Baby Is Three (56 page)

I sat up and swung my legs to the floor. “Okay,” I said.

Stern looked a little annoyed. “This is going to work,” he said, “but it can only work if you cooperate. Just lie—”

“It did work,” I said.

“What?”

“The whole thing. A to Z.” I snapped my fingers. “Like that.”

He looked at me piercingly. “What do you mean?”

“It was right there, where you said. In the library. When I was eleven. When she said, ‘Baby is three.’ It knocked loose something that had been boiling around in her for three years, and it all came blasting out. I got it, full force; just a kid, no warning, no defenses. It had such a—a pain in it, like I never knew could be.”

“Go on,” said Stern.

“That’s really all. I mean that’s not what was in it; it’s what it did to me. What it was, a sort of hunk of her own self. A whole lot of things that happened over about four months, every bit of it. She knew Lone.”

“You mean a whole
series
of episodes?”

“That’s it.”

“You got a series all at once? In a split second?”

“That’s right. Look, for that split second I
was
her, don’t you see? I was her, everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever thought and heard and felt. Everything, everything, all in the right order if I wanted to bring it out like that. Any part of it if I wanted it by itself. If I’m going to tell you about what I had for lunch, to I have to tell you everything else I’ve ever done since I was born? No. I tell you I
was
her, and then and forever after I can remember anything she could remember up to that point. In just that one flash.”

“A
gestalt,”
he murmured.

“Aha!” I said, and thought about that. I thought about a whole lot of things. I put them aside for a moment and said, “Why didn’t I know all this before?”

“You had a powerful block against recalling it.”

I got up excitedly. “I don’t see why. I don’t see that at all.”

“Just natural revulsion,” he guessed. “How about this? You had a distaste for assuming a female ego, even for a second.”

“You told me yourself, right at the beginning, that I didn’t have that kind of a problem.”

“Well, how does this sound to you? You say you felt pain in that episode. So—you wouldn’t go back into it for fear of re-experiencing the pain.”

“Let me think, let me think. Yeah, yeah, that’s part of it—that
thing of going into someone’s mind. She opened up to me because I reminded her of Lone. I went in. I wasn’t ready; I’d never done it before, except maybe a little, against resistance. I went all the way in and it was too much; it frightened me away from trying it for years. And there it lay, wrapped up, locked away. But as I grew older, the power to do that with my mind got stronger and stronger, and still I was afraid to use it. And the more I grew, the more I felt, down deep, that Miss Kew had to killed before she killed the … what I am. My God!” I shouted. “Do you know what I am?”

“No,” he said. “Like to tell me about it?”

“I’d like to,” I said. “Oh, yes, I’d like that.”

He had that professional open-minded expression on his face, not believing or disbelieving, just taking it all in. I had to tell him, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have enough words. I knew the things, but not the names for them.

Lone took the meanings and threw the words away
.

Further back:
“You read books. Read books for me.”

The look of his eyes. That—“opening up” thing.

I went over to Stern. He looked up at me. I bent close. First he was startled, then he controlled it, then he came even closer to me.

“My God,” he murmured. “I didn’t look at those eyes before. I could have sworn those irises spun like wheels …”

Stern read books. He’d read more books than I ever imagined had been written. I slipped in there, looking for what I wanted.

I can’t say exactly what it was like. It was like walking in a tunnel, and in this tunnel, all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you, like the thing at the carnival, the merry-go-round, the thing you snatch brass rings from. There’s a brass ring on the end of each of these arms, and you can take any one of them you want to.

Now imagine you make up your mind which rings you want, and the arms hold only those. Now picture yourself with a thousand hands to grab the rings off with. Now just suppose the tunnel is a zillion miles long, and you can go from one end of it to the other,
grabbing rings, in just the time it takes you to blink once. Well, it was like that, only easier.

It was easier for me to do than it had been for Lone.

Straightening up, I got away from Stern. He looked sick and frightened.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“What did you do to me?”

“I needed some words. Come on, come on. Get professional.”

I had to admire him. He put his pipe in his pocket and gouged the tips of his fingers hard against his forehead and cheeks. Then he sat up and he was okay again.

