More Than Human

reflex, not until I’ve hunted him down and - But again he lost the thought. Whatever it was, it had been more important to him than love or marriage or a job or a colonelcy. (Colonelcy? Had he ever wanted to be a colonel?)

Well, then maybe it was a conquest. Janie loved him. She’d seen him and the lightning had struck and she wanted him, so she was going about it in her own way. Well, then! If that’s what she wanted…

He closed his eyes, seeing her face, the tilt of her head in that waiting, attentive silence; her slim strong arms and lithe body, her magic hungry mouth. He saw a quick sequence of pictures taken by the camera of his good male mind, but filed under ‘ inactive’ in his troubled, partial one: Janie’s legs silhouetted against the window, seen through the polychrome cloud of her liberty silk skirt. Janie in a peasant blouse, with a straight spear of morning sunlight bent and moulded to her bare shoulder and the soft upper curve of her breast. Janie dancing, bending away and cleaving to him as if he and she were the gold leaves of an electroscope. (Where had he seen… worked with… an electroscope? Oh, of course! In the… But it was gone.) Janie barely visible in the deep churning dark, palely glowing through a mist of nylon and the flickering acid of his tears, strongly holding his hands until he quieted.

But this was no seduction, this close intimacy of meals and walks and long shared silences, with never a touch, never a wooing word. Love-making, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing. Janie demanded nothing. She only… she only waited. If her interest lay in his obscured history she was taking a completely passive attitude, merely placing herself to receive what he might unearth. If something he had been, something he had done, was what she was after, wouldn’t she question and goad, probe and pry the way Thompson and Bromfield had done? (Bromfield? Who’s he?) But she never had, never.

No, it must be this other, this thing which made her look at lovers with such contained sadness, with an expression on her face like that of an armless man spellbound by violin music…

Picture of Janie’s mouth, bright, still, waiting. Picture of Janie’s clever hands. Picture of Janie’s body, surely as smooth as her shoulder, as firm as her forearm, warm and wild and willing -

They turned to each other, he the driving, she the driven gear. Their breath left them, hung as a symbol and a promise between them, alive and merged. For two heavy heartbeats they had their single planet in the lovers’ spangled cosmos; and then Janie’s face twisted in a spasm of concentration, bent not towards a ponderous control, but rather to some exquisite accuracy of adjustment.

A thing happened to him, as if a small sphere of the hardest vacuum had appeared deep within him. He breathed again and the magic about them gathered itself and whipped in with the breath to fill the vacuum which swallowed and killed it, all of it, in a tick of time. Except for the brief spastic change in her face, neither had moved; they still stood in the sunset, close together, her face turned up to his, here gloried, here tinted, there self-shining in its own shadow. But the magic was gone, the melding; they were two, not one, and this was Janie quiet, Janie patient, Janie not damped, but unkindled. But no – the real difference was in him. His hands were lifted to go round her and no longer cared to and his lips lost their grip on the unborn kiss and let it fall away and be lost. He stepped back. ‘Shall we go?’

A swift ripple of regret came and went across Janie’s face. It was a thing like many other things coming now to plague him: smooth and textured things forever presenting themselves to his fingertips and never to his grasp. He almost understood her regret, it was there for him, it was there -and gone, altogether gone, dwindling high away from him.

They walked silently back to the midway and the lights, their pitiable thousands of candlepower; and to the amusement rides, their balky pretence at motion. Behind them in the growing dark they left all real radiance, all significant movement. All of it; there was not enough left for any particular reaction. With the compressed air guns which fired tennis balls at wooden battleships; the cranks they turned to make the toy greyhounds race up a slope; the darts they threw at balloons – with these they buried something now so negligible it left no mound.

At an elaborate stand were a couple of war surplus servo-mechanisms rigged to simulate radar gun directors. There was a miniature anti-aircraft gun to be aimed by hand, its slightest movement followed briskly by the huge servo-powered gun at the back. Aircraft silhouettes were flashed across the domed half ceiling. All in all, it was a fine conglomeration of gadgetry and dazzle, a truly high-level catchpenny.

Hip went first, amused, then intrigued, then enthralled as his small movements were so obediently duplicated by the whip and weave of the massive gun twenty feet away. He missed the first ‘plane’ and the second; after that he had the fixed error of the gun calculated precisely and he banged away at every target as fast as they could throw them and knocked out every one. Janie clapped her hands like a child and the attendant awarded them a blurred and glittering clay statue of a police dog worth all of a fifth of the admission price. Hip took it proudly, and waved Janie up to the trigger. She worked the aiming mechanism diffidently and laughed as the big gun nodded and shook itself. His cheeks flushed, his eyes expertly anticipating the appearance-point of each target, Hip said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.’

Janie’s eyes narrowed a trifle and perhaps that was to help her aiming. She did not answer him. She knocked out the first target that appeared before it showed fully over the artificial horizon, and the second, and the third. Hip swatted his hands together and called her name joyfully. She seemed for a moment to be pulling herself together, the odd, effortful gesture of a preoccupied man forcing himself back into a conversation. She then let one go by and missed four in a row. She hit two, one low, one high, and missed the last by half a mile. ‘Not very good,’ she said tremulously.

‘Good enough,’ he said gallantly. ‘You don’t have to hit ‘em these days, you know.’

‘You don’t?’

‘Nah. Just get near. Your fuses take over from there. This is the world’s most diabetic dog.’

She looked down from his face to the statuette and giggled. ‘I’ll keep it always,’ she said. ‘Hip, you’re getting that nasty sparkle stuff all over your jacket. Let’s give it away.’

They marched up and across and down and around the tinsel stands in search of a suitable beneficiary, and found him at last – a solemn urchin of seven or so, who methodically sucked the memory of butter and juice from a well-worn corncob. ‘This is for you,’ carolled Janie. The child ignored the extended gift and kept his frighteningly adult eyes on her face.

Hip laughed. ‘No sale!’ He squatted beside the boy. ‘I’ll make a deal with you. Will you haul it away for a dollar?’

No response. The boy sucked his corncob and kept watching Janie.

‘Tough customer,’ grinned Hip.

Suddenly Janie shuddered. ‘Oh, let’s leave him alone,’ she said, her merriment gone.

‘He can’t outbid me,’ said Hip cheerfully. He set the statue down by the boy’s scuffed shoes and pushed a dollar bill into the rip which looked most like a pocket. ‘Pleasure to do business with you, sir,’ he said and followed Janie, who had already moved off.

‘Regular chatterbox,’ laughed Hip as he caught up with her. He looked back. Half a block away, the child still stared at Janie. ‘Looks like you’ve made a lifelong impress – Janie!’

Janie had stopped dead, eyes wide and straight ahead, mouth a triangle of shocked astonishment. ‘The little devil! ‘ she breathed. ‘At his age!’ She whirled and looked back.

Hip’s eyes obviously deceived him for he saw the corncob leave the grubby little hands, turn ninety degrees and thump the urchin smartly on the cheekbone. It dropped to the ground; the child backed away four paces, shrilled an unchivalrous presumption and an unprintable suggestion at them and disappeared into an alley.

‘Whew!’ said Hip, awed. ‘You’re so right!’ He looked at her admiringly. ‘What clever ears you have, grandma,’ he said, not very successfully covering an almost prissy embarrassment with badinage. ‘I didn’t hear a thing until the second broadside he threw.’

‘Didn’t you?’ she said. For the first time he detected annoyance in her voice. And the same time he sensed that he was not the subject of it. He took her arm. ‘Don’t let it bother you. Come on, let’s eat some food.’

She smiled and everything was all right again.