I agreed so long as the matter be kept secret. Hinch, I think, actually pictured himself as the entrepreneur of a successful “racket”—to use a pre-Chileking word popular in my youth—a sort of latter-day Barnum. I agreed to the examinations, but insisted that they be secret and postponed for at least three days, for I clung to the fantastic hope that there might be some spontaneous recovery in that time.
I sat propped up in the corner of my big chair like an organ-grinder’s monkey, while Hinch, with his buttons catching the sunlight, paced the room like a general. He would walk away from me, then turn suddenly on his heel, flash a look in my direction, and start perceptibly, to see me still there, still the same size, the same shape.
I finally put an end to it. “There’s no need taking more of your time, Hinch,” I said. “Will you stop in the kitchen, remind Maria about coming abovestairs, bring us up some sandwiches and fruit, and drop in tonight about six?”
It was noon when he left. I got the children to take naps after lunch and I was left alone in my room at last. I had had Mary place my books and papers in the seat of a chair, and by using the hassock to sit on I had a pretty fair desk. Before I permited myself any thought concerning my present condition, my future, and that of my wife and children, I wanted to test, once and for all, whether or not I had suffered any diminution of mental ability. I resolutely turned to the revision with which I had been occupied the night before. I became completely absorbed in the specific problems with which I had been working, and the solution that had till then evaded me came to me that afternoon. There was no doubt about it. There was nothing miniature, nothing juvenile about my mind. It was my appearance only which was altered. I worked until dusk, then got off the hassock and paced about exultantly feeling again my former self. The furniture, the room, even the books dwarfed me, but the man inside was unaltered.
Before I knew it, it was six o’clock and Hinch was back, and had brought our dinner upstairs. I went to the playroom to call the children. I hadn’t seen them since they left to take their naps. I found them both lying full length on the playroom floor talking in low voices. I stood for a moment listening to them.
“Well,” said David, “I guess from now on we do what we want to.”
“Yes,” said Mary Frances, “we’re the grownups now and Daddy’s the baby. Poor Daddy. He looks just like a monkey, doesn’t he? But we’ll have to let him have his way sometimes, Dave. He was kind to us lots of times. Really he was, Dave. ‘Member how he helped you with your jack-o’-lantern last night?” and she laughed maliciously.
Dave snorted. “I could have done it. He took it away from me just when it was most fun.”
“Yes,” Mary Frances agreed, “he’s always been like that. But we’ve got to be kind to him. He looks so awful, and he can’t help it.”
I could bear to hear no more. The children to whom I had given life and for whom I had been willing to sacrifice everything! We were not then aware of the profound influence of size in the relationship of parents and children. None had then guessed the part force and fear played in that relationship. I was the first man to have a glimpse of that truth, listening to that conversation. But I could not credit it. Had my children obeyed me, not because they loved me, because I was reasonable, but because they feared my superior size? I could not then believe it. Their dear, childish natures had been warped, disfigured by this alteration. They had not had time, I thought, to learn the true relativity of size.
I cleared my throat. “Children,” I called. “David, Mary Frances, time for dinner.”
Mary Frances answered pleasantly, “Yes, Daddy,” but David came running out of his room bellowing in that many-times-amplified child’s voice of his, “Damn it, I’m hungry.”
“David,” I started, but before I could continue he stooped down, picked me up with an easy swoop and held me awkwardly over his head. I was filled with fury, but could do nothing but kick and squeak. He was shamefaced when he put me down.
“David,” I cried, “Never do that again. I don’t like it.”
“I never liked it, either,” he said.
Down the hall Hinch stood looking on sardonically.
Dinner was a strained and unhappy meal. As soon as it was over I asked Hinch and the children to leave me. I was exhausted by the day’s events and as soon as I was alone I undressed, pushed a chair next to my bed, and clambered laboriously up its rungs to the seat, and from the seat to the bed. I lay there, with the great bolsterlike pillow thrusting my head out at a right angle from my body, and pulled the covers of the unmade bed up over my wretched gnome-like body.
Dully I picked up the evening paper which Hinch had brought me. There was no use pretending that I felt any real interest in what had happened that day in the world. Because of the change in me the world was no longer what it had been. It no longer fitted me. The newspaper itself was an annoyance and irritation. Great, bulky, flapping thing that I had to struggle with. You, with your neat little built-to-size accommodations, know nothing of the perverse and recalcitrant nature that then infested the very things in which we had been wont to find our greatest pleasures and conveniences. When at last I had bent and shaped the paper into a size I could handle I was almost too tired to read it. But I let my eyes run over the print hunting some anodyne, something that would, even for the short time my eyes rested on it, let me forget myself. But there seemed to be no news of importance that night.
I did not sleep at all during the first part of the night, but 1 was deep in sleep the next morning when the incessant ringing of the phone roused me. I came up out of sleep, forgetful of what happened to me, and plunged out of bed onto the floor with a thud that momentarily stunned me. But in spite of this I limped out to the hall, climbed up the chair to the telephone table.
