He paused, eying the tip of his cigarette. “You know,” he said, “it sounds like a simple case of arrested development, doesn’t it? Now, now, wait a minute! I only said sounds like it. You’ve got sense enough to recognize a moron when you see one. I don’t say Clarissa was anything like that. I’m just getting at something—.
“I’m thinking about my own little boy. He’s eleven now, and getting adjusted, but when he first started school he- had an I. Q. away above the rest of the class, and they bored him. He didn’t want to play with the other kids. Got to hanging around the house reading until my wife and I realized something had to be done about it. High I. Q. or not, a kid needs other kids to play with. He’ll never learn to make the necessary social adjustments unless he learns young. Can’t grow up psychically quite straight unless be grows up with his own kind. Later on a high I. Q. will be a fine thing, but right now it’s almost a handicap to the kid.” He paused. “Well, see what I mean?”
Leasing shook his head. “I can’t see anything. I’m still dizzy.”
“Clarissa,” said Dyke slowly, “might—in the allegory, mind you, not in any real sense—be the king’s daughter. She might have been born of…well, call it royal blood…into a race of inferiors, and never guess it until she began to develop beyond their level. Maybe the…the king felt the same as I did about my own child—she needed the company of inferiors…of children—while she was growing up. She couldn’t develop properly among—adults. Adults, you see, so far developed beyond anything we know that when they’re in the same room with you, you can’t even remember what they looked like.”
It took Leasing a good minute after Dyke stopped speaking to realize just what he meant. Then he sat up abruptly and said, “Oh, no! It can’t be that. Why, I’d have known—”
“You ought,” Dyke remarked abstractedly, “to watch my kid play baseball. While he’s playing, it’s the most important thing in life. The other kids never guess he has thoughts that go beyond, the game.”
“But…but the shower of gold, for instance,” protested Leasing. “The presence of the god…even the—”
“Wait a minute! Just wait, now. You remember yourself that you jumped at conclusions about the god. Made him up completely out of a glimpse of what looked like a golden shower, and the memory of the Danae legend, and the feeling of a presence and a purpose behind what happened. If you’d seen what looked like a burning bush instead of a shower, you’d have come up with a completely different theory involving Moses, maybe. As for the presence and the visions—” Dyke paused and gave him a narrowed look. He hesitated a moment. “I’m going to suggest something about those later on. You won’t like it. First, though, I want to follow this…this allegory on through. I want to explain fully what might lie beyond this obvious theory on Clarissa. Remember, I don’t take it seriously, But neither do I want to leave it dangling.
It’s fascinating, just as it stands. It seems very clearly to indicate—in the allegory—the existence of homo superior, here and now, right among us.
“Supermen?” Leasing echoed. With an obvious effort he forced his mind into focus and sat up straighter, looking at Dyke with a thoughtful frown. “Maybe. Or maybe, Lieutenant, do you ever read Cabell? In one of his books somewhere I think he has a character refer to a sort of super-race that Impinges on ours with only one…one facet He uses the analogy of geometry, and suggests that the other race might be represented by cubes that show up as squares on the plane geometric surface of our ‘world, though in their own they have a cubic mass we never guess.” He frowned more deeply, and was silent.
Dyke nodded. “Something like that, maybe. Fourth dimension stuff—people restricting themselves into our world temporarily, and for a purpose.” He pulled at his lower lip and then repeated, “For a purpose. That’s humiliating! I’m glad I don’t really believe it’s true. Even considering the thing academically is embarrassing enough. Homo superior, sending his children among us—to play.”
He laughed. “Run along, children! I wonder if you see what I’m driving at. I’m not sure myself, really. It’s too vague. My mind’s human, so it’s limited. I’m set in patterns of anthropomorphic thinking, and my habit-patterns handicap me. We have to feel important. That’s a psychological truism. That’s why Mephistopheles was always supposed to be interested in buying human souls. He wouldn’t have wanted them, really—impalpable, intangibles, no use at all to a demon with a demon’s powers.”
“Where do the demons come in?”
“Nowhere. I’m just talking. Homo superior would be another race without any human touching points at all—as adults.
Demons, in literature, were given human emotions and traits.
Why? Muddy thinking. They wouldn’t have them, any more than a superman would. Tools!” Dyke said significantly, and sat staring at nothing.
“Tools?”
“This…this world.” He gestured. “What the devil do we know about it? We’ve made atom-smashers and, microscopes. And other things. Kid stuff, toys. My boy can use a microscope and see bugs in creek water. A doctor can take the same microscope, use stains, isolate a germ and do something about it That’s maturity. All this world, all this—matter around us, might be simply tools that we’re using like kids. A super race—”
“By definition, wouldn’t it be too super to understand?”
“In tote. A child can’t completely comprehend an adult.
But a child can more or less understand another child—which is reduced to the same equation as his own, or at least the same common denominator. A superman would have to grow. He wouldn’t start out mature. Say the adult human is expressed by x. The adult superman is xy. A superchild—undeveloped, immature—is. Or in other words, the equivalent of a mature specimen of homo sapiens. Sapiens reaches senility and dies. Superior goes on to maturity, the true superman. And that maturity—”
They were silent for awhile.
