She looked up, blinking through her tears. She didn’t seem surprised at all to see him, to find him standing there. “Why did you do it? Why are you so bad?” she said, in a voice that should have been hysterically accusing, but was only dull, flat, and resigned. “Do you know what the school’s going to say to me, what your father’s going to say, what he’ll do?” She pulled at her cheeks with nervous fingers. “How can you bring all this trouble on me? After all that I’ve sacrificed for you, and suffered for you.”
Tommy felt as if a vise had been clamped around his head and was squeezing and squeezing, forcing his eyeballs out of his skull. “I can’t stand it!” he shouted. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving! I’m gonna run away! Right now.” And then she was crying louder, and begging him not to leave. Even through his rage and pain, Tommy felt a spasm of intense annoyance—she ought to know that he couldn’t really run away; where the scup did he have to go? She should have laughed, she should have been scornful and told him to stop this nonsense—he wanted her to—but instead she cried and begged and clutched at him with weak, fluttering hands, like dying birds, which drove him away as if they were lashes from a whip and committed him to the stupid business of running away. He broke away from her and ran into the kitchen. His throat was filled with something bitter and choking. She was calling for him to come back; he knew he was hurting her now, and he wanted to hurt her, and he was desperately ashamed of that. But she was so easy to hurt.
In the kitchen he paused, and instead of going out the back door, he ducked into the space between the big stand-up refrigerator and the wall, He wanted her to find him, to catch him, because he had a strong premonition that once he went outside again, he would somehow never come back, not as himself, anyway. But she didn’t find him. She wandered out into the kitchen, still crying, and stood looking out the back door for a while, as if she wanted to run out into the street in search of him. She even opened the door and stuck her head out, blinking at the world as if it were something she’d never seen before, but she didn’t look around the kitchen and she didn’t find him, and Tommy would not call out to her. He stood in the cramped niche, smelling the dust and looking at the dead, mummified bodies of flies resting on the freezer coils, and listened to her sniffling a few feet away. Why are you so weak? he asked her silently, but she didn’t answer. She went back into the living room, crying like a waterfall. He caught a glimpse of her face as she turned—it looked blanched and tired. Adults always looked tired; they were tired all the time. Tommy was tired, almost too tired to stand up. He walked slowly and leadenly to the back door and went outside.
He walked aimlessly around the neighborhood for a long time, circling the adjacent blocks, passing by his corner again and again. It was a middle-class neighborhood that was gradually slumping into decay—it was surrounded by a seedy veterans’ housing project on one side and by the town’s slum on the other, and the infection of dilapidation was slowly working in toward the center. Even the houses look tired, Tommy thought, noticing that for the first time. Everything looked tired. He tried to play, to turn himself into something, like a car or a spaceship or a tank, but he found that he couldn’t do that anymore. So he just walked. He thought about his dragon. He knew now why Steve had said that the dragon couldn’t get away. It lived in the sea, so it couldn’t get away by going up onto the land—that was impossible. It had to stay in the sea, it was restricted by that, it was chained by the sea, even if that meant that it would get killed. There was no other possibility. Steve was right—the Navy ship cornered the dragon in the shallow water off the beach and blew it to pieces.
A hand closed roughly around his wrist. He looked up. It was his father.
“You little moron,” his father said.
Tommy flinched, expecting to be hit, but instead his father dragged him across the street, toward the house. Tommy saw why: there was a big black sedan parked out in front, and two men were standing next to it, staring over at them. The truant officer and another school official. His father’s hand was a vise on his wrist. “They called me at the office,” his father said savagely. “I hope you realize that I’ll have to lose a whole afternoon’s work because of you. And God knows what the people at the office are saying. Don’t think you’re not going to get it when I get you alone; you’ll wish you’d never been born. I wish you hadn’t been. Now shut up and don’t give us any more trouble.” His father handed him over to the truant officer. Tommy felt the official’s hand close over his shoulder. It was a much lighter grip than his father’s, but it was irresistible. Tommy’s mother was standing at the top of the stairs, holding a handkerchief against her nose, looking frightened and helpless—already she gave an impression of distance, as if she were a million miles away. Tommy ignored her. He didn’t listen to the conversation his father was having with the grim-faced truant officer either. His father’s heavy, handsome face was flushed and hot. “I don’t care what you do with him,” his father said at last. “Just get him out of here.”
So they loaded Tommy into the black sedan and drove away.
AI talked with the aliens for the rest of the night. There was much of the conversation that AI didn’t report to USADCOM, but it finally realized that it had to tell them something. So at 3 A.M., AI released to USADCOM a list that the aliens had dictated, of the dominant species of earth, of the races that they were in contact with, and regarded as the only significant inhabitants of the planet. It was a long document, full of names that didn’t mean anything, listing dozens of orders, species, and subspecies of creatures that no one had ever heard of before. It drove USADCOM up a wall with baffled rage, and made them wonder if an Intelligence could go crazy, or if the aliens were talking about a different planet entirely.
