More Than Human (18 page)

       He thought about it. “So—what made it ready to happen?”
       “You went back.”
       “To the store, the plate glass window?”
       “Yes,” she said and immediately, “No. What I mean is this: You came alive in this room, and you—well, you said it yourself: the world got bigger for you, big enough to let there be a room, then big enough for a street, then a town, But the same thing was happening with your memory. Your memory got big enough to include yesterday, and last week, and then the jail, and then the thing that got you into jail. Now look: At that moment, the cable meant something to you, something terribly important. But when it happened, for all the time after it happened, the cable meant nothing. It didn’t mean anything until the second your memory could go back that far. Then it was real again.”
       “Oh,” he said.
       She dropped her eyes. “I knew about the cable. I could have explained it to you. I tried and tried to bring it to your attention but you couldn’t see it until you were ready. All right—I know a lot more about you. But don’t you see that if I told you,
you wouldn’t be able to hear me?
”
       He shook his head, not in denial but dazedly. He said, “But I’m not—sick any more!”
       He read the response in her expressive face. He said faintly, “Am I?” and then anger curled and kicked inside him. “Come on now,” he growled, “you don’t mean to tell me I’d suddenly get deaf if you told me where I went to high school.”
       “Of course not,” she said impatiently. “It’s just that it wouldn’t mean anything to you. It wouldn’t relate.” She bit her lip in concentration. “Here’s one: You’ve mentioned Bromfield a half dozen times.”
       “Who? Bromfield? I have not.”
       She looked at him narrowly. “Hip—you have. You mentioned him not ten minutes ago.”
       “Did I?” He thought. He thought hard. Then he opened his eyes wide. “By God, I did!”
       “All right. Who is he? What was he to you?”
       “Who?”
       “Hip!” she said sharply.
       “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I’m a little mixed up.” He thought again, hard, trying to recall the entire sequence, every word. At last, “B-bromfield,” he said with difficulty.
       “It will hardly stay with you. Well, it’s a flash from a long way back. It won’t mean anything to you until you go back that far and get it.”
       “Go back? Go back how?”
       “Haven’t you been going back and back—from being sick here to being in jail to getting arrested, and just before that, to your visit to that house? Think about that, Hip. Think about why you went to the house.”
       He made an impatient gesture. “I don’t need to. Can’t you see? I went to that house because I was searching for something—what was it? Oh, children; some children who could tell me where the half-wit was.” He leapt up, laughed. “You see? The half-wit—I remembered. I’ll remember it all, you’ll see. The half-wit... I’d been looking for him for years, forever. I... forget why, but,” he said, his voice strengthening, “that doesn’t matter any more now. What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t have to go all the way back; I’ve done all I need to do. I’m back on the path. Tomorrow I’m going to that house and get that address and then I’ll go to wherever that is and finish what I started out to do in the first place when I lost the—”
       He faltered, looked around bemusedly, spied the tubing lying on the chair arm, snatched it up. “This,” he said triumphantly. “It’s part of the—the—oh,
damn
it!”
       She waited until he had calmed down enough to hear her. She said, “You see?”
       “See what?” he asked brokenly, uncaring, miserable.
       “If you go out there tomorrow, you’ll walk into a situation you don’t understand, for reasons you can’t remember, asking for someone you can’t place, in order to go find out something you can’t conceive of. But,” she admitted, “you are right, Hip—you
can
do it.”
       “If I did,” he said, “it would all come back.”
       She shook her head. He said harshly, “You know everything, don’t you?”
       “Yes, Hip.”
       “Well, I don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.”
       She took one deep breath. “You’ll be killed.”
       “
What?
”
       “If you go out there you will be killed,” she said distinctly. “Oh, Hip, haven’t I been right so far? Haven’t I? Haven’t you gotten back a lot already—really gotten it back, so it doesn’t slip away from you?”
       Agonized, he said, “You tell me I can walk out of here tomorrow and find whatever it is I’ve been looking— Looking?
Living
for... and you tell me it’ll kill me if I do. What do you want from me? What are you trying to tell me to do?”
