The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy Read online

  The Diploids and Other Flights of Fancy

  KATHERINE MacLEAN

  * * *

  AVON BOOK DIVISION

  The Hearst Corporation 572 Madison Avenue, New York 22, N.Y.

  Copyright, ©, 1962, by Katherine MacLean.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by arrangement with the author.

  * * *

  SIX FINGERS (THE DIPLOIDS), from Thrilling Wonder, April, 1963. Copyright, ©, 1953 by Standard Magazines.

  GAMES, from Galaxy, March, 1953. Copyright, ©, 1953, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

  FEEDBACK, from Astounding, July, 1951. Copyright, ©, 1951, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  PICTURES DON’T LIE, from Galaxy, August, 1951. Copyright, ©, 1951, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

  INCOMMUNICADO, from Astounding, June, 1950. Copyright, ©, 1950, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  THE SNOWBALL EFFECT, from Galaxy, September, 1952. Copyright, ©, 1952, by Galaxy Publishing Corp.

  DEFENSE MECHANISM, from Astounding, October, 1949. Copyright, ©, 1949, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  THE PYRAMID IN THE DESERT (AND BE MERRY), from Astounding, February, 1950. Copyright, ©, 1950, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  The Diploids

  I

  LOOK out!” The shout was almost in his ear, and with the shout came another sound, a flat crack like two boards slapping together. He moved instinctively, grasping Nadine’s arm and making three rapid strides to the shelter of a store doorway. Then he turned as the flat echoes of sound rang back from the stone fronts of the buildings across the street. He expected to see something fallen from a window, or a car out of control veering up over the curb.

  At first glance there was nothing. The traffic moved by silently and swiftly as usual, but the people on the sidewalk milled oddly, and then straightened to stare all in one direction down the street. The light had changed a few seconds ago, and the traffic sped by more rapidly, accelerating.

  He picked out voices.

  “Did you get his number?”

  “Some nut waving a gun from a taxi.”

  “But he shot at us!”

  He glanced at Nadine; they exchanged a half shrug and walked on.

  Then “Mart” Breden remembered that something had brushed his neck roughly as he heard the shout. He had assumed it was the sleeve of a waving arm but…

  “So as I was saying—” he continued stubbornly, determined to finish a half-finished witty point. While he spoke he put his fingertips up to feel the spot on his neck, then brought them down again. There was a dampness on his neck and a red smear of color on his fingertips… blood.

  Nadine halted. “As you were saying, brother—you’re just too dumb to know when you’ve been hurt.”

  She moved quickly around to his other side where she could see the side of his neck. “It’s only a scratch. The bullet just touched you,” she reassured, groping in her jade-green bag with gold-tinted fingernails. “Hold still! I’ll fix it.”

  He stood still. Whatever he had been about to say had vanished from his mind, but it was a pleasure to stand and have Nadine fussing over him and ministering to him with obvious concern. She was indisputably lovely, and dressed in a way that was designed to bring out the fact. He was conscious of envious glances. Streams of brightly dressed, handsome people returning to work from lunch passed by, their feet soundless on the green resilient sidewalk. Some of them were talking quietly and laughing in conversation as they passed; some were listening to music spools with ear-buttons that touched his hearing with a faint faraway strain of music as they passed. He was pleased that they looked at her, and had no attention for him.

  Standing still under Nadine’s ministrations, he said appreciatively, “You’re the perfect partner to take along to an accident.”

  She smiled up at him. “Well, if you’re going to make a habit of being shot at, I’ll buy more band-aids.” Stepping back she cocked her head to inspect her work. The wail of a police patrol wing throttled down to a growl as it touched road and swung in to where the crowd clustered. She glanced back doubtfully. “Should we go back and tell them?”

  He touched the small flesh-colored bandage on his scratch, looking at the reflection in a window. “Hardly worth going back. All we’d prove is that someone was shooting, and they know that already.”

  THEY walked on together through the shade of the tall trees that lined the avenue. “When your Revision Committee for the Patent Code testifies before Congress,” he said, remembering what he had been saying, “you should be spokesman in that tight green and gold suit you’re wearing. They’d agree to anything.”

  She picked up the thread. “ ‘Gentlemen,’ I’ll say—”

  “Undulating slightly,” he added.

  “Invention has become a form of restriction. The law has been diverted from—”

  “Seduced from!”

  “Seduced from its original intention, which was to guarantee sufficient profits to the inventor to encourage and stimulate invention. Instead, research now has as its main purpose the desire to invent something first and patent it first, not for use, but to prevent its use, to preserve the status quo for the industry, financing the research, by preventing its use by competitors.”

  A small tube elevator whooshed them up to the sixtieth floor, “Lawyers’ Row.” They were at the door of his office.

  PAUL BREDEN

  PATENT LAW

  Nadine’s office was further down the corridor. Paul pushed his door open, hoping to extend their lunch time together a little more, beguiling her with the imaginary speech. “At this point your claque in the gallery claps and cheers and stomps, and while they are being ejected you pull out your compact and put on more lipstick.”

