I saw the following article the other day:
Ga. judge jails Muslim woman over head scarf
And it occurred to me that many people in this country might feel that the woman's refusal to remove her head scarf was much ado about nothing; why not simply remove it and be done with it, if security requires it? After all, we all have to take our shoes off to go through the airport security checkpoints, right? And while that's a nuisance, we all do it anyway.
But let's have a little perspective here: according to her culture, it is improper for a woman to bare her head in public. Asking her to remove her head scarf is roughly equivalent to asking a mainstream American woman to remove her shirt. We may find it hard to accept the equivalence; we may find it a very odd cultural taboo. But it isn't OUR reaction to removing headgear that is relevant; TO HER, it was essentially the same. If we would be appalled at a woman being cited for contempt of court because she wouldn't bare her breasts in public, we need to be appalled at this woman being so cited for refusing to bare her head. At least, we need to be equally appalled if we claim to believe in religious freedom and tolerance; to refuse to do so is to deny her religion the rights that more mainstream religions have of defining their own cultural taboos. If we are going to do that, we may as well scrap the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution and just admit that we don't REALLY believe in religious freedom & diversity except for those religions that are more or less like ours.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Friday, December 12, 2008
Re: Abortion and fetal rights:
Let us suppose, just for a moment, that a fetus is a fully-fledged, fully human being with all of the rights possessed by any other human being. (A debatable supposition, but one I'm prepared to grant for the sake of argument.)
Do **I** have the right to inhabit a woman's body against her will? Do YOU? Does any other fully-fledged human being? No? Then why would anyone claim that a fetus does?
In fact, I don't have the legal right (Moral right? Possibly, but that's a different matter altogether) to require a woman (not even my mother, were she still alive) to do so much as to give me a blood transfusion. Not even if my life depended on it. If an unquestionably living, fully-fledged human being has no legal right to require something as trivial as that, even to save his life, a fetus has (or should have) no legal right to require a woman to act as life-support unit for nine months. (Or a month, or a week, or a day.)
Religions can teach that abortion is wrong, immoral, unethical. I may even agree with them in most cases. But that has nothing to do with whether it should be prohibited legally. Not until and unless we are prepared to make far more trivial impositions upon a person's life required by law.
Do **I** have the right to inhabit a woman's body against her will? Do YOU? Does any other fully-fledged human being? No? Then why would anyone claim that a fetus does?
In fact, I don't have the legal right (Moral right? Possibly, but that's a different matter altogether) to require a woman (not even my mother, were she still alive) to do so much as to give me a blood transfusion. Not even if my life depended on it. If an unquestionably living, fully-fledged human being has no legal right to require something as trivial as that, even to save his life, a fetus has (or should have) no legal right to require a woman to act as life-support unit for nine months. (Or a month, or a week, or a day.)
Religions can teach that abortion is wrong, immoral, unethical. I may even agree with them in most cases. But that has nothing to do with whether it should be prohibited legally. Not until and unless we are prepared to make far more trivial impositions upon a person's life required by law.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Gay marriage, Prop 8 & Pat Boone's column:
The following is an e-mail that I sent to Pat Boone after reading his column on the subject of Gay Marriage & Prop 8 in California; to see the column I was responding to, click on the following link: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=82830.
You make some interesting points; slavery was abolished and women won the right to vote through due process, not through demonstrations and violence. But the deliberative process was undoubtedly influenced by demonstrations and campaigns by people who felt vehemently about those issues, and while violence is never the answer in such situations (it is, in fact, counterproductive, as witness the reaction against some of the violent anti-slavery actions) it is definitely necessary to make a sufficiently loud noise for one's cause to be noticed; rights are not won by sitting quietly by and hoping that the public mood shifts.As with the anti-slavery and women's sufferage movements, the gay rights movement has its extremists; I won't try to deny that fact. But if having extremists invalidated the truth to a political movement, and rendered that movement unworthy of success, then there would still be slavery, and women would still not have the right to vote. Both the Constitution and the bible were used to justify slavery, but that didn't make it right; no more does the fact that the Constitution is silent on the issue, and the bible, arguably, condemns homosexuality, nor the fact that Webster's Dictionary has a definition of marriage that excludes homosexual unions, make a homosexual marriage wrong. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, in some parts of the country, it was illegal for people of different races to marry; nowadays, most people would be appalled at any suggestion of passing such a law. The current resistance to homosexual marriage is a very similar situation: society is taking it upon itself to tell people who they can love, or whether or not they can marry the person they love, based on an arbitrary standard that has nothing to do with whether they would be able to do for each other those things that a married couple needs to be able to do. Millions of homosexuals are involved in relationships that are more stable than many state-approved marriages, even without the ability to make it legal and official; denying them the various rights that automatically come with marriage -- inheritance, hospital visiting priveleges, the right to make emergency medical decisions for one another, among many others -- is simply unjust. You and your co-religionists are free and welcome to teach that homosexuality is wrong and immoral. But the rest of us, who do not share your religious attitudes, should have the right to ignore your religious teachings. Even if your religious attitudes are held by the majority of the populace. That is the beauty of the first amendment and its freedom of religion clause. That is why measures like Prop 8 are wrongheaded and counter to the spirit of the United States Constitution, and it is in that spirit that people (like Brad Pitt) speak of the "Right" of homosexuals to marry. I have attempted to keep the tone of this letter civil, knowing that it is more likely to be read in its entirety if I do so; I hope you will not feel that I have failed in this regard if I point out that there has historically been (and no doubt currently still is) a great deal more violence directed against homosexuals by those who consider what they do to be immoral and evil than there has ever been directed against straights by homosexual activists; therefore, there is a far more direct "line" from the horrors in Mumbai to those opposed to gay marriage than there is from Mumbai to attempts by gays to secure the right to marry the partner they love.I do not ask you to accept that homosexuality is a morally neutral choice, in terms of your religious beliefs. I do ask you to understand that not everyone shares your religious beliefs, and our country is built on the bedrock that says that the minority cannot be forced to accept the religious teachings of the majority. Those of us who support the rights of homosexuals to marry may still be a minority (the prevalence of successful popular initiatives to deny them that right makes it hard to argue otherwise) but our minority religious attitudes should not be trampled by the majority simply because they can be; it should require a clear-cut societal need to allow that to happen. There is no clear-cut, non-denominational societal need to deny homosexuals the right to marry their partners. It should be civilly allowed, even if those marriages are not recognized by many religions.
(P.S. It should not matter; my arguments are the same in either case, but in case it DOES matter, I am a happily married heterosexual man.)
Yours in a spirit of open discourse,
You make some interesting points; slavery was abolished and women won the right to vote through due process, not through demonstrations and violence. But the deliberative process was undoubtedly influenced by demonstrations and campaigns by people who felt vehemently about those issues, and while violence is never the answer in such situations (it is, in fact, counterproductive, as witness the reaction against some of the violent anti-slavery actions) it is definitely necessary to make a sufficiently loud noise for one's cause to be noticed; rights are not won by sitting quietly by and hoping that the public mood shifts.As with the anti-slavery and women's sufferage movements, the gay rights movement has its extremists; I won't try to deny that fact. But if having extremists invalidated the truth to a political movement, and rendered that movement unworthy of success, then there would still be slavery, and women would still not have the right to vote. Both the Constitution and the bible were used to justify slavery, but that didn't make it right; no more does the fact that the Constitution is silent on the issue, and the bible, arguably, condemns homosexuality, nor the fact that Webster's Dictionary has a definition of marriage that excludes homosexual unions, make a homosexual marriage wrong. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, in some parts of the country, it was illegal for people of different races to marry; nowadays, most people would be appalled at any suggestion of passing such a law. The current resistance to homosexual marriage is a very similar situation: society is taking it upon itself to tell people who they can love, or whether or not they can marry the person they love, based on an arbitrary standard that has nothing to do with whether they would be able to do for each other those things that a married couple needs to be able to do. Millions of homosexuals are involved in relationships that are more stable than many state-approved marriages, even without the ability to make it legal and official; denying them the various rights that automatically come with marriage -- inheritance, hospital visiting priveleges, the right to make emergency medical decisions for one another, among many others -- is simply unjust. You and your co-religionists are free and welcome to teach that homosexuality is wrong and immoral. But the rest of us, who do not share your religious attitudes, should have the right to ignore your religious teachings. Even if your religious attitudes are held by the majority of the populace. That is the beauty of the first amendment and its freedom of religion clause. That is why measures like Prop 8 are wrongheaded and counter to the spirit of the United States Constitution, and it is in that spirit that people (like Brad Pitt) speak of the "Right" of homosexuals to marry. I have attempted to keep the tone of this letter civil, knowing that it is more likely to be read in its entirety if I do so; I hope you will not feel that I have failed in this regard if I point out that there has historically been (and no doubt currently still is) a great deal more violence directed against homosexuals by those who consider what they do to be immoral and evil than there has ever been directed against straights by homosexual activists; therefore, there is a far more direct "line" from the horrors in Mumbai to those opposed to gay marriage than there is from Mumbai to attempts by gays to secure the right to marry the partner they love.I do not ask you to accept that homosexuality is a morally neutral choice, in terms of your religious beliefs. I do ask you to understand that not everyone shares your religious beliefs, and our country is built on the bedrock that says that the minority cannot be forced to accept the religious teachings of the majority. Those of us who support the rights of homosexuals to marry may still be a minority (the prevalence of successful popular initiatives to deny them that right makes it hard to argue otherwise) but our minority religious attitudes should not be trampled by the majority simply because they can be; it should require a clear-cut societal need to allow that to happen. There is no clear-cut, non-denominational societal need to deny homosexuals the right to marry their partners. It should be civilly allowed, even if those marriages are not recognized by many religions.
(P.S. It should not matter; my arguments are the same in either case, but in case it DOES matter, I am a happily married heterosexual man.)
