My Best Science Fiction Story

by Leo Margulies

  Kennedy stared. “You think I’m mad?”

  “What I think is beside the point. Look, Captain. Nothing like this ever happened before. If the truth goes in, you’ll be busted for killing an Experimenter. That’s what he must have been, because a ray gun won’t do that to ordinary stuff. That ship was some new kind of material.

  “But if I say it was internal combustion, the big shots will just be sorry, but not sore enough to kick you off the force. I’ll say it, but I want one good sock. Drop your hands!”

  Captain Kennedy’s jaw set. He dropped his hands.

  “All right, McBriar,” he grated. “I’ll remember this.”

  SERGEANT RION McBRIAR grinned. “So will I, believe me!”

  He swung. His fist landed with a satisfying crack on Kennedy’s jaw. His superior did a satisfying loop in the air. But, to McBriar’s amazement, the captain bounded to his feet and before McBriar could defend himself took a swing of his own.

  The blackness paled. Kennedy was helping McBriar to his feet.

  “You dumb Irishman,” Kennedy said with a grin. “Nothing was said about me returning a sock.”

  McBriar shook his head, glared, then grinned.

  “No,” he admitted, “nothing was said. Ain’t I a dope?”

  He stuck out his hand. Kennedy took it.

  The Hibited Man - L. Sprague de Camp

  CHAPTER I

  As Thomas Otterburn entered the offices of the laboratory that Friday morning and hung his hat on the rack, he heard somebody call, “Tom!” behind him.

  It was Eduard Dubrowsky from the Psychoelectronic Section, looking more like a disheveled hawk than usual. Dubrowsky barked, “Busy this morning?”

  “Good morning, Ed,” murmured Otterburn with his usual formality. “Yes, I’ve got to get out the weekly project-hour sheet, the biweekly news-letter, the monthly project report, the quarterly appropriations estimate, the—”

  “Okay, okay—after lunch then.”

  “What after lunch?”

  “You know, you know.” Dubrowsky lowered his voice and came closer. “We’re ready for the first human test with the materiostat. And you’re going to be it. Remember?”

  “Uh—yes, I suppose I do. But—”

  “But nothing. See you after lunch in my section.”

  “Oh, all right.” Otterburn, wondering if he had been smart in volunteering for the first human tryout on Project Styx, sought his desk and spread out his papers.

  On top of the pile in his in-box lay the envelope containing his pay-check. Jimmy the office-boy must have been around early. He slit the envelope and looked at the check to make sure, put the envelope in his pocket and plunged into his work despite the fact that he had ten minutes to go before the working day officially commenced.

  Behind him he heard McQueen’s loud: “Hi, genius!” as McQueen scaled his hat ten feet onto a hook beside Otterburn‘s.

  “Good morning, Donald,” said Otterburn.

  McQueen found his own desk, put his feet on it, ran a hand through his red hair and opened his newspaper. Presently he said, “It says here—say, for gossakes, Tom, why don’t you relax? There’s nobody here to be impressed by your industry except me, and heaven knows I’m not.”

  Otterburn looked at him briefly and went on working without reply. Then’ McQueen’s feet came down off his desk with a bang. That meant that Seymour Barlow, head of the Fluid Mechanics Section and the mutual boss of Otterburn and McQueen, had arrived. McQueen, after a brief glance at the clock, continued reading his newspaper. Five minutes to go.

  Otterburn looked up long enough to say, “Good morning, Mr. Barlow.” Everybody else in the section called Barlow “Seymour,” “Sey,” or even “Fats.”

  Then, rapidly pro-rating hours of work among his various projects, he heard the sounds of the arrival of the other engineers in the section. From the glassed-in section of the big room devoted to the Stenographic Department came the clack of female tongues as the space filled up with stenos.

  The bell sounded. At a certain click of heels Otterburn caught his breath and peered slantwise through his glasses without turning his head enough so you’d notice. Lucy Kneipf was coming in, one minute late as usual.

  Otterburn called, “Good morning, Lucy,” but so softly that the girl apparently did not hear it.

  Otterburn told himself that Barlow, as usual, would do nothing about Lucy’s lateness. Good-looking girls really had no business going in for engineering and then disrupting the routine. However, if he were in Barlow’s position he would no doubt do the same. He’d even take advantage of his position to date Lucy.

  His mind left the figures to wander off into a fantasy in which he married Lucy in the teeth of competition from the entire section and settled down with her in some suburban paradise to raise a vast family and be the envy of the whole laboratory. He had never expected to fall in love with a short dark plump girl, especially since he was on the tall thin sandy side, but there it was.

  His daydream was shattered by McQueen’s bawl, “Hi, gorgeous! How’s the lady engineer this morning? Boy, we sure spray-painted the town last night, didn’t we?”

  Lucy smiled and said something that Otterburn missed. Otterburn pressed his lips together angrily and forced his mind back to his figures. He despised himself. Here that booming extravert was no section head but he managed to date Lucy all right while he, Otterburn, had never nerved himself to get beyond the how-are-you-this-nice-morning stage.

