‘What’s he to you, Miss Gerald?’ demanded the sheriff.
‘Gerard,’ she corrected. She had grey-green eyes and a strange mouth. ‘He’s my cousin.’
‘All Adam’s chillun are cousins, one way or the other. You’ll have to tell me a little more than that.’
‘He was in the Air Force seven years ago,’ she said. ‘There was some—trouble. He was discharged. Medical.’
The sheriff thumbed through the file on the desk before him. ‘Remember the doctor’s name?’
‘Thompson first, then Bromfield. Dr Bromfield signed the discharge.’
‘Guess you do know something about him at that. What was he before he did his hitch in the Air Force?’
‘An engineer. I mean, he would have been if he’d finished school.’
‘Why didn’t he?’
She shrugged. ‘He just disappeared.’
‘So how do you know he’s here?’
‘I’d recognize him anywhere,’ she said. ‘I saw… I saw it happen.’
‘Did you now.’ The sheriff grunted, lifted the file, let it drop. ‘Look, Miss Gerald, it’s not my business to go advising people. But you seem like a nice respectable girl. Why don’t you just forget him?’
‘I’d like to see him, if I may,’ she said quietly.
‘He’s crazy. Did you know that?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Slammin’ his fist through a plate glass window. For nothing.’
She waited. He tried again. ‘He’s dirty. He don’t know his own name, hardly.’
‘May I see him?’
The sheriff uttered a wordless growl and stood up. ‘Them Air Force psychos had any sense, they’d’ve put him where he would never even get near a jail. This way.’
The walls were steel plates like a ship’s bulkhead, studded with rivets, painted a faded cream above and mustard colour below. Their footsteps echoed. The sheriff unlocked a heavy door with one small high grating and slid it aside. They stepped through and he closed and locked it. He motioned her ahead of him and they came into a barnlike area, concrete on walls and ceiling. Built around it was a sort of balcony; under and over this were the cells, steel-walled, fronted by close-set bars. There were perhaps twenty cells. Only a half dozen were occupied. It was a cold, unhappy place.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ demanded the sheriff, reading her expression. ‘The Waldorf Plaza or something?’
‘Where is he?’ she asked.
They walked to a cell on the lower tier. ‘Snap out of it, Barrows. Lady to see you.’
‘Hip! Oh, Hip!’
The prisoner did not move. He lay half on, half off a padded steel bunk, one foot on the mattress, one on the floor. His left arm was in a dirty sling.
‘See? Nary a word out of him. Satisfied, Miss?’
‘Let me in,’ she breathed. ‘Let me talk to him.’
He shrugged and reluctantly unlocked the door. She stepped in, turned. ‘May I speak to him alone?’
‘Liable to get hurt,’ he warned.
She gazed at him. Her mouth was extraordinarily expressive. ‘Well,’ he said at length, ‘I’ll stay in the area here. You yell if you need help. S’help me I’ll put a slug through your neck, Barrows, if you try anything.’ He locked the barred door behind the girl.
She waited until he stepped away and then went to the prisoner. ‘Hip,’ she murmured. ‘Hip Barrows.’
His dull eyes slid in their sockets until they approximated her direction. The eyes closed and opened in a slow, numb blink.
She knelt beside him. ‘Mr Barrows,’ she whispered, ‘you don’t know me. I told them I was your cousin. I want to help you.’
He was silent.
She said, ‘I’m going to get you out of here. Don’t you want to get out?’
For a long moment he watched her face. Then his eyes went to the locked door and back to her face again.
She touched his forehead, his cheek. She pointed at the dirty sling. ‘Does it hurt much?’
His eyes lingered, withdrew from her face, found the bandage. With effort, they came up again. She asked, ‘Aren’t you going to say anything? Don’t you want me to help?’
He was silent for so long that she rose. ‘I’d better go. Don’t forget me. I’ll help you.’ She turned to the door.
He said, ’Why?’
She returned to him. ‘Because you’re dirty and beaten and don’t care—and because none of that can hide what you are.’
‘You’re crazy,’ he muttered tiredly.
She smiled. ‘That’s what they say about you. So we have something in common.’
He swore, foully.
Unperturbed, she said, ‘You can’t hide behind that either. Now listen to me. Two men will come to see you this afternoon. One is a doctor. The other is a lawyer. We’ll have you out of here this evening.’
He raised his head and for the first time something came into his lethargic face. Whatever it was was not pretty. His voice came from deep in his chest. He growled, ‘What type doctor?’
‘For your arm,’ she said evenly. ‘Not a psychiatrist. You’ll never have to go through that again.’
He let his head drop back. His features slowly lost their expression. She waited and when he had nothing else to offer, she turned and called the sheriff.
It was not too difficult. The sentence was sixty days for malicious mischief. There had been no alternative fine offered. The lawyer rapidly proved that there should have been, and the fine was paid. In his clean new bandages and his filthy clothes, Barrows was led out past the glowering sheriff, ignoring him and his threat as to what the dirty bum could expect if he ever showed up in town again.
The girl was waiting outside. He stood stupidly at the top of the jailhouse steps while she spoke to the lawyer. Then the lawyer was gone and she touched his elbow. ‘ Come on, Hip.’
He followed like a wound-up toy, walking whither his feet had been pointed. They turned two corners and walked five blocks and then up the stone steps of a clean, dried spinster of a house with a bay window and coloured glass set into the main door. The girl opened the main door with one key and a door in the hallway with another. He found himself in the room with the bay window. It was high ceilinged, airy, clean.
For the first time he moved of his own volition. He turned around, slowly, looking at one wall after another. He put out his hand and lifted the corner of a dresser scarf, and let it fall. ‘Your room?’
‘Yours,’ she said. She came to him and put two keys on the dresser. ‘Your keys.’ She opened the top drawer. ‘Your socks and handkerchiefs.’ With her knuckles she rapped on each drawer in turn. ‘Shirts. Underclothes.’ She pointed to a door. ‘Two suits in there; I think they’ll fit. A robe. Slippers, shoes.’ She pointed to another door. ‘Bathroom. Lots of towels, lots of soap. A razor.’
‘Razor?’
‘Anyone who can have keys can have a razor,’ she said gently. ‘Get presentable, will you? I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do you know how long it is since you’ve eaten anything?’
He shook his head.
‘Four days. ‘Bye now.’
She slipped through the door and was gone, even as he fumbled for something to say to her. He looked at the door for a long time. Then he swore and fell limply back on the bed.
He scratched his nose and his hand slid down to his jaw. It was ragged, itchy. He half rose, muttered, ‘Damn if I will,’ and lay back. And then, somehow, he was in the bathroom, peering at himself in the mirror. He wet his hands, splashed water on his face, wiped the dirt off on to a towel and peered again. He grunted and reached for the soap.
He found the razor, he found the underclothes, the slacks, socks, slippers, shirt, jacket. When he looked into the mirror he wished he had a comb. When she elbowed the door open she put her packages on the top of the dresser and then she was smiling up at him, her hand out, the comb in it. He took it wordlessly and went and wet his head and combed it.
‘Come on, it’s all ready,’ she called from the other room. He emerged. She had taken the lamp off the night table and had spread out a thick oval platter on which was a lean, rare steak, a bottle of ale, a smaller bottle of stout, a split Idaho potato with butter melting in it, hot rolls in a napkin, a tossed salad in a small wooden bowl.
‘I don’t want nothing,’ he said, and abruptly fell to. There was nothing in the world then but the good food filling his mouth and throat, the tingle of ale and the indescribable magic of the charcoal crust.
When the plate was empty, it and the table suddenly wanted to fly upward at his head. He toppled forward, caught the sides of the table and held it away from him. He trembled violently. She spoke from behind him, ‘All right. It’s all right,’ and put her hands on his shoulders, pressed him back into his chair. He tried to raise his hand and failed. She wiped his clammy forehead and upper lip with the napkin.
In time, his eyes opened. He looked round for her, found her sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him silently. He grinned sheepishly. ‘ Whew! ’
She rose. ‘You’ll be all right now. You’d better turn in. Good night!’
She was in the room, she was out of it. She had been with him, he was alone. It made a change which was too important to tolerate and too large to understand. He looked from the door to the bed and said ‘Good night,’ only because they were the last words she had said, and they hung shimmering in the silence.
He put his hands on the chair arms and forced his legs to cooperate. He could stand but that was all. He fell forward and sidewise, curling up to miss the table as he went down. He lay across the counterpane and blackness came.
‘Good morning.’
He lay still. His knees were drawn up and the heels of his hands were tight on his cheekbones. He closed his eyes tighter than sleep to shut out the light. He closed his kines-thetic sense „to shut out the slight tilting of the mattress which indicated where she sat on the bed. He disconnected his hearing lest she speak again. His nostrils betrayed him; he had not expected there to be coffee in the room and he was wanting it, wanting it badly, before he thought to shut it out.
Fussily he lay thinking, thinking something about her. If she spoke again, he thought, he’d show her. He’d lie there till she spoke again and when she spoke he’d ignore her and lie still some more.
He waited.
Well, if she wasn’t going to speak again, he couldn’t ignore her, could he?
He opened his eyes. They blazed, round and angry. She sat near the foot of the bed. Her body was still, her face was still, her mouth and her eyes were alive.
He coughed suddenly, violently. It closed his eyes and when he opened them he was no longer looking at her. He fumbled vaguely at his chest, then looked down at himself.
‘Slep’ in my clothes all night,’ he said.
‘Drink your coffee.’
He looked at her. She still had not moved, and did not. She was wearing a burgundy jacket with a grey-green scarf. She had long, level, grey-green eyes, the kind which in profile are deep clear triangles. He looked away from her, farther and farther away, until he saw the coffee. A big pot, a thick hot cup, already poured. Black and strong and good. ‘Whoo,’ he said, holding it, smelling it. He drank. ‘Whoo.’
He looked at the sunlight now. Good. The turn and fall and turn again of the breeze-lifted marquisette at the window, in and out of a sunbeam. Good. The luminous oval, a shadow of the sunlight itself, where the sun glanced off the round mirror on one wall to the clean paint on the adjoining one. Good. He drank more good coffee.
He set the cup down and fumbled at his shirt buttons. He was wrinkled and sweaty. ‘Shower,’ he said.
‘Go ahead,’ said the girl. She rose and went to the dresser where there was a cardboard box and some paper sacks. She opened the box and took out an electric hot plate. He got three buttons undone and somehow the fourth and fifth came off with little explosive tearing sounds. He got the rest of his clothes off somehow. The girl paid him no attention, neither looking at him nor away, just calmly doing things with the hot plate. He went into the bathroom and fussed for a long time with the shower handles, getting the water just right. He got in and let the water run on the nape of his neck. He found soap in the dish, so he let the water run on his head and then rubbed it furiously with the cake of soap until he was mantled in warm, kind, crawling lather. God, the thought came from somewhere, I ’ m thin as a xylophone. Got to put some beef back on or I ’ ll get sick and… The same thought looped back on him, interrupting itself: Not supposed to get well. Get good and sick, stay sick. Get sicker. Angrily he demanded, ‘Who says I got to get sick?’ but there was no answer except a quick echo off the tiles.
He shut off the water and stepped out and took an oversized towel from the rack. He started one end of it on his scalp, worked it on his hair from one end to the other. He threw it on the floor, in the corner, and took another towel and rubbed himself pink. He threw that one down too and came out into the room. The robe lay over the arm of an easychair by the door so he put it on.
The girl was spooning fragrant bacon grease over and over three perfect eggs in a pan. When he sat down on the edge of the bed she slid the eggs deftly on to a plate, leaving all the grease behind in the pan. They were perfect, the whites completely firm, the yolks unbroken, liquid, faintly filmed over. There was bacon, four brief seconds less than crisp, paper dried and aromatic. There was toast, golden outside, soft and white inside, with butter melting quickly, running to find and fill the welcoming caves and crevices; two slices with butter, one with marmalade. And these lay in some sunlight, giving off a colour possible only to marmalade and to stained glass.
He ate and drank coffee; ate more and drank coffee and coffee. All the while she sat in the easychair with his shirt in her lap and her hands like dancers, while the buttons grew back on to the material under their swift and delicate paces.
He watched her and when she was finished he came to her and put out his hand for the shirt, but she shook her head and pointed. ‘A clean one.’
He found a knitted pullover polo shirt. While he dressed she washed his dishes and the frying pan and straightened out the bed. He lay back in the easychair and she knelt before him and worked the soggy dressing off his left hand, inspected the cuts and bound them up again. The bandage was firm and comforting. ‘You can do without the sling now,’ she said, pleased. She got up and went to the bed. She sat there facing him, still again except for her eyes, except for her mouth.
Outside an oriole made a long slender note, broke it, and let the fragments fall through the shining air. A stake-bed truck idled past, busily shaking the string of cowbells on its back, while one hoarse man and one with a viola voice flanked it afoot, chanting. In one window came a spherical sound with a fly at its heart and at the other appeared a white kitten. Out by the kitten went the fly and the kitten reared up and batted at it, twisted and sprang down out of sight as if it had meant all along to leave; only a fool would have thought it had lost its balance.
And in the room was quiet and a watchfulness which was without demand, except perhaps a guarding against leaving anything unwatched. The girl sat with her hands aslumber and her eyes awake, while a pipe-cleaner man called Healing was born in all his cores, all his marrow, taking the pose of his relaxed body, resting and growing a little and resting again and growing.
Later, she rose. Without consultation, but merely because it seemed time to do so, she picked up a small handbag and went to the door where she waited. He stirred, rose, went to her. They went out.
They walked slowly to a place where there was smooth rolling land, mowed and tended. Down in the hollow some boys played Softball. They stood for a while, watching. She studied his face and when she saw reflected in it only the moving figures and not the consecutive interest of the game itself, she touched his elbow and moved on. They found a pond where there were ducks and straight cinder paths with flower beds. She picked a primrose and put it in his lapel. They found a bench. A man pushed a bright clean wagon up to them. She bought a frankfurter and a bottle of soda and handed them to him. He ate and drank silently.
It was a quiet time they had together.
When it began to grow dark, she brought him back to the room. She left him alone for half an hour and returned to find him sitting just where she had left him. She opened packages and cooked chops and mixed a salad, and while he was eating, made more coffee. After dinner he yawned. She was on her feet immediately. ‘Good night,’ she said, and was gone.
He turned slowly and looked at the closed door. After a time he said, ‘Good night.’ He undressed and got into bed and turned out the light.
The next day was the day they rode on a bus and lunched in a restaurant.
The day after that was the one they stayed out a little later to see a band concert.
Then there was the afternoon when it rained and they went to a movie which he watched wordlessly, not smiling, not frowning, not stirring to the musical parts.
‘Your coffee.’ ‘Let’s get these to the laundry.’ ‘Come.’ ‘Good night.’ These were the things she said to him. Otherwise she watched his face and, undemandingly, she waited.
He awoke, and it was too dark. He did not know where he was. The face was there, wide-browed, sallow, with its thick lenses and its pointed chin. Wordlessly, he roared at it and it smiled at him. When he realized that the face was in his mind and not in the room, it disappeared… no; it was simply that he knew it was not there. He was filled with fury that it was not there; his brain was fairly melting with rage. Yes, but who is he? he asked, and answered, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know…’ and his voice became a moan, softer and softer and softer until it was gone. He inhaled deeply and then something inside him slipped and fell apart and he began to cry. Someone took his hand, took his other hand, held them together; it was the girl; she’d heard him, she’d come. He was not alone.
Not alone… it made him cry harder, bitterly. He held her wrists as she bent over him, looked up through darkness at her face and her hair and he wept.
She stayed with him until he was finished and for as long afterwards as he held her hand. When he released it he was asleep, and she drew the blanket up to his chin and tiptoed out.
In the morning he sat on the edge of the bed, watching the steam from his coffee spread and fade in the sunlight, and when she put the eggs before him he looked up at her. His mouth quivered. She stood before him, waiting.
At last he said, ‘Have you had your breakfast yet?’
Something was kindled in her eyes. She shook her head.
