6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

by Edited by Groff Conklin

  He spread his hands. “I don’t think so either. So why hesitate? You have mentioned that I do a lot of things. Would that be true if I got all frothed up every time I tried something I’d never tried before?”

  “No. No, of course not.” She realized that it had been foolish of her to mix ordinary practical psychology into any consideration of Robin English. Obviously gland imbalances have frequent psychological symptoms, and in many of these cases the abnormal condition has its own self-justifying synapses which will set up a powerful defense mechanism when treatment is mentioned. Equally obviously, this wouldn’t apply to Robin. Where most people seem to have an inherent dislike of being changed, Robin seemed to have a subconscious yearning for just that.

  He said, “We get off at the next station.”

  “I know.”

  “I just wanted to tell you.”

  “Where to get off?”

  In utter surprise, he said “Me?” and it was the most eloquent monosyllable she had ever heard. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder consciously what he thought of her. It hadn’t seemed to matter, before. What was she, in his eyes? She suddenly realized that she, as a doctor meeting a man socially, had really no right to corner him, question him, analyze and diagnose the way she had over the past few weeks. She couldn’t abide the existence of a correctible condition in her specialty, and it was probably the essence of selfishness for her to do it. He probably regarded her as meddling and dominating. She astonished herself by asking him, point-blank.

  “What do I think of you?” He considered, carefully. He appeared not to think it remarkable that she could have asked such a question. “You’re a taffy-puller.”

  “I’m a what?”

  “A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn’t you ever see one?”

  “I don’t think so,” she breathed. “But—”

  “You see them down on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the ‘handle’ of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one ‘handle’ and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again.” Robin’s eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. “Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn’t a speck of taffy on it. Not a drop, not a smidgin. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished con rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of that fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and pulled out and squashed fiat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they’re being mauled around the way the bubbles were.” He sighed. “There’s almost too much contrast—that competent, beautiful machinist’s dream handling what? Taffy—no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I’d feel better if the machine handled one of Dali’s limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn’t matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You’re a taffy-puller. You’ve never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.”

  She sat quietly, letting the vivid picture he had painted fade away. Then, sharply, “Haven’t I!” she cried. “I’ve let us ride past our station!”

  ~ * ~

  Dr. Mellett Warfield let them in himself. Towering over his colleague, he bent his head, and the light caught his high white forehead, which, with his peaked hairline, made a perfect Tuscan arch. “Peg!”

  “Hello, Mel. This is Robin English.”

  Warfield shook hands warmly. “I am glad to see you. Peg has told me a lot about you.”

  “I imagine she has,” grinned Robin. “All about my histones and my albumins and the medullic and cortical tissues of my lobulae. I love that word. Lobulae. I lobule very much, Peg.”

  “Robin, for Pete’s sake!”

  Warfield laughed. “No—not only that. You see, I’d heard of you before. You designed that, didn’t you?” He pointed. On a side table was a simple device with two multicolored disks mounted at the ends of a rotating arm, and powered by a little electric motor.

  “The Whirltoy? Robin, I didn’t know that!”

  “I don’t know a child psychologist or a pediatrician who hasn’t got one,” said Warfield. “I wouldn’t part with that one for fifty times what it cost me—which is less than it’s worth. I have yet to see the child, no matter how maladjusted, glandular, spoiled, or what have you, who isn’t fascinated by those changing colors. Even the color-blind children can’t keep their eyes off it because of the changing patterns it makes.”

  Peg looked at Robin as if he had just come in through the wall. “Robin… the patent on that—”

  “Doesn’t exist,” said Warfield. “He gave it to the Parent’s Association.”

  “Well, sure. I made mine for fun. I had it a long time before a friend of mine said I ought to sell the idea to a toy manufacturer. But I heard that the Parent’s Association sent toys to hospitals, and I sort of figured maybe kids that needed amusement should have it, rather than only those whose parents could afford it.”

  “Robin, you’re crazy. You could have—”

  “No, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “Don’t try to make him regret it. Robin… you won’t mind if I call you Robin… what led you to design the rotors so that they phase over and under the twentieth-of-a-second sight persistence level, so that the eye is drawn to it and then the mind has to concentrate on it?”

  “I remember Zeitner’s paper about that at the Society for Mental Sciences,” said Peg in an awed tone. “A brilliant application of optics to psychology.”

  “It wasn’t brilliant,” said Robin impatiently. “I didn’t even know that that was what it was doing. I just messed with it until I liked it.”

  A look passed between Warfield and Peg. It said, “What would he accomplish if he ever really tried?”

