“Obviously,” Dr. Jones continued, “presently in human form. This, for her, is the state of involuntary reversion. During the war she operated behind Terran lines, acting for the Blobel War League. She was captured and held, but then the war ended and she was neither tried nor sentenced.”
“They released me,” Miss Arrasmith said in a low, carefully-controlled voice. “Still in human form. I stayed here out of shame. I just couldn’t go back to Titan and—” Her voice wavered.
“There is great shame attached to this condition,” Dr. Jones said, “for any high-caste Blobel.”
Nodding, Miss Arrasmith sat, clutching a tiny Irish linen handkerchief and trying to look poised. “Correct, Doctor. I did visit Titan to discuss my condition with medical authorities there. After expensive and prolonged therapy with me they were able to induce a return to my natural form for a period of—” She hesitated. “About one-fourth of the time. But the other three-fourths… I am as you perceive me now.” She ducked her head and touched the handkerchief to her right eye.
“Jeez,” Munster protested, “you’re lucky; a human form is infinitely superior to a Blobel form—I ought to know. As a Blobel you have to creep along… you’re like a big jellyfish, no skeleton to keep you erect. And binary fission—it’s lousy, I say really lousy, compared to the Terran form of—you know. Reproduction.” He colored.
Dr. Jones ticked and stated, “For a period of about six hours your human forms overlap. And then for about one hour your Blobel forms overlap. So all in all, the two of you possess seven hours out of twenty-four in which you both possess identical forms. In my opinion—” It toyed with its pen and paper. “Seven hours is not too bad. If you follow my meaning.”
After a moment Miss Arrasmith said, “But Mr. Munster and I are natural enemies.”
“That was years ago,” Munster said.
“Correct,” Dr. Jones agreed. “True, Miss Arrasmith is basically a Blobel and you, Munster, are a Terran, but—” It gestured. “Both of you are outcasts in either civilization; both of you are stateless and hence gradually suffering a loss of ego-identity. I predict for both of you a gradual deterioration ending finally in severe mental illness. Unless you two can develop a rapprochement.” The analyst was silent, then.
Miss Arrasmith said softly, “I think we’re very lucky, Mr. Munster. As Dr. Jones said, we do overlap for seven hours a day… we can enjoy that time together, no longer in wretched isolation.” She smiled up hopefully at him, rearranging her coat. Certainly, she had a nice figure; the somewhat low-cut dress gave an ideal clue to that.
Studying her, Munster pondered.
“Give him time,” Dr. Jones told Miss Arrasmith. “My analysis of him is that he will see this correctly and do the right thing.”
Still rearranging her coat and dabbing at her large, dark eyes, Miss Arrasmith waited.
The phone in Dr. Jones’ office rang, a number of years later. He answered it in his customary way. “Please, sir or madam, deposit twenty dollars if you wish to speak to me.”
A tough male voice on the other end of the line said, “Listen, this is the UN Legal Office and we don’t deposit twenty dollars to talk to anybody. So trip that mechanism inside you, Jones.”
“Yes, sir,” Dr. Jones said, and with his right hand tripped the lever behind his ear that caused him to come on free.
“Back in 2037,” the UN legal expert said, “did you advise a couple to marry? A George Munster and a Vivian Arrasmith, now Mrs. Munster?”
“Why yes,” Dr. Jones said, after consulting his built-in memory banks.
“Had you investigated the legal ramifications of their issue?”
“Um well,” Dr. Jones said, “that’s not my worry.”
“You can be arraigned for advising any action contrary to UN law.”
“There’s no law prohibiting a Blobel and a Terran from marrying.”
The UN legal expert said, “All right, Doctor, I’ll settle for a look at their case histories.”
“Absolutely not,” Dr. Jones said. “That would be a breach of ethics.”
“We’ll get a writ and sequester them, then.”
“Go ahead.” Dr. Jones reached behind his ear to shut himself off.
