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Title: Mr. Adam
Author: Frank, Pat [Frank, Harry Hart] (1907-1964)
Date of first publication: 1946
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1946
   ["Ninth Impression"]
Date first posted: 21 March 2018
Date last updated: 21 March 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1517

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.






MR. ADAM

by Pat Frank




For Doris and Mont





CHAPTER ONE


I suppose it is up to me to tell the story in its entirety, because I
broke it in the first place, and I lived with it from then on, and I
grew to know Mr. Adam. My name is Stephen Decatur Smith, and before I
got involved in the most important story in the world I was a feature
writer on the New York staff of AP. I specialized in ship launchings,
and sports spectacles, and indignation sprees at Town Hall, and the
like. I inhabit the ground floor of a brownstone house on West Tenth
Street. I am still married, which is a surprise to me.

I got a break on the story strictly by accident, which is of course the
way you get most big beats. Most guys who win the Pulitzer Prize are
also lucky at shooting craps.

It started on the night I covered the Zionist rally in the Garden. When
the last resolution had been unanimously adopted I went hurtling out of
the Garden, bound for Toots Shor's. I never got there, because of my
trick knee, and the fat lady. When the fat lady loomed up at the Eighth
Avenue entrance I tried some fast evasive action and my trick knee went
out on me. If it had not been for that medium tank of a woman the world
would not have known for weeks, or perhaps several months, what had
happened to it.

I let out a yell, and collapsed against the building, and the fat lady's
mouth flew open, and she put on a burst of speed and got out of there. I
knew she thought I was having a fit.

Right across the street from the Garden is Polyclinic Hospital,
strategically situated for hockey, rodeo, wrestling, and prize-fight
casualties. Some of the very best surgeons in town are on the staff
there. They like it, because they never know what will come into the
Emergency Room next. As Dr. Thompson says, "It's like an evac hospital
plus a maternity ward."

It was Thompson I saw after I'd hobbled across the street. He's a
friendly elephant of a man with brown, stubby hands. I'd known him in
Italy, during the Gothic Line campaign, when he was running the station
hospital outside Florence. I remember watching him with wonder as he
worked among the wounded, using those great, powerful hands on the
mud-caked doughs as tenderly as a woman touching an infant's face.

He went to work with those hands on my knee, and in a moment there was
one short, sharp pain, and then my knee was good again, as I knew it
would be. "It'll jump out," he warned, "whenever you try any
broken-field running in traffic."

"I know," I said. "Come on down to Shor's and hoist a couple."

"Can't," Thompson said. "I've got a mystery. The board had a meeting
today, and they discovered a mystery, and they delegated me to find out
why."

"What's the mystery?" I asked.

Thompson hesitated a moment. Then he said: "I'll brief you on it. But
it's not for publication. Not yet. You see, it's the no reservations in
the maternity ward."

"No reservations. That's strange."

"Very. There's never been less hospital space, compared to the
population, than in the last few years, and it has actually been getting
worse since the war ended. You see, the increase in the birth rate has
been fantastic. You'd think everybody in the United States had settled
on one occupation and hobby, and that was producing babies. Why, we've
been getting reservations for our maternity ward as long as eight months
in advance."

"How can they be sure?" I asked.

"They cannot. But they just speculate. That's the Broadway crowd for
you." Thompson examined the big loose-leaf ledger on his desk. "Then
suddenly," he said, "nothing at all!"

"You don't mean," I suggested, "that people have quit having babies?"

"All I know for certain," said Thompson, "is that people have quit
making reservations to have their babies in Polyclinic Hospital, as of
June 22."

I looked at the ledger. There were twenty names, addresses, telephone
numbers, names of attending physicians, and amounts of deposit listed
for every day in May, and every day in June, until June 22. Then, as he
said, nothing at all.

I said, my finger on June 11: "What do you know, Dotty Fair's going to
be a mamma! Just for fun, I think I'll scoop Winchell."

"Now look," said Thompson, "this is serious."

"Ridiculous!" I said. "Preposterous! Imagine an institution like
Polyclinic spinning in a tizzy because people have decided not to make
reservations five months ahead! Hospitals are just money-grubbing,
capitalistic corporations, as I've always suspected. The truth is that
people have just got damned sick and tired of kowtowing to those sacred,
omnipotent institutions, the hospitals, and have decided to have their
babies at home. And I might remind you that up until about a century ago
all babies were born at home."

