The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  NOW he was outside, still walking in his private fog. Nade, he thought. Then in an ironical flash that seemed to come from some separate place in himself that didn’t ache like the rest. You’re in love, brother.

  Judging by the way it felt, people in love should be locked up to beat their heads against white padded walls until the fit passed. There was a tiny element of doubt that made it worse, for that meant he would have to force her to say it herself. Being sure what her reaction would be wasn’t enough; he would have to hear it.

  Then he was in a televiewer booth with Nadine looking at him, close, very close, but nothing but only a picture with the hard touch of glass. She was far away in the library, out of reach. “Are you all right, Mart? It was bad news, wasn’t it.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment, looking at her then said, “Secret.”

  “Secret,” she repeated with a small motion of crossing her heart. It was a promise not to tell.

  “I’m some sort of a lousy genetics experiment,” he said bluntly. “Not even anything special, just a test run.” He looked at the screen image of Nadine— the beautiful hair and eyes, the slim five fingered hands, the notebook and library cards she was carrying, the cards scrawled on in larger more irregular letters than usual, her hair slightly mussed on top from a habit she had of running her fingers into it when nervous. Signs of waiting. “Don’t wait for me when you get through, Nadine, go on home,”

  “Is it hereditary?” The picture looked at him. It was hard to tell with a picture, but it looked white, and it looked as if it might be crying.

  “It’s hereditary.”

  Then it seemed they were going to switch off, and suddenly he had to know, he had to be sure.

  “Nade, would you marry a three-eyed freak, a lousy laboratory experiment?”

  Her voice came controlled and dead-sounding. “No Mart, I wouldn’t.”

  Then both screens were blank and he sat in the dark televiewer booth, trying to remember who had hung up first. “See you,” he said absently, but the connection was cut and she could not hear him now.

  “I’d marry for children.” Had she said that? She had said it once in a discussion of something else several months ago, and he could hear her voice as if she had just said it. “I’m sorry for myself, Mart, losing you.” That was a good thing to have said, he hoped that she had really said it.

  Numbly, Mart Breden left the televiewer booth and began to walk. He walked carefully, balancing his numbness and trying not to disturb it, as a man would carry a fragile vase. Whatever his feelings were, he would feel them later; for now, for the moment, he had no emotions. He could see the things around him very clearly—buildings, sidewalk, people, trees—and he could think with an odd effect of being distant from himself, seeing the point of view of Keith and Sorell.

  Scientists are not trained to consider individuals. Their philosophy and practice included a daily practice of inflicting small immediate losses to win long range large gains. The MSKZ team of biologists, when they had added a line of stereotyped human fetuses to their selection of standardized stereotyped laboratory animais, had probably done so with the full expectation that some of them would be carried illegally to term in the incubators by purchasers, and birthed as physical misfits into a world of people differently shaped from themselves. The results in psychological loss could easily have been predicted, and probably was something the biologists took into account and disregarded as not particularly important.

  And in the long run, he supposed, it probably wasn’t important…

  TRAFFIC hummed in the sky over the skyscrapers, circling in changing interweaving patterns as radar control patterns changed with the gradually diminishing load, and the commuters’ ’copters streamed away from the city. The sky had darkened to a transparent deep blue, and the street lights were beginning to glow. A little way behind him a man in a gray overcape was walking almost in step with him, but Mart ignored him and walked blindly, trying to keep himself walking away from the thing that had happened to him. Hating was no good as a solution, and letting it hurt was no good either. He had to think, to grasp and understand it as a pattern of events that was natural, something that was inevitable and had to be—before he could let himself feel.

  He had to keep thinking, asking logical questions. What had Sorell said was the reason for them giving the E-2s the extra eye?

  There were few pedestrians now, and only one convertible air-ground car parked on the block between himself and the door to MSKZ. It was a business section without restaurants, and so always almost totally deserted during the dinner hours.

  As he came opposite the parked car he saw that there were some people sitting in it, and simultaneously a hand touched his arm. “Are you sure you want to go back to MSKZ?”

  Breden turned. He had assumed indifferently that the follower was some arrangement of MSKZ, but now this stranger’s presence became something that rang along his nerves like the clangor of an alarm bell. The presence of the follower implied that MSKZ and the National Counseling Service had enemies to whom their secret purposes were known and familiar, enemies as secretive as their own hidden goals.

  The man insisted. “You shouldn’t go in there without knowing something about it.” Out of the sides of his eyes Mart could see the black air-road convertible at the curb. Inside, shrouded in the half darkness, was the pale blur of two faces and the twin small glows of cigarettes.

  Waiting for me, thought Mart. The follower had waited and had not spoken to him until they were both opposite the car. A quick silent shot from an illegal hypo-gun and a quick ordering of him into the car—and then what? Why should anything of the sort happen? His only known enemy was a lunatic inventor who had singled him out as the source of his demented persecution. A madman who thought he was either a Martian or a diploid.

