Nightfall and Other Stories

  She said, slowly, “No, I can’t. What are you talking about?”

  “It’s all very well to say that if we could remove the parasite, we would have eternal growth and life if we wanted it; or at least until we got tired of being too big or of living too long, and did away with ourselves neatly. But how many millions of years has it been since the human body has had occasion to grow in such an unrestrained fashion? Can it do so any longer? Is the chemistry of the body adjusted to that? Has it got the proper whatchamacallits?”

  “Enzymes,” Rose supplied in a whisper.

  “Yes, enzymes. It’s impossible for us. If for any reason the parasitic intelli­gence, as Harg Tholan calls it, does leave the human body, or if its relation­ship to the human mind is in any way impaired, growth does take place, but not in any orderly fashion. We call the growth cancer. And there you have it. There’s no way of getting rid of the parasite. We’re together for all eternity. To get rid of their inhibition Death, extraterrestrials must first wipe out all vertebrate life on Earth. There is no other solution for them, and so we must keep knowledge of it from them. Do you understand?”

  Her mouth was dry and it was difficult to talk. “I understand, Drake.” She noticed that his forehead was damp and that there was a line of perspi­ration down each cheek. “And now you’ll have to get it out of the apart­ment.”

  “It’s late at night and I’ll be able to get the body out of the building. From there on--” He turned to her. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  “I understand, Drake,” she said again.

  Harg Tholan was heavy. Drake had to drag him through the apartment. Rose turned away, retching. She hid her eyes until she heard the front door close. She whispered to herself, “I understand, Drake.”

  It was 3 a.m. Nearly an hour had passed since she had heard the front door click gently into place behind Drake and his burden. She didn’t know where he was going, what he intended doing--

  She sat there numbly. There was no desire to sleep; no desire to move. She kept her mind traveling in tight circles, away from the thing she knew and which she wanted not to know.

  Parasitic minds! Was it only a coincidence or was it some queer racial memory, some tenuous long-sustained wisp of tradition or insight, stretching back through incredible millennia, that kept current the odd myth of hu­man beginnings? She thought to herself, there were two intelligences on Earth to begin with. There were humans in the Garden of Eden and also the serpent, which “was more subtil than any beast of the field.” The serpent infected man and, as a result, it lost its limbs. Its physical attributes were no longer necessary. And because of the infection, man was driven out of the Garden of eternal life. Death entered the world.

  Yet, despite her efforts, the circle of her thoughts expanded and returned to Drake. She shoved and it returned; she counted to herself, she recited the names of the objects in her field of vision, she cried, “No, no, no,” and it returned. It kept returning.

  Drake had lied to her. It had been a plausible story. It would have held good under most circumstances; but Drake was not a biologist. Cancer could not be, as Drake had said, a disease that was an expression of a lost ability for normal growth. Cancer attacked children while they were still growing; it could even attack embryonic tissue. It attacked fish, which, like extraterrestrials, never stopped growing while they lived, and died only by disease or accident. It attacked plants which had no minds and could not be parasitized. Cancer had nothing to do with the presence or absence of normal growth; it was the general disease of life, to which no tissue of no multicellular organism was completely immune.

  He should not have bothered lying. He should not have allowed some obscure sentimental weakness to persuade him to avoid the necessity of killing her in that manner. She would tell them at the Institute. The para­site could be beaten. Its absence would not cause cancer. But who would believe her?

  She put her hands over her eyes. The young men who disappeared were usually in the first year of their marriage. Whatever the process of reproduc­tion of the parasite intelligences, it must involve close association with an­other parasite--the type of close and continuous association that might only be possible if their respective hosts were in equally close relationship. As in the case of newly married couples.

  She could feel her thoughts slowly disconnect. They would be coming to her. They would be saying, “Where is Harg Tholan?” And she would an­swer, “With my husband.” Only they would say, “Where is your husband?” because he would be gone, too. He needed her no longer. He would never return. They would never find him, because he would be out in space. She would report them both, Drake Smollett and Harg Tholan, to the Missing Persons Bureau.

  She wanted to weep, but couldn’t; she was dry-eyed and it was painful.

  And then she began to giggle and couldn’t stop. It was very funny. She had looked for the answers to so many questions and had found them all. She had even found the answer to the question she thought had no bearing on the subject.

  She had finally learned why Drake had married her.

  ---

  The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable. Once the horror at Hiroshima took place, anyone could see that science fiction writers were not merely dreamers and crackpots after all, and that many of the motifs of that class of literature were now permanently part of the newspaper headlines.

  I suppose that science fiction writer and reader were, on the whole, pleased--if not at the effect of the atom bomb itself, then at least at the crystallization into fact of something that had been so science fictional.

  I myself was ambivalent. Quite apart from the frightening aspects of nuclear explosions and the mildly irrational feeling that such things as atom bombs belonged to us and not to the real world, I also felt that reality might have a stultifying effect on the field.

