Caviar

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Mayb went to the corner and wheeled the index to the Library designations, found the number and spoke it into the screen, which lit up. A moment later its blankness dissolved away like windblown fog, to show a young woman’s face. She was the true redhead from whom Andi had his eyes, that was certain.

  “You remember me,” said Mayb. “Crèche-Mayb; I’m Andi’s Sector-Guardian.”

  “Uh-huh,” said the woman positively.

  “Is… is Andi there?”

  “Uh-uh,” said the woman negatively.

  “Now Beth—are you sure?”

  The woman wet her lips. “Sure I’m sure. Isn’t he locked up in your old crèche? What are you trying to do; trick me again into signing that paper to have him put in the Quiet Room?”

  “Why, Beth! No one ever tried to trick you! We just sent you a report and our recommendation.”

  “I know, I know,” said the woman sullenly. “And if I sign it you’ll put him away, and if I don’t sign it you’ll appeal it and the Examining Board’ll back you up. They always do.”

  “That’s because we’re very careful. Guardians—”

  “Guardians!” snarled Beth. “What kind of Guardians let a four-year-old child wander out of the Crèche?”

  “We are not guardians of the children,” said Mayb with sudden dignity, “we are Guardians of the Norm.”

  “Well, you’ll never get him back!” screamed Beth. “Never, you hear?” The screen went black.

  “Is Andi there?” The Examiner’s eyes twinkled.

  “My goodness,” murmured Mayb. “My, my goodness!”

  “I wish the predisposal examinations had never passed the Board. If it weren’t for them, this would never have happened. Why, ten years ago, we’d have quietly put the little fellow out of the way when we found he was an Irregular. Now we have to wait three weeks, and poke and prod and pry to see if the irregularity can possibly turn into a talent. I tell you, it’ll break the crèches. The mother of every last freak on earth is going to cry that her little monster is a genius.”

  “Oh, if only I hadn’t been careless with that silly old door!” She wrung her hands.

  “Mayb, don’t get worked up. It’ll be all right. I’m sure it will.”

  “You’re so nice!” Her voice was shockingly loud in the still room. “Oh dear! Suppose that woman really does hide him? I mean, suppose she takes him away? Do you realize what it will be like if that child is allowed to grow up?”

  “Now that is a terrifying thought.”

  “Think of it! He already knows what he can do, and he’s only four years old. Think of those radiations of his grown up man-sized! Suppose he suddenly appeared, grown up, in the middle of a city. Why, when he wanted anything, he’d get it. He’d have to get it. And he couldn’t be stopped! He can’t be reached at all when he does that!”

  The Examiner took her arms and gently led her to a mirror on the wall. “Look at yourself, Mayb. You know, you don’t look at all like the fine, reliable Guardian you are. Suppose Essie saw you now; you’d never be able to teach her a thing. I’m head of the Crèche. That’s a privilege and there’s a certain amount of worrying I have to do to earn it. So let me do the worrying.”

  “You’re so good,” she sobbed. “But—I’m afraid!”

  “I’m afraid, too,” he agreed soberly. “It’s a bad business. But—don’t worry. Tell you what. You just go and lie down for a while. Cry yourself out if you want to—it’ll do you good. And then go on with your work.” He patted her on the shoulder. “This isn’t the end of the world.”

  “It might be,” she gasped, “with creatures like that loose in it, forcing and pressing and pushing and not to be stopped until they had what they wanted.”

  “Go on now.”

  She went, wringing her hands.

  It was almost exactly the same time the next morning when Mayb was summoned from the Assembly Room where she was teaching her children to sing

  “There was a young fellow called Smitti

  Who lived in an abnormal city.

  His children were bugs

  And two-headed slugs,

  Oh, dear! What a terrible pity!”

  and in the midst of the children’s shrill merriment at Smitti’s comic predicament, she got the Examiner’s call.

  The thin veil of laughter fell from her face and she rose. “Free time!” she called. The children took the signal as a permission to play; the hidden watchers behind one-way glass in Observation 1 and 2 bent toward their panes, Normalcy Reaction charts at their elbows.

