COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 257
I wasn't a baby anymore. I was a gorilla. Wow!
The helmet almost fell off my head, and I caught it awkwardly, not yet used to my new body. As I wondered what to do with the thing, I saw Billie across the arena, rising from the prostrate body of the battlewagon. I yelled at her, and it came out a deep, booming roar. But she looked at me.
I tossed her the helmet. Then I went for Smith!
Guns were popping off somewhere, which didn't mean anything. The bullets went wild. Did you ever try to fire a snap shot at a bellowing gorilla charging straight at you? Okay, then.
Smith dropped the baby as I got there, and hurdled a row of seats. I caught the kid, set him down gently, and kept going. I didn't bother to jump over the seats. I just tore 'em up. I ploughed ahead toward Smith, stopping only to gather in the squint-eyed thug and pick him up in one mighty hand. He wasn't so heavy. I threw him at Smith.
They went down, hard. I landed on top of them, with a crash of splintered wood. They didn't bother to get up.
Somebody fired at me. It was the squint-eyed Nazi. He and Number Three had finally managed to knock out the cop, though it took two of them, clubbing their guns. I couldn't see Number Three.
-
THE gunman thought he was out of my reach, but he'd forgotten how long a gorilla's arms are. I didn't realize that myself till I swung hard, heard a klunk, and saw the guy go spinning off like a pinwheel. He didn't get up, either.
Billie screamed. That whirled me around in a hurry. She was halfway across the arena, running to pick up Stinky and the other helmet, running as fast as she could, and Number Three was racing after her, his gun ready. The crowds around the exits were making so much rumpus that hardly anybody noticed what was happening. But I did.
Gorillas can't go fast, except for short distances. Number Three had too good a lead. He'd catch Billie before I could catch him—unless I did something quick.
I charged down the swathe of destruction I'd made, and leaped up with all my strength. The gymnasts had fled, but their equipment was still here. One trapeze was hooked back right where I wanted it. I caught the bar, and my weight ripped it free from its hook. It carried me sailing across the arena, straight for Number Three.
He'd stopped. He was standing motionless, taking steady aim at Billie's back as she stooped to scoop up Stinky.
Then I saw I was going to miss him. The trapeze was arcking me off to the left. I let go, twisting frantically in midair, and went swooshing down. If I missed—Number Three wouldn't!
I gave a last desperate writhe. A gun went off, but a fraction before that, I hit. I hit with all the impact of a gorilla's tremendous bulk. Luckily, my fall was cushioned.
It was tough on Number Three, though. They couldn't even scrape him up afterward. They had to use blotting paper.
I got up and brushed myself off. Billie wasn't hurt, I saw. Anyhow, she was running again. I yelled her name. It came out in an unintelligible roar.
But she must have heard something familiar in it, for she stopped and looked over her shoulder. I couldn't talk, of course, but I made gestures. But Billie got the idea.
She knew what I wanted—one of the helmets. So she tossed it to me, though she didn't get too close. After making sure the switch was on, I fitted it on my head as well as I could. People were closing in now, keepers and so forth. There wasn't much time. I pointed insistently.
Billie put the other helmet over Stinky's head. The switch had been flipped off, but she moved it when I made pointing motions. That did it.
I wasn't a gorilla any more. I was in Billie's arms, panting with exhaustion, and feeling thirsty and sleepy as the dickens.
"Jerry!" she gasped. "Are you all right? Is this you now?"
"Yeah," I said. "Get the other helmet back after they catch the gorilla. We'll need it to—to—bwob-wob—uh—"
It was no use. I'd turned into mush. I went to sleep, right then and there ...
When I woke up, I started to crawl automatically, but it didn't feel right, somehow. Then I knew why. I was me again.
I was lying on a couch, and Billie was sitting beside me, watching. She looked tired.
"Oh, gosh," I said. "What happened, hon?"
"Jerry!"
"Uh-huh. All of me, for a change. How come?"
"Doctor McKenney recovered—he didn't have a concussion after all. He verified the whole business, and used the helmets while you were asleep. Stinky's a baby all through now, and you're—you're a hero. It'll be in all the papers. And the government sent somebody to arrange about the helmets with the doctor."
She had it all mixed up, but I got the idea.
"Stinky's okay?"
"He's fine. He wasn't hurt a bit. And it wasn't your fault, Jerry, after all. You couldn't help what happened. So don't feel badly."
I looked at her. "About what?"
"Well, you did capture those enemy agents, and everything. He can't be too hard on you!"
"Who?"
"Captain Dawson," Billie said. "He's waiting outside to see you. Mrs. Dawson went home with Stinky."
I gulped. "Oh. How does he look?"
"Kind of mad," Billie admitted. "Where are you going?"
"Look, there's another door, see?" I said. "And there's a fire escape outside that window. My pass is good for another two days, and by that time Captain Dawson may decide not to court martial me. Somehow I don't think I better see him now."
"Maybe you're right. But I'm coming with you."
