More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Lever forward, this device made the truck heavier. Lever back, lighter.

  It was antigravity!

  Antigravity: a fantasy, a dream. Antigravity, which would change the face of the earth in ways which would make the effects of steam, electricity, even nuclear power, mere sproutings of technology in the orchard this device would grow. Here was skyward architecture no artist had yet dared to paint; here was wingless flight and escape to the planets, to the stars, perhaps. Here was a new era in transportation, logistics, even the dance, even medicine. And oh, the research … and it was all his.

  The soldier, the dull-witted Pfc, stepped forward and yanked the lever full back. He smiled and threw himself at Barrows’ legs. Barrows kicked free, stood, sprang so his knees crackled. He stretched, reached, and the tips of his fingers touched the cool bright underside of one of the cables. The contact could not have lasted longer than a tenth of a second; but for years afterward, for all the years Barrows was to live, part of him seemed to stay there in the frozen instant, his fingertips on a miracle, his body adrift and free of earth. He fell.

  Nightmare.

  First the breast-bursting time of pounding heart and forgotten breathing, the madness of an ancient ruin rising out of its element, faster and faster, smaller and smaller into the darkening sky, a patch, a spot, a speck, a hint of light where the high sunlight touched it. And then a numbness and pain when the breath came again.

  From somewhere the pressure of laughter; from somewhere else, a fury to hate it and force it down.

  A time of mad shouting arguments, words slurred into screams, the widening crescents of laughing eyes, and a scuttling shape escaping him, chuckling. He did it … and he tripped me besides.

  And nothing to kill; racing into the growing dark and nothing there; pound-pound of feet and fire in the guts and flame in the mind. Falling, hammering the uncaring sod.

  The lonely return to the empty, so empty, so very empty hole in the ground. Stand in it and yearn upward for the silver cables you will never see again.

  A yellow-red eye staring. Bellow and kick; the detector rising too, but only so high, turning over and over, smashed, the eye blind.

  The long way back to barracks, dragging an invisible man called Agony whose heavy hands were clamped upon a broken foot.

  Fall down. Rest and rise. Splash through, wallow, rise and rest and then the camp.

  HQ. Wooden steps, the door dark; hollow hammering; blood and mud and hammering. Footsteps, voices: astonishment, concern, annoyance, anger.

  The white helmets and the brassards: MP. Tell them, bring the Colonel. No one else, only the Colonel.

  Shut up, you’ll wake the Colonel.

  Colonel, it’s anti-magnetron, to the satellite, and freight; no more jets!

  Shut up, ROTC boy.

  Fight them then and someone screamed when someone stepped on the broken foot.

  The nightmare lifted and he was on a white cot in a white room with black bars on the windows and a big MP at the door.

  “Where am I?”

  “Hospital, prison ward, Lieutenant.”

  “God, what happened?”

  “Search me, Sir. Mostly you seemed to want to kill some GI. Kept telling everybody what he looks like.”

  He put a forearm over his eyes. “The Pfc. Did you find him?”

  “Lieutenant, there ain’t such a man on the roster. Honest. Security’s been through every file we got. You better take it easy, Sir.”

  A knock. The MP opened the door. Voices.

  “Lieutenant, Major Thompson wants to talk to you. How you feel?”

  “Lousy, Sergeant. Lousy …. I’ll talk to him, if he wants.”

  “He’s quiet now, Sir.”

  A new voice—that voice! Barrows pressed down on the forearm he held over his eyes until sparks shone. Don’t look; because if you’re right, you’ll kill him.

  The door. Footsteps. “Evening, Lieutenant. Ever talk to a psychiatrist before?”

