Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Manuel threw up his hands. “I don’t know, Dran. I know when it’s right, that’s all. I know before I rig my lathe or milling machine what I’m after.” His face darkened, and his soft voice took on a tone of fury. “I’m sick and tired of getting pushed around. I’m tired of feeling things I can’t put a name to. For the first time in my life I can’t whip something or get away from it.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do? Get out of the service, hole up somewhere, finish this work.”

  “How do you know it won’t go on for the rest of your life?”

  “I don’t know. But I know this. I know what I’ve done is done right, and that when it’s finished, that’ll be the end of it,” said Manuel positively. “Hey—you better turn her loose. The purple face goes great with the hair, but it’s beginning to turn black.”

  Dran released Vaughn, and just then the bells began to ring.

  “Old one—”

  The other turned on Torth. “Get out. Get out and leave me alone. Get out!”

  Torth got.

  The bells.…

  “Not now,” smiled Vaughn. “Not now. I’ll give you rascals the punishment you deserve next year sometime.” She reached out her arms, and they came close to her. She kissed Manuel, then Dran, and said, “Happy New Year, darlings.”

  The bells were ringing, and the city spoke with a mighty voice, part hum, part roar, part whistle, part scream, all a unison of joy and hope. “Should auld acHappy-Nooooo Yearzhz-z-zh-h-h …” said the city, and Manuel pulled Vaughn closer (and Dran with her, because Dran was so close to her) and Manuel said, “This is it. This is right, the three of us. I quit. Whether I like it or not don’t matter. I got it and I’m stuck with it. I …”

  EUDICHE!

  No one said that. No one shouted it out, but for a split second there was a gasping silence in the club, in the floors above and the floors below, as three abstracts coalesced and a great subetheric emanation took place. It was more joyous than all the joy in the city, and a greater voice than that of all the other voices; and it left in a great wave and went rocketing out to the stars. And then someone started to sing again, and the old song shook the buildings

  “… and never brought to mind …”

  “It’s done!” said the old one.

  Torth replied caustically. “I appreciate the news. You realize that not one of us on Titan could have missed that signal.”

  “Eudiche has succeeded,” exulted the old one. “A new era for our race … on his next transmission we will start the emigration.

  “And you had doubts of Eudiche.”

  “I did—I did. I admit it. But it is of no moment now—he has overcome his defection.”

  “What is it, this defection?”

  “Stop your ceaseless questions and leave me to my joy!

  “Tell me that, decrepit one, and I shall go.”

  “Very well, Eudiche was imbalanced. He suffered from an over-broadening of the extrapolative faculty. We call it empathy. It need not concern you. It is an alien concept and a strange disease indeed.”

  Eudiche left, still in three parts, but now one. He stopped at the railroad station for a heavy foot-locker, and at a hotel for a large suitcase. And in the long ride in a taxi, Eudiche thought things out—not piecemeal, not single-mindedly in each single field, but with the magnificent interaction of a multiple mind.

  “Is it certain that everything will fit together?” asked the mechanical factor.

  “It certainly should. The motivation was the same, the drive was almost identical, and the ability in each case was of a high order,” said the intellectual.

  The aesthetic was quiet, performing its function of matching and balancing.

  The mechanical segment had a complimentary thought for the intellectual. “That spore chest is a mechanical miracle for this planet. Wasn’t it grueling, without a full mechanical aptitude to help?”

  “The bipeds have wide resources. Once the design is clear, they can make almost anything. The spores themselves have started lines of research on molds, by the way, that will have far- reaching effects.”

  “And good ones,” murmured the aesthetic. “Good ones.”

  Far away from the city Eudiche paid the driver and the intellectual told him to come back in the morning. And then Eudiche struck off through the icy fields, across a frozen brook, and up a starlit slope, carrying with him the spore case, the projector, and the projectiles.

  It was cold and clear, and the stars competed with one another—and helped one another, too, the aesthetic pointed out: “… for every star which can’t outshine the others seems to get behind and help another one be bright.”

