by Pat Frank
Shy as he was, and awkward, standing first on one leg and then on the other like a peculiar species of redheaded crane, Homer sometimes exhibited unexpected spunk and wit. Like when a sly, cynical, harridan from one of the tabloids asked him: “Now, Mr. Adam, not that it’s wrong, but did you and your wife by any chance have premarital relations?”
Homer took a breath and replied, without anger: “You use awfully big words, ma’am. If you mean did we sleep together before we were married, the answer is no.”
She jumped, and the other reporters laughed, and this annoyed her, and she said: “I was only endeavoring to discover whether this child might not have been the result of an exceptionally long pregnancy.”
“That would have been sort of difficult,” said Homer, “because almost up to the very day we were married Mary Ellen was in New York, and I was in Colorado.”
“Well,” said this unwholesome adjective artist, “there is also such a thing as extra-marital relationships!”
I had the answer to that one, but I wanted to see the creature hang herself, so for the moment I remained quiet. Homer stood very still, his long, bony hands white and twisting, and no color in his face. Then Mike Burgin, from the Times, said: “Look, madame”—and the way he pronounced “madame” left no doubt as to what sort of madame he meant—“I think you are out of line, and anyway this kid has already got red hair just like her father.”
“My desk,” the dough-faced witch alibied, “told me to ask.”
“Well, just so your desk will not work itself into a lather,” I interrupted, “tell your desk that we have already run complete blood tests, and Homer Adam is undoubtedly the pappy.”
After the press was reasonably satisfied, the Army moved in. The American Army, when it has a war to fight, is an aggressive, eager, brainy, and enormously efficient organization. But when there is no war, the Army is something less than that. I suspect that its higher echelons are staffed, except for the professional soldiers, by gentlemen fearful of facing the competition of civilian life, officers to whom the barracks has become a nice, safe refuge.
The Army moved in first, with a platoon of Military Police dispatched from Fort Totten, after the Tarrytown Police Department, overworked and bewildered, sent out urgent distress signals. The MP’s found a job to do, and they did it. They kept traffic moving outside the estate, and they shooed away the over-inquisitive who climbed fences, and sometimes frightened Mrs. Brundidge by staring through the kitchen windows, bug-eyed, while she mixed Eleanor’s formula.
Perhaps their most arduous and interesting chore was acting as buffers, between Homer Adam and the teen-age girls who had, en masse, deserted a crooner known as “The Larynx,” and a screen actor called “The Leer.” Why it was no man can explain, but the photographs of Homer Adam definitely registered sex appeal to excitable, half-matured, single females. Until the MP’s established a cordon sanitaire around the estate, their uninhibited tactics frightened Homer into the shakes, alarmed Mary Ellen, and disturbed the baby’s digestion. They shocked Homer into the shattering knowledge that he was no longer—and probably never would be again—a private citizen enjoying the Fifth Freedom—Privacy.
But with the arrival of Colonel Merle Phelps-Smythe at Rosemere, Homer began to understand fully his future role in the national, and possibly the world scene.
Homer and I were playing gin and Blandy was kibitzing when the colonel put his riding boots and spurs through the door. “Who’s in charge here?” he boomed. “I’m here to see Mr. Adam!”
“Why nobody’s in charge,” Homer said, rising derrick-like, “but I’m Adam.”
“Well, now, that’s why I’m here,” Phelps-Smythe explained. “I’m here just exactly for that reason—because nobody’s in charge. That’s why the Army sent me to take over.” He stated his name with some formality, and added: “I am the personal aide and Public Relations Officer of the Commanding General, Eastern Defense Command, Zone of the Interior. From now on”—he poked a fat forefinger at Homer’s throat—“you are under the protection of the Eastern Defense Command. General Kipp is personally responsible for your safety, and I am personally responsible to General Kipp.”
He glared at Blandy and me as if he had just, single-handed and above and beyond the call of duty, saved Homer Adam from violence at our hands. I glared back. There is nothing a Smith abhors so thoroughly as a hyphenated Smythe.
