The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  Dr. Braden finished the article. He sucked thoughtfully on the burned-out pipe. Without seeming to do so, he regarded John Kingman again. Mental cases have unpredictable reactions, but as with children and will animals, much can be done if care is taken not to startle them. Presently young Dr. Braden said meditatively:

  “John, I think something can be done for you”

  The regal figure turned its eyes. They looked at the younger man. They were aloofly amused at the imperitinence of a mere human being addressing John Kingman, who was so much greater than a mere human being that he was not even annoyed at human impertinence. Then John Kingman looked away again.

  “I imagine,” said Braden, as meditatively as before, “that you’re pretty bored. I’m going to see if something can’t be done about it. In fact-”

  Someone came across the grass toward him. It was the clerk of the records department. He looked very unhappy. He had the card Dr. Braden had turned in with a request for more complete information. Braden waited.

  “Er …doctor,” said the clerk miserably, “there’s something wrong! Something terribly wrong! About the records, I mean.”

  The aloofness of John Kingman had multiplied with the coming of a second, low, human being into his ken. He gazed into the distance in divine indifference to such creatures.

  “Well?” said Braden.

  “There’s no record of his admission!” said the clerk. “Every year there’s a complete roster of the patients, you know. I thought I’d just glance back, find out what year his name first appeared, and look in the committal papers for that year. But I went back twenty years, and John Kingman is mentioned every year!”

  “Look back thirty, then,” said Braden.

  “I … I did!” said the clerk painfully. “He was a patient here thirty years ago!”

  “Forty?” asked Braden.

  The clerk gulped.

  “Dr. Braden,” he said desperately, “I even went to the dead files, where records going back to 1850 are kept. And … doctor, he was a patient then!”

  Braden got up from the grass and brushed himself off automatically.

  “Nonsense!” he said. “That’s ninety-eight years ago!”

  The clerk looked crushed. “I know, doctor. There’s something terribly wrong! I’ve never had my records questioned before. I’ve been here twenty years.”

  “I’ll come with you and look for myself,” said Dr. Braden. “Send an attendant to come here and take him back to his ward.”

  “Y-yes, doctor,” said the clerk, gulping again. “At… at once.”

  He went away at a fast pace between a shuffle and a run. Dr. Braden scowled impatiently.

  Then he saw John Kingman looking at him again, and John Kingmàn was amused. Tolerantly, loftily amused. Amused with a patronizing condescension that would have been infuriating to anyone but a physician trained to regard behavior as symptomatic rather than personal.

  “It’s absurd,” grunted Braden, matter of factly treating the patient, as a good psychiatrist does, like a perfectly normal human being. “You haven’t been here for ninety-eight years!”

  One of the six-fingered hands stirred. While John Kingman regarded Braden with infinitely superior scorn, six fingers made a gesture as of writing. Then the hand reached out.

  Braden put a pencil in it. The other hand reached. Braden fumbled in his pockets and found a scrap of paper. He offered that.

  John Kingman looked aloofly into the far distance, not even glancing at what his hands did. But the fingers sketched swiftly, with practiced ease. It took only seconds. Then, negligently, he reached out and returned pencil and paper to Braden. He returned to his godlike indifference to mere mortals. But there was now the faintest possible smile on his face. It was an expression of contemptuous triumph.

  Braden glanced at the sketch. There was design there. There was an unbelievable intricacy of relationship between this curved line and that, and between them and the formalized irregular pattern in the center. It was not the drawing of a lunatic. It was cryptic, but it was utterly rational. There is something essentially childish in the background of most forms of insanity. There was nothing childish about this. And it was obscurely, annoyingly familiar. Braden had seen something like it, somewhere, before. It was not in the line of psychiatry, but in some of the physical sciences diagrams like this were used in explanations.

  An attendant came to return John Kingman to his ward. Braden folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

  “It’s not in my line, John,” he told John Kingman. “I’ll have a check-up made. I think I’m going to be able to do something for you.”