Yours in a spirit of open discourse,
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Gas prices:
Given: gas prices have dropped from approximately $4.00/gallon to as low as $1.55/gallon,
Given: while there may be a few more unemployed people not driving in to work than there were, and a few people for whom money is tight enough that they're restricting their discretionary driving, there is almost certainly not enough of this to account for demand being reduced enough to account for the precipitous drop in prices,
Given: The crash of the stock market has caused speculators to stop buying up gas futures.
Conclusion: the "demand" that drives gas prices up is not the demand from the poor shmucks driving their cars; it is the demand from speculators buying up commodities because they are valuable. Therefore, the next time oil prices spike, we should remember that the solution is not to try to convince Main Street to drive less; it is to control the ravening appetite of Wall Street for hoarding gasoline.
Given: while there may be a few more unemployed people not driving in to work than there were, and a few people for whom money is tight enough that they're restricting their discretionary driving, there is almost certainly not enough of this to account for demand being reduced enough to account for the precipitous drop in prices,
Given: The crash of the stock market has caused speculators to stop buying up gas futures.
Conclusion: the "demand" that drives gas prices up is not the demand from the poor shmucks driving their cars; it is the demand from speculators buying up commodities because they are valuable. Therefore, the next time oil prices spike, we should remember that the solution is not to try to convince Main Street to drive less; it is to control the ravening appetite of Wall Street for hoarding gasoline.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
I Watched the debate between Christopher Hitchens & Dinesh D'Souza last night
I am left with many questions I would have liked to pose to Mr. D'Souza, had I been able to work my way to the front of the line.
1) Who is a more honorable, ethical, BETTER man: one who does not believe in God, has no hope or expectation of reward, no fear of punishment, but does his poor, flawed human best to live an ethical life BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO, or a man who believes in God and does his best to behave because he is afraid of punishment and/or hopes for a reward?
2) If your answer is the latter, you're just wrong. If you cannot imagine why a person who does not believe in God would do their best to live an ethical life, then I suggest that you do not truly understand what it means to be ethical. But if your answer is the former, what kind of God rewards the latter while punishing the former?
3) YOU hope to get into heaven, even though you admit that you don't deserve it, by virtue of SOMEBODY ELSE'S blood sacrifice, and you accuse ME of trying to dodge personal accountability? I do not look to get into heaven, even if there is an afterlife and it does exist; I do not deserve it. But I also do not expect to be sentenced to hell, even if there is an afterlife and it does exist; I do not deserve that, either. The one is an unreasonably generous reward, the other an unreasonably harsh punishment, for anything that anyone can accomplish in a few decades on earth. If there IS an afterlife, and a just God, then there must be some alternative to those two options, a life more or less like this one, neither heaven nor hell; that is what I and almost everyone else deserves, and if we get anything other than that, the "God" who judges us is not just.
4) You spoke of Pascal's wager. First of all, is a person who chooses to believe because he is hedging his bets really a moral person? This relates back to questions 1 & 2. Secondly, do you believe that a person can really CHOOSE what to believe? Granted, I agree with Mr. Hitchens that I would not believe in the teachings of Christianity if I could, but I also could not if I wanted to, any more than I could CHOOSE to believe that I could fly to the moon by flapping my arms hard enough. Furthermore, I suggest that Pascal's wager is flawed: the suggestion that you have nothing to lose if you accept Christianity as it is generally taught and accepted is not necessarily true. Suppose, for a moment, that there IS a God, but he is more just than you credit him with being, and life is a test: if you accept a flawed and barbaric religion because you are afraid to question it, for fear of the supposed punishment, you fail the test. But if you deny that flawed and barbaric religion, you pass the test. Then there would, in fact, be a potential loss for accepting Christianity and being wrong as great as the potential loss for denying it and being wrong. I choose to gamble that IF there is a God (which I very much doubt) he is more just than standard teaching would suppose, and rewards GOOD behavior (or at least honest attempts at such) rather than blind faith.
5) You mentioned Mr. Hitchens' "obsession" with atheism, his "evangelical" atheism, and suggested that it was one thing to disbelieve, but it was another, much worse thing to attempt to persuade others to not believe. You drew the parallel to your own disbelief in unicorns, and suggested that since you to not make a big deal out of that disbelief or attempt to dissuade others from a silly belief in unicorns, Mr. Hitchens should treat his disbelief in your God and your religious beliefs in the same way.
I will admit that I am not AS evangelical an atheist as Mr. Hitchens, but will posit to you that if believers in unicorns had much social and political power, and made a habit of attempting to justify their attempts to gain more such power, and to use that power to restrict what you and yours could do or believe, and justified all of this by their belief in unicorns, then you might find yourself inclined to be a bit more evangelical in your disbelief.
6) We can debate all night and into tomorrow whether Hitler was an atheist, a Christian, an atheist who had formed an alliance with the Vatican, a worshipper of Kali, or of the Norse goddess of death Hel. But I think we can all agree that there have been bad people -- terrible people -- who professed Christian belief. Whether we speak of those who went on Crusades in the middle ages, or those who burned heretics at the stake, or those who engage/d in religious wars in Ireland (on both sides), or those who professed Christian belief and owned slaves prior to the Civil war, or those who joined the Ku Klux Klan afterward and lynched blacks (and others) who they felt had done things that deserved such punishment, or many others, there are many people throughout history who have done TERRIBLE things, yet who professed Christian belief. In many cases, they actually used their Christian beliefs to rationalize those evil acts. So unless you want to have your religion held responsible for ALL of those acts, please do not hold atheists, or even atheism, reponsible for the actions of those atheists who have done evil things (like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and the others that you keep referring to whenever attempting to "prove" that an atheist society is inevitably an evil one.) For every Stalin you can name, I can name a Torquemada. If you challenge that statement by attempting to compare body counts, or by actually attempting to see whether you can, in fact, come up with a longer list of evil atheists than I can of evil Christians, all I can say is, IF you can prove that there have been fewer evil Christians throughout history than there have been evil atheists, and/or that evil Christians have done less harm than evil atheists, I will posit that you are damning your own side with faint praise.
7) You, and Christianity in general, seem to make much of the fact that we are all flawed, that no human can claim to be perfectly good, as though this demonstrates that without a religion or a belief in God we are all doomed to evil, chaos, and villainy. But while it is unquestionably true that no one is perfect, I will dispute the Christian tenet that this shows that mankind is inherently sinful. Many people, while far from perfect, are still quite kind, pleasant, honorable, ethical people. The fact that they are not perfect does not render them inherently sinful; if you owned a car that was a beautiful, sleek, shiny new car except for one tiny scratch in the paint, that never needed maintainence beyond an occasional oil change, and that got 75 miles to the gallon, would the fact that it did have a tiny scratch in the paint, DID need the occasional oil change, and didn't get 150 miles to the gallon (and was therefore clearly not perfect) cause you to consider it a basically flawed car? No, it would be a spectacularly GOOD car; there's a huge difference between imperfect and "basically flawed". Yet one of the sins that I hold Christianity accountable for is the fact that it has spent centuries convincing as many good people as possible that their minor imperfections rendered them "basically evil", convincing them that the important thing is not leading a good life, but "accepting Christ as your personal savior".
These will do for a start; I may come up with more later.
1) Who is a more honorable, ethical, BETTER man: one who does not believe in God, has no hope or expectation of reward, no fear of punishment, but does his poor, flawed human best to live an ethical life BECAUSE IT IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO, or a man who believes in God and does his best to behave because he is afraid of punishment and/or hopes for a reward?
2) If your answer is the latter, you're just wrong. If you cannot imagine why a person who does not believe in God would do their best to live an ethical life, then I suggest that you do not truly understand what it means to be ethical. But if your answer is the former, what kind of God rewards the latter while punishing the former?
3) YOU hope to get into heaven, even though you admit that you don't deserve it, by virtue of SOMEBODY ELSE'S blood sacrifice, and you accuse ME of trying to dodge personal accountability? I do not look to get into heaven, even if there is an afterlife and it does exist; I do not deserve it. But I also do not expect to be sentenced to hell, even if there is an afterlife and it does exist; I do not deserve that, either. The one is an unreasonably generous reward, the other an unreasonably harsh punishment, for anything that anyone can accomplish in a few decades on earth. If there IS an afterlife, and a just God, then there must be some alternative to those two options, a life more or less like this one, neither heaven nor hell; that is what I and almost everyone else deserves, and if we get anything other than that, the "God" who judges us is not just.
4) You spoke of Pascal's wager. First of all, is a person who chooses to believe because he is hedging his bets really a moral person? This relates back to questions 1 & 2. Secondly, do you believe that a person can really CHOOSE what to believe? Granted, I agree with Mr. Hitchens that I would not believe in the teachings of Christianity if I could, but I also could not if I wanted to, any more than I could CHOOSE to believe that I could fly to the moon by flapping my arms hard enough. Furthermore, I suggest that Pascal's wager is flawed: the suggestion that you have nothing to lose if you accept Christianity as it is generally taught and accepted is not necessarily true. Suppose, for a moment, that there IS a God, but he is more just than you credit him with being, and life is a test: if you accept a flawed and barbaric religion because you are afraid to question it, for fear of the supposed punishment, you fail the test. But if you deny that flawed and barbaric religion, you pass the test. Then there would, in fact, be a potential loss for accepting Christianity and being wrong as great as the potential loss for denying it and being wrong. I choose to gamble that IF there is a God (which I very much doubt) he is more just than standard teaching would suppose, and rewards GOOD behavior (or at least honest attempts at such) rather than blind faith.
5) You mentioned Mr. Hitchens' "obsession" with atheism, his "evangelical" atheism, and suggested that it was one thing to disbelieve, but it was another, much worse thing to attempt to persuade others to not believe. You drew the parallel to your own disbelief in unicorns, and suggested that since you to not make a big deal out of that disbelief or attempt to dissuade others from a silly belief in unicorns, Mr. Hitchens should treat his disbelief in your God and your religious beliefs in the same way.