I would not have liked this hyphenated Smythe in any case. He had, somehow, without the aid of a single combat decoration, made his chest resemble a triple rainbow. He wore the Victory Ribbon from that old war, the pre-Pearl Harbor ribbon, and the American, European, and Asiatic Theater ribbons. But since no battle stars bloomed on these ribbons, they appeared to me like the gaudy hotel stickers that the tourists of the thirties exhibited on their luggage after doing Europe in three weeks. In addition, he wore various exotic decorations that I vaguely associated with Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and the World’s Fair. Under these, dangled ladders of shooting badges, indicating that he was a second-class pistol shot from the back of a horse, and a fair to middling rifle shot, prone. There was an unidentified sunburst on the right side of his stomach, just where the fat would be oozing out from under the ribs, had it not been for his obvious girdle.
“How,” I inquired, “does the Eastern Defense Command go about taking over Mr. Adam?”
“In the first place—” the Colonel began, and then said: “You’re that AP man who has been messing up the publicity. Who authorized you to be here anyway?”
“Me,” said Homer meekly. “I did.”
Blandy laughed. “And isn’t this Mr. Adam’s house?” he asked.
For a moment Phelps-Smythe was repulsed by this unexpected show of resistance, but he quickly recovered.
“In the first place,” he said, “perhaps you do not know it, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff have decided, in the national interest, that Mr. Adam is vital, strategic government property. The Joint Chiefs felt themselves authorized in making this decision on the basis of future national defense.”
“Congress,” logically concluded Dr. Blandy, “has been demanding that the Administration do something about poor Homer, here, and that was the only thing they could think up to do.”
Homer sat down, his mild blue eyes blinking. “But I don’t wish to be taken over,” he protested. “I just want to be left alone with Mary Ellen and the baby. Is it my fault that all the rest of you are sterile?”
Phelps-Smythe put his hand on Homer’s drooping shoulder. “Now, my boy,” he said, “remember this is in the national interest. Consider—you are just as much a military secret as the atomic bomb.”
“Please don’t mention atomic bombs,” I said, remembering what Mississippi had done to our future, “I’m allergic to them.”
“Besides,” the colonel went on, ignoring me, “your wife and child will be taken care of until the present emergency is over. Funds have already been provided.”
“I’m not going to leave Mary Ellen and the baby!” said Homer with some determination. “That, I simply won’t do!”
“You won’t have to leave immediately. You don’t have to go to Washington until the hearings.”
“What hearings?”
“The Congressional hearings on what to do with you. You see, the Joint Chiefs have simply declared you are vital and strategic. The War Department was entrusted with your safety, and my commanding general was given the job. But your final disposition will not be decided until after the Congressional hearings.”
Homer looked dazed and helpless. “I see,” he murmured.
“You’re pretty lucky at that,” said the colonel. “At first, we were going to put you down with the gold in Fort Knox. But the Surgeon General decided it might be bad for your health. Now that I’ve seen you in person, I think he was probably right. You weren’t in the Army, were you?”
“No,” said Homer. “I wasn’t in the Army. The FEA sent me to Australia to locate quartz crystals. They
were needed for radar.”
“Well,” said the colonel, “it’s too bad you weren’t in the Army, but I guess that radar tieup will show you’re okay. I mean you weren’t a conscientious objector, anyway.”
“No, I wasn’t a conscientious objector. Please, can I go upstairs and see Mary Ellen?”
“Well, make it snappy,” the colonel ordered. “I’ve got a lot of papers for you to fill out. Incidentally, I’m taking you out to dinner tonight. My commanding general wants to meet you.”
I caught the next train back to the city. I found J.C. in his office and told him that the Army had taken over, and my extra-curricular activities in Tarrytown had come to an end. I also told him I felt pretty sorry for Homer Adam.
“You’ll feel sorrier,” observed J.C., “when you see what happens to him in Washington!”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“You’ve been too close to things in Tarrytown,” J.C. surmised, “to keep up on what’s been happening. First of all, there’s a tug-of-war going on between the National Research Council and the National Re-fertilization Project as to who will get Adam.”
“What do you mean, get him?”
