The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  “Take us, a good sample of disjointed specialties. You could learn neurology, and I could learn anthropology and psychology, and then we could talk the same language and still be like Jack Spratt and his wife, covering the field of human behavior between us. We would be close enough to collaborate—without many gaps of absolute ignorance—to write the most wonderful books. We could even… ah—We can even—”

  (There was a silence, and then a shaky laugh.)

  “I forgot. I said, ‘Take us for example,’ as if we weren’t examples already. Research is supposed to be for other people. This is for us. It is a shock. Funny—funny how it keeps taking me by surprise.

  “It shouldn’t make that much difference. After all, one lifetime is like another. We’ll be the same people on the same job—with more time. Time enough to see the sequoias grow, and watch the ripening of the race. A long time.

  “But the outside of the condemned cell is not very different from the inside. It is the same world, full of the same harebrained human beings. And yet here I am, as shaky as if I’ve just missed being run over by a truck.”

  (There was another uncertain laugh.)

  “I can’t talk just now, Alec. I have to think.”

  For some minutes after the record stopped Alec stared out of the window, his hands locked behind his back, the knuckles working and whitening with tension. It was the last record, the only clue he had. The quaver in her voice, her choice of words, had emphatically filled his mind with the nameless emotion that had held her. It was almost a thought, a concept half felt, half seen lying on the borderline of logic.

  Before his eyes persistently there grew a vision of the great pyramid of Cheops, half completed, with slaves toiling and dying on its slopes. He stared blindly out over the rooftops of the city, waiting, not daring to force the explanation. Presently the vision began to slip away, and his mind wandered to other thoughts. Somewhere down in that maze of buildings was Helen. Where?

  It was no use. Unclenching his stiffening fingers Alec jotted down a small triangle on the envelope of the record, to remind himself that a pyramid held some sort of clue. As he did it, suddenly he remembered that Helen, when she was puzzled, liked to jot the problem down on paper as she thought.

  On the bedroom vanity table there was a tablet of white paper, and beside it an ashtray holding a few cigarette stubs. The tablet was blank, but he found two crumpled sheets of paper in the wastebasket and smoothed them carefully out on the table.

  It began “Dear Alec” and then there were words crossed and blotted out. “Dear Alec” was written again halfway down the sheet, and the letters absently embroidered into elaborate script. Under it were a few doodles, and then a clear surrealistic sketch of a wisdom tooth marked with neat dental work, lying on its side in the foreground of a desert. Subscribed was the title “TIME”, and beside it was written critically, “Derivative: The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Doodles and vague figures and faces covered the bottom of the page and extended over the next page. In the midst of them was written the single stark thought, “There is something wrong.”

  That was all. Numbly Alec folded the two sheets and put them into the envelope of the record. A tooth and a triangle. It should have been funny, but he could not laugh. He took the record out and considered it. There was another concentric ribbon of sound on the face of the disk. Helen had used it again, but the needle had balked at a narrow blank line where she had restarted the recorder and placed the stylus a little too far in.

  He put the record back on the turntable and placed the needle by hand.

  “Alec darling, I wish you were here. You aren’t as good a parlor psychologist as any woman, but you do know human nature in a broad way, and can always explain its odder tricks. I thought I was clever at interpreting other people’s behavior, but tonight I can’t even interpret my own. Nothing startling has happened. It is just that I have been acting unlike myself all day and I feel that it is a symptom of something unpleasant.

  “I walked downtown to stretch my legs and see the crowds and bright lights again. I was looking at the movie stills in a theater front when I saw Lucy Hughes hurrying by with a package under one arm. I didn’t turn around, but she recognized me and hurried over.

  “ ‘Why Helen Berent! I thought you were in Tibet.’

  “I turned around and looked at her. Lucy, with her baby ways and feminine intuition. It would be easy to confide in her but she was not the kind to keep a secret. I didn’t say anything. I suppose I just looked at her with that blank expression you say I wear when I am thinking.

  “She looked back, and her eyes widened slowly.

  “ ‘Why you’re too young. You’re not—Heavens! I’m awfully sorry. I thought you were someone else. Silly of me, but you look just like a friend of mine—when she was younger I mean. It’s almost uncanny!

  “I put on a slight western drawl, and answered politely, as a stranger should, and she went away shaking her head. Poor Lucy!

  “I went in to see the movie. Alec, what happened next worries me. I stayed in that movie eight hours. It was an obnoxious movie, a hard-boiled detective story full of blood and violence and slaughter. I saw it three and a half times. You used to make critical remarks on the mental state of a public that battens on that sort of thud and blunder—something about Roman circuses. I wish I could remember how you explained it, because I need that explanation. When the movie house closed for the night I went home in a taxi. It drove too fast but I got home all right. There was some meat stew contaminated with botulus in the icebox, but I tasted the difference and threw it out. I have to be very careful. People are too careless. I never realized it before, but they are.

  “I had better go to bed now and see if I can get some sleep.”

