THE eye of the telescope looked upward giddy miles to where the last sphere, its sides pierced with yawning holes, swayed above the city. A teacher from Baton Rouge had paid her quarter, looked, and left, a moment before. A man from Des Moines would come soon, but he would be too late. For a few seconds a figure stood at one of those holes; then another who struggled with him; then both were gone.
The subway rocked and jerked in the malicious way subways have on Sunday afternoons, when the rocking and jerking are out of harmony with the mood of the time and the people on the trains, people crossing the city to visit relatives or seek the cool of the ocean. The motion did not seem to bother Bonnie, who sat with her hands upon the purse in her lap with her arms enclosing protectively and possessively the scarcely noticeable swelling.
Bonnie was pregnant. That made all the difference, as Joe told himself. Bonnie was pregnant.
She was a tall, rather lanky girl, colored Scotch-Irish around her red flushed elbows and hands. She wore a black maternity skirt with a hole for the belly in front—it had been lent her by her brother Chuck’s wife—and a voluminous blue smock like the uniform of one of those semipublic institutions whose inmates are issued clothing that does not seem to be a uniform until two of them are seen together. Joe was Irish-Italian, darker than she, with big hands and forearms.
A group of men on the far side of the car stared for a moment at Bonnie, and he glowered at them. He wanted to ask them what the hell they thought they were looking at, but he knew Bonnie would be upset. He embarrassed her too often anyway, too often for him to do it when he could see it coming. Besides, someone might get really tough, and Bonnie would become frightened for him and cry, sniveling and choking with shame as she wept because it had been a crime to cry in Bonnie’s family. For himself he did not care if someone did get tough. Not that he wanted to die.
“I think it’s the next stop after this.” Bonnie said above the clatter. It was the first time she had spoken since they had boarded the train. Joe nodded.
He would be glad to get out. He had seldom been outside New York before, and the few occasions when he had were associated in his mind with pleasure, with sunny skies and fragrant winds, those one-day trips on which someone brought a portable television so that they would not be bereft of the familiar computer-written jokes, and someone else his friends and the friends of his friends so that the reassurance of the crowd was with them too. He played softball in the high grass of meadows and enjoyed it much more than the semi-pro which had occupied his weekday evenings since he quit night school.
“Come on.” Bonnie was pulling at his shoulder. “This is our stop. You feel all right? It doesn’t hurt?”
He stood up, his broad body almost filling the narrow subway aisle, then waited for her to stand too. The train bumped to a stop.
At the gate of the fair grounds Bonnie showed the pass Chuck had given her, telling the guard a lot more about Chuck’s job selling for the plastics company and what his connection was with the fair than the guard wanted to know. Joe stood back away from them, looking up at the entrance arch with its twenty-foot letters that read NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR ’91. It was big as hell, but you could see The Thing on past it, and The Thing made it seem small.
Of course The Thing made everything seem small. He had not been up there to see, because the elevator didn’t go that high and he was supposed to stay away from steps, but they said you could even see The Thing from the roof of the buildings where he and Bonnie lived, way over in Yonkers. It was far higher than the Empire State Building.
Finally Bonnie quit talking to the guard, and he let them through the gate. “Where’d Chuck say he was going to meet us?” Joe asked. Even though he was curious to see the inside of The Thing—especially to see it now, before the public was admitted, before any of the people they knew had seen it—he found himself hoping Bonnie’s brother would not be there.
“At Howard Johnson’s right at the foot of it. They’ve got that opened up already so the people working on the pavilions from the different countries can eat there, and the reporters.” He was walking a pace behind her, and Bonnie looking at him seriously over her shoulder said, “You didn’t really want to come, did you, Joe?”
“Sure I did. I was going crazy sitting around the apartment all day.”
Bonnie pursed her lips, turning to look up at him and seeming to understand everything with her blue eyes. “I know you were. But you feel bad about Chuck. Envious.”
He said, “No.” But it was true.
She waited for him to catch up to her and took his hand. “I just want to tell you that I’m not mad because of it. Chuck isn’t either. We understand.”
Joe said nothing after that, just looking up at The Thing as they walked along. Thousands upon thousands of colored balls linked together with slender looking tubular stems he knew were really big enough to hold moving belts that would carry sightseers from ball to ball. Although there was no wind down here on the ground it was blowing hard high up. You could see the top of The Thing lean away from the wind. The engineers said (Joe had read it in Time) that even a hurricane couldn’t knock it down, but it looked as though it were about to go as he watched. He wondered what it would be like to be up in it with the wind blowing it like that.
II
Chuck was waiting for them in front of Howard Johnson’s, jingling the change in his pocket as he stood there, the way he always did. Chuck was ten years older than Bonnie. He had been selling those plastics ever since he got out of school. Two years ago, when the fair was just in the planning stage, he had landed the contract for the stuff that went into The Thing, and since then he had it knocked. The commissions were making him rich; you could see it and not just from the clothes he wore. It was in the way he stood, and the way he wore his hat. That was a hat that said: I’ve got it made. I’m big time, and you’d better believe it.
