Mr. Adam (18 page)

By the time General Kipp, commanding Eastern Defense Com
mand, Zone of the Interior, arrived with Colonel Phelps-Smythe, Homer was a little tight around the edges. Their entrance was rather awkward, as if it hadn't been properly rehearsed. They were accompanied by second lieutenants, complete with sidearms, and a photographer.

General Kipp, perspiring and unhappy, grasped Homer's hand, and shook it, and the photographer unloosed a bulb. “My dear Mr. Adam,” Kipp said woodenly, as if he were making a radio speech and had difficulty reading the script, “I hope you are well.”

“Take the glass out of his hand,” said Phelps-Smythe. A second lieutenant took the glass out of Homer's hand, and they started again. “My dear Mr. Adam,” the general repeated, “I hope you are well.”

“Give me back my drink,” said Homer.

“Give him back his drink,” the general ordered the second lieutenant.

The photographer took another shot, and the second lieutenant gave the drink back to Homer.

“How are things?” the general inquired.

“Things are very drunk out today,” Homer said.

“What's that?” said Phelps-Smythe. “What was that you said, Adam?”

“You can take the National Research Council, plus three large cyclotrons, and you can—” I don't think there is any use repeating what Homer told Phelps-Smythe, because such things are said every day. But Homer Adam's saying them was new. So I listened.

Phelps-Smythe puffed out like a turkey gobbler trying to impress his hens with his bravery. “Adam,” he said, “we are through with all this damn foolishness. From now on, Adam, you'll take orders! By God, you will!”

“He will indeed!” General Kipp agreed.

“No,” said Adam, “I won't.”

Phelps-Smythe felt around in his pockets and came up with a mimeographed sheet of paper, legal size. He put his heels together and read
from it as if it were the Articles of War. “This,” he began, “is the directive prepared by the War Department and signed by the President:

SUBJECT: HOMER ADAM.

     
1.
  
Homer Adam, civilian, is hereby declared Class AAA Strategic Material vital to the defense of the United States.

     
2.
  
The Department of War will be responsible for the maintenance and security of this property.

     
3.
  
Homer Adam, civilian, will at all times be subservient to, and conduct himself according to whatever rules and regulations shall be promulgated by the Chief of Staff, or Adjutant General, to carry out the purpose of Paragraphs 1 and 2.

     
4.
  
The National Research Council shall have the opportunity to use said Homer Adam for purposes of research upon the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but this in no way shall interfere with Paragraph 2.”

Phelps-Smythe folded his directive, and tucked it into a hip pocket. “There,” he said, “now you see.”

“Now I see what?” said Homer.

“Now you see where things stand. I guess that directive is pretty air tight, isn't it, General?”

“I'll say it is,” said General Kipp. “That doesn't leave any doubt about who's in control. The N.R.C. can't do a damn thing until they've got approval from the Joint Chiefs.”

Adam was thinking. “Does that mean,” he asked, “that nothing is going to happen?”

“Certainly not!” Phelps-Smythe said. “That only means that before the N.R.C. can do anything it has to have the approval of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which means Army, Navy, and Air. And of course before the Joint Chiefs approve anything it will require a
staff study from each branch of the service, and proposals will have to be made by the experts in each branch, and it probably will require special surveys to find the effect on the existing situation. Furthermore, public opinion must be considered. That's why we have a Public Relations Branch, and in addition, the international situation cannot be overlooked. And of course the whole thing will have to be co-ordinated with the War Plans Division. Isn't that so, General?”

“That is it, precisely,” said General Kipp.

“Why can't I take a little vacation?” Homer asked.

“Vacation!” shouted Phelps-Smythe. “Vacation! Now let me tell you, young man, this foolishness is all over. From now on your life is strictly business. Right at the first, I think we'll send you to one of the O.C. camps and give you a little basic training. Do you good. Just what you need. Knock this cockiness out of you.”

“I won't do it,” said Homer.

“You won't do it!” exploded Phelps-Smythe. “From now on you haven't got anything to say about what you'll do or won't do.”

“Oh, yes I have,” said Homer. “If you keep on being nasty, I won't eat.”

Phelps-Smythe started to say something, but General Kipp checked him and told Homer, “Now we don't want any trouble, Adam. We're only doing our duty as soldiers, you know. Come on, let's get going.”