Thompson scratched his nose, and said: "Now if a lot of new hospitals
had been built, or if we'd had a dysentery epidemic, and a lot of kids
had been killed, it would be explainable. But I tell you, Stephen,
nowadays they don't wait until the honeymoon is over to call the
hospital."

I said, soothingly, "I'll come back tomorrow, and you'll find it's been
all a mistake, and that some file clerk, fresh out of the WACS, has been
bucking all the reservations to the next highest echelon."

I decided not to go to Shor's. When you get to Shor's there are a lot of
other newspapermen there and they drink, and talk, and sometimes one of
them tells about a story he is going to write for the Sunday section,
and then he reads it in another paper on Saturday. I took the Eighth
Avenue subway, and walked into our apartment at midnight.

The fire logs were thin, bigger at the ends than in the middle, and in
the middle only the blue flame of the dying fire spurted. Marge was on
the davenport, asleep, with her long legs crossed and her hands folded
across her stomach, and the New York _Post_ shielding her face from the
light. The headlines told of fighting in Palestine, China, Burma, and
Syria, which is about par for peacetime, but the news didn't bother me,
because Marge was more interesting.

I tiptoed across the room and leaned over to kiss her hair, and she
pulled the paper aside and winked at me, and I knew she wasn't sleeping
and kissed her on the mouth instead. I'm the old-fashioned monogamous
species of man who loves his wife.

"What's the matter," she said, "coming right home like this?"

"A moment without you," I explained, "is a moment wasted."

"You're just feeling lustful," she said, "or you would be in a pub." She
looked up at me, speculating. It's amazing, what a woman can find out
about a man in four years. "No," she decided, "it's not that. You want
to tell me about a story."

"Uh-huh," I admitted, and I told her about Dr. Thompson and the
hospital.

"I think," she said when I'd finished, "that it's time we had a baby.
The war's over, the world is settling down, there's space in the
hospitals, and it is time we started building a family. Besides, you're
not getting any younger."

"I'm only thirty-eight!"

"That's practically middle-aged. Sometimes I think we should have had a
baby right away."

"Come on," I said, "what do you think is wrong at Polyclinic?"

"Nothing at all," Marge said, "except all my friends have been going to
Episcopal. I think I'll go to Episcopal. I want a big room, with a
radio, and I'll want my own nurse for at least the first three days.
Weren't we dopes not to subscribe to group hospitalization?"

"Maybe you have forgotten," I suggested with what I considered to be
irony, "that it takes two to make a baby."

She kissed me again. "Darling," she said, "I am so glad you came home
early tonight."

****

During the next week there was a blizzard in New England, LaGuardia
turned down the job of military governor of Germany, and prime
ministers, jobless kings, and jobless generals arrived every day by
plane from Europe. They all had to be interviewed, and I had forgotten
about Dr. Thompson and his mystery.

I forgot, that is, until one day I found myself staring up at Episcopal
Hospital, and I recalled that Marge preferred Episcopal, and just on a
hunch I went inside.

I was inquiring, I told the red-headed girl in the office, about the
possibility of reserving a room in the maternity section, say about June
20. The girl dipped into a filing cabinet. She came back to the counter,
shook her head, and smiled. "Too bad," she said. "We're booked solid for
June 20. Now if it was just two days later--"

"You mean," I said, feeling my stomach knot up inside me, "that you have
plenty of space for the twenty-second?"

"For the twenty-second," she said, "we don't have a single reservation.
As a matter of fact, we don't have any at all beyond June 21." The
redhead frowned. "That _is_ peculiar," she said. "That is _very_
peculiar. Funny I didn't notice it before."

"Thank you very much," I said, and I left, and noticed as I walked out
into the snow that she was telephoning, and that the frown had not gone
from her face.

I went to the AP office and called five other hospitals. Then I walked
into J.C. Pogey's inner sanctum, unannounced. I certainly was shaken,
and I suppose I must have been white with fright and foreboding, because
when J.C. saw me he said: "For Christ's sake what's the matter?"

I fell into the leather chair by his desk, and tried to light a
cigarette. I couldn't make my hands behave, and J.C. held a match for
me. "It may be the most frightful thing!" I said. "The most frightful
thing!"

"What?"

"No babies. No babies after June 21."

J.C. Pogey is a very old, and patient, and infinitely wise man who has
been the New York manager since, it is believed, the Administration of
Taft. In that time all the most startling events of history have flowed
through his ancient and delicate fingers, so what must have appeared to
him as the spectacle of a reporter going wacky could not be expected to
move him overmuch. He said, gently, "All right, Steve, take it easy and
tell me the tale."

