The Alien
by Jon Worley
Dingy didn't begin to describe the motel. The rooms had been condemned long ago, but the owners still rented out the lobby for small meetings. It was a good place to assemble.
In the group of fifty, forty-eight were retarded. Some slightly, many severely. Their parents, while probably not Pittites, didn't feel that retardation was enough to keep a potential child from the world. Of course, all these people had an overwhelming curiosity about outer space. The meeting began orderly enough, but after a half-hour or so most of the folks had crossed their attention-span threshold and simply started wandering about, chatting with each other about many inane things.
Phil Termst and Grady Wilson, the two "normal" members, wandered over and introduced themselves. The first thing they asked was to see my genome report.
A very personal request, as you know. Yeah, almost everyone keeps it on his or her person (it is a law, and the data is imprinted on your ID, anyway), but this seemed a bit forward. Phil assured me that they were only looking for one thing. Apparently, Grady was a genetic counselor, and, on a lark, one day he called up the reports of many of the club members. Every one had the same genetic defect I had. The retarded members also had another defect, one that is also associated with poor brain development.
"You, Phil and I all have the defect in abstract thought," he said. "But we don't have the additional retardation defect." He let that sink in for a minute.
"So our gene is not really an indicator of retardation?" I asked after a minute. When I went to college, I discarded my parent's Pittite ways and had my genome mapped. The counselor told me that with the abstract thought error indicator, I should have had an I.Q. of 65 or so. Had my parents not been Pittites, they almost certainly would have aborted me.
"Do you think you are retarded" Phil asked.
"No," I said, answering my own question. "So what does our marking mean?"
Grady looked at both of us for a minute.
"I've thought about it for a long time," he finally said. "Phil and I have talked it over. We had a theory, so I ran a search on genomes from the past two hundred centuries or so. I found something interesting." He stopped and gave me a sly smile, as if to heighten my anticipation.
"You're going to freak," Phil said. "Freak like a father."
I snorted. "Come on. Out with it."
"When the original genome project finished back in the middle of the 21st century, the scientists ran quite a few tests that were similar to the standard one we give today. They mapped out quite a few subjects. And, indeed, they noted that our gene had something to do with abstract thought."
"Freak, man, freak," Phil said softly.
Grady looked straight at me. "Anyone who didn't have the mark we do was considered to be deficient." He stared at me for a moment.
I finally understood. "You mean, our mark was normal?"
"People who didn't have the mark couldn't visualize beyond their own realm of understanding."
"Come again?" I said.
"You're in education, right?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"You much up on science?"
"Not really."
"But you're interested in outer space."
"Sure."
"You curious about other life?"
Other life. Dogs? Chimpanzees? Fleas?
"Life on other planets," Phil chimed in. "Aliens was what they used to call them."
My mind reeled. "We know about creatures on other worlds? Why aren't these things being taught?"
"Calm down," Grady said. "We haven't made contact with any aliens. But that's what people used to call that sort of thing."
"A couple hundred years ago, alien speculation was one of the more popular forms of entertainment around. The major nations of the world spent large sums of money putting humans into space and seeing what they could do. We tried to contact alien civilizations with radio, ray beams, spaceships, whatever came to our heads."
"I've read a little about that."
"But not in the history programs," Grady said.
"No," I admitted.
"Around the beginning of the 22nd century, most of the outer space missions had gone bad. And the weird thing was, no one seemed to care. This idea of alien civilizations, or even the desire to further explore outer space really waned."
"To the point where today no one will even talk about it," Phil chimed in. "Except us nuts."
"You see," Grady said, "the counselors told me and Phil's parents that we would be born retarded. Maybe not even be able to keep our pants unsoiled. You can imagine the distress."
"But your parents had you," I said. "Like all the other people in the room."
"Yeah," Grady said. "And I've done some research on this whole gene thing. The same time when all the interest in space was declining, the prevalence of our gene also dropped severely. And those that had it very often also had the genetic problems most of our members here have."
"So the genetic counselors began associating our gene with retardation, and even fewer people were born with it," I said. And I understood.
Grady smiled. "You see it, too. Our gene has something to do with an interest in outer space. Well, it may have been a pioneer gene, too, back when the Earth was less populated. Can't really say. But for some reason, evolution saw fit to make it fall out of favor."
"Because the whole world was teetering on population collapse?" I asked.
"Maybe," Phil said. "We just don't know. Could be anything."
The dates hit me again.
"Do you believe in a god?" I asked both of them.
"Nope," Grady said.
"Me neither," Phil said.
"But the idea makes sense to you, right?"
"Idea?" Phil asked.
"Yeah," I said. "The idea of a god. The concept of what a god could or should be. You can understand why people would wrap their minds around such a subject."
"I guess," Grady said. He shook his head. "I kinda see where you're going with this. Kinda."
"What if one of these gods we used to believe in came down and altered the basic genome?"
"Whoa, buddy," Phil said. "Nothin' like that. Nope. I don't see that at all."
"Me neither," Grady said. "I mean, maybe something changed us, a mutation or something. Some kind of nuclear leftover or virus or something. But no god."
Something. Something changed us. While the whole concept of radical gene mutation hadn't quite sunk in, I still could almost feel the hands that altered our species. This change in the basic human makeup wasn't a random encounter. It was subtle and sophisticated. And calculated to keep people from venturing into space, or believing in any being more powerful than themselves.
Something...
Grady could see my revelation. And I think it may well have hit him at the same time.
"The alien," I said, and he nodded.
"What?" Phil asked.
"The alien did it to us."
"What alien?" he asked.
"An alien that fears us, obviously," Grady said. "We somehow spooked something out there, and it 'fixed' us. Made it so that we wouldn't come out and bother it."
"We just figured out how to do that stuff a hundred years ago," Phil said. "Why would something with that much knowledge be afraid of us? And if it was, why wouldn't it just destroy us?"
"Maybe it did destroy us," I said. "Look at our civilization. We haven't really advanced technology in revolutionary ways in at least a century. There seems to be no impetus for improvement. This gene must have been what the alien feared."
"I don't know," Phil said. "No one I know fears me."
"Or me," Grady said. "But imagine a civilization filled with beings that have the capacity to think beyond their means. To dream. To see a future that is radically different than the present. That's power."
"Power that is lost," I said.
"You think?" Phil asked.
"How many of us are there?"
"You mean that have this 'pioneer' gene and are not retarded?"
"Yeah," I said. "You've got access to the files. Why don't you look?"
"He can't do that," Grady broke in. "They'd fire him."
Phil gave me a thoughtful look. Rubbed his chin.
"Maybe," he drawled out slowly. "Maybe not. I've got plenty of reasons for running searches, and I've already done all this work."
"Whatcha gonna do?" Grady asked.
I looked him square in the eye.
"We're going to reintroduce this gene into the general population."
"I know that's illegal," Grady said. "Plus, that's tampering way above and beyond what anyone should do."
"And of course, we don't know what havoc we'd wreak," Phil said.
"We know what will happen if we don't try," I said.
We pondered that reality. And realized the three of us had a weapon that most of rest of the world didn't have. A sword that truly could wipe out any disadvantage, real or imagined.
We had hope.
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