Collected Fiction

by Kris Neville

  The guard checked the identity of the man who had knocked, and having satisfied himself, he admitted him to the room.

  “This is Mr. Hanson,” he said, “of the Daily-Star-Telegraph-Sun-News.”

  “Ah, yes, of course, Mr. Hanson,” Smith said. “Won’t you sit down?” Smith was clad in unpressed tweeds and an open collared shirt—one of his numerous Twentieth Century affectations, the total of which had before now already given rise to a considerable body of fact and fiction concerning his eccentricity. The reporter, on the other hand, was more presentably arrayed. He wore carefully engraved glasses, and his suit had all the latest handmade additions: lace, diaphanous here, opaque there, halfway between elsewhere; three-yard, silk-quilted lapels; loose-woven broad belt; and 32-button trousers. He smelled subtly of the great outdoors. His hair (in sharp contrast to Smith’s horribly tousled thatch) was piled high in layer after layer of careful curls. His left eye twitched nervously, indicating that he was probably neurotic enough to need weekly sessions with his psychiatrist. In short, he, unlike Smith, was the perfectly adjusted social animal.

  The reporter, after viewing the scientist with polite curiosity, gestured with an immaculate hand in a manner so as to convey a shrug and carefully placing his redi-quip camera on the table, sat down, hoisting his trouser legs with a nice solicitousness for the numerous pleats. He cleared his throat and popped a scented lozenge into his mouth.

  “I wanted a picture,” he said, “but I’m afraid I can’t take it after all. Not with your hair that way. Not at all! It’s indecent enough to lose us a great many subscribers if we ran a picture like that.”

  “But,” Smith protested, unmoved by the reporter’s obvious good intentions. “I thought a picture wouldn’t be necessary. I thought you only came over to get my profit disclaimer.”

  “Oh, to the contrary, Doctor,” the reporter explained without rancor. “You may not realize the percentage of our readers who get their news exclusively through pictures, but it is considerable.”

  “Well . . .” Smith said reluctantly. “If you’d give me an hour, I might be able to get something done with the hair.”

  Hanson glanced at his watch. “Oh, damn,” he said mildly, ignoring as well as he could the implicit bad taste of the remark. “I’ve an appointment with my masseuse at 2. Suppose I finish up the interview right now and come back for the picture tomorrow? How would that be?”

  There was a brief, muted roar in the room from the air rockets heading north to hunt up and drive over the city a cooling shower.

  Smith was obviously displeased with the suggestion, for he puckered his lips sourly.

  Hanson studied his nails. “Frankly, Dr. Smith,” he said in a burst of magnanimity, “just between the two of us, I don’t think you’ve got the chance God gave a goose anyhow. Working from the Journal article, Parmenter will have your research duplicated in a couple more months. You’ll never get the cease and desist order against him in that time, and once he can duplicate the process, he can tie you up in court with counter-claims until doomsday. Why not just give up? ‘Smith joins Parmenter, Agrees to Drop Project.’ Now that would be a story.”

  Smith did not take the advice in the spirit in which it was given. He snorted through his nose. “I’ve written down my disclaimer. Here it is.” He picked up a sheet of type and read: “It is my intention that all information arising from my research as described in the July, 2019 issue of the Journal of Federal Biochemists and all research I have later done on the same project be made freely available.”

  Hanson turned up the hidden knob of his hidden porto-recorder. “Fine,” he said. “And now if you’ll just give me a brief summary of your work again?”

  “I’ve done that a hundred times already!” Smith said with inexcusable vexation.

  “One more time, if you please, Doctor,” the reporter said, stiffening his attitude at last, but still refusing to take offense at the man’s conduct. “After all, we intend to publish your statement. I’m afraid that you don’t understand that we have to keep getting fresh leads for our general copy.”

  “Well . . . ,” Smith said wearily. Then with bitterness and very unfairly, “I don’t see how your paper can do me any more harm. I suppose I may as well . . . well, you see I have been able to mutate selectively more than a dozen animal genes. And I am now able to apply this technique to the human fetus in the earliest stages of development and—just for example—produce offsprings with any given eye color . . . See here now, it’s silly going over all this again!”

