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he has supplied me with few details to go by.
He found the cataract, not very far ahead; evidently, he had jumped none
too soon. As its sound had suggested, it was a monster, leaping over an
underground cliff which he guesses must have been four or five miles high,
into a cavern which might have been the Great Gulf itself. He says, and I
think he is right, that we now have an explanation for the low density of
Chandala: If the rest of it has as much underground area as the part he
saw, its crust must be extremely porous. By this reckoning, the Chandalese
underworld must have almost the surface area of Mars.
It must have seemed a world to itself indeed to Naysmith, standing on the
rim of that gulf and looking down at its 119
A Dusk of Mob
fire-filled floor. Where the cataract struck, steam rose in huge billows and
plumes, and with a scream which forced him to shut off the radio at once.
Occasionally the ground shook faintly under his feet.
Face to face with Hell, Naysmith found reason to hope. This inferno, it
seemed to him, might well underlie the region of hot springs, geysers, and
fumaroles towards which he had been heading from the beginning; and if so,
there should be dead voUtnic funnels through which he might escape to the
surface. This proved to be the case; but first he hadto pick his way around
the edge of the abyss to search for one, starting occasional rockslides,
the heat blasting through his helmet, and all in the most profound and
unnatural silence. If this is scenery, I prefer not to be offered any more
scenic vacations.
"But on the way, I figured it out," Naysmith told me. "Rituals don't grow
without a reason--especially not rituals involving a whole culture. This
one has a reason that I should have been the first to see--or any physician
should. You, too."
"Thanks. But I don't see it. If the Heart stars do, they aren't telling."
"They must think it's obvious," Naysmith said. "It's eugenics. Most planets
select for better genes by controlling breeding. The Chandalese do it by
genocide. They force their lower castes to kill themselves off."
"Ugh. Are you sure? Is it scientific? I don't see how it could be, under
the circumstances."
"Well, I don't have all the data. But I think a really thorough study of
Chandalese history, with a statistician to help, would show that it is.
It's also an enormously dangerous method, and it may wind up with the whole
planet dead; that's the chance they're taking, and I assume they're aware
of it."
"Well," I said, "assuming that it does work, I woul&1 admit a planet that
'survived' by that method into any federation I ran."
120
A Dusk of Idols
"No," Naysmith said soberly. "Neither would I. And there's the rub, you
see, because the Heart stars will. That's what shook me. I may have been a
lousy doctor-and don't waste your breath denying it, you know what I
mean-but I've been giving at least lip service to all our standard
humanitarian assumptions all my life, without ever examining them. What the
Chandalese face up to, and we don't, is that death is now and has always
been the drive wheel of evolution. They not only face up to it, they use
it.
"When I was down there in the middle of that sewer, I was in the middle of
my own Goetzendaemmerung-the twilight of the idols that Nietzsche speaks
of. I could see all the totems of my own world, of my own fife, falling
into the muck ... shooting like logs over the brink into Hell. And it was
then that I knew I couldn't be a surgeon any more."
"Come now," I said. "You'll get over it. After all, it's just another
planet with strange customs. There are millions of them."
"You weren't there," Naysmith said, looking over my shoulder at nothing.
"For you, that's all it is. For me ... 'No other taste shall change this.'
Don't you see? All planets are Chandalas. It's not just that Hell is real.
The laws that run it are the laws of life everywhere."
His gaze returned to me. It made me horribly uneasy.
"What was it Mephistopheles said?'Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.'
The totems are falling all around us as we sit here. One by one, Rosenbaum;
one by one."
And that is how we lost Naysmith. It would have been easy enough to say
simply that he had a desperate experience on a savage planet and that it
damaged his sanity, and let it go at that. But it would not be true. I
would dismiss it that way myself if I could.
But I cannot bring myself to forget that the Heart stars classify Chandala
as a civilized world.
121
None so Blind
A number of readers, including Fritz Leiber, complained on its first
appearance that this story wasn't a fantasy at all. But there are, on the
contrary, two fantastic assumptions buried in it, one large and one small.
The present title-which was the original, though not the one under which
it first appeared-probably won't help, since the whole quotation from
which it comes appeared in the magaziVe editor's blurb for the piece.
The early Mott Street morning was misty, but that would bum off later; it
was going to be a hot day in New York. The double doors of the boarded-up
shop swung inward with a grating noise, and a black-and-white tomcat bolted
out of an overflowing garbage can next door and slid beneath a parked car.
It was safe there: The car had been left in. distress two days ago, and
since then the neighbourhood kids had removed three tyres and the engine.
After that, nothing moved for a while. At last, a preternaturally clean old
man, neatly dressed in very clean rags, came out of the dark, chill
interior of the shop with a kettle heaped with freshly fired charcoal,
which he set on the sidewalk. Straightening, he took a good long look at
the day, exposing his cleanliness, the sign of his reclamation from the
Bowery two blocks away, to the unkind air. Then he scuffled back into the
cave with a bubbly sigh; he would next see the day tomorrow morning at the
same time, if it didn't rain. Behind him, the bucket of charcoal sent up
petals of yellow flame, in the midst of which the briquettes nestled like
dragon's eggs, still unhatched.
. 122
None so Blind
Now emerged the hot-dog wagons, three of them, one by one, their
blue-and-orange-striped parasols bobbing stiffly, pushed by men in stiff
caps. The men helped themselves to charcoal from the bucket, to heat the
franks (all meat) and the sauerkraut (all cabbage) and the rolls (all
sawdust). Behind them came the fruit pushcarts, and then two carts heaped
with the vegetables of the district: minute artichokes for three cents
each, Italian tomatoes, eggplants in all sizes, zucchini, peppers, purple
onions.
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