The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  “Probably,” commented Planck-Planck, “the reason why the town had been inbreeding and staying to itself. All a bullheaded lot who don’t like strangers and won’t marry anyone but cousins.”

  Breden glanced at a catalogue lying open on the table. “MSKZ original house for genetic identicals since 1968. If you need precise standardized animal reactions for comparison experiments, and are dissatisfied with the variability of ordinary inbred animals, we can adapt any special strain of experimental animal you find suitable, and from it provide you with two strains of genetically homogeneous males and genetically homogeneous females, one or more of each, all of whose progeny will be genetically identical male twins. You can breed them to any quantity you require.” There was a repeating frieze of tiny identical rabbits bordering the page. Breden remembered the page with the curled embryonic figure that was E2… experimental animals….

  He shut the catalogue hastily.

  “When is Keith coming back?”

  Zal was still talking. “Naturally Keith discontinued the F strain and started looking for another for a base. That’s what started most of the fighting. They want MSKZ to make more of the F type crosses like themselves, and we won’t.”

  Planck-Planck said, “Frankly, if this is the way super humanity is going to behave, I don’t see that the world of the future will be any calmer than the world of the present.”

  “Who wants calm?” Zal observed.

  “Superman,” Mart said, as though he had not heard. The word still sounded fantastic. “I thought only the supers used that word.”

  “Oh, we use it too. It’s just that we’re not so looping superior about it.” Planck-Planck glanced down at his skinny length with a wry smile. “I’m a superman—you’re a superman, anyone over I.Q. 140 is enough of a superman to do in a pinch. They’re using the Wallace corn technique in breeding. Incrosses are always frail and idiosynchratic compared to what comes next. If you want what you would call supermen, just let MSKZ go along selecting the cream of the world’s health and ability and increasing—diploiding them—letting selection weed out weakness—and see what happens when they start combining what’s left into outcrosses.”

  ZAL made a mystic sign of propitiation to luck. “That’s my job,” he breathed reverently. “Keep your fingers crossed; we’ve already started. In fact, we have some kids adopted out. Brother, the F strain outcrosses haven’t a chance! If they can’t figure a way to capture or stop MSKZ now,”they’ll be calling themselves subs.”

  The tall heavy girl came in the front door and set a large plastic container with a spigot on the table beside them. “Hot coffee,” she announced to the room. “Anyone who wants it, come ladle it out.”

  “Look,” Mart said, trying to get the attention of the two friendly halfwits as they reached for coffee. “Could you tell me when Keith is coming back? Someone was supposed to give me an examination.”

  Somewhere in the room behind him Keith said distinctly, “Ahem.” He was standing near the secret door, and looked as if he had been standing there for some time. “I am examining you, Mr. Breden.” He smiled slightly. “You move like a dancer—you seem to have more vitality than anyone here. Is it something you learned how to do? Self training?”

  Mart hesitated, trying to understand the question of the tall man with pale hair who should have known him in advance as the E2 pattern. Keith read his hesitation, and stopped moving in the midst of reaching for a coffee cup.

  “Man, do you mean to say that you are genuinely not crippled? That all those structural abnormalities work? I expected some kind of physical and mental wreck. The kind of topblowing you were doing in here earlier was about what I expected psychologically, but Doctor Sheers reported that you were more stable than I am, friendly and accessible even with all that included rejection stress.” He drew himself some coffee and walked over to his desk to sit down. “And Mirella reports that you were hellishly poised. What’s the trick, man? Nothing should have been strong about you but those teeth, and here you are back gabbing with my zoo, healthy as a gorilla and more sure of yourself than I am.”

  “I’m only poised from five to nine and alternate weekends.” Mart allowed himself a slight grin. He couldn’t afford to like Keith—Keith was the enemy—but it was getting difficult not to. “I’m only friendly on hours whose names begin with T.” It was time. Abruptly he walked over to the wall and put his back against the filing cabinets. He raised his voice. “Nobody can leave the room.” He took the curare gun out of his pocket and leveled it at Keith.

