The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  The tall stout girl picked it up and suddenly the room was quiet. Only Devon continued to struggle against the restraining arms.

  She waved the gun in a sweeping hurried gesture, holding it by the barrel. “Everybody get out through the passage and close the door. Pick up the bottles and sandwich wrappings and take them along so it won’t look like there was a crowd,” she called, “Keith will take care of this madman.”

  The big blond man approached the group and locked on a wrestling grip as the others unpeeled from their struggling captive one by one and darted through the open door.

  Zal had uncurled from his hands-and-knees position and rolled over on his side. There was a small pool of blood where he had crouched. They gave him hardly a glance as they passed him and crowded through the open catalogue rack, but Planck-Planck said, as he passed, “Take it easy Zal. Look out for those doctors. They’ll get curious and claim they have to open you up and take out something—just for a look inside.” The tall girl lagged behind last and handed the gun to Breden.

  “Take over, boy,” she called, her lips close to Breden’s ear. Devon had wriggled free except for one wrist, and he was pulling and jerking at the end of his held arm like a hooked fish flopping on a line. His whimpers were rising to a keening wail, like a banshee warming up. The girl raised her voice. “Shut the door behind us and leave us out of the story.” Sirens in the street and air outside were adding to the racket. She vanished through the door, and he closed the swinging rack hastily.

  VIII

  DEVON was still pulling away from Keith’s placid grip on his wrist, jerking and shrieking thinly with every breath, apparently under the impression that the Martians were going to murder him. It was hard to think, like being in the same room with a fire siren, and the sound of feet pounding up the escalator and a whistle blowing on the sidewalk added to the din. Holding the gun turned in Devon’s direction, Mart moved toward the door, and through it abruptly caught a glimpse of two policemen. He noticed that they had been wearing flesh colored pads over their noses and recognized their intention just as the first sudden startling noise of a fizz bullet sizzled past his face, but it was too late to stop the breath he was drawing and some of the gas went into his lungs.

  There were three other sharp sizzling sounds. He saw Keith and Devon slow to a stop, just as his own desire to move faded. When Devon stopped screaming it left the air empty.

  The gas-ice bullets had shattered against the walls and filing cabinets, and the shattered small pieces lay on the floor sizzling and dwindling into gas.

  He felt like a cataleptic, perfectly able to think, but with no desire to move or speak. The fizz pistols shot some standard hypnotic suspended in a compressed gas-ice pellet.

  The police waited a cautious minute and a half and then they stepped into the room. “You won’t move or talk unless we ask you to,” said the one in the uniform of a sergeant, speaking with slight difficulty because, of his nose pad. He walked up to Breden and efficiently removed the gun from his hand, wrapped it in a handkerchief and dropped it in his pocket. The other one was busy at a desk opening out and arranging a sound recorder. He switched it on and stepped back. “Okay,” he told the sergeant.

  The sergeant turned his head and said matter-of-factly into the recorder, “These are preliminary questionings taken under hypnosis at the scene of the incident and do not constitute voluntary confessions unless later sworn to in freewill state, and a condition of sanity.”

  He turned to Breden and gestured at Zal on the floor. “Who’s that?”

  “Zalemeyer Elberg.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Paul Breden.”

  “Are you responsible for his injury?”

  It was a debatable question. “Indirectly,” he said, after hesitating.

  The sergeant looked faintly annoyed. “Did you fire at him with intent to kill?”

  “No.”

  “Did you fire at him accidentally?”

  “No.” There was some disadvantage in this method of questioning, for though he answered willingly, he felt no desire to save the man questions by explaining that he had not had the gun.

  The sergeant belatedly put two and two together. “Who did the shooting?”

  “Yardly Devon.” Mart knew he could fight the drug and lie if he had to.

  “With this gun?”

  “Yes.” So far no lies had been necessary.

  “Point him out.” The cop glanced at the other two. “Which is he?”

