9 Tales of Space and Time Page 17

  The room was static and timeless and full of details. The open notebook on the desk. The sharply etched titles in the bookcase full of medical volumes. The sunlight on the pane of the partly open window. The still curtains. The white screen across from the bookcase. The . . .

  She fell into his arms and clung desperately to him as he retreated in surprise. Jerry, Jerry,” she sobbed against his lapel. She held him frantically, and, perhaps with some unconscious memory of some movie scene, unaware herself of what she was doing, she put both her arms around him tightly. “Jerry, Jerry.”

  “Here, here,” he said. He tried to daub at her eyes.

  She sobbed and stepped back in sudden shame. “I . . . I . . . I’m sorry, Doctor, Dr. Wing. I, I, I’d better go.” She turned and fled to the door.

  It was then Wing noticed that she had two normal arms.

  Bettyann was in the street. The song of the people’s voices around her seemed muttering voices of her alienness, sighing: You don’t belong, you can never belong . . .

  “Hello, Bettyann,” someone said. She trudged on.

  She passed a movie theater that was no longer as well kept as it had been only a few years ago. It was surrendering slowly to the drive-in theater and television. It cried out the old, the changing, the passing, from the marquee, and clung to the periphery of existence.

  She walked by the hitching post which the town kept for sentimental reasons. Horses were not allowed on the square.

  “Hello, Bettyann.”

  “Hello,” she said tonelessly.

  She was moving automatically, trying not to think. The huge Gothic courthouse in the middle of the square stood like the world. From where she was, she could not touch it. The world was beyond her.

  The winter slush whispered against her moving feet. The sky was so blue it hurt her eyes.

  She walked on, unaware of the extent to which site would someday change the world. When, in time, she explored completely and understood fully the strange compartment of her alienness, she would be able, if she wished, to take a drop of muddy water such as now lay beneath her feet and holding it before her, transform it into iridescent dew. And then, if she wished, she would be able to reach into its essential core of nondiscrete particles and, telling them like beads, move them each from each.

  But she thought: the world is so far away from me that I cannot touch it, and these pale passing faces are strangers.

  He died. He died. He is dead in spite of all I could do; I could do nothing.

  He is dead.

  Wing locked his office and drove over to see Dave and Jane. He was calm, and, as he drove, the world around him seemed good.

  He knocked.

  “Come in, Jerry.” Dave’s eyebrows elevated with a worried question. “I just left Bettyann down at your office.”

  “I’d like to talk to you and Jane.”

  “Jane!” Dave called. “Oh, Jane! Come down here, will you?”

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s Jerry Wing!” He turned to the doctor. “She’ll be right down.”

  In the living room, Dave stood uncertainly before the bookcase. He told himself that he had nothing to fear. Wing sat uneasily on the edge of the sofa. Jane perched insecurely on the arm of a chair.

  “She’s not your child,” Wing said.

  “It’s no secret,” Dave said, trying to still the heavy beating of his heart. “We adopted her.”

  Wing tried to remember if he had ever been told that she was an adopted daughter. Doubtless he had, and the information had been relegated to some obscure corner of his mind. “You couldn’t tell by looking at her,” he said. “I’ve never seen a child look more like her parents.”

  “We’ve often noticed that,” Jane said. Her hands lay still and tense in her lap.

  Wing took a deep breath. “I’ve just found out something about her today. Dave, Jane . . . Bettyann isn’t . . . she . . . isn’t . . . Bettyann is not human.”

  The room was quiet. Nothing moved. As if from a great distance came the sound of a passing car. Out of the silence now, unheard before, came the ticking of a clock, recording the minute, inexorable progress of the tomorrow.

  “That depends on what you mean by human,” Dave said.

  Wing looked at him and then at Jane. Jane smiled tentatively.

  Wing looked down at his hands. “I believe she arrested the development of cancer in Mr. Starke. That’s why she collapsed over at his house. It was almost too much for her. He died last night of starvation. That was inevitable. But I took a bit of tissue. She’d stopped the cancer.”

