Selected Stories (51 page)

Did they throw you out, gal?

Old Sam had asked her that; he knew, even when she didn’t. But now, in this strange silver moment, she knew; she knew it all. Yes, they had thrown her out. They had let her be a dead man’s dream until she was nearly dead herself. They never let her be Mary Haunt who wanted to fix the new curtains or bake a berry pie, and have a square hedge along the Elm Street side and go to meeting on Sundays. They had marked her destiny on her face and body and on the clothes she wore, and stamped it into her speech and fixed her hair the way they wanted it, and to the bottom of her heart she was angry.

And now, all of a sudden, and for the very first time, it occurred to her that she could, if she wanted, be Mary Haunt her own self, and be it right there at home; that home was the best place to be that very good thing, and she could replace their disappointment with a very real pride. She could be home before the Strawberry Festival at the church; she would wear an apron and get suds on her forehead when she pushed her hair back, the way Bitty did sometimes.

So Mary Haunt sat on a fire engine, next to the high-school librarian who was enveloped in a tremendous raincoat, saying that everything was burned up, lost; and about to say, “I’ve got to go home now.” But she said, “I can go home now.” She looked into Miss Schmidt’s eyes and smiled a smile the older woman had never seen before. “I can, I can! I can go home now!” Mary Haunt sang. Impulsively she took Miss Schmidt’s hand and squeezed it. She looked into her face and laughed, “I’m not mad any more, not at you or anybody … and I’ve been a little stinker and I’m sorry; I’m going
home!
” And Miss Schmidt looked at the smudged face, the scorched hair drawn back into a childish ponytail and held by a rubber band, the spotless princess dress. “Why,” said Miss Schmidt, “you’re beautiful, just beautiful!”

“I’m not. I’m seventeen, only seventeen,” Mary Haunt said out of a wild happiness, “and I’m going home and bake a cake.” And she hugged her mother’s picture and smiled; even the ruined house did not glow quite this way.

EXCERPT FROM FIELD EXPEDITION [NOTEBOOK]:
[! ! !] Did it ever work! [You]’d think these specimens had used Synapse Beta sub Sixteen all their lives! If [we] had a [tenth] as much stamina [we] could [lie down] in a [bed] of paradoxes and go to [sleep].

[We] will observe for a [short period] longer, and then pack up and leave. This is a [fascinating] place to visit, but [I] wouldn’t want to [live] here.

It was October, and possibly the last chance they’d have for a picnic, and the day agreed and was beautiful for them. They found a fine spot where a stand of birch grew on both sides of an old split-rail fence, and a brook went by just out of sight. After they were finished O’Banion lay on his stomach in the sun, and thoughtfully scratched his upper lip with a bit of straw.

His wife laughed softly.

“Hm?”

“You’re thinking about the Bittelmans again.”

“How’d you know?”

“Just used to it. When you go off into yourself and look astonished and mystified and annoyed all at once, it’s the Bittelmans again.”

“Harmless hobby,” said Halvorsen, and smiled.

“Is it, Phil? Tonio, how would you like me to go all pouty and coy and complain that you’ve spent more time thinking about them than about me?”

“Do by all means go all pouty and coy. I’ll divorce you.”

“Tony!”

“Well,” he said lazily, “I had so much fun marrying you in the first place that it might be worth doing again. Where’s Robin?”

“Right b—Oh, dear,
Robin!
”

Down in the cleft, where the brook gurgled, Robin’s voice answered instantly. “Frogs here, Mommy. Deelicious!”

“Does he eat ’em raw?” asked Halvorsen mildly.

Sue laughed. “That just means ‘pretty’ or ‘desirable’ or even ‘bright green.’ Robin, don’t you dare get wet, you promise me?”

“I promise me,” said the voice.

“And don’t go away!”

“I don’t.”

“Why don’t they show up?” demanded O’Banion. “Just once, that’s all I’d ever want. Just show their faces and answer two questions.”

“Why don’t who—oh, Sam and Bitty. What two questions?”

“What they did to us, how and why.”

“That’s one question, counselor?” asked Halvorsen.

“Yes. Two: What they are.”

“Now, why’d you say ‘what’ instead of ‘who’?”

“It comes to that.” He rolled over and sat up. “Honey, would you mind if I ran down everything we’ve found out so far, just once more?”

