Baby Is Three (15 page)

“I have something lined up. Advertising—direct mail. It isn’t too tough. I’ll stay with that for a couple of years. See how the other half lives. The half with money, that is. When I’m ready, I’ll drop it and write a novel. It’ll be highly successful.”

“Real cocky,” said Manuel.

“Well, damn it, it will be. With me.
I’ll
like it. So far as I’m concerned it will be successful. And what about you, Vaughn?”

“I have a little money. Not much. But I’ll manage. I’ll write poems.” She smiled. “They’ll be successful, too.”

“Good thing you guys don’t have to depend on what anyone else thinks,” Manuel grunted. “Me, I do it the way the man wants it done or else.”

“But you please yourself doing it,” Dran said.

“Huh? I—never thought of it like that. I guess you’re right. Well.” He looked from Vaughn to Dran and back. They suddenly spoke, almost in unison. “Manuel! What are you going to—” and—“Manuel! What will you do now?”

“Me? I’ll make out. You two don’t think I
need
you?”

Vaughn’s eyes grew bright. Dran put an understanding hand on her shoulder. He said, “Who writes this plot? What a switch! Manuel, of all people, clinging to these walls with the rest of the ivy, while Vaughn and I try our wings.”

“Sometimes you characters give me a pain in the back of my lap,” said Manuel abruptly. “I hang around with you and listen to simple-minded gobbledegook in yard-long language, if it’s you talking, Dran, and pink-and-purple sissification from the brat here. Why I do it I’ll never know. And it goes that way up to the last gasp. So you’re going to leave. Dran has to make a speech, real logical. Vaughn has to blow out a sigh and get misty-eyed.” He spat.

“How would you handle it?” Dran asked, amused. Vaughn stared at Manuel whitely.

“Me? You really want to know?”

“This I want to hear,” said Vaughn between her teeth.

“I’d wait a while—a long while—until neither of you was talking. Then I’d say, ‘I joined the Marines yesterday.’ And you’d both look at me a little sad. There’s supposed to be something wrong with
coming right out and saying something. Let’s see. Suppose I do it the way Vaughn would want me to.” He tugged at an imaginary braid and thrust out his lower lip in a lampoon of Vaughn’s full mouth. He sighed gustily. “I have felt …” He paused to flutter his eyelashes. “I have felt the call to arms,” he said in a histrionic whisper. He gazed off into the middle distance. “I have heard the sound of trumpets. The drums stir in my blood.” He pounded his temples with his fists. “I can’t stand it—I can’t! Glory beckons. I will away to foreign strands.”

Vaughn turned on her heel, though she made no effort to walk away. Dran roared with laughter.

“And suppose I’m you,” said Manuel, his face taut with a suppressed grin. He leaned easily against the base of the statue and crossed his legs. He flung his head back. “Zeno of Miletus,” he intoned, “in reflecting on the cromislon of the fortiseetus, was wont to refer to a razor as ‘a check for a short beard.’ While shaving this morning I correlated ‘lather’ with ‘leather’ and, seeing some of it on my neck, I recalled the old French proverb, ‘Jeanne D’Arc,’ which means: The light is out in the bathroom. The integration was complete. If the light was out I could no longer shave. Therefore I can not go on like this. Also there was this matter of the neck. I shall join the Marines. Q. E. D., which means thus spake Zarathusiasm.”

Dran chuckled. Vaughn made a furious effort, failed, and burst out laughing. When it subsided, Manuel said soberly, “I did.”

“You did what?”

“I joined the Marines yesterday.”

Dran paled. Manuel looked at him in open astonishment. He had never seen Dran without an instant response before. And Vaughn clutched at his arms. “You didn’t! You couldn’t! Manuel … Manuel … the uniform … the pain … you’ll be
killed!”

“Yup. But slowly. In agony. And as I lie there in the growing dark, a sweet thought will sustain me. I’ll never again see another line of your lousy poetry. For Christ’s sake!” he bellowed suddenly. “Get off that tragic kick, stupid! I’ll be all right.”

“What did you go and do a thing like that for?” Dran asked slowly.

“What are you and the reptile leaving for?” Manuel returned. “The same thing. This place has taught me all it can—for me. I’m going where I’ll know who’s my boss, and I’ll know who takes orders from me. What I’ll wear, where I’ll live—someone else can decide that. Meantime I’ll work in communications, which I’d be doing anyway, but someone else will buy the equipment and materials.”

“You’ll be caged. You’ll never be free,” said Vaughn.

