Agent of the Unknown Read online

  "Um. Too synthetic. I've heard other people say that. Sometimes I think everything in our world is synthetic, even happiness. But did you have such a bad actual childhood, Don?"

  "I don't know. I mean, I can't remember. That was one of the things the psychotherapist used to get annoyed with me for. He said I was deliberately erecting a mental block, and he'd lecture me by the hour about co-operation. But I honestly couldn't remember. Believe it or not, my earliest clear memory doesn't go back beyond the time I was fourteen. Before that, there's something about being in a big room. But that's just an impression, not a memory."

  Kunitz whistled. "That's awfully unusual."

  "I know it is. Up to the time I was fourteen, I was in an institution. At least, that's what the records show. You couldn't prove it by me."

  "I've something of the same difficulty," Kunitz said after a moment. "I can't remember my childhood clearly either."

  "Was it so painful you've forgotten it?"

  "Painful? No, not at all. But almost all my childhood, anyhow from the time I was three onward, was passed in the haze of the Martian pyrexia."

  "The—? H'um, yes, I've heard of it. It was a disease. But it was before my time."

  "It would have been. But, Haig, you can't imagine what a time it was." Kunitz chuckled softly, as if he were remembering something disreputable and agreeable.

  "The pyrexia was little like being a little drunk all the time. It was a disease, of course, but in its mild form it was so gentle and agreeable that more than ninety per cent of the population of Terra contracted it before they realized they had contracted anything. Then some of the cases passed into the severe form, and people began dying. That wasn't so nice; in the serious form there's pain, delirium, and a most alarming red body flush. But even then nobody got much excited. The pyrexia blurred the edges and softened everything.

  "Life was so relaxed in those days! Nobody worried. There were hardly any accidents, despite the gently alcoholic atmosphere, because people were too relaxed to hurry about anything. It was—it was a very strange time, especially in contrast with today.

  "I'll give you an example of the kind of thing people did. Some jokester introduced a motion in the world council for what he called 'double daylight wasting time,' and it was passed to the accompaniment of delighted and hilarious laughter. For two blessed years the entire population of Terra rose and went to bed two hours late. It was wonderful."

  Don laughed. "I'd have liked that."

  "Yes, it was fun. If the disease hadn't always been liable to pass into its severe form, it would have been nice for us to keep on being feverish forever. But that's why I can't be sure I really had wings—there's that soft, pleasant haze."

  "You think you dreamed it?" Don said. He looked at his empty glass rather wistfully. Phlomis was terrible, of course, but it was quite a bit better than nothing at all was.

  "I may have. I'll tell you about it, Haig. (I haven't talked about this in years—your little lady must be 'unsettling' me.)

  "As far as I remember, my wings started to sprout when I was five. At first they were just big, flaccid lumps on my shoulder blades. Mother looked at them. She wasn't worried, but finally she took me to a group doctor. I do honestly think I remember this.

  "I don't know what he said, if he said anything. I have a mental picture of being in the doctor's waiting room, watching a puppet show, and then there's a blank. He must have told mother that I was growing wings, though, because after that I knew what was happening to me.

  "I have a hazy recollection of bragging to the other children about how I was going to have wings, real big wings, when I grew up. I don't remember what they thought of it. Then a new little girl moved in next door.

  "Her name was Loris; I'm almost certain I remember that. She was a pretty, rather prim little girl, half Martian, with the wonderful deep turquoise Martian eyes. I was very much taken with her.

  "We played together all that winter ... You understand, Haig, this stuff isn't continuous. I'll have one or two vivid mental pictures, and then there'll be a lot of haziness, or maybe even complete blanks. I think we played together all that winter. Happy Beavers, mainly, and free-flight swings, I think. Then one day it was getting to be really spring.

  "Loris came out in a little gold sun tunic, and I was wearing G.S. breeks. She saw the lumps on my back. She must have asked about them, and I must have told her how they were going to be wings. Anyhow, I have an almost abnormally vivid picture of her saying, with her pretty little pink mouth all puckered up, 'That's just cha-drze. What foolishness! You won't have real wings. It isn't reasonable.' You know how Martians always talk about reasonableness."

