Collected Short Fiction, page 570
“Then look at this.” Gellian reached to touch the bright hull of that toy rocket, his thin smile fading. “It grew there—inside a sort of shell we were able to chisel off.” His fearful eyes came back to Dane. “What do you think of that?”
Dane stooped to feel the toy. The metal was heavy and cold in his trembling fingers. Fragments of a dark, thick husk still clung to it, around the hard metal stem which attached it to the tree.
“A wonderful thing!” He straightened from it reluctantly. “Though, granting that somebody can rebuild genes, I suppose such a toy as this would be a good deal simpler to make than a human being—or a superhuman mutant.”
“I think it was planned to be more than a toy.” Gellian’s voice had a tremor of unease. “It was still growing, until we cut away that husk. Our Geiger counters show that uranium is being concentrated inside the hull, possibly for fuel.”
“You don’t mean—” Dane paused to stare at the tiny ship, breath-taken.
“I think it was meant to grow into a real space ship,” Gellian peered at it apprehensively. “The not-men are already uneasy, I should imagine, under our attacks. I think they’re looking for a fortress on some other planet, beyond our reach.”
“These mutants—” Dane turned at last from the metallic plant, frowning over that more disturbing puzzle. “How do you identify them?”
“That’s a problem I hope you can help us solve,” Gellian said. “A difficult thing, because the mutants are so cleverly shaped to hide among men. They’re somewhat tougher and quicker and stronger than we are, and apparently immune to most diseases, but the older ones are already cunning enough to conceal such physical differences, as well as their stranger mental endowments.”
“And—the mental differences?”
“High intelligence,” the gaunt man said. “An average I.Q. probably twice ours. A remarkable acuity of the senses—from the images she used in her poems, that blind child must have been able to smell the red color of a rose, and to hear the molecular vibration of heat. But the gift that makes them so dangerous, and so difficult to trap, is ESP.”
“Extrasensory perception! Are you certain?”
GELLIAN nodded. “We haven’t had any not-men in the laboratory. Not alive. We don’t know the extent or the the limits of their psychological capacities. But nothing else could account for that girl’s escapes from all our traps. Besides evading all our efforts to kill or capture her, she has been able to warn and hide quite a number of suspected children before we could take them.”
“Is that the worst thing she has done?” Dane inquired. “Rescuing children doesn’t seem so reprehensible—”
“She’s deadly!” Gellian stiffened angrily. “She is armed with weapons more dangerous than that convict’s H-bomb—because they’re more subtle. Several of our best operatives have disappeared on her trail. By sheer good luck, we found what she had done to the last one.” Dane stood listening uneasily.
“The chief investigator for our Canberra office,” Gellian went on grimly.
“An able man, trained and loyal, armed as well as we could arm him. He went out alone, two months ago, to check a newspaper story about a gifted eight-year-old. He didn’t come back.
“Investigating a possible mutant takes time and caution, and he had been gone three days before the branch manager got alarmed enough to look for him. The manager couldn’t find him, or the mutant child, or any other clue. It’s just an accident that one of our operatives on another case recognized him last week, washing dishes in a waterfront joint up in Darwin.”
“Then this girl didn’t kill him?”
“Not physically.” Gellian seemed to shiver again. “But his mind had been destroyed. Memory wiped out. He was using a different name, and apparently he was quite content with his dishwashing job. He recalled nothing of his work with the agency—didn’t even know the old friend who found him.”
“Amnesia?”
“Not any common kind.” Gellian shook his head. “Our medical experts say that he has Craven’s disease—a rare type of encephalitis, first reported a dozen years ago by a mission doctor in New Guinea. A brain infection that destroys the memory—permanently. All the evidence shows that he had been deliberately infected with the virus—probably by this mutant girl.”
Dane nodded uncomfortably. The chill of danger hung cold in the room, and he wondered for an instant if what his senses had detected could be the working of some other secret weapon, strange as that virus.