“Yes,” I said.
“Phipps, Phipps,” came an anguished and squeaky voice. “My God! Phipps.”
“What is it?” I cried. “Who is speaking? Who is it? Speak louder.” But in my bones I knew and was glad.
“This is Hinch,” came back the thin voice that I hated because I knew that it echoed my own. “This is Hinch and it’s happened to me. I’ve shrunk. We’ve all shrunk. Everyone in the house. My wife. We’re dwarfs. My God, the world is ending. Or has ended!”
I suddenly felt cheerful. “Come, Hinch,” I shouted. “Buck up. You’ve just lost a few inches.”
“I’ve had calls all morning. It’s happening to everyone.”
“Town people, too?” I could hardly hear him. The phone service was very bad at the moment.
“No—only our own people so far. I think it’s infectious. I think I caught it from you. Oh God, why did you ever call me over?”
“Did you see everyone yesterday who has called you this morning?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Well, it can’t be infectious,” I said.
Hinch lost control of himself then and began to whimper hysterically. This man who had thought of me as a subject for a scientific paper the day before!
* * * * * * * *
“Hinch,” I said, “I’ll be over at once. As soon as I can get the children up. Be calm now. Get yourself together.”
I put the phone back on the table and smiled. I will not dissemble what I felt then. Relief, hope. I, my family, were not singled out. We were all in the grip of some wide-spread malady. Now there were those I too could pity. I need not carry the burden of every other creature’s pity and commiseration—nor watch the man who pitied me swell up with the joy of being not as I was. No, I will not deceive you. Tears of relief filled my eyes. I saw, even then, it would not be so bad a thing to be a little man with other little men. But still I did not foresee what it would mean to be a little man in a Chileking world.
As I stood supporting myself on the chair in the hall, rubbing my bruised arms and legs, I heard little thin cries of distress from the bottom of the stairs and awkward plodding steps. I went to the head of the stairs and looked over. There was Maria, a p
oor, gray-haired midget wrapped about in a formless garment, crying and clambering like some stray dog. She was a pitiable object. I have never thought that women have been able to undergo Subtraction as gracefully as men. You would think otherwise: that the female, being by nature slighter and more fragile than men, would be a better subject for Subtraction—but it was not proved so. Her bulges and curves become crowded when she is shortened, so that she is like a little country with too much topography. Well, be that as it may, Maria was the first female I had ever seen who had suffered Subtraction, the first adult of either sex, in fact, and her miserable crawling figure stays in my mind even after a lapse of sixty years.
When I had eased her mind as best I could concerning what had happened, and had warned her to let no one see her, I roused the children and told them that they were to drive me to Dr. Hinch’s; they were immediately beside themselves with excitement. Mary Frances could drive after a fashion and I could see nothing for it but to risk her being able to get us there safely. There was no question of my being able to drive. I would have sat under the wheel like an elf under a toadstool. The children dressed with care—David using my clothes, Mary Frances her mother’s—but they were grotesque figures when they had finished. They stood, broad and shapeless like cloth-draped planks. I made my first trip, after Subtraction, in a laundry basket with a sheet covering me. That is not a ride I like to recall: Mary Frances driving with an unevenness that I thought at any moment would either wreck us or attract the attention of some passing motor cop. But we finally arrived at Hinch’s, safe enough.
My memories now concern events which have been exhaustively written about. Hinch’s own account in his memoirs is known everywhere, as is Colonel Werle’s The First Decade. Whitmore, who was at Hinch’s that first morning, is the author of the standardPsychology of Subtraction. The events they write of were so extraordinary, they moved at so swift a pace, the change in accepted practices was so revolutionary, that it is little wonder that their reports are conflicting. When a man’s life breaks up about him he has neither the time nor the emotional stability to classify the splinters. And so it is that one of these men will emphasize one thing and perhaps omit altogether something which struck me as being of paramount significance.
The scene at Hinch’s that morning was sad enough, but it had a grisly, diabolic humor too. Goyen’s imaginative painting, “The Little Men” based on that morning’s meeting is in no wise too bitter or too violent in its emphasis of that grotesquerie. I had had a day and a night in which to accustom myself to what had happened to me. The men I saw that morning in Hinch’s library had had a few hours at most. Then too they were army men, accustomed to the protection a uniform gives. Here they were, worse than naked, wrapped about in the cast-off rag, tag, and bobtail of their children. Accustomed to order and hierarchies, here they were stripped of all insignia of rank, almost of all signs of humanity. Earlier that morning when Hinch had told me what was happening I had rejoiced that I was not to be separated because of my size from my fellow men. But as I stood looking at that collection of monkeys in motley, these erstwhile men, I felt myself, in spite of my size, to be unlike them; surely from my throat would never rise any such sad, simian gibber, such uncontrolled quavers. There were thirty-four men in the room. That is the exact figure. I counted them as I stood there. Some had managed to crawl up into chairs; others were sitting on the slightly elevated hearth holding hands they could not believe were theirs toward the fireplace in which no fire burned; but most were walking about in an aimless, tormented way, clutching their fantastic garments about them.
