the eyes and ears of the three people. Now, however, I, the great van Manderpootz, Jimmy, examined their worthless thoughts carefully. And, you know, they weren't thinking of anything but the words of the stories they were reading. Not of anything. Not even of other mystery stories!
"It took me quite a while; to get to the bottom of this. I picked the wife (she was nearest the end of her book) and followed her through the reading of it It was very dull, Jimmy, but rather sexy. Anyway, she followed that tale with a completely lax mind and with perfect contentment, right to the end. Then she performed some mental gymnastics that I couldn't follow, and to my surprise, mine, van Manderpootz's, Jimmy, she forgot about the contents of the book entirely, and remembered only that she liked it. So she turned tack to the first page, and started through her favorite book again.
"No wonder they didn't need any more books, Jimmy. And what can you say against it? I suppose her book wasn't any worse than any other she would have liked. But it didn't please me. I imagine that in that place and that year, some people in Britain may have been re-reading over and over again just their favorite paragraph from their favorite book. Maybe some were walking dazedly in the street repeating their favorite sentence endlessly and finding it ever fresh and completely satisfactory. Perhaps they just muttered their favorite word. I don't know, Jimmy; I didn't wait to find out. I went ahead.
"America in the year 2300 was different At first I thought it was better, now I don't know. Anyway, there was more activity. People worked in groups, doing what labor was needed. Some of it looked like very unnecessary or uncomfortable labor to me. They dug ditches, and they moved heavy stones by hand in re-landscaping the parks and grounds and in planting new buildings in the cities. Yes, Jimmy, they had grown whole cities, and there was an organized life of drudgery in bringing in food and in all the accounting to keep it going. The people worked hard to do this without machines, but they looked healthy and happy. Here, I missed leisure, even the misused leisure which I had found among the readers and forgetters of Britain. Sure, I thought, the Americans must tire of these never-ending routine tasks. How wrong I was, Jimmy!
"Let me tell you. I examined the thoughts of a ditch-digger. I found that he was the happiest man imaginable. He had been in his earlier years, I learned, an applied nuclear, physicist in an atomic energy plant (I marveled that there had been such in his lifetime, and I was tempted to seek them out). His days had been spent in endless worries about the techniques of keeping the complicated machinery going. His nights had been haunted by calculations concerning possibilities which had been overlooked, and problems which had not been solved. Then, in a day of enlightenment, he had left all this, and be was enjoying the rest of his life out in the fresh air, digging ditches. Jimmy, for a moment I admired that man. This was what I had tried to do for humanity. But, Jimmy, I have always been curious. So, I thought I will find out a little more about this atomic energy plant; where it is and what the present state of nuclear physics is. And, Jimmy, despite the position this man seemed to have held, I got no substantial information at all. His memories of his former life seemed to have been whittled down until nothing was left but their emotional content.
"I'm a trusting man, Jimmy, hut some things need explanation. So I followed this ditch-digger through all the rest of the day, and home that night to a third-floor walkup apartment (they had not succeeded in growing elevators) where he was greeted by a wife of remarkable ugliness.
"You know, Jimmy, that man's entire past life vanished from his mind the moment he saw his wife's face. It was replaced by an entirely different past, which I won't bother to describe. The gist of it was, of course, that because of these now-past events he was remarkably lucky to be married to this very ordinary and very ill-favored creature.
"You see, Jimmy, what the Americans had achieved in a life of thought was a controlled rationalization of remarkable clarity. They could make their tastes conform to whatever they did, and they could make their memories back them up. It was remarkably successful, too, for they were all happy. I found men happy to be paralyzed, men happily dying of cancer, and women happy to have home idiot children. There was nothing more to be desired, for whatever a man's lot might be was just what he wanted.
"Jimmy, I was shaken then. Where was my world of nature and thought and philosophy, music and contemplation, the world I had tried to give to men? But then, I wondered if such a civilization as I had seen might not fall to pieces, giving way to something better. So, Jimmy, I decided to look at the end product.
I tried 50,000 A.D. It looked a lot better, Jimmy. You should see it yourself, for a bit."
Herr van Manderpootz broke off and led me to the room with the apparatus which looked like a dentist's chair. He bade me to lie back, and he strapped a helmet over my head.
"You won't be there long," he said, "and you won't need to know what to do."
He turned a switch and I found myself, as nearly as I can describe it, floating in space. I hoped that for the first time in my life I had got where I was headed for.
It was a space not empty, however, but filled everywhere with a faint illumination. There were luminous buildings, or temples, or palaces—I don't know how to describe them, floating apparently in mid-air, and lighted from nowhere. And there were creatures, too, of various form. Some were tenuous, gaslike, with bright-colored nuclei of light. Some were geometrical and jewel-like, flashing back rays which had never shone on them. And there was music, and a group of creatures of like form were weaving in a geometric pattern, a dance, I thought. But all of this was so different from anything I had ever seen, and so confusing, that I cannot remember it distinctly. Then one of the "onlookers" seemed to sense my presence.