  "What does 'cha-drze' mean?" Haig interrupted.

  "It's Martian for 'fairy stuff'. Anyhow, after that I had an operation on my wings."

  "You mean an amputation? You mean you had the operation because she didn't believe you?"

  "Yes, an amputation. Whether the reason was that Loris was so doubtful—" Kunitz shrugged. "I've always thought that was the reason. Her disbelief must have hurt my feelings deeply. If I went and asked my mother, and she told me that Loris was right, I wouldn't ever have wings that would work ... I'd certainly have wanted to get rid of the lumps. I'd have considered them a deformity. But of course my parents may have had the operation scheduled anyhow, to save me from something that was certainly abnormal. I don't know.

  "As far as that goes, I can't be sure I ever had an operation. Maybe I never had lumps on my shoulders at all, maybe there never was a Loris. Perhaps the whole thing was only a vivid fantasy."

  The room had been growing darker. Now rain began to drum down upon the roof. It was Fyon's regular early afternoon shower. Kunitz got up and closed the shutters on the windows.

  "There must be some way of checking up," Don said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of the rain. "I mean, if it's really important to you to know. The hospital records would show whether or not you had an operation, for one thing."

  Kunitz groped his way back to his seat. With the shutters closed the room was almost dark. In the faint light the doll on the table seemed to have an unearthly shimmer, not so much as if she were self-luminous, but as if she caught the light in herself, like porcelain.

  "I thought of that," Kunitz answered. "Unfortunately, there was a fire in the local hospital, and the records for those years were destroyed. I can't ask my parents; they both died with the pyrexia. I haven't any scars on my shoulders, but I don't think that proves anything. With modern surgery ..."

  "Do you think you could have had a fantasy that vivid?" Don queried rather idly.

  "That's the trouble. I think I could. One of the ways the pyrexia affected me was to make my fantasies extremely vivid. For instance, I could tell you a long, connected story about what happened when I was a dragon. I used to fly around over a valley—the wing motif again, you see; as a dragon I had big scaly wings—and pick up people and take them home to my castle. I never ate them. They were farmers. I think they would have been unpleasantly tough."

  "Um. But that's obviously nothing but a fantasy."

  "Yes, but I had domestic ones, too. Once I shot my father with a popgun. Killed him dead. There was blood all over him. I went in the house and told mother, 'I just killed daddy.' She said, 'Did you, dear? We'll get married when you grow up.' "

  Don laughed. "Charming little Oedipus! How frank! But your wing fantasy does seem in a different category from that."

  " 'M, yes. All the same, I'd have dismissed it as just a fantasy, if it hadn't been for what happened when I grew up."

  Kunitz cleared his throat; he was plainly preparing to embark on narration. Don shifted in his chair. Why was Kunitz telling him all this? Up until now, Kunitz had been definitely close-mouthed about himself. Was his present burst of communication nothing more than the result of the doll's unsettling effect? Or did Kunitz have some obscure ulterior motive? What?

  "You've got to understand what it was like when we go
t over the pyrexia," Kunitz said. "The moral and intellectual climate changed. After we had the serum injections—"

  "Didn't the SSP have something to do with that?" Don interrupted.

  "Yes, it did. Nowadays people have almost forgotten what SSP originally meant. The initials stand for Special Serum Purveyance; and the SSP did, almost single-handed, defeat the plague. Whatever you think about the organization today, you have to give it credit for that.

  "They developed the serum—the handful of scientists who either didn't get the plague or managed to keep on working in spite of it—and then they administered it to the rest of us, despite our indifference and dislike. Maybe, considering how things have turned out, it would have been better for us to keep on being sick. I don't know.

  "But as I was saying, there was a remarkable change in the intellectual climate. After the laissez-faire years, there came an era of intense respectability. People's backbones seemed to stiffen, and not only in a moral sense. That, by the way, is how the SSP managed to grow so powerful—by taking advantage of the new hunger for the rigid and the orthodox.

