Complete Short Fiction, page 161
“What if I don’t.” His lips were ash-dry. “Why do I have to do this?”
The doctor’s voice was grave:
“Because, if you don’t, your brain will become almost as blank as a new born baby’s. There may be”—he hesitated—“other reactions, perhaps of a marvelous nature. but we don’t know that. We do know that you are forgetting your past at an alarming rate. The reason for that is as follows:
“Ordinarily, the cells in the human body and brain are in a continuous state of being used and being repaired. Every hour, every day, your billions of memory cells are undergoing that repair; and apparently, in the mending, the little wave of memory electrically stored away, is not damaged, at least not seriously damaged. In the long run, no doubt, the replacement of tissue diminishes the story of memory. Perhaps, there lies the true explanation of why memories go dimmer with the years.
“Now it’s different: You have at this instant toti-potent cells. Instead of being repaired, your cells have been replaced by brand new, healthy cells; and those new cells know nothing of the memory carried by the old, for memory is not hereditary.
“You have then cells as potentially capable of storing memory as your old ones, but all you can store in them before they in turn are replaced, will be the impressions gained by your mind in a period of, say, a week, perhaps a little longer.” The doctor finished briskly: “Your name, for the record, will be Peter Smith. Try to remember that, will you?”
He examined the name mentally: “Smith!” he said finally, aloud. He lay, listening to the rhythm of it go through his mind, then repeated: “Peter Smith.”
“That’s right-,” said the doctor. “Now any questions?”
“Yes. Why not take me to the town of Alcina? I have a conviction”—Smith paused, and a tenseness welled up inside him, a thickening of his neck muscles—“that it’s very important.”
“Impossible!” The doctor spoke sharply. “I assure you we are doing all we can to identify you. Tomorrow’s issue of the Alcina Weekly Herald will contain a story about you. But you can’t leave here now. Your arm was amputated only thirteen days ago!”
“But I feel all right.”
He saw that the argument was useless. He lay back. The doctor said:
“Just rest yourself—and do as I’ve said.”
There was a sound at the door, an intern looked in. “Thought you might be interested,” he said. “The word was just flashed on the radio. Jefferson Davies is re-elected president by a majority of two million.”
“Thank God!” said the doctor, sighing. “I thought sure a neurotic America would elect that woman. I have no doubt she’s intellectually capable and could handle the job. But it’s too fast, a passing whim of an unstable electorate. Reaction would be just as swift, and could easily destroy all the built-up progress of the last two centuries. Women must take over their half of the political power gradually, not in one emotional spree.”
“Oh, you men!” said one of the nurses in quiet fury.
The second nurse snapped: “Don’t forget it was only two million majority. Next time—”
They went out. The silence of night settled. Twice, as he lay there, footsteps moved along the hallway, grew loud, and receded into distance.
He lay quiet, completely awake. He thought: “I wonder what a radio is.”
He thought: “Have to get to Alcina. Can’t wait!”
He climbed out of bed. There was no sense of pain, or dizziness. It did not occur to him that he was not dressed for outdoors. He knew better though than to leave by the door.
The window opened hard. But there was a metal fence beyond, and a narrow metal staircase leading down.
He went down into the strange world of night. A chill wind was blowing, but the warmth of the bed was still in him; and the discomfort seemed unimportant. His bare feet began to hurt after he reached the ground, from the roughnesses that he kept stepping on. But he pressed forward grimly until he came to a hard, smooth surface.
Two lights in the distance of that dim lit street attracted his attention, because they moved. And they made a roaring sound.
The lights and the sound fascinated. He stepped towards them out of the shadow of a tree, intrigued.
In a flash they were upon him. At the last instant, he saw that behind the lights was a large, black shape.
There was an unimaginably hard blow, then a faraway squealing sound, then distant voices:
“We’re drunk, all of us. Nobody’ll believe he stepped into our path—jail for sure. Quick, get him into the car, then first to Ned’s place—to get some more gas—then we’ll dump the body a hundred miles from here. Hell, fellows, we’ve got to do it. We can’t afford—”
For a week, the thing that had been Lesley Craig lay in a ditch, very still—re-growing!
V.
Jefferson Davies studied the report of the scientists on the eve of inauguration. The first perusal left him with a blank consciousness of puzzlement. Later, he thought, later when the excitement was over, he would read it more carefully.
But he took it to bed with him, and in the middle of the night rose and re-read sketchily the astounding document:
In the matter of the two so-called electric-engined automobiles and the so-called electric-engined plane turned over to us by your agents . . .
Electronic-engined would have been a better term. The motive power seems to be derived from a dark metal electronic tube which, when taken apart, proved too intricate for reassembly, in spite of all our careful notations on each phase of the process . . .
As this failure resulted in spite of the fact that we took apart, not one, but two of the engines, we have determined not to dismantle the third and last engine until after a very careful and, we recommend in the event others are assigned to the investigation, a very exhaustive study of the parts of the two tubes already dismembered.
It is possible the secret of their reaction may lie in some subtle alloy combination of the construction materials. Even the welding compound must be examined and analyzed for its possible influence . . .