  “Oh, now, please,” Hanson pacified.

  Smith actually glared at him. It was a full moment before he continued. “At the present stage there is still a great deal to learn. It may take years to be able to control even the majority of the genes. But I can safely say that my techniques will some day apply to every human hereditary characteristic. It would not only be possible to, say—as we could now—to eliminate unsightly body hair, but to effect important changes like—”

  “Hold it!” Hanson said. “That’s good. We can run her: ‘Smith Says Hair Must Go!’ ”

  Smith began to curse.

  “No, that’s quite all right. I think that’s fine for today. Your profit disclaimer is the main thing anyway. Now look, you be sure to visit a tonsorium—or better yet send out for a barber right now—and I’ll be in for the picture tomorrow morning.”

  Hanson got to his feet, picked up his camera and left, having achieved one of the minor reportorial victories which it was his job to achieve and for which his paper was justly renowned.

  Smith sat motionless in his chair, muttering to himself bitterly.

  His very posture seemed to proclaim that here was a man indifferent to social pressures. There was an inherent rudeness and truculence in his bearing. Although his face was superficially kindly and his eyes were intelligent, there was something basically insensitive about the face, something that implied a lack of good taste, a callous disregard for the welfare of the common man.

  “I’ll get their damned haircut,” he said after a while.

  The guard at the door smiled approval. “I’ll phone a barber.”

  “I’ll go out,” Smith said.

  “I’ll phone a cab, then,” the guard said.

  “I want to walk,” Smith said.

  There was a stunned silence. It was just past midday, and the sun was shining hotly on the streets. The guard in the chair that was leaning against the wall came down heavily. “Walk?”

  “Yes, damn it, walk. What’s wrong with walking?”

  “ ‘What’s wrong with walking?’ he says,” said the guard at the door The two guards stared at the biologist.

  Smith, with one of his frequent boorish remarks, said, “To hell with both of you. Stay here if you want to.”

  “Aw . . .” one of the guards said. “You know we got our orders.” Smith started for the door. Shrugging, the two guards followed him into the corridor with very good grace considering their provocation.

  The floor attendant came off the sofa with a half bow. “May I be of service, sir?” he said to Smith.

  “No,” Smith said curtly. “I’m going out.”

  “May I call you an air cab, then?”

  “We’re walking,” Smith said.

  “Walking?” the attendant said. “If you want exercise, sir, the hotel masseur is on call. If you want fresh air, isn’t your outdoor ventilation working in the apartment? We have excellent cold mountain air, today, smelling of snow and pine needles. The Service operator will gladly arrange it.”

  “We’ll walk.”

  Taken aback, the attendant reached up and examined the bridge of his nose, adjusting his glasses as an afterthought. “I see,” he said. His cheeks puffed and he cleared his throat. “I’ll ring for the elevator.”

  “We’ll walk down.”

  The guards blushed and made embarrassed gestures.

  But Smith, ignoring their discomfiture, was already jogging down the stairs, which were shi
ny and unaccustomed to human feet.

  The guards followed.

  Below the second landing, Smith passed a cleaning maid who was polishing the brass hand rail. She looked up and stared at Smith’s head of hair and smiled pityingly. “Is he dangerous?” she whispered to one of the guards as he came abreast of her.

  It was easy enough getting out of the hotel undetected. The pickets had forgotten—or did not know of—the underground to Beke’s restaurant. Smith and the guards merely got in the tiny electric car and rode to relative safety. After they came out of Beke’s, the guards kept anxious watch on the pickets, who surged before the Waldheim, muttering angrily, their glasses glinting dully in the lights.

  Before they had gotten two blocks from the restaurant, they saw the Daily-Star-Telegraph-Sun-News extra delivered by cab-drop to the corner of Polk and Wilshire.

  They could see the screaming headlines, all bald says biologist!

  The newshawk—saving for Smith and his guards—was the only one abroad to read the copy, but since only the front pages of the pound and a quarter, ad-filled newspapers had been changed for the extra, the edition could scarcely be called an extravagance.

