The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy Page 2

  For an instant a crowd of painful incidents pushed against the unlocked door of memory. The time, when he was twelve, visiting the city and he had wandered into a strange neighborhood where the kids did not know him; the fight he had lost. And other times. “I’ve lived long enough to find out what happens if I don’t.”

  “Are you sure that still applies?” she asked, her cool green eyes showing interest and concern.

  Breden went on talking as if he hadn’t heard her question. His eyes held a faraway look as he remembered people’s past reactions to his difference.

  “Take my face—ears set higher than normal and tipped back more—a difference easy to sense, hard to focus on. It makes my face look foreign, but what race? I can see the reaction to it even in the faces of people who pass on the sidewalk—the usual quick unseeing glance, then a double-take and a puzzled expression. Then they’re past and they forget about it. It doesn’t lead anywhere with adults. No one spits at me anymore or stops me to ask who the hell I am and why don’t I go back to wherever I came from, but the reaction is always the same. None of them can classify me. It must be a genuinely strong feeling of something alien.” He laughed suddenly and harshly, surprising himself with the sound. “By the law of democracy the majority is right. Maybe I am a Martian, if that’s what they think!”

  She blew a plume of smoke reflectively, not commenting, then picked up the phone. “Let’s see if the police have our paranoid friend yet.”

  “A Martian.” Saying that hateful word to Nadine made it sound like a joke and not like something that had been dreams and nightmares ever since he was a. kid and they had dubbed him “Martian” Breden, and he’d known something secret about himself that the others did not know.

  Nadine’s voice, vibrant and soft. “Calling in for Paul Breden about a threat to him we reported… yes, did you? Oh… no… of course. Thank you.” She hung up thoughtfully, “You can switch off now.”

  He switched off the scanner that had held connection with Devon’s blown televiewer. “What’d they say?”

  “They didn’t get him. When they got there there was nothing but a smashed televiewer and the neighbor in the next room complaining about the racket— that must have been his gun.”

  “Anything else?”

  “They want you to drop down to the local station house today or tomorrow and swear out a complaint. I said yes.”

  “Check.”

  She smiled. “Let’s hope he sticks to trying to kill you by television.”

  Then when he thought she had let it pass, Nadine looked at her long, gold-tinted nails, and asked, “What did you mean about being a Martian?”

  She had known it was more than a gag.

  He glanced at his appointment pad. “Could you spare me fifteen more minutes?”

  She settled back and crossed her legs. “I’m listening.”

  He hesitated a moment, his hands flat on the desk top, looking for easier ways of saying what he was going to say. Stray fugitive thoughts scurried around the fringes of consciousness like a dusty frightened nest of mice looking for knotholes of escape from a suddenly opened closet—mice that could have grown to full scale monsters if he had waited longer before telling someone of this. And the tightening feeling in his chest warned of coming fear, the ghost that always comes out of mental closets that have been locked too long and are opened reluctantly.

  IT WOULD be better, he decided, to speak rapidly and bluntly, or he might not get it out at all. There was no real trouble, it was just that this was the first time he had explained to anyone. What are you afraid of? This just needs airing out.

  “Let’s take it item by item,” he said slowly, still holding his hands palm down, flat against the desk top, feeling their slight tremor. “I’ve got six fingers, right?”

  “Sure,” she said with a touch of defiance. “Six good fingers.”

  “Ever notice something odd about my walk?”

  “Yes.” She smiled reflectively. “Individual… a slightly crouched springy look. I’d recognize you by it.”

  “My feet are different.”

  “Oh?” She exhaled a translucent puff of smoke, looking at it, then met his eye. “In what way?”

  He swung in his chair so that she could see his legs and shoes. “They’re long in the arch, and abnormally narrow. I can’t keep my heel on the ground, it doesn’t feel right there. Go on my toes instead.” He considered his deep rubber soles, checking their normal appearance. “My shoes are built up inside—up in the back—down in the front, so inside I’m standing on my toes the way I like it. The angle brings my shoe down to normal length.” He looked up at her, challenging her to answer. “Remind you of something?”

  “Hocks,” she said reluctantly. “Do they hurt?” It was a key question.

  “No.” He knew what she meant. An abnormality should be imperfect. Feet hurt vehemently at the slightest trace of imperfection. His feet felt fine.

  “What else?” she asked grimly. He could see the conclusions forming in her mind.

  “What race would you say I am, Nadine?”

  The long grey-green eyes wandered over his face. “I don’t know. A nice, handsome blend—definitely worth staring at. If you’re sensitive about stares —try being ugly and peculiar both. People will look away in droves… Probably some Japanese for those good, broad cheekbones and the set of those ears. Mongoloid skull, Caucasian nose, extra wide chiseled mouth, Hindu almost. I’d guess American Indian, or high cast Brahmin. That orangy olive skin doesn’t tell me anything.” She smiled. “I give up.”

  “My parents were straight Caucasian—white midwestern Americans from Omaha.”

  “Anyone in the family look like you?”

  “No.”

  “What else?” She was forgetting to smoke.

