More Than Human (19 page)

Bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup-bup
.
       (Fifties, he thought, way off in the hills. Lifelong ambition of every red-blooded boy: get a machine gun and make like a garden hose with it.)
       Wham-wham-wham-wham!
       (Oerlikons! Where’d they dredge those things up from? Is this an ack-ack station or is it a museum?)
       “Hip! Hip Barrows!”
       (For Pete’s sake, when is that corporal going to learn to say “Lieutenant”? Not that I give a whistle, one way or another, but one of these days he’ll do it in front of some teen-age Air Force Colonel and get us both bounced for it.)
       Wham! Wham! “Oh... Hip!”
       He sat up palming his eyes, and the guns were knuckles on a door and the corporal was Janie, calling somewhere, and the anti-aircraft base shattered and misted and blew away to the dream factory.
       “Hip!”
       “Come on,” he croaked. “Come on in.”
       “It’s locked.”
       He grunted and got numbly to his feet. Sunlight poured in through the curtains. He reeled to the door and opened it. His eyes wouldn’t track and his teeth felt like a row of cigar butts.
       “Oh, Hip!”
       Over her shoulder he saw the other door and he remembered. He drew her inside and shut his door. “Listen, I’m awful sorry about what happened. I feel like a damn fool.”
       “Hip—don’t,” she said softly. ”It doesn’t matter, you know that. Are you all right?”
       “A little churned up,” he admitted and was annoyed by the reappearance of his embarrassed laugh. “Wait till I put some cold water on my face and wake up some.” From the bathroom he called, “Where you been?”
       “Walking. I had to think. Then... I waited outside. I was afraid you might—you know. I wanted to follow you, be with you. I thought I might help... You really are all right?”
       “Oh sure. And I’m not going anywhere without talking to you first. But about the other thing—I hope
she’s
all right.”
       “What?”
       “I guess she got a worse shock than I did. I wish you’d told me you had somebody in there with you. I wouldn’t’ve barged—”
       “Hip, what are you talking about? What happened?”
       “Oh!” he said. “Omigosh. You came straight here—you haven’t been in your room yet.”
       “No. What on
earth
are you—”
       He said, actually blushing, “I wish she’d told you about it rather than me. Well, I suddenly had to see you, but
bad
. So I steamed across the hall and charged in, never dreaming there would be anyone but you there, and here I am halfway across the room before I could even stop, and there stood this friend of yours.”
       “Who? Hip, for heaven’s sake—”
       “The woman. Had to be someone you know, Janie. Burglars aren’t likely to prance around naked.”
       Janie put a slow hand up to her mouth.
       “A colored woman. Girl. Young.”
       “Did she... what did she...”
       “I don’t know what she did. I didn’t get but a flash glimpse of her—if that’s any comfort to her. I hightailed right out of there. Aw, Janie, I’m sorry. I know it’s sort of embarrassing, but it can’t be
that
bad. Janie!” he cried in alarm.
       “He’s found us... We’ve got to get out of here,” she whispered. Her lips were nearly white; she was shaking. “Come on, oh, come
on!
”
       “Now wait! Janie, I got to talk to you. I—”
       She whirled on him like a fighting animal. She spoke with such intensity that her words blurred. “Don’t talk! Don’t ask me. I can’t tell you; you wouldn’t understand. Just get out of here, get away.” With astonishing power her hand closed on his arm and pulled. He took two running steps or he would have been flat on the floor. She was at the door, opening it, as he took the second step, and she took the slack of his shirt in her free hand, pulled him through, pushed him down the hall towards the outer exit. He caught himself against the doorpost; surprise and anger exploded together within him and built an instant of mighty stubbornness. No single word she might have uttered could have moved him; braced and on guard as he was, not even her unexpected strength could have done anything but cause him to strike back. But she said nothing nor did she touch him; she ran past, white and whimpering in terror, and bounded down the steps outside.
       He did the only thing his body would do, without analysis or conscious decision. He found himself outside, running a little behind her. “Janie...”
       “Taxi!” she screamed.
       The cab had barely begun to slow down when she had the door open. Hip fell in after her. “Go on,” said Janie to the driver and knelt on the seat to peer through the rear window.
       “Go where?” gasped the driver.
       “Just go. Hurry.”
       Hip joined her at the window. All he could see was the dwindling house front, one or two gaping pedestrians. “What was it? What happened?”
       She simply shook her head.
       “What was it?” he insisted. “The place going to explode or something?”
       Again she shook her head. She turned away from the window and cowered into the corner. Her white teeth scraped and scraped at the back of her hand. He reached out and gently put it down. She let him.
       Twice more he spoke to her, but she would not answer except to acknowledge it, and that only by turning her face slightly away from him each time. He subsided at last, sat back and watched her.
