Un-Man and Other Novellas

by Poul Anderson

The door was in front of him, shaded by a small vine-draped portico. He thumbed the button, and the voice informed him that no one was at home. Which was doubtless a lie, but— Poor kid! Poor girl, huddled in there against fear, against the night which swallowed her man—waiting for his return, for a dead man’s return. Naysmith shook his head, swallowing a gorge of bitterness, and spoke into the recorder: “Hello, honey, aren’t you being sort of inhospitable?”

  She must have activated the playback at once, because it was only a moment before the door swung open. Naysmith caught her in his arms as he stepped into the vestibule.

  “Marty, Marty, Marty!” She wa$ sobbing and laughing, straining against him, pulling his face down to hers. The long

  black hair blinded his stinging eyes. “Oh, Marty, take off that blasted mask. It’s been so long—”

  She was of medium height, lithe and slim in his grasp, the face strong under its elfish lines, the eyes dark and lustrous and very faintly slanted, and the feel and the shaking voice of her made him realize his own loneliness with a sudden desolation. He lifted the mask, letting its helmet-shaped hollowness thud on the floor, and kissed her with hunger. God damn it, he thought savagely, Donner would have to pick the kind I’m a sucker for! But then, he’d he bound to do so, wouldn’t he?"

  “No time, sweetheart,” he said urgently, while she ruffled his hair. “Get some clothes and a mask—Jimmy too, of course. Never mind packing anything. Just call up the police and tell ’em you’re leaving of your own accord. We’ve got to get out of here fast.”

  She stepped back a pace and looked at him with puzzlement. “What’s happened, Marty?” she whispered.

  “Fast, I saidl” He brushed past her into the living room. “I’ll explain later.”

  “She nodded and was gone into one. of the bedrooms, bending over a crib and picking up a small sleepy figure. Naysmith lit another cigaret while his eyes prowled the room.

  It was a typical prefab house, but Martin Donner, this other self who was now locked in darkness, had left his personality here. None of the mass-produced featureless gimmickry of today’s floaters: this was the home of people who had meant to stay. Naysmith thought of the succession of apartments and hotel rooms which had been his life, and the loneliness deepened in him.

  Yes—just as it should be. Donner had probably built that stone fireplace himself, not because it was needed but because the flicker of burning logs was good to look on. There was an antique musket hanging above the mantle, which 'bore a few objects: old marble clock, wrought-brass candlesticks, a flashing bit of Lunar crystal. The desk was a mahogany anachronism among relaxers. There were some animated films on the walls, but there were a couple of reproductions too—a Rembrandt rabbi and a Constable landscape—and a few engravings. There was an expensive console with a wide selection of music wires. The bookshelves held their share of microprint rolls, but there were a lot of old-style volumes too, carefully rebound. Naysmith smiled as his eye fell on the well-thumbed set of Shakespeare.

  The Donners had not been live-in-the-past cranks, but they had not been rootless either. Naysmith sighed and recalled his anthropology. Western society had been based on the family as an economic and social unit; the first raison ddtre had gone out with technology, the second had followed in the last war and the postwar upheavels. Modem life was an impersonal thing. Marriage—permanent marriage—came late, when both parties were tired of chasing, and was a loose contract at best; the creche, the school, the public entertainment, made children a shadowy part of the home. And all of this reacted on the human self. From a creature of strong, highly focused emotional life, with a personality made complex by the interaction of environment and ego, Western man was changing to something like the old Samoan aborigines; easy-going, well-adjusted, close friendship and romantic love sliding into limbo. You couldn’t say that it was good or bad, one way or the other; but you wondered what it would do to society.