  Mayb hurried to the Examiner’s office. She found him alone rubbing his hands. “Well, Mayb! I knew it would be all right.”

  “It’s about Andi? You’ve found him? Did you get the police?”

  “She got them.” He laughed. “She got them, herself. She just couldn’t take it—his own mother.”

  “Where is he?”

  “She’s bringing him … and I’ll bet that’s her, right now.”

  The door swung open. An Under-Guardian said, “Library-Beth, Examiner.”

  Pushing past the underling, Library-Beth entered. Her flaming hair was unkempt; her face was white and her eyes wild. In her arms she carried the limp form of Andi.

  “Here he is … here! Take him; I can’t stand it! I thought I could, but I can’t. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m a good citizen; I want to do my duty; I care about the law, and the Norm, and the race. I was crazy, I guess. I had a thing all made up to tell you, about Andi, about him surviving, that was it—he can survive better than anyone else on earth, he can; he can get anything he wants just by wanting it, and no one can say no to him, not so it makes any difference to him.” It poured from her in a torrent. She put the limp form down on the settee. “But I didn’t know it was like this. And he badgered me all night and I couldn’t sleep, and he ran away in the morning and I couldn’t find him, and he hated me and when I saw him and ran to him he hated me with his mind, more and more and more the nearer I got, so that I couldn’t touch him, and people gathered round and looked at him as if he was a monster, and he is, and he hated them all, every one of them. And somebody got a policeman and he threw sleep-dust, and Andi made a hate then that made everyone cry out and run away, and he hated everyone until he fell asleep. Now take him. Where is that paper? Where is it?”

  “Beth, Beth, don’t. Please don’t. You’ll flurry everyone in the place, and all the children.”

  “Where’s the paper?” she screamed, joltingly. It made Mayb’s ears ring.

  The Examiner went for the form, handed two copies and a stylus to Beth. She signed them, and then collapsed weeping into a chair.

  “M-mayb?” The voice was faint.

  “He’s waking up. Quick, Mayb. Take him to the Quiet Room!”

  Mayb scooped up the child and ran, kicking the door open. Two doors down the hall was a cubicle exactly like all the other cubicles, except that it had a black door. And certain concealed equipment. This time she did not forget to press the door until it was locked. Gray with tension, she went back to the office. “All right, Examiner.”

  The Examiner nodded and stepped swiftly to his button-board. He pressed a certain button firmly, and a red light appeared.

  “Andi!” Beth moaned.

  Mayb went to her and put her arms around her. “There now. It’s for the best. This doesn’t happen much any more. We used to have to do it all the time. Soon we’ll never have to do it again.”

  The Examiner’s expression was bitter, and sad, too. Minority victims don’t give a damn for statistics, he thought.

  Mayb changed her approach. “Beth, we’re getting our norm back. Think—really think what that means. Humans used to live in complete confidence that they would be real, hundred per cent humans, with all the senses and talents and abilities that humans can have. And we’re getting that back! It’s a pity, a thousand times a pity, but it has to be done like this. There is no other way!”

  Her carefully chosen thoughts could no
t override the mental pressure which began to squeeze at them from somewhere—from the Quiet Room.

  The light on the board turned yellow.

  “Andi—”

  “And it’s a good norm,” thought Mayb desperately, “chosen in a congress of the most wonderful, objective minds we have ever had on earth. Why, some of them weren’t normal according to the Code they drew up! Think how brave—”

  The agonizing, yammering call blared up, dwindled, flickered a moment, surged again and was suddenly gone. Through Mayb’s mind trickled the phrase “in at the death.” She knew it came from the Examiner, who was standing stiffly, his face registering a harrowing repulsion. He turned abruptly and threw a lever. The incinerator was fed.

  “Don’t cry. It’s better this way,” Mayb radiated to the weeping woman. “It’s better for him. He never could have been happy, even if men left him alone. Poor, poor unfinished little thing—imagine the life he’d have, always able to speak, never to know when he shouted or screamed, and never being able to hear except with his ears—the only nontelepath in the whole world!”