  Warfield shook his head and perched on the edge of a table. “Now listen to me, Robin,” he said, gently and seriously. “I don’t think Peg’ll mind my telling you this; but it’s important.”

  Peg colored slightly. “I think I know what you’re going to say. But go ahead.”

  ~ * ~

  “When she first told me about you, and what she wanted to try, I was dead set against it. You see, we know infinitely more about the ductless glands nowadays than we did—well, even this time last year. But at the same time, their interaction is so complex, and their functions so subtle, that there are dozens of unexplored mysteries. We’re getting to them, one by one, as fast as they show themselves and as fast as we can compile data. The more I learn about the ductless glands, the less I like to take chances with them. When Peg just told me about you as a talented young man whose life history was a perfect example of hyper-thymus—immaturity, I think was the word she used—”

  “Da! Also goo!” laughed Robin. “She might have been kind enough to call it, say, a static precociousness.”

  “Please don’t tease me about it, Robin.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Go on, Mel.” Peg smiled at the way Warfield’s eyebrows went up. She had done the same thing, for the same reason, the first time Robin called her “Peg.”

  “Anyhow, I certainly had no great desire to follow her suggestion—shoot you full of hormones and sterones to help you reorganize your metabolism and your psychology. After all, interesting as these cases are, a doctor has to ration his efforts. There are plenty of odd glandular situations walking around in the guise of human beings. In addition, I had no personal interest in you. I hav
e too much work to do to indulge a Messiah complex.

  “But Peg got persistent. Peg can be very persistent. She kept bringing me late developments. I didn’t know whether you were a hobby or an inverted phobia of hers. With some effort I managed to remain uninterested until she brought me those blood analyzes.”

  “I’ll never get over my disappointment about what she did with those blood specimens,” said Robin soberly.

  “Disappointment? Why?”

  “I had hoped she was a vampire.”

  “Go on, Mel. Don’t try to keep up with him.”

  “It wasn’t until I found out that you wrote ‘The Cellophane Chalice’—and mind you, I never did like poetry, but that was different—and that you also”—he ticked them off on his fingers—”wrote the original continuity for that pornographic horror of a comic strip ‘Gertie and the Wolves,’ did the pipe-cleaner figurines that were photographed to illustrate ‘The Tiny Hans Anderson,’ dropped a sackful of pine oil into the fountain at Radio City purely because you wanted to see thirty thousand gallons of bubbles, got thrown in the pen for it and while there saved the lives of two prisoners and a guard by slugging it out with a homicidal maniac in the bull pen; composed ‘The Lullaby Tree’… by the way, how was it Rollo Vincente got all the credit—and the money—for that song? It was Number One on the hit list for sixteen weeks.”

  “He did a swell job,” said Robin. “He wrote it down for me.”

  “Robin can’t read music,” Peg said tiredly.

  “Oh Lord,” said Warfield reverently. “I also learned that you invented that disgusting advertising disease ‘Stoplight Acne’ and gave it for free to an advertising copywriter—”

  “Who is now making twenty thousand a year,” said Peg.

  “The guy was desperate,” said Robin. “Besides, he gave me my gold trumpet.”

  “Which is in hock,” said Peg.

  “Oh, why go on?” said Warfield. “Most important, I learned that you didn’t eat regularly, that you suffered from recurrent eviction, that you continually give away your possessions, including your overcoats, with such bland illogic that once you spent four months in the hospital with pneumonia and complications—”

  “Four winter months, I might point out,” said Robin. “So help me, I don’t know how I’d have gotten through that winter otherwise. That was well worth the price of an overcoat.”

  “So Peg began to make a social issue of it. She said that you were a fountainhead of art, science, and industry and that the dispersal of your talents was a crime against humanity. At this stage I would be inclined to agree with her even if she weren’t Peg.” Warfield looked at the girl, and the way he did it made Robin raise his eyebrows.

  “So now that we have your cooperation, we’ll go ahead, for the greater honor and glory of humanity and creative genius, as Dr. Wenzell here once phrased it. But I want you to thoroughly understand that although there is every chance of success, there might be no result at all, or… or something worse.”

  “Like what?”

  “How do I know?” said Warfield sharply, and only then did Peg realize what a strain this was to him.

  “You’re the doctor,” said Robin. Suddenly he walked up to Warfield and touched his chest gently. He smiled. He said, “Mel, don’t worry. I’ll be all right.”