Chuck grinned big at him and shook his hand with his own soft one in that up-and-down way he had until Joe mashed it a little to see him wince. Joe’s own hands had been getting soft during the months since the accident, but they were still firm and not flabby like Chuck’s. He swore to himself he’d never let them get that way, either; he’d find something he could do, even if it was only wood carving or something silly like that.
“Come on in,” Chuck said when Joe had let go of his hand. “Ed Baker—he’s the guy I told you about, the chief engineer—is waiting in there already. I just stepped outside to look for you.”
The engineer rose when Bonnie came to the table. He was a tall man, thin as a rake, with a sharp “V” of hair beginning to grey at the sides. Chuck introduced both of them, Bonnie first, and beckoned to one of the uniformed girls who were waiting on the tables.
“Chuck here says you people’d like to see the inside of The Thing.” Baker had a noticeable New England twang. “And if you would, now’s the time to do it. They’ve sold tickets for six months in advance already.”
“Is it finished?” Bonnie asked timidly.
Chuck laughed. “Not quite inside, sir. But it won’t come down with you in it, if that’s what you mean. Finishing up the displays in Ed’s job, though. And believe me, he can make the ones that aren’t complete more interesting than the stuff near the bottom that’s ready to roll.”
“There aren’t any steps, are there?” Bonnie looked at Joe, and he wanted to sink into the floor. He knew what was coming.
Baker shook his head. “All the rises are by belt. Does your husband have a heart condition? Chuck mentioned something.”
Bonnie’s brother held his fingers an impossible distance apart. “He’s got a nail in his heart this big. A great big galvanized nail.”
Baker’s eyebrows went up, and Joe said quickly, “It’s only five-eighths of an inch long, really. From a spiking gun—one of those tools that shoot a shell like a .22 so that you can nail furring strips onto concrete.”
“But it’s in your heart?” The engineer was half astonished, half skeptical.
“In one of the chambers. The doctor told me the name of it, but I forget now.”
“My God, what happened?”
“You know how you got to push the barrel against something and pull the trigger at the same time to make it go off?”
Baker nodded. “I’ve used them; they’re practically foolproof.”
“Yeah. Well, this guy at work was fooling around with one. I guess he must have had his finger on the trigger, and he bumped the end against a steel I beam.”
Chuck broke in: “It wasn’t square against it, you see, Ed. Kind of at a slant. So the spike caromed off the beam and hit Joe. The doctor told Bonnie it happens with bullets once in a while, especially small ones like maybe buckshot. They can go right through the wall of a man’s heart—just puncture it—and stay there. But without killing him. The heart heals up behind them.”
Baker picked up one of the cups of coffee the waitress was handing around, and although his hand was steady Joe could see that he was shaken. “They can’t get it out?”
“He won’t let them,” Bonnie said. “I’ve begged him.”
“Listen,” Joe told them, “I don’t like to go over all this again. Let me say my piece now, and then let’s shut up about it and talk about The Thing. That’s what we came here for.”
“You don’t have to—” Baker began, but Joe interrupted him with a gesture.
“Like I’ve explained to Bonnie a thousand times—” he was addressing the engineer alone now—“I haven’t got a lot of life insurance, just what the union gives everybody. And if they take it out it’ll have to be what they call open heart surgery, where the chances aren’t so good. This way, as long as I’m alive I draw workman’s compensation, and medical benefits and all that kind of stuff. If I drop over some day Bonnie’ll get the insurance anyway, so then she won’t be no worse off. Now tell us about The Thing, huh? What’s it supposed to be, anyway?”
“Oh, you know.” Bonnie seemed to be as relieved as he was at the change of the subject. “You read to me about it out of the paper.”
“Sure,” Joe said, “but I want to hear from an expert. The papers always get something wrong. What is it, Mr. Baker?”
“You’d need a biochemist to really tell you. I can only repeat the same things you’ve already read; that it’s actually a giant model of a molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid—what we call DNA for short. It’s the stuff genes are made of, so in the fundamental sense it’s what determines that each of us has the heredity he has.”
Bonnie asked, “And it looks like that?” She was staring out the window toward the base of The Thing.
“Somewhat like that. We’ve followed the normal conventions for making a molecular model, of course. Those balls, as the public calls them, represent atoms in the model, although each one is actually a hollow sphere thirty yards in diameter. The black ones are carbon, the light blue ones oxygen, and so on.”
The engineer’s interest in his work was infectious. Joe asked, “But it really does have that crazy shape? All the DNA in the world?”
Chuck snorted. “If all the DNA had the same shape, everybody’d be the same, Joe. Ed, you’ve got to excuse him; Joe’s not too technically oriented.”
