The Creatures of Man

by Howard L. Myers

  "But nobody turned up?"

  "Oh, a lot of guys turned up, but not one of us. Some looked like good bets but cases of delayed maturity are not unheard of among ordinary homo sapiens; that's all any of them turned out to be." She studied Gweanvin's face questioningly. "Just how much did your friends tell you about my search?"

  "Well, they told how you finagled a permit to go into the Federation's central personnel files and run a computer check for individuals with genetic charts that match your own. My name was the only one thrown out—and you already knew about me, didn't you?"

  Marvis nodded. "Go on."

  "All right. Next you enlisted Monte's help. It assisted by working out a scheme to get one of our agents into the Commonality's personnel files to see what they had to offer."

  "Monte's a he, not an it," put in Marvis. "The feel is definitely that of a masculine mind, as anyone who has ever been on Orrbaune knows."

  "Which I haven't," said Gweanvin, "but we'll soon know the feel of Monte's mind here on Narva, won't we? If the project's a success, that is. Right?"

  Marvis gave her a cool smile. "If you expect a security agent to join you in loose talk about a secret project, dearie, think again. Get back to the subject."

  "Well, that's about all I know, except that you had no luck with the Commonality files. All that search produced was another female . . . somebody about my age named Gweanvin Oster."

  Marvis nodded slowly. When she said nothing, Gweanvin added, "I'd like to know more about that Oster wench."

  Marvis smirked. "Don't ask me, Rayeal, dear. Check with those spies of yours. If they can't tell you anything, tough."

  "Not that tough," Gweanvin replied equably. "If you find out Miss Oster has located a male—and that's the only thing about her I'm really interested in—I'll know soon enough. When you vanish into the Commonality."

  Marvis gave a little chuckle. "You think I'd be so unpatriotic as to defect for a man?"

  "Yep. And so would I."

  "Well . . . you could be right about that," murmured Marvis. "Actually, Rayeal, I don't mind telling you about Gweanvin Oster, but there's precious little to tell. She's a Commonality frontliner. We're unable to obtain data about her appearance, present activities, or whereabouts."

  "Then . . . she may have found a male!" breathed Gweanvin, all wide-eyed ingenuousness.

  "Unlikely. Our information is fairly solid on one point—that she's on assignment, not off in the bushes."

  "Oh."

  * * *

  For a while Marvis gazed at Gweanvin without speaking. "You needn't peer at me like that," Gweanvin protested. "I'm not Gweanvin Oster, and I've got a long pedigree to prove it."

  "I almost wish you were," grumbled Marvis.

  "Why? Would you and the whole security bureaucracy enjoy looking like champion idiots?"

  "I'm referring to the odds," Marvis said.

  "Which odds?"

  "Those against three mutant females being born without a single matching male." She frowned. "Don't tell me that hasn't occurred to you, too."

  Actually, it had not, because Gweanvin knew there were only two females, not three. She realized she had made a slip with that "Which odds?" question . . . a rather subtle slip, but one that could nevertheless blow her cover sky-high . . . and just when her assignment was reaching the pay-off point. Had she shown dismay? No. Like Marvis, she had the ability to maintain a perfect poker-face at will.

  "Surely you understand the laws of probability better than that!" she exclaimed. "Or does security work dull the reasoning powers?"

  Marvis replied flatly: "I know the odds are eight to one against flipping a coin for three heads in a row. If there were no factors working against the conception of a male . . . if the odds were fifty-fifty in any given birth, then at least one of us three should be male."

  Gweanvin laughed. "Have you actually done any coin-flipping recently?" she asked.

  "Of course not! Why should I?"

  "Try it sometime. It should make you happier about those 'odds'. I tried it myself not long ago, and flipped a sequence of five tails, one head, another tail, three heads, two tails, two heads, a tail, and so on. What were the odds against my starting out with a sequence of five tails like that?"

  "Well . . . thirty-two to one. But a run like that is unusual."

  "Sure, but it happens! I made over a hundred tosses without getting another string of five. But I had three fours, and five runs of three.

  "The point is, Marvis, that probability works out to what we call 'the law of averages' only when we're dealing with a statistically significant number of events . . . the more the better. A gambler can actually have a lucky streak, you know. But he doesn't leave the game a winner unless he gets out at the right time. If he keeps playing long enough, the law of averages catches up with him. Don't depend on what you've read about probability, Marvis," she concluded with a grin. "Get a coin and start flipping it. The results should prove therapeutic."

  Marvis thought about it for a moment. "You're right about mathematical probability, Rayeal," she said at last, "but the circumstances leave the possibility open that something is repressing conceptions of males of our species."

  Gweanvin shrugged. "A possibility, sure. In which event, we're not the next evolutionary step for man, just three more old maids in the making. And if so, so what? I see no signs that man's about to cave in for lack of a new breed, anyway. But I don't really think that, Marvis. I think we're being balked out of motherhood, temporarily, by a streak of bad luck."