  Peg’s emotional pop-valve let go a hysterical giggle. Warfield turned abruptly away and roughly tore a drawer open and pulled out a thin sheaf of documents. “You’ll have to sign these,” he said roughly. “I’m going to get the solutions ready. Come on, Peg.”

  ~ * ~

  In the laboratory, Peg leaned weakly against the centrifuge. “Don’t worry, Mel,” she quoted mistily.

  “From the time of Hippocrates,” growled Warfield, “it has been the duty and practice of the physician to do everything in his power to engender confidence in the patient. And he—”

  “Made you feel better.”

  After a long pause Warfield said, “Yes, he did.”

  “Mel, I think he’s right. I think he will be all right. I think that what he has can’t be killed. There’s too much of it!”

  She suddenly noticed that Warfield’s busy hands had become still, though he didn’t turn to look at her. He said “I was afraid of that.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I—skip it.”

  “Mel, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing of any importance—especially to you. It’s just the way you talk about Robin… the way your voice sounds—”

  “That’s utterly ridiculous!”

  Warfield chuckled a little. “Not that I can blame you. Really I can’t.

  That boy has, without exception, the most captivating—”

  “Mel, you’re being offensive. You certainly know me well enough to know that my interest in Robin English is purely professional—even if I have to include the arts among the professions. Personally he doesn’t appeal to me. Why, he’s a child!”

  “A situation which I shall adjust for you.”

  “That was the n-nastiest thing anyone ever said to me!” she blazed.

  “Oh, Peg.” He came to her, wiping his hands on a towel. He threw it away—a most uncharacteristic gesture, for him—and put his hands gently on her shoulders. She would not meet his eyes. “Your lower lip is twice as big as it ought to be,” he said softly. “I am sorry, darling.”

  “Don’t call me darling.”

  “I lost my good sense. May I ask you to marry me again?”

  “M-marry me again?”

  “Thank the powers for that sense of the ridiculous! May I ask you again? It’s about time.”

  “Let’s see—what is the periodicity? You ask me every nineteen days, don’t you?”

  “Aloud,” he said gravely.

  “I—” At last she met his eyes. “No. No! Don’t talk about it!”

  He took his hands off her shoulders. “All right, Peg.”

  “Mel, I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing this up. If I ever change my mind, I’ll speak up.”

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I believe you would.”

  “It’s just that you—Oh Mel, everything’s so balanced now! My work is finally going the way I want it to go, and I just don’t need anything else.” She held up a hand, quickly. “If you say anything about ductless glands I’ll walk out of here and never see you again!”

  “I won’t, Peg.”

  There was a strained silence. Finally Peg said, “Are you almost ready?”

  Mel nodded and went back to the bench. “You can bring him in now.”

  Peg went out into the reception office. Something white and swift swished past her face, went rocketing up into the corner of the ceiling, hovered, and then drifted down to the floor in slow spirals. “What in—”

  “Oh—Sorry, Peg,” Robin said, grinning sheepishly. He went and picked up the white object, and held it out to her. “Tandem monoplane,” he explained. “The Langley principle. If Langley had only had a decent power plant, aviation history would have been drastically different. The thing is really airworthy.”

  “Robin, you’re impossible. Mel’s ready. Where’s the thing he asked you to sign?”

  “Hm-m-m? Oh, that—this is it.”

  “You made that airplane out of it?”

  “Well, I wanted to see if I could do it without tearing the paper. I did too.” He disassembled the aircraft busily, and smoothed the papers. “They’re all right, see?”

  “I ought to make you stand in the corner,” she said, half angrily.

  “O.K. It’s a long time till Christmas. You won’t hold that over my head.”

  She looked at him and suddenly, violently, resented Mel for what he had intimated. “Come on, Robin,” she said softly. She took his hand and led him into the laboratory.

  ~ * ~

  “Sit down, Robin,” said Warfield without looking up.

  “Per—dition!” said Robin, wide-eyed. “You’ve got more glassware here than the Biltmore Bar. As the
hot, cross Bunsen said to the evaporator, ‘Be still, my love.’”

  Peg moaned. Warfield said “And what did the evaporator say to that?”

  “‘Thank you very much.’ You see,” said Robin solemnly, “It was a retort courteous.”

  “Do you think,” gasped Peg, “that we’ll be able to put a stop to that kind of thing with these treatments?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Robin instantly. “The generation of puns is not a phenomenon of the immature mind. The repetition of them is.”

  “There is probably a flaw in that,” said Peg. “I have my hopes, anyway.”

  “Of course there’s a flaw in it. But didn’t it sound nice?”