teenager in Bayonne. This morning, goaded by hunger, he broke into a sporting goods store, grabbed a fiberglass hunting bow and a quiver of arrows, and pedaled off toward the Delaware Water Gap. He hopes to bag a deer by nightfall. Lots of luck, Danny.
Like I said, I got it right this time. Iâve won. No more tasteless skyscrapers. No more arrogant space shuttles or presumptuous particle accelerators. Damn, but Iâm good. Oh, Me, but Iâm clever.
I guess thatâs why Iâve got the job.
Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks
The world is not a prison-house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
âEdwin Arlington Robinson
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1 J ULY 2059
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P ROCYON -5, Southwest Continent, Greenrivet University. The air here is like something youâd find inside a chain-smokerâs lungs, but no matterâwe are still exultant from our success on Arcturus-9. In a mere two weeks, not only did Marcus and I disabuse the natives of their belief that carving large-breasted stone dolls cures infertility, we also provided them with the rudiments of scientific medicine. I am confident that, upon returning to Arc-9, we shall find public hospitals, diagnostic centers, outpatient clinics, immunization programs . . . The life of a science missionary may be unremunerative and harsh, but the spiritual rewards are great!
Our arrival at Greenrivetâs space terminal entailed perhaps the most colorful welcome since HMS
Bounty
sailed into Tahiti. The nativesâandroids every oneâturned out en masse bearing gifts, including thick, fragrant leis that they ceremoniously lowered about our necks. Marcus is allergic to flowers of all species, but he bore his ordeal stoically. Even if he were not my twin brother, I would still regard him as the most talented science missionary of our age. Itâs a fair guess heâll go directly from this ministry to a full position at the Heuristic Instituteâhe has the stuff to become a truly legendary Archbishop of Geophysics.
Amid the shaving mugs and the neckties, one of the androidsâ gifts struck me as odd: a reprint of Charles Darwinâs
The Origin of Species
âthe original 1859 versionâhand lettered on gold-leaf vellum and bound in embossed leather. After giving me the volume, a rusting and obsolete Model 605 pressed his palms together and raised his arms skyward, crossing them to form a metallic X. ââThe innumerable species, genera, and families with which this world is peopled are all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents,ââ the robot recited. âThe
Origin:
fourteenth chapter, section seven, paragraph four, verse one.â
âThank you,â I replied, though the decrepit creature seemed not to hear.
The president of Greenrivet University, Dr. Polycarp, is a Model 349 with teeth like barbed wire and blindingly bright eyes. He drove us from the spaceport in his private auto, then gave us a Cookâs tour of the school, a clutch of hemispheric buildings rising from the tarmac like concrete igloos. In the faculty lounge we met Professor Hippolytus and Dean Tertullian. Polycarp and his colleagues
seem
rational enough. No doubt their minds are clogged with myths and superstitions that Marcus and I shall have to remove through the plumberâs helper of logical positivism.
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2 J ULY 2059
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What sort of culture might machine intelligence evolve in the absence of human intervention? Before the Great Economic Collapse, the sociobiology department of Harvard University became obsessed with this provocative question. They got a grant. And so Harvard created Greenrivet, populating it with Series-600 androids and abandoning them to their own devices . . .
Our cottage, which Dr. Polycarp insists on calling a house, is an unsightly pile of stone plopped down next to a marsh, host to mosquitoes and