  But what could be done about it? You couldn’t go back again, you couldn’t support today’s population with medieval technology even if the population had been willing to try. But that meant accepting the philosophical basis of science, exchanging the cozy medieval cosmos for a bewildering grid of impersonal relationships and abandoning the old cry of man shaking his fist at an empty heaven. Why? If you wanted to control population and disease, (and the first, at least, was still a hideously urgent need) you accepted chemical contraceptives and antibiotic tablets and educated people to carry them in their pockets; but then it followed that the traditional relationships between the sexes became something else. Modem technology had no use for the pick-and-shcivel laborer or for the routine intellectual; so you were faced with a huge class of people not fit for anything else, and what were you going to do about it? What your great, unbelievably complex civilization-machine needed, what it had to have in appalling quantity, was the trained man, trained to the limit of his capacity. But then education had to start early and, being free as long as you could pass exams, be ruthlessly selective. Which meant that your first classes, Ph.D.’s at twenty or younger, looked down on the Second schools, who took out their frustration on the Thirds— intellectual snobbishness, social friction, but how to escape it?

  And it was, after all, a world of fantastic anachronisms. It had grown too fast and too unevenly. Hindu peasants scratched in their tiny fields and lived in mud huts while each big Chinese collective was getting its own powerplant. Murderers lurked in the slums around Manhattan Crater while a technician could buy a house and furniture for six months’ pay. Floating colonies were being established in the oceans, cities rose on Mars and Venus and the Moon, while Congo natives drummed at the rain-clouds. Reconciliation— how?

  Most people looked at the surface of things. They saw that the great upheavals, the World Wars and the Years of Hunger and the Years of Madness and the economic breakdowns, had been accompanied by the dissolution of traditional social modes, and they thought that the first was the cause of the second. “Give us a chance and we’ll bring back the good old days.” They couldn’t see that those good old days had carried the seeds of death within them, that the change in technology had brought a change in human nature itself which would have deeper effects than any ephemeral transition period. War, depression, the waves of manic perversity, the hungry men and the marching men and the doomed men, were not causes, they were effects—symptoms. The world was changing and you can’t go home again.

  The psychodynamicists thought they were beginning to understand the process, with their semantic epistemology, games theory, least effort principle, communications theory— maybe so. It was too early to tell. The Scientific Synthesis was still more of a dream than an achievement, and there would have to be at least one generation of Synthesis-trained citizens before the effects could be noticed. Meanwhile, the combination of geriatrics and birth control, necessary as both were, was stiffening the population with the inevitable intellectual rigidity of advancing years, just at the moment when original thought was more desperately needed than ever before in history. The powers of chaos were gathering, and those who saw the truth and fought for it were so terribly few. Are you absolutely sure you’re right? Can you really justify your battle?

  “Daddy!”

  Naysmith turned and held out his arms to the boy. A two-year-old, a sturdy lad with light hair and his mother’s dark eyes, still half misted with sleep, was calling him. My son— Donner’s son, damn it! “Hullo, Jimmy.” His voice shook a little.

  Jeanne picked the child up. She was masked and voluminously cloaked, and her tones were steadier than his. “All right, shall we go?”

  Naysmith nodded and went to the front door. He was not quite there when the bell chimed.

  “Who’s that?” His ragged bark and the leap in his breast told him how strained his nerves were.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been staying indoors since—” Jeanne strode swiftly to one of the bay windows and lifted a curtain, peering out. “Two men. Strangers.”

>   Naysmith fitted the mask on his own head and thumbed the playback switch. The voice was hard and sharp: “This is the Federal police. We know you are in, Mrs. Dormer. Open at once.”

  “S-men!” Her whisper shuddered.

  Naysmith nodded grimly. “They’ve tracked you down so soon, eh? Run and see if there are any behind die house.”

  Her feet pattered across the floor. “Four in the garden,” she called.

  "All right.” Naysmith caught himself just before asking if she could shoot. He pulled the small flat stet-pistol from his tunic and gave it to her as she returned. He’d have to assume her training; the needier was recoilless anyway.

  ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends—’ We’re getting out of here. Keep close behind me and-shoot at their faces or hands. They may have breastplates under the clothes.”

  His own magnum automatic was cold and heavy in his hand. It was no gentle sleepy-gas weapon. At short range it would blow a hole in a man big enough to put your arm through, and a splinter from its bursting slug killed by hydrostatic shock. The rapping on the door grew thunderous.

  She was all at once as cool as he. “Trouble with the law?” she asked crisply.

