I looked over the edge of the bed—and drew back. I seemed to be perched on a scaffolding, so far away and dwarfed was the floral jungle of the carpet below me. I was marooned on my own bed. The realization was frightful and revolting. I was not only a man, but a soldier and campaigner accustomed to bend circumstances to my own needs. Here was a circumstance without flexibility. Nowhere would it give. And then as I examined again that attenuated, that hideously minimized body, which could not and yet must be mine if I existed at all, I cried out again and again in that tormented bird whistle, that thin marionette wail which was the only voice I had.
The voice which echoed so shrilly in my own ears evidently carried. I heard a great thud in my son David’s room, and then my diminished ears seemed not large enough to contain the heavy, flapping sounds of his bare feet as he came down the hall. I remember wondering dully if I had shrunk in relation to everything: if all sounds but my own were to be thunderous.
Then my son David, my eight-year-old, stood in the door of my room.
“Daddy,” he called, “Daddy, look! I’ve grown up. I grew up in the night. I’m as big as you now.”
And he had—he had. He stood in the doorway looking down at himself, not seeing me yet, and I thought, “This is the final proof of my madness,” for my son, David, my eight-year-old, filled the doorway. He was stark-naked, pink, boyish, and unmuscled; over six feet, and heavy of shoulder and arm.
We have now grown accustomed to big babies and little men, and this reversal no longer seems revolting. But that morning, that first morning, it was a horrible thing to see that babyish form so extended, that childish gap-toothed face above those heavy shoulders. Surely, my feeling for my son did not hinge upon his being of a size I could dandle, or toss upon my shoulders? Surely, fatherhood was more than the feeling one has for small things? Yet, I did not feel fatherly toward that baby-faced giant who stood in my doorway proudly punching his big pink thighs, even though his face was that, though enlarged, of my son David.
He looked up finally from his delighted examination of his own body.
“Daddy,” he said, “isn’t it wonderful?”
Then he saw me. There was fear and loathing in his face. He started to run. Then he turned back. “Get out of my daddy’s bed, you nasty little man. Get out. My daddy will come back and throw you out of the window.”
“David,” I said. “David, my boy.”
“I’m not your boy. You can’t make me your boy.”
Then it suddenly came to him, that he needn’t wait for his father to come to throw me out of the window. He was himself strong enough to do with me as he liked. He couldn’t put his loathing from him, but he came menacingly toward me. “I’ll throw you out the window and smash you in a thousand pieces. Where’s my daddy?”
I thought he would do it. I couldn’t but admire the child. I thought, “He is my son after all.” But at the final second he couldn’t bring himself to touch me. I was like a spider he had cornered but couldn’t kill. He turned and flung himself on the floor and lay there naked and sobbing, “I want my daddy. I want my daddy.”
I was suddenly shaking with cold. I was still sitting cross-legged and unclothed on my bed, and fog wisps were still blowing clammily through the window. But I was calm now; my son’s outbreak had quieted my own hysteria.
“David,” I said, “David, you’ll take cold there. Get up and put something on. Get up and stop that crying.”
The boy stopped crying and stood up. “Go to my closet, get my dressing gown and put it on.” He obeyed me in a sullen, dazed way. The dressing gown left his wrists and ankles bare. He was three or four inches taller than I was—than I had been. He stood by the door looking at me fearfully and incredulously.
I pulled my pajama top about my shoulders and leaned back against the headboard of the bed.
“David, I am your father. You can see that, surely. I helped you carve your jack-o’-lantern last night. Something very strange and terrible has happened to us. While we slept you have grown as big as a man and I have shrunk as small as a baby. But you are still my son and I’m your father. See, here’s where I cut my thumb last night making your jack-o’-lantern. You can see I’m your father, can’t you—only smaller?”
“Yes,” he hiccuped, “you look like my daddy, but my daddy is a big man. You look like a Halloween goblin. You look-” and he threw his arm over his face and began to cry again.
“David,” I cried sharply. “I know that—I look horrible, awful, but I am your father and we must help each other.” But I was repelled by the sight of those heavy, heaving shoulders, and those childish gulps and sniffles coming from behind that big pink hand.
“David,” I shouted. “Stop it, stop it, I say. Something terrible has happened and we must get the doctor here at once. Perhaps he can do something for us. Make us as we were last night.”
My son looked up, “I like to be big. I don’t want to be little again. Only have Dr. Hinch give you something so you won’t look so awful.”
The phone was in the hall. “David,” I said, “I want you to carry me to the hall and put me on the chair by the telephone table. I’m going to talk to Dr. Hinch. And while I’m talking to Dr. Hinch, I want you to tiptoe down to Mary Frances’ room. If she’s asleep don’t waken her, but see—see what size she is.”