       Just outside of town where the highway forks, the driver asked timidly, “Which way?” and it was Hip who said, “Left.” Janie came out of herself enough to give him a swift, grateful glance and sank out of sight behind her face.
       At length there was a difference in her, in some inexplicable way, though she still sat numbly staring at nothing! He said quietly, “Better?”
       She put her eyes on him and, appreciably later, her vision. A rueful smile plucked at the corners of her mouth. “Not worse anyway.”
       “Scared,” he said.
       She nodded. “Me too,” he said, his face frozen. She put her hand on his arm. “Oh Hip, I’m sorry; I’m more sorry than I can say. I didn’t expect this—not so soon. And I’m afraid there isn’t anything I can do about it now.”
       “Why?”
       “I can’t tell you.”
       “You can’t tell me? Or you can’t tell me
yet?
”
       She said, carefully, “I told you what you’d have to do—go back and back; find all the places you’ve been and the things that happened, right to the beginning. You can do it, given time.” The terror was in her face again and turned to a sadness. “But there isn’t any more time.”
       He laughed almost joyfully. “There is.” He seized her hand. “This morning I found the cave. That’s two years back, Janie! I know where it is, what I found there: some old clothes, children’s clothes. An address, the house with the porte-cochère. And my piece of tubing, the one thing I ever saw that proved I was right in searching for... for... Well,” he laughed, “that’s the next step backward. The important thing is that I found the cave, the biggest step yet. I did it in thirty minutes or so and I did it without even trying. Now I’ll
try
. You say we have no more time. Well, maybe not weeks, maybe not days; do we have a day, Janie? Half a day?”
       Her face began to glow. “Perhaps we have,” she said. “Perhaps... Driver! This will do.”
       It was she who paid the driver; he did not protest it. They stood at the town limits, a place of open, rolling fields barely penetrated by the cilia of the urban animal: here a fruit stand, there a gas station, and across the road, some too-new dwellings of varnished wood and obtrusive stucco. She pointed to the high meadows.
       “We’ll be found,” she said flatly, “but up there we’ll be alone... and if—anything comes, we can see it coming.”
       On a knoll in the foothills, in a green meadow where the regrowth barely cloaked the yellow stubble of a recent mowing, they sat facing one another, where each commanded half a horizon.
       The sun grew high and hot, and the wind blew and a cloud came and went. Hip Barrows worked; back and back he worked. And Janie listened, waited, and all the while she watched, her clear deep eyes flicking from side to side over the open land.
       Back and back... dirty and mad, Hip Barrows had taken nearly two years to find the house with the porter-cochère. For the address had a number and it had a street; but no town, no city.
       It took three years from the insane asylum to the cave. A year to find the insane asylum from the county clerk’s office. Six months to find the county clerk from the day of his discharge. From the birth of his obsession until they threw him out of the Service, another six months.
       Seven plodding years from starch and schedules, promise and laughter, to a dim guttering light in a jail cell. Seven years snatched away, seven years wingless and falling.
       Back through the seven years he went until he knew what he had been before they started.
       It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster.
       Still young, still brilliant as ever, but surrounded by puzzling rejection. Lieutenant Barrows found himself with too much spare time, and he hated it.

The range was small, in some respects merely a curiosity, a museum, for there was a good deal of obsolete equipment. The installation itself, for that matter, was obsolete in that it had been superseded years ago by larger and more efficient defense nets and was now part of no system. But it had a function in training gunners and their officers, radar men, and technicians.
       The Lieutenant, in one of his detested idle moments, went rummaging into some files and came up with some years-old research figures on the efficiency of proximity fuses, and some others on the minimum elevations at which these ingenious missiles, with their fist-sized radar transmitters, receivers, and timing gear, might be fired. It would seem that ack-ack officers would much rather knock out a low-flying plane than have their sensitive shells pre-detonated by an intervening treetop or power pole.
       Lieutenant Barrows’ eye, however, was one of those which pick up mathematical discrepancies, however slight, with the accuracy of the Toscanini ear for pitch. A certain quadrant in a certain sector in the range contained a tiny area over which passed more dud shells than the law of averages should respectably allow. A high-dud barrage or two or three perhaps, over a year, might indicate bad quality control in the shells themselves; but when every flight of low-elevation “prox” shells over a certain point either exploded on contact or not at all, the revered law was being broken. The scientific mind recoils at law-breaking of this sort, and will pursue a guilty phenomenon as grimly as ever society hunted its delinquents.
       What pleased the Lieutenant most was that he had here an exclusive. There had been little reason for anyone to throw great numbers of shells at low elevations anywhere. There had been less reason to do so over the area in question. Therefore it was not until Lieutenant Barrows hunted down and compared a hundred reports spread over a dozen years that anyone had had evidence enough to justify an investigation.
