The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy

by Katherine MacLean

  They set to work, and only Cliff knew the growing disorder and desperation that would come. He knew the abilities of the men on his team—the physicists, the field warp specialists, the metallurgists. There was no one capable of doing coordination. Without perfect coordination the project would fall apart, blow up, kill.

  And he was leaving them. Gross criminal negligence. Manslaughter.

  “Why did you leave the project?” Spaceways Commission would ask at the trial.

  “I would be no use there.” Not without Mike.

  He sat in the stern of his ship in the control armchair and looked at the blend of dim lights and shadows that picked out the instrument panel and the narrow interior of the control dome. Automatically the mixture analyzed for him into overlapping spheres of light blending and reflecting from the three light sources. There was no effort to such knowledge. It was part of sight. He had always seen a confusion of river ripples as the measured reverberations of wind, rocks, and current. It seemed an easy illiterate talent, but for nineteen years it had bought him a place on Station A, privileged with the company of the top research men of Earth who were picked for the station staff as a research sinecure, men whose lightest talk was a running flame of ideas. The residence privilege was almost an automatic honor to the builder, but Cliff knew it was more of an honor than he deserved.

  After this the others would know.

  Why did you leave the project? Incompetence.

  Cliff looked at his hands, front and back. Strong, clumsy, almost apelike hands that knew all the secrets of machinery by instinct, that knew the planets as well as if he had held them and set them spinning himself. If all the lights of the sky were to go out, or if he were blind, he could still have cradled his ship in any spaceport in the system, but this was not enough. It was not skill as others knew skill, it was instinct, needing no learning. How hard to throw a coconut—how far to jump for the next branch—no words or numbers needed for that, but you can’t tape automatics or give directions without words and numbers.

  All he could give would be a laugh and another anecdote to swell the collection.

  “Did you see Cliff trying to imitate six charged bodies in a submagnetic field?”

  Sitting in the shock tank armchair of the tug, Cliff shut his eyes, remembered Brandy’s remarks on borrowing trouble, and cutting tension cycles, and with an effort put the whole subject on ice, detaching it from emotions. It would come up later. He relaxed with a slightly lopsided grin. The only current problem was how to get Archy and himself back to Pluto before the whole project blew up.

  He left his ship behind him circling the anchorage asteroid at a distance and speed that broke all parking rules, and he knew how much drain the anchorage projectors could take. They could hold the ship in for two hours, long enough for him to get Archy and tangent off again with all the ship momentum intact.

  High speeds are meaningless in space, even to a lone man in a thin spacesuit. There was no sense of motion, and nothing in sight but unmoving stars, yet the polarized wiring of his suit encountered shells of faint resistance, shoves and a variety of hums, and Cliff did not need his eyes. He knew the electromagnetic patterns of the space around Station A better than he knew the control board of the tug. With the absent precision of long habit he touched the controls of his suit, tuning its wiring to draw power from the station carrier wave. As he tuned in, the carrier was being modulated by a worried voice.

  “Can’t quite make out your orbit. Would you like a taxi service? Answer please. We have to clear you, you know.”

  Cliff wide-angled the beam of his phone and flashed it in the general direction of Station A for a brief blink of full power that raised it to scorching heat in his hand. The flash automatically carried his identification letters.

  “Oh, is that you, Cliff? I was beginning to wonder if your ship were heaving a bomb at us. O.K. clear. The port is open.” In the far distance before him a pinpoint of light appeared and expanded steadily to a great barrel of metal rotating on a hollow axis. Inside, invisible forces matched his residual velocity to the station and deposited him gently in a storage locker.

  Cliff passed through the ultraviolet and supersonic sterilizing stalls to the locker room, changed his sterilized spacesuit for clean white shorts, and stepped out onto the public corridors. They were unusually deserted. He managed to reach the library without exchanging more than a distant wave with someone passing far down a corridor.

  There was someone in the reading room, but Cliff passed hurriedly, hoping the man would not turn and greet him or ask why he was there, or how was Mike— Hurriedly he shoved through a side door, and was in the tube banks and microfiles where the information service works were open to Archy’s constant tinkering.