  The newshawk watched the men curiously as they came toward him.

  Cabs whizzed by overhead; the sun shone warmly; and the streets were clean and dustless and silent.

  The newshawk waited until they had crossed Wilshire. Then he stepped into the middle of the sidewalk, directly in Smith’s path. He was dressed in a beautiful, hand-embroidered gown of sheerest silk which rustled sleepily. He smelled of gun powder and axle grease: essence Vhomme.

  “Ain’t I seen your picture?” he demanded. “Ain’t you that Smith character?”

  Smith tried to brush him aside.

  “Listen, Smith, what you want to rock the boat for?”

  Smith stepped around him and continued down Polk.

  The newshawk followed.

  “Look at the papers!” he cried. “Ain’t you ashamed? There’s mobs demonstrating against you all over the city—preachers preaching against you. Ain’t you ashamed? Why don’t you crawl in a hole?”

  Smith began to walk faster.

  “Who do you think you are, I want to know? The editorials say you’d make us like insects, if you had your way. Who do you think you are to tell us what we’re going to be like?”

  “Okay, okay,” one of the guards spoke kindly. “Let him alone.”

  “You see!” the newshawk cried. “You’ve even got to have government men follow you around so somebody don’t shoot you!”

  Smith turned into one of the city phone booths and very uncivilly slammed the door on the newshawk, who, after a few moments, reluctantly returned to his post at the corner.

  Smith put a coin into the box and pressed for the intown operator. He gave her the number of Franklin Finweister.

  Finweister—from whose name is derived the opprobrious expression, finweisterism—came on the circuit after a slight delay.

  “Yes,” he said oilily.

  “Have you seen the papers?” Smith asked. “They had me again.”

  “Just looking at one,” Finweister said. “It’s a shame, but . . .”

  “I told you public opinion is getting out of hand.”

  “Take it easy, boy.”

  “Parmenter’s behind it.”

  “So he is, so he is,” Finweister agreed, “but our support’s still strong, too. I’ve talked another commentator around to our side, and he hasn’t lost his sponsor yet. He said yesterday afternoon that you’ve opened whole new vistas to mankind.”

  “But Parliament won’t be back for the emergency session for two weeks, and maybe by then Parmenter will be able to influence enough votes, with public pressure running like it is, to . . .”

  “I’m working on Edwards. I think he’ll agree to propose our legislation. The tide hasn’t turned in Parmenter’s favor yet.”

  “Listen, Frank, how can we be sure? He’s kept us from getting the Presidential injunction lifted. Time’s on his side. I’m scared. Maybe if we could sit down and talk it over with that bastard again we might get something out of him before it’s too late.”

  “I don’t think it would do any good.”

  “But if Parliament doesn’t act damned quick he’ll have us tied up in a court fight that’ll last until he’s sure he’s brought public opinion around.” Finweister grunted.

  “Let me try once more,” Smith pleaded. “Can you arrange another meeting?”

  “. . . if you say so. But I don’t like it.”

  “Let’s make one last try! And if it doesn’t work, I’ll come out with a firm endorsement of your group—even if becoming an open partisan will decrease the effectiveness of my testimony at Parliamentary hearings.”

  “I’ll phone you back.”

  After Finweister hung up, Smith phoned his fiancée, Dorothy. While he was waiting for her to come to the phone, he overheard some of her parents’ understandably provoked remarks. “That bum again . . . Why couldn’t she have taken up with a custom launderer or artist tailor or something worth while . . . I won’t have that man in this house!” Smith slammed down the receiver before Dorothy answered.

  Muscles were rippling in his jaw as he left the phone booth. He had never learned to take criticism kindly and he snapped, “Let’s go,” angrily at the innocent guards.

  They walked on to the tonsorium.

  The door attendant greeted them with raised eyebrows, but he said nothing to reflect on Smith’s appearance or on their mode of locomotion.

  Once inside the door, having made his want known, Smith was beset by helping hands, peeling off his coat, whisking his trousers, air-blowing his shirt—and presently, releasing him, the attendants stepped back, smiling.

