Mayberry broke in, “A month from now, a year from now ask yourself that question. A man is his size; his thoughts, attitudes, are molded not only by what he is, but by the figure he sees himself cut alongside his fellow men. Did you ever know a dwarf? I did. Do you think he wasn’t influenced by his size—and that your children haven’t been?”
“You forget,” I reminded him, “that your dwarf friend was an isolated case. We’ll be surrounded by others like ourselves. We’ll be the norm.”
“You at thirty inches, the norm, with your son looking down on you from a four-foot advantage? Perhaps.”
Oren, who with his round, red face, and faded blond hair, needed only a frilled bonnet to look like a real baby, objected heatedly to this. “Our entire civilization has been built on the theory that mind and intellect are the criteria by which to judge men and nations. Are you ready to renounce that now, Mayberry? To say that size and physical strength are paramount? I myself never felt more convinced of the contrary.”
Mayberry laughed as if he were really enjoying himself. “And you an old army man. Well, well.” He threw back his head. Mayberry’s laugh was clear and pleasant, not the little goat-giggle of most of us Subtracted men. “Well, Oren, I hope your idealism is justified.” He left us and went over to the hearth where Hinch was trying to get a fire started. With Mayberry’s help, Hinch was able to lift a eucalyptus log onto the blazing kindling. I never, to this day, smell eucalyptus smoke without remembering that scene.
Oren turned to me, “My wife’s pregnant, you know,” he said, and stroked his bulging baby’s brow as if embarrassed that a creature his size should be an expectant father.
“What does Hinch say?”
“He’s too taken up with himself to have any mind for anything else. Says it will be all right.”
“Well, it seems reasonable,” I tried to console him, “that if Helen has diminished the child has too, and the birth will be normal.”
“But the child, the child? What can it be?”
I didn’t know. No one knew then, and for Oren the prospect was terrifying.
The fire was blazing comfortably now, and we all sat on the hearth’s edge to warm ourselves before leaving.
Mayberry said, “You know Marsha’s still her own size?” Marsha was the girl he was engaged to, a teacher who lived in Sausalito.
“You saw her?”
“God, no,” he grimaced, “but she called this morning, and she’s all right.”
“I don’t know about my own wife,” I said. (As a matter of fact she and her mother had both been Diminished the night before, but I didn’t have word of it until I returned home.)
Hinch said, ‘This is striking like any disease. Some have more resistance—hold out longer than others.”
“But certain people have complete resistance to some diseases,” Mayberry reminded him. ‘“Perhaps Marsha has. Beautiful opportunity to test your theory, Oren.” His laugh was unpleasant then.
As experience proved, Mayberry was right about that, too. Some never were Subtracted. Some children never experienced Addition. They were very few, a handful really. I remember the names of most of the men of my generation who for some reason or another were never Diminished. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for their escape. They made up an extraordinarily diverse group: Einstein, the physicist, was one. Max Baer, a local prize fighter, was another. There were two or three poets whose names I never knew well and have forgotten. In California beside Marsha O’Brien, there was a sister at an Ursuline Academy who was never Subtracted.
A good deal of investigation and writing has been done on the subject of the Unchanged, but none of it, to my mind, has been very convincing.
* * * * * * * *
Certainly, however, it begins to appear that whatever it is that gives to these persons their immunity to Subtraction, it is a quality which is not inherited, transferred from one generation to the next. Though it has proved, I think, an exceedingly doubtful gift. Those adults who have not been Subtracted live among us like half-breeds—they are at ease neither with the Chilekings who are their own size, nor with their contemporaries, who walk about them at knee level, horrible monstrosities. It has often seemed to me that all those adults who have not been Subtracted, have had about them something childlike, ingenuous. Certainly it is true that in those great upheavals of policy in which the Chilekings and Smalfri have been opposed, the Unchanged have always sided with the Chilekings. And their position has been the more untenable because the Chilekings resented them, considered them spies from the Smalfri. Their position, however trying, has not been anything like as bad as that of the children who were not Expanded. But I am getting ahead of my story.
These memories take more care in the telling than I at first anticipated. On the one hand there is the temptation to give readers a quantity of purely personal detail and reaction which they may find boring. On the other hand, if I avoid the personal, retell the high lights of those first days, I will repeat much that has already been many times retold. My best course is, I think, to confine myself to those events in which I was either a participant, or observed at first hand, and which were in themselves significant or momentous. [A fine resolve, but one which Phipps is unable to keep consistently.] God knows there were plenty of those. Many which did not seem so at the time have since proved to be extremely “seminal,” to use once more a word fashionable sixty years ago.
The day after our meeting at Hinch’s, we went with, or rather were taken by, our sons, to the Post. Nothing untoward marked our arrival. Every man at the Post, had that morning, as it was later ascertained, experienced Subtraction. Most were not on duty, but were still hiding in their barracks or homes, not yet aware that what had happened to them had happened to all. Orders had been given excluding all civilians from the Post, and by some lucky chance, nothing of what had happened had yet gotten into the papers.