  He bent his right arm, clenching his fist near his shoulder. “My arms. The proportion of forearm to upper arm is wrong. They should be about equal. My fist should come level with my shoulder.” His fist was five inches above his shoulder. “My upper arm is shorter and thicker than my forearm.”

  “Handicap?” The question was automatic now. She knew what the answer would be.

  “Advantage, I think. My arms are unusually strong.” Abnormalities should be crippling defects, but these weren’t. People had told him that he was one of the strongest and most vital persons they had ever met. He wondered how much of this Nadine had noticed herself, and how much she had shrugged off. She wasn’t shrugging now.

  “What else?”

  He hesitated. There was something else—a fact that came into his mind reluctantly as if it were something that was half untrue, a private fairy tale that had no meaning except for him. He had hidden it too long. It was a repression now. His fingers whitened against the desk top. He could feel them trembling. “I’ve got a soft spot in the back of my head.” That’s what he had told the other kids when they had bumped it accidentally and he had cried. His hair covered it, and he hadn’t let them look at it. He had fought instead.

  “On the left side,” he said. “The doctor said it looks like it was starting out to be an eye.” He watched her face and saw it go hard and expressionless in defense against whatever was coming, reflecting his own sudden tight control. He continued levelly without change of tone. “I’m lying to you, Nadine. It is an eye!”

  AFTER he had told her. he sat frozen. This brought the fact to full reality in one blow. An eye in the back of his head! What was it doing there?

  After a pause she said. “I believe you.” Her cigarette had burned down to the holder. She stubbed it out.

  “Want to see it?” They had to bull through this now it was begun.

  “No—yes.” She got up and moved behind him, “Show me.”

  He reached back and parted his hair in the place where he let it grow long.

  There was a moment of silence. “Does it open?” she asked behind him.

  He opened it. The unaccustomed glare of the light in the room was painful, a blinding
blend of tans and blues. A pinkish blur came into focus in the shape of a face. He shut his eye again, gratefully shutting out the light.

  Nadine walked back in front of the desk looking younger and more flustered than he had ever seen her. “Not the right place for an eye,” she muttered confusedly. Fumblingly she took out a cigarette, juggled and dropped it. “It blinked at me.” she said, picking up the cigarette and trying with trembling fingers to fit it into her holder.

  Her confusion was amusing. He had never seen her even slightly flustered before, and the sight distracted him from his own reactions. The tremor left his hands as he began to smile. Self consciously, Nadine made an effort to say something controlled and practical. “Why don’t you have it taken out?”

  He looked at her without answering for a moment, then said, “Why don’t you have one of your eyes taken out?”

  She looked up at him, seeing him as a person, thinking how he would feel, and suddenly had back her balance and wisdom like picking up a purse she had dropped. “Sorry. You gave me the right answer to that one.”

  He grinned, snapping on his cigarette lighter and holding it out for her, his hand steady, and she remembered the cigarette in her hand with a start and looked from it to him, beginning to grin back, and leaned forward putting it between her lips. When the cigarette caught she straightened. “All right, so I’m a sissy.”

  They shared smiles. “Okay, I’ve shown you the inventory. How does it add up?”

  She sobered abruptly and took the holder from her lips and looked at the cigarette’s glowing tip, delaying speech. Then she took a deep breath and forced herself to look at him and reply. “All right. What gives you the idea that you’re human?”

  For a moment he didn’t breathe or think, then his mind raced like a squirrel trapped in a cage. It was almost unbelievable how long he had managed to avoid the elementary question that had trapped him at last. Why should he think he was human? Why should any man have so many freakish differences, and yet feel no pain from any of them at all?

  Automatically he gasped out the stock answer he had used to fool himself with all those years. “My parents are normal.”

  “How do you know that they are your parents?”

  Here was another shattering question. They were obviously too normal, no physical peculiarities at all. They could not possibly be his parents, and yet he had wanted them to be his parents when he was a kid, wanted it desperately enough to fool himself into believing it. The shock of the idea when he heard it now was appalling. It was the effect of the tremendous effort by which he had always avoided that awful question. It was incredible how long he had managed to suppress it, and how cleverly he had been able to fool himself, he thought dully.

  All right, so he wasn’t human.

  Then damn all humans! The hatred flamed like a blow torch. He could hate them now, all these puny, two-eyed five-fingered people who were the same race as the kids who had jeered and tormented him through his bitter childhood. Somewhere there were people like him— people for whom three eyes and six fingers were right, who could be friends and accept him without thinking anything about him was wrong—or ugly— or inhuman..

  “All right,” he said thickly. “So I’m a Martian. Now what?”

  Nadine held up a perfectly manicured five-fingered hand. “Not so fast!” She was recovering from the shock and thinking now as he’d seen her concentrate when they were working on a tough case and the opposition had them in a tight corner. She was on his aide, battling against his conclusions. “You don’t have to go all the way into a padded cell with our friend there.” She jerked her head at the televiewer screen. “We don’t need extra-terrestrials to account for a non-human anthropoid type race. You’re obviously Earth adapted, so you have to be a member of a race natural to Earth.”

