Field Study (3 page)

"What do you want to see?"

"This city at play in the pre-dawn hours."

Pake gave a humorful grunt. "My wife would suit you better in the role of guide. She's playing pretty hard right now."

He explained. He wanted to explain. Betty was suddenly vivid in his mind: beautiful but fretful, at odds with life, yearning for the opiate of soft lights and sweet music, afraid to face herself, afraid to proclaim her interest in humanity in case such a generalized belief should hurt her in some way.

Trancore listened sympathetically as Pake spoke of the broken date and his own preference for the quiet life.

Trancore said, "Surely she'll appreciate the irony of this when you tell her?"

"The hell she will! If she knows I've been painting the town without her, even in line of duty — "

Trancore asked, "Do you know where she's likely to be?"

Pake looked at him curiously. "There's a couple of spots she fancies."

"Could we go there a little later?" He held up his hand as Pake was about to veto the idea. "I promise you there'll be no unpleasant consequences if we meet her."

Pake believed him. Pake would have believed in a pan-handling green hippo with puce spots at that moment. The apparition would have been absorbed without comment into the basic fantasy of this situation.

THEY started at Brondine's, where it was boasted that any potable man had ever devised for the delectation of palate and the drugging of senses could be served — with second choice on the house if first choice wasn't in stock.

Trancore asked for the first twelve favorites, took them in turn without a blink.

Pake stuck to rye, watched, and listened.

"Your palates," observed Trancore, "are more civilized than your minds."

"But why," asked Pake in wonderment, "are you still upright?"

"I make sure to eliminate the poisons in the alcohol, and thus the toxic effects. As a rule, I don't drug. But when in Rome — -"

Something lit up in Pake's mind. Fantasy came to fantasy. He remembered a story. "Now I get it. You're from the future!"

Trancore laughed, genuinely. "Your imagination deserves something better than comic strips to work on. It's fascinating, but depressing, to see science negated by superstition, and your concept of time is the greatest superstition. Let's go. A game shop next."

He meant a pinball arcade.

He cheated abominably. Pake watched a steel ball bump the thousand pin twenty times, defying gravity. "Surgical manipulative technique," Trancore murmured.

A strabismic attendant, called by the clanging of the surfeited machine, shouldered through the matching crowd and squinted unbelievingly.

"Whatcha doon?" The attendant demanded menacingly.

"Or this," Trancore said gently. "The same technique."

The man pressed a hand to his eyes and made an animal noise. Then he looked at his fingers, held up one, two, three; blinked at the lights.

Pake grasped Trancore's arm, pulled him outside. He was suddenly quite sober. There was a strange harshness in his voice.

"Do you have to impress me? The world needs your knowledge and" — he waved at the glitter of Broadway — "you fritter time and energy mooching around here. You don't cure a girl of T.B., but you fix that old thug's squint."

"A whim. Alone, I can do so little."

"Why do you do anything?"

TRANCORE fingered a green bill reflectively. "Even a healer must eat. Field research is expensive. And we are pledged to live as far as possible within the framework of the society we examine, applying our skills to that end. In that way, we reduce the possibility of observation affecting the subject we observe.

"By using the hypnotic and telekinetic techniques which I have developed in my own profession, I could obviously earn sufficient of your tokens for subsistence during my period of study by gambling, for instance; but that would not be ethical."

Pake imagined a poker player who not only reshuffled cards as they were being dealt to him, but who could disappear, if his opponents queried his success, by erasing the fact of his presence from their minds.

"You could teach — " he began.

"And run foul of the witch-doctors who briefed you yesterday? Think, Mr. Pake! Would you give a hypodermic and a gallon of cocaine to an aboriginal tribe suffering from toothaches? Besides, these techniques have taken me five hundred years to learn."

"That's why I thought — "

"That I was from the future? I might be, in terms of possibility. We are," said Trancore, "no older than you, as a race, in terms of universal evolution. But as individuals, we are longer-lived. The biggest single advance you will make as a race will be when you increase the life-span of the individual."

Pake thought that over, and fantasy was far from his mind.

"You could help us," he said.

"We may, when you become more than ephemerate. And, for psychological reasons, that must be achieved by your own efforts."

"Are we so contemptible?"

"Would we study you if you were? Our architects, our musicians, even our fiction writers do fieldwork in this territory, write scholarly theses when they return. Anthropology, in our sense of the term, embraces all the arts and sciences. We are all scholars. Occasionally we innovate, and you benefit."

"Why do you tell me this?"

Trancore shrugged. For the first time, Pake noticed that they were standing in the middle of a busy side-walk. They might have been in the middle of the Gobi desert for all the notice people took of them. A plump man walked straight toward them, frowned, then detoured carefully around the spot where they stood. Pake wondered what the man thought he saw. Probably a puddle or broken-up side-walk.

"I like you," Trancore said simply. "And you will remember very little that you can impart to others and expect any measure of belief. And you have imagination enough to control your terrestrial chauvinism and your natural resentment at being studied. It may comfort you to know that, in the physical sciences, your race is considered to be quite well advanced."

It did, somehow. Yet —

ALL the niggling, back-mindbiting inferiorities that man has ever suffered, from the time he was first chased by a sabertooth to his feeling of helplessness when science outran his emotional control, suddenly seemed to crowd together into Pake's brain for a staggering second.

"Resentment isn't the word," Pake said slowly. "I could kill you."