  There was a figure sitting cross-legged, checking some tubes, but it was not Archy. It was a stranger.

  Cliff tapped the seated figure on the shoulder and extended a hand as the man turned. “My name is Cliff Baker. I’m one of the engineers of this joint. Can I be of any help to you?”

  The man, a small friendly Amerind, leaped to his feet and took the hand in a wiry nervous clasp, smiling widely. He answered in Glot with a Spanish accent.

  “Happy to meet you, sir. My name is McCrea. I am the new librarian to replace Dr. Reynolds.”

  “It’s a good job,” said Cliff. “Is Archy around?”

  The new librarian gulped nervously. “Oh, yes, Dr. Reynolds’ son. He withdrew his application for the position. Something about music I hear. I don’t want to bother him. I am not used to the Reynolds’ system, of course. It is hard to understand. It is sad that Dr. Reynolds left no diagrams. But I work hard, and soon I will understand.” The little man gestured at his scattered tools and half-drawn tentative diagrams and gulped again. “I am not a real, a genuine station research person, of course. The commission they have honored me with is a temporary appointment while they—”

  Cliff had listened to the flow of words, stunned. “For the luvva Pete!” he exploded. “Do you mean to say that Archy Reynolds has left you stewing here trying to figure out the library system, and never raised a hand to help you? What’s wrong with the kid?”

  He smiled reassuringly at the anxious little workman. “Listen,” he said gently. “He can spare you ten minutes. I’ll get Archy up here if I have to break his neck.”

  He strode back into the deserted library, where one square stubborn man sat glowering at the visoplate on his desk. It was Dr. Brandias, the station medico.

  “Ahoy, Brandy,” said Cliff. “Where’s Archy? Where is everybody anyhow!”

  Brandy looked up with a start. “Cliff. They’re all down in the gym, heavy level, listening to Archy give a jazz concert.” He seemed younger and more alert, yet paradoxically more tense and worried than normal. He assessed Cliff’s impatience and glanced smiling at his watch. “Hold your horses, it will be over any minute now. Spare me a second and show me what to do with this contraption.” He indicated the reading desk. “It’s driving me bats!” The intonations of his voice were slightly strange, and he tensed up self-consciously as if startled by their echo.

  Cliff considered the desk. It sat there looking expensive and useful, its ground glass reading screen glowing mildly. It looked like an ordinary desk with a private microtape file and projector inside to run the microfilm books on the reading screen, but Cliff knew that it was one of Reynolds’ special working desks, linked through the floor with the reference files of the library that held in a few cubic meters the incalculable store of all the Earth’s libraries, linked by Doc Reynolds to the service automatics and the station computer with an elaborate control panel. It was comforting to Cliff that a desk should be equipped to do his calculating for him, record the results and photograph and play back any tentative notes he could make on any subject. Reynolds had made other connections and equipped his desks to do other things which Cliff had never bothered to figure out, but there was an irreverent rumor around that if your fingers slipped on the con
trols it would give you a ham sandwich.

  “Cliff,” Brandy was saying, “if you fix it, you’re a life saver. I’ve just got the glimmering of a completely different way to control the sympathetic system and take negative tension cycles out of decision and judgment sets, and—”

  Cliff interrupted with a laugh, “You’re talking out of my frequency. What’s wrong with the desk?”

  “It won’t give me the films I want,” Brandy said indignantly. “Look, I’ll show you.” The doctor consulted a list of decimal index numbers on a note pad, and rapidly punched them into the keyboard. As he did so the board gave out a trill of flutelike notes that ran up and down the scale like musical morse. “And all that noise—” Brandy grumbled. “Doc kept turning it up louder and louder as he got deafer and deafer before he died. Why doesn’t somebody turn it down?” He finished and pushed the total key to the accompaniment of a sudden simultaneous jangle of notes. The jangle moved into a high twittering, broke into chords and trailed off in a single high faint note that somehow seemed as positive and final as the last note of a tune.