The boys were in uniform, and from a distance they weren’t so bad to look at—a big, hulking beefy line. But close up they were most unsoldierly. Not only were they physically lumpish and shapeless, but their plump, characterless faces above their uniforms made them look like an exercise group at an imbecile’s home. The fact that my son was one of them did not mitigate this impression.
But however they looked, they were extremely quick to catch on. There were no boys younger than David in the group, and a few were fifteen or over—but all of the older boys picked up almost at once all that was necessary for the manning of the guns which then constituted our chief harbor defense. Much of this was done through electrical controls, and except for the scale on which everything was constructed, a scale which made our manipulation of the guns after Subtraction hazardous as well as difficult, we might have been able to carry on alone. But in time of attack swiftness and dexterity of manipulation are essential. That we could not manage, and they, with our instruction, could. In the matter of sighting an invisible target, a matter which requires a good deal of mathematical ability, they had of course to rely on our calculations. That at least we were still fit to do. It was heartbreaking work though, in spite of their responsiveness: to stand, dwarfed and antlike, beside those you had, the day before, been able to dominate. There were tears and curses as well as instruction the day the Chilekings took over.
All went well that first day until about four o’clock when we called for a brief break in the work. It was hard to remember that six-footers like David were accustomed to a nap and a glass of milk in the middle of the afternoon. I had told David to lie down for awhile, and had placed, with considerable effort, a coat across him (he had never outgrown a tendency to croup). Then I had gone over to sit on the ground and look out across the quiet bay toward the green hills of Sausalito, while I considered the outcome of these crushing and amazing happenings. I had been there perhaps a half an hour when I was shaken and momentarily stunned by the detonation of one of the big sixteen-inch guns. As I ran stumbling and falling toward the guns I saw at a glance what had happene
d.
The gun had been fired and a direct hit had been made on the Russian ship, the Stalingrad, which was anchored in the harbor with a delegation of representatives from Communist or Communist-dominated countries here for a “last” conference with the anti-Communist nations. These delegates, with typical Communist caution about fraternizing with foreigners, were all housed aboard their ship rather than in the hotels of San Francisco as would have been the case with the representatives from any other countries. The boys knew this, of course, but I did not, at the time, understand the connection between their knowledge and the firing of the shot. I assumed that the firing was accidental and it was not until later that I learned that it was deliberate, the result of what seemed to the Chilekings to be logical thinking. These boys had grown up at a time when they had heard continual talk of the danger of Communism, of the menace of the Communist countries and of Russia as our enemy in a cold war and our potential attacker in a hot one. This being true, they saw no reason, in their forthright and childish way, why they should not do something to mitigate this danger. Children have wonderfully single-track minds. They are unable to understand that action need not follow upon recognition of a need for action. They had accepted our words concerning the danger and it seemed stupid to them, as they said later, not to take advantage of a God-given chance to lessen it. If it was true that Russia was only biding her time, waiting an opportunity to attack us, why wait? Why not strike the first blow? They had heard, being army children, more of that talk than most. Combine that conviction with the natural love most boys have for playing with mechanical toys and the action they took was, I suppose, highly predictable. Wanting to fire those guns, with or without cause, completely unaware for the most part of the meaning of death in reality, though very familiar with it as an abstraction through their television, comic book and motion picture experiences, they were easily able to convince themselves that they should fire them. Another element, though it is not one the Chilekings have ever themselves admitted, played its part in their action. It is an element which has been a constantly present and determining one in the relationship of Chilekings and Smalfri: I refer to the children’s resentment toward and hatred of adults—especially such adults as had the misfortune of being their parents. This bitterness before Subtraction had gone unnoticed, since the children had been unable, because of their size, to do much about it. And by the time most of them (before Subtraction) had reached a size which made it possible for them to retaliate with any degree of success, they had been so inculcated with their parents’ principles, “Honor your father and your mother,” and the like, that they had lost heart for revolt and reprisal. Of course an occasional child, even before Subtraction, of unusual energy and determination, managed to blow off his father’s head or stab his mother. Such overt aggressive tactics were no longer necessary after Subtraction. The Chilekings had the upper hand and they knew it—nevertheless their relationship with us has continued to be more or less punitive.
* * * * * * * *
So the gun was fired not only for “fun,” not only because the firing made sense to the children, but as an act of defiance against us. It was fired because after a lifetime of denial, of “hands off,” “don’t touch,” or “do as Father says,” it was glorious to touch, to do exactly the opposite of what Father said. So the gun was fired.