"He has returned," I seemed to sense his thoughts.
"He has returned," a chorus of thoughts replied. The dancing stopped, and one of the dancers seemed to me to waiver. Then with a wrench I was back in van Manderpootz's dentist chair, staring at van Manderpootz's clean-shaven face.
"It's beautiful, Jimmy, isn't it?" he asked.
"It came out all right in the end?" I asked, rather unbelievingly.
"No, Jimmy," he said, "that's why I'm doing what I am." And then he began the end of his tale:
"I think they would recognize you, Jimmy; they would take you for me. You see, I spent some time with them in their world. Yes, where it was my first puzzle, for when I got past my initial astonishment and joy, I wondered at the absence of Earth, or sun or stars, or anything with which I had been familiar. Could these have vanished? Certainly, not in a few thousand years.
"Jimmy, it didn't take long for me to find out. Theirs is a mental world! It has space and light, form and color and music, because they think these things in their minds.
Indeed, they have legends of matter—old, misunderstood legends which are the myths of their world. Some of those have been woven into their art. They have a festival of the body, which they celebrate at times—at what times, I wonder, for what is time in a nonphysical world? They held the festival for me, once. I think it is a myth about a myth of creation. All of the creatures gathered around in a hollow sphere and thought a nebulous mist into being in the center of it. Then the mist congealed into the forms of a man and a woman, lying under a tree. To them, this had no meaning save as a very old ritual with a quaintness which gave it artistic value. Their forms have nothing to do with the human; they are entirely arbitrary. They are the result of fashion. In that world, someone creates a form as a woman would design a dress. Others take a fancy to it and copy it The whole world is in a perpetual flux.
"And that is true of the buildings themselves, and of the very pattern of space. Mostly they, and their buildings, exist in a space very much like our own, for they are used to this. But in play, they delight in changing the laws, in making up spaces with queer but consistent geometries. Some are periodic; in them creatures and things appear endlessly repeated. Other simple spaces are oddly warped, so that everything changes shape as it moves, queerly but consistently. Indeed, one of their games is to invent a space according to geometrical postulates. Then a group will imagine themselves and a portion of their world in it, and imagine their behavior and appearance, and together, imagine the appearance of their buildings. And to make an error, to imagine something inconsistent with the assumed laws, is to lose the game.
"I said, Jimmy, that they sometimes imagine in a group. Their buildings are made that way; they are there because a group of the creatures imagine them. For in larger things, with great detail, it takes the minds of many, although each one imagines his own form, or so I thought at first.
"Well, Jimmy, you can believe that I was delighted. Here was the future of humanity (of that I was sure, by the festival of the body, and by other familiar aspects of their thought and imaginings). But it was a humanity entirely freed from the physical. Vestiges remained, but only as pleasing aspects of thought. Thus, in some vague way there seemed to be sex left in the creatures (how, I could not then imagine) and love, but these were more of a mode of artistic expression than any fixed reality. There were poems, which could be graven across their heavens of the mind in fiery letters, or rolled out in imagined voices. There was music, too, to be heard with the ear of the mind, and accompanied with flashing patterns and harmonies of scent which could not have seemed more real had they been physical. And there was contemplation, and thought of mathematics, or of philosophy, so consistent in all of its subtle relations that it seemed to be beyond human criticism—even of the great van Manderpootz.
"You can imagine, Jimmy, that I wasn't looking for flaws, at least, not at first. And then, I began to wonder. Some way, Jimmy, it didn't seem too good. I looked for flaws. I found sickness.
"Yes, sickness, Jimmy, in a world without anything physical in it. First I asked, and no one paid any attention. But then, it happened even as I was thinking mathematics with a wonderful creature of shimmering whorls. For a moment his thoughts were troubled. He lost the thread of his argument—his thoughts became unpleasant and disconnected, as if, almost, of pain.
"And then his fellows gathered around, and helped him. They thought the right thoughts with him. It was as if they were leading him back to the right path. I could not understand it all; there was a period of confusion during which I thought that his form waivered. And then he steadied again. His thoughts cleared and we resumed our discussion for a moment Then I asked him what had been wrong. The reply seemed to mean, I was sick; but now I am well again. I noticed that some of his companions still lingered, following the conversation, and I wondered if the creature of whorls were not wholly recovered. .
"Well, Jimmy, I am suspicious, a little, and I watched my creature of whorls, and kept him, well, where I could see him out of the corner of my mind. And you know, Jimmy, he was weak yet. When it came time to think into existence a new building, or to change an old one, he seemed to take little part, and this puzzled me.
