The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  In the painting on the screen the figure of Christ sat at the long table. The paint was blotched and cracked and his face almost hidden.

  Mr. Dunner turned to it. “No, it need not be Fascism. The rulers of a corrupt government may have no beliefs or ideals left to defend. The Roman government would have pardoned Christ, the bringer of a new belief, but it was his own people who slew him, preferring to pardon a robber and murderer instead.”

  He pointed with the stick. “He is eating with his disciples. He has just said “One of you will betray me.” Observe the composition of—”

  There was a slight stirring and whispering of disapproval. The things he had said were puzzling and almost violent, and sounded different from things they had been taught were true. They did not want him to return to the usual kind of lecture. A question was passed among them in quick murmuring and agreement. A boy raised his hand.

  “Yes, Johnny?”

  “Why is it democratic?” He was almost defiant. “Burning people.”

  “Because it was an expression of the majority will. The majority of people have faith that the things they already believe are true, and so they will condemn anyone who teaches different things, believing them to be lies. All basic progress must start with the discovery of a truth not yet known and believed. Unless those who have new ideas and different thoughts be permitted to speak and are protected carefully by law, they will be attacked, for in all times men have confused difference with criminality.”

  The murmur began again, and the boy put up his hand. “Yes, Johnny?”

  “I like inventors. I like inventions. I like things to change.” He was speaking for the class. It was a question about people disliking changes. The teacher hesitated oddly.

  “Stand up please.”

  The boy stood up. He had a thin oval face with large brown eyes which he narrowed to hide his nervousness. The other children in the class turned in their seats to look at him.

  “You said you like things different,” the teacher reminded him. “That’s a good trait, but do you like to be different yourself? Do you like to stand up when the others are sitting down?” The boy licked his lips, glancing from the side of his eyes at the classmates seated around him, his nervousness suddenly increased.

  Mr. Dunner turned to the blackboard and wrote “sameness.”

  “Here is the sameness of mass production, and human equality, and shared tastes and dress and entertainment, and basic education equalized at a high level, and forgotten prejudices, and the blending of minorities, and all the other good things of democracy. The sameness of almost everybody doing the same thing at once. Some of the different ones who are left notice their difference and feel left out and alone. They try to be more like the others.” He curved a chalk arrow, and wrote “conformity.” Johnny, still standing, noticed that Mr. Dunner was nervous, too. The chalk line wavered.

  The arrow curved through “conformity” and back to the first word in a swift circle. “And then those who are left feel more conspicuous and lonesome than ever. People stare and talk about them. So they try to be more like the others. And then everybody is so much like everybody else that even a very tiny necessary difference looks peculiar and wrong. The unknown and unfamiliar is feared or hated. All differences, becoming infrequent, look increasingly strange and unfamiliar, and shocking, and hateful. Those who want to be different hide themselves and pretend to be like the others.”

  He moved the chalk in swift strokes. The thickening circle of arrows passed through the words: sameness, conformity, sameness, conformity, sameness…

  He stepped back and printed in the middle of the circle, very neatly, “STASIS.”

  He turned back to the class, smiling faintly. “They are trapped. And they don’t know what has happened to them.”

  He turned back to the blackboard and drew another circle thoughtfully. This one wavered much more. “These are feedback circles. All positive feedbacks are dangerous. Not just man but other social animals have an instinct to follow, and can fall into the trap. Even the lowly tent caterpillars are in danger from it, for they crawl after each other in single file, and if the leader of a line happens to turn back and find before him the end of his own line, he will follow it, and the circle of caterpillars will keep crawling around and around, growing hungry and exhausted, following each other until they die.”

  Johnny licked his lips nervously, wishing Mr. Dunner would let him sit down.

  Miraculously the teacher’s eyes met his.

  “I stand up,” said Mr. Dunner softly to him alone. “If everyone else went sledding, could you go skating alone, all by yourself?”

  He could see that it was a real question: Mr. Dunner honestly wanted him to answer, as if he were an equal. Johnny nodded.

  “It would take courage, wouldn’t it? Sit down, Johnny.”

  Johnny sat down, liking the tall shy bony teacher more than ever. He was irritably aware of the stares and snickers of the others around him. As if he’d done something wrong! What did they think they were snickering at anyhow!

  He leaned both elbows on the desk and looked at the teacher as if he were concentrating on the lecture.

  The bell rang.

  “Class dismissed,” called Mr. Dunner unnecessarily and helplessly over the din of slamming desk tops and shouts as everybody rushed for the door.

  Glancing back, Johnny saw the teacher still standing before the blackboard. Beside him the projected image of Leonardo’s painting glowed dimly, forgotten, on the screen.

  At his locker, Johnny slipped his arms into his jacket and grabbed his cap angrily. Why did they have to scare Leonardo? Grownups! People acted crazy!

  Outside they were shouting, “Yeaaa-ahh yeaaa-ahh! Charlie put his cap on backward! Charlie put his cap on backward!” Charlie, one of his best pals, stood miserably pretending not to notice. His cap was frontward. He must have put it right as soon as they had started to call.