  “I’ve already chosen sides,” he explained boldly to the suddenly silent room. “I chose the supers.”

  “Oye!” Zal clapped himself on the forehead exclaiming in an undertone. “I let him go out alone and the supers got him!” There was dismay behind the joke.

  Mart smiled at that. Someone moved stealthily, and he swung the curare pistol a little towards him, saying clearly, “I would like to point out that if I find it necessary to fire, a radio signal will bring the police. Don’t forget that there are laws against human experimenting. The Anti-Vivisection League will interest itself in the use of E-2 embryos and doubtless find that most laboratories let them run past five months. A post five month embryo is considered legally human, so the Anti-Vivisection League would carry the case to court and stand guard over all the post-five-month embryos to see that they are birthed when they come to term. That would give me fifty duplicates or so.” He smiled around the room at unsmiling faces.

  “You’d destroy all of MSKZ for a lousy fifty replicas?” asked the gorilla-like young man who had not previously spoken to him. He was angry. “What would you do with them when you had them, play ring-around-the-rosey?”

  IN BREDEN’S pocket the button push that would call the police was growing slippery from contact with the fingers of his left hand. He was trying to push it, but something seemed to be holding his tensed hand back from completing the motion.

  Planck-Planck hiked himself gangling up on the edge of a table facing him. “We can talk it over. You want to give MSKZ unfavorable publicity in order to have your replicas birthed. You have decided that MSKZ owes you something, and you want to take it out in replicas, right?”

  That wasn’t what he wanted. Breden hesitated. What did he want? He remembered Nadine again. He had lost her. There was nothing like knowing the truth, even if knowing it never helped. “Mister Planck-Planck,” he said coldly, “I don’t need a reason, I’m just expressing my feelings. Somebody owes me something for making me a freak, and if I don’t take it out in replicas, I’ll take it out in hide.” If only someone would attack him. he thought wistfully; if only he had an excuse for hitting someone, preferably Keith. He made another try at pushing the button and this time succeeded.

  With an odd mingling of satisfaction and depression he realized that he had called the police. If he didn’t let them shut the secret door, if he made them remain to be questioned, MSKZ as an organization was dead. And then he knew that the whole thing was unreal. Something else was going to happen. The door to the hall, the door downstairs that opened to the darkened street both stood ajar, open and waiting. For… he found his finger too tense on the trigger and relaxed it, turning the gun carefully away from Keith’s face.

  The members of MSKZ and the diploids did not know that he had sent a call signal.

  Zal was saying seriously, “Don’t argue with him. Can’t you see that he’s been hypnoed?”

  “He can’t be, Zal. The supers wouldn’t have him calling the police; not if they hypnoed him. The police hypno questioning would be too likely to show up what they had done to him, and you know there’s a penalty in the anti-hypnotic law for making people catspaws. They have more to lose by it than we have.”

  “If he’s catspaw for them, they don’t have to give him the inside dope on what he’s doing. Any story will do.” Zal turned to him. “Mart, as a favor, could you tell me where you went between six and nine?”

  “I was met by some su
pers,” he answered, feeling that he was breaking some obscure instructions in answering, yet easily able to do it. “They persuaded me to enlist on their side.”

  “How much did they tell you? Can you remember what arguments they used to persuade you?” Zal was earnest, leaning forward with interest.

  He hesitated, a vast confusion flooding into his mind and subsiding again. He had been sure he had discussed the subject with the supers for a long time and been informed and chosen his own side reasonably, but—“I can’t remember any specific arguments.” The supers were still his friends and these were his enemies, but it was better to know the facts.

  “He was hypnoed,” Planck-Planck said. “That makes him completely unpredictable. We don’t know what he’s standing here with his gun for, because he doesn’t either. Not only do we have to look after ourselves now, but we have to look after him.”