I started with my knee, and went through the whole chronology. When I
had finished he did not speak for a time, but rubbed his bald head
behind the ears with his thin thumbs--a sort of manual method he
employed to induce rapid cerebration.

Finally he said: "It may be, of course, the most terrible and certainly
the most important story since the Creation. We must make the most
thorough check, and yet we must not reveal what we're after, or do
anything that will bring premature publication. It may be simply an
extraordinary coincidence--but I'm afraid not."

"That's pretty pessimistic," I said.

J.C. swung his high-backed chair until it faced the window, and he
looked out upon the spires of the city, soft gold in the winter sun, and
it seemed that he looked through and beyond. "If I were God," he said,
"and I were forced to pick a time to deprive the human race of the magic
power of fertility and creation, I think that time would be now."

We decided that I should check the story, as far as possible, by
telephone. We didn't want to send any more queries or cables than
necessary, because when you start sending queries you get a lot of other
people excited, and the story is likely to get beyond your control.

I armed myself with telephone directories for twenty big cities. I
started by calling a hospital in Boston. I didn't say it was the AP
calling. I just said I was a prospective father. The Boston hospital was
booked up for June 21, like those in New York, but I was somewhat
relieved when they said they had a few reservations for the last week in
June.

"I don't think that is important," J.C. warned. "I think you'll find it
is just a miscalculation by some Boston doctor. That's bound to happen."

I called Rochester, Philadelphia, Miami, and New Orleans, and then
desperately swung west to San Francisco. The situation was identical. I
called Chicago, St. Louis, and Omaha, and then tried some small towns in
the South. So far as I could discover, our July birth rate was going to
be zero.

"Maybe it's only the United States," I suggested.

"Try Montreal and Mexico City and B.A. and Rio," J.C. ordered.

I found I was hungry, and that it was night, and we sent out for
sandwiches and coffee, and I began combing the Western Hemisphere.
Things didn't change.

"This isn't proving anything," I said at midnight. "Maybe there isn't
any shortage of hospital space. The only people who really know about
this are the obstetricians."

"All right," said J.C., "call some obstetricians." I knew, by the way he
said it, that his mind was set. A night fog had rolled over the city,
and a Europe-bound liner was moaning its way toward the sea. He kept
staring out into the night as if he expected to see something.

I only knew one obstetrician, Maria Ostenheimer, a friend of Marge who
lives around the corner on Fifth Avenue. While I dialed her number, I
noticed that J.C. was scribbling on an outgoing message form.

Dr. Ostenheimer was awake, and by the noise, she was having a party. I
said, "Maria, I've got something serious, and very confidential to ask
you."

"Marge was over here, and she left a half-hour ago," Dr. Ostenheimer
said. "She came over here alone, and she left alone, and I think you're
a pig to even suspect..."

"No! No! No! This is nothing like that," I interrupted. "This is
strictly business, and damn vital business."

"If you're going to have a baby," she said, "it'll be both a relief and
a surprise, because nobody else is having babies." Her voice was just a
bit hysterical, I thought.

"That's what I called about," I said, "this business of no babies."

There was a pause, and I knew she had shut the door to her rumpus room,
because the party noises ceased. "What do you know about it?" she asked.

"I know that the hospitals aren't getting reservations in the maternity
wards after June 21. That's not only here, but all over the country, all
over other countries too."

There was no sound from the other end of the phone, and I thought for a
moment that Maria might have fainted. But then she said, in a hushed,
tense voice: "Stephen, at first I thought it was me. At first I thought
somebody was spreading vicious lies about my work, and that I was being
secretly blackballed. You know I've got a big practice, Stephen, and
then suddenly, a few months ago, no new patients came. I start in the
beginning with prenatal care, you know, Stephen."

"You only accept a limited number of patients each month, but that quota
is always filled, right?"

"That's right. Well, it's awfully hard, going to a colleague and
announcing that you're not getting any new patients, and I kept quiet
until a few days ago, and then Dr. Blandy--he's got a big practice in
Westchester--dropped in to see me, and I felt that the same thing was
worrying him, and all of a sudden he told me, and I told him that the
same thing had happened to me. We've talked to six others--I suppose
together they're the top obstetricians in Manhattan--and we're having a
meeting next week to investigate."

"You keep it quiet," I said, thinking of the story, although when I look
back on it now a news beat seems very small potatoes, and indeed almost
irrelevant. "You keep quiet about this, but I'll want to see you about
it later."