The boy was beginning to get hold of himself, but it took a good deal of effort for him to be able to touch me, or for me to endure that touch. He lifted me easily, but clumsily, wadding my pajama coat about my waist so that my legs dangled bare. It was not until I attempted to dial Hinch that I realized that I had lost in strength as in stature. The dial barely rotated beneath my pygmy finger. It took all the strength of my wrist and forearm to budge it. At last the six figures were dialed. Dr. Hinch himself answered the phone from his bed.
“Hinch,” I said, “this is Phipps speaking. Captain Phipps.”
“Speak up, speak up,” Hinch roared sleepily. “I can’t hear you.”
“Hinch,” I cried, “this is Phipps. Something ghastly has happened! Something ghastly. Get here at once. Come right up to my room, and in God’s name, hurry.”
“All right, David,” he said at last, “I’ll be right over.”
As I hung up the receiver David came down the hall to me.
“Is she asleep?” I asked.
David nodded.
“Is she big—or little, David?”
“Big,” he whispered.
Poor Mary Frances. Poor Mary Frances.
“Help me to the floor, David. I want to walk.”
You accept that doll’s pace now. And you say, perhaps, as you read, “The old man takes it pretty hard,” or “The old fellow doesn’t let the story lose anything in the telling,” or maybe, “It gets sadder every time he tells it.”
All right. All right. You have your say; then I’ll have mine. It’s easy enough in these after days when all has been explained, rationalized, accepted. You toddle happily enough now. But then! That morning, when for the first time I stood in my own hall on those pitiful baby feet and started to walk to my own room—my own and my wife’s room. Step, step, step, and less than a yard covered. Walking along with my nose a foot and a half above the floor boards, and with the furniture hanging over my head like wooden precipices. Come to your own bed, and need a ladder to get into it, and have your own chair as inaccessible as a tree top, and crouch finally on your hassock like a toad. Do that for the first time with no blanket of rationalization to shield you from the sharp reality!
David spent a good deal of the time while we awaited Dr. Hinch’s coming looking at himself in the mirror. It was curiously repellent to see in that big body those childish attitudes—as if my son were a half wit. I knew this wasn’t fair. The boy was eight years old, but you can not after a lifetime —yours and the universe’s—associate intelligence and adulthood with stature, and have that association broken suddenly without some bleeding.
Dr. Hinch was an experienced, hard-bitten
army surgeon; and you may read, perhaps have read, in his own memoirs of his sensations that October morning. While we waited for him I kept thinking that this was perhaps something doctors knew about—but kept hushed up. I’d never been sick then, and still had a layman’s faith in a doctor’s ability to be able to do something.
When Dr. Hinch stood in the door of my room and saw me sitting on the hassock, and David standing over me, he fainted; he went down like a bombed building, wavering a minute, then collapsing with legs and arms sprawled confusedly like broken cornices, smashed facades. I saw how bad it was with us then.
David fetched water from the bathroom, and between us we brought him round. He lay there for a long time, though, with his biscuit-colored face in a pool of water. I was close enough to see clearly the look in his eyes when at last he opened them: it was the look of a man who fears he is mad.
I think Hinch in his memoirs misrepresents that morning’s happenings, though no doubt unconsciously. He was after all a physician and I have yet to meet the physician who is able to confess having made a mistake. Hinch was no exception. In the first place he fails to mention that the first thing he did on entering my room that morning was to faint. This omission alone gives an entirely false air of capability and resourcefulness to his account. In addition he fails to say that such plans as were made that morning were mine; and worst of all he definitely suggests that he, on that morning, anticipated the approaching universality of the change I had experienced. If he did, it was only with hindsight.
* * * * * * * *
But, as I have said, we brought him around finally and David got him onto his feet and into a chair. He sat there with his hand over his eyes saying, “My God, my God,” and occasionally peeping out at us from between his fingers. David began to whimper again at his strange actions.
I talked to him collectedly enough I think, the circumstances being considered, and finally had him sufficiently calm to give his attention to our problem. But I could see that, though he listened to me, he could not escape feeling that a diminution in brain had accompanied my physical diminution. He talked to me as if I were a child, as though my years, experience, training had dropped from me with my lost inches. He talked in a loud, slow, patient voice using small words. It was unendurable.
“Look here, Hinch,” I said at last, “nothing’s happened to my mind. Get that straight and don’t talk baby talk to me. If you have any doubt concerning my mental processes, give me any test you like and you’ll find my power of thought undiminished. Pull yourself together, man. God knows this is awful enough as it is without your reading into it changes that haven’t occurred. All I want to know is whether or not you as a medical man have any knowledge of what’s happened to me and David and Mary Frances. It’s a simple yes or no situation. Has medical history records of such cases? Have you yourself ever encountered any such thing?”
He said this and that but the upshot of it was that he knew nothing of such a happening either through study or experience. There had been cases where men had lost a few inches —probably as the result of a calcium deficiency; and as a young practitioner in southern Kentucky he had taken care of a child, much dwarfed, whose parents said it had the “little-growth.” The child had died, though, before he himself had observed any shrinkage in it.
