Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
From down the slope came a clear little voice, “Wash ’at noice?”
Sue and Halvorsen smiled at one another and then O’Banion said earnestly, “That’s what Bitty and Sam gave us—a synaptic reflex like the equilibrium mechanisms, but bigger—much bigger. A human being is an element in a whole culture, and the culture itself is alive.… I suppose the species could be called, as a whole, a living thing. And when we found ourselves in a stress situation which was going to affect us signally—dangerously, or just importantly—we reacted to it in the way I did just now when you pushed me—only on a cultural level. It’s as if Sam and Bitty had found a way to install or develop that ‘balancing’ mechanism in us. It resolved some deep personal conflict of Halvorsen’s; it snapped Mary out of a dangerous delusion and Miss Schmidt out of a dangerous retreat. And, well, you know about me.”
“I can’t believe people don’t think that way in emergencies!” she said, dazed.
“Maybe some do,” said Halvorsen. “Come to think of it, people do some remarkable things under sudden stress; they make not-obvious but very right choices under pressure, like the man who cracks a joke and averts a panic or the boy who throws himself on a grenade to save his squad. They’ve surveyed themselves in terms of all they are and measured that against their surroundings and all it is—all in a split fraction of a second. I guess everyone has it. Some of it.”
“Whatever this synapse is, the Bittelmans gave it to us … yes, and maybe set the house on fire too.… Why? Testing? Testing what—just us, or human beings?
What are they?
” demanded the lawyer.
“Gone, that’s what,” said Halvorsen.
For a very brief time, he was wrong to say that.
EXCERPT FROM FIELD EXPEDITION [NOTEBOOK]: [Our] last [hour] here, so [we] [induced] three of the test specimens to [locus B] for final informal observation. [Smith] pretends to a certain [chagrin]. After all, [he] [says] all [we] did was to come [sizable abstract number] of [terrestrially immeasurable distance unit]s, forgoing absolutely the company of [our] [] and the pleasures of the []; strain [our] ingenuity and our [technical equipment] to the [break]ing point, even getting trapped into using that [miserable impractical] power supply and [charge]ing it up every [month]—all to detect and analyze the incidence of Synapse Beta sub Sixteen. And here these specimens sit, locating and defining the Synapse during a brief and idle conversation! Actually, [I] [think] [Smith] is [pleased] with them for it. We shall now [dismantle] the [widget] and the [wadget] and [take off].
Robin was watching a trout.
“Tsst! Tsst!”
He was watching more than the trout, really; he was watching its shadow. It had occurred to him that perhaps the shadow wasn’t a shadow, but another and fuzzier kind of fish which wouldn’t let the more clear-cut one get away from over it, so maybe that was
why the trout kept hanging into the current, hanging and
zoom!
darting forward. But he never was fast enough for the fuzzy one, which stayed directly under him no matter what.
“Tsst! Robin!”
He looked up, and the trout was forgotten. He filled his powerful young lungs with air and his face with joy, and then made a heroic effort and stifled his noisy delight in obedience to that familiar finger-on-lips and its explosive
“Shh!”
Barely able to contain himself, he splashed straight across the brook, shoes and all, and threw himself into Bitty’s arms. “Ah Robin!” said the woman, “wicked little boy. Are you a wicked little boy!”
“Yis. Bitty-bitty-BITTY!”
“Shh. Look who’s with me.” She put him down, and there stood old Sam. “Hey-y-y-y, boy?”
“Ah Sam!” Robin clasped his hands together and got them between his knees, bending almost double in delight. “Ware you
been
, Sam?”
“Around,” said Sam. “Listen, Robin, we came to say goodbye. We’re going away now.”
“Don’t go ‘way.”
“We have to,” said Bitty. She knelt and hugged him. “Goodbye, darling.”
“Shake,” said Sam gravely.
“Shake, rattle an’ roll,” said Robin with equal sobriety.
“Ready, Sam?”
“All set.”
Swiftly they took off their bodies, folded them neatly and put them in two small green plastic cases. On one was lettered [WIDGET] and on the other [WADGET], but of course Robin was too young to read. Besides, he had something else to astonish him. “Boff!” he cried. “Googie!”
