Far Out

by Damon Knight

  “Now, Mrs. Connington, we’re looking just fine today. How have we been feeling?”

  “Just fine. My husband thinks I’m insane.”

  “That’s g—Well, that’s a funny thing for him to think, isn’t it?” Berry glanced at the wall midway between himself and Len, then shuffled some file cards rather nervously.

  “Now. Have we had any burning sensations in our urine?”

  “No. Not as far as I’m—No.”

  “Any soreness in our stomach?”

  “Yes. He’s been kicking me black and blue.”

  Berry misinterpreted Moira’s brooding glance at Len, and his eyebrows twitched involuntarily.

  “The baby,” said Len. “The baby kicks her.”

  Berry coughed. “Any headaches? Dizziness? Vomiting? Swelling in our legs or ankles?”

  “No.”

  “All rightie. Now let’s just find out how much we’ve gained, and then we’ll get up on the examining table.”

  Berry drew the sheet down over Moira’s abdomen as if it were an exceptionally fragile egg. He probed delicately with his fat fingertips, then used the stethoscope.

  “Those X-rays,” said Len. “Have they come back yet?”

  “Mm-hm,” said Berry. “Yes, they have.” He moved the stethoscope and listened again.

  “Did they show anything unusual?”

  Berry’s eyebrows twitched a polite question.

  “We’ve been having a little argument,” Moira said in a strained voice, “about whether this is an ordinary baby or not.”

  Berry took the stethoscope tubes out of his ears. He gazed at Moira like an anxious spaniel. “Now let’s not worry about that. We’re going to have a perfectly healthy, wonderful baby, and if anybody tells us differently, why, we’ll just tell them to go jump in the lake, won’t we?”

  “The baby is absolutely normal?” Len said in a marked manner.

  “Absolutely.” Berry applied the stethoscope again. His faced blanched.

  “What’s the matter?” Len asked after a moment. The doctor’s gaze was fixed and glassy.

  “Vagitus uterinus,” Berry muttered. He pulled the stethoscope off abruptly and stared at it. “No, of course it couldn’t be. Now isn’t that a nuisance: we seem to be picking up a radio broadcast with our little stethoscope here. I’ll just go and get another instrument.”

  Moira and Len exchanged glances. Moira’s was almost excessively bland.

  Berry came confidently in with a new stethoscope, put the diaphragm against Moira’s belly, listened for an instant and twitched once all over, as if his mainspring had broken. Visibly jangling, he stepped away from the table. His jaw worked several times before any sound came out.

  “Excuse me,” he said, and walked out in an uneven line.

  Len snatched up the instrument he had dropped.

  Like a bell ringing under water, muffled but clear, a tiny voice was shouting: “You bladder-headed pill-pusher! You bedside vacuum! You fifth-rate tree surgeon! You inflated enema bag!” A pause. “Is that you, Connington? Get off the line; I haven’t finished with Dr. Bedpan yet.”

  Moira smiled, like a Buddha-shaped bomb. “Well?” she said.

  “We’ve got to think,” Len kept saying over and over.

  “You’ve got to think.” Moira was combing her hair, snapping the comb smartly at the end of each stroke. “I’ve had plenty of time to think, ever since it happened. When you catch up—”

  Len flung his tie at the carved wooden pineapple on the corner of the footboard. “Moy, be reasonable. The chances against the kid kicking three times in any one-minute period are only about one in a hundred. The chances against anything like—”

  Moira grunted and stiffened for a moment. Then she cocked her head to one side with a listening expression, a new mannerism of hers that was beginning to send intangible snakes crawling up Len’s spine.

  “What?” he asked sharply.

  “He says to keep our voices down, he’s thinking.”

  Len’s fingers clenched convulsively, and a button flew off his shirt. Shaking; he pulled his arms out of the sleeves and dropped the shirt on the floor. “Look. I just want to get this straight. When he talks to you, you don’t hear him shouting all the way up past your liver and lights. What—”

  “You know perfectly well. He reads my mind.”

  “That isn’t the same as—” Len took a deep breath. “Let’s not get off on that. What I want to know is what is it like, do you seem to hear a real voice, or do you just know what he’s telling you, without knowing how you know, or—”

  Moira put the comb down in order to think better. “It isn’t like hearing a voice. You’d never confuse one with the other. It’s more—The nearest I can come to it, it’s like remembering a voice. Except that you don’t know what’s coming.”

