The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  I put the X-rays back on the desk. “Isn’t there quite a large literature on medical anomalies?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Doc. “Double hearts, upside-down stomachs, extra arms, legs, heads—almost any distortion or variation you can think of. But not like this.” He leaned over and tapped his finger emphatically on the films. “This isn’t a distortion of anything. This is different. And that’s not all.”

  He pushed a microscope slide toward me.

  “That’s the capper, Hank. Blood sample. Jim tried to type it. I tried to type it. We couldn’t. There isn’t any such type.”

  I stared at them. Their faces were flushed, their eyes were bright, they quivered with excitement, and suddenly it got to me too.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you trying to tell me—”

  “We’ve got something here,” said Doc Callendar. “Something—” He shook his head. I could see the dreams in it. I could see Callendar standing ten feet tall on a pedestal of medical journals. I could see him on podiums addressing audiences of breathless men, and the same dreams were in Bossert’s eyes.

  I had my own. The Newhale News suddenly a famous name on the wire-services, and one Henry Temple bowing with modest dignity as he accepted the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

  “Big,” said Bossert softly. “The boy is more than a freak. He’s something new. A mutation. Almost a new species. The blood-type alone—”

  Something occurred to me and I cut him short. “Listen,” I said. “Listen, are you sure you didn’t make a mistake or something? How could the boy’s blood be so different from his mother’s?” I hunted for the word. “Incompatibility. He’d never have been born.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Doc Callendar mildly, “he was born. And nevertheless, there is no such blood-type. We’ve run tests backward and forward, together and independently. Kindly allow us to know what we’re talking about, Hank. The boy’s blood obviously must have been compatible with his mother’s. Possibly it’s a more advanced Type O, universally compatible. This is only one of the many things we have to study and evaluate.”

  He picked up the X-ray films again and looked at them, with an expression of holy ecstasy in his eyes.

  I lighted another cigarette. My hands were shaking now, like theirs. I leaned forward.

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s the first thing we do?”

  Doc’s station wagon, with county health service painted on its side, slewed and snorted around the turns of the steep dirt road. Jim Bossert had had to stay at the hospital, but I was sitting beside Doc, hunched forward in a sweat of impatience. The road ran up around the shoulder of Tunkhannock Ridge. We had thick dark woods on our right going up, and thick dark woods on our left going down. Buckhorn hung in the north like a curtain across the sky.

  “We’ll have to be careful,” Doc was saying. “I know these people pretty well. If they get the idea we’re trying to pull something, we’ll never get another look at the kid.”

  “You handle it,” I said. “And by the way, nobody’s mentioned the boy’s father. Doesn’t he have one?”

  “Do you know the Tate girls?”

  “No. I’ve been through Possum Creek all right, but through it is all.”

  “You must have gone fast,” said Doc, grinning. “The answer is physiologically yes, legally are you kidding?” He shifted into second, taking it easy over a place where the road was washed and gullied. “They’re not a bad bunch of girls at that, though,” he added reflectively. “I kind of like them. Couple of them are downright married.”

  We bucketed on through the hot green shadows, the great centers of civilization like Newhale forgotten in the distance behind us, and finally in a remote pocket just under Tunkhannock’s crest we came upon a few lean spry cattle, and then the settlement of Possum Creek.

  There were four ancient houses straggled out along the side of the stream. One of them said general store and had a gas pump in front of it. Two old men sat on the step.

  Doc kept on going. “The Tates,” he said, straight-faced, “live out a little from the center of town.”

  Two more turns of the road, which was now only a double-rutted track, brought us to a rural mailbox which said tate. The house behind it was pretty well run down, but there was glass in most of the windows and only half the bricks were gone from the chimney. The clapboards were sort of a rusty brown, patched up with odds and ends of tarpaper. A woman was washing clothes in an old galvanized tub set on a stand in the side yard. There was a television aerial tied on cockeyed to the gable of the house. There was a sow with a litter in a pen right handy to the door, and a little way at the back was a barn with the ridge-pole swayed like an old horse. A tarpaper shack and a battered house-trailer were visible among the trees—probably the homes of the married daughters. An ancient man sat in an ancient rocking chair on the porch and peered at us, and an ancient dog beside him rose up heavily and barked.

