“There’s a limit even to tolerance,” Calderon said. “I’m wondering about a créche.”
Bordent shook his shiny metallic-sheathed head. “He needs you,”
“But,” Myra said, “but! Can’t you give him just a little discipline?”
“Oh, it isn’t necessary. His mind’s still immature, and he must concentrate on more important things. You’ll tolerate him.”
“It’s not as though he’s our baby any more,” she murmured. “He’s not Alexander.”
“But he is. That’s just it. He’s Alexander!”
“Look, it’s normal for a mother to want to hug her baby. But how can she do that if she expects him to throw her halfway across the room?”
Calderon was brooding. “Will he pick up more… more super powers as he goes along?”
“Why, yes. Naturally.”
“He’s a menace to life and limb. I still say he needs discipline. Next time I’ll wear rubber gloves.”
“That won’t help,” Bordent said, frowning. “Besides, I must insist… no, Joseph Calderon, it won’t do. You mustn’t interfere. You’re not capable of giving him the right sort of discipline—which he doesn’t need yet anyway.”
“Just one spanking,” Calderon said wistfully. “Not for revenge. Only to show him he’s got to consider the rights of others.”
“He’ll learn to consider the rights of other X Free supers. You must not attempt anything of the sort. A spanking—even if you succeeded, which is far from probable—might warp him psychologically. We are his tutors, his mentors. We must protect him. You understand?”
“I think so,” Calderon said slowly. “That’s a threat.”
“You are Alexander’s parents, but it’s Alexander who is important. If I must apply disciplinary measures to you, I must.”
“Oh, forget it,” Myra sighed. “Joe, let’s go out and walk in the park while Bordent’s here.”
“Be back in two hours,” the little man said. “Good-by.”
As time went past, Calderon could not decide whether Alexander’s moronic phases or his periods of keen intelligence were more irritating. The prodigy had learned new powers; the worst of that was that Calderon never knew what to expect, or when some astounding gag would be sprung on him. Such as the time when a mess of sticky taffy had materialized in his bed, filched from the grocery by deft teleportation. Alexander thought it was very funny. He laughed.
And, when Calderon refused to go to the store to buy candy because he said he had no money—“Now don’t try to teleport me. I’m broke.”—Alexander had utilized mental energy, warping gravity lines shockingly. Calderon found himself hanging upside-down in midair, being shaken, while loose coins cascaded out of his pocket. He went after the candy.
Humor is a developed sense, stemming basically from cruelty. The more primitive a mind, the less selectivity exists. A cannibal would probably be profoundly amused by the squirmings of his victim in the seething kettle. A man slips on a banana peel and breaks his back. The adult stops laughing at that point, the child does not. And a civilized ego finds embarrassment as acutely distressing as physical pain. A baby, a child, a moron, is incapable of practicing empathy. He cannot identify himself with another individual. He is regrettably autistic; his own rules are arbitrary, and garbage strewn around the bedroom was funny to neither Myra nor Calderon.
There was a little stranger in the house. Nobody rejoiced. Except Alexander. He had a lot of fun.
“No privacy,” Calderon said. “He materializes everywhere, at all hours. Darling, I wish you’d see a doctor.”
“What would he advise?” Myra asked. “Rest, that’s all. Do you realize it’s been two months since Bordent took over?”
“And we’ve made marvelous progress,” Bordent said, coming over to them. Quat was en rapport with Alexander on the carpet, while the other two dwarfs prepared the makings of a new gadget. “Or, rather, Alexander has made remarkable progress.”
“We need a rest,” Calderon growled. “If I lose my job, who’ll support that genius of yours?” Myra looked at her husband quickly, noting the possessive pronoun he had used.
Bordent was concerned. “You are in difficulty?”
“The Dean’s spoken to me once or twice. I can’t control my classes any more. I’m too irritable.”
“You don’t need to expend tolerance on your students. As for money, we can keep you supplied. I’ll arrange to get some negotiable currency for you.”
