Baby Is Three

by Theodore Sturgeon

  There was a belly-thumping cough and the incredible rotor-blades began to turn.

  Garth flung down his leaf and ran straight toward the ship, trusting to luck that he wouldn’t be seen. When he was under the slow-whirling tips of the rotor he still had what seemed an impossible distance to run. He found some more energy somewhere and applied it to his pumping legs.

  A tire lost the swelling at the base that indicated weight-bearing. It lifted free. Garth swerved slightly and made for the other. It leapt upward as he approached. He ran despairingly under it. Only the nose-wheel was left. Without slackening speed he rushed it. Fortunately it was smaller than the others—the rim of the wheel was only about as high as his collarbone when the tire rested on the ground. But it was off the ground when he got there. He grunted with effort and made a desperate leap.

  His outthrust arm went through the lightening hole just as the wheel jerked upward. He crooked his elbow grimly as his momentum swung his flailing legs under the tire. Then he got his other arm through the hole. It was just big enough for his head and the upper part of his shoulders. The air-tanks kept him from wriggling further.

  Then, to his horror, he saw the strut above him fold on a hinge.

  The wheel was retractable!

  He had to turn his whole body to look upward through his helmet-glass, and somehow he managed it. He had no way of gauging how deep the wheel recess was. Was it deep enough to accept the wheel—and him too?

  He looked down.

  It would have to be deep enough … the craft was a hundred feet up and rising rapidly!

  He doubled up and got one toe on the edge of the lightening hole. He could just grasp the fork of the wheel. He swarmed up it, caught the other arm of the fork and lay belly down on the top part of the tire-tread. Then the wheel was inside, and the great bayflaps swung closed. The inside of the recess touched his back, squeezed, and stopped.

  He couldn’t move, but he wasn’t crushed.

  It was night.

  Garth crouched by a building the size of a mountain. It was built of wooden planks that looked like sections of a four-lane highway.

  He tried to forget the flight, though he knew it would haunt him for years—the cramped position, the slight kink in his airhose and the large kink in his neck which had caused him such misery, and finally the horror of the landing, when the wheel he clung to had contacted and rolled. Stiff as he was, he’d had to hit the ground ahead of it and leap out of the way.

  He moved along the wall, looking for a way in. He would try the doorways as a last resort, for not only were they at the top of steps with seven-foot risers but they were flooded with light.

  He stumbled and fell heavily into a dark hollow scooped out at the ground line. It was about four feet deep. He got to his knees, caught a movement in the dim light, and froze. Before him was a black opening through which he could see the bright-yellow stripes of artificial light seeping between enormous floorboards. And in the dim light he was aware of something which crouched beside him in the dark. It was horny and smooth, and at one end two graceful, sensitive whips trembled and twirled.

  It was a cockroach, very nearly as long as his leg.

  He wet his lips. “After you, friend,” he said politely.

  As if it had heard him, the creature flirted its antennae and scuttled into the hole. Garth drew a deep breath and followed.

  It was black and brilliant, black and brilliant under that floor. Twice he fell into holes, and one of them was wet. Filthy and determined, he explored further and further, until he lost all sense of direction. He didn’t know where the entrance hole was and he no longer cared very much. He knew what he was looking for and at last he found it.

  Near one wall was a considerable hump on the rough earth floor he walked on. A wide, oval patch of light above showed the presence of a tremendous knot-hole. He climbed toward it.

  The wood was soft under his fingers, like balsa. He began tearing out chunks of it, widening the knot-hole. The earth here was about three feet under the hole, so he had to squat and work upward. It was extremely tiring, but he kept at it until he had a hole large enough to put his head through.

  Because of the small size of his helmet glass, he had to put his head almost all the way up before he could see anything. And because of the brilliance above, he had to stay there a moment to accustom his eyes to the glare—What he saw made him, for the first time in his life, fully understand the phrase “And when I looked, I thought I was going to faint!”

