by Fritz Leiber
In his youth this old stricken eagle, this thunder-blasted tree, had had a great dream to which he had dedicated his whole life. It had come to him while he was interning at a primitive mental hospital—a vision of healing the sick minds of mankind with narcotic drugs alone. Remember this was when even Sigmund Freud briefly thought the newly-discovered cocaine was great for everyday use (at least by a young and vigorous psychiatrist), when the best thing you could do for a mental case was to keep him soothed down and quiet. (They still have that last idea, why else lobotomy?)
Today it is hard for us to visualize how lightly people regarded narcotic drugs then (the Professor said wistfully) and how easy they were to purchase. The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914 wiped them off the legal market faster than Roosevelt banned dealings in gold.
At any rate, the old doctor (young then) had the inspiration that there must be a specific narcotic drug that in massive doses would cure each recognized form of insanity. He even had them provisionally identified—morphine for mania, codeine for hysteria, cocaine for involutional melancholia, heroin for catatonia, laudanum (though it’s no single drug) for dementia praecox, and so on. Somehow the old doctor never got on drugs himself, but his theory was worthy of a King Weedhead—actually it is quite a kick just by itself.
There wasn’t much he could do then to test his theory—he didn’t have the reputation or a private sanitarium—but he could prepare to test it. At that time the most important preparation was to get hold of an adequate supply of the drugs he’d need. Narcotics were still openly purchasable, but they wouldn’t be for long. The Shanghai Conference and the Hague Convention were coming up and the Harrison Act was already a little black cloud on the horizon. The old doctor didn’t want mankind to miss out on the boon he was readying for it just because soon even he, a licensed physician, wouldn’t be able to get hold of the essential drugs in the large quantities he’d need, so for the next few years he sank all his spare cash in narcotics, purchasing them all over the country and trying to make sure that he had an adequate supply of every known drug—because he couldn’t be certain yet just which narcotic would prove to be the specific remedy for each form of insanity. Even after the passage of the Harrison Act, he continued in a small way to build up his stock, especially of newly discovered drugs, through the regular medical channels available to him.
A few years later he got a fine opportunity to test his great theory: his wife went crazy, and a little later their two children took off in the same direction. He shot them each full of what he considered was the right drug. His theory didn’t work. One by one, he had to ship them off to the asylum.
That was the little tragedy that finished the old doctor as a dreamer (the Professor said softly). That was the lightning bolt that blackened and blasted him, that started the first bats winging through his lonely belfry, that turned him into a miserly automaton. Being an addict, I often wondered what happened to his great stockpile of drugs, but that was one point where the old doctor got cagey with me. He’d never quite say. I suppose I assumed that he’d sold them or used them somehow in the natural course of things—after all, would he be writing morphine prescriptions for me if he could with greater safety and profit be selling me some? Besides, his great dream had been dead for twenty years or so when we had our little talks.
What I forgot was the degree of his miserliness and the rigidity of his automatism. There were larger and hairier bats in his belfry than I ever guessed.
I soon drifted away from the city and the old doctor (sighed the Professor), partly to take an involuntary cure for my addiction at Lexington. The cure didn’t altogether work, but eventually I did make the unusual but not unheard-of transition to alcohol. At any rate, when I got back to the city again I was a wino and (what is almost a tautology) I was broke. I looked up my friend the old doctor and he was dead and they were tearing down the building he’d practiced in for over fifty years.
For the next week or so I camped nights in that half-destroyed building. It was a convenient den and the dead old doctor’s dismantled office—still with the same soot-drifted green walls—was a closer approximation to home for me than my other spot in the known world. I remember I dripped a couple of tears the night I dragged myself and my jug up the crazy stairs and came to the familiar doorway—and discovered just in time that they’d knocked the floor out of his place that day. The green wall across from me was still up, though the plaster and laths had started to fall away here and there, but in between was just a pit unevenly floored with rubble two stories down.
That night I camped in the room across the hall, where there was still a floor. It must have been almost dawn when I woke up coughing. The air was full of smoke and the floor was hot and I heard distant sirens. I struggled into the hall and there the heat really hit me.
Light flared through the old doctor’s door. Someone (another crazy wino probably) had set fire to what was left of the building. The floor below and the opposite wall were ablaze. And at the very moment I looked in, a big section of flaming lath and green-crusted plaster fell away right across from me, revealing a dark space behind it that had been hidden for decades.
Now pause (the Professor said) and recall that I was going to tell you about a kick involving all the weed in the world. For this kick, you simply imagine that all the weed in the world has been harvested and dried and variously processed and then gathered in one spot close by you—all the reefers, all the joints, all the hemp, all the bhang, kif, takrouri, dagga, charas, mutah, manzoul, maconha, djamba, ganja, esrar, dynamite, tea, pot, stick, gauge, grass, yummy (for those are all names that have been used for marijuana)—and that someone has set fire to this resinous and ecstasy-loaded haystack and that you are sitting at a comfortable distance downwind from it, inhaling the beatific smoke.
