HE PAUSED for a moment, staring at her with brows downdrawn. He wondered fleetingly if she’d gone mad. She took a deep breath.
“Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet thou dost destroy me.
“Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay; and wilt thou bring me into dust again?”
“Did you make that up?” he demanded sharply.
She shook her head. “Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese? Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews. Thou hast granted me life—”
The recitative was weirdly arresting, in the hazy red-shadowed void of the Factory, beside the dynamite boxes. The great vats brooded glowing near and far in their many shades of red; and for some reason he noticed again the one that was dark, in sign that it was come to its time.
The girl’s eyes were dark and wild upon him and the queer, archaic words seemed to strike at poignant personal meanings. But as she paused for breath he broke in, shattering the near-hypnotic spell . . . shattering it, though, only at the risk of letting the meanings behind the words penetrate and grow real . . .
“What’s that? Poetry? If you didn’t make it up, who did?”
“It’s a sort of poem,” she acknowledged. “Something I found in one of the books—an old book, thousands of years old. One of Their books, of course. I don’t suppose anybody knows who wrote the poem, except that he was a Jew—one of the kinds of people They once singled out for that hate of Theirs . . . It’s about a man called Job.”
“A man?” he asked stupidly.
“Job is complaining bitterly to the God who, he believes, created him in His own image; saying, ‘You made me what I am, and now you treat me like this? You had no right to do it!’ And he goes on and says:
“Thou huntest me as a fierce lion . . . Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me!”
“I should have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from the womb to the grave.”
“Yes,” he muttered, “that’s it . . . But . . . a man? One of Them?”
He was looking very closely into her intent eyes, only vaguely aware that she had taken his clenched hand in hers and was gently trying to loosen his fingers’ grip on the deadly wires. “You’re not trying to fool me?” he asked.
“I’m trying to make you see the truth. That They can be unhappy, too . . . weak and afraid and desperate and bitter to the point of rebellion, of wanting to die—because that’s the only way you can rebel against somebody that’s far above you . . . But They’re not above us; They’re only beside us. In the end, They’ll realize that, and we will, too; and it won’t make any difference whether a person’s born or made. That’s what those lines told me the first time I read them; that’s why I remembered them now.
“Do you understand? Once we know that—we don’t have to commit suicide, as individuals or as a race. We can fight Them—when, we have to—as equals; and we can live at peace with Them as equals afterward, when the battle’s won. Perhaps you and I can do more than most of our people, if we can go among Them, work among Them unnoticed . . .”
SLOWLY he raised his hand, stared dumbly at the trailing wires it clutched. He let them fall.
She grasped both his hands and tugged at him in sudden anxious impatience; her eyes were alight though her mouth was unsmiling. “Come, let’s hurry; let’s get away . . .”
(Cars rolled up, quietly, without lights, alongside the outer fence. Men slipped warily through the open gate into the Factory yard. Men in uniform with shiny boots and belts, some with drawn guns. But they waited, hugging the fence, glancing with impatience out to the highway and with suspicion at the partly-open storeroom door . . . Finally another car pulled up beside the others, and two more men got out; a gaunt elderly man, as neatly dressed as if it were noon and a shorter one with sandy hair and thick glasses, wearing a topcoat flung on over striped pajamas. The police parted to let them through, and they conferred tersely in the lee of the building.)
They’d gone half the length of the workshop—he moving beside her like a sleepwalker—when he stopped short, closing a hand upon her arm. “Wait. There’s still—something’s got to be done here.”
She gave him a quick, scared glance. “No, not that—not any more. But look—over there.”
She looked, saw the breeder which gloomed darkly across the way,’ among its glowing companions, its inner light guttering out into the darkness of ripeness and frustrated parturience.
He said jerkily, “One of us; one more! But he, or she, won’t live—or will be deformed, a monster, if nothing’s done before morning. We should have plenty of time—”
“Yes, of course,” she breathed.
“Do you know the reception procedure on the basement line? I can handle all the steps on this level; I’ve done it lots of times . . . All right. You go down there. After discharge is completed, you can signal if you need help to put him—it—into suspension so it’ll be all right till morning.”
She nodded again, hurried off into the red haze as he made his way toward the breeder.
A light flashed on presently among the jumble of controls, signaling her presence on the level beneath.
HE OPENED the first valve, and a hidden gurgling began as the nutrient bath started to drain away. Deftly, summoning up old skills as they were needed, he made fine adjustments of current and radiation; he waited, counting seconds without haste, to snap the right switches at the right moments.
Heavy footsteps rang and echoed in the windowless cavern. He glanced up, briefly, glimpsing the men, the uniforms, the guns. Then he saw that a temperature gauge was creeping dangerously downward, and his hand shot out automatically to twist a vernier. The expiring ruby glow in the depths of the great glass womb grew brighter. Murkily seen, down there, something stirred, flexing spasmodically in the first voluntary exercise of muscles, protesting feebly against the increasing breakdown of its cozy little world . . .
He sensed Them closing round him. felt the catwalk shake Their tread.
