Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Len answered candidly, except when he was certain that he knew what the Superintendent wanted to hear; then he lied like a Trojan.

  Mrs. Greer had conjured up a premature pot of tea and, oblivious of the stares of the thirsty teachers present, she and Moira were hogging it, heads together, as if they were plotting the overthrow of the Republic or exchanging recipes.

  Greer listened attentively to Len's final reply, which was delivered with as pious an air as if Len had been a Boy Scout swearing on the Manual. But since the question had been "Do you plan to make teaching your career?" there was not a word of truth in it.

  He then inspected his paunch and assumed a mild theatrical frown. Len, with that social sixth sense which is unmistakable when it operates, knew that his next words were going to be: "You may have heard that Oster High will be needing a new science teacher next fall...."

  At this point Moira made a noise like a seal.

  The ensuing silence was broken a moment later by a hearty scream, followed instantly by a clatter and a bone-shaking thud.

  Mrs. Greer was sitting on the floor, legs sprawled, hat over her eye. She appeared to be attempting to perform some sort of excessively pagan dance.

  * * * * *

  "It was Leo," Moira incoherently told Len at home. "You know she's English--she said of course a cup of tea wouldn't hurt me, and she insisted I go ahead and drink it while it was hot, and I couldn't--"

  "No, no--wait," said Len in a controlled fury. "What--"

  "So I drank some. And Leo kicked up and made me burp the burp I was saving. And--"

  "Oh, Lord!"

  "--then he kicked the teacup out of my hand into her lap, and I wish I was dead!"

  On the following day, Len took Moira to the doctor's office, where they read dog-eared copies of The Rotarian and Field and Stream for an hour.

  Dr. Berry was a round little man with soulful eyes and a twenty-four-hour bedside manner. On the walls of his office, where it is customary for doctors to hang all sorts of diplomas and certificates of membership, Berry had only three. The rest of the space was filled with enlarged colored photographs of beautiful, beautiful children.

  When Len followed Moira determinedly into the consulting room, Berry looked mildly shocked for a moment, then apparently decided to carry on as if nothing outré had happened. You could not say that he spoke, or even whispered; he rustled.

  "Now, Mrs. Connington, we're looking just fine today. How have we been feeling?"

  "Just fine. My husband thinks I'm insane."

  "That's g--Well, that's a funny thing for him to think, isn't it?" Berry glanced at the wall midway between himself and Len, then shuffled some file cards rather nervously. "Now. Have we had any soreness in our stomach?"

  "Yes. He's been kicking me black and blue."

  Berry misinterpreted Moira's brooding glance at Len, and his eyebrows twitched involuntarily.

  "The baby," said Len. "The baby kicks her."

  Berry coughed. "Any headaches? Dizziness? Vomiting? Swelling in our legs or ankles?"

  "No."

  "All rightie. Now let's just find out how much we've gained, and then we'll get up on the examination table."

  Berry drew the sheet down over Moira's abdomen as if it were an exceptionally fragile egg. He probed delicately with his fat fingertips, then used the stethoscope.

  "Those X-rays," said Len. "Have they come back yet?"

  "Mm-hm," said Berry. "Yes, they have." He moved the stethoscope and listened again.

  "Did they show anything unusual?" Len asked.

  Berry's eyebrows twitched a polite question.

  "We've been having a little argument," Moira said in a strained voice, "about whether this is an ordinary baby or not."

  Berry took the stethoscope tubes away from his ears. He gazed at Moira like an anxious spaniel.

  "Now let's not worry about that. We're going to have a perfectly healthy wonderful baby, and if anybody tells us differently, why, we'll just tell them to go jump in the lake, won't we?"

  "The baby is absolutely normal?" Len said in a marked manner.

  "Absolutely." Berry applied the stethoscope again. His face blanched.

  "What's the matter?" Len asked after a moment.

  The doctor's gaze was fixed and glassy.

  "Vagitus uterinus," Berry muttered. He pulled the stethoscope off abruptly and stared at it. "No, of course it couldn't be. Now isn't that a nuisance? We seem to be picking up a radio broadcast with our little stethoscope here. I'll just go and get another instrument."