  “My God.” Len picked his tie off the floor and abstractedly began knotting it on his bare chest. “And he sees what you see, he knows what you’re thinking, he can hear when people talk to you?”

  “Of course.”

  “But damn it, this is tremendous!” Len began to blunder around the bedroom, not looking where he was going. “They thought Macaulay was a genius. This kid isn’t even born. Quints, schmints. I heard him. He was cussing Berry out like Monty Woolley.”

  “He had me reading The Man Who Came to Dinner two days ago.”

  Len made his way around a small bedside table by trial and error. “That’s another thing. How much could you say about his… his personality? I mean, does he seem to know what he’s doing, or is he just striking out wildly in all directions?” He paused. “Are you sure he’s really conscious at all?”

  Moira began, “That’s a silly—” and stopped. “Define consciousness,” she said doubtfully.

  “All right, what I really mean is—Why am I wearing this necktie?” He ripped it off and threw it over a lampshade. “What I mean—”

  “Are you sure you’re really conscious?”

  “Okay. You make joke, I laugh, ha. What I’m trying to ask you is, have you seen any evidence of creative thought, organized thought, or is he just… integrating, along the lines of, of instinctive responses. Do you—”

  “I know what you mean. Shut up a minute… I don’t know.”

  “I mean, is he awake, or asleep and dreaming about us, like the Red King?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And if that’s it, what’ll happen when he wakes up?”

  Moira took off her robe, folded it neatly, and manoeuvred herself between the sheets. “Come to bed.”

  Len got one sock off before another thought struck him. “He reads your mind. Can he read other people’s?” He looked appalled. “Can he read mine?”

  “He doesn’t. Whether it’s because he can’t, I don’t know. I think he just doesn’t care.”

  Len pulled the other sock halfway down and left it there. In another tone he said, “One of the things he doesn’t care about is whether I have a job.”

  “No… He thought it was funny. I wanted to sink through the floor, but I had all I could do to keep from laughing when she fell down… Len, what are we going to do?”

  He swivelled around and looked at her. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t mean to sound that gloomy. We’ll do something. We’ll fix it. Really.”

  “All right.”

  Careful of his elbows and knees, Len climbed into the bed beside her. “Okay now?”

  “Mm… Ugh.” Moira tried to sit up suddenly and almost made it. She wound up propped on one elbow and said indignantly, “Oh, no.”

  Len stared at her in the dimness. “What?”

  She grunted again. “Len, get up. All right. Len, hurry!”

  Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered up, goose-pimpled and tense. “Now what?”

  “You’ll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom—”

  “On that couch? Are you crazy?”

  “I can’t help it,” she said
in a thin voice. “Please don’t let’s argue, you’ll just have to—”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t sleep in the same bed,” she wailed. “He says it’s—oh!—unhygienic!”

  Len’s contract was not renewed. He got a job waiting on tables in a resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week and a half, until his four years of college physics earned him employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great opportunities in radio-TV, and firmly believed that atombomb tests were causing all the bad weather.

  Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology, astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture, Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law, business management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature. ,

  His domination of Moira’s life remained absolute, and I his experiments with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and fruit washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol.

  With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high-school staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new direction.

  The diabolical event was due on or about July 29. Len crossed off each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil. It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the parent of a super-prodigy—Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world by the time he was fifteen, unless he was assassinated first—but almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his maternal fortress.

  Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her.

  “It isn’t anything, I’m just tired. He started this after lunch. Look.”

  Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up.

  Droning. Abrasing

  the demiurge.

  Hier begrimms the tale:

  Eyes undotted, grewling

  and looking, turns off

  a larm, seizes cloes.

  Stewed! Bierly a wretch!

  Pence, therefore jews we. Pons!

  Let the pants take air of themsulves.

  Searches in the bottom of a hole

  for soap; hawks up a good job.

  Flayed on fable, a

  round cut of cat’s meat…

  The first three sheets were all like thai. The fourth was a perfectly good Petrarchan sonnet reviling the current administration and the party of which Len was an assenting member.

  The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira.

  “No, go on,” she said. “Read the rest.”

  The sixth and seventh were dirty limericks, and the eighth, ninth and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel.

  Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his gallon-bosomed daughter Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes; there were also courtesans, spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers, priests, whoremasters and men-at-arms, in magnificent profusion.

  “He’s decided,” said Moira, “what he wants to be when he’s born.”