  Dave cleared his throat.

  “What is she?” Wing asked. “I saw her just a few minutes ago, and both her arms were normal.”

  Dave’s heart pulsed sharply with surprise. He knew now how she must have felt when she discovered her own nature. And the surprise passed, and he marveled.

  “I don’t understand it,” Wing said. “My God! Dave, what else can she do?”

  “What else can she do?” Dave said. “That’s a good question, Jerry. I think, I think we’ll have to wait and find out. I think . . . I think we’ll have to wait until she knows.”

  “She’s pretty upset right now,” Jane said. “You can’t blame her.”

  Dave felt a thrill of undiluted pride. What could Bettyann do? He could not even guess.

  They were silent, thinking.

  For a second time today Dave said, “The world is changing.” He looked out the window where the sunlight was. “She’ll help it along, she’ll do her share, changing it. And what are we going to do? We’re going to watch because that’s all we an do, and we’re going along with the world because we can’t do anything else.” He could almost feel the sense of change in his blood and bones. “If she can do half as much a I imagine she can, the world isn’t ever going to be the same again. I only know one thing. I’m not going to be afraid of her Do you see what I mean?”

  Wing felt a weariness lift from his body. It was a weariness that he had never been conscious of before because it had been so much a part of him. I am not afraid, he thought.

  “We’re going to send her back to Smith,” Jane said. “That will keep her busy for a little while.”

  Jane and Dave were looking at hint. He started to smile, and they smiled with him. A sense of wonder and waiting and hope and excitement filled the air.

  “. . . I hated to have to tell tier Mr. Starke was dead,” Wing said. “She must have thought it was very important to her, to keep him alive.”

  “A lot of things are important at that age,” Dave said. “The world is important, and the people in it.”

  A lot of things are important at that age, Wing thought. I remember what you mean, he thought. And suddenly he felt that it was he, himself, who had forgotten how to grow up; suddenly he felt that Bettyann was older than he. He wanted to ask her to wait for him. I’ll be here in the summer when you get back, he thought. If you’ll wait for me, he thought, I’ll be here.

  “You go find her, Dave, and drive her home,” Jane said.

  “Let her alone for now,” Dave said. “There’s nothing we can do but let her alone. Now that he’s dead, she’s got to be alone for a little while.”

  The world is important, Wing thought. Those lost, beautiful words: the world is important, and the people in it. He had known that once, and forgotten it, and now knew it again. He felt young and bashful, and he wanted to tell everybody—most of all Bettyann—that he was in love. His throat was choked with the longing to speak. Bettyann, he thought, Bettyann. I wonder if she’ll understand? be thought. I’ve got to talk to her and tell her . . . tell her . . . ask her . . . Bettyann, Bettyann . . .

  “I know what you mean,” Wing said. “I don’t think we need be afraid.”

  Bettyann turned front the square. The great steeple of the courthouse was behind her. Beneath its shadow on the snow, spring things lay waiting to grow and turn the world green with new life. Decay sat under the eaves where the pigeons r
oosted and beneath its marble facade, time kneaded the paneling and the beams and the floorings. But the courthouse could never vanish entirely, for its roots went deep into art and history and mankind, and nothing later built upon that spot could fail to reflect its solid majesty.

  Gloom and black despair hovered around Bettyann and filled her eyes with bitter tears. She was a stranger alone in a darkling world.

  She felt mute, helpless, and insignificant. The world was huge and distant and she bore no relation to it. She felt she was a tiny mote, unseen because there was no light upon it, drifting to no purpose and alone upon currents of air from afar.

  She saw Whistling Red coming toward her down the street. She could not bear the thought of meeting him in passing and having him read in the remoteness of her face the terror of her failure and the eternity of her alienness. She crossed the street in the middle of the block to escape him.

  Whistling Red’s eyes twinkled at the sight of her. It was pleasant to watch her: the lithe, unconscious movement of her hips, the vitality of her body, the grave and innocent eyes . . . Philosophically, he began to whistle his eternal and changeless tune. And for once it varied itself and took flight and soared and sparkled and danced in the air, yet all the while retaining its identity, an identity that was part of himself, part of the town, and perhaps part of all of us.