I will admit that I am not AS evangelical an atheist as Mr. Hitchens, but will posit to you that if believers in unicorns had much social and political power, and made a habit of attempting to justify their attempts to gain more such power, and to use that power to restrict what you and yours could do or believe, and justified all of this by their belief in unicorns, then you might find yourself inclined to be a bit more evangelical in your disbelief.
6) We can debate all night and into tomorrow whether Hitler was an atheist, a Christian, an atheist who had formed an alliance with the Vatican, a worshipper of Kali, or of the Norse goddess of death Hel. But I think we can all agree that there have been bad people -- terrible people -- who professed Christian belief. Whether we speak of those who went on Crusades in the middle ages, or those who burned heretics at the stake, or those who engage/d in religious wars in Ireland (on both sides), or those who professed Christian belief and owned slaves prior to the Civil war, or those who joined the Ku Klux Klan afterward and lynched blacks (and others) who they felt had done things that deserved such punishment, or many others, there are many people throughout history who have done TERRIBLE things, yet who professed Christian belief. In many cases, they actually used their Christian beliefs to rationalize those evil acts. So unless you want to have your religion held responsible for ALL of those acts, please do not hold atheists, or even atheism, reponsible for the actions of those atheists who have done evil things (like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and the others that you keep referring to whenever attempting to "prove" that an atheist society is inevitably an evil one.) For every Stalin you can name, I can name a Torquemada. If you challenge that statement by attempting to compare body counts, or by actually attempting to see whether you can, in fact, come up with a longer list of evil atheists than I can of evil Christians, all I can say is, IF you can prove that there have been fewer evil Christians throughout history than there have been evil atheists, and/or that evil Christians have done less harm than evil atheists, I will posit that you are damning your own side with faint praise.
7) You, and Christianity in general, seem to make much of the fact that we are all flawed, that no human can claim to be perfectly good, as though this demonstrates that without a religion or a belief in God we are all doomed to evil, chaos, and villainy. But while it is unquestionably true that no one is perfect, I will dispute the Christian tenet that this shows that mankind is inherently sinful. Many people, while far from perfect, are still quite kind, pleasant, honorable, ethical people. The fact that they are not perfect does not render them inherently sinful; if you owned a car that was a beautiful, sleek, shiny new car except for one tiny scratch in the paint, that never needed maintainence beyond an occasional oil change, and that got 75 miles to the gallon, would the fact that it did have a tiny scratch in the paint, DID need the occasional oil change, and didn't get 150 miles to the gallon (and was therefore clearly not perfect) cause you to consider it a basically flawed car? No, it would be a spectacularly GOOD car; there's a huge difference between imperfect and "basically flawed". Yet one of the sins that I hold Christianity accountable for is the fact that it has spent centuries convincing as many good people as possible that their minor imperfections rendered them "basically evil", convincing them that the important thing is not leading a good life, but "accepting Christ as your personal savior".
These will do for a start; I may come up with more later.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Too High A Price
The two men stared at each other across the table, undisguised hostility apparent in each face. The prisoner wore an electric-yellow prison jumpsuit; his arms were shackled behind his back, and his legs were shackled to the legs of the chair he sat in. His swarthy skin glistened with sweat from the heat of the blindingly bright naked lightbulb that hung just in front of him. His dark hair was long and unkempt, his moustache drooped as if it shared his exhaustion, and he had a five-day growth of dark beard on his face. His eyes squinted, but he tried to hide his discomfort and to appear unconcerned by the situation. His captor wore a blue United States military uniform. His hands were clenched into fists, quivering with obvious tension as he leaned over his end of the table, glowering at the captive. His collar was unbuttoned, sweat stained his armpits, and his Navy cap was tossed carelessly on the back of a chair just behind him. He, too, glistened with sweat, his blonde hair just as unkempt as that of the prisoner. He was closer to cleanshaven, however; he had only half a day’s worth of stubble darkening his chin, and it was much less noticeable than the dark growth on the face of the prisoner.
“Once more. Where and when is your organization going to strike next? Make things easy on yourself, why don’t you?” His voice expressed many emotions to anyone who cared to listen; primarily, he was furious, but he was also frustrated, exhausted, and behind all of that, perhaps a bit frightened.
“Or what? You won’t let me sleep? You won’t feed me? You’ll make me sit here and smell your sweat and blink in the bright lights for the rest of my natural life? You forget, I was prepared to die in the attack. What can you possibly threaten me with?” The prisoner was unsuccessful in attempting to sound calm, but he was clearly less upset than his captor was. His accent was noticeably Middle Eastern, but not overly hard to understand.
The blonde navy man slammed his hand down onto the surface of the table. His gaze narrowed still further, and he began to move around the table. “You’re probably right. There’s probably nothing I can do to get any information out of you. But by God, I have to try. So maybe beating you to death won’t accomplish anything other than getting me court-martialed, but at least I’ll know that I made the effort.” As he spoke, he approached the prisoner, raising a hand in a fist.
Before he struck, the door slammed open behind him and a commanding voice rang out. “Belay that, lieutenant. That’s not how we do things, and you know it.”
The lieutenant froze in place, fist raised, trembling with the effort to ignore that voice. But his training was too thorough, and he couldn’t bring himself to disobey a direct order from his superior officer, at least not while that superior officer stood looking on.
“I said belay it, lieutenant. You’re dismissed. I’ll take over here.” The captain was tall, even taller than the lieutenant, who was himself not a small man. He was impeccably dressed in a crisp uniform, his cap placed precisely where it belonged on his head, his posture ramrod-straight, his dark hair closely cropped, his square jaw perfectly clean even though it was ten at night, his chiseled features stern but controlled.
Slowly, the lieutenant lowered his arm, still trembling. He turned to the captain, came to attention, and offered a salute. “Sir, we need to know what he can tell us. We won’t get it from him just by asking nicely.”
“And we won’t get it from him by beating it out of him, either. You said so yourself. And if we did, what then? We obey the laws here, lieutenant. We’ll just have to defend ourselves without his information. Brutality is never the answer.”
“Yes sir.” Clearly unconvinced, the lieutenant remained where he stood, standing at attention.
“Fortunately, I managed to stop you before you did something that I’d have to put you on report for. Get out of here, lieutenant. Go get cleaned up and go home. You’ve done everything you could.”
“Yes, sir.” Stiffly, in as perfectly military a posture as his exhaustion could manage, the lieutenant stalked out of the room. When the door closed behind him, the captain turned his attention to the prisoner.
He paused for a moment, as if waiting to make sure that the lieutenant would not be coming back in for his forgotten cap, then allowed his posture to relax. He took off his cap, tossed it onto the table, and sat facing the prisoner, shaking his head and smiling sadly. The prisoner continued to glower, but remained silent.
“I know what you’re thinking, you know. You figure it’s all an act. He was playing the bad cop; I get to be the good cop. Having contrasted his behavior as what you’d expect, I come in and act civilized and rational, and hope to impress you enough to earn some cooperation. I can’t blame you for thinking that; I certainly would, if I were in your position. And the sad thing is, we really DO need your cooperation, so I have to try to win your respect enough to find out what you know. But I don’t expect it to work; you really believe that your actions and those of your co-religionists are right and proper and necessary. I don’t suspect that there’s anything I can say in the next couple of hours that can change that. So let’s just sit and talk for a while for appearance’s sake; then I’ll send you back to your cell and I’ll go home to bed.”
The prisoner looked up, and squinted as the light dazzled him. Seeing his discomfort, the captain reached up and flicked off the light, then stood and walked in the near-dark back to the door, switching on the normal overhead lighting in the room, then returned to his seat.
“You’re right. It won’t work.” His voice was almost inaudible, a dry rasping sound that was painful to hear. The captain poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the table, wordlessly walked around the table to the prisoner, and held the glass to the prisoner’s mouth. Gently, he tipped it to allow the prisoner to drink, and managed to get the entire glass down the prisoner’s throat without spilling a drop. Then, wordlessly, he returned to his seat, placed the glass on the table, and returned his gaze to the prisoner.
“How old are you, son?” His voice was calm and measured, with more than a touch of sympathy in it. The sympathy seemed genuine.
The prisoner paused for a moment, seeming to try to understand what useful knowledge he would be surrendering by answering the question. Unable to detect any trap, he answered. “Twenty two.”
“I’m thirty eight. Been military almost as long as you’ve been alive. I have a son just ten years younger than you, a daughter who’s five. You have any kids?”
Again, the prisoner paused, searching the question he was being asked for sensitive information. Finding none, he again answered. “No. I have a nephew, though. My sister’s son.”
The captain smiled. “Son, I’d ask what makes a young man who hasn’t even experienced fatherhood fanatic enough to try to blow himself up along with a whole bunch of people who he’s never met and who’ve never done him any harm, but I know the answer. It’s because you ARE that young that you can be that fanatical. You’ve been told that those people are your enemies just by virtue of belonging to a culture that your mentors say threatens your culture by its very existence. And you’re too young to know enough not to trust somebody else to pick your enemies for you. Heck, half the men in my command are no better; if I told them to take a plane and destroy a target in “enemy” territory, they’d take that plane and, if necessary, heroically dive it right into the target, blowing themselves to bits but “accomplishing the mission”. Such loyalty can be a marvelous thing, if properly used. I try very hard not to abuse it. I’d tell you that your leaders have abused your trust, but you wouldn’t believe me, so why bother?”
“Indeed, why bother?” The prisoner allowed himself a small smile, but it no longer held the mockery or the hostility that it had held before. They spoke for another twenty minutes, the captain asking nothing that seemed to be sensitive information, and the captain fed the prisoner a small loaf of bread soaked in stew, then saw him returned to his cell.
When the captain returned to his desk, he scribbled a few notes detailing what minor information he’d been able to finesse from his conversation with the prisoner, directed the memo to the department where it might possibly be of use, and left for “home”, once again perfectly military in his bearing.
