The Second Fritz Leiber

by Fritz Leiber

  “Hani and Hilda were athletic outdoor women, yet fiercely proud—I don’t imagine they ever spoke to anyone in America except as to a servant—and with a seething distaste for all men except Martin. They showered all their devotion on him. So of course, though Martin didn’t realize it, they were consumed with jealousy when he fell in love with Mary Alice Pope. They’d thought that since he’d reached forty without marrying, he was safe.

  “Mary Alice came from a pure-bred, or as a biologist would say, inbred British stock. She was very young, but very sweet, and up to a point very wise. She sensed Hani and Hilda’s feelings right away and did everything she could to win them over. For instance, though she was afraid of horses, she took up horseback riding, because that was Hani and Hilda’s favorite pastime. Naturally, Martin knew nothing of her fear, and naturally his sisters knew about it from the first. But—and here is where Mary’s wisdom fell short—her brave gesture did not pacify them: it only increased their hatred.

  “Except for his research, Martin was blind to everything but his love. It was a beautiful and yet frightening passion, an insane cherishing as narrow and intense as his sisters hatred.”

  * * * *

  With a start, Jack remembered that it was Mrs. Kesserich telling him all this.

  She went on, “Martin’s love directed his every move. He was building a home for himself and Mary, and in his mind he was building a wonderful future for them as well—not vaguely, if you know Martin, but year by year, month by month. This winter, he’d plan, they would visit Buenos Aires, next summer they would sail down the inland passage and he would teach Mary Hungarian for their trip to Buda-Pesth the year after, where he would occupy a chair at the university for a few months…and so on. Finally the time for their marriage drew near. Martin had been away. His research was keeping him very busy—”

  Jack broke in with, “Wasn’t that about the time he did his definitive work on growth and fertilization?”

  Mrs. Kesserich nodded with solemn appreciation in the gathering darkness. “But now he was coming home, his work done. It was early evening, very chilly, but Hani and Hilda felt they had to ride down to the station to meet their brother. And although she dreaded it, Mary rode with them, for she knew how delighted he would be at her cantering to the puffing train and his running up to lift her down from the saddle to welcome him home.

  “Of course there was Martin’s luggage to be considered, so the station wagon had to be sent down for that.” She looked defiantly at Jack. “I drove the station wagon. I was Martin’s laboratory assistant.”

  She paused. “It was almost dark, but there was still a white cold line of sky to the west. Hani and Hilda, with Mary between them, were waiting on their horses at the top of the hill that led down to the station. The train had whistled and its headlight was graying the gravel of the crossing.

  “Suddenly Mary’s horse squealed and plunged down the hill. Hani and Hilda followed—to try to catch her, they said, but they didn’t manage that, only kept her horse from veering off. Mary never screamed, but as her horse reared on the tracks, I saw her face in the headlight’s glare.

  “Martin must have guessed, or at least feared what had happened, for he was out of the train and running along the track before it stopped. In fact, he was the first to kneel down beside Mary—I mean, what had been Mary—and was holding her all bloody and shattered in his arms.”

  A door slammed. There were steps in the hall. Mrs. Kesserich stiffened and was silent. Jack turned.

  The blur of a face hung in the doorway to the hall—a seemingly young, sensitive, suavely handsome face with aristocratic jaw. Then there was a click and the lights flared up and Jack saw the close-cropped gray hair and the lines around the eyes and nostrils, while the sensitive mouth grew sardonic. Yet the handsomeness stayed, and somehow the youth, too, or at least a tremendous inner vibrancy.

  “Hello, Barr,” Martin Kesserich said, ignoring his wife.

  The great biologist had come home.

  III

  “Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?”

  Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.

  “Not especially, sir,” he mumbled.

  The house was still. A few minutes after the professor’s arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.

  Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher’s trick to show up a pupil’s inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.

  “You know what I mean, of course,” Kesserich pressed. “The factors that make you you, and me me.”

  “Heredity and environment,” Jack parroted like a freshman.

  Kesserich nodded. “Suppose—this is just speculation—that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could re-create the same individual at will.”

  Jack felt a shiver go through him. “To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That’d be far beyond us.”