  Slowly, in terror of the explosion he knew must come, Barrows lowered his arm and opened his eyes. The clean, well-cut jacket with a Major’s leaves and the Medical Corps insignia did not matter. The man’s professionally solicitous manner, the words he spoke—these meant nothing. The only thing in the universe was the fact that the last time he had seen this face, it belonged to a Pfc, who had uncomplainingly and disinterestedly hauled his heavy detector around for a whole, hot day; who had shared his discovery; and who had suddenly smiled at him, pulled the lever, let a wrecked truck and a lifetime dream fall away upwards into the sky.

  Barrows growled and leapt.

  The nightmare closed down again.

  They did everything they could to help him. They let him check the files himself and prove that there was no such Pfc. The “degaussing” effect? No observations of it. Of course, the Lieutenant himself admitted that he had taken all pertinent records to his quarters. No, they are not in the quarters. Yes, there was a hole in the ground out there and they’d found what he called his “detector,” though it made no sense to anyone; it merely tested the field of its own magnet. As to Major Thompson, we have witnesses who can prove he was in the air on his way here when it happened. If the Lieutenant would only rid himself of the idea that Major Thompson is the missing Pfc, we’d get along much better; he isn’t, you know; he couldn’t be. But of course, Captain Bromfield might be better for you at that….

  I know what I did, I know what I saw. I’ll find that device or whoever made it. And I’ll kill that Thompson!

  Bromfield was a good man and heaven knows he tried. But the combination in the patient of high observational talent and years of observational training would not accept the denial of its own data. When the demands for proof had been exhausted and the hysterical period was passed and the melancholia and finally the guarded, superficial equilibrium was reached, they tried facing him with the Major. He charged and it took five men to protect the Major.

  These brilliant boys, you know. They crack.

  So they kept him awhile longer, satisfying themselves that Major Thompson was the only target. Then they wrote the Major a word of warning and they kicked the Lieutenant out. Too bad, they said.

  The first six months was a bad dream. He was still full of Captain Bromfield’s fatherly advice and he tried to get a job and stay with it until this “adjustment” the Captain talked about should arrive. It didn’t.

  He’d saved a little and he had his separation pay. He’d take a few months off and clear this thing out of his mind.

  First, the farm. The device was on the truck and the truck obviously belonged to the farmer. Find him and there’s your answer.

  It took six months to find the town records (for the village had been preempted when the ack-ack range was added to the base) and to learn the names of the only two men who might tell him about the truck. A. Prodd, farmer. A halfwitted hired hand, name unknown, whereabouts unknown.

  But he found Prodd, nearly a year later. Rumor took him to Pennsylvania and a hunch took him to the asylum. From Prodd, all but speechless in the last gasp of his latest dotage, he learned that the old man was waiting for his wife, that his son Jack had never been born, that old Lone maybe was an idiot, but nobody ever was a better hand at getting the truck out of the mud; that Lone was a good boy, that Lone lived in the woods with the animals, and that he, Prodd, had never missed a milking.

  He was the happiest human being Hip had ever seen.

  Barrows went into the woods with the animals. For three and a half years he combed those woods. He ate nuts and berries and trapped what he could; he got his pension check until he forgot about picking it up. He forgot engineering; he very nearly forgot his name. The only thing he cared to know was that to put such a device on such a truck was the act of an idiot, and that this Lone was a halfwit.

  He found the cave, some children’s clothes and a scrap of the silvery cable. An address.

  He found the address. He learned where to find the children. But then he
ran into Thompson—and Janie found him.

  Seven years.

  It was cool where he lay and under his head was a warm pillow and through his hair strayed a gentling touch. He was asleep, or he had been asleep. He was so completely exhausted, used, drained that sleeping and waking were synonymous anyway and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He knew who he was, who he had been. He knew what he wanted and where to find it; and find it he would when he had slept.

  He stirred happily and the touch in his hair ceased and moved to his cheek where it patted him. In the morning, he thought comfortably, I’ll go see my halfwit. But you know what, I think I’ll take an hour off just remembering things. I won the sack race at the Sunday school picnic and they awarded me a khaki handkerchief. I caught three pike before breakfast at the Scout camp, trolling, paddling the canoe and holding the fishing line in my teeth; the biggest of the fish cut my mouth when he struck. I hate rice pudding. I love Bach and liverwurst and the last two weeks in May and deep clear eyes like …“Janie?”