  I’ve known quite a lot of families like the Tates. They scratch out enough corn for their pigs and their still-houses, and enough garden for themselves. The young men make most of their money as guides during hunting season, and the old men make theirs selling moonshine. They have electricity now, and they can afford radios and even television sets. City folks call them lazy and shiftless. Actually, they find the simple life so pleasant that they hate to let hard work spoil their enjoyment of it.

  Doc drove his station wagon into the yard and stopped. Instantly there was an explosion of dogs and children and people.

  “There he is,” Doc said to me, under cover of the whooping and woofing and the banging of screen doors. “The skinny little chap with the red hair. There, just coming down the steps.”

  I looked over and saw the boy.

  He was an odd one, all right. The rest of the Tate tribe all had straight hair ranging from light brown to honey-blond. His was close and curly to his head and I saw what Jim Bossert had meant about his coloring. The red had undertones of something else in it. One would almost, in that glare of sunlight, have said silver. The Tates had blue eyes. His were copper-colored. The Tates were fair and sunburned, and so was he, but there was a different quality of fairness to his skin, a different shading to the tan.

  He was a little boy. The Tate children were rangy and big boned. He moved among them lightly, a gazelle among young goats, with a totally unchildlike grace and sureness. His head was narrow, with a very high arch to the skull. His eyes were grave, precociously wise. Only in the mouth was there genuine childishness, soft and shy.

  We got out of the car. The kids—a dozen of them, give or take a couple—all stopped as though on a signal and began to study their bare feet. The woman came from the washtub, wiping her hands on her skirt. Several others came out of the house.

  The little boy remained at the foot of the steps. His hand was now in the hand of a buxom girl. Judging by Bossert’s description, this would be his mother. Not much over nineteen, handsome, big-breasted, full-hipped. She was dressed in tight jeans and a boy’s shirt, her bare feet stuck into sandals, and a hank of yellow hair hung down her back.

  Doc spoke to them all, introducing me as a friend from town. They were courteous, but reserved. “I want to talk to Sally,” he said, and we moved closer to the steps. I tried not to look at the boy lest the glitter in my eye give me away. Doc was being so casual and hearty it hurt. I could feel a curious little prickle run over my skin as I got close to the child. It was partly excitement, partly the feeling that here was a being different from myself, another species. There was a dark bruise on the child’s forehead, and I remembered that the others had beaten him. Was this otherness at the bottom of their resentment? Did they sense it without the need for blood samples and X-rays?

  Mutant. A strange word. A stranger thing to come upon here in these friendly familiar hills. The child stared at me, and the July sun turned cold on my back.

  Doc spoke to Sally, and she smiled. She had an honest, friendly smile. Her mouth was wide and full, frankly s
ensuous but without coquetry. She had big blue eyes, and her sunburned cheeks were flushed with health, and she looked as uncomplicated and warmly attractive as a summer meadow. I wondered what strange freak of genetics had made her the fountainhead of a totally new race.

  Doc said, “Is this the little boy you brought in to the hospital?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But he’s better now.”

  Doc bent over and spoke to the boy. “Well,” he said. “And what’s your name, young man?”

  “Name’s Billy,” he answered, in a grave sweet treble that had a sound in it of bells being rung far off. “Billy Tate.”

  The woman who had come from the washtub said with unconcealed dislike, “He ain’t no Tate, whatever he might be.”

  She had been introduced as Mrs. Tate, and was obviously the mother and grandmother of this numerous brood. She had lost most of her teeth and her gray-blonde hair stood out around her head in an untidy brush. Doc ignored her.

  “How do you do, Billy Tate,” he said. “And where did you get that pretty red hair?”