“Home” was a hotel room; he was assisting here in D.C. for the weekend; his family and his true home were in New York City, a few hours flight away. He could have slept on base, but for the couple of days he would be here, it was just as easy to stay in a hotel, and it gave him a bit of a chance to unwind. He tossed his cap on the bed, unbuttoned his uniform shirt halfway, and poured himself a carefully measured shot of Jameson’s from the bottle on the dresser. He was hungry, but tired enough that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay awake long enough to eat.
“That was quite a performance this evening. Even I was impressed.” The voice came from behind him, well into the room; he was sure that there had been no one there a moment before, and no one could have gotten there from the door without walking right past him. He whirled and saw a man of medium height and build, a reddish face, dressed in an expensive-looking business suit, with short hair and arched eyebrows, two horns like those of a young goat at his temples, and a forked tail trailing behind him. He wore a sardonic smile, and seemed totally at ease.
“How did you get in here?” The captain’s service pistol was in his hand and pointed unwaveringly at the intruder, who seemed not the least put out by that fact.
“Such an unimaginative question, Captain. Surely it’s apparent that I can go anywhere I please?”
“Don’t give me that. Anybody can buy a devil costume, even if it isn’t anywhere near Halloween. Put your hands up and don’t move.”
“As you wish, Captain.” The intruder raised his hands as if surrendering, and then, suddenly, was gone. No puff of brimstone, no flash of light, just gone. The captain whirled, searching the room for the man who’d been there only moments before. The room was empty.
“Really, Captain Stone, it gets so dreary having to make these demonstrations whenever I want to do business, but I suppose it is a necessary part of the experience. But can we dispense with the silliness now?” The voice came from behind him, halfway across the room from where the intruder had been at first. The captain whirled, found his opponent, sighted his gun squarely on the man’s midsection, and fired.
The intruder never flinched. There was no way that the shot could have missed, not at that range; the captain was, of course, an excellent marksman. But there was no result of the shot; not only did the intruder show no signs of injury, but there was no damage to the room; the lamp behind him was untouched, no hole appeared in the bland, unmarked wall of the room, there was no sound of a ricochet. It was as if the gun had fired a blank. The captain fired twice more, with the same lack of result.
“Really, captain, you can’t kill evil with a gun. I would have thought that that would be obvious to such a civilized man.”
The Captain slowly lowered his gun. Cautiously, without taking his eye from his visitor, he checked the remaining load in the gun. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his bullets; if anyone had tampered with his weapon, they’d done it very subtly, and when had it ever been out of his possession long enough for someone to do so? “Okayyyyy….” he shrugged, reholstering the gun. "So maybe you are what you look to be. I’ve never believed in any of that, but I make a point of believing my own eyes, at least to a point. So what do you want?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I have a proposition for you.”
Stone stared at him for a long moment, measuring. “No deal. I don’t know what you have planned, but even if I don’t really believe in souls, if the devil exists, I’m not about to take a chance on selling mine. You’ve got to know that.”
“Nonsense; I know no such thing.” The devil, if the intruder was in fact the devil, smiled jauntily. “But if you don’t want to know how to prevent a major American city from suffering nuclear holocaust, I suppose there’s no need for me to hang around.” And with that, he was gone, winked out of existence as if he’d never been there.
Captain Stone recognized the move for what it was, and resisted calling out for his visitor to return, as was clearly intended. He tried to put the incident out of his mind and return to his preparations for bed. He picked his glass of whiskey back up from where he’d set it when the intruder had first spoken; he didn’t even remember having set it down, but there it was, untouched. He felt a powerful temptation to down it in a swallow and pour another, but decided that he didn’t dare muddle his thinking or lower his inhibitions just now; he set it back down again, still unsipped.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what his visitor had said. He tried for almost an hour to convince himself that it was a fraud, that it was simply a taunt that had no reality, thrown out to tempt him into listening. But there WERE terrorists out there; his activity earlier in the day reminded him that the threat was all too real, and it was everyone’s nightmare that those terrorists might have acquired nuclear technology. Frankly, he was amazed that such a thing hadn’t happened long since. He was reasonably certain that the unwelcome guest was still invisibly present, and if he only spoke a word of invitation, would return bodily. He sensed that he’d regret it if he did, but the more he considered the matter, the more sure he was that if he didn’t, and the threat proved not to be a bluff, he’d regret that, too. Ultimately, he persuaded himself that there was no harm in listening. He could always refuse an unacceptable proposition AFTER hearing it. There was no need to reject a deal, even a deal with the devil, unheard.
As soon as he came to that conclusion, before he even spoke a word of invitation, the intruder was back, acting as if there had been no break in the conversation at all. “So; tomorrow morning, a terrorist will plant a bomb in the heart of a major American city. Millions will die, and the country will take a huge hit financially, and an even huger hit to its morale. Unless you choose to do business with me; in that case, the bomb will malfunction, will be found unexploded and will be defused, and the man who plants it will be captured. Millions of lives will be saved. What do you say, Captain? Is one man’s soul so precious as to be worth allowing the country you love to suffer such a loss? That would seem rather selfish to me; it would seem to me that it would be a rather cruel, heartless…no, SOULLESS thing to do, to allow such suffering if one could prevent it.”
“How do I know that what you’re telling me is true?” The Captain was clearly conflicted; his brow furrowed and his eyes already haunted.
“My dear Captain, I NEVER lie.” The expression on the visitor’s face was frank and open, and clearly showed shock at the suggestion that anything he’d said could be questioned.
“Bull. You’re called the Prince of Lies.”
“By people without the wit to recognize the truth when they hear it, or the ability to face the fact that they’ve made mistakes when dealing with me. No, Captain, I always speak the truth. Not always the whole truth, I will admit. I occasionally shade the truth I speak so as to be somewhat misleading. But you can count on what I say to be absolutely factual.”
“How do I know that? I have, after all, only your word on the matter, and if you AREN’T truthful, then your assurances that you are are hardly very meaningful, are they?”
“True enough. But consider this; we’re considering a contractual agreement. If I fail to live up to my end, the contract is invalid and you will not be held to your end.”
“Not good enough. Suppose I sell you my soul on condition that you prevent that nuke from exploding; it doesn’t explode, the city is saved, you come to collect. How do I know that it WOULD have exploded if I hadn’t done the deal? Perhaps you simply have knowledge of what WILL happen, but no power to affect it. Perhaps there will be no disaster, regardless of what I do. Then I would have sold my soul for nothing but an illusion of having saved the day.”
The devil’s brow darkened. He seemed to grow larger, more threatening. The air in the hotel room became oppressive, almost as if a thunderstorm were brewing within the room. “Do I LOOK like I have no power over events? You know from close experience how much power evil has over the world. You know that the reason you’re even listening to what I have to say is because you’re surprised that the event I’m predicting hasn’t happened long since.” His voice reverberated like thunder.
Then he was back to being a normal-sized individual with a jauntily sarcastic expression on his face. He continued in a normal tone of voice, without a pause or break in the speech, as if his manner had never changed. “Really, Captain, that’s going to be a decision you’re going to have to make on your own. I can’t offer you proof, but I assure you that if you don’t deal with me, a major American city will be destroyed at oh-eight-thirteen tomorrow morning. Search your feelings; you know in your heart that the threat is real. I have no need to make empty threats. I have the power to make evil happen or not happen; that’s what I DO. The question is, are you willing to make a huge personal sacrifice to save millions of people from a horrible, untimely death? To save their out-of-town family members from the terrible loss? To save your country from a terrible blow?
Captain Stone had always been quite capable of decisive action when it was called for. “Very well. Bring out the contract. I’ll sign.”
“Sign, Captain? You’re thinking that this transaction is finalized by your affixing your name to a contract, written in your own blood on a piece of parchment made from human skin? No, Captain, you misunderstand. Signing your name to a contract doesn’t cost you your soul, no matter what that contract may say. Even if I could find a judge and jury anywhere in the country who would rule in my favor, no matter how clear the contract language might be, it still wouldn’t mean anything. I admit, I’ve sometimes insisted on the written contract in the past, when dealing with people for whom it meant something, but even then, it was a purely symbolic thing. No, more than signing your name is needed for you to surrender your soul.”
Stone’s face showed surprise, then puzzlement, and finally curiosity as his visitor made this speech. Finally, he asked, “So what IS required?”
“For you to sacrifice your soul, Captain, you must perform an action so evil, so appalling, so terrible, that you will never again be able to face yourself in the mirror without flinching. So horrible that no amount of rationalizing will ever allow you to think of yourself as a decent human being.” He gestured theatrically, and at his side materialized a small child. The girl was perhaps three years old, with dark, curly hair, an olive complexion, and wide dark eyes. She stared around the room in silent wonder, but seemed unafraid and openly curious. She wore a plain brown flannel shift . “You must rape this child, and then break every bone in her body before finally killing her.”
Stone was stricken. He tried to cover it with anger. “Absolutely not. No. Get out. What kind of person do you think I am?”
The devil smiled insultingly. “I KNOW what kind of a man you ARE, Captain. That’s why I require this; it will change the kind of man you are into the kind of man I want you to be, irrevocably. You were willing enough to sell your soul when it was an intellectual exercise involving nothing more horrible than signing a piece of parchment; what did you THINK it would mean to lose your soul?”
“True enough, but now that you’ve been kind enough to make it clear to me what the price really means, the deal’s off. That’s too high a price.”
The devil shrugged. “If you say so, Captain. If this one little girl’s life and pain are more important than the millions of children who will die, some at the edges of the blast slowly and agonizingly from radiation burns, if it’s more important to you to keep your precious hands clean than to save them, I’ll just have to take what pleasure I can from their deaths. That, and the guilt you’ll feel for having failed to save them.”
“People die and suffer every day.” Stone’s face was contorted in agony as he tried to convince himself of the truth of what he was saying. “I can’t save all of them, not even at the price you’re charging. At least I contribute as little as possible to that suffering. It’s better to accept that fact than to actively increase the sum total of human suffering in a vain attempt to lower it.”