  He dropped back down the hole and lay gasping, with reaction. One of the giantesses was sitting on the floor, propped up by one arm stretched out behind her. And he had busily dug his hole and thrust out his head exactly between her wide-spread thumb and forefinger!

  He sat up and looked about him very carefully indeed. He followed the mammoth outline of the girl’s shadow, where it crossed the lines of light between the floorboards. And then he lay back patiently to wait until she moved.

  He must have dozed, and in the meantime become immune to the thunderous shuffling and subsonic bellowings of the creatures above, for when he opened his eyes again the shadow was gone. He knelt and cautiously put his head up through the hole.

  The floor stretched away from him like a pampa. There were eight or nine of the huge women in the room, as far as he could see. Several were in a stage of dress which, under different circumstances, he might have found intriguing.

  He pressed up harder. The tanks caught on the edge of the hole. He gritted his teeth and pushed with his legs under the floor and his arms above. He felt the wood yield under his hands. Then the tanks ripped their way through and he was at last in the room.

  He backed cautiously up to the baseboard, darting glances in every direction. Making sure that none of the women was looking in his direction, he darted for the only patch of shadow he could see—a loose-hung fishnet that covered a window, serving as sort of a drape. He slid behind it and peered through the mesh. It seemed to be indifferent concealment; yet, from their point of view, he knew he would be hard to locate.

  He paused to switch tanks—his air was getting foul—and then took stock.

  The women were gathered around a table near the center of the room, rumbling and gesticulating in their strange, slow-motion fashion. None were looking his way. He looked down to the right. A small table stood in the corner and there was another fishnet behind it. Garth moved toward it, passing one leg which was like a redwood tree and, reaching up, twined his hands in the wide mesh of the drape. It sagged alarmingly as his weight came on it. He waited until it was still and then climbed up a few feet. Putting both feet into the mesh he jumped hard to test it. It sagged again, but held.

  To the underside of the table seemed the longest thirty feet he had ever determined to travel, but he started up. The fishnet seemed to stretch a foot for every eighteen inches he climbed. He looked down and saw it touch the floor, then begin piling up.

  He suddenly remembered the incredible density of the tiny Ffanx invaders, and a great light dawned in his brain.

  Excitedly he climbed higher, higher, and at last reached the table top. He swung onto it, teetered for a hair-raising moment on the edge, recovered his balance, and stood on the wooden surface. Sure enough, his footprints showed on the table top as he walked away from the edge.

  There was a piece of electrical equipment on the table, which he ignored. He went to the far edge, crouched by the side of the machine, and gazed across to the center table around which the giants were gathered.

  His blood froze.

  Under a glaring floodlight, in the center of the enormous table, lay a sealed glass cage. Lying in it, devoid of his helmet, lay Bronze’s body. The leader, the one who looked so very much like Glory Gehman, was handling the delicate controls of a remote-apparatus which passed a series of rods through the pressure sleeves into the cage. At the end of the rods were clamps, clumps of white material as rough as coconut fibre, tweezers, a swab, and a gleaming scalpel as long
as a two-handed sword.

  If they’re being that particular about atmosphere, he thought, Bronze must be alive!

  The flood of joy this thought brought him died a quick death, for it was followed by … and they’re about to vivisect him.

  He yielded to a short moment of panic and despair. He rushed back toward the drape as if to slide down it and attack the women by force. He stopped, then got hold of himself.

  He looked around him. Suddenly, he straightened and smiled. Then he went into furious action.

  “Isn’t he pretty!”

  The women gathered about the tiny figure. “We shouldn’t cut him up until the rest of the girls have a chance to look at him. He’s just a doll!” said one.

  “You’ve forgotten that all the Ffanx are just dolls,” said the leader coolly. “Do you propose to lead thirty-two hundred women, one by one, past this little devil? You’d have a wave of hysteria I’d as soon not have to handle. Let’s keep to ourselves what we have here. We’ll learn what we can and file it away.”

  “Oh, you’re so duty-bound,” said the blonde petulantly. “Well, go ahead if you must.”

