The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy
Page 5
“Very much secrecy,” Sorell replied gravely. “We will explain later.” She touched a button on her intercom box and switched off her desk light. “I’m leaving for the day, but I’ll have someone show you around.” She gathered up things from the desk and moved toward the door, adding absently. “There’s a diploid meeting going on upstairs. I don’t think many of them have left yet. If you can spare the time…”
“I think so,” Breden said. He remembered Nadine, waiting at the library for the news, added. “I can’t stay long.”
“Long enough to be introduced around, anyway,” Sorell said at the door, and as a young man came in she introduced him hastily. “Zal, this is E-2 control standard. Mr. Breden, this is Ea-crossZ, he can explain anything you want to know. If you don’t mind, I have to leave now.”
Zal Elberg shook hands firmly, saying over his shoulder to Sorell as she left, “G’night Mirella.” He turned back to Breden. “Glad to meet you.” he grinned. “She’s a monomaniac. People aren’t real to her, they’re just carriers for genes. I also have a name, besides a gene file. Zal Elberg.”
“Mart Breden,” he said, puzzling over an odd familiarity in the young man’s appearance. “What’s going on upstairs?” he then asked curiously.
“Sort of a party.” Zal Elberg was shorter than Breden. but broad in the shoulders. He was handsome with rugged features, slightly slanting blue eyes and dark hair bristling up in a stiff crew cut. He was wearing a defiantly gaudy pink sport shirt. “Come on upstairs and join in. I’ll answer your questions like a tourist guide.”
V
ON THE way up in the escalator Mart saw that there was something odd about Zal Elberg’s hands, and realized suddenly that there had been something odd about the feel of his handshake. Their fingers had meshed. Six fingers.
And the familiarity of Elberg’s face —it was like his own, like a brother would look if he had a brother.
While Mart was absorbing the realization and trying to frame a question about it, they came to the right floor and walked towards the sound of mingled voices. They entered through a half open door into a big room with desks, file cabinets, computers and a standard laboratory work-table with a sink down the middle. It was filled with a mild babble of voices.
Mart’s first impression was like a blare of colors; there were so many completely different personalities there, and they were so dissimilar. Most of them were eating sandwiches, drinking beer, and talking with intensity and excitement.
He took a deep breath and looked around more carefully, but his first impression was confirmed. They were all individuals—characters. They all deviated, and they all deviated in different directions, setting off each other’s differences by the contrast of their own.
There was a long, drawn-out individual seated cross-legged on a table in a mediative pose listening to a very short individual who was telling a funny story. There was a short chubby girl of about 14 with buck teeth and the face of a happy baby loudly arguing some obscure mathematical point with a short, square, thick-armed young man who looked as if he had a dash of gorilla blood.
In the middle of the room was a lanky young man with a beaked nose that could have been used to slice bread. His hair was too long, and he sat on a stool quietly reading a magazine, eating a sandwich and swizzling from a bottle of beer. Two doll-like children on short stools drank milk and root beer and talked excitedly in shrill fluting voices about the Doppler effect.
Somehow this wasn’t what he had expected.
“These are diploids?”
“Sure.”
“But,” he hesitated. He had expected that they would all look something like him or Zal, but the expectation suddenly seemed foolish. “Then what the blue blazes are diploids?”
Zal grinned and stepped forward to tap the lanky fellow on the shoulder. “Plink Plunk, what’s a diploid? E-2 wants to know.”
“Please,” said the one addressed, putting down his beer bottle and turning his beaked face to them with slow dignity. “The name is Max P. Planck, or Planck-Planck, if you prefer, and the answer is, I’m a diploid. Who did you say wants to know?”
“E-2 control standard,” Zal said, reaching up and putting a hand on Mart’s shoulder. “He’s just come in.”
The thin one offered his hand gravely. “I’m glad you found us. Do you know that E-2 has been the anchor to windward of an entire generation of biological research? The world owes the E-2 set a great deal. What’s your real name by the way?”
“Mart—er—Paul Breden.”
“Mine is really Max Planck-Planck, but these discourteous characters have no concept of dignity,” He indicated Zal, “They call me Plink Plunk, or Plunk Plink or Plunk-Plunk. What have you been called?”
“Martian.”
The skinny young man made a slight bend of the shoulders that implied a bow. “Thank you, Mr. Breden. I take it, being a newcomer, that you are eager for an explanation.” He glanced at Zal. “Mister Elberg, would you see that our guest is properly provided for?”
“Sure. Swiss with white or rye?” Zal asked Breden. “Beer or ale?”
The sight of the food around him had set his stomach gnawing at itself for minutes.
“Ale,” he said gratefully.
“Right away,” said Zal and went off toward a big white refrigerator. Planck-Planck continued.
“Although I do not work with MSKZ I am almost uniquely provided among diploids to explain the process of diploiding. The others being kept in the dark as to their individual inheritance, to avoid any influence of expectation on their behavior, I am one of the few fully able to explain precisely my own origins.”
Nearby, the two children of the doll-like incredible beauty were now arguing dogmatically about the latest. stellar evolution theory, and Max Planck-Planck raised his voice slightly to compensate. “I’m the only one who thus has his proper name, and these buffoons are jealous.”