He looked down at the plate, puzzling something out. Finally he pushed it away from him a fraction of an inch and stood up. ‘You have this,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix some more.’
He had seen her smile but he had not noticed it before. Now, it was as if the warmth of all of them was put together for this one. She sat down and ate. He fried his eggs, not as well as she had done, and they were cooked before he thought of toast and the toast burned while he was eating the eggs. She did not attempt to help him in any way, even when he stared blankly at the little table, frowned and scratched his jaw. In his own time he found what he was looking for—the other cup on top of the dresser. He poured fresh coffee for her and took the other which she had not touched, for himself, and she smiled again.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked her, for the very first time.
‘Janie Gerard.’
‘Oh.’
She considered him carefully, then stretched down to the footpost of the bed where her handbag hung by its strap. She drew it towards her, opened it, and took out a short piece of metal. At first glance, it was a piece of aluminium tubing, perhaps eight inches long and oval in cross-section. But it was flexible—woven of tiny strands rather than extruded. She turned his right hand palm up, where it lay beside his coffee cup, and put the tubing into it.
He must have seen it for he was staring down into the cup. He did not close his fingers on it. His expression did not change. At length he took a slice of toast. The piece of tubing fell, rolled over, hung on the edge of the table and dropped to the floor. He buttered his toast.
After that first shared meal there was a difference. There were many differences. Never again did he undress before her or ignore the fact that she was not eating. He began to pay for little things—bus fares, lunches, and, later, to let her precede him through doorways, to take her elbow when they crossed streets. He went to the market with her and carried the packages.
He remembered his name; he even remembered that the ‘Hip’ was for ‘Hippocrates’. He was, however, unable to remember how he came by the name, or where he had been born, or anything else about himself. She did not urge him, ask him. She simply spent her days with him, waiting. And she kept the piece of aluminium webbing in sight.
It was beside his breakfast plate almost every morning. It would be in the bathroom, with the handle of his toothbrush thrust into it. Once he found it in his side jacket pocket where the small roll of bills appeared regularly; this one time the bills were tucked into the tubing. He pulled them out and absently let the tubing fall and Janie had to pick it up. She put it in his shoe once and when he tried to put the shoe on and could not, he tipped it out on to the floor and let it lie there. It was as if it were transparent or even invisible to him; when, as in the case of finding his money in it, he had to handle it, he did so clumsily, with inattention, rid himself of it and apparently forgot it. Janie never mentioned it. She just quietly put it in his path, time and time again, patient as a pendulum.
His afternoons began to possess a morning and his days, a yesterday. He began to remember a bench they had used, a theatre they had attended, and he would lead the way back. She relinquished her guidance as fast as he would take it up until it was he who planned their days.
Since he had no memory to draw on except his time with her, they were days of discovery. They had picnics and rode learningly on buses. They found another theatre and a place with swans as well as ducks.
There was another kind of discovery too. One day he stood in the middle of the room and turned, looking at one wall after another, at the windows and the bed. ‘I was sick, wasn’t I?’
And one day he stopped on the street, stared at the grim building on the other side. ‘I was in there.’
And it was several days after that when he slowed, frowned, and stood gazing into a men’s furnishing shop. No—not into it. At it. At the window.
Beside him Janie waited, watching his face.
He raised his left hand slowly, flexed it, looked down at the curled scar on the back of his hand, the two straight ones, one long, one short, on his wrist.
‘Here,’ she said. She pressed the piece of tubing into his hand.
Without looking at it he closed his fingers, made a fist. Surprise flickered across his features and then a flash of sheer terror and something like anger. He swayed on his feet.
‘It’s all right,’ said Janie softly.
He grunted questioningly, looked at her as if she were a stranger and seemed slowly to recognize her. He opened his hand and looked carefully at the piece of metal. He tossed it, caught it. ‘That’s mine,’ he said.
She nodded.
He said, ‘I broke that window.’ He looked at it, tossed the piece of metal again, and put it in his pocket and began to walk again. He was quiet for a long time and just as they mounted the steps of their house he said, ‘I broke the window and they put me in that jail. And you got me out and I was sick and you brought me here till I was well again.’
He took out his keys and opened the door, stood back to let her pass in. ‘What did you want to do that for?’
‘Just wanted to,’ she said.
He was restless. He went to the closet and turned out the pockets of his two suit jackets and his sport coat. He crossed the room and pawed aimlessly at the dresser scarf and opened and shut drawers.
‘What is it?’
‘That thing,’ he said vaguely. He wandered into and out of the bathroom. ‘You know, that piece of pipe, like.’
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘I had it,’ he muttered unhappily. He took another turn around the room and then shouldered past Janie where she sat on the bed, and reached to the night table. ‘Here it is!’
He looked at it, flexed it, and sat down in the easychair. ‘Hate to lose that,’ he said relievedly. ‘Had it a long time.’
‘It was in the envelope they were holding for you while you were in jail,’ Janie told him.
‘Yuh. Yuh.’ He twisted it between his hands, then raised it and shook it at her like some bright, thick, admonishing forefinger. ‘This thing—’
She waited.
He shook his head. ‘Had it a long time,’ he said again. He rose, paced, sat down again. ‘I was looking for a guy who… Ah! ’ he growled, ‘I can’t remember.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said gently.
He put his head in his hands. ‘Damn near almost found him too,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘Been looking for him a long time. I’ve always been looking for him.’
‘Always?’
‘Well, ever since… Janie, I can’t remember again.’
‘All right.’
‘All right, all right, it isn’t all right!’ He straightened and looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, Janie. I didn’t mean to yell at you.’
She smiled at him. He said, ‘Where was that cave?’
‘Cave?’ she echoed.
He waved his arms up, around. ‘Sort of a cave. Half cave, half log house. In the woods. Where was it?’
‘Was I there with you?’
‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘That was before, I guess. I don’t remember.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I do worry about it!’ he said excitedly. ‘I can worry about it, can’t I?’ As soon as the words were out, he looked to her for forgiveness and found it. ‘You got to understand,’ he said more quietly, ‘this is something I—I got to—Look,’ he said, returning to exasperation, ‘can something be more important than anything else in the world, and you can’t even remember what it is?’
‘It happens.’
‘It’s happened to me,’ he said glumly. ‘I don’t like it either.’
‘You’re getting yourself all worked up,’ said Janie.
‘Well, sure!’ he exploded. He looked around him, shook his head violently. ‘What is this? What am I doing here? Who are you, anyway, Janie? What are you getting out of this?’
‘I like seeing you get well.’
‘Yeah, get well,’ he growled. ‘I should get well! I ought to be sick. Be sick and get sicker.’
‘Who told you that?’ she rapped.
‘Thompson,’ he barked and then slumped back, looking at her with stupid amazement on his face. In the high, cracking voice of an adolescent he whimpered, ‘Thompson? Who’s Thompson?’
She shrugged and said, matter-of-factly, ‘The one who told you you ought to be sick, I suppose.’
‘Yeah,’ he whispered, and again, in a soft-focused flood of enlightenment, ‘yeah-h-h-h…’ He wagged the piece of mesh tubing at her. ‘I saw him. Thompson.’ The tubing caught his eye then and he held it still, staring at it. He shook his head, closed his eyes. ‘I was looking for…’ His voice trailed off.
‘Thompson?’
‘Nah!’ he grunted. ‘I never wanted to see him! Yes I did,’ he amended. ‘I wanted to beat his brains out.’
‘You did?’
‘Yeah. You see, he—he was—aw, what’s the matter with my head? ’ he cried.
‘Sh-h-h,’ she soothed.
‘I can’t remember, I can’t,’ he said brokenly. ‘It’s like… you see something rising up off the ground, you got to grab it, you jump so hard you can feel your knee-bones crack, you stretch up and get your fingers on it, just the tips of your fingers…’ His chest swelled and sank. ‘Hang there, like forever, your fingers on it, knowing you’ll never make it, never get a grip. And then you fall, and you watch it going up and up away from you, getting smaller and smaller, and you’ll never—‘ He leaned back and closed his eyes. He was panting. He breathed, barely audible, ‘And you’ll never…’
He clenched his fists. One of them still held the tubing and again he went through the discovery, the wonder, the puzzlement. ‘Had this a long time,’ he said, looking at it. ‘Crazy. This must sound crazy to you, Janie.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘You still think I’m crazy?’
‘ No. ’
‘I’m sick,’ he whimpered.
Startlingly, she laughed. She came to him and pulled him to his feet. She drew him to the bathroom and reached in and switched on the light. She pushed him inside, against the washbasin, and rapped the mirror with her knuckles. ‘Who’s sick?’
He looked at the firm-fleshed, well-boned face that stared out at him, at its glossy hair and clear eyes. He turned to Janie, genuinely astonished. ‘I haven’t looked this good in years! Not since I was in the… Janie, was I in the Army?’
‘Were you?’
He looked into the mirror again. ‘Sure don’t look sick,’ he said, as if to himself. He touched his cheek. ‘Who keeps telling me I’m sick?’
He heard Janie’s footsteps receding. He switched off the light and joined her. ‘I’d like to break that Thompson’s back,’ he said. ‘Throw him right through a—‘
‘What is it?’
‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘was going to say, through a brick wall. I was thinking it so hard I could see it, me throwing him.’
‘Perhaps you did.’
He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t a wall. It was a plate glass window. I know!’ he shouted. ‘I saw him and I was going to hit him. I saw him standing right there on the street looking at me and I yelled and jumped him and… and…’ He looked down at his scarred hand. He said, amazed, ‘I turned right around and hauled off and hit the window instead. God.’
He sat down weakly. ‘That’s what the jail was for and it was all over. Just lie there in that rotten jail, sick. Don’t eat, don’t move, get sick and sicker and it’s all over.’
‘Well, it isn’t all over, is it?’
He looked at her. ‘No. No, it isn’t. Thanks to you.’ He looked at her eyes, her mouth. ‘What about you, Janie? What are you after, anyway?’
She dropped her eyes.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. That must’ve sounded…’ He put out a hand to her, dropped it without touching her. ‘I don’t know what’s gotten into me today. It’s just that… I don’t figure you, Janie. What did I ever do for you?’
She smiled quickly. ‘Got better.’
‘It’s not enough,’ he said devoutly. ‘Where do you live?’
She pointed. ‘Right across the hall.’
‘Oh,’ he said. He remembered the night he had cried, and pushed the picture away in embarrassment. He turned away, hunting for a change of subject, any change. ‘Let’s go out.’
‘All right.’ Was that relief he detected in her voice?
They rode on a roller coaster and ate cotton candy and danced in an outdoor pavilion. He wondered aloud where he had ever learned to dance, but that was the only mention he made of the things which were troubling him until late in the evening. It was the first time he had consciously enjoyed being with Janie; it was an Occasion, rather than a way of life. He had never known her to laugh so easily, to be so eager to ride this and taste that and go yonder to see what was there. At dusk they stood side by side, leaning on a railing which overlooked the lake, watching the bathers. There were lovers on the beach, here and there. Hip smiled at the sight, turned to speak to Janie about it and was arrested by the strange wistfulness which softened her taut features. A surge of emotion, indefinable and delicate, made him turn away quickly. It was in part a recognition of the rarity of her introspection and an unwillingness to interrupt it for her; and partly a flash of understanding that her complete preoccupation with him was not necessarily all she wanted of life. Life had begun for him, to all intents and purposes, on the day she came to his cell. It had never occurred to him before that her quarter of a century without him was not the clean slate that his was.
Why had she rescued him? Why him, if she must rescue someone? And—why?
What could she want from him? Was there something in his lost life that he might give her? If there was, he vowed silently, it was hers, whatever it might be; it was inconceivable that anything, anything at all she might gain from him would be of greater value than his own discovery of the life which produced it.
But what could it be?
He found his gaze on the beach and its small galaxy of lovers, each couple its own world, self-contained but in harmony with all the others adrift in the luminous dusk. Lovers… he had felt the tuggings of love… back somewhere in the mists, he couldn’t quite remember where, with whom… but it was there, and with it his old, old reflex, not until I ’ ve hunted him down and - But again he lost the thought. Whatever it was, it had been more important to him than love or marriage or a job or a colonelcy. (Colonelcy? Had he ever wanted to be a colonel?)
Well, then maybe it was a conquest. Janie loved him. She’d seen him and the lightning had struck and she wanted him, so she was going about it in her own way. Well, then! If that’s what she wanted…
He closed his eyes, seeing her face, the tilt of her head in that waiting, attentive silence; her slim strong arms and lithe body, her magic hungry mouth. He saw a quick sequence of pictures taken by the camera of his good male mind, but filed under ‘ inactive’ in his troubled, partial one: Janie’s legs silhouetted against the window, seen through the polychrome cloud of her liberty silk skirt. Janie in a peasant blouse, with a straight spear of morning sunlight bent and moulded to her bare shoulder and the soft upper curve of her breast. Janie dancing, bending away and cleaving to him as if he and she were the gold leaves of an electroscope. (Where had he seen… worked with… an electroscope? Oh, of course! In the… But it was gone.) Janie barely visible in the deep churning dark, palely glowing through a mist of nylon and the flickering acid of his tears, strongly holding his hands until he quieted.
But this was no seduction, this close intimacy of meals and walks and long shared silences, with never a touch, never a wooing word. Love-making, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing. Janie demanded nothing. She only… she only waited. If her interest lay in his obscured history she was taking a completely passive attitude, merely placing herself to receive what he might unearth. If something he had been, something he had done, was what she was after, wouldn’t she question and goad, probe and pry the way Thompson and Bromfield had done? (Bromfield? Who ’ s he?) But she never had, never.
No, it must be this other, this thing which made her look at lovers with such contained sadness, with an expression on her face like that of an armless man spellbound by violin music…
Picture of Janie’s mouth, bright, still, waiting. Picture of Janie’s clever hands. Picture of Janie’s body, surely as smooth as her shoulder, as firm as her forearm, warm and wild and willing—
They turned to each other, he the driving, she the driven gear. Their breath left them, hung as a symbol and a promise between them, alive and merged. For two heavy heartbeats they had their single planet in the lovers’ spangled cosmos; and then Janie’s face twisted in a spasm of concentration, bent not towards a ponderous control, but rather to some exquisite accuracy of adjustment.
A thing happened to him, as if a small sphere of the hardest vacuum had appeared deep within him. He breathed again and the magic about them gathered itself and whipped in with the breath to fill the vacuum which swallowed and killed it, all of it, in a tick of time. Except for the brief spastic change in her face, neither had moved; they still stood in the sunset, close together, her face turned up to his, here gloried, here tinted, there self-shining in its own shadow. But the magic was gone, the melding; they were two, not one, and this was Janie quiet, Janie patient, Janie not damped, but unkindled. But no—the real difference was in him. His hands were lifted to go round her and no longer cared to and his lips lost their grip on the unborn kiss and let it fall away and be lost. He stepped back. ‘Shall we go?’
A swift ripple of regret came and went across Janie’s face. It was a thing like many other things coming now to plague him: smooth and textured things forever presenting themselves to his fingertips and never to his grasp. He almost understood her regret, it was there for him, it was there—and gone, altogether gone, dwindling high away from him.
They walked silently back to the midway and the lights, their pitiable thousands of candlepower; and to the amusement rides, their balky pretence at motion. Behind them in the growing dark they left all real radiance, all significant movement. All of it; there was not enough left for any particular reaction. With the compressed air guns which fired tennis balls at wooden battleships; the cranks they turned to make the toy greyhounds race up a slope; the darts they threw at balloons—with these they buried something now so negligible it left no mound.
At an elaborate stand were a couple of war surplus servo-mechanisms rigged to simulate radar gun directors. There was a miniature anti-aircraft gun to be aimed by hand, its slightest movement followed briskly by the huge servo-powered gun at the back. Aircraft silhouettes were flashed across the domed half ceiling. All in all, it was a fine conglomeration of gadgetry and dazzle, a truly high-level catchpenny.