  “I’m here.”

  He smiled and snuggled his head into the pillow and realized it was Janie’s lap. He opened his eyes. Janie’s head was a black cloud in a cloud of stars; a darker night in nighttime. “Nighttime?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Sleep well?”

  He lay still, smiling, thinking of how well he had slept. “I didn’t dream because I knew I could.”

  “I’m glad.”

  He sat up. She moved cautiously. He said, “You must be cramped up in knots.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I liked to see you sleep like that.”

  “Let’s go back to town.”

  “Not yet. It’s my turn. Hip. I have a lot to tell you.”

  He touched her. “You’re cold. Won’t it wait?”

  “No—oh, no! You’ve got to know everything before he … before we’re found.”

  “He? Who’s he?”

  She was quiet a long time. Hip almost spoke and then thought better of it. And when she did talk, she seemed so far from answering his question that he almost interrupted; but again he quelled it, letting her lead matters in her own way, in her own time.

  She said, “You found something in a field; you had your hands on it just long enough to know what it was, what it could mean to you and to the world. And then the man who was with you, the soldier, made you lose it. Why do you suppose he did that?”

  “He was a clumsy, brainless bastard.”

  She made no immediate comment but went on, “The medical officer they sent in to you, a Major, looked exactly like that Pfc to you.”

  “They proved otherwise.”

  He was close enough to her to feel the slight movement in the dark as she nodded. “Proof: the men who said they were with him in a plane all afternoon. Now, you had a sheaf of files which showed a perturbation of some sort which affected proximity fuses over a certain area. What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. My room was locked, as far as I know, from the time I left that day until they went to search it.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that those three things—the missing Pfc, the missing files, and the resemblance of the Major to the Pfc—were the things which discredited you?”

  “That goes without saying. I think if I could’ve straightened out any one or any two of those three things, I wouldn’t have wound up with that obsession.”

  “All right. Now think about this. You stumbled and grubbed through seven years, working your way closer and closer to regaining what you had lost. You traced the man who built it and you were just about to find him. But something happened.”

  “My fault. I bumped into Thompson and went crazy.”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “Suppose it wasn’t carelessness that made that Pfc pull the lever. Suppose it was done on purpose.”

  He could not have been more shocked if she had fired a flashbulb in his face. The light was as sudden, as blinding, as that. When he could, he said, “Why didn’t I ever think of that?”

  “You weren’t allowed to think of it,” she said bitterly.

  “What do you mean, I wasn’t—”

  “Please. Not yet,” she said. “Now, just suppose for a moment that someone did this to you. Can you reason out who it was—why he did it—how he did it?”

  “No,” he said immediately. “Eliminating the world’s first and only antigravity generator makes no sense at all. Picking on me to persecute and doing it through such an elaborate method means even less. And as to method, why, he’d have to be able to reach into locked rooms, hypnotize witnesses and read minds!”

  “He did,” said Janie. “He can.”

  “Janie—who?”

  “Who made the generator?”

  He leaped to his feet and released a shout that went rolling down and across the dark field.

  “Hip!”

  “Don’t mind me,” he said, shaken. “I just realized that the only one who would dare to destroy that machine is someone who could make another if he wanted it. Which means that—oh, my God!—the soldier and the halfwit, and maybe Thompson—yes, Thompson: he’s the one made me get jailed when I was just about to find him again—they’re all the same!—Why didn’t I ever think of that before?”

  “I told you. You weren’t allowed.”

  He sank down again. In the east, dawn hung over the hill like the loom of a hidden city. He looked at it, recognizing it as the day he had chosen to end his long, obsessive search and he thought of Janie’s terror when he had determined to go headlong into the presence of this—this monster—without his sanity, without his memory, without arms or information.