While I stood there, Captain Mayberry, who killed himself a few months later, saw me, and clambered laboriously up the steps to where I was standing. He was a very young man for his rank, thin and brown, with a goatee. Subtraction suited him better than any man I have ever seen. He seemed completely unconcerned over what had happened, an ironical troll or faun.
“Well, Phipps,” he smiled, “you too? This is a wonderful thing—an interesting thing—I don’t mean what’s happened— but the way they’re taking it. Actually, how have we changed? Our clothes, our furniture don’t fit us, but otherwise how have we changed? Besides we’re not going to have to worry about things much longer. They’ll take things out of our hands,” and he nodded his head toward the living room where the children—they weren’t the Chilekings yet, were lounging about.
“You forget they’re only children,” I said.
“But they feel big, and people who feel big, act big; they are big,” he replied. “And we are small and feel smaller. And will act smaller.”
“They know nothing—we have the knowledge.”
“That won’t last long. Who brought you here this morning? Mary Frances? I thought so. Well, the car’s hers now.”
“Mayberry, you’re not married. You don’t know anything about the parental relationship. The matter of size is relative.”
He looked at me and laughed, “They’re proposing already down there that the boys be trained to take our places at the Post.”
I had already thought of that. “They ought to,” I said, “for the time being—until adjustments can be made.”
“You too?” Mayberry asked.
“Why not?” I wanted to know. “It’s not safe, leaving us defenseless this way, an easy target for any country. We can’t man any of our equipment now—but they could, with instructions from us.”
“Perhaps they could. Will they? As you say? Anyway, how long do you think this can be kept secret?”
“I don’t know. But it’s worth trying for a good many reasons. And there might be a reversal at any time.”
“You think so?” Mayberry smiled skeptically. Poor fellow. He shot himself a few months later when the girl he was engaged to was not Subtracted.
Mayberry and I talked together for some time before we joined the men in the room below. The two of us felt a bond —a bond that united us, and separated us from those poor, lamenting figures. He, because of his naturally reflective, ironic nature, I, because of the somewhat longer period of adjustment I had had, were loath to step down into that room of molten emotion. But it had to be done. That was our world now. It is impossible to report with any detail or accuracy what was said there. Those men did not so much talk as emit jets of feeling, raw lumps of bleeding emotion. I remember Lieutenant Hildebrand though. He’d been having something to drink—had it with him in fact. He kept singing snatches from a movie that had been popular about two decades before. I forget its name, something about a band of dwarfs. Afterwards we used to speak of its unconscious prophecy. Strange that Hildebrand’s irrelevancies should stick with me when much of that morning’s serious conversation has escaped me. But Hildebrand I can still see, draped in something white and togalike, toddling uncertainly about the room tilting his bottle as big as his head and singing a song, one snatch of which went, “Heigh-ho, it’s off to work we go.” No, Goyen’s picture is no exaggeration.
Colonel Oren, the senior officer there that morning, was able finally to bring about some organized consideration of what we were to do. It was he who railroaded us into the fantastic idea, and dangerous too, as it later proved, of having our sons take our places at the Presidio. The times were extremely uncertain internationally just then. Oren was afraid that if news concerning our Subtraction leaked out other nations would be quick to take advantage of weakness. He, like me, hoped for a spontaneous restoration of size in time, and he argued that, even if this did not occur, by the time other countries became aware of what was happening in California, our sons, with us to direct them, would be able to give a good account of themselves. It is true Oren had had for a number of years an idée fixe concerning Russia’s desire to attack us; and this shrinkage seemed to him to provide them with the logical moment of attack—the moment when he, Oren, would be unable to do anything to resist them.
In the light of what followed, much that we planned that morning was worse than silly. I have heard that many times
since, and especially have I heard it from the Chilekings. It is extremely easy to be wise after the event. It has always seemed remarkable to me that we were able to plan anything that morning, miserable, overnight-midgets that we were.
It was Oren’s plan then, but I fully admit it was agreed to by every man there, including myself (in spite of disclaimers after the disaster) except Mayberry and Hildebrand. Hildebrand was snoozing under the library table and past awakening when it came to a vote, and Mayberry alone opposed it with, as it afterwards proved, his extremely well-founded fears. But Mayberry was overruled and we agreed, without other dissent, to exercise every possible caution toward keeping this night’s happenings secret, and in the interval until the matter should be known, to train our sons to replace us—in some of the essential defensive practices at least.
The meeting broke up about noon with a pathetic flurry of salutes; the children, who had been playing rummy and dominoes in the living room, and bolting all the food they could find in the kitchen, got their variously disguised and hidden parents out to the waiting cars. Mayberry, Oren, and I stayed on sometime longer talking with Hinch. I asked Hinch if he still believed there had been mental as well as physical changes. He was now. convinced that the change was physical alone.
Star SHort Novels - [Anthology] Page 3
