Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Edie.”

  “Jon! How are you?” Then she said, in unison with him, “Can’t complain.” And she laughed at him.

  He flushed, but it was not anger. He sat on the ottoman by her feet. “How’ve you been, Edie? You haven’t changed.”

  “I haven’t,” she nodded seriously. There was an echo in his mind. “We’ll always be friends, Jon. Nothing can change that.” Was that what she meant? She said, “Still trying to find out how the human mind works?”

  “Yes, on the occasions when I find one that does. Are you in town for long?”

  “I’ve come back. They closed the Great Falls office. Jon …”

  “Yes?”

  “Who’s the redhead?”

  “Priscilla. Priscilla Berg. My assistant.”

  “She’s lovely, Jon. Really lovely. Is she … are you …”

  At last he could smile. “You can ask, Edie,” he said gently. “Here, I’ll ask you first. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. I don’t know why, but I didn’t think so. Neither am I.”

  He looked down at his hands because he knew she was smiling, and somehow he didn’t want to look into her eyes and smile too. “I’ll get us a drink.”

  She waited until he was on his feet and a pace away before she said what she used to say: “Come back quickly.”

  Someone jostled him at the bar.

  “What’s up, Doc?” said Irving, and nickered. “Hey, that assistant of yours, she drinks scotch, doesn’t she?”

  “Rye on the rocks,” he said absently, and then realized that the scotch suggestion was Irving’s shot in the dark, and that he’d given the idiot an opening gambit with Priscilla. He was mildly annoyed as he ordered two Irish-and-waters and went back to Edie.

  Communication was dim and labored.

  “We’re trapped …”

  “Don’t give up. Ked is very close to me now.”

  “Yes, you and Ked can achieve proximity. But these creatures won’t combine emotionally in threes!”

  “They can—they must!”

  “Do not force them. Remain encysted and work carefully. Did you know the Pa’ak got Mak?”

  “No! How horrible! What about Myk and Mok, then?”

  “They will be guardians, watchers, communicators. What else can they do?”

  “Nothing … nothing. How terrible to be one-third dead! What happened to Mak?”

  “The creature Mak occupied killed itself, walked in front of a speeding vehicle as Mak tried to synthesize. Mak could not get clear in time from the dead thing.”

  “We must hurry or these beasts will leap off into space before we join our strength again.”

  The club wouldn’t be open for hours yet, but Derek knew which of the long row of herculite doors would be unlocked. He shouldered it open and sidled in, being careful not to let it swing shut on his bass viol.

  Someone was playing the piano out back. Piano … hadn’t Janie been knocking herself out looking for a piano man before he went away? He mumbled, “Hope she—” and then Jane was on, over, and all around him.

  “Derek, you tall, short underdone yuk, you!” she crooned. She hugged him, and put a scarlet print of her full mouth on his cheek. “Why didn’t you wire? God, man, I missed you. Here, put down that Steinway and smooch me once. Am I glad to see your ugly head … Look at the man,” she demanded of the empty club as he leaned the big bass against the wall and stroked its rounded flank with the tips of his fingers. “Hey, this is me over here.”

  “How are you, Janie?” He delivered a hug. “What’s been giving around here?”

  “Me,” she said. “Giving, but out. Ma-an … a hassle. For ten days I had a sore throat clear from neck to tonsil, carrying that piano man. Damn it, I got a way I sing, and a piano’s got to walk around me when I do it. Chopsticks this square makes—eggs—ack—ly—on—the—beat,” she stressed flatly. “And then a bass player I had, a doghouse complete with dog, and tone-deaf to boot. I booted him. I worked the last three nights without a bass, and am I glad you’re back!”

  “Me too.” He touched her hair. “We’ll get you a piano player and everything’ll riff like Miff.”

  “A piano I got,” she said, and her voice was awed. “Little cat I heard in a joint after hours. Gives his left hand a push and forgets about it. Right hand is crazy. Real sad little character, Derek. Gets the by-himself blues and plays boogie about it. Worse he feels, the better he plays. Sing with him? Man! All his chords are vocal cords for little Janie. He’s back there now. Listen at him!”