  “The wrong kind of law,” he answered. “We’ve still got cops on our side, though, if that’s any consolation.”

  They couldn’t be agents of'Fourre’s or they would have given him the code sentence. That meant they were sent by the same power which had murdered Martin Donner. He felt no special compunctions about replying in kind. The trick was to escape.

  Naysmith stepped back into the living room and picked up a light table, holding it before his body as a shield against needles. Returning to the hall he crowded himself in front of Jeanne and pressed the door switch.

  As the barrier swung open, Naysmith fired, a muted hiss and a dull thump of lead in flesh. That terrible impact sent the S-man off the porch and tumbling to the lawn in blood. His companion shot as if by instinct, a needle thunking into the table. Naysmith gunned him down even as he cried out.

  Now—outside—to the boat' and fast! Sprinting across the grass, Naysmith felt the wicked hum of a missile fan his cheek. Jeanne whirled, encumbered by Jimmy, and sprayed the approaching troop with needles as they burst around the comer of the house.

  Naysmith was already at the opening door of his jet. He fired once again while his free hand started the motor.

  The S-men were using needles. They wanted the quarry alive. Jeanne stumbled, a dart in her arm, letting Jimmy slide to earth. Naysmith sprang back from the boat. A needle splintered on his mask and he caught a whiff that made his head swoop.

  The detectives spread out, approaching from two sides as

  they ran. Naysmith was shielded on one side by the boat, on the other by Jeanne’s unstirring form as he picked her up. He crammed her and the child into the seat and wriggled across them. Slamming the door, he grabbed for the controls.

  The whole performance had taken less than a minute. As the jet stood on its tail and screamed illegally skyward, Naysmith realized for the thousandth time that no ordinary human would have been fast enough and sure enough to carry off that escape. The S-men were good but they had simply been outclassed.

  They’d check the house, inch by inch and find his recent fingerprints, and those would be the same as the stray ones left here and there throughout the world by certain Un-man operatives—the same as Donner’s. It was the Un-man, the hated and feared shadow who could strike in a dozen places at once, swifter and deadlier than flesh had a right to be, and who had now risen from his grave to hairy them again. He, Naysmith, had just added another chapter to a legend.

  Only—the S-men didn't believe in ghosts. They’d look for an answer. And if they found the right answer, that was the end of every dream.

  And meanwhile the hunt was after him. Radio beams, license numbers, air-traffic analysis, broadcast alarms, ID files —all the resources of a great and desperate power would be hounding him across the world, and nowhere could he rest.

  JIMMY WAS weeping in fright, and Naysmith comforted him as well as possible while ripping through the sky. It was hard to be gay, laugh with the boy and tickle him and convince him it was all an exciting game, while Jeanne slumped motionless in the seat and the earth blurred below. But terror at such an early age could have devastating psychic effects and had to be allayed at once. It’s all I can do for you, son. The Brotherhood owes you that much, after the dirty trick it played in bringing you into this world as the child of one of us.

  When Jimmy was at ease again, placed in the back seat to watch a televised robotshow, Naysmith surveyed his situation. The boat had more legs than the law permitted, which was one good aspect. He had taken it five miles up, well above the lanes of controlled traffic, and was running northward in a circuitous course. His hungry engines gulped oil at a frightening rate; he’d have to stop for a refill two or three times. Fortunately, he had plenty of cash along. The routine identification of a thumbprint check would leave a written invitation to the pursuers, whereas they might never stumble on the isolated fuel stations where he meant to buy.

  Jeanne came awake, stirring and gasping. He held her close to him until the spasm of returning consciousness had passed and her eyes were clear again. Then he lit a cigaret for her and one for himself, and leaned back against the cushions.

  “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Her smile was uncertain. “How much can you tell me?”

  “As much as is safe for you to know,” he answered. Damn it, how much does she already know I can’t give myself away

  yeti She must be aware that her husband is—was—an Unman, that his nominal job was a camouflage, but the details? “Where are we going?” she asked.