“Well, both outfits think they can use Adam to start our birth rate going again. They’ve hinted at all sorts of schemes. Some of them don’t sound completely unreasonable. At least they’re no more unreasonable than what has already happened to us.”
“Poor Adam!”
“That isn’t all. There’s a battle going on between Congress and an Inter-Departmental Committee as to who will decide policy on Adam. And that isn’t all, either, because there is a quite powerful group which feels that the question of Adam is international, rather than national, and should be turned over to the United Nations.”
“Quite a story, wasn’t it,” I mentioned, hinting at a bonus.
J.C. got that faraway look in his eyes, staring out over the masonry filled with pride that rises from the rock of Manhattan. “Quite a little fuss,” he said. “We are indeed blind and naive if we believe that in this universe we will find living, feeling, happy, hurting, thinking creatures on this tiny sphere alone—this speck of an earth revolving around a dim star we call the sun, which is not even part of a constellation.
“It is as if an ant heap had been stamped down, and all the ants within cried that the world had come to an end.”
Sometimes J.C. gave me the shivers.
CHAPTER 4
On a day in early December when an ice storm swept out of the northeast, and stiffened and slowed the arteries of Manhattan, and I knew that J.C. Pogey would want staffers covering the damage on the Jersey coast, I developed a convenient chill and retired to Smith Field to wait out the weather.
There is no vacation so exciting, so satisfactory, relaxing, and inwardly pleasing as that of a small boy playing hookey from school. I made the most of it. I clad myself in the soft, blue, silken pajamas inherited from Lynn Heinzerling when we were roommates at the Hotel de la Ville, in Rome, and he was ordered to Czecho-Slovakia; the wonderful brocaded Arabian robe that Noel Monks had purchased on the Street Called Straight, in Damascus, and willed to me when he flew Indiaward; and the pliant red leather slippers, with upturned toes, that had cost me three dollars, American gold seal, in the medina in Casablanca.
I cast myself upon Smith Field, set coffee dripping, and opened a package of cigarettes and a bottle of rye. I touched a switch at the side of the bed, and on the television screen there appeared an oval blur, and then the blur resolved itself into the face of a man—a full-jowled, hearty man who looked as if all he did was attend World Series, Bowl games, the tennis championships at Forest Hills, and the international shooting matches at Camp Perry. It turned out that this was expert deduction, because the man said:
“This is Malcolm Parkinson. I am speaking to you from sun-drenched Hialeah Park, Miami, Florida, and in a few moments I am going to focus your television camera on this magnificent race course, and you will see—yes, see—the first event on today’s program . . .”
I picked up the telephone and called Sam’s Cigar Store, at Sixth Avenue and Tenth. “Send me,” I requested, “a Racing Form and Bob’s Best Bets.”
“In this weather?” Sam demanded.
“The horses,” I pointed out, “are not running up the Avenue of the Americas.”
“That I know,” said Sam. “That I can see from here.” He asked: “Tell me, Mr. Smith, why don’t they do something about Mr. Adam?”
“Who do you mean by they?”
“Them bureaucrats.”
“What,” I inquired, “would you have them do?”
“The missus keeps pestering me,” said Sam. “She believes in A.I.” A.I. had become the popular abbreviation for artificial insemination.
“Well, there’s bound to be a decision soon,” I assured him.
“There better be, or there’ll be hell to pay in this country. My wife says she’s not getting any younger. I tell you, Mr. Smith, she wants kids.”
When the Racing Form arrived I began to dope the horses at Hialeah. Like every frustrated sports writer, I believe I am a better handicapper than any now operating at the tracks. I picked Fair Vision in the second, and then called “Two Tone Jones,” a gentleman of doubtful color who operates a bookmaking establishment near Sheridan Square. I bet two across the board on Fair Vision, poured myself a rye, and settled back on the pillows to watch the race.