"Swell," I said. "What I need is a beer. Let's go."
We went.
I didn't see the Captain till my pass was up. I guess he'd cooled off a little. But—uh—not much. Besides, he couldn't have meant all the things he said. I don't know where he ever picked up such language. Oh, well. I got one consolation. I'm a hero, even if I am on extra duty, bossing a fatigue detail.
I'm warning you lugs—if anybody calls me Baby Face again—well, I'm warning you, that's all!
The End
THE CODE
Astounding Science Fiction - July 1945
(as by Lawrence O'Donnell)
The ancient legends of rejuvenation, though they called it magic, told something of its price. The trouble was, it was, like many ancient formulas and bits of knowledge, coded ...
-
Through the parlor windows Dr. Bill Westerfield could see the village street, with laden branches hanging low above the blue-shadowed snow. The double tracks of tires diminished in the distance. Peter Morgan's sleek sedan was parked by the curb, and Morgan himself sat opposite Bill, scowling into his coffee cup.
Bill Westerfield watched a few flakes of snow making erratic pseudo-Brownian movements in the winter twilight. He said under his breath, "This is the winter of my discontent—"
Morgan moved his heavy shoulders impatiently and drew his heavy black brows closer together. "Yours?"
"His." Both men looked up, as though their vision could pierce wood and plaster. But no sound came from upstairs, where old Rufus Westerfield lay in the big walnut bed carved with grapes and pineapples. He had slept and wakened in that same bed for seventy years, and he had expected to die in it. But it was not death that hovered above him now.
"I keep expecting Mephistopheles to pop up through a star trap and demand somebody's soul," Bill said. "His discontent ... my discontent ... I don't know. It's going too smoothly."
"You'd feel better if there were a price tag hanging on the bedpost, would you? 'One Soul, Prepaid'."
Bill laughed. "Logic implies somebody has to pay. Energy must be expended to do work. That's the traditional price, isn't it? Youth restored at the cost of Faustus' soul."
"So it's really thaumaturgy after all?" Pete Morgan inquired, pulling down the corners of his heavy mouth until the lines standing deep made his face look a little Mephistophelian after all. "I've been thinking all along I was an endocrinologist."
"O.K., O.K. Maybe that was how Mephisto did it too. Anyhow, it works."
Upstairs the nurse's heels sounded briefly on bare boards, and there was a murmur of voices, one light, one flat with age but echoing now with an undertone of depth and vibration that Bill Westerfield remembered only vaguely, from his boyhood.
"It works," agreed Pete Morgan, and rattled the coffee cup in its saucer. "You don't sound too happy. Why?"
Bill got up and walked down the room without answering. At the far end he hesitated, then swung around and came back with a scowl on his thin face to match Morgan's black-browed saturninity.
"There's nothing wrong about reversing the biological time-flow—if you can," he declared. "Father hasn't got his eye on a Marguerite somewhere. He isn't doing it for selfish reasons. We aren't tampering with the Fountain of Youth because we want glory out of it, are we?"
Morgan looked at him under a thicket of black brows. "Rufus is a guinea pig," he said. "Guinea pigs are notoriously selfless. We're working for posterity ourselves, and a halo after we're dead. Is that what you want me to say? Is there something the matter with you, Bill? You've never been squeamish before."
Bill went down the room again, walking quickly as if he wanted to get to the far end before his mind changed. When he came back he was holding a framed photograph.
"All right, look here." He thrust it out roughly. Morgan put down his cup and held the frame up to the light, squinting at the pictured face. "That was Father ten years ago," Bill said. "When he was sixty."
In silence Morgan looked long and steadily at the photograph. Upstairs they could hear faintly in the stillness how the carved bed creaked as Rufus Westerfield moved upon it. He moved more easily now than he had done a month ago, in the depth of his seventy years. Time was flowing backwards for old Rufus. He was nearing sixty again.
Morgan lowered the photograph and looked up at Bill.
"I see what you mean," he said deliberately. "It isn't the same man."
-
Biological time is a curious, delusive thing. It is no quirk of imagination that makes a year seem endless to the child and brief to the grandfather. To a child of five a year is long, a fifth of his whole life. To a man of fifty, it represents only a fiftieth. And the thing is not wholly a matter of the imagination. It links inescapably into the physical make-up of a man, in a sort of reverse ratio. In youth the bodily processes are demonstrably as much faster as the time-sense is slower. The fetus, during gestation, races through a million years of evolution; the adolescent in ten years' time covers an aging process that will take him another fifty years of slowing change to equal. The young heal rapidly; the old sometimes never heal. Dr. du Nouy in his "Biological Time" plunges even deeper than this into the mysteries of youth and age, speculating on the private time universe in which each of us lives alone.
Rufus Westerfield was groping his way slowly backward through his.