  "I hope you're right. I . . ." Marvis paused in the listening attitude that told Gweanvin someone was speaking to her via her communications-implant. "Right away, Thydan," she responded to the call, then looked up at Gweanvin. "I must run along, dear. Some people I'm supposed to join for lunch."

  "Oh. I'm sorry. We've got so much to talk about," said Gweanvin, rising.

  "I'll have some time later," Marvis assured her, walking toward the door. "I'll get in touch."

  Gweanvin followed her. "One thing I simply must ask you now. You've been mature, sexually, for some years, Marvis. Are you sure we can't procreate with an ordinary homo sap male?"

  Marvis paused on the balcony jutting into the building's west wing scramble area and turned. "I'm positive, dear. And that's not theoretical." She gave a slight smile. "Maybe I did not bother with coin-flipping, but that I checked out with experiment. Many experiments, in fact. We're a new and different species, Rayeal. We can't cross-breed with the old."

  "I was afraid of that," nodded Gweanvin, soberly.

  "Sorry. See you later, dear."

  * * *

  Marvis stepped off the platform and plummeted downward on semi-inert transport mode. Probably on her way to the tightly restricted basement test-chambers, Gweanvin guessed. She knew the project was due to reach its climax very soon, probably that very afternoon. The arrival of Marvis Jans made that almost certain . . .

  Across the scramble area from her balcony was the balcony and open door to Don Plackmon's office, with his desk so situated that he could sit looking out. When she glanced that way she found Don watching her. She waved, and he waved back. Don was supposed to be a circuitry growth technician . . . and he wasn't too bad at it . . . but she suspected he also had a security function. On a project like this one of every two people were probably involved in counterespionage.

  And how many were spy-saboteurs?

  None but her, she guessed. An operation such as this was too thoroughly guarded. First, it took the ability to lie to an emo-monitor without detection, which was something not one human in a thousand could do. Also it took a personal history that could be checked out by some of the most suspicious eyes in the Federation without revealing a flaw. That kind of cover took time, effort and money to build. Actually, it took a long-established family, one which had devoted itself for generations to the job of resembling loyal citizens of the Lontastan Federation, for Gweanvin Oster to be "born into"—with a minimal and painsta
king doctoring of public records—as Rayeal Promton.

  And getting inside this kind of project required one more thing: a reason for being there. To work on something that would of necessity involve circuitry growth one became an expert circuit-grower. The more expert the better. And with her mental equipment, Gweanvin had not had too much trouble becoming tops in the field, so far as the Federation was concerned. The Primgranese Commonality had the real leadership there, and Gweanvin had the benefit of being coached for her assignment by some of those leaders.

  She knew more of circuitry growth than she was using on this project—and she was using more than her Lontastan colleagues knew.

  Thus, she might actually wind up a net contributor to the Lontastan project if she were caught, or her assignment goofed in any way.

  She returned to her work console. It lighted as she sat down, revealing the bitbox diagram she had been studying when Marvis Jans interrupted her. In a sense, this was make-work she was doing—the examination of alternate possibilities for the Lontastan version of a Bauble. Just in case the Bauble her section had completed, and that was now resting well-guarded in one of the basement test chambers, failed to work.

  She knew it would work . . . and do other things the Lontastans would find far less desirable. This territory had been explored by Commonality scientists over a decade earlier, after the success of the first Bauble telepathic-communication systems led to a great deal of experimentation into the potentials of various Bauble-type constructs.

  Was anything happening in the test chamber yet?

  While continuing to gaze studiously at the console screen, she exteriorized from her body and—as an ego-field—dropped to the basement room. There she touched the Bauble gently, not really entering it, but establishing enough contact with it to use some of the special features its circuitry contained, features the Lontastans knew nothing about.

  She found the Bauble was unchanged. It was in contact only with the pedestal on which it sat, like a beachball-size pearl. Nor was any field, ego or electronic, impinging on it. Judging from the silence of the room, no human was in the test chamber where it waited.

  So Marvis Jans and the others who were to be on hand for the test probably actually were at lunch. Nothing would happen for at least an hour. And speaking of lunch . . . she had better start the afternoon with a full stomach herself. Her cover might be blown if her plans slipped just a little, in which event days might pass before her next solid meal.

  2

  She walked out on her balcony, semi-inerted and soared across the scrambleway to Don Plackmon's office. He watched her approach, and stood up and stepped around his desk when she came in. He gave her a squeeze and a kiss to which she responded with casual pleasure. Don was nice—and handsome as well.

  She pushed herself back from him after a moment and said, "I know I'm early for your invitation to lunch, Don, but I'm starving. Let's go now."

  "Sure, Rayeal," he agreed, nuzzling her. "You always give me an appetite."