  Derek listened. The piano back there was talking to itself about something rich and beautiful and lost. “That just one man?” he asked after a moment.

  “Come on back and meet him,” she said. “Oh, Derek, he’s a sweetheart.”

  “Sweetheart?”

  She thumped his chest and chuckled. “Wait till you see him. You don’t need to lie awake nights over him. Come on.”

  He was a man with a hawk face and peaceful eyes. He huddled on the bench watching what his hands did on the keyboard as if he hadn’t seen them before but didn’t much care. His hands were extraordinarily eloquent. He didn’t look up.

  Derek said, “I’m going to go get my fiddle.”

  He did, and picked up the beat so quietly that the pianist didn’t hear him for three bars. Then he looked up and smiled shyly at Derek and went on playing. It was very, very good. They volleyed an intro back and forth for a while and then, before Derek fully realized what they were playing, Janie was singing “Thunder and Roses”:

  “When you gave me your heart

  You gave me the world …”

  And, after, there was a chord with a tremendous emphasis on an added sixth, and then it was augmented—a hungry, hungry leading tone, which led, with a shocked sort of satisfaction, into silence.

  Derek put by his bass, carefully, so it wouldn’t make any sound.

  Jane said, in a mouselike voice, “I can breathe now?”

  The pianist got up. He was not tall. He said, “You’re Derek Jax. Thanks for letting me play along with you. I always wanted to.”

  “Thanks, he says.” Derek gestured. “You play a whole mess of piano. What’s your name?”

  “Henry. Henry Faulkner.”

  “I never heard of you.”

  “He was head of the Orchestration Department at the Institute for twelve years,” said Jane.

  “Hey? That’s all right,” said Derek. “Symphony stuff. What’d you leave for?”

  “Squares,” said Henry. To Derek, it was a complete explanation. “I’d like to work here.”

  Jane closed her eyes and clasped her hands. “Yummy.”

  Derek said, from a granite face, “No.”

  Jane stood frozen. Henry came out from behind the piano. He walked—he all but trotted up to Derek. “No? Oh, please! A—joke?”

  “No joke. Just no.”

  Jane breathed, “Derek, what are you on? Goofballs?”

  Derek threw up his hands. “No. It’s a good word. Ain’t ‘no’ better than a whole lot of yak? No, that’s all.”

  “Derek—”

  “Mr. Jax,” said Derek.

  “Mr. Jax, please think it over,” Henry said. “I’ve been wanting to work with you ever since you recorded ‘Slide Down.’ ” You know how long ago that was. I don’t just want to play piano someplace. I want to play here—with you. I don’t care about the pay. Just let me back up that bass.”

  “He never talked like that to me,” said Jane with a small smile. “You’ve made yourself a conquest, puddin’head. Now—”

  “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk,” exploded Derek. “I don’t want to hear any kind of talk. I said no!”

  Jane came to him. She squeezed Henry’s forearm and gave him a long look. “Walk around some,” she said kindly. “Come back and see me later.”

  Derek stood looking at the piano. Jane watched Henry go. He walked slowly, holding himself in, hi
s head forward. At the other side of the dance floor he turned and opened his mouth to speak, but Jane waved him on. He went out.

  Jane whirled on Derek. “Now what the God—”

  Derek interrupted her, rasping, “If you got any more to say about this, you can look for a new bass man too.”

  Pallas McCormick was fifty-three years old and knew what she was about. She strode briskly down Eleventh Street, a swift, narrow figure with pointed shoulders and sharp wattles at the turn of her thin jaw. It was late and the tea room would be closed before long.

  Verna was there before her, her bright white hair and bright blue eyes standing out like beacons in the softly lit room.

  “Good evening, Pallas.” Verna’s voice was soft and pillowy, like her pudgy face and figure.

  “Evening,” said Pallas. Without preliminaries she demanded, “How are yours?”

  Verna sighed. “Not so well. Two are willing, one isn’t. The little fool.”