So they took Homer away. Just as he left, Phelps-Smythe turned to me and said, “Remember, Smith—you and that Red secretary of yours—all this is Top Secret.”

Marge made a face at him, but I don't think he noticed it.

We caught the Congressional back to New York. It didn't take us long to get out of the hotel, because Marge had done most of the packing the night before. This I laid to intuition, but she denied it, and said it was only common sense. She claimed that I was addled, perhaps by strain, and wasn't able to see things with the proper perspective. She said that immediately after a man is kicked in the teeth
by a woman, a great clarity creeps into his brain, and that this clarity persists until scar tissue—in the shape of another woman—grows over his memory.

Just before we got on the train I bought a late edition of an evening paper. The headline said: “ADAM BALKS; A.I. OUT!” and under this was another headline, which read: “Army Takes Over; President for N.R.C.” There was a front page editorial, entitled, “No Cause for Alarm.”

CHAPTER 14

S
o we settled down in the brownstone house on West Tenth Street, first floor; the bed known as Smith Field, and resumed our normal mode of living. I found myself doing eight hours of rewrite a day, and liking it. It was like occupational therapy. I wrote about the opening of the state trout season, and I covered the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue, and I wrote a piece about the selection of the country's ten best-dressed men.

I rewrote our cables from Delhi and Chungking about the famine, but of course that could hardly be considered news, because it was a running story, the same day after day. I wrote about the over-production of pigs, and the shortage of meat; the bumper wheat crop, and the possible rationing of bread; the need for subsidies for the Southern cotton farmers, and the black market in textiles; our record employment, and our record poverty. In God's Country everything was normal, and for a considerable space of time nothing disturbed our American Way of Life.

I kept an eager eye open for dispatches from Washington about
Mr. Adam. In the AP report, you could always find the slug, “Adam.” Even when there was no news of Homer, I knew that somebody in the AP Bureau in Washington had to sit down and write a piece about him, and his progress, every night, and around noon some reporter sat himself before a typewriter, confronted by a slug saying, “New lead Adam.”

So I kept watching Adam, just as a released suspect in a murder keeps alert for news of the crime. Mostly, the Adam stories were wooden and almost newsless. The N.R.C. was confident that, now it had been placed in charge of Adam, science would solve the riddle of what had happened to the world post-Mississippi. The N.R.C. had enlisted all the top scientists of the country in the scientific battle for re-fertilization. The N.R.C. requested more funds from the President, and claimed it must expand to meet the crisis.

Having once been stricken with the disease, I found the symtoms familiar. I was not overly surprised when one day I read, in a single paragraph on page twenty-two of the
World-Telegram
, that Percy Klutz, formerly of N.R.P., had joined N.R.C. as administrative assistant. Nor was I surprised when I read that Nate Gableman, an experienced public relations expert, had been loaned to N.R.C. by the Department of the Interior, where he had just arrived from N.R.P. Prior to that, Gableman had held a number of government positions. About a half dozen of them were listed.

However, that was all S.O.P. What was truly puzzling were some of the stories out of the War Department. There was a little squib that said the War Department was sending Homer Adam to Camp Blanding, in Florida, to absorb sunshine and recreation, because his duties in Washington had been so arduous. There were stories about meetings of the Joint Chiefs, at which a number of things were discussed, including Arctic maneuvers, and Mr. Adam. The War Department sometimes said its Arctic maneuvers were not directed at any specific power, but really at the elements, but it never explained about about Mr. Adam. Finally, there were stories about the difficul
ties of using Mr. Adam, and hints that Adam wasn't really essential, at all. He could be useful, it was admitted, but the N.R.C. didn't regard him as absolutely essential.

One day Marge and I went to a double-header between the Yanks and the Nats. We were propped up on our pillows in Smith Field, watching the remnants of the immortal Yankees make fools of themselves around second base, and I was telling Marge about Ruth and Gehrig and Dickey, and without warning my favorite sports announcer, Malcolm Parkinson, poked his ruddy face into our bedroom, and said, inspecting a sheet of yellow teletype paper:

“Well, folks, I'm sorry to have to interrupt this ball game, but we've just received an important news flash. But before I read this flash I want to tell you that for calm nerves—nerves able to withstand the shock of modern living—smoke . . .” And he went on, and on. Finally he finished his commercial, and said, “And here is that flash, folks. Homer Adam ruined! Yes, sir, a flash from Washington tells us that Homer Adam has been ruined. That is all for now, but as we receive additional details we'll give them to you, so you might as well keep tuned to this exciting ball game, with the Yanks gamely fighting against a driving Washington team which at this moment has a six run lead. And the next batter for the Nats it . . .”

