Collected Short Fiction, page 569
“Excuse me—aren’t you Dr. Belfast?”
The inquiry was softly spoken behind him, as he left the newsstand. Somehow, it awoke a momentary echo of that disconcerting danger-sense. He spun apprehensively, and saw a tall man hurrying after him.
“I’m Belfast,” he admitted huskily. “I suppose you are John Gellian?”
“Of the Gellian Agency.” The stranger gave him a tight little smile. “May I have a moment of your time?”
II
DANE studied the stranger sharply, and failed to find the implacable enemy that Nan Sanderson’s call and his own shock of danger had led him to expect. John Gellian was a rawboned, dark-skinned man of about thirty-five, vigorous and muscular but slightly stooped, as if from overwork. Something about him was puzzling.
There was a veiled desperation beneath the gravely courteous restraint of his manner. He looked grimly determined, yet thoroughly afraid. Waiting anxiously to find out what he wanted, Dane had time to see the haggard brightness of his eyes and the bad color of his skin and the lines of pain cut deep around his mouth.
They reached a group of chairs in an empty corner, but Gellian made no move to sit. He swung abruptly to face Dane, his hollowed eyes unexpectedly sharp.
“I wasn’t expecting you to know me.” His voice was still oddly soft. “Do you mind saying how you knew my name?”
Dane said warily, “I might ask the same question.”
“We’re a private detective agency.” Gellian smiled. “We have been investigating you, with a view to offering you a place on our staff. When our operatives reported that you were in town, I decided to talk it over with you.” Somewhat astonished, Dane shook his head. “I’m afraid you have the wrong man, he said. “I’m not a criminologist.”
“What we need is an expert geneticist,” Gellian answered quietly. “I understand that you are free, since the Kendrew Memorial Laboratory went out of existence—and we’re able to pay whatever you want.”
“Thanks,” Dane said. “Thanks, but really I’m not interested.”
“You will be,” Gellian promised. “When you know what we’re doing. Because we aren’t the usual sort of agency. We don’t run down missing husbands or people who fail to pay their bills. We’re fighting a war—”
Gellian checked himself sharply to glance around the lobby as if afraid of being overheard.
“The job will interest you.” His voice sank cautiously. “But, before I tell you any more about it, I’d like to know something about your work at the Kendrew laboratory.”
“I’m not looking for a job,” Dane insisted. “But there’s no secret about our research there. We were studying mutations—the sudden changes in the genes that give the offspring new traits, not inherited from either parent.” Gellian nodded impatiently. “But what was the purpose of your work?”
“When my father set up the laboratory, he was hoping to find a method of directing mutation—a process for creating new varieties and species at will, without waiting on the random process of natural variation the way plant and animal breeders have always done. We spent twelve years and two million dollars on the project, and finally gave it up.”
“I know, I know.” Gellian shrugged nervously. “Our people on the West Coast reported your failure.” His eyes narrowed keenly. “What they didn’t report is where you got the two million.”
“My father’s secret.” Dane felt his fingers tighten on the handle of the brief case, as he thought of the letters from Messenger inside. “The gifts were anonymous,” he went on quickly, hoping Gellian hadn’t noticed his reaction. “We promised not to reveal their source.”
“Why was your laboratory named for Charles Kendrew?”
DANE answered soberly, “Kendrew was an old friend of my father’s. A gifted geneticist, born before his time. Forty years ago, he began trying what we just failed to do. But a family tragedy broke up his life. He abandoned his work and dropped out of sight, back in 1939, years before I was born. My father was hoping to carry on from where he quit—”
“But he didn’t quit!” A hushed violence quivered in Gellian’s voice. “He never abandoned his work. He disappeared deliberately, to carry on his unholy experiments in secret.”
“You’re mistaken,” Dane said sharply. “I’ve seen letters Kendrew wrote about his work, and it wasn’t unholy. I know he meant nothing but good—”
“I don’t know his intentions,” Gellian cut in, grimly. “But I’ve seen the results.”
