Case and the Dreamer

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “Every bit of our research points to a single possible treatment that could reverse the viroid effect that’s behind this thing. Nothing known will attack the viroid directly—not without bombing everything around it. The only approach is to create an environment in which it can’t replicate. The only thing that can do this is a very complex protein that is at one stage lethal, and at another, nutritious. Example: the akee.”

  “The what?”

  “Akee. It’s a handsome fruit that grows wild in Jamaica particularly, though it is happy to grow anywhere with that climate. It’s a strange looking thing, bright red-orange, with a shiny black pit that is half inside and half outside the rind. It looks ripe before it is ripe. When it is ripe it’s delicious, cooked with salt fish—it’s practically a Jamaican national dish. But if you eat it before it’s ripe it can kill you.

  “Another vegetable with the right characteristics, also a protein poison, is the fava bean, and this one will grow virtually anywhere that anything will grow. Eaten raw, it’s pretty deadly. Cooked, it’s very sustaining, with trace minerals and vitamins, and a really efficient protein and a good measure of carbohydrates and oil.

  “Every test we can devise—and we devise a lot around here—indicates that at the exact stage at which these poison proteins turn into real food, they are in an intermediate, interface stage. Catch it there, screen it out, and feed it to someone with the plague, and it will create an environment that—well, to avoid the gobbledygook—that coats the viroidal DNA with glue. It doesn’t kill it or remove it; the viroidal DNA just can’t do anything, and it dies. It’s replaced by what it’s used to—the original DNA structure. An ovum fertilized at that time will be normal and will come to term.”

  Szigeti had begun to breathe hard and irregularly, like a hurt child about to cry. “I think … you’re telling me … that there is a cure.”

  McCambridge leaned back and beamed at him. “Yup. And that’s your scoop for today.”

  Szigeti had a new clean handkerchief. Did he change them twice a day? McCambridge waited until he had put it away and then said, “ ‘Cure’ is a peculiar name for it, but it can spread fast like any other four-letter word.”

  “I’ve got to know more. Are there any side effects?”

  “Damn it!” McCambridge roared. “You’ve just pushed my number one crusade button. There are no side effects, you hear that? There are no side effects! ‘Side effects’ is a piece of semantic wizardry, a brainwashing trick, foisted on the world by the marketing people in so-called ‘ethical’ drug companies. I could write an ad, medical-journal style, for the Pill, with a big headline—FOR SWOLLEN ANKLES, BLOOD CLOTS, AND NAUSEA—and a long list in small print of side effects: among them, it may act as a contraceptive. You get what I’m saying? Compound a drug, you put in big words what you want to do, and in little words all the other things it does, and you call all those other things side effects. There are no side effects! You get that? They’re only effects. From now on, any time you find yourself saying ‘side effects’—bite your tongue!”

  “Wow!” said Szigeti admiringly.

  McCambridge relaxed, leaned back and laughed, wiping his brow with a tissue. “I do go off bang sometimes, don’t I? Well: effects. The vegetable protein I described can be prepared in quantity very cheaply from akees and fava. Fava especially can be grown anywhere and harvested quickly. The only precision part of the process is to get the transitory stage out of the product and isolate it, but that can be done with automatic machinery. What you come up with is a gray-green paste that tastes kind of good until you realize it’s going to be your sole sustenance for two months or more. And I mean sole sustenance; anything else, even salt, with it and you’ve diluted or canceled it. And it won’t work.

  “And that isn’t the only effect. The nutritious protein sustains the patient adequately, but there’s enough of the poisonous protein left in it to make the patient feel nauseated a lot of the time, with occasional dizziness, double vision, and the like. And some of the hair will fall out and the skin will get scaly and dry.”

  “Both men and women?”

  “Only women. Men would have the same symptoms, but there’s no immunity. The viroid’s too widespread; it just wouldn’t do any good.”

  “You mean people will have to go through this every time they want a child?”