“They might impinge on us a little, while taking care of their own young,” Dyke went on presently. “They might impose amnesia on anyone who came too close, as you did—might have done. Remember Charles Fort? Mysterious disappearances, balls of light, spaceships, Jersey devils. That’s a side issue. The point is, a superchild could live with us, right here and now, unsuspected. It would appear to be an ordinary adult human. Or if not quite ordinary—certain precautions might be taken.” Again he fell silent, twirling a pencil on the desk.
“Of course, it’s inconceivable,” he went on at last. “All pure theory. I’ve got a much more plausible explanation, though as I warned you, you won’t like it.”
Lessing smiled faintly. “What is it?”
“Remember Clarissa’s fever?”
“Of course. Things were different after that—much more in the open. I thought—maybe she saw things in the delirium for the first time that she couldn’t be allowed to see head-on, in normal life. The fever seemed to be a necessity. But of course—”
“Wait. Just possibly, you know, you may have the whole thing by the wrong end. Look back,- now. You two were caught in a rainstorm, and Clarissa came out of it with a delirium, right? And- after that, things got stranger and stranger. Leasing, did it ever occur to you that you were both caught in that storm? Are you perfectly sure that it wasn’t yourself who had the delirium?”
Lessing sat quite still, meeting the narrowed gaze. After a long moment he shook himself slightly.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sure.”
Dyke. smiled. “All right. Just thought I’d ask. It’s one possibility, of course.” He waited.
Presently Leasing looked up.
“Maybe I did have a fever,” he admitted. “Maybe I imagined it all. That still doesn’t explain the forgetfulness, but skip that. I know one way to settle at least part of the question,”
Dyke nodded. “I wondered if you’d want to do that I mean, right away.”
“Why not? I know the way back I’d know it blindfolded.
Why, she. may have been wait
ing for me all this time!
There’s nothing to prevent me going back tomorrow.”
“There’s a little matter of a pass,” Dyke said. “I believe I can fix that up. But do you think you want to go so soon, Leasing? Without thinking things over? You know, it’s going to be an awful shock if you find no apartment and no Clarissa. And Ill admit I won’t be surprised if that’s just what you do find. I think this whole thing’s an allegory we haven’t fathomed yet. We may never fathom it. But—”
“I’ll have to go,” Leasing told him. “Don’t you see that? We’ll never prove anything until we at least rule- out the most obvious possibility. After all, I might be telling the simple truth!”
Dyke laughed and then shrugged faintly.
Leasing stood before the familiar door, his finger hesitating on the bell. So far, his memory had served him with perfect faith. Here was the corridor he knew well. Here was the door. Inside, he was quite sure, lay the arrangement of walls and rooms, where once Clarissa moved. She might not be there any more, ol course. He must not be disappointed if a strange face answered the bell. It would disprove nothing.
After all, two years had passed.
And Clarissa had been changing rather alarmingly when he saw her last. The fever had seemed to speed things up.
Well, suppose it were all true. Suppose she belonged to the superrace. Suppose she impinged upon Leasing’s world with only one facet of her four-dimensional self. With that one facet she had loved him—they had that much of a meeting ground. Let her have a deeper self, then, than he could ever comprehend; still she could not yet be fully developed into her world of solid geometry, and while one facet remained restricted into the planar world which was all he knew, she might, he thought, still love him. He hoped she could. He remembered her tears. He heard again the sweet, shy, ardent voice saying, “I’ll always love you—”
Firmly he pressed the bell.
The room was changed. Mirrors still lined it, but not—not as he remembered. They were more than mirrors now.
He had no time to analyze the change, for a motion stirred before him.
“Clarissa—” he said. And then, in the one brief instant of awareness that remained to him, he knew at last how wrong he had been.
He had forgotten that four dimensions are not the outermost limits of conceivable scope. Cabell bad unwittingly led him astray~ there are dimensions in which a cube may have many more than six sides. Clarissa’s dimension—
Extensions are possible in dimensions not entirely connected with space—or rather, space is merely a medium through which these extensions may be made. And because humans live upon a three-dimensional planet, and because all planets in this continuum are three-dimensional, no psychic tesseract is possible—except by extensions.
That is, a collection of chromosomes and genes, arranged on earth and here conceived, cannot in themselves form the matrix for a superman. Nor can a battery give more than its destined voltage. But if there are three, six, a dozen batteries of similar size, and if they are connected in series—
Until they are connected, until the linkage is complete, each is an individual. Each has its limitations. There are gropings, guided fumblings through the dark, while those in charge seek to help the scattered organism in fulfilling itself. And therefore the human mind can comprehend the existence of a superbeing up to the point that the connection is made and the batteries become one unit, of enormous potential power.
On earth there was Clarissa and her nominal aunt—who could not be comprehended at all.
On a remote planet in Cygnae Taurus, there was a Clarissa too, but her name there was something like Ezandora, and her mentor was a remote and cryptic being who was accepted by the populace as a godling.
