“That’s all right. I didn’t really start growing myself until I was about two. My parents thought I was sickly.”
“And look at you now.” She smiled genuinely. “All right, you win. But when does he start talking English? I’d like to understand him, too. After all, I’m his mother.”
“Maybe this year, maybe next year,” Ted said teasingly. “I didn’t start talking until I was three.”
“You mean that you don’t want him to learn,” she told him indignantly, and then smiled coaxingly at Jake. “You’ll learn English soon for Mommy, won’t you, Lovekins?”
Ted laughed annoyingly. “Try coaxing him next month or the month after. Right now he’s not listening to all these thoughts. He’s just collecting associations and reflexes. His cortex might organize impressions on a logic pattern he picked up from me, but it doesn’t know what it is doing any more than this fist knows that it is in his mouth. That right, bud?” There was no demanding thought behind the question, but instead, very delicately, Ted introspected to the small world of impression and sensation that flickered in what seemed a dreaming corner of his own mind. Right then it was a fragmentary world of green and brown that murmured with the wind.
“He’s out eating grass with the rabbit,” Ted told her.
Not answering, Martha started putting out plates. “I like animal stories for children,” she said determinedly. “Rabbits are nicer than people.”
Putting Jake in his pen, Ted began to help. He kissed the back of her neck in passing. “Some people are nicer than rabbits.”
Wind rustled tall grass and tangled vines where the rabbit snuffled and nibbled among the sun-dried herbs, moving on habit, ignoring the abstract meaningless contact of minds, with no thought but deep comfort.
Then for a while Jake’s stomach became aware that lunch was coming, and the vivid business of crying and being fed drowned the gentler distant neural flow of the rabbit.
Ted ate with enjoyment, toying with an idea fantastic enough to keep him grinning, as Martha anxiously spooned food into Jake’s mouth. She caught him grinning and indignantly began justifying herself. “But he only gained four pounds, Ted. I have to make sure he eats something.”
“Only!” he grinned. “At that rate he’d be thirty feet high by the time he reaches college.”
“So would any baby.” But she smiled at the idea, and gave Jake his next spoonful still smiling. Ted did not tell his real thought, that if Jake’s abilities kept growing in a straight-line growth curve, by the time he was old enough to vote he would be God; but he laughed again, and was rewarded by an answering smile from both of them.
The idea was impossible, of course. Ted knew enough biology to know that there could be no sudden smooth jumps in evolution. Smooth changes had to be worked out gradually through generations of trial and selection. Sudden changes were not smooth, they crippled and destroyed. Mutants were usually monstrosities.
Jake was no sickly freak, so it was certain that he would not turn out very different from his parents. He could be only a little better. But the contrary idea had tickled Ted and he laughed again. “Boom food,” he told Martha. “Remember those straight-line growth curves in the story?”
Martha remembered, smiling, “Redfern’s dream—sweet little man, dreaming about a growth curve that went straight up.” She chuckled, and fed Jake more spoonfuls of strained spinach, saying, “Open wide. Eat your boom food, darling. Don’t you want to grow up like King Kong?”
Ted watched vaguely, toying now with a feeling that these months of his life had happened before, somewhere. He had felt it before, but now it came back with a sense of expectancy, as if something were going to happen.
It was while drying the dishes that Ted began to feel sick. Somewhere in the far distance at the back of his mind a tiny phantom of terror cried and danced and gibbered. He glimpsed it close in a flash that entered and was cut off abruptly in a vanishing fragment of delirium. It had something to do with a tangle of brambles in a field, and it was urgent.
Jake grimaced, his face wrinkled as if ready either to smile or cry. Carefully Ted hung up the dish towel and went out the back door, picking up a billet of wood as he passed the woodpile. He could hear Jake whimpering, beginning to wail.
“Where to?” Martha asked, coming out the back door.
“Dunno,” Ted answered. “Gotta go rescue Jake’s rabbit. It’s in trouble.”
Feeling numb, he went across the fields through an outgrowth of small trees, climbed a fence into a field of deep grass and thorny tangles of raspberry vines, and started across.
A few hundred feet into the field there was a hunter sitting on an outcrop of rock, smoking, with a successful bag of two rabbits dangling near him. He turned an inquiring face to Ted.
“Sorry,” the hunter said. He was a quiet-looking man with a yet. “It can’t understand being upside down with its legs tied.” Moving with shaky urgency he took his penknife and cut the small animal’s pulsing throat, then threw the wet knife out of his hand into the grass. The rabbit kicked once more, staring still at the tangled vines of refuge. Then its nearsighted baby eyes lost their glazed bright stare and became meaningless.
“Sorry,” the hunter said. He was a quiet-looking man with a sagging, middle-aged face.
“That’s all right,” Ted replied, “but be a little more careful next time, will you? You’re out of season anyhow.” He looked up from the grass to smile stiffly at the hunter. It was difficult. There was a crowded feeling in his head, like a coming headache, or a stuffy cold. It was difficult to breathe, difficult to think.
