More Than Human

They did everything they could to help him. They let him check the files himself and prove that there was no such Pfc. The ‘degaussing’ effect? No observations of it. Of course, the Lieutenant himself admitted that he had taken all pertinent records to his quarters. No, they are not in the quarters. Yes, there was a hole in the ground out there and they’d found what he called his ‘detector’, though it made no sense to anyone; it merely tested the field of its own magnet. As to Major Thompson, we have witnesses who can prove he was in the air on his way here when it happened. If the Lieutenant would only rid himself of the idea that Major Thompson is the missing Pfc, we’d get along much better; he isn’t, you know; he couldn’t be. But of course, Captain Bromfield might be better for you at that…

I know what I did, I know what I saw. I’ll find that device or whoever made it. And I’ll kill that Thompson!

Bromfield was a good man and heaven knows he tried. But the combination in the patient of high observational talent and years of observational training would not accept the denial of its own data. When the demands for proof had been exhausted and the hysterical period was passed and the melancholia and finally the guarded, superficial equilibrium was reached, they tried facing him with the Major. He charged and it took five men to protect the Major.

These brilliant boys, you know. They crack.

So they kept him a while longer, satisfying themselves that Major Thompson was the only target. Then they wrote the Major a word of warning and they kicked the Lieutenant out. Too bad, they said.

The first six months was a bad dream. He was still full of Captain Bromfield’s fatherly advice and he tried to get a job and stay with it until this ‘adjustment’ the Captain talked about should arrive. It didn’t.

He’d saved a little and he had his separation pay. He’d take a few months off and clear this thing out of his mind.

First, the farm. The device was on the truck and the truck obviously belonged to the farmer. Find him and there’s your answer.

It took six months to find the town records (for the village had been pre-empted when the ack-ack range was added to the base) and to learn the names of the only two men who might tell him about the truck. A. Prodd, farmer. A halfwitted hired hand, name unknown, whereabouts unknown.

But he found Prodd, nearly a year later. Rumour took him to Pennsylvania and a hunch took him to the asylum. From Prodd, all but speechless in the last gasp of his latest dotage, he learned that the old man was waiting for his wife, that his son Jack had never been born, that old Lone maybe was an idiot, but nobody ever was a better hand at getting the truck out of the mud; that Lone was a good boy, that Lone lived in the woods with the animals, and that he, Prodd, had never missed a milking.

He was the happiest human being Hip had ever seen.

Barrows went into the woods with the animals. For three and a half years he combed those woods. He ate nuts and berries and trapped what he could; he got his pension check until he forgot about picking it up. He forgot engineering; he very nearly forgot his name. The only thing he cared to know was that to put such a device on such a truck was the act of an idiot, and that this Lone was a half-wit.

He found the cave, some children’s clothes and a scrap of the silvery cable. An address.

He found the address. He learned where to find the children. But then he ran into Thompson – and Janie found him.

Seven years.

It was cool where he lay and under his head was a warm pillow and through his hair strayed a gentling touch. He was asleep, or he had been asleep. He was so completely exhausted, used, drained that sleeping and waking were synonymous anyway and it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He knew who he was, who he had been. He knew what he wanted and where to find it; and find it he would when he had slept.

He stirred happily and the touch in his hair ceased and moved to his cheek where it patted him. In the morning, he thought comfortably, I’ll go see my half-wit. But you know what, I think I’ll take an hour off just remembering things. I won the sack race at the Sunday school picnic and they awarded me a khaki handkerchief. I caught three pike before breakfast at the Scout camp, trolling, paddling the canoe and holding the fishing line in my teeth; the biggest of the fish cut my mouth when he struck. I hate rice pudding. I love Bach and liverwurst and the last two weeks in May and deep clear eyes like… ‘Janie?’

‘I’m here.’

He smiled and snuggled his head into the pillow and realized it was Janie’s lap. He opened his eyes. Janie’s head was a black cloud in a cloud of stars; a darker night in nighttime. ‘Night-time?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Sleep well?’

He lay still, smiling, thinking of how well he had slept.

‘I didn’t dream because I knew I could.’

‘I’m glad.’

He sat up. She moved cautiously. He said, ‘You must be cramped up in knots.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I liked to see you sleep like that.’

‘Let’s go back to town.’

‘Not yet. It’s my turn, Hip. I have a lot to tell you.’

He touched her. ‘You’re cold. Won’t it wait?’

‘No – oh, no! You’ve got to know everything before he… before we’re found.’

‘He? Who’s he?’

She was quiet a long time. Hip almost spoke and then thought better of it. And when she did talk, she seemed so far from answering his question that he almost interrupted; but again he quelled it, letting her lead matters in her own way, in her own time.

She said, ‘You found something in a field; you had your hands on it just long enough to know what it was, what it could mean to you and to the world. And then the man who was with you, the soldier, made you lose it. Why do you suppose he did that?’

‘He was a clumsy, brainless bastard.’

She made no immediate comment but went on, ‘The medical officer then sent in to you, a Major, looked exactly like that Pfc to you.’

‘They proved otherwise.’

He was close enough to her to feel the slight movement in the dark as she nodded. ‘Proof: the men who said they were with him in a plane all afternoon. Now, you had a sheaf of files which showed a perturbation of some sort which affected proximity fuses over a certain area. What happened to them?’

‘I don’t know. My room was locked, as far as I know, from the time I left that day until they went to search it.’

‘Did it ever occur to you that those three things – the missing Pfc, the missing files, and the resemblance of the Major to the Pfc – were the things which discredited you?’

‘That goes without saying. I think if I could’ve straightened out any one or any two of those three things, I wouldn’t have wound up with that obsession.’

‘All right. Now think about this. You stumbled and grubbed through seven years, working your way closer and closer to regaining what you had lost. You traced the man who built it and you were just about to find him. But something happened.’

‘My fault. I bumped into Thompson and went crazy.’

She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Suppose it wasn’t carelessness that made that Pfc pull the lever. Suppose it was done on purpose.’

He could not have been more shocked if she had fired a flashbulb in his face. The light was as sudden, as blinding, as that. When he could, he said, ‘Why didn’t I ever think of that?’

‘You weren’t allowed to think of it,’ she said bitterly.

‘What do you mean, I wasn’t – ‘

‘Please. Not yet,’ she said. ‘Now, just suppose for a moment that someone did this to you. Can you reason out who it was – why he did it – how he did it?’

‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘Eliminating the world’s first and only anti-gravity generator makes no sense at all.