  Despite the fact that he was more intelligent than McQueen and a better engineer too. Barlow had practically told him so—that he was the smartest man in the section except old Matthias back in the corner there. And if he were going to get married ever he’d better start soon. He was going to be thirty.

  “It’s Friday in case any of you have forgotten,” said Seymour Barlow.

  McQueen gave a dramatic groan. “Paperwork day! I wish you guys with the brass would figure a way to let us poor mad scientists do our science instead of this glorified bookkeeping. Say, Tom!”

  “Yes, Donald?” Otterburn turned his head. He thought that McQueen would probably not treat him so genially if he suspected that Thomas Otterburn was a rival for the esteem of Lucy Kneipf—even if only a latent rival.

  “I sometimes wonder. Is it as bad as this in private industry? Or are all these blasted reports and dope-sheets and things a disease peculiar to government?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Otterburn. “I’ve worked for the government ever since I finished college, eight years ago.”

  Matthias cackled from his corner, “I can answer that one. Some big private companies are even worse. Every time some new super or manager comes in he thinks of a new periodical report he’s simply got to have, so he sends out an order establishing it.

  “The only trouble is he never thinks to abolish any of the old reports, so they accumulate until the personnel spend all their time filling them out and haven’t any time for useful work.”

  Otterburn forced his mind back to his work again—no easy feat, since this kind of paperwork was the dullest task he had to do. His mind wandered off into apprehensive speculation as to what might happen this afternoon when Dubrowsky tried out his darned gadget on him. He’d been foolish to accede to Dubrowsky’s urgings. If he could only say, “No!” and make it stick …

  Lunch came before Otterburn realized it. He put away the small remainder of his paperwork, stopped at the check-cashing window to cash his paycheck and shuffled over to the cafeteria with the others of his section. He slouched along with nervous little steps, hands in pockets and eyes on the ground, mumbling polite responses to the helloes of his acquaintances from the other departments.

  At the cafeteria he carefully let all the others of his section precede him through the door of the portion of the room partitioned off and marked Executives, Engineers and Guests Only.

  Then, by quickly dodging around a table, he managed to reach Lucy Kneipf’s chair in time to pull it out for her. S
he thanked him, and while he stood blushing and trying to think of a witty reply McQueen took the place on one side of her and another engineer that on the other.

  McQueen made his usual complaints, long grown banal from repetition, about the food and the service. Then he barked at Otterburn, “Don’t you think so too, Tom?”

  Otterburn studied his plate and answered modestly: “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse.”

  McQueen snorted, “Try and get you to criticize anything or anybody!” and turned his attention to giving Miss Kneipf a shamelessly public buss.

  Otterburn felt a hand on his shoulder, and there was Dubrowsky looking down at him. “Coming to our lab right after you finish, Tom?”

  “We-ell,” said Otterburn hesitantly, “I do have some more to do on the quarterly estimate.”

  “Oh, fertilize the estimate! It’ll keep till Monday and we can’t wait around. You promised you’d help us, didn’t you?”

  “Why, sure, you know that.”

  “All right then, come over to the lab with me when you finish.”

  Otterburn wiped his mouth, folded his paper napkin neatly, rose and followed the engineers of the Psychoelectronic Section to their own part of the building. This laboratory had a No Admittance sign on the door.

  In front of the door stood a desk at which sat a police woman with a register. Otterburn signed the register, and followed the others in. These were Dubrowsky, Dubrowsky’s young P-l assistant, and Dubrowsky’s associate, de Castro, a bald and burly psychologist.

  The test was to be the first tryout on a human being of what some mythological-minded functionary in the Bureau had christened Project Styx. Otterburn had become involved in this project by solving a minor but baffling problem in the design of the apparatus—a matter of getting an actuator-mechanism into a small space—for the regular engineers on the project.

  Since the project was classed as Secret he had had to be cleared for secret information outside of his own immediate field. And because the plan had fascinated him—although he was not an electronics man—he had kept in touch with it ever since and had let Dubrowsky talk him into volunteering for the first tests on a live man.

  Dubrowsky ambled over to his section of the laboratory and extracted from the general clutter on the workbench a mess of straps and cables, saying, “This is her. Want to take off your coat and shirt?”

  Otterburn, while stripping to the waist, asked, “How did those live tests come out?”

  Dubrowsky said, “Fine, except that the field seems to extend in from the surface of the skin as well as out.”

  “What does that do?”

  “Nearly as we can figure from the effects on the animals it affects parts of their brains.”

  “Huh?” said Otterburn in a tone of alarm.

  “Nothing serious. Has an effect like a little alcohol. Doc can tell you.”

  “Yes,” said de Castro. “It appears to affect mainly the frontal lobes and also some of the cortex, so as to decrease inhibitions and promote the thalamic functions. The dog, for instance, tended to forget that he was housebroken while he had it on.”