       “Just keep on,” she pleaded. “Just keep on with what you’ve been doing.”
       “For what?” he raged. “Go back and back, go farther away from the thing I want? What good will—”
       “Stop it!” she said sharply. To his own astonishment he stopped. “You’ll be biting holes in the rug in a minute,” she said gently and with a gleam of amusement. “That won’t help.” He fought against her amusement but it was irresistible. He let it touch him and thrust it away; but it had touched him. He spoke more quietly; “You’re telling me I mustn’t
ever
find the—the half-wit and the... whatever it is?”
       “Oh,” she said, her whole heart in her inflection, “oh,
no!
Hip, you’ll find it, truly you will. But you have to know what it is; you have to know why.”
       “How long will it take?”
       She shook her head soberly. “I don’t know.”
       “I can’t wait. Tomorrow—” He jabbed a finger at the window. The dark was silvering, the sun was near, pressing it away. “
Today
, you see?
Today
I could go there... I’ve got to; you understand how much it means, how long I’ve been...” His voice trailed off; then he whirled on her. “You say I’ll be killed; I’d rather be killed, there with it in my hands; it’s what I’ve been living for anyway!”
       She looked up at him tragically. “Hip—”
       “No!” he snapped. “You can’t talk me out of it.”
       She started to speak, stopped, bent her head. Down she bent, to hide her face on the bed.
       He strode furiously up and down the room, then stood over her. His face softened. “Janie,” he said, “help me...”
       She lay very still. He knew she was listening. He said, “If there’s danger... if something is going to try to kill me... tell me what. At least let me know what to look for.”
       She turned her head, faced the wall, so he could hear her but not see her. In a laboured voice she said, “I didn’t say anything will try to kill you. I said you
would
be killed.”
       He stood over her for a long time. Then he growled. “All right. I will. Thanks for everything, Janie. You better go home.”
       She crawled off the bed slowly, weakly, as if she had been flogged. She turned to him with such a look of pity and sorrow in her face that his heart was squeezed. But he set his jaw, looked towards the door, moved his head towards it.
       She went, not looking back, dragging her feet. It was more than he could bear. But he let her go.

The bedspread was lightly rumpled. He crossed the room slowly and looked down at it. He put out his hand, then fell forward and plunged his face into it. It was still warm from her body and for an instant so brief as to be indefinable, he felt a thing about mingled breaths, two spellbound souls turning one to the other and about to be one. But then it was gone, everything was gone and he lay exhausted.
      
Go on, get sick. Curl up and die
. “All right,” he whispered.
       Might as well. What’s the difference anyway? Die or get killed, who cares?
       Not Janie.
       He closed his eyes and saw a mouth. He thought it was Janie’s, but the chin was too pointed. The mouth said, “
Just lie down and die, that’s all
,” and smiled. The smile made light glance off the thick glasses which must mean he was seeing the whole face. And then there was a pain so sharp and swift that he threw up his head and grunted. His hand, his hand was cut. He looked down at it, saw the scars which had made the sudden, restimulative pain. “Thompson, I’m gonna kill that Thompson.”
       Who was Thompson who was Bromfield who was the half-wit in the cave... cave, where is the cave where the children... children... no, it was
children’s
... where the children’s...
clothes
, that’s it! Clothes, old, torn, rags; but that’s how he ...
       Janie... You will be killed.
Just lie down and die
.
       His eyeballs rolled up, his tensions left him in a creeping lethargy. It was not a good thing but it was more welcome than feeling. Someone said, “Up forty or better on your right quadrant, corp’r’l, or the pixies’ll degauss your fuses.” Who said that?
       He, Hip Barrows. He said it.
       Who’d he say it to?
       Janie with her clever hand on the ack-ack prototype.
       He snorted faintly. Janie wasn’t a corporal. “Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. Nothing it was designed to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”
       Who said that? Oh—Bromfield. The jerk! He should know better than to try to talk engineering to an engineer. “Cap’n Bromfield” (tiredly, the twenty damn thousandth tune), “if I wasn’t an engineer I wouldn’t’ve found it, I wouldn’t’ve recognized it, and I wouldn’t give a damn now.” Ah, it doesn’t matter.