I found that watching the races, from a bed in New York, was more satisfactory than watching them at the track, in Florida. Maniacs do not jump up and down in front of you, deafening you with their shrill cries, and interfering with your vision. Nobody picks your pocket. Nobody tramps on your feet. You don’t have to butt your way to the parimutuel windows, tramping on other people, between each race. You don’t have to foam at the mouth while crawling through traffic jams, park your car, pay $2.20 admission, avoid touts, buy programs, pencils, and peanuts, or steer your wife away from the hundred-to-one shots. You don’t have to shiver in a white linen suit, and try to warm yourself by talking about the cold wave up north.
You just lie there in bed and lose your money.
When I telephoned to place my bet on the fifth, Two Tone Jones said: “You got a minute, Mr. Smith? I want to ask you a question.”
“Certainly,” I said graciously, for by then Two Tone Jones was one of my considerable creditors.
“We’re having a little argument up here,” said Two Tone Jones. “You’re a pretty smart man, Mr. Smith, and maybe you can help us out.”
“I’m not very smart about picking horses.”
“Oh,” said Two Tone, “we all have our bad days. Now what we want to know, Mr. Smith, is what about this here artificial insemination?”
I drank some black coffee. “Well, what can I tell you about it?” I said. I was pretty sick of this A.I. It reminded me of toddle tops, ouija boards, every day in every way I feel better and better, two cars in every garage, life begins at forty, and every other fad that ever existed.
“Well, we just want to know about it,” Two Tone complained.
“It is very simple,” I said. “When normal intercourse isn’t practical, you just take a specimen of the male sperm, and plant it within the female.”
“Hasn’t it been done with horses?” Two Tone asked.
“Oh, yes. Nowadays, when a horse is standing at stud, he doesn’t have to service a mare in person. His sperm is shipped, injected, and that is all there is to it. Why, some of our best thoroughbred stock has been planted in Argentine and Australia that way. It’s much easier to ship an ounce of sperm than a one-ton horse.”
“Can it be done with men?” Two Tone demanded.
“Of course. I think there are eight thousand cases of artificial insemination recorded in this country.”
“That’s what we wanted to know.”
“Don’t you read the papers?” I asked. “The papers have been talking about nothing but A.I. ever since it was recommended by N.R.P.�
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“Well, we don’t read that part of the papers,” said Two Tone Jones. That was that. I bet twenty to win on Eastbound, in the fifth, and he finished absolutely last.
Marge returned home during the running of the sixth. Cliffdweller, which I had backed to win and place, was on the rail and leading by two lengths when Marge swung open the door of our bedroom. I hushed her with a wave of my hand. “And now as they come into the stretch,” Malcolm Parkinson was saying, “it is still Cliffdweller, and he’s running easy. He’s followed by Ragtime, June Bug, Third Fleet, and Firefly . . . now at an eighth from the wire Cliffdweller still leads but—”
“Stephen Decatur Smith,” Marge interrupted, “we have company!”
“Quiet!” I shouted, leaning forward, pounding my knees with my fists as Cliffdweller labored towards the finish. At this point, it seemed that the television screen had shifted to slow motion.
“Stephen!” Marge shouted.
The horses crossed the finish line. “It’s a photo!” shouted Parkinson. I fell back against the pillow.
“So this is why I haven’t been able to get you on the telephone all afternoon!” Marge said. “Sneaked off to the races!”
I looked up at her. She was remarkably businesslike and trim and tidy in a blue suit and a white blouse that concealed, and yet promised, the smooth curves underneath. She was a very admirable-looking woman, but she was very angry. In a case like this, I believe that the best defense is an offense. “Here I am, down in bed with a chill, and I get abused!” I reproached her.
Marge smiled, and touched my forehead lightly with her fingers. She knew that I wasn’t ill, and she knew that I knew that she knew. “Come on! Get off the Field and into the living room. I brought home some people.”
Parkinson’s cheerful, weathered face appeared on the screen. “Who?” I asked absent-mindedly.
“In just a second,” said Parkinson, “the judges will have inspected the picture, and we will have the result of the sixth. Meanwhile, let me tell you that I’ve never seen Hialeah more colorful than it is today, here in the bright sunshine, with the brilliant plumage of the famous flamingoes out by the lake. And remember that for relaxation like a trip to the Southland, always smoke—”