  They crowded closer. The leader propped her elbows on the table to steady her hands, and carefully manipulated the clamps. One descended over each thigh of the tiny figure and trapped it firmly to the floor of the cage. Two more captured the biceps, and another pair settled over the wrists. Then the scalpel swung up and positioned itself. The leader suddenly stopped.

  “Did you leave that thing on?”

  In unison they swung toward the corner. One of the women walked over and looked. “No, but the tubes are warm.”

  “It’s a warm night,” said another. “Go ahead. Cut.”

  They gathered about the table again. The blade turned, descended slowly.

  “STOP!” roared a voice—a deep, masculine voice.

  “A man!” squeaked one of the women. Another quickly drew her tunic together and belted it. A third squeaked “Where? Where? I haven’t seen a man in so long I could just—”

  “Glory Gehman!” said the voice. “Hally Gehman—short for ‘Hallelujah’—remember?”

  “Gesell!” gasped the leader.

  “The fool,” growled the blonde. “I knew a man wouldn’t be able to leave us alone. This is his idea of a joke—but he set up the Gateway to play it. No wonder these little devils got through.” She raised her voice. “Where are you?”

  The blonde snapped her fingers. “It’s a broadcast of some sort,” she said. “He hasn’t answered you once, Glory!” She turned to the corner. “What’s my name, Dr. Gesell?”

  There was a pause. Somewhere there was a squeaky sound, like the distant chattering of a field creature. “Everybody calls you Butch, towhead,” said the voice. “Come over here, tapeworms.”

  “The recorder!”

  “They raced across the room, clustered around the small table.

  “I thought you said it was turned off? Look—the tape’s moving!” Glory reached out a hand to turn it off.

  “Don’t turn it off,” said the voice. “Now, listen to me. You’ve got to believe me. I’m Gesell. No matter what you see, no matter what you think, you’ve got to understand that. Now, hear me out. You’ll get your opportunity to test my identity after I’m finished.”

  “No one but Gesell ever called me Hally,” said Glory.

  “Shh!” hissed the blonde.

  “I’m right here in this room, and you’ll see me in a moment. But before you do, Glory, I want to spout some math at you.”

  “Remember the vibratory interaction theory of matter? It hypothesized that universes interlock. Universe A presents itself for x duration, one cycle, then ceases to exist. Universe B replaces it; C replaces B; D replaces C, each for one micro-milli-sub-n-second of time. At the end of the chain, Universe A presents itself again. The two appearances of Universe A are consecutive in terms of an observer in Universe A. Same with B and C and all the others. Each seems to its observers to be continuous, whereas they are actually recurrent. All that’s elementary.

  “Here are the formulae for each theoretical universe in a limited series of four inter-recurrent continua …”

  There followed a series of mathematical gobbledegook which was completely unintelligible to everyone in the room but Glory Gehman. She listened intently, her high-arched brows drawn together in deep thought. She drew out a tablet and stylus from her pocket and began to calculate rapidly as the voice went on.

  “Now notice the quantitative shift in the first phase of each cycle. To achieve an overall resonance there has to be a shift. To put it in simple terms, if you drew a hyperbolic curve with a trembling hand, the curve is the overall resonance of the whole series of small cyclic motions. And there’s only one way in which that can have a physical effect—in the continuum itself. Each cycle occurs in a slightly altered condition of space-time. That accounts for the super-density of the Ffanx and everything they owned and handled. What was normal to us was rarefied to them. We saw them as dense little androids, and they saw us as rarefied-molecule giants. There must be some point in the cycle where they are rarefied in terms of our condition. But space characteristics are only part of the continuum. The time-rate must alter with it.

  “According to my calculations you have been here for something more than seven but less than eight-and-a-half months, and are waiting with considerable patience for the three-year minimum it would take to prepare the cyanide capsule for the Ffanx world.