  They walked into the inner office past the secretary, ignoring the fact that lunch was over and they both had work to do. Nadine continued the speech, gesticulating with mock earnestness. He considered her from a standpoint of an imaginary audience of lascivious Congressmen. She was beautiful—yes, but too perfectly dressed, too crisp and finished and unapproachable. It was probably an effect carefully calculated to keep the minds of her business associates on the subject of business.

  “You should muss your hair a little,” he interrupted, getting a frown for his efforts.

  “The competition, not to be outdone, pours its money into research to find other ways of doing what it needs done rather than the way the patent excludes them from. This, gentlemen, is…”

  He looked at her with a familiar question coming: up in his mind, quickening his pulse. She probably had a private life of friends and lovers, but he had never dared let himself approach that side of her, although they had known each other for six months. She could choose among many men—men without his handicap—yet she seemed glad to be with him as a law collaborator, and welcomed any free time they could escape from business lunches to eat together. Yet…

  “… does not make the inventor any richer, for he draws only his research salary from his company. Actually, the prime result is duplication of research, so that instead of each day bringing hundreds of brilliant new inventions, the patent office is flooded daily with hundreds of brilliant new ways of doing the same damned thing, each one tying up the patent office with its red tape—each one no better than the other!”

  He sat down behind his desk and propped his elbows on it, smiling. “Add this. ‘There are nine and ninety ways —Of constructing tribal lays, And every —Single—One—Of them—Is right!’”

  “As Kipling wrote—” she began, then stopped to frown at him. “Would Congressmen know that lays are a form of poetry?”
/>   He laughed. “All the better if they don’t.” It was not often they had lunch together or extended their lunch hours like this. They were too busy. She probably would have been surprised to learn how much these occasional lunches meant to him.

  The televiewer chimed.

  PAUL muttered a “damn,”, reaching for the right phone, and Nadine gave him a farewell salute and moved toward the door. “Wait a minute,” he asked her, “and we’ll see who this jerk is.” He pushed a button and a screen on the wall opposite him sprang to life in color, showing a lean old man in a snappy pearl gray suit, waiting with restless impatience. “Yardly Devon.” Breden identified him without pleasure, remembering the things Devon had said before switching off the last time they had seen each other.

  “His last two inventions were not patentable, Nadine, and I told him so, but he insisted I try to get patents on them anyhow. When they were rejected he claimed I’d sabotaged them. He probably took them to another consultant, got the same opinion, and wants to apologize now.” He indicated the chair beside the desk. “Sit there a minute. You’re out of range of the scanner.”

  She smiled and sat down. The bell chimed again impatiently, and Breden switched on the scanner that put him on Devon’s screen. “Yes?”

  A light came into the eyes of the dapper old man as he saw Breden. With a quick move he jumped to his feet, bringing a gun up from somewhere below screen range. “I’ve got you now, Breden. I suspected it a long time, and now I know what you are.”

  For a half second of time Breden started to laugh, then he remembered the shot on the street a quarter hour before with a sudden cold jolt. Devon was not kidding.

  “Careful there, old boy, you’ll break your scanner,” Nadine called.

  His screen couldn’t see her, and the tailored neat old man was childishly startled. “Who said that!” He leaned forward, peering, then turned to inspect the partially visible room showing on the screen, the gun waving in his hand. “I’ve got to kill him,” he said clearly to no one in particular. “He’s a diploid.” He dwindled and came into full view further away, peered around and then wandered out of screen view.

  “Crazy,” Breden muttered. He felt weak. That last meaningless word had been a shock. “Have the police trace the call. I’ll try to hold him.” He handed her one of the phones.

  The old man had wandered back to his screen and he glimpsed the motion. He whirled, gun leveled. “Don’t try to escape!”

  Breden pulled his hand back and arranged his features in an expression of respect and interest. He felt shaken. Diploid. Judging by Devon’s voice it meant something different from a human. It had been a long time since he had heard that inflection in anyone’s tone. The meaningless word rang in his ears as if he had been called something animal. He forced himself to think. What would hold an inventor’s interest long enough for the police to reach him? “I gather that that gun shoots through television screens. Could you give me an idea how it works, Mister Devon?”

  Nadine was murmuring into the phone, “Yes, with a gun. It looks like a private room he’s calling from.” She turned and whispered, “What’s your number?”

  “Lascar B-1063,” Breden said, without turning his head. On the screen Devon was looking down at his automatic.

  “It’s an invention—” he said, looking up at the sound of Breden’s voice—“a new Devon invention.” The old man stroked it fondly with his left hand without turning it from its perfect pictured aim at Breden’s face. It looked startlingly deadly in full stereo pointing at him from the screen.

  Breden pulled his eyes from it, resisting an irrational impulse to switch off the screen. “How does it work?”

  If only he could keep this conversation going for a while the police would come on to the screen in the room behind Devon and take him away.