Hip went first, amused, then intrigued, then enthralled as his small movements were so obediently duplicated by the whip and weave of the massive gun twenty feet away. He missed the first ‘plane’ and the second; after that he had the fixed error of the gun calculated precisely and he banged away at every target as fast as they could throw them and knocked out every one. Janie clapped her hands like a child and the attendant awarded them a blurred and glittering clay statue of a police dog worth all of a fifth of the admission price. Hip took it proudly, and waved Janie up to the trigger. She worked the aiming mechanism diffidently and laughed as the big gun nodded and shook itself. His cheeks flushed, his eyes expertly anticipating the appearance-point of each target, Hip said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.’
Janie’s eyes narrowed a trifle and perhaps that was to help her aiming. She did not answer him. She knocked out the first target that appeared before it showed fully over the artificial horizon, and the second, and the third. Hip swatted his hands together and called her name joyfully. She seemed for a moment to be pulling herself together, the odd, effortful gesture of a preoccupied man forcing himself back into a conversation. She then let one go by and missed four in a row. She hit two, one low, one high, and missed the last by half a mile. ‘Not very good,’ she said tremulously.
‘Good enough,’ he said gallantly. ‘You don’t have to hit ‘em these days, you know.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Nah. Just get near. Your fuses take over from there. This is the world’s most diabetic dog.’
She looked down from his face to the statuette and giggled. ‘I’ll keep it always,’ she said. ‘Hip, you’re getting that nasty sparkle stuff all over your jacket. Let’s give it away.’
They marched up and across and down and around the tinsel stands in search of a suitable beneficiary, and found him at last—a solemn urchin of seven or so, who methodically sucked the memory of butter and juice from a well-worn corncob. ‘This is for you,’ carolled Janie. The child ignored the extended gift and kept his frighteningly adult eyes on her face.
Hip laughed. ‘No sale!’ He squatted beside the boy. ‘I’ll make a deal with you. Will you haul it away for a dollar?’
No response. The boy sucked his corncob and kept watching Janie.
‘Tough customer,’ grinned Hip.
Suddenly Janie shuddered. ‘Oh, let’s leave him alone,’ she said, her merriment gone.
‘He can’t outbid me,’ said Hip cheerfully. He set the statue down by the boy’s scuffed shoes and pushed a dollar bill into the rip which looked most like a pocket. ‘Pleasure to do business with you, sir,’ he said and followed Janie, who had already moved off.
‘Regular chatterbox,’ laughed Hip as he caught up with her. He looked back. Half a block away, the child still stared at Janie. ‘Looks like you’ve made a lifelong impress— Janie! ’
Janie had stopped dead, eyes wide and straight ahead, mouth a triangle of shocked astonishment. ‘The little devil! ‘ she breathed. ‘At his age!’ She whirled and looked back.
Hip’s eyes obviously deceived him for he saw the corncob leave the grubby little hands, turn ninety degrees and thump the urchin smartly on the cheekbone. It dropped to the ground; the child backed away four paces, shrilled an unchivalrous presumption and an unprintable suggestion at them and disappeared into an alley.
‘Whew!’ said Hip, awed. ‘You’re so right!’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘What clever ears you have, grandma,’ he said, not very successfully covering an almost prissy embarrassment with badinage. ‘I didn’t hear a thing until the second broadside he threw.’
‘Didn’t you?’ she said. For the first time he detected annoyance in her voice. And the same time he sensed that he was not the subject of it. He took her arm. ‘Don’t let it bother you. Come on, let’s eat some food.’
She smiled and everything was all right again.
Succulent pizza and cold beer in a booth painted a too-bright, edge-worn green. A happy-weary walk through the darkening booths to the late bus which waited, breathing. A sense of membership because of the fitting of the spine to the calculated average of the bus seats. A shared doze, a shared smile, at sixty miles an hour through the flickering night, and at last the familiar depot on the familiar street, echoing and empty but my street in my town.
They woke a taxi driver and gave him their address. ‘ Can I be more alive than this?’ he murmured from his corner and then realized she had heard him. ‘I mean,’ he amended, ‘it’s as if my whole world, everywhere I lived, was once in a little place inside my head, so deep I couldn’t see out. And then you made it as big as a room and then as big as a town and tonight as big as… well, a lot bigger,’ he finished weakly.
A lonely passing streetlight passed her answering smile over to him. He said, ‘So I was wondering how much bigger it can get.’
‘Much bigger,’ she said.
He pressed back sleepily into the cushions. ‘I feel fine,’ he murmured. ‘I feel… Janie,’ he said in a strange voice, ‘I feel sick.’
‘You know what that is,’ she said calmly.
A tension came and went within him and he laughed softly. ‘Him again. He’s wrong. He’s wrong. He’ll never make me sick again. Driver! ’
His voice was like soft wood tearing. Startled, the driver slammed on his brakes. Hip surged forward out of his seat and caught the back of the driver under his armpit. ‘Go back,’ he said excitedly.
‘Goddlemighty,’ the driver muttered. He began to turn the cab around. Hip turned to Janie, an answer, some sort of answer, half formed, but she had no question. She sat quietly and waited. To the driver Hip said, ‘Just the next block. Yeah, here. Left. Turn left.’
He sank back then, his cheek to the window glass, his eyes raking the shadowed houses and black lawns. After a time he said, ‘There. The house with the driveway, there where the big hedge is.’
‘Want I should drive in?’
‘No,’ Hip said.’ Pull over. A little farther… there, where I can see in.’
When the cab stopped, the driver turned around and peered back. ‘Gettin’ out here? That’s a dollar ’n—’
‘ Shh! ’ The sound came so explosively that the driver sat stunned. Then he shook his head wearily and turned to face forward. He shrugged and waited.
Hip stared through the driveway’s gap in the hedge at the faintly gleaming white house, its stately porch and porte-cochere, its neat shutters and fanlit door.
‘Take us home,’ he said after a time.
Nothing was said until they got there. Hip sat with one hand pressing his temples, covering his eyes. Janie’s corner of the cab was dark and silent.
When the machine stopped Hip slid out and absently handed Janie to the walk. He gave the driver a bill, accepting the change, pawed out a tip and handed it back. The cab drove off.
Hip stood looking down at the money in his hand, sliding it around on his palm with his fingers. ‘Janie?’
‘Yes, Hip.’
He looked at her. He could hardly see her in the darkness. ‘Let’s go inside.’
They went in. He switched on the lights. She took off her hat and hung her bag on the bedpost and sat down on the bed, her hands on her lap. Waiting.
He seemed blind, so deep was his introspection. He came awake slowly, his gaze fixed on the money in his hand. For a moment it seemed without meaning to him; then slowly, visibly, he recognized it and brought it into his thoughts, into his expression. He closed his hand on it, shook it, brought it to her and spread it out on the night table—three crumpled bills, some silver.’ It isn’t mine,’ he said.
‘Of course it is!’
He shook his head tiredly. ‘No it isn’t. None of it’s been mine. Not the roller coaster money or the shopping money or coffee in the mornings or… I suppose there’s rent here.’
She was silent.
‘That house,’ he said detachedly. ‘The instant I saw it I knew I’d been there before. I was there just before I got arrested. I didn’t have any money then. I remember. I knocked on the door and I was dirty and crazy and they told me to go around the back if I wanted something to eat. I didn’t have any money; I remember that so well. All I had was…’
Out of his pocket came the woven metal tube. He caught lamplight on its side, flicked it off again, squeezed it, then pointed with it at the night table. ‘Now, ever since I came here, I have money. In my left jacket pocket every day. I never wondered about it. It’s your money, isn’t it; Janie?’
‘It’s yours. Forget about it, Hip. It’s not important.’
‘What do you mean it’s mine?’ he barked.’ Mine because you give it to me?’ He probed her silence with a bright beam of anger and nodded. ‘Thought so.’
‘Hip!’
He shook his head, suddenly, violently, the only expression he could find at the moment for the great tearing wind which swept through him. It was anger, it was humiliation, it was a deep futility and a raging attack on the curtains which shrouded his self-knowledge. He slumped down into the easychair and put his hands over his face.
He sensed her nearness, then her hand was on his shoulder. ‘Hip…’ she whispered. He shrugged the shoulder and the hand was gone. He heard the faint sound of springs as she sat down again on the bed.
He brought his hands down slowly. His face was twisted, hurt. ‘You’ve got to understand, I’m not mad at you, I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done, it isn’t that,’ he blurted. ‘I’m all mixed up again,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Doing things, don’t know why. Things I got to do, I don’t know what. Like…’ He stopped to think, to sort the thousand scraps that whirled and danced in the wind which blew through him. ‘Like knowing this is wrong, I shouldn’t be here, getting fed, spending money, but I don’t know who ever said I shouldn’t, where I learned it. And… and like what I told you, this thing about finding somebody and I don’t know who it is and I don’t know why. I said tonight…’ He paused and for a long moment filled the room with the hiss of breath between his teeth, his tense-curled lips. ‘ I said tonight, my world… the place I live, it’s getting bigger all the time. It just now got big enough to take in that house where we stopped. We passed that corner and I knew the house was there and I had to look at it. I knew I’d been there before, dirty and all excited… knocked… they told me to go around back… I yelled at them… somebody else came. I asked them, I wanted to know about some—’
The silence, again the hissing breath.
‘—children who lived there, and no children lived there. And I shouted again, everybody was afraid, I straightened out a little. I told them just tell me what I wanted to know, I’d go away, I didn’t want to frighten anybody. I said all right, no children, then tell me where is Alicia Kew, just let me talk to Alicia Kew.’
He straightened up, his eyes alight, and pointed the piece of tubing at Janie. ‘You see? I remember, I remember her name, Alicia Kew!’ He sank back. ‘And they said, „Alicia Kew is dead.” And then they said, oh her children! And they told me where to go to find them. They wrote it down someplace, I’ve got it here somewhere…’ He began to fumble through his pockets, stopped suddenly and glared at Janie. ‘It was the old clothes, you have it, you ’ ve hidden it!’
If she had explained, if she had answered, it would have been all right but she only watched him.
‘All right,’ he gritted. ‘I remembered one thing, I can remember another. Or I can go back there and ask again. I don’t need you.’
Her expression did not change but, watching it, he knew suddenly that she was holding it still and that it was a terrible effort for her.
He said gently, ‘I did need you. I’d’ve died without you. You’ve been…’ He had no word for what she had been to him so he stopped searching for one and went on, ‘It’s just that I’ve got so I don’t need you that way any more. I have some things to find out but I have to do it myself.’
At last she spoke: ‘You have done it yourself, Hip. Every bit of it. All I’ve done is to put you where you could do it. I—want to go on with that.’
‘You don’t need to,’ he reassured her. ‘I’m a big boy now. I’ve come a long way; I’ve come alive. There can’t be much more to find out.’
‘There’s a lot more,’ she said sadly.
He shook his head positively. ‘ I tell you, I know! Finding out about those children, about this Alicia Kew, and then the address where they’d moved—that was right at the end; that was the place where I got my fingertips on the—whatever it was I was trying to grab. Just that one more place, that address where the children are; that’s all I need. That’s where he’ll be.’
‘He?’
‘The one, you know, the one I’ve been looking for. His name is—‘ He leapt to his feet. ‘His name’s—‘
He brought his fist into his palm, a murderous blow. ‘I forgot,’ he whispered.
He put his stinging hand to the short hair at the back of his head, screwed up his eyes in concentration. Then he relaxed. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll find out, now.’
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘Go on, Hip. Sit down and listen to me.’
Reluctantly he did; resentfully he looked at her. His head was full of almost-understood pictures and phrases. He thought, Can ’ t she let me alone? Can ’ t she let me think a while? But because she… Because she was Janie, he waited.
‘You’re right, you can do it,’ she said. She spoke slowly and with extreme care. ‘You can go to the house tomorrow, if you like, and get the address and find what you’ve been looking for. And it will mean absolutely— nothing— to you. Hip, I know! ’
He glared at her.
‘Believe me, Hip; believe me!’
He charged across the room, grabbed her wrists, pulled her up, thrust his face to hers. ‘You know!’ he shouted. ‘I bet you know. You know every damn thing, don’t you? You have all along. Here I am going half out of my head wanting to know and you sit there and watch me squirm!’
‘Hip! Hip, my arms—‘
He squeezed them tighter, shook her.’ You do know, don’t you? All about me?’
‘Let me go. Please let me go. Oh, Hip, you don’t know what you’re doing!’
He flung her back on the bed. She drew up her legs, turned on her side, propped up on one elbow and, through tears, incredible tears, tears which didn’t belong to any Janie he had yet seen, she looked up at him. She held her bruised forearm, flexed her free hand. ‘You don’t know,’ she choked, ‘what you’re…’ And then she was quiet, panting, sending, through those impossible tears, some great, tortured, thwarted message which he could not read.
Slowly he knelt beside the bed. ‘Ah, Janie. Janie.’
Her lips twitched. It could hardly have been a smile but it wanted to be. She touched his hair. ‘It’s all right,’ she breathed.
She let her head fall to the pillow and closed her eyes. He curled his legs under him, sat on the floor, put his arms on the bed and rested his cheek on them.
She said, with her eyes closed, ‘I understand, Hip; I do understand. I want to help, I want to go on helping.’
‘No you don’t,’ he said, not bitterly, but from the depths of an emotion something like grief.
He could tell—perhaps it was her breath—that he had started the tears again. He said, ‘ You know about me. You know everything I’m looking for.’ It sounded like an accusation and he was sorry. He meant it only to express his reasoning. But there wasn’t any other way to say it. ‘Don’t you?’
Still keeping her eyes closed, she nodded.
‘Well then.’
He got up heavily and went back to his chair. When she wants something out of me, he thought viciously, she just sits and waits for it. He slumped into the chair and looked at her. She had not moved. He made a conscious effort and wrung the bitterness from his thought, leaving only the content, the advice. He waited.
She sighed then and sat up. At sight of her rumpled hair and flushed cheeks, he felt a surge of tenderness. Sternly he put it down.
She said, ‘You have to take my word. You’ll have to trust me, Hip.’
Slowly he shook his head. She dropped her eyes, put her hands together. She raised one, touched her eye with the back of her wrist.
She said, ‘That piece of cable.’
The tubing lay on the floor where he had dropped it. He picked it up. ‘What about it?’
‘When was the first time you remembered you had it—remembered it was yours?’
He thought, ‘The house. When I went to the house, asking.’
‘No,’ she said,’ I don’t mean that. I mean, after you were sick.’
‘Oh.’ He closed his eyes briefly, frowned. ‘The window. The time I remembered the window, breaking it. I remembered that and then it… oh!’ he said abruptly. ‘You put it in my hand.’
‘That’s right. And for eight days I’d been putting it in your hand. I put it in your shoe, once. On your plate. In the soap dish. Once I stuck your toothbrush inside it. Every day, half a dozen times a day—eight days, Hip!’
‘I don’t—’
‘You don’t understand! Oh, I can’t blame you.’
‘I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, I don’t believe you.’
At last she looked at him; when she did he realized how rare it was for him to be with her without her eyes on his face. ‘Truly,’ she said intensely. ‘Truly, Hip. That’s the way it was.’
He nodded reluctantly. ‘All right. So that’s the way it was. What has that to do with—‘
‘Wait,’ she begged. ‘You’ll see… now, every time you touched the bit of cable, you refused to admit it existed. You’d let it roll right out of your hand and you wouldn’t see it fall to the floor. You’d step on it with your bare feet and not even feel it. Once it was in your food, Hip; you picked it up with a forkful of lima beans, you put the end of it in your mouth, and then just let it slip away; you didn’t know it was there!’
‘Oc—‘ he said with an effort, then, ‘occlusion. That’s what Bromfield called it.’ Who was Bromfield? But it escaped him; Janie was talking.
‘That’s right. Now listen carefully. When the time came for the occlusion to vanish, it did; and there you stood with the cable in your hand, knowing it was real. But nothing I could do beforehand could make that happen until it was ready to happen!’
He thought about it.’ So—what made it ready to happen?’
‘You went back.’
‘To the store, the plate glass window?’
