Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “You’re getting old,” said Torth maliciously.

  “Go away,” said the other. “With two particles assimilated and the third about to be, matters have reached a critical point.”

  “There is nothing you could do about it no matter what happened,” said Torth.

  “Will you go away? What did you come for, anyway?”

  “I was having an extrapolative session with another triad,” Torth explained. “Subject: is the Eudiche experiment a hoax? Conclusion: it could be. Corollary: it might as well be, for all it has benefited our race. I came for your comments on that. You are an unpleasant and preoccupied entity, but for all that you are an authority.”

  The old one answered with angry evenness: “Answers: The Eudiche experiment is no hoax. It will benefit the race. As soon as Eudiche has perfected his fusion technique, we shall emigrate. Our crystalline casings are dust-motes to the bipeds of the third planet; our psychic existence will be all but unnoticeable to them until we synthesize. When we do, they will live for us, which is right and just. They will cease thinking their own thoughts, they will discontinue their single-minded activities. They will become fat and healthy and gracious as hosts.”

  “But observations indicate that they feed themselves largely by tilling the soil, that they combat the rigors of their climate by manufacturing artificial skins and complex dwelling shelters. If we should stop all that activity, they will die off, and we—”

  “You always were a worrier, Torth,” interrupted the other. “Know, then, that there are many of them and few of us. Each of us will occupy three of them, and those three will work together to keep themselves fed and us contented. The groups of three will be hidden in the mass of bipeds, having little or no physical contact with one another and remaining largely undetected. They will slaughter as they become hungry; after all, they are also flesh-eaters, and the reservoir of unoccupied bipeds will be large indeed. If, after we get there, the bipeds never plant another seed nor build another dwelling, their own species will still supply an inexhaustible supply of food purely by existing to be slaughtered as needed. They breed fast and live long.”

  Torth saluted the other. “We are indeed entering upon an era of plenty. Your report is most encouraging. Our present hosts are small, few, and too easy to kill. I assume that the bipeds have somewhat the same minuscule intelligence?

  “The bipeds of the third planet,” said the other didactically, “have mental powers several hundred times as powerful as do those we have dominated here. We can still take them over, of course, but it will be troublesome. Look at the length of time it is taking Eudiche. However, the reward is great. Once we have disrupted their group efforts by scattering our triads among them, I can predict an eternity of intriguing huntings and killings in order for our hosts to feed themselves. Between times, life will be a bountiful feast of their vital energies.

  “Now, leave me, Torth. As soon as the final part of Eudiche’s triad is settled in, we can expect the synthesis, by which he will come into full operation as an entity again. And that I want to observe. He has chosen well, and his three seeds are sprouting on fertile soil indeed.”

  “You have been uncharacteristically polite and helpful,” conceded Torth. He left.

  Dranley Hamilton drank the highball with the cold realization that it was one too many, and went on talking cleverly about his book. It was easy to do, because for him it was so easy to define what these fawning critics, publishers, club-women and hangers-on wanted him to say. He was a little disgusted with his book, himself, and with these people, and he was enjoying his disgust immensely, purely because he was aware of it and of his groundless sense of superiority.

  Then there was a sudden, powerful agreement within him, compounded of noise, heat, stupidity and that last highball, which made him turn abruptly, to let a press-agent’s schooled wisecrack spend itself on his shoulder blades as he elbowed his way through the room to the terrace doors. Outside, he stood with his arms on the parapet, looking out over the city and thinking, “Now, that didn’t do me any good. I’m acting like something from the Village. Art for art’s sake. What’s the matter with me anyway?”

  There was a light step behind him. “Hello, Dranley Hamilton.”

  “Oh—it’s you.” He took in the russet hair, the blend of blendings which she used for a complexion. He had not noticed her before. “Do you know I have hung around this literary cackle-factory for the past two hours only because you were here and I wanted to get you alone?”

  “Well!” said the girl. Then, with the same word in a totally different language, she added, “Well?”