  Otterburn said, “Boy, I sure hope it doesn’t—”

  “I do not think so. Of course we do not really know with a human being. The effect on the forebrain might suppress the superego.”

  “The what? I’m sorry, but that’s out of my line.”

  “Of course, of course,” said de Castro. “The superego is the name given in the old Freudian psychology to the section of the ego, mostly on the unconscious level, that criticizes one’s performance by comparing it with some ideal and punishes one by making one unhappy when one fails to live up to the ideal.”

  “Do you mean the conscience?” said Otterburn. Dubrowsky was fastening. the thing around his bare torso. There was a little flat black-enameled box in front, over his solar plexus, and another in back. The two were connected by a number of straps radiating from each, so that they looked not unlike a pair of enormous black spiders embracing Otterburn’s trunk between them.

  “No, not exactly the conscience,” said de Castro. “That is on the conscious level.”

  “Let’s not get off into psych terminology,” said Dubrowsky. “Been listening to it for years now and I still don’t understand it. The point is that it may temporarily uninhibit you a little, like a prefrontal lobotomy. Or hibit you, if you prefer.” He smiled at his little joke.

  “That’s why I wanted you to be the first subject, because heaven knows if there’s anybody on the station who’s over-inhibited it’s you. Gives us a margin of safety to play with.” .

  De Castro smiled agreement. “Yes, Tom, you even stand out among a crowd of research scientists, who tend to be inhibited introverts—you know, the quiet, subdued, intellectual type—-to begin with.”

  Dubrowsky said, “All right, she’s ready to go. Are you?”

  “Okay,” said Otterburn, feeling a little like the Earl of Essex giving his own executioner the signal to swing the ax. Despite the excitement inside him, however, he kept his voice as low and steady as always.

  -

  CHAPTER II

  Dubrowsky clicked the switch on the chest-section of the materiostat, saying: “We’ll try it on low power first.” He turned the knob control to the first index figure. “Feel anything?”

  “No, not a thing—wait, it tingles a little,” said Otterburn.

  They waited several minutes in silence. “Anything now?” asked Dubrowsky.

  “No. I got used to the tingle so I don’t notice it.”

  “How about your brain?”

  “Hasn’t affected it at all as far as I can tell.”

  “All right, let’s begin testing. Brace yourself.” Dubrowsky put his hand out and touched the skin of Otterburn’s face, neck, and thorax. Then he began slapping lightly, making a note on a pad after each slap.

  As long as he moved his hand slowly nothing out of the ordinary happened, but as he slapped harder, some force manifested itself just before his hand reached his subject’s skin, so that his slaps were slowed and cushioned before they reached their target.

  “Try intermediate,” suggested de Castro.

  Dubrowsky turned the control a notch higher. “Any feeling?”

  “No, sir,” said Otterburn. “A little more tingle but that’s going away now. Okay, go ahead, sock me one.”

  Dubrowsky tried more slaps. This time, when he struck hard, his hand bounced back before it reached Otterburn’s skin at all. Finally Dubrowsky doubled his fist and threw a stiff punch at Otterburn’s jaw.

  The fist bounced off empty air. Otterburn’s head rocked a bit as the energy of the fist was transferred to it through the cushioning medium of the materiostat field, but he grinned.

  “Hot spit!” he said. “That didn’t hurt at all. Here, you, give me a whack with that stick!”

  De Castro raised an eyebrow—after all he was nearly twice Otterburn’s age—but wordlessly picked up the sawed-off broomstick and swung on Otterburn. The stick swooshed through the air and bounced harmlessly away.

  Otterburn’s grin became broader. “Say, this is the thing to wear when you’re attending a riot! Too bad we haven’t got a bow and arrow,” he said. “We could put on a William Tell act. I know, how about a baseball? I don’t suppose there’d be one around the lab, would there?”

  “Come to think of it, one of the mechs has one they play catch with in the lunch hour,” said Dubrowsky. “Hey, John!”

  The mechanic presently produced one very dirty hard baseball out of his tool-box. “You want I should lend you the gloves too?” he said.

  “No thanks,” said Dubrowsky. “Stand by, everybody!” He wound up and hurled the ball at Otterburn in a very creditable pitch.

  The ball ricocheted off the field and went through a pane of glass separating Dubrowsky’s part of the laboratory from that adjoining. The tinkle of falling glass mingled with shouts of alarm and indignation from the engineers in the next section
.

  “Oh-oh,” said Dubrowsky. “Must be getting kind of hibited myself.” He recovered the baseball, pacified the occupants of the adjacent booth as best he could and returned the ball to its owner.

  “Now,” he said with artificial solemnity, “let’s try high.”

  When he turned the control as far as it would go, the results were similar only more so. Even a light tap was repulsed, and the subject’s clothes showed a tendency to bag out from his body as he moved.

  Dubrowsky said, “With that setting you’d have to be careful about eating. If you shoved a forkful of grub at your face too fast it would fly off at a tangent.”