  Eudiche worked swiftly and carefully and set up the projector. The spores were loaded into the projectiles, and the projectiles were primed with the acid and set into the gun.

  The aesthetic stood apart with the stars, while the mechanical and the intellectual of Eudiche checked the orbital computations and trained the projector. It was exacting work, but there was not a single wasted motion.

  The triggering was left to charge for a while, and Eudiche rested. The aesthetic put a hand to the projector—that seeking hand, always, with her, a gesture of earnestness.

  “Back to Titan, and may the race multiply and grow great,” she intoned. “Search the spaces between the stars and find Titan’s path; burst and scatter your blessings at his feet.”

  The condensers drank and drank until they had their fill and a little over—

  Phup! It was like the popping of a cork. Far up, seemingly among the stars, there was a faint golden streak, gone instantly.

  “Reload,” said the intellectual

  Two worked; the third, by her presence, guided and balanced and added proportion to each thought, each directive effort. Eudiche waited, presently, for the projector to charge again. “Earth …” crooned the aesthetic. “Rich, wide, wonderful Earth, rich with true riches, rich in its demonstrations of waste … wealthy Earth, which can afford to squander thousands upon thousands of square miles in bleak hills on which nothing grows … wealthy Earth with its sea-sunk acres, its wandering rivers which curiously seek everything of interest, back and forth, back and backwards and seaward again, seeking in the flatlands. And for all its waste it produces magnificently, and magnificently its products are used. Humans are its products, and through the eyes of humans are seen worlds beyond worlds … in the dreams of the dullest human are images unimaginable to other species. Through their eyes pour shapes and colors and a hungry hope that has no precedent in the cosmos.”

  “Empathy,” defined the intellectual: “The ability to see through another’s eyes, to feel with his finger-tips.

  “To know fire as the feathers of a Phoenix know it. To know, as a bedded stone, the coolth of brook-water …”

  Phup!

  “Reload,” said the intellectual

  In its time the second projectile followed, and then a third and a fourth.

  “This is the machine,” old Torth said to the youngster. “It was monopolized, long ago, by a caustic old triad who has since died. And may I join him soon, for it troubles me to be so old.”

  “And what was the machine for?”

  “One Eudiche was analyzed into his three components and sent to that star there.

  “It’s a planet.”

  “Youth knows too much, too young,” grumbled Torth.

  “And why was Eudiche sent?”

  “To test the sending; to synthesize himself there; and to prepare for mass emigration of our kind to the planet.”

  “He failed?”

  “He failed. He took over three inhabitants successfully enough, but that was all. He had empathy, you know.”

  The youngster shuddered. “No loss.”

  “No loss,” repeated Torth. “And then the reason for invasion was removed, and no one bothered to use the machine again, and no one will.”

  “That was when the molds came?”
<
br />   “Yes, the molds. Just as we came out of space so long ago, as crystalline spores, so these molds arrived on Titan. At that time, you know, we possessed all Titans and reproduced faster than they did. We had to expand.”

  “It is not so now,” said the youngster with confidence.

  “No,” said Torth. “Happily, no. The products of the molds—and the molds grow profusely here—worked miracles with the metabolism of our hosts. They reproduce faster and they live longer.”

  “And will they never overpopulate Titan?”

  “Not in our time, not in any predictable time. Titan can support billions of the little creatures, and there are only a few thousand today. The rate of increase is not that great. Just great enough to give us, who are parasites, sufficient hosts.”

  “And—what happened to Eudiche?”

  “He died,” said Vaughn. Her voice was shocked, distraught in the cold dawn.

  “He had to die,” said Dran sorrowfully. “His synthesis was complete in us three. His consistency was as complete. His recognition of the right to live gave him no alternative. He saved his own race on its own terms, and saved—spared, rather—spared us on human terms. He found what we were, and he loved it. Had he stayed here, he and his progeny and his kind would have destroyed the thing he loved. So he died.”