I switched him off, and his face faded off the screen, looking a bit disturbed. “I knew it!” I said. “I knew it would happen.”

“You knew what?” Marge asked.

“I knew that they'd sterilize Homer!”

“How do you know he was sterilized? All they said was that he was ruined.”

“How else could he be ruined?”

“Oh!” Marge said. “Isn't that awful!”

I turned on our bedside radio. It was beside itself. It rattled as if men from Mars had appeared, and it wished to duck under the sheets. It said that the War Department had informed the President
that the National Research Council had sterilized Mr. Adam. It said this had happened several weeks ago. It said that the announcement was withheld until it was utterly certain that Mr. Adam had been sterilized. It said that the National Research Council announced it was a complete accident. The War Department agreed with the N.R.C. that it was a complete accident, and the President agreed with the War Department. Nobody was to blame.

Marge stared at the radio as if it were foul and repugnant and untouchable. “There it goes,” she whispered.

“There goes what?”

“Everything. Just everything. That pitiful little man!”

“He's not pitiful,” I said, simply for something to say.

“He is. He is, too, pitiful. When I think what's happened to him it makes me feel unclean, as if I'd seen a murder, and hadn't done anything to stop it.”

“We all did our best,” I said.

“Did we?” she asked, not of me, but of herself. “Did we really?”

I felt a little wave of anger and resentment ripple over me, like the first chill that heralds the onset of fever. I wasn't exactly sure at whom I was angry, but somebody had hurt and damaged my wife, and I wanted to strike back. I wondered who had sterilized Adam, and how, and why. Somehow, the radio didn't go into that part of it. The radio contented itself with announcing that Homer Adam had been ruined, and then erudite commentators rushed to the microphones to assure us that the ruination of Adam wasn't necessarily fatal to mankind. Their conjectures were that Adam had already contributed as much as he could to science, and anyway, Russia had never denied possessing the two potent Mongolians. Looking at the whole matter logically, and without undue hysteria, it could be seen that the loss of Adam's services wasn't so important after all. Perhaps the situation in Indo-China was of more immediate importance, and they spoke learnedly of the situation in Indo-China.

Our telephone rang, and it was J.C. Pogey, and he wanted to know whether I'd heard the news, and I said I had, and he said, “I think you'd better handle the local angle on the Adam story?”

“What local angle?” I asked.

He said there were a good many local angles. He reminded me that some of the N.R.C. directors lived in New York, and that they should be interviewed, and Adam himself had returned to Tarrytown, according to the Washington Bureau. The story wasn't by any means cleaned up. As a matter of fact, the details of Adam's sterilization remained a mystery. I said I'd get right on it, and as I shaved and dressed the pattern began to take shape in my mind. The first person I was going to visit was Felix Pell. He might be the last, too.

I tried to remember where I had cached the Browning. It was my one souvenir of the war, a handsomely machined, Belgian-made automatic. I rummaged through the hall closet until I found it, and Marge saw me drop it into my coat pocket. “Stephen! Why are you taking that gun?” she demanded.

I didn't reply.

“Don't be ridiculous. If the police find that gun they'll throw you in jail because of the Sullivan law. Anyway, you can't hit anything with it more than ten feet away.”

“What I'm going to shoot,” I said, “won't be more than ten feet away.”

Marge stared at me, astonished as if I'd just announced I was a bigamist. “Stephen,” she said, “are you serious?”

“I am,” I said.

“I won't let you go out of the house with that weapon.”

I took her by the shoulders. Maybe I was a little rough. I said, “Darling, up to now I have been a mild and civilized man. But now I have a killing to do.”

I left before she could say anything more.

I went up to Columbia, and the home of Felix Pell. The maid opened the door a crack, and I could see it was secured by a chain
latch. On occasion, I think it is fair to use deception. Mostly I think it is crude and stupid, but once in a while, when the stakes are high enough, it is the only thing to do. “Quickly,” I said, “undo that chain and let me in. Before the reporters come. They'll be here in a minute.”

She blinked at me, and said, “Dr. Pell told me especially he doesn't want to see reporters.” She unhooked the latch and let me in.

