More Than Human (4 page)

There were two boys for whom the smell of disinfectant on tile was the smell of hate.
       For Gerry Thompson it was the smell of hunger, too, and of loneliness. All food was spiced with it, all sleep permeated with disinfectant, hunger, cold, fear... all components of hatred. Hatred was the only warmth in the world, the only certainty. A man clings to certainties, especially when he has only one; most especially when he is six years old. And at six Gerry was very largely a man—at least, he had a grown man’s appreciation of that gray pleasure which comes merely with the absence of pain; he had an implacable patience, found usually only in men of purpose who must appear broken until their time of decision arrives. One does not realize that for a six-year-old the path of memory stretches back for just as long a lifetime as it does for anyone, and is as full of detail and incident. Gerry had had trouble enough, loss enough, illness enough, to make a man of anyone. At six he looked it, too; it was then that he began to accept, to be obedient, and to wait. His small, seamed face became just another face, and his voice no longer protested. He lived like this for two years, until his day of decision.
       Then he ran away from the state orphanage, to live by himself, to be the color of gutters and garbage so he would not be picked up; to kill if cornered; to hate.

For Hip there was no hunger, no cold, and no precocious maturity. There was the smell of hate, though. It surrounded his father the doctor, the deft and merciless hands, the sombre clothes. Even Hip’s memory of Doctor Barrows’ voice was the memory of chlorine and carbolic.
       Little Hip Barrows was a brilliant and beautiful child, to whom the world refused to be a straight, hard path of disinfected tile. Everything came easily to him, except control of his curiosity—and “everything” included the cold injections of rectitude administered by his father the doctor, who was a successful man, a moral man, a man who had made a career of being sure and of being right.
       Hip rose through childhood like a rocket, burnished, swift, afire. His gifts brought him anything a young man might want, and his conditioning constantly chanted to him that he was a kind of thief, not entitled to that which he had not earned; for such was the philosophy of his father the doctor, who had worked hard for everything. So Hip’s talents brought him friends and honours, and friendships and honours brought him uneasiness and a sick humility of which he was quite unaware.
       He was eight when he built his first radio, a crystal set for which he even wound the coils. He suspended it from the bedsprings so it could not be seen except by lifting the bed itself, and buried an earphone inside the mattress so he could lie awake at night and hear it. His father the doctor discovered it and forbade his ever touching so much as a piece of wire in the house again. He was nine when his father the doctor located his cache of radio and electronics texts and magazines and piled them all up in front of the fireplace and made him burn them, one by one; they were up all night. He was twelve when he won a Science Search engineering scholarship for his secretly designed tubeless oscilloscope, and his father the doctor dictated his letter of refusal. He was a brilliant fifteen when he was expelled from premedical school for playfully cross-wiring the relays in the staff elevators and adding some sequence switches, so that every touch of a control button was an unappreciated adventure. At sixteen, happily disowned, he was making his own living in a research laboratory and attending engineering school.
       He was big and bright and very popular. He needed to be very popular, and this, like all his other needs, he accomplished with ease. He played the piano with a surprisingly delicate touch and played swift and subtle chess. He learned to lose skilfully and never too often at chess and at tennis and once at the harassing game of being “first in the Class, first in the School”. He always had time—time to talk and to read, time to wonder quietly, time to listen to those who valued his listening, time to rephrase pedantries for those who found them arduous in the original. He even had time for
ROTC
and it was through this that he got his commission.
       He found the Air Force a rather different institution from any school he had ever attended, and it took him a while to learn that the Colonel could not be softened by humility or won by a witticism like the Dean of Men. It took him even longer to learn that in Service it is the majority, not the minority, who tend to regard physical perfection, conversational brilliance, and easy achievement as defects rather than assets. He found himself alone more than he liked and avoided more than he could bear.
       It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster...

Alicia Kew stood in the deepest shade by the edge of the meadow. “Father, Father, forgive me!” she cried. She sank down on the grass, blind with grief and terror, torn, shaken with conflict.