  “From his daddy,” said Mrs. Tate sharply. “Same place he got his sneaky-footed ways and them yellow eyes like a bad hound. I tell you, Doctor, if you see a man looks just like that child, you tell him to come back and get what belongs to him!”

  A corny but perfectly fitting counterpoint to her words, thunder crashed on Buckhorn’s cloudy crest, like the ominous laughter of a god.

  Sally reached down suddenly and caught up the boy into her arms…

  The thunder quivered and died on the hot air. I stared at Doc and he stared at me, and Sally Tate screamed at her mother.

  “You keep your dirty mouth off my baby!”

  “That ain’t no way to talk to Maw,” said one of the older girls. “And anyway, she’s right.”

  “Oh,” said Sally. “You think so, do you?” She turned to Doc, her cheeks all white now and her eyes blazing. “They set their young ones on my baby, Doctor, and you know why? They’re jealous. They’re just sick to their stomachs with it, because they all got big hunkety kids that can’t do nothin’ but eat, and big hunkety men that treat them like they was no better’n brood sows.”

  She had reached her peak of fury so quickly that it was obvious this row had been going on for a long while, probably ever since the child was born.

  Possibly even before, judging by what she said then.

  “Jealous,” she said to her sisters, showing her teeth. “Every last one of you was dancing up and down to catch his eye, but it was me he took to the hayloft. Me. And if he ever comes back he can have me again, for as often and as long as he wants me. And I won’t hear no ill of him nor the baby!”

  I heard all this. I understood it. But not with all, or even most of my mind. That was busy with another thing, a thing it didn’t want to grapple with at all and kept shying away from, only to be driven back shivering.

  Doc put it into words.

  “You mean,” he said, to no one in particular, “the boy looks just like his father?”

  “Spit an’ image,” said Sally fondly, kissing the red curls that had that queer glint of silver in them. “Sure would like to see that man again, I don’t care what they say. Doctor, I tell you, he was beautiful.”

  “Handsome is as handsome does,” said Mrs. Tate. “He was no good, and I knew it the minute I saw—”

  “Why, Maw,” said Mr. Tate, “he had you eating out of his hand, with them nicey ways of his.” He turned to Doc Callendar, laughing. “She’d a’ gone off to the hayloft with him herself if he’d asked her, and that’s a fact. Ain’t it, Harry?”

  Harry said it was, and they all laughed.

  Mrs. Tate said furiously, “It’d become you men better to do something about getting some support for that brat from its father, instead of making fool jokes in front of strangers.”

  “Seems like, when you bring it up,” said Mr. Tate, “it would become us all not to wash our dirty linen for people who aren’t rightly concerned.” He said courteously to Doc, “Reckon you had a reason for coming here. Is there something I can do?”

  “Well—” said Doc uncertainly, and looked at the boy. “Just like his father, you say.”

  And if that is so, I thought, how can he be a mutant? A mutant is something new, something different, alien from the parent stem. If he is the spit an’ image outside, then build and coloring bred true. And if build and coloring bred true, probably blood-type and internal organs—

  Thunder boomed again on Buckhorn Mountain. And I thought, Well, and so his father is a mutant, too.

  But Doc said, “Who was this man, Sally? I know just about everybody in these hills, but I never saw anyone to answer that description.”

  “His name was Bill,” she said, “just like the boy’s. His other name was Jones. Or he said it was.”

  “He lied,” said Mrs. Tate. “Wasn’t Jones no more than mine is. We found that out.”

  “How did he happen to come here?” asked Doc. “Where did he say he was from?”

  “He come here,” Mrs. Tate said, “driving a truck for some appliance store, Grover’s I think it was, in Newhale. Said the place was just new and was making a survey of teevees around here, and offering free service on them up to five dollars, just for goodwill. So I let him look at ours, and he fussed with it for almost an hour, and didn’t charge me a cent. Worked real good afterward, too. That would ‘a been the end of it, I guess, only Sally was under his feet all the time and he took a shine to her. Kept coming back, and coming back, and you see what happened.”