  “You’re probably quite right,” said Breden, suddenly liking him without caring which side he was on. There was an odd stir in the room. Planck-Plank looked at him directly and keenly, without stirring. “Mister Breden, you know that people with post hypnotic commands on them are also commanded to forget what was done to them. You are not supposed to bo able to admit that you can’t remember, and you are definitely not supposed to recognize any possibility that you have been influenced to do what you are doing. How do you account for your own behavior?”

  BREDEN remembered something. It was a disturbing memory, but the sound of the words was quite clear. “They said I learned resistance to drugs like learning a nursery rhyme.” He found the gun muzzle was pointing at Keith’s face again and shifted it, remembering the police warning not to shoot anyone in the eye. His gun hand was growing tense, and there was a feeling of instructions he was about to remember…

  Keith had been leaning back in his desk chair, watching Breden with a cool, studying expression. “It’s probably true. In all the hundreds or thousands of generations of division and selection of the E-2 cells within our incubators the only possible evolution that could have gone on was evolution in the direction of chemical adaptability, since only the chemical environment varied. If this happened, Breden, it means that biochemically you are something like twenty thousand years ahead of the rest of us. At that rate I think you should be able to pull yourself out of any effect from external drugs without any help from us.”

  Breden found himself swallowing painfully. “This is good news…” It came out as half a whisper, and he pulled himself together with an effort, trying to forget what he had just heard, and to remember what he was supposed to do. He shifted the direction of the gun absently away from Keith’s face.

  “If this is so,” Keith continued, his eyes straying from Mart’s face to the gun and back. “Then it answers the question of why you are so healthy. That kind of adaptability could probably fit any random kind of physical structure together and make it work.”

  Mart suddenly felt the health of his body as a physical sensation, and the gun in his hand which he was pointing at this quiet room full of people seemed totally incongruous. He was following instructions, but he had no enthusiasm for it now. He was doing it only as a favor to the supers. They were his friends, they were with him in his fight against humanity. Fight against humanity…

  A second of silence had passed and Zal exploded impetuously, “For heaven’s sake, Mart! Put that damn gun down. Don’t you see you’re holding us for some kind of a trap?”

  “The supers are my friends. I’m doing what they want.”

  “That’s hypnosis talking. Fight it.”

  “I don’t want to fight it,” Breden said reasonably. “I want to help them.” If the button push was to have brought the police, they would have been here minutes ago. Something prickled along the back of his neck. Just what kind of a trap had his friends prepared for MSKZ? Why hadn’t they told him? He hoped it was no worse than hypno-conversion.

  “I suggest,” Planck-Planck said softly, “that the F line of supers know something about the E-2 abilities and are afraid of being displaced. They have worked out some plausible way of eliminating Breden, who is E-2’s only living representative.”

  “This was to be a trap for him, and not for us.”

  “Mart,” Zal’s voice was strained, “For God’s sake, take care of yourself. Don’t just stand there.”

  He was fighting now, trying to open his hand and drop the gun. He could feel the tension straining the muscles of his arm right up to the shoulder, and the surging and growth of the feeling of obligation, the feeling of obedience to the supers that fought to keep the gun in his hand, wavering, pointing…

  Pointing in the general direction of the lined face of the big blond man who was sitting so close, leaning back in his desk chair, occasionally glancing from Breden’s eyes to the gun. They probably could have jumped then and taken the gun away from him, but everyone in the room knew that they could not risk the chance that his finger would contract on the trigger, for one shot would bring the police, and a hypno question to any of them about the shot would bring out enough of the story to retrograde forty years of MSKZ’S work in genetics and make it once more into a simple supply house for laboratory animals.

  It was up to him. “I don’t believe they are against me,” he said, “but I…” He tried. His eyes fogging with the effort, he glanced up at a sound, looking past Keith’s face toward the half open door on the far side of the room.

  YARDLY DEVON stood there, a slim old man dressed in pearl grey. A hat was rakishly on the side of his head; his face was smoothly shaven and pink, and in his hand was the blue-steel glimmer of an old fashioned automatic. “I heard you.” he told Breden.

