“Stop!” she gasped. “Robin, you’re mad! You’re delirious!”
“Delirious and repressing, like a certain soft drink. Four o’clock suit you?”
It so happened that it did not.
But “All right, Robin,” she said helplessly, and hung up.
~ * ~
She discovered that she had cleared her afternoon so efficiently that she had time to go home and change. Well, of course she had to change. That princess neckline was—not daring, of course, but—too demure. That was it; demure. She did not want to be demure. She wanted to be businesslike.
So she changed to a navy sharkskin suit with a wide belt and a starched dicky at the throat, the severest thing in her wardrobe. It was incidental that it fitted like clasped hands, and took two inches off her second dimension and added them to her third. As incidental as Robin’s double-take when he saw it; she could almost sense his shifting gears.
“Well!” said Robin as he stepped back from the door. “A mannequin, kin to the manna from heaven. Come in, Peg!”
“Do you write your scripts out, Robin? You can’t generate those things on the spur of the moment!”
“I can for moments like this,” he said gallantly, handing her inside.
It was her turn for a double-take. The little apartment was scrupulously clean and neat. Books were in bookcases; it had taken the addition of three more bookcases to accomplish that. A set of shelves had been built in one corner, very cleverly designed to break up the boxlike proportions of the room, and in it were neatly stacked manuscripts and, up above, musical instruments. There was more livestock than ever, but it was in cages and a terrarium—she wondered where the white rats had been on her last visit. Imprisoned in the bathtub, no doubt. There was a huge and gentle pastel of a laughing satyr on the wall. She wondered where the big oil was.
“I painted ol’ Splay-foot over it,” said Robin.
“You include telepathy among your many talents?” she asked without turning.
“I include a guilty conscience among my many neuroses,” he countered. “Sit down.”
“I hear you’re getting a play produced,” she said conversationally, as he deftly set out a beautiful tray of exotic morsels—avocado mashed with garlic juice on little toast squares; stuffed olives sliced paper-thin on zwieback and chive cheese; stems of fennel stuffed with blue-cheese; deviled eggs on rounds of pimento, and a strange and lovely dish of oriental cashews in blood-orange pulp.
“It isn’t a play. It’s a musical.”
“Oh? Whose book?”
“Mine.”
“Fine, Robin. I read that Vic Hill’s doing the lyrics.”
“Well, yes. Voisier seemed to think mine were—Well, to tell you the truth, he called in Hill for the name. Got to have a name people know. However, they are my lyrics.”
“Robin. Are you letting him—”
“Ah—shush, Peg! No one’s doing anything to me!” He laughed. “Sorry. I can’t help laughing at the way you, looking like a Vassar p.g., ruffle up like a mother hen. The truth is that I’m getting plenty out of this. There just don’t seem to be enough names to go around on the billing. I wrote the silly little thing at one sitting, and filled in the music and staging just to round it off—sort of an overall synopsis. Next thing you know this Voisier is all over me like a tent, wanting me to direct it as well; and since there’s a sequence in there—sort of a duet between voice and drums in boogie-beat—that no one seems to be able to do right, he wants me to act that part too.” He spread his hands. “Voisier knows what he is doing. Only you can’t have one man’s name plastered all over the production. The public doesn’t take to that kind of thing. Voisier’s treating the whole deal the way he handles his trucking concern and his insurance business and his pharmaceutical house—like a business. Show business is still business.”
“Oh—that’s better. And what about this anthology of poems?”
“Oh, that. Stuff I had kicking around the house here.” His eyes traveled over the neat shelves and bookcases. “Remarkable what a lot of salable, material I had here, once I found it by cleaning up some.”
“What else did you find?”
“Some gadgets. A centrifugal pump I designed using the business end of a meat grinder for the impeller. A way to take three-dimensional portraits with a head clamp and a swivel chair and a 35 mm camera, A formula for a quick-drying artist’s oil pigment which can’t contract the paint. A way to drill holes through glass—holes a twenty-five thousandth of an inch or less in diameter—with some scraps of wire and a No. 6 dry cell. You know—odds and ends.”
“You’ve marketed all these?”
“Yes, or patented or copyrighted them.”
“Oh Robin, I’m so glad! Are you getting results?”
“Am I?” The old, lovely, wondering look came into his face. “Peg, people are crazy. They just give money away. I honestly don’t have to think about money any more. That is, I never did; but now I tell people my account number and ask them to send their check to it for deposit, and they keep piling it in, and I can’t cash enough checks to keep up with it. When are you going to ask me why I’ve been keeping away from you?”
The abruptness of the question took Peg’s breath away. It was all she had been thinking about, and it was the reason she had accepted his invitation. She colored. “Frankly, I didn’t know how to lead up to it.”
“You didn’t have to lead up to it,” he said, smiling gravely. “You know that, Peg.”
“I suppose I know it. Well—why?”