“It does all have that general double helix construction,” Baker said stiffly, “and it’s incorrect to think that a single molecule of DNA like the one we’ve modeled here determines its owner’s complete heredity. It takes the entire set of human chromosomes to do that. The DNA molecule only determines the makeup of a single type of cell, although even so its structure seems to be minutely different for each person. Only identical twins can readily accept tissue grafts from one another, so one individual’s cells must be subtly different from another’s—even though the grafts are from corresponding parts of the body, liver tissue.”
“Well, what kind of a cell would this make?” Bonnie asked.
“And who is it from?”
Baker shrugged. “This is just a typical human DNA molecule, as far as I know. I’m only an electrical engineer and I’m not sure even a Ph.D. biochemist could tell you what sort of a cell would contain it from looking at it.”
“It could be a brain cell,” Joe said unexpectedly, and the other three stared at him.
“It could be,” Baker agreed after a moment’s pause. “It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if there actually were someone who had that exact pattern.”
Chuck said airily, “The odds are probably a million to one against it.”
“I know, but suppose someone did.” Baker seemed to be talking half to himself. “Would the molecule itself recognize its own structure the way that a set of cell transducers read the history of gene structure? There must be a logic to the geometry we are completely incapable of recognizing; but it is the logic that makes all life possible, and the human race only stays alive because it’s capable of duplicating itself endlessly—”
“Tell them how big The Thing is, really,” Chuck demanded. “Three hundred thousand million to one, that’s the scale this thing here is built to, Bonnie. It’s the biggest model of anything ever built, and the tallest building in the world at the same time. And do you know what it is that makes something like this possible?”
“Yes,” Joe said. “Glass fibers.”
Chuck was only slightly crestfallen. “That’s right, what we call monomolecular strands. They’re only one molecule thick, stronger than hell, and we embed them in high-strength resin—really key them in. Every one of those balls was made out of two bowls from the same mold, fitted together, and the tubes that connect them were extruded and cut off to length. After that all they had to do was hang them up there after they’d installed the partition floors that cut the top half of the ball that you see off from the bottom half where the machinery is.”
Baker seemed embarrassed by Chuck’s exuberance, but he nodded verification. “We didn’t even use a scaffold. Just picked up the pieces with helicopters and fitted them into place. I suppose you saw it on television.”
“And you’ve got displays inside all of them?” Bonnie asked.
“That’s what I want to hear about.”
The engineer smiled. “I’m glad you do, because it’s the displays and the analytical circuits, not the structure, that are really my responsibility. The civil engineering boys have done their job and left. They only come back to read their strain gauges every once in a while.”
Joe scarcely listened while Baker explained the displays. His attention was somewhat in his chest, in the area just beneath his breastbone, where a strange tightness had gripped him. He remembered the X-rays he had been shown; the spike moving, tumbling in the current of his blood, with each beat of his heart. The doctors had said that if it lodged in a valve …
“Come on.”
Suddenly they were all standing up, pushing back their chairs and setting down their coffee cups. He rose too, feeling a little confused. There was no point in making a fuss; he would simply have to go on behaving normally until he fell over on his face, if that were what he was going to do … .
Outside the engineer led them to the foot of The Thing.
Joe stood a little behind the others, his head thrown back to stare up at the dizzily swaying top thousands of feet above him. A droning little business jet of an airplane went past. It was only a tiny silver cross against the sky, but the lacework of The Thing towered over it like a thunderhead. With dizzied eyes he tried to follow the complexities of the spiraling pattern, becoming more certain as he did that some secret of colossal importance was contained in it.
Bonnie was touching his elbow; he looked down at her at last, the earth rocking under his feet. “What’s the matter?” he asked. The entrance to The Thing was still shut.
“Something’s wrong with the door. Mr. Baker’s key won’t make it work.”
Baker said, “Come along, and we’ll go to the shop and get someone who can open this up for us. It’s at the back of the grounds.”
Joe took a step forward as Bonnie released his elbow, then stopped, afraid he was going to lose his balance. The vertigo which had seized him while he was staring upward required a few seconds to subside. Bonnie and Chuck were leaving him, trailing after Baker. None of them looked back to see if he were coming too.
Half in anger, half to have something against which to steady himself, he went over to the big door instead of following them. It was massive, impressive and somber. He grasped the handle and pulled back.
He was a big man, owning the strength that comes of hard physical work done every day, and the accident had done nothing to change that. The door gave almost imperceptibly. He pulled harder, throwing his weight backward. The door rasped a quarter inch more, then suddenly gave free. “Stuck,” he muttered to himself.
He looked at his wife’s back; she was almost out of shouting distance now. For half a second he thought of hurrying after her, then decided against it. Let them all walk to wherever it was they were going, and back. He would make his own inspection of The Thing—the lower levels at least—and be ready to laugh at them when they returned.
III
The base chamber was dark until he entered it. Then the light came up slowly like the illumination in a theater. No doubt in coming through the doorway he had stepped on a pressure-sensitive plate or interrupted a photocell beam. A man in a white laboratory smock stepped forward smiling a greeting, and it was an instant before Joe realized that the man was an automaton activated like the lights, by his entry.