Zal returned with a cold plastibottle of ale and two sandwiches. He set them down on the laboratory table beside them.
Breden remembered what he had read of the great mathematician and physicist. “Are you related to Max Planck?” he asked with respect, peeling the pliofilm shell from his sandwich.
“Closely,” said the skinny young man with precision, hitching himself around in his stool and closing his hand on the neck of his beer bottle. “He’s the one person that I am related to. To be exact, I represent half of his chromosome set, doubled up to a full set, so that some of his characteristics I have in double strength, and others, dominant genes which shaped him, I don’t have at all, just the other of the gene pair, doubled in me so that it comes out, while it was just an unused recessive for him. MSKZ was probably trying to double the genius genes and get a double genius, but my friends say that obviously they doubled the wrong half.”
He paused and took a thoughtful swallow from the bottle. “The number of different people with different combinations of traits you can get from one man’s genes, after nature has done its job of haploiding—randomly selecting one set of twenty-four from two sets of twenty-four—is I think, factorial twenty-four, or twenty-four plus twenty-three plus twenty-two and so on. It comes to some large number. I can’t say precisely because I’m no mathematician; I’m a musician. She could tell you.” He indicated the plump, baby-faced girl who was still discussing something incomprehensibly mathematical with the gorilla-like young man. “I suspect that May, there, is another diploided Planck set. I think she represents the opposite half set, allowing for embryo mortality to weed out the doubled lethals. I think she is probably the Hyde to my Jekyll. Neither of us look at all like Max Planck.” He waved a hand from her to himself. “Can you explain why one of us is fat and the other thin?”
BREDEN thought of suggesting that she might eat more, but decided that it was a remark inappropriate to an academic discussion of heredity. He found himself liking the courtly, ugly young man he was talking with, and possessed of a strong desire to call him Plunk Plunk.
“Who are those kids?” Breden indicated them as they went out.
“Sales Package,” Zal answered for Planck-Planck. “They’re for people who want beautiful children. Will Your Child Be A TV Star? If the customers have no brains of their own that’s all they’ll want, but brains and health and all the mutant improvements we can collect from all the populations of the world will be in the same package. We’ll need a wide selection of different kinds of beauty to have sets that will closely match the purchasers. The customers won’t mind that they have quiz kids, as long as they are born naturally to Momma and look like Momma or Papa and are pretty enough to compete with movie kids. They’ll think of them as their own kids and be flattered by any extra abilities that are thrown into the bargain. Trouble is, beauty is something we can’t check in embryo to see how the crosses come out. It will take fifty more years. We’ll need plenty more test kids like Em and Ben before we can advertise.”
“These scientist characters work themselves like Simon Legree worked Uncle Tom,” commented Planck-Planck. “Fifty more years of work he mentions like planning a weekend. My work plans extend to the age of thirty when I shall retire to a hammock and fiddle or compose music in a recumbent position. All this work, and for what?”
“For supermen,” Zal said in a very low voice, so that Breden barely heard him. The word was a shock, although he had been touching the edges of the idea for days. It sounded like something for the far future, not to be casually mentioned as a project.
“Supermen we have,” Planck-Planck said mildly. “At least that is what the supers claim to be, and so far they…”
Zal interrupted, speaking to Breden hurriedly. “Would you like to meet another fourth of MSKZ?”
Breden felt a surge of the subconscious hostility he had felt for Mirella Sorell at the mention of the organization name. MSKZ had him in its catalogues.
MSKZ sold gene duplicates of him for experimental purposes. “That’s rather a large order,” he said casually, concealing his resentment. “I haven’t time to meet the whole organization. It’s…”
Zal laughed. “It’s not an it, it’s a them. MSKZ are the initials of the team that runs MSKZ. You’ve met Sorell. She’s S.” He indicated a man sitting on the other side of the room. “That’s K over there—Keith. He’s in town this week. I’ll introduce you to him.”
The pale blond man sitting across the room had been easy to ignore, but now that he had been pointed out Breden could see that he was not a diploid. He was too normal, and he lacked some extra charge of vitality that made the others relatively conspicuous. When they walked over he looked up inquiringly, and Breden saw that he was greying and considerably older than anyone in the room. The diploids were all young.
“Mart,” said Zal, “I want you to meet Anson Keith, one of the guys responsible for this outfit being started. Responsible for you being here, too.” He put his hand on Breden’s arm. “And Keith,” Zal continued, “I want you to meet Mart Breden. He’s the first E-2 to show up.”
Keith rose to shake hands. He was big and thick-boned, the kind built to carry muscle and fat, but there wasn’t any fat on him, and not much muscle. His hand was bony in Breden’s hand— he was thin in the same way Sorell had been thin, wasted out in the fires of too much work without enough food or rest, with enthusiasm giving a life and energy to his face that denied its lines. “E-2, are you?” Interest shone in his eyes, and he pulled a note pad and pencil from his pocket with a practiced motion. “Do you have wisdom teeth?”