‘Yes,’ she said and immediately, ‘No. What I mean is this: You came alive in this room, and you—well, you said it yourself: the world got bigger for you, big enough to let there be a room, then big enough for a street, then a town. But the same thing was happening with your memory. Your memory got big enough to include yesterday, and last week, and then the jail, and then the thing that got you into jail. Now look: At that moment, the cable meant something to you, something terribly important. But when it happened, for all the time after it happened, the cable meant nothing. It didn’t mean anything until the second your memory could go back that far. Then it was real again.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
She dropped her eyes. ‘I knew about the cable. I could have explained it to you. I tried and tried to bring it to your attention but you couldn’t see it until you were ready. All right—I know a lot more about you. But don’t you see that if I told you, you wouldn ’ t be able to hear me? ’
He shook his head, not in denial but dazedly. He said, ‘But I’m not—sick any more!’
He read the response in her expressive face. He said faintly, ‘Am I?’ and then anger curled and kicked inside him. ‘Come on now,’ he growled, ‘you don’t mean to tell me I’d suddenly get deaf if you told me where I went to high school.’
‘Of course not,’ she said impatiently. ‘ It’s just that it wouldn’t mean anything to you. It wouldn’t relate.’ She bit her lip in concentration. ‘Here’s one: You’ve mentioned Bromfield a half dozen times.’
‘Who? Bromfield? I have not.’
She looked at him narrowly. ‘Hip—you have. You mentioned him not ten minutes ago.’
‘Did I?’ He thought. He thought hard. Then he opened his eyes wide. ‘By God, I did!’
‘All right. Who is he? What was he to you?’
‘Who?’
‘Hip!’ she said sharply.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m a little mixed up.’ He thought again, hard, trying to recall the entire sequence, every word. At last, ‘ B-bromfield,’ he said with difficulty.
‘It will hardly stay with you. Well, it’s a flash from a long way back. It won’t mean anything to you until you go back that far and get it.’
‘Go back? Go back how?’
‘Haven’t you been going back and back—from being sick here to being in jail to getting arrested, and just before that, to your visit to that house? Think about that, Hip. Think about why you went to the house.’
He made an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t need to. Can’t you see? I went to that house because I was searching for something—what was it? Oh, children; some children who could tell me where the half-wit was.’ He leapt up, laughed. ‘You see? The half-wit—I remembered. I’ll remember it all, you’ll see. The half-wit… I’d been looking for him for years, forever. I… forget why, but,’ he said, his voice strengthening, ‘that doesn’t matter any more now. What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t have to go all the way back; I’ve done all I need to do. I’m back on the path. Tomorrow I’m going to that house and get that address and then I’ll go to wherever that is and finish what I started out to do in the first place when I lost the—’
He faltered, looked around bemusedly, spied the tubing lying on the chair arm, snatched it up. ‘This,’ he said triumphantly. ‘It’s part of the—the—oh, damn it!’
She waited until he had calmed down enough to hear her. She said, ‘You see?’
‘See what?’ he asked brokenly, uncaring, miserable.
‘If you go out there tomorrow, you’ll walk into a situation you don’t understand, for reasons you can’t remember, asking for someone you can’t place, in order to go find out something you can’t conceive of. But,’ she admitted, ‘you are right, Hip—you can do it.’
‘If I did,’ he said, ‘it would all come back.’
She shook her head. He said harshly, ‘You know everything, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Hip.’
‘Well, I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.’
She took one deep breath. ‘You’ll be killed.’
‘ What? ’
‘If you go out there you will be killed,’ she said distinctly. ‘Oh, Hip, haven’t I been right so far? Haven’t I? Haven’t you gotten back a lot already—really gotten it back, so it doesn’t slip away from you?’
Agonized, he said, ‘You tell me I can walk out of here tomorrow and find whatever it is I’ve been looking—Looking? Living for… and you tell me it’ll kill me if I do. What do you want from me? What are you trying to tell me to do?’
‘Just keep on,’ she pleaded. ‘Just keep on with what you’ve been doing.’
‘For what?’ he raged. ‘Go back and back, go farther away from the thing I want? What good will—‘
‘Stop it!’ she said sharply. To his own astonishment he stopped. ‘You’ll be biting holes in the rug in a minute,’ she said gently and with a gleam of amusement. ‘That won’t help.’
He fought against her amusement but it was irresistible. He let it touch him and thrust it away; but it had touched him. He spoke more quietly; ‘You’re telling me I mustn’t ever find the—the half-wit and the… whatever it is?’
‘Oh,’ she said, her whole heart in her inflection, ‘ oh, no! Hip, you’ll find it, truly you will. But you have to know what it is; you have to know why.’
‘How long will it take?’
She shook her head soberly. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I can’t wait. Tomorrow—‘He jabbed a finger at the window. The dark was silvering, the sun was near, pressing it away. ‘ Today, you see? Today I could go there… I’ve got to; you understand how much it means, how long I’ve been…’ His voice trailed off; then he whirled on her. ‘ You say I’ll be killed; I’d rather be killed, there with it in my hands; it’s what I’ve been living for anyway!’
She looked up at him tragically. ‘Hip—‘
‘No!’ he snapped. ‘You can’t talk me out of it.’
She started to speak, stopped, bent her head. Down she bent, to hide her face on the bed.
He strode furiously up and down the room, then stood over her. His face softened. ‘Janie,’ he said, ‘help me…’
She lay very still. He knew she was listening. He said, ‘If there’s danger… if something is going to try to kill me… tell me what. At least let me know what to look for.’
She turned her head, faced the wall, so he could hear her but not see her. In a laboured voice she said, ‘I didn’t say anything will try to kill you. I said you would be killed.’
He stood over her for a long time. Then he growled. ‘All right. I will. Thanks for everything, Janie. You better go home.’
She crawled off the bed slowly, weakly, as if she had been flogged. She turned to him with such a look of pity and sorrow in her face that his heart was squeezed. But he set his jaw, looked towards the door, moved his head towards it.
She went, not looking back, dragging her feet. It was more than he could bear. But he let her go.
The bedspread was lightly rumpled. He crossed the room slowly and looked down at it. He put out his hand, then fell forward and plunged his face into it. It was still warm from her body and for an instant so brief as to be indefinable, he felt a thing about mingled breaths, two spellbound souls turning one to the other and about to be one. But then it was gone, everything was gone and he lay exhausted.
Go on, get sick. Curl up and die. ‘All right,’ he whispered.
Might as well. What’s the difference anyway? Die or get killed, who cares?
Not Janie.
He closed his eyes and saw a mouth. He thought it was Janie’s, but the chin was too pointed. The mouth said, ‘ Just lie down and die, that ’ s all, ’ and smiled. The smile made light glance off the thick glasses which must mean he was seeing the whole face. And then there was a pain so sharp and Swift that he threw up his head and grunted. His hand, his hand was cut. He looked down at it, saw the scars which had made the sudden, restimulative pain. ‘Thompson, I’m gonna kill that Thompson.’
Who was Thompson who was Bromfield who was the half-wit in the cave… cave, where is the cave where the children… children… no, it was children ’ s… where the children’s… clothes, that’s it! Clothes, old, torn, rags; but that’s how he…
Janie… You will be killed. Just lie down and die.
His eyeballs rolled up, his tensions left him in a creeping lethargy. It was not a good thing but it was more welcome than feeling. Someone said, ‘Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.’ Who said that?
He, Hip Barrows. He said it.
Who’d he say it to?
Janie with her clever hand on the ack-ack prototype.
He snorted faintly. Janie wasn’t a corporal,’ Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.’
Who said that? Oh—Bromfield. The jerk! He should know better than to try to talk engineering to an engineer. ‘Cap’n Bromfield’ (tiredly, the twenty damn thousandth time), ‘if I wasn’t an engineer I wouldn’t’ve found it, I wouldn’t’ve recognized it, and I wouldn’t give a damn now.’ Ah, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn ’ t matter. Just curl up and as long as Thompson don’t show his face. Just curl up and … ‘No, by God,’ roared Hip Barrows. He sprang off the bed, stood quaking in the middle of the room. He clapped his hands over his eyes and rocked like a storm-blown sapling. He might be all mixed up, Bromfield’s voice, Thompson’s face, a cave full of children’s clothes, Janie who wanted him killed; but there was one thing he was sure of, one thing he knew. Thompson wasn’t going to make him curl up and die. Janie had rid him of that one!
He whimpered as he rocked, ‘Janie…?’
Janie didn’t want him to die.
Janie didn’t want him killed; what’s the matter here? Janie just wants… go back. Take time.
He looked at the brightening window.
Take time? Why, maybe today he could get that address and see those children and find the half-wit and… well, find him anyway; that’s what he wanted, wasn’t it? Today. Then by God he’d show Bromfield who had an obsession!
If he lived, he’d show Bromfield.
But no; what Janie wanted was to go the other way, go back. For how long? More hungry years, nobody believes you, no one helps, you hunt and hunt, starve and freeze, for a little clue and another to fit it: the address that came from the house with the porte-cochere which came from the piece of paper in the children’s clothes which were… in the…
‘Cave,’ he said aloud. He stopped rocking, straightened.
He had found the cave. And in the cave were children’s clothes, and among them was the dirty little scrawled-up piece of paper and that had led him to the porte-cochere house, right here in town.
Another step backward, a big one too; he was deeply certain of that. Because it was the discovery in the cave that had really proved he had seen what Bromfield claimed he had not seen; he had a piece of it! He snatched it up and bent it and squeezed it: silvery, light, curiously woven—the piece of tubing. Of course, of course! The piece of tubing had come from the cave too. Now he had it.
A deep excitement began to grow within him. She’d said ‘Go back,’ and he had said no, it takes too long. How long for this step, this rediscovery of the cave and its treasures?
He glanced at the window. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes—forty at the outside. Yes, and while he was all messed up, exhausted, angry, guilty, hurt. Suppose he tried this going-back business head-on, rested, fed, with all his wits about him, with—with Janie to help?
He ran to the door, threw it open, bounded across the hall, shoved the opposite door open. ‘Janie, listen,’ he said, wildly excited. ‘Oh, Janie—‘ and his voice was cut off in a sharp gasp. He skidded to a stop six feet into the room, his feet scurrying and slipping, trying to get him back out into the hall again, shut the door. ‘I beg your—excuse me ’ he bleated out of the shock which filled him. His back struck the door, slammed it; he turned hysterically, pawed it open, and dove outside. God, he thought, I wish she’d told me! He stumbled across the hall to his own room, feeling like a gong which had just been struck. He closed and locked his door and leaned against it. Somewhere he found a creaky burst of embarrassed laughter which helped. He half turned to look at the panels of his locked door, drawn to them against his will. He tried to prevent his mind’s eye from going back across the hall and through the other door; he failed; he saw the picture of it again, vividly, and again he laughed, hot-faced and uncomfortable. ‘She should’ve told me,’ he muttered.
His bit of tubing caught his eye and he picked it up and sat down in the big chair. It drove the embarrassing moment away; brought back the greater urgency. He had to see Janie. Talk with her. Maybe it was crazy but she’d know: maybe they could do the going-back thing fast, really fast, so fast that he could go find that half-wit today after all. Ah… it was probably hopeless; but Janie, Janie’d know. Wait then. She’d come when she was ready; she had to.
He lay back, shoved his feet as far out as they would go, tilted his head back until the back of the chair snugged into the nape of his neck. Fatigue drifted and grew within him like a fragrant smoke, clouding his eyes and filling his nostrils.
His hands went limp, his eyes closed. Once he laughed, a small foolish snicker; but the picture didn’t come clear enough or stay long enough to divert him from his deep healthy plunge into sleep.
Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup.
(Fifties, he thought, way off in the hills. Lifelong ambition of every red-blooded boy: get a machine gun and make like a garden hose with it.)
Wham-wham-wham-wham!
(Oerlikons! Where’d they dredge those things up from? Is this an ack-ack station or is it a museum?)
‘Hip! Hip Barrows!’
(For Pete’s sake, when is that corporal going to learn to say ‘ Lieutenant’? Not that I give a whistle, one way or another, but one of these days he’ll do it in front of some teen-age Air Force Colonel and get us both bounced for it.)
Wham! Wham! ‘Oh… Hip!’
He sat up palming his eyes, and the guns were knuckles on a door and the corporal was Janie, calling somewhere, and the anti-aircraft base shattered and misted and blew away to the dream factory.
‘Hip!’
‘Come on,’ he croaked. ‘Come on in.’
‘It’s locked.’
He grunted and got numbly to his feet. Sunlight poured in through the curtains. He reeled to the door and opened it. His eyes wouldn’t track and his teeth felt like a row of cigar butts.
‘Oh, Hip!’
Over her shoulder he saw the other door and he remembered. He drew her inside and shut his door. ‘Listen, I’m awful sorry about what happened. I feel like a damn fool.’
‘Hip—don’t,’ she said softly.’ It doesn’t matter, you know that. Are you all right?’
‘A little churned up,’ he admitted and was annoyed by the reappearance of his embarrassed laugh. ‘Wait till I put some cold water on my face and wake up some.’ From the bathroom he called, ‘Where you been?’
‘Walking. I had to think. Then… I waited outside. I was afraid you might—you know. I wanted to follow you, be with you. I thought I might help… You really are all right?
‘Oh sure. And I’m not going anywhere without talking to you first. But about the other thing—I hope she ’ s all right.’
‘What?’
‘I guess she got a worse shock than I did. I wish you’d told me you had somebody in there with you. I wouldn’t’ve barged—‘
‘Hip, what are you talking about? What happened?’
‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Omigosh. You came straight here—you haven’t been in your room yet.’
‘No. What on earth are you—’
He said, actually blushing, ‘I wish she’d told you about it rather than me. Well, I suddenly had to see you, but bad. So I steamed across the hall and charged in, never dreaming there would be anyone but you there, and here I am halfway across the room before I could even stop, and there stood this friend of yours.’
‘Who? Hip, for heaven’s sake—’
‘The woman. Had to be someone you know, Janie. Burglars aren’t likely to prance around naked.’
Janie put a slow hand up to her mouth.
‘A coloured woman. Girl. Young.’
‘Did she… what did she…’
‘I don’t know what she did. I didn’t get but a flash glimpse of her—if that’s any comfort to her. I hightailed right out of there. Aw, Janie, I’m sorry. I know it’s sort of embarrassing, but it can’t be that bad. Janie!’ he cried in alarm.
‘He’s found us… We’ve got to get out of here,’ she whispered. Her lips were nearly white; she was shaking. ‘Come on, oh, come on! ’
‘Now wait! Janie, I got to talk to you. I—‘
She whirled on him like a fighting animal. She spoke with such intensity that her words blurred. ‘Don’t talk! Don’t ask me. I can’t tell you; you wouldn’t understand. Just get out of here, get away.’ With astonishing power her hand closed on his arm and pulled. He took two running steps or he would have been flat on the floor. She was at the door, opening it, as he took the second step, and she took the slack of his shirt in her free hand, pulled him through, pushed him down the hall towards the outer exit. He caught himself against the doorpost; surprise and anger exploded together within him and built an instant of mighty stubbornness. No single word she might have uttered could have moved him; braced and on guard as he was, not even her unexpected strength could have done anything but cause him to strike back. But she said nothing nor did she touch him; she ran past, white and whimpering in terror, and bounded down the steps outside.
He did the only thing his body would do, without analysis or conscious decision. He found himself outside, running a little behind her. ‘Janie…’
‘Taxi!’ she screamed.
The cab had barely begun to slow down when she had the door open. Hip fell in after her. ‘Go on,’ said Janie to the driver and knelt on the seat to peer through the rear window.
‘Go where?’ gasped the driver.
‘Just go. Hurry.’
Hip joined her at the window. All he could see was the dwindling house front, one or two gaping pedestrians.’ What was it? What happened?’
She simply shook her head.
‘What was it?’ he insisted. ‘The place going to explode or something?’
Again she shook her head. She turned away from the window and cowered into the corner. Her white teeth scraped and scraped at the back of her hand. He reached out and gently put it down. She let him.