“But it ISN’T a vain attempt in this case, Captain. If you brutalize this one little girl, millions WILL be saved. Isn’t that ‘lowering the sum total of human suffering’ “?
“It’s just wrong. One can’t determine right and wrong by Mathematics.”
“Would it make a difference, Captain, if I told you that she was the daughter of the man who will plant the bomb that will kill all those millions of people?”
“Of course not. She didn’t choose her father; it isn’t her fault.”
“How about if I told you that she will grow up to be a radical fanatic who will very persuasively recruit suicide bombers to attack your country, and the mother of the greatest terrorist of all, who will be the one to finally defeat and destroy Western Civilization? Who will plunge the world into a thousand years of rule by a medieval, harsh version of Islam? Would that make a difference? Just because she’s cute and innocent now, Captain, doesn’t mean that she’ll always be that way.”
Stone hesitated, torn for long moments, his face haunted. “I…I can’t. I just can’t. It’s just wrong. I could, maybe, manage to kill her to prevent all of that, but the rape, the torture, there’s no excuse for it. I can’t and I won’t.”
“So civilized, Captain. You’re a tough nut to crack. Very well, then, if you would sooner see your own son and daughter die horribly than hurt this poor little moppet, I guess I’ll just have to go.” He began a theatrical sweep of his arm.
The captain was across the room in a heartbeat, and immobilized the devil’s arm in an iron grip before he’d even consciously thought. “WHAT did you say?”
The devil smiled an insincerely apologetic smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I neglect to mention? The city in question is New York. Your children, your wife, your parents, brothers and sisters, will all be among the millions to die. Does that make a difference? I thought that for such a civilized man as yourself, such selfish considerations wouldn’t make any difference. Surely, if you wouldn’t do what I want to save MILLIONS of strangers, it can’t make any difference if a handful of those victims are actually people you care about personally? If ONE of them is YOUR little girl?”
Stone released the devil’s arm, and sank to a sitting position on the bed, his head in his hands. “It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t make a difference in the final decision, but God help me, it DOES make it much harder.” He straightened, his head coming up with a manic glittering in his eyes. He sprang from the bed, dashing toward the hotel phone. “I’ll warn them! I can’t save everyone, but I can get my wife and kids out of the city.” He picked up the headset, put it to his ear. When he heard no dialtone, he depressed the cradle hook several times in rapid succession.
“I’m sorry, Captain. Having trouble getting an open line?” The devil’s words were calm and his tone sympathetic, but his face blazed with sadistic pleasure. “Perhaps you’d have more luck with your cell phone?”
The captain paused, and, no longer moving with manic energy but rather hesitantly, as if anticipating what would happen, crossed the room to where he’d left his cell phone. Picking it up and turning it on, he seemed unsurprised to see the message “unable to retrieve signal” appear.
He sat for a moment, his eyes unfocussed, his shoulders slumped. Then, the manic energy reappearing in his eyes, he leaped to his feet. He grabbed his cap and his keys from the top to the dresser, and headed toward the door.
“It won’t work, Captain. There isn’t time.” The smile on the devil’s face was smug.
Stone turned in the doorway. “There’s plenty of time for me to commandeer a chopper from the base. My clearance will allow it. I can be in New York in three hours. Load my family on and be back out of there long before oh eight hundred.”
“If everything went smoothly, I suppose that might be true. Alas, your chopper will have some minor mechanical problems. Nothing too severe, but they’ll delay your takeoff for a few hours. You won’t even have time to get INTO New York to say a tearful last goodbye to your family and hold them while you all romantically die together. No, you’ll be airborne, approaching the city but not yet close enough to be within the blast zone when the explosion happens. You will be close enough to get a very good look at the blast, though.”
Stone stood in the doorway, his right hand on the knob, playing with his keys with his left hand, weighing his options, for a long minute. Finally, he shrugged, closed the door and returned to the room, tossing his hat and keys back onto the dresser. He moved as though to sit on the bed again, but as he came within ten feet of the devil, he launched himself at his tormentor, striking out with all of the pent-up fury he could muster. His initial blow was a right hand that impacted squarely with the devil’s face; he’d planned a flurry of follow-up blows, being, of course, an expert in hand to hand combat, but he’d anticipated his initial blow having some effect; when it didn’t, it threw him off-balance, and he was forced to abort the rest of his flurry.
That blow, had it landed on any human being, no matter how large they might have been, would have produced some movement on their part; even if they were braced for it, their head would have snapped back at least an inch or two. The devil seemed to be a rather normal-sized individual, and rather lean and wiry; by rights, he should have been knocked off of his feet and into the wall. But for all of the effect the punch had on him, he might as well have been a granite statue, and Stone felt agony in his hand that radiated all the way up his arm. He was reasonably certain that he’d broken at least one bone in his hand, probably more. Holding his right hand with his left, he sank to the bed again.
“When attempting to fight pure evil, violence only weakens yourself and strengthens the enemy.” The devil grinned, his tone that of a lecturer addressing a backward student. “You see, Captain, there is no ‘thinking outside the box’ here. You have two choices. You commit the vile action I want from you, or you allow your family (and a few million other innocent victims) to die horribly. Those are your only options. What is your choice?”
Stone sat for long minutes absently nursing his wounded hand, his eyes haunted, before he stood and began to undo his belt.
***
Hours later, after it was done, he once again sat on the bed, tears streaming down his face, his tortured face bearing no resemblance to the controlled, self-assured face that he had worn the previous evening. He wondered idly if he’d ever be able to sleep again, and rather hoped that he wouldn’t. It had been some minutes since the little girl’s screams had stopped, but he could still hear them and he was sure that he would always hear them. The wall clock read “8:22”; the devil, smiling widely, picked up the television remote and switched on the set. The reception was poor, but good enough for Stone to hear the announcer, who was apparently giving an emergency news report.
“…a nuclear device was found just minutes ago in the heart of the New York financial district. It had malfunctioned, or it would have exploded before being found. A suspect has been apprehended near the device, and is being questioned by authorities even now…”
Stone let out a ragged breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “It worked, then. They’re safe.”
“Safe enough, I suppose, Captain. A shame about the child, though. She would have been quite an effective advocate for peace and moderation if she’d only been allowed to grow up.”
Stone’s head snapped up. “That’s not what you said! You said…”
“I said nothing, Captain. I merely ASKED if it would make a difference if I told you that she would be instrumental in your country’s downfall. I didn’t say that she WOULD be, and when you indicated that it wouldn’t make any difference if I did, I let the matter drop. Had you said that it made a difference, I’d have said, ‘What a shame; she won’t be.’ You don’t mean to tell me now that it DID make a difference in your decision? Pity.” But in the devil’s eyes, there was amused gloating, and not a trace of pity.
Stone’s eyes blazed with repressed fury for a moment, but then, slowly, the light was extinguished, replaced with resigned anguish. Then his attention was brought back to the television, as the announcer’s voice rose several pitches in timbre and took on a tone of horrified energy.
“This just in: apparently, the bomb that failed to destroy New York was not the only one planted last night; I have just received a report that Los Angeles was destroyed minutes ago by what has been estimated as a ten megaton blast…”
Stone looked to the devil with all trace of animation gone from his face. “Any others?”
“That’s all.” The devil grinned hugely. “For today.”
***
A week later, New York was destroyed by a nuclear bomb planted by another terrorist.
“Once more. Where and when is your organization going to strike next? Make things easy on yourself, why don’t you?” His voice expressed many emotions to anyone who cared to listen; primarily, he was furious, but he was also frustrated, exhausted, and behind all of that, perhaps a bit frightened.
“Or what? You won’t let me sleep? You won’t feed me? You’ll make me sit here and smell your sweat and blink in the bright lights for the rest of my natural life? You forget, I was prepared to die in the attack. What can you possibly threaten me with?” The prisoner was unsuccessful in attempting to sound calm, but he was clearly less upset than his captor was. His accent was noticeably Middle Eastern, but not overly hard to understand.
The blonde navy man slammed his hand down onto the surface of the table. His gaze narrowed still further, and he began to move around the table. “You’re probably right. There’s probably nothing I can do to get any information out of you. But by God, I have to try. So maybe beating you to death won’t accomplish anything other than getting me court-martialed, but at least I’ll know that I made the effort.” As he spoke, he approached the prisoner, raising a hand in a fist.
Before he struck, the door slammed open behind him and a commanding voice rang out. “Belay that, lieutenant. That’s not how we do things, and you know it.”
The lieutenant froze in place, fist raised, trembling with the effort to ignore that voice. But his training was too thorough, and he couldn’t bring himself to disobey a direct order from his superior officer, at least not while that superior officer stood looking on.
“I said belay it, lieutenant. You’re dismissed. I’ll take over here.” The captain was tall, even taller than the lieutenant, who was himself not a small man. He was impeccably dressed in a crisp uniform, his cap placed precisely where it belonged on his head, his posture ramrod-straight, his dark hair closely cropped, his square jaw perfectly clean even though it was ten at night, his chiseled features stern but controlled.
Slowly, the lieutenant lowered his arm, still trembling. He turned to the captain, came to attention, and offered a salute. “Sir, we need to know what he can tell us. We won’t get it from him just by asking nicely.”
“And we won’t get it from him by beating it out of him, either. You said so yourself. And if we did, what then? We obey the laws here, lieutenant. We’ll just have to defend ourselves without his information. Brutality is never the answer.”
“Yes sir.” Clearly unconvinced, the lieutenant remained where he stood, standing at attention.
“Fortunately, I managed to stop you before you did something that I’d have to put you on report for. Get out of here, lieutenant. Go get cleaned up and go home. You’ve done everything you could.”
“Yes, sir.” Stiffly, in as perfectly military a posture as his exhaustion could manage, the lieutenant stalked out of the room. When the door closed behind him, the captain turned his attention to the prisoner.
He paused for a moment, as if waiting to make sure that the lieutenant would not be coming back in for his forgotten cap, then allowed his posture to relax. He took off his cap, tossed it onto the table, and sat facing the prisoner, shaking his head and smiling sadly. The prisoner continued to glower, but remained silent.
