More Than Human

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “I know. This fellow told me about you.”

  “About me?”

  “About what you called a ‘mathematical recreation,’ anyway. An extrapolation of the probable operating laws and attendant phenomena of magnetic flux in a gravity generator.”

  “God!”

  She made a short and painful laugh. “Yes, Hip. I did it to you. I didn’t know then of course. I just wanted to interest Gerry in something.

  “He was interested all right. He asked Baby about it and got the answer pronto. You see, Lone built that thing before Gerry came to live with us. We’d forgotten about it pretty much.”

  “Forgotten! A thing like that?”

  “Look, we don’t think like other people.”

  “You don’t,” he said thoughtfully and, “Why should you?”

  “Lone built it for the old farmer, Prodd. That was just like Lone. A gravity generator, to increase and decrease the weight of Prodd’s old truck so he could use it as a tractor. All because Prodd’s horse died and he couldn’t afford another.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. He was an idiot all right. Well, he asked Baby what effect it would have if this invention got out and Baby said plenty. He said it would turn the whole world upside down, worse than the industrial revolution. Worse than anything that ever happened. He said if things went one way we’d have such a war, you wouldn’t believe it. If they went the other way, science would go too far, too fast. Seems that gravitics is the key to everything. It would lead to the addition of one more item to the Unified Field—what we now call psychic energy, or ‘psionics.’”

  “Matter, energy, space, time and psyche,” he breathed, awed.

  “Yup,” Janie said casually, “all the same thing and this would lead to proof. There just wouldn’t be any more secrets.”

  “That’s the—the biggest thing I ever heard. So—Gerry decided us poor half-developed apes weren’t worthy?”

  “Not Gerry! He doesn’t care what happens to you apes! One thing he found out from Baby, though, was that whichever way it went the device would be traced to us. You should know. You did it by yourself. But Central Intelligence would’ve taken seven weeks instead of seven years.

  “And that’s what bothered Gerry. He was in retreat. He wanted to stew in his own juice in his hideout in the woods. He didn’t want the Armed Forces of the United Nations hammering at him to come out and be patriotic. Oh sure, he could have taken care of ’em all in time, but only if he worked full time at it. Working full time was out of his field. He got mad. He got mad at Lone who was dead and he especially got mad at you.”

  “Whew. He could have killed me. Why didn’t he?”

  “Same reason he didn’t just go out and confiscate the device before you saw it. I tell you, he was vicious and vengeful—childish. You’d bothered him. He was going to fix you for it.

  “Now I must confess I didn’t care much one way or the other, it did me so much good to see him moving around again. I went with him to the base.

  “Now, here’s something you just wouldn’t remember. He walked right into your lab while you were calibrating your detector. He looked you once in the eye and walked out again with all the information you had, plus the fact that you meant to take it out and locate the device, and that you intended to—what was your phrase?—‘appoint a volunteer.’”

  “I was a hotshot in those days,” said Hip ruefully.

  She laughed. “You don’t know. You just don’t know. Well, out you came with that big heavy instrument on a strap. I saw you, Hip; I can still see you, your pretty tailored uniform, the sun on your hair … I was seventeen.

  “Gerry told me to lift a Pfc shirt quick. I did, out of the barracks.”

  “I didn’t know a seventeen-year-old could get in and out of a barracks with a whole skin. Not a female type seventeen-year-old.”

  “I didn’t go in!” she said. Hip shouted in sheer surprise as his own shirt was wrenched and twisted. The tails flew up from under his belt and flapped wildly in the windless dawn. “Don’t do that!” he gasped.

  “Just making a point,” she said, twinkling. “Gerry put on the shirt and leaned against the fence and waited for you. You marched right up to him and handed him the detector. ‘Come on, soldier,’ you said. ‘You just volunteered for a picnic. You carry the lunch.’”

  “What a little stinker I was!”

  “I didn’t think so. I was peeping out from behind the MP shack. I thought you were sort of wonderful. I did, Hip.”