  The grey light warmed as they started down the hill, and then the dawn came crashing up in one great crescendo of color, obliterating its pink prelude and establishing the theme for the sun’s gaudy entrance. Drunk with its light, three people crossed the frozen brook and came to the edge of the road.

  At last Manuel spoke. “What have we got here?”

  Dran looked at the satchels, at Vaughn, at Manuel. “What have you got?”

  Manuel kicked his foot locker. “I’ve got the beginnings of a space drive. You’ve got a whole new direction in biological chemistry. Runt—Oh my god, will you look at that face. I know—poems.”

  “Poems,” she whispered, and smiled. The dawn had not been like that smile.

  The taxi came. They loaded their cases in and sat very close together in the back.

  “No one of us will ever be greater than any other,” Dran said after a time. “We three have a life, not lives. I don’t know anything yet about the details of our living, except that they will violate nothing.”

  Vaughn looked into Manuel’s face, and into Dran’s. Then she chuckled, “Which means I’ll probably marry Joe.”

  They were very close. Dran again broke the silence. “My next book will be my best. It will have this dedication:

  “What Vaughn inspires, I design, and Manuel builds.”

  And so it came about.

  Poor Joe.

  * The author apologizes for this poor translation of the Titan personal pronoun, which, in the original, is singular and plural, masculine and feminine, and has no counterpart in our tongue.

  Special Aptitude

  AS WE APPROACH the year 2300, the most popular parlor game seems to be picking the Man of the Century. Some favor Bael benGerson because he rewrote the World Constitution, and some hark back to Ikihara and his work on radiation sickness. More often than not, you’ll hear Captain Riley Riggs nominated, and that comes pretty close to the mark.

  But it misses—it misses. I’m just an old space-hound, but I know what I’m talking about. I was communications officer with Riggs, remember, and even if it was all of sixty years ago I remember it as if it was last month. The Third Venus Expedition, it was, and the trip that changed the face of the Earth. That was the space voyage that brought back the Venus crystals, and made you and you into the soft and happy butterflies you are today. Things were different in the old days. We knew what it was to put in a solid five-hour workday, and we had no personal robots the way everyone has now—we had to put our clothes on by ourselves in the morning. Well, it was a tougher breed then, I guess.

  Anyway, my bid for the Man of the Century was on that ship, the old Starlure—but it wasn’t Riggs.

  They were a grand crew. You couldn’t want a better skipper than Riggs nor a better mate than Blackie Farrel. There was Zipperlein, the engineer, a big quiet man with little eyes, and his tube techs, Greaves and Purci—a wilder pair of fire-eaters never hit black space. And there was Lorna Bernhard, the best navigator before or since. She was my girl, too, and she was gorgeous. There were two other women aboard—a ray analyst by the name of Betty Ordway and Honey Lundquist, the damage control officer. But they were strictly from blueprints and homely to boot.

  And for comic relief we had this character Slopes. He was shipped because of some special training in the Venus crystals. I don’t know why they bothered to put him aboard. Any development work on the crystals would have to be done on Earth when—if—we got back. I guess they figured there was room for him, and maybe he’d be needed to locate the crystals or something. Meanwhile, he was useless. We all thought he was and we told him about it often enough to keep him reminded.

  Not that he was a nuisance to anybody. It was just that he was funny. A natural comic. I don’t mean the kind who slips an anti-gravity plaque under the tablecloth and switches it on when somebody sets down the soup, and I don’t mean the life-of-the-party who sticks a brace of fluorescent tubes under his collar and pretends he’s a Martian. This Slopes was just automatically funny to have around. He wasn’t quite big enough, see, and though he wasn’t homely, he also wasn’t good-looking enough to do himself any good. His voice wasn’t quite deep enough or loud enough to be completely heard.… I guess the best way to say it is to call him an Almost; a thoroughgoing Almost. And the difference between Almost and Altogether—at least in Slopes—was very funny to ship out with, and he had it in every department.