Dane’s clutch on the brief case stiffened. Those letters held tantalizing hints of Kendrew’s success, but he had found no actual proof.
“What results?” he whispered eagerly.
“Mutants!” Gellian’s deep-sunk eyes glittered, but his quiet voice seemed sane enough. “Superhuman monsters! Hiding among mankind, and waiting to overwhelm us.”
“Huh!” Dane stepped back uneasily, with that pall of sensed peril again around him. “You don’t mean—mutant men?”
“They aren’t men! They’re a new species. Not-men, we call them. They were bred from human beings, by Kendrew’s wicked science.”
Dane stood hunched apprehensively. His nostrils had caught a sharper scent of danger, and its bitter taste was on his tongue again.
“I told you we’re at war,” Gellian went on bleakly. “Our agency is a little group of loyal, determined men, organized to fight Kendrew’s creatures for survival—the same way I suppose the last desperate Neanderthalers fought our own mutant Cro-Magnon forebears, a hundred thousand years, ago. Only, we know the danger. We’re getting a faster start than the Neanderthalers did. And in spite of all the gifts and powers Kendrew gave his monsters, we intend to win.”
“They can’t exist,” Dane muttered huskily.
But couldn’t they? He had the letters in his brief case, and he knew that human mutants were no more impossible than the mutant plants Messenger’s company was growing in New Guinea.
“Wait till you meet them,” Gellian challenged him. “They’re so clever that it’s hard to see the difference, but you’ll feel it then—like ice in the marrow of your bones.”
“I’ve been feeling—something.” Dane couldn’t help glancing behind him, as uneasily as Gellian had done. Was that what he had sensed—the veiled enmity of monstrous mutant minds, striving with unknown powers to overwhelm humanity?
“Yes?” Gellian whispered quickly. “Feeling what?”
“Danger.” He shook his head uncomfortably. “Ever since I opened the door of my room this morning. I can’t understand it, because I’ve no reason to be afraid of anybody.”
“But you do. You were in danger from the moment we decided to take you into the agency—those things seem to have an uncanny knowledge of our plans against them.” Gellian stood silent for a moment, swaying on his feet as if weak from fatigue or perhaps from the illness visible in him. Then he straightened, with a stubborn effort.
“Let’s step over to the office, if you can spare a moment.” His voice was mild again; self-control had returned. “If you still have any doubts about our proposition, I can show you all the proof you want.”
III
THE Gellian Agency occupied the seventh floor of a shabbily respectable old building near Madison Square. The receptionist was a slim, shy-faced Negro girl, whose limpid eyes seemed to light with devotion when she spoke to Gellian. The operator at the switchboard behind her was a dazzling Nordic blonde, and the trim brunette busy at the teletype machines beyond was Chinese.
“Yes, we come from every race,” Gellian commented softly. “From every human race. Our old racial quarrels have come to seem pretty stupid, now that we’re fighting side by side against these things of Kendrew’s.”
He took Dane back into a comfortable private office. A huge map of the world covered most of one wall. Dozens of black pins had been stuck into it, and a scarlet cord was wound among them, ending upon a black-inked question mark. The pins were scattered, as if at random, across the inhabited areas of five continents.
In a dim corner was a small, darkleaved evergreen set in a common red flower pot. The pot had been weighted with pieces of dark rock and rusty scrap metal. A few bits of dusty tinsel still hung from the branches, and among them was a toy.
A rocket ship. He wondered for a moment why it hung neglected here, so long after Christmas. The tiny ship was a thing to delight any child, with its bright sheen and the fine workmanship of airlock and landing gear and bell-flared exhausts. He was reaching to touch it, when Gellian strode to the map, gesturing at the red cord wound across the continents.
“Each pin marks the birthplace of a proven mutant,” he said. The string joins them, in order of occurrence. The first was Kendrew’s own child, born in Albuquerque thirty-four years ago. The latest we’ve found is an infant prodigy born eight years ago in Australia.”