  FOR a moment Breden was held by the sight of her hand. It had five fingers, five lovely fingers, and he couldn’t hate Nadine. He couldn’t hate his “father” or his “mother” either, and they were human. Even some of his clients were good guys and honest dealers. He clenched his hands and unclenched them in frustration. Was there nothing in the world that was simple? Nothing that a person could be wholeheartedly either for or against? He smiled wryly. A tolerant sense of humor was supposed to be the mature reaction to such impulses. But it was a pale substitute for the pleasure of a knock-down, drag-out fight.

  He forced his attention back to what Nadine was saying. Other races. on Earth… “There isn’t any other—”

  She interrupted, restraining a knife-edge of impatient logic. “No other known species of mankind surviving. But paleontologists have already dug up almost a hundred extinct species. Apparently the conditions were so favorable back in the early days that every species of tarsier, monkey, lemur, baboon and gorilla existing started evolving an offshoot branch of man, and homo sap got there firstus with the mostus and wiped the others out. But perhaps he hasn’t wiped all the others out. There may be a few small tribes of a different kind still surviving in the hills and jungles.”

  He had wanted to meet and know people like himself, but this presented only a depressing vision of a patent lawyer foolishly out of place on some distant mountainside, trying to communicate in six-fingered sign language to a bunch of frightened six-fingered savages.

  “If there are any people like myself around,” he said emphatically, “they’ll be running things.”

  “Like that, eh?” she looked him up and down, measuring him for a straight-jacket. “The diploid conspiracy?”

  “Like that,” he snapped, uneasily defiant.

  She stood up and touched her fingers to the top of his desk, looking at him with irritated affection. “Let’s bring it down to common sense, Mart, If there’s any group running things, it’s obviously a group of low grade imbeciles. The world has never been in such a mess. We’ve been walking the plank towards an atomic blow-up for fifty years, and the longer we take to get there, the bigger the blow. Or put it this way… granted your I.Q. is high, and maybe high I.Q. goes with six fingers—are you running things? There are a million people every bit as intelligent as ourselves. We meet them every day in this line of work. Are they controlling the world?” Her vehemence grew, adding force to her words and brightness to her eyes. “Now add them up. If all the political experts, intellectuals, economists, sociologists and general geniuses who ought to know how to run things better, plus all their brains, success, money and power can’t get control of what’s going on—then a hypothetical handful of conspiring three-eyes has about as much chance of seizing power as a package of Jello has of stiffening up the English Channel for dessert!”

  He grinned and cowered down behind his desk. “Cease fire! You’re right, kamerad.”

  She smiled, holding out her hand. “All right, Mart. The war’s over. Now I have to get back to work.”

  He took her hand, standing up. “Sorry you can’t stay.”

  “I’m sorry too. We had a nice lunch.” She looked at him slantwise from under her long dark lashes, suddenly provocatively helpless and appealing. “Remember, any time you want someone to talk to while you’re being used for a target, or any time you feel confessional and want to tell someone about a few extra things like a third arm, or how you walk through walls…”

  “I’ll call on you.” He finished the sentence as she let it trail off wistfully, and he hustled her toward the door, grinning. She had taken it the way he had hoped she would, as something casual. There was no discernible difference in the easy relationship they had established.

  She poked her lovely head back in a moment after he had closed the door after her. “If you find out that there really is a Martian conspiracy, tell me so I can help. I like conspiracies.”

  Suddenly fear and loneliness came again. “I like conspiracies,” she had said. His spirits sank. But what of Martians, of freaks. How could she like a freak? Perhaps it was all pretense. The old wave of doubts assailed him. A spasm clenched somewhere in his chest and he rose trying
to think of something to say—some question that would somehow bring an answer he could trust.

  Nadine stood in the doorway in her green suit, looking at him, seeing something in his expression. She came back into the office and put her hand on his arm, looking up into his face with an intent and puzzled gaze. Something changed in the air between them. He felt the warmth of her hand on his arm as if it were fusing into his body, as if in some subtle way their bloodstreams had grown into one. For a long joined moment they stood in silence, their gazes locked together, and then she said in an oddly quiet voice, “Well, there’s work.”

  With an effort they stepped away from each other. “I’ll see you, Nade,” he said as she walked away.

  “Yes,” she said, for he had stated something that had to happen. They could not help but see each other. The thought of remaining apart had become an impossible, ridiculous thought.

  He had been given his answer, and it was magnificently more than he had hoped for..

  He postponed thinking on the subject, letting it remain in the back of his mind as a source of warmth and happiness, and got down to his delayed stack of work. An interview with a client was due in five minutes and he had to brief up on the legal twists he was planning to use to get the man’s patent through.

  Concentration shut out from his universe everything but patents and technical details for the time that was necessary. But before the man came in, Mart lifted his head and let his mind range back over the discussion, just once. Maybe there was some explanation for his differences, some pleasant explanation that he could tell Nadine with pride. Mart Breden wants to know where he came from, what his real name is, and why he has an extra finger on each hand and an extra eye in the back of his head. Put that way, it hardly seemed too much to ask.

  III