There is something hateful about always having to look up at a man—at anyone. It is not only that the neck tires and the eyes glaze, but that there is implicit in the attitude some deference, some recognition of superiority. It is an association pattern without intrinsic truth, but centuries of use has made the mental response slavish that accompanies the curved neck, the uplifted eye. The rulers of men stand on balconies, ride horseback; the crucified Christ hangs above us on his cross. When the man comes who can dig himself a pit and, standing below us, yet lead us, then there will be true leadership. What the Chilekings have done has had its roots in our uplifted eyes.
* * * * * * * *
My first perceptions of all this came to me that October morning as I sat on the hassock looking up into Hinch’s pale, puffy face. I called to David sharply to help me up on to the bed. But the boy had gone to sleep. He was lying face down across the bed breathing audibly. The fog had cleared away; the sun filled the room with warm yellow light. It was getting on toward midmorning. None of us had eaten and David and I had had a shattering experience.
“David,” I called, “David, wake up, boy.”
He roused himself bewilderedly, sat up, and said, “Daddy, I’m hungry.”
“Hinch,” I said, “go downstairs and tell Maria we want coffee and toast and scrambled eggs up here at once. Enough for four. Mary Frances had as well be awakened.”
I remember David asked to have some of his “Muscleo,” a breakfast food popular at the time. He was saving coupons and wanted to use boxes as quickly as possible. It seemed intolerably half-witted to have this young giant crying for “Muscleo” and coupons for model airplanes.
“You’ll have scrambled eggs,” I said sharply.
“What am I to tell Maria?” Hinch asked.
“Tell her anything you like except the truth. Tell her we all have scarlet fever and are quarantined and she’s not to put a foot abovestairs. My God! Man, you don’t want every newsreel cameraman in California in here, do you?”
Hinch hadn’t thought of that. As he went into the hall the phone rang. It was his wife. I listened to him tell her that we were all down with scarlet fever, and that he would be with us the rest of the morning. Then at my suggestion he called Headquarters and my wife, giving them the same story. He told Amy he would keep in touch with her, that we were seriously but not dangerously ill, and that she should make no attempt to see us. I was glad to have that matter attended to. I tried to keep my mind off Amy and our future relationship.
While Hinch was downstairs getting our breakfast, David and I washed and dressed. He helped me onto a chair so that I could reach the lavatory. I didn’t attempt shaving that morning. David got into a sweater and a pair of old slacks of mine. My shoes were too small for him but he managed to get his toes into a pair ofespadrilles.
I put on an outworn play suit of his. For a minute as I stood on the hassock in that ridiculous blue-frilled garment I was tempted to plunge out the window, let the concrete below put an end to this pitiful travesty. There on the table lay the notes I had made the night before for the revision of the Phipps-Viorsky manual. I saw clearly, as I stood there looking out into the sunlit morning, that never again would I be accepted as the man who wrote that: I would be hereafter simply the man who had shrunk, the monstrosity.
Hinch came back upstairs with our breakfast. I left the awakening of Mary Frances to him. The poor child had none of David’s delight in the change. She came into the room wrapped about in a negligee of her mother’s, a great, strapping, sexless figure carrying her doll and crying passionately. She was taller than Hinch who was a little, pursy man, and it was ridiculous to see him pat her and murmur, “There, there, my child: Now, now. Don’t take on so, don’t take on.”
“Don’t take on!” It was too late to ask that, but Hinch, as those who have read his memoirs will remember, had no humor in him.
* * * * * * * * Note
I had to face again in Mary Frances all the horror and disgust I had seen in David’s eyes. It was a strange breakfast party, an unequaled one, I dare say. There wasn’t much said beyond attempts to reassure Mary Frances. David ate most of the food. I found myself watching with deep disgust the clumsy, greedy way he piled great forkfuls of eggs into his gap-toothed mouth. And there was something loutish and overbearing in the way he disregarded my suggestions that he’d had enough. And Mary Frances pressing her doll to her big, flat chest and saying, “Don’t you want a bite, dollie, dear?” and Hinch breaking out, “Lord, what a paper I can write on this!” No, that is a meal I can never forget.
[NOTE - It has been necessary to omit a good deal of material here having to do with doctors in general and Hinch in particu
lar. Phipps never ceases to blame the doctors for not “doing something” about Subtraction. He seems to feel that if they had been as competent in their field as he was in his, they would have “repulsed” the “invasion” by the forces of Subtraction.]
As soon as we had eaten I sent the children to the playroom, though David was determined to go out, show his friends what had happened.
“Well, Hinch,” I said when they had gone, “What’s to be done?”
“God only knows,” he muttered, “God only knows: this is beyond me.”
He walked over to me and I thought he was going to pat me on the head, say, “There, there, little man.” Hinch never got far beyond exterior appearances.
“I’ll want to have a consultation of course; have Dr. Kleigh and Dr. Marbot here. There’ll have to be X-rays, blood tests. I’d like to have a psychiatrist, see if there has been any fundamental personality change.”
Star SHort Novels - [Anthology] Page 2