by Pat Frank
In the morning I went into Homer’s room and found he was dressing. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m seeing Kathy off. She’s catching the noon plane for Los Angeles.”
“Homer,” I said, “I don’t think that is wise. Why prolong the agony? You’ll just make it tough on yourself. You’ve made your decision, now stick with it.”
Homer sat down on the bed, his bare, lathlike legs almost touching his chin, and put his head in his hands. “I just wanted to see her this once more,” he said. “Just this one more time.”
I felt like saying to hell with it, and taking him down to the airport and putting him on the Coast plane, then I remembered Marge, and how anxious she was that something come of this business, and all the other women who were really sincerely troubled, and what a mess the world would be in if Homer ran off with The Frame. “It would be bad, Homer,” I said. “It would be especially bad since I’m arranging for Mary Ellen to come to Washington and stay here with you, at least until A.I. begins. See what I mean?”
“Yes,” he said, “I see.”
“You do want to see Mary Ellen, don’t you?”
“Why of course I want to see her. I’m all confused.”
“Naturally you’re confused. All of us get confused once in a while. You’ve just had more than your share in a short space of time.”
Homer groaned.
“Since you’ll probably see Mary Ellen tonight, it would only make it worse to see Kathy at noon, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose so, but I promised Kathy—”
I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling more or less like a heel. “You don’t worry about that,” I said. “I’ll go to the airport and see her off, and tell her how things are. I’ll take the responsibility.”
“Will you?” Homer said gratefully. “Thanks, Steve.” He hesitated a moment and then asked: “Steve, what shall I tell Mary Ellen?”
“Tell her? Why tell her nothing! Not a word! Not a hint!”
“But that seems unfair.”
“Homer, believe me, if there is one thing a woman would rather not hear about a thing like that, it is the truth. If it ever comes up, deny everything. That’s an order!”
“But—”
“Homer, about this there can be no buts. If you want to lead a life of utter and complete misery, just start confessing. But as long as you are married to Mary Ellen and it looks like your marriage is going to last, lie, lie, lie until your teeth drop out!”
Homer looked at me in shock and wonder, like a Boy Scout whose Scoutmaster has uttered a bad word, but he nodded yes. However, when I left for National Airport, I still had misgivings.
The wind was playing hide-and-seek around the ramp at the airport, and it was an unseasonably warm day. The Frame was carrying her fur coat across her arm, and the wind had shellacked her dress against her, outlining a sight that could cast men into a trance. “Hello, Steve,” she said, smiling at my stares, “where’s Homer?”
“He’s not seeing you any more,” I said. “His wife is coming down from New York right away.”
“Did he tell you about us?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
She wasn’t smiling any more. Her chin was set and her eyes, tawny, golden-brown eyes which men forgot to notice, were steady. “Steve,” she said, “you remember me when I was a kid in New York, club-dancing, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“I suppose you thought I was a brainless little tramp. Well, Steve, all kids are a little wild when they first go to New York. I got over that. This isn’t simply an infatuation.”
“It has got to be simply an infatuation,” I said. “There are things you’ve forgotten. There’s his wife and daughter, and there’s A.I.”
“Your foolish A.I.!” she said. She had the strangest expression on her face. Some evangelists get it, and you used to see it in the pictures of Nazis while they listened to Hitler, and madmen wear it. It is fanaticism, and it is always frightening.
The loudspeakers were calling her flight. “Well, happy landings, Kathy,” I said. “But I might as well be frank. I don’t see any hope for it.”
“You don’t? Well, you try to stop me, Steve! You can’t turn destiny aside, or halt the will of God.”
Everyone on the ramp stared when she boarded the plane. I knew what they all were thinking. But as for me, she only made me shiver. You think you know a lot about a person, and then you find out you don’t know anything about what goes on inside. I realized that Kitty Ruppe was much too complicated a bit of feminine machinery for me to piece together all by myself. On the way back to the Shoreham I stopped off at the FBI.
