The Creatures of Man (4 page)

"Boy, if you could only talk," Kent moaned, "I'd give you control from here on out!"

Pard twisted out of the seat, which was not easy in the cramped compartment, and methodically began pulling the seat to pieces. "What now?" Kent demanded.

His skull-mate ignored him and kept working until he found what he was after. It was under a reglued manufacturer's label on the shock-cushion assembly.

Another green disk!

Squatting in the clutter of seat components, Pard got a razor blade from his toilet kit and hurriedly sliced the disk into tiny shreds. These he wadded into the remains of the label. He tugged the emergency-vent plug out of the side of the cabin and allowed the escaping air to yank the wad out of the clopter entirely. Then he shoved the plug back in place and waited for the air pressure to normalize. When he was breathing easily again he reassembled the seat and wriggled back into it.

Relax,
his wrist twitched.

What was Pard up to, anyway? Kent wondered fretfully. And how could he
possibly
have got mixed up with the kind of people who stole secret weapons and planted bombs under beds? Kent simply didn't
mingle
with such grim individuals, so how could Pard have managed to do so? Of course, there were those midnight strolls of Pard's, but how involved could a man get who couldn't communicate? Yet, Pard was entangled in something, as the "mystery girl's" pictures testified. And Pard said he was in love with her!

Kent mumbled, "You sure that girl is worth all this?"

Yes.

"How do you know? Have you kissed her?"

No.

"Touched her at all?"

No.

Kent sneered. "One of those I-worship-thee-from-afar bits, huh? You're an oddball, Pard! You really are!" He sat back huffily, staring ahead into the starry night. "She's the reason you won't let me get involved with any kind of girl except cheap fluff," he guessed after a moment.

Yes.

"And you keep strewing her pictures around for me to find. Am I supposed to fall for her, too?"

Yes.

"Huh!" Kent grunted disgustedly. But he had to admit that the "mystery girl" looked most appealing, with that uncertain little smile. Maybe she was right for him. It would be fun to meet her and find out. Besides, he was twenty-four years old, and ought to be thinking about marriage. And his wife should meet Pard's approval, because in a way she would be Pard's wife, too.

Poor old Pard, he mused. A mind living all these, let's see . . . these eighteen years in isolation, practically incommunicado. What strange thoughts would such a mind have by now?

He and Pard had been one person at first, so whatever Pard was now was what Kent himself would probably be if he had been stuck with the voiceless half of their brain. Kent tried to imagine himself in that situation, but it was too much for him to picture. It was a wonder, he decided, that Pard hadn't gone raving mad long ago.

He had been too young at the time of their separation to recall many details. That was in the year of the big Florida hurricane, when he was six . . . A lot of loud noise and the house tearing up all around him, and something hurting his head, and his mother and father never being found . . .

He had no memory of being violently epileptic at the little rural hospital where the rescuers took him. He was told about that a week or two later, after he had been operated on and was well. The old doctor had been awfully nice to him, and had said how sorry he was that the hospital didn't have the equipment to make him well with just a small operation instead of a big one.

Kent remembered some of the doctor's words:

"We had to give you a partner, son, to live inside you. You and he must be friends, and always work and play together, because he can make you do things you don't want to do if you fuss with each other, or he can keep his side of your body from doing what you tell it, if he wishes. And probably only one of you will be able to talk, and the one who talks should be especially nice to the other one. And the one who can talk must never tell other people about his partner, because other people might think you are still sick, and make you stay in a hospital all the time."

When he was older, Kent had read up on the treatment of epilepsy, to learn what had been done to him.

It was a drastic cure worked out some ten years earlier, and justifiable only in the most violent cases even then. It had soon become outmoded as neural research learned how to pinpoint more precisely the cause of epilepsy in an injured brain. But that old country neurosurgeon in Florida had doubtless done his best under emergency conditions.

