by Pat Frank
“What do you mean, ‘limited scale’?” I asked.
“Well, so long as everything goes along evenly, we can use Adam for the impregnation of, say, two or three women a week. After he gains more weight and his metabolism perks up he can be used more frequently, providing that there are no glandular disturbances. Of course, if he were subjected to great emotional shock, or his general physical condition started to get worse instead of better, then we’d have to call it off. But for now, you can go ahead.”
I almost shouted. I’m afraid I ran to the telephone like a cub reporter with his first flash. I called Abel Pumphrey, and gave him the news, and then I called Danny Williams at the White House. Danny was a little cagey, and made me repeat everything Tommy had said, and then he asked me: “I suppose you feel your job’s over now?”
I said, “I have only one life to give for my country, and believe me, bud, I have given it!”
“Oh, no you haven’t,” he told me. “We’ll be satisfied when A.I. is S.O.P.*”
“That’s not fair, Danny,” I pleaded. “I only agreed to get Adam in condition for production. I’ve got my own life to lead.”
“I could give you a lecture,” Danny said, “on national responsibility. But I do not think it is necessary. You know damn good and well that your job hasn’t ended. What about your wife? Do you want her to be childless? For that matter, do you want to be childless? Do you want to pass out of this world without perpetuating the name of—” he hesitated—“Stephen Decatur Smith, the second.”
“Okay, Danny,” I surrendered. “But when things are S.O.P., I’m finished.”
“When it is all over,” Danny said, “the President will no doubt give you an award of the Legion of Merit.”
I remembered Colonel Phelps-Smythe. I started out to tell Danny what he could do with the Legion of Merit, pointed end first, but at that moment Tommy touched me on the shoulder, and said the car was there, and he and Homer were waiting.
So we went back to the party. Perhaps I had better explain. It wasn’t a party when we left, but it was a party when we got back. You cannot put a lot of people in a large number of rooms with an unlimited assortment of free liquor, and an excuse, and not have a party. The excuse was the beginning of A.I., and they had anticipated the verdict before we returned. As a matter of fact, when I look back on it, any other verdict seemed impossible. On that day, even if Homer Adam were drawing his last breath, gasping like a fish long out of water, still he would have been approved for A.I. I guess we were all pretty desperate.
Everybody treated Homer as if he had just made a winning touchdown, and he seemed to like it. You cannot exactly say that he stuck out his chest, but at least his habitual slump straightened, in the manner of all men who have been thumped and probed by the doctors, and told they will live. But he stayed around the telephone. Whenever our phone rang, Homer answered. Long before I’d arranged to have all our calls screened. That is, I’d left a selected list of people who could call and get straight through. Other calls were referred to N.R.P. Finally Homer answered the telephone and didn’t call me, or Jane, or J.C. Pogey, or anyone else to it. He simply seemed to curl around it. I edged toward him, but I didn’t hear much. Just yes, and no, and grunts.
When he had finished, I went downstairs to the switchboard. “There was just a call for Mr. Adam,” I said. “Where did it come from?”
“Oh, that one. From L.A.”
“Who authorized calls from L.A. up into 5-F?”
“Why, Mr. Smith,” the girl said, surprised. “Mr. Adam himself did! We don’t screen any calls from Miss Kathy Riddell.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Why, ever since Miss Riddell was in Washington.”
I said “thank you,” and went back upstairs. There wasn’t much, or anything, that I could do about it. I didn’t want to start anything that would send Homer off on some unpredictable tangent. I simply wanted to maintain the status quo. Anyway, in a few days it wouldn’t matter, I thought. Homer would be so busy re-populating the earth that not even The Frame would interest him.
I don’t think J.C. Pogey was a good influence on Homer. That afternoon we were all sitting around, and Marge was acting as bartender, and Tommy Thompson was telling us about his experiments which he hoped would revive the male germ through medicine. It seems his first batch of seaweed lotion, or whatever it was, hadn’t been successful. Some fellows got sick, but no wives got pregnant. So he had revised the formula.