  "I was put in an institution and then adopted. My father and mother seemed far away, lost in the soft pyrexia haze. Even my grief for them was unreal. I tried to adapt myself to the new world.

  "When I was twenty-two, I married. Her name was Thecla—I used to call her Ted—and she looked a little like Loris. We both worked in the Chlorella sun-energy plant.

  "I told her about my wing fantasy before we were married. She said it was just a fantasy; she didn't pay any attention to it. Thecla was intelligent, but she had little imagination. The strongest trait in her character was her longing to be respectable, to be perfectly, entirely, orthodox.

  "We had a child in our second year of marriage. It was a little girl, a beauty. We were both crazy about her."

  The rain was coming down more slowly now. In half an hour it would be over. Kunitz poured the last of the phlomis into the glasses and chucked the empty bottle into the corner. It landed with a thump.

  "We named the baby Bettina, but we always called her Bets. For two years Thecla and I were happy. Then Bets started to grow wings.

  "They weren't like mine had been, mere lumps. As soon as they started to appear, it was clear they were going to be usable. And they grew fast. It was just unbelievable how fast. We didn't have time to be alarmed over Bets' getting some kind of growth before we were confronted with a new fact, a child of ours who had wings.

  "Ted was bowled over. It was something she just couldn't adjust to. Looking back on it, I can see she was having a serious and painful emotional conflict. At the time I didn't appreciate it. But Thecla was torn between one of the precepts of orthodoxy—that a mother always loves her child—and the very unorthodox fact that she was the mother of a sort of freak, a child who could fly.

  "She wanted to have the wings amputated. She pointed out that they'd make Bets' emotional and social development difficult. The other children would make fun of her. It was abnormal. And so on.

  "I wouldn't consent to the operation. Of course I was wrong, but how was I to know? The wings were pretty, pretty as could be. And then—after my own wings were cut off and I was in the institution—I'd had such vivid dreams of flying. Bets had a wonderful gift, an extraordinary power. Why should she be deprived of it?

  "For a while Thecla and I quarreled about it almost constantly. Then my wife seemed to work the situation out for herself. She said it was because she was using one of those little 'communion with the infinite mirrors' which were just coming into popularity then. But I think it was because Thecla had decided that the situation with Bets came under the heading, 'A mother will make any sacrifice for her child.' That's a thoroughly orthodox idea.

  "But Thecla insisted that we keep the wings a secret. Bets had to keep them strapped down under her dress, and she wasn't allowed to fly except when we were out between the green strips, in the country. Even then Ted was always nervous. It wasn't too bad, though. We got along.

  "Then the SSP started its mutation study program—you know, Program X. All this time the SSP had been growing more powerful. There'd been a good deal of talk. But it wasn't until Program X was announced that we realized we had a new government.

  "Mutants were ordered to register. Then what seemed like a random sampling of the registrants was picked up and taken into custody. Only a few at first, and then wider and wider 'samples'. We were told a date—it kept being advanced into the future—when the mutants would be released again. But none of them ever was.

  "Ted and I were getting scared. Something might have leaked about Bets; and even if nothing had, her wings made a perceptible hump under her dress. There were plenty of informers, and there was always a chance somebody would suspect Bets was a mutant and turn us in.

  "We kept talking about it to each other, trying to persuade ourselves that we didn't need to be scared. Then two SSP men in their dark-blue uniforms came into the Chlorella plant where we were working. They picked up one of the men in the drying section—his name was Thorsen—and took him away with them. His mutation was that he had six fingers on one hand.

  "His arrest brought it home to us, somehow. We decided it was time we ran."

  "I—was it very bad?" Don asked. He had heard stories like this before, but they had not seemed so real and close as Kunitz' did. The rain was almost over. His leg had gone to sleep.

  "Not—not so bad then as later," Kunitz answered. "Bad enough. The next two years were running and hiding. We couldn't stay in one place long enough to work steadily, and we didn't dare apply for any of the specialized social services. We were always poor. And we missed our regular work.