“Wait. It may interest you to know that the Munsters now have four children. And, following the Mendelian Law, the offspring comprise a strict one, two, one ratio. One Blobel girl, one hybrid boy, one hybrid girl, one Terran girl. The legal problem arises in that the Blobel Supreme Council claims the pure-blooded Blobel girl as a citizen of Titan and also suggests that one of the two hybrids be donated to the Council’s jurisdiction.” The UN legal expert explained, “You see, the Munsters’ marriage is breaking up; they’re getting divorced and it’s sticky finding which laws obtain regarding them and their issue.”
“Yes,” Dr. Jones admitted, “I would think so. What has caused their marriage to break up?”
“I don’t know and don’t care. Possibly the fact that both adults and two of the four children rotate daily between being Blobels and Terrans; maybe the strain got to be too much. If you want to give them psychological advice, consult them. Goodbye.” The UN legal expert rang off.
Did I make a mistake, advising them to marry? Dr. Jones asked itself. I wonder if I shouldn ‘t look them up; I owe at least that to them.
Opening the Los Angeles phone book, it began thumbing through the Ms.
These had been six difficult years for the Munsters.
First, George had moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles; he and Vivian had set up a household in a condominium apartment with three instead of two rooms. Vivian, being in Terran form three-fourths of the time, had been able to obtain a job; right out in public she gave jet flight information at the Fifth Los Angeles Airport. George, however—
His pension comprised an amount only one-fourth that of his wife’s salary and he felt it keenly. To augment it, he had searched for a way of earning money at home. Finally in a magazine he had found this valuable ad:
Make Swift Profits in Your Own Condo!
Raise Giant Bullfrogs From Jupiter, Capable of Eighty-Foot Leaps.
Can Be Used in Frog-Racing (where legal) and…
So in 2038 he had bought his first pair of frogs imported from Jupiter and had begun raising them for swift profits, right in his own condominium apartment building, in a corner of the basement that Leopold, the partially-homeostatic janitor, let him use gratis.
But in the relatively feeble Terran gravity the frogs were capable of enormous leaps, and the basement proved too small for them; they ricocheted from wall to wall like green ping pong balls and soon died. Obviously it took more than a portion of the basement at QEK-604 Apartments to house a crop of the damned things, George realized.
And then, too, their first child had been born. It had turned out to be a pure-blooded Blobel; for twenty-four hours a day it consisted of a gelatinous mass and George found himself waiting in vain for it to switch over to a human form, even for a moment.
He faced Vivian defiantly in this matter, during a period when both of them were in human form.
“How can I consider it my child?” he asked her. “It’s—an alien life form to me.” He was discouraged and even horrified. “Dr. Jones should have foreseen this; maybe it’s your child—it looks just like you.”
Tears filled Vivian’s eyes. “You mean that insultingly.”
“Damn right I do. We fought you creatures—we used to consider you no better than Portuguese sting-rays.” Gloomily, he put on his coat. “I’m going down to Veterans of Unnatural Wars Headquarters,” he informed his wife. “Have a beer with the boys.” Shortly, he was on his way to join with his old war-time buddies, glad to get out of the apartment house.
VUW Headquarters was a decrepit cement building in downtown Los Angeles left over from the twentieth century and sadly in need of paint. The VUW had little funds because most of its members were, like George Munster, living on UN pensions. However, there was a pool table and an
old 3-D television set and a few dozen tapes of popular music and also a chess set. George generally drank his beer and played chess with his fellow members, either in human form or in Blobel form; this was one place in which both were accepted.
This particular evening he sat with Pete Ruggles, a fellow veteran who also had married a Blobel female, reverting, as Vivian did, to human form.
“Pete, I can’t go on. I’ve got a gelatinous blob for a child. My whole life I’ve wanted a kid, and now what have I got? Something that looks like it washed up on the beach.”
Sipping his beer—he too was in human form at the moment—Pete answered, “Criminy, George, I admit it’s a mess. But you must have known what you were getting into when you married her. And my God, according to Mendel’s Law, the next kid—”
“I mean,” George broke in, “I don’t respect my own wife; that’s the basis of it. I think of her as a thing. And myself, too. We’re both things.” He drank down his beer in one gulp.