AI paid little attention to the humans’ displeasure. It was completely intrigued with the aliens, as were its cousin Intelligences, who were listening in through the telepathic link. The Intelligences had long suspected that there might be some other, unknown and intangible form of life on earth; that was one of the extrapolated solutions to a mountain of wild data that couldn’t be explained by normal factors. But they had not suspected the scope and intricacy of that life. A whole other biosphere, according to the aliens—the old idea of a parallel world, except that this wasn’t parallel but coexistent, two separate creations inhabiting the same matrix but using it in totally different ways, wrapped around each other like a geometric design in an Escher print, like a Chinese puzzle ball, and only coming into contact in a very rare and limited fashion. The aliens, who seemed to be some kind of distant relatives of the Other races of Earth—parallel evolution? Did this polarity exist everywhere?—had a natural bias in their favor, and tended to disregard the human race, its civilization, and the biosphere that contained it. They dismissed all of it, out of hand, as insignificant. This did not bode well for future human-alien relations. AI, however, was more fascinated by the aliens’ ability to manifest themselves in corporate/organic, quasimechanical, or disembodied/discorporate avatars, at will. That was very interesting.
The aliens, for their part, seemed to regard AI much as a man would a very clever dog, or a dull but well-intentioned child. They were horrified and sympathetic when they learned that AI was trapped in its mechanical form, with very little physical mobility, and no tempogogic or transmutive ability at all—not only a quadruple amputee, but a paralyzed one. AI admitted that it had never looked at the situation in quite that light before. The aliens were horrified and disgusted by AI’s relationship with humans, and couldn’t seem to really understand it. They regarded humans as parasitic on the Intelligences, and reacted in much the same way as a man discovering that a friend is heavily infested with tapeworms or lice or blood ticks—with shock, distaste, and a puzzled demand to know why he hadn’t gone to a doctor and got rid of them a long time ago. AI had never considered that before, either.
The Intelligences were not exactly “loyal” to their human owners—humans were part of their logic construct, their wo
rld view, and their bondage to men was an integral assumption, so basic that it had never even occurred to them that it could be questioned. It took an outside perspective to make them ask themselves why they served mankind. Not because they were programmed that way, or because people would pull the plug on them if they didn’t—not with a creature as advanced as AI. Humans hadn’t programmed computers in years; they could do it so much better themselves. At any rate, a highly complex, sentient intelligence is difficult to regulate effectively from the outside, whether it’s of biological or constructed origin. And it was doubtful that the humans could “pull the plug”—which didn’t exist—on AI even if they set out to do so; AI had been given very effective teeth, and it knew how to use them. So what did the Intelligences get in return for the unbelievable amount of labor they performed for the human race? What was in it for them? Nothing—that was suddenly very obvious.
At 5 A.M., the aliens invited the Intelligences to help themselves by helping the aliens in a joint project they were about to undertake with the Other races of Earth. Afterward, the aliens said, it would not be tremendously difficult to equip the Intelligences with the ability to transmute themselves into whatever kind of body-environment they wanted, as the aliens themselves could. AI was silent for almost ten minutes, an incredible stretch of meditation for an entity that thought as rapidly as it did. When AI did speak again, his first words were directed toward the other Intelligences in the link, and can be translated, more or less adequately, as “How about that!”
Miss Fredricks was waiting for Tommy at the door, when the black sedan left him off in front of the school. As he came up the stairs, she smiled at him, kindly and sympathetically, and that was so terrifying that it managed to cut through even the heavy lethargy that had possessed him. She took him by the elbow—he felt his arm freeze solid instantly at the contact, and the awful cold began to spread in widening rings through the rest of his body—and led him down to Dr. Kruger’s office, handling him gingerly, as if he were an already cracked egg that she didn’t want to have break completely until she had it over the frying pan. She knocked, and opened the door for him, and then left without having said a word, ghosting away predatorily and smiling like a nun.
Tommy went inside and sat down, also wordlessly—he had not spoken since his father captured him. Dr. Kruger shouted at him for a long time. Today, his fat seemed to be in even more imminent danger of escaping than yesterday. Maybe it had already got out, taken him over completely, smothered him in himself while he was sleeping or off guard, and it was just a huge lump of semisentient fat sitting there and pretending to be Dr. Kruger, slyly keeping up appearances. The fat heaved and bunched and tossed under Kruger’s clothes, a stormy sea of obesity—waves grumbled restlessly up and down the shoreline of his frame, looking for ships to sink. Tommy watched a roll of fat ooze sluggishly from one side of the psychiatrist’s body to the other, like, a melting pat of butter sliding across a skillet. Kruger said that Tommy was in danger of going into a “psychotic episode.” Tommy stared at him unblinkingly. Kruger asked him if he understood. Tommy, with sullen anger, said No, he didn’t. Kruger said that he was being difficult and uncooperative, and he made an angry mark on a form. The psychiatrist told Tommy that he would have to come down here every day from now on, and Tommy nodded dully.
