Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human

‘You’ll have to tell me, Janie. All of it.’

She told him—all of it. She told him of Lone, of Bonnie and Beanie and of herself; Miss Kew and Miriam, both dead now, and Gerry. She told how they had moved, after Miss Kew was killed, back into the woods, where the old Kew mansion hid and brooded, and how for a time they were very close. And then…

‘Gerry got ambitious for a while and decided to go through college, which he did. It was easy. Everything was easy. He’s pretty unremarkable looking when he hides those eyes of his behind glasses, you know; people don’t notice. He went through medical school too, and psych.’

‘You mean he really is a psychiatrist?’ asked Hip.

‘He is not. He just qualifies by the book. There’s quite a difference. He hid in crowds; he falsified all sorts of records to get into school. He was never caught at it because all he had to do with anyone who was investigating him was to give them a small charge of that eye of his and they’d forget. He never failed any exam as long as there was a men’s room he could go to.’

‘A what? Men’s room?’

‘That’s right.’ She laughed. ‘There was hell to pay one time. See, he’d go in and lock himself in a booth and call Bonnie or Beanie. He’d tell them where he was stumped and they’d whip home and tell me and I’d get the answer from Baby and they’d flash back with the information, all in a few seconds. So one fine day another, student heard Gerry talking and stood up in the next booth and peeked over. You can imagine! Bonnie and Beanie can’t carry so much as a toothpick with them when they teleport, let alone clothes.’

Hip clapped a hand to his forehead. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh, Gerry caught up with the kid. He’d charged right out of there yelling that there was a naked girl in the john. Half of the student body dove in there; of course she was gone. And when Gerry caught up with the kid, he just naturally forgot all about it and wondered what all the yelling was about. They gave him a pretty bad time over it.

‘Those were good times,’ she sighed. ‘Gerry was so interested in everything. He read all the tune. He was at Baby all the time for information. He was interested in people and books and machines and history and art—everything. I got a lot from it. As I say, all the information cleared through me.

‘But then Gerry began to… I was going to say, get sick, but that’s not the way to say it.’ She bit her lip thoughtfully. ‘I’d say from what I know of people that only two kinds are really progressive—really dig down and learn and then use what they learn. A few are genuinely interested; they’re just built that way. But the great majority want to prove something. They want to be better, richer. They want to be famous or powerful or respected. With Gerry the second operated for a while. He’d never had any real schooling and he’d always been a little afraid to compete. He had it pretty rough when he was a kid; ran away from an orphanage when he was seven and lived like a sewer rat until Lone picked him up. So it felt good to get honours in his classes and make money with a twist of his wrist any time he wanted it. And I think he was genuinely interested in some things for a little while: music and biology and one or two other things.

‘But he soon came to realize that he didn’t need to prove anything to anyone. He was smarter and stronger and more powerful than anybody. Proving it was just dull. He could have anything he wanted.

‘He quit studying. He quit playing the oboe. He gradually quit everything. Finally he slowed down and practically stopped for a year. Who knows what went on in his head? He’d spend weeks lying around, not talking.

‘Our Gestalt, as we call it, was once an idiot, Hip, when it had Lone for a „head”. Well, when Gerry took over it was a new, strong, growing thing. But when this happened to him, it was in retreat like what used to be called a manic-depressive.’

‘Uh!’ Hip grunted. ‘A manic-depressive with enough power to run the world.’

‘He didn’t want to run the world. He knew he could if he wanted to. He didn’t see any reason why he should.

‘Well, just like in his psych texts he retreated and soon he regressed. He got childish. And his kind of childishness was pretty vicious.

‘I started to move around a little; I couldn’t stand it around the house. I used to hunt around for things that might snap him out of it. One night in New York I dated a fellow I know who was one of the officers of the I.R.E.’

‘Institute of Radio Engineers,’ said Hip. ‘Swell outfit. I used to be a member.’

‘I know. This fellow told me about you.’

‘About me? ’

‘About what you called a „mathematical recreation”, anyway. An extrapolation of the probable operating laws and attendant phenomena of magnetic flux in a gravity generator.’

‘God!’

She made a short and painful laugh. ‘Yes, Hip. I did it to you. I didn’t know then of course. I just wanted to interest Gerry in something.

‘He was interested all right. He asked Baby about it and got the answer pronto. You see, Lone built that thing before Gerry came to live with us. We’d forgotten about it pretty much.’

‘Forgotten! A thing like that? ’

‘Look, we don’t think like other people.’

‘You don’t,’ he said thoughtfully and, ’Why should you?’

‘Lone built it for the old farmer, Prodd. That was just like Lone. A gravity generator, to increase and decrease the weight of Prodd’s old truck so he could use it as a tractor. All because Prodd’s horse died and he couldn’t afford another.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. He was an idiot all right. Well, he asked Baby what effect it would have if this invention got out and Baby said plenty. He said it would turn the whole world upside down, worse than the industrial revolution. Worse than anything that ever happened. He said if things went one way we’d have such a war, you wouldn’t believe it. If they went the other way, science would go too far, too fast. Seems that gravities is the key to everything. It would lead to the addition of one more item to the Unified Field—what we now call psychic energy, or „psionics”.’

‘Matter, energy, space, time, and psyche,’ he breathed, awed.

‘Yup,’ Janie said casually, ‘all the same thing and this would lead to proof. There just wouldn’t be any more secrets.’

‘That’s the—the biggest thing I ever heard. So—Gerry decided us poor half-developed apes weren’t worthy?’

‘Not Gerry! He doesn’t care what happens to you apes! One thing he found out from Baby, though, was that whichever way it went the device would be traced to us. You should know. You did it by yourself. But Central Intelligence would’ve taken seven weeks instead of seven years.

‘And that’s what bothered Gerry. He was in retreat. He wanted to stew in his own juice in his hideout in the woods. He didn’t want the Armed Forces of the United Nations hammering at him to come out and be patriotic. Oh 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”.’