  Moira and Len exchanged glances. Moira's was almost excessively bland.

  Berry confidently came in with a new stethoscope, put the diaphragm against Moira's belly, listened for an instant and twitched once all over, as if his mainspring had snapped. Visibly jangling, he stepped away from the table. His jaw worked several times before any sound came out.

  "Excuse me," he said, and walked out in an uneven line.

  Len snatched up the instrument he had dropped.

  Like a bell ringing under water, muffled but clear, a tiny voice was shouting: "You bladder-headed pillpusher! You bedside vacuum! You fifth-rate tree surgeon! You inflated--" A pause. "Is that you, Connington? Get off the line; I haven't finished with Dr. Bedpan yet."

  Moira smiled, like a Buddha-shaped bomb.

  "Well?" she said.

  * * * * *

  "We've got to think," Len kept saying over and over.

  "You've got to think." Moira was combing her hair, snapping the comb smartly at the end of each stroke. "I've had plenty of time to think, ever since it happened. When you catch up--"

  Len flung his tie at the carved wooden pineapple on the corner of the footboard. "Moy, be reasonable. The chances against the kid kicking three times in any one-minute period are only about one in a hundred. The chances against anything like--"

  Moira grunted and stiffened for a moment. Then she cocked her head to one side with a listening expression ... a new mannerism of hers that was beginning to send intangible snakes crawling up Len's spine.

  "What now?" he asked sharply.

  "He says to keep our voices down. He's thinking."

  Len's fingers clenched convulsively, and a button flew off his shirt. Shaking, he pulled his arms out of the sleeves and dropped the shirt on the floor. "Look. I just want to get this straight. When he talks to you, you don't hear him shouting all the way up past your liver and lights. What--"

  "You know perfectly well he reads my mind."

  "That isn't the same as--" Len took a deep breath. "Let's not get off on that. What I want to know is, what is it like? Do you seem to hear a real voice, or do you just know what he's telling you, without knowing how you know?"

  Moira put the comb down in order to think better. "It isn't like hearing a voice. You'd never confuse one with the other. It's more--the nearest I can come to it, it's like remembering a voice. Except that you don't know what's coming."

  Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on his bare chest. "And he sees what you see, he knows what you're thinking, he can hear when people talk to you?"

  "Of course."

  "This is tremendous!" Len began to blunder around the bed-room, not looking where he was going. "They thought Macaulay was a genius. This kid isn't even born. I heard him. He was cussing Berry out like Monty Woolley."

  "He had me reading The Man Who Came to Dinner two days ago."

  Len made his way around a small bedside table by trial and error. "That's another thing. How much could you say about his--his personality? I mean does he seem to know what he's doing, or is he just striking out wildly in all directions?" He paused. "Are you sure he's really conscious at all?"

  * * * * *

  Moira began, "That's a silly--" and stopped. "Define consciousness," she said doubtfully.

  "All right, what I really mean--why am I wearing this necktie?" He ripped it off and threw it over a lampshade. "What I mean--"

  "Are
you sure you're really conscious?"

  "Okay. You make joke, I laugh, ha-ha. What I'm trying to ask is, have you seen any evidence of creative thought, organized thought, or is he just--integrating, along the lines of--of instinctive responses? Do you--"

  "I know what you mean. Shut up a minute.... I don't know."

  "I mean is he awake, or asleep and dreaming about us, like the Red King?"

  "I don't know!"

  "And if that's it, what'll happen when he wakes up?"

  Moira took off her robe, folded it neatly, and maneuvered herself between the sheets. "Come to bed."

  Len got one sock off before another thought struck him. "He reads your mind. Can he read other people's?" He looked appalled. "Can he read mine?"

  "He doesn't. Whether it's because he can't, I don't know. I think he just doesn't care."

  Len pulled the other sock halfway down and left it there. In a stiffer tone, he said, "One of the things he doesn't care about is whether I have a job."

  "No. He thought it was funny. I wanted to sink through the floor, but I had all I could do to keep from laughing when she fell down.... Len, what are we going to do?"

  He swiveled around and looked at her.