  Medusa

  I WASN’T sore at them. I didn’t know what they’d done to me, exactly—I knew that some of it wasn’t so nice, and that I’d probably never be the same again. But I was a volunteer, wasn’t I? I’d asked for it. I’d signed a paper authorizing the department of commerce of the league to use me as they saw fit. When they pulled me out of the fleet for routine examinations, and when they started examinations that were definitely not routine, I didn’t kick. When they asked for volunteers for a project they didn’t bother to mention by name, I accepted it sight unseen. And now—

  “How do you feel, Rip?” old Doc Renn wanted to know. He spoke to me easylike, with his chin on the backs of his hands and his elbows on the table. The greatest name in psychoscience, and he talks to me as if he were my old man. Right up there in front of the whole psycho board, too.

  “Fine, sir,” I said. I looked around. I knew all the doctors and one or two of the visitors. All the medicos had done one job or another on me in the last three years. Boy, did they put me through the mill. I understood only a fraction of it all—the first color tests, for instance, and the electro-coordination routines. But that torture machine of Grenfell’s, and that copper helmet that Winton made me wear for two months—talk about your nightmares! What they were doing to or for me was something I could only guess at. Maybe they were testing me for something. Maybe I was just a guinea pig. Maybe I was in training for something. It was no use asking, either. I volunteered, didn’t I?

  “Well, Rip,” Doc Renn was saying, “it’s all over now—the preliminaries, I mean. We’re going ahead with the big job.”

  “Preliminaries?” I goggled. “You mean to tell me that what I’ve been through for the last three years was all preliminaries?”

  Renn nodded, watching me carefully. “You’re going on a little trip. It may not be fun, but it’ll be interesting.”

  “Trip? Where to?” This was good news; the repeated drills on spaceship techniques, the refresher courses on astrogation, had given me a good-sized itch to get out into the black again.

  “Sealed orders,” said Renn, rather sharply. “You’ll find out. The important thing for you to remember is that you have a very important role to play.” He paused; I could see him grimly ironing the snappiness out of his tone. Why in Canaan did he have to be so careful with me? “You will be put aboard a Forfield Super—the latest and best equipped that the league can furnish. Your job is to tend the control machinery, and to act as assistant astrogator no matter what happens. Without doubt you will find your position difficult at times. You are to obey your orders as given, without question, and without the use of force where possible.”

  This sounded screwy to me. “That’s all written up, just about word for word, in the Naval Manual,” I reminded him gently, “under ‘Duties of Crew.’ I’ve had to do all you said every time I took a ship out. Is there anything special about this one, that it calls for all this underlining?”

  He was annoyed, and the board shuffled twenty-two pairs of feet. But his tone was still friendly, half-persuasive when he spoke. “There is definitely something special about this ship, and—its crew. Rip, you’ve come through everything we could hand you, with flying colors. Frankly, you were subjected to psychic forces that were enough to drive a normal man quite mad. The rest of the crew—it is only fair to tell you—are insane. The nature of this expedition necessitates our manning the ship that way. Your place on the ship is a key position. Your responsibility is a great one.”

  “Now—hold on, sir,” I said. “I’m not questioning your orders, sir, and I consider myself under your disposition. May I ask a few questions?”

  He nodded.

  “You say the crew is insane. Isn’t that a broad way of putting it—” I couldn’t help needling him; he was trying so hard to keep calm—“for a psychologist?”

  He actually grinned. “It is. To be more specific, they’re schizoids—dual personalities. Their primary egos are paranoiac. They’re perfectly rational except on the subject of their particular phobia—or mania, as the case may be. The recessive personality is a manic depressive.”

  Now, as I remembered it, most paranoiacs have delusions of grandeur coupled with a persecution mania. And a manic depressive is the “Yes master” type. They just didn’t mix. I took the liberty of saying as much to one of Earth’s foremost psychoscientists.

