Pat Frank - Mr. Adam

I undressed, tossing my trousers and shirt across the back of a chair. I was examining myself in the full length mirror, wondering how a man who kept such irregular hours, and ate so erratically, could develop a definite belly, when the boogie-woogie faded, and a girl announcer said in the peculiar clipped sing-song which is currently the fashion among swing shift announcers:

“We are interrupting for another news flash. Washington—Surgeon General George Gail announced that he has called a congress of the nation’s leading physicians and scientists early next week. They will meet in the capital to plan national re-fertilization. Next you will hear that international wartime favorite, ‘Lili Marlene,’ and while I adjust the needle, let me remind you that this program comes to you through the courtesy of SILK E. RUB Furniture Polish, pronounced Silky Rub, the polish of Gracious Living.”

In the background I could hear the opening bars of “Lili Marlene,” and then a deep-voiced female quartet cut in with:

“Lili Marlene” swelled up, and I remembered the last time I had heard it, and the lyrics that went with it, while the Army trucks bound for the repple-depple in Naples rumbled by, and I began to sing the lyrics aloud:

Marge stirred, and inched across Smith Field until she reached the corner farthest away from me. “Damn you!” she grumbled sleepily. “Damn you!”

“I’m sorry, darling,” I said. “Had to work all night. Big story.”

Marge propped herself on her elbows and rubbed her eyes. “I’ll say it was a big story,” she exclaimed. “Oh, yes, it was the very biggest story—you eunuch, you!”

I didn’t say anything, because it was the first time I had heard it put that way, and I was somewhat shocked, but I began to understand that the situation was complicated beyond anything either I or J.C. had imagined.

“You eunuch, you!” she repeated.

“Is that nice?” I inquired.

Marge sat up straight. She wore the red silk pajamas fashioned from the ammo chute I’d scrounged when the British paratroops jumped into Megara, Greece. You put a blonde into red pajamas, piped with white silken parachute cord, and ruffle her hair, and let indignant fire run out of her eyes, and you have something particularly lovable, if she is in the mood to be loved. She was not in that mood. She said: “You sleep on your own side of the field!”

“But darling,” I protested, “is it my fault?”

“Of course it’s your fault,” she said. “At least it is your fault that we didn’t start any children before it happened.”

“Who was it,” I asked, “who said the world wasn’t a fit place to produce babies?”

“That was in forty-three,” she retorted. “It wasn’t, then.”

“Is it my fault, entirely,” I enquired, “that Mississippi blew up? Simply because Mississippi blew up, are we going to go through the remainder of our lives like distant and not-too-friendly cousins?”

“Stephen Decatur Smith,” Marge said, “I know it sounds silly to you but I think it is a dirty trick on the part of the whole male population. For the rest of your lives you will be rabbiting around, smirking, all equipped with built-in contraceptives.”

It didn’t seem necessary to answer. I got into my own side of Smith Field. “Not being a woman, you could never completely understand,” Marge went on. “Men will continue to live their lives. But to every woman, it will be as if she were already dead.”

Later, I found that Marge’s evaluation was accurate, and until the miracle of Mr. Adam, the feminine suicide rate rose considerably.

But generally, life continued on an astoundingly normal plane. The world ticked on, like a clock that would never be wound again, but which would continue to tell time and sound off the hours until it finally ran down.

Winter slipped into spring. There was the usual art fair in Washington Square. Young people in love held hands and planned plastic houses, including nurseries, in the blind confidence of love and youth. Radical plastic automobiles appeared, the United Nations reached agreement on the Hungarian-Slovak border, and a United States oil company succeeded in obtaining a ninety-nine-year lease on the new field in Iraq.

The front pages of the newspapers, of course, were devoted to little except stories on World Sterilization, or, as abbreviated by the tabloid headline writers, W.S. But so long as babies continued to be born, the whole thing seemed incredible and fantastic, and indeed it was denounced every day, officially, by experts such as Congressmen, Anglican Bishops, the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Dorothy Thompson, and three- and four-star generals.

But things began to get tense in June, and as the month slid by, apprehension increased. By this time, of course, the facts had been so well established, in every country and on every continent, including the interior of Africa and the Eskimos near the Pole, that there was no reason for hope—and yet hope persisted. On June 21 the Daily News ran a banner, “W.S. DAY TOMORROW!”

The world held its breath, prepared for the worst, and the worst happened.

For the remainder of the month, and indeed well into July, there were sporadic bursts of optimism as communities reported births, but all these, it developed, were the result of over-long periods of gestation.

False alarms were frequent, naturally, and we realized that they would continue for a generation or two. But for the most part, by autumn the world had composed itself to slow death, although the President had allotted unlimited funds, and all science had been enlisted, for the N.R.P., or National Re-fertilization Project. The Sunday supplements began to speculate as to who would inherit the earth—the insects, or the fishes.

On the first anniversary of the Mississippi explosion I awoke at noon. Marge was sitting, cross-legged, at the other end of Smith Field, and I smelled fresh coffee. “You see what I’ve done,” she said. “I’ve installed a percolator here at the corner. We weren’t using this corner at all.”

“You’re a genius,” I admitted.

“I’ve got another idea,” she said. “When the new television sets come out, we can put a screen down here at the bottom of the field, and on Saturday afternoons we can lie in bed and watch the football games.”

“Some day,” I warned, “people will find out about the way we live, and will put us on exhibition.”

The phone rang, and Marge picked up the extension. “It’s Maria Ostenheimer,” she said, puzzled, “for you.”

I took the telephone, and said, “Hello, Maria, what are you doing for a living nowadays?”

“That’s not very funny,” the lady obstetrician said. “I’ve got a good mind not to tell you what I called about.”

There was excitement in her voice. I said: “Go ahead, Maria, talk.”

“Stephen,” she said, “listen carefully. A baby is going to be born—may have been born already—in Tarrytown.”

“Now Maria,” I said, “just last week I flew down to a place called Big Stone Gap, Virginia, on one of those tips, and we landed in a cornfield and ground-looped, and it turned out to be a baby, all right, but a baby born to a circus elephant named Priscilla.”

“Stephen,” said Maria, enunciating her words slowly and carefully, “this is the real thing. You will remember I mentioned Dr. Blandy, who practises in Westchester. He was called on this case four months ago, back in May.”