Twice more he spoke to her, but she would not answer except to acknowledge it, and that only by turning her face slightly away from him each time. He subsided at last, sat back and watched her.
Just outside of town where the highway forks, the driver asked timidly, ‘Which way?’ and it was Hip who said, ‘Left.’ Janie came out of herself enough to give him a swift, grateful glance and sank out of sight behind her face.
At length there was a difference in her, in some inexplicable way, though she still sat numbly staring at nothing. He said quietly, ‘Better?’
She put her eyes on him and, appreciably later, her vision. A rueful smile plucked at the corners of her mouth. ‘Not worse anyway.’
‘Scared,’ he said.
She nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said, his face frozen. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Oh Hip, I’m sorry; I’m more sorry than I can say. I didn’t expect this—not so soon. And I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do about it now.’
‘Why?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘You can’t tell me? Or you can’t tell me yet? ’
She said, carefully, ‘I told you what you’d have to do—go back and back; find all the places you’ve been and the things that happened, right to the beginning. You can do it, given time.’ The terror was in her face again and turned to a sadness. ‘But there isn’t any more time.’
He laughed almost joyfully. ‘There is.’ He seized her hand. ‘This morning I found the cave. That’s two years back, Janie! I know where it is, what I found there: some old clothes, children’s clothes. An address, the house with the porte-cochere. And my piece of tubing, the one thing I ever saw that proved I was right in searching for… for… Well,’ he laughed, ‘that’s the next step backward. The important thing is that I found the cave, the biggest step yet. I did it in thirty minutes or so and I did it without even trying. Now I’ll try. You say we have no more time. Well, maybe not weeks, maybe not days; do we have a day, Janie? Half a day?’
Her face began to glow. ‘Perhaps we have,’ she said. ‘Perhaps… Driver! This will do.’
It was she who paid the driver; he did not protest it. They stood at the town limits, a place of open, rolling fields barely penetrated by the cilia of the urban animal: here a fruit stand, there a gas station, and across the road, some too-new dwellings of varnished wood and obtrusive stucco. She pointed to the high meadows.
‘We’ll be found,’ she said flatly, ‘but up there we’ll be alone… and if—anything comes, we can see it coming.’
On a knoll in the foothills, in a green meadow where the regrowth barely cloaked the yellow stubble of a recent mowing, they sat facing one another, where each commanded half a horizon.
The sun grew high and hot, and the wind blew and a cloud came and went. Hip Barrows worked; back and back he worked. And Janie listened, waited, and all the while she watched, her clear deep eyes flicking from side to side over the open land.
Back and back… dirty and mad, Hip Barrows had taken nearly two years to find the house with the porte-cochere. For the address had a number and it had a street; but no town, no city.
It took three years from the insane asylum to the cave. A year to find the insane asylum from the county clerk’s office. Six months to find the county clerk from the day of his discharge. From the birth of his obsession until they threw him out of the Service, another six months.
Seven plodding years from starch and schedules, promise and laughter, to a dim guttering light in a jail cell. Seven years snatched away, seven years wingless and falling.
Back through the seven years he went until he knew what he had been before they started.
It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster.
Still young, still brilliant as ever, but surrounded by puzzling rejection. Lieutenant Barrows found himself with too much spare time, and he hated it.
The range was small, in some respects merely a curiosity, a museum, for there was a good deal of obsolete equipment. The installation itself, for that matter, was obsolete in that it had been superseded years ago by larger and more efficient defence nets and was now part of no system. But it had a function in training gunners and their officers, radar men, and technicians.
The Lieutenant, in one of his detested idle moments, went rummaging into some files and came up with some years-old research figures on the efficiency of proximity fuses, and some others on the minimum elevations at which these ingenious missiles, with their fist-sized radar transmitters, receivers, and timing gear, might be fired. It would seem that ack-ack officers would much rather knock out a low-flying plane than have their sensitive shells pre-detonated by an intervening treetop or power pole.
Lieutenant Barrows’ eye, however, was one of those which pick up mathematical discrepancies, however slight, with the accuracy of the Toscanini ear for pitch. A certain quadrant in a certain sector in the range contained a tiny area over which passed more dud shells than the law of averages should respectably allow. A high-dud barrage or two or three perhaps, over a year, might indicate bad quality control in the shells themselves; but when every flight of low-elevation ‘prox’ shells over a certain point either exploded on contact or not at all, the revered law was being broken. The scientific mind recoils at law-breaking of this sort, and will pursue a guilty phenomenon as grimly as ever society hunted its delinquents.
What pleased the Lieutenant most was that he had here an exclusive. There had been little reason for anyone to throw great numbers of shells at low elevations anywhere. There had been less reason to do so over the area in question. Therefore it was not until Lieutenant Barrows hunted down and compared a hundred reports spread over a dozen years that anyone had had evidence enough to justify an investigation.
But it was going to be his investigation. If nothing came of it, nothing need be said. If on the other hand it turned out to be important, he could with immense modesty and impressive clarity bring the matter to the attention of the Colonel; and perhaps then the Colonel might be persuaded to revise his opinion of ROTC Lieutenants. So he made a field trip on his own time and discovered an area wherein to varying degrees his pocket voltmeter would not work properly. And it dawned on him that what he had found was something which inhibited magnetism. The rugged but sensitive coils and relays in the proximity fuses, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist when they passed this particular hillside lower than forty yards. Permanent magnets were damped just as electromagnets.
Nothing in Barrows’ brief but brilliant career had even approached this incredible phenomenon in potential. His accurate and imaginative mind drank and drank of it and he saw visions: the identification and analysis of the phenomenon (Barrows Effect, perhaps?) and then a laboratory effort—successful of course—to duplicate it. Then, application. A field generator which would throw up an invisible wall of the force; aircraft and their communications—even their intercoms—failing with the failure of their many magnets. Seeking gear on guided missiles, arming and blasting devices, and of course the disarming of proximity fuses… the perfect defensive weapon for the electromagnetic age… and how much else? No limit to it. Then there would be the demonstrations of course, the Colonel introducing him to renowned scientists and military men: ‘ This, gentlemen, is your ROTC man! ’
But first he had to find what was doing it, now that he knew where it was being done; and so he designed and built a detector. It was simple and ingenious and very carefully calibrated. While engaged in the work, his irrepressible mind wrought and twisted and admired and reworked the whole concept of ‘contramagnetism’. He extrapolated a series of laws and derived effects just as a mathematical pastime and fired them off to the Institute of Electrical Engineers, who could appreciate them and did; for they were later published in the Journal. He even amused himself in gunnery practice by warning his men against low-elevation shelling over his area, because ‘the pixies would degauss (demagnetize) their proximity fuses’. And this gave him a high delight, for he pictured himself telling them later that his fanciful remark had been nothing but the truth and that had they the wit God gave a goose they could have gone out and dug up the thing, whatever it was, for themselves.
At last he finished his detector. It involved a mercury switch and a solenoid and a variable power supply and would detect the very slightest changes in the field of its own magnet. It weighed about forty pounds but this mattered not at all since he did not intend to carry it. He got the best ordnance maps of the area that he could find, appointed as a volunteer the stupidest-looking Pfc he could find, and spent a long day of his furlough time out on the range, carefully zigzagging the slope and checking the readings off on his map until he located the centre of the degaussing effect.
It was in a field on an old abandoned farm. In the middle of the field was an ancient truck in the last stages of oxidation. Drought and drift, rain and thaw had all but buried the machine and the Lieutenant flogged himself and his patient soldier into a frenzy of explosive excavation. After sweaty hours, they had dug and scraped and brushed until what was left of the truck stood free and clear; and under it they found the source of the incredible field.
From each corner of the frame ran a gleaming silvery cable. They came together at the steering column and joined and thence a single cable ran upward to a small box. From the box protruded a lever. There was no apparent power source but the thing was operating.
When Barrows pushed the lever forward, the twisted wreck groaned and sank noticeably into the soft ground. When he pulled the lever back, it crackled and creaked and lifted up to the limits of its broken springs and wanted to lift even more.
He returned the lever to neutral and stepped back.
This was everything he had hoped to find certainly and made practical the wildest of his dreams. It was the degaussing generator, awaiting only his dissection and analysis. But it was all these things as a by-product.
Lever forward, this device made the truck heavier. Lever back, lighter.
It was anti-gravity!
Anti-gravity: a fantasy, a dream. Anti-gravity, which would change the face of the earth in ways which would make the effects of steam, electricity, even nuclear power, mere sproutings of technology in the orchard this device would grow. Here was skyward architecture no artist had yet dared to paint; here was wingless flight and escape to the planets, to the stars, perhaps. Here was a new era in transportation, logistics, even the dance, even medicine. And oh, the research… and it was all his.
The soldier, the dull-witted Pfc, stepped forward and yanked the lever full back. He smiled and threw himself at Barrows’ legs. Barrows kicked free, stood, sprang so his knees crackled. He stretched, reached, and the tips of his fingers touched the cool bright underside of one of the cables. The contact could not have lasted longer than a tenth of a second; but for years afterwards, for all the years Barrows was to live, part of him seemed to stay there in the frozen instant, his fingertips on a miracle, his body adrift and free of earth.
He fell.
Nightmare.
First the breast-bursting time of pounding heart and forgotten breathing, the madness of an ancient ruin rising out of its element, faster and faster, smaller and smaller into the darkening sky, a patch, a pot, a speck, a hint of light where the high sunlight touched it. And then a numbness and pain when the breath came again.
From somewhere the pressure of laughter; from somewhere else, a fury to hate it and force it down.
A time of mad shouting arguments, words slurred into screams, the widening crescents of laughing eyes, and a scuttling shape escaping him, chuckling. He did it… and he tripped me besides.
Kill…
And nothing to kill; racing into the growing dark and nothing there; pound-pound of feet and fire in the guts and flame in the mind. Falling, hammering the uncaring sod.
The lonely return to the empty, so empty, so very empty hole in the ground. Stand in it and yearn upward for the silver cables you will never see again.
A yellow-red eye staring. Bellow and kick; the detector rising too, but only so high, turning over and over, smashed, the eye blind.
The long way back to barracks, dragging an invisible man called Agony whose heavy hands were clamped upon a broken foot.
Fall down. Rest and rise. Splash through, wallow, rise and rest and then the camp.
HQ. Wooden steps, the door dark; hollow hammering; blood and mud and hammering. Footsteps, voices: astonishment, concern, annoyance, anger.
The white helmets and the brassards: MP. Tell them, bring the Colonel. No one else, only the Colonel.
Shut up, you’ll wake the Colonel.
Colonel, it’s anti-magnetron, to the satellite, and freight; no more jets!
Shut up, ROTC boy.
Fight them then and someone screamed when someone stepped on the broken foot.
The nightmare lifted and he was on a white cot in a white room with black bars on the windows and a big MP at the door.
‘Where am I?’
‘Hospital, prison ward, Lieutenant.’
‘God, what happened?’
‘Search me, Sir. Mostly you seemed to want to kill some GI. Kept telling everybody what he looks like.’
He put a forearm over his eyes. ‘The Pfc. Did you find him?’
‘Lieutenant, there ain’t such a man on the roster. Honest. Security’s been through every file we got. You better take it easy, Sir.’
A knock. The MP opened the door. Voices.
‘Lieutenant, Major Thompson wants to talk to you. How you feel?’
‘Lousy, Sergeant. Lousy… I’ll talk to him, if he wants.’
‘He’s quiet now, Sir.’
A new voice— that voice! Barrows pressed down on the forearm he held over his eyes until sparks shone. Don ’ t look; because if you ’ re right, you ’ ll kill him.
The door. Footsteps. ‘Evening, Lieutenant. Ever talk to a psychiatrist before?’
Slowly, in terror of the explosion he knew must come, Barrows lowered his arm and opened his eyes. The clean, well-cut jacket with a Major’s leaves and the Medical Corps insignia did not matter. The man’s professionally solicitous manner, the words he spoke—these meant nothing. The only thing in the universe was the fact that the last time he had seen this face, it belonged to a Pfc, who had uncomplainingly and disinterestedly hauled his heavy detector around for a whole, hot day; who had shared his discovery; and who had suddenly smiled at him, pulled the lever, let a wrecked truck and a lifetime dream fall away upward into the sky.
Barrows growled and leapt.
The nightmare closed down again.
They did everything they could to help him. They let him check the files himself and prove that there was no such Pfc. The ‘degaussing’ effect? No observations of it. Of course, the Lieutenant himself admitted that he had taken all pertinent records to his quarters. No, they are not in the quarters. Yes, there was a hole in the ground out there and they’d found what he called his ‘detector’, though it made no sense to anyone; it merely tested the field of its own magnet. As to Major Thompson, we have witnesses who can prove he was in the air on his way here when it happened. If the Lieutenant would only rid himself of the idea that Major Thompson is the missing Pfc, we’d get along much better; he isn’t, you know; he couldn’t be. But of course, Captain Bromfield might be better for you at that…
I know what I did, I know what I saw. I ’ ll find that device or whoever made it. And I ’ ll kill that Thompson!
Bromfield was a good man and heaven knows he tried. But the combination in the patient of high observational talent and years of observational training would not accept the denial of its own data. When the demands for proof had been exhausted and the hysterical period was passed and the melancholia and finally the guarded, superficial equilibrium was reached, they tried facing him with the Major. He charged and it took five men to protect the Major.
These brilliant boys, you know. They crack.
So they kept him a while longer, satisfying themselves that Major Thompson was the only target. Then they wrote the Major a word of warning and they kicked the Lieutenant out. Too bad, they said.
The first six months was a bad dream. He was still full of Captain Bromfield’s fatherly advice and he tried to get a job and stay with it until this ‘adjustment’ the Captain talked about should arrive. It didn’t.
He’d saved a little and he had his separation pay. He’d take a few months off and clear this thing out of his mind.
First, the farm. The device was on the truck and the truck obviously belonged to the farmer. Find him and there’s your answer.
It took six months to find the town records (for the village had been pre-empted when the ack-ack range was added to the base) and to learn the names of the only two men who might tell him about the truck. A. Prodd, farmer. A halfwitted hired hand, name unknown, whereabouts unknown.
But he found Prodd, nearly a year later. Rumour took him to Pennsylvania and a hunch took him to the asylum. From Prodd, all but speechless in the last gasp of his latest dotage, he learned that the old man was waiting for his wife, that his son Jack had never been born, that old Lone maybe was an idiot, but nobody ever was a better hand at getting the truck out of the mud; that Lone was a good boy, that Lone lived in the woods with the animals, and that he, Prodd, had never missed a milking.
He was the happiest human being Hip had ever seen.
Barrows went into the woods with the animals. For three and a half years he combed those woods. He ate nuts and berries and trapped what he could; he got his pension check until he forgot about picking it up. He forgot engineering; he very nearly forgot his name. The only thing he cared to know was that to put such a device on such a truck was the act of an idiot, and that this Lone was a half-wit.
He found the cave, some children’s clothes and a scrap of the silvery cable. An address.
He found the address. He learned where to find the children. But then he ran into Thompson—and Janie found him.
Seven years.
It was cool where he lay and under his head was a warm pillow and through his hair strayed a gentling touch. He was asleep, or he had been asleep. He was so completely exhausted, used, drained that sleeping and waking were synonymous anyway and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He knew who he was, who he had been. He knew what he wanted and where to find it; and find it he would when he had slept.
He stirred happily and the touch in his hair ceased and moved to his cheek where it patted him. In the morning, he thought comfortably, I’ll go see my half-wit. But you know what, I think I’ll take an hour off just remembering things. I won the sack race at the Sunday school picnic and they awarded me a khaki handkerchief. I caught three pike before breakfast at the Scout camp, trolling, paddling the canoe and holding the fishing line in my teeth; the biggest of the fish cut my mouth when he struck. I hate rice pudding. I love Bach and liverwurst and the last two weeks in May and deep clear eyes like… ‘Janie?’
‘I’m here.’