Boff and Googie [waved] at him and he waved back. They picked up the plastic cases and threw them into a sort of bubble that was somehow there, and [walked] in after them. Then they [went].
Robin turned away and without once looking back, climbed the slope and ran to Sue. He flung himself into her lap and uttered the
long, whistle-like wail that preceded his rare bouts with bitter tears.
“Why
darling
, whatever happened? What is it? Did you bump your—”
He raised a flushed and contorted face to her. “Boff gone,” he said wetly. “Oh, oh-h-h, Boff an’ Googie gone.”
He cried most of the way home, and never mentioned Boff again.
INCIDENTAL [NOTES] ON FIELD REPORT: The discovery of total incidence and random use of Synapse Beta sub Sixteen in a species is unique in the known [cosmos]; yet introduction of the mass of data taken on the Field Expedition into the [master] [computer] alters its original [dictum] not at all: the presence of this Synapse in a species ensures its survival.
In the particular case at hand, the species undoubtedly bears, and will always bear, the [curse] of interpersonal and inter-cultural frictions, due to the amount of paradox possible. Where so many actions, decisions, and organizational activities can occur uncontrolled by the Synapse and its [universal-interrelational] modifying effect, paradox must result. On the other [hand], any species with such a concentration of the Synapse, even in partial use, will not destroy itself and very probably cannot be destroyed by anything.
Prognosis positive.
Their young are delightful. [I] [feel good]. [Smith], [I] [forgive] [you].
1.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Despite the acknowledged fact that the translator is an expert on extraterrestrial language, culture, philosophy, and the theory and design of xenological devices, the reader’s indulgence is requested in this instance. To go into detail about these machines and the nature and modes of communication of the beings that operate them would be like writing the story of a young lover on the way to his reward, springing up his beloved’s front steps, ringing the bell—and then stopping to present explicit detail about circuitous wiring and dry, dry cells. It is deemed more direct and more economical to use loose and convenient translations and to indicate them by brackets, in order to confine the narrative to the subject at hand. Besides, it pleases the translator’s modesty to be so sparing with his [omniscience].
What I
meant
was that no more than one person in one or two hundred is worth a second thought, and that says it all. But why say it all in one sentence with the whole evening to kill and good drinks and comfortable surroundings? So I was saying to Bruno, “There is no such thing as a population explosion. We don’t even have a population explosion. You know how many real people there are in the world? Maybe one in two hundred.” You can kick this kind of tin-can along for an hour or more. And it really isn’t my fault if I have a voice like a boat-horn and if at that moment Bruno had to go away and retread a couple of manhattans at the other end.
I mean, it isn’t my
fault
.
Next thing I know this guy without glasses wants to touch my face. Ranges up alongside and excuses himself and says can he
touch
me! I looked him up and back and he was rumpled and he was worried and he was a little smaller than me, and his eyes were red and he would squinch them up and suck in his chin and move his head back on his neck every now and then which was why I thought he’d come out without his glasses. But one thing I didn’t think he was, was queer. Then he called Bruno and bought one, and when Bruno went away he said, “Well, can I?” And I took up the full glass and said, “In this case, why not?” And he touched me. Quickly, forehead and cheeks, with both hands. “Thank God,” he said. “Oh, thank God.” And he drank his drink right down. “All right,” I told him because I had nothing else to do and because this has been known to keep an anxious guy buying for hours and hardly noticing it, “What’s your problem?”
His name was Millbourne and he was a physical biochemist and he used up two whole rounds of drinks telling me a lot of stuff that I don’t remember and I wouldn’t understand if I did. He said he’d
been making some measurements with old-fashioned steel calipers and also with a newfangled radar thing, only I think he said it worked with light instead of radio waves. And the results didn’t match. I mean, here he was measuring the human body with tried-and-true methods and also with a new machine that had to be more accurate, and he was getting different results. But every now and then he would measure somebody, or a stiff, where the results matched up nice as you please. It was as if only one body in every two, three hundred was really what it seemed to be. Then he tried to explain about LSD and mescaline and that kind of hop, drugs that make you see more than you thought you could. What it all shook down to was, he had these three things on his mind, a pill, a set of like eyeglasses, and this girl.