  None of us knew him before he came aboard, which he did two hours before blast-off in civilian clothes. That was his first mistake, though why I should call it a mistake … after all, he was a civilian technician. Even so, all the rest of us were from one or another of the Services, and we just naturally had something on him from the start. Purci, the Number Two Tube Man, was lounging in the alleyway when Slopes stepped off the cargo-lift with his gear, and he sized the man up right now. Purci was tall, loose-jointed, relaxed, deadpan. He took Slopes aft (down, that is, since the Starlure stood upright on her tail-vanes when she was aground) and showed him where to stow his gear. The locker Purci gave him happened to be the garbage port, which scavenged out automatically when we hit the ionosphere. There was no real harm in that—there was plenty of gear in the slop-chest which almost fit him, and at least he looked halfway “regulation.” But he sure was funny. The look on his face when he went to that garbage port six hours out was indescribable. I have to laugh now thinking about it. And for the rest of the trip all he had to do was ask where anything was, and someone’d say, “Look in the garbage!” and the whole crew would lay back and roar.

  Probably the most fun we had was at “turnover,” when we stopped accelerating and went into free fall. For Slopes’s benefit the artificial gravity was left off, and all hands but Zipperlein, who was at the drive controls, gathered in the wardroom to watch. Word had passed to everyone but Slopes as to just when the gravity would cut out, and believe me, it was a tough job to keep from busting out laughing and spoiling the whole deal. We all sprawled around hard by a stanchion or a bolted-down table so we’d have something solid to grab when the time came. Slopes came in and sat by himself near the chow-chutes, innocent as a babe. Greaves sat with one hand cupping his wrist watch and his eyes on the sweep second hand. About three seconds short of turnover, he barked, “Slopes! Come over here, huh?”

  Slopes blinked at him. “Me?” He uncrossed his legs and got to his feet, timidly. He had taken about two steps when the drive cut off.

  I guess nobody ever gets really used to turnover. Your stomach gives a delicate little heave and the semicircular canals in your inner ear rebel violently. You tense yourself, all over, to the cramping point, and get no end confused because, though you know you’r
e falling, you don’t know which way—and anyhow, your reflexes expect a swift and sudden impact (because you’re falling) and there just isn’t any impact, so your reflexes feel foolish. Your hair drifts out every which way, and through and through, completely separated from your intense panic, is the damnedest feeling of exhilaration and well-being. They call it Welsbach’s Euphoria. Psychological stuff. Anxiety relief with the gravityless state.

  But I was talking about Slopes.

  When Zipperlein cut the drive, Slopes just went adrift. His advancing foot touched and lightly scraped the floor instead of making a good solid pace. He flung his arms backward, I guess because he thought he was falling that way, and as his shoulders checked the arm motion, they were carried down while his feet went up. He did a slow-motion half-somersault and would have gone all the way around if his feet hadn’t touched the overhead and stopped his rotation. He hung in midair with his head down and his feet up, with nothing to hang on to, and with the powerful feeling that, though the blood ought to be rushing to his face, it wasn’t. All of a sudden, everything around him acted like up, and there wasn’t any down left anywhere. He grabbed wildly toward the bulkhead, the overhead, the door—things he knew he couldn’t reach. After that he subsided, trembling, and by that time the rest of us had recovered from the weird impact of turnover—after all, we’d all felt it before—and we could enjoy the fun.

  “I said, ‘Come here’!” Greaves snapped.

  Slopes sort of flailed at the air and jigged with his feet. It made no never mind—he just stayed where he was, head down and helpless. We roared. He flapped his lips a couple of times, and then said, real strained, “Mmmph. Mmmph.” I thought I’d die.

  “Don’t be so standoffish,” said the Lundquist chick, the damage control officer. “Come on down and give us a kiss.”

  Slopes whispered, “Please … please.”