CHAPTER 7
Mary Ellen arrived the next day. I had forgotten what an attractive girl she was, in a healthy Midwest way, and perhaps Homer had, too, because he seemed genuinely glad to see her. For a while I followed them about like an unwelcome duenna, fearful that Homer would implicate himself with The Frame by a thoughtless remark, but he appeared more self-possessed than at any time since he had been installed in Washington.
Mary Ellen was one of the few women I’ve ever seen who looks good with a shiny nose. She was fresh and crisp as newly laundered linen, and she had a lot of bounce. Things rocked along nicely, but the very sight of Mary Ellen and Homer holding hands and behaving like they were on a honeymoon made me feel lonesome and dispirited. On Sunday morning I put Jane Zitter in charge of the menage Adam and flew to New York. I soothed my conscience by telling myself I was duty bound to see Thompson and Ostenheimer, and give them a report on Adam’s progress.
My home, and my wife, made Washington feel unreal and faraway. Marge was wearing a new dress when I arrived, one of those dresses that make you keep watching. She was all smelled up with perfume, and it seemed to me that her makeup was a bit too perfect, and her hair-do a little professional. “You think we’re going out tonight,” I accused her, “but we’re not.”
She kissed me experimentally. “Of course not, darling,” she said. “We’re going to stay right here, and Maria and Tommy Thompson are coming over, and we’ll play bridge and talk.” She kissed me again, as if she were testing my breath for liquor, or something.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
“Is there anything wrong with me wanting to kiss you?”
“No, certainly not. I like it. That’s why I’m here.”
“You’ve been having fun in Washington, haven’t you dear?”
“Fun? Hell no. What a snafu.”
“Your face is all full of lipstick,” she said. She took a handkerchief and went to work on me. “I thought it would be fun for you, with that curvy wench—what’s her name—The Frame?”
“The Frame! What about me and The Frame?”
“Oh, nothing. I just saw a picture of you and what’s her name—The Frame—in the Journal-American. The caption said something about Mr. Adam, glimpsed with the Special Assistant to the Director of N.R.P., the former newspaperman Stephen Decatur Smith, and The Frame, at a fashionable supper club. Since you had your arm around The Frame, I thought you must be having fun.”
This is the kind of reward people get for trying to render a public service. About a matter like this there is no use being serious. The more earnest your pleas of innocence, the more guilty you seem. I said, “That’s what you get for reading the Journal-American.”
“She must be charming,” Marge said. “And she’s probably very much impressed with your official position. I really don’t see why you bothered to come to New York and visit me, except of course you probably have business to discuss with Maria and Dr. Thompson.”
“Of course I’ve got business to discuss with them,” I said, “and of course that’s the only reason I came to New York. As a matter of fact, I do not see how I can stay the night.”
Marge kissed me again, and this time it wasn’t testing. “Come on,” she said, “give.” I told her about Homer and The Frame. It mad
e her very thoughtful. “Stephen,” she said, “I think you’re in trouble. If that girl gets Homer, where will that leave the rest of us?”
“But she’s not going to get Homer. His wife is with him now, and they seem perfectly happy and contented.”
“But that isn’t much better.”
I considered this a very queer statement. “Marge,” I inquired, “honestly, are you considering having a baby by A.I.?”
“Perhaps,” she said. I knew that meant yes. Instantly, I felt betrayed. I felt like a cuckold, and I knew that every other husband whose wife contemplated having an A.I. baby would feel the same. I know it wasn’t sensible, but there it was, as fundamental as Homer’s desire for The Frame, or Marge’s urge to have children.
When Tommy Thompson and Maria arrived they seemed to be tiptoeing on a pink cloud. His St. Bernard eyes followed her, proud and possessive and devoted, and she sat beside him, and squirmed against his shoulder. A love affair between two doctors, or between a doctor and a nurse, is sometimes difficult to understand. How they can reconcile the terms of medical anatomy with the delicate language of passion is something that has never been fully explained, but they do it all the time.
