Moreau’s Other Island. Brian Aldiss

to apologize. ‘Why the healthy body should apologize to the defective I do not know. That’s not part of my philosophy.

      ‘Why are you so anxious to gain my pity?’

      He leant sideways. The little fingers pressed a button inside the artificial arm. It moved back into place again, snapping when it was correctly positioned. The tiny sound provoked him to nod to himself almost complacently.

      He was in control of himself, as his voice showed when he spoke again. ‘Back in all those crummy years when I was a kid, I used to go on reading jags, Mr Roberts. All sorts of crap I read. Not old H. G. Wells, I don’t mean. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and a lot more, as well as technical books. A French writer called Gide compares Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. He finds them very alike, and do you know what he puts on about them? He says that Nietzsche was jealous of Jesus Christ, envied him to the point of madness, whereas Dostoevsky was struck with humility and regarded Jesus as a superman. You know what? As those two writers regarded Jesus Christ, so I regarded ordinary human beings – holding both attitudes at the same time. Because I was born monstrous and deformed, Mr Roberts. I was a thalidomide kid. Remember thalidomide?’

      I remembered the thalidomide scandal well. The drug had been manufactured as a tranquilliser by a German company and licensed by chemical firms all over the world. The side-effects of the drug had not been properly researched; its teratogenicity had only become apparent when babies were born deformed. When the drug was administered to women in the early stages of pregnancy, it had the power of passing through the placental barrier and malforming the growth of the foetus. From eight to ten thousand children were born defective in various parts of the globe.

      What made me recall the case so clearly was that over twenty years ago, when there was a court case in Canada regarding the amount of compensation to be paid one of the thalidomide children, my mother had said to me, ‘Cal, you were born at the time when thalidomide was available all round the world. We are just lucky that the States has sane laws about testing drugs – so that when I went to Doc Harris for a tranquilliser during pregnancy, he prescribed something safe, or otherwise you might have been born without your proper limbs like other babies your age in England and elsewhere.’

      I said to Dart, ‘That whole case was a piece of criminal negligence.’ I could but stare at him, ashamed to move my eyes away.

      ‘My mother was prescribed Distaval, as thalidomide was called in England, and used it for a week only. One week! That week covered the forty-eighth day of her pregnancy. When I was born, I had these severe abnormalities on which you now gaze with such pleasure.

      ‘If the doctors had had any sense, they would never have let me live.’