  Johnny hunched his shoulders and walked through the ring as if he had not seen it, and it broke up unconcernedly in his wake into the scattering and clusters of kids going home. Johnny did not wait to get into a group. Stupid, they were all stupid! He wished he could have thought of something to tell them.

  At home, stuffing down a sandwich in the kitchen, he came to a conclusion. “Mother, does everyone have to be like everyone else? Why can’t they be different?”

  It’s started again, she thought. I can’t let Johnny get that way.

  Aloud she said, “No, dear, everyone can be as different as they like. This is a free country, a democracy.”

  “Then can Charlie wear his cap backward?”

  It was an insane concept. She was tempted to laugh. “No, dear. If he did, he would be locked up.”

  He grew more interested. “Why? Why would they lock him up?”

  “Because it would be crazy—” Her breath caught in her throat but she kept the sound of her voice level, and busied herself at the stove, her head down so that he wouldn’t notice anything wrong.

  “Why? Why would it be crazy?” The clear voice seemed too clear, as if someone could hear it outside the room, outside the walls, as if the whole town could hear. “Why can’t I wear my cap backward—”

  “It’s crazy!” she snapped. The pan clattered loudly on the stove under the violence of her stirring. Always answer a child’s questions with a smile. She swallowed with a dry mouth, and tried.

  “I mean it would be queer. It’s odd. You don’t want to be odd, do you?” He didn’t answer, and she plunged on, trying desperately to make him see it. “Only crazy people want to be odd. Crazy people and seditioners.” She swallowed again. “Everyone likes to be like everyone else.” Breathless, she waited, turning her head covertly to see if he understood. He had to understand! He couldn’t talk like this in front of her friends, they might not understand, they might think that she—

  She remembered the seditioner who had moved into town three years ago, a plane and tractor mechanic. He had see
med such a nice man on the outside, but he had turned out to be a seditioner, wanting to change something. People from the town had gone to show him what they thought of it, and someone had hit him too hard, and he had died. Johnny mustn’t—

  He looked sulky and unconvinced. “Mr. Dunner said everybody could be as different as they liked,” he said. “He said it doesn’t matter what you wear.” He kicked the edge of the sink defiantly, something like desperation welling up in his voice. “He said being like other people is stupid, like caterpillars.”

  She thought, Mr. Dunner now, the history teacher, another seditioner. That tall shy man. And he had been teaching the children for five years! Other people’s children too. She turned off the stove and went numbly to the telephone.

  While she was telephoning the fourth house, Johnny came out of the kitchen with his cap on and his jacket zipped, ready to go out and play. She lowered her voice. While she talked on the phone he went to the hall mirror, looked into it and carefully took his cap off, rotated it and replaced it backward, with the visor to the back and the ear tabs on his forehead. His eyes met hers speculatively in the mirror.

  For a moment she did not absorb what he had done. She had never seen anyone wearing a hat wrong way before. It gave a horrible impression of a whole head turned backward, us if the back of his head were a featureless brown face watching her under the visor. The pale oval of his real face in the mirror seemed changed and alien.

  Somehow a steel strength came to her. She remembered that the viewing screen was off. No one had seen. She said into the phone, as if starting a sentence, “Well, I think—” and put her finger on the lever, cutting the connection, and hung up.

  Johnny was watching her. Rising, she slapped his face. Seeing the white hand marks, she realized that she had slapped harder than she had intended, but she was not sorry. It was for his sake.

  The phone began ringing.

  “Go upstairs—” she whispered, breathing hard. “Go to your room—” He went. She picked up the phone. “Yes, Mrs. Jessups, I’m sorry… I guess we were cut off.”

  Three calls, four calls, five calls.

  When Bruce Wilson arrived home he heard the story. He listened, his hand clutching the bannister rail, the knuckles whitening.

  When Pam finished he asked tightly, “Do you think a spanking would do any good?”

  “No, he’s all right now, he’s frightened.”

  “Are you sure he’s safe?”

  “Yes.” But she looked tired and worried. Johnny had been exposed to sedition. It remained to be seen if it would have any effect. Seditioners were always tarred and feathered, fired, driven out of their home, beaten, hanged, burned.

  The telephone rang, Pam reached for it, then paused, glancing away from him. Her voice changed. “That will be the vigilantes, Bruce.”

  “I have to finish that report tonight. I’m tired, Pam.”

  “You didn’t go last time. It wouldn’t look right if you—”

  “I guess I’d better go. It’s my duty anyhow.”

  They didn’t look at each other. He answered the phone.

  They screamed and shouted, pushing, making threatening gestures at the man on the platform, lashing at him with the noise, trying to build his fear to the point where it would be visible and cowering. Someone in the crowd was waving a noose, shouting for his attention. Someone else was waving a corkscrew. He saw it.

  They laughed at the comic horror of the threat, and laughed again at the man’s expression as he realized what it was.