“Is Kendrew really alive?” Dane turned hopefully from the riddle of the tiny rocket ship. “I mean—how do you link him with those later births?”
“We don’t know how the mutants are made.” The gaunt man spoke deliberately. “But it seems logical to assume that the man who made them was near by when they were conceived.” He gestured sternly at the map. “The maker must have been in Acapulco in 1940, and in Rio de Janeiro two years later, and in Manila in 1945. Kendrew followed that same trail, making each move at precisely the right date—so far as we can trace him.”
“Pretty flimsy evidence,” Dane objected. “There must have been thousands of travelers who went the same way.”
“But very few geneticists,” Gellian said. “None known to have been tinkering with the genes. We eliminated many suspects before we came across Kendrew—he doesn’t seem to have published any work, and he was never well known. But I’m certain he’s the mutant maker.”
DANE glanced at the map, with a doubtful frown.
“If that’s your best evidence, how do you know there is a maker?” he demanded, “Mightn’t it be that you’re investigating cases of natural mutation?”
“Mutations in nature are usually slight,” Gellian answered quickly. “And usually bad. Nature can’t create a successful new species with one tremendous step, the way these not-men were made. Natural evolution requires thousands of generations, to accumulate the tiny accidental changes that happen to be useful, and to eliminate those that don’t.”
Dane nodded reluctantly.
“That’s true,” he admitted. “If these mutants are different enough from men to be classified as a new species, that would show manipulation of the genes by some intelligence.”
“By Charles Kendrew’s!”
“Maybe.” Dane stepped back watchfully; he had begun to see that this meeting might have awkward consequences. “But you haven’t shown me anything to prove that Kendrew made these mutants—or even anything to show that they exist. If you’ve any real evidence, let’s see it.”
“There’s what I used to show.” Gellian gestured at a locked steel cabinet “Such objects as a book of intellectual poems, written in Braille by a blind child. A symphony—a weird, metallic, dissonant sort of thing, hard to perform and painful to hear composed by a boy of six. The notebooks of another infant prodigy, kept in cipher—the only section we managed to read is a criticism of the quantum theory.”
“Are such things alarming?”
“They do seem harmless,” Gellian agreed quietly. “Harmless as the first human footprints must have seemed to creatures still walking on all fours.” Dane stared at him. “Have you declared war on a few gifted children, just because they seem a little too precocious?”
“It’s true that most of the things we fight are young. Their youth is all that gives us any chance of winning.” His stern face tightened. “We can’t afford mercy, when even a mutant baby carries the seed of our destruction.” His haggard eyes looked hard at Dane. “Can’t you see that?”
Dane straightened defiantly. Whatever the trouble ahead, he meant to take no part in any war on children, whether mutant or human.
“No,” he said. “Nothing you show me could make me see that.”
Gellian’s stare seemed hawklike for an instant, but then his frosty smile came back.
“You’re human, and you want to be humane.” He nodded disarmingly, his voice soft again. “Most of us did, in the beginning. But war is not humane. Don’t make up your mind before you’ve seen the evidence.”
“Let’s see it,” Dane said. “But it will have to be good.”
The haggard man swung to the cabinet.
“Here’s an item that always enlists the technically minded. It’s a report written by a stool pigeon for the warden at Alcatraz. It describes the plans of another convict to blow up the prison with a lithium hydride bomb. The convincing technical point is that the atomic explosion was to be triggered with radium from the dial of a wrist watch.”
“Not very convincing,” Dane objected. “It takes a fission bomb, plus a lot of secret equipment, to set off any sort of fission reaction.”
“Radium atoms fission,” Gellian said gently. “In this case, the evidence shows that they set off a fusion bomb.”
Dane stared skeptically. “When I left San Francisco yesterday, Alcatraz was still sitting in the bay.”
“But you probably heard about the explosion and fire there last year.”
“We felt the shock, out at the lab.” He shook his Head. “It must have been quite a blast—but a real H-bomb would have burned out the whole bay area.”