  He half laughed. “Go on. Tell me the rest.”

  “You know the rest. Gerry flashed Bonnie to get the files out of your quarters. She found them and threw them down to me. I burned them. I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t know what Gerry was planning.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, that’s it. Gerry saw to it that you were discredited. Psychologically, it had to be that way. You claimed the existence of a Pfc no one had ever seen. You claimed he was the psychiatrist—a real danger sign, as any graduate medic knows. You claimed files, facts and figures to back you up and they couldn’t be traced. You could prove that you’d dug something up, but there was nothing to show what it might have been. But most of all, you had a trained scientist’s mind, in full possession of facts which the whole world could prove weren’t so—and did. Something had to give.”

  “Cute,” murmured Hip from deep in his chest.

  “And just for good measure,” said Janie with some difficulty, “he handed you a post-hypnotic command which made it impossible for you to relate him either as Major Thompson, psychiatrist, or as the Pfc, to the device.

  “When I found out what he’d done I tried to make him help you. Just a little. He—he just laughed at me. I asked Baby what could be done. He said nothing. He said only that the command might be removed by a reverse abreaction.”

  “What in time is that?”

  “Moving backward, mentally, to the incident itself. Abreaction is the process of reliving, in detail, an event. But you were blocked from doing that because you’d have to start from the administration of the command; that’s where the incident started. And the only way would be to immobilize you completely, not tell you why, and unpeel all subsequent events one by one until you reached the command. It was a ‘from now on’ command like all such. It couldn’t stop you when you were traveling in reverse.

  “And how was I ever going to find you and immobilize you without letting you know why?”

  “Holy smoke,” Hip said boyishly. “This makes me feel kind of important. A guy like that taking all that trouble.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself!” she said acidly, then: “I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded…. It was no trouble for him. He swatted you like a beetle. He gave you a push and forgot all about you.”

  Hip grunted. “Thank you.”

  “He did it again!” she said furiously. “There you were, seven good youthful years shot, your good engineer’s mind gone, with nothing left but a starved, dirty frame and a numb obsession that you were incapable of understanding or relieving. Yet, by heaven, you had enough of—whatever it is that makes you what you are—to drag through those seven years picking up the pieces until you were right at his doorstep. When he saw you coming—it was an accident, he happened to be in town—he knew immediately who you were and what you were after. When you charged him he diverted you into that plate glass window with just a blink of those … rotten … poison … eyes of his …”

  “Hey,” he said gently. “Hey, Janie, take it easy!”

  “Makes me mad,” she whispered, dashing her hand across her eyes. She tossed her hair back, squared her shoulders. “He sent you flying into the window and at the same time gave you that ‘curl up and die’ command. I saw it, I saw him do it…. S-so rotten….”

  She said, in a more controlled tone, “Maybe if it was the only one I could have forgotten it. I never could have approved it but I once had faith in him … you’ve got to understand, we’re a part
of something together, Gerry and I and the kids; something real and alive. Hating him is like hating your legs or your lungs.”

  “It says in the Good Book, ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand—’”

  “Yes, your eye, your hand!” she cried. “Not your head!” She went on, “But yours wasn’t the only case. Did you ever hear that rumor about the fusion of Element 83?”

  “A fairy tale. Bismuth won’t play those games. I remember vaguely … some crazy guy called Klackenhorst.”

  “A crazy guy called Klackenheimer,” she corrected. “Gerry got into one of his bragging phases and let go with a differential he shouldn’t have mentioned. Klack picked it up. He fusioned bismuth all right. And Gerry got worried; a thing like that would make too much of a splash and he was afraid he’d be bothered by a mob of people who might trace him. So he got rid of poor old Klack.”

  “Klackenheimer died of cancer!” snorted Hip.

  She gave him a strange look. “I know,” she said softly.