  They were in a clearing among trees which was the town picnic grounds. At the center, before the mob, was the oration platform, built around the base of the giant picnic oak.

  On the rear of the platform the judges of the occasion finished arranging themselves and were ready.

  “Silence.”

  The mob quieted.

  “William C. Dunner, you are accused of teaching sedition —malign and unworthy doctrines—to our children, violating the trust placed in you.” He did not reply.

  “Have you anything to say in your defense?‘

  The fluorescent lamp shone on the people grouped on the platform. Below, the light gleamed across the upturned faces of the mob as they watched the tall, stooped man who stood disheveled in the light, his hands tied behind him and a smear of blood on one cheek. He shook his head in negation. “I wouldn’t do anything against the children,” he said. They heard the faltering voice unclearly. “I’m sorry if it seems to you that—”

  “Do you or do you not teach subversion?”

  The reply was clearer. “Not by my definition of the term, although I have heard usages that—”

  “Are you or are you not a seditioner?”

  “You would have to define—”

  A thick-armed young man standing by was given a nod by one of the judges and stepped forward and knocked the prisoner down. He started clumsily struggling to get up, hampered by his tied hands.

  “Just like a seditioner, trying to hide behind words,” said someone behind Bruce in the crowd. Bruce nodded.

  Seditioners must all be skilled with words as their weapon, for, though it had been twenty years since any hostile foreign power existed to assist and encourage treachery, there seemed to be more and more seditioners. It was impossible to open a paper without reading an item of their being tarred and leathered, beaten up or fired, of newer and stricter uniformity oaths with stricter penalties of jailing and fines for those who were found later expressing opinions different from those beliefs they had sworn to. Yet in spite of this the number of seditioners increased. Their creed must be terrifyingly seductive and persuasive.

  And Johnny had been exposed to those words! The shy tall teacher who was supposed to be “so good with children,” whom he and Pam had hospitably invited to dinner several times, had repaid their hospitality with treachery.

  Bruce felt the anger rising in him, and the fear. It must never happen again!

  “We’ve got to find every crawling seditioner in Fairfield right now, and get rid of them! We’ve got to get the names of the others from this sneak!”

  “Take it easy,” said the man on his left, whose name he remembered vaguely as Gifford. “We’re getting to that now.” The teacher had regained his feet and stood up to face the judges.

  The questioning began again.

  Off to one side a man had climbed to the rail and was tossing the knotted end of a rope towards a high thick branch of the oak above.

  “William Dunner, were you, or were you not, directed to teach subversion and disloyalty to our children?”

  “I was not.”

  “Are you associated with other seditioners in any way?”

  “I know other people of my own opinion. I wouldn’t call them seditioners though.”

  “Are you directed by any subversive or disloyal organization?”

  “I hold a great deal of love and loyalty for the people of the United States,” he answered steadily. “But right now I think you people here are being extremely childish. You—” He was struck across the mouth.

  “Answer the question!”

  “I am a member of no subversive or disloyal organization.”

  “Will you give the names of those associated with you in subversion?”

  The end of the rope was slung again, and passed over the limb this time, coming suddenly writhing down to be captured dexterously by the man holding the other end. The hangman did not seem to be listening to the questions, or care what the answers would be.

  “I will not. I’m sorry but it’s impossible.”

  Gifford nudged Bruce. “He’s sorry! He doesn’t know how sorry he can get. He’ll change his mind in a hurry.”

  Up on the platform the judges conferred ceremonially and Dunner waited, standing abnormally still. The finished noose was released, and swung down and past his face in a slow arc. In the crowd the man with the corkscrew waved it again, grinning. There was laughter.

  The teacher’s face wa
s suddenly shiny with sweat.

  The men who were the judges turned from their conferring.

  “Our finding is treason. However, confess, throw yourself on the mercy of the court, give the names of your fellow traitors and we will extend clemency.”

  The disheveled tall man looked from one face to another for a time of silence. “Do you have to go through with this?” The voice barely reached the crowd. The judges said nothing. His eyes searched their faces.

  “I have committed no crimes. I refuse to tell any names.” His voice was clear and carrying, a teacher’s voice, but he was terrified, they could see.

  “The prisoner is remanded for questioning.”

  One of the judges made an imperious gesture and the teacher was seized roughly on either side by two guards, and his jacket and shirt stripped off roughly and cut free from the bound arms. As the slashed clothing was tossed to one side, the crowd chuckled at the effective brutality of the gesture, and at the reaction of the teacher.

  “A good vicious touch,” Bruce grinned. “He’s impressed.”

  “Scared,” Gifford laughed. “We’ll have him talking like a dictaphone. Watch what’s next.”

  Something small was handed up onto the platform. Walt Wilson, who had volunteered for the questioning, held it up for all to see. It was a card of thumbtacks.

  The teacher was shoved against the trunk of the oak and secured to it rapidly. The rope was looped around his elbows, and his ankles fastened together with another loop. He faced the crowd upright, helpless and unable to struggle, with the harsh bright light of the lantern shining in his face and the noose dangling where he could see it.