       “Forgive me,” she whispered with passion. “Forgive me,” she whispered with scorn.
       She thought, Devil, why won’t you be dead? Five years ago you killed yourself, you killed my sister, and still it’s “Father, forgive me.” Sadist, pervert, murderer, devil...
man
, dirty poisonous
man!
       I’ve come a long way, she thought, I’ve come no way at all. How I ran from Jacobs, gentle Lawyer Jacobs, when he came to help with the bodies; oh, how I ran, to keep from being alone with him, so that he might not go mad and poison me. And when he brought his wife, how I fled from her too, thinking women were evil and must not touch me. They had a time with me, indeed they did; it was so long before I could understand that I was mad, not they... it was so long before I knew how very good, how very patient, Mother Jacobs was with me; how much she had to do with me, for me. “But child, no one’s worn clothes like those for forty years!” And in the cab, when I screamed and couldn’t stop, for the people, the hurry, the bodies, so many bodies, all touching and so achingly visible; bodies on the streets, the stairs, great pictures of bodies in the magazines, men holding women who laughed and were brazenly unfrightened... Dr Rothstein who explained and explained and went back and explained again; there is no poison sweat, and there must be men and women else there would be no people at all... I had to learn this, Father, dear devil Father, because of you; because of you I had never seen an automobile or a breast or a newspaper or a railroad train or a sanitary napkin or a kiss or a restaurant or an elevator or a bathing suit or the hair on—oh forgive me, Father.
       I’m not afraid of a whip, I’m afraid of hands and eyes, thank you Father. One day, one day, you’ll see, Father, I shall live with people all around me, I shall ride on their trains and drive my own motor car; I shall go among thousand on a beach at the edge of a sea which goes out and out without walls, I shall step in and out among them with a tiny strip of cloth here and here and let them see my navel, I shall meet a man with white teeth, Father, and round strong arms, Father, and I shall oh what will become of me, what have I become now, Father forgive me.
       I live in a house you never saw, one with windows over-looking a road, where the bright gentle cars whisper past and children play outside the hedge. The hedge is not a wall and, twice for the drive and once for the walk, it is open to anyone. I look through the curtains whenever I choose, and see strangers. There is no way to make the bathroom black dark and in the bathroom is a mirror as tall as I am; and one day, Father, I shall leave the towel off.
       But all that will come later, the moving about among strangers, the touchings without fear. Now I must live alone, and think; I must read and read of the world and its works, yes, and of madmen like you, Father, and what twists them so terribly; Dr Rothstein insists that you were not the only one, that you were so rare, really, only because you were so rich.
       Evelyn...
       Evelyn never knew her father was mad. Evelyn never saw the pictures of the poisoned flesh. I lived in a world different from this one, but her world was just as different, the world Father and I made for her, to keep her pure...
       I wonder, I wonder how it happened that you had the decency to blow your rotten brains out...
       The picture of her father, dead, calmed her strangely. She rose and looked back into the woods, looked carefully around the meadowy shadow by shadow, tree by tree. “All right, Evelyn, I will, I will...”
       She took a deep breath and held it. She shut her eyes so tight there was red in the blackness of it. Her hands flickered over the buttons on her dress. It fell away. She slid out of underwear and stockings with a single movement. The air stirred and its touch on her body was indescribable; it seemed to blow through her. She stepped forward into the sun and with tears of terror pressing through her closed lids, she danced naked, for Evelyn, and begged and begged her dead father’s pardon.

When Janie was four she hurled a paperweight at a Lieutenant because of an unanalysed but accurate feeling that he had no business around the house while her father was overseas. The Lieutenant’s skull was fractured and, as is often the case in concussion, he was for ever unable to recall the fact that Janie stood ten feet away from the object when she threw it. Janie’s mother whaled the tar out of her for it, an episode which Janie accepted with her usual composure. She added it, however, to the proofs given her by similar occasions that power without control has its demerits.