  Hip beat his temples softly with his fists. Janie said, “There’ve been more. Not all big things like that. I dared him into wooing a girl once, strictly on his own, without using his talents. He lost out to someone else, an awfully sweet kid who sold washing machines door-to-door and was doing pretty well. The kid wound up with acne rosacea.”

  “The nose like a beet. I’ve seen it.”

  “Like an extra-boiled, extra-swollen beet,” she amended. “No job.”

  “No girl,” he guessed.

  She smiled and said, “She stuck by him. They have a little ceramics business now. He stays in the back.”

  He had a vague idea of where the business had come from. “Janie, I’ll take your word for it. There were lots of ’em. But—why me? You went all out for me.”

  “Two good reasons. First, I saw him do that to you in town, make you charge his image in the glass, thinking it was him. It was the last piece of casual viciousness I ever wanted to see. Second, it was—well, it was you.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Listen,” she said passionately, “we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a herd of goats!”

  “I’m the goat.”

  “Yes, yes, you are, can’t you see? But we were born on this island with no one like us to teach us, tell us how to behave. We can learn from the goats all the things that make a goat a good goat, but that will never change the fact that we’re not a goat! You can’t apply the same set of rules to us as you do to ordinary humans; we’re just not the same thing!”

  She waved him down as he was about to speak. “But listen, did you ever see one of those museum exhibits of skeletons of, say horses, starting with the little Eohippus and coming right up the line, nineteen or twenty of them, to the skeleton of a Percheron? There’s an awful lot of difference between number one and number nineteen. But what real difference is there between number fifteen and number sixteen? Damn little!” She stopped and panted.

  “I hear you. But what’s that to do with—”

  “With you? Can’t you see? Homo Gestalt is something new, something different, something superior. But the parts—the arms, the guts of it, the memory banks, just like the bones in those skeletons—they’re the same as the step lower, or very little different. I’m me, I’m Janie. I saw him slap you down like that; you were like a squashed rabbit, you were mangy and not as young as you should be. But I recognized you. I saw you and then I saw you seven years ago, coming out into the yard with your detector and the sun on your hair. You were wide and tall and pressed and you walked like a big glossy stallion. You were the reason for the colors on a bantam rooster, you were a part of the thing that shakes the forest when the bull moose challenges; you were shining armor and a dipping pennant and my lady’s girdle on your brow, you were, you were … I was seventeen, damn it, Barrows, whatever else I was. I was seventeen years old and all full of late spring and dreams that scared me.”

  Profoundly shaken, he whispered, “Janie … Janie …”

  “Get away from me!” she spat. “Not what you think, not love at first sight. That’s childish; love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with. I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about being seventeen and feeling … all …” She covered her face. He waited. Finally she put her hands down. Her eyes were closed and she was very still. “… all … human,” she finished.

  Then she said, matter-of-factly, “So that’s why I helped you instead of anyone else.”

  He got up and walked into the fresh morning, bright now, new as the fright in a young girl’s frightening dream. Again he recalled her total panic when he had reported Bonnie’s first appearance; through her eyes he saw what it would be like if he, blind, numb, lacking weapons and insight, had walked again under that cruel careless heel.

  He remembered the day he had emerged from the lab, stepped down into the compound, looking about for a slave. Arrogant, self-assured, shallow, looking for the dumbest Pfc in the place.

  He thought more then about himself as he had been that day; not about what had happened with Gerry, for that was on the record, accomplished; susceptible to cure but not in fact to change. And the more he thought of himself as he had been the more he was suffused with a deep and choking humility.

  He walked almost into Janie as she sat watching her hands sleeping in her lap as he had slept and he thought, surely they too must be full of pains and secrets and small magics too, to smile at.

  He knelt beside her. “Janie,” he said, and his voice was cracked, “you have to know what was inside that day you saw me. I don’t want to spoil you-being-seventeen … I just want to tell you about the part of it that was me, some things that—weren’t what you thought.” He drew a deep breath. “I can remember it better than you because for you it’s been seven years and for me it’s only just before I went to sleep and dreamed that I went hunting for the halfwit. I’m awake again and the dream is gone, so I remember it all very well….