  Cliff ignored it. All of Reynolds’ automatics ran on a frequency discrimination system, and Doc Reynolds had liked to hetrodyne them down to audible range so as to keep track of their workings. Every telephone and servo in the station worked to the tune of sounds like a chorus of canaries, and the people of the station had grown so used to the sound that they no longer heard it. He looked the panel over again.

  “You have the triangulation key in,” he told Brandias, and laughed shortly. “The computer is taking the numbers as a question, and it’s trying to give you an answer.”

  “Sounds like a Frankenstein,” Brandy grinned. “Everything always works right for engineers. It’s a conspiracy.”

  “Sure,” Cliff said vaguely, consulting his chrono. “Say, what’s the matter with your voice?”

  The reaction to that simple question was shocking; Dr. Brandias turned white. Brandy, who had taught Cliff to control his adrenals and pulse against shock reaction, was showing one himself, an uncontrolled shock reaction triggered to a random word. Brandy had taught that this was a good sign of an urgent problem suppressed from rational calculation, hidden, and so only able to react childishly in irrational identifications, fear sets triggered to symbols.

  The square, practical looking doctor was stammering, looking strangely helpless. “Why… uh… uh… nothing.” He turned hastily back to his desk.

  The news service clicked into life. “The concert is over,” it announced.

  Cliff hesitated for a second, considering Brandias’ broad stooped back, and remembering what he had learned from the doctor’s useful lesson on fear. What could be bad enough to frighten Brandy? Why was he hiding it from himself?

  He didn’t have time to figure it out. He had to get hold of Archy. “See you later.” Poor Brandy. Physician, heal thyself.

  People were streaming up from the concert.

  He strode out into the corridor and headed for the elevator, answering the hails of friends with a muttered greeting. At the door of the elevator Mrs. Gibbs stepped out, trailing her husband. She passed him with a gracious “Good evening, Cliff.”

  But Willy Gibbs stopped. “Hi, Cliff. Did you see the new movie? You fellows up around Pluto sure got the breaks.” Oddly the words came out in a strange singsong that robbed them of meaning. As Cliff wondered vaguely what was wrong with the man, Mrs. Gibbs turned and tried to hurry her husband with a tug on his arm.

  Willy Gibbs went on chanting. “There wasn’t even an extra to play me in this one.” The ecologist absently acknowledged his wife’s repeated nudge with an impatient twitch of his shoulder. The shoulder twitched again, reasonlessly, and kept on twitching as the ecologist’s voice became jerky. “It’s… risks… that… appeal to… them. Maybe I… should… write… an article… about… my… man… eating… molds… or reep beep tatatum la kikikinoo stup.”

  Mrs. Gibbs glared icily at her husband, and Willy Gibbs suddenly went deep red. “Be seeing you,” he muttered and hurried on. As the elevator door slid closed Cliff thought he heard a burst of whistling, but the door shut off his view and the elevator started softly downward.

  He found Archy in the stage rehearsal room at 1.6 G. As he opened the door a deep wave of sound met him.

  Eight teen-age members of the orchestra sat around the room, their eyes fixed glassily on the drummer. Archy Reynolds sat surrounded by drums, using his fingertips with an easy precision, filling the room with a vibrating thunder that modulated through octaves like an impossibly deep and passionate voice.

  The sound held him at the door like a thick soft wall.

  “Archy,” he said, pitching his voice to carry over the drums. The cold eyes in the bony face flickered up at him. Archy nodded, flipped the score over two pages, and the drumbeat changed subtly. A girl in the orchestra lifted her instrument and a horn picked up the theme in a sad intermittent note, as the drumbeat stopped. Archy unfolded from his chair and came over with the smallest drum still dangling from one bony hand. Behind him the horn note rose up instantly and a cello began to whisper.

  He had grown tall enough to talk to Cliff face to face, but his expression was cold and remote.

  “What is it, Mr. Baker?”