“Don’t disturb him now! Stand clear!” It was a shrill voice, not very authoritative, belonging to the man who wore his topcoat over his pajamas. But the police drew back and made way. The sandy-haired man came near, peered through his glasses at the instrument settings, noted the signal light. “He’s got a helper down in the basement . . . No! Don’t go down there yet! This is a delicate process they’re carrying out; if anything should go wrong at this stage . . .” In response to a gruff query he said grudgingly: “About ten minutes more.”
. . . He heard Their talk with only half an ear; all his mind was concentrated on precision, on making the intuitive right decisions of the trained operator. And They spoke rather hushedly now, as They stood unmoving or fidgeted, watching with faces that looked pale in the red twilight.
“Well, it must have been one of ’em slugged the watchman.”
“I don’t get it, though; you can see, it works here. So it busts in in the middle of the night to put in some overtime? That’s a hell of a way to buck for a transfer to the coal mines.”
“Shdup! You want to make him foul up now? Got any idea how much one of them things costs?”
“Hey, look at this!”
“Good God. Don’t touch it; put in a call for the bomb squad.”
“Doctor, I intend to insist on a thorough psychological investigation of this case. And—I think the results ought to be published.”
“Published? First of all, we’ve got to decide how to present this incident to the Committee.”
“The Committee be damned!”
“Unfortunately, we can’t . . .”
The preparatory steps were all finished. He pressed a button twice, and saw, by the blink of the signal light, that she was still standing by below.
With a careful and steady hand, he began easing over the lever which launched th
e newly-created one on the beginning of its perilous path into life.
The two of them were hustled out of the Factory separately, out into the cold night air, blinking at the spotlights that blazed now from the waiting patrol cars.
Yet there was a moment when they passed near enough that he was able to call hastily, “How—Was it—” And she could answer quickly, head held high between the guards: “He was perfect.”
Then they were hurried apart.
THE LAUGH
To Dicky grownups were absurdly like ants. They worked hard for no good purpose. But some day a big, big change would be coming!
If a lad of eight should get an urge to go tramping into a cosmic shoe-store in search of a giant’s boots his egotism might become a frightening thing. Robert Abernathy probably hopes it wont happen. But he here plants such grave doubts in our mind that we wonder if it’s safe to spoil children.
DICKY lay comfortably on his stomach in the high backyard weeds, watching the ants. His eyes darted back and forth, trying to see what all of them were doing at the same time—all around their hill on the sun-warmed bare slope by the weed patch.
But there were too many of them and they ran too fast in too many different directions. They skirmished, climbed, and slid. They pushed, lifted, and tugged at bits of straw, at seeds, and even the leg of a beetle. They labored mightily and inefficiently to transport these treasures to their nest. Dicky gazed at them in rapt absorption obscurely awed by their incomprehensible fervor of dedication.
They reminded him—He searched the teeming storehouse of a five-year-old’s memories, and thought that the ants reminded him of the lawn-tender which, every evening when it wasn’t raining, crept out of its little kennel behind the house to see if the grass needed cutting or watering. If it did, the dutiful machine went clicking and buzzing up and down on its fat wheels, pivoting precisely at the edge of the yard. It never came down here, where the ground sloped toward the brook thirty yards away, and the weeds grew rank—where Dicky the courageous wasn’t supposed to go either.
He glanced up the slope, suddenly conscious of the naked sun blazing down on him through the thin cover of foliage and of the nearness of the house beyond its clipped green rectangle of lawn. The cooling intake on the house roof turned slowly, flaring to snare an unreliable faint breeze. The windows had half-shuttered themselves against the July afternoon brilliance, and they now resembled squinting eyes. The eyes were dark with indoor shadow and you couldn’t tell whether they were looking at you or not.
But if Mother did look out, she couldn’t possibly see him here. She would think he was sitting in the sun by the wall of the house, playing as he was supposed to do with his toy cars or his toy helicopter. The cars would run just to the edge of the yard, and the helicopter would fly only as high as the house. So naturally Dicky had grown bored with them.
He wriggled closer to the busy ants, to the very edge of the weed forest. The ants went on behaving as if Dicky wasn’t there. Softly, Dicky said, “Boo! Woo? You!” But the ants didn’t notice.
Judicially, he decided that he would never be an ant, even if the opportunity should be offered him. Ants were like grownups. They worked hard for no good reason which Dicky could understand and they paid no attention to more important things.
But it would be fun to be very small, and live here among weeds like giant trees. It would be fun to hide under the leaves when people came looking for him. He scanned the ground minutely, picturing himself walking here and there among the wonders of the little world—climbing on a straw that was a fallen log, and looking up to see an insect go whirring past with iridescent wings. Then the slope would be a mountain, and the brook at its foot would become a vast shining ocean.
Not an ant, though. He would rather be a frog.
Vividly, for life, Dicky would remember the day when he’d first seen the frog. It had been back when there’d been a hole in the fence, hidden by weeds. It had been a hole which only he knew about, and several times he’d crawled through and visited the forbidden shores beyond. The brook flowed there dark, deep, and quiet between cement banks, severely walled like almost all the world. But under the footbridge a little way below the house lived the frog.