ANOTHER person to whom he was just E-2. Breden smiled faintly. “No.” Another diploid, a tall sturdy girl, entered the room through a swinging bookcase that was evidently a secret door, and sat down quietly with a magazine and a sandwich. Breden was not surprised by the door. It fitted with the signs of secrecy that he had observed, and with the way Zal had just interrupted Planck-Planck to prevent him from giving some information that had to do with the incredible word—supermen. There was something obviously undercover about the organization of MSKZ, and something illegal about its activities.
“Good. We hoped you might have that allele.” Smiling, Keith made a note. “It had been one chance in four. I’m glad you came in. You settled something we were in doubt about with the E-2 set. We can follow up that line now. Any dental work ever needed?”
“No.” Breden found himself hating the greying blond man, hating his normal Caucasian face, his narrow five-digited hands and his evident intelligence, just as he had hated Mirella Sorell. He hated them as a chess pawn would hate the players who moved the pawn. He was just an experiment with a number to them. As a long range result of their experiment he had lost Nadine —lost any chance of any kind of marriage. They had done it by making a freak of him.
Keith made a note. “That seems to be hopeful. There’s a faint probability that one of the E line got a gene for self-repairing teeth in the shuffle We couldn’t check that in embryo, and even if your teeth continue in good shape we can’t be sure it isn’t coincidence unless one of them is knocked out and we see whether it grows back in.”
“I’ll have someone knock one out for you.” Breden said drily.
Looking at him more sharply, Keith folded his notebook and put it away. “Is there something I could do for you— something you might like to discuss?”
He had decided what he could do. Breden took a deep breath and said softly, “I’d like to know what is there in your program that justifies my being born with an extra astigmatic eye? It seems to me I owe you nothing for that. Life itself is a meaningless gift, for no one misses life when it is not given. It’s the quality of life that’s important, and for that you were responsible. But you don’t acknowledge your responsibility. You don’t ask what your distortions may have cost me, or what I may have lost by them.”
Breden had always angered slowly; he was angering now. “If your routine plans had their way, the geneticist who incubated me—supposedly for his experiments—would have sent me the usual way of the scalpel and the ashcan. I don’t owe you anything for that either. Oh yes, I accidentally escape the ashcan, and so you greet me cheerfully and ask about the condition of my teeth, inquiring in effect what more I can do for you.” Although he kept his voice at conversational pitch the words were intense, and as Keith listened, Breden got the impression that everyone in the room was listening, keeping up their previous activities and conversation without change, but bending an interested ear to the remarks the newcomer was making to Keith.
“Do any of these experiments—” he indicated those in the room—“who are taken in by this good-of-humanity mishmash actually owe you anything?”
Zal. leaning against a table reading a technical journal, said, “Diploids of the world, arise.” He turned a page blandly. “Go on, Mart.”
“For the sake of the future of mankind—” Keith began mildly.
“Propaganda! Does the white rat owe any duty to mankind because he is the subject of experiments? No, he owes duty to his own kind—to humanity he owes only hatred, because he is being used and sacrificed by humanity. An enemy.”
He had maneuvered himself back against the bank of filing cabinets, and he could feel the reassuring weight of the curare gun in his pocket. The gun which was also a radio signal mechanism to call the police if it were fired. The police would probably be very interested in secret doors and whatever lay beyond them. “You know,” he said, suddenly mild, “I could cause you people a lot of trouble.”
There was a vague kind of motion in the room, a slight reshifting of positions so that there were more people between him and the door, though they still were not looking at him. Zal glanced aro
und and suddenly laid down his magazine, his expression changing.
Keith sat down, seeming politely attentive, his expression a mask hiding his thoughts. “I find your viewpoint interesting. Mr. Breden. Other people have tried to convince me to see things in that light before, but not quite so rapidly as you seem to have arrived at your conclusions. Would you say you have chosen sides, then?” The urbanity was not natural to the man; it was camouflaging something else.
Very clearly, speaking to Breden alone, Zal said. “Mart, look; this isn’t good. You’re going off half cocked. You’re in some kind of bad mood.” His voice was low, but the repressed urgency of his tone made what he meant as emphatic as a shout. “Before you do anything, how about going out and walking it off? You’re not thinking clearly right now.”
As he became aware of it, Mart could hear the pulse pounding in his ears and the stiff tension of his hands, the way he had been leaning forward on the balls of his feet unconsciously in anticipation and hope that someone would attack him. What he wanted was a good stupid old-fashioned brawl. He wanted to work off his rage and pain against something tangible. He had been talking through a fog of hatred for what seemed like hours, like a drunk precariously giving the impression he was sober.
“We can talk it over later,” Zal said softly, watching him with eyes that had doubtless seen similar expressions in the mirror on his own similar face. Keith watched the two of them without remark or motion. With an effort of decision Breden pulled his hand stiffly from his pocket and relaxed. “I have an appointment,” he apologized to Keith.
To Zal he muttered, “See you sometime.” People between him and the door hesitated briefly as he walked toward them, and for a moment he hoped they would try to stop him. His hands clenched, but there was no sound from Keith and his fellow diploids stepped aside.
VI