‘It says in the Good Book, „If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee. If thy right hand—„‘
‘Yes, your eye, your hand!’ she cried. ‘Not your head!’ She went on, ‘But yours wasn’t the only case. Did you ever hear that rumour about the fusion of Element 83?’
‘A fairy tale. Bismuth won’t play those games. I remember vaguely… some crazy guy called Klackenhorst.’
‘A crazy guy called Klackenheimer,’ she corrected.’ Gerry got into one of his bragging phases and let go with a differential he shouldn’t have mentioned. Klack picked it up. He fusioned bismuth all right. And Gerry got worried; a thing like that would make too much of a splash and he was afraid he’d be bothered by a mob of people who might trace him. So he got rid of poor old Klack.’
‘Klackenheimer died of cancer!’ snorted Hip.
She gave him a strange look. ‘I know,’ she said softly.
Hip beat his temples softly with his fists. Janie said, ‘There’ve been more. Not all big things like that. I dared him into wooing a girl once, strictly on his own, without using his talents. He lost out to someone else, an awfully sweet kid who sold washing machines door-to-door and was doing pretty well. The kid wound up with acne rosacea.’
‘The nose like a beet. I’ve seen it.’
‘Like an extra-boiled, extra-swollen beet,’ she amended. ‘No job.’
‘No girl,’ he guessed.
She smiled and said,’ She stuck by him. They have a little ceramics business now. He stays in the back.’
He had a vague idea of where the business had come from. ‘Janie, I’ll take your word for it. There were lots of ‘em. But—why me? You went all out for me.’
‘Two good reasons. First, I saw him do that to you in town, make you charge his image in the glass, thinking it was him. It was the last piece of casual viciousness I ever wanted to see. Second, it was—well, it was you.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Listen,’ she said passionately, ‘we’re not a group of freaks. We’re Homo Gestalt, you understand? We’re a single entity, a new kind of human being. We weren’t invented. We evolved. We’re the next step up. We’re alone; there are no more like us. We don’t live in the kind of world you do, with systems of morals and codes of ethics to guide us. We’re living on a desert island with a herd of goats!’
‘I’m the goat.’
‘Yes, yes, you are, can’t you see? But we were born on this island with no one like us to teach us, tell us how to behave. We can learn from the goats all the things that make a goat a good goat, but that will never change the fact that we’re not a goat! You can’t apply the same set of rules to us as you do to ordinary humans; we’re just not the same thing!’
She waved him down as he was about to speak. ‘But listen, did you ever see one of those museum exhibits of skeletons of, say horses, starting with the little Eohippus and coming right up the line, nineteen or twenty of them, to the skeleton of a Percheron? There’s an awful lot of difference between number one and number nineteen. But what real difference is there between number fifteen and number sixteen? Damn little!’ She stopped and panted.
‘I hear you. But what’s that to do with—’
‘With you? Can’t you see? Homo Gestalt is something new, something different, something superior. But the parts—the arms, the guts of it, the memory banks, just like the bones in those skeletons—they’re the same as the step lower, or very little different. I’m me, I’m Janie. I saw him slap you down like that; you were like a squashed rabbit, you were mangy and not as young as you should be. But I recognized you. I saw you and then I saw you seven years ago, coming out into the yard with your detector and the sun on your hair. You were wide and tall and pressed and you walked like a big glossy stallion. You were the reason for the colours on a bantam rooster, you were a part of the thing that shakes the forest when the bull moose challenges; you were shining armour and a dipping pennant and my lady’s girdle on your brow, you were, you were… I was seventeen, damn it, Barrows, whatever else I was. I was seventeen years old and all full of late spring and dreams that scared me.’
Profoundly shaken, he whispered. ‘Janie… Janie…’
‘Get away from me!’ she spat. ‘Not what you think, not love at first sight. That’s childish; love’s a different sort of thing, hot enough to make you flow into something, interflow, cool and anneal and be a weld stronger than what you started with. I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about being seventeen and feeling… all…’ She covered her face. He waited. Finally she put her hands down. Her eyes were closed and she was very still. ‘… all… human,’ she finished.
Then she said, matter-of-factly, ‘So that’s why I helped you instead of anyone else.’
He got up and walked into the fresh morning, bright now, new as the fright in a young girl’s frightening dream. Again he recalled her total panic when he had reported Bonnie’s first appearance; through her eyes he saw what it would be like if he, blind, numb, lacking weapons and insight, had walked again under that cruel careless heel.
He remembered the day he had emerged from the lab, stepped down into the compound, looking about for a slave. Arrogant, self-assured, shallow, looking for the dumbest Pfc in the place.
He thought more then about himself as he had been that day; not about what had happened with Gerry, for that was on the record, accomplished; susceptible to cure but not in fact to change. And the more he thought of himself as he had been the more he was suffused with a deep and choking humility.
He walked almost into Janie as she sat watching her hands sleeping in her lap as he had slept and he thought, surely they too must be full of pains and secrets and small magics too, to smile at.
He knelt beside her. ‘Janie,’ he said, and his voice was cracked, ‘you have to know what was inside that day you saw me. I don’t want to spoil you-being-seventeen… I just want to tell you about the part of it that was me, some things that—weren’t what you thought.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘I can remember it better than you because for you it’s been seven years and for me it’s only just before I went to sleep and dreamed that I went hunting for the half-wit. I’m awake again and the dream is gone, so I remember it all very well…
‘Janie, I had trouble when I was a child and the first thing I learned was that I was useless and the things I wanted were by definition worthless. I hardly questioned that until I broke away and found out that my new world had different values from my old one and in the new I was valuable. I was wanted, I belonged.
‘And then I got into the Air Force and suddenly I wasn’t a football hero and captain of the Debating Society. I was a bright fish with drying scales, and the mud-puppies had it all their way. I nearly died there, Janie.
‘Yes, I found the degaussing field all by myself. But what I want you to know is that when I stepped out of the lab that day and you saw me, I wasn’t the cockerel and the bull moose and those other things. I was going to discover something and bring it to humanity, not for humanity’s sake, but so that they would…’ he swallowed painfully,’… ask me to play the piano at the officers’ club and slap me on the back and… look at me when I came in. That’s all I wanted. When I found out that it was more than magnetic damping (which would make me famous) but anti-gravity (which would change the face of Earth) I felt only that it would be the President who asked me to play and generals who would slap my back; the things I wanted were the same.’