“You like the eatments?” He indicated the colorful dishes on the coffee table.
“Delicious, and simply lovely to look at. But—”
“It’s like that. This isn’t food for hungry people. Canapes like these are carefully designed to appeal to all five senses—if you delight in the crunch of good zwieback the way I do, and include hearing.”
She stared at him. “I think I’m being likened to a… a smorgasbord!”
He laughed. “The point I’m making is that a hungry man will go for this kind of food as happily as any other. The important thing to him is that it’s food. If he happens to like the particular titillations offered by such food as this, he will probably look back on his gobbling with some regret, later, when his appetite for food is satisfied and his psychic—artistic, if you like—hungers can be felt.” Robin grinned suddenly. “This is a wayward and wandering analogy, I know; but it does express why I kept away from you.”
“It does?”
“Yes, of course. Look, Peg, I can see what’s happening to me even if I am the patient. I wonder why so many doctors overlook that? You can play around with my metabolism and my psychology and ultimately affect such an abstract as my emotional maturity. But there’s one thing you can’t touch—and that is my own estimate of the things I have learned. My sense of values. You can change my approach to these things, but not the things themselves. One such thing is that I have a violent reaction against sordidness, no matter how well justified the sordidness may have been when I did the sordid thing, whatever it was. In the past, the justification has been the important thing. Now—and by ‘now’ I mean since I started these treatments—the reaction is more important. So I avoid sordidness because I don’t want to live through the reaction afterward, and not so much because I dislike doing a sordid thing.”
“That’s a symptom of maturity,” said Peg. “But what has it to do with me?”
“I was hungry,” he said simply. “So hungry I couldn’t see straight. And suddenly so full of horse sense that I wouldn’t reach for the pretty canapes until I could fully appreciate them. And now—sit down, Peg!”
“I… have to go,” she said in a throttled voice.
“Oh, you’re wrong,” he said, not moving. He spoke very quietly. “You don’t have to go. You haven’t been listening to me. You’re acting defensive when I’ve laid no siege. I have just said that I’m incapable of doing anything in bad taste—that is, anything whi
ch will taste bad to me, now or later. And you are acting as if I had said the opposite. You are thinking with your emotions instead of your intellect.”
Slowly, she sank back into her chair. “You take a great deal for granted,” she said coldly.
“That, in effect, is what the bread and cheese and pimentos and olives told me when I told them about these trays,” he said. “Oh, Peg, let’s not quarrel. You know that all I’ve just said is true. I could candy-coat all my phrases, talk for twice as long, and say half as much; and if I did you’d resent it later; you know you would.”
“I rather resent it now.”
“Not really.” He met her gaze, and held it until she began to smile.
“Robin, you’re impossible!”
“Not impossible. Just highly unlikely.”
He sprang to pour coffee for her—and how did he know that she preferred coffee to tea? he had both—and he said, “Now we can talk about the other thing that’s bothering me. Mel.”
“What about Mel?” she said sharply.
He smiled at her tone. “I gather that it’s the other thing that’s been bothering you?”
She almost swore at him.
“Sorry,” he said with his quick grin, and was as quickly sober. “Warfield’s very much in love with you, Peg.”
“He—has said so.”
“Not to me,” said Robin. “I’m not intimating that he has poured out his soul to me. But he can’t conceal it. What he mostly does is avoid talking about you. Under the circumstances, that begins to be repetitious and—significant.” He shrugged. “Thing is, I have found myself a little worried from time to time. About myself.”
“Since when did you start worrying about yourself?”
“Perhaps it’s symptomatic. This induced maturity that I am beginning to be inflicted with has made me think carefully about a lot of things I used to pass off without a thought. No one can escape the basic urgencies of life—hunger, self-preservation, and so on. At my flightiest moments I was never completely unaware of hunger. The difference between a childish and a mature approach to such a basic seems to be that the child is preoccupied only with an immediate hunger. The adult directs most of his activities to overcoming tomorrow’s hunger.
“Self-preservation is another basic that used to worry me not at all as long as danger was invisible. I’d dodge an approaching taxi, but not an approaching winter. Along comes a few gland-treatments, and I find myself feeling dangers, not emotionally, and now, but intellectually, and in the future.”
“A healthy sign,” nodded Peg.
“Perhaps so. Although that intellectual realization is a handy thing to have around to ward off personal catastrophies, it is also the raw material for an anxiety neurosis. I don’t think Mel Warfield is trying to kill me, but I think he has reason enough to.”
“What?” Peg said, horrified.
~ * ~
“Certainly. He loves you. You—” he broke off, and smiled engagingly. She felt her color rising, as she watched his bright eyes, the round bland oval of his almost chinless face.
“Don’t say it, Robin,” she breathed.