  John Kingman suffered himself to be led away. Rather, he grandly preceded the attendant, negligently preventing the man from touching him, as if such a touch Would be a sacrilege the man was too ignorant to realize.

  Braden went to the record office. With the agitated clerk beside him, he traced John Kingman’s name to the earliest of the file of dead records. Handwriting succeeded typewriting as he went back through the years. Paper yellowed. Handwriting grew Spencerian. It approached the copperplate. But, in ink turned brown, in yellowed rag paper in the ruled record, books of the Eastern Pennsylvania Asylum, which was Meadeville Mental in 1850, there were the records of a patient named John Kingman for every year. Twice Braden came upon notes alongside the name. One was in 1880. Some staff doctor, there were no psychiatrists in those days, had written, “High fever.” There was nothing else. In 1853 a neat memo stood beside the name. “This man has six functioning fingers on each hand.” The memo had been made ninety-five years before.

  Dr. Braden looked at the agitated clerk. The record of John Kingman was patently impossible. The clerk read it as a sign of inefficiency in his office and possibly on his part. He would be upset and apprehensible until the source of the error had safely been traced to a predecessor.

  “Someone,” said Braden dryly, but he did not believe it even then, “forgot to make a note of the explanation. An unknown must have been admitted at some time as John Kingman. In time, he died. But somehow the name John Kingman had become a sort of stock name like John Doe, to signify an unidentified patient. Look in the death records for John Kingman. Evidently a John Kingman died, and that same year another unidentified patient was assigned the same name. That’s it!”

  The clerk almost gasped with relief. He went happily to check. But Braden did not believe it. In 1853 someone had noted that John Kingman had six functioning fingers on each hand. The odds against two patients in one institution having six functioning fingers, even in the same century, would be enormous.

  Braden went doggedly to the museum. There the devices used in psychiatric treatments in the days of New Bedlam were preserved, but not displayed. Meadeville Mental had been established in 1776 as New Bedlam. It was the oldest mental institution in the United States, but it was not pleasant to think of the treatment given to patients, then termed “madmen”, in the early days.

  The records remained. Calf-leather bindings. Thin rag paper. Beautifully shaded writing, done with quill pens. Year after year, Dr. Braden searched. He found John Kingman listed in 1820. In 1801. In 1795. In 1785 the name “John Kingthan” was absent from the annual list of patients. Braden found the record of his admission in 1786. On the 21st of May, 1786, ten years after New Bedlam was founded, one hundred and sixty-two years before the time of his search, there was a neat entry:

  A poore madman admitted this day has been assigned the name of John Kingman because of his absurdly royal manner and affected dignity. He is five feet eight inches tall, appears to speak no English or any other tongue known to any of the learned men here about, and has six fingers on each hand, the extra fingers being perfectly formed and functioning. Dr. San Forde observed that he seems to have a high fever. On his left shoulder, when stripped, there appears a curious design which is not tattooing according to any known fashion. His madness appears to be so strong a conviction of his greatness that he will not condescend t
o notice others as being so much his inferiors, so that if not committed hee would starve. But on three occasions, when being examined by physicians, he put out his hand imperiously for writing instruments, and drew very intricate designs which all agree have no significance. He was committed as a madman by a commission consisting of Drs. San Forde, Smyth, Hale, and Bode.”

  Young Dr. Braden read the entry a second time. Then a third. He ran his hands through his hair. When the clerk came back to announce distressedly that not in all the long history of the institution had a patient named John Kingman died, Braden was not surprised.

  “Quite right,” said Braden to the almost hysterical clerk. “He didn’t die. But I want John Kingman taken over to the hospital ward. We’re going to look him over. He’s been rather neglected. Apparently he’s had actual medical attention only once in a hundred and sixty-two years. Get out his committal papers for me, will you? He was admitted here May 21st, 1786.”

  Then Braden left, leaving behind him a clerk practically prostrated with shock. The clerk wildly suspected that Dr. Braden had gone insane. But when he found the committal papers, he decided hysterically that it was he who would shortly hold in one of the wards.

