Midnight

Watkins looked down at the grotesque corpse of the regressive. 'What have you done to us, Shaddack?'

'Haven't you grasped what I've said?'

'What have you done to us?'

'This is a great gift!'

'To have no emotions but fear?'

'That's what frees your mind and gives you the power to control your very form,' Shaddack said excitedly. 'What I don't understand is why the regressives have all chosen a subhuman condition. Surely you have the power within you to undergo evolution rather than devolution, to lift yourself up from mere humanity to something higher, cleaner, purer. Perhaps you even have the power to become a being of pure consciousness, intellect without any physical form. Why have all these New People chosen to regress instead?'

Watkins raised his head, and his eyes had a half-dead look, as if they had absorbed death from the very sight of the corpse. 'What good is it to have the power of a god if you can't also experience the simple pleasures of a man?'

'But you can do and experience anything you want,' Shaddack said exasperatedly.

'Not love.'

'What?'

'Not love or hate or joy or any emotion but fear.'

'But you don't need them. Not having them has freed you.'

'You're not thick headed,' Watkins said, 'so I guess you don't understand because you're psychologically … twisted, warped.'

'You must not speak to me like—'

'I'm trying to tell you why they all choose a subhuman form over a superhuman form. It's because, for a thinking creature of high intellect, there can be no pleasure separate from emotion. If you deny men emotions, you deny them pleasure, so they seek an altered state in which complex emotions and pleasure aren't linked — the life of an unthinking beast.'

'Nonsense. You are—'

Watkins interrupted him again, sharply. 'Listen to me, for God's sake! If I remember, even Moreau listened to his creatures.'

His face was flushed now instead of pale. His eyes no longer looked half dead; a certain wildness had returned to them. He was only a step or two from Shaddack and seemed to loom over him, though he was the shorter of the two. He looked scared, badly scared — and dangerous.

He said, 'Consider sex — a basic human pleasure. For sex to be fully satisfying, it has to be accompanied by love or at least some affection. To a psychologically damaged man, sex can still be good if it's linked to hate or pride of domination; even negative emotions can make the act pleasurable for a twisted man. But done with no emotion at all, — it's pointless, stupid, just the breeding impulse of an animal, just the rhythmic function of a machine.'

A flash of lightning burned the night and blazed briefly on the bedroom windows, followed by a crash of thunder that seemed to shake the house. That celestial flicker was, for an instant, brighter than the soft glow of the single bedroom lamp.

In that queer light Shaddack thought he saw something happen to Loman Watkins's face … a shift in the relationship of the features. But when the lightning passed, Watkins looked quite like himself, so it must have been Shaddack's imagination.

Continuing to speak with great force, with the passion of stark fear, Watkins said, 'It's not just sex, either. The same goes for other physical pleasures. Eating, for example. Yeah, I still taste a piece of chocolate when I eat it. But the taste gives me only a tiny fraction of the satisfaction that it did before I was converted. Haven't you noticed?'

Shaddack did not reply, and he hoped that nothing in his demeanor would reveal that he had not undergone conversion himself. He was, of course, waiting until the process had been more highly refined through additional generations of the New People. But he suspected Watkins would not react well to the discovery that their maker had not chosen to submit himself to the blessing that he had bestowed on them.

Watkins said, 'And do you know why there's less satisfaction? Before conversion, when we ate chocolate, the taste had thousands of associations for us. When we ate it, we subconsciously remembered the first time we ate it and all the times in between, and subconsciously we remembered how often that taste was associated with holidays and celebrations of all kinds, and because of all that the taste made us feel good. But now when I eat chocolate, it's just a taste, a good taste, but it doesn't make me feel good any more. I know it should; I remember that such a thing as 'feeling good' was part of it once, but not now. The taste of chocolate doesn't generate emotional echoes any more. It's an empty sensation, its richness has been stolen from me. The richness of everything but fear has been stolen from me, and everything is gray now — strange, gray, drab — as if I'm half dead.'

The left side of Watkins's head bulged. His cheekbone enlarged. That ear began to change shape and draw toward a point.

Stunned, Shaddack backed away from him.

Watkins followed, raising his voice, speaking with a slight slur but with no less force, not with real anger but with fear and an unsettling touch of savagery 'Why the hell would any of us want to evolve to some higher form with even fewer pleasures of the body and the heart? Intellectual pleasures aren't enough, Shaddack. Life is more than that. A life that's only intellectual isn't tolerable.'

As Watkins's brow gradually sloped backward, slowly melting away like a wall of snow in the sun, heavier accretions of bone began to build up around his eyes.

Shaddack backed into the dresser.

Still approaching, Watkins said, 'Jesus! Don't you see yet? Even a man confined to a hospital bed, paralyzed from the neck down, has more in his life than intellectual interests; no one's stolen his emotions from him; no one's reduced him to fear and pure intellect. We need pleasure, Shaddack, pleasure, pleasure. Life without it is terrifying. Pleasure makes life worth living.'

'Stop.'

'You've made it impossible for us to experience the pleasurable release of emotion, so we can't fully experience pleasures of the flesh, either, because we're creatures of a high order and need the emotional aspect to truly enjoy physical pleasure. It's both or neither in human beings.'

Watkins's hands, fisted at his sides, were becoming larger, with swollen knuckles and tobacco-brown, pointed nails.

'You're transforming,' Shaddack said.

Ignoring him, speaking more thickly as the shape of his mouth began to change subtly, Watkins said, 'So we revert to a savage, altered state. We retreat from our intellect. In the cloak of the beast, our only pleasure is the pleasure of the flesh, the flesh, flesh … but at least we're no longer aware of what we've lost, so the pleasure remains intense, so intense, deep and sweet, sweet, so sweet. You've made….. made our lives intolerable, gray and dead, dead, all dead, dead….. so we have to devolve in mind and in body … to find a worthwhile existence. We … we have to flee … from the horrible restrictions of this narrowed life … this very narrowed life you've given us. Men aren't machines. Men … men … men are not machines! '

'You're regressing. For God's sake, Loman!'

Watkins halted and seemed disoriented. Then he shook his head, as if to cast off his confusion as he might a veil. He raised his hands, looked at them, and cried out in terror. He glanced past Shaddack, at the dresser mirror, and his cry grew louder, shriller.

Abruptly Shaddack was acutely aware of the stench of blood, to which he had somewhat accustomed himself. Watkins must be even more affected by it, though not repulsed, no, not in the least repulsed, but excited.

Lightning flashed and thunder shook the night again, and rain suddenly came down in torrents, beating on the windows and drumming on the roof.

Watkins looked from the mirror to Shaddack, raised a hand as if to strike him, then turned and staggered out of the room, into the hall, away from the ripe stink of blood. Out there he dropped to his knees, then onto his side.