“I know,” I said. “That’s how Miss Kew felt when Lone did it to her.”

“What
are
you?”

“I’ll tell you. I’m the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Jane, telekineticist; and myself, telepath and central control. There isn’t a single thing about any of us that hasn’t been documented: the teleportation of the Yogi, the telekinetics of some gamblers, the idiot savant mathematicians, and most of all, the so-called poltergeist, the moving about of household goods through the instrumentation of a young girl. Only in this case every one of my parts delivers at peak performance.

“Lone organized it, or it formed around him; it doesn’t matter which. I replaced Lone, but I was too underdeveloped when he died, and on top of that I got an occlusion from that blast from Miss Kew. To that extent you were right when you said the blast made me subconsciously afraid to discover what was in it. But there was another good reason for my not being able to get in under that ‘Baby is three’ barrier.

“We ran into the problem of what it was I valued more than the security Miss Kew gave us. Can’t you see now what it was? My
gestalt
organism was at the point of death from that security. I figured she had to be killed or it—
I
—would be. Oh, the parts would live on: two little colored girls with a speech impediment, one introspective
girl with an artistic bent, one mongoloid idiot, and me—ninety per cent short-circuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent.” I laughed. “Sure, she had to be killed. It was self-preservation for the
gestalt.”

Stern bobbled around with his mouth and finally got out: “I don’t—”

“You don’t need to,” I laughed. “This is wonderful. You’re fine, hey, fine. Now I want to tell you this, because you can appreciate a fine point in your specialty. You talk about occlusions! I couldn’t get past the ‘Baby is three’ thing because in it lay the clues to what I really am. I couldn’t find that out because I was afraid to remember that I had failed in the thing I had to do to save the
gestalt
. Ain’t that purty?”

“Failed? Failed how?”

“Look. I came to love Miss Kew, and I’d never loved anything before. Yet I had reason to kill her. She
had
to be killed; I
couldn’t
kill her. What does a human mind do when presented with imperative, mutually exclusive alternatives?”

“It—it might simply quit. As you phrased it earlier, it might blow a fuse, retreat, refuse to function in that area.”

“Well, I didn’t do that. What else?”

“It might slip into a delusion that it had already taken one of the courses of action.”

I nodded happily. “I didn’t kill her. I decided I must; I got up, got dressed—and the next thing I knew I was outside, wandering, very confused. I got my money—and I understand now, with super-empathy, how I can win
anyone’s
prize contest—and I went looking for a head-shrinker. I found a good one.”

“Thanks,” he said dazedly. He looked at me with a strangeness in his eyes. “And now that you know, what’s solved? What are you going to do?”

“Go back home,” I said happily. “Reactivate the superorganism, exercise it secretly in ways that won’t make Miss Kew unhappy, and we’ll stay with her as long as we know it pleases her. And we’ll please her. She’ll be happy in ways she’s never dreamed about until now. She rates it, bless her strait-laced, hungry heart.”

“And she can’t kill your—
gestalt
organism?”

“Not a chance. Not now.”

“How do you know it isn’t dead already?”

“How?” I echoed. “How does your head know your arm works?”

He wet his lips. “You’re going home to make a spinster happy. And after that?”

I shrugged. “After that?” I mocked. “Did the Peking man look at Homo Sap walking erect and say, ‘What will he do after that?’ We’ll live, that’s all, like a man, like a tree, like anything else that lives. We’ll feed and grow and experiment and breed. We’ll defend ourselves.” I spread my hands. “We’ll just do what comes naturally.”

“But what can you do?”

“What can an electric motor do? It depends on where we apply ourselves.”

Stern was very pale. “But you’re the only such organism …”

“Are we? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I’ve told you parts have been around for ages—the telepaths, the
poltergeists
. What was lacking was the ones to organize, to be heads to the scattered bodies. Lone was one, I’m one; there must be more. We’ll find out as we mature.”

“You—aren’t mature yet?”

“Lord, no!” I laughed. “We’re an infant. We’re the equivalent of about a three-year-old-child. So you see, there it is again, and this time I’m not afraid of it; Baby is three.” I looked at my hands. “Baby is three,” I said again, because the realization tasted good. “And when this particular group-baby is five, it might want to be a fireman. At eight, maybe a cowboy or maybe an FBI man. And when it grows up, maybe it’ll build a city, or perhaps it’ll be President.”

