American Science Fiction Four Classic Novels 1953-56

by Gary K. Wolfe

“I didn’t know a seventeen-year-old could get in and out of a barracks with a whole skin. Not a female type seventeen-yearold.”

  “I didn’t go in!” she said. Hip shouted in sheer surprise as his own shirt was wrenched and twisted. The tails flew up from under his belt and flapped wildly in the windless dawn. “Don’t do that!” he gasped.

  “Just making a point,” she said, twinkling. “Gerry put on the shirt and leaned against the fence and waited for you. You marched right up to him and handed him the detector. ‘Come on, soldier,’ you said. ‘You just volunteered for a picnic. You carry the lunch.’ ”

  “What a little stinker I was!”

  “I didn’t think so. I was peeping out from behind the MP shack. I thought you were sort of wonderful. I did, Hip.”

  He half laughed. “Go on. Tell me the rest.”

  “You know the rest. Gerry flashed Bonnie to get the files out of your quarters. She found them and threw them down to me. I burned them. I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t know what Gerry was planning.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, that’s it. Gerry saw to it that you were discredited. Psychologically, it had to be that way. You claimed the existence of a Pfc no one had ever seen. You claimed he was the psychiatrist—a real danger sign, as any graduate medic knows. You claimed files, facts and figures to back you up and they couldn’t be traced. You could prove that you’d dug something up, but there was nothing to show what it might have been. But most of all, you had a trained scientist’s mind, in full possession of facts which the whole world could prove weren’t so—and did. Something had to give.”

  “Cute,” murmured Hip from deep in his chest.

  “And just for good measure,” said Janie with some difficulty, “he handed you a post-hypnotic command which made it impossible for you to relate him either as Major Thompson, psychiatrist, or as the Pfc, to the device.

  “When I found out what he’d done I tried to make him help you. Just a little. He—he just laughed at me. I asked Baby what could be done. He said nothing. He said only that the command might be removed by a reverse abreaction.”

  “What in time is that?”

  “Moving backward, mentally, to the incident itself. Abreaction is the process of reliving, in detail, an event. But you were blocked from doing that because you’d have to start from the administration of the command; that’s where the incident started. And the only way would be to immobilize you completely, not tell you why, and unpeel all subsequent events one by one until you reached the command. It was a ‘from now on’ command like all such. It couldn’t stop you when you were traveling in reverse.

  “And how was I ever going to find you and immobilize you without letting you know why?”

  “Holy smoke,” Hip said boyishly. “This makes me feel kind of important. A guy like that taking all that trouble.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself!” she said acidly, then: “I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. . . . It was no trouble for him. He swatted you like a beetle. He gave you a push and forgot all about you.”

  Hip grunted. “Thank you.”

  “He did it again!” she said furiously. “There you were, seven good youthful years shot, your good engineer’s mind gone, with nothing left but a starved, dirty frame and a numb obsession that you were incapable of understanding or relieving. Yet, by heaven, you had enough of—whatever it is that makes you what you are—to drag through those seven years picking up the pieces until you were right at his doorstep. When he saw you coming—it was an accident, he happened to be in town—he knew immediately who you were and what you were after. When you charged him he diverted you into that plate glass window with just a blink of those . . . rotten . . . poison . . . eyes of his . . .”

  “Hey,” he said gently. “Hey, Janie, take it easy!”

  “Makes me mad,” she whispered, dashing her hand across her eyes. She tossed her hair back, squared her shoulders. “He sent you flying into the window and at the same time gave you that ‘curl up and die’ command. I saw it, I saw him do it. . . . S-so rotten. . . .”

  She said, in a more controlled tone, “Maybe if it was the only one I could have forgotten it. I never could have approved it but I once had faith in him . . . you’ve got to understand, we’re a part of something together, Gerry and I and the kids; something real and alive. Hating him is like hating your legs or your lungs.”

  “It says in the Good Book, ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand—’ ”

  “Yes, your eye, your hand!” she cried. “Not your head! ” She went on, “But yours wasn’t the only case. Did you ever hear that rumor about the fusion of Element 83?”

  “A fairy tale. Bismuth won’t play those games. I remember vaguely . . . some crazy guy called Klackenhorst.”

  “A crazy guy called Klackenheimer,” she corrected. “Gerry got into one of his bragging phases and let go with a differential he shouldn’t have mentioned. Klack picked it up. He fusioned bismuth all right. And Gerry got worried; a thing like that would make too much of a splash and he was afraid he’d be bothered by a mob of people who might trace him. So he got rid of poor old Klack.”

  “Klackenheimer died of cancer!” snorted Hip.

  She gave him a strange look. “I know,” she said softly.

  Hip beat his temples softly with his fists. Janie said, “There’ve been more. Not all big things like that. I dared him into wooing a girl once, strictly on his own, without using his talents. He lost out to someone else, an awfully sweet kid who sold washing machines door-to-door and was doing pretty well. The kid wound up with acne rosacea.”

  “The nose like a beet. I’ve seen it.”

  “Like an extra-boiled, extra-swollen beet,” she amended. “No job.”