“We had the facts hushed up, hoping to keep other not-men from repeating that experiment,” Gellian said quietly. “But that fire was actually caused by a limited fusion reaction, set off in a few grams of lithium hydride by some process that the AEC hasn’t yet discovered. The prisoner died in the blast, but the evidence is adequate. Besides the stool pigeon’s testimony, there’s the fact that the whole cell block was contaminated with radioisotopes—so strongly that the debris had to be dumped at sea.”
“A homemade H-bomb!” Dane stared at the gaunt man, appalled. “If such a secret got out—”
“Compared to the secrets of genetic engineering, it would be pretty harmless,” Gellian cut in grimly. “But it didn’t get out. The explosion obliterated every trace of the gadget itself, and the stool pigeon’s description is pretty sketchy. That shows you, though, what Kendrew’s creatures can do—even the imperfect mutations.”
HE MOVED as if to leave the cabinet, but swung back with a troubled frown.
“There’s another item that’s even more disturbing. A letter, written before the last war by a patient in a state mental hospital. Addressed to the president. It’s a protest against his diplomatic blunders—and it describes the results to come, with the dates and the places of all our first terrible defeats and disasters.
“At the time, of course, it looked like just one more crank letter. The investigators found that the writer was a girl in her early teens, confined as a hopeless manic-depressive case, and the letter was simply filed away. By the time it came into our hands—after all those dreadful events had confirmed her predictions—she had already hanged herself.”
His sick eyes lifted.
“Almost frightening, don’t you think?”
“Not to me,” Dane protested. “Ordinary human beings seem to have such glimpses of the future now and then. My own mother did.”
“I’m afraid,” Gellian said softly. “Though not so much because of the ingenious convict and the psychopathic seer—I think they were flawed creations. Slips of the maker’s hand.”
The colorless cast of danger lay cold on Gellian’s fleshless face, and Dane thought he shuddered.
“The things that frighten me are those precocious poems, and that uncanny music, and that notebook in cipher,” he went on huskily. “Because they show the terrible abilities of the true not-men. The prisoner and the seer were unfit—they didn’t even live to meet our agents. The fitter mutants have a greater capacity for survival.” His sunken face grew hard again. “Greater than our own, if we let them grow up!”
Dane straightened impatiently. “You still haven’t shown me any sufficient reason for hunting down bright children.”
“But here it is.” Gellian swung abruptly from the cabinet, toward the potted evergreen Dane had seen. “Our newest exhibit. As innocent, at first glance, as that blind child’s poetry. Just a child’s toy, hanging on a Christmas tree. But it has never failed to convince anybody.”
Dane followed him to the dusty little tree.
“What’s so odd about it?”
“Plenty.” Gellian’s voice sank dramatically. “The oddities are cunningly disguised, as you might expect—it was last Christmas day that we found the thing, in a raid on a Park Avenue apartment where we had hoped to trap a mutant girl. She escaped, as the more competent and dangerous ones generally do. But we did get this plant.”
“I don’t see anything—”
“Feel the leaves.”
DANE reached to touch the needles, and pricked his finger on a point sharp as glass. The entire plant seemed curiously heavy and hard.
“Metal,” Gellian said softly. “The roots are using up that scrap and ore in the pot. When we sawed off a branch for analysis—and ruined a good hacksaw blade—the report showed forty percent iron. And a dozen other metals, with even a trace of uranium.”
His feverish eyes peered at Dane.
“Would you believe that?”
Dane had to catch his breath, but he nodded slowly.
“I do,” he whispered. “Metals are essential, after all, to any sort of life. The iron in this plant is no more remarkable, I suppose, than the iron carrying oxygen in our own red blood cells.”
Gellian was smiling bleakly.
“Then you find it convincing?”
“Exciting!” Dane bent over it eagerly. “A remarkable mutation. Real proof, I suppose, that somebody can manipulate the genes. I’d like to look at it, inside a good laboratory.” He turned back to Gellian. “But I don’t see anything to make it so alarming.”