“Wouldn’t it be grand if it worked,” Homer said. “Imagine, I could—why I could do whatever I wanted. I’d be just like everybody else!”
“I don’t see anything good about it,” said J.C., “any more than I see any real sense in torturing Homer Adam, here, simply because he was the victim of an oversight. You—” he pointed a lean finger at Tommy—“exhaust yourself trying to combat destiny. Why don’t you take that girl—” he shifted his finger towards Maria—“out into the woods somewhere and forget all about the so-called human race. This little globe we live on has grown old, as I have, and God has simply decided to eliminate it. When Mississippi blew up God could just as easily have allowed the world to blossom as a nova. Instead, he is going to let it die like the last coal in the grate. Why fight it?”
Maria had been sitting on the arm of Tommy’s chair, one small hand on his massive shoulder. She waited for Tommy to speak, and when he did not, she said, quietly, “I think I can tell you why Tommy works, and why I work, Mr. Pogey. We are fighting for more than our lives. We are fighting to keep intact the thread that ties us to the hereafter. Man’s only link with immortality is through his children. That’s why we want the world to keep on having babies.”
J.C. Pogey shook his head in unhappy denial. “You’re taking the short view,” he said. “I take the long view. This particular sphere is only one of unnumbered millions stretching out across uncountable light years. Some of these spheres probably carry creatures which also fancy they have souls, and that they are linked with the Almighty. We would be very self-centered to think otherwise.”
“I’ll agree,” Maria argued, “that there must be some kind of life on other planets, perhaps in other constellations, but you can’t call it human.”
“Depends on what you term human,” said J.C. Pogey. “Now I can imagine a human being on some other globe. He might have four heads and eight arms. If we saw him we’d consider him a monstrosity, simply because he would be a bit unusual. But think how much better off he would be than we humans who have only one head and two arms. One brain might be a whiz at mathematics and a second at literature and another at philosophy and the fourth might just like to raise hell. Think of the fun he’d have.”
Marge said she thought J.C. was crazy, and that furthermore he made her feel frightened, but Homer was listening, fascinated. “If that’s true,” he said, “it wouldn’t be so bad if I—failed, would it?”
“Not at all,” J.C. said.
“Don’t listen to him, Homer,” Marge said. “He’s just a nasty sacrilegious old man.”
“On the contrary,” said J.C., “the only thing that makes me retain my sanity, and my belief in the Deity, is that this is a third-class world which God doesn’t take very seriously. It is like a rotten fruit that has hung too long upon the tree. God has simply become bored with running this world, and is closing it down.”
“Then you don’t think A.I. will work?” Homer asked, with the utter faith of a woman asking a question of a swami.
“Frankly, no,” J.C. replied. “I think you are just an accident, Homer, an oversight that will be remedied. You shouldn’t have been down in that shaft when Mississippi blew up.”
I could see that Homer was impressed. “Now look, J.C.,” I said. “Stop putting those silly ideas into Homer’s head. Just because you’re too old to have children yourself, you shouldn’t discourage everybody else in the world.”
J.C. snorted. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “Fate’s against it.”
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“A.I. starts Monday,” I said. “On Monday everything begins again.”
A few hours later I began to think J.C. Pogey was right. Gableman and Klutz came to see us. I thought they were coming in to join the celebration, but they seemed distraught and worried. “Bring Mr. Gableman and Mr. Klutz a drink,” I told Marge. “And honey, change the brand. Every drink I’ve had this afternoon tastes funny.”
“Has it, dear?” Marge asked. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I’m mixing them wrong. I’ll do better.”
Gableman signaled me with a nod, and we went into a huddle in a corner. “Hell to pay,” he said. “The office is a madhouse.”
“What’s wrong?”
Klutz said, “Well, this thing took us rather suddenly—I mean putting Adam into production right away—and quite truthfully, we don’t seem to be prepared for it.”