“Oh, God!” he said. “God!”

I looked down at him. “You’re afraid,” I said. “You’re afraid of
Homo Gestalt
.”

He made a wonderful effort and smiled. “That’s bastard terminology.”

“We’re a bastard breed,” I said. I pointed. “Sit over there.”

He crossed the quiet room and sat at the desk. I leaned close to him and he went to sleep with his eyes open. I straightened up and looked
around the room. Then I got the thermos flask and filled it and put it on the desk. I fixed the corner of the rug and put a clean towel at the head of the couch. I went to the side of the desk and opened it and looked at the tape recorder.

Like reaching out a hand, I got Beanie. She stood by the desk, wide-eyed.

“Look here,” I told her. “Look good, now. What I want to do is erase all this tape. Go ask Baby how.”

She blinked at me and sort of shook herself, and then leaned over the recorder. She was there—and gone—and back, just like that. She pushed past me and turned two knobs, moved a pointer until it clicked twice. The tape raced backward past the head swiftly, whining.

“All right,” I said, “beat it.”

She vanished.

I got my jacket and went to the door. Stern was still sitting at the desk, staring.

“A
good
head-shrinker,” I murmured. I felt fine.

Outside I waited, then turned and went back in again.

Stern looked up at me. “Sit over there, Sonny.”

“Gee,” I said. “Sorry, sir. I got in the wrong office.”

“That’s all right,” he said.

I went out and closed the door. All the way down to the store to buy Miss Kew some flowers, I was grinning about he’d account for the loss of an afternoon and the gain of a thousand bucks.

by Paul Williams

“Shadow, Shadow on the Wall”:
first published in
Imagination
, February 1951. Apparently written April or May 1950. There is little information available regarding the exact dates of composition of many of the stories in this volume or the sequence in which they were written. In a letter to his mother dated March 21, 1950, Sturgeon fretted:
Aside from my TV show and a short I wrote last weekend, I haven’t written an original line since last May
. “Last May” was when Theodore Sturgeon began working at Time Inc., writing direct mail copy for
Fortune
magazine. The Time Inc. job lasted until late in 1951. Sturgeon wrote “The Hurkle Is a Happy Beast” for
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
in late April 1949. (The “TV show” he refers to was a speculative project that never came to fruition).

On June 19, 1950 TS wrote to J. Francis McComas, one of the editors who’d bought “The Hurkle”:
Here’s IT STAYED, the fantasy of which I spoke to you
. This story—presumably rejected by F&SF, who didn’t publish their second Sturgeon story until November 1953—is clearly “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall”
(“He stayed, he did,” said Bobby. “He stayed!”)
. “Shadow” could not have been the “short I wrote last weekend,” since TS says he wrote it in 28 days (see below), so if we believe Sturgeon wrote no stories between May 1949 and March 1950, “Shadow” must have been written in April or May 1950.

Theodore Sturgeon told interviewer Paul Sammon in 1977 [in response to a question about his writing habits]:
Another time when I wrote a story I had a bad writer’s block. I was working for Time Inc., and felt I really wanted to write something. But I’d come home from work and try to write and find that I couldn’t. So I finally
decided to turn the coin over, and create a situation where I would not be trying hard to write, but trying hard not to write. This is what I did: I decided I would double-space the typewriter and write to the bottom of the page. One page every day. And if I stopped in the middle of the word, with a hyphen, I would not write another word on another page. This created a situation where I’d get to the bottom of my page and say, “This is crazy! At least let me finish this sentence!” But I wouldn’t let myself do it. So in twenty-eight days I wrote a story that ran twenty-eight pages, and it came out beautifully. I’ve become one of the world’s great experts at breaking writer’s blocks. In almost any case, I can break anyone’s block
. In another 1977 interview, with D. Scott Apel, TS described the same incident and specifically identifies the 28-day story as “Shadow, Shadow on the Wall.” He added, jokingly:
That technique was so successful that I never used it again
.