  “This way, sir.”

  “Ah,” said the barber as Smith entered the cubicle. “Ah,” he said again with mounting enthusiasm. The guards were stationed outside the door.

  As Smith advanced, the barber shrugged his sleeves up over his wrists. He waved his hand gracefully toward the chair.

  “What hair!” he said. “Professionally speaking, what absolutely wonderful hair!”

  Smith sat down. “Just once over lightly.”

  “Ha, ha,” laughed the barber good humoredly. “He brings a head of hair like this in and says, ‘Once over lightly.’ This head is a good two hour job, and he says, ‘Once over lightly.’ Indeed, two hours at the least. Now, our fall styles . . .”

  “I’m rather in a hurry,” Smith snapped.

  The barber narrowed his eyes and sniffed delicately. Whistling tunelessly, he laid out a row of instruments.

  Then: squirt-squirt.

  The barber beamed. Smith smelled of nasturtium and sea spray. The barber put the atomizer back on the shelf.

  “There,” he said. “Now you smell nice.”

  The chair curved to Smith’s body, tightened, relaxed, began to ripple soothingly.

  “Shut that damned thing off!” Smith ordered.

  “Sir!” said the barber, shocked. But he obeyed.

  “Hold your head still, please.”

  Clip-clip went the scissors.

  Smith’s hand was taken by the female attendant. Snip-snip, and his unsightly fingernails began to come away.

  Swish-swish, and his scuffed shoes were being polished to a high shine by practiced hands.

  “Throw those other people out,” Smith said. “I just want a haircut.”

  There were gasps and rustlings.

  The barber cleared his throat. One by one the tidying personnel departed, indignant, but politely mute.

  Smith groaned with boredom.

  Gingerly the barber went back to his work.

  “Curled?” the barber said eventually.

  “No,” Smith said.

  “But it’s the style this season, sir.”

  “No.”

  “Ah . . .” said the barber conversationally. “You’ve been away from civilization for some time?”
r />   “Of course not,” Smith said.

  When the haircut was over with, Smith went back to his apartment and began working on one of the genetic problems.

  At 4 o’clock just after the shower—which had been somewhat too light to cool the city properly—Finweister phoned that the Parmenter conference had been set for next Friday week.

  That was the first Friday in June. It was also the day the Parliament met for its first emergency session. It was also the day of a partial eclipse of the sun at 2:27, and the day the Wilmington Nargansers won 19-7 over Plumripe’s Queens.

  In the interest of secrecy, the conference was arranged for 7 o’clock in the evening at the home of G. Perdue (professor emeritus of John’s) at Baxter, a place, if we are to believe contemporary accounts, almost impossible to find, situated a quarter of a mile or so from the junction of Alternate 7 with Wilksway, on the very lip of the wheat plains then under cultivation and extending for nearly 70 miles in the direction of Monksburg.

  There was unusually heavy traffic in the Alternate 7 flight lane, because to the east a transcontinental had force-landed and burned. But in spite of the ambulance traffic, Smith and his guards and Finweister arrived early.

  Parmenter was already there in the living room, drinking brandy with the host.

  Smith stationed his guards in the main hall and Perdue retired to his study.

  Parmenter was smiling and friendly, radiating his pleasant self confidence; Smith was nervous and ill at ease.

  “Well, well, well, well,” said Parmenter heartily. He chuckled. “Imagine hairless people like those rats you wrote about. Oh dear, the things you want to do to our economy.” Parmenter was a jolly, round-faced little man with an air of sweet reasonableness about him and a suppressed twinkle in his eyes.

  “Let’s cut out the humor and get down to business.”

  “Business? Why, of course, my dear boy.”

  “Now look,” Smith said. “I’m a scientist. I figure how things work. That’s my only angle.”

  Finweister nodded.

  Parmenter glanced disapprovingly at Smith’s companion.

  “I know, for instance,” Smith continued, “that the human female is not adapted to walking upright and that in two generations we could provide her with a better skeleton and with a better arrangement of organs. There are endless functional disorders that can be changed by mutation.”