The Diploids and Other Flghts of Fancy Page 4

  A single slogan was blazoned across it: SQUARE HOLES FOR SQUARE PEGS. A small block of print at the bottom, placed like a footnote, stated. “The National Counseling Service is approved by The American Psychometric Association, and The Association for Corrective Psychotherapy, and works in co-operation with the Human Engineering Laboratories of Stevens Institute, Columbia University and the University of Chicago. We have available on request all personal data of public, State and Federal psychometric tests already individually taken.”

  All the organizations mentioned were of unassailable integrity. Feeling impressed, he turned the page to the next, a glowing montage of full color tri-dimensional photographs of faraway landscapes, and able-looking people working with unusual machines. Large glowing white letters superimposed across the middle of the page stated aggressively: WE’LL TELL YOU WHERE TO GO—AND YOU’LL LIKE IT!

  He turned to the next page. It was an exaggerated drawing of a small nervous man sitting in an electroencephalograph that was built like an electric chair, with a huge metal headpiece over his head and wires streaming from it in all directions: —EVEN IF IT’S TO A HOSPITAL TO HAVE YOUR HEAD EXAMINED.

  THE outside door opened and a timid woman came in, looked around hesitantly and then, taking courage from his example, took a pamphlet, sat down and began to read. There was nothing visibly unusual about her. Breden began to wonder if he had merely let himself in for a total psychological check, and a diagnosis of what his abilities best fitted him to do. The six fingered hand could be merely a coincidence, a copywriter’s inspiration.

  He turned to the next page. On it a man stood triumphantly with his arms flexed, bulging startlingly with muscle, grinning with enthusiasm and radiating health, vigor and vitality in big orange rays: Our technique WORKS.

  The nonsensical cheer of it was infectious. Someone came in and said, “Doctor Sheers will see you now.” Breden looked up with a grin reflecting the grin in the cartoon. The receptionist had apparently spoken to him rather than to the mousy woman, so he rose. “Could I keep this pamphlet?”

  “Yes indeed,” she smiled professionally as a nurse smiles, warm but distant. “The office is right down the hall.”

  He followed, still grinning. The receptionist reminded him of Nadine in the incongruity of her pretty face and figure, and her efficient businesslike air. If nothing happened now he’d take his counseling like a man, and have a good laugh with Nadine when he came out.

  They turned the blind bend in the corridor and it widened with doors on either hand for thirty feet before making another turn. The receptionist stopped before an open door to let him pass, and then closed it after him as he went in.

  He found himself in a mellow, wood-paneled room with the relaxing half-dusk of indirect lighting focused on the shelves of books. Good books with thoughtful titles, and reference books he recognized as old friends, books he had for his own reference in microfilm.

  The man who greeted him was spare, with a slight scholarly round-shoulderedness. He came forward and took Breden’s hand with confident hospitality. “How do you do. I’m Doctor Sheers, and you’re—”

  “Paul Breden.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Mister Breden,” he said, seating himself behind his desk. “Have a chair.”

  Breden sat down, trying to judge Sheers’s face. The diffuse desk light lay in a pool of orange-brown on the mahogany and lit up the counselor’s face from below with a ruddy light that should have made him look satanical, but instead merely made his face look round and childish. He looked at Breden, waiting for him to speak.

  “I saw your advertisement,” Breden said, “and I was interested. Could you tell me more about it?” He moved his hands, slightly shifting their position. The reading light that was clipped to the arm of the chair was focusing diffusely in his lap, spotlighting his hands.

  The room’s atmosphere of safety and concealment was the result of having one’s face in shadow. It was probably very relaxing to the shy, self-conscious misfits, and the hostile types that came in, needing counseling. But the concealment was an illusion, for the counselor could read expressions and reactions in the small unconscious motions and tensions of the spotlighted hands.

  He should also be able to notice a deliberate conscious motion made to call his attention, such as Breden had made. Breden waited, wondering if it would mean anything to him.

  The counselor’s own hands under the desk light were white and large knuckled, with blue lines of veins showing through. They lay there quietly, white and inexpressive, schooled to perfect relaxation.

  “What is your profession, Mister Breden?”

  “I’m an attorney—my specialty’s patent law.”

  “And what complaint against life attracted you here?” There was a slight smile in his voice, and he interrupted before Breden could reply. “You needn’t answer that one. I’m not completely unobservant.” He stood up, smiling, and said regretfully. “I would have liked to have given you a few tests and made at least a surface diagnosis. You’re an interesting case, and rather well integrated considering the stress. Interesting… but you didn’t come for that, and I can’t take up your time of course.”

  He held out his hand.

  With excitement building in him, Breden rose and shook hands. “What you want is right down the hall,” the counselor said regretfully. He escorted him to the door and opened it, then reached into a recess of a bookcase shelf and pulled out a box of fig bars. “Here, have a couple of fig bars. You need to fortify your blood sugar. You’re probably going to get something of a shock…”

  Breden accepted them with an inward smile. Some diagnosis! He was hungry all right. That sandwich for lunch hadn’t been enough, and he was growing shaky, with so much excitement.