Of course we talked about A.I. We played bridge, in the sense that someone dealt cards and we looked at them, but mostly we talked. Except Tommy didn’t talk much. Tommy Thompson was thinking. He did his thinking slowly. When you watched him you could almost hear his brain go click, click, click like an old grandfather clock, just as creaky, and just as right.
“I’ll tell you,” he said finally, “I don’t think the world is going to be permanently sterile. I think there’s a chance for it.”
“You mean through Mr. Adam?” Marge asked.
“Perhaps. He might get it started.”
“What then?”
“Well,” Tommy hesitantly explained, “you know I’ve been experimenting. I’m not entirely satisfied that the male sperm is really dead. I think he is stunned, knocked out, paralyzed, but I’m not sure he is dead. I think I saw one wriggle.”
“When you look through a microscope too long everything wriggles,” said Maria.
“No, I am sure I saw one wriggle.” Tommy looked into his glass, as if he saw one there. “I might as well tell you all about it. I’ve been working eighteen hours a day on this idea of mine. If it is true that the male germ isn’t totally destroyed, then it is just a matter of nursing him back—or jarring him back—into full vitality. I’ve got a compound—”
“Quack!” I interrupted. “Medicine man! Purveyor of snake oil!”
“It is a silly sort of business,” he continued, ignoring me. “It is mostly seaweed. High iodized content.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Maria, suddenly alert. “Why don’t you try it out?”
“I am trying it out. But I need more experimental animals—mostly husbands. How about you, Steve? Some of my colleagues at Polyclinic are taking it.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m no guinea pig.”
Marge looked at me. “Go ahead and try it,” she urged. “You ought to contribute something to humanity.”
“All over the world,” I replied, “pathologists and biologists and endocrinologists are undoubtedly working, just like Tommy here, on such ideas. Maybe Tommy or one of the others will come up with something. When he does, why naturally I’ll take it. But right at the moment I don’t feel like filling my stomach with seaweed.”
“You’re a big help!” said Marge. “You’re practically a traitor to the human race!”
“If he changes his mind,” Tommy told her, “I’ll give him a bottle of the stuff. It can’t hurt him—at least I don’t think it can hurt him because it hasn’t hurt any of the others. I prescribe forty drops a day, in this test period, and none of the fellows at the hospital are sick yet. On the other hand none of them seem to be starting any babies.”
“He won’t change his mind,” Marge said. “He just doesn’t want to have any children—never has.”
I didn’t argue. What was the sense of arguing? Marge has that damnable type of memory that goes back through the years and picks up evidence that you have long forgotten, and drowns you in it.
I told Maria and Tommy about Homer’s progress, touching lightly on the episode of The Frame, and they agreed that it sounded as if he were greatly improved, and probably on the way to recovery. They promised to come down to Washington and look him over. Perhaps he was in shape for the beginning of A.I., although they couldn’t be sure until they’d given him a thorough checkup.
At nine o’clock we listened to Winchell. He sounded breathless as if he had run up twenty flights in Radio City. He started off with a flash from London. The British Foreign Office had learned, he said, that two unsterilized males had been discovered in Outer Mongolia. They had been discovered several months ago, but the Russians were keeping it a secret. It seems that they were miners, and like Adam they had been in the lowest level of a deep lead workings when Mississippi blew up.
“That’s very interesting,” Tommy said. “I wonder if it’s true?”
“It sounds plausible,” said Maria.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It isn’t very likely that the British Foreign Office would know what goes on in Outer Mongolia. There probably have been some rumors floating around, and finally the rumors reached London, and the Foreign Office allowed them to leak, just to sound out the Russians as to whether they were true.”
“If it is true, what effect would that have on the N.R.P.?” Marge asked.