“Free for what? To starve? Free to argue with salesmen and landlords? Nuts. I’ll go and work with things I can measure, work with my hands, while you two are ex-prassing your tortured souls. What would you like to see me do instead? Take up writing sonnets that nobody’ll ever read? Suppose I do that, and
you
go join the Marines.”

Dran touched Vaughn’s arm. “He’s right, Vaughn. What he’s doing would be wrong for you, or for me, but it’s right for him.”

“I don’t … I don’t know what to do,” she mourned.

“I do,” said Manuel. “Let’s go eat.”

“We are parasites,” said the Titan, “which is the initial measure of our intelligence.”

Torth said, “Our intelligence doesn’t make it possible for us to survive on Titan.”

“It’s an impasse. The very act of settling the three components of our psyche into the brains of the natives gives us a home—and shortens the life of the native.”

“Wouldn’t that be true of the bipeds on the third planet?”

“To a degree,” admitted the other. “But they are long-lived—and there are three billion of them.”

“And how would we affect them?”

“Just as we affect the natives here.”

Torth made the emanation which signified amusement. “That should make them very unhappy.”

“You speak of a matter of no importance,” said the other irritably. “And it is not true. They will be as incapable of expressing unhappiness as anything else.” He applied himself again to the machine, with which he was tracking the three crystalline casings which carried Eudiche on his Earthward journey
.

After dinner they went to a concert. They sat in their favorite seats—the loges—and waited, each wrapped in his own thoughts. Dran stared at the dusty carved figures under the ceiling. Manuel sketched busily—a power-operated shock absorber, this time. Between them Vaughn sat, withdrawn and dreamy, turning night-thoughts into free verse.

They straightened as the conductor appeared and crossed the platform, amid applause which sounded like dead leaves under his feet. When he raised his baton, Vaughn glanced swiftly at the faces of the other two, and then they pressed forward in unison.

It was Bach—the
Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor
. The music stepped and spiralled solemnly around them, enclosing them in a splendid privacy. They were separate from the rest of the audience, drawn to each other. Manuel and Dran moved slightly toward Vaughn, until their shoulders touched. Their eyes fixed unmoving on the orchestra.

At the last balanced, benevolent crescendo they rose together and left, ahead of the crowd. None of them cared to talk, strangely. They walked swiftly through the dark streets to a brightly lit little restaurant several blocks from the Academy.

In a high-walled booth, they smiled to each other as if acknowledging a rich secret. Then Vaughn’s eyes dropped; she pulled at her fingers and sighed.

“No effusions from you, please,” said Dran—possibly more coldly than he intended. “We all felt it, whatever it was. Don’t mess it up.”

Vaughn’s gaze was up again, shocked. Manuel said, with an astonishing gentleness, with difficulty, “I was—somewhere else, but you were with me. And we all seemed to be—to be walking, or climbing …” He shook his massive head. “Nuts. I must be thirsty or something. What do you want, runt? Dran?”

Vaughn didn’t answer. She was staring at Dran, her violet eyes dark with hurt.

“Speak up, chicken. I didn’t mean to crush you. I just didn’t feel like listening to an iambic extravagance. Something happened to all of us.”

“Thanks f-for crediting me with so little sensitivity that you think I didn’t feel it. That you think I’d spoil it!”

“Not too little sensitivity. Too much—
and
out of control. I’m sorry,” Dran relented. “Let’s order.” He turned to Manuel, and froze in surprise at the look in the other’s face. It was a look of struggling, as if unwelcome forces were waking within him, disturbing the rough, familiar patterns of his thinking.

Joe passed, flashy, noisy, wide open for hurt. The trio had often discussed Joe. Superficially, he was pushing into their group because of Vaughn, who appeared to make him quite breathless. Dran had once said, however, that it went deeper than that. Joe could not abide a liaison that he couldn’t understand. Joe called, “Hi! As I live and bleed, it’s the internal triangle. Nice to see you, Vaughn. When am I going to do it on purpose instead of by accident?”

“Is this drip necessary?” Manuel muttered.

“I’ll see you soon, Joe,” Vaughn said, smiling at him. “We have a class together tomorrow. I’ll talk to you about it then.” Her nod was a warm touch, and a dismissal. Joe appeared about to speak, thought better of it, waved and went away.

“That impossible idiot,” growled Dran. “A more quintessential jerk I have yet to meet.”