I hung up, and turned to J.C. "I think," I said, "that the world has had
it!"

"Perhaps not the whole world," said J.C. "Perhaps only the Western
Hemisphere." He handed me the message form. It read:

    URGENT PRESS FYI ONLY FYI ONLY USING UTMOST DISCRETION ASCERTAIN
    WHETHER ANY SUDDEN DROP BIRTHRATE EXPECTED LOCALLY JUNE OR JULY
    STOP REPLY PERSONALLY URGENTEST POGEY

"We'll send this immediately," he said, "to Pat Morin in Paris, and
Boots Norgaard in Rome, and Frank O'Brien in Istanbul, and Goldberg in
Budapest, and Eddy Gilmore in Moscow. And of course to the London
Bureau."

"They'll think you're nuts," I said.

"They will until they've checked up," said J.C. "Then they'll be
frightened, just as you are, and just as I am. We won't get answers to
these queries until tomorrow, so you go on home to that blonde wife of
yours, and get plenty of sleep, because I do not believe you will be
sleeping very much for a week or so."

****

One of our best spies told me, once, that there were only two kinds of
wives--those to whom you told nothing, and those to whom you told
everything. I tell Marge everything, but on this night I kept my mouth
shut, because I knew if we started talking about it I'd never get any
sleep. Besides, I was afraid. I didn't know how she'd react if I told
her it didn't appear likely that we'd ever have any babies. I felt
desolate, and empty inside. I consumed a good deal of rye, straight,
before I slept.

In the morning Marge brought coffee to bed, which was unusual, and she
said: "Stephen, you're not sick, are you?"

"No. I've got to get up. I've got to go to the office early."

"Stephen, what's the trouble?"

"Nothing," I said, and put the covers over my head and crawled into the
middle of "Smith Field." We have the most enormous double bed in New
York, built for lazy living. It's surrounded by a shelf, and gadgets. On
one side we have a radio, and a bookcase, and on the other a little
refrigerator and bar. Our friends say our bed is decadent, and indecent,
but we like it, and call it Smith Field.

"There's no use hiding," said Marge. "Come out from under there. You've
either been gambling, or there's been trouble at the office, or you're
sick. Something really bad has happened. I know."

"It's just that I'm a little hung over," I lied.

"Is it that hospital business you talked about last week?"

I didn't reply, but I knew that she knew. "I don't know why," Marge
said, "but I've been worrying about it."

"Nothing is certain, yet," I said. When I left the house I kissed her
with what I thought was reassurance. But I had never before seen Marge's
face so strained, and her eyes so dull, and lacking of life. On the way
uptown it seemed that I stood apart and alone from all the others on the
streets and in the subway. The bustle of New York going to work on a
weekday morning seemed altogether futile and without meaning.

J.C. had a little stack of teletype messages on his desk, and I knew the
verdict before I read them, simply by the set of his shoulders, and by
his silence.

The answers were all the same. So far as anyone could determine, no more
children would be born after the last week in June. In Paris and London,
very secret official investigations had already been started.

"We've got answers," said J.C., "from everywhere except Moscow," but
even as he spoke an office boy brought in another incoming teletype. It
was from the Moscow Bureau. It read:

    URGENT PRESS ASSOCIATED NEW YORK PROPOGEY SOVIET GOVERNMENT
    PERTURBEDEST MY INQUIRIES STOP MY EXPULSION THREATENED
    PROATTEMPTING PENETRATE STATE SECRETS STOP HOWEVER YOUR HUNCH
    CORRECT GILMORE

"That's enough for me," said J.C.

"It seems to me," I said, "that the whole world knows about this thing,
and is trying to keep it a secret."

"I don't blame the whole world," said J.C. "The whole world is like a
man who knows he has cancer, but won't admit it, even to himself.
However, it has to break some time, and as long as it has to break, the
AP might as well break it."

"We'll have to put the Washington Bureau on it, for official statements,
and the American Medical Association. But--why?"

"That's it--why?"

"There must be a scientific reason."

J.C. put the worn serge of his elbows on his desk and massaged his head
behind the ears. "All night," he said, "I kept thinking of something
General Farrell said after he witnessed the first atomic bomb explosion
in New Mexico. He said, if I remember the words correctly, that the
explosion 'warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were
blasphemous to dare tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the
Almighty.'"

I recalled a kindred phrase, after Hiroshima was atomized, about
civilization now having the power to commit suicide at will. I thought
about it, and I thought of the Mississippi disaster, and the thing began
to come clear to me, and I yelled: "When was it that Mississippi blew
up? Wasn't it in September?"