The operation amounted, quite simply, to slashing the two hemispheres of the brain apart. The connective neural tissues near the core of the brain—the corpus callosum and the lesser commissures—were cut, breaking communication between hemispheres and at the same time disrupting the epileptic syndrome.

The consequences of such an operation were less severe than one might expect, especially in an adult patient. Either hemisphere can direct almost all body functions. The two hemispheres begin their existence in a nearly balanced state, but during childhood one becomes increasingly dominant as the seat of consciousness—the left hemisphere in right-handed persons and vice versa—while the other becomes responsible for less exalted sensory and motor functions. Thus, in the adult patient there would be no emphatic "twoness," no great awareness within the severed secondary hemisphere.

But as the old doctor had known or suspected, this was not necessarily true of a six-year-old. Consolidation of ego in a single hemisphere would have only started, primarily with the shift of language functions to one center. A major portion of Kent Lindstrom could never move out of the secondary hemisphere, because the bridges were down, and would grow—if it grew at all—as a separate ego, a silent partner—Pard.

So there they were—as far as Kent knew the only human of their kind in existence—a duplex man, two functioning minds in one body. And a hell of an inconvenience to each other—except at the piano, of course.

But Kent could console himself that Pard was basically a nice, reasonably sane guy, even if he was mixed up in something pretty weird. The mob was out to kill him, which proved he wasn't on their side. And the upshot of his acts in Los Angeles had been the exposure of that weapons cache.

Also, Pard's special interests—electronic gadgetry and the like—might be trivial, but there was nothing unwholesome about them.

"Pard," Kent said at last, "those characters know we're headed for Toronto. Won't they be waiting for—"

Yes.

"We've got to stay alive and get to the bottom of this," said Kent, "and our chances of doing either in Toronto don't seem worth a damn. If I talked to this girl of yours, would she fill me in?"

Yes.

"Where is she?"

Pard pulled a map out of the rack and put a finger on New York City.

"I'm sure to be recognized there!" Kent protested.

Pard swooped a finger through the air and down on a little town in New Jersey, then rubbed it along the map to the big city. Kent nodded.

"Yeah, it might help to land in a cornball town and go the rest of the way by train. But I wish I had a disguise."

Pard made clipping motions around his head.

"That's what I was afraid you would do," said Kent glumly. Nevertheless, he took the scissors and a small mirror from his toilet kit and began shearing his long curly locks. He had trimmed his coiffure frequently—but far less severely—in the past, and could do a neat job of it. But when he had the mop down to businessman-length, he stared in the mirror with sad misgivings.

"I don't know what my fans in Toronto will think of this," he mourned, "if I ever get to Toronto."

He reached Manhattan shortly after midnight. The town, away from the tourist-trap centers, was resting quietly.

Pard walked into a well-kept residential section and halted in a shadowed spot near the beginning of a long block of brownstones. He watched and listened intently for a minute, then moved cautiously ahead. Halfway down the block he paused in front of a house and looked around again.

"Where is she?" Kent mouthed.

Pard shrugged:
I don't know.

"Is this where she lives?" Kent persisted.

Yes-no.

"If you're trying to confuse me, you're doing great!"

Pard didn't respond. He went up the steps of the house, and Kent saw the row of apartment bell buttons. Pard quickly mashed every button, then hurried down the steps and across the street, where he hid behind an illegally parked car.

Lights came on in the apartments, and after a couple of minutes someone opened the door and peered outside. Kent could hear loud words being exchanged, but couldn't understand them. Five minutes later the house was dark again.

Pard stayed a little longer behind the car, then strolled away. Mystified, Kent hazarded, "Was that some kind of code to find out if she was home?"

After a pause:
Yes.

"Not quite right, huh?"

Yes.

By subway and bus Pard went into the New Jersey suburbs. He wound up in front of a home that Kent put in the seventy-thousand-dollar class. The place was dark and silent.

Pard eased across the lawn, then around the corner and along the side of the house. An empty garbage can stood behind a side porch. Pard picked up the can and flung it with all his strength against the wall of the house.

