Alexander Key
Riddle of Bill

    I have to think of him simply as Bill, for all his other names merely catalogue him and rob him of individuality. Looking at him only as a species – pawing over his bones, taking cranial measurements and listening to repeated comments about his brain and the spurring effect of his opposing thumb – has never brought him into understandable focus. More has been written about him than any living person has time to read, and through it all Bill remains anonymous. Lost in the verbiage is the plain fact that Bill is an enigma, a contradiction, and a continuing mystery that no one has ever managed to explain.
    Bill became the object of my curiosity as a small boy – every boy at some time turns into a Darwin and asks questions not answered by Genesis, and he continues a secret wonder long after he has become bored with elemental anthropology. Nothing I’ve read in the half century following my initial curiosity as enlightened me a whit; largely, I think, because Bill has always been anonymous. It was only after I had brashly personified him with a given name that he shifted suddenly into focus as my blood brother. Not clearly into focus – but clearly enough to give me a glimmering and add greatly to my wonder.
    I was appalled by what I saw. And I became more appalled when I began to consider what he has done, is doing now, and possibly may do tomorrow. Bill, I realized, is unquestionably the strangest creature ever to call this planet his home.
    It was only by stepping back and taking an Olympian view that I was able to bring him down to a more understandable reality, otherwise he looms so large that Bill the individual is lost. It is as plain Bill that I must consider him – not as a collection of bones or a frightening megalithropus. Bill, my brother.
    What is he? How did he get here? Why is he the way he is? Where is he going?
    * * *
    Those who discourse learnedly over molars and tibias now say that man, or something approximating him, has been around some millions of years. But that wasn’t Bill. Bill, as we know him, first appeared about twenty thousand years ago. At that time he was just as tall, just as fine featured, and his cranium just as large as it is today. If you endowed him with a college education, shaved him, and dressed him as you are dressed, I doubt if you would know him from your neighbor – ’though I suspect his health would be considerably better. But a curious and confounding thing about Bill is that the bones of his alleged predessors have been dug up in the strata above him. And nowhere has there been found a direct link between the two.
    Maybe the link will be found, but that is neither here nor there. Bill always was a rake and a hellion, and you need only to look about you now to see his dominant blood mixed with every lesser race on the globe. Some say Bill is a mutation, and that he appeared from an inferior breed. Maybe so. Others, with just as much evidence to prove their claims, insist that he crashed here on a ship from somewhere else, and had to start from scratch. Again maybe so. After noting some of the things that I have about him, I am willing to believe almost anything about Bill, including the probability that time will see him crashing on some other planet where he will be forced to start once more from scratch.
    That is one of the things to remember about Bill: his driving, overwhelming curiosity and urge to get somewhere else. But before examing the significance of that, let’s look at a few more of Bill’s traits, and take note of what he has done.
    Wherever he is, Bill wants to dominate. Everything – the sea, the sky, the earth and all things on it. Being proud and vain and loving adulation, he likes to think he has conquered the seas, the air, and even Everest – though he has yet to build a vessel of any kind that cannot plunge him to his death in a matter of minutes. And in scaling the highest peaks he has done little more than prove that he is not quite the equal of a mountain goat. Still, I applaud him. After all, Bill is my brother. If there were a hundred unclimbed Everests, I know Bill would keep on til he had overcome them all; he would do it simply because they were there.
    * * *
    There are many wonderful things about him I applaud even more, yet when I look at other sides of him I want only to hide my face in shame. Names like Dachau make me sick to my soul. Yet when I look farther back, Dachau becomes a trifle, and Bill becomes an overwhelming confliction, an anomaly that almost passes beliefs. He is saint and monster, beast and budding godling, genius and dolt. As a scourge, Bill has no equal, and all the locusts since time began have never destroyed a hundredth part of what Bill has laid waste. He has turned vast areas of this planet into deserts, obliterated whole species, and brought screaming agony and death to uncounted millions of his fellows. His guilt is greater because he has the best brain on earth and he has managed at times to use it in the worst possible way. No other creature on this planet has ever killed as much, and with less reason. I can almost believe that at times Bill is utterly insane. Is he insane?
    Is his a schizoid or a manic personality? Remember, this is the same Bill who will turn around and go to incredible lengths to rescue a lost puppy that has fallen into a crevass. He may plunder and rape – and the next day make tender love, throw away his life for his fellows, or write soaring lyrics and music that endure for generations. All of this tells us something – but what?