“Naturally not,” I said.

“I don't think he wants to see anybody,” she said. “Who are you?”

“Tell him Mr. Smith is calling,” I said, “on a matter of greatest importance.” She scuttled upstairs, and I followed her. I followed her into Pell's bedroom, morose with old-fashioned walnut furniture. Pell was propped up in bed, his picturesque head supported by pillows. He glared at me, one eye winking erratically. Since I had last seen him, he had developed a tic.

The maid looked at Pell, and she looked at me, and she saw that we knew each other, and she vanished. “How did you get in here?” he demanded.

The standard defense, in a killing, is that everything either goes black, or it goes red, and in any case the first thing the killer knows is that the other person is dead and he is standing there with a smoking gun in his hand. The verdict, his attorney hopes, will be temporary insanity. It isn't exactly like that. It is simply that things are hazy, and move with annoying slowness. I took the Browning out of my pocket. The hammer caught in the lining, and it seemed a long time before I ripped it loose. I thumbed the safety, and it released with a definite click. A nice, final, decisive sound, that click. “This isn't going to be much satisfaction for anyone except me,” I said, “but for me it will be fun.”

“You're out of your head,” Pell said clinically. “You're unbalanced.”

I was going to shoot him through the middle of the chest, just under the chin, where the hem of his old-fashioned nightgown met the pallid flesh. Then I was going to shoot him again, in the same
place, to make sure. “So you finished off Homer Adam,” I said. “You were very thorough, and very clever. And it was all a deplorable accident! A most deplorable accident!”

“No, it wasn't an accident,” Pell said.

“I know it wasn't an accident. You finished off Homer Adam, and everyone else, deliberately, just as I'm going to slam a nine-millimeter slug through you deliberately.”

He dropped back against his pillows. “All right,” he said, “go ahead.” He folded his dried, tallow-yellow hands, one against the other, and repeated, “Go ahead. I am tired. I am very tired and there is nothing more I can do. I don't suppose it matters whether I die quickly, now, or that I live for several months or years. Please when you shoot be sure I am dead, because I do not want to die slowly.”

This was not what I had expected him to say. He was saying all the wrong things. “Tell me,” I said, “what have you and your buddies got against humanity that made you do it?”

Dr. Pell groaned. “Against humanity? Why, I haven't got anything against humanity,” he said. “I have always felt that I'd devoted my life to humanity. I know you won't believe it now, and considering what you know—the limitations of what you know—I can hardly blame you. Now please go ahead and shoot me.”

The Browning was beginning to feel heavy in my hand, and I felt rather ridiculous, standing there, threatening this old man. I let it fall to my side. “That doesn't make sense. You admit that Homer Adam wasn't sterilized by accident, and yet you say—”

“He certainly was not sterilized by accident,” Dr. Pell said, anger cracking his voice. “He did it himself!”

“Did it himself?”

“Yes, he committed what amounted to sexual suicide.”

This was a possibility that I had not considered. But it was so very possible, and so intriguing, that I knew I could not kill Pell until I found out whether it was so. I shoved the gun back into my
pocket, knowing immediately that I would never shoot Pell now, and said, “Tell me about it.”

“It is all so exasperating, and so confusing, that I don't like to discuss it,” Pell said. “I wish you would please go ahead and kill me, because if I am forced to write a paper on this business I shall certainly lose my mind.”

“What's so exasperating and confusing?”

Pell saw that there was no chance that I would shoot him, and he said, with resignation, “I suppose I'd better tell you about it, because I don't think you will leave until I do. In the first place, there were the complications. As you know, we only needed Adam for a few days of tests, but I was never able to get my hands on him. I found that all I was doing was attending meetings and conferences. I believe it was a conspiracy.”

“That wasn't a conspiracy,” I said. “It was just ordinary procedure.”

“Obstacles sprouted from the streets,” Pell went on. “People sat up nights thinking up reasons why we couldn't begin operations.”

“I know what you mean.”

“We were patient. Finally all the boards and committees and panels had approved all their plans, and Adam was delivered to the laboratory. He was calm, and in good health. We were very careful, because much of our equipment and apparatus was designed to reproduce the rays and radiations which we believe were unloosed in the Mississippi explosion. The first thing we did was warn Adam not to walk in certain areas, or go near certain machines.”