“Oh, Dran! He’s not bad! Just undeveloped. Of course, he isn’t one of
us
, but he’s fun all the same. He reads good poetry, and he’s quite a—”

Manuel brought his hand down with a crash.
“That’s
what I was after. ‘One of us.’ What do you mean, ‘one of us?’ Who joins this union? I’m not ‘one of us.’ You two have more in common than you have with me.”

Vaughn touched his hand. “Manuel,” she said softly. “Oh, Manuel! Why, everyone links us together. I—I know I do. So much so that until now I didn’t think it required questioning. It’s something you accept as natural.”

Dran’s eyes brightened. “Wait, Vaughn. Let’s not call it natural. Let’s examine it. See what we get. I’ve been chewing on it since the business with the music tonight anyway.”

Manuel shrugged. “Okay. What do the runt and I share after all? You and I can agree on politics, and we have one or two mechanical interests. But you, Vaughn—you …” He wet his lips. “Hell!” he exploded. “You’re—useless!”

“I can ignore that,” said Vaughn, very obviously ignoring nothing, “because you are only trying to hurt me.”

“Hold on,” said Dran easily. “I think this is worth an effort to avoid that kind of emotional smokescreen. You particularly, Manny. You sound resentful, and I don’t know that you have anything to resent.”

“She makes me mad, that’s all. Look—there are a lot of useful things in the world—lock washers .. cotter pins. But this—this dame! You couldn’t use her for a paperweight. She’s a worm trying to be a snake. You can’t approach her logically. I can get to you that way, Dran, though I’ll admit the going gets a little swampy sometimes.”

“Perhaps this thing we have,” said Vaughn softly, “is more than emotion, or intellect, or any of those things.”

“Here we go again,” snorted Manuel.

“A mystic entity or something?” Dran chuckled. “I doubt it. But there is something between us—all of us. It isn’t limited to any two. We all belong. I’m not sure of what it’s for, or even if I like it. But I’m not prepared to deny it. You aren’t either, Manny.”

“Manuel,” said Vaughn urgently. She reached across and touched him, as if she wanted to press her eager words into him. “Manuel—haven’t you ever felt it even a little? Didn’t you, tonight? Didn’t you? In your own terms.… Manuel, just this once, I’d like to know honestly, without any sneers.”

Manuel glowered at her, hesitated, then said, “What if I have?” truculently. In a gentler tone, he added, “Oh, I have, all right. Once or twice. It—like I said, damn it, it makes me mad. I don’t like getting pushed around by something I don’t understand. It’ll probably stop when I get away from here, and good riddance to it.”

Vaughn touched her knuckles to her teeth. She whispered, “To me, it’s something to treasure.”

Dran grinned at her. “If you like it it’s got to be fragile, hm?
Vaughn, it isn’t. And I think Manny’s in for a surprise if he thinks distance is going to make any difference.”

“I have hopes,” Manuel said sullenly.

Dran spread his hands on the table and looked at them. “Vaughn stands in awe of this—this thing we have, and to Manuel it’s like a dose of crabs. Excuse me, chicken. Far as I’m concerned, it’s something that will bear watching. I can’t analyze it now. If it gets weaker I will be able to analyze it even less. If it gets stronger it will show its nature no matter what I do. So I’m going to relax and enjoy it. I can say this much …” He paused, frowning, searching for words. “There is a lowest common denominator for us. We’re all way off balance. And our imbalances are utterly different in kind, and negligibly different in degree.”

Vaughn stared dully. Manuel said, “Huh?”

Dran said, more carefully, “Vaughn’s all pastels and poetry. Manuel’s all tools and technology. I’m—”

“All crap and complication,” said Manuel.

“Manuel!”

Dran laughed. “He’s probably right, Vaughn. Anyway, we’re all lopsided to the same degree, which is a lot, and that’s the only real similarity between us. If we three were one person, it’d be a somebody, that’s for sure.”

“It’d be an insect,” Manuel scowled. “Six legs.” He looked at Vaughn. “With your head. No one’d know the difference.”

“You’re ichor-noclastic,” said Dran. Vaughn groaned. Manuel said, “That was one of those puns. The only part I got was the ‘corn’. Where the hell’s the waiter?”

“Why Eudiche?” Torth fretted. “Why couldn’t they send someone else?”

“Eudiche is expendable,” said the other parasite shortly
.

“Why? His balance is so perfect …”

“Answer restricted. Go away. One-third of his psyche has found a host and is settling in. The observations are exceedingly difficult, because of the subtlety of Eudiche’s operations. And you are most exasperating.”