“I don’t see why not,” I told him. “Everything is simple enough now. Homer is okay. I’ll just take him down to the lab Monday morning, and by Monday night some worthy female will be pregnant.”
“That’s just it,” Klutz said. “How do we pick the worthy female?”
“You don’t mean to tell me,” I said, “that with practically every woman in the United States wanting to become a mother—even women who never wanted to be mothers before—that you have trouble picking one!”
Klutz drew a pencil from his pocket, and paper. He seemed incapable of thought or speech unless they were accompanied by doodles. “It is far more complicated than that!” he said. “It is complicated beyond anything anyone imagined! It is a major matter of policy that should have been decided, long ago, by the Inter-Departmental Committee, on the highest level, mind you. For whomever we pick as the first A.I. mother, all the other women will raise a howl, and it is bound to have political repercussions!”
“That sounds insane,” I commented. I looked up, and saw Homer’s gaunt form behind me, swaying slightly. He was listening, and he did not seem amused.
“Oh, no,” said Gableman. “It is not insane at all. Consider the factors involved. In the first place—and this is really minor—there is the matter of geography. Every state wants priority on production, and the honor of furnishing the first A.I. mother.”
“That shouldn’t be hard,” I pointed out. “After all, while Homer’s capacity is to be limited for the time being, each section of the country can be represented in the first group of mothers selected.”
Gableman ran his long, unwashed hands through his long, oily hair. “As I said,” he persisted, “that is the simplest part. Then you get into race, religion, and social and economic position. The Negro question is particularly vexing. Do you know what the Southern Democrats in the Senate are doing? They’re planning to legislate N.R.P. out of existence unless we follow an All White policy. And the Negro press is screaming that we will be murdering the race unless we follow at least a policy of fifty-fifty.
“And take religion. There are some people who think that this is a fine opportunity to eliminate the Catholics, or the Jews, and naturally the Catholics and Jews are afraid of just this and they are demanding guarantees against extinction.”
I noticed that J.C. Pogey and Marge had joined our little group. Pogey’s face showed no emotion, but I knew he was laughing inside himself. “I think it is ridiculous,” I said. “The thing to do is get it started. Why, look at Marge here. She’s an average woman, and most of all she wants things to begin again, don’t you dear?”
“I wouldn’t mind having an Adam child, if that’s what you mean,” Marge said, smiling at Homer. “As a matter of fact, I’d like one very much.”
“Now that wouldn’t do at all, if I may say so,” Gableman said seriously. “Then people would charge the Administration with a sort of new-fangled nepotism.”
Klutz’s pencil continued to work. “And that isn’t by any means all,” he went on. “That is just the beginning. Suppose we pick a nice, average, Presbyterian, white, not rich not poor housewife, of good character. Well, all the unmarried women will say she’s already had her chance, and didn’t do anything about it, and that they, the unmarried women who never had a chance should have one now. Then, of course, the veterans’ wives have been asking for priority—and certainly this should be considered, with elections coming up next year—but so have the Wacs and the Waves. Who should have the priority, the wives or the service-women? Dear, dear, I should think that this is the most perplexing problem that N.R.P. has ever faced.” Klutz stared at us. Obviously, it was so monumental he could say no more.
Gableman took it up. “When the State Department heard that A.I. was authorized to begin Monday, it immediately protested to the President, because it had not been kept fully informed. The State Department is conducting the most delicate negotiations on how to share Adam. It is so delicate because of the two Mongolians.”
“May I say something?” Homer asked timidly.
Gableman didn’t hear him. “You see, the international situation is this way. The State Department doesn’t want to be accused of appeasing Russia, but if there actually are two Mongolians then we want to be big-hearted, and offer Russia a good slice of Adam. However, nobody knows whether there are two Mongolians or not, and until the State Department finds out, they do not want to be committed to a program. They have given us an order to do nothing hasty.”