“But I want to work. I like my job.”
“Alexander is your job.”
“I need a maid,” Myra said, looking hopeless. “Can’t you make me a robot or something? Alexander scares every maid I’ve managed to hire. They won’t stay a day in this madhouse.”
“A mechanical intelligence would have a bad effect on Alexander,” Bordent said. “No.”
“I wish we could have guests in once in a while. Or go out visiting. Or just be alone,” Myra sighed.
“Some day Alexander will be mature, and you’ll reap your reward. The parents of Alexander. Did I ever tell you that we have images of you two in the Great Fogy Hall?”
“They must look terrible,” Calderon said. “I know we do now.”
“Be patient. Consider the destiny of your son.”
“I do. Often. But he gets a little wearing sometimes. That’s quite an understatement.”
“Which is where tolerance comes in,” Bordent said. “Nature planned well for the new race.”
“Mm-m-m.”
“He is working on sixth-dimensional abstractions now. Everything is progressing beautifully.”
“Yeah,” Calderon said. And he went away, muttering, to join Myra in the kitchen.
Alexander worked with facility at his gadgets, his pudgy fingers already stronger and surer. He still had an illicit passion for the blue ovoid, but under Bordent’s watchful eye he could use it only along the restricted lines laid out by his mentors. When the lesson was finished, Quat selected a few of the objects and locked them in a cupboard, as was his custom. The rest he left on the carpet to provide exercise for Alexander’s ingenuity.
“He develops,” Bordent said. “Today we’ve made a great step.”
Myra and Calderon came in in time to hear this. “What goes?” he asked.
“A psychic bloc-removal. Alexander will no longer need to sleep.”
“What?” Myra said.
“He won’t require sleep. It’s an artificial habit anyway. The super race has no need of it.”
“He won’t sleep any more, eh?” Calderon said. He had grown a little pale.
“Correct. He’ll develop faster now, twice as fast.”
At 3:30 a. m. Calderon and Myra lay in bed, wide awake, looking through the open door into the full blaze of light where Alexander played. Seen there clearly, as if upon a lighted stage, he did not look quite like himself any more. The difference was subtle, but it was there. Under the golden down his head had changed shape slightly, and there was a look of intelligence and purpose upon the blobby features. It was not an attractive look. It didn’t belong there. It made Alexander look less like a super-baby than a debased oldster. All a child’s normal cruelty and selfishness—perfectly healthy, natural traits in the developing infant—flickered across Alexander’s face as he played absorbedly with solid crystal blocks which he was fitting into one another like a Chinese puzzle. It was quite a shocking face to watch.
Calderon heard Myra sigh beside him.
“He isn’t our Alexander any more,” she said. “Not a bit.”
Alexander glanced up and his face suddenly suffused. The look of paradoxical age and degeneracy upon it vanished as he opened his mouth and bawled with rage, tossing the blocks in all directions. Calderon watched one roll through the bedroom door and come to rest upon the carpet, spilling out of its solidity a cascade of smaller and smaller solid blocks that tumbled winking toward him. Alexander’s cries filled the apartment. After a moment windows began to slam across the court, and
presently the phone rang. Calderon reached for it, sighing.
When he hung up he looked across at Myra and grimaced. Above the steady roars he said, “Well, we have notice to move.”
Myra said, “Oh. Oh, well.”
“That about covers it.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Calderon said, “Nineteen years more of it. I thing we can expect about that. They did say he’d mature at twenty, didn’t they?”
“He’ll be an orphan long before then,” Myra groaned. “Oh, my head! I think I caught cold when he teleported us up to the roof just before dinner. Joe, do you suppose we’re the first parents who ever got… got caught like this?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was there ever another super-baby before Alexander? It does seem like a waste of a lot of tolerance if we’re the first to need it.”