He smiled and snuggled his head into the pillow and realized it was Janie’s lap. He opened his eyes. Janie’s head was a black cloud in a cloud of stars; a darker night in nighttime. ‘Night-time?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Sleep well?’
He lay still, smiling, thinking of how well he had slept.
‘I didn’t dream because I knew I could.’
‘I’m glad.’
He sat up. She moved cautiously. He said, ‘You must be cramped up in knots.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I liked to see you sleep like that.’
‘Let’s go back to town.’
‘Not yet. It’s my turn, Hip. I have a lot to tell you.’
He touched her. ‘You’re cold. Won’t it wait?’
‘No—oh, no! You’ve got to know everything before he… before we’re found.’
‘ He? Who’s he?’
She was quiet a long time. Hip almost spoke and then thought better of it. And when she did talk, she seemed so far from answering his question that he almost interrupted; but again he quelled it, letting her lead matters in her own way, in her own time.
She said, ‘You found something in a field; you had your hands on it just long enough to know what it was, what it could mean to you and to the world. And then the man who was with you, the soldier, made you lose it. Why do you suppose he did that?’
‘He was a clumsy, brainless bastard.’
She made no immediate comment but went on, ‘The medical officer then sent in to you, a Major, looked exactly like that Pfc to you.’
‘They proved otherwise.’
He was close enough to her to feel the slight movement in the dark as she nodded. ‘Proof: the men who said they were with him in a plane all afternoon. Now, you had a sheaf of files which showed a perturbation of some sort which affected proximity fuses over a certain area. What happened to them?’
‘I don’t know. My room was locked, as far as I know, from the time I left that day until they went to search it.’
‘Did it ever occur to you that those three things—the missing Pfc, the missing files, and the resemblance of the Major to the Pfc—were the things which discredited you?’
‘That goes without saying. I think if I could’ve straightened out any one or any two of those three things, I wouldn’t have wound up with that obsession.’
‘All right. Now think about this. You stumbled and grubbed through seven years, working your way closer and closer to regaining what you had lost. You traced the man who built it and you were just about to find him. But something happened.’
‘My fault. I bumped into Thompson and went crazy.’
She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Suppose it wasn’t carelessness that made that Pfc pull the lever. Suppose it was done on purpose.’
He could not have been more shocked if she had fired a flashbulb in his face. The light was as sudden, as blinding, as that. When he could, he said, ‘Why didn’t I ever think of that?’
‘You weren’t allowed to think of it,’ she said bitterly.
‘What do you mean, I wasn’t—‘
‘Please. Not yet,’ she said. ‘Now, just suppose for a moment that someone did this to you. Can you reason out who it was—why he did it— how he did it?’
‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘Eliminating the world’s first and only anti-gravity generator makes no sense at all. Picking on me to persecute and doing it through such an elaborate method means even less. And as to method, why, he’d have to be able to reach into locked rooms, hypnotize witnesses and read minds!’
‘He did,’ said Janie. ‘He can.’
‘Janie— who? ’
‘Who made the generator?’
He leaped to his feet and released a shout that went rolling down and across the dark field.
‘Hip!’
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, shaken. ‘I just realized that the only one who would dare to destroy that machine is someone who could make another if he wanted it. Which means that—oh, my God! —the soldier and the half-wit, and maybe Thompson—yes, Thompson: he’s the one made me get jailed when I was just about to find him again—they’re all the same!—Why didn’t I ever think of that before?’
‘I told you. You weren’t allowed.’
He sank down again. In the east, dawn hung over the hills like the loom of a hidden city. He looked at it, recognizing it as the day he had chosen to end his long, obsessive search and he thought of Janie’s terror when he had determined to go headlong into the presence of this—this monster—without his sanity, without his memory, without arms or information.
‘You’ll have to tell me, Janie. All of it.’
She told him—all of it. She told him of Lone, of Bonnie and Beanie and of herself; Miss Kew and Miriam, both dead now, and Gerry. She told how they had moved, after Miss Kew was killed, back into the woods, where the old Kew mansion hid and brooded, and how for a time they were very close. And then…
‘Gerry got ambitious for a while and decided to go through college, which he did. It was easy. Everything was easy. He’s pretty unremarkable looking when he hides those eyes of his behind glasses, you know; people don’t notice. He went through medical school too, and psych.’
‘You mean he really is a psychiatrist?’ asked Hip.
‘He is not. He just qualifies by the book. There’s quite a difference. He hid in crowds; he falsified all sorts of records to get into school. He was never caught at it because all he had to do with anyone who was investigating him was to give them a small charge of that eye of his and they’d forget. He never failed any exam as long as there was a men’s room he could go to.’
‘A what? Men’s room?’
‘That’s right.’ She laughed. ‘There was hell to pay one time. See, he’d go in and lock himself in a booth and call Bonnie or Beanie. He’d tell them where he was stumped and they’d whip home and tell me and I’d get the answer from Baby and they’d flash back with the information, all in a few seconds. So one fine day another, student heard Gerry talking and stood up in the next booth and peeked over. You can imagine! Bonnie and Beanie can’t carry so much as a toothpick with them when they teleport, let alone clothes.’
Hip clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘What happened?’
‘Oh, Gerry caught up with the kid. He’d charged right out of there yelling that there was a naked girl in the john. Half of the student body dove in there; of course she was gone. And when Gerry caught up with the kid, he just naturally forgot all about it and wondered what all the yelling was about. They gave him a pretty bad time over it.
‘Those were good times,’ she sighed. ‘Gerry was so interested in everything. He read all the tune. He was at Baby all the time for information. He was interested in people and books and machines and history and art—everything. I got a lot from it. As I say, all the information cleared through me.
‘But then Gerry began to… I was going to say, get sick, but that’s not the way to say it.’ She bit her lip thoughtfully. ‘I’d say from what I know of people that only two kinds are really progressive—really dig down and learn and then use what they learn. A few are genuinely interested; they’re just built that way. But the great majority want to prove something. They want to be better, richer. They want to be famous or powerful or respected. With Gerry the second operated for a while. He’d never had any real schooling and he’d always been a little afraid to compete. He had it pretty rough when he was a kid; ran away from an orphanage when he was seven and lived like a sewer rat until Lone picked him up. So it felt good to get honours in his classes and make money with a twist of his wrist any time he wanted it. And I think he was genuinely interested in some things for a little while: music and biology and one or two other things.
‘But he soon came to realize that he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He was smarter and stronger and more powerful than anybody. Proving it was just dull. He could have anything he wanted.
‘He quit studying. He quit playing the oboe. He gradually quit everything. Finally he slowed down and practically stopped for a year. Who knows what went on in his head? He’d spend weeks lying around, not talking.
‘Our Gestalt, as we call it, was once an idiot, Hip, when it had Lone for a „head”. Well, when Gerry took over it was a new, strong, growing thing. But when this happened to him, it was in retreat like what used to be called a manic-depressive.’
‘Uh!’ Hip grunted. ‘A manic-depressive with enough power to run the world.’
‘He didn’t want to run the world. He knew he could if he wanted to. He didn’t see any reason why he should.
‘Well, just like in his psych texts he retreated and soon he regressed. He got childish. And his kind of childishness was pretty vicious.
‘I started to move around a little; I couldn’t stand it around the house. I used to hunt around for things that might snap him out of it. One night in New York I dated a fellow I know who was one of the officers of the I.R.E.’
‘Institute of Radio Engineers,’ said Hip. ‘Swell outfit. I used to be a member.’
‘I know. This fellow told me about you.’
‘About me? ’
‘About what you called a „mathematical recreation”, anyway. An extrapolation of the probable operating laws and attendant phenomena of magnetic flux in a gravity generator.’
‘God!’
She made a short and painful laugh. ‘Yes, Hip. I did it to you. I didn’t know then of course. I just wanted to interest Gerry in something.
‘He was interested all right. He asked Baby about it and got the answer pronto. You see, Lone built that thing before Gerry came to live with us. We’d forgotten about it pretty much.’
‘Forgotten! A thing like that? ’
‘Look, we don’t think like other people.’
‘You don’t,’ he said thoughtfully and, ’Why should you?’
‘Lone built it for the old farmer, Prodd. That was just like Lone. A gravity generator, to increase and decrease the weight of Prodd’s old truck so he could use it as a tractor. All because Prodd’s horse died and he couldn’t afford another.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. He was an idiot all right. Well, he asked Baby what effect it would have if this invention got out and Baby said plenty. He said it would turn the whole world upside down, worse than the industrial revolution. Worse than anything that ever happened. He said if things went one way we’d have such a war, you wouldn’t believe it. If they went the other way, science would go too far, too fast. Seems that gravities is the key to everything. It would lead to the addition of one more item to the Unified Field—what we now call psychic energy, or „psionics”.’
‘Matter, energy, space, time, and psyche,’ he breathed, awed.
‘Yup,’ Janie said casually, ‘all the same thing and this would lead to proof. There just wouldn’t be any more secrets.’
‘That’s the—the biggest thing I ever heard. So—Gerry decided us poor half-developed apes weren’t worthy?’
‘Not Gerry! He doesn’t care what happens to you apes! One thing he found out from Baby, though, was that whichever way it went the device would be traced to us. You should know. You did it by yourself. But Central Intelligence would’ve taken seven weeks instead of seven years.
‘And that’s what bothered Gerry. He was in retreat. He wanted to stew in his own juice in his hideout in the woods. He didn’t want the Armed Forces of the United Nations hammering at him to come out and be patriotic. Oh sure, he could have taken care of ‘em all in time, but only if he worked full time at it. Working full time was out of his field. He got mad. He got mad at Lone who was dead and he especially got mad at you.’
‘Whew. He could have killed me. Why didn’t he?’
‘Same reason he didn’t just go out and confiscate the device before you saw it. I tell you, he was vicious and vengeful—childish. You’d bothered him. He was going to fix you for it.
‘Now I must confess I didn’t care much one way or the other, it did me so much good to see him moving around again. I went with him to the base.
‘Now, here’s something you just wouldn’t remember. He walked right into your lab while you were calibrating your detector. He looked you once in the eye and walked out again with all the information you had, plus the fact that you meant to take it out and locate the device, and that you intended to—what was your phrase?—„appoint a volunteer”.’
‘I was a hotshot in those days,’ said Hip ruefully.
She laughed. ‘You don’t know. You just don’t know. Well, out you came with that big heavy instrument on a strap. I saw you, Hip; I can still see you, your pretty tailored uniform, the sun on your hair… I was seventeen.
‘Gerry told me to lift a Pfc shirt quick. I did, out of the barracks.’
‘I didn’t know a seventeen-year-old could get in and out of a barracks with a whole skin. Not a female type seventeen-year-old.’
‘I didn’t go in!’ she said. Hip shouted in sheer surprise as his own shirt was wrenched and twisted. The tails flew up from under his belt and flapped wildly in the windless dawn. ‘Don’t do that!’ he gasped.
‘Just making a point,’ she said, twinkling. ‘Gerry put on the shirt and leaned against the fence and waited for you. You marched right up to him and handed him the detector. „Come on, soldier,” you said. „You just volunteered for a picnic. You carry the lunch.”‘
‘What a little stinker I was!’
‘I didn’t think so. I was peeping out from behind the MP shack. I thought you were sort of wonderful. I did, Hip.’
He half laughed. ‘Go on. Tell me the rest.’
‘You know the rest. Gerry flashed Bonnie to get the files out of your quarters. She found them and threw them down to me. I burned them. I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t know what Gerry was planning.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, that’s it. Gerry saw to it that you were discredited. Psychologically, it had to be that way. You claimed the existence of a Pfc no one had ever seen. You claimed he was the psychiatrist—a real danger sign, as any graduate medic knows. You claimed files, facts, and figures to back you up and they couldn’t be traced. You could prove that you’d dug something up, but there was nothing to show what it might have been. But most of all, you had a trained scientist’s mind, in full possession of facts which the whole world could prove weren’t so—and did. Something had to give.’
‘Cute,’ murmured Hip from deep in his chest.
‘And just for good measure,’ said Janie with some difficulty, ‘he handed you a post-hypnotic command which made it impossible for you to relate him either as Major Thompson, psychiatrist, or as the Pfc, to the device.
‘When I found out what he’d done I tried to make him help you. Just a little. He—he just laughed at me. I asked Baby what could be done. He said nothing. He said only that the command might be removed by a reverse abreaction.’
‘What in time is that?’
‘Moving backward, mentally, to the incident itself. Ab-reaction is the process of reliving, in detail, an event. But you were blocked from doing that because you’d have to start from the administration of the command; that’s where the incident started. And the only way would be to immobilize you completely, not tell you why, and unpeel all subsequent events one by one until you reached the command. It was a „from now on” command like all such. It couldn’t stop you when you were travelling in reverse.
‘And how was I ever going to find you and immobilize you without letting you know why?’
‘Holy smoke,’ Hip said boyishly. ‘This makes me feel kind of important. A guy like that taking all that trouble.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself!’ she said acidly, then: ‘I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded… It was no trouble for him. He swatted you like a beetle. He gave you a push and forgot all about you.’
Hip grunted. ‘Thank you. ’
‘He did it again!’ she said furiously. ‘There you were, seven good youthful years shot, your good engineer’s mind gone, with nothing left but a starved, dirty frame and a numb obsession that you were incapable of understanding or relieving. Yet, by heaven, you had enough of—whatever it is that makes you what you are—to drag through those seven years picking up the pieces until you were right at his doorstep. When he saw you coming—it was an accident, he happened to be in town—he knew immediately who you were and what you were after. When you charged him he diverted you into that plate glass window with just a blink of those… rotten… poison… eyes of his…’
‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘Hey, Janie, take it easy!’
‘Makes me mad,’ she whispered, dashing her hand across her eyes. She tossed her hair back, squared her shoulders. ‘He sent you flying into the window and at the same time gave you that „curl up and die” command. I saw it, I saw him do it… S-so rotten…’
She said, in a more controlled tone, ‘Maybe if it was the only one I could have forgotten it. I never could have approved it but I once had faith in him… you’ve got to understand, we’re a part of something together, Gerry and I and the kids; something real and alive. Hating him is like hating your legs or your lungs.’
‘It says in the Good Book, „If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand—„‘
‘Yes, your eye, your hand!’ she cried. ‘Not your head! ’ She went on, ‘But yours wasn’t the only case. Did you ever hear that rumour about the fusion of Element 83?’
‘A fairy tale. Bismuth won’t play those games. I remember vaguely… some crazy guy called Klackenhorst.’
‘A crazy guy called Klackenheimer,’ she corrected.’ Gerry got into one of his bragging phases and let go with a differential he shouldn’t have mentioned. Klack picked it up. He fusioned bismuth all right. And Gerry got worried; a thing like that would make too much of a splash and he was afraid he’d be bothered by a mob of people who might trace him. So he got rid of poor old Klack.’
‘Klackenheimer died of cancer!’ snorted Hip.
She gave him a strange look. ‘I know,’ she said softly.
Hip beat his temples softly with his fists. Janie said, ‘There’ve been more. Not all big things like that. I dared him into wooing a girl once, strictly on his own, without using his talents. He lost out to someone else, an awfully sweet kid who sold washing machines door-to-door and was doing pretty well. The kid wound up with acne rosacea. ’
‘The nose like a beet. I’ve seen it.’
‘Like an extra-boiled, extra-swollen beet,’ she amended. ‘No job.’
‘No girl,’ he guessed.
She smiled and said,’ She stuck by him. They have a little ceramics business now. He stays in the back.’
He had a vague idea of where the business had come from. ‘Janie, I’ll take your word for it. There were lots of ‘em. But—why me? You went all out for me.’
‘Two good reasons. First, I saw him do that to you in town, make you charge his image in the glass, thinking it was him. It was the last piece of casual viciousness I ever wanted to see. Second, it was—well, it was you.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Listen,’ she said passionately, ‘we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a herd of goats!’
‘I’m the goat.’
‘Yes, yes, you are, can’t you see? But we were born on this island with no one like us to teach us, tell us how to behave. We can learn from the goats all the things that make a goat a good goat, but that will never change the fact that we’re not a goat! You can’t apply the same set of rules to us as you do to ordinary humans; we’re just not the same thing!’
