The Complete Stories (Page 219)

"I was joking," said Winthrop.

"Why Beelzebub?" asked Polen.

"It amounts to a pun," said Winthrop. "The ancient Hebrews used it as

one of their many terms of derision for alien gods. It comes from Ba’al, meaning lord and zevuv, meaning fly. The lord of flies."

Casey said, "Come on, Winthrop, don’t say you don’t believe in Beelzebub."

"I believe in the existence of evil," said Winthrop, stiffly.

"I mean Beelzebub. Alive. Horns. Hooves. A sort of competition deity." 1 "Not at all." Winthrop grew stiffer. "Evil is a short-term affair. In the end it must lose-"

Polen changed the subject with a jar. He said, "I’ll be doing graduate work for Venner, by the way. I talked with him day before yesterday, and he’ll take me on."

"No! That’s wonderful." Winthrop glowed and leaped to the subject-change instantly. He held out a hand with which to pump Polen’s. He was always conscientiously eager to rejoice in another’s good fortune. Casey often pointed that out.

Casey said, "Cybernetics Venner? Well, if you can stand him, I suppose he can stand you."

Winthrop went on. "What did he think of your idea? Did you tell him your idea?"

"What idea?" demanded Casey.

Polen had avoided telling Casey so far. But now Venner had considered it and had passed it with a cool, "Interesting!" How could Casey’s dry laughter hurt it now?

Polen said, "It’s nothing much. Essentially, it’s just a notion that emotion is the common bond of life, rather than reason or intellect. It’s practically a truism, I suppose. You can’t tell what a baby thinks or even // it thinks, but it’s perfectly obvious that it can be angry, frightened or contented even when a week old. See?

"Same with animals. You can tell in a second if a dog is happy or if a cat is afraid. The point is that their emotions are the same as those we would have under the same circumstances."

"So?" said Casey. "Where does it get you?"

"I don’t know yet. Right now, all I can say is that emotions are universals. Now suppose we could properly analyze all the actions of men and certain familiar animals and equate them with the visible emotion. We might find a tight relationship. Emotion A might always involve Motion B. Then we could apply it to animals whose emotions we couldn’t guess at by common sense alone. Like snakes, or lobsters."

"Or flies," said Casey, as he slapped viciously at another and flicked its remains off his wrist in furious triumph.

He went on. "Go ahead, Johnny. I’ll contribute the flies and you study them. We’ll establish a science of flychology and labor to make them happy

by removing their neuroses. After all, we want the greatest good of the greatest number, don’t we? And there are more flies than men." "Oh, well," said Polen.

Casey said, "Say, Polen, did you ever follow up that weird idea of yours? I mean, we all know you’re a shining cybernetic light, but 1 haven’t been reading your papers. With so many ways of wasting time, something has to be neglected, you know."

"What idea?" asked Polen, woodenly.

"Come on. You know. Emotions of animals and all that sort of guff. Boy, those were the days. I used to know madmen. Now I only come across idiots."

Winthrop said, "That’s right, Polen. I remember it very well. Your first year in graduate school you were working on dogs and rabbits. I believe you even tried some of Casey’s flies."

Polen said, "It came to nothing in itself. It gave rise to certain new principles of computing, however, so it wasn’t a total loss."

Why did they talk about it?

Emotions! What right had anyone to meddle with emotions? Words were invented to conceal emotions. It was the dreadfulness of raw emotion that had made language a basic necessity.

Polen knew. His machines had by-passed the screen of verbalization and dragged the unconscious into the sunlight. The boy and the girl, the son and the mother. For that matter, the cat and the mouse or the snake and the bird. The data rattled together in its universality and it had all poured into and through Polen until he could no longer bear the touch of life.

In the last few years he had so painstakingly schooled his thoughts in other directions. Now these two came, dabbling in his mind, stirring up its mud.

Casey batted abstractedly across the tip of his nose to dislodge a fly. "Too bad," he said. "I used to think you could get some fascinating things out of, say, rats. Well, maybe not fascinating, but then not as boring as the stuff you would get out of our somewhat-human beings. I used to think-"

Polen remembered what he used to think.

Casey said, "Damn this DOT. The flies feed on it, I think. You know, I’m going to do graduate work in chemistry and then get a job on insecticides. So help me. I’ll personally get something that will kill the vermin."

They were in Casey’s room, and it had a somewhat keroseny odor from the recently applied insecticide.

Polen shrugged and said, "A folded newspaper will always kill."

Casey detected a non-existent sneer and said instantly, "How would you summarize your first year’s work, Polen? I mean aside from the true summary any scientist could state if he dared, by which I mean: ‘Nothing.’ "

"Nothing," said Polen. "There’s your summary."

"Go on," said Casey. "You use more dogs than the physiologists do and I bet the dogs mind the physiological experiments less. I would."

"Oh, leave him alone," said Winthrop. "You sound like a piano with 87 keys eternally out of order. You’re a bore!"

You couldn’t say that to Casey.