  DAVID HAROLD FINK, M.D.

  5

  COMPOUND B

  David Harold Fink is the famed Beverly Hills psychiatrist whose book, Release from Nervous Tension, has been a best seller for a decade. Translated into fifteen languages, this book’s sensible approach to the problems of the nervous patient has brought comfort to countless thousands all over the world.

  “Compound B,” Dr. Fink’s first fiction offering, reflects a different facet of his active and superior mind. He suggested the theme of this story to Frank Fenton when we asked the latter to do a story for this book. Fenton chose to do a sardonic reversal of it instead and we then prevailed upon the busy doctor to write the story himself.

  The result is a novel contribution, the distinguished psychiatrist examining human motivations and problems in a warmly humorous though somewhat startling vein. Anthropology, sociology, religion, psychology—even high finance—are some of the subjects examined in this clinical but rewarding tale.

  What would happen, asks Dr. Fink, if a drug were developed which could change morons into near-geniuses? Plenty! is the answer, particularly if the inventor of such a drug were to discover that it worked on morons—and others—of specific races only!

  Gently ironical, slyly humorous, “Compound B” introduces a superior talent to the science-fiction fold.

  5

  COMPOUND B

  IF THE DISCOVERIES OF DR. MAX MURDOCK HAD NOT BEEN hidden behind the coconut palm curtain in the late 1950’s World War III might have been averted. As it happened, the hoarding of his scientific discovery set back the progress of world unity and civilization by hundreds of years and, what is worse, permanently impoverished the limited resources of this poor planet by loosing atomic warfare in its almost unlimited destructiveness.

  I came upon the discoveries of Dr. Murdock while participating as literary editor for an archeological project in the Mantu Islands, which rise above the blue waters of the South Pacific a few hundred miles south and west of New Guinea. No human life remained upon these once-populous lands. With her inexorable vegetable logic, Nature had taken over to destroy and absorb almost every trace of man’s invasion of her domain. Only some concrete caves remained, mutely to tell the tragic defeat of man’s high hopes; and it was within these bleak caves that we found a crude but usable chemistry laboratory and the records from which I pieced together the story of the life and death of Dr. Max Murdock.

  I am a novelist. I can tell a story only in my own way. I hope that I may be permitted to set down in narrative form the drama which was played out to its tragic conclusion five hundred years ago, roughly between 1950 and 1960.

  The Murdocks were on their way to the Mantu Islands. They had sailed on a ship, the Lurline, to Hawaii where they spent ten days waiting for the freighter which was to take them to Sydney, Australia. In Hawaii they had whiled away the time sight-seeing and shopping. They had not enjoyed this; Dr. Murdock was indifferent and bored, while Mrs. Murdock worried so much over the price of every purchase that its ownership gave her no feeling of pleasure. It was with relief that they boarded the British freighter which was to take them to Sydney. They settled down to endure the heat and the empty passage of time with stoical equanimity.

  The trip seemed endless and endlessly boring. However, when they reached Sydney, their luck seemed to turn. When they inquired at the booking office, they found that a Dutch tramp steamer would leave Sydney in two days; it would stop at the Mantu Islands to pick up copra. They engaged passage at once and for the first time in three weeks they smiled spontaneously.

  “Anyhow,” exclaimed Mrs. Murdock as she paid for the tickets, “it won’t cost us much to live there.”

  “Missionaries?” inquired the booking agent as he filled out the necessary forms.

  “Yes,” replied Dr. Murdock decisively as his wife hesitated with her answer.

  “My husband’s a doctor,” Mrs. Murdock volunteered.

  The booking agent looked at them curiously. What, he wondered, could induce apparently sane people to leave their comfortable living to take residence among such unsavory people as the Mantus? Once he had employed a Mantu boy as a house servant when he lived in New Guinea and he had not been able to tolerate the Melanesian lad for a week. “Well,” he said, “they need something in those Mantu Islands. Not very nice people, you know.”