  He leaned back against the parapet and studied her tilted eyes. “No,” he said finally. “No. I guess I was thinking of somebody else. Or maybe even something else.”

  Her real defenses went up in place of the party set. “Excuse me!” she said coldly.

  “Oh, think nothing of it,” he responded. He slapped her shoulder as if it were the withers of a friendly horse, and went back to the reception. That was lousy, he thought. What’s the matter with me?

  “Dran,” It was Mike Pontif, from his publisher’s publicity department. “You got that statement up about your next novel?”

  “Next novel?” Dran looked at him thoughtfully. “There’s not going to be a next novel. Not until I catch up on .. something I should be doing instead.” At the publicity man’s bewildered expression, he added, “Going to bone up on biology.”

  “Oh,” said the man, and winked. “Always kidding.”

  Dran was not kidding.

  Manuel crumpled up the letter and hurled it into the corner of the communications shack. He shouldered through the door and went out on the beach, his boots thudding almost painfully down on the rough white coral sand. He drove his feet into the gritting stuff, stamping so that the heavy muscles of his thighs felt it. He scooped up the stripped backbone of a palm frond and cut at the wet sand by the water’s edge as he walked, feeling the alternate pull of shoulders and chest.

  He needed something. It wasn’t women or liquor or people or solitude. It wasn’t building or fighting or laughter. He didn’t even need it badly. What he did want badly was to find out what this gentle, steady, omnipresent need was. He was sick of trying this and that to see if it would stop this infernal tugging.

  He stopped and stared out to sea. The thick furrows across his forehead deepened as he thought about the sea, and the way people wrote about it. It was always alive, or mysterious, or restless, or something. Why were people always hanging mysterious qualities on what should be commonplace? He was impatient with all that icky business.

  “It’s just wet salt and distance,” he muttered. Then he spat, furious with himself, thinking how breathless the runt would be if she heard him say such a hunk of foolishness. He turned and strode back to the shack, feeling the sun too hot on the back of his neck, knowing he should have worn his helmet. He kicked open the screen door, blinked a moment against the indoor dimness, and went to the corner. He picked up the letter and smoothed it out.

  “From some remembered world

  We broke adrift

  Like lonely stars

  Divided at their birth.

  For some remembered dream

  We wait, and search

  With riven hearts

  A vast and alien earth …”

  With the poem in his hand, Manuel glared around at useful things—the transmitter, the scrambler, the power supply. He looked at worthwhile things—the etched aluminum bracelets, the carved teak, the square-knotted belt he had made. And he looked at those other things, so meticulously machined, so costly in time and effort, so puzzling in function, that he had also made without knowing why. He shook the paper as if he wanted to hurt it. Why did she write such stuff? And why send it to him? What good was it?

  He carried it to the desk, ripped out his personal file, and put it away. He filed it with Dran Hamilton’s letters. He had no file for the runt’s stuff.

  When s
he concluded that she loved Dran, Vaughn wrote and said so, abruptly and with thoroughness. His answering telegram made her laugh and cry. It read:

  NONSENSE, CHICKEN! ROMANTIC LOVE WRONG DIAGNOSIS. I JUDGE IT A CONVENTIONAL POETIC IMPULSE BETTER CONFINED TO PAPER. A CASE OF VERSE COME VERSE SERVED. TAKE A COLD SHOWER AND GO WRITE YOURSELF A SONNET. BESIDES, WHAT ABOUT MANUEL? HE ARRIVES, INCIDENTALLY, NEW YEAR’S EVE AND INTENDS MEETING ME AT YOUR HOUSE. OKAY?

  Dran arrived first, looking expensive and careless and, to Vaughn, completely enchanting. He bounded up the front steps, swung her off her feet and three times around before he kissed her, the way he used to do when they were children. For a long while they could say nothing but commonplaces, though their eyes had other things to suggest.