Pete said meditatively, “But from the Blobel standpoint—”
“Listen, whose side are you on?” George demanded.
“Don’t yell at me,” Pete said, “or I’ll deck you.”
A moment later they were swinging wildly at each other. Fortunately Pete reverted to Blobel form in the nick of time; no harm was done. Now George sat alone, in human shape, while Pete oozed off somewhere else, probably to join a group of the boys who had also assumed Blobel form.
Maybe we can find a new society somewhere on a remote moon, George said to himself moodily. Neither Terran nor Blobel.
I’ve got to go back to Vivian, George resolved. What else is there for me? I’m lucky to find her; I’d be nothing but a war veteran guzzling beer here at VUW Headquarters every damn day and night, with no future, no hope, no real life…
He had a new money-making scheme going now. It was a home mail-order business; he had placed an ad in the Saturday Evening Post for MAGIC LODE-STONES REPUTED TO BRING YOU LUCK. FROM ANOTHER STAR-SYSTEM entirely! The stones had come from Proxima and were obtainable on Titan; it was Vivian who had made the commercial contact for him with her people. But so far, few people had sent in the dollar-fifty.
I’m a failure, George said to himself.
Fortunately the next child, born in the winter of 2039, showed itself to be a hybrid; it took human form fifty percent of the time, and so at last George had a child who was—occasionally, anyhow—a member of his own species.
He was still in the process of celebrating the birth of Maurice when a delegation of their neighbors at QEK-604 Apartments came and rapped on their door.
“We’ve got a petition here,” the chairman of the delegation said, shuffling his feet in embarrassment, “asking that you and Mrs. Munster leave QEK-604.”
“But why?” George asked, bewildered. “You haven’t objected to us up until now.”
“The reason is that now you’ve got a hybrid youngster who will want to play with ours, and we feel it’s unhealthy for our kids to—”
George slammed the door in their faces.
But still, he felt the pressure, the hostility from the people on all sides of them. And to think, he thought bitterly, that I fought in the war to save these people. It sure wasn ‘t worth it.
An hour later he was down at VUW Headquarters once more, drinking beer and talking with his buddy Sherman Downs, also married to a Blobel.
“Sherman, it’s no good. We’re not wanted; we’ve got to emigrate. Maybe we’ll try it on Titan, in Viv’s world.”
“Chrissakes,” Sherman protested, “I hate to see you fold up, George. Isn’t your electromagnetic reducing belt beginning to sell, finally?”
For the last few months, George had been making and selling a complex electronic reducing gadget which Vivian had helped him design; it was based in principle on a Blobel device popular on Titan but unknown on Terra. And this had gone over well; George had more orders than he could fill. But—
“I had a terrible experience, Sherm,” George confided. “I was in a drugstore the other day, and they gave me a big order for my reducing belt, and I got so excited—” He broke off. “You can guess what happened. I reverted. Right in plain sight of a hundred customers. And when the buyer saw that he canceled the order for the belts. It was what we all fear… you should have seen how their attitude toward me changed.”
Sherm said, “Hire someone to do your selling for you. A full-blooded Terran.”
Thickly, George said, “I’m a full-blooded Terran, and don’t you forget it. Ever.”
“I just mean—”
“I know what you meant,” George said. And took a swing at Sherman. Fortunately he missed and in the excitement both of them reverted to Blobel form. They oozed angrily into each other for a time, but at last fellow veterans managed to separate them.
“I’m as much Terran as anyone,” George thought-radiated in the Blobel manner to Sherman. “And I’ll flatten anyone who says otherwise.”
In Blobel form he was unable to get home; he had to phone Vivian to come and get him. It was humiliating.
Suicide, he decided. That’s the answer.
How best to do it? In Blobel form he was unable to feel pain; best to do it then. Several substances would dissolve him… he could for instance drop himself into a heavily-chlorinated swimming pool, such as QEK-604 maintained in its recreation room.
Vivian, in human form, found him as he reposed hesitantly at the edge of the swimming pool, late one night.