"But you won't. Others would. Now you understand why our visits are unannounced. And they will remain so until all men are as essentially civilized — that is to say, non-aggressive — as you are."

Pake knew the question was really unimportant and that its true answer would be incomprehensible, anyway. But he asked it.

Trancore smiled. "Your preoccupation with the physical sciences . . . No, I don't have a spaceship garaged anywhere. Your popular concept of time may be superstition, but the limiting speed of light is not. We don't travel. We arrive. I'm afraid the distinction is not clear to you, but it will have to do.

"And now — " The slender man took Pake's arm. Crowds brushed against them again. "Quick visits to a burlesque show, an all-night cinema. And perhaps we could look in at those nightclubs where your wife might be. I owe you a favor. Then I must return home."

They cabbed to three clubs before they found Betty.

"You are not members, we are booked up, it is evening dress only," objected the hastily summoned manager.

"Are you mad?" asked Trancore pleasantly. "Or is your memory so very short?"

The manager thumb-and-fingered his eyes, then beamed at them.

"Good evening, gentlemen. Good to see you again.. This way."

"Teach me that trick," muttered Pake as they followed him.

He looked down at his open overcoat and tweed suit.

"Tell me, am I wearing a soft shirt or a boiled one?"

"Boiled."

"Good. I like to be formal."

Trancore stopped at the entrance to the big circular room. The manager left them and hurried back to his private office with the conviction of a frantic headache to be numbed with aspirin immediately.

"Do you see her?" Trancore asked.

Pake glanced around the soft-lit tables. He looked hard at one table. He made a wry face.

"Boiled," he said, "has more than one meaning. Or maybe Betty just can't resist using that torso of hers as a prop. I wish she wasn't wearing that dress at that angle of inclination. Would you think me so uncivilized, Trancore, if I walked up and poked Football Shoulders in one of those roving eyes of his?"

"You are not altogether without blame in this arisement," Trancore observed mildly. "You make insufficient allowance for her. You are reasonably well-adjusted. She is not."

"I'd like to adjust that damned dress."

"Primitive possessiveness. You disappoint me, Pake," Trancore said, but his eyes were laughing.

Betty looked up as they approached. Her eyes weren't quite focused. "Frankie . . . What the hell! Look-it what the river washed up!"

She grabbed the table for support as Football Shoulders rose suddenly, rubbed his forehead.

"Phone call or — or something," he muttered. "Pardon me. Must go."

Betty did a double-take like a puppet as the shoulders lumbered off. "Wheel me home. What goes — "

Pake said, "Meet Mr. Trancore."

TWO men walked slowly along the footpath of a great girdered bridge. The taller man had a hesitation in his walk and stooped a little, as if burdened.

Halfway across, they stopped and watched in silence the slow dawn rose-gilding the towers of Manhattan.

A tugboat below, looking no larger than a water beetle, made its loud, self-important noise. As much noise as an ocean-going liner.

Pake had put Betty in a cab, had walked with Trancore, had asked many more questions, and learned very little. Now he asked the final question as Trancore turned and held out his slender hand.

"Good-by, Mr. Pake."

"At least tell me — which star?"

"You haven't seen or named it yet. Take care of Mr. Trancore for me, won't you? You'll find his address in this pocket. Good-by."

Pake took the hand. For a crazy moment, despite what he knew, he expected it to be withdrawn from his grasp suddenly, to see a figure drawn heavenward along a lancing path of light.

But there was merely a sigh from the lips of the slender man, who collapsed limply into Pake's ready arms.

PAKE told his chief, "Those quacks can examine him until they drive the poor devil crazy, but he won't be able to tell them any more. His name is Chandra Trancore, a second-rate Doctor who disappeared from his practice in Madras province ten months ago. He has less idea of what he has been doing during those months than they have."

"How do you explain it?"

Pake stood by the window of the office and inhaled deeply. Somewhere nearby there was a window-box with gardenias. He caught their scent as well as if they had been under his nose.

He said, "I don't. And I'd like you to hurry through my resignation as fast as you can, chief."

"I still don't understand why, Frankie. We're pals, aren't we, apart from official status? I know I've had to drive you hard lately. Had to drive myself, too. Sorry I put you on this off-routine stunt. But if you want to rest up for a while—"

Pake inhaled again, audibly. Someone was cooking spaghetti bolognese quite a distance away. "I want to be free to take legal action on behalf of Trancore if those witch-doctors have him arrested on some trumped-up charge just to give themselves more time to examine him. I'll take personal responsibility for seeing him home to India."

"You can do that without resigning. I'll fix special leave, if you insist on being crazy."

"That's not all, though." Pake wondered how he could explain, regretfully decided it was impossible. "I'm taking an intensive two year course for a new career."

"So you told me. I thought you were drunk. Anyway, how will Betty take to a fool idea like that? She goes for the bright lights, doesn't she? And I thought her — nerves were edgy."

"She's all for it," Pake said, and was amused at his chief's gape-mouthed disbelief. "A neurosis is a disease. And she met Trancore. I'll send you a card when we get started."

THE card arrived three years later. It was headed:

M'Beli Medical Mission Station Upper Congo

Pake wrote: ".
.. probably the most backward tribe mentally and physically in the whole of Africa. Some trouble from the witch-Doctors at first, but I've settled down quite nicely now and I think they're beginning to trust me, with Betty's help. The women love her. Tribal customs are fascinating. Watch out for my name in the Anthropological Review.
"