  But he was a diploid! Did that make a target of him in some way he couldn’t conceive? Was the mere fact of his existence a provocation for murder? Why hadn’t Keith explained this and warned him? Mart measured the distance to the door of MSKZ and considered the amount of time it would take the man beside him to free a hypno gun from under his cape. There was time enough if he ran. But running would be ridiculous; you don’t run from a surmise. And pulling out his curare pistol, or pushing the buttonpush that would summon the police would seem equally ridiculous to rational outsiders.

  “If you could give us a few minutes —” a tense voice interrupted his thoughts—“you could find out what we have to say,” the man continued, watching his face as if looking for hesitation. “There are things about MSKZ you should know.”

  HE WAS a small man, with sharply cut features, and the skin was tight over the bones of his face as if he were in fear, holding in check a great fear of the door labeled MSKZ BIOLOGICAL SUPPLIES. Looking at Mart’s hesitation he smiled, and his face changed and seemed younger until he seemed less than twenty, perhaps a kid who had learned to pass as an adult. He held out his hand.

  “My name is John Eskhart.” The smile seemed friendly and eager.

  Beginning an answering smile Mart grasped the extended hand.

  And felt the needle with its hypnotic contents sink into his palm.

  He had about five seconds before the hypnotic would return in the circulating blood from his arm and reach his brain. He reached for his pocket to push the button in the radio signaler and summon the police. John Eskhart gripped his arm and stopped the motion. The man was small and light, but the full weight of even a small person clinging to his arm would make it impossible to get his hand into his pocket. With a sudden yank Mart pulled free and ran for the doorway of MSKZ. There were only a few seconds left.

  There was no sound of anyone running after him, but when he was ten feet from the door John Eskhart’s voice reached him very clearly.

  “There’s no hurry. You don’t have to go in just yet.”

  No hurry. He found himself slowing as he reached for the door. No hurry… don’t have to go in… He hesitated tryin
g to remember why he had been hurrying.

  Behind him Eskhart’s voice said, “You do want to find out what we can tell you about MSKZ before you go in there. Don’t fight it, man, we’re friends.”

  Friends. He could have laughed at that, but then as the hypnotic swirled darkly up into his mind, he believed, and turned to walk back. They held the car door open for him…

  The only thing of which he was conscious was a voice, or was it several voices?

  “No human could genuinely love you. People who said they loved you were pretending. Your parents—”

  “No.” He tried to pull away from the awful words, knowing they were not true, but they came into his mind in a steady flow, each sentence with its own burning belief and pain.

  “Only your own kind, only those of the diploids who have not been misled to favor humanity can be your friends.”

  “No,” he thought, but the ideas burnt their way in. He tried to wake up to escape from the voice, but it came remorselessly.

  “Compared to average humanity you are a freak. You are only at home among your own kind. The friends you have had were not your friends.”

  Nade… no. He struggled to pull himself up out of the dream, and suddenly there was the sight of a gray ceiling and a male arm. He had succeeded in opening his eyes. He lay looking at the ceiling, victorious, but oddly without any wish to look around.

  “He learns resistance to drugs like learning to recite ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’,” said a voice disgustedly. It sounded like the same voice, but this time it was a real voice, outside of him, and not a voice in his mind.

  “Okay, switch to octo-hypno and take him down again. It’s a good thing we blacklisted the E strain—I never would have believed it without seeing this.” It was another person, but this voice sounded like the other, like the man or youth who had called himself John Eskhart.

  “We can’t have these recalcitrants and immunes—they’re dangerous.”

  “Diploids must control.” These voices were younger, but still alike.

  “He’s a diploid too. You mean supers must control.”

  “You two are talking like hypno indoctrination formulas.” This was an older voice. “You don’t have to take that literally. Words are just words. We follow what we feel.”

  Obligingly Mart held still for an injection, feeling friendly and tolerant, because these were his friends. As his senses ebbed again, he wondered of what famous man all these John Eskharts were the diploid descendants. These anti-MSKZ diploids had called themselves “supers” in his hearing, but even as supers, what would they do with this “control” if they had it? Who could genuinely control any part of such a jumble of events? An image of Nade, her face flushed and earnest leaning forward with her hands planted on his desk. “If all the political experts, intellectuals, economists, sociologists, and general geniuses who ought to know how to run things better—plus all their brains, success, money, and positions of power can’t get control of what’s going on—”

  “Package of Jello—” he murmured to himself smiling. Then he felt an inexplicable wave of loss and desolation, and escaped from it into the drugged darkness.

  MSKZ BIOLOGICAL SUPPLIES said the lettering on the door. It was much later in the evening, about nine thirty, and he was hungry again, but before eating there were important things he had to do for the supers and for himself. Some time during the evening he would use his curare pistol, and some time during the evening he would use the button push in his pocket to call the police. It would have to be done with a careful timing that was vague to him now.

  But he knew he would remember when the time came.

  The door was unlocked and there was a light in the hall. He wedged a match-book cover into the lock to make sure it would stay unlocked and left the door slightly ajar for someone who would be following. Then he switched on the escalator and went up to the second floor, where he could hear the distant sound of conversation.