It occurred to Ted then to wonder why Jake had never put him in touch with the mind of an adult. After a frozen stoppage of thought he laboriously started the wheels again and realized that something had put him in touch with the mind of the hunter, and that was what was wrong. His stomach began to rise. In another minute he would retch.
Ted stepped forward and swung the billet of wood in a clumsy sidewise sweep. The hunter’s rifle went off and missed as the middle-aged man tumbled face first into the grass.
Wind rustled the long grass and stirred the leafless branches of trees. Ted could hear and think again, standing still and breathing in deep, shuddering breaths of air to clean his lungs. Briefly he planned what to do. He would call the sheriff and say that a hunter hunting out of season had shot at him and he had been forced to knock the man out. The sheriff would take the man away, out of thought range.
Before he started back to telephone he looked again at the peaceful, simple scene of field and trees and sky. It was safe to let himself think now. He took a deep breath and let himself think. The memory of horror came into clarity.
The hunter had been psychotic.
Thinking back, Ted recognized parts of it, like faces glimpsed in writhing smoke. The evil symbols of psychiatry, the bloody poetry of the Golden Bough, that had been the law of mankind in the five hundred thousand lost years before history. Torture and sacrifice, lust and death, a mechanism in perfect balance, a short circuit of conditioning through a glowing channel of symbols, an irreversible and perfect integration of traumas. It is easy to go mad, but it is not easy to go sane.
“Shut up!” Ted had been screaming inside his mind as he struck. “Shut up.”
It had stopped. It had shut up. The symbols were fading without having found root in his mind. The sheriff would take the man away out of thought reach, and there would be no danger. It had stopped.
The burned hand avoids the fire. Something else had stopped. Ted’s mind was queerly silent, queerly calm and empty, as he walked home across the winter fields, wondering how it had happened at all, kicking himself with humor for a suggestible fool, not yet missing—Jake.
And Jake lay awake in his pen, waving his rattle in random motions, and crowing “glaglagla gla—” in a motor sensory cycle, closed and locked against outside thoughts.
He would be a normal baby, as Ted had been, and as Ted’s father before him.
&nb
sp; And as all mankind was “normal.”
The Pyramid In The Desert
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf
And I don’t feel so well myself!
Arthur Guiterman
* * *
IT WAS AFTERNOON. The walls of the room glared back the white sunlight, their smooth plaster coating concealing the rickety bones of the building. Through the barred window drifted miasmic vapors, laden with microscopic living things that could turn food to poison while one ate, bacteria that could find root in lungs or skin, and multiply, swarming through the blood.
And yet it seemed to be a nice day. A smoky hint of burning leaves blurred the other odors into a pleasant autumn tang, and sunlight streaming in the windows reflected brightly from the white walls. The surface appearance of things was harmless enough. The knack of staying calm was to think only of the surface, never of the meaning, to try to ignore what could not be helped. After all, one cannot refuse to eat, one cannot refuse to breathe. There was nothing to be done.
One of her feet had gone to sleep. She shifted her elbow to the other knee and leaned her chin in her hand again, feeling the blood prickling back into her toes. It was not good to sit on the edge of the bed too long without moving. It was not good to think too long. Thinking opened the gates to fear. She looked at her fingernails. They were pale, cyanotic. She had been breathing reluctantly, almost holding her breath. Fear is impractical. One cannot refuse to breathe.
And yet to solve the problems of safety it was necessary to think, it was necessary to look at the danger clearly, to weigh it, to sum it up and consider it as a whole. But each time she tried to face it her imagination would flinch away. Always her thinking trailed off in a blind impulse to turn to Alec for rescue.
When someone tapped her shoulder she made sure that her face was calm and blank before raising it from her hands. A man in a white coat stood before her, proffering a pill and a cup of water. He spoke tonelessly.
“Swallow.”
There was no use fighting back. There was no use provoking them to force. Putting aside the frantic futile images of escape she took the pill, her hands almost steady.
She scarcely felt the prick of the needle.
It was afternoon.
Alexander Berent stood in the middle of the laboratory kitchen, looking around vaguely. He had no hope of seeing her.
His wife was missing.
She was not singing in the living room, or cooking at the stove, or washing dishes at the sink. Helen was not in the apartment.
She was not visiting any of her friends’ houses. The hospitals had no one of her description in their accident wards. The police had mot found her body on any slab of the city morgue.
Helen Berent was missing.
In the corner cages the guinea pigs whistled and chirred for food, and the rabbits snuffled and tried to shove their pink noses through the grill. They looked gaunt. He fed them and refilled their water bottles automatically.
There was something different about the laboratory. It was not the way he had left it. Naturally after five months of the stupendous deserts and mountains of Tibet any room seemed small and cramped and artificial, but there were other changes. The cot had been dragged away from the wall, towards the icebox. Beside the cot was a wastebasket and a small table that used to be in the living room. On top of the table were the telephone and the dictation recorder surrounded by hypodermics, small bottles cryptically labeled with a red pencil scrawl, and an alcohol jar with its swab of cotton still in it. Alec touched the cotton. It was dusty to his fingers, and completely dry.