  "For what?"

  He chuckled. "I'll settle for food right now. Look. Old Marchell wants to join us, and much as I'd prefer to be alone with you, it's not good form to say no to the boss. I'd better give him a call."

  "Okay," she nodded.

  Plackmon tongued his toothmike and commed briefly with Boll Marchell while Gweanvin considered the point that Marchell was not with the lunching group of bigwigs, which probably meant he would not be present at the upcoming test. Security wraps must be on very tight indeed to exclude one (and perhaps both) of the two major production chiefs, she mused.

  Plackmon reported, "Boll says for us to go on and he'll join us in a few minutes."

  "Good. Let's go."

  They left the office and soared up through the scramble area to the dining garden level, which they entered and found a table for three where Marchell would see them when he arrived. "I'm going to try something on the ancient Egyptian menu today," said Plackmon.

  "Go ahead. I'm in a steak and potatoes mood myself."

  He laughed. "You weren't kidding about being starved."

  They punched their orders, and Plackmon said, "Was that dish who came to see you who I think it was?"

  "How you ever get any work done with all your girl-watching, I'll never know," Gweanvin replied tartly. "Yep, that was my fellow mutant, Marvis Jans."

  "You're much prettier than she is," he murmured, leaning close. "She doesn't have your full lips."

  "Yeah, but she's got a lot of full other places I don't—as you might just possibly have noticed."

  Plackmon laughed. "Give yourself time, Rayeal. You're beginning to bud very nicely." Their lunches arrived and they busied themselves with eating for a moment before he said, "I find it very hard to think of you as a mutant, you know. You don't look all that unusual. Neither does she. It's hard to imagine your genes being so different from mine."

  "Genetic tension," she replied around a mouthful of extremely rare steak.

  "Tension?"

  She nodded. "That's part of evolutionary theory which post-dates Darwin by several centuries, after geneticists began to find out how such things really work. You're the same species as Homo Neanderthalensis, who was chipping flint on Earth thirty thousand years ago. He was homo sapiens the same as you, but if you saw him you probably wouldn't be sure he was even human—and he would be just as dubious about you. But still you could mate and produce offspring. And knowing you, you probably would."

  "Only in a pinch, my dear," he chuckled.

  "The difference between you and Neanderthal Man can be summed up as genetic tension," she continued her explanation. "The species changes, adapts to new environmental demands and to somatic responses to our conscious ideas of what man should be. Changes in the genetic structure go with these adaptations, but they aren't the kind of basic changes that mark a difference of species . . . only the difference between individuals or races within a species.

  "But they do place something of a strain on the original pattern. This strain, genetic tension, gradually builds toward a point where no further departure from the original is possible without breaking the species pattern itself. Humanity reached that stage in late Earth-Only times, it seems. People have been pretty much the same ever since.

  "But in the meanwhile, we've changed our environment drastically. We have our life-support implants that enable us to live on almost any half-way habitable planet—or go streaking through interstellar space stark naked, for that matter. We've found the psych-release techniques with which to clean up ourselves, as ego-fields, and eliminate insanity. We've developed the econo-war as our major social institution, simply to make existence more of a competitive challenge than it would be otherwise. All of which adds up to the fact that homo sapiens needs to change into something as different from present man as present man is from the Cro-Magnon. But he can't, because his genetic tension is already as tight as it can get.

  "So," she finished, "here we are, Marvis Jans and myself—and Gweanvin Oster in the Commonality. We have some structural differences that set us apart from homo sapiens, such as nasal bridges of solid bone. Also we mature more slowly and probably live longer. But the really important difference is that genetically we're a new species, with zero genetic tension. Our offspring can adapt like mad for a long time to come. They're the ones who'll really be different."

  Plackmon nodded slowly, and started to speak but at that moment Boll Marchell joined them. "Hope I'm interrupting something intimate," he remarked, favoring Gweanvin with his best dirty-old-man leer.

  "Rayeal was just explaining why my love for her is tragic," Plackmon replied. "Sit down, Boll."

  Marchell sat, punched his selection on the menu. "Gene-crossed lovers, hah?"

  Gweanvin said, "I think Don's real throb is for a big-busted visitor I had this morning. His eyes bulged out into the scrambleway when he saw her."

  "Marvis Jans?" asked Marchell.

  "Yes. Have you met her?"

  "Just br
iefly."

  "What do you think of her?"

  "Well, if you and she are does I'd hate to tangle with the buck!" Marchell chuckled. "She's quite a doll, but hardnosed in more ways than one."

  "One step farther from the primordial flat-faced apeman," said Gweanvin. "Do you really find her formidable?"

  "Damned right I do. And you, too. That's why I'd hate to tangle with a male of your species."

  Gweanvin thought about it, puzzled momentarily. "Oh, you mean because men are more competitive, more combative than women," she hazarded.