  “Janie, I had trouble when I was a child and the first thing I learned was that I was useless and the things I wanted were by definition worthless. I hardly questioned that until I broke away and found out that my new world had different values from my old one and in the new I was valuable. I was wanted, I belonged.

  “And then I got into the Air Force and suddenly I wasn’t a football hero and captain of the Debating Society. I was a bright fish with drying scales, and the mud-puppies had it all their way. I nearly died there, Janie.

  “Yes, I found the degaussing field all by myself. But what I want you to know is that when I stepped out of the lab that day and you saw me, I wasn’t the cockerel and the bull moose and those other things. I was going to discover something and bring it to humanity, not for humanity’s sake, but so that they would …” he swallowed painfully, “… ask me to play the piano at the officers’ club and slap me on the back and … look at me when I came in. That’s all I wanted. When I found out that it was more than magnetic damping (which would make me famous) but antigravity (which would change the face of Earth) I felt only that it would be the President who asked me to play and generals who would slap my back; the things I wanted were the same.”

  He sank back on his haunches and they were quiet together for a long time. Finally she said, “What do you want now?”

  “Not that any more,” he whispered. He took her hands. “Not any more. Something different.” Suddenly he laughed. “And you know what, Janie? I don’t know what it is!”

  She squeezed his hands and released them. “Perhaps you’ll find out. Hip, we’d better go.”

/>   “All right. Where?”

  She stood beside him, tall. “Home. My home.”

  “Thompson’s?”

  She nodded.

  “Why, Janie?”

  “He’s got to learn something that a computer can’t teach him. He’s got to learn to be ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking away from him, “how moral systems operate. I don’t know how you get one started. All I know about morals is that if they’re violated, you feel ashamed. I’ll start him with that.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Just come,” she flashed. “I want him to see you—what you are, the way you think. I want him to remember what you were before, how much brilliance, how much promise you had, so he’ll know how much he has cost you.”

  “Do you think any of that will really make a difference?”

  She smiled; one could be afraid of someone who could smile like that. “It will,” she said grimly. “He will have to face the fact that he is not omnipotent and that he can’t kill something better than he is just because he’s stronger.”

  “You want him to try to kill me?”

  She smiled again and this time it was the smile of deep achievement. “He won’t.” She laughed, then turned to him quickly. “Don’t worry about it, Hip. I am his only link with Baby. Do you think he’d perform a prefrontal lobotomy on himself? Do you think he’d risk cutting himself off from his memory? It isn’t the kind of memory a man has, Hip. It’s Homo Gestalt’s. It’s all the information it has ever absorbed, plus the computation of each fact against every other fact in every possible combination. He can get along without Bonnie and Beanie, he can get things done at a distance in other ways. He can get along without any of the other things I do for him. But he can’t get along without Baby. He’s had to ever since I began working with you. By this time he’s frantic. He can touch Baby, lift him, talk to him. But he can’t get a thing out of him unless he does it through me!”

  “I’ll come,” he said quietly. Then he said, “You won’t have to kill yourself.”

  They went first to their own house and Janie laughed and opened both locks without touching them. “I’ve wanted so to do that but I didn’t dare,” she laughed. She pirouetted into his room. “Look!” she sang. The lamp on the night table rose, sailed slowly through the air, settled to the floor by the bathroom. Its cord curled like a snake, sank into a baseboard outlet and the switch clicked. It lit. “Look!” she cried. The percolator hopped forward on the dresser-top, stopped. He heard water trickling and slowly condensed moisture formed on the outside as the pot filled up with ice water. “Look,” she called, “look, look!” and the carpet grew a bulge which scuttled across and became nothing at the other side, the knives and forks and his razor and toothbrush and two neckties and a belt came showering around and down and lay on the floor in the shape of a heart with an arrow through it. He shouted with laughter and hugged her and spun her around. He said, “Why haven’t I ever kissed you, Janie?”