  Breden pointed, and the cop followed his indication and addressed Devon, who stood passively, looking pathetic, his thin sandy hair rumpled, his overshirt ripped and his hat knocked off. “What’s your name?”

  “Yardly Evert Devon,” answered Devon obediently, and the recorder took down the sound of his voice.

  “Did you shoot this man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He was trying to get my automatic. I had to stop him.”

  “Why did you have a gun?”

  “Because they are—I think they are Martians.”They call themselves—”

  “Cuffs,” said the sergeant. While the other was snapping cuffs on Devon’s wrists he checked the time on his watch, unclipped a small mike from his belt and spoke into it. “Everything under control. Gas cleared. Send up a stretcher and the med for one gut wound and a violent case.” He hung the mike on his belt again and walked over, switching off the recorder.

  Breden found his powers of motion returning as the hypnotic wore off almost as suddenly as it had taken effect. A man came in with a five lens motion picture camera and began moving around with it in routine fashion.

  “They’re Martians,” Devon stated suddenly as he recovered his ability to speak. “There were a lot more of them and they escaped before you got here.”

  The sergeant swung on Breden with his expression hardening. “How about that? You know that the people involved in a shooting have to stay around to be questioned. Did somebody leave?”

  Here was the perfect moment to do what he had once intended, destroy MSKZ in a blast of publicity. The moment was spectacular. The cameraman taking pictures, the wounded man on the floor, the doctor coming in the door accompanied by two attendants carrying a stretcher, the madman making strange accusations…

  All Breden had to do now to add the crowning touch of sinister fantasy was to walk over to the catalogue rack that concealed the hidden door and swing it open. After that he could make whatever accusations he chose, and they would bo believed.

  SUDDENLY Breden found that he no longer wanted to tell the police about the secret door. He had forgotten what his reasons had been for threatening it.

  His lag in answering had been only an instant. “Nobody else was here,” he lied.

  The sergeant gave Devon a disgusted glance and nodded. “Okay. Do you two want to go down to the station with this Devon character now and make a statement of what happened? We’ll give you a lift.” He glanced at Zal’s fingers as he was carried past on the stretcher, then spoke as if from some shadowy uncertainty. “I take it you two are related.”

  “Cousins.”

  “Yeah.” The sergeant gave Devon another disgusted glance. “Let’s go.”

  They went out and down the escalator, and behind them Devon pushed back against urging hands, his voice growing hysterical. “No you have to listen to me. Believe me, the Martians were here. They went out a secret door. It’s behind that bookcase.” His voice was pleading now. “You can’t take me away without listening to me. At least look at the—” The policeman with him gave him an impatient shove to the head of the escalator. Devon clung to the side with manacled hands, his voice shrill.

  “For the love of justice! Look at that bookcase! You can’t… not without even…” A rough shove dislodged him from the railing, and the screaming began again while the irritated young policeman held him still and the police doctor passed Keith and Breden, running up the moving escalator with a pacifying
hypo in hand. It was the sound of terror.

  “You can’t—no, you’re with them! You’re with the Martians. They’ve hired you. I see it now. You’re against me too. No don’t. It’s poison. Help!”

  Behind them the shouting choked off to a mumble as the hypo took hold. The escalator delivered them, silent and pale, to street level. A crowd had assembled outside. Keith and Breden climbed into the waiting police patrol wing…

  After they had given their testimony and signed the record of their statements they paused on the station house steps, reluctant to separate.

  “Quite a day!” Mart said.

  “It was interesting enough,” Keith agreed. He hesitated oddly. “If you don’t mind my saying—I’m sorry about—ah —your troubles. E-2s weren’t really meant to be birthed, but I can arrange that if you have children they shan’t be like you—that is—”

  “That they won’t be too much like me anyhow?” Mart supplied the words, grinning.

  “That’s it.” Keith shook hands with embarrassed vigor as they parted. “Take care of yourself. Remember that you are my star line now.”

  “Thanks.” Mart said, meaning it.