Another experimenter, a Dr. Francois this time, had given the clue which he was following, as Theseus followed another sort of clue through the labyrinthine ways where the Minotaur lurked in hiding. Dr. Francois trained subjects to tap a telegraph key three hundred times a minute in their normal state. Then he applied heat and cold, gently, not to distract his subjects. And heat shortened their appreciation of time. The key tapped faster. Academically speaking they were older when warmth surrounded them. In the cold, time ran slower, like the long days of youth.
It had not. of course, been as simple as all that. The cardiac and vascular systems of the human machine needed powerful stimulus; the liver had almost ceased to build red cells. For these time could not turn backward without help. And there had been hypnosis, too. Seventy years of habit-patterns took a lot of erasing, and more esoteric matters than these had to be dealt with. The awareness of time itself, flowing soundlessly past in a stream that moved faster and faster as it neared the brink.
-
"It isn't the same man," Morgan repeated without emotion, his eyes on Bill's face. Bill jerked his shoulders irritably.
"Of course it's the same man. It's Father at sixty, isn't it? Who else could it be?"
"Then why did you show it to me?"
Silence.
"The eyes," Bill said carefully after awhile. "They're ... a little different. And the slope of the forehead. And the angle of the cheek isn't ... well, not quite the same. But you can't say it isn't Rufus Westerfield."
"I'd like to compare them," Morgan said practically. "Shall we go up?"
The nurse was closing the bedroom door behind her as they reached the stair head.
"He's asleep," she mouthed silently, her glasses glittering at them. Bill nodded, stepping past her to push the door soundlessly open.
The room inside was big and bare with an almost monastic simplicity that made the ornately carved bed incongruous. A night light glowing on a table near the door cast long humped shadows upward on walls and ceiling, like shadows cast by a fire that has burned low. The man in the bed lay quiet, his eyes closed, his thin, lined face and thin nose austere in the dimness.
They crossed the floor silently and stood looking down. Shadows softened the face upon the pillow, giving it an illusion of the youth to come. Morgan held the photograph up to catch what light there was, his lips pursed under the black mustache as he studied it. This was, of course, the same man. There could be no possibility of error. And superficially the two faces were identical. But basically—
Morgan bent his knees a little and stooped to catch the angle of forehead and cheek as the photograph showed it. He stood stooping for a full minute, looking from face to photograph. Bill watched anxiously.
Then Morgan straightened, and as he rose the old man's eyelids rose too. Rufus Westerfield lay there looking up at them without moving. The night light caught in his eyes, making them very black and very bright. They looked sardonic, all that was alive in the weary face, but young and wise and amused.
For a moment, no one spoke; then the eyes crinkled in slanting enjoyment, and Rufus laughed, a thin, high laugh that was older than his years. Senility sounded in the laugh, and a man of sixty should not be senile. But after the first cracked cackle, the sound deepened slightly and was no longer old. His voice was liable, at this stage, to break into senility as an adolescent's breaks into maturity. The adolescent break is normal, and perhaps Rufus' break was normal too, in a process that created its own norm because it was as yet unique in human history.
"You boys want something?" inquired Rufus.
"Feel all right?" Morgan asked.
"I feel ten years younger," Rufus grinned. "Anything wrong, son? You look—"
"No, not a thing." Bill smoothed the frown off his face. "Almost forgot your shots. Pete and I were talking—"
"Well, hurry up. I'm sleepy. I'm growing fast, you know. Need sleep." And he laughed again, no cackle in the sound this time.
Bill went out hastily. Morgan said, "You're growing, all right. And it does take energy. Have a good day?"
"Fine. You going to unlearn me any this evening?"
Morgan grinned. "Not exactly. I want you to do a little ... thinking ... though. After Bill's finished."
Rufus nodded. "What's that under your arm. The frame looks familiar. Anyone I know?"
Morgan glanced down automatically at the photograph he was holding, the face hidden. Bill, coming in at that moment with the nurse behind him, saw the old man's brilliant, quizzical stare, and Morgan's eyes shift away from it.
"No," said Morgan. "Nobody'd you know."
Bill's hand shook a little. The hypodermic he was carrying, point up, trembled so that the drop upon its needle spilled over and ran down the side.
"Steady," Rufus said. "You nervous about something, son?"
Carefully Bill did not meet Morgan's gaze. "Not a thing. Let's have your arm, Father."
-
After the nurse had gone Morgan pulled a stump of candle from his pocket and set it upon Rufus' bedside table. "Put out the night light, will you?" he said to Bill as he held a match to the wick. Yellow flame bloomed slowly in the dimness.
"Hypnosis," Rufus said, squinting at the flicker.
"Not yet, no. I'm going to talk. Look at the flame, that's all."
"That's hypnosis," Rufus insisted in an argumentative voice.
"It makes you more receptive to suggestion. Your mind has to be liberated enough so you can ... see ... time."
"Mm-m."
"All right—not see it, then. Sense it, feel it. Realize it as a tangible thing."
"Which it isn't," Rufus said.
"The Mad Hatter managed."
"Sure. And look what happened to him."
