Baby Is Three (14 page)

Henry looked up from the keyboard and smiled shyly.

“Hello,” Priscilla said.

“Hello.” He looked at her face, her hair, her body, her eyes. His shyness was there, and no boldness was present; he looked at her the way she listened to his music. It was personal and not aggressive. He moved over on the bench. “Sit down.”

Without hesitation she did. She looked at him, too—the hawk profile, the gentle gray-green eyes. “You play beautifully.”

“Listen.”

He played with his eyes on her face. His hands leaped joyfully like baby goats. Then they felt awe and hummed something. Henry stopped playing by ear. He began to sight-read.

Note followed note followed note for the line of her nose, and doubled and curved and turned back for her nostrils. The theme became higher and fuller and rounded and there was her forehead, and then there were colorful waves up and back for her hair. Here was a phrase for an earlobe, and one for the turn of the cheek, and now there were mysteries, two of them, long and subdued and agleam and end-tilted, and they were her eyes.…

Derek came out of the office and stopped so abruptly that Jane ran into him. Before she could utter the first startled syllable, her breath was taken away in a great gasp.

Derek turned and gestured at the music. “You—”

She looked up at him, the furious eyes, the terrified trembling at the corners of his mouth. “No, Derek, so help me God, I didn’t ask him to come back. I wouldn’t do that, Derek. I
wouldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t,” he agreed gently. “I know it, hon. I’m sorry. But out he goes.” He strode out to the stand. Jane trotted behind him, and when they turned the corner she caught his arm so violently that her long fingernails sank into his flesh.
“Wait!”

There was a girl on the bench with Henry, and as he played he
stared at her face. His eyes moved over it, his own face moved closer. His hands made music like the almost visible current which flowed between them. Their lips touched.

There was a tinkling explosion of sound from the piano that built up in fullness and sonority until Jane and Derek all but blinked their eyes, as if it were a blaze of light. And then Henry’s left hand picked up a theme, a thudding, joyous melody that brought the few late-owls in the club right to their feet. He no longer looked at the girl. His eyes were closed, and his hands spoke of himself and what he felt—a great honest hunger and new riches, a shy and willing experience with a hitherto undreamed-of spectrum of sensation.

Jane and Derek looked at each other with shining eyes. Jane said, deliberately, “Son, you got a rival,” and Derek laughed in sheer relieved delight.

“I’m going to get my fiddle,” he said.

When Derek started to play, four people left their table and came up to the piano as if cables drew them. Hand in hand, Jon and Edie stopped close by Priscilla and stood there rapt as she, Pallas and Verna stood at the other end of the bench, their eyes glowing.

And out of the music, out of the bodies that fell into synchronization with the masterful pulse of the great viol, came a union, a blending of forces from each of six people. Each of the six had a part that was different from all of the others, but the shape of them was a major chord, infinitely complete and completely satisfying.

“Ril!”

“Oh, make it formal, KadKedKud!”

“RilRylRul, then …”

“If only Mak were here.”

“Myk is with us, and Muk. Poor partial things, and how hard they have worked, guarding and guiding with those pitifully inadequate bodies as instruments. Come, Ril; we must decide. Now that we can operate fully, we can investigate these creatures.”

Just as they had investigated, compared, computed and stored away observations on industrial techniques, strength of materials, stress and temperature and power and design, so now they took instant and total inventory of their hosts.

RilRylRul found classicism and inventiveness, tolerance and empathy in Henry. In Derek were loyalty and rugged strength and a powerful interpretive quality. In Jane was the full-blown beauty of sensualism and directive thought, and a unique stylization of the products of artistic creation.

KadKedKud separated and analyzed a splendid systematization in Priscilla, a superior grasp of applied theory in Edie, and in Jon that rarest of qualities, the associative mind—the mind that can bridge the specialties.

“A great race,” said Ril, “but a sick one, badly infected with the Pa’ak pestilence.”