  “Of course they don’t mix,” snapped Renn. “I didn’t say they did. There’s no interflowing of egos in these cases. They are schizoids. The cleavage is perfect.”

  I have a mole under my arm that I scratch when I’m thinking hard. I scratched it. “I didn’t know anything like that existed,” I said. Renn seemed bent on keeping this informal, and I was playing it to the limit. I sensed that this was the last chance I’d have to get any information about the expedition.

  “There never were any cases like that until recently,” said Renn patiently. “Those men came out of our laboratories.”

  “Oh. Sort of made-to-order insanity?” He nodded.

  “What on earth for, sir?”

  “Sealed orders,” he said immediately. His manner became abrupt again. “You take off tomorrow. You’ll be put aboard tonight. Your commanding officer is Captain William Parks.” I grinned delightedly at this. Parks—the horny old fire eater! They used to say of him that he could create sunspots by spitting straight up. But he was a real spaceman—through and through. “And don’t forget, Rip,” Renn finished. “There is only one sane man aboard that ship. That is all.”

  I saluted and left.

  A Forfield Super is as sweet a ship as anything ever launched. There’s none of your great noisy bulk pushed through the ether by a cityful of men, nor is it your completely automatic “Eyehope”—so called because after you slipped your master control tape into the automatic pilot you always said, “you’re on your way, you little hunk of tinfoil—I hope!”

  With an eight-man crew, a Forfield can outrun and outride anything else in space. No rockets—no celestial helices—no other such clumsy nonsense drives it. It doesn’t go places by going—it gets there by standing still. By which I mean that the ship achieves what laymen call “Universal stasis.”

  The Galaxy is traveling in an orbit about the mythical Dead Center at an almost incredible velocity. A Forfield, with momentum nullified, just stops dead while the Galaxy streams by. When the objective approaches, momentum is resumed, and the ship appears in normal space with only a couple of thousand miles to go. That is possible because the lack of motion builds up a potential in motion; motion, being a relative thing, produces a set of relative values.

  Instead of using the terms “action” and “reaction” in speaking of the Forfield drive, we speak of “stasis” and “re-stasis.” I’d explain further but I left my spherical slide rule home. Let me add only that a Forfield can achieve stasis in regard to planetary, solar, galactic or universal
orbits. Mix ’em in the right proportions, and you get resultants that will take you anywhere, fast.

  I was so busy from the instant I hit the deck that I didn’t have time to think of all the angles of this more-than-peculiar trip. I had to check and double-check every control and instrument from the milliammeter to the huge compound integrators, and with a twenty-four-hour deadline that was no small task. I also had to take a little instruction from a league master mechanic who had installed a couple of gadgets which had been designed and tested at the last minute expressly for this trip. I paid little attention to what went on round me; I didn’t even know the skipper was aboard until I rose from my knees before the integrators, swiveled around on my way to the control board, and all but knocked the old war horse off his feet.

  “Rip! I’ll be damned!” he howled. “Don’t tell me—you’re not signed on here?”

  “Yup,” I said. “Let go my hand, skipper—I got to be able to hold a pair of needle noses for another hour so. Yeah, I heard you were going to captain this barrel. How do you like it?”

  “Smooth,” he said, looking around, then bringing his grin back to me. He only grinned twice a year because it hurt his face; but when he did, he did it all over. “What do you know about the trip?”

  “Nothing except that we have sealed orders.”

  “Well, I’ll bet there’s some kind of a honkatonk at the end of the road,” said Parks. “You and I’ve been on … how many is it? Six? Eight?… anyway, we’ve been on plenty of ships together, and we managed to throw a whing-ding ashore every trip. I hope we can get out Aldebaran way. I hear Susie’s place is under new management again. Heh! Remember the time we—”

  I laughed. “Let’s save it, skipper. I’ve got to finish this check-up, and fast. But, man, it’s good to see you again.” We stood looking at each other, and then something popped into my head and I felt my smile washing off. What was it that Dr. Renn had said—“Remember there’s only one sane man aboard!” Oh, no—they hadn’t put Captain Parks through that! Why—