THE EXALTED
L. Sprague de Camp
THE STORKLIKE MAN WITH THE GRAY GOATEE SHUFFLED THE TWELVE black billets about on the table top. “Try it again,” he said.
The undergraduate sighed. “O. K., Professor Methuen.” He looked apprehensively at Johnny Black, sitting across the table with one claw on the button of the stop clock. Johnny returned the look impassively through the spectacles perched on his yellowish muzzle.
“Go,” said Ira Methuen.
Johnny depressed the button. The undergraduate started the second run of his wiggly-block test. The twelve billets formed a kind of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle; when assembled they would make a cube. But the block had originally been sawn apart on wavy, irregular lines, so that the twelve billets had to be put together just so.
The undergraduate fiddled with the billets, trying this one and that one against one he held in his hand. The clock ticked round. In four minutes he had all but one in place. This one, a corner piece, simply would not fit. The undergraduate wiggled it and pushed it. He looked at it closely and tried again. But its maladjustment remained.
The undergraduate gave up. “What’s the trick?” he asked.
Methuen reversed the billet end for end. It fitted.
“Oh, heck,” said the undergraduate. “I could have gotten it if it hadn’t been for Johnny.”
Instead of being annoyed, Johnny Black twitched his mouth in a bear’s equivalent of a grin. Methuen asked the student why.
“He distracts me somehow. I know he’s friendly and all that, but… it’s this way, sort of. Here I come to Yale to get to be a psychologist. I hear all about testing animals, chimps and bears and such. And when I get here I find a bear testing me. It’s kind of upsetting.”
“That’s all right,” said Methuen. “Just what we wanted. We’re after, not your wiggly-block score by itself, but the effect of Johnny’s presence on people taking the test. We’re getting Johnny’s distraction factor—his ability to distract people. We’re also getting the distraction factor of a lot of other things, such as various sounds and smells. I didn’t tell you sooner because the knowledge might have affected your performance.”
“I see. Do I still get my five bucks?”
“Of course. Good day, Kitchell. Come on, Johnny; we’ve just got time to make Psychobiology 100. We’ll clean up the stuff later.”
On the way out of Methuen’s office, Johnny asked: “Hey, boss! Do you feer any effec’ yet?”
“Not a bit,” said Methuen. “I think my original theory was right: that the electrical resistance of the gaps between human neurons is already as low as it can be, so the Methuen injections won’t have any appreciable effect on a human being. Sorry, Johnny, but I’m afraid your boss won’t become any great genius as a result of trying a dose of his own medicine.”
The Methuen treatment had raised Johnny’s intelligence from that of a normal black bear to that of—or more exactly to the equivalent of that of—a human being. It had enabled him to carry out those spectacular coups in the Virgin Islands and the Central Park Zoo. It had also worked on a number of other animals in the said zoo, with regrettable results.
Johnny grumbled in his urso-American accent: “Stirr, I don’t sink it is smart to teach a crass when you are furr of zat stuff. You never know—”
But they had arrived. The class comprised a handful of grave graduate students, on whom Johnny’s distraction factor had little effect.
Ira Methuen was not a good lecturer. He put in too many uh’s and er’s, and tended to mumble. Besides, Psychobiology 100 was an elementary survey, and Johnny was pretty well up in the field himself. So he settled himself to a view of the Grove Street Cemetery across the street, and to melancholy reflections on the short life span of his species compared with that of men.
“Ouch!”
R. H. Wimpus, B.S., ‘68, jerked his backbone from its normally nonchalant arc into a quivering reflex curve. His eyes were wide with mute indignation.
Methuen was saying: “—whereupon it was discovered that the… uh… paralysis of the pes resulting from excision of the corresponding motor area of the cortex was much more lasting among the Simiidae than among the other catarrhine primates; that it was more lasting among these than among the platyrrhines—Mr. Wimpus?”
“Nothing,” said Wimpus. “I’m sorry.”
“And that the platyrrhines, in turn, suffered more than the lemuroids and tarsioids. When—”
“Unh!” Another graduate student jerked upright. While Methuen paused with his mouth open, a third man picked a small object off the floor and held it up.
“Really, gentlemen,” said Methuen, “I thought you’d outgrown such amusements as shooting rubber bands at each other. As I was saying when—”
Wimpus gave another grunt and jerk. He glared about him. Methuen tried to get his lecture going again. But, as rubber bands from nowhere continued to sting the necks and ears of the listeners, the classroom organization visibly disintegrated like a lump of sugar in a cup of weak tea.
Johnny had put on his spectacles and was peering about the room. But he was no more successful than the others in locating the source of the bombardment.
He slid off his chair and shuffled over to the light switch. The daylight through the windows left the rear end of the classroom dark. As soon as the lights went on, the source of the elastics was obvious. A couple of the graduates pounced on a small wooden box on the shelf beside the projector.
The box gave out a faint whir, and spat rubber bands through a slit, one every few seconds. They brought it up and opened it on Methuen’s lecture table. Inside was a mass of machinery apparently made of the parts of a couple of alarm clocks and a lot of hand-whittled wooden cams and things.
“My, my,” said Methuen. “A most ingenious contraption, isn’t it?”
The machine ran down with a click. While they were still examining it, the bell rang.
Methuen looked out the window. A September rain was coming up. Ira Methuen pulled on his topcoat and his rubbers and took his umbrella from the corner. He never wore a hat. He went out and headed down Prospect Street, Johnny padding behind.
“Hi!” said a young man, a fat young man in need of a haircut. “Got any news for us, Professor Methuen?”
“I’m afraid not, Bruce,” replied Methuen. “Unless you call Ford’s giant mouse news.”
“What? What giant mouse?”
“Dr. Ford has produced a three-hundred-pound mouse by orthogonal mutation. He had to alter its morphological characteristics—”
“Its what?”
“Its shape, to you. He had to alter it to make it possible for it to live—”
“Where? Where is it?”
“Osborn Labs. If—” But Bruce Inglehart was gone up the hill toward the science buildings. Methuen continued: “With no war on, and New Haven as dead a town as it always has been, they have to come to us for news, I suppose. Come on, Johnny. Getting garrulous in my old age.”
A passing dog went crazy at the sight of Johnny, snarling and yelping. Johnny ignored it. They entered Woodbridge Hall.
Dr. Wendell Cook, president of Yale University, had Methuen sent in at once. Johnny, excluded from the sanctum, went up to the president’s secretary. He stood up and put his paws on her desk. He leered—you have to see a bear leer to know how it is done—and said: “How about it, kid?”
Miss Prescott, an unmistakable Boston spinster, smiled at him. “Suttinly, Johnny. Just a moment.” She finished typing a letter, opened a drawer, and took out a copy of Hecht’s “Fantazius Mallare.” This she gave Johnny. He curled up on the floor, adjusted his glasses, and read.
After a while he looked up, saying: “Miss Prescott, I am halfway srough zis, and I stirr don’t see why zey cawr it obscene. I sink it is just durr. Can’t you get me a rearry dirty book?”