“Pardon me a moment,” Homer interrupted. “I was just going to say—”
“Yes,” Klutz said. “I am afraid we have been caught flat-footed. I think we should have a group of experts draw up recommendations to present to the Planning Board, which in turn will work out a proposal which will be presented to the Inter-Departmental Commitee, which then can draw up a directive for the approval of the President.”
“Wait a moment!” Homer shouted. It was the first time I, or I suppose anyone else, had ever heard Homer Adam shout. It shocked us all into silence. Even Homer himself could not speak for a few seconds. But observing the surprising effect upon us all, apparently gave him courage, because he thrust out his chin as far as it would go and demanded: “Did it ever occur to you people that I might want to have something to say about this matter? It’s me that’s doing it, you know!”
Nobody said anything. “Why can’t I pick my own brides?” Homer demanded.
“Oh, but you cannot really call them brides,” Klutz protested. “It is doubtful whether you’ll ever see any of them at all.”
“The children,” Homer said, “are going to be my children, and I think I should have something to say about what the mothers look like.”
“Perhaps,” Gableman suggested smoothly, “Mr. Adam is thinking of one certain person?”
“And what if I am?” said Homer. He looked angry enough to fight. “You stand up there and talk about splitting me up and dealing me out as if I were a tax rebate. Perhaps, so long as I am to be given away, I can give away a little of myself.”
Marge shoved herself in front of me. “I think Homer is absolutely right,” she said. “I think for the first one he should choose whoever he wants.”
“You keep out of this!” I ordered her. “This is official business, and anyway I think you’ve got your mind set on being unfaithful to me.”
Klutz held up his hands. “Now, Mr. Adam,” he pleaded, “please be reasonable. The N.R.P.—and I am sure I am speaking for Mr. Pumphrey and the Planning Board—could not possibly allow you to allocate yourself. We would be accused of permitting you to set yourself up as a dictator—which indeed you would be. Why, if you picked the mothers, there wouldn’t be much use of the N.R.P. continuing at all, would there? It would be contrary to the national interest.”
Gableman rubbed his face, and his lower jaw worked as if in rhythm with deep thought. “Gentlemen, I think I can offer a solution,” he said. “Why not pick the first A.I. mothers by lot, just the way soldiers are picked by the draft?”
“That sounds like a very sound idea,” Klutz agreed. “The only thing is we’d have to register all the women who wante
d to be mothers, which would consume much time. And in addition, if every single prospect for motherhood was allowed to register, the first choice might be one who would be extremely controversial, and then where would we be? I’m not sure N.R.P. could survive an unlucky choice.”
“Well, let’s put it in the lap of Congress,” Gableman said. “We’ll have each Senator and Congressman nominate two women—just like they nominate candidates for West Point—and then we’ll give them numbers, and the President can pick a number out of that goldfish bowl we always use for those things.”
“Say, that’s fine,” Klutz agreed. “I think that does it. But what about the international drawings, if we have any?”
“Oh, we’ll leave that to the UN,” said Gableman, “although the State Department won’t like it.”
“Well, thank goodness that’s settled,” said Klutz.
Homer, silent and white-faced, walked out of the room, down the hall, into his own bedroom, and shut the door. I didn’t feel good about the way we’d treated Homer, but obviously, for his own best interests, I felt he should not be allowed to participate in this phase of things.
Later that evening a Special Agent from the FBI came to 5-F. He brought, as a safe hand messenger, the dossier of The Frame which I’d requested the day she left for the Coast. You’d think newspapermen would quit being surprised. They discover that kindly old gentlemen rape, and sometimes chop up, little girls; and church deacons garnish their wives’ soup with arsenic over a period of years; and the impoverished old lady who has been on relief has three hundred thousand in cash stuffed in her mattress; and the lieutenant general who is a hero at home is a heel at the front. Newspapermen ought to quit being surprised, but they never do, and I was surprised at the dossier on The Frame. I had no more read the book of her life correctly than the man browsing through the library, who picks up a volume and reads an occasional sentence and paragraph here and there—skipping whole chapters—and lays it down in ten minutes.