Eutopia by David Nickle Read Free Book Online

going through my private things than rooting through the charnel house over in the saloon. Well, Jason, tell me: is everything clear to you now?”
    Jason had to admit that nothing was any clearer now that he’d snooped through Aunt Germaine’s things, and said he was sorry once more.
    “Perhaps,” she continued, “you have a question then? Something that you might have asked me earlier, as we ate the dinner I prepared for you? Drank the tea I brewed for you?” Jason felt his face flush with shame. Any questions he had, and there were more than a few, got buried in that shame. Aunt Germaine’s lips pursed, and she nodded as though he had confirmed something.
    “Let me hazard a question for myself then. ‘What, oh dear Aunt Germaine, ever are you doing for the Eugenics Records Office?’”
    Aunt Germaine didn’t say any more that night. She was clearly upset at her nephew for invading her things like that, so ordered Jason back to sleep while she carefully replaced the box into her bag, and moved it next to her.
    But they were there for days after, and she soon forgot her anger—her strange night terror—and set about answering her own question.
    §
    When Aunt Germaine was quite a bit younger and Mr. Frost was still of this world, she took a hungry interest in the foundling science of biology—“Like medicine,” she said, “but with an interest in all living things.”
    “I thought you were a doctor, or a nurse or some such thing, all you know about germs,” said Jason. “Didn’t you say you were a nurse?”
    “We are getting ahead of ourselves,” said Germaine.
    Mr. Frost was a doting husband and so indulged his wife’s passion as much as his pocketbook would permit. He purchased her a microscope and kit for making slides—allowing her to view the most minute specks of life—and a small library of volumes which included: Herbert Spencer’s Social Statistics ; Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species ; and of course, Charles Galton’s seminal tome Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development .
    “What about Bulfinch’s Mythology ?”
    “That is not a biology book,” said Aunt Germaine.
    In addition to her reading and her microscopy, Mr. Frost’s fortune enabled Aunt Germaine to attend summer lectures at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York. That was where she first heard Dr. Charles Davenport speak.
    “Looking at him, one could see the divinely inspired brilliance,” said Aunt Germaine. A native New Yorker who had completed his studies at Harvard University, Charles Davenport was engaged with the Institute at their biological research station at Cold Spring Harbor in Long Island. He was a tall man, stooped, in his early middle years then but with a goatee going to white on a chin and an expression of sheer intellectual vigour in his eye.
    “Sheer intellectual vigour,” repeated Jason. “Now what’s that look like?”
    “Studious. Serious,” said Aunt Germaine.
    Charles Davenport was a zoologist—which is to say that he studied the ins and outs of the animal kingdom. The first lectures that Aunt Germaine encountered were discussions of studies he had made of lower life forms such as he might dredge from the harbour: pill bugs and molluscs and primitive fish.
    It was clear to Aunt Germaine, however, that he was most interested in the study and improvement of the kingdom’s greatest achievement.
    “What was that?” asked Jason.
    “Man,” said Aunt Germaine.
    Dr. Davenport even then had very clear ideas about the way that man might be bettered. In the course of his lecture, Aunt Germaine recalled, he stopped and asked the room:
    “Why do we study these lowly, wet creatures? These things that cling to the bottom of rocks and suck up algae? Is it because we have a direct application for them in our lives? Surely not. Then why?”
    Aunt Germaine’s hand shot up, and when he called upon her, she answered:
    “Toward the betterment of all mankind?”
    “Excellent,