  “You’ll have to tell me, Janie. All of it.”

  She told him—all of it. She told him of Lone, of Bonnie and Beanie and of herself; Miss Kew and Miriam, both dead now, and Gerry. She told how they had moved, after Miss Kew was killed, back into the woods, where the old Kew mansion hid and brooded, and how for a time they were very close. And then …

  “Gerry got ambitious for a while and decided to go through college, which he did. It was easy. Everything was easy. He’s pretty unremarkable looking when he hides those eyes of his behind glasses, you know; people don’t notice. He went through medical school too, and psych.”

  “You mean he really is a psychiatrist?” asked Hip.

  “He is not. He just qualifies by the book. There’s quite a difference. He hid in crowds; he falsified all sorts of records to get into school. He was never caught at it because all he had to do with anyone who was investigating him was to give them a small charge of that eye of his and they’d forget. He never failed any exam as long as there was a men’s room he could go to.”

  “A what? Men’s room?”

  “That’s right.” She laughed. “There was hell to pay one time. See, he’d go in and lock himself in a booth and call Bonnie or Beanie. He’d tell them where he was stumped and they’d whip home and tell me and I’d get the answer from Baby and they’d flash back with the information, all in a few seconds. So one fine day another student heard Gerry talking and stood up in the next booth and peeked over. You can imagine! Bonnie and Beanie can’t carry so much as a toothpick with them when they teleport, let alone clothes.”

  Hip clapped a hand to his forehead. “What happened?”

  “Oh, Gerry caught up with the kid. He’d charged right out of there yelling that there was a naked girl in the john. Half of the student body dove in there; of course she was gone. And when Gerry caught up with the kid, he just naturally forgot all about it and wondered what all the yelling was about. They gave him a pretty bad time over it.

  “Those were good times,” she sighed. “Gerry was so interested in everything. He read all the time. He was at Baby all the time for information. He was interested in people and books and machines and history and art—everything. I got a lot from it. As I say, all the information cleared through me.

  “But then Gerry began to … I was going to say, get sick, but that’s
not the way to say it.” She bit her lip thoughtfully. “I’d say from what I know of people that only two kinds are really progressive—really dig down and learn and then use what they learn. A few are genuinely interested; they’re just built that way. But the great majority want to prove something. They want to be better, richer. They want to be famous or powerful or respected. With Gerry the second operated for a while. He’d never had any real schooling and he’d always been a little afraid to compete. He had it pretty rough when he was a kid; ran away from an orphanage when he was seven and lived like a sewer rat until Lone picked him up. So it felt good to get honors in his classes and make money with a twist of his wrist any time he wanted it. And I think he was genuinely interested in some things for a little while: music and biology and one or two other things.

  “But he soon came to realize that he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He was smarter and stronger and more powerful than anybody. Proving it was just dull. He could have anything he wanted.

  “He quit studying. He quit playing the oboe. He gradually quit everything. Finally he slowed down and practically stopped for a year. Who knows what went on in his head? He’d spend weeks lying around, not talking.

  “Our gestalt, as we call it, was once an idiot, Hip, when it had Lone for a ‘head.’ Well, when Gerry took over it was a new, strong, growing thing. But when this happened to him, it was in retreat like what used to be called a manic-depressive.”

  “Uh!” Hip grunted. “A manic-depressive with enough power to run the world.”

  “He didn’t want to run the world. He knew he could if he wanted to. He didn’t see any reason why he should.

  “Well, just like in his psych texts he retreated and soon he regressed. He got childish. And his kind of childishness was pretty vicious.

  “I started to move around a little; I couldn’t stand it around the house. I used to hunt around for things that might snap him out of it. One night in New York I dated a fellow I know who was one of the officers of the I.R.E.”

  “Institute of Radio Engineers,” said Hip. “Swell outfit. I used to be a member.”