  The counselor leaned out from his office and pointed. “Just turn right and keep straight ahead until it stops at a door.”

  “Right,” Breden started off, taking a quick bite from a fig bar.

  “And remember, I’d like to diagnose you sometime,” the counselor said after him wistfully. “You diploids are always fascinating.”

  BREDEN had rounded the turn and was walking along a remarkably long featureless corridor before the full explosive impact of that struck him. “You diploids!” Then diploids were real; it was not just a gibberish word from Devon’s imagination! It meant something! Diploids. What in the name of Howling Entropy was a diploid?

  He wolfed the second fig bar and licked his fingers, walking steadily down a doorless corridor where every step looked just like every other step, like a corridor in a dream. What was a diploid? There was an answer to that question, but it was a joke. He was a diploid.

  So far, being a diploid was no different from being a Martian.

  Ahead, terminating the corridor, was a small door. He felt the floor-level change subtly from one stride to the next and realized that he had just walked out of one building into another. The corridor had been going straight back through the building, and it was longer than the building itself, move than half a block long. The door was closer, just ahead now.

  Doctor Sheers was a pleasant man, he thought irrelevantly. Too bad there wasn’t time… he opened the door and stepped through.

  He stepped through into a shock of light. The corridor had been dimmer than he thought. Blinking, he stood still, letting his eyes adjust. To his left a woman was writing at a desk. There was an odd sweetish smell in the air. A form dimly seen moved beside him and the sweetish smell increased and mounted to his brain and swirled there with the thin singing of a dream, and he could not turn or look in the direction of the person moving beside him.

  From that direction a voice asked patiently. “Ever hear of MSKZ?”

  “I read something about it once,” answered a voice that sounded like his own.

  “Are you a super, or directed by supers?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Never heard of supers, all right. Have you been given hypnotic instruction for any special be
havior while here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you intend any damage while here?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” The smell changed to something sharp and acrid, and the figure on the side of his vision moved blurrily, fading back. “You’ll forget this. When you wake, you’ll feel and act as if you’d just come in.” The smell was gone, and after some vague time the swirling feeling stopped abruptly.

  He’d just stepped into the room. It was lighter than he had expected, and he stood blinking, waiting for his eyes to adjust. A woman was writing at a desk on his left. This was another office, but this one was bright and aseptic in white and grey, with the scientific look of a hospital—everything in clean precise squares and angles, with heavy medical books and scientific journals arranged neatly in grey metal shelves. Medical and Biological, he thought, classifying automatically. He glanced behind him. The door he had come through was flat and inconspicuous beside another door which stood between two banks of open shelves.

  It looked like the door to a closet.

  The desk was beautiful in grey ruled metal, with the weightless, floating effect of expensive design. A lucite light hose had been pulled out from its wall coil and arched back above the desk, sending down its beam of brilliance like a transparent cobra suspended in the act of striking.

  The woman at the desk said, “Just a minute,” without looking up and continued writing for a moment.

  Then she looked up. She was middle-aged and small, with an air of restless energy and a thin pointed face with large eyes that her friends would probably call pixy-like. Her gaze was impersonal, her eyes flickering across his face and down to his hands then back to his face again thoughtfully as if he were making an effort to place an old acquaintance.

  “E-2 control.” She nodded. “You look like the pure type, too. I didn’t think there would be any.”

  After a second he decided that he had not been mistaken for someone else who would have understood her.

  “My name is Breden,” he said. “I saw an advertisement.”

  “Six fingers,” she nodded again. “We run that one once a year. It pulled in a few people last year too.” She looked at him speculatively again. “The extra eye is recessive. You do have it, don’t you?”

  AGAIN he mastered the jolt that came with mentioning the thing which he had hidden so long. “Yes,” he said, forcing the word out. And then the full implication of what she had said came through. There were others like him. They had seen the advertisement and come to this place before him. And they were important, very important, judging by the expense and secrecy used in locating them. He was the pure type, she had said.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  He answered mechanically through the surge of his excitement. “Twenty eight.” Leaning forward, he was unable to conceal his eagerness, and he no longer wanted to. “You mean that there are other people like me? I’m not the only one?”

  She leaned back, beginning to smile. Her chair was metal, he saw with one corner of his mind, and cunningly designed metal joints in the chair gave with the motion.

  Money, he thought again, automatically fitting facts together. Inconspicuous swank. This place sells something medical. Then he thought, in the first touch of rising fear, This is routine to her. She doesn’t treat me as if I were important.

  “The only one?” she repeated. Abruptly the woman laughed. “To put it bluntly—no.” Smiling she reached into a desk drawer and took out a heavy catalogue. He glimpsed the cover, MSKZ LIVE BIOLOGICALS as she found a place in the thumb tab index and flattened it open, turning it so that he could see what was on the page. A double spread of twenty four diagrammatic chromosomes were spaced across it, like twenty-four vertical strings of black and white beads, each bead numbered and explained in a listing at the bottom. At the upper left of the left page was an insert circle with the photograph of a small, curled fetal figure.