“That’s the sort of thing we’re up against,” Gellian went on. “Such biological warfare could destroy us before we know we’ve been attacked, yet it’s perfectly safe for the not-men, because of their natural immunity to disease. You can see why we need you.”
“I’m not sure.” Dane shook his head. “It looks to me as if the mutants used that virus only in self-defense—”
“A hellish weapon!” Gellian broke in. “But we could learn to cope with weapons. What worries me isn’t any weapon, or even the terrible cunning of the not-men, but their psychological gifts. While I suppose some human beings do have some feeble extrasensory perceptions, those mutant psi capacities are as strange and dangerous to us as the new mutation of human reason must have been, long ago, to the last dull near-men.”
Dane shivered, awed in spite of himself.
“That’s the danger.” Gellian’s haunted eyes looked at him. “Now will you join us?”
DANE hesitated. The bitter taste of danger burned his tongue again. Refusal was going to be awkward, yet he knew he must refuse. Sparring for time to decide what to say, he asked uneasily:
“Just what would you want me to do?”
“Help us trap the maker, first,” Gellian said grimly. “That trail’s too cold to be of much more use.” He gestured restlessly at the wall map. “If we can catch him alive, we can make him tell us who all the not-men are, and how he mutated them. Perhaps we can destroy them, with the same science that made them.” His lips tightened. “That’s your job, Belfast. Are you ready to begin?”
“I don’t think so. If Kendrew’s discoveries have fallen into the wrong hands, I’m anxious to do something about it. But I don’t see any reason for panic. Certainly, I’m not ready to start slaughtering children!”
Gellian’s breath caught sharply. “You phrase it too harshly!” Anger snapped in his hard voice. “Don’t forget that your father was a friend of Kendrew’s that might become an awkward fact, if you refuse to join us. I advise you to be here at eight tomorrow morning!”
“Or else I become another black pin on the wall?”
“I’m not threatening you. I’m simply stating an ugly situation. You’re either with us or against us. This is war, and that’s the way it has to be. But—I didn’t want to be so blunt.” Glancing soberly up at the wall map, Gellian seemed almost apologetic. “I’m quite sure you’re human. I know the maker left San Francisco many years before your birth.”
Dane made himself pause to look at his watch. Ten-thirty. He still had time to find out what that girl wanted, at the Sanderson Service, before he tried to see Messenger. He bent to pick up his brief case, trying not to seem too uneasy with it, and turned toward the door.
“By eight in the morning,” Gellian repeated behind him. “I hope you decide to come back.”
He went out to the elevator, trying not to hurry. The glare and reek and chill of enmity went with him. He clutched the brief case desperately, afraid for a moment that Gellian’s agents would try to stop him. But they let him go.
IV
THE small reception room on the nineteenth floor was empty when he entered, yet it seemed a sanctuary. Dane Belfast escaped that haunting danger-sense at the door, as if he had come somehow into a safe refuge. He was looking at the neat glass desk and the chrome-and-plastic chairs, trying to surmise the nature of the Sanderson Service, when a tall girl walked out of the room beyond.
“Dane!” She looked at him with a curiously anxious intentness, and then smiled approvingly. “I’m Nan Sanderson.”
He smiled back, at the friendly light in her eyes. He liked the clean planes of her tan face and the smooth upsweep of her red-brown hair and the trim simplicity of her gray business suit, but those surface things couldn’t explain the way she made him feel.
Somehow, she made a tremendous sense of relieved security well up inside him. That surge of feeling took his breath and closed his throat, so that for a moment he couldn’t speak.
“Well?” she was saying. “Aren’t you Dr. Belfast?”
“Dane Belfast.” Gulping at the lump in his throat, he yielded to his impulse to explain, because her serene blue eyes seemed so understanding. “I didn’t mean to stare, but you just gave me the oddest feeling.”
“Yes?” She waited, interested.
