that he didn’t know about. He could be enslaved if he forgot to go downwind before farting in the presence of a cop. He was assured, however, that he wasn’t subject to the laws.
“Not as long as you leave within two weeks,” his informant said. “We wouldn’t want you as a slave. You have too many strange ideas. If you stayed here long, you might spread these, infect too many people.”
Simon didn’t comment. The analogy of new ideas to deadly diseases was not new to him.
One of Simon’s favorite writers, a science-fiction author by the name of Jonathan Swift Somers III, had once written a story about this parallel between diseases and ideas. In his story, Quarantine!, an Earthman had landed on an uncharted planet. He was eager to study the aliens, but they wouldn’t let him out of the spaceship until he had been given a medical checkup. At first, he thought they suspected him of bringing in germs they weren’t equipped to handle. After he’d learned their language, he was told that this wasn’t so. The aliens had long ago perfected a panacea against illnesses of the flesh. They were worried about his disrupting their society, perhaps destroying it, with deadly thoughts.
The port officials, wearing lead mind-shields, questioned the Earthman closely for two weeks. He sweated while he talked because the aliens’ method of disease-prevention, which was one hundred percent effective, was to kill the sick person. His body was then burned and his ashes were buried at midnight in an unmarked grave.
After two weeks of grilling, the head official said, smiling, “You can go out among our people now.”
“You mean I have a clean bill of health?” the Earthman said.
“Nothing to worry about,” the official said. “We’ve heard every idea you have. There isn’t a single one we didn’t think of ten thousand years ago. You must come from a very primitive world.”
Jonathan Swift Somers III, like most great American writers, had been born in the Midwest. His father had been an aspiring poet whose unfinished epic had not been printed until long after his death. Simon had once made a pilgrimage to Petersburg, Illinois, where the great man was buried. The monument was a granite wheelchair with wings. Below was the epitaph:
JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS III
1910-1982
He Didn’t Need Legs
Somers had been paralyzed from the waist down since he was ten years old. In those days, they didn’t have a vaccine against polio. Somers never left the wheelchair or his native town, but his mind voyaged out into the universe. He wrote forty novels and two hundred short stories, mostly about adventure in space. When he started writing, he described exploits on the Moon and Mars. When landings were made on these, he shifted the locale to Jupiter. After the Jovian Expedition, he wrote about astronauts who traveled to the extreme edge of the cosmos. He figured that in his lifetime men would never get beyond the solar system, and he was right. Actually, it made no difference whether or not astronauts got to the places he described. His books about the Moon and Mars were still read long after voyages there had become humdrum. It didn’t matter that Somers had been one hundred percent wrong about those places. His books were poetic and dramatic, and the people he depicted going there seemed more real than the people who actually went there. At least, they were more interesting.
Somers belonged to the same school of writing as the great French novelist Balzac. Balzac claimed he could write better about a place if he knew nothing of it. Invariably, when he did go to a city he had described in a book, he was disappointed.
Near Somers’ grave was his father’s.
JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS II
1877-1912
I tried to fly on verse’s wings.
Rejection slips all called it corn.
How Nature balances joys and stings!
I never suffered a critic’s scorn.
However, the book reviewers had given the son a hard time most of his life. It wasn’t
“Not as long as you leave within two weeks,” his informant said. “We wouldn’t want you as a slave. You have too many strange ideas. If you stayed here long, you might spread these, infect too many people.”
Simon didn’t comment. The analogy of new ideas to deadly diseases was not new to him.
One of Simon’s favorite writers, a science-fiction author by the name of Jonathan Swift Somers III, had once written a story about this parallel between diseases and ideas. In his story, Quarantine!, an Earthman had landed on an uncharted planet. He was eager to study the aliens, but they wouldn’t let him out of the spaceship until he had been given a medical checkup. At first, he thought they suspected him of bringing in germs they weren’t equipped to handle. After he’d learned their language, he was told that this wasn’t so. The aliens had long ago perfected a panacea against illnesses of the flesh. They were worried about his disrupting their society, perhaps destroying it, with deadly thoughts.
The port officials, wearing lead mind-shields, questioned the Earthman closely for two weeks. He sweated while he talked because the aliens’ method of disease-prevention, which was one hundred percent effective, was to kill the sick person. His body was then burned and his ashes were buried at midnight in an unmarked grave.
After two weeks of grilling, the head official said, smiling, “You can go out among our people now.”
“You mean I have a clean bill of health?” the Earthman said.
“Nothing to worry about,” the official said. “We’ve heard every idea you have. There isn’t a single one we didn’t think of ten thousand years ago. You must come from a very primitive world.”
Jonathan Swift Somers III, like most great American writers, had been born in the Midwest. His father had been an aspiring poet whose unfinished epic had not been printed until long after his death. Simon had once made a pilgrimage to Petersburg, Illinois, where the great man was buried. The monument was a granite wheelchair with wings. Below was the epitaph:
JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS III
1910-1982
He Didn’t Need Legs
Somers had been paralyzed from the waist down since he was ten years old. In those days, they didn’t have a vaccine against polio. Somers never left the wheelchair or his native town, but his mind voyaged out into the universe. He wrote forty novels and two hundred short stories, mostly about adventure in space. When he started writing, he described exploits on the Moon and Mars. When landings were made on these, he shifted the locale to Jupiter. After the Jovian Expedition, he wrote about astronauts who traveled to the extreme edge of the cosmos. He figured that in his lifetime men would never get beyond the solar system, and he was right. Actually, it made no difference whether or not astronauts got to the places he described. His books about the Moon and Mars were still read long after voyages there had become humdrum. It didn’t matter that Somers had been one hundred percent wrong about those places. His books were poetic and dramatic, and the people he depicted going there seemed more real than the people who actually went there. At least, they were more interesting.
Somers belonged to the same school of writing as the great French novelist Balzac. Balzac claimed he could write better about a place if he knew nothing of it. Invariably, when he did go to a city he had described in a book, he was disappointed.
Near Somers’ grave was his father’s.
JONATHAN SWIFT SOMERS II
1877-1912
I tried to fly on verse’s wings.
Rejection slips all called it corn.
How Nature balances joys and stings!
I never suffered a critic’s scorn.
However, the book reviewers had given the son a hard time most of his life. It wasn’t
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