  There were fewer people than before, and the conversation had grown more subdued. Breden looked around and was suddenly let down from a tenseness he had not recognized in himself. He had been ready to do something in connection with Keith being there. What it was, he did not know.

  The fluorescent pink shirt drew his eye to where Zal was holding forth to Planck-Planck and the tall heavy girl who had come in through the secret door when he was last there. Zal was explaining, gesturing occasionally with a technical magazine he had clutched in one hand. “Or, better yet, a small operation on the father will replace his sperm manufacturing tissue with our own improved gene-carrying substitute, and permit him to take care of fertilization in his own way. A rather more complicated operation will do the same for a woman.” He added regretfully, “We need to make it all easier than that before we can sell on a large scale. These operations are too expensive, and people are generally afraid of operations anyhow.”

  Zal grinned at him as he approached. “Hello Mart, how’d it go?”

  “I cooled off,” Breden said, smiling briefly. He liked this husky slant-eyed kid who looked like him. But he had to appear ignorant and innocent as if he had not learned things and chosen sides against MSKZ while he was gone. “By the way Zal, what’s the secret door for?”

  “For ourselves,” Zal waved at it casually. “We just like to have it handy. It leads to a secret room where we keep things we don’t want stolen and work on gadgets we don’t want made public. We need defenses, and we don’t want to broadcast the fact or get the police in on it.”

  “Defenses against what?” Asking the question he realized that he did not know much of the answer. He knew which side he was on, but the reason for the fight… MSKZ was run by the team of MSKZ, biologists—human, non-diploid human, and for some reason they opposed direct action by diploids who were interested in some kind of political activity. It was all vague and sketchy, though he could have sworn the details had been explained to him and he had been persuaded by logic. “Some of our diploid geniuses go a little wild. They go all out for being supermen with a capital S and want to conquer the world—manufacture a million type copies of themselves for an army.” Zal grinned at Breden with some friendly mockery in his expression. “There must be a lot of pleasure in the idea of shaking hands with yourself and forming a mutual admiration society, huh?”

  “A lot of pleasure,” Breden agreed gravely. Brothers closer than brothers, fellowship and understanding to end the loneliness of being different and separate and unable to join wholeheartedly with the people around you. Loneliness can become so basic that a whole personality is built on it. Who would know better than a diploid?

  Of all mankind, only MSKZ had the power to make duplicates.

  Soberly Zal said, “Diploiding as a process brings out all kinds of hidden hereditary weaknesses in the strain. We can weed out the physical defects by spotting them in embryo, but we can’t see the mental defects until the child is born. Some of our incross geniuses have turned out sort of nuts. They’ve organized together in a separate faction, and they’ve tried to steal their egg files from the gene bank a couple of times, and they tried to take MSKZ once when all four of them were here, to hold them hostage until the organization produced and birthed a half army of baby duplicates and found homes for them at random.”

  Breden blinked, reconsidering the last casual statement. “What help could they get from babies?”

  Zal nodded, “No help at first. But we can’t kill off babies, once they are developed, and babies grow up. The chances are good that every one would grow up just like his adult prototype—a genius. But from the strictly humanoid point of view, more than half crazy, with drives completely tangent to the main line of human ambition, born enemies to everything that’s human. For them it’s a straight-out issue of dominate or be dominated. They’d make an army all right.” The other two were listening soberly to this recital of a situation they all knew. They looked grave and thoughtful, as if they foresaw danger and possible defeat. Zal went on seriously:


  “It’s been something of a private war between us. We fight each other quietly with hypnosis and gadgets that won’t attract police attention. Both factions have invented some good gadgets, too. It’s not a big war, but it’s serious enough. If the public ever got wind of any of this, all hell would break loose. And if the renegades were to get hold of Self Perfection, they could plant their own type copies on a million women, to be born normally instead of incubated, and the country would be swamped with them.”

  Breden remembered a similarity of voices he had heard somewhere recently, and his curiosity about them. “Are many of the supers the same type copy, I mean, from the same person?”

  VII

  THERE was no doubt in Breden’s mind that he was for the supers and would help them as much as he could, but he needed to know something about them. It had to seem like a casual question.

  Zal did not seem to have noticed anything different about his manner. He answered slowly, “Let’s see… Keith and Mac don’t spill much. We don’t know our own eggs, generally, but Keith told me something about this line when it started making trouble. He needed a good healthy outcross to mix in, because most of the star genius lines have traditionally moved around the world so much and outcrossed so much that there hasn’t been any inbreeding in their background which would weed out the accumulation of lethal recessives, so diploiding shows up too much physical weakness. For the cross, Keith scouted around and picked up a batch of gamete-producing tissue from a healthy inbred high I.Q. family from one of those inbred southern small towns that get into the sex and scandal novels. The crossing strengthened the other strains, but those kids mostly grew up with an odd personality, all misfits the same way, not liking anybody but each other. Their organization has pulled in other misfits, but the kids of the F line of crosses have been the nucleus and center of it. That southern family strain personality was as dominant as the Hapsburg lip.”