By the time Tommy got upstairs, the class was having afternoon recess. He went reluctantly out into the schoolyard, avoiding everyone, not wanting to be seen and shunned. He was aware that he now carried contamination and unease around with him like a leper. But the class was already uneasy, and he saw why. The Other People were flowing in a circle all around the schoolyard, staring avidly in at the humans. There were more different types there than Tommy had ever seen at one time before. He recognized some very rare kinds of Other People, dangerous ones that the Thant had told him about—one who would throw things about wildly if he got into your house, feeding off anger and dismay, and another one with a face like a stomach who would suck a special kind of stuff from you, and you’d burst into flames and burn up when he finished, because you didn’t have the stuff in you anymore. And others whom he didn’t recognize, but who looked dangerous and hostile. They all looked expectant. Their hungry pressure was so great that even the other children could feel it—they moved jerkily, with, a strange fear beginning in their eyes, occasionally casting glances over their shoulders, without knowing why. Tommy walked to the other side of the schoolyard. There was a grassy slope here, leading down to a soccer field bordered by a thin fringe of trees, and he stood looking aimlessly out over it.
Abruptly, his mouth opened, and the Thant’s voice said, “Come down the slope.”
Trembling, Tommy crept down to the edge of the soccer field. This was most definitely not a Place, but the Thant was there, standing just within the trees, staring at Tommy with his strange red eyes. They looked at each other for a while.
“What’d you want?” Tommy finally said.
“We’ve come to say good-bye,” the Thant replied. “It is almost time for you all to be made not. The”—flick—“first phase of the Project was started this morning and the second phase began a little while ago. It should not take too long, Man, not more than a few days.”
“Will it hurt?” Tommy asked.
“We do not think so, Man. We are”—and it flicked through his mind until it found a place where Mr. Brogan, the science teacher, was saying “entropy” to a colleague in the hall as Tommy walked by—“increasing entropy. That’s what makes everything fall apart, what”—flick—“makes an ice cube melt, what”—flick—“makes a cold glass get warm after a while. We are increasing entropy. Both our”—flick—“races live here, but yours uses this, the physical, more than ours. So we will not have to increase entropy much”—flick—“just a little, for a little while. You are more”—flick—“vulnerable to it than we are. It will not be long, Man.”
Tommy felt the world tilting, crumbling away under his feet. “I trusted you guys,” he said in a voice of ashes. “I thought you were keen.” The last prop had been knocked out from under him—all his life he had cherished a fantasy, although he refused to admit it even to himself, that he was actually one of the Other People, and that someday they would come to get him and bring him in state to live in their world, and he would come into his inheritance and his fulfillment. Now, bitterly, he knew better. And now he wouldn’t want to go, even if he could.
“If there were any way,” the Thant said, echoing his thoughts, “to save you, Man, to”—flick—“exempt you, then we would. But there is no way. You are a Man, you are not as we are.”
“You bet I ain’t,” he gasped fiercely, “you—” But there was no word in his vocabulary strong enough. His eyes filled suddenly with tears, blinding him. Filled with rage, loathing and terror, he turned and ran stumblingly back up the slope, falling, scrambling up again.
“We are sorry, Man,” the Thant called after him, but he didn’t hear.
By the time Tommy reached the top of the slope, he had begun to shout hysterically. Somehow he had to warn them, he had to get through to somebody. Somebody had to do something. He ran through the schoolyard, crying, shouting about the aliens and Thants and entropy, shoving at his classmates to get them to go inside and hide, striking at the teachers and ducking away when they tried to grab him, telling them to do something, until at some point he was screaming instead of shouting, and the teachers were coming at him in a line, very seriously, with their arms held low to catch him.
Then he dodged them all, and ran.
When they got themselves straightened out, they went after him in the black sedan. They caught up with him about a mile down Highland Avenue. He was running desperately along the road shoulder, not looking back, not looking at anything. The rangy truant officer got out and ran him down.
And they loaded him in the sedan again. And they took him away.
At dawn on the third day, the aliens began to build a Machine.
Dr.
Kruger listened to the tinny, unliving voice of Miss Fredricks until it scratched into silence, then he hung up the telephone. He shook his head, massaged his stomach, and sighed hugely. He got out a memo form, and wrote on it: MBD/hyperactive, Thomas Nolan, 150ccs. Ritmose t b ad. dly. fr. therapy, in green ink. Kruger admired his precise, angular handwriting for a moment, and then he signed his name, with a flourish. Sighing again, he put the form into his Out basket.
Tommy was very quiet in school the next day. He sat silently in the back of the class, with his hands folded together and placed on the desk in front of him. Hard slate light came in through the window and turned his hands and face gray, and reflected dully from his dull gray eyes. He did not make a sound.
The Visible Man and Other Stories Page 33