  Automatically Alec took the record off and slid it back into its envelope. The penciled triangle caught his eye, and his hands slowed and stopped. For a long time he looked at it without moving—the pyramids, the tombs of kings. An ancient religion that taught that one of man’s souls lived on in his mummy, a ghostly spark that vanished if the human form was lost. A whisper of immortality on earth. Cheops, spending the piled treasures of his kingdom and the helpless lives of slaves merely for a tomb to shield his corpse, building a pitiful mountain of rock to mock his name down the centuries. Hope—and fear. Hope brings terror.

  There are wells of madness in us never tapped.

  Alec put away the record and stepped to the window. The brown towers of Columbia Medical Center showed in the distance. Cornell Medical was downtown, Bellevue—“Hope,” said Alec. “When there is life there is hope,” said Alec, and laughed harshly at the pun. He knew now what he had to do. He turned away from the window, and picking up a classified telephone directory, turned to “Hospitals”.

  It was evening. The psychiatric resident doctor escorted him down the hall talking companionably.

  “She wouldn’t give her name. Part of the complex. A symptom for us, but pretty hard on you. It would have helped you to find her if she had some identifying marks I suppose, like scars I mean. It is unusual to find anyone without any—”

  “What’s her trouble?” asked Alec. “Anxiety? Afraid of things, germs, falls—?”

  “She’s afraid all right. Even afraid of me! Says I have germs. Says I’m incompetent. It’s all a symptom of some other fear of course. These things are not what she is really afraid of. Once we find the single repressed fear and explain it to her—” He checked Alec’s objection. “It’s not rational to be afraid of little things. Those little dangers are not what she is really afraid of anyhow. Now suppression—”

  Alec interrupted with a slight edge to his voice.

  “Are you afraid of death?”

  “Not much. There is nothing you can do about it, after all, so normal people must manage to get used to the idea. Now she—”

  “You have a religion?”

  “Vedanta. What of it? Now her attitude in this case is—”

  “Even a mo
use can have a nervous breakdown!” Alec snapped. “Where is the repression there? Vedanta you said? Trouble is, Helen is just too rational!” They had stopped. “Is this the room?”

  “Yeah,” said the doctor sullenly, making no move to open the door. “She is probably still asleep.” He looked at his watch. “No, she would be coming out of it now.”

  “Drugs,” said Alec coldly. “I suppose you have been psychoanalyzing her, trying to trace her trouble back to some time when her mother slapped her with a lollypop, eh? Or shock treatment perhaps, burning out the powers of imagination, eh?”

  The young psychiatrist let his annoyance show. “We know our jobs, mister. Sedatives and analysis, without them she would be screaming the roof off. She’s too suspicious to consciously confide her warp to us, but under scopolamine she seems to think she is a middle-aged woman. How rational is that?” With an effort he regained his professional blandness.

  “She has not said much so far, but we expect to learn more after the next treatment. Of course being told her family history will help us immeasurably. We would like to meet her father and mother.”

  “I’ll do everything in my power to help,” Alec replied. “Where there is life there is hope.” He laughed harshly, on a note that drew a keen professional glance from the doctor. The young man put his hand to the knob, his face bland.

  “You may go in and identify her now. Remember, be very careful not to frighten her.” He opened the door and stood aside, then followed Alec in.

  Helen lay on the bed asleep, her dark hair lying across one cheek. She looked like a tired kid of nineteen, but to Alec there seemed to be no change. She had always looked this way. It was Helen.

  The doctor called gently. “Miss… ah… Berent. Miss Berent.”

  Helen’s body stiffened, but she did not open her eyes. “Go away,” she said in a small, flat voice. “Please!”

  “It is just Dr. Marro,” the young man said soothingly.

  “How do I know you are a doctor?” she said without stirring. “You’d say that anyway. Maybe you escaped and disguised yourself as a doctor. Maybe you are a paranoiac.”

  “I’m just myself,” said the resident, shrugging. “Just Dr. Marro. How can I prove it to you if you don’t look at me?”

  The small voice sounded like a child reciting. It said: “If you are a doctor, you will see that having you here upsets me. You won’t want to upset me, so you will go away.” She smiled secretly at the wall. “Go away please.”

  Then, abruptly terrified, she was sitting up, staring. “You called me Miss Berent. Oh, Alec!” Her eyes dilated like dark pools in a chalk face, and then Helen crumpled up and rolled to face the wall, gasping in dry sobs. “Please, please—”

  “You are exciting her, Mr. Berent,” said the resident. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

  It had to be done. Alec swallowed with a dry mouth, and then said in a loud clear voice, enunciating every syllable: “Helen, honey, you are dying.”

  For a moment there was a strange silence. The doctor was looking at him with a shocked white face; then he moved, fumbling for an arm lock, fumbling with his voice for the proper cheerful tone. “Come, Mr. Berent, you… we must be going now.”

  Alec swung his clenched fist into the babbling white face. The jolt on his knuckles felt right. He did not bother to watch the doctor fall. It only meant that he would have a short time without interruption. Helen was cowering in the far corner of the bed, muttering “No—no—no—no—” in a meaningless voice. The limp weight of the psychiatrist leaned against his leg and then slipped down and pressed across the toes of his shoes.

