More Than Human

sure, he could have taken care of ‘em all in time, but only if he worked full time at it. Working full time was out of his field. He got mad. He got mad at Lone who was dead and he especially got mad at you.’

‘Whew. He could have killed me. Why didn’t he?’

‘Same reason he didn’t just go out and confiscate the device before you saw it. I tell you, he was vicious and vengeful – childish. You’d bothered him. He was going to fix you for it.

‘Now I must confess I didn’t care much one way or the other, it did me so much good to see him moving around again. I went with him to the base.

‘Now, here’s something you just wouldn’t remember. He walked right into your lab while you were calibrating your detector. He looked you once in the eye and walked out again with all the information you had, plus the fact that you meant to take it out and locate the device, and that you intended to – what was your phrase? – „appoint a volunteer”.’

‘I was a hotshot in those days,’ said Hip ruefully.

She laughed. ‘You don’t know. You just don’t know. Well, out you came with that big heavy instrument on a strap. I saw you, Hip; I can still see you, your pretty tailored uniform, the sun on your hair… I was seventeen.

‘Gerry told me to lift a Pfc shirt quick. I did, out of the barracks.’

‘I didn’t know a seventeen-year-old could get in and out of a barracks with a whole skin. Not a female type seventeen-year-old.’

‘I didn’t go in!’ she said. Hip shouted in sheer surprise as his own shirt was wrenched and twisted. The tails flew up from under his belt and flapped wildly in the windless dawn. ‘Don’t do that!’ he gasped.

‘Just making a point,’ she said, twinkling. ‘Gerry put on the shirt and leaned against the fence and waited for you. You marched right up to him and handed him the detector. „Come on, soldier,” you said. „You just volunteered for a picnic. You carry the lunch.”‘

‘What a little stinker I was!’

‘I didn’t think so. I was peeping out from behind the MP shack. I thought you were sort of wonderful. I did, Hip.’

He half laughed. ‘Go on. Tell me the rest.’

‘You know the rest. Gerry flashed Bonnie to get the files out of your quarters. She found them and threw them down to me. I burned them. I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t know what Gerry was planning.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, that’s it. Gerry saw to it that you were discredited. Psychologically, it had to be that way. You claimed the existence of a Pfc no one had ever seen. You claimed he was the psychiatrist – a real danger sign, as any graduate medic knows. You claimed files, facts, and figures to back you up and they couldn’t be traced. You could prove that you’d dug something up, but there was nothing to show what it might have been. But most of all, you had a trained scientist’s mind, in full possession of facts which the whole world could prove weren’t so – and did. Something had to give.’

‘Cute,’ murmured Hip from deep in his chest.

‘And just for good measure,’ said Janie with some difficulty, ‘he handed you a post-hypnotic command which made it impossible for you to relate him either as Major Thompson, psychiatrist, or as the Pfc, to the device.

‘When I found out what he’d done I tried to make him help you. Just a little. He – he just laughed at me. I asked Baby what could be done. He said nothing. He said only that the command might be removed by a reverse abre-action.’

‘What in time is that?’

‘Moving backward, mentally, to the incident itself. Ab-reaction is the process of reliving, in detail, an event. But you were blocked from doing that because you’d have to start from the administration of the command; that’s where the incident started. And the only way would be to immobilize you completely, not tell you why, and unpeel all subsequent events one by one until you reached the command. It was a „from now on” command like all such. It couldn’t stop you when you were travelling in reverse.

‘And how was I ever going to find you and immobilize you without letting you know why?’

‘Holy smoke,’ Hip said boyishly. ‘This makes me feel kind of important. A guy like that taking all that trouble.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself!’ she said acidly, then: ‘I’m sorry, Hip. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded… It was no trouble for him. He swatted you like a beetle. He gave you a push and forgot all about you.’

Hip grunted. ‘Thank you.’

‘He did it again!’ she said furiously. ‘There you were, seven good youthful years shot, your good engineer’s mind gone, with nothing left but a starved, dirty frame and a numb obsession that you were incapable of understanding or relieving. Yet, by heaven, you had enough of- whatever it is that makes you what you are – to drag through those seven years picking up the pieces until you were right at his doorstep. When he saw you coming – it was an accident, he happened to be in town – he knew immediately who you were and what you were after. When you charged him he diverted you into that plate glass window with just a blink of those… rotten… poison… eyes of his…’

‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘Hey, Janie, take it easy!’

‘Makes me mad,’ she whispered, dashing her hand across her eyes. She tossed her hair back, squared her shoulders. ‘He sent you flying into the window and at the same time gave you that „curl up and die” command. I saw it, I saw him do it… S-so rotten…’

She said, in a more controlled tone, ‘Maybe if it was the only one I could have forgotten it. I never could have approved it but I once had faith in him… you’ve got to understand, we’re a part of something together, Gerry and I and the kids; something real and alive. Hating him is like hating your legs or your lungs.’

‘It says in the Good Book, „If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand – „‘

‘Yes, your eye, your hand!’ she cried. ‘Not your head!’ She went on, ‘But yours wasn’t the only case. Did you ever hear that rumour about the fusion of Element 83?’

‘A fairy tale. Bismuth won’t play those games. I remember vaguely… some crazy guy called Klackenhorst.’

‘A crazy guy called Klackenheimer,’ she corrected.’ Gerry got into one of his bragging phases and let go with a differential he shouldn’t have mentioned. Klack picked it up. He fusioned bismuth all right. And Gerry got worried; a thing like that would make too much of a splash and he was afraid he’d be bothered by a mob of people who might trace him. So he got rid of poor old Klack.’

‘Klackenheimer died of cancer!’ snorted Hip.

She gave him a strange look. ‘I know,’ she said softly.

Hip beat his temples softly with his fists. Janie said, ‘There’ve been more. Not all big things like that. I dared him into wooing a girl once, strictly on his own, without using his talents. He lost out to someone else, an awfully. sweet kid who sold washing machines door-to-door and was doing pretty well. The kid wound up with acne rosacea.’

‘The nose like a beet. I’ve seen it.’

‘Like an extra-boiled, extra-swollen beet,’ she amended. ‘No job.’

‘No girl,’ he guessed.

She smiled and said,’ She stuck by him. They have a little ceramics business now. He stays in the back.’

He had a vague idea of where the business had come from. ‘Janie, I’ll take your word for it. There were lots of ‘em. But – why me? You went all out for me.’

‘Two good reasons. First, I saw him do that to you in town, make you charge his image in the glass, thinking it was him. It was the last piece of casual viciousness I ever wanted to see. Second, it was – well, it was you.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Listen,’ she said passionately, ‘we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a