“George, I beg you—go back to Dr. Jones.”
“Naw,” he boomed dully, forming a quasi-vocal apparatus with a portion of his body. “It’s no use, Viv. I don’t want to go on.” Even the belts; they had been Viv’s idea, rather than his. He was second even there… behind her, falling constantly farther behind each passing day.
Viv said, “You have so much to offer the children.”
That was true. “Maybe I’ll drop over to the UN War Office,” he decided. “Talk to them, see if there’s anything new that medical science has come up with that might stabilize me.”
“But if you stabilize as a Terran,” Vivian said, “what would become of me?”
“We’d have eighteen entire hours together a day. All the hours you take human form!”
“But you wouldn’t want to stay married to me. Because, George, then you could meet a Terran woman.”
It wasn’t fair to her, he realized. So he abandoned the idea.
In the spring of 2041 their third child was born, also a girl, and like Maurice a hybrid. It was Blobel at night and Terran by day.
Meanwhile, George found a solution to some of his problems.
He got himself a mistress.
He and Nina arranged to meet each other at the Hotel Elysium, a rundown wooden building in the heart of Los Angeles.
“Nina,” George said, sipping Teacher’s scotch and seated beside her on the shabby sofa which the hotel provided, “you’ve made my life worth living again.” He fooled with the buttons of her blouse.
“I respect you,” Nina Glaubman said, assisting him with the buttons. “In spite of the fact—well, you are a former enemy of our people.”
“God,” George protested, “we must not think about the old days—we have to close our minds to our pasts.” Nothing but our future, he thought.
His reducing belt enterprise had developed so well that now he employed fifteen full-time Terran employees and owned a small, modern factory on the outskirts of San Fernando. If UN taxes had been reasonable he would by now be a wealthy man… brooding on that, George wondered what the tax rate was in Blobel-run lands, on Io, for instance. Maybe he ought to look into it.
One night at VUW Headquarters he discussed the subject with Reinholt, Nina’s husband, who of course was ignorant of the modus vivendi between George and Nina.
“Reinholt,” George said with difficulty, as he drank his beer, “I’ve got big plans. This cradle-to-grave socialism the UN operates… it’s not for me. It’s cramping
me. The Munster Magic Magnetic Belt is—” He gestured. “More than Terran civilization can support. You get me?”
Coldly, Reinholt said, “But George, you are a Terran; if you emigrate to Blobel-run territory with your factory you’ll be betraying your—”
“Listen,” George told him, “I’ve got one authentic Blobel child, two half-Blobel children, and a fourth on the way. I’ve got strong emotional ties with those people out there on Titan and Io.”
“You’re a traitor,” Reinholt said, and punched him in the mouth. “And not only that,” he continued, punching George in the stomach, “you’re running around with my wife. I’m going to kill you.”
To escape, George reverted to Blobel form; Reinholt’s blows passed harmlessly deep into his moist, jelly-like substance. Reinholt then reverted too, and flowed into him murderously, trying to consume and absorb George’s nucleus.
Fortunately fellow veterans pried their two bodies apart before any permanent harm was done.
Later that night, still trembling, George sat with Vivian in the living room of their eight-room suite at the great new condominium apartment building ZGF-900. It had been a close call, and now of course Reinholt would tell Viv; it was only a question of time. The marriage, as far as George could see, was over. This perhaps was their last moment together.
“Viv,” he said urgently, “you have to believe me; I love you. You and the children—plus the belt business, naturally—are my complete life.” A desperate idea came to him. “Let’s emigrate now, tonight. Pack up the kids and go to Titan, right this minute.”
“I can’t go,” Vivian said. “I know how my people would treat me, and treat you and the children, too. George, you go. Move the factory to Io. I’ll stay here.” Tears filled her dark eyes.
“Hell,” George said, “what kind of life is that? With you on Terra and me on Io—that’s no marriage. And who’ll get the kids?” Probably Viv would get them… but his firm employed top legal talent—perhaps he could use it to solve his domestic problems.
The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories tcsopkd-4 Page 52