  I said, “There isn’t any Grover’s store in Newhale. There never has been.”

  “We found that out,” said Mrs. Tate. “When we knew the baby was coming we tried to find Mr. Jones, but it seems he’d told us a big pack of lies.”

  “He told me,” Sally said dreamily, “where he come from.”

  Doc said eagerly, “Where?”

  Twisting her mouth to shape the unfamiliar sounds, Sally said, “Hrylliannu.”

  Doc’s eyes opened wide. “Where the hell is that?”

  “Ain’t no place,” said Mrs. Tate. “Even the schoolteacher couldn’t find it in the atlas. It’s only another of his lies.”

  But Sally murmured again, “Hrylliannu. Way he said it, it sounded like the most beautiful place in the world.”

  The stormcloud over Buckhorn was spreading out. Its edges dimmed the sun. Lightning flicked and flared and the thunder rolled. I said, “Could I take a look at your television?”

  “Why,” said Mrs. Tate, “I guess so. But don’t you disturb it, now. Whatever else he done, he fixed that teevee good.”

  “I won’t disturb it,” I said. I went up the sagging steps past the old man and the fat old dog. I went into the cluttered living room, where the springs were coming out of the sofa and there was no rug on the floor, and six kids apparently slept in the old brass bed in the corner. The television set was maybe four years old, but it was the best and biggest made that year. It formed a sort of shrine at one end of the room, with a piece of red cloth laid over its top.

  I took the back off and looked in. I don’t know what I expected to see. It just seemed odd to me that a man would go to all the trouble of faking up a truck and tinkering with television sets for nothing. And apparently he hadn’t. What I did see I didn’t understand, but even to my inexpert eye it was obvious that Mr. Jones had done something quite peculiar to the wiring inside.

  A totally unfamiliar component roosted on the side of the case, a little gadget not much bigger than my two thumbnails.

  I replaced the back and turned the set on. As Mrs. Tate said, it worked real good. Better than it had any business to. I got a peculiar hunch that Mr. Jones had planned it that way, so that no other serviceman would have to be called. I got the hunch that that component was important somehow to Mr. Jones.

  I wondered how many other such components he had put in television sets in this area, and what they were for.

  I turned off the
set and went outside. Doc was still talking to Sally.

  “…some further tests he wants to make,” I heard him say. “I can take you and Billy back right now…”

  Sally looked doubtful and was about to speak. But the decision was made for her. The boy cried out wildly, “No! No!” With the frantic strength of a young animal he twisted out of his mother’s arms, dropped to the ground, and sped away into the brush so swiftly that nobody had a chance even to grab for him.

  Sally smiled. “All them shiny machines and the funny smells frightened him,” she said. “He don’t want to go back. Isn’t anything wrong with him, is there? The other doctor said he was all right.”

  “No,” said Doc reluctantly. “Just something about the X-rays he wanted to check on. It could be important for the future. Tell you what, Sally. You talk to the boy, and I’ll come back in a day or two.”

  “Well,” she said. “All right.”

  Doc hesitated, and then said, “Would you want me to speak to the sheriff about finding this man? If that’s his child he should pay something for its support.”

  A wistful look came into her eyes. “I always thought maybe if he knew about the baby—”

  Mrs. Tate didn’t give her time to finish. “Yes, indeed,” she said. “You speak to the sheriff. Time somebody did something about this, ‘fore that brat’s a man grown himself.”

  “Well,” said Doc, “we can try.”

  He gave a last baffled glance at the woods where the boy had disappeared, and then we said goodbye and got into the station wagon and drove away. The sky was dark overhead now, and the air was heavy with the smell of rain.

  “What do you think?” I said finally.

  Doc shook his head. “I’m damned if I know. Apparently the external characteristics bred true. If the others did—”

  “Then the father must be a mutant too. We just push it back one generation.”

  “That’s the simplest explanation,” Doc said.

  “Is there any other?”

  Doc didn’t answer that. We passed through Possum Creek, and it began to rain.

  “What about the television set?” he asked.