  “They will. Of course, the ultimate reward is that they will have a child. Also,” he added, “the hair will grow back better than before and the skin will recover without fine wrinkles, really renewed.”

  “But surely medical technology can get to a one-shot treatment. You’ve done it before.”

  McCambridge snorted. “How long has it taken medical technology to find a one-shot cure for rabies—the very first disease subject to a miracle treatment? No, my friend, not with this bug. It’s the nature of the beast. We’ll keep trying, of course, but this is another one like the rabies cure; we’re stuck with a primitive, painful course of treatment for years and years to come. But Szigeti—we’ll have those years now and we’ll have them for everybody. Go write it, boy; it’s all yours. And—my regards to your wife and kid. Kids.”

  Heard all over the world, in many languages:

  “If you think for one minute I’m going through that just have your kid, buster, you better think again.”

  “I know I don’t have to take the treatment with you, Sue, but I want to. I want to go through what you go through.” “You can’t.” “Why can’t I?” “Because you can’t have a baby, and I can. Because I’m a woman, Eve’s curse, you know. And even if I get bald and crinkly, I don’t want a lover with his dear hair falling out.” “Oh, I love you.”

  “I saw one of them today, she wore a veil over her whole head and face. And everyone stood aside for her, like she was something holy. Because she would have a baby.”

  “Sell your rubber stock and get into akee orchards. There’s a classic buck in akee orchards.”

  A long time later.

  “Hello … Dr. McCambridge?”

  “Hello … Wacky? Whickter?”

  “Dr. Whickter here, yes.”

  “Why the formality?”

  “Because this may be the last word I ever speak to you. I wouldn’t even go this far but for a sense of fairness. I need my suspicions confirmed, and I want to know if you can possibly explain your motives. Or defend them.”

  “Oh my, oh my, you are on a high horse. What wickedness do you think I’ve committed?”

  “What wickedness?…” (hard breathing.) “… Let me put it this way: What would a man have to be to concoct a dangerous disease and bring the whole world to the brink of ultimate extinction, just to snatch it back again at the last moment?”

  “He’d have to be damned accomplished,” said McCambridge gleefully. “He might even have a cure first.”

  “I’m in a special position to figure this out,” said the telephone. “I’ve known a man like that for very long time. Very well. He would have to have almost unlimited funding. He’d have to have a profound background in genetics and biology and molecular theory. He’d have to have been a top consultant on population growth, and have traveled all over the world for many years where he saw the very worst effects of exploding populations. He’d have to have a special group of loyal undergraduates of every ethnic variety to touch off a manufactured plague simultaneously in so many places that the source could never be discovered. And he’d have to be an obsessive, arrogant son of a bitch.”

  “Oh, you forgot a couple of things, Wacky. He’d have to have a pheromone so ingeniously compounded that it would make his operative irresistible to women—but only to women who were ovulating.”

  “There is no such thing.”

  “You’re right. But let’s hypothesize that there were. Let us recall that all female mammals undergo a period of estrus, heat, rut. When that happens there are glandular changes of many kinds affecting the animal and its surroundings and behaviors in many ways.”

  “But n
ot human females.”

  “Not human females. Yet at the time of ovulation there are certain traces of that phenomenon. Mittelschmerz, the sharp abdominal pain some women feel at the moment a ripe ovum moves out. Certain changes of mood, of body and breath odors, of susceptibility—like and dislike—of external odors. More women surrender to seduction and even rape when they are ovulating than when they are not. Granted these things are almost disappearingly subtle, the fact is that they are there, buried in the complexities of the white brain and the endocrines. Vestigial they might be, but so is the abductor minimi digit muscle on the outside of your foot, and it can be brought back by the right stimulus, or even by concentration. So! If such an agent is armed with a pheromone so designed that it totally reactivates estrus in the highest, brainless, gland-driven form, and if he has a second weapon in its way just as powerful, it would not be difficult at all to scatter the seed in the most efficient way. Of course,” he added quickly, overriding the sputtering from the telephone, “such a supreme aphrodisiac does not exist, if it ever did. An ethical person would see to it that it was destroyed utterly, beyond discovery or recovery.”