“Good day, sir,” the robot began. “Are you interested in a guided tour of the exhibit in this atom?”
“Sure. That’s what I came for.” It was amusing to address the mechanical toy as though it were in fact a human being.
“I will be delighted to show you around. I will form my next tour in two minutes.”
“Why can’t we start now?”
The robot shook his head regretfully. “My programming requires a two-minute wait for others who might wish to join us.”
“Okay.” Joe shrugged, grinning. “You don’t mind if I look around a little on my own while you’re waiting, do you? Nobody’s really going to come anyway, you know.”
“There is always that possibility,” the mechanical guide admitted diplomatically. “In the meantime you have the freedom of the exhibit.”
Joe left him standing, still smiling, by the entrance—apparently oblivious to the fact that Joe had closed it behind him.
Most of the material on display in this chamber of The Thing was in the form of 3D projections—objects solid and real to the eye but insubstantial. Mutated fruit flies, magnified a hundred times, crawled about a section of the floor. He found himself wanting to kick them away when they approached his legs and he went past them without bothering to read the printed explanations of their grotesque abnormalities that floated in the air above them.
Beyond the fruit flies an experiment still more bizarre claimed his attention. An egg, palely translucent, stood upright on its large end. The small end was two feet higher than his head, and the yolk could be seen through the shell—a golden globe showing a single dark speck. As he watched the speck grew, developed a head, wings and legs. It seemed to writhe with the energy of its thrust toward being. Behind him the robot said, “My tour is ready to form, sir. Would you care to go back to the flies, or shall we begin here?”
Joe said a little sarcastically, “Where’s all the other people on this tour?”
“There are no others,” the robot replied in an unruffled voice. “If you are expecting friends or members of your family to join you I will be happy to wait until they arrive.”
“They won’t be along for a while yet,” Joe told him. “I think I’ll go ahead without them.” He was still staring at the growing chick, now nearly ready to burst from its shell.
“This display,” the robot said chattily, “shows a White Leghorn egg in incubation; the unfolding of the miracle of life. It is designed to illustrate the sequence of alterations every embryo undergoes before the final form is realized. The old naturalists used to say that every creature had to climb its own family tree to qualify for the privilege of birth, and although we are no longer accustomed to employ such quaint phrases the old tag illuminates a truth.”
The chick was scratching weakly at the shell with its egg tooth. Joe took his eyes from it long enough to glance at the guide. “What do you mean, climb his family tree?”
“He goes briefly through the forms of each of his forebears—”
“His father was a chicken, wasn’t he? And he’s a chicken too. How could you tell whether he looks like his father or not?”
“That’s not what is meant—” the robot began.
“I know darn well it’s not what you meant,” Joe told him irritably. “You meant this chicken here goes up through evolution from just one little blob like a germ. So why couldn’t you say so instead of all that junk about family trees? If that was true it would mean everybody has their father and grandfather and all that inside them. You know what the trouble with you and all those smart guys that set you up is? You think that anybody that went to college is so stupid they’ve got to have everything explained to them like a little kid.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the robot said. “But it is interesting to consider that since each of us receives half his genetic structure from each parent—”
“Oh, shut up.”
The chick had broken the shell now and was struggling through the hole it had created. The robot remained obediently silent, and for a few seconds Joe watched it without speaking. Then he asked abruptly, “Where’s the horn on its legs?”
“Sir?”
“I said, where’s the horn on its legs. You said it was a Leghorn chicken and I’ll bet you don’t know why it’s called that.”
There was a barely perceptible hesitation before the robot replied, “No, I don’t, sir. I find the information is not in my memory banks. Please rest assured that your question had been recorded, and that the answer will be supplied to my program as part of the next reprogramming session.”
“I can tell you right now,” Joe said sourly. “Leghorn’s a place in Italy. That’s where they got this kind of chicken from.”
The chick, its magnified image as tall as an ostrich, was struggling to its feet. The robot said nothing.
“Here’s some more for you, smart guy. Who was the King of the Cowboys on the old TV movies, huh? And what year was it the Mets first won the pennant? Where was Grand Central before they tore it down?”
The robot hesitated again, then said, “I’m afraid the answers to none of your questions are in my memory banks, sir. Would you like to see the other exhibits in this atom?”
Joe was walking away. “No.”
“In that case, sir, the entrance to the pedestrian conveyor which will take you to the next atom on the regular tour is on your right. If you wish to leave the complex entirely, you may use the door by which you entered.”
“Does the next place have another dummy like you in it?”
“Oh, no, sir. Each atom has a completely different guide.”
Not certain why he did it, Joe turned to his right and stepped onto the silently moving belt.
IV
The upward angle was even steeper than he had expected, but the surface of the belt was ribbed with ridges almost like steps. The lights of the chamber behind him faded until he was left in near darkness. It reminded him of the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island, where he had gone once with Bonnie before they were married. Her perfume had seemed intensified in the dark until it was all around him, and in the boat ahead another couple, a boy and a girl he had not noticed particularly when they had gotten in, had made little animal sounds like chipmunks mating. Nothing had mattered then. Both Bonnie and he had believed that in spite of everything he would be a success. He would go to night school, take a Saturday job … . And nothing, nothing at all, had worked out as they had planned.