Let me see if I can get it sorted out for you. He said if the world and everything in it was all the time getting larger and smaller, including all the scales and rulers and everything you used to measure with, why, you’d never know it. But maybe one day you find a ruler that stayed the same. Maybe you’d find something to measure with this ruler that also stayed the same. He said he got the idea that he himself was like a ruler that changed when everything else changed, so he couldn’t measure right, and what he did, he took small doses of one of these drugs because, he said, it “expands the consciousness” —that is, it makes you see more than you thought you could see. Well, he saw more than he had, but not enough, so he made a contraption like eyeglasses to help them, using the kind of light the new measuring instrument was using, and that’s when he found out that there isn’t but one or two people in every three hundred that’s real. I can’t help how kooky that sounds, that’s what the man said. If he took the pill and then looked at people through these like glasses, he could see which ones were real. And that isn’t all. Without the glasses he could touch somebody and feel the difference, no matter what he saw. Go ahead, laugh. Just notice I’m not laughing.
All right, about the girl. This Millbourne worked at a big research laboratory connected to a hospital, and in the clinic one day he saw this girl bringing her mother in. The mother died right after and Millbourne
kind of helped the girl through the bad time afterward, and, well, he got hung up on her. What I mean, if I tell you the Pacific is quite a little puddle, if I say Hood and Washington are fair-sized hills, it’s the same kind of talk. Millbourne was
really
hung up. This girl—well, wait a bit.
So here’s a guy who thinks he’s discovered that only a fraction of the population is real, and the others—I asked him about the others, and he began to shake so much I all but ordered a drink for him, but he quieted down some and asked me if I’d help him. I said help him do what?
He wanted me to look at his girl. Just to be sure, he wanted me to touch her. Imagine, touch her: he wanted me to put my hands on his girl.
Well I said sure. But then he told me I had to take this pill and also learn how to run the eyeglasses thing. I didn’t much like that, especially the pill bit, but he was very persuasive, and about three more drinks along I was convinced. After all, all he wanted was for me to do something he couldn’t bring himself to do, because he was so hung up on this girl: look at her through the gimmick to find out if she was real like him and me. I said throw away the pills and forget it, you couldn’t tell otherwise, right? But no; he had to know for sure, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. So okay, and we went to his place and he gave me the pills, three or four of them, and a paper telling me how to get in touch with him, and he checked me out on the eyeglasses gizmo. You had to have a battery pack and there were some controls to match up, and things look sort of hazy through them, but he said it worked all right. Then he said where to find the girl.
The next day I went there, a greeting-card shop it was, without my equipment, you understand, just to have a look and sort of figure the approach. And you know …
You know, she, she— I am going to embarrass myself with you. I am no, well, poet is what I mean, but let me spit this out quick because it’s in the way. You know there are girls that seem like they are sunlit, no matter what time or day or night you see them; like the sun is shining on them. I’ve seen a few like that in my life, two
or three. But only once did I see a moonlit girl, and here she was, coming out of the card shop at quitting time. I didn’t say anything, I let her go by, I would see her again when I had a chance to think, and I wasn’t going to think about much else. The whole crazy story Millbourne told me turned into something different when I saw that girl come out of the shop. A guy is hot for some particular chick, well and good, it’s maybe a matter of taste, maybe his and mine, maybe his and not mine, but … this—
I did what I had to do. I mean, things like this are nobody’s
fault
, is what I mean. I practiced around with the eyeglasses and made some experiments, and finally one night I called Millbourne and made him meet me at the bar. He came in and I handed him a color photograph. He looked at it and quick at me; oh I hope to God I never see a man look at me like that again. I said to him why didn’t he think of this? You hang one lens of the eyeglass gizmo over a Polaroid camera like a portrait attachment. The camera sees what it sees and takes no pills. He looked again at the picture and I thought I was going to have to hold him up. He closed his eyes for a long time and then he put the picture face up on the bar and we both looked at. What it showed was more or less human shaped, but nothing was … nothing was finished. It was a base to put things on—here’s where the hair will go, an eye goes here, here the mouth, and so on, but nobody had put anything on it.