J.C. straightened. "That's it, of course!" he said. "The Mississippi
explosion was September the twenty-first. Nine months to the day! Nine
months to the very day!"




CHAPTER TWO


You will remember that on September 21 the great new nuclear fission
plants at Bohrville, Mississippi--a city erected in the center of the
state and named after one of the famous atomic physicists--disintegrated
in an explosion that made Nagasaki and Hiroshima mere cap pistols by
comparison.

Not only did Bohrville disintegrate but most of Mississippi went along
with it. The blinding glare of the Bohrville disaster was seen as far
north as Chicago, and across the Gulf of Mexico. St. Louis felt it as an
earthshock, while the heat was dangerous in New Orleans.

What caused the explosion no man knew, for naturally there were no
survivors. But it was known in Washington that the Bohrville plants were
producing U-235, Plutonium, and even rarer and more violently
radioactive substances in quantities that had been impossible in the
plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington.

The effects of the explosion upon the world were profound, and not all
of them could be classed as evil. For one thing the United States
stopped making atomic bombs, and the other nations showed no desire to
begin where we left off. Molotov issued a statement blaming the
explosion on the greedy capitalistic system, and assured the Russians
that there were no nuclear fission plants within the borders of the
Soviet Union. In the Argentine, certain pro-Fascist scientists suddenly
ceased their private experiments, and began to take up botany and
ichthyology.

The United Nations had no trouble pledging its members to outlaw the
atom as a weapon of war, but of course small wars kept going on, around
the world.

Besides, nobody really missed Mississippi. The explosion eliminated
Bilbo and Rankin, and anyway Mississippi was the most backward of
states. People felt that if any one of the forty-eight states had to be
sacrificed, it was just as well that it happened to Mississippi.

After the explosion I was assigned to interview the atomic physicists
who lived in the New York area as to the probable cause, and the
results. I remembered, now, that all the physicists had assured me that
the explosion was only dangerous within a radius of a few hundred miles.
But always I had had a disquieting feeling that there was something else
they wished to say, but were afraid to say. It was as if there were
something they were afraid to put into words, even to themselves.

Whenever I had asked about possible sterilization from Gamma rays,
they'd clam up. Or they had pointed out, in words carefully picked and
studied (for they knew they were talking for publication) that
radioactive substances emitted Gamma rays "for only a comparatively
short time." Then they'd lapse into the jargon of the physicist, and
lead me into a dark scientific jungle where my pedestrian, layman's
learning cast only a dim light.

Now I went to Professor Felix Pell, up at Columbia University. I went to
Pell because, of all the surviving atomic physicists, he had talked
least about the Mississippi disaster, although I had felt at the time
that he could have told most.

Pell is a little man with narrow shoulders and uncertain legs, and you
feel his body was constructed simply as a temporary support for his
massive head. On his feet he is a caricature of a college professor, but
in his own office, his shrunken body hidden behind an immense desk, he
is imposing as a Supreme Court Justice posing for his first
post-appointment picture.

Pell received me in his office. "I suppose," he suggested, "that you're
still troubled about that business in Mississippi."

"Well, not exactly," I said. "I'm not troubled about Mississippi. Now
I'm troubled about the world."

Professor Pell allowed himself to smile, but I had a feeling--reporters
are always getting feelings or they wouldn't be reporters--that he was
not completely at ease.

"It appears," I said, reaching into my pocket for a cigarette in my
attempt to be completely casual, "that the Mississippi explosion
sterilized the human race."

I will say this for Professor Pell. He was emotionally shockproof. "A
most peculiar statement," he said. "I haven't heard anything about the
human race being sterilized."

"That is because," I said, "you are not, at this stage in humanity's
development, able to read tomorrow's newspapers."

"You are serious?"

"I certainly am. I am sterile, and you are sterile."

The professor's head twisted on the thin, wrinkled stem of his neck, and
he peered up at me for a period of seconds. Then he dropped his eyes and
said: "And what has this alleged sterilization got to do with the
Mississippi catastrophe?"

"Since Mississippi blew up, no babies have been conceived anywhere on
earth, so far as we can find out."

"That is hardly scientific proof."