Ahead of him light grew; not merely because he was approaching it, but as in the chamber below because the voltage was being turned on gradually. He could make out the displays in the area immediately in front of the end of the connecting tube now, and a flicker of motion beyond them. He stepped off the belt.
An elderly man came forward to greet him. He wore a black cassock and a Roman collar. “Good morning, sir,” the new guide said in a gentle, slightly accented voice. “I am Father Gregor Mendel. Good morning, madam.”
With a start Joe turned to look behind him at the person the cybernaut “priest” was addressing. A young woman, almost a girl, was stepping from the belt. “Hello,” (she had a soft voice that was somehow familiar,) “do you mind if I join your tour?”
Joe shook his head, then remembering his manners said, “No, not at all.” He was looking at the girl’s clothing: a skirt fully eight inches shorter than was currently fashionable, and a blouse fantastically patterned with interlaced squares. “Where did you come from?” he asked.
The girl smiled, brushing back her long, straight hair. “I came in with you, actually. When you opened the door.”
“I didn’t see you.” After a moment he realized how hostile the flat statement sounded and added, “I mean, I’m surprised I didn’t notice you down below.”
“I kept in the background. I’m afraid that’s rather a fault of mine.”
The figure of Mendel made a little gesture of welcome. “This is nice, very nice. The two of you will make an ideal party to tour my little exhibit.”
“Wasn’t there somebody here before us?” Joe asked. “I thought I saw him go out the exit over there just as we came in.”
Mendel nodded. “There was, my son. But he did not stay. I didn’t even have time to speak to him.”
Puzzled, Joe said, “I don’t see how he could of gotten in ahead of me.”
The girl tossed her head. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
“I guess not.”
She smiled suddenly. “Do you know that the only one who’s formally introduced himself here is Father Mendel? Although I know your name’s Joe—let’s say I overheard some people talking to you in Howard Johnson’s.”
He told her his full name, adding unnecessarily, “I’m married.”
“I’m not,” the girl said, “but I’m engaged.” She held up her left hand so that he could see the ring she wore. “My name’s Mary Hogan.”
He felt an unexpected warmth toward her. “That’s my mother’s maiden name. There’s a coincidence.”
“That’s nothing.” She was grinning now. “You have the same last name as the boy I’m engaged to.”
Mendel cleared his throat. “I’m afraid my atom is one of the dullest, but are you ready to see it now, my children?”
“What’s it about?” the girl inquired.
“My discovery of genetics. I used garden peas, you know, and all my experiments are condensed here for you. The idea of the designers, I suppose, is to teach the principles in the same way in which they were originally discovered. I hope it is a good one.”
To please the girl Joe followed the monk-scientist from display to display, looking at tall and short pea plants and genetic charts which appeared in glowing lines in the air; but he could not fix his attention on the exhibits or Mendel’s rambling, accented lecture. The brief glimpse he had gotten of the man who had fled the exhibit just as he entered exerted a hypnotic attraction on his mind so that he found himself re-creating that flicker of furtive motion over and over again in his imagination while Mendel droned on.
At last it was over, and the diminutive priest-robot made a little bow to them, then stood, smiling shyly.
“That was wonderful,” the girl said. “A wonderful discovery.”
“He didn’t do it,” Joe told her, and hated himself for saying it as soon as he saw the hurt in her face.
“I know I didn’t,” the robot admitted in its gentle voice, “but can’t you think of me as a sort of actor?”
“I suppose so,” Joe mumbled.
“I look much as the real Mendel did, and insofar as is possible my logic pattern has been shaped to duplicate his as revealed in his works. Although I admit we can’t hope for the accuracy obtainable when the genetic pattern of one of the subject’s descendants is available for study. Thus far you two are the only audience to whom I have lectured. But I felt as proud, when I was talking to you a moment ago, as I would have if the work Mendel did was really my own.”
The girl whispered in Joe’s ear, “Ask his blessing—it will make him feel better.”
Before he was fully aware of what he was doing he had dropped to his knees. He heard himself mumble, “Bless me, Father.”
An expression of bewilderment passed over Mendel’s face. “Are you Catholic, my son?” he asked.
“Does that matter? Couldn’t you give me your blessing anyway?”
“I suppose it doesn’t really,” Mendel said, “and no, I couldn’t.” He reached down and drew Joe to his feet again. “This is like the story,” he continued in his mild voice, “they used to tell about one of the Emperor Franz Josef’s visits to Baden. They were going to perform one of the operas based on Goethe’s Faust for him, and when one of the emperor’s courtiers brought his little daughter behind the scenes in the theater she saw an actor dressed as the pope and asked for his blessing.”
Mary Hogan asked curiously, “And did he bless her?”