“I don’t quite know what’s wrong with me today.” He looked at her hopefully. “Since just before you called, I’ve had the queerest feelings. Of danger. I can’t be sure it’s anything real, yet the sensations are so vivid they frighten me. I seem to see danger, like dark fire, and feel it, like a cold wind—if you can imagine that. It somehow comes and goes, but it followed me all the way here. But suddenly, when I saw you, I felt—well, safe.”
He had paused, afraid of what she might think, but she was nodding soberly.
“The danger’s real enough,” she said quietly. “But we’ll try to make you safe.”
“What sort of danger?” He couldn’t help glancing back toward the empty corridor outside. “And how are you going to make me safe?”
She shook her head. “Before I can tell you anything, you must establish your right to our service.”
“How do I do that?”
“You answer questions, and you pass a test.” She turned to the door behind her. “Come on inside.”
He followed eagerly, lifted by a curious confidence that he could answer any question, and pass every test. The tastefully plain room beyond might have been the office of a successful psychoanalyst, but nothing about it told him the object of the Sanderson Service. The girl beckoned him toward a chair and turned to take a wide blue card from a filing cabinet.
“First we must check your record.”
She studied the card thoughtfully. “Dane Belfast. Race: white. Birthplace: San Francisco. Father: Dr. Philip Belfast, surgeon and bio-chemist. Mother: Tanya de Jong Belfast.” Her liquid eyes lifted. “Is all that correct?”
“All—almost. Except for the race. My mother was Eurasian. A quarter Chinese. An eighth each Javenese and Filipino. The rest was white, Russian and Colonial Dutch.
“That’s the way we have it.” When he dared look up, she was calmly checking something on the card. “Now, your university records—”
“Doesn’t that matter?” He couldn’t help his hoarse interruption. “That Eurasian blood?”
“Not to us.” Her blue eyes were innocently wide. “No racial strain is really pure, anyhow. I’m an eighth Cherokee, myself.” Smiling, her face was a warm golden brown. “Do you mind that?” He could only shake his head.
“Any racial stock can contribute very useful genes.” She was studying the card again. “But we’re interested now in qualifications of an entirely different sort.”
SHE didn’t say where she had found the information, but the card listed his biology degrees from Stanford, and his doctorate in biochemistry from Caltech, and even his two years as research director at the Kendrew Memorial. She asked about the common diseases of childhood, and seemed pleased when he said he had escaped them.
“Now come with me,” she said, and he followed her back into a small laboratory, where she took his blood pressure and deftly stabbed his finger for a blood specimen. “All this is just preliminary. The physical data is no more important than your racial background, really. The essential tests are mental.”
He almost gasped. That curious sense of sanctuary had swept away his first faint notion that she might be one of the mutants Gellian hunted, but this brought that suspicion back. Recovering from his involuntary start, he studied her searchingly.
Busy, to his relief, with the microscope, her fine face intent and the cold north light turned warm on her hair, she looked entirely and enchantingly human. But all the maker’s creatures, in Gellian’s disturbing theory, had been cunningly shaped to hide among men.
That flashing suspicion made the nature of her business seem suddenly clear. She must be looking for her kinsmen, scattered along the maker’s trail, to warn and aid them against Gellian’s exterminators. The Sanderson Service, it struck him, must exist to serve not-men only. And these tests were designed to find them!
“Well?” He saw her turning from the microscope, and tried to cover his awed wonder with that casual query. “How am I doing?”
“Well enough.” Nodding approvingly, she brought two sharpened pencils to the little table where she had seated him. “Now we come to the psychological tests.”
Psychology was one of the biological sciences, and he knew all the standard tests. These were unfamiliar, however, and the most difficult he had seen. For the next hour, while the girl held a stop watch and marked his papers, he sweated through increasingly intricate riddles.
“Do I have to be a genius?” he finally demanded.
“It wouldn’t hurt your chances.” Smiling slightly, she glanced at his scores on the card. “But you have qualified for the final test. I’m going to shuffle these, and deal them out of your sight.” She showed him a thin deck of cards, printed with simple geometric figures. “I want you to call them as they fall.”