The surpassing importance of cautious development can best be gauged by our discovery that the engine will take aloft a wingless propellorless plane . . .
Jefferson Dayles crawled back into lied, and lay in the darkness with closed eyes thinking: It was the old, old story: Too complicated for mortal minds.
As he took the oath for his second term, Jefferson Dayles thought: Three years, not more. Three years to find him.
After that it might be too late.
Too late, too late—all that great day the words trampled through his mind, dulling his smiles, dimming his exultation, darkening ail his thought.
Find Craig! Find the man whose blood could in one week strip old age from his body, and, in so doing immortalize his power and the mighty civilization he visualized. Find him!
The thought was like a sickness, a craving—that was still upon him six months later when they brought in the farmer.
The man was big and rangy. As he sat listening to the fellow’s extremely colloquial account, one question quivered in Jefferson Dayles’ mind. The problem of how to phrase it engaged his attention, as the farmer’s voice twanged on:
“. . . Like I was sayin’, he was at my place ten days, an’ old Doc Gillespie came twice to look at him, but he didn’t seem to need no medical attention, only food. Mind you, he did act queer. Wouldn’t tell me his name nor nuthin’.
“Anyways, I finally took him to Carness and turned him over to the employment commission. I told the feller in charge that his name was Bill Smith. He didn’t argue none about that, so that’s what they put him down as—Bill Smith. There was some labor job they sent him to, can’t just recollect what it was. Anything else you wanta know?”
Jefferson Dayles sat cold. But that was an outward covering for an inner excitement. Craig was alive. Discovered, so Kay had said, when an old news item was followed up, a news item which reported that on November 21, 1972, somebody had called the police department of the nearby city of Carness and reported a body in a roadside ditch.
Actually, this farmer had already found Craig when the phone call was received. So it was obvious that the person making the call must have been one of those responsible for leaving Craig in that icy gutter. Somebody become conscience-stricken, or perhaps simply anxious to get the whole affair over and forgotten. The exact psychology of it didn’t matter.
The toti-potent man. was alive.
There was the one question that remained, a verification: Craig’s arm! The one that had been regrowing. The farmer’s voice came again:
“There’s one more thing; Mr. President—”
Jefferson Dayles waited, involved in the preparation of his question. It was a hard sentence to utter because, well, you couldn’t ask if a human being’s arm had re-grown. You couldn’t, although the very idea was fascinating and mind-staggering and—
“The thing,” said the fanner, “is this: when I picked him up, I coulda swore one o’ his arms was shorter’n t’other. Yet when he left, they wuz the same length. Now, am I crazy or—”
“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” said Jefferson Dayles. He went on quietly: “Thank you for your assistance. My secretary will see to it that you are well paid for your trouble. You will, I hope, continue to regard silence about this interview as a duty to your country.”
“You kin count on me,” said the man with the quiet positivity of sublime and unquestioning patriotism. “An’ you kin forget about the money.”
But Jefferson Dayles had his own conscience to assuage. He mustered a smile. “No,” he said, “we mustn’t forget money. It’s a valuable aid to good living, so I’ve been told.”
As a clerk Prowse rather fancied himself. He spent a large fraction of his money on clothes, and, in the beginning, he was always charging up and down the long aisles of the Workman’s Compensation board offices, past the men who were really working, and not simply pretending.
Neat, natty little man, he nursed a tiny, obstinate mustache, and an attitude of coarse humor towards his superiors. They must have thought it showed an adult trend of tiling for in seven years, which was literally no time at all in such a dead level organization, he was chief of one section of the filing department, a sharp-tongued, faultfinding straw boss.
Ossification of the brain set in at the ripe age of thirty-one, and his ephemerally youthful body began to dry up. At thirty-five, he was a little, bespectacled runt with cold, blue suspicious eyes and a hatred of the world that, though he couldn’t figure out just how it had happened, had done him dirt.
To his desk in December, 1973, were brought two files under the names of Bill Smith and William Smith. Bill, according to the statements in the document, had had his left arm cut off at the elbow. And William had lost the fingers of his left hand at a somewhat later date. In both cases compensation was being paid at the full allowable rates, but that was only incidentally important.
What interested Prowse was that Bill and William Smith both lived at Apartment N, 111 Hunt Street.
“Shall I combine the two files?” said the wan-voiced female slave, who had discovered the similarity.
“Leave them on my desk,” replied the pontiff.
He meditated over the problem during the next half hour. If the fingers had been lost before the forearm, the identification would have been simpler.
But they hadn’t. And there were the doctors’ signatures and all other necessary data. It was a situation requiring all the curious and complicated skills of the head of a filing department, requiring moreover a decision.
Frowning, Prowse studied not only the files but the index cards in the cabinets. There were eleven blocks of “Smith” cards; and among them he found five other cards, one of them under the name of Bill, and the others were, in alphabetical order, Frank, George, Milton and Tom.
The seven Smiths possessed among other common denominators, according to their files, the fact that they all lived at apartment N, 111 Hunt Street.