“We could use a lot more. We’ll need a lot.” He said nothing more for awhile, but he lay there thinking and trying not to hear his super-child’s rhythmic howling. Tolerance. Every parent needed a great deal of it. Every child was intolerable from time to time. The race had certainly needed parental love in vast quantities to permit its infants to survive. But no parents before had ever been tried consistently up to the very last degree of tolerance. No parents before had ever had to face twenty years of it, day and night, strained to the final notch. Parental love is a great and all-encompassing emotion, but—
“I wonder,” he said thoughtfully. “I wonder if we are the first.”
Myra’s speculations had been veering. “I suppose it’s like tonsils and appendix,” she murmured. “They’ve outlived their use, but they still hang on. This tolerance is vestigial in reverse. It’s been hanging on all these millenniums, waiting for Alexander.”
“Maybe. I wonder—Still, if there ever had been an Alexander before now, we’d have heard of him. So—”
Myra rose on one elbow and looked at her husband. “You think so?” she said softly. “I’m not so sure. I think it might have happened before.”
Alexander suddenly quieted. The apartment rang with silence for a moment. Then a familiar voice, without words, spoke in both their brains simultaneously.
“Get me some more milk. And I want it just warm, not hot.”
Joe and Myra looked at one another again, speechless. Myra sighed and pushed the covers back. “I’ll go this time,” she said. “Something new, eh? I—”
“Don’t dawdle,” said the wordless voice, and Myra jumped and gave a little shriek. Electricity crackled audibly through the room, and Alexander’s bawling laughter was heard through the doorway.
“He’s about as civilized now as a well-trained monkey, I suppose,” Joe remarked, getting out of bed. “I’ll go. You crawl back in. And in another year he may reach the elevation of a bushman. After that, if we’re still alive, we’ll have the pleasure of living with a super-powered cannibal. Eventually he may work up to the level of practical joker. That ought to be interesting.” He went out, muttering to himself.
Ten minutes later, returning to bed, Joe found Myra clasping her knees and looking into space.
“We aren’t the first, Joe,” she said, not glancing at him. “I’ve been thinking. I’m pretty sure we aren’t.”
“But we’ve never heard of any supermen developing—”
She turned her head and gave him a long, thoughtful look. “No,” she said.
They were silent. Then, “Yes, I see what you mean,” he nodded.
Something crashed in the living room. Alexander chuckled and the sound of splintering wood was loud in the silence of the night. Another window banged somewhere outside.
“There’s a breaking point,” Myra said quietly. “There’s got to be.”
“Saturation,” Joe murmured. “Tolerance saturation—or something. It could have happened.”
Alexander trundled into sight, clutching something blue. He sat down and began to fiddle with bright wires. Myra rose suddenly.
“Joe, he’s got that blue egg! He must have broken into the cupboard.”
Calderon said, “But Quat told him—”
“It’s dangerous!”
Alexander looked at them, grinned, and bent the wires into a cradle-shape the size of the egg.
Calderon found himself out of bed and halfway to the door. He stopped before he reached it. “You know,” he said slowly, “he might hurt himself with that thing.”
“We’ll have to get it away from him,” Myra agreed, heaving herself up with tired reluctance.
“Look at him,” Calderon urged. “Just look.”
Alexander was dealing competently with the wires, his hands flickering into sight and out again as he balanced a tesseract beneath the cradle. That curious veil of knowledge gave his chubby face the debased look of senility which they had come to know so well.
“This will go on and on, you know,” Calderon murmured. “Tomorrow he’ll look a little less like himself than today. Next week—next month—what will he be like in a year?”
“I know.” Myra’s voice was an echo. “Still, I suppose we’ll have to—” Her voice trailed to a halt. She stood barefoot beside her husband, watching.
“I suppose the gadget will be finished,” she said, “once he connects up that last wire. We ought to take it away from him.”
“Think we could?”
“We ought to try.”
They looked at each other. Calderon said, “It looks like an Easter egg. I never heard of an Easter egg hurting anybody.”