  “They have souls to be saved,” Dr. Murdock replied tartly.

  The booking agent did not reply. “Those Americans,” he was thinking. “All they think about is saving the almighty dollar and souls. No sense of humor.”

  Dr. and Mrs. Murdock had been missionaries for two months. It was the cleaning woman’s feeble-minded son who had been the unlikely instrument that turned them into this field, so foreign to their natures. Neither of them took religion seriously; neither of them liked people as individuals. Yet here they were in Sydney, eager to embark on a ship which was to carry them into the most intimate relationships with their fellow man.

  Dr. Murdock was afraid of people because he did not understand them. People are really very simple except to those who, like Dr. Murdock, think that people are very complex and unpredictable.

  But Dr. Murdock thought he liked people. He took a deep and intelligent interest in social problems. He read the weekly news magazines avidly to keep himself informed of what people were doing. He formed decided opinions on politics. He loved mankind but loved no individual man, woman, or child. In short, he suffered from that deformity of spirit we call intellectualism. Like the midget and bearded lady in the circus, he prided himself on his deformity. “I,” he said, “am an intellectual.”

  He had begun his career as a biological chemist, but because he wanted to do something great for humanity, he studied medicine. He felt that by combining these skills and sciences he could invent a drug which would lift humanity out of its doldrums and into a place where life could be lived pleasantly, without needless friction and suffering. And with his singleness of purpose, his dedication to his idea, his implacable perseverance, he did invent just such a medicine.

  It was this invention which led to his becoming a missionary to the Mantu Melanesians in the South Pacific.

  For fifteen years he had been working in the little laboratory which he had improvised in his Los Angeles home when on a certain fateful Thursday morning his wife interrupted him.

  “Sally is here,” she said. “I need seventeen dollars. We didn’t pay her last week.”

  Sally was the colored cleaning woman who came in once a week to help Mrs. Murdock.

  “I have it! I have it!”

  Mrs. Murdock waited impatiently while the doctor exam
ined a purple liquid in an Ehrlenmeyer flask which he held up to the light.

  “I have it!” he repeated.

  “Well, give it to me then,” Mrs. Murdock said.

  For the first time Dr. Murdock heard his wife. “Give you what?” he asked.

  “The seventeen dollars.”

  “What seventeen dollars?”

  “The seventeen dollars we owe Sally. This is her day for cleaning the house. You told me you had it.”

  Dr. Murdock’s face lost its glow of exhilaration.

  “Oh,” he said, “I meant that my experiment worked. The new catalyst worked. I’ve got it.” He held up the flask and swirled the purple solution around.

  “Do you know what this is?” he asked. “This is the drug that will save the world from its own stupidity. It will transform even a moron into a genius.”

  “Don’t you have the seventeen dollars?” asked Mrs. Murdock.

  Dr. Murdock shook his head. “No. As a matter of fact, I have only two dollars, but I expect to collect something in the office this afternoon. We’ll get by.”

  Mrs. Murdock sighed. “But what in the world will I tell Sally? We didn’t pay her last week, either.”

  They both thought deeply, and then Dr. Murdock sighed.

  “It’s always money, money, money. The love of money is the root of all evil.”

  This reflection did not bring happiness to Mrs. Murdock who was thinking that the lack of money was the root of all her evils. However, she was thinking fast and practically.

  “Sally has a feeble-minded son. I wonder . . .”

  Dr. Murdock snatched at the conversation. “We’ll give her some of this. Her son will be the first to be cured.”

  Mrs. Murdock was still thinking about the seventeen dollars and beyond that to eight dollars and fifty cents a week for the weeks stretching ahead.

  “Are you sure it will work?” she asked.

  “I’m positive,” Dr. Murdock replied. “This solution . . .” and he swirled it in front of his wife’s eyes, “this beautiful purple solution contains di-alpha-hydrobenzol-glutamic acid hydrochloride. Synthesizing it had to wait upon my invention of the catalyst.”