“The wisest thing to do,” reflected Kad, “would be to stimulate the virus to such an extent that humanity will impose its own quarantine—by reducing itself to savagery through atomic warfare. There is such a great chance of that, no matter what we do, that it would seem expedient to hasten the process. The object would be to force atomic warfare before space travel can begin. That at least would keep the virus out of the Galaxy, which is what we came here to effect.”

“It’s a temptation,” conceded Ril. “And yet—what a tremendous species this human race could be! Let us stay, Kad. Let us see what we can do with them. Let us move on to other human groups, now that we know the techniques of entry and merging. With just the right pressure on exactly the right points, who knows? Perhaps we can cause them to discover how to cure themselves?

“It will be a close race,” worried Kad. “We can do a great deal, but can we do it soon enough? We face three possibilities: Mankind may destroy itself through its own sick ingenuity; it may reach the stars to spread its infection; or it may find its true place as a healthy species in a healthy Cosmos. I would not predict which is more likely.”

“Neither would I,” Ril returned. “So if the forces are that closely balanced, I have hope for the one we join. Are you with me?”

“Agreed. Myk—Muk … will you join us?”

Faintly, faintly came the weak response of the two paltry parts of a once powerful triad: “Back in our sector we would be considered dead. Here we have a life, and work. Of course we will help.”

So they considered, and, at length, decided.

And their meeting and consideration and decision took four microseconds.

The six people looked at one another, entranced, dazed.

“It’s—gone,” said Jon. He wondered, then, what he meant by that.

Henry’s fingers slid off the keys, and the big bass was silent. Priscilla opened her tilted eyes wide and looked about her. Edie pressed close to Jonathan, bright-faced, composed. Jane stood with her head high, her nostrils arched.

They felt as if they were suddenly living on a new plane of existence, where colors were more vivid and the hues between them more recognizable. There was a new richness to the air, and a new strength in their bodies; but most of all it was if a curtain had been lifted from their minds for the first time in their lives. They had all reached a high unity, a supreme harmony in the music a second before, but this was something completely different, infinitely more complete. “Cured” was the word that came to Jonathan. He knew instinctively that what he now felt was a new norm, and that it was humanity’s birthright.

“My goodness gracious!”

Verna and Pallas stood close together, like two frightened birds, darting glances about them and twittering.

“I can’t think what I’m doing here,” said Pallas blankly, yet aware. “I’ve had one of my spells …”

“We both have,” Verna agreed. “And that’s the way it is.”

Jonathan looked at them, and knew them instantly as incomplete.

He raised his eyes to the rest of the people in the club, still stirring with the final rustle of applause from the magnificent burst of music they had heard, and he recognized them as sick. His mind worked with a new directiveness and brilliance to the causes of their sickness.

He turned to Edie. “We have work to do …”

She pressed his hand, and Priscilla looked up and smiled.

Derek and Jane looked into each other’s eyes, into depths neither had dreamed of before. There would be music from that, they knew.

Henry said, with all his known gentleness and none of the frightened diffidence, “Hey, you with the red hair. I love you. What’s your name?” And Priscilla laughed with a sound like wings and buried her face in his shoulder.

On earth there was a new kind of partnership of three. And …

Watch your local newspapers for latest developments.

“W
E SHALL NEVER SEE
him again … there will be no more arguments, no more pleasant thinking with Eudiche,” mourned Torth to the other Titan
.

“Come now. Don’t be so pessimistic,” said Larit, stroking the machine. “The idea of dissociation has horrified you, that’s all. There is every chance that his components will fuse.”

“So involved, so very involved,” Torth fretted. “Is there really no way to send the complete psyche?”

“Apparently not. The crystals are of a limited capacity, you know. If we grow them larger, they cannot retain a psychic particle. If we sent all three encased particles together, their interaction would break down the crystals chemically. They must be sent separately.”

“But—horrible! How can one third of a psyche live alone?”

“Biologically, you know perfectly well. Psychologically, you need only look about you. You will find a single psyche only in each of our gracious hosts—”

“—gracious indeed,” muttered Torth, “and gracious they will remain, or die.”