“Oh, I think it would start a production race between us and the Russians. And there would be a lot of pressure to utilize Adam immediately. I’m glad he’s better, because even the hint of an unsterilized Russian is likely to send Washington spinning.”
“It is sort of frightening,” Marge said. “Those Mongols breed like mice, don’t they?”
“All things considered,” Tommy said, “I think a good husky Mongol would outbreed Adam three to one, from what I have seen of him.”
“That’s probably true,” said Maria, “but if we’re able to perfect improved methods of A.I. utilizing a single germ for each impregnation—which as you know is what I’ve been working on—why we can meet their competition. However, they’re just as advanced as we are in those things and if they have two men to our one, and a bigger population to work with, why I suppose they can keep their birth rate well above ours.”
I said it was all hypothetical anyway, until something definite was known, and if it was true then that was good, because then both countries would get together and pool their knowledge and perhaps save the human race after all. Maria said she didn’t think it would work out that way, because all her experiments were viewed as military secrets, and she supposed it was the same with the Russians.
I explained about military secrets, so far as I knew. It seems that every major power has two operations, one called S.I.—Secret Intelligence—and the other C.I.—Counter Intelligence. “Now that this is peacetime,” I said, “ordinarily those guys would be back in their normal occupations as purveyors of buggy whips, peddlers of brushes, operators of shooting galleries, and clam and oyster salesmen. But a secret agent makes a lot of money and he doesn’t have to account for it. In every country in the world it is called ‘unvouchered funds,’ and a secret agent supposedly pays out these unvouchered funds to people for information.”
“It sounds very profitable,” Marge agreed.
“Oh, it is. It is a wonderful racket. It is sort of an international club. All the fellows in S.I. try to penetrate other countries, and all the fellows in C.I. try to keep other countries from penetrating us.”
“We have very nice counter-intelligence men,” Maria objected. “They come to see me all the time. They put up baskets in our laboratories, and we are supposed to throw all our notes in them, and then they come around and burn the baskets. It is just like collecting the garbage, only cleaner.”
“Is that all they do?” ask
ed Marge.
“Oh, no. They make you sign papers.”
“The British,” I explained, “are wise to the racket, and they do it better. Most of the men in the British Secret Service have to hold other jobs too. In that way the government gets some work out of them. It is also a very good cover, because it is an honest cover. We aren’t that smart. A guy turns up in a place like Istanbul and claims to be a reporter for Field and Stream, or Vogue, and everyone knows it is a phoney cover, but nobody says anything about it, because it would hurt the racket generally.”
The telephone rang. It was Jane, in Washington. The N.R.P. was boiling, she said. Everybody was excited about the news from Outer Mongolia. Both Gableman and Mr. Pumphrey had called, and they wanted me to return to Washington immediately. There was to be a special conference with the State Department at ten in the morning, and the Planning Board would meet at eleven, and at noon Mr. Pumphrey would call at the White House. “But is it true about this Outer Mongolian business?” I asked.
“They don’t know,” Jane said. “But whether it is true or not, it is bound to have repercussions in Congress, and that’s what worries them.”
“Nothing doing,” I said. “Tell them I’ve got a very important business engagement with the Advisory Committee, and we are discussing every phase of the situation. Tell them I’ll bring in the recommendations of the Advisory Committee when I get back. Do you think that will fix it?”
“I hope so,” Jane said, “but they are terribly excited.”
She asked how soon I’d be back, and I said probably in a couple of days, unless something really urgent developed. She said that was all right, and she would call Mr. Gableman and Mr. Pumphrey and stress the importance of my conferring with the medical advisers at this time. I said she was a sweetheart, and that I would give her a kiss when I got back, because I saw that Marge was listening.
“You don’t make me a bit jealous,” Marge said when I hung up. “That was your secretary, and she doesn’t worry me at all, if you gave me an accurate description of her. However, I’m still not sure about that Hollywood person.”