“Summarize and rest your case?”

“I don’t know about resting it … reviewing the brief.”

“I often wonder why you call it a brief,” Halvorsen chuckled.

O’Banion rose and went to the fence. Putting one hand on a slender birch trunk, he hopped upward, turning, to come to rest sitting on the top rail. “Well, one thing I’m sure of: Sam and Bitty could
do
things to people, and they did it to all of us. And I refuse to believe that they did it with logic and persuasion.”

“They could be pretty persuasive.”

“It was more than that,” O’Banion said impatiently. “What they did to me changed everything about me.”

“How very intriguing.”

“Everything about the way I
think,
hussy. I can look back on that now and realize that I was roped, thrown, and notched. When he wanted me to answer questions I had to answer them, no matter what I was thinking. When he was through with me he turned me loose and made me go back to my business as if nothing had happened. Miss Schmidt told me the same thing.” He shifted his weight on the rail and said excitedly, “Now there’s our prize exhibit. All of us were—changed—by this thing, but Reta—she’s a
really
different person.”

“She wasn’t more changed than the others,” said Sue soberly. “She’s thirty-eight years old. It’s an interesting age because when you’re there and look five years older, and then spruce up the way she did and look five years younger, it looked like twenty years’ difference, not ten. That’s all cosmetics and clothes, though. The real difference is as quiet and deep as—well, Phil here.”

Again Halvorsen found a smile. “Perhaps you’re right. She shifted from library to teaching. It was a shift from surrounding herself with other people’s knowledge to surrounding other people with hers. She’s alive.”

“I’ll say. Boyfriend too.”

“Quiet and deep,” said O’Banion thoughtfully, swinging his feet. “That’s right. All you get out of Halvorsen when you ask him about it is a smile like a light going on and, ‘Now it’s right for me to be me.’”

“That’s it—all of it,” chuckled Halvorsen happily.

“And Mary Haunt, bless her. Second happiest child I ever saw.
Robin! Are you all right?
”

“Yis!” came the voice.

“I’m still not satisfied,” said O’Banion. “I have the feeling we’re staring at very petty and incidental results of some very important cause. In a moment of acute stress I made a decision which affected my whole life.”

“Our.”

He blew her a kiss. “Reta Schmidt says the same thing, though she wouldn’t go into detail. And maybe that’s what Halvorsen means when he says, ‘
Now,
it’s right for me …’
You
annoy me.”

“Sir!” she cried with mock horror.

He laughed. “You know what I mean. Only you got exposed to the Bittelmans and didn’t change. Everybody else got wonderful,” he smiled, “You just stayed wonderful. Now what’s so special about you?”

“Must we sit here and be—”

“Shush. Think back. Was there any
different
kind of thing that happened to you that night, some kind of emergency thinking you did that was above and beyond anything you thought you could do?”

“Not that I remember.”

Suddenly he brought his fist down on his thigh. “There
was!
Remember right after we got out of the house, the wall fell on us? You dragged me back and held me still and that attic vent dropped right around us?”

“That. Yes, I remember. But it wasn’t special. It just made sense.”

“
Sense?
I’d like to put a computer on that job—after scorching it half through and kicking it around a while. Somehow you calculated how fast that thing was falling and how much ground it would cover when it hit. You computed that against our speed outward. You located the attic vent opening and figured where it would land, and whether or not it could contain us both. Then you estimated our speed
if
we went toward the safe spot and concluded that we could make it.
Then
you went into action, more or less over my dead body to boot. All that in—” He closed his eyes to relive the moment. “—all of one and a half seconds absolute tops. It wasn’t
special?
”

“No, it wasn’t,” she said positively. “It was an emergency, don’t you see? A real emergency, not only because we might get hurt, but in terms of all we were to each other and all we could be if only you—”

“Well, I did,” he smiled. “But I still don’t understand you. You mean you think more, not less—widen your scope instead of narrowing your focus when it’s that kind of emergency? You can think of all those things at once, better and faster and more accurately?”