These facts were ascertained and these conjectures made afterwards, of course. There was no time then for getting at reasons; and, as I said earlier, we all, then, took for granted that both the firing of the shot and the hitting of the Stalingrad were accidental. There was of course immediate pandemonium both at the Post and in San Francisco. Oren and those of his officers who were with him at the time put off for the scene of the catastrophe in a launch belonging to one of the officers. I say “put off” euphemistically. The Chilekings put off. We were passengers on the launch, helpless as papooses in their mother’s carrying bags. Dangerous as it had now proved to entrust any knowledge of equipment to the children, it was nevertheless absolutely necessary to make use of their help in boarding and manning the launch.
The decision to go out to the stricken Stalingrad had been preceded by another decision—a difficult one to make. A decision to give up any attempt at secrecy. As we made the short trip out to the sinking ship my mind was filled with a despairing conflict of ideas. I forgot my size, which would in itself have put an end to my army career, and thought that all was now over with me: that this incident would mean war for my country and court-martial and probable death for all of us.
We were among the first to reach the Stalingrad—and, although it had been struck only twenty minutes earlier, it had already heeled over onto its port side at an angle that indicated that it had not much longer to live. The ship had listed so quickly and so badly, and so many of both crew and passengers had been killed outright that no lifeboats had been put over. The water was filled with the dead and wounded— many, both of the living and dead, being terribly maimed— headless, dismembered, disembowelled. I had been an army man all my life but as chance would have it I had never participated in an engagement. This was my first sight of carnage—and I was not prepared for what I saw and heard: the screams, the bloodstained water, entrails afloat on the encarmined bay like lush aquatic plants. I report these gruesome facts so that you can better understand the subsequent reactions of the Chilekings. They, of course, had the actual work of lifting these torn and bleeding bodies into the launch. We were as helpless as babies would have been attempting to rescue full-grown men. The Chilekings had the size for it and the strength—but not the stomach. All the gore of television and comics had not prepared them for the real thing —any more than their reading of the wooing and wedding of Sleeping Beauty, say, could have prepared them for the realities of marriage. I remember one young boy, a Chinese I would guess, with his arm off at the shoulder, who screamed pitifully until he died. One of the Chilekings refused to go on with the rescue work and bent over him sobbing and crying, “Don’t die, don’t die.” But he did die and the Chileking shook him and patted him the way a small boy will pet a puppy when it dies—unable to believe that his own will and desire—to which the pet has always before responded—will not cause the animal once more to respond.
The last person we were able to take onto the launch was, we thought, another, though smaller, child. When we turned him onto his back we saw, though he was no larger than a four-year-old, that he had a full beard and the marked and lined face of a man well past middle age. We Smalfri were more unnerved by this sight than by that of all the injured put together. Oren clutched my arm and whispered, “This is the end for us.” By “us,” he meant both the world as we had known it—and we, the adults who had made that world. And he was absolutely right. “Our” world, the world we had made and dominated, had ended that day—and we as “dominators” ended then too. The Chileking Era had already, though we did not then know it, begun.
In spite of the confusion and terror, the make-up of the crew of our launch—midget officers directing a crew of imbeciles is how it looked I suppose—had not gone unnoticed. Subtraction (or Deflation, as the Chilekings call it), as I said earlier, had begun first and with a hundred per cent effectiveness at the Presidio. On the morning of the thirty-first, most of San Francisco was as yet unaware of what was taking place —all over the world as it later proved. A launch on which there were several representatives of the press, including not only the local dailies but a number of the national press services had been near us while we were picking up survivors, and their own lifesaving efforts had not blinded them to our peculiarities—to use rather a cheerful and inadequate word for what had happened to us. Hemworth of the “Chronicle,” who knew Oren and me well but did not recognize us, reduced, shouted over to us, “In God’s name who are you guys? What have you got there? That’s a Post launch isn’t it? The shot was fired from the Post wasn’t it? For God’s sake where did you come from and who are you? Look at this! Do you know anything about this
?” He was pointing at a Subtracted Russian whom the newsmen had picked up. “Is he one of you?”
“He is one of us,” Oren called back in mournful recognition, but his answer was lost in the general cry that went up to put away from the Stalingrad which was then sinking fast. There were survivors still in the water but our boat was already overfull—and in any case we could not help those in the water by lingering to be ourselves engulfed. The Stalingrad went down quietly, with a kind of organic shudder as she slid from sight. Hemworth’s launch had kept close to us as we swung out to avoid the Stalingrad. Oren, who as I said knew Hemworth well, shouted to him, “Hemworth, I’m Oren, Colonel Oren of the Post. Let me come on board. I’ve a story for you.”
Hemworth called back, “If you’re Oren, I’m Malenkov.”
Oren said, “What have you got to lose?”
“What have I got to gain?” Hemworth answered, but his launch pulled in close to ours and a more than willing Chileking tossed Oren over to the newsmen like a sack of potatoes— a nephew of Oren’s, it was. Both boats, already dangerously overloaded, then put in for shore where private cars and ambulances were waiting to relieve us of our injured. We made two more trips out into the bay—on the last trip picking up only dead bodies—one of which was another reducee, a woman this time. (On the whole women were more tardily reduced than the men.)
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