  Dran leaned back in a kitchen chair as if it were a chaise longue and fitted a cigarette to a long ivory holder. “The holder?” he chattered. “Pure affectation. It does me good. Sometimes it makes me laugh at myself, which is healthy, and sometimes it makes me feel fastidious, which is harmless. You look wonderful with your hair down. Never pin it up or cut it again. Manuel’s just turned down a commission. He ought to arrive about six, which gives us plenty of time to whirl the wordage. I liked your latest poems. I think I can help you get a collection published. The stuff’s still too thin in the wrong places, though. So are you.”

  Vaughn turned down the gas under the percolator and set out cups. “You do look the successful young author. Oh, Dran, I’m so glad to see you!”

  He took her hand, smiled up into her radiant face. “I’m glad too, chicken. You had me worried there for a while, with that love business.”

  Vaughn’s eyes stopped seeing him for a moment. “I was—silly, I suppose,” she whispered.

  “Could be,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll tell you, hon—I like women. Without question there’s a woman somewhere on earth that will make me go pitty-pat, quit drinking, write nothing but happy endings, and eat what’s given to me instead of what I want. Maybe I’ve already met her and don’t realize it. But one thing I’m sure of is that you’re not that woman.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “The same thing that makes you sure of it. You had a momentary lapse, it seems, but—come now; do you love me?”

  “I wish Manuel would get here.”

  “Isn’t that irrelevant?

  “No.”

  Then the coffee boiled over and the thread was lost.

  They talked about Dran’s book until Manuel arrived. The book was a strange one—one of those which captivates or infuriates, with no reader-reactions between the extremes. There were probably far more people who were annoyed by it than not, “which,” said Dran, “is one of the few things the book has in common with its author.”

  “That remark,” laughed Vaughn, “is the first you have made which sounded the way your picture in the Literary Review looked. It was awful. The decadent dilettante—the bored and viceful youth.”

  “It sells books,” he said. “It’s the only male answer to the busty book-jacket, or breast seller. I call it my frontispiece pose; separate but uplifted.”

  “And doubly false,” snapped Vaughn. When he had quieted, she said, “but the book, Dran. There was one thing in there really worth mentioning—between us. The thing the critics liked the least.”

  “Oh—the dancer? Yes—they all said she was always present, never seen. Too little character for such a big influence.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said Vaughn. “I know and you know—and Manuel? We’ll ask him—that the dancer wasn’t a person at all, but an omnipresent idea, a pressure. Right?”

  “Something like that cosmic search theme that keeps pushing you around in your work,” he agreed. “I wonder what Manuel’s counterpart is. It would have to be something he’d turn on a lathe.”

  Vaughn smiled. And then there was a heavy tread on the porch, the front door flew open, and the room was full of Manuel. “Hi, Dran. Where’s the runt? Come out from under the furniture, you little—oh. There you are. Holy cow,” he bellowed. “Holy sufferin’ sepoys! You’ve shrunk!”

  Dran threw up his hands. “Sepoys. Foreign background. Authentic touch.”

  Vaughn came forward and put out a demure hand. “I haven’t shrunk, Manuel. It’s you. You’re thicker and wider than ever.”

  He took her hand, squeezed it, apologized when she yelped, rubbed his knuckles into her scalp until she yelped again, and threw himself onto the divan. “Lord, it’s cold. Let’s get going. Do something about this New Year’s Eve and welcome home and stuff.”

  “Can’t we just stay here and talk awhile?” asked Vaughn in rumpled petulance.

  “What’s the matter, runt?” Manuel asked in sudden concern, for Vaughn’s eyes were filling.

  Dran grinned. “I come in here, ice-cold and intellectual, and kiss the lass soundly. You come flying through the door, Lochinvar, shake hands with her and then proceed to roll her around like a puppy. Like the song says—try a little tenderness.”

  “You be quiet!” Vaughn almost shouted.

  “Oh, so that’s what you want.” He strode across to Vaughn, brushed aside her protecting arms, and kissed her carefully in the exact center of the forehead. “Consider yourself smootched,” he growled, “and we’ll have no more of this lollygagging. Vaughn, you’re acting like an abandoned woman.”