“I know what you’re thinking, you know. You figure it’s all an act. He was playing the bad cop; I get to be the good cop. Having contrasted his behavior as what you’d expect, I come in and act civilized and rational, and hope to impress you enough to earn some cooperation. I can’t blame you for thinking that; I certainly would, if I were in your position. And the sad thing is, we really DO need your cooperation, so I have to try to win your respect enough to find out what you know. But I don’t expect it to work; you really believe that your actions and those of your co-religionists are right and proper and necessary. I don’t suspect that there’s anything I can say in the next couple of hours that can change that. So let’s just sit and talk for a while for appearance’s sake; then I’ll send you back to your cell and I’ll go home to bed.”
The prisoner looked up, and squinted as the light dazzled him. Seeing his discomfort, the captain reached up and flicked off the light, then stood and walked in the near-dark back to the door, switching on the normal overhead lighting in the room, then returned to his seat.
“You’re right. It won’t work.” His voice was almost inaudible, a dry rasping sound that was painful to hear. The captain poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the table, wordlessly walked around the table to the prisoner, and held the glass to the prisoner’s mouth. Gently, he tipped it to allow the prisoner to drink, and managed to get the entire glass down the prisoner’s throat without spilling a drop. Then, wordlessly, he returned to his seat, placed the glass on the table, and returned his gaze to the prisoner.
“How old are you, son?” His voice was calm and measured, with more than a touch of sympathy in it. The sympathy seemed genuine.
The prisoner paused for a moment, seeming to try to understand what useful knowledge he would be surrendering by answering the question. Unable to detect any trap, he answered. “Twenty two.”
“I’m thirty eight. Been military almost as long as you’ve been alive. I have a son just ten years younger than you, a daughter who’s five. You have any kids?”
Again, the prisoner paused, searching the question he was being asked for sensitive information. Finding none, he again answered. “No. I have a nephew, though. My sister’s son.”
The captain smiled. “Son, I’d ask what makes a young man who hasn’t even experienced fatherhood fanatic enough to try to blow himself up along with a whole bunch of people who he’s never met and who’ve never done him any harm, but I know the answer. It’s because you ARE that young that you can be that fanatical. You’ve been told that those people are your enemies just by virtue of belonging to a culture that your mentors say threatens your culture by its very existence. And you’re too young to know enough not to trust somebody else to pick your enemies for you. Heck, half the men in my command are no better; if I told them to take a plane and destroy a target in “enemy” territory, they’d take that plane and, if necessary, heroically dive it right into the target, blowing themselves to bits but “accomplishing the mission”. Such loyalty can be a marvelous thing, if properly used. I try very hard not to abuse it. I’d tell you that your leaders have abused your trust, but you wouldn’t believe me, so why bother?”
“Indeed, why bother?” The prisoner allowed himself a small smile, but it no longer held the mockery or the hostility that it had held before. They spoke for another twenty minutes, the captain asking nothing that seemed to be sensitive information, and the captain fed the prisoner a small loaf of bread soaked in stew, then saw him returned to his cell.
When the captain returned to his desk, he scribbled a few notes detailing what minor information he’d been able to finesse from his conversation with the prisoner, directed the memo to the department where it might possibly be of use, and left for “home”, once again perfectly military in his bearing.
“Home” was a hotel room; he was assisting here in D.C. for the weekend; his family and his true home were in New York City, a few hours flight away. He could have slept on base, but for the couple of days he would be here, it was just as easy to stay in a hotel, and it gave him a bit of a chance to unwind. He tossed his cap on the bed, unbuttoned his uniform shirt halfway, and poured himself a carefully measured shot of Jameson’s from the bottle on the dresser. He was hungry, but tired enough that he wasn’t sure if he wanted to stay awake long enough to eat.
“That was quite a performance this evening. Even I was impressed.” The voice came from behind him, well into the room; he was sure that there had been no one there a moment before, and no one could have gotten there from the door without walking right past him. He whirled and saw a man of medium height and build, a reddish face, dressed in an expensive-looking business suit, with short hair and arched eyebrows, two horns like those of a young goat at his temples, and a forked tail trailing behind him. He wore a sardonic smile, and seemed totally at ease.
“How did you get in here?” The captain’s service pistol was in his hand and pointed unwaveringly at the intruder, who seemed not the least put out by that fact.
“Such an unimaginative question, Captain. Surely it’s apparent that I can go anywhere I please?”
“Don’t give me that. Anybody can buy a devil costume, even if it isn’t anywhere near Halloween. Put your hands up and don’t move.”
“As you wish, Captain.” The intruder raised his hands as if surrendering, and then, suddenly, was gone. No puff of brimstone, no flash of light, just gone. The captain whirled, searching the room for the man who’d been there only moments before. The room was empty.
“Really, Captain Stone, it gets so dreary having to make these demonstrations whenever I want to do business, but I suppose it is a necessary part of the experience. But can we dispense with the silliness now?” The voice came from behind him, halfway across the room from where the intruder had been at first. The captain whirled, found his opponent, sighted his gun squarely on the man’s midsection, and fired.
The intruder never flinched. There was no way that the shot could have missed, not at that range; the captain was, of course, an excellent marksman. But there was no result of the shot; not only did the intruder show no signs of injury, but there was no damage to the room; the lamp behind him was untouched, no hole appeared in the bland, unmarked wall of the room, there was no sound of a ricochet. It was as if the gun had fired a blank. The captain fired twice more, with the same lack of result.
“Really, captain, you can’t kill evil with a gun. I would have thought that that would be obvious to such a civilized man.”
The Captain slowly lowered his gun. Cautiously, without taking his eye from his visitor, he checked the remaining load in the gun. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his bullets; if anyone had tampered with his weapon, they’d done it very subtly, and when had it ever been out of his possession long enough for someone to do so? “Okayyyyy….” he shrugged, reholstering the gun. "So maybe you are what you look to be. I’ve never believed in any of that, but I make a point of believing my own eyes, at least to a point. So what do you want?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I have a proposition for you.”
Stone stared at him for a long moment, measuring. “No deal. I don’t know what you have planned, but even if I don’t really believe in souls, if the devil exists, I’m not about to take a chance on selling mine. You’ve got to know that.”
“Nonsense; I know no such thing.” The devil, if the intruder was in fact the devil, smiled jauntily. “But if you don’t want to know how to prevent a major American city from suffering nuclear holocaust, I suppose there’s no need for me to hang around.” And with that, he was gone, winked out of existence as if he’d never been there.
Captain Stone recognized the move for what it was, and resisted calling out for his visitor to return, as was clearly intended. He tried to put the incident out of his mind and return to his preparations for bed. He picked his glass of whiskey back up from where he’d set it when the intruder had first spoken; he didn’t even remember having set it down, but there it was, untouched. He felt a powerful temptation to down it in a swallow and pour another, but decided that he didn’t dare muddle his thinking or lower his inhibitions just now; he set it back down again, still unsipped.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what his visitor had said. He tried for almost an hour to convince himself that it was a fraud, that it was simply a taunt that had no reality, thrown out to tempt him into listening. But there WERE terrorists out there; his activity earlier in the day reminded him that the threat was all too real, and it was everyone’s nightmare that those terrorists might have acquired nuclear technology. Frankly, he was amazed that such a thing hadn’t happened long since. He was reasonably certain that the unwelcome guest was still invisibly present, and if he only spoke a word of invitation, would return bodily. He sensed that he’d regret it if he did, but the more he considered the matter, the more sure he was that if he didn’t, and the threat proved not to be a bluff, he’d regret that, too. Ultimately, he persuaded himself that there was no harm in listening. He could always refuse an unacceptable proposition AFTER hearing it. There was no need to reject a deal, even a deal with the devil, unheard.
As soon as he came to that conclusion, before he even spoke a word of invitation, the intruder was back, acting as if there had been no break in the conversation at all. “So; tomorrow morning, a terrorist will plant a bomb in the heart of a major American city. Millions will die, and the country will take a huge hit financially, and an even huger hit to its morale. Unless you choose to do business with me; in that case, the bomb will malfunction, will be found unexploded and will be defused, and the man who plants it will be captured. Millions of lives will be saved. What do you say, Captain? Is one man’s soul so precious as to be worth allowing the country you love to suffer such a loss? That would seem rather selfish to me; it would seem to me that it would be a rather cruel, heartless…no, SOULLESS thing to do, to allow such suffering if one could prevent it.”
“How do I know that what you’re telling me is true?” The Captain was clearly conflicted; his brow furrowed and his eyes already haunted.
“My dear Captain, I NEVER lie.” The expression on the visitor’s face was frank and open, and clearly showed shock at the suggestion that anything he’d said could be questioned.
“Bull. You’re called the Prince of Lies.”
“By people without the wit to recognize the truth when they hear it, or the ability to face the fact that they’ve made mistakes when dealing with me. No, Captain, I always speak the truth. Not always the whole truth, I will admit. I occasionally shade the truth I speak so as to be somewhat misleading. But you can count on what I say to be absolutely factual.”
“How do I know that? I have, after all, only your word on the matter, and if you AREN’T truthful, then your assurances that you are are hardly very meaningful, are they?”
“True enough. But consider this; we’re considering a contractual agreement. If I fail to live up to my end, the contract is invalid and you will not be held to your end.”
“Not good enough. Suppose I sell you my soul on condition that you prevent that nuke from exploding; it doesn’t explode, the city is saved, you come to collect. How do I know that it WOULD have exploded if I hadn’t done the deal? Perhaps you simply have knowledge of what WILL happen, but no power to affect it. Perhaps there will be no disaster, regardless of what I do. Then I would have sold my soul for nothing but an illusion of having saved the day.”
The devil’s brow darkened. He seemed to grow larger, more threatening. The air in the hotel room became oppressive, almost as if a thunderstorm were brewing within the room. “Do I LOOK like I have no power over events? You know from close experience how much power evil has over the world. You know that the reason you’re even listening to what I have to say is because you’re surprised that the event I’m predicting hasn’t happened long since.” His voice reverberated like thunder.