Back to the real fire now and to me crouching in the old doctor’s doorway and staring across the floorless space at the wall opposite—a wall as far away from me as that of China, as far as my ability to reach it went.
The dark space revealed by the falling lath and plaster was not empty, but neatly lined with shelves, and on the shelves were all manner of boxes and tins and bottles—big bottles with glass stoppers, filled mostly with white powders and crystals. Already one or two of the bottles had burst with the heat and the bold labels were blackening, but I could read enough of them to tell the story—and I’m sure I could have guessed the story without any labels at all.
Even as I watched, a few more bottles exploded and the local flames sprang up more fiercely. Most of the opiates are highly inflammable, you know—people smoke opium—they’re unsaturated hydrocarbons.
So there I crouched and watched them burn—not fifteen feet away from me but absolutely inaccessible. The white crystalline morphine and heroin and cocaine, great swelling jars of it. The tins of black bubbling opium with the pale blue flames shooting up. Hashish melting and flaming and running like some lava of the Eastern gods. The tall sealed beaker of ruby-red laudanum—that really set everything blazing when it burst, for laudanum is opium dissolved in alcohol. The big bottles of melting barbiturate capsules—red Seconal, blue Amytal, yellow Nembutal, phenobarbital, tuinal, Veronal. Oily, hot-burning chloral and paraldehyde. Volatile chloroform and the devil-god ether—there were explosions for you! And all the endless others that the old doctor had gathered in his crazy quest—pantopon, paregoric, papaverine, novocaine, thebaine, narcotine, narceine, codeine, Dilaudid, Dicodide, Dionin—all, all burning, burning completely and utterly.
I didn’t hear the fire engines arriving or the hoses sizzling into the flames, or the firemen finally clumping up the stairs behind me. I just crouched there witless, staring and sniffling until I blacked out.
The firemen found me in time, though I sometimes think that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I woke up in the city hospital, telling my story over and over again to anyone who’d listen. I honestly think I was still higher than a kite on the variegated fumes I’d sniffed.
>
Of course everyone told me the old building burned down completely, and that was so.
All my big mouth should have got me was trouble (the Professor finished) except no one believed that my story was anything but a wino’s vision, an old hophead’s dream.
THE MUTANT’S BROTHER
The cabin of the Steelton airjet was like a long satiny box, hurled miraculously through the night. Inside it, the thunder of the jets was muted to a soothing rumble. Passengers dozed in the soft gloom, or chatted together in low, desultory voices.
There was comfort in the cabin, and the warmth of human security.
But Greer Canarvon turned away from his fellow passengers and peered out at the wild rack of wind-torn clouds, silvered by a demon moon. Like shadowy monsters they loomed and writhed, now bending close around the airjet, now opening their ranks so that he caught moonlit glimpses of the ragged Dakota Bad Lands.
Out there, he knew, lay his real kinship—with all that is alien and terrible and lonely. With the wild forces of darkness and the unknown. With all that is abnormal and inhuman, though it wear the mask of humanity.
Hunger to be with one of his own kind—a hunger which had never been satisfied—rose to a new pitch of poignancy. He fumbled in his pocket for the radiogram, which already looked creased and old, although it had popped out of the radioprinter only yesterday.
CONSOL SKYGRAMS
EXPRESS BEAM
No. 3A-3077-B89
9/17/1973
GREER CANARVON
209 BUNA TERRACE
COMPTON, OHIO
DEAR BROTHER.
IT IS TIME WE GOT IN CONTACT. IF YOU ARE WHAT I THINK YOU ARE, YOU WILL KNOW WE HAVE MUCH TO TALK ABOUT THAT ONLY YOU AND I CAN UNDERSTAND. THE ADDRESS IS 1532 DAMON PLACE, STEELTON. IF YOU COME, HURRY.
JOHN HALLIDANE.
Greer’s heart pounded—that heart whose beating always brought a momentary frown of perplexity to doctor’s faces as they listened to it through their stethoscopes. He felt for a cigarette, but the package was empty. He glanced at his conventional radioactive-driven wrist watch. Half an hour yet to Steelton. An hour perhaps before he got to Damon Place.
His only brother. His twin brother. And, if orphanage records of their striking similarity could be trusted, his identical twin. The only person in the whole world whose chromosomes and genes could carry the pattern of that frightening mutation.
For it must be a mutation. It was unthinkable that his parents could have possessed his powers and still lived such cramped and mediocre lives as the brief records showed. Almost equally unthinkable that such characteristics could have lain dormant in the germ plasm for generations, submerged by dominant factors, to be brought to life by one chance mating.
“I’m coming home a day early to please the wife,” one of the men in the seat ahead was explaining jocularly. “This Carstairs business has made her jumpy.”
“A regular city-wide scare,” agreed his airjet acquaintance. “Glad to be back with the family myself.”
Home, thought Greer bitterly. The familiar, the cozy, the safe, the tried-and-true—all he was now cut off from. Should he lean forward and whisper confidentially, “Speaking of scares, gentlemen, I have certain knowledge that there is a monster on this airjet.”