“I suppose we’re doing him a favor, really,” Myra said in a low voice. “A burnt child dreads the fire. Once a kid burns himself on a match, he stays away from matches.”
They stood in silence, watching.
It took Alexander about three more minutes to succeed in his design, whatever it was. The results were phenomenally effective. There was a flash of white light, a crackle of split air, and Alexander vanished in the dazzle, leaving only a faint burnt smell behind him.
When the two could see again, they blinked distrustfully at the empty place. “Teleportation?” Myra whispered dazedly.
“I’ll make sure.” Calderon crossed the floor and stood looking down at a damp spot on the carpet, with Alexander’s shoes in it. He said, “No. Not teleportation.” Then he took a long breath. “He’s gone, all right. So he never grew up and sent Bordent back in time to move in on us. It never happened.”
“We weren’t the first,” Myra said in an unsteady, bemused voice. “There’s a breaking point, that’s all. How sorry I feel for the first parents who don’t reach it!”
She turned away suddenly, but not so suddenly that he could not see she was crying. He hesitated, watching the door. He thought he had better not follow her just yet.
CLASH BY NIGHT
by Lawrence O’Donnell
INTRODUCTION
A half mile beneath the shallow Venusian Sea the block impervium dome that protects Montana Keep rests frowningly on the bottom. Within the Keep is carnival, for the Montanans celebrate the four-hundred-year anniversary of Earthman’s landing on Venus. Under the great dome that houses the city all is light and color and gaiety. Masked men and women, bright in celoflex and silks, wander through the broad streets, laughing, drinking the strong native wines of Venus. The sea bottom has been combed, like the hydroponic tanks, for rare delicacies to grace the tables of the nobles.
Through the festival grim shadows stalk, men whose faces mark them unmistakably as members of a Free Company. Their finery cannot disguise that stamp, hard-won through years of battle. Under the domino masks their mouths are hard and harsh. Unlike the undersea dwellers, their skins are burned black with the ultraviolet rays that filter through the cloud layer of Venus. They are skeletons at the feast. They are respected but resented. They are Free Companions—
We are on Venus, nine hundred years ago, beneath the Sea of Shoals, not much north of the equator. But there is a wide range in time and space. All over the cloud planet the underwater
Keeps are dotted, and life will not change for many centuries. Looking back, as we do now, from the civilized days of the Thirty-fourth Century, it is too easy to regard the men of the Keeps as savages, groping, stupid and brutal. The Free Companies have long since vanished. The islands and continents of Venus have been tamed, and there is no war.
But in periods of transition, of desperate rivalry, there is always war. The Keeps fought among themselves, each striving to draw the fangs of the others by depriving them of their reserves of korium, the power source of the day. Students of that era find pleasure in sifting the legends and winnowing out the basic social and geopolitical truths. It is fairly well known that only one factor saved the Keeps from annihilating one another—the gentlemen’s agreement that left war to the warriors, and allowed the undersea cities to develop their science and social cultures. That particular compromise was, perhaps, inevitable. And it caused the organization of the Free Companies, the roving bands of mercenaries, highly trained for their duties, who hired themselves out to fight for whatever Keeps were attacked or wished to attack.
Ap Towrn, in his monumental “Cycle of Venus,” tells the saga through symbolic legends. Many historians have recorded the sober truth, which, unfortunately, seems often Mars-dry. But it is not generally realized that the Free Companions were almost directly responsible for our present high culture. War, because of them, was not permitted to usurp the place of peace-time social and scientific work. Fighting was highly specialized, and, because of technical advances, manpower was no longer important. Each band of Free Companions numbered a few thousand, seldom more.
It was a strange, lonely life they must have led, shut out from the normal life of the Keeps. They were vestigian but necessary, like the fangs of the marsupians who eventually evolved into Homo sapiens. But without those warriors, the Keeps would have been plunged completely into total war, with fatally destructive results.
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