  "Look," he said, "I didn't mean to sound that gloomy. We'll do something. We'll fix it. Really."

  "I hope so."

  Careful of his elbows and knees, Len climbed into the bed beside her. "Okay now?"

  "Mm.... Ugh." Moira tried to sit up suddenly, and almost made it. She wound up propped on one elbow, and said indignantly, "Oh, no!"

  Len stared at her in the dimness. "What--?"

  She grunted again. "Len, get up. All right. Len, hurry!"

  Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered up, goose-pimpled and tense. "What's wrong?"

  "You'll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom--"

  "On that couch? Are you crazy?"

  "I can't help it," she said in a small faint voice. "Please don't let's argue. You'll just have to."

  "Why?"

  "We can't sleep in the same bed," she wailed. "He says it's--oh!--unhygienic!"

  * * * * *

  Len's contract was not renewed. He got a job waiting on tables in a resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week and a half until his four years of college physics earned him employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great opportunities in radio and television, and firmly believed that atom-bomb tests were causing all the bad weather.

  Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology, astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture, Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law; business management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature.

  His domination of Moira's life remained absolute, and his experiments with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and fruit, washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol.

  With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high school staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new direction.

  The diabolical event was due on or about July 29th. Len crossed off each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil. It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the parent of a super-prodigy. Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world by the time he was fifteen, unless he would be assassinated first, but almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his maternal fortress.

  Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her.

  "It isn't anything. I'm just tired. He started this after lunch. Look."

  Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up.

  Droning. Abrasing the demiurge. Hier begrimms the tale: Eyes undotted, grewling and looking, turns off a larm, seizes cloes. Stewed Bierly a wretch Pence, therefore tchews we. Pons! Let the pants take air of themsulves.

  * * * * *

  The first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the political party of which Len was a registration-day member.

  The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira.

  "No, go on," she said, "read the rest."

  The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel.

  Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans, spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion.

  "He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born."

  Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line for it--The Virgin of Persepolis by Leon Lenn--and mailed it off to a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of the novel.

  Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime.

  Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index, containing three times as many clauses as a lease.

  This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check for nine hundred dollars.

  * * * * *

  Len tilted his mop-handle against the wall and straightened carefully, conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a year?

  It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath.

  The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered housecoat, was lighting a cigarette.

  "How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always received one.

  She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes killed Anaxander."

  "Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?"

  "I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it was that raped Marianne in the garden?"

  "No, who?"

  "Ganesh."

  "You're kidding!"

  "Nope." She pointed to the stack of typescript. "See for yourself."

  Len didn't move. "But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire. He didn't return till--"

  "I know, I know. But he wasn't. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose with his beard dyed. It's all perfectly logical, the way Leo explains it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols--you remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were turned--"

  "All right. But for God's sake, this fouls everything up. If Ganesh never went to Lydia, then he couldn't have had anything to do distempering Cyrus's armor. And Zeuxias couldn't, ei
ther, because--"

  "It's exasperating. I know he's going to pull another rabbit out of the hat and clear everything up, but I don't see how."

  Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out Philomenes once and for all. Unless--no. I forgot about that business in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?"

  "I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. It's going to be something brilliant and he knows what it is, but he won't tell me. We'll just have to wait."

  "I guess so." Len stood up, grunting. "You want me to see if there's anything in the pot?"

  "Please."

  Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the silex, stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his interest in Moira's diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small blessings....

  * * * * *

  Moira was leaning back with her eyes closed, looking very tired. "How's the money?" she asked without moving.

  "Lousy. We're down to twenty-one bucks."

  She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. "We couldn't be! Len, how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?"

  "Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about half an hour after it was paid for. We spent less than fifty on ourselves, I think. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn't any coming in."

  She sighed. "I thought it would last longer."

  "So did I. If he doesn't finish this thing in a few days, I'll have to go look for work again."

  "Oh. That isn't so good. How am I going to take care of the house and do Leo's writing for him?"

  "I know, but--"

  "All right. If it works out, fine. If it doesn't--he must be near the end by now." She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly and sat up, hands over the keyboard. "He's getting ready again. See about that coffee, will you? I'm half dead."