  And I think it did to a certain extent. There was a tendency for the new reality to nail the science fiction writer to the ground. Prior to 1945, science fiction had been wild and free. An its motifs and plot varieties remained in the realm of fantasy and we could do as we pleased. After 1945, there came the increasing need to talk about the AEC and to mold all the infinite scope of our thoughts to the small bit of them that had become real.

  In fact, there was the birth of something I called “tomorrow fiction”; the science fiction story that was no more new than tomorrow’s headlines.

  Believe me, there can be nothing duller than tomorrow’s headlines in science fiction. As an example, consider Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. Surely to the science fiction fan--as opposed to the general public--this must seem very milk-and-watery. So there’s a nuclear war to start the story with--and what else is new?

  I resisted the temptation to base a story slavishly on the present until I could think of a way to do so without making myself a minion of the headlines and of topicality. I wanted to write a story that would deal with the things of tomorrow without becoming outdated the day after tomorrow.

  The result was “Breeds There a Man...?” which, despite all its topicality, is as much science fiction now as it was in 1951 when it was written.

  First appearance--Astounding Science Fiction, June 1951. Copyright, 1951, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  Breeds There a Man?

  Police Sergeant Mankiewicz was on the telephone and he wasn’t enjoying it. His conversation was sounding like a one-sided view of a firecracker.

  He was saying, “That’s right! He came in here and said, ‘Put me in jail, because I want to kill myself.’

  “... I can’t help that. Those were his exact words. It sounds crazy to me, too.

  “... Look, mister, the guy answers the description. You asked me for information and I’m giving it to you.

  “... He has exactly that scar on his right cheek and he said his name was John Smith. He didn’t say it was Doctor anything-at-all.

  “... Well, sure it’s a pho
ny. Nobody is named John Smith. Not in a police station, anyway.

  “... He’s in jail now.

  “... Yes, I mean it.

  “... Resisting an officer; assault and battery; malicious mischief. That’s three counts.

  “... I don’t care who he is.

  “... All right. I’ll hold on.”

  He looked up at Officer Brown and put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. It was a ham of a hand that nearly swallowed up the phone altogether. His blunt-featured face was ruddy and steaming under a thatch of pale-yellow hair.

  He said, “Trouble! Nothing but trouble at a precinct station. I’d rather be pounding a beat any day.”

  “Who’s on the phone?” asked Brown. He had just come in and didn’t really care. He thought Mankiewicz would look better on a suburban beat, too.

  “Oak Ridge. Long Distance. A guy called Grant. Head of somethingological division, and now he’s getting somebody else at seventy-five cents a min... Hello!”

  Mankiewicz got a new grip on the phone and held himself down.

  “Look,” he said, “let me go through this from the beginning. I want you to get it straight and then if you don’t like it, you can send someone down here. The guy doesn’t want a lawyer. He claims he just wants to stay in jail and, brother, that’s all right with me.

  “Well, will you listen? He came in yesterday, walked right up to me, and said, ‘Officer, I want you to put me in jail because I want to kill myself.’ So I said, ‘Mister, I’m sorry you want to kill yourself. Don’t do it, because if you do, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.’

  “... I am serious. I’m just telling you what I said. I’m not saying it was a funny joke, but I’ve got my own troubles here, if you know what I mean. Do you think all I’ve got to do here is to listen to cranks who walk in and--

  “... Give me a chance, will you?” I said, ‘I can’t put you in jail for wanting to kill yourself. That’s no crime.’ And he said, ‘But I don’t want to die.’ So I said, ‘Look, bud, get out of here.’ I mean if a guy wants to commit suicide, all right, and if he doesn’t want to, all right, but I don’t want him weeping on my shoulder.

  “... I’m getting on with it. So he said to me. ‘If I commit a crime, will you put me in jail?” I said, ‘If you’re caught and if someone files a charge and you can’t put up bail, we will. Now beat it.’ So he picked up the inkwell on my desk and, before I could stop him, he turned it upside down on the open police blotter.

  “... That’s right! Why do you think we have ‘malicious mischief tabbed on him? The ink ran down all over my pants.

  “... Yes, assault and battery, too! I came hopping down to shake a little sense into him, and he kicked me in the shins and handed me one in the eye.

  “... I’m not making this up. You want to come down here and look at my face?

  “... He’ll be up in court one of these days. About Thursday, maybe.

  “... Ninety days is the least he’ll get, unless the psychos say otherwise. I think he belongs in the loony-bin myself.

  “... Officially, he’s John Smith. That’s the only name he’ll give.

  “... No, sir, he doesn’t get released without the proper legal steps.

  “... O.K., you do that, if you want to, bud! I just do my job here.”

  He banged the phone into its cradle, glowered at it, then picked it up and began dialing. He said “Gianetti?” got the proper answer and began talking.

  “What’s the A.E.C.? I’ve been talking to some Joe on the phone and he says--

  “... No, I’m not kidding, lunk-head. If I were kidding, I’d put up a sign. What’s the alphabet soup?”

  He listened, said, “Thanks” in a small voice and hung up again.

  He had lost some of his color. “That second guy was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission,” he said to Brown. “They must have switched me from Oak Ridge to Washington.”