Mendel shook his head. “He explained that he was only a make-believe pope, and when she understood she said, ‘Then bless my doll.’ Just so, I cannot bless this young man, my daughter, but I will bless you.” His fingers sketched a cross in the air, and he murmured a Latin phrase. The girl knelt.
When it was over the two of them stepped onto the belt that would take them to the next hemispherical room, and the darkness of the tube closed around them. “Why would he bless you,” Joe asked, “and not me?”
“Maybe you were too sincere about it.” He felt the girl’s fingers touch his hand. “It was sweet though.”
He could sense her beside him in the blackness; and unexpectedly, overwhelmingly, the certainty came to him that they had waited together like this before, that the sensation he now felt was familiar through countless repetitions. He tried to recall when this might have been and if he had not perhaps known this girl before he had met Bonnie, or before they had married and he had cut off his contacts with other women. But no memory of her came, and he found his recollection forced backward instead to a place he had nearly forgotten: the tenement apartment in which he lived with his parents when he was very small.
There had been only one bedroom, with the double bed on one side and his own with the high wooden railings on the other. An electric sign outside the window flashed blue, then yellow, blue, then yellow, then went dark. Now in the darkness he found himself waiting for the blue flash again, and the bright spark when his mother drew on her cigarette, just as he had on nights when he would awaken to see her waiting for his father to return home.
Instead white light gleamed in front of them, the lights of the next chamber springing into life. “I wonder what this one will be,” the girl said, but he did not answer her. He was looking for the man he had glimpsed in the chamber below, somehow certain that he would be here too.
He was, but he remained hidden until they were almost ready to get off the belt.
V
Perhaps because it was so crowded this exhibit seemed smaller than the others. Poultry cackled and quacked around the attenuated legs of a giraffe. Huge beetles climbed the walls and, slipping, fell back to the floor to wiggle and struggle before they could turn themselves over and climb again.
Then, on the far side of the chamber, peering from behind a huge Empire wardrobe of oiled walnut which stood in Napoleonic grandeur among the animals, Joe saw the man’s eyes. For an instant they stared at him. He received an impression of malice unfathomable. Then they were gone. A hunched, hurrying figure scuttled like one of the beetles, darting from behind the wardrobe and disappearing into the darkness of the next exit.
He yelled and jumped from the end of the steeply rising belt, wading through the insubstantial animals that surged about his feet; but as he reached the middle of the room the doors of the wardrobe flew apart like the doors of some Christmas toy, and a man with bandaged eyes stepped directly into his path. They collided and went crashing to the resilient plastic floor.
By the time he got to his feet again he knew it was too late. With the girl’s help he pulled the robot erect, wondering all the while, rather vaguely as he might have wondered about some back-page story in a newspaper, whether or not the exertion he had just undergone would kill him. He could feel the thumping of his heart as clubbed blows from inside his chest.
“Bon soir,” the blind robot said. “I am Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine De Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck.” He made a courtly bow.
“What happened to you?” the girl asked suddenly. She pointed, and Joe saw that Lamarck’s right hand was missing. It seemed to have been torn or hacked away; the plastisol flesh was ragged around the amputation, and color-coded wires, blue and yellow, dangled from the stump.
“I fear, mademoiselle,” Lamarck murmured, “that there may be a vandal in our complex.” He seemed ashamed of the injury that so clearly revealed his nature, and thrust the injured limb behind him.
“Yes, and I almost caught him,” Joe said. “If you hadn’t jumped out of that big cabinet when you did I would have. What were you doing in there anyway?”
“It is a service closet,” Lamarck explained. “Each atom has one, equipped to perform routine maintenance on the guide assigned to it and to make minor repairs. When the vandal released me I went in hoping to have something done about my hand; when I heard the three of you coming, however, I felt that since I retained sufficient functioning to perform my office I should do so.” A tall wading bird, insubstantial as mist, flew through his body as he spoke, its stilt legs trailing behind it.
“Three of us?” Startled, Joe glanced back at the tube from which he and Mary Hogan had entered. A second girl was standing near the end of the belt. She was taller than Mary, but seemed even younger, coltishly unsure of herself. Like Mary’s, her skirt ended well above her knees; but short blond hair peeped from under her close-fitting hat, and she carried a beaded handbag with a long strap. Looking at the three of them she swung it nervously.
“Come on.” Mary gestured to her. “Join the freakout. We won’t put you down.”
“I overheard you talking about someone damaging something in here.” The new girl’s voice was shrill and self-conscious. “And I just wanted to tell you it was not me.”
“We know who it was,” Joe said gruffly. “It’s a man, and he’s ahead of us, not behind us. I’m not going to stay here and look at the exhibits. I’m going on ahead and try to get him.” The resolve had formed in his mind, so it seemed to him, as he spoke; but once formed and articulated he felt that it had the force of divine law. In his imagination he saw himself dying, the spike jamming his heart action at the very moment the scuttling man he had seen come from behind Lamarck’s cabinet sprang some simple, horrible trap that would leave his body mangled—and he did not care.