Halvorsen suddenly lunged and caught O’Banion’s foot, pulling it sharply upward. He shouted
“Yoop!”
His right hand whipped up and back and scrabbled at the tree-trunk; his torso twisted and his left hand shot straight down. His legs flailed and straightened; for a moment he see-sawed on the rail on his kidneys. At last he got his left hand on the rail and pulled himself upward to sit again. “Hey! What do you think you’re—”

“Proving a point,” said Halvorsen. “Look, Tony: without warning you were thrown off balance. What did you do? You reached out for that tree-trunk without looking—got it, too; you knew just how fast and how far to go. But at the same time you put your left hand straight down, ready to catch your weight if you went down to the ground. Meantime you banged around with your legs and shifted your weight this way just enough to make a new balance on top. Now tell me: did you sit there after I pushed you and figure all those things out, one by one?”

“By golly no. Snop—snap—synapses.”

“What?”

“Synapses. Sort of pathways in the brain that get paved better and better as you do something over and over. After a while they happen without conscious thought. Keeping your balance is that kind of thing, on the motor level. But don’t tell me you have a sort of … personal-cultural inner ear—something that makes you reach reflexively in terms of your past and your future and … but that’s what happened to me that night!” He stared at Halvorsen. “You figured that out long ago, you and your IBM head!”

“It always happens if the emergency’s a bad one,” Sue said composedly. “Sometimes when you don’t even know it is an emergency. But what’s remarkable? Aren’t drowning men supposed to see their whole lives pass before them?”

“Did you say that always happens with your emergencies?”

“Well, doesn’t it?”

Suddenly he began to chuckle softly, and at her questioning look he said, “You remind me of something a psychologist told me once. A man was asked to describe his exact sensations on getting drunk. ‘Just like anybody else,’ he says ‘Well, describe it,’ says the doctor. The man says, ‘Well, first your face gets a little flushed and your tongue gets thick, and after a while your ears begin to wiggle—’ Sue, honey, I’ve got news for you. Maybe you react like that in important moments, a great big shiny flash of truth and proportional relationships, but believe me, other people don’t. I never did until that night.
That’s it!
” he yelled at that top of his voice.

From down the slope came a clear little voice, “Wash ’at noice?”

Sue and Halvorsen smiled at one another and then O’Banion said earnestly, “That’s what Bitty and Sam gave us—a synaptic reflex like the equilibrium mechanisms, but bigger—much bigger. A human being is an element in a whole culture, and the culture itself is alive … I suppose the species could be called, as a whole, a living thing. And when we found ourselves in a stress situation which was going to affect us signally—dangerously, or just importantly—we reacted to it in the way I did just now when you pushed me—only on a cultural level. It’s as if Sam and Bitty had found a way to install or develop that ‘balancing’ mechanism in us. It resolved some deep personal conflict of Halvorsen’s; it snapped Mary out of a dangerous delusion and Miss Schmidt out of a dangerous retreat. And, well, you know about me.”

“I can’t believe people don’t think that way in emergencies!” she said, dazed.

“Maybe some do,” said Halvorsen. “Come to think of it, people do some remarkable things under sudden stress; they make not-obvious but very right choices under pressure, like the man who cracks a joke and averts a panic or the boy who throws himself on a grenade to save his squad. They’ve surveyed themselves in terms of all they are and measured that against their surroundings and all it is—all in a split fraction of a second. I guess everyone has it. Some of it.”

“Whatever this synapse is, the Bittelmans gave it to us … yes, and maybe set the house on fire too … why? Testing? Testing what—just us, or human beings?
What are they?
” demanded the lawyer.

“Gone, that’s what,” said Halvorsen.

For a very brief time, he was wrong to say that.

EXCERPT FROM FIELD EXPEDITION [NOTEBOOK]:
[Our] last [hour] here, so [we] [induced] three of the test specimens to [locus B] for final informal observation. [Smith] pretends to a certain [chagrin]. After all, [he] [says] all [we] did was to come [sizable abstract number] of [terrestrially immeasurable distance unit]s, forgoing absolutely the company of [our] [    ] and the pleasures of the [    ]; strain [our] ingenuity and our [technical equipment] to the [break]ing point, even getting trapped into using that [miserable impractical] power supply and [charge]ing it up every [month]—all to detect and analyze the incidence of Synapse Beta sub Sixteen. And here these specimens sit, locating and defining the Synapse during a brief and idle conversation! Actually, [I] [think] [Smith] is [pleased] with them for it. We shall now [dismantle] the [widget] and the [wadget] and [take off].