Though for that matter his own home life had been of the most pleasantly conventional sort. His foster parents were grand people—apparently he’d been luckier than John in that regard. During childhood and adolescence there had been only the most shadowy intimations of what would some day set him so utterly apart. Doctors had frowned at his heartbeat, had puzzled over something in his eyes and an odd tinge in the color of his skin. They had caught fleeting, almost intangible impressions of otherness. But being practical physicians, they had assured themselves that his health was sound, and had gone no further. Or perhaps something—some kind of intuition that shields men from contact with the unnatural—had made them sheer off.
At times he had wondered, with a touch of fear, if there weren’t something different about him. But all children do that.
Otherwise, he had grown up as a healthy, normal child in a favorable environment. His ideals and aims and standards of behavior had been those of the children around him—a little better, perhaps, for his foster father was a very upright man.
And all the while that thing—that power—had been silently breeding in his flesh.
The cabin lurched gently, and the rumble of the jets went a tone deeper, as if some vast organ in space were sounding the opening notes of an awesome prelude. The silvery-smoky cloud monsters swooped close.
Awareness of his power had come with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Afterward he remembered the splitting headaches he’d had for weeks, and realized that something might have been growing in his brain. Some new organ for which his skull hardly provided space.
Not all characteristics of an individual, whether normal or mutant, need be present at birth. Some, like sexuality, mature late. His power was like that.
He stared at the ragged cloud monsters. They seemed for a moment to be reeling in a wild dance, perhaps in invocation of the spirit of the grotesque and barren landscape the airjet was traversing. A terror of the abnormality lurking in the cosmos possessed him. Evolution was such a coldly and frighteningly inhuman process.
Mutation worked by chance. It had no pattern or plan. Usually it only botched the normal organism. Sometimes, though rarely, it brought a slight improvement. But it could, conceivably, give rise to—anything.
He realized he was trembling slightly. His face was a tight mask. He automatically fingered for a cigarette, then remembered that the package was empty and crumpled it. He was frightened of his own power, terrified. It was such a darkly inhuman thing, like a survival from myth or primitive sorcery. That was one of the reasons he had not been able to tell anyone about it. It had such immense potentialities. It made a man a king—much more than a king. It clamored to be used. It tempted him, and he wondered if he would be strong enough to resist temptation.
He must talk to someone about it! In less than an hour, he would be with his brother. It would be easier then. Together they could work out some course of action. If only they could have gone together sooner!
Greer had not always known that he had a brother. When his foster parents took him from the orphanage, his twin had already been adopted by the Hallidanes. Later on his foster parents had tried to bring the two boys together, for a visit at least, but the Hallidanes had rebuffed this friendly suggestion.
There were things which his foster parents had not told him about the Hallidanes—unpleasant things, which he had now only discovered through his recent inquiries at the orphanage. How the Hallidanes had been accused of neglect and cruelty with regard to their adopted son, but had successfully fought a legal action. How—final action of what must have been a sordid domestic tragedy—the father had murdered the mother and then killed himself.
That had happened a little less than a year ago. Thereafter the orphanage had lost track of John Hallidane.
For a brief moment the soft lights of the cabin winked out. Chilly moonlight, flooding through a gap in the turbulent clouds, transformed his fellow passengers into a company of ghosts, bound on some ominous mission.
Since Greer had first learned that he had a twin, he had indulged in endless speculations about him. He imagined his twin doing the same things, thinking the same thoughts. Realization that he was a mutant had changed those speculations into a frantic desire for contact. During the past months he had made every conceivable attempt to pick up his brother’s trail. All had failed. In the end it was his brother who had gotten in touch with him.
Evidently John Hallidane had been kept completely ignorant of the fact that he had a twin, and had only discovered it by chance. Perhaps he had recently recontacted the orphanage.
Again Greer scanned the terse radiogram. He could read something like his own anxiety between the guarded lines. The same hunger for a kindred b
eing. The same fear of being found out by strangers. “If you are what I think you are—”
Anticipation made Greer’s mind almost painfully alive. Speculations about his brother and his brother’s life flashed through it more quickly than he could grasp them. There were a thousand things he wanted to know.
“Well, we should be there in a couple of minutes,” observed one of the men on the seat ahead, reaching for his hat. “Then we’ll be able to get the real dope on this Carstairs business,” he added.
“No doubt of that,” his companion replied with a faint, nervous chuckle. “Everybody in Steelton must be talking about it.”
Only half an hour now—maybe less! As Greer folded the radiogram, he realized that his hands were shaking. His body throbbed—a suffocating feeling.
The muffled thunder of the jets changed to a different key. He pressed his face against the cold transparency of the window. The airjet was slanting down toward a hole in the thinning clouds. Through it, as through a vast reducing glass, he could glimpse the streets and towers of Steelton. A general glow, and the absence of bright points of glaring light, made it seem like a spectral city.