  Looking up at him with a smile she said, “You might be the only adult copy in existence. Except for that, Mister Breden, you are probably the least unique being in existence.” She dropped her hand emphatically on the diagram of numbered chromosomes. “That’s your chromosome set right there. At this moment there are probably several hundred thousand identical embryo copies of you from that chromosome set in use in all the genetics, cytology, endocrinology and geriatrics laboratories in the world. Embryos—not legally persons, not meant ever to be persons—being used as experimental animals, under the premise that they will never be men. In thirty years of use, hundreds of thousands of them have gone down the drain, advancing the knowledge of medicine and genetics immeasurably, and we are prepared to make and sell millions more. You are our diploid standard model E-2.”

  Smiling with a touch of impishness she waited for him to speak.

  So this was the great secret.

  He was a laboratory fetus accidentally grown up to be a human being. A laboratory animal! A million fetal copies of him were bring experimented on, damaged, injured and mutilated in the experiments — dissected and casually thrown away as junk at each experiment’s end! For a moment he could feel the scalpels and needles in his own flesh, the probes moving in his brain, the hypodermics plunging in deep with germs and poisons. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood… a million mangling deaths, and it’s what we were designed for legally, not for life…

  The woman still leaned back pleasantly, showing mild friendliness and attention. She had told him cheerfully and without feeling, either not knowing or not caring what the information would do to him. The only emotion that he had seen in her since he entered was intellectual interest—an experimenter, one who experimented on E-2s.

  HE STOOD with his hands resting at his sides and let the fury go off inside him like a silent explosion of firecrackers, rockets and pin wheels. When it died down he found himself still standing in the same position, lightly dewed with cold sweat, damp in the palms of his hands and shaking slightly, but he had not moved, and to the woman he could have just looked thoughtful. He had probably changed color but the artificial lights helped conceal that.

  A habit of self control was a good thing, he thought. It can even carry you through an attack of madness.

  “I didn’t get the name,” he said smoothly, hating the woman’s aging pixy face and graying curly hair. Why are you doing this?

  “Mirella Sorell.”

  “Doctor?”

  “—of Philosophy—Biochemical.” She was smiling slightly.

  “Why are you doing this?” His voice seemed to have no connection with himself. It was urbane and polite, as if the question meant nothing.

  She was still smiling. The overhead light left her eyes in shadow. “I could have said ‘for money,’ Mister Breden. That’s always considered an honorable and adequate motive for any act. As long as one stays inside the law that answer is enough—no further questions are asked. Its only when one becomes tainted with beliefs or ideals or purposes that one becomes dangerous and an object of suspicion and ridicule and hostility…Is that not so, E-2?”

  He took the name stoically, and after a moment realized that by it she had meant a compliment. It indicated that she expected some extra quality of understanding or special insight from him by virtue of his being born to a letter and a number instead of a name. A compliment of a sort, but she had not answered what he wanted to know. He touched his lips with his tongue. “Why are you doing this?”

  Sorell made a gesture of deprecation.

  “I’ll tell you this much, Mister Breden—your genes were selected from some of the cream of humanity, the top men and women in atom power and radioactive tracer research, with I.Q.’s of one hundred seventy and over. We managed to get our hands on these by taking a government research contract, where the government wanted to know if the genes of their scientists who had been exposed to sublethal radiation over long periods had more recessive lethal mutations. The sperm and ova we took to answer the question we kept, and it gave us a good start in o
ur classified gene bank,”

  “My abilities, I know about,” he said. “Regardless of their history. What interests me is why these—these—”

  “We wanted abnormalities. We needed a good control for crosses before we could go ahead in any other genetic research. Your characteristics had to be tagged with slight abnormalities and mixed racial differences which were plain enough to be visible in embryo. That way we could see what we were doing and judge the properties of each outcross into E-2 by watching the embryo develop and checking the number of E-2 alleles showing. Once we had the control gene set selected we not only used it ourselves, but we began to sell it. It has been priceless in a thousand laboratories. Almost thirty years of genetics research is based on E-2.” She smiled. “We suspected that some geneticists might be tempted to follow their test crossbreeds past the embryo stage, even though it’s strictly illegal. And they were tempted—obviously. Here you are, a sample of the pure strain, indicating someone needed you for a control check on another child.”

  THEY had trademarked him with peculiarities simply for purposes of recognition. He began to wonder if his question had any meaning. Could they be doing everything she described for mere scientific curiosity, without purpose, indifferent to the cost? Or was there some purpose hidden behind her evasions of his question? He asked, “You have me now—E-2, adult version. What do you want me for?”

  “You could answer some questions first, and take a physical examination. You don’t object?” There was a trace of mockery in her voice, and something quizzical in her expression, almost as if she were interested in his reactions, and observing them closely.

  “Anything you say,” he replied with bitterness. How much of this could he tell Nadine? And what good would it do him to tell her? If other things had not driven her away, why this new knowledge of what he was would certainly do it. A laboratory guinea pig. “How much secrecy is there in this business?”