  “Brace yourself Jughead,” Cliff said kindly, wondering how Archy would take the shock. The kid had always wanted to go along on a project. It was funny that now he would go to help instead of watch. He paused, collecting words. “How would you like to go up to Pluto Station and be my partner for a while?”

  Archy looked past him without blinking, his bony face so preoccupied that Cliff thought he had not heard. He began again. “I said, how would you like—”

  The horn began to whimper down to a silence, and the orchestra stirred restlessly. Archy shifted the small drum under his arm and laid his fingertips against it.

  “No,” he said, and walked back to his place, his fingers making a shuffling noise on the drum that reminded Cliff of a heart beating. The music swelled up again, but it was strange. Cliff could see someone striking chords at the piano, a boy with a flute—all the instruments of an orchestra sounding intermittently, but they were unreal. The sound was not music, it was the jumbled voices of a dream, laughing and muttering with a meaning beyond the mind’s grasp.

  A dull hunger to understand began to ache in his throat, and he let his eyes half close, rocking on his feet as the dreamlike clamor of voices surged up in his mind.

  Instinct saved him. Without remembering having moved he was out in the hall, and the clean slam of the soundproofed door cut off the music and left a ringing silence.

  At Pluto Station a field interacted subtly with fields out of its calculated range, minor disturbances resonated and built, and suddenly the field moved. Ten feet to one side, ten feet back.

  “Medico here,” said Smitty on a directed beam, tightening the left elbow joint of his spacesuit with his right hand. He was using all the strength he had, trying to stop the jet of blood from where his left hand had been. Numbly he moved back as the field began to swing towards him again. He hummed two code notes that switched his call into general beam, and said loudly and not quite coherently: “Oscillation build up, I think. Something wrong over here. I don’t get it.”

  The hall was painted soberly in two shades of brown, with a faint streak of handprints running along the wall and darkening the doorknobs. It looked completely normal. Cliff shook his head to shake the ringing out of his ears, and snorted, “What the Sam Hill!” His voice was reassuringly sane, loud and indignant. Memory came back to him. “He said no. He said no!”

  “What now?” He strode furiously toward the public elevator. “Watch your temper,” he cautioned himself. “For Pete’s sake! Stop talking to yourself. Archy will listen when it’s explained to him. Wait till he’s through.” Eight more minutes. They were only going over a flubbed phrase from the concert.

  A snatch of the tune played by the flute came back to him
, with a familiar ring. He whistled it tentatively, then with more confidence. It sounded like the Reynolds’ automatics running through its frequency selection before giving service. The elevator stopped at the gym level and loaded on some people. They crowded into the elevator, greeted Cliff jerkily, and then stood humming and whistling and twitching with shame-faced grins, avoiding each other’s eyes. They all sounded like the Reynolds’ automatics, and all together they sounded like the bird cage at the zoo.

  “What the devil,” muttered Cliff as the elevator loaded and unloaded another horde of grinning imbeciles at every level. “What’s going on!” Cliff muttered, beginning to see the scene through a red haze of temper. “What’s going on!”

  At one G he got off and strode down the corridor, cooling himself off. By the time he reached the door marked Baker he had succeeded in putting it out of his mind. With a brief surge of happiness he came into the cool familiar rooms and called, “Mary.”

  Bill, his ten-year-old, charged out of the kitchen with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand, shouting.

  “Pop! Hey, I didn’t know you were coming!” He was grabbed by Cliff and swung laughing towards the ceiling. “Hey! Hey! Put me down. I’ll drop my sandwich.”

  Laughing, Cliff threw him onto the sofa. “Go on, you always have a sandwich. It’s part of your hand.”

  Bill got up and took a big bite of the sandwich, fumbling in his pocket with the other hand. “Hm-m-m,” he said unintelligibly, and pulled out a child’s clicker toy, and began clicking it. He gulped, and said, in a muffled voice, “I’ve got to go back to class. Come watch me, Pop. You can give that old teacher a couple of tips, I bet.”

  There was something odd about the tones of his voice even through the sandwich, and the clicker clicked in obscure relation to the rhythm of his words.

  Cliff tried not to notice. “Where’s your mom?”