Trying too hard to seem at ease, he heard the pencil point snap beneath his tightened fingers. For he knew the cards; the standard ESP deck, devised years ago for the parapsychology research at Duke University. Extrasensory perception, Gellian had said, was the mark of the mutants.
“I can’t,” he whispered. “I’m not psychic.”
Investigating that new frontier of the widening sciences of life, he had sometimes found challenging signs of a real psi capacity—an inexplicable reach of the mind beyond the range of any known senses or physical faculties—but always in other subjects. Never in himself.
“Please!” The anxiety in his own voice surprised him. “Can’t we skip this?”
“This is the one you have to pass.” But her warm eyes gave him a grave encouragement. “I think you will. This feeling of danger you mention—I think that’s an actual perception, of a very actual peril.”
He nodded, reluctantly. That cold dry glow of evil over everything outside this puzzling haven must be evidence of—something. He straightened in the chair, waiting nervously for her to go ahead.
“Ready?” She sat down behind the screen, where he couldn’t see her. “Here’s the first card, face down on the table. Just take your time, and try to tell me what it is.”
HE TRIED hard enough, surely, but could only guess, desperately: “Is it—a star?”
“I don’t know, until we finish the run. Now just relax, and take your time, and tell me what you see. Ready?”
“It’s—probably a cross?”
She dealt again, and he kept on guessing wildly. He couldn’t stop the anxious sweat that felt cold on his forehead and clammy on his hands.
“Why take it so hard?” She rose when the run was finished, shaking her head in reproof at his breathless tensity. “Why don’t you smoke, while I check your score?”
He was a light smoker, because he had worked so much in sterile laboratories where nicotine was contraband.
but he found a cigarette and pulled on it nervously until he heard her shuffling the cards again.
“How’d I do?” he asked huskily.
“Well enough.” But he caught the disappointment in her voice. “Let’s try another run.”
He tried again, but still he felt no truth in his desperate guesses. And he saw the trouble on her face when she rose, her faint smile forced and foreboding.
“I’m terribly sorry, Dr. Belfast.” He felt the chill of a new formality in her voice. “I was sure you’d qualify, and I can’t understand your failure—unless your psi capacity has been disturbed by some emotional shock.” Her blue eyes turned piercing. “Have you seen the man I mentioned?” she asked sharply. “John Gellian?”
Meeting her probing stare, watching for her reaction, Dane nodded slowly. “He found me in the lobby of my hotel, an hour after you called. He took me around to his office, and told me a story, and offered me a job.”
Her body seemed to freeze. Her wary eyes searched him again as she demanded: “Did you take it?”
“Not yet.” Curiously relieved to discover that her mutant perception didn’t tell her everything—if she were a mutant—Dane relaxed a little. “What he told me was too much to deal with, all at once. I’m thinking it over, till eight in the morning.”
“He told you I’m something strange?” she breathed faintly. “Something—monstrous?”
“He talked about genetic mutations.” Dane admitted uncomfortably. “A strange story. I don’t quite know what to think—”
“Don’t believe him!” The ice in her voice thawed suddenly, to a hot vehemence. “I know that horrible story, and it isn’t true. That man’s sick! He has those hideous delusions. They make him dangerous—to you as well as to me!”
She sat down suddenly on the edge of the little table that held the screen, as if weak with her troubled emotion. Her blue eyes were suddenly too innocent.
“No wonder you bungled the tests—if you believed Gellian’s insane lies! Trust me, Dane. Just ask me anything you want to know.”
“All right.” He leaned a little forward. “Tell me what the Sanderson Service is—and what you do here?”
“I’m a geneticist, too,” she said, after a moment. “I’m helping conduct a tremendous experiment in human genetics. The service is part of that.”
“Your object?”
“To rescue the human race from civilization.”
He waited, puzzled.
“We feel that modern civilization, by sheltering the unfit, has stopped the forward evolution of the individual. Perhaps even turned it backward. We’re trying to replace the missing care of nature. To evolve an improved human type, by a process of intelligent artificial selection.”