  “Helen,” Alec called clearly, “Helen, you are dying. You have cancer.”

  She answered only with a wordless animal whimper. Alec looked away. The gleaming white walls began to lean at crazy angles. He shut his eyes and thought of darkness and silence. Presently the whimpering stopped. A voice faltered: “No, I am never going to d— No, I am not.”

  “Yes,” he said firmly, “you are.” The darkness ebbed. Alec opened his eyes. Helen had turned around and was watching him, a line of puzzlement on her forehead. “Really?” she asked childishly.

  His face was damp, but he did not move to wipe it. “Yes,” he stated, “absolutely certain. Cancer, incurable cancer.”

  “Cancer,” she murmured wonderingly. “Where?”

  He had that answer ready. He bad picked it from an atlas of anatomy as an inaccessible spot, hard to confirm or deny, impossible to operate for. He told her.

  She considered for a second, a vague puzzlement wrinkling her face. “Then… I can’t do anything about it. It would happen just the same. It’s there now.” She looked up absently, rubbing a hand across her forehead. “The deadline?”

  “It’s very small and encysted.” Casually he waved a hand. “Maybe even ten—twenty years.”

  Thinking, she got out of bed and stood looking out the window, her lips pursed as if she were whistling.

  Alec turned to watch her, a polite smile fixed on his lips. He could feel the doctor’s weight shifting as his head cleared. “Cells,” Helen murmured, once, then exclaimed suddenly to herself. “Of course not!” She chuckled, and chuckling spoke in her own warm voice, the thin note of fear gone. “Alec, you’ll never guess what I have been doing. Wait until you hear the records!” She laughed delightedly. “A wild goose chase! I’m ashamed to face you. And I didn’t see it until this minute.”

  “Didn’t see what, honey?”

  The doctor got to his knees and softly crawled away.

  Helen swung around gayly. “Didn’t see that all cells are mutable, not just germ cells but all cells. If they keep on multiplying—each cell with the same probability of mutation —and some viable mutations would be cancerous, then everybody— Work it out on a slide rule for me, Hon. I didn’t discover immortality. Everybody who lives long enough will die of something with so many million cells in the body, with—”

  She had been looking past him at the new idea, but now her gaze focused and softened. “Alec, you look so tired. You shouldn’t be pale after all your tramping around in—” The mists of thought cleared. She saw him. “Alec, you’re back.”

  And now there was no space or time separating them and she was warm and alive in his arms, nuzzling his cheek, whispering a chuckle in his ear. “And I was standing there lecturing you about cells! I must have been crazy.”

  He could hear the doctor padding up the hall with a squad of husky attendants, but he didn’t care. Helen was back.

  From too much love of living

  From hope and fear set free

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  Swinburne

  The Snowball Effect

  “ALL RIGHT,” I said, “what is sociology good for?”

  Wilton Caswell, Ph.D., was head of my Sociology Department, and right then he was mad enough to chew nails. On the office wall behind him were three or four framed documents in Latin that were supposed to be signs of great learning, but I didn’t care at that moment if he papered the walls with his degrees. I had been appointed dean and president to see to it that the university made money. I had a job to do, and I meant to do it.

  He bit off each word with great restraint: “Sociology is the study of social institutions, Mr. Halloway.”

  I tried to make him understand my position. “Look, it’s the big-money men who are supposed to be contributing to the support of this college. To them, sociology sounds like socialism—nothing can sound worse than that—and an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album. We can’t appeal to them that way. Come on now.” I smiled condescendingly, knowing it would irritate him. “What are you doing that’s worth anything?”

  He
glared at me, his white hair bristling and his nostrils dilated like a war horse about to whinny. I can say one thing for them—these scientists and professors always keep themselves well under control. He had a book in his hand and I was expecting him to throw it, but he spoke instead:

  “This department’s analysis of institutional accretion, by the use of open system mathematics, has been recognized as an outstanding and valuable contribution to—”

  The words were impressive, whatever they meant, but this still didn’t sound like anything that would pull in money. I interrupted. “Valuable in what way?”

  He sat down on the edge of his desk, thoughtful, apparently recovering from the shock of being asked to produce something solid for his position, and ran his eyes over the titles of the books that lined his office walls.

  “Well, sociology has been valuable to business in initiating worker efficiency and group motivation studies, which they now use in management decisions. And, of course, since the depression, Washington has been using sociological studies of employment labor and standards of living as a basis for its general policies of—”

  I stopped him with both raised hands. “Please, Professor Caswell! That would hardly be a recommendation. Washington, the New Deal and the present Administration are somewhat touchy subjects to the men I have to deal with. They consider its value debatable, if you know what I mean. If they got the idea that sociology professors are giving advice and guidance— No, we have to stick to brass tacks and leave Washington out of this. What, specifically, has the work of this specific department done that would make it as worthy to receive money as—say, a heart disease research fund?”