  "I’ve got a hiding place for you and the kid, up in the Canadian Rockies. Not too comfortable, I’m afraid, but reasonably safe. If we can get there without being intercepted. It—”

  “We interrupt this program to bring you an urgent announcement. A dangerous criminal is at large in an Airflyte numbered USA-1349-U-7683 Repeat, USA-1349-U-7683. This man is believed to be accompanied by a woman and child. If you see the boat, call the nearest police headquarters or Security office at once. The man is wanted for murder and kidnaping, and is thought to be the agent of a foreign power. Further announcements with complete description will follow as soon as possible.”

  The harsh voice faded and the robotshow came back on. "Man, oh man, oh man,” breathed Naysmith. “They don’t waste any time, do they?”

  Jeanne’s face was white, but her only words were: “How about painting this boat’s number over?”

  “Can’t stop for that now or they’d catch us sure.” Naysmith scanned the heavens. “Better strap yourself and Jimmy in, though. If a police boat tracks us, I’ve got machine guns in this one. We’ll blast them.”

  She fought back the tears with a heart-wrenching gallantry. “Mind explaining a little?”

  “I’ll have to begin at the beginning,” he said cautiously. “To get it all in order, I’ll have to tell you a lot of things you already know. But I want to give you the complete pattern.

  I want to break away from the dirty names like spy and traitor, and show you what we’re really trying to do.”

  “We?” She caressed the pronoun. No sane human likes to stand utterly alone.

  “Listen,” said the Naysmith. “I’m an Un-man. But a rather special kind. I’m not in the Inspectorate, allowed by charter and treaty to carry out investigations and report violations of things like disarmament agreements to the Council. I’m in the U.N. Secret Service—the secret Secret

  Service—and our standing is only quasi-legal. Officially we’re an auxiliary to the Inspectorate; in practice we do a hell of a lot more. The Inspectorate is supposed to tell the U.N. Moon bases where to plant their rocket bombs; the Service tries to make bombardment unnecessary by forestalling hostile action.”

  “By assassinating
Kwang-ti?” she challenged.

  “Kwang-ti was a menace. He’d taken China out of the U.N. and was building up her armies. He’d made one attempt to take over Mongolia by sponsoring a phony revolt, and nearly succeeded. I’m not saying that he was knocked off by a Chinese Un-man, in spite of his successor government’s charges. I’m just saying it was a good thing he died.”

  “He did a lot for China.”

  “Sure. And Hitler did a lot for Germany and Stalin did a lot for Russia, all of which was nullified, along with a lot of innocent people, when those countries went to war. Never forget that the U.N. exists first, last, and all the time to keep the peace. Everything else is secondary.”

  Jeanne lit another cigaret from the previous one. “Tell me more,” she said in a voice that suggested she had known this for a long time.

  “Look,” said Naysmith, “the enemies the U.N. has faced in the past were as nothing to what endangers it now. Because before the enmity has always been more or less open. In the Second War, the U.N. got started as a military alliance against the fascist powers. In the Third War it became, in effect, a military alliance against its own dissident and excommunicated members. After Rio it existed partly as an instrument of multilateral negotiation but still primarily as an alliance of a great many states, not merely Western, to prevent or suppress wars anywhere in the world. Oh, I don’t want to play down its legal and cultural and humanitarian and scientific activities, but the essence of the U.N. was force, men and machines it could call on from all its member states—even against a member of itself, if that nation were found guilty by a majority vote in the Council. It wasn’t quite as large of the United States as you think to turn its Lunar bases over to the U.N. It thought it could still control the Council as it had done in the past, but matters didn’t work out that way. Which is all to the good. We need a truly international body.

  “Anyway, the principle of intervention to stop all wars, invited or not, led to things like the Great Jehad and the Brazil-Argentine affair. Small-scale war fought to prevent large-scale war. Then when the Russian government appealed for help against its nationalist insurgents, and got it, the precedent of active intervention within a country’s own boundaries was set—much to the good and much to the distaste of almost every government, including the American. The conservatives were in power here about that time, you remember, trying unsuccessfully to patch up the Socialist Depression, and they nearly walked us out of membership. Not quite, though. And those other international functions, research and trade regulation and so on, have been growing apace.