       “She gives me the creeps,” her mother told her other Lieutenant later. “I can’t stand her. You think there’s something wrong with me for talking like that, don’t you?”
       “No I don’t,” said the other Lieutenant, who did. So she invited him in for the following afternoon, quite sure that once he had seen the child, he would understand.
       He saw her and he did understand. Not the child, nobody understood her; it was the mother’s feelings he understood. Janie stood straight up, with her shoulders back and her face lifted, legs apart as if they wore jackboots, and she swung a doll by one of its feet as if it were a swagger-stick. There was a tightness about the child which, in a child, was wrong. She was, if anything, a little smaller than average. She was sharp-featured and narrow-eyed; her eyebrows were heavy. Her proportions were not quite those of most four-year-olds, who can bend forward from the waist and touch their foreheads to the floor. Janie’s torso was a little too short or her legs a little too long for that. She spoke with a sweet clarity and a devastating lack of tact. When the other Lieutenant squatted clumsily and said, “
Hel
-lo, Janie. Are we going to be friends?” she said, “No. You smell like Major Grenfell.” Major Grenfell had immediately preceded the injured Lieutenant.
       “Janie!” her mother shouted, too late. More quietly, she said, “You know perfectly well the Major was only in for cocktails.” Janie accepted this without comment, which left an appalling gap in the dialogue. The other Lieutenant seemed to realize all in a rush that it was foolish to squat there on the parquet and sprang to his feet so abruptly he knocked over the coffee table. Janie achieved a wolfish smile and watched his scarlet ears while he picked up the pieces. He left early and never came back.
       Nor, for Janie’s mother, was there safety in numbers. Against the strictest orders, Janie strode into the midst of the fourth round of Gibsons one evening and stood at one end of the living room, flicking an insultingly sober gray-green gaze across the flushed faces. A round yellow-haired man who had his hand on her mother’s neck extended his glass and bellowed, “You’re Wima’s little girl!”
       Every head in the room swung at once like a bank of servo-switches, turning off the noise, and into the silence Janie said, “You’re the one with the—”
       “
Janie!
” her mother shouted. Someone laughed. Janie waited for it to finish. “—big, fat—” she enunciated. The man took his hand off Wima’s neck. Someone whooped, “Big fat what, Janie?”
       Topically, for it was wartime, Janie said, “—meat market.”
       Wima bared her teeth. “Run along back to your room, darling. I’ll come and tuck you in in a minute.” Someone looked straight at the blond man and laughed. Someone said in an echoing whisper, “There goes the Sunday sirloin.” A drawstring could not have pulled the fat man’s mouth so round and tight, and from it his lower lip bloomed like strawberry jam from a squeezed sandwich.
       Janie walked quietly towards the door and stopped as soon as she was out of her mother’s line of sight. A sallow young man with brilliant black eyes leaned forward suddenly. Janie met his gaze. An expression of bewilderment crossed the young man’s face. His hand faltered out and upward and came to rest on his forehead. It slid down and covered the black eyes.
       Janie said, just loud enough for him to hear, “Don’t you ever do that again.” She left the room.
       “Wima,” said the young man hoarsely, “that child is telepathic.”
       “Nonsense,” said Wima absently, concentrating on the fat man’s pout. “She gets her vitamins every single day.”
       The young man started to rise, looking after the child, then sank back again. “God,” he said, and began to brood.

When Janie was five she began playing with some other little girls. It was quite a while before they were aware of it. They were toddlers, perhaps two and a half years old, and they looked like twins. They conversed, if conversation it was, in high-pitched squeaks, and tumbled about on the concrete courtyard as if it were a haymow. At first Janie hung over her window-sill, four and a half storeys above, and contemplatively squirted saliva in and out between her tongue and her hard palate until she had a satisfactory charge. Then she would crane her neck and, cheeks bulging, let it go. The twins ignored the bombardment when it merely smacked the concrete, but yielded up a most satisfying foofaraw of chitterings and squeals when she scored a hit. They never looked up, but would race around in wild excitement, squealing.