“Wait!” The blind robot grasped him by the arm with his one hand. “If you don’t see the things here—if you don’t listen to what I must tell you about them—you will miss the point of all of it.”
“I think he should go.” The voice was the girl’s, shrill and insistent.
“I think he should too,” Mary Hogan said. “There’s no telling how much damage that thing loose up ahead may do.”
“I shall ask the master computer.” Lamarck’s blind face looked at no one in particular. “Monsieur, when none of the programmers are here the master computer is the highest authority. Will you abide by the decision of the master computer?”
The girl with the beaded bag said, “It’s the unit that controls the whole Thing. All of it; all the exhibits.”
Joe wanted to shake himself free. He could have done it easily—the tiny servo motors which powered robots’ actions were strong only on televised horror dramas—but he found himself unable to do so. Lamarck’s aged face, although he knew it to be a plastisol mask, his sightless eyes and his intangible air of genius in defeat, held him. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll do whatever your computer says. How do we consult it?”
“I can contact it from the service closet, monsieur.” Lamarck released his arm and wheeled with uncanny accuracy to face the Empire wardrobe. The two girls watched him expressionlessly. As soon as the doors had closed Joe bolted for the exit leading to the next atom.
He did not wait for the belt to carry him this time, but scrambled up it. Behind him the unsteady tapping of high-heeled shoes told him that at least one of the two girls was following him.
The atom into which he burst held Charles Darwin, but the great scientist lay tumbled on the floor, his midsection a mass of smashed circuit elements which a Galapagos tortoise near him appeared to regard incuriously. Moths big as swans covered every wall, their wings stiffly extended to make an incredible pattern of iridescent color.
He was bending over the inert Darwin when something whistled past his head. He heard it strike the wall behind him and fall clattering to the floor as he looked up.
The vandal was no longer hiding. He stood near a scale model of H.M.S. Beagle, his left hand grasping a bundle of slender rods with ragged, razor-sharp ends. His right arm was drawn back as though to cast a spear, and as Joe watched he whipped it forward; there was barely time to jerk himself to one side as the jagged sliver hurtled toward him. With a solid thudding sound it buried itself in Darwin’s chest.
He jerked it out as he drew himself erect, poised to dodge the next missile. It came flying at his face. As he ducked, the vandal leaped onto the belt which would carry him to the next atom.
That atom was empty a moment after Joe arrived, but a metal sliver plucked at his shirt as he jumped from the belt, and he saw his quarry disappear into the next tube.
After that he lost count of the atoms through which they passed, and he no longer noticed what displays they held and whether they were complete or not.
The structure of The Thing was complex, and most of the atoms possessed several radiating tubes so that the figure he was pursuing could easily have shaken him off. But he did not seem to wish to do so; and when Joe grew too fatigued to climb along the steep belts that carried them higher and higher he found that he lost no ground in the pursuit. Always, at the end of each tube he glimpsed the man running for the next belt. And it was always the belt which would loft them highest that he finally chose.
But as he continued the pursuit Joe came to realize that he also was followed. Behind him the sound of the two girls’ feet grew until it was the roar of a crowd, high pitched and quick voiced.
At last they reached an atom which had no floor, and from which no belt led, an empty globe of fiberglass with gaping holes in its sides. He saw the man he had followed waiting with a metal sliver upraised beside the lowest of the holes, and only blue sky and clouds beyond. Behind him were the hurrying noises of a hundred women.
“Go ahead,” he called. “What are you going to do—jump?”
The figure silhouetted against the sky only stared at him dumbly.
Upright Joe walked forward, down the curving inside of the sphere that led to the level bottom, then slowly up until the man he had followed all these thousands of feet into the air and he were no more than a few yards apart. The spearlike fragment of metal rod remained poised; but the corners of the man’s mouth drew down and down with each step he took until the yellowish skin must have been ready to tear under the strain and the mouth was drawn open to show the square white teeth.
Then, with a gesture that was almost casual, the metal sliver was flipped into the void. With his shoulder down Joe rushed forward, struck the man, and drew him away from the edge.
The man’s resistance revived at the moment of contact, and for a few seconds he struggled desperately. He still held four or five pieces of metal similar to the one he had thrown away in his left hand; but Joe pinned it, then jerked one from him to drive against his throat. The struggling stopped.
“What’s happening,” someone behind him asked. “What are those things?”
VI
From the corner of an eye he saw the girl who had called herself Mary Hogan. Behind her came the girl with the beaded bag; then, as he watched, a third girl who wore a skirt that reached her ankles. And behind her, some stepping agilely from the belt, some staggering clumsily, came woman after woman.
Many were young, and some were pretty and even beautiful, but others were neither and a few were monstrously fat. Several wore silks, but most were in plain dresses not much better than rags.
“What are those things?” Mary Hogan asked again. She was standing close to his shoulder now. “What are you going to do?”