  Whickter’s snortings revealed an inner conflict; then: “What second weapon?”

  “I don’t know, of course, but I was told about it a long time ago by an old college chum. It’s a line, a single sentence. I was told that the student who used it batted a thousand. He would simply say, at the right tender moment, “I want an experience. I do not want an affair.” He used to say that there were millions of women just aching to hear someone say that; who had many fantasies but who were afraid to go for them for fear of involvement and entanglements.”

  “You really are a son of a bitch,” said Whickter; but he laughed. He then said sententiously, “But I still can’t see any decency in a man’s bringing about worldwide terror just to satisfy an obsession about overpopulation.”

  “Overpopulation?” roared McCambridge. “Is that what you’re thinking? Gerard O’Neill’s space settlements will take care of overpopulation forever. The Club of Rome was wrong: there are no limits to growth, not for this species.”

  Then he said very quietly, “No, Wacky; whoever did it, did it so that never, never again on this world or within this species, will there be such a thing as an unwanted child.”

  Black Moccasins

  Even though Laughlin had damn well made up his mind, he hesitated, looking up at the fourth-floor front. It was evening, just dark enough to make the lights come on in the apartments, and her light was on all right, and it wasn’t shining through blue drapes anymore.

  Pink.

  Blue is for boys; pink is for girls, he thought sardonically, squinting up. Not that he cared if she had any boys up there. That’s what he’d told her, anyway.

  And anyway, it wasn’t really pink. Salmon. He walked up to the front entrance and into the foyer with the whole wall full of mail-slots and the two tall rows of pushbuttons with name-tags, one row on each side of the brass speaker grille. Habit twitched his hand toward his pocket, toward the keys he didn’t have anymore.

  Salmon, how about that. He reached to thumb the button marked B4, but stopped when he saw the tag. Square white letters on black, it didn’t say just LAUGHLIN anymore. It said M. SVOBODA-LAUGHLIN. With a hyphen. Svoboda was her maiden name. A hyphen. How about that.

  He thumbed the button. The bars on the speaker grille combed her voice out thin. “Yes?”

  “Me.”

  She didn’t answer with the words, or a word, but the electric lock buzzed and he pushed the door open. He used to go up the stairs two at a time. Quicker. Keep in shape. Get to the door breathing hard, it always made her laugh, or anyway smile. This time he walked past the stairs and took the elevator. Slower.

  Down the corridor to B4. Another button to push. He had an idea that she stood just inside, purposely waiting a little before she opened the door, but why would she do that?

  She opened the door. “Maudie.”

  “Hello, Flip.” She turned away, hardly looking at him, and walked inside, leaving him to come in and closed the door. He did, and followed her into the living room. With a light on this side, the drapes weren’t salmon. Burnt something. Siena.

  She turned to face him, saying, “You’re looking—” at the same time he was saying, “well …” so they both stopped. She said, “Sit down. Want coffee?”

  “No,” he said and suddenly became aware of that posture, with a small fist pushed into the small palm, the eyes studying the hands, which meant tension, waiting, not knowing what to expect; and he realized that his “no” might have meant about sitting, or about coffee, and she didn’t know which or what that might mean. He sat down. Her hands came apart and she said, “I’ll get coffee.” She went through the archway into the little kitchen and ran water, while he looked around the room. The big chair and the couch were the same. There was a new fuzzy rug, yellow, small, laid right over the wall-to-wall carpet. He thought with some reluctance that it really didn’t look too bad with those drapes. The mantle over the artificial fireplace was empty. He called out, “You could’ve kept the horse.”

  Her voice drifted out to him, “Oh no … you always, well, I mean, it was really yours, the horse. Unicorn.”