       Then there was another game. On warm days the twins could skin out of their rompers faster than the eye could follow. One moment they were as decent as a deacon and in the next one or both would be fifteen feet away from the little scrap of cloth. They would squeak and scramble claw back into them, casting deliciously frightened glance at the basement door. Janie discovered that with a little concentration she could move the rompers—that is, when they were unoccupied. She practised diligently, lying across the window-sill, her chest and chin on a cushion, her eyes plickered with effort. At first the garment would simply lie there and flutter weakly, as if a small dust-devil had crossed it. But soon she had the rompers scuttling across the concrete like little flat crabs. It was a marvel to watch those two little girls move when that happened, and the noise was a pleasure. They became a little more cautious about taking them off, and sometimes Janie would lie in wait for forty minutes before she had a chance. And sometimes, even then, she held off and the twins, one clothed, one bare, would circle around the romper, and stalk it like two kittens after a beetle. Then she would strike, the romper would fly, the twins would pounce; and sometimes they caught it immediately, and sometimes they had to chase it until their little lungs were going like a toy steam engine.
       Janie learned the reason for their preoccupation with the basement door when one afternoon she had mastered the knack of lifting the rompers instead of just pushing them around. She held off until the twins were lulled into carelessness and were shucking out of their clothes, wandering away, ambling back again, as if to challenge her. And still she waited, until at last both rompers were lying together in a little pink-and-white mound. Then she struck. The rompers rose from the ground in a steep climbing turn and fluttered to the sill of a first-floor window. Since the courtyard was slightly below street level, this put the garments six feet high and well out of reach. There she left them.
       One of the twins ran to the centre of the courtyard and jumped up and down in agitation, stretching and craning to see the rompers. The other ran to the building under the first-floor window and reached her little hands up as high as she could get them, patting at the bricks fully twenty-eight inches under her goal. Then they ran to each other and twittered anxiously. After a time they tried reaching up the wall again, side by side. More and more they threw those terrified glances at the basement door; less and less was there any pleasure mixed with the terror.
       At last they hunkered down as far as possible away from the door, put their arms about one another, and stared numbly. They slowly quieted down, from chatters to twitters to cooings, and at last were silent, two tiny tuffets of terror.
       It seemed hours—weeks—of fascinated anticipation before Janie heard a thump and saw the door move. Out came the janitor, as usual a little bottle-weary. She could see the red crescents under his sagging yellow-whited eyes. “Bonnie!” he bellowed, “Beanie! Wha y’all?” He lurched out into the open and peered around. “Come out yeah! Look at
yew
! I gwine snatch yew bald-headed! Wheah’s yo’ clo’es?” He swooped down on them and caught them, each huge hand on a tiny biceps. He held them high, so that each had one toe barely touching the concrete and their little captured elbows pointed skyward. He turned around, once, twice, seeking, and at last his eye caught the glimmer of the rompers on the sill. “How you do dat?” he demanded. “You trine th’ow away yo’ ’spensive clo’es? Oh, I gwine whop you.”
       He dropped to one knee and hung the two little bodies across the other thigh. It is probable that he had the knack of cupping his hand so that he produced more sound than fury, but however he did it, the noise was impressive. Janie giggled.
       The janitor administered four equal swats to each twin and set them on their feet. They stood silently side by side with their hands pressed to their bottoms and watched him stride to the window-sill and snatch the rompers off. He threw them down at their feet and waggled his right forefinger at them. “Cotch you do dat once mo’, I’ll git Mr Milton the conductah come punch yo’ears fulla holes.
Heah?
” he roared. They shrank together, their eyes round. He lurched back to the door and slammed it shut behind him.
       The twins slowly climbed into their rompers. Then they went back to the shadows by the wall and hunkered down, supporting themselves with their backs and their feet. They whispered to one another. There was no more fun for Janie that day.