"We'll see. Anyway ..."

"The conclusions!"

"I'll try to put them into plain English. We are not complete robots, as Sam Clemens and that writer I told you about, Kurt Vonnegut, claimed we are. They said our behavior and thoughts were entirely determined by what had taken place in the past and by the chemicals in our bodies. Clemens' theory was that everything that happened in the past, everything, determined f everything in the present. The speed with which and the angle at which the first atom at the beginning of the universe bumped into the second atom started a chain of events in a particular direction. What we were was the result of that primal collision. If the first atom had bumped into the second at a different velocity and angle, then we would be different. Vonnegut said nothing about that but claimed that we acted and thought the way we did because of what he called 'bad chemicals.

"Both Clemcns and Vonnegut railed against evil, but they ignored the fact that their own philosophies removed blame for evil from evildoers. According to them, a person couldn't help the way he or she acted. So, why should they write so much about evildoers and condemn them when the evildoer was not at all responsible? Could murderers be held responsible, could the rich help themselves if they exploited the poor, could the poor help it if they allowed themselves to be exploited, could the child-beater be blamed for his brutality, the Puritan for his in- j tolerance and narrow and rigid morality, the libertines for their sexual excesses, the judge for his corruption, the Ku Klux Klanner for his racial prejudice, the liberal for his blindness to the openly declared goals and obvious bloody methods of the communists, the fascist and capitalist for using evil means to achieve supposedly good goals, the conservative for his contempt for the common people and his excuses for exploiting them? Could Ivan the Terrible and Gilles de Rais and Stalin and Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung and Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat and Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar and the IRA terrorist who drops a bomb into a mailbox and blows legs off babies, could any of these be blamed? Not if you accept Clemens' and Vonnegut's basic philosophy. The murderer and child-abuser and rapist and racist are no more to blame for their actions than those who do good are to be praised. All behave the way they do because of genes or their chemical or psychosocial conditioning. So why did they bother to write about evils when they themselves could not blame the evildoers?

"They did so, according to their own philosophy, because they had been determined to do so. Thus, they get no moral credit."

Burton had been waiting patiently for the results. Now he said, "Those two said, then, that we are just billiard balls waiting to be struck by other balls and so sent into whatever pocket is determined for them?"

"Yes."

"I'm well aware of that philosophy. As you know, I wrote a poem about it. However, even those who don't believe in free will always act as if they had it. It seems to be the nature of the beast. Perhaps our genes determine that. Now, would you mind getting to the point?"

"There is more than one," Frigate said. "First, the Ethical studies prove that mental potential is equal among races. All have the same reserves of geniuses, highly intelligent, intelligent, fairly intelligent, and stupid. In 1983, when I died, there was still a lot of controversy about that. Intelligence tests seemed to show that the average Negro intelligence was a few points below that of the Caucasian. The same tests also indicated that the Mongolian IQ was a few points higher than the Caucasian. A lot of people claimed that these tests were not accurate and that they ignored social conditioning, economic opportunity, bias against race, and so forth/ These objectors were right. The Ethical tests prove that all races have an equal mental potential.

"That goes against the grain of your observations on Earth, Dick. You claimed that the Negro was less intelligent than the Caucasian. Oh, you admitted that perhaps the American Negro might be capable of becoming more 'civilized' and brighter than the African Negro. But the implication was that, if this was so, it was because the Yankee black had a lot of white blood, that is, Caucasian genes from racial mixing."

"I said many things on Earth that I now admit were wrong," Burton said heatedly. "After sixty-seven years of intimate, though often forced, socializing with every race and every nationality and tribe you could imagine, and some you couldn't, I have changed my mind about many things. I'm perfectly willing to call Sambo my brother."

"I wouldn't use 'Sambo' myself. It shows a lingering trace of bad thinking."

"You know what I mean."

"Yes. I remember a line in your poem, 'Stone Talk,' where you criticized the American white because he wouldn't call ... ah, Sambo ... his brother. You were in no position to throw stones."

"What I was is not what I am. Rubbing elbows with many people causes you to rub in some of their skin. And vice versa."

"You did a lot of elbow-rubbing on Earth. Very few people traveled as much as you did and came into contact with all classes, rich and poor."

"It wasn't long enough. Not only are conditions different here, I wasn't only just rubbed here. I was shaken and knocked about. That does something to the machinery, you know."

"Let's not use mechanistic terms," Frigate said.

"Psychic machinery is perfectly appropriate."

"The psyche is not an engine but a subtle and complex field of waves. Many fields, in fact, a superfield. Like light, it can be described as being both wave and particle, a psychic wavicle, wavicles forming a hypercomplex."

"The results."

"All right. Every person is a semirobot. That is, each is subject to the demands of the biological machine, the body. If you hunger, you eat or try to find food. No one can rise above himself enough to go without food and not starve to death. Injuries to the cerebroneural system, cancer, chemical imbalances, these can cause changes in mentality, make you crazy, make your motives and attitudes change. There's no way the will can suppress the effects of syphilis, poisons, brain damage, and so on. And everyone is born with a set of genes that determine the particular direction his interests take. His tastes, too, I mean in food. Not everybody likes steak or tomatoes or Scotch.

"Also, some are born with chromosomal complexes that make them more emotionally rigid than others. I mean, they can't adapt to new things or changes as well as others. They tend to stick to the old and to the cultural elements that affected them when they were young. Others are more adaptable, less rigid. But sometimes reason, logic, can affect the will and the person can overcome his rigidity, defossilize himself, as it were.

"Take as an example a person who's been brought up in a fundamental Christian faith. That is, a sect in which he believes that every word of the Bible has to be taken literally. Thus, the world was created in six days, there was a worldwide deluge, a Noah and an ark, God did stop Earth's rotation so that Joshua and his bloodthirsty genocidal Hebrews could have enough daylight to defeat the bloodthirsty Amorites. Eve was seduced by a snake and in turn got Adam to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jesus did walk on water. And so on. Like others in his sect, he ignores the vast accumulation of data establishing the fact of evolution. He reads the Bible but does not see that, though the Bible nowhere states that the Earth is flat, it clearly implies that the Earth is flat. Nor does he take literally Christ's injunction to hate your father and mother. He ignores those. Puts them in a separate compartment of his brain. Or erases them as if they were on a tape.