  “No girl,” he guessed.

  She smiled and said, “She stuck by him. They have a little ceramics business now. He stays in the back.”

  He had a vague idea of where the business had come from. “Janie, I’ll take your word for it. There were lots of ’em. But— why me? You went all out for me.”

  “Two good reasons. First, I saw him do that to you in town, make you charge his image in the glass, thinking it was him. It was the last piece of casual viciousness I ever wanted to see. Second, it was—well, it was you.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Listen,” she said passionately, “we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a herd of goats!”

  “I’m the goat.”

  “Yes, yes, you are, can’t you see? But we were born on this island with no one like us to teach us, tell us how to behave. We can learn from the goats all the things that make a goat a good goat, but that will never change the fact that we’re not a goat! You can’t apply the same set of rules to us as you do to ordinary humans; we’re just not the same thing!”

  She waved him down as he was about to speak. “But listen, did you ever see one of those museum exhibits of skeletons of, say horses, starting with the little Eohippus and coming right up the line, nineteen or twenty of them, to the skeleton of a Percheron? There’s an awful lot of difference between number one and number nineteen. But what real difference is there between number fifteen and number sixteen? Damn little!” She stopped and panted.

  “I hear you. But what’s that to do with—”

  “With you? Can’t you see? Homo Gestalt is something new, something different, something superior. But the parts—the arms, the guts of it, the memory banks, just like the bones in those skeletons—they’re the same as the step lower, or very little different. I’m me, I’m Janie. I saw him slap you down like that; you were like a squashed rabbit, you were mangy and not as young as you should
be. But I recognized you. I saw you and then I saw you seven years ago, coming out into the yard with your detector and the sun on your hair. You were wide and tall and pressed and you walked like a big glossy stallion. You were the reason for the colors on a bantam rooster, you were a part of the thing that shakes the forest when the bull moose challenges; you were shining armor and a dipping pennant and my lady’s girdle on your brow, you were, you were . . . I was seventeen, damn it, Barrows, whatever else I was. I was seventeen years old and all full of late spring and dreams that scared me.”

  Profoundly shaken, he whispered, “Janie . . . Janie . . .”

  “Get away from me!” she spat. “Not what you think, not love at first sight. That’s childish; love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with. I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about being seventeen and feeling . . . all . . .” She covered her face. He waited. Finally she put her hands down. Her eyes were closed and she was very still. “. . . all . . . human,” she finished.

  Then she said, matter-of-factly, “So that’s why I helped you instead of anyone else.”

  He got up and walked into the fresh morning, bright now, new as the fright in a young girl’s frightening dream. Again he recalled her total panic when he had reported Bonnie’s first appearance; through her eyes he saw what it would be like if he, blind, numb, lacking weapons and insight, had walked again under that cruel careless heel.

  He remembered the day he had emerged from the lab, stepped down into the compound, looking about for a slave. Arrogant, self-assured, shallow, looking for the dumbest Pfc in the place.

  He thought more then about himself as he had been that day; not about what had happened with Gerry, for that was on the record, accomplished; susceptible to cure but not in fact to change. And the more he thought of himself as he had been the more he was suffused with a deep and choking humility.

  He walked almost into Janie as she sat watching her hands sleeping in her lap as he had slept and he thought, surely they too must be full of pains and secrets and small magics too, to smile at.

  He knelt beside her. “Janie,” he said, and his voice was cracked, “you have to know what was inside that day you saw me. I don’t want to spoil you-being-seventeen . . . I just want to tell you about the part of it that was me, some things that—weren’t what you thought.” He drew a deep breath. “I can remember it better than you because for you it’s been seven years and for me it’s only just before I went to sleep and dreamed that I went hunting for the halfwit. I’m awake again and the dream is gone, so I remember it all very well. . .

  “Janie, I had trouble when I was a child and the first thing I learned was that I was useless and the things I wanted were by definition worthless. I hardly questioned that until I broke away and found out that my new world had different values from my old one and in the new I was valuable. I was wanted, I belonged.

  “And then I got into the Air Force and suddenly I wasn’t a football hero and captain of the Debating Society. I was a bright fish with drying scales, and the mud-puppies had it all their way. I nearly died there, Janie.

  “Yes, I found the degaussing field all by myself. But what I want you to know is that when I stepped out of the lab that day and you saw me, I wasn’t the cockerel and the bull moose and those other things. I was going to discover something and bring it to humanity, not for humanity’s sake, but so that they would . . .” he swallowed painfully, “. . . ask me to play the piano at the officers’ club and slap me on the back and . . . look at me when I came in. That’s all I wanted. When I found out that it was more than magnetic damping (which would make me famous) but antigravity (which would change the face of Earth) I felt only that it would be the President who asked me to play and generals who would slap my back; the things I wanted were the same.”

  He sank back on his haunches and they were quiet together for a long time. Finally she said, “What do you want now?”

  “Not that any more,” he whispered. He took her hands. “Not any more. Something different.” Suddenly he laughed. “And you know what, Janie? I don’t know what it is!”

