Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human

Just outside of town where the highway forks, the driver asked timidly, ‘Which way?’ and it was Hip who said, ‘Left.’ Janie came out of herself enough to give him a swift, grateful glance and sank out of sight behind her face.

At length there was a difference in her, in some inexplicable way, though she still sat numbly staring at nothing. He said quietly, ‘Better?’

She put her eyes on him and, appreciably later, her vision. A rueful smile plucked at the corners of her mouth. ‘Not worse anyway.’

‘Scared,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said, his face frozen. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Oh Hip, I’m sorry; I’m more sorry than I can say. I didn’t expect this—not so soon. And I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do about it now.’

‘Why?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘You can’t tell me? Or you can’t tell me yet? ’

She said, carefully, ‘I told you what you’d have to do—go back and back; find all the places you’ve been and the things that happened, right to the beginning. You can do it, given time.’ The terror was in her face again and turned to a sadness. ‘But there isn’t any more time.’

He laughed almost joyfully. ‘There is.’ He seized her hand. ‘This morning I found the cave. That’s two years back, Janie! I know where it is, what I found there: some old clothes, children’s clothes. An address, the house with the porte-cochere. And my piece of tubing, the one thing I ever saw that proved I was right in searching for… for… Well,’ he laughed, ‘that’s the next step backward. The important thing is that I found the cave, the biggest step yet. I did it in thirty minutes or so and I did it without even trying. Now I’ll try. You say we have no more time. Well, maybe not weeks, maybe not days; do we have a day, Janie? Half a day?’

Her face began to glow. ‘Perhaps we have,’ she said. ‘Perhaps… Driver! This will do.’

It was she who paid the driver; he did not protest it. They stood at the town limits, a place of open, rolling fields barely penetrated by the cilia of the urban animal: here a fruit stand, there a gas station, and across the road, some too-new dwellings of varnished wood and obtrusive stucco. She pointed to the high meadows.

‘We’ll be found,’ she said flatly, ‘but up there we’ll be alone… and if—anything comes, we can see it coming.’

On a knoll in the foothills, in a green meadow where the regrowth barely cloaked the yellow stubble of a recent mowing, they sat facing one another, where each commanded half a horizon.

The sun grew high and hot, and the wind blew and a cloud came and went. Hip Barrows worked; back and back he worked. And Janie listened, waited, and all the while she watched, her clear deep eyes flicking from side to side over the open land.

Back and back… dirty and mad, Hip Barrows had taken nearly two years to find the house with the porte-cochere. For the address had a number and it had a street; but no town, no city.

It took three years from the insane asylum to the cave. A year to find the insane asylum from the county clerk’s office. Six months to find the county clerk from the day of his discharge. From the birth of his obsession until they threw him out of the Service, another six months.

Seven plodding years from starch and schedules, promise and laughter, to a dim guttering light in a jail cell. Seven years snatched away, seven years wingless and falling.

Back through the seven years he went until he knew what he had been before they started.

It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster.

Still young, still brilliant as ever, but surrounded by puzzling rejection. Lieutenant Barrows found himself with too much spare time, and he hated it.

The range was small, in some respects merely a curiosity, a museum, for there was a good deal of obsolete equipment. The installation itself, for that matter, was obsolete in that it had been superseded years ago by larger and more efficient defence nets and was now part of no system. But it had a function in training gunners and their officers, radar men, and technicians.

The Lieutenant, in one of his detested idle moments, went rummaging into some files and came up with some years-old research figures on the efficiency of proximity fuses, and some others on the minimum elevations at which these ingenious missiles, with their fist-sized radar transmitters, receivers, and timing gear, might be fired. It would seem that ack-ack officers would much rather knock out a low-flying plane than have their sensitive shells pre-detonated by an intervening treetop or power pole.

Lieutenant Barrows’ eye, however, was one of those which pick up mathematical discrepancies, however slight, with the accuracy of the Toscanini ear for pitch. A certain quadrant in a certain sector in the range contained a tiny area over which passed more dud shells than the law of averages should respectably allow. A high-dud barrage or two or three perhaps, over a year, might indicate bad quality control in the shells themselves; but when every flight of low-elevation ‘prox’ shells over a certain point either exploded on contact or not at all, the revered law was being broken. The scientific mind recoils at law-breaking of this sort, and will pursue a guilty phenomenon as grimly as ever society hunted its delinquents.

What pleased the Lieutenant most was that he had here an exclusive. There had been little reason for anyone to throw great numbers of shells at low elevations anywhere. There had been less reason to do so over the area in question. Therefore it was not until Lieutenant Barrows hunted down and compared a hundred reports spread over a dozen years that anyone had had evidence enough to justify an investigation.

But it was going to be his investigation. If nothing came of it, nothing need be said. If on the other hand it turned out to be important, he could with immense modesty and impressive clarity bring the matter to the attention of the Colonel; and perhaps then the Colonel might be persuaded to revise his opinion of ROTC Lieutenants. So he made a field trip on his own time and discovered an area wherein to varying degrees his pocket voltmeter would not work properly. And it dawned on him that what he had found was something which inhibited magnetism. The rugged but sensitive coils and relays in the proximity fuses, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist when they passed this particular hillside lower than forty yards. Permanent magnets were damped just as electromagnets.

Nothing in Barrows’ brief but brilliant career had even approached this incredible phenomenon in potential. His accurate and imaginative mind drank and drank of it and he saw visions: the identification and analysis of the phenomenon (Barrows Effect, perhaps?) and then a laboratory effort—successful of course—to duplicate it. Then, application. A field generator which would throw up an invisible wall of the force; aircraft and their communications—even their intercoms—failing with the failure of their many magnets. Seeking gear on guided missiles, arming and blasting devices, and of course the disarming of proximity fuses… the perfect defensive weapon for the electromagnetic age… and how much else? No limit to it. Then there would be the demonstrations of course, the Colonel introducing him to renowned scientists and military men: ‘ This, gentlemen, is your ROTC man! ’

But first he had to find what was doing it, now that he knew where it was being done; and so he designed and built a detector. It was simple and ingenious and very carefully calibrated. While engaged in the work, his irrepressible mind wrought and twisted and admired and reworked the whole concept of ‘contramagnetism’. He extrapolated a series of laws and derived effects just as a mathematical pastime and fired them off to the Institute of Electrical Engineers, who could appreciate them and did; for they were later published in the Journal. He even amused himself in gunnery practice by warning his men against low-elevation shelling over his area, because ‘the pixies would degauss (demagnetize) their proximity fuses’. And this gave him a high delight, for he pictured himself telling them later that his fanciful remark had been nothing but the truth and that had they the wit God gave a goose they could have gone out and dug up the thing, whatever it was, for themselves.