  “It’s with mixed feelings that I inform you that the Ffanx war was over twenty-two Earth years ago. Dr. Gilbert Gesell died in a Ffanx raid that closed the Gateway. The Gateway has been opened again momentarily, but something has gone wrong with it—I don’t know what. I must tell you too that in terms of Earth standards you cute cuddly creatures are in the neighborhood of seventy-five feet tall.

  “So check your figures before you fly off the handle and kill any small dense creature which arrives through a Gateway wearing a breathing helmet. It might be Dr. Gesell’s little boy Garth, grown up to be all of seven inches tall, and recording into your tape at its highest speed and playing it back slowly …”

  “I’m clinging to the fishnet just under the level of the table-top. Treat me gently, sisters. I’ve come a long way.”

  There was a concerted lunge for the drape, a concerted reaction of horror away from it. “Ffanx,” someone blurted. “Kill it!”

  “We have to kill it,” said the blonde. “We can’t take chances, Glory.” Behind her voice was the concentrated horror of the conquest of Earth … the forcefield pens … the hollow, piteous presence of the handful of “returned” women. “This could be a new Ffanx trick, a new weapon …”

  “The math is …”

  “The hell with the math!” screamed a girl from the edge of the crowd.

  “She’s right!”

  “She’s right!”

  “Kill it!”

  Garth stepped over to the table top and walked toward the tape machine. The circle of women widened instantly. Garth muscled the huge controls, placed his helmet firmly against the microphone, and chattered shrilly as the tape raced through the guides. Then he rewound, stopped the spools, and began the playback:

  “I got that, and I must say I expected it. You’ll follow your own consciences in the end, but be sure it’s your conscience and not your panic that you follow. I want to tell you this, though: Earth is a mess. There’s a new dark age back there. It’s slipped into a tribal state—polyandrous in some places, feudal in others, matriarchal in many. You three thousand women, and the daughters that many of you will bear, will mean a great deal to Earth.”

  The chattering ran high.

  “Polyandrous?”

  “One woman—several husbands.”

  “Lead me to it! Poly wants an androus!”

  “If he’s seven inches high here, we’d be seventy-five feet tall there. Oh my!”

  Garth’s voice cut in. “You’ll want to know how you can g
et back to Earth size, or how to get to Earth when its size corresponds to yours. I can tell you. But I’m not going to. If you can argue about my life, I can bargain with it.”

  A pause. “Now tell me if you’ve killed that boy over there.” Slyly, Garth added, “Go look at him again. He’s six-three, and a hundred and two percent man.”

  One, two, two more drifted over to the big table, to look with awed eyes at the magnificent miniature.

  Glory, as if sensitive to a voice-tone she had noticed, snatched up the mike. “No, he isn’t dead. He would have been, but he fired with a blaster just as I put the neo-tourmaline soaker field on him. The blaster threw out all the energy the crystal could absorb.”

  Garth held up his arms for the mike. When his voice came again, it said, “Glory, get together the best math minds you have here. I want to give you some raw material to work on.”

  There was a sudden crash of sound. To Garth it was a great thudding bass that struck at his helmet like soft-nosed bullets. To the women it was a shrill siren-alarm.

  Glory yelped, “Get the ’copter warm. Asta, Marion, Josephine this time. Jo—check the transistor leads on the direction finder in the plane. It kept losing a stage of amplification this morning.” She turned to the microphone. “That’s a Gateway. We’ll damn soon find out whether the Ffanx war is over or not. I’m going to park you with your friend there. Just pray that these cats will obey orders while I’m gone.” She dropped the mike and raced to the big table. “Butch. Put that one in with the other. If you touch either one of them until I get back, so help me I’ll pry you loose from your wall eyes. You hear me.”

  “You’ll be sorry for that,” snapped the blonde. “When you find out that these lousy Ffanx have been sending out a homing signal for their playmates—they’re telepathic, you know—then you can apologize.”

  “On bended knee,” said Glory. “Meantime, A-cup, do as you’re told.” She ran out.

  “Come on. Orders is orders.”