  “They’re all fools,” said Pallas. “Two billion stupid fools. Never heard of such a place.”

  “They want to do everything by twos,” said Verna. “They’re all afraid they’ll lose something if they don’t pair off, pair off. They’ve been schooled and pushed and ordered and taught that that’s the way it must be, so—” she sighed again—“that’s the way it is.”

  “We haven’t much more time. I wish we hadn’t lost—” There followed a dim attempt to project “Mak,” a mental designation for which there was no audible equivalent.

  “Oh, dear, stop saying that! You’re always saying that. Our first third is gone, all eaten up, and that’s the way it is.”

  “We’re two,” said Pallas caustically, “and we don’t want to be. Are you all right?”

  “Thoroughly encysted, thank you. Pa’ak can’t get to me. I’m so well encased I can barely get through to control this—” she lifted her arms and dropped them heavily on the table—“this bag of bones. And I can’t telepath. I wish I could communicate with you and the others directly, instead of through this primitive creature and its endless idioms. I’ve even got to use that clumsy terrestrial name of yours—there’s no vocalization for our real ones.” Again there was an effort to identify the speaker as “Myk” and the other as “Mok,” which failed.

  “I wish I could get through to the others. Goodness! A weak signal once in a while—a mere ‘come close’ or ‘go away’—and in between, nothing, for weeks on end.”

  “Oh, but they’ve got to stay closed up so tight! You know how the Pa’ak infection works—increasing the neurotic potential so that the virus can feed on the released nervous energy. There are two groups of three people who must come together by their own free emotional merging, or Ril’s three parts and Kad’s three parts can never become one again. To allow them that emotional freedom is to allow the Pa’ak virus which infests them to remain active, since they tend to be attracted to one another for neurotic reasons. At least we don’t have that much trouble. There was so little neurosis or anything else left in these minds when we took them over that they were poor feeding grounds for Pa’ak. And that’s the—”

  “Verna, can you spare me that everlasting—”

  ”—the way it is,” finished Verna inexorably. “I’m sorry, Pallas, truly. There’s a horrid little pushbutton in this mind that plays that phrase off every once in a while no matter what I do. I’m rebuilding the mind as fast as I can; I’ll get to it soon. I hope.”

  “Verna …” said Pallas with an air of revelation. “We can speed this thing up. I’m sure we can. Look. These fools won’t group in threes. And Ril and Kad can’t complete themselves unless their three hosts are emotionally ready for it. Now then.” She leaned forward over her teacup. “There’s no important difference between two groups of three and three groups of two.”

  “You really think … why, Pallas, that’s a marvelous idea. You’re so clever, dear! Now the first thing we’ll have to—”

  They both froze in an attitude of listening.

  “My word,” said Verna. “That’s a bad one.”

  “I’ll go,” said Pallas. “That’s one of the creatures I’m guarding. Ril is in it.”

  “Shall I come too?”

  “You stay here. I’ll take a taxi and keep in touch with you. When I’m far enough away I’ll triangulate. Keep watch for that signal again. Goodness! What an urgent one!”

  She trotted out. Verna looked across at Pallas’s untouched teacup. “She left me with the check.” A sigh. “Well, that’s the way it is.”

  The news is the artificial satellite program and flying discs … three-stage rockets and guilt by association.

  Dr. Jonathan Prince was saying, “The world’s never been in such a state. Industrialization is something you can graph, and you find a geometric increase. You can graph the incidence of psychoneuroses the same way and find almost the same curve, but it’s a much larger one. I tell you, Edie, it’s as if something were cultivating our little traumas and anxieties like plowed fields to increase their yield, and then feeding off them.”

  “But so much is being done, Jon!” his ex-wife protested.

  Jon waved his empty glass. “There are 39,000 psychotherapists to how many millions of people who need their help? There’s a crying need for some kind of simple, standardized therapy, and people refuse to behave either simply or according to standards. Somewhere, somehow, there’s a new direction in therapy. So-called orthodox procedures as they now exist don’t show enough promise. They take too long. If by some miracle of state support and streamlined education you could create therapists for everyone who needed them, you’d have what amounted to a nation or a world of full-time therapists. Someone’s got to bake bread and drive buses, you know.”