Then he was back to being a normal-sized individual with a jauntily sarcastic expression on his face. He continued in a normal tone of voice, without a pause or break in the speech, as if his manner had never changed. “Really, Captain, that’s going to be a decision you’re going to have to make on your own. I can’t offer you proof, but I assure you that if you don’t deal with me, a major American city will be destroyed at oh-eight-thirteen tomorrow morning. Search your feelings; you know in your heart that the threat is real. I have no need to make empty threats. I have the power to make evil happen or not happen; that’s what I DO. The question is, are you willing to make a huge personal sacrifice to save millions of people from a horrible, untimely death? To save their out-of-town family members from the terrible loss? To save your country from a terrible blow?
Captain Stone had always been quite capable of decisive action when it was called for. “Very well. Bring out the contract. I’ll sign.”
“Sign, Captain? You’re thinking that this transaction is finalized by your affixing your name to a contract, written in your own blood on a piece of parchment made from human skin? No, Captain, you misunderstand. Signing your name to a contract doesn’t cost you your soul, no matter what that contract may say. Even if I could find a judge and jury anywhere in the country who would rule in my favor, no matter how clear the contract language might be, it still wouldn’t mean anything. I admit, I’ve sometimes insisted on the written contract in the past, when dealing with people for whom it meant something, but even then, it was a purely symbolic thing. No, more than signing your name is needed for you to surrender your soul.”
Stone’s face showed surprise, then puzzlement, and finally curiosity as his visitor made this speech. Finally, he asked, “So what IS required?”
“For you to sacrifice your soul, Captain, you must perform an action so evil, so appalling, so terrible, that you will never again be able to face yourself in the mirror without flinching. So horrible that no amount of rationalizing will ever allow you to think of yourself as a decent human being.” He gestured theatrically, and at his side materialized a small child. The girl was perhaps three years old, with dark, curly hair, an olive complexion, and wide dark eyes. She stared around the room in silent wonder, but seemed unafraid and openly curious. She wore a plain brown flannel shift . “You must rape this child, and then break every bone in her body before finally killing her.”
Stone was stricken. He tried to cover it with anger. “Absolutely not. No. Get out. What kind of person do you think I am?”
The devil smiled insultingly. “I KNOW what kind of a man you ARE, Captain. That’s why I require this; it will change the kind of man you are into the kind of man I want you to be, irrevocably. You were willing enough to sell your soul when it was an intellectual exercise involving nothing more horrible than signing a piece of parchment; what did you THINK it would mean to lose your soul?”
“True enough, but now that you’ve been kind enough to make it clear to me what the price really means, the deal’s off. That’s too high a price.”
The devil shrugged. “If you say so, Captain. If this one little girl’s life and pain are more important than the millions of children who will die, some at the edges of the blast slowly and agonizingly from radiation burns, if it’s more important to you to keep your precious hands clean than to save them, I’ll just have to take what pleasure I can from their deaths. That, and the guilt you’ll feel for having failed to save them.”
“People die and suffer every day.” Stone’s face was contorted in agony as he tried to convince himself of the truth of what he was saying. “I can’t save all of them, not even at the price you’re charging. At least I contribute as little as possible to that suffering. It’s better to accept that fact than to actively increase the sum total of human suffering in a vain attempt to lower it.”
“But it ISN’T a vain attempt in this case, Captain. If you brutalize this one little girl, millions WILL be saved. Isn’t that ‘lowering the sum total of human suffering’ “?
“It’s just wrong. One can’t determine right and wrong by Mathematics.”
“Would it make a difference, Captain, if I told you that she was the daughter of the man who will plant the bomb that will kill all those millions of people?”
“Of course not. She didn’t choose her father; it isn’t her fault.”
“How about if I told you that she will grow up to be a radical fanatic who will very persuasively recruit suicide bombers to attack your country, and the mother of the greatest terrorist of all, who will be the one to finally defeat and destroy Western Civilization? Who will plunge the world into a thousand years of rule by a medieval, harsh version of Islam? Would that make a difference? Just because she’s cute and innocent now, Captain, doesn’t mean that she’ll always be that way.”
Stone hesitated, torn for long moments, his face haunted. “I…I can’t. I just can’t. It’s just wrong. I could, maybe, manage to kill her to prevent all of that, but the rape, the torture, there’s no excuse for it. I can’t and I won’t.”
“So civilized, Captain. You’re a tough nut to crack. Very well, then, if you would sooner see your own son and daughter die horribly than hurt this poor little moppet, I guess I’ll just have to go.” He began a theatrical sweep of his arm.
The captain was across the room in a heartbeat, and immobilized the devil’s arm in an iron grip before he’d even consciously thought. “WHAT did you say?”
The devil smiled an insincerely apologetic smile. “Oh, I’m sorry. Did I neglect to mention? The city in question is New York. Your children, your wife, your parents, brothers and sisters, will all be among the millions to die. Does that make a difference? I thought that for such a civilized man as yourself, such selfish considerations wouldn’t make any difference. Surely, if you wouldn’t do what I want to save MILLIONS of strangers, it can’t make any difference if a handful of those victims are actually people you care about personally? If ONE of them is YOUR little girl?”
Stone released the devil’s arm, and sank to a sitting position on the bed, his head in his hands. “It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t make a difference in the final decision, but God help me, it DOES make it much harder.” He straightened, his head coming up with a manic glittering in his eyes. He sprang from the bed, dashing toward the hotel phone. “I’ll warn them! I can’t save everyone, but I can get my wife and kids out of the city.” He picked up the headset, put it to his ear. When he heard no dialtone, he depressed the cradle hook several times in rapid succession.
“I’m sorry, Captain. Having trouble getting an open line?” The devil’s words were calm and his tone sympathetic, but his face blazed with sadistic pleasure. “Perhaps you’d have more luck with your cell phone?”
The captain paused, and, no longer moving with manic energy but rather hesitantly, as if anticipating what would happen, crossed the room to where he’d left his cell phone. Picking it up and turning it on, he seemed unsurprised to see the message “unable to retrieve signal” appear.
He sat for a moment, his eyes unfocussed, his shoulders slumped. Then, the manic energy reappearing in his eyes, he leaped to his feet. He grabbed his cap and his keys from the top to the dresser, and headed toward the door.
“It won’t work, Captain. There isn’t time.” The smile on the devil’s face was smug.
Stone turned in the doorway. “There’s plenty of time for me to commandeer a chopper from the base. My clearance will allow it. I can be in New York in three hours. Load my family on and be back out of there long before oh eight hundred.”
“If everything went smoothly, I suppose that might be true. Alas, your chopper will have some minor mechanical problems. Nothing too severe, but they’ll delay your takeoff for a few hours. You won’t even have time to get INTO New York to say a tearful last goodbye to your family and hold them while you all romantically die together. No, you’ll be airborne, approaching the city but not yet close enough to be within the blast zone when the explosion happens. You will be close enough to get a very good look at the blast, though.”
Stone stood in the doorway, his right hand on the knob, playing with his keys with his left hand, weighing his options, for a long minute. Finally, he shrugged, closed the door and returned to the room, tossing his hat and keys back onto the dresser. He moved as though to sit on the bed again, but as he came within ten feet of the devil, he launched himself at his tormentor, striking out with all of the pent-up fury he could muster. His initial blow was a right hand that impacted squarely with the devil’s face; he’d planned a flurry of follow-up blows, being, of course, an expert in hand to hand combat, but he’d anticipated his initial blow having some effect; when it didn’t, it threw him off-balance, and he was forced to abort the rest of his flurry.
That blow, had it landed on any human being, no matter how large they might have been, would have produced some movement on their part; even if they were braced for it, their head would have snapped back at least an inch or two. The devil seemed to be a rather normal-sized individual, and rather lean and wiry; by rights, he should have been knocked off of his feet and into the wall. But for all of the effect the punch had on him, he might as well have been a granite statue, and Stone felt agony in his hand that radiated all the way up his arm. He was reasonably certain that he’d broken at least one bone in his hand, probably more. Holding his right hand with his left, he sank to the bed again.
“When attempting to fight pure evil, violence only weakens yourself and strengthens the enemy.” The devil grinned, his tone that of a lecturer addressing a backward student. “You see, Captain, there is no ‘thinking outside the box’ here. You have two choices. You commit the vile action I want from you, or you allow your family (and a few million other innocent victims) to die horribly. Those are your only options. What is your choice?”
Stone sat for long minutes absently nursing his wounded hand, his eyes haunted, before he stood and began to undo his belt.
***
Hours later, after it was done, he once again sat on the bed, tears streaming down his face, his tortured face bearing no resemblance to the controlled, self-assured face that he had worn the previous evening. He wondered idly if he’d ever be able to sleep again, and rather hoped that he wouldn’t. It had been some minutes since the little girl’s screams had stopped, but he could still hear them and he was sure that he would always hear them. The wall clock read “8:22”; the devil, smiling widely, picked up the television remote and switched on the set. The reception was poor, but good enough for Stone to hear the announcer, who was apparently giving an emergency news report.
“…a nuclear device was found just minutes ago in the heart of the New York financial district. It had malfunctioned, or it would have exploded before being found. A suspect has been apprehended near the device, and is being questioned by authorities even now…”
Stone let out a ragged breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “It worked, then. They’re safe.”
“Safe enough, I suppose, Captain. A shame about the child, though. She would have been quite an effective advocate for peace and moderation if she’d only been allowed to grow up.”
Stone’s head snapped up. “That’s not what you said! You said…”
“I said nothing, Captain. I merely ASKED if it would make a difference if I told you that she would be instrumental in your country’s downfall. I didn’t say that she WOULD be, and when you indicated that it wouldn’t make any difference if I did, I let the matter drop. Had you said that it made a difference, I’d have said, ‘What a shame; she won’t be.’ You don’t mean to tell me now that it DID make a difference in your decision? Pity.” But in the devil’s eyes, there was amused gloating, and not a trace of pity.