She waved him down as he was about to speak. ‘But listen, did you ever see one of those museum exhibits of skeletons of, say horses, starting with the little Eohippus and coming right up the line, nineteen or twenty of them, to the skeleton of a Percheron? There’s an awful lot of difference between number one and number nineteen. But what real difference is there between number fifteen and number sixteen? Damn little!’ She stopped and panted.
‘I hear you. But what’s that to do with—’
‘With you? Can’t you see? Homo Gestalt is something new, something different, something superior. But the parts—the arms, the guts of it, the memory banks, just like the bones in those skeletons—they’re the same as the step lower, or very little different. I’m me, I ’ m Janie. I saw him slap you down like that; you were like a squashed rabbit, you were mangy and not as young as you should be. But I recognized you. I saw you and then I saw you seven years ago, coming out into the yard with your detector and the sun on your hair. You were wide and tall and pressed and you walked like a big glossy stallion. You were the reason for the colours on a bantam rooster, you were a part of the thing that shakes the forest when the bull moose challenges; you were shining armour and a dipping pennant and my lady’s girdle on your brow, you were, you were… I was seventeen, damn it, Barrows, whatever else I was. I was seventeen years old and all full of late spring and dreams that scared me.’
Profoundly shaken, he whispered. ‘Janie… Janie…’
‘Get away from me!’ she spat. ‘Not what you think, not love at first sight. That’s childish; love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with. I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about being seventeen and feeling… all…’ She covered her face. He waited. Finally she put her hands down. Her eyes were closed and she was very still. ‘… all… human, ’ she finished.
Then she said, matter-of-factly, ‘So that’s why I helped you instead of anyone else.’
He got up and walked into the fresh morning, bright now, new as the fright in a young girl’s frightening dream. Again he recalled her total panic when he had reported Bonnie’s first appearance; through her eyes he saw what it would be like if he, blind, numb, lacking weapons and insight, had walked again under that cruel careless heel.
He remembered the day he had emerged from the lab, stepped down into the compound, looking about for a slave. Arrogant, self-assured, shallow, looking for the dumbest Pfc in the place.
He thought more then about himself as he had been that day; not about what had happened with Gerry, for that was on the record, accomplished; susceptible to cure but not in fact to change. And the more he thought of himself as he had been the more he was suffused with a deep and choking humility.
He walked almost into Janie as she sat watching her hands sleeping in her lap as he had slept and he thought, surely they too must be full of pains and secrets and small magics too, to smile at.
He knelt beside her. ‘Janie,’ he said, and his voice was cracked, ‘you have to know what was inside that day you saw me. I don’t want to spoil you-being-seventeen… I just want to tell you about the part of it that was me, some things that—weren’t what you thought.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I can remember it better than you because for you it’s been seven years and for me it’s only just before I went to sleep and dreamed that I went hunting for the half-wit. I’m awake again and the dream is gone, so I remember it all very well…
‘Janie, I had trouble when I was a child and the first thing I learned was that I was useless and the things I wanted were by definition worthless. I hardly questioned that until I broke away and found out that my new world had different values from my old one and in the new I was valuable. I was wanted, I belonged.
‘And then I got into the Air Force and suddenly I wasn’t a football hero and captain of the Debating Society. I was a bright fish with drying scales, and the mud-puppies had it all their way. I nearly died there, Janie.
‘Yes, I found the degaussing field all by myself. But what I want you to know is that when I stepped out of the lab that day and you saw me, I wasn’t the cockerel and the bull moose and those other things. I was going to discover something and bring it to humanity, not for humanity’s sake, but so that they would…’ he swallowed painfully,’… ask me to play the piano at the officers’ club and slap me on the back and… look at me when I came in. That’s all I wanted. When I found out that it was more than magnetic damping (which would make me famous) but anti-gravity (which would change the face of Earth) I felt only that it would be the President who asked me to play and generals who would slap my back; the things I wanted were the same.’
He sank back on his haunches and they were quiet together for a long time. Finally she said, ‘What do you want now?’
‘Not that any more,’ he whispered. He took her hands. ‘Not any more. Something different.’ Suddenly he laughed. ‘And you know what, Janie? I don ’ t know what it is! ’
She squeezed his hands and released them.’ Perhaps you’ll find out. Hip, we’d better go.’
‘All right. Where?’
She stood beside him, tall. ‘Home. My home.’
‘Thompson’s?’
She nodded.
‘Why, Janie?’
‘He’s got to learn something that a computer can’t teach him. He’s got to learn to be ashamed.’
‘Ashamed?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, locking away from him, ‘how moral systems operate. I don’t know how you get one started. All I know about morals is that if they’re violated, you feel ashamed. I’ll start him with that.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Just come,’ she flashed.’ I want him to see you—what you are, the way you think. I want him to remember what you were before, how much brilliance, how much promise you had, so he’ll know how much he has cost you.’
‘Do you think any of that will really make a difference?’
She smiled; one could be afraid of someone who could smile like that. ‘It will,’ she said grimly. ‘He will have to face the fact that he is not omnipotent and that he can’t kill something better than he is just because he’s stronger.’
‘You want him to try to kill me?’
She smiled again and this time it was the smile of deep achievement. ‘He won’t.’ She laughed, then turned to him quickly. ‘Don’t worry about it, Hip. I am his only link with Baby. Do you think he’d perform a prefrontal lobotomy on himself? Do you think he’d risk cutting himself off from his memory? It isn’t the kind of memory a man has, Hip. It’s Homo Gestalt ’ s. It’s all the information it has ever absorbed, plus the computation of each fact against every other fact in every possible combination. He can get along without Bonnie and Beanie, he can get things done at a distance in other ways. He can get along without any of the other things I do for him. But he can’t get along without Baby. He’s had to ever since I began working with you. By this time he’s frantic. He can touch Baby, lift him, talk to him. But he can’t get a thing out of him unless he does it through me!’
‘I’ll come,’ he said quietly. Then he said, ‘You won’t have to kill yourself.’
They went first to their own house and Janie laughed and opened both locks without touching them. ‘I’ve wanted so to do that but I didn’t dare,’ she laughed. She pirouetted into his room. ‘Look!’ she sang. The lamp on the night table rose, sailed slowly through the air, settled to the floor by the bathroom. Its cord curled like a snake, sank into a baseboard outlet and the switch clicked. It lit. ‘Look!’ she cried. The percolator hopped forward on the dresser-top, stopped. He heard water trickling and slowly condensed moisture formed on the outside as the pot filled up with ice water. ‘Look,’ she called, ‘look, look!’ and the carpet grew a bulge which scuttled across and became nothing at the other side, the knives and forks and his razor and toothbrush and two neckties and a belt came showering around and down and lay on the floor in the shape of a heart with an arrow through it. He shouted with laughter and hugged her and spun her around. He said, ‘Why haven’t I ever kissed you, Janie?’
Her face and body went quite still and in her eyes was an indescribable expression-tenderness, amusement, and something else. She said, ‘I’m not going to tell you because you’re wonderful and brave and clever and strong, but you’re also just a little bit prissy.’ She spun away from him and the air was full of knives and forks and neckties, the lamp and the coffeepot, all going back to their places. At the door she said, ‘Hurry,’ and was gone.
He plunged after her and caught her in the hall. She was laughing.
He said, ‘I know why I never kissed you.’
She kept her eyes down, but could not do the same with the corners of her mouth. ‘You do?’
‘You can add water to a closed container. Or take it away.’ It was not a question.
‘I can?’
‘When we poor males start pawing the ground and horning the low branches off trees, it might be spring and it might be concreted idealism and it might be love. But it’s always triggered by hydrostatic pressures in a little tiny series of reservoirs smaller than my little fingernail.’
‘It is?’
‘So when the moisture content of these reservoirs is suddenly lowered, I—we—uh—… well, breathing becomes easier and the moon has no significance.’
‘It hasn’t?’
‘And that’s what you’ve been doing to me.’
‘I have?’
She pulled away from him, gave him her eyes and a swift, rich arpeggio of laughter. ‘You can’t say it was an immoral thing to do,’ she said.
He gave her laughter back to her; ‘No nice girl would do a thing like that.’
She wrinkled her nose at him and slipped into her room. He looked at her closed door and probably through it, and then turned away.
Smiling and shaking his head in delight and wonderment, encasing a small cold ball of terror inside him with a new kind of calm he had found; puzzled, enchanted, terrified, and thoughtful, he turned the shower on and began to undress.
They stood in the road until after the taxi had gone and then Janie led the way into the woods. If they had ever been cut, one could not know it now. The path was faint and wandering but easy to follow, for the growth overhead was so thick that there was little underbrush.
They made their way towards a mossy cliff; and then Hip saw that it was not a cliff but a wall, stretching perhaps a hundred yards in each direction. In it was a massive iron door. It clicked as they approached and something heavy slid. He looked at Janie and knew that she was doing it.
The gate opened and closed behind them. Here the woods were just the same, the trees as large and as thick, but the path was of brick and took only two turns. The first made the wall invisible and the second, a quarter of a mile farther, revealed the house.
It was too low and much too wide. Its roof was mounded rather than peaked or gabled. When they drew closer to it, he could see at each flank the heavy, grey-green wall, and he knew that this whole area was in prison.
‘I don’t, either,’ said Janie. He was glad she watched his face.
Gooble.
Someone stood behind a great twisted oak near the house, peeping at them. ‘Wait, Hip.’ Janie walked quickly to the tree and spoke to someone. He heard her say, ‘You’ve got to. Do you want me dead?’
That seemed to settle the argument. As Janie returned he peered at the tree, but now there seemed to be no one there.
‘It was Beanie,’ said Janie. ‘You’ll meet her later. Come.’
The door was ironbound, of heavy oak planks. It fitted with curious concealed hinges into the massive archway from which it took its shape. The only windows to be seen were high up in the moundlike gables and they were mere barred slits.
By itself—or at least, without a physical touch—the door swung back. It should have creaked, but it did not; it was silent as a cloud. They went in, and when the door closed there was a reverberation deep in the subsonic; he could feel it pounding on his belly.
On the floor was a reiteration of tiles, darkest yellow and a brownish grey, in hypnotic diamond shapes they were repeated in the wainscoting and in the upholstery of furniture either built-in or so heavy it had never been moved. The air was cool but too humid and the ceiling was too close. I am walking, he thought, in a great sick mouth.
From the entrance room they started down a corridor which seemed immensely long and was not at all, for the walls came in and the ceiling drew even lower while the floor rose slightly, giving a completely disturbing false perspective.
‘It’s all right,’ said Janie softly. He curled his lips at her, meaning to smile but quite unable to, and wiped cold water from his upper lip.
She stopped near the end door and touched the wall. A section of it swung back, revealing an ante-room with one other door in it. ‘Wait here, will you, Hip?’ She was completely composed. He wished there were more light.
He hesitated. He pointed to the door at the end of the hall. ‘Is he in there?’
‘Yes.’ She touched his shoulder. It was partly a salutation, partly an urging towards the little room.’ I have to see him first,’ she said. ‘Trust me, Hip.’
‘I trust you all right. But are you—is he—‘
‘He won’t do anything to me. Go on, Hip.’
He stepped through. He had no chance to look back, for the door swung swiftly shut. It gave no more sign of its existence on this side than it had on the other. He touched it, pushed it. It might as well have been that great wall outside. There was no knob, no visible hinge or catch. The edges were hidden in the panelling; it simply had ceased to exist as a door.
He had one blinding moment of panic and then it receded. He went and sat down across from the other door which led, apparently, into the same room to which the corridor led.
There was not a sound.
He picked up an ottoman and placed it against the wall. He sat with his back tight against the panelling, watching the door with wide eyes.
Try that door, see if it’s locked too.
He didn’t dare, he realized. Not yet. He sensed vaguely what he would feel if he found it locked; he wanted no more just now than that chilling guess.
‘Listen,’ he hissed to himself, furiously, ‘you’d better do something. Build something. Or maybe just think. But don’t sit here like this.’
Think. Think about that mystery in there, the pointed face with its thick lenses, which smiled and said, Go on, die.
Think about something else! Quick!
Janie. By herself, facing the pointed face with the—
Homo Gestalt, a girl, two tongue-tied Negroes, a mongoloid idiot, and a man with a pointed face and—
Try that one again. Homo Gestalt, the next step upward. Well, sure, why not a psychic evolution instead of the physical? Homo sapiens stood suddenly naked and unarmed but for the wrinkled jelly in his king-sized skull; he was as different as he could be from the beasts which bore him.
Yet he was the same, the same; to this day he was hungry to breed, hungry to own; he killed without compunction; if he was strong he took, if he was weak he ran; if he was weak and could not run, he died.
Homo sapiens was going to die.
The fear in him was a good fear. Fear is a survival instinct; fear in its way is a comfort for it means that somewhere hope is alive.
He began to think about survival.
Janie wanted Homo Gestalt to acquire a moral system so that such as Hip Barrows would not get crushed. But she wanted her Gestalt to thrive as well; she was a part of it. My hand wants me to survive, my tongue, my belly wants me to survive.
Morals: they’re nothing but a coded survival instinct!
Aren’t they? What about the societies in which it is immoral not to eat human flesh? What kind of survival is that?
Well, but those who adhere to morality survive within the group. If the group eats human flesh, you do too.
There must be a name for the code, the set of rules, by which an individual lives in such a way as to help his species—something over and above morals.
Let’s define that as the ethos.
That’s what Homo Gestalt needs: not morality, but an ethos. And shall I sit here, with my brains bubbling with fear, and devise a set of ethics for a superman?
I’ll try. It’s all I can do.
Define:
Morals: Society’s code for individual survival. (That takes care of our righteous cannibal and the correctness of a naked man in a nudist group.)
Ethics: An individual’s code for society’s survival. (And that’s your ethical reformer: he frees his slaves, he won’t eat humans, he ‘turns the rascals out’.)
Too pat, too slick; but let’s work with ‘em.
As a group, Homo Gestalt can solve his own problems. But as an entity:
He can ’ t have a morality, because he is alone.
An ethic then. ‘An individual’s code for society’s survival.’ He has no society; yet he has. He has no species; he is his own species.
Could he—should he choose a code which would serve all of humanity?
With the thought, Hip Barrows had a sudden flash of insight, completely intrusive in terms of his immediate problem; yet with it, a load of hostility and blind madness lifted away from him and left him light and confident. It was this:
Who am I to make positive conclusions about morality, and codes to serve all of humanity?
Why—I am the son of a doctor, a man who chose to serve mankind, and who was positive that this was right. And he tried to make me serve in the same way, because it was the only rightness he was sure of. And for this I have hated him all my life… I see now, Dad. I see!
He laughed as the weight of old fury left him forever, laughed in purest pleasure. And it was as if the focus was sharper, the light brighter, in all the world, and as his mind turned back to his immediate problem, his thought seemed to place its fingers better on the rising undersurface, slide upward towards the beginnings of a grip.
The door opened. Janie said, ‘Hip—‘
He rose slowly. His thought reeled on and on, close to something. If he could get a grip, get his fingers curled over it… ‘Coming.’
He stepped through the door and gasped. It was like a giant greenhouse, fifty yards wide, forty deep; the huge panes overhead curved down and down and met the open lawn—it was more a park—at the side away from the house. After the closeness and darkness of what he had already seen it was shocking but it built in him a great exhilaration. It rose up and up, and up rose his thought with it, pressing its fingertips just a bit higher…
He saw the man coming. He stepped quickly forward, not so much to meet him as to be away from Janie if there should be an explosion. There was going to be an explosion; he knew that.
‘Well, Lieutenant. I’ve been warned, but I can still say—this is a surprise.’
‘Not to me,’ said Hip. He quelled a surprise of a different nature; he had been convinced that his voice would fail him and it had not. ‘I’ve known for seven years that I’d find you.’
‘By God,’ said Thompson in amazement and delight. It was not a good delight. Over Hip’s shoulder he said, ‘I apologize, Janie. I really didn’t believe you until now.’ To Hip he said, ‘You show remarkable powers of recovery.’