  “What about identical twins?” Kesserich pointed out. “And then there’s parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.” Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. “There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.”

  Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. “Even then you wouldn’t get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.”

  “Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother’s traits?”

  “But environment would change things,” Jack objected. “The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.”

  “Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other’s existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called ‘Trixie.’ That’s without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times.…”

  For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich’s sphinx-like face.

  “Well, we’ve escaped quite far enough from Jamieson’s marine worms,” the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels. “Let’s get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won’t have any time for it tomorrow.”

  Jack looked at him blankly.

  “Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,” the biologist explained.

  IV

  Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife—things said and half said last night—but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.

  Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet—he felt behind it, but the key was gone—he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.

  The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when
he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.

  After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.

  This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he’d brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.

  He hadn’t realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.

  The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. “You must go away at once and never come back. You’re a wicked man, but I don’t want you to be hurt. I’ve been watching for you all morning.”

  He tossed the newspapers over the fence. “You don’t have to read them now,” he told her. “Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.”

  When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it’s 1933 now instead of 1951. I’m not sure why it’s been done, though I think I know who you really are.”

  “But,” the girl faltered, “my aunts tell me it’s 1933.”

  “They would.”

  “And there are the papers…the magazines…the radio.”

  “The papers are old ones. The radio’s faked—some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.”

  “These papers might be faked,” she said, pointing to where she’d let them drop on the ground.

  “They’re new,” he said. “Only old papers get yellow.”

  “But why would they do it to me? Why?”

  “Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That’ll set you straight quicker than anything.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said, drawing back. “He’s coming tonight.”

  “He?”

  “The man who sends me the boxes…and my life.”

  Jack shivered. When he spoke, his voice was rough and quick. “A life that’s completely a lie, that’s cut you off from the world. Come with me, Mary.”

  She looked up at him wonderingly. For perhaps ten seconds the silence held and the spell of her eerie sweetness deepened.

  “I love you, Mary,” Jack said softly.

  She took a step back.

  “Really, Mary, I do.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what’s true. Go away.”

  “Mary,” he pleaded, “read the papers I’ve given you. Think things through. I’ll wait for you here.”

  “You can’t. My aunts would find you.”

  “Then I’ll go away and come back. About sunset. Will you give me an answer?”

  She looked at him. Suddenly she whirled around. He, too, heard the chuff of the Essex. “They’ll find us,” she said. “And if they find you, I don’t know what they’ll do. Quick, run!” And she darted off herself, only to turn back to scramble for the papers.

  “But will you give me an answer?” he pressed.

  She looked frantically up from the papers. “I don’t know. You mustn’t risk coming back.”

  “I will, no matter what you say.”

  “I can’t promise. Please go.”

  “Just one question,” he begged. “What are your aunts’ names?”

  “Hani and Hilda,” she told him, and then she was gone. The hedge shook where she’d darted through.

  Jack hesitated, then started for the cove. He thought for a moment of staying on the island, but decided against it. He could probably conceal himself successfully, but whoever found his boat would have him at a disadvantage. Besides, there were things he must try to find out on the mainland.

  As he entered the oaks, his spine tightened for a moment, as if someone were watching him. He hurried to the rippling cove, wasted no time getting the Annie O. underway. With the wind still in the west, he knew it would be a hard sail. He’d need half a dozen tacks to reach the mainland.

  When he was about a quarter of a mile out from the cove, there was a sharp smack beside him. He jerked around, heard a distant crack and saw a foot-long splinter of fresh wood dangling from the edge of the sloop’s cockpit, about a foot from his head.

  He felt his skin tighten. He was the bull’s-eye of a great watery target. All the air between him and the island was tainted with menace.

  Water splashed a yard from the side. There was another distant crack. He lay on his back in the cockpit, steering by the sail, taking advantage of what little cover there was.

  There were several more cracks. After the second, there was a hole in the sail.

  Finally Jack looked back. The island was more than a mile astern. He anxiously scanned the sea ahead for craft. There were none. Then he settled down to nurse more speed from the sloop and wait for the motorboat.

  But it didn’t come out to follow him.