    A vague picture is beginning to emerge, but there are more facets to consider before any fair opinion of Bill can be formed. Let’s go as far back as we can, to Bill’s first known appearance on earth. Maybe, as Bill, he was here a hundred thousand years earlier, but if so the secret is hidden in the Gobi sands or at the bottom of the Atlantic. There is a vast ruined city in the Gobi that has been glimpsed only in part; there may be other cities under it. And somewhere in the Atlantic, surely, there is Atlantis. But no matter. When we first know of Bill, he was starting from scratch, because he was chipping flints.
    Don’t think for an instant he wasn’t as smart then as he is now. If you don’t believe it, try chipping a flint, carving some of the tools he evolved, or – more important – see if you can equal the breathtaking paintings he made in caves. (I’ll take them any time over his present Pop art.) The only difference between flint-Bill and atom Bill is a perishable pyramid of accumulated knowledge. If it were suddenly wiped out – and with his present know-how and manic drives, Bill might do it at any time if nature doesn’t – it soon would be back to chipped flints again.
    There is, I should add, a fair chance that nature will do the wiping out before Bill himself manages it. After all, it wasn’t Bill who flooded the Mediterranean, tumbled a mid-Atlantic land mass into the depths, or brought the meteor swarm believed to have darkened the sun and so produced the last ice age. Actually, Bill has had a rough deal on this planet, and it has taken something just to survive.
    To survive and improve his lot, flint-Bill had two outstanding qualities: a genius for tinkering, and an awareness of God. The anomaly is that Bill had gained so much knowledge, and so little wisdom.
    In spite of his awareness of God, Bill has somehow missed the crux, gone continually to war, tortured, maimed, spread untold suffering and death, and spent nearly two thousand years trying to convert his world to a simple and wonderous philosophy that he refuses to live by. Curiously, Bill is intelligent enough to know that, if he ever does settle down and live by it, he can turn his battered earth into a paradise. Why doesn’t he? Is it just because he’s too full of brains and has to gain wisdom by slow experience?
    * * *
    Bill approves of humility and likes to think of his nobility, but on the whole, throughout his later existence at least, he has displayed very little of either. Adulation is more important to him. In his pride, Bill early-conceived the idea that he must build mightily and populate the earth. Only now is he beginning to realize he has succeeded much too well at both, for his cities are horrors and his populations are frightening. Why has this grain of wisdom come so late?
    With his genius for tinkering, Bill has contrived gadgets that can relieve him of all drudgery, produce more food than he can eat, and given himself princely leisure to improve his culture. But Bill is selfish; he wants more than he needs, and leisure is something to squander if he can gain it. To gain it he allows most of his fellows to exist in squalor and go hungry, and he doesn’t hesitate to use his gadgets to decimate, at an unprecedented rate, his brothers who disagree with him. Yet you cannot say Bill is without heart and compassion – doesn’t he save lost puppies and send tons of grain and medicine to the needy?
    Surely the awareness of God is in him, and with it the seeds of everything needed to make him a godling. Yet Bill, the embryonic godling, is still dedicated mainly to the material, most of which he achieves by blithely continuing to wreck his planet. The better part of himself he allows to lie dormant, untended.
    The picture of Bill is almost complete, but not quite. Along with his God-awareness is a kindred quality allied to his immense creativeness, a strange latent ability that may be his greatest asset. Bill tries to ignore it. The fact is, he is a bit ashamed of it. It is something in his mind that has nothing to do with computing ability. It is an awareness that extends beyond him – a still, vague awareness, that at times gives him miraculous flashes of insight. With various facets of this extrasensory ability he can, on occasion, read minds, foretell events, and even communicate mentally at a distance. If Bill would ever awaken this slumbering part of himself, he would indeed be a godling.
    Now, finally, what do we have in Bill?
    * * *
    A strange and confusing creature. A tinkerer, a builder, a creator, and a mad destroyer; a selfish and sadistic monster addicted to blind rages and wholesale murder, who will turn around and give you the shirt off his back; a dominating hellion with a driving curiosity that takes him over every fence, who continually keeps his abode in a mess. He knows better, but he won’t listen. Wisdom isn’t in him yet, but smouldering deep in him is the spark of unconceived genius.
    Interpret it as you will, but I suddenly realized Bill is a very much like my growing son: when he’s good he’s very, very good, but when he’s bad, he’s horrid. His room is always a mess, he’s always on the go, making or poking into something; he’s smart as a whip part of the time, knows far too much for his age, and yet he can be an absolute dolt. Wisdom just isn’t in him yet, but I can see it beginning to grow.
    Isn’t that Bill? A youngster just finding his feet? It seems so to me, and if true there’s great hope for him if he survives – though I shudder at what may be in store for him before wisdom comes. The mystery of where he came from becomes the greater when I think of the strange, smouldering spark within him, but I have no doubts where he’s headed. This planet will never hold him, nor even this solar system when the spark begins to flame.

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