  “What about these new therapies I’ve been reading about?” Edie wanted to know.

  “Oh, they’re a healthy sign to a certain extent; they indicate we know how sick we are. The most encouraging thing about them is their diversity. There are tools and schools and phoneys and fads. There’s psychoanalysis, where the patient talks about his troubles to the therapist, and narcosynthesis, where the patient’s troubles talk to the therapist, and hypnotherapy, where the therapist talks to the patient’s troubles.

  “There’s insulin to jolt a man out of his traumas and electric shock to subconsciously frighten him out of them, and CO2 to choke the traumas to death. And there’s the pre-frontal lobotomy, the transorbital leukotomy, and the topectomy to cut the cables between a patient’s expression of his aberrations and its power supply, with the bland idea that the generator will go away if you can’t see it any more. And there’s Reichianism which, roughly speaking, identifies Aunt Susan, who slapped you, with an aching kneecap which, when cured, cures you of Aunt Susan too.

  “And there’s—but why go on? The point is that the mushrooming schools of therapy show that we know we’re sick; that we’re anxious—but not yet anxious enough, en masse—to do something about it, and that we’re willing to attack the problem on all salients and sectors.”

  “What kind of work have you been doing recently?” Edie asked.

  “Electro-encephalographics, mostly. The size and shape of brainwave graphs will show a great deal once we get enough of them. And—did you know there’s a measurable change in volume of the fingertips that follows brainwave incidence very closely in disturbed cases? Fascinating stuff. But sometimes I feel it’s the merest dull nudging at the real problems involved. Sometimes I feel like a hard-working contour cartographer trying to record the height and grade of ocean waves. Every time you duplicate an observation to check it, there’s a valley where there was a mountain a second ago.

  “And sometimes I feel that if we could just turn and look in the right direction, we’d see what’s doing it to us, plain as day. Here we sit with our psychological bottle of arnica and our therapeutic cold compresses, trying to cure up an attack of lumps on the headbone. And if we could only turn and look in the right place, there would be an invisible
maniac with a stick, beating us over the head, whom we’d never detected before.”

  “You sound depressed.”

  “Oh, I’m not, really,” he said. He stood up and stretched. “But I almost wish I’d get away from that recurrent thought of looking in a new direction; of correlating neurosis with a virus disorder. Find the virus and cure the disease. It’s panacea; wishful thinking. I’m probably getting lazy.”

  “Not you, Jon.” His ex-wife smiled at him. “Perhaps you have the answer, subconsciously, but what you’ve learned won’t let it come out.”

  “Very astute. What made you say that?”

  “It’s a thing you used to say all the time.”

  He laughed and helped her up. “Edie, do you have to get up early tomorrow?”

  “I’m unemployed. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “I didn’t ask,” he said ruefully. “My God, I talk a lot. Would you like to see my new lab?”

  “I’d love to! Oh, I’d love it. Will it be—all right?”

  “All right? Of course it—oh. I see what you mean. Priscilla. Where is she, anyway?”

  “She went out. I thought you noticed. With that man who plays the guitar. Irving.” She nodded toward the discarded instrument.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” he said. Over his features slipped the poker expression of the consulting psychologist. “Who did you come with?”

  “The same one. Irving. Jon, I hope Priscilla can take care of herself.”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Faintly, and with exasperation, Ril’s thought came stumblingly through to Ryl and Rul:

  “How can a thinking being be so stupid? Have you ever heard a more accurate description of the Pa’ak virus than that? ‘Cultivating our little traumas and anxieties like plowed fields to increase their yield, and then feeding off them.’ And ‘a new direction.’ Why haven’t these people at least extrapolated the idea of energy life? They know that matter and energy are the same. An energy virus is such a logical thing for them to think of!”

  And Rul’s response: “They can no more isolate their experiments from their neuroses than they can isolate their measuring instruments from gravity. Have patience. When we are able to unite again, we will have the strength to inform them.”