  She squeezed his hands and released them. “Perhaps you’ll find out. Hip, we’d better go.”

  “All right. Where?”

  She stood beside him, tall. “Home. My home.”

  “Thompson’s?”

  She nodded.

  “Why, Janie?”

  “He’s got to learn something that a computer can’t teach him. He’s got to learn to be ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking away from him, “how moral systems operate. I don’t know how you get one started. All I know about morals is that if they’re violated, you feel ashamed. I’ll start him with that.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Just come,” she flashed. “I want him to see you—what you are, the way you think. I want him to remember what you were before, how much brilliance, how much promise you had, so he’ll know how much he has cost you.”

  “Do you think any of that will really make a difference?”

  She smiled; one could be afraid of someone who could smile like that. “It will,” she said grimly. “He will have to face the fact that he is not omnipotent and that he can’t kill something better than he is just because he’s stronger.”

  “You want him to try to kill me?”

  She smiled again and this time it was the smile of deep achievement. “He won’t.” She laughed, then turned to him quickly. “Don’t worry about it, Hip. I am his only link with Baby. Do you think he’d perform a prefrontal lobotomy on himself? Do you think he’d risk cutting himself off from his memory? It isn’t the kind of memory a man has, Hip. It’s Homo Gestalt’s. It’s all the information it has ever absorbed, plus the computation of each fact against every other fact in every possible combination. He can get along without Bonnie and Beanie, he can get things done at a distance in other ways. He can get along without any of the other things I do for him. But he can’t get along without Baby. He’s had to ever since I began working with you. By this time he’s frantic. He can touch Baby, lift him, talk to him. But he can’t get a thing out of him unless he does it through me!”

  “I’ll come,” he said quietly. Then he said, “You won’t have to kill yourself.”

  They went first to their own house and Janie laughed and opened both locks without touching them. “I’ve wanted so to do that but I didn’t dare,” she laughed. She pirouetted into his room. “Look!” she sang. The lamp on the night table rose, sailed slowly through the air, settled to the floor by the bathroom. Its cord curled like a snake, sank into a baseboard outlet and the switch clicked. It lit. “Look!” she cried. The percolator hopped forward on the dresser-top, stopped. He heard water trickling and slowly condensed moisture formed on the outside as the pot filled up with ice water. “Look,” she called, “look, look!” and the carpet grew a bulge which scuttled across and became nothing at the other side, the knives and forks and his razor and toothbrush and two neckties and a belt came showering around and down and lay on the floor in the shape of a heart with an arrow through it. He shouted with laughter and hugged her and spun her around. He said, “Why haven’t I ever kissed you, Janie?”

  Her face and body went quite still and in her eyes was an indescribable expression—tenderness, amusement and something else. She said, “I’m not going to tell you because you’re wonderful and brave and clever and strong, but you’re also just a little bit prissy.” She spun away from him and the air was full of knives and forks and neckties, the lamp and the coffeepot, all going back to their places. At the door she said, “Hurry,” and was gone.

  He plunged after her and caught her in the hall. She was laughing.

  He said, “I know why I never kissed you.”

  She kept her eyes down, but could not do the same with the corners of her mouth. “You do?”
r />   “You can add water to a closed container. Or take it away.” It was not a question.

  “I can?”

  “When we poor males start pawing the ground and horning the low branches off trees, it might be spring and it might be concreted idealism and it might be love. But it’s always triggered by hydrostatic pressures in a little tiny series of reservoirs smaller than my little fingernail.”

  “It is?”

  “So when the moisture content of these reservoirs is suddenly lowered, I—we—uh . . . well, breathing becomes easier and the moon has no significance.”

  “It hasn’t?”

  “And that’s what you’ve been doing to me.”

  “I have?”

  She pulled away from him, gave him her eyes and a swift, rich arpeggio of laughter. “You can’t say it was an immoral thing to do,” she said.

  He gave her laughter back to her. “No nice girl would do a thing like that.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him and slipped into her room. He looked at her closed door and probably through it, and then turned away.

  Smiling and shaking his head in delight and wonderment, encasing a small cold ball of terror inside him with a new kind of calm he had found; puzzled, enchanted, terrified and thoughtful, he turned the shower on and began to undress.

  They stood in the road until after the taxi had gone and then Janie led the way into the woods. If they had ever been cut, one could not know it now. The path was faint and wandering but easy to follow, for the growth overhead was so thick that there was little underbrush.

  They made their way toward a mossy cliff; and then Hip saw that it was not a cliff but a wall, stretching perhaps a hundred yards in each direction. In it was a massive iron door. It clicked as they approached and something heavy slid. He looked at Janie and knew that she was doing it.

  The gate opened and closed behind them. Here the woods were just the same, the trees as large and as thick, but the path was of brick and took only two turns. The first made the wall invisible and the second, a quarter of a mile further, revealed the house.

  It was too low and much too wide. Its roof was mounded rather than peaked or gabled. When they drew closer to it, he could see at each flank the heavy, gray-green wall, and he knew that this whole area was in prison.