“Steel construction strips he’s ripped out of something,” Joe told her. “And I’m going to kill him with this one—rip him wide open. Want to watch?” He pushed one jagged end of the piece he held against the other’s body.
“Don’t!”
Joe stared down at the impassive face of the man under him and drove the splinter tighter still; the face contorted under the pressure until malice blasted from it like heat from the top of an open crucible.
The girl in the long skirt dropped to her knees beside him. “Don’t you know who that is?” she asked. She was not pretty, but somehow clean looking and attractive.
“It’s a robot.” Joe’s voice was stubborn, although he found himself gasping for breath in the thin air. “Another crummy, clanking robot; a robot with my face. I’m going to wreck him.”
“I wasn’t sure you knew who it was,” the girl murmured.
“You think I don’t know my own face? What I’d like to know is what sort of dirty joke is being played here.”
“I think I can tell you,” Mary Hogan said; she stooped beside the kneeling girl, pushing her long hair away from her face. “It involves who all of us are too. Have you guessed yet?”
“You’re robots too,” Joe said bitterly. “That’s why the robot pretending to be a priest would bless you and not me. You aren’t a real person any more than this thing is.”
“We’re more—I’m more than that. Don’t you know who I am yet?”
He said something inaudible.
“I couldn’t hear you.” She bent closer, the other women crowding around her.
“You’re supposed to be my mother; my mother the way she looked when I was born. My real mother is still alive in Brooklyn.”
“This is the way I was when you were conceived,” the girl said. “It’s at conception that the heritage is passed.”
Joe nodded. “I knew it once I’d thought of it. That skirt-and-blouse outfit of yours: miniskirts and op-art prints mean ’67 or ’68. I’m twenty-four, so that puts you just about right, and I guess the girl with the bag back there is your mother, and this one,”—he looked at the kneeling woman in the long skirt—“is her mother.”
Mary Hogan nodded. “Your grandmother and great-grandmother, really; it was from your cells that the transducers took the patterns. It used to be believed that only the parents’ own heredity could be transmitted, but recently we’ve discovered that Lamarck was correct in certain respects—every characteristic, as it exists at conception, is to some extent transmitted to the new generation. That’s what he was supposed to explain to you in his atom.”
Joe said stubbornly, “But you’re really a robot.” “Physically, yes. But mentally—spiritually if you will—I am a replica of the young woman who became your mother. Tomorrow I will be someone else.” There was sadness in her voice.
“You change?”
“Yes; that’s the point of this entire complex. There are a hundred of us here who constitute what might be called a repertory company. As visitors enter the master computer reads a component of some randomly selected individual’s genetic heritage, then programs one of us as that person’s forebear.”
“But over and over?” Joe looked at the crowd of women. “Generation after generation? From the same person?”
The girl in the long skirt said, “It wasn’t supposed to work this way. But an automatic program sequence was installed that demands maximum utilization of us. With a whole crowd of visitors coming in each of us would have been assigned to a different one, but with only you in the complex …”
“I got read every time I went past a thingamajig, and they’re in all the tubes. I see. But what about him?”
“He was the first one, really,” the girl with the beaded bag said unhappily. “Only something went haywire.”
“Well, what went haywire? How does he fit into this?” The other girls looked at Mary Hogan.
“You have a death wish. Do you realize that, Joe?”
He shook his head. “I want to live as much as anyone else.”
“Consciously, yes. But not subconsciously. No one who didn’t want to die would make up that story of refusing surgery for his wife’s sake.”
“How did you know … ?”
“I’ve been contained in your body all your life; there’s a carryover of information—don’t you remember that I knew your name when we first met? In so far as I am your mother—and till my program is changed that’s very far—that carryover is all that holds me sane. Without it I would be finding myself suddenly here without an explanation at all.”
Joe looked down at the man he held pinned. “And that’s the way you know about him too?”
“Partly, and I can guess the rest. For a long time it’s been known that a person’s will to die could actually produce the death, and to do that it must effect a change in certain cell structures. Somehow the first time the transducers tried to read your DNA they produced this. The master computer corrected for the error on subsequent readings by automatically rejecting all male data matrices, but it could do nothing about this one which was already programmed. He is your own personal hope for death personified.”
Joe clenched his teeth. “He’ll get what he wants; because I’m going to kill him.”
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“Your death wish is strong now. I can only guess what destroying an image of yourself will do to it. You’ve been using that metal thing to hold him down—look at your own chest.”
He looked. The opposite end of the steel sliver was as sharp as the one with which he was threatening his double. It had torn his shirt and scratched his chest until it was covered with his own blood. For a long time he stared at it.
VII
They found him sitting outside The Thing, waiting for them. Chuck yelled, “See! I told you he’d be here. He’s just got too much sense to wear himself out walking around the grounds with us.”
In Father Mendel’s room he was able to get Bonnie alone long enough to explain that he had decided to have the spike removed after all and had already telephoned the doctor from Howard Johnson’s while he was waiting. When she asked if he were not afraid he shook his head, remembering suddenly that Bonnie was pregnant.