The new Bill had lost his right hand. Frank Smith had suffered severe head and shoulder injuries. George’s face had been smashed. Milton and Tom had each lost a left arm.
In every case the name of the wife was given as Gracie Smith, and it was to her that the checks for compensation were made out.
“Naturally,” Prowse finished his story to the president, “we had him arrested.”
He shook his head wonderingly. “He was a pretty smart chap, that fellow Smith. The woman had skipped with the money; and Smith just played dumb at the trial, never saying a word. Because of our inability to prove how it had been done, the judge only gave him six months. He got out,” Prowse finished, “four months ago.”
Four months—It turned out to be four months too long. The trail ended at the prison gate. A guard recalled that a car had been waiting for Craig. It drove off into the oblivion of the vast land that was the United States.
Women won two-thirds of the contested seats in the mid-term elections. And went mad with hope. By the end of November every city had its daily parade, its line of sullen men watching, and other men cheering.
Jefferson Dayles had allowed the election to be honest because he was genuinely anxious to learn the exact situation and because—
“Women,” he told Kay, “might as well discover before it’s too late that politics are a painful business for the physically weak. Men have fought to an uneasy balance, which has made for a false atmosphere of quiet and dignity. I firmly expect that the men who are now such ardent supporters of women in Congress will be the most violent enemies of women in time.”
He smiled with a savage sardonicism. “Prepare the hospitals,” he said, “for women with broken heads, and the jails for the men who break them—and find Craig, or we’ll be swamped by a sea of emotionalism.”
The year ground heavily towards its end—and didn’t quite make it unscathed.
On Christmas Eve, press wires hummed, radios broke off programs to announce: Los Angeles—A long line of women marching with placards—“HURRAH FOR THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN” “IN THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE MEN WILL DO THE PHYSICAL WORK WOMEN THE ADMINISTRATIVE” “A TUST ORDERLY PEACEFUL WORLD ADMINISTERED BY WOMEN—”
A man’s interrupting shout—“Break it up, let’s break it up. They’re counting on us to respect them, while they make slaves of us. Come on.”
Men surged sullenly from the sidelines, and became a mob. When armored cars finally cleared the streets, twenty-four women lay dead, ninety-seven others were seriously injured, and more than four hundred required hospital treatment.
The pathological nature of the assault was revealed when four of the men accused of murder proved with the assistance of lie detectors that they had voted for women in the elections. They were unable to account for their violent change of heart, except for one who stated plaintively that he suddenly “saw that there would be hell to pay if women ever really got into power.” Three days before the date set for their execution, all of the seventeen men condemned for the parade killings staged a mass escape from the death house.
There were riots in a dozen cities, and mass delegations of women demanded punishment for the prison guards responsible, and that the escaped men be immediately recaptured and gassed.
It was a crisis of the kind that could win or lose five million votes; and Jefferson Dayles made a speech to the nation, promising all possible action would be taken.
On the second day following his speech, the letter arrived, the letter which read:
Cell 676, Kaggat Prison,
January 27, 1975.
Dear Mr. President:
I have learned that my husband was one of the seventeen condemned men, and I know where he and they are. Speed is essential if his life is to be saved. Please hurry.
Anrella Craig.
The cell did not look as comfortable as he had originally ordered it should be. Jefferson Dayles made a mental note to deliver a sharp reprimand on the matter, then turned his attention to the pale creature that was Anrella Craig.
It was his first face-to-face contact. And in spite of her bleached appearance, he felt impressed. There was something about her eyes, a dignity and power, a maturity that was oddly disturbing.
After that first impression, the dullness of her voice surprised him. She sounded more beaten than she looked. Anrella Craig said:
“No, I want to tell you. Lesley is in hiding in great California desert. The ranch is located about forty miles southeast of the village of Mountainside—
“Please don’t ask me under what circumstances he did what he did. The important thing is to make sure when you find the hideout, that he is not killed.”
She smiled wanly. “Our original belief was that, as a group, we could through him dominate world affairs. I’m afraid we overestimated our capabilities.”
On the north-bound plane, Kay said:
“I see no reason why either Mrs. Craig or any of the others should be released. Now that she has so foolishly revealed her ace in the hole, Craig’s identity as one of the parade killers, we owe her nothing. She—”
There was an interruption. “A radiogram message, Mr. President, from Kaggat prison.”
Jefferson Dayles read the long message with pursed lips, then banded it without a word to Kay.
“Escaped!” Kay cried. “The whole gang!” She sat very still. “Why, the little, white-faced actress, standing there pretending to be depressed to the point of nothing-else-matters-but-that-he-be-saved. But why did she tell us? Why—”
She stopped, and re-read the telegram, and whispered finally:
“Did you see this? Ninety planes participated in the rescue. What an organization they must have. It means the escape could have been managed at any time. And yet they waited till now. Sir, this is very serious.”
Jefferson Dayles felt curiously remote from his assistant’s half panic, his mood was exhilaration, and there was in him an intense and gathering will to victory.