  They walked away from each other, and it was a warm friendly summer night that seemed to Mart to be just for him.

  When he stepped out of the elevator on his own floor Nadine flew into his arms. “Mart. Are you all right? I called everyplace and you weren’t there. You weren’t home—”

  She was crying. He wrapped his arms around her comfortingly, and she tilted her face back from his shoulder to look at him, and everything was fine. It was wonderful, and he couldn’t understand how he could ever have been unhappy. “Mart… I wanted to tell you. We don’t have to have children.”

  “Oh yes we do,” he said firmly before kissing her. “And they’ll all grow up to be President.” He’d explain later.

  —«»—«»—«»—

  Defense Mechanism

  THE ARTICLE was coming along smoothly, words flowing from the typewriter in pleasant simple sequence, swinging to their predetermined conclusion like a good tune. Ted typed contentedly, adding pages to the stack at his elbow.

  A thought, a subtle modification of the logic of the article began to glow in his mind, but he brushed it aside impatiently. This was to be a short article, and there was no room for subtlety. His articles sold, not for depth, but for an oddly individual quirk that he could give to commonplaces.

  While he typed a little faster, faintly in the echoes of his thought the theme began to elaborate itself richly with correlations, modifying qualifications, and humorous parenthetical remarks. An eddy of especially interesting conclusions tried to insert itself into the main stream of his thoughts. Furiously he typed along the dissolving thread of his argument.

  “Shut up,” he snarled. “Can’t I have any privacy around here?”

  The answer was not a remark, it was merely a concept; two electro-chemical calculators pictured with the larger in use as a control mech, taking a dangerously high inflow, and controlling it with high resistance and blocs, while the smaller one lay empty and unblocked, its unresistant circuits ramifying any impulses received along the easy channels of pure calculation. Ted recognized the diagram from his amateur concepts of radio and psychology.

  “All right. So I’m doing it myself. So you can’t help it!” He grinned grudgingly. “Answering back at your age!”

  Under the impact of a directed thought the small circuits of the idea came in strongly, scorching their reception and rapport diagram into his mind in flashing repetitions, bright as small lightning strokes. Then it spread and the small other brain flashed into brightness, reporting and repeating from every center. Ted even received a brief kinesthetic sensation of lying down, before it was all cut off in a hard bark of thought that came back in exact echo of his own irritation.

  “Tune down!” It ordered furiously. “You’re blasting in too loud and jamming everything up! What do you want, an idiot child?”

  Ted blanketed down desperately, cutting off all thoughts, relaxing every muscle; but the angry thoughts continued coming in strongly a moment before fading.

  “Even when I take a nap,” they said, “he starts thinking at me! Can’t I get any peace and privacy around here?”

  Ted grinned. The kid’s last remark sounded like something a little better than an attitude echo. It would be hard to tell when the kid’s mind grew past a mere selective echoing of outside thoughts and became true personality, but that last remark was a convincing counterfeit of a sincere kick in the shin. Conditioned reactions can be efficient.

  All the luminescent streaks of thought faded and merged with the calm meaningless ebb and flow of waves in the small sleeping mind. Ted moved quietly into the next room and looked down into the blue-and-white crib. The kid lay sleeping, his thumb in his mouth and his chubby face innocent of thought. Junior—Jake.

  It was an odd stroke of luck that Jake was born with this particular talent. Because of it they would have to spend the winter in Connecticut, away from the mental blare of crowded places. Because of it Ted was doing free lance in the kitchen, instead of minor editing behind a New York desk. The winter countryside was wide and windswept, as it had been in Ted’s own childhood, and the warm contacts with the stolid personalities of animals through Jake’s mind were already a pleasure. Old acquaintances—Ted stopped himself skeptically. He was no telepath. He decided that it reminded him of Ernest Thompson Seton’s animal biographies, and went back to typing, dismissing the question.