  V

  Same as yesterday, Mrs. Kesserich was sitting on the edge of the couch in the living room, yet from the first Jack was aware of a great change. Something had filled the domestic animal with grief and fury.

  “Where’s Dr. Kesserich?” he asked.

  “Not here!”

  “Mrs. Kesserich,” he said, dropping down beside her, “you were telling me something yesterday when we were interrupted.”

  She looked at him. “You have found the girl?” she almost shouted.

  “Yes,” Jack was surprised into answering.

  A look of slyness came into Mrs. Kesserich’s bovine face. “Then I’ll tell you everything. I can now.

  “When Martin found Mary dying, he didn’t go to pieces. You know how controlled he can be when he chooses. He lifted Mary’s body as if the crowd and the railway men weren’t there, and carried it to the station wagon. Hani and Hilda were sitting on their horses nearby. He gave them one look. It was as if he had said, ‘Murderers!’

  “He told me to drive home as fast as I dared, but when I got there, he stayed sitting by Mary in the back. I knew he must have given up what hope he had for her life, or else she was dead already. I looked at him. In the domelight, his face had the most deadly and proud expression I’ve ever seen on a man. I worshiped him, you know, though he had never shown me one ounce of feeling. So I was completely unprepared for the naked appeal in his voice.

  “Yet all he said at first was, ‘Will you do something for me?’ I told him, ‘Surely,’ and as we carried Mary in, he told me the rest. He wanted me to be the mother of Mary’s child.”

  Jack stared at her blankly.

  Mrs. Kesserich nodded. “He wanted to remove an ovum from Mary’s body and nurture it in mine, so that Mary, in a way, could live on.”

  “But that’s impossible!” Jack objected. “The technique is being tried now on cattle, I know, so that a prize heifer can have several calves a year, all nurtured in ‘scrub heifers,’ as they’re called. But no one’s ever dreamed of trying it on human beings!”

  Mrs. Kesserich looked at him contemptuously. “Martin had mastered the technique twenty years ago. He was willing to take the chance. And so was I—partly because he fired my scientific imagination and reverence, but mostly because he said he would marry me. He barred the doors. We worked swiftly. As far as anyone was concerned, Martin, in a wild fit of grief, had locked himself up for several hours to mourn over the body of his fiancee.

  “Within a month we were married, and I finally gave birth to the child.”

  Jack shook his head. “You gave birth to your own child.”

  She smiled bitterly. “No, it was Mary’s. Martin did not keep his whole bargain with me—I was nothing more than his ‘scrub wife’ in every way.”

  “You think you gave birth to Mary’s child.”

  Mrs.
Kesserich turned on Jack in anger. “I’ve been wounded by him, day in and day out, for years, but I’ve never failed to recognize his genius. Besides, you’ve seen the girl, haven’t you?”

  Jack had to nod. What confounded him most was that, granting the near-impossible physiological feat Mrs. Kesserich had described, the girl should look so much like the mother. Mothers and daughters don’t look that much alike; only identical twins did. With a thrill of fear, he remembered Kesserich’s casual words: “…parthenogenesis…pure stock…special techniques.…”

  “Very well,” he forced himself to say, “granting that the child was Mary’s and Martin’s—”

  “No! Mary’s alone!”

  Jack suppressed a shudder. He continued quickly, “What became of the child?”

  Mrs. Kesserich lowered her head. “The day it was born, it was taken away from me. After that, I never saw Hilda and Hani, either.”

  “You mean,” Jack asked, “that Martin sent them away to bring up the child?”

  Mrs. Kesserich turned away. “Yes.”

  Jack asked incredulously, “He trusted the child with the two people he suspected of having caused the mother’s death?”

  “Once when I was his assistant,” Mrs. Kesserich said softly, “I carelessly broke some laboratory glassware. He kept me up all night building a new setup, though I’m rather poor at working with glass and usually get burned. Bringing up the child was his sisters’ punishment.”

  “And they went to that house on the farthest island? I suppose it was the house he’d been building for Mary and himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “And they were to bring up the child as his daughter?”

  Mrs. Kesserich started up, but when she spoke it was as if she had to force out each word. “As his wife—as soon as she was grown.”

  “How can you know that?” Jack asked shakily.