  John Kingman manifested amusement when he was taken into the hospital laboratory. For a good ten seeonds, Braden watched him narrowly, he glanced from one piece of apparatus to another. It was impossible to doubt that after one glance he understood the function and operation of every appliance in the ultramodern, super, scientifically, equipped laboratory of the hospital ward. Bnt he was amused. In particular, he looked at the big X-ray machine and smiled with such contempt that the X-ray technician bristled.

  “No paranoid suspicion,” said Braden. “Most paranoid patients suspect that they’re going to be tortured or killed when they’re brought to a place where there’s stuff they don’t understand.”

  John Kingman turned his eyes to Braden. He put out his six-fingered hand and made the motion of writing. Braden handed him a pencil and a memo tablet. Negligently, contemptuously, he sketched. He sketched again. He handed the sketches to Braden and retreated into his enormous amused contempt for humanity.

  Braden glanced at the scraps of paper. He jerked his bead, and the X-ray technician came to his side.

  “This,” said Braden dryly, “looks like a diagram of an X-ray tube. Is it?”

  The technician blinked.

  “He don’t use the regular symbols,” he objected, “but … well . . yes. That’s what he puts for the target and this’s for the cathode. Hm-m-m. Yes.” Then he said suddenly: “Say! That’s not right.”

  He studied the diagram. Then he said in abrupt excitement:

  “Look! He’s put in a field like in a electron microscope! That’s an idea! Do that, and you’d get straightline electron flow and a narrower X-ray beam.”

  Braden said:

  “I wonder! What’s this second sketch? Another type of X-ray?“The X-ray technician studied the second sketch absorbedly. After a time he said dubiously:

  “He don’t use regular symbols. I don’t know. Here’s the same sign for the target and that for the cathode. This looks like something to … hm-m-m … accelerate the electrons. Like in a Coolidge tube.

  Only it’s,” He scratched his head. “I see what he’s trying to put down. If something like this would work, you could work any tube at any voltage you wanted. Yeah! And all the high EMF would be inside the tube. No danger. Hey! You could work this off dry batteries! A doctor could carry a X-ray outfit in his handbag! And he could get million-volt stuff!”

  The technician stared in mounting excitement. Presently he said urgently:

  “This is crazy! But … look, Doe! Let me have this thing to study over! This is great stuff! This is… Gosh! Give me a chance to get this made up and try it out! I don’t get it all yet, but…”

  Braden took back the sketch and put it in his pocket.

  “John Kingman,” he observed, “has been a patient here for a hundred and sixty-two years. I think we’re going to get some more surprises. Let’s get at the job on hand!”

  John Kingman was definitely amused. He was amenable, now. His air of pitying condescension, as of a god to imbeciles, under other circumstances would have been infuriating. He permitted himself to be X-rayed as one might allow children to use one as a part of their play. He glanced at the thermometer and smiled contemptuously. He permitted his body temperature to be taken from an armpit. The electrocardiograph aroused just such momentary interest as a child’s unfamiliar plaything might cause. With an air of mirth he allowed the tattooed design on his shoulder, it was there, to be photographed. Throughout, he showed such condescending contempt as would explain his failure to be annoyed.

  But Braden grew pale as the tests went on. John Kingman’s body temperature was 1050 F. A “high fever” had been observed in 1850, ninety-eight years before, and in 1786, well over a century and a half previously. But he still appeared to be somewhere between forty and sixty years old. John Kingman’s pulse rate was one hundred fifty-seven beats per minute, and the electrocardiograph registered an absolutely preposterous pattern which had no meaning until Braden said curtly:

  “If he had two hearts, it would look like that!”

  When the X-ray plates came out of the fixing-bath, he looked at them with the grim air of someone expecting to see the impossible. And the impossible was there. When John Kingman was admitted to New Bedlam, there were no such things as X-rays on earth. It was natural that he had never been X-rayed before. He had two hearts. He had three extra ribs on each side. He had four more vertebrae than a normal human being. There were distinct oddities in his elbow joints. And his cranial capacity appeared to be something like twelve per cent above that of any but exceptional specimens of humanity. His teeth displayed distinct, consistent deviations from the norm in shape.