  It was pleasant to eavesdrop on things through Jake, as long as the subject was not close enough to the article to interfere with it.

  Five small boys let out of kindergarten came trooping by on the road, chattering and throwing pebbles. Their thoughts came in jumbled together in distracting cross currents, but Ted stopped typing for a moment, smiling, waiting for Jake to show his latest trick. Babies are hypersensitive to conditioning. The burnt hand learns to yank back from fire, the unresisting mind learns automatically to evade too many clashing echoes of other minds.

  Abruptly the discordant jumble of small boy thoughts and sensations delicately untangled into five compartmented strands of thoughts, then one strand of little boy thoughts shoved the others out, monopolizing and flowing easily through the blank baby mind, as a dream flows by without awareness, leaving no imprint of memory, fading as the children passed over the hill. Ted resumed typing, smiling. Jake had done the trick a shade faster than he had yesterday. He was learning reflexes easily enough to demonstrate normal intelligences. At least he was to be more than a gifted moron.

  A half hour later, Jake had grown tired of sleeping and was standing up in his crib, shouting and shaking the bars. Martha hurried in with a double armload of groceries.

  “Does he want something?”

  “Nope. Just exercising his lungs.” Ted stubbed out his cigarette and tapped the finished stack of manuscript contentedly. “Got something here for you to proofread.”

  “Dinner first,” she said cheerfully, unpacking food from the bags. “Better move the typewriter and give us some elbow room.”

  Sunlight came in the windows and shone on the yellow table top, and glinted on her dark hair as she opened packages.

  “What’s the local gossip?” he asked, clearing off the table. “Anything new?”

  “Meat’s going up again,” she said, unwrapping peas and fillets of mackerel. “Mrs. Watkin’s boy, Tom, is back from the clinic. He can see fine now, she says.”

  He put water on to boil and began greasing a skillet while she rolled the fillets in cracker crumbs. “If I’d had to run a flame thrower during the war, I’d have worked up a nice case of hysteric blindness myself,” he said. “I call that a legitimate defense mechanism. Sometimes it’s better to be blind.”

  “But not all the time,” Martha protested, putting baby food in the double boiler. In five minutes lunch was cooking. “Whaaaa—” wailed Jake.

  Martha went into th
e baby’s room, and brought him out, cuddling him and crooning. “What do you want, Lovekins? Baby just wants to be cuddled, doesn’t baby.”

  “Yes,” said Ted.

  She looked up, startled, and her expression changed, became withdrawn and troubled, her dark eyes clouded in difficult thought.

  Concerned, he asked: “What is it, Honey?”

  “Ted, you shouldn’t—” She struggled with words. “I know, it is handy to know what he wants, whenever he cries. It’s handy having you tell me, but I don’t— It isn’t right somehow. It isn’t right.”

  Jake waved an arm and squeaked randomly. He looked unhappy. Ted took him and laughed, making an effort to sound confident and persuasive. It would be impossible to raise the kid in a healthy way if Martha began to feel he was a freak. “Why isn’t it right? It’s normal enough. Look at E. S. P. Everybody has that according to Rhine.”

  “E. S. P. is different,” she protested feebly, but Jake chortled and Ted knew he had her. He grinned, bouncing Jake up and down in his arms.

  “Sure it’s different,” he said cheerfully. “E. S. P. is queer. E. S. P. comes in those weird accidental little flashes that contradict time and space. With clairvoyance you can see through walls, and read pages from a closed book in France. E. S. P., when it comes, is so ghastly precise it seems like tips from old Omniscience himself. It’s enough to drive a logical man insane, trying to explain it. It’s illogical, incredible, and random. But what Jake has is limited telepathy. It is starting out fuzzy and muddled and developing towards accuracy by plenty of trial and error—like sight, or any other normal sense. You don’t mind communicating by English, so why mind communicating by telepathy?”

  She smiled wanly. “But he doesn’t weigh much, Ted. He’s not growing as fast as it says he should in the baby book.”