“—you won’t marry him,” Robin finished easily. “Whom you love needn’t enter into the conversation.” He laughed. “What amounts of wind we use to avoid the utterance of a couple of syllables! Anyway, let it suffice that Mel, for his own reasons, regards me as a rival, or at least as a stumbling block.” His eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I gather that he has also concluded that your chief objection to me has been my… ah… immaturity. No, Peg, don’t bother to answer. So if I am right—and I think I am—he has been put in the unenviable position of working like fury to remove his chief rival’s greatest drawback. His only drawback, if you’ll forgive the phrase, ma’am,” he added, with a twinkle and the tip of an imaginary hat. “No fun for him. And I don’t think that Brother Mel is so constituted that he can get any pleasure out of the great sacrifice act.”
“I think you’re making a mountain out of—”
“Peg, Peg, certainly you know enough about psychology to realize that I am not accusing Mel of being a potential murderer, or even of consciously wanting to hurt me. But the compulsions of the subconscious are not civilized. Your barely expressed annoyance at the man who jostles you in a crowded bus is the civilized outlet to an impulse for raw murder. Your conditioned reflexes keep you from transfixing him with the nearest nail file; but what about the impulses of a man engaged in the subtle complexities of a thing like the glandular overhaul I’m getting? In the bus, your factor of safety with your reactions can run from no visible reaction through a lifted eyebrow to an acid comment, before you reach the point where you give him a light tap on the noggin and actually do damage. Whereas Mel’s little old subconscious just has to cause his hand to slip while doing a subcutaneous, or to cause his eye to misread a figure on the milligram scale, for me to be disposed of in any several of many horrible ways. Peg! What’s the matter?”
Her voice quivering, she said quietly, “That is the most disgusting, conceited, cowardly drivel I have ever had to listen to. Mel Warfield may have the misfortune to be human, but he is one of the finest humans I have ever met. As a scientist, there is no one in this country—probably in the world—more skilled than he. He is also a gentleman, in the good old-fashioned meaning of the word—I will say it, no matter how much adolescent sneering you choose to do—and if he is engaged on a case, the case comes first.” She rose. “Robin, I have had to take a lot from you, because as a gland specialist I knew what an advanced condition I had to allow for. That is going, to stop. You are going to find out that one of the prices you must pay for the privilege of becoming an adult is the control of the noises your mouth makes.”
Robin looked a little startled. “It would be a little dishonest of me to think these things without expressing them.”
She went on as if she hadn’t heard. “The kind of control I mean has to go back further than the antrums. All of us have mean, cowardly thoughts from time to time. Apparently the maturity you’re getting is normal enough that you’re developing a man-sized inferiority complex along with it. You are beginning to recognize that Mel is a better man than you’ll ever be, and the only way you can rationalize that is to try to make him small enough to be taking advantage of you.”
“Holy cow,” breathed Robin. “Put down that knout, Peg! I’m not going to make a hobby of taking cracks at Mel Warfield behind his back. I’m just handing it to you straight, the way I see it, for just one reason—to explain why I am discontinuing the course of treatment.”
She was halfway to the door as he spoke, and she brought up sharply as if she had been tied by a ten-foot rope. “Robin! You’re not going to do anything of the kind!”
“I’m going to do exactly that,” said Robin. “I’m not used to lying awake nights worrying about what someone else is likely to do. I’m doing all right. I’ve come as far in this thing as I intend to go. I’m producing more than I ever did in my life before, and I can live adequately on what I’m getting and will get for this music and these patents and plays and poems, to live for the rest of my life if I quit working tomorrow—and I’m not likely to quit working tomorrow.”
“Robin! You’re half hysterical! You don’t know what you’re talking about! In your present condition you can’t depend on the biochemical balance of your glandular system. It can only be kept balanced artificially, until it gradually adjusts itself to operation without the thymus. In addition, the enormous but balanced overdoses of other gland extracts we have had to give you must be equalized as they recede to normalcy. You simply can’t stop now!”
“I simply will stop now,” he said, mimicking her tone. “I took the chance of starting with this treatment, and I’ll take the chance of quitting. Don’t worry; no matter what happens your beloved Mel’s nose is clean, because of that release I signed. I’m not going to sue anybody.”
She looked at him wonderingly. “You’re really trying to be as offensive as you poss
ibly can, aren’t you? I wonder why?”
“It seems the only way for me to put over a point to you,” he said irritably. “If you must know, there’s another reason. The stuff I’m producing now is good, if I can believe what I read in the papers. It has occurred to me that whatever creativeness I have is largely compounded of the very immaturity you are trying to get rid of. Why should I cut off the supply of irrationality that produces a work of art like my musical comedy? Why should I continue a course of treatment that will ultimately lead me to producing nothing creative? I’m putting my art before my course, that’s all.”
“A good pun, Robin,” said Peg stonily, “but a bad time for it. I think we’ll let you stew in your own juice for a while. Watch your diet and your hours, and when you need professional help, get in touch with me and I’ll see what I can do about getting Mel to take you on again.”
6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Page 40