  Leo refused to be bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty pages of the manuscript, Moira invented a title and by-line for it—The Virgin of Persepolis, by Leon Lenn—and mailed it off to a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was cautiously enthusiastic and a trifle plaintive. He asked for an outline of the remainder of the novel.

  Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldy and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd pages Leo had turned out in the meantime.

  Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this time Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index, containing three times as many clauses as a lease.

  This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent’s cheque for nine hundred dollars.

  Len tilted his mop handle against the wall and straightened carefully, conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two bloody weeks a year? It was a little cooler now that the sun was down, and he was working stripped to shorts and bath slippers, but he might as well have been wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath.

  The clatter of Moira’s monstrous new typewriter stopped, leaving a faint hum. Len went into the living room and sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered housecoat, was lighting a cigarette.

  “How’s it going?”

  She switched off the machine wearily. “Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes killed Anaxander.”

  “Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?”

  “I don’t know.” She frowned. “I can’t figure it out. You know who it was that raped Miriam in the garden?”

  “No, who?”

  “Ganesh.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.” She pointed to the stack of typescript. “See for yourself.”

  Len didn’t move. “But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire. He didn’t get back till—”

  “I know, I know. But he wasn’t. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose and his beard dyed. It’s all perfectly logical, the way he explains it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols—you remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were turned—”

  “All right, but for God’s sake this fouls everything up. If Ganesh never went to Lydia, then he couldn’t have had anything to do with distempering Cyrus’s armour. And Zeuxias couldn’t, either, because—”

  “I know. It’s exasperating. I know he’s going to pull another rabbit out of the hat and clear everything up, but I don’t see how.”

  Len brooded. “It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or Philomenes. But look, damn it, if Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out Philomenes once and for all. Unless… No. I forgot about that business in the temple. Whuff. Do you think he really knows what he’s doing?”

  “I’m certain. Lately I’ve been able to tell what he’s thinking even when he isn’t talking to me - I mean just generally, like when he’s puzzling over something, or when he’s feeling mean. It’s going to be something brilliant, and he knows what it is, but he won’t tell me. We’ll just have to wait.”

  “I guess.” Len stood up, grunting. “You want me to see if there’s anything in the pot?”

  “Please.”

  Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the Silex, stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his interest in Moira’s diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small blessings…

  Moira was leaning back with her eyes closed, looking very tired. “How’s the money?” she asked without moving.

  “Lousy. We’re down to twenty-one bucks.”

  She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. “We couldn’t be. Len, how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?”

  “Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about half an hour after it was paid for. We spent about fifty on ourselves, I guess. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn’t any coming in.”

  She sighed. “I thought
it would last longer.”

  “So did I… If he doesn’t finish this thing in a few days, I’ll have to go look for work again.”

  “Oh. That isn’t so good.”

  “I know it, but—”

  “All right, if it works out, fine, if it doesn’t… He must be near the end by now.” She stubbed out her cigarette abruptly and sat up, hands poised over the keyboard. “He’s getting ready again. See about that coffee, will you?”

  Len poured two cups and carried them in. Moira was still sitting in front of the typewriter, with a curious half-formed expression on her face.

  Abruptly the carriage whipped over, muttered to itself briefly and thumped the paper up twice. Then it stopped. Moira’s eyes got bigger and rounder.

  “What’s the matter?” said Len. He went and looked over her shoulder.

  The last line on the page read:

  (TO BE CONTINUED IN OUR NEXT)

  Moira’s hands curled into small, helpless fists. After a moment she turned off the machine. “

  “What?” said Len incredulously. “To be continued—What kind of talk is that?”

  “He says he’s bored with the novel,” Moira replied dully. “He says he knows the ending, so it’s artistically complete; it doesn’t matter whether anybody else thinks so or not.” She paused. “But he says that isn’t the real reason.”

  “Well?”

  “He’s got two. One is that he doesn’t want to finish the book till he’s certain he’ll have complete control of the money it earns.”

  “Well,” said Len, swallowing a lump of anger, “that makes a certain amount of sense. It’s his book. If he wants guarantees…”

  “You haven’t heard the other one.”

  “All right, let’s have it.”

  “He wants to teach us, so we’ll never forget, who the boss is in this family. Len, I’m awfully tired.”

  “Let’s go over it once more; there has to be some way—He still isn’t talking to you?”

  “I haven’t felt anything from him for the last twenty minutes. I think he’s asleep.”