On Seven Million Folk Twenty Eight of Center Galaxy there was Jándav, who cared with her a small crystal through which her guidance came.
In atmospheres of oxygen and halogen, in lands ringed with the shaking blaze of. crusted stars beyond the power of our telescopes—beneath water, and in places of cold and darkness and void, the matrix repeated itself, and by the psychic and utterly unimaginable power and science of homo superior, the biological cycle of a race more than human ran and completed itself and began again. Not entirely spontaneously, at the same time, in many worlds, the pattern that was Clarissa was conceived and grew. The batteries strengthened.
Or to use Cabell’s allegory, the Clarissa Pattern impinged one facet upon earth, but it was not one facet out of a possible six—but one out of a possible infinity of facets. Upon each face of that unimaginable geometric shape, a form of Clarissa moved and had independent being, and gradually developed. Learned and was taught. Reached out toward the center of the geometric shape that was—or one day would be—the complete Clarissa. One day, when the last mirror-facet sent inward to the center its matured reflection of the whole, when the many Clarissas, so to speak, clasped hands with themselves and fused into perfection.
Thus far we can follow. But not after the separate units become the complete and tremendous being toward which the immaturity of Clarissa on so many worlds was growing. After that, the destiny of homo superior has no common touching point with the understanding of homo sapiens. We knew them as children. And they passed. They put away childish things.
“Clarissa—” he said.
Then he paused—standing motionless in silence, looking across that dark threshold into that mirrory dimness, seeing—what he saw. It was dark on the landing. The staircases went up and down, shadowy and still. There was stasis here, and no movement anywhere in the quiet air. This was power beyond the need for expression of power.
He turned and went slowly down the stairs. The fear and pain and gnawing uneasiness that had troubled him for so long were gone now. Outside, on the curb, he lit a cigarette, hailed a taxi, and considered his next movements.
A cab swung in. Further along the street, the liquid, shining blackness of the East River glissaded smoothly down to the Sound. The rumble of an El train came from the other direction.
“Where to, sergeant?” the driver asked.
“Downtown,” Lessing said. “Where’s a good floorshow?”
He relaxed pleasantly on the cushions, his mind quite free from strain or worry now.
This time the memory block was complete. He would go on living out his cycle, complacent and happy as any human ever is, enjoying life to his capacity for enjoyment, using the toys- of earth with profound satisfaction.
“Nightclub?” the driver said. “The new Cabana’s good—” Lessing nodded. “O.K. The Cabana.” He leaned back, luxuriously inhaling smoke. It was the children’s hour.
Carla felt the chill of approaching winter more than I did. I had been here for nearly a year, and for all that time the twenty-year winter had been advancing stealthily as the Little Sun hurtled away toward aphelion. I was used to the cold. But Carla had only come out from Earth to join me a few days ago, after my boss finally decided to make my assignment here permanent. Spending all that time in Florida had done little to prepare her for the bleak hills and cold air here.
Today I was showing her Centaurus Historical Park, jointly maintained by humans and Redskins as a memorial to their first meeting here a few decades earlier. The climb from the quaint little Mayflower village was strenuous enough to take her mind off the cold, and she showed revived interest as we strolled among the historic boulders on the hilltop. Hardly anyone else was there, either human or Redskin (a corruption of “Reska” which happened to fit), so we could read the plaques set in the rockfaces at our leisure.
Carla paused for a long time in front of the one which told how the first Redskins here had had to be rescued from their own laws against antagonizing alien races—laws which to civilized humans seemed almost incredibly harsh. Finally she said quietly. “Mike. J think that’s why I feel uneasy about them.”
“Huh?” I said, surprised, “Who?”
“The Redskins.” She drew her sweater tighter around her sh
oulders and motioned toward the plaque. “They were going to slaughter their own people because one of them might have trivially annoyed a human. I know there’s been no trouble since, but I can’t help thinking there’s something sinister about them that may show up someday. Humans wouldn’t treat their own like that!”
I put my arm around her and tried to think how to dispel her vague worries. Thoughts like that weren’t going to make frontier life any easier for her. Before I found words, an unmistakably accented voice behind us said quietly, “Please don’t be too sure of that.”
Carla jumped a foot and whirled around with a little shriek to find herself facing a Redskin. He was shorter than Carla, hairless, his skin toughened and darkened almost to brown by age and work, and his face might have been drawn by a human caricaturist. But I hoped Carla would recognize his smile and the twinkle in his eyes.
Just in case, I hastened to introduce her. “Carla, this is Kirlatsu, a good friend of mine from the day I landed here and a real old-timer on the Reska spaceways. Kirlatsu, my wife, Carla”
Kirlatsu extended his hand and Carla took it, a trifle timidly. “Very happy to meet you, Carla, ’ ’ he told her. ‘ ‘I’m sorry if I startled you. But I overheard your comment, and I wouldn’t want Mike’s wife to get the wrong idea. Our colonization laws are extreme—but so were the events that produced them. I know. I was there.
“I knew Ngasik well. Our paths crossed in several sirla during our dlazol, and though he was four years older, we were close friends on Slepo IV…”
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