      
It doesn’t matter. Just curl up and
as long as Thompson don’t show his face.
Just curl up and
... “No, by God,” roared Hip Barrows. He sprang off the bed, stood quaking in the middle of the room. He clapped his hands over his eyes and rocked like a storm-blown sapling. He might be all mixed up, Bromfield’s voice, Thompson’s face, a cave full of children’s clothes, Janie who wanted him killed; but there was one thing he was sure of, one thing he
knew
: Thompson wasn’t going to make him curl up and die. Janie had rid him of
that
one!
       He whimpered as he rocked, “Janie...?”
       Janie didn’t want him to die.
       Janie didn’t want him killed; what’s the matter here? Janie just wants... go back. Take time.
       He looked at the brightening window.
       Take time? Why, maybe today he could get that address and see those children and find the half-wit and... well, find him anyway; that’s what he wanted, wasn’t it?
Today
. Then by God he’d show Bromfield who had an obsession!
       If he lived, he’d show Bromfield.
       But no; what Janie wanted was to go the other way, go back. For how long? More hungry years, nobody believes you, no one helps, you hunt and hunt, starve and freeze, for a little clue and another to fit it: the address that came from the house with the porte-cochère which came from the piece of paper in the children’s clothes which were... in the...
       “Cave,” he said aloud. He stopped rocking, straightened.
       He had found the cave. And in the cave were children’s clothes, and among them was the dirty little scrawled-up piece of paper and that had led him to the porte-cochère house, right here in town.
       Another step backward, a big one too; he was deeply certain of that. Because it was the discovery in the cave that had really proved he had seen what Bromfield claimed he had not seen; he had a piece of it! He snatched it up and bent it and squeezed it: silvery, light, curiously woven—the piece of tubing. Of course, of
course!
The piece of tubing had come, from the cave too. Now he had it.
       A deep excitement began to grow within him. She’d said “Go back,” and he had said no, it takes too long. How long for this step, this rediscovery of the cave and its treasures?
       He glanced at the window. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes—forty at the outside. Yes, and while he was all messed up, exhausted, angry, guilty, hurt. Suppose he tried this going-back business head-on, rested, fed, with all his wits about him, with—with Janie to help?
       He ran to the door, threw it open, bounded across the hall, shoved the opposite door open. “Janie, listen,” he said, wildly excited. “Oh, Janie—” and his voice was cut off in a sharp gasp. He skidded to a stop six feet into the room, his feet scurrying and slipping, trying to get him back out into the hall again, shut the door. “I beg your—excuse
me
,” he bleated out of the shock which filled him. His back struck the door, slammed it; he turned hysterically, pawed it open, and dove outside. God, he thought, I wish she’d
told
me! He stumbled across the hall to his own room, feeling like a gong which had just been struck. He closed and locked his door and leaned against it. Somewhere he found a creaky burst of embarrassed laughter which helped. He half turned to look at the panels of his locked door, drawn to them against his will. He tried to prevent his mind’s eye from going back across the hall and through the other door; he failed; he saw the picture of it again, vividly, and again he laughed, hot-faced and uncomfortable. “She should’ve told me,” he muttered.
       His bit of tubing caught his eye and he picked it up and sat down in the big chair. It drove the embarrassing moment away; brought back the greater urgency. He had to see Janie. Talk with her. Maybe it was crazy but she’d know: maybe they could do the going-back thing fast, really fast, so fast that he could go find that half-wit today after all. Ah... it was probably hopeless; but Janie, Janie’d know. Wait then. She’d come when she was ready; she had to.
       He lay back, shoved his feet as far out as they would go, tilted his head back until the back of the chair snugged into the nape of his neck. Fatigue drifted and grew within him like a fragrant smoke, clouding his eyes and filling his nostrils.
       His hands went limp, his eyes closed. Once he laughed, a small foolish snicker; but the picture didn’t come clear enough or stay long enough to divert him from his deep healthy plunge into sleep.