  Brown lounged to his feet, “Maybe the F.B.I, is after this John Smith guy. Maybe he’s one of these here scientists.” He felt moved to philosophy. “They ought to keep atomic secrets away from those guys. Things were O.K. as long as General Groves was the only fella who knew about the atom bomb. Once they cut in these here scientists on it, though--”

  “Ah, shut up,” snarled Mankiewicz.

  Dr. Oswald Grant kept his eyes fixed on the white line that marked the highway and handled the car as though it were an enemy of his. He always did. He was tall and knobby with a withdrawn expression stamped on his face. His knees crowded the wheel, and his knuckles whitened whenever he made a turn.

  Inspector Darrity sat beside him with his legs crossed so that the sole of his left shoe came up hard against the door. It would leave a sandy mark when he took it away. He tossed a nut-brown penknife from hand to hand. Earlier, he had unsheathed its wicked, gleaming blade and scraped casually at his nails as they drove, but a sudden swerve had nearly cost him a finger and he desisted.

  He said, “What do you know about this Ralson?”

  Dr. Grant took his eyes from the road momentarily, then returned them. He said, uneasily, “I’ve known him since he took his doctorate at Princeton. He’s a very brilliant man.”

  “Yes? Brilliant, huh? Why is it that all you scientific men describe one another as ‘brilliant’? Aren’t there any mediocre ones?”

  “Many. I’m one of them. But Ralson isn’t. You ask anyone. Ask Oppenheimer. Ask Bush. He was the youngest observer at Alamogordo.”

  “O.K. He was brilliant. What about his private life?”

  Grant waited. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “You know him since Princeton. How many years is that?”

  They had been scouring north along the highway from Washington for two hours with scarcely a word between them. Now Grant felt the atmo­sphere change and the grip of the law on his coat collar.

  “He got his degree in ‘43.”

  “You’ve known him eight years then.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you don’t know about his private life?”

  “A man’s life is his own, Inspector. He wasn’t very sociable. A great many of the men are like that. They work under pressure and when they’re off the job, they’re not interested in continuing the lab acquaintanceships.”

  “Did he belong to any organizations that you know of?”

  “No.”

  The inspector said, “Did he ever say anything to you that might indicate he was disloyal?”

  Grant shouted “No!” and there was silence for a while.

  Then Darrity said, “How important is Ralson in atomic research?”

  Grant hunched over the wheel and said, “As important as any one man can be. I grant you that no one is indispensable, but Ralson has always seemed to be rather unique. He has the engineering mentality.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He isn’t much of a mathematician himself, but he can work out the gadgets that put someone else’s math into life. There’s no one like him when it comes to that. Time and again, Inspector, we’ve had a problem to lick and no time to lick it in. There were nothing but blank minds all around until he put some thought into it and said, ‘Why don’t you try so-and-so?’ Then he’d go away. He wouldn’t even be interested enough to see if it worked. But it always did. Always! Maybe we would have got it ourselves eventually, but it might have taken months of additional time. I don’t know how he does it. It’s no use asking him either. He just looks at you and says ‘It was obvious’, and walks away. Of course, once he’s shown us how to do it, it is obvious.”

  The inspector let him have his say out. When no more came, he said, “Would you say he was queer, mentally? Erratic, you know.”

  “When a person is a genius, you wouldn’t expect him to be normal, would you?”

  “Maybe not. But just how abnormal was this particular genius?”

  “He never talked, particularly. Sometimes, he wouldn??
?t work.”

  “Stayed at home and went fishing instead?”

  “No. He came to the labs all right; but he would just sit at his desk. Sometimes that would go on for weeks. Wouldn’t answer you, or even look at you, when you spoke to him.”

  “Did he ever actually leave work altogether?”

  “Before now, you mean? Never!”

  “Did he ever claim he wanted to commit suicide? Ever say he wouldn’t feel safe except in jail?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure this John Smith is Ralson?”

  “I’m almost positive. He has a chemical bum on his right cheek that can’t be mistaken.”

  “O.K. That’s that, then I’ll speak to him and see what he sounds like.”

  The silence fell for good this time. Dr. Grant followed the snaking line as Inspector Darrity tossed the penknife in low arcs from hand to hand.

  The warden listened to the call-box and looked up at his visitors. “We can have him brought up here, Inspector, regardless.”

  “No,” Dr. Grant shook his head. “Let’s go to him.”

  Darrity said, “Is that normal for Ralson, Dr. Grant? Would you expect him to attack a guard trying to take him out of a prison cell?”

  Grant said, “I can’t say.”

  The warden spread a calloused palm. His thick nose twitched a little. “We haven’t tried to do anything about him so far because of the telegram from Washington, but, frankly, he doesn’t belong here. I’ll be glad to have him taken off my hands.”

  “We’ll see him in his cell,” said Darrity.

  They went down the hard, barlined corridor. Empty, incurious eyes watched their passing.

  Dr. Grant felt his flesh crawl. “Has he been kept here all the time?”

  Darrity did not answer.

  The guard, pacing before them, stopped. “This is the cell.”

  Darrity said, “Is that Dr. Ralson?”