Dicky had known he was there, had heard him at twilight—krraak! krraak! But for a long time he hadn’t known who made the sound. And then, one rain-washed afternoon, he’d crept stealthily along the wet grass of the bank and peered into the shadows beneath the bridge.
The frog was sitting on the slimed rubble close to the water—fat, green, self-important. He was squatting there with his tiny forefeet accurately tucked up under him. He had lazy jewel eyes, and was ballooning his mottled throat to send out his krraak. Smugly happy he seemed, in his confidence that the world had only been waiting to hear his frog noise.
The revelation had been too much for Dicky, and he had burst out laughing. Then he had looked quickly around, alarmed, to see if anyone had heard him. But nobody had except the frog, who promptly went gchonk! into the water.
Now the fence had been repaired and there was no way through. If Dicky so much as went near it—forbidden as he was to go that far—his father’s voice came to his ears, just as if his father were not away at work. It said: “Dicky, go home!”
But Dicky didn’t grieve unduly. Having found the way blocked, he dismissed it from his thoughts. After all, lie had seen the frog, and he could remember it any time he wanted to.
Remembering now, he rose to a crouching position among the weeds, and said, “Krraak, krraak!” He said it softly under his breath, and smiled to himself.
A sudden commotion on the sunlit ground recalled his attention to the ants. Two of them had seized hold of a tiny leaf, one on each side, but they seemed unable to agree on which way it should go. They tugged in opposite directions. First one of them found firm footing in a half-buried pebble and dragged the other one, its feet scrabbling madly in loose sand. Then the second ant got a purchase on the pebble and in turn triumphantly wrestled the leaf, and its struggling rival for a fraction of an inch in its chosen direction. Both ants kept skidding.
Dicky bent close to watch them, a well of pure, delighted amusement bubbling up inside him. Suddenly it all seemed irresistibly funny—that grim Lilliputian determination see-sawing across a pebble just when he’d been thinking of the frog and how he’d laughed at the funny frog—
Dicky felt the spasm starting in his stomach, and ascending sneezelike into his throat, making his nose twitch and his eyes half-close. He felt the laughter coming and couldn’t stop it, and suddenly he was laughing uncontrollably, loudly, gleefully . . .
“Dicky!”
He heard his mother’s shocked voice and scrambled to his feet, the laughter dying into indrawn sobs. The shining afternoon whirled about him into cataclysm.
“What are you doing down there?” she demanded. She stood on the edge of the lawn above him, her voice quivering with anger. “Dicky, answer me!”
“Looking at ants,” he gulped. “I was just—” He crumbled under her reproachful eyes. “I couldn’t help it, Mommie,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t—”
“Come here,” she said in the same strained tone. “What if the neighbors heard you! Do you want them to think crazy people live here? Do you?” She broke off with an effort, and took a deep breath. “Come straight in the house now. And just you wait until your father comes home!”
The next day Dicky’s father didn’t go to work at the yeast plant. Instead, all three of them went for a ride. They went in a coptercab, which meant downtown, instead of in the car which would have meant a picnic in the country.
The night before there had been a consultation which Dicky had overheard only in snatches:
“Laughing at ants! I caught him at it.”
“. . . At people next, I suppose!”
“But what can we have done wrong?”
Since then, happily, Dicky’s fall from grace hadn’t been mentioned, and in the excitement of a ’copter tri
p he forgot it altogether.
The automatic pilot set them down on the roof of a building that loomed large even in a neighborhood of huge buildings. Below were long halls with slick tiles and rubber runners. There were also many doors, and a great many people, dressed entirely in white, and all hurrying.
Without knowing quite how it happened, Dicky became separated from his parents in a big room with two men and a lady in white, and a lot of gleaming and mysterious apparatus. He’d been told not to be scared, and he wasn’t—quite.
“Sit right here, Dicky. Just hold still, now . . .”
They tapped his knees with little mallets, tickled the soles of his bare feet, and shone dazzling lights into his eyes.
“Say ‘black bugs’ blood,’ Dicky.”
“Black bugs’ blood,” stammered Dicky, and looked around anxiously to see what, if anything, the strange incantation might have summoned up.
“That’s a good boy,” said the lady in white soothingly.
“Somatically okay,” said the biggest man in white at last. He nodded to the other two, and they went out.
The big man sat down opposite Dicky and regarded him gravely, but not sternly. He reminded Dicky of his own father in one of his good moods.
“Now, that didn’t hurt, did it?” inquired the big man.
“N-no,” said Dicky.
“We had to give you some tests to make sure you were all right. You are all right. But your parents seem to be a little upset about you. Hmm. Why’s that?” The question was gently authoritative.
“I—I—” Dicky stumbled painfully over the truth. “I guess I laughed.”
The man nodded soberly, and Dicky was aware, with a sudden rush of confidence, that he wasn’t surprised or shocked. It was plain that he wouldn’t be, even if Dicky were to laugh right in his face. Not that Dicky felt like doing that.
“Why did you laugh? Tell me, Dicky.”
“At some ants.” Dicky’s face felt hot, but the big man’s manner was unchanged.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 86