I suddenly discovered that I hated Professor Pell. Up to this moment I
had regarded him with a great deal of respect, and even awe, for was he
not one of the superior beings who had, in the President's words, tapped
the source from which the sun draws its power? But of a sudden I hated
him, and I knew that I would not be alone in my hate. I put my hands on
his desk, and leaned over it until my face was close to his face.
"Professor Pell," I said, "it may not be scientific proof, but it is
pretty damn good circumstantial evidence." I fixed my eyes on his
turkey-thin neck. "It is good enough evidence to hang a man," I
continued. "It is good enough evidence to hang any man who even looked
sideways at an atom."

I could see that I had shaken Pell loose from his equanimity. In this
moment he was an old man, afraid for his life. "Please sit down," he
said, "and tell me what you want of me, but I would rather not have my
name connected with this."

"You didn't mind having your name at the top of the list when they were
passing out credit for developing the bomb."

He nodded. "That is true," he said slowly. "That is perfectly true, and
with the credit must go the blame. We have always known that this risk
existed, and certainly at every stage in our research and production we
took the most careful precautions to safeguard our personnel. But the
risk was always there."

Pell touched a stapled sheaf of papers on the corner of his desk. I
could read _Top Secret_ on the first page. "Ever since the Mississippi
explosion," he continued, "we have speculated on the possible harmful
effects of unloosing such an unprecedented quantity of radioactive
substances--along with obscure rays of which we know little--upon the
earth. This is my analysis, which I was about to forward to the National
Research Council."

"And what was your conclusion?" I asked.

"My conclusion," he said hesitantly, "was that such an explosion would
send very penetrating radiations, encompassing the whole spectrum,
around the world with the speed of light. Not only Gamma rays, and Alpha
and Beta rays and particles, but their obscure variations. It was also
my conclusion that these rays would prove harmful, but to what extent it
was impossible to predict."

"Now we know," I said.

"Yes, indeed," Pell said, "now we know." Then he added: "Tell me, were
women affected as well as men?"

"Of course the investigations aren't complete," I said. "A group of
doctors has been making as many examinations as possible. But thus far
they've found that all men are sterilized without exception, while few
if any women were affected. The doctors say almost all women still
ovulate, and the Fallopian tubes have not been damaged."

"The human body," said Pell, "is a strange business. There are
chemistries of the body more mysterious than any problem in physics. Now
I asked that question for a good reason. Men have always been more
susceptible to certain rays than women. But all known harmful rays have
affected both men and women. So the ray which did the damage must be one
with which we are not as yet familiar."

"I don't see that it matters very much," I said.

"Well," said Pell, "it is an interesting aspect of the phenomenon,
although its importance henceforth can only be classed as theoretical."

"Henceforth," I said, rising, "the importance of everything will only be
theoretical." He was puzzling that one out as I left.

****

That night we began to move the story across our wires. The reactions,
throughout the world, were immediate and fearful. I could trot out all
the Hollywood adjectives, and run them into a sentence, two by two, like
Noah's animals entering the Ark, and they would not begin to describe
what started happening that night, and kept on happening.

J.C. Pogey, handling the story with no more flurry than if it were a
national election, kept me at the rewrite desk until dawn. By that time,
the story was not dissimilar to an election, for the whole world was
split straight up the middle--those who believed it and those who
didn't.

Strange little sidebar stories began to creep into the main trunk wires.

In Boston, an eminent churchman, hauled from his bed by the local press,
denounced the whole thing as a vicious hoax. In Baltimore an equally
eminent churchman said he'd been expecting it all along, and added that
he wouldn't be at all surprised if the world didn't blow up within
forty-eight hours.

In London, the King spoke over the BBC, and reassured the Empire that
His Majesty's government was, and had been, well aware of the situation,
was conducting an investigation, and was taking the necessary steps.

There were riots in Paris, but there are always riots in Paris.

Moscow cut itself off from the world.

The President urged the nation to be calm.

Up in Morningside Heights, a group of serious young women stoned the
apartment house inhabited by Professor Pell.

Spontaneous rumors started simultaneously in Vienna, Budapest, Frankfurt
am Main. Madrid and Berne said it was a plot on the part of Jewish
scientists.

But it is best, perhaps, to describe what went on in my own particular
household.

When I got home, just after the milkman but before the morning papers,
Marge was curled up in one corner of Smith Field. I could tell, by the
number of cigarette butts, that she had been up all night, undoubtedly
listening to the news on the radio. The radio was still on, tuned to a
Newark station, and giving out boogie-woogie.