The dictation recorder and the telephone had been oddly linked into one circuit with a timer clock, but the connections were open, and when he picked up the receiver the telephone buzzed as it should.
Alec replaced the receiver and somberly considered the number of things that could be reached by a woman lying down. She could easily spend days there. Even the lower drawers of the filing cabinet were within reach.
He found what he was looking for in the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet, filed under “A,” a special folder marked “ALEC.” In it were a letter and two voice records dated and filed in order.
The letter was dated the day he had left, four months ago. He held it in his hand a minute before beginning to read.
* * *
Dear Alec,
You never guessed how silly I felt with my foot in that idiotic bandage. You were so considerate I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. After you got on board I heard the plane officials paging a tardy passenger. I knew his place was empty, and it took all my will power to keep from running up the walk into the plane. If I had yielded to the temptation, I would be on the plane with you now, sitting in that vacant seat, looking down at the cool blue Atlantic, and in a month hiking across those windy horizons to the diggings.
But I can’t give up all my lovely plans, so I sublimated the impulse to confess by promising myself to write this letter, and then made myself watch the plane take off with the proper attitude of sad resignation, like a dutiful wife with a hurt foot.
This is the confession. The bandage was a fake. My foot is all right. I just pretended to be too lame to hike to have an excuse to stay home this summer. Nothing else would have made you leave without me.
New York seems twice as hot and sticky now that the plane has taken you away. Honestly, I love you and my vacations too much to abandon the expedition to the unsanitary horrors of native cooking for just laziness. Remember, Alec, once when I was swearing at the gnats along the Whangpo, you quoth, “I could not love you so my dear, loved I not science more.” I put salt in your coffee for that, but you were right. I am the wife of an archeologist. Whither thou goest I must go, your worries are my worries, your job, my job.
What you forget is that besides being your wife, I am an endocrinologist, and an expert. If you can cheerfully expose me to cliffs, swamps, man-eating tigers and malarial mosquitoes, all in the name of Archeology, I have an even better right to stick hypodermics in myself in the name of Endocrinology.
You know my experiments in cell metabolism. Well naturally the next step in the investigation is to try something on myself to see how it works. But for ten years, ever since you caught me with that hypodermic and threw such a fit, I have given up the personal guinea pig habit so as to save you worry. Mosquitoes can beat hypos any day, but there is no use trying to argue with a husband.
So I pretended to have broken one of the small phalanges of my foot instead. Much simpler.
I am writing this letter in the upstairs lobby of the Paramount, whither I escaped from the heat. I will write other letters every so often to help you keep up with the experiment, but right now I am going in to see this movie and have a fine time weeping over Joan Crawford’s phony troubles, then home and to work.
G’by darling. Remember your airsick tablets, and don’t fall out.
Yours always,
Helen
* * *
P.S. Don’t eat anything the cook doesn’t eat first. And have a good time.
After the letter there were just two voice records in envelopes. The oldest was dated July 24th. Alec put it on the turntable and switched on the play-back arm. For a moment the machine made no sound but the faint scratching of the needle, and then Helen spoke, sounding close to the microphone, her voice warm and lazy.
“Hello, Alec. The day after writing that first letter, while I was looking for a stamp, I suddenly decided not to mail it. There is no use worrying you with my experiment until it is finished. I resolved to write daily letters and save them for you to read all together when you get home.
“Of course, after making that good resolution I didn’t
write anything for a month but the bare clinical record of symptoms, injections and reactions.
“I concede you that any report has to include the human detail to be readable, but honestly, the minute I stray off the straight and narrow track of formulas, my reports get so chatty they read like a gossip column. It’s hopeless.
“When you get back you can write in the explanatory material yourself, from what I tell you on this disk. You write better anyhow. Here goes:
“It’s hard to organize my words, I’m not used to talking at a faceless dictaphone. A typewriter is more my style, but I can’t type lying down, and every time I try writing with a pen, I guess I get excited, and clutch too hard, and my finger bones start bending, and I have to stop and straighten them out. Bending one’s finger bones is no fun. The rubbery feel of them bothers me, and if I get scared enough, the adrenalin will upset my whole endocrine balance and set me back a week’s work.
“Let’s see: Introduction. Official purpose of experiment—to investigate the condition of old age. Aging is a progressive failure of anabolism. Old age is a disease. No one has ever liked growing old, so when you write this into beautiful prose you can call it—‘The Age-Old Old-Age problem’.”
“Nowadays there is no evolutionary reason why we should be built to get old. Since we are learning animals, longevity is a survival factor. It should be an easy conquest, considering that each cell is equipped to duplicate itself and leave a couple of young successor cells to carry on the good work. The trouble is, some of them just don’t. Some tissues brace themselves to hang on fifty years, and you have to get along with the same deteriorating cells until death do you part.
“From Nature’s point of view that is reasonable. The human race evolved in an environment consisting mainly of plagues, famines, blizzards, and saber-toothed tigers. Any man’s chances of staying unkilled for fifty years were pretty thin. Longevity was not worth much those days. What good is longevity to a corpse?
The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy Page 9