  Vaughn laced her anger with laughter as she said, “Abandoned is right. Now wait while I get my coat.”

  “I brought something back with me,” Manuel said.

  They were at a corner table at Enrique’s, immersed in the privacy of noise, lights, and people. “What is it?” asked Vaughn. “Something special in costume jewelry?”

  “Always want gilding, don’t you, lily? Yes, I have the usual cargo. But that’s not what I mean.”

  “Quell your greed,” said Dran. “What is it, Manny?”

  “It’s a …” He swizzled his drink. “It’s a machine. I don’t know what it is.”

  “You don’t—but what does it do? What’s it made of?”

  “Wire and a casting and a machined tube and ceramics, and I built it myself and I don’t know what it does.”

  “I hate guessing games,” said Dran petulantly.

  Vaughn touched his arm, “Leave him alone, Dran. Can’t you see he’s bothered about it?” She turned quickly to the Marine, stroked the ribbons on his chest. “Talk about something else if you want to. What are these for?” she asked solicitously.

  Manuel looked down at the ribbons, then thumbed the catch and removed them. He dropped them into Vaughn’s hand. “For you,” he said, his eyes glinting. “As a reward for talking like a hot damned civilian. I won’t need ’em any more. My hitch is up; I’m out.”

  “Why, Manuel?”

  “It’s … I get—spells, sort of.” He said it as if he were confessing to leprosy or even body odor. “Trances, like. Nobody knows about it. I wanted to get out from under before the brass wised up.”

  Vaughn, whose terror of “the ills our flesh is heir to” amounted to a neurosis, gasped and said, “Oh! What is it? Are you sick? What do you think it is? Don’t you think you ought to have an examination right away? Where does it hurt? Maybe it’s a—”

  Dran put an arm around her shoulders and his other hand firmly over her mouth. “Go on, Manny.”

  “Thanks, Dran. QRM, we call that kind of background noise in the Signal Corps. Shut up, short-change. About those spells … everything seems to sort of—recede, like. And then I work. I don’t know what I’m doing, but my hands do. That’s how I built this thing.”

  “What sort of a thing is it?”

  Manuel scratched his glossy head. “Not a gun, exactly, but something like it. Sort of a solenoid, with a winding like nothing you ever dreamed of, and a condenser set-up to trigger it.”

  “A gun? What about projectiles?”

  “I made some of those too. Hollow cylinders with a mechanical bursting arrangement.”

  “Filled
with what?”

  “Filled with nothing. I don’t know what they’re supposed to hold. Something composed of small particles, or a powder, or something. It wouldn’t be an explosive, because there’s this mechanical arrangement to scatter the stuff.”

  “Fuse?”

  “Time,” Manuel answered. “You can let her go now. I think she’s stopped.”

  Dran said, “Manny, I’ve got the charge for your projectiles.” He raised his hand a fraction of an inch. Vaughn said, “Let me go! Dran, let me go! Manuel, maybe you ate too much of that foreign—”

  Dran’s hand cut her off again.

  Manuel said, “Like holding your hand over a faucet with a busted washer, isn’t it?”

  “More like getting a short circuit in a Klaxon. Vaughn, stop wriggling! Go on, Manny. I might as well tell you, something like it has happened to me. But I’ll wait until you’ve finished. What about the fuse timing?”

  “Acid vial. Double acting. There’s an impact shield that pops up when a shell is fired, and a rod to be eaten through which starts a watch-movement. That goes for eight days. As for the acid—it’d have to be something really special to chew through that rod. Even good old Aqua Regia would take months to get through it.”

  “What acid are you using?”

  Manuel shook his head. “That’s one of the things I don’t know,” he said unhappily. “That acid, and the charge, and most of all what the whole damned thing is for—those things I don’t know.”

  “I think I’ve got your acid too,” said Dran, shifting his hand a little because Vaughn showed signs of coming up for air. “But where are your specifications? What’s the idea of making a rod so thick you can’t find an acid to eat through it?”