Stone’s eyes blazed with repressed fury for a moment, but then, slowly, the light was extinguished, replaced with resigned anguish. Then his attention was brought back to the television, as the announcer’s voice rose several pitches in timbre and took on a tone of horrified energy.
“This just in: apparently, the bomb that failed to destroy New York was not the only one planted last night; I have just received a report that Los Angeles was destroyed minutes ago by what has been estimated as a ten megaton blast…”
Stone looked to the devil with all trace of animation gone from his face. “Any others?”
“That’s all.” The devil grinned hugely. “For today.”
***
A week later, New York was destroyed by a nuclear bomb planted by another terrorist.
(Copyright 2008)
THE PROFESSOR WILL NOW DEMONSTRATE
(A CONCLUSIVE ANSWER TO THE AGE-OLD QUESTION: WHICH CAME FIRST, THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG)
People frequently treat the question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" as an insoluble question, one of those mysteries of life that we will never know the answer to. Nonsense. "How does Dick Clark stay so young?"--now there's a puzzler. But the chicken or egg thing is eminently solvable by simple logic.
As with any other question, one must be careful to ask exactly what it is that one wants the answer to. Here, for instance, if the question is really simply whether chickens predate eggs or vice versa, the answer is easy and requires very little thought. Eggs predate chickens. There were fish eggs, dinosaur eggs, insect eggs, all kindsa eggs long before there were chickens.
If, on the other hand, what you really want to know is whether chickens predate chicken eggs or not, that's another question entirely. Still not terribly difficult for The Professor to answer, mind you, but one that actually requires the careful logic of a trained professional. Given that what obviously happened is that at some point in time some pteradactyloid laid an egg and a chicken hatched out of it, the question becomes "Is an egg that is laid by a pteradactyloid, out of which a chicken hatches, a chicken egg?" Thus, the question is a question of just what defines a chicken egg. Is a chicken egg something which, by definition, comes out of a chicken, or is it something that a chicken comes out of? Or is it one of those things you buy at the supermarket in a styrofoam twelve-pack labelled "grade A"?
If by definition a chicken egg is one of those things you buy at the supermarket, then clearly chickens came first. After all, there were chickens long before there were supermarkets. But while these things clearly are chicken eggs, I hardly think they are an exclusive definition. After all, if they were the exclusive definition of what constitutes chicken eggs, then all those eggs which don't make it to the supermarket, but which chickens hatch out of, wouldn't be chicken eggs.
On the other hand, if by definition a chicken egg is something out of which a chicken comes, then clearly the egg would come first. But we've already acknowledged that the grade-A's from the supermarket are chicken eggs, and I've never heard of a chicken coming out of an egg bought at the supermarket. (Don't write to tell me if you have heard of such a case -- it's irrelevant. I hope you're not going to try to tell me that any egg that gets eaten and which no chicken therefore ever comes out of isn't a chicken egg.)
Therefore, clearly, a chicken egg is something which comes out of a chicken. Ergo, the chicken comes first.
People frequently treat the question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" as an insoluble question, one of those mysteries of life that we will never know the answer to. Nonsense. "How does Dick Clark stay so young?"--now there's a puzzler. But the chicken or egg thing is eminently solvable by simple logic.
As with any other question, one must be careful to ask exactly what it is that one wants the answer to. Here, for instance, if the question is really simply whether chickens predate eggs or vice versa, the answer is easy and requires very little thought. Eggs predate chickens. There were fish eggs, dinosaur eggs, insect eggs, all kindsa eggs long before there were chickens.
If, on the other hand, what you really want to know is whether chickens predate chicken eggs or not, that's another question entirely. Still not terribly difficult for The Professor to answer, mind you, but one that actually requires the careful logic of a trained professional. Given that what obviously happened is that at some point in time some pteradactyloid laid an egg and a chicken hatched out of it, the question becomes "Is an egg that is laid by a pteradactyloid, out of which a chicken hatches, a chicken egg?" Thus, the question is a question of just what defines a chicken egg. Is a chicken egg something which, by definition, comes out of a chicken, or is it something that a chicken comes out of? Or is it one of those things you buy at the supermarket in a styrofoam twelve-pack labelled "grade A"?
If by definition a chicken egg is one of those things you buy at the supermarket, then clearly chickens came first. After all, there were chickens long before there were supermarkets. But while these things clearly are chicken eggs, I hardly think they are an exclusive definition. After all, if they were the exclusive definition of what constitutes chicken eggs, then all those eggs which don't make it to the supermarket, but which chickens hatch out of, wouldn't be chicken eggs.
On the other hand, if by definition a chicken egg is something out of which a chicken comes, then clearly the egg would come first. But we've already acknowledged that the grade-A's from the supermarket are chicken eggs, and I've never heard of a chicken coming out of an egg bought at the supermarket. (Don't write to tell me if you have heard of such a case -- it's irrelevant. I hope you're not going to try to tell me that any egg that gets eaten and which no chicken therefore ever comes out of isn't a chicken egg.)
Therefore, clearly, a chicken egg is something which comes out of a chicken. Ergo, the chicken comes first.
The Tale Of Titania Cat And Oberon Cat
Hi. My name is Titania. That's pronounced "Tuh-tahn-ya", not "Tie-tain-ee-uh". I'm named for the Queen of the Fairies in some old play or something. That's the name my humans gave me, obviously. There's not much point in my telling you my real cat name; you couldn't pronounce it, and probably couldn't tell it apart from the sentence, "My food dish is empty," in cat talk. I'm a smallish black girl cat with white on my nose, my chin, my paws, and my belly. My brother is Oberon, which is the King of the Fairies in that same old play. He's a bit larger than I am, grey with the same white markings that I have. Sad to say, he doesn't make nearly as good a king, of fairies, cats, or otherwise, as I do a queen. Not to say anything bad about him, mind you, but he's not the most kingly type; I think he could probably be dominated by a particularly forceful cotton ball. Or maybe one that wasn't particularly forceful. And he's not the brightest kitty in the litter, either, not that that keeps him from being kinglike. And both of these lacks on his part lead to the story I'm about to tell you. It happened many years ago, when we were both much younger. Mind you, even then we weren't exactly YOUNG, but now we're both elderly kitties. Then we were sort of middle-aged. (We're the same age, being from the same litter; as of last May, we were sixteen, which in kitty years is something like seventy-five for a human.) Anyway, our human had to move out of his home, and was going to be staying temporarily with a friend, who already had two cats living with him. He didn't want to impose any more than he already was, so rather than moving us with him, he asked his girlfriend to put us up for a while. Of course, there were already two cats living with HER, too, but she had a bigger place, and anyway he was more willing to ask the favor of her. She agreed, but it turns out that the cats at her place weren't real happy with the arrangement. They didn't feel that the place was big enough for four cats. We tried to tell them that it was only temporary, but they didn't want to listen. To be honest, I can't say that I blame them. It was THEIR house, after all, and nobody had asked THEM whether they minded company. Still, it made for an uncomfortable situation for Oberon and me. I managed okay; I just stayed out of their way as much as possible, and dealt with the verbal abuse when I couldn't avoid them. I made it plain, though, that I wouldn't put up with them getting physical with me, and they respected that. Oberon, on the other hand, was really upset, and couldn't convincingly demonstrate that he could defend himself, so they really picked on him something fierce. They didn't actually do him any harm, but they were always chasing him away from the food dish (even though there was plenty there for all of us), swatting him on the nose, biting his ears, and loudly threatening to do much worse. So one day, when one of the humans living there left the door slightly ajar, Oberon made a break for it. Ran off into the woods. In some ways, this made life easier for me, 'cause the place was one cat less crowded now. On the other hand, in some ways it made things worse, because I was the ONLY unwelcome cat, instead of there being an easier mark handy for them to take their frustrations out on. But in any case, I missed my brother. At first, I figured he'd be back soon enough; "Mighty Hunter" is not a role he plays well, not being bright enough to outsmart a rutabaga, much less something edible and comparatively smart, like a cricket or a beetle. So I figured that once he got hungry enough, he'd be back. Then, after a couple of days, I figured that the humans would go out and find him; I heard them talking about it upstairs (we mostly lived in the basement.) But eventually it became obvious that he wasn't coming back on his own, and that the humans had given up on finding him. So after a few weeks, when somebody again left the door between the garage and the basement ajar, and the garage door open, I took my chance and went out to find him myself. It wasn't really very hard; he was barely a quarter of a mile away (the entire woods up there wasn't really big enough to hide in; I'll never understand why the humans had so much trouble) and he wasn't really trying to hide anyway (not that he was bright enough to hide successfully if he wanted to). He was just lost. Lost! Less than a mile from where he came from, and he couldn't find his way back. A disgrace to cats everywhere. Still, I couldn't help feeling sorry for him; he looked half starved. I gave him a piece of my mind anyway, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and dragged him back to the property line of our temporary housing. "There! That one!" I growled, and gave him a nip on the behind out of frustration. "Go on! It smells like they've even put out food for us." Well, after being without a good meal for so long, he was even more timid than usual. He was afraid not to go back, thanks to me, but was still afraid of the resident cats, and afraid that the people would be upset with him, so it was a couple of days before he'd let our humans pick him up and take him inside. He did eat the cat food that they left out, though, and that gradually calmed him down. (It's amazing what a bit of food will do to calm down a skittish cat.) So after they finally managed to get him inside, I stayed out another couple of days just to explore for a bit, and then wandered on up, knocked on the door, and asked politely to be let back in. The humans were only too happy to oblige, and it turns out that by then, our human had a place that he could keep us at and we didn't have to stay with our unwilling hosts. So it all worked out okay in the end, but only because I didn't depend on any humans to do a cat's job. (Note: Both Titania and Oberon died in early 2002; this story was initially told in the summer of 2001.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)