  "Our hopes centered on getting a visa for Mars. The SSP hadn't much strength there. We thought that if we could only leave Terra we'd be safe. We waited for the visa for months, hoping—we got sick of hoping. Finally it came through. And then the day before we were jetting, we learned that the SSP was checking everybody for 'mutationism' at the exit ports.

  "That pricked the Martian bubble. I remember how Thecla and I stood staring at each other while some idiot was giving the direct suggestion cast over the tri-di. He kept blathering away about happiness—we were happy, he was happy, it was expected that everybody would be happy. Thecla said, 'He isn't the parent of a mutant child.' "

  Kunitz rose and opened the shutters. The rain-fresh, fragrant air of Fyon came in. Don blinked in the sudden light.

  "What happened finally?" he asked.

  "What could happen?" Kunitz answered bitterly. "They got her. They started checking the poorer residential areas block by block. Thecla got an anti-grav from somewhere and put Bets in a trunk. She hoped the anti-grav would make the trunk so light no one would suspect there was a child in it. But she gave the wrong answer to a robot. They opened the case and took Bets. They didn't do anything to us, for some reason. I suppose Program X was all they could handle.

  "Thecla's slip with the robot was unintentional. I know it was. But she kept accusing herself and crying. Once when she was crying hardest she said it was my fault, because I hadn't permitted the wings to be amputated. I guess that was true, but perhaps it wasn't. The hospital records would have shown that Bets had been a mutant. They might have picked her up anyway.

  "They gave us a receipt for her, but she never came back. I used to stand outside the stockade where they kept the mutants, hoping. They had guards with blasters all around it. I couldn't have saved her. But I wish I'd tried it, anyway."

  Kunitz cleared his throat. "I wonder what she'd have looked like," he said painfully. "If they'd let her grow up, I mean. I think she'd have been beautiful. Her wings were a deep rich gold, you know—I didn't mean light brown, I mean deep gold. Her skin was a shade lighter, and she had brown eyes with green-gold flecks. Grown up and flying—she'd have looked like some great golden bird.

  "Well." Once more Kunitz cleared his throat. "Let's get back to your discovery, Don. You've found one of Vulcan's weeping dolls.
What are you going to do with it?"

  "I haven't decided. I don't know."

  "Get rid of it, Don. She's dangerous."

  "What makes you say that? She's so beautiful."

  "Yes, but she's dangerous. Too valuable, too strange—and maybe too unsettling—for an ordinary person to keep. She's like having wings. You ought to get rid of her."

  Don made no answer. After a moment Kunitz laughed. It was an odd sound. "Don't be stubborn, Don. There's a strain of—shall I call it—weak stubbornness in you. It comes out in the way you drink. But get rid of the doll."

  Don's lips compressed. He picked up the doll and looked at her. Tiny, marvelous tears were still flowing down her cheeks. Sell her? What business was it of Kunitz'? He'd be damned if he would.

  "Have you got something, an empty bottle, I could put her in?" he asked. "She's so tiny and frail looking. I'm afraid she'll get hurt."

  "I could find a bottle," Kunitz answered, "But really, Don, you needn't worry about her in that way. I know she looks fragile, but Vulcan's creations are remarkably durable. I doubt there's anything you or anyone else could think of to do to her that would possibly damage her."

  "Thank you," Haig answered. He put the doll in his pocket carefully. He started toward the door, Kunitz following him.

  "Are you going to sell her, Don?" Kunitz asked with a touch of anxiety as they passed the threshold.

  Don looked about him. Every blade of grass, every colored flower petal was sparkling with round drops of rain. The air was clear as crystal, smelling of damp earth. A bird was beginning to sing somewhere to the right, three trembling throaty notes and then a pause. And though the rain was so recently over, the path was dry.

  Sell the doll? He would almost rather have parted with his eyes. But how could he make that clear to Kunitz?

  "Oh, I don't know," he said carelessly. "I guess I'll keep her for a while."

  He heard Kunitz draw his breath in sharply. For a moment the older man stood motionless. Then he went back into the house and closed the door. Don had a quite irrational impression that there was a smile on his face.