A shrill feminine scream, followed by enraged male curses, came from inside, and Pard scooted behind a neighbor's garage. He peeked out to see the porch light come on and a heavy man lurch out carrying a mean-looking rifle. The man looked at the garbage can, cursed some more, and glared out into the night, his eyes halting on Pard's hiding place much too long for Kent's mental comfort. At last the man stalked back inside, slammed the door, and turned off the light.

As Pard crept away and headed back for the bus line, Kent growled angrily, "Are you supposed to be accomplishing something?"

Yes.

"Damned if I can see what!" Kent snapped. "If this is the way you spend your nights out, I wonder why you bother!"

Pard napped while Kent returned to the town where he had left the clopter. He had breakfast there just after dawn, and refueled the clopter. Pard had indicated he wanted to head west again.

"Where to now?" he asked when they were airborne. Pard opened the map and pointed to Green River, Wyoming. "The girl's somewhere around there, you think?"

Yes.

"I hope you're right for a change!" Kent snapped, thinking of the rehearsal with the Toronto Symphony he seemed destined to miss that evening. A dress rehearsal at that! A concert artist who didn't show up for engagements could get a stinky reputation, no matter how good he was.

He must have unconsciously mouthed his fretful thoughts, because Pard put an imaginary pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, to remind him that some gents whose instruments were more percussive than those of an orchestra were also waiting in Toronto. Kent simmered down quickly.

Pard landed the clopter at a public field in Green River, and steered Kent to a rent-a-car agency. The girl behind the desk looked like a person of culture, which worried Kent briefly, but she did not recognize his name when he signed for the car. He decided she couldn't be so very cultured after all.

From a distance the place looked like a ranch out of a TV western. It was about fifty miles out of Green River, a distance that took Pard nearly an hour and a half to drive over narrow country roads that were by turn pot-holed and rutted. They saw no other car during the final ten miles.

Pard parked out of sight and approached the house on foot, staying under cover. Kent wondered where Pard had learned his infiltration technique. They hadn't had military training, but Pard dashed from tree to bush to gully as if he knew what he was doing.

The frightening thing to Kent was that Pard thought it advisable to sneak up on the ranch house in this manner. Here he was, miles from nowhere without even a peashooter, and Pard was behaving as if he were going up against a machine-gun nest!

"This is crazy!" Kent mouthed.

Relax.

"Nuts to relaxing! Just when our career was starting to look so great . . ."

But he didn't interfere with Pard's actions. Pard seemingly knew the score, and this was probably better than just waiting to be killed, and—

Machine-gun slugs stitched the dirt four feet from where Pard had crouched behind a bush, and the air was rent by the weapon's startling chatter. Pard hugged the ground, staring at the house still over a hundred yards away.

A loudspeaker bellowed at him: "SURPRISE, LINDSTROM! DIDN'T EXPECT REMOTE CONTROLLED DEFENSES, DID YOU! WALK FORWARD WITH YOUR HANDS UP!"

Pard crouched a moment longer, then stood up and started toward the house.
Take over,
he twitched.

The man on the loudspeaker lowered the volume to a more conversational level and said jovially, "That's one of the advantages of this rustic setting. It makes people think in terms of cowboys toting six-shooters! No gun without a man behind it. So fools and telepaths rush in!" The voice stopped and a mine exploded fifty feet behind Kent, knocking him flat on his face.

"You're not hurt!" the voice snapped. "Get up and come on! That was to remind you of two things: that you're never out of my range, and I don't care greatly if you wind up dead!"

Kent got to his feet, groggy with concussion, and plodded through the yard and onto the porch. The door opened and two guys with pistols came out.

"Inside, Buddy!" one of them barked, stepping aside.

Kent went through the door and saw a third man who was covering him from in front.

"Down on your belly!" this one ordered. Kent obeyed, and only then did one of the men step forward to frisk him. "Roll over real slow," he was told. He did so, and the man finished frisking him.

"Now get up and move! Down the hall and down the stairs!"