  Which brought back the anger-pain, the tender-anger, the there’s-really-no-name for it two hours they had spent separating their stuff, each of them determined to take this, too willing to yield that. It had been pretty awful. And anyway, once he’d taken the unicorn, he’d found no real room for it at his place. He opened his mouth to suggest that he bring it back some time but closed it again. The one thing he was really sure about in this awkward moment was that she wouldn’t get the idea he had come here to initiate a series of visits. What he should do is just pick up his box and go. It was right there waiting for him at the bottom of the oh.

  Bedroom closet.

  He discovered that he had half risen; that he had actually begun to get up to go back there into the bedroom to pick up the one thing she’d agreed to keep for him. He sank back down, hot-faced. Not that he cared one way or the other, but what would she think, coming back in here to find him gone, rummaging around in the …

  “Flip—I—” She was standing in the archway to the kitchen. “Maude, I was thinking, why don’t I just—” and again they spoke simultaneously and stopped. At which point the whistling teakettle began to scream, and she ducked back out of his sight.

  This is just too stupid, he thought in sudden indignation. Hadn’t he already said he didn’t want coffee? So all right, she was tense, well, so was he; perfectly understandable. All he wanted was the box of junk she was keeping for him; so take it and go.

  “Here’s your coffee,” she said, coming out of the kitchen with the tray, the oval one with the butterfly wings under its glass floor. That had been his mother’s; he never had been crazy about it but Maude just loved it. She’d made herb tea herself too. She never drank coffee. She set the tray down on the coffee table. It had the cream in it already, and for sure, honey. He never took sugar. She sat down, not beside him, but in the occasional chair across from him.

  Oh, well.… “I came for my box.”

  “You said,” she replied briefly. “When you called.”

  He picked up his cup. Mug. A pedestal mug, blue and white, with a thick handle. It felt good to his hand. It felt good against his mouth and the coffee against his tongue was just right, which for some reason infuriated him. He looked across at her. She had not touched her tea. She was looking intently at him, pressing one fist into her other palm, and when she met his eyes, dropped her gaze.

  He said, “I’ve been thinking … if it’s all the same to you, that box is full of just junk. I mean, the stamp catalog is way out of date and I’ve really got no more use for the magazines. That tool set, well, there’s no way to get another lens for it.” It was a kind of flashlight with a transparent dome with a chuck on it, which could hold a variety of tools and a screw-starter; the very first
time he had used it with a screwdriver the dome had cracked. He’d never seen another like it; he’d had it for years. “And the chinchilla book, well, let’s face it, I’m never going to have a chinchilla farm. I’m sorry it all took up so much sp—so much of your space, Maudie. All I really want out of it is the black moccasins.”

  The black moccasins.… A long time before he met and married Maud Svoboda he’d worn those moccasins—and worn them and worn them. In the years before he’d acquired the dealership, he had at times been very poor; there had been long stretches when the black moccasins were the only shoes he had. Sometimes he couldn’t even afford the liquid scuff polish that suited them so well, especially when they creased and developed little breaks in the high points of the cracks. And although he kept them glossy, age and usage took their toll. There were times when he was careful not to elevate his feet or to sit on the grass or a bleacher in such a way that the holes in the soles might show. For all that, they were the most comfortable footwear he ever had; and they were more than that; they were trusted old companions.

  For a while he drove an ancient VW, and the hole in the sole of his left shoe grew so large that once in a while it would capture the little clutch pedal on the left shoe. And one day, crossing a parking lot, he walked carelessly through the remnants of a broken bottle, ground almost to its original sand by repeated crushing by automobile tires. But a sliver of glass—no more, really, than a thorn or splinter, ran into his foot—a sharp reminder that measures should be taken.

  Flip Laughlin, in those early days, was a connoisseur of the “day-old”—his name not only for past-date baked goods, but that basket in the rear corner of supermarkets where dwelt bent cans, broken cartons, punctured and taped bags of rice and flour, and the like, all at very reduced prices. The preoccupation extended to special sales, “cents-off” offers, double coupons, and rebates. He always felt triumphant, a beater of the system, when he had taken advantage of these tattered temptations and generous gifts from the loss-leading fraternity.