       But it was going to be
his
investigation. If nothing came of it, nothing need be said. If on the other hand it turned out to be important, he could with immense modesty and impressive clarity bring the matter to the attention of the Colonel; and perhaps then the Colonel might be persuaded to revise his opinion of
ROTC
Lieutenants. So he made a field trip on his own time and discovered an area wherein to varying degrees his pocket voltmeter would not work properly. And it dawned on him that what he had found was something which inhibited magnetism. The rugged but sensitive coils and relays in the proximity fuses, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist when they passed this particular hillside lower than forty yards. Permanent magnets were damped just as electromagnets.
       Nothing in Barrows’ brief but brilliant career had even approached this incredible phenomenon in potential. His accurate and imaginative mind drank and drank of it and he saw visions: the identification and analysis of the phenomenon (Barrows Effect, perhaps?) and then a laboratory effort—successful of course—to duplicate it. Then, application. A field generator which would throw up an invisible wall of the force; aircraft and their communications—even their intercoms—failing with the failure of their many magnets. Seeking gear on guided missiles, arming and blasting devices, and of course the disarming of proximity fuses... the perfect defensive weapon for the electromagnetic age... and how much else? No limit to it. Then there would be the demonstrations of course, the Colonel introducing him to renowned scientists and military men: “
This, gentlemen, is your
ROTC
man!
”
       But first he had to find what was doing it, now that he knew where it was being done; and so he designed and built a detector. It was simple and ingenious and very carefully calibrated. While engaged in the work, his irrepressible mind wrought and twisted and admired and reworked the whole concept of “contramagnetism”. He extrapolated a series of laws and derived effects just as a mathematical pastime and fired them off to the Institute of Electrical Engineers, who could appreciate them and did; for they were later published in the Journal. He even amused himself in gunnery practice by warning his men against low-elevation shelling over his area, because “the pixies would degauss (demagnetize) their proximity fuses”. And this gave him a high delight, for he pictured himself telling them later that his fanciful remark had been nothing but the truth and that had they the wit God gave a goose they could have gone out and dug up the thing, whatever it was, for themselves.
       At last he finished his detector. It involved a mercury switch and a solenoid and a variable power supply and would detect the very slightest changes in the field of its own magnet. It weighed about forty pounds but this mattered not at all since he did not intend to carry it. He got the best ordnance maps of the area that he could find, appointed as a volunteer the stupidest-looking Pfc he could find, and spent a long day of his furlough time out on the range, carefully zigzagging the slope and checking the readings off on his map until he located the centre of the degaussing effect.
       It was in a field on an old abandoned farm. In the middle of the field was an ancient truck in the last stages of oxidation. Drought and drift, rain and thaw had all but buried the machine and the Lieutenant flogged himself and his patient soldier into a frenzy of explosive excavation. After sweaty hours, they had dug and scraped and brushed until what was left of the truck stood free and clear; and under it they found the source of the incredible field.
       From each corner of the frame ran a gleaming silvery cable. They came together at the steering column and joined and thence a single cable ran upward to a small box. From the box protruded a lever. There was no apparent power source but the thing was operating.
       When Barrows pushed the lever forward, the twisted wreck groaned and sank noticeably into the soft ground. When he pulled the lever back, it crackled and creaked and lifted up to the limits of its broken springs and wanted to lift even more.
       He returned the lever to neutral and stepped back.
       This was everything he had hoped to find certainly and made practical the wildest of his dreams. It was the degaussing generator, awaiting only his dissection and analysis. But it was all these things as a by-product.
       Lever forward, this device made the truck
heavier
. Lever back,
lighter
.
       It was anti-gravity!
       Anti-gravity: a fantasy, a dream. Anti-gravity, which would change the face of the earth in ways which would make the effects of steam, electricity, even nuclear power, mere sproutings of technology in the orchard this device would grow. Here was skyward architecture no artist had yet dared to paint; here was wingless flight and escape to the planets, to the stars, perhaps. Here was a new era in transportation, logistics, even the dance, even medicine. And oh, the research... and it was all his.
       The soldier, the dull-witted Pfc, stepped forward and yanked the lever full back. He smiled and threw himself at Barrows’ legs. Barrows kicked free, stood, sprang so his knees crackled. He stretched, reached, and the tips of his fingers touched the cool bright underside of one of the cables. The contact could not have lasted longer than a tenth of a second; but for years afterwards, for all the years Barrows was to live, part of him seemed to stay there in the frozen instant, his fingertips on a miracle, his body adrift and free of earth.
       He fell.