  He regarded Braden with contemptuous triumph when the tests were over. He did not speak. He drew dignity about himself like a garment. He allowed an attendant to dress him again while he looked into the distance, seemingly thinking godlike thoughts. When his toilet was complete he looked again at Braden, with vast condescension, and his six-fingered hands again made a gesture of writing. Braden grew, if possible, slightly paler as he handed over a pencil and pad.

  John Kingman actually designed to glance, once, at the sheet on which he wrote. When he handed it back to Bradeñ and withdrew into magnificently amused aloofness, there were a dozen or more tiny sketches on the sheet. The first was an exact duplicate of the one he had handed Braden before the Administration Building. Beside it was another which was similar but not alike. The third was a specific variation of the two together. The rest carried on that variation in precise, exact steps until the last pair of sketches divided again into two, of which one, by a perfectly logical extension of the change, pattern, had returned to the original design, while the other was a bewilderingly complex pattern with its formalized central part in two closely-linked Sections.

  Braden caught his breath. Just as the X-ray man had been puzzled at first by the use of unfamiliar symbols for familiar ideas, so Braden had been puzzled by untraceable familiarity in the first sketch of all. But the last diagram made everything clear. It resembled almost exactly the standard diagrams illustrating fissionable elements as atoms. Once it was granted that John Kingman was no ordinary lunatic, it became clear that here was a diagram of some physical process which began with normal and stable atoms and arrived at an unstable atom, with one of the original atoms returned to its original state. It was, in short, a process of physical catalysis which would produce atomic energy.

  Braden raised his eyes to the contemptuous, amused eyes of John Kingman.

  “I think you win,” he said shakenly. “I still think you’re crazy, but maybe we’re crazier still.”

  The commitment papers on John Kiagman were a hundred and sixty-two years old. They were yellow and brittle and closely written. John Kingman, said the oddly spelled and sometimes curiously
phrased document, was first seen on the morning of April 10, 1786, by a man named Thomas Hawkes, as he drove into Aurora, Pennsylvania, with a load of corn. John Kingman was then clad in very queer garments, not like those of ordinary men. The material looked like silk, save that it seemed also to be metallic. The man Hawkes was astounded, but thought perhaps some strolling player had got drunk and wandered off while wearing his costume for a play or pageant. He obligingly stopped his horse and allowed the stranger to climb in for a ride to town. The stranger was imperious, and scornfully silent. Hawkes asked who he was, and was contemptuously ignored. He asked, seemingly, all the world was talking of such matters then, at least the world about Aurora, Pennsylvania, if the stranger had seen the giant shooting stars of the night before. The stranger ignored him. Arrived in town, the stranger stood in the street with regal dignity, looking contemptuously at the people. A crowd gathered about him, but he seemed to feel too superior to notice it. Presently a grave and elderly man, Mr. Wycherly, appeared and the stranger fixed him with a gesture. He stooped and wrote strange designs in the dust at his feet. When the unintelligible design was meaningless to Mr. Wycherly, the stranger seemed to fly into a very passion of contempt. He spat at the crowd, and the crowd became unruly and constables took him into custody.

  Braden waited patiently until both the Director of Meadeville Mental and the man from Washington had finished reading the yellowed papers. Then Braden explained calmly:

  “He’s insane, of course. It’s paranoia. He is as convinced of his superiority to us as, say, Napoleon or Edison would have been convinced of their superiority if they’d suddenly been dumped down among a tribe of Australian bushmen. As a matter of fact, John Kingman may have just as good reason as they would have had to feel his superiority. But if he were sane he would prove it. He would establish it. Instead, he has withdrawn into a remote contemplation of his own greatness. So he is a paranoid. One may surmise that he was insane when he first appeared. But he doesn’t have a delusion of persecution because on the face of it no such theory is needed to account for his present situation.”