"And being puzzled, Jimmy, I became critical, too. The world was beautiful, and impressive beyond all compare, but, despite its manifold and arbitrary changes, it came to seem monotonous to me. At first I did not know what I missed. Then I realized what it was. This world was a world of thought alone. It lacked the infinite and arbitrary variety of nature and of a world modeled on nature. There was no beach made up of grains of sand, uncountable and yet each a little different from the rest. There were no snowflakes, all hexagonal and yet no two alike. And, in the buildings, there was no hidden and forgotten carving, as in a Gothic cathedral, to be rediscovered by the curious, in a dark corner, seen by the light of a flickering candle. The world was of the mind. There could be nothing outside of the mind; all there was, it had made, and there was nothing to discover.
"And in these disquieting meditations, I thought of my creature of whorls and of his sickness. I thought for him, but I could not find him. And, Jimmy, I was frightened. And I fled the place, back to here.
"I didn't know what to do, Jimmy. I, the great van Manderpootz. I was so hurt, and so disappointed to doubt the future which I had helped to bring about, or which I would help to bring about if I continued with my biology and psychology. But I can face the truth. Van Manderpootz is no coward. So I went back to the machine, and I explored time back from that remote future in which I had been. And do you know what I found, Jimmy? Symbiosis! I found men preparing closed tanks, filled with all the elements needful to life, and with glass tops faced to the sun. And I saw them lowering unconscious human bodies into those tanks, into a mess of what looked like slime and must have been alive. And I knew what had happened. Man had found a way to live without effort, in the partnership with some simple organism, his body cradled and fed and kept young through the ages. And he had found telepathy as well. Finally, the very last man to walk the face of the earth had lowered himself into a tank and closed the lid. And men had lived in a world of dreams, thinking their thoughts together. They had forgotten their bodies, which lay on the face of the earth.
"Perhaps they had planned that someone would tend the bodies. I suppose so, but no one had. And now, earthquakes, or floods, or life—some successor to the termite, perhaps, boring into the tanks, was killing men, one by one. And as a man's body died, his consciousness faded. I thought of the creature of whorls. He had died, and his fellows had taken over his thoughts; they had maintained him in their consciousness, just as they did the buildings which they built together, and they called this curing him. And then, they forgot him, and he vanished, and no one remembered him, and those who were left were happy.
"Jimmy, I wept. I did, Jimmy, I, the great van Manderpootz. But I am a man of action, so next I thought, what could I do about it? At first, I was dazed, and I went far ahead into the world of the gorgeous creatures, and I tried to tell them about the physical world, about stars and the sun and the Earth and seas and stones and soil and creatures, hoping even to tell them about their bodies in the tanks. But it was no good, Jimmy. At first they listened, for it was strange—like ghost stories to us, and tales of heaven and hell. But then, they lost interest, and when I tried to make them believe that this was serious, and real, they turned their minds away. They knew, you see, that thoughts alone were real. At first I despaired, tut then I realized that it was too late. Suppose the impossible, that I did convince them. What could they do? They had no way of raising their bodies out of the tanks, and living in them again. So I thought, where shall I start to prevent this? And I thought of the earlier worlds. When they were putting them into the tanks, that was too late already. And the world of rationalizations, one should stop before that. And the world of forgetting, where people muttered over a favorite phrase; that too should be prevented. And then, Jimmy, I came right back to this house. If these things were to exist, it would be because I, Haskel van Manderpootz, gave to the world the results which I should achieve through my biological researches, instead of what I should give the world."
"But you said that life was the most wonderful thing," I exclaimed. "And surely, all your plants were wonderfully useful. Even that chair…" and I pointed to the object.
It's crooked, Jimmy," he said. "And I was thinking crooked. I was wrong when I was right. I'm not too proud to admit I can be wrong," he added magnanimously, "when I find it out myself.
"What was wrong, Jimmy, was thinking that what the future needed was chairs, or houses that were easier to make, or crops that were easier to take care of. What the world really needed was better people. Smarter people. More aggressive people. People who don't just lie in a tank and dream, but people who think and then get up and do things."
"You mean, you can use your genetic visualizer and manipulator to make better people?" I asked.
"Better people!" he replied. "How could people be better than van Manderpootz? What the world needs is more van Manderpootzes."
"And so, Joyce?" I asked.
"Yes, Joyce," he replied. "She's healthy. And she has a wonderful mind-capable, and absolutely blank. All she thinks of are tennis and skiing and horses. They come next," he added. "Van
Manderpootz can do anything a woman can, and better, except make him little van Manderpootzes."
I was awed at this revelation. Here was something my guru hadn't told me about man and his future. When I left van Manderpootz to visit my guru's spiritual colleague in Carmel, I found I had taken a flight to Iowa. Married to a farmer's daughter, I'm thinking of asking van Manderpootz if he really destroyed all of those pest-proof, self-tending crops.