“—and each of the natives on the planet to which we sent Eudiche has but one psyche
.

“How then can he occupy three of them?”

“Torth, you insist on asking questions requiring a higher technological comprehension than yours to understand,” replied the other in annoyance. “There are closer ties than physical proximity. Eudiche will avail himself of them. Let that suffice.” More kindly, he added, “Eudiche will be all right. Wait; just wait.”
^*

The statue of Ben Franklin, by the very weight of its greyness, sobered the green sparkle of the campus. At the foot of the benevolent image the trio stood—Vaughn, tiny, with long braids of flaxen hair; Dran, slender and aquiline, and—apart from the others, as usual—Manuel, with heavy shoulders and deep horizontal creases over his thick brows.

Dran smiled at some chattering coeds who passed, then slanted his narrow face toward the semi-circle of stone buildings. “After three years,” he said, “I’ve gotten over being delighted by my own uniqueness—the three miserable years it took me to convince myself that distinction and difference are not synonymous. And now that I’m
of
this place—no longer on the outside looking in, or on the inside looking on, I—”

“Who’s so exceptional?” growled Manuel, moving closer. “Aside from the runt here, who never will get the knack of being a human being.”

“Are you a specimen of humanity?” asked the girl stormily. “Manuel, I don’t expect compliments from you, but I wish you’d try courtesy. Now listen. I have something to tell you. I—”

“Wait a minute,” said Dran, “I have something more important, whatever you have on your mind. I’ve got the answer—for me, anyway—to this whole question of being the same as everyone else and being different at the same time. I—”

“You said it all last night,” said Vaughn wearily. “Only you were so full of sherry that you didn’t know what you were saying. I quote: ‘Vaughn, not only your charming person but your poetry would be a lot more popular if you wouldn’t hide behind this closed door of non-aggression and restraint.’ Well, I’ve been thinking about that, and I—”

“Manuel,” Dran interrupted, “you’ve got muscles. Throttle her, will you? Just a little. Just until I can put a predicate on this subject.”

“I’d love to get started on that job,” grinned Manuel, licking his lips. “Imagine how those wall eyes would pop.”

“Keep your hands off me, animal,” Vaughn hissed. “Dran, I’m trying to—”

“I will not be stopped,” said Dran. With a gesture completely
characteristic, he knocked back a strand of his red-gold hair, scattering ashes from his cigarette through it. “Be quiet and listen. You two have held still for a lot of my mouthings and gnashings of teeth about my being a white monkey—the one all the brown monkeys will tear to pieces just because he’s different. Well, I have the solution.”

“Get to the point,” Manuel grunted. “It could be that I got a speech to make, too.”

“Not until I’ve told you—” Vaughn began.

“Shut up, both of you,” said Dran. “Especially you, Vaughn. All right. What are we here for?”

“To get a degree.”

“We are not. At least, I’m not,” said Dran. “The more I think of it, the less I think school teaches you anything. Oh, sure, there are some encyclopaedics that you sponge up, but that’s secondary. A school’s real function is to teach you how to learn. Period.”

“All right—then what about the degree?”

“That’s just to convince other people that you have learned how to learn. Or to convince yourself, if you’re not sure. What I’m driving at, is that
I’m
sure. I know all I need to know about how to learn. I’m leaving.”

There was a stunned silence. Vaughn looked slowly from one to the other. Dran’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t expect such a dramatic effect. Vaughn …? Say something!”

“Y—you’ve been reading my script!” she murmured. Her eyes were huge.

“What do you mean?”

“Why—I’ve been thinking .. For more than a year I’ve known what I wanted to do. And this—” she waved a hand at the grey buildings—“this hasn’t been it. This … interferes. And I wanted to tell you about that, and that you mustn’t think it means that I’ve finished learning. I want to learn a world of things—but not here.”

Manuel released a short bark of laughter. “You mean you made a great big decision—all by yourself?”

“I’ll make a decision about you one of these days, now that I’ve learned the technique,” she spat. “Dran … what are you going to do? Where are you going?”