‘Homo sap’s a hardy beast,’ said Hip.
Thompson took off his glasses. He had wide round eyes, just the colour and luminescence of a black-and-white television screen. The irises showed the whites all the way around; they were perfectly round and they looked as if they were just about to spin.
Once, someone had said, Keep away from the eyes and you ’ ll be all right.
Behind him Janie said sharply, ‘Gerry!’
Hip turned. Janie put up her hand and left a small glass cylinder, smaller than a cigarette, hanging between her lips. She said, ‘I warned you, Gerry. You know what this is. Touch him and I bite down on it—and then you can live out the rest of your life with Baby and the twins like a monkey in a cage of squirrels.’
The thought, the thought—‘I’d like to meet Baby.’
Thompson thawed; he had been standing, absolutely motionless, staring at Janie. Now he swung his glasses around in a single bright circle. ‘You wouldn’t like him.’
‘I want to ask him a question.’
‘Nobody asks him questions but me. I suppose you expect an answer too?’
‘Yes.’
Thompson laughed. ‘Nobody gets answers these days.’
Janie said quietly, ‘This way, Hip.’
Hip turned towards her. He distinctly felt a crawling tension behind him, in the air, close to his flesh. He wondered if the Gorgon’s head had affected men that way, even the ones who did not look at her.
He followed her down to a niche in the house wall, the one which was not curved glass. In it was a crib the size of a bathtub.
He had not known that Baby was so fat. ‘Go ahead,’ said Janie. The cylinder bobbed once for each of her syllables.
‘Yes, go ahead.’ Thompson’s voice was so close behind him that he started. He had not heard the man following him at all and he felt boyish and foolish. He swallowed and said to Janie, ‘What do I do?’
‘Just think your question. He’ll probably catch it. Far as I know he receives everybody.’
Hip leaned over the crib. Eyes gleaming dully like the uppers of dusty black shoes caught and held him. He thought, Once this Gestalt had another head. It can get other telekines, teleports. Baby: Can you be replaced?
‘He says yes,’ said Janie. ‘That nasty little telepath with the corncob—remember?’
Thompson said bitterly, ‘I didn’t think you’d commit such an enormity, Janie. I could kill you for that.’
‘You know how,’ said Janie pleasantly.
Hip turned slowly to Janie. The thought came closer, or he went high and faster than it was going. It was as if his fingers actually rounded a curve, got a barest of purchases.
If Baby, the heart and core, the ego, the repository of all this new being had ever been or done or thought—if Baby could be replaced, then Homo Gestalt was immortal!
And with a rush, he had it. He had it all.
He said evenly, ‘ I asked Baby if he could be replaced; if his memory banks and computing ability could be transferred.’
‘Don’t tell him that!’ Janie screamed.
Thompson had slipped into his complete, unnatural stillness. At last he said, ‘Baby said yes. I already know that. Janie, you knew that all along, didn’t you?’
She made a sound like a gasp or a small cough.
Thompson said, ‘And you never told me. But of course, you wouldn’t. Baby can’t talk to me; the next one might. I can get the whole thing from the Lieutenant, right now. So go ahead with the dramatics. I don’t need you, Janie.’
‘Hip! Run! Run!’
Thompson’s eyes fixed on Hip’s. ‘No,’ he said mildly. ‘Don’t run.’
They were going to spin; they were going to spin like wheels, like fans, like… like…
Hip heard Janie scream and scream again and there was a crunching sound. Then the eyes were gone.
He staggered back, his hand over his eyes. There was a gabbling shriek in the room, it went on and on, split and spun around itself. He peeped through his fingers.
Thompson was reeling, his head drawn back and down almost to his shoulderblades. He kicked and elbowed backward. Holding him, her hands over his eyes, her knee in the small of his back, was Bonnie, and it was from her the gabbling came.
Hip came forward running, starting with such a furious leap that his toes barely touched the floor in the first three paces. His fist was clenched until pain ran up his forearm and in his arm and shoulders was the residual fury of seven obsessive years. His fist sank into the taut solar plexus and Thompson went down soundlessly. So did the Negro but she rolled clear and bounced lithely to her feet. She ran to him, grinning like the moon, squeezed his biceps affectionately, patted his cheek and gabbled.
‘And I thank you! ’ he panted. He turned. Another dark girl, just as sinewy and just as naked, supported Janie who was sagging weakly. ‘Janie!’ he roared. ‘Bonnie, Beanie, whoever you are—did she…’
The girl holding her gabbled. Janie raised her eyes. They were deeply puzzled as she watched him come. They strayed from his face to Gerry Thompson’s still figure. And suddenly she smiled.
The girl with her, still gabbling, reached and caught his sleeve. She pointed to the floor. The cylinder lay smashed under their feet. A slight stain of moisture disappeared as he watched. ‘Did I?’ repeated Janie. ‘I never had a chance, once this butterfly landed on me.’ She sobered, stood up, came into his arms. ‘Gerry… is he…’
‘I don’t think I killed him,’ said Hip and added, ‘yet.’
‘I can’t tell you to kill him,’ Janie whispered.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know.’
She said, ‘It’s the first time the twins ever touched him. It was very brave. He could have burned out their brains in a second.’
‘They’re wonderful. Bonnie!’
‘Ho.’
‘Get me a knife. A sharp one with a blade at least so long. And a strip of black cloth, so-by-so.’
Bonnie looked at Janie. Janie said, ‘What—‘
He put his hand on her mouth. Her mouth was very soft. ‘Sh.’
Janie said, panicked, ‘Bonnie, don’t—‘
Bonnie disappeared. Hip said, ‘Leave me alone with him for a while.’
Janie opened her mouth to speak then turned and fled through the door. Beanie vanished.
Hip walked over to the prone figure and stood looking down at it. He did not think. He had his thought; all he had to do was hold it there.
Bonnie came through the door. She held a length of black velvet and a dagger with an eleven-inch blade. Her eyes were very big and her mouth was very small.
‘Thanks, Bonnie.’ He took them. The knife was beautiful. Finnish, with an edge he could have shaved with, and a point drawn down almost to invisibility. ‘Beat it, Bonnie!’
She left—blip!—like a squirted appleseed. Hip put the knife and the cloth down on a table and dragged Thompson to a chair. He gazed about him, found a bell-pull and tore it down. He did not mind if a bell rang somewhere; he was rather sure he would not be interrupted. He tied Thompson’s elbows and ankles to the chair, tipped the head back and made the blindfold.
He drew up another chair and sat close. He moved his knife hand gently, not quite tossing it, just feeling the scend of its superb balance in his palm. He waited.
And while he was waiting he took his thought, all of it, and placed it like a patterned drape across the entrance to his mind. He hung it fairly, attended to its folds and saw with meticulous care that it reached quite to the bottom, quite to the top, and that there were no gaps at the sides.
The pattern read:
Listen to me, orphan boy, I am a hated boy too. You were persecuted; so was I.
Listen to me, cave boy. You found a place to belong and you learned to be happy in it. So did I.
Listen to me, Miss Kew’s boy. You lost yourself for years until you went back and learned again. So did I.
Listen to me, Gestalt boy. You found power within you beyond your wildest dreams and you used it and loved it. So did I.
Listen to me, Gerry. You discovered that no matter how great your power, nobody wanted it. So did I.
You want to be wanted. You want to be needed. So do I.
Janie says you need morals. Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.
You don’t need morals. No set of morals can apply to you. You can obey no rules set down by your kind because there are no more of your kind. And you are not an ordinary man, so the morals of ordinary men would do you no better than the morals of an anthill would do me.
So nobody wants you and you are a monster.
Nobody wanted me when I was a monster.
But Gerry, there is another kind of code for you. It is a code which requires belief rather than obedience. It is called ethos.
The ethos will give you a code for survival too. But it is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity. It is a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes.
Help humanity, Gerry, for it is your mother and your father now; you never had them before. And humanity will help you for it will produce more like you and then you will no longer be alone. Help them as they grow; help them to help humanity and gain still more of your own kind. For you are immortal, Gerry. You are immortal now.
And when there are enough of your kind, your ethics will be their morals. And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star.
I was a monster and I found this ethos. You are a monster. It’s up to you.
Gerry stirred.
Hip Barrows stopped tossing the knife and held it still.
Gerry moaned and coughed weakly. Hip pulled the limp head back, cupped it in the palm of his left hand. He set the point of the knife exactly on the centre of Gerry’s larynx.
Gerry mumbled inaudibly. Hip said, ‘Sit quite still, Gerry.’ He pressed gently on the knife. It went in deeper than he wanted it to. It was a beautiful knife. He said, ‘That’s a knife at your throat. This is Hip Barrows. Now sit still and think about that for a while.’
Gerry’s lips smiled but it was because of the tension at the sides of his neck. His breath whistled through the not-smile.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘What would you do?’
‘Take this thing off my eyes. I can’t see.’
‘You see all you need to.’
‘Barrows. Turn me loose. I won’t do anything to you. I promise. I can do a lot for you, Barrows. I can do anything you want.’
‘It is a moral act to kill a monster,’ said Hip. ‘Tell me something, Gerry. Is it true you can snatch out the whole of a man’s thought just by meeting his eyes?’
‘Let me go. Let me go,’ Gerry whispered.
With the knife at the monster’s throat, with this great house which could be his, with a girl waiting, a girl whose anguish for him he could breathe like ozoned air, Hip Barrows prepared his ethical act.
When the blindfold fell away there was amazement in the strange round eyes, enough and more than enough to drive away hate. Hip dangled the knife. He arranged his thought, side to side, top to bottom. He threw the knife behind him. It clattered on the tiles. The startled eyes followed it, whipped back. The irises were about to spin…
Hip bent close. ‘Go ahead,’ he said softly.
After a long time, Gerry raised his head and met Hip’s eyes again.
Hip said, ‘Hi.’
Gerry looked at him weakly. ‘Get the hell out of here,’ he croaked.
Hip sat still.
‘I could’ve killed you,’ said Gerry. He opened his eyes a little wider. ‘I still could.’
‘You won’t though.’ Hip rose, walked to the knife and picked it up. He returned to Gerry and deftly sliced the knots of the cord which bound him. He sat down again.
Gerry said, ‘No one ever… I never…’ He shook himself and drew a deep breath. ‘I feel ashamed,’ he whispered. ‘No one ever made me feel ashamed.’ He looked at Hip, and the amazement was back again. ‘I know a lot. I can find out anything about anything. But I never… how did you ever find out all that?’
‘Fell into it,’ said Hip. ‘An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.’
‘God,’ said Gerry into his hands. ‘What I’ve done… the things I could have…’
‘The things you can do,’ Hip reminded him gently. ‘You’ve paid quite a price for the things you’ve done.’
Gerry looked around at the huge glass room and everything in it that was massive, expensive, rich. ‘I have?’
Hip said, from the scarred depths of memory, ‘ People all around you, you by yourself.’ He made a wry smile. ‘Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?’
Gerry nodded, slowly. ‘I did better when I was a kid.’ He shuddered. ‘Cold…’
Hip did not know what kind of cold he meant, and did not ask. He rose. ‘I’d better go see Janie. She thinks maybe I killed you.’
Gerry sat silently until Hip reached the door. Then he said. ‘Maybe you did.’
Hip went out.
Janie was in the little ante-room with the twins. When Hip entered, Janie moved her head slightly and the twins disappeared.
Hip said, ‘I could tell them too.’
‘Tell me,’ Janie said. ‘They’ll know.’
He sat down next to her. She said, ‘You didn’t kill him.’
‘No.’
She nodded slowly, ‘I wonder what it would be like if he died. I—don’t want to find out.’
‘He’ll be all right now,’ Hip said. He met her eyes. ‘He was ashamed.’
She huddled, cloaking herself, her thoughts. It was a waiting, but a different one from that he had known, for she was watching herself in her waiting, not him.
‘That’s all I can do. I’ll clear out.’ He breathed once, deeply. ‘Lots to do. Track down my pension cheques. Get a job.’
‘Hip—‘
Only in so small a room, in such quiet, could he have heard her. ‘Yes, Janie.’
‘Don’t go away.’
‘I can’t stay.’
‘Why?’
He took his time and thought it out, and then he said, ‘You’re a part of something. I wouldn’t want to be part of someone who was… part of something.’
She raised her face to him and he saw that she was smiling. He could not believe this, so he stared at her until he had to believe it.
She said, ‘The Gestalt has a head and hands, organs and a mind. But the most human thing about anyone is a thing he learns and… and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I—you mean I’m… I could be part of the… No, Janie, no.’ He could not escape from that sure smile. ‘What part?’ he demanded.
‘The prissy one who can’t forget the rules. The one with the insight called ethics who can change it to the habit called morals.’
‘The still small voice!’ He snorted. ‘I’ll be damned!’
She touched him. ‘I don’t think so.’
He looked at the closed door to the great glass room. Then he sat down beside her. They waited.
It was quiet in the glass room.
For a long time the only sound was Gerry’s difficult breathing. Suddenly even this stopped, as something happened, something— spoke.
It came again.
Welcome.
The voice was a silent one. And here, another, silent too, but another for all that. It ’ s the new one. Welcome, child!
Still another: Well, well, well! We thought you ’ d never make it.
He had to. There hasn ’ t been a new one for so long…
Gerry clapped his hands to his mouth. His eyes bulged. Through his mind came a hush of welcoming music. There was warmth and laughter and wisdom. There were introductions; for each voice there was a discrete personality, a comprehensible sense of something like stature or rank, and an accurate locus, a sense of physical position. Yet, in terms of amplitude, there was no difference in the voices. They were all here, or, at least, all equally near.
There was happy and fearless communion, fearlessly shared with Gerry—cross-currents of humour, of pleasure, of reciprocal thought and mutual achievement. And through and through, welcome, welcome.
They were young, they were new, all of them, though not as new and as young as Gerry. Their youth was in the drive and resilience of their thinking. Although some gave memories old in human terms, each entity had lived briefly in terms of immortality and they were all immortal.
Here was one who had whistled a phrase to Papa Haydn, and here one who had introduced William Morris to the Rossettis. Almost as if it were his own memory, Gerry saw Fermi being shown the streak of fission on a sensitive plate, a child Landowska listening to a harpsichord, a drowsy Ford with his mind suddenly lit by the picture of a line of men facing a line of machines.
To form a question was to have an answer.
Who are you?
Homo Gestalt.
I’m one; part of; belonging…
Welcome.
Why didn’t you tell me?
You weren ’ t ready. You weren ’ t finished. What was Gerry before he met Lone?
And now… is it the ethic? Is that what completed me?
Ethic is too simple a term. But yes, yes… multiplicity is our first characteristic; unity our second. As your parts know they are parts of you, so must you know that we are parts of humanity.
Gerry understood then that the things which shamed him were, each and all, things which humans might do to humans, but which humanity could not do. He said, ‘I was punished.’
You were quarantined.
And—are you… we… responsible for all humanity’s accomplishments?
No! We share. We are humanity!
Humanity’s trying to kill itself.
(A wave of amusement, and a superb confidence, like joy.) Today, this week, it might seem so. But in terms of the history of a race … O new one, atomic war is a ripple on the broad face of the Amazon!
Their memories, their projections and computations flooded in to Gerry, until at last he knew their nature and their function; and he knew why the ethos he had learned was too small a concept. For here at last was power which could not corrupt; for such an insight could not be used for its own sake, or against itself. Here was why and how humanity existed, troubled and dynamic, sainted by the touch of its own great destiny. Here was the withheld hand as thousands died, when by their death millions might live. And here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew—not an exterior force nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odour of sanctity.
He saw himself as an atom and his Gestalt as a molecule. He saw these others as a cell among cells, and he saw in the whole the design of what, with joy, humanity would become.
He felt a rising, choking sense of worship, and recognized it for what it has always been for mankind—self-respect.
He stretched out his arms, and the tears streamed from his strange eyes. Thank you, he answered them. Thank you, thank you…
And humbly, he joined their company.