  For a moment he clearly remembered his instructions. He was supposed to shout and start pulling the trigger of the curare pistol wildly in Devon’s general direction. None of the bullets would strike Devon, but one of the bullets was to go, as if by accident, into the face of Keith, penetrating one of his eyes. If he did this, they had told him, he would be perfectly safe and have his revenge against MSKZ for what it had done to him. Murder. Keith’s eyes were a cool grey-blue color. Murder…

  Mart Breden shut his own eyes tightly with a knot of terror that leaped together in his chest twisting intolerably. Then it was gone and he could breathe and his heart could beat again. With immeasurable relief he felt the gun fall from his fingers and heard it thud lightly on the floor. He opened his eyes, looking back at Yardly Devon, who stood across the room regarding him triumphantly, ready to shoot.

  It had been a double catspaw. They had primed him so that he would do a murder for them, apparently by accident, and then never be able to reveal that it was a catspaw murder, or that he had been hypnoed—because he would be dead, killed by Yardly Devon, a paranoiac who had probably been easily set off in his direction by a few carefully keyed casual remarks. Devon made a handy killer, for he would kill with perfect innocence, convinced that his choice of time and place was his own, convinced that he had learned of Breden’s whereabouts by accident and able to tell the police no more than that. He felt he ought to warn the others in the room.

  “Mr. Devon’s business is entirely with me,” he said, leaning back against the filing cases and feeling the handles and knobs push against his back. Filing cases aren’t comfortable to lean against, but there had been too many cross-currents of melodrama, and he was tired. “I think it is his contention that I am a diploid or a Martian or something. He has been trying to kill me.” He added wearily, “If I have been irritable today you can blame it on that.”

  All the tiny normal motions of the people in the room had suddenly stopped, even the motion of breathing diminished. A madman with a smile and a shave and a gun full of bullets is not the person to bring confidence and relaxation. Devon said. “I had my detectives follow you. I told you that you couldn’t get away.”

  Breden could feel the tight weight of the curare pistol against his toe. It was supposed to be there to protect him, but it might as well have been on
the moon for all the chance he would have to get it. He leaned against the filing cases, watching Devon’s gun, wondering if a person could see the bullet flash out.

  SOMEONE was stirring slightly in a stealthy movement, “He’s a good shot,” Breden warned quietly, remembering the creased neck in a shot from a moving cab. He looked into the dark hole of the muzzle. It was like a small dark eye that would expand to cover the world with darkness. His own voice seemed to come from a distance. “If I’m going to hell I don’t want an escort. Just take it easy and hold still, and in a minute E-2 will stop complaining and giving you trouble and go back to being just another label on an egg compartment.”

  “But I like Mart,” said Zal plaintively after a moment. He stood up, a solid-shouldered nineteen-year-old in a defiantly gaudy pink sport shirt, carefully stuck his thumbs into his ears and wiggled his fingers at Devon. His excessive number of fingers. Breden saw it from the side of his vision as something fantastic but unimportant. At the center of focus he saw the most important thing in the universe, the automatic and the hand that held it jerk slightly, and then begin to waver in an arc. He wondered why Devon neither spoke nor fired.

  “You’re all Martians,” wailed Devon.

  That was when the tension broke. Everyone began to move rapidly at once, apparently all acting on the same simple impulse that Breden was acting on, that there was no profit in waiting for Devon to shoot them all down. The shots wore too loud in that inclosed room. The sound had an impact like a succession of blows, distorting everything.

  Zal was clinging to Devon’s gun arm, and then was on the floor on his hands and knees while the tall stout girl held the thrashing figure in a tight desperate clasp with his arms partially pinned, and the convulsively squeezing hand pumped shots into the floor.

  Breden had instinctively circled out of the line of fire and come in from behind, his eyes ranging for the gun in the struggling tangle of heads and arms and hands. The convulsively squeezing hand began pulling the trigger randomly again, and the impact of the sound stung his ears and skin as he spotted it. He slapped at the deadly shiny thing with an open palm, and it suddenly thumped on the floor and skidded away…