  The inventor’s voice began to rise. “I won’t tell you. It’s secret. And you’re not going to stop me from patenting it like you did the others. You sneaking diploids are trying to get in everywhere. But I won’t let you have the Earth. You can’t fool me! I know what you are. You’re not going to hold up progress by keeping people from getting patents—” His voice had risen to a shriek; his face was distorted, “I’ll stop you! I’ll kill you… I’ll kill you right now!” The shots came with a shocking crack of sound. The screen was too clear, too tri-dimensional, too much like an undefended open window through which a yammering madman poured shots at him. Instinctively Breden threw himself to one side and half rose before he could check the motion.

  The vision of the shouting old man cracked across like a broken mirror and, still moving, began to waver in ripples like something seen in disturbed water, then abruptly shattered to darkness. They heard a shriek, “Got you!” just before a final tearing sputter and the dull pfut of a blown fuse as Devon’s sound system went dead.

  NADINE had been staring fascinated, but now there was nothing to stare at but the smooth grayness of the viewer screen. “He just shot his televiewer all to hell.” she said into the phone, still staring fascinated at the screen. “It blew out… that’s right. We’ll leave it on.” She put the phone back in its cradle with a sigh. “They said not to switch off.”

  Her expression changed as she looked at him. “What is it, Mart? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” Another spasm of depression hit him. “Oh hell yes—everything. You heard him call me a diploid?”

  She took out a cigarette case and opened it, selecting a cigarette with unnecessary care. She was concerned. “One of those little green men, you mean? Smoke?”

  “No thanks.”

  She untelescoped a long cigarette holder and fitted the cigarette into it, speaking thoughtfully, “I heard him. It was nothing personal, Mart. For a paranoid there always has to be the deros or the spies or the Martians, and the big conspiracy somehow against him. It had to be someone, and you were elected. You must see enough nuts coming in here with lunatic inventions and delusions of grandeur to be used to it.”

  He leaned forward and lit her cigarette. “Too used to it. Beginning to wonder.” He put away his cigarette lighter and held up his hand, looking at it. Five fingers and a thumb. Too many fingers.

  “Right up to high school they called me “Marty” for “Martian Breden”—and it wasn’t a friendly nickname. I was with a gang, but I was its goat. If we played cops and robbers—I was the robber, and got arrested or electrocuted, or shot resisting arrest. If we played cowboys and Indians—I tried to burn people at the stake and got my throat slit by a hero with a bowie knife, and bit the dust. In high school they started getting smarter, and I had friends who were friends, but for them I was “Marty” too. By that time it was my name. I like it now, but that’s where it came from.”

  He put his six-fingered hand down on the desk. “When a new client comes in, now, I mention that the simplest inventions are the best, like the safety pin— or the small labor saving device I invented which makes it easier to play the piano and carry four beer bottles in each hand. ‘What is it?’ they ask… I hold my hand up. ‘Extra finger’ I say. ‘It is patented.’ That always tickles them.”

  He had given her the same line when they first met. He remembered that he had felt the same first hostile alertness and expectation of hurt for her as for any other stranger, and had concealed his tension behind the usual line of entertaining talk. She had been just another beautiful woman to him, a lawyer like himself, but more poised and bland than he was—and too beautifully dressed, too efficient, probably critical and unforgiving and egotistical, someone who could hurt you if you dropped your guard.

  That was before he knew her. His guard was all the way down now. There was no pretending and no caution when he talked with Nadine. “I’m not just being sensitive, Nade, I need jokes like that. I have to use them, and use them carefully. So they’ll get a lift and a laugh every time they notice a detail that’s different. That Mart! Always a character. Everything with him has to be original—if I don’t point it out and make jo
kes about it, sooner or later people begin to fidget and grow uncomfortable with an instinct of something being wrong. There are too many subtle physical oddities that disturb instinct with a feeling of misproportion. The only thing I can do to stop nervousness and tension from building up in them is to bring out my differences and display them like a collection of card tricks, so whenever they get that wrong feeling again, it’s part of the joke, just Mart being a character again.”

  II

  FOR a time Nadine sat back, something close to pity on her lovely face. Then she grinned and mimicked him from memory, with a proudly bent arm and clenched fist, demonstrating the muscles. “My own invention… ” she quoted words he had said, flexing her arm as she had seen him do, with a precise back and forth motion. “I’m the only genuinely self made man. Self made—self assembled—” a rusty hinge noise began in perfect time with the motion of the flexing arm, and she glanced at the arm with dismay and tried to stop it.

  It kept moving stiffly, the rusty squeak growing louder. Hastily she grabbed it and brought it to a halt with her other hand, and then apologetically took an imaginary small object from her pocket. “Of course, I was pretty young at the time… might have slipped and gotten some parts in from the wrong stack… not enough light…” Nadine’s voice faded to an apologetic mumble as she carefully oiled her elbow with an imaginary oil can.

  He was laughing. This was the first time he had seen anyone else do his act. He had seen clients laugh, but this was the first time he had seen what they were laughing at from the outside, and, well, it was funny.

  She looked up from oiling her elbow, her eyes round and solemn. “You were saying?” she asked innocently, putting the invisible and imaginary oil can carefully back into her pocket, and then smiled. “I wondered about that end-man effect, Mart. It’s amusing and starts a talk off in a good mood, but it isn’t exactly like you, not when a person gets to know you better. Are you sure you need it?”