I undressed, tossing my trousers and shirt across the back of a chair. I
was examining myself in the full length mirror, wondering how a man who
kept such irregular hours, and ate so erratically, could develop a
definite belly, when the boogie-woogie faded, and a girl announcer said
in the peculiar clipped sing-song which is currently the fashion among
swing shift announcers:

"We are interrupting for another news flash. Washington--Surgeon General
George Gail announced that he has called a congress of the nation's
leading physicians and scientists early next week. They will meet in the
capital to plan national re-fertilization. Next you will hear that
international wartime favorite, 'Lili Marlene,' and while I adjust the
needle, let me remind you that this program comes to you through the
courtesy of SILK E. RUB Furniture Polish, pronounced Silky Rub, the
polish of Gracious Living."

In the background I could hear the opening bars of "Lili Marlene," and
then a deep-voiced female quartet cut in with:

    'For all the news of sterilization
    Please keep tuned to this station.'

"Lili Marlene" swelled up, and I remembered the last time I had heard
it, and the lyrics that went with it, while the Army trucks bound for
the repple-depple in Naples rumbled by, and I began to sing the lyrics
aloud:

    Please, Mr. Truman, let the boys go home.
    We have conquered Naples, and we have captured Rome.
    We have licked the master race,
    Now all we want is shipping space.
    Oh, please, may we go home!
    Let the boys at home see Rome!

Marge stirred, and inched across Smith Field until she reached the
corner farthest away from me. "Damn you!" she grumbled sleepily. "Damn
you!"

"I'm sorry, darling," I said. "Had to work all night. Big story."

Marge propped herself on her elbows and rubbed her eyes. "I'll say it
was a big story," she exclaimed. "Oh, yes, it was the very biggest
story--you eunuch, you!"

I didn't say anything, because it was the first time I had heard it put
that way, and I was somewhat shocked, but I began to understand that the
situation was complicated beyond anything either I or J.C. had imagined.

"You eunuch, you!" she repeated.

"Is that nice?" I inquired.

Marge sat up straight. She wore the red silk pajamas fashioned from the
ammo chute I'd scrounged when the British paratroops jumped into Megara,
Greece. You put a blonde into red pajamas, piped with white silken
parachute cord, and ruffle her hair, and let indignant fire run out of
her eyes, and you have something particularly lovable, if she is in the
mood to be loved. She was not in that mood. She said: "You sleep on your
own side of the field!"

"But darling," I protested, "is it my fault?"

"Of course it's your fault," she said. "At least it is your fault that
we didn't start any children before it happened."

"Who was it," I asked, "who said the world wasn't a fit place to produce
babies?"

"That was in forty-three," she retorted. "It wasn't, then."

"Is it my fault, entirely," I inquired, "that Mississippi blew up?
Simply because Mississippi blew up, are we going to go through the
remainder of our lives like distant and not-too-friendly cousins?"

"Stephen Decatur Smith," Marge said, "I know it sounds silly to you but
I think it is a dirty trick on the part of the whole male population.
For the rest of your lives you will be rabbiting around, smirking, all
equipped with built-in contraceptives."

It didn't seem necessary to answer. I got into my own side of Smith
Field. "Not being a woman, you could never completely understand," Marge
went on. "Men will continue to live their lives. But to every woman, it
will be as if she were already dead."

****

Later, I found that Marge's evaluation was accurate, and until the
miracle of Mr. Adam, the feminine suicide rate rose considerably.

But generally, life continued on an astoundingly normal plane. The world
ticked on, like a clock that would never be wound again, but which would
continue to tell time and sound off the hours until it finally ran down.

Winter slipped into spring. There was the usual art fair in Washington
Square. Young people in love held hands and planned plastic houses,
including nurseries, in the blind confidence of love and youth. Radical
plastic automobiles appeared, the United Nations reached agreement on
the Hungarian-Slovak border, and a United States oil company succeeded
in obtaining a ninety-nine-year lease on the new field in Iraq.

The front pages of the newspapers, of course, were devoted to little
except stories on World Sterilization, or, as abbreviated by the tabloid
headline writers, W.S. But so long as babies continued to be born, the
whole thing seemed incredible and fantastic, and indeed it was denounced
every day, officially, by experts such as Congressmen, Anglican Bishops,
the President of the Chamber of Commerce, Dorothy Thompson, and
three- and four-star generals.

But things began to get tense in June, and as the month slid by,
apprehension increased. By this time, of course, the facts had been so
well established, in every country and on every continent, including the
interior of Africa and the Eskimos near the Pole, that there was no
reason for hope--and yet hope persisted. On June 21 the _Daily News_ ran
a banner, "W.S. DAY TOMORROW!"

The world held its breath, prepared for the worst, and the worst
happened.

For the remainder of the month, and indeed well into July, there were
sporadic bursts of optimism as communities reported births, but all
these, it developed, were the result of over-long periods of gestation.

False alarms were frequent, naturally, and we realized that they would
continue for a generation or two. But for the most part, by autumn the
world had composed itself to slow death, although the President had
allotted unlimited funds, and all science had been enlisted, for the
N.R.P., or National Re-fertilization Project. The Sunday supplements
began to speculate as to who would inherit the earth--the insects, or
the fishes.

On the first anniversary of the Mississippi explosion I awoke at noon.
Marge was sitting, cross-legged, at the other end of Smith Field, and I
smelled fresh coffee. "You see what I've done," she said. "I've
installed a percolator here at the corner. We weren't using this corner
at all."

"You're a genius," I admitted.

"I've got another idea," she said. "When the new television sets come
out, we can put a screen down here at the bottom of the field, and on
Saturday afternoons we can lie in bed and watch the football games."

"Some day," I warned, "people will find out about the way we live, and
will put us on exhibition."

The phone rang, and Marge picked up the extension. "It's Maria
Ostenheimer," she said, puzzled, "for you."

I took the telephone, and said, "Hello, Maria, what are you doing for a
living nowadays?"

"That's not very funny," the lady obstetrician said. "I've got a good
mind not to tell you what I called about."

There was excitement in her voice. I said: "Go ahead, Maria, talk."

"Stephen," she said, "listen carefully. A baby is going to be born--may
have been born already--in Tarrytown."

"Now Maria," I said, "just last week I flew down to a place called Big
Stone Gap, Virginia, on one of those tips, and we landed in a cornfield
and ground-looped, and it turned out to be a baby, all right, but a baby
born to a circus elephant named Priscilla."

"Stephen," said Maria, enunciating her words slowly and carefully, "this
is the real thing. You will remember I mentioned Dr. Blandy, who
practises in Westchester. He was called on this case four months ago,
back in May."

"Why didn't he mention it before?" I demanded.

"You dunce!" Maria said. "At first he thought it was going to be an
abnormally small baby, and after the end of June he thought it might be
an unusually long pregnancy. He didn't want to say a word about it until
he was absolutely sure."

"And is he sure now?"

"There can be no doubt of it. The baby was conceived exactly nine months
ago--three months after those damn uranium rays sterilized all the men.
Blandy brought all the records of the case to my office this morning."

"Why did he bring them to you?" I asked, looking for a loophole I was
sure existed.

"I am," said Maria, "on the executive board of the New York City
investigating committee for the N.R.P. Besides, he knew there would be a
great deal of publicity after the baby was born, and he wanted my
advice. I said," she continued sarcastically, "that I might persuade you
to handle the press, since you had some experience along those lines,
and were sometimes considered reliable."

"Bless you! Maria. Bless you!" I exclaimed.

"What's going on here?" Marge interrupted.

"Quiet!" I shouted.

"You're not going to leave me out of this," Marge said. She went to the
closet and took out a blue dress. Then she began to pull underthings out
of a drawer.

"Maria," I said into the phone, "where is this child being born?"

There was a pause, and I knew she was searching for a memorandum. I
considered all the things that J.C. would want me to do. "The address,"
Maria said, "is The Gatehouse, Rosemere, Tarrytown."

"That sounds like an estate," I said.

"It sounds like the gatehouse on an estate," Maria amended. "You'd
better get going, Stephen, because it may happen any time this
afternoon, according to Blandy. And remember, I'm depending on you to
help him out."

My pajamas were off before I was out of bed. "I never," said Marge,
startled, "saw you move so fast in all my life before."

"Throw some shirts and socks and shorts and my shaving kit and
handkerchiefs into a bag," I yelled. "A baby is being born!"

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Tarrytown."

"But that's only--"

"If this thing is true, I'm going to stay."

"You mean _we_ are going to stay. This is just as important for me as it
is for you. More!" I could see that Marge was already dressed, and was
packing two bags, swiftly and efficiently, as if we were off for the
weekend, and the train was going to leave in twenty minutes.

We caught a cab on Fifth Avenue, and the lights were with us all the way
to Grand Central. The next train for Tarrytown was the Croton local. I
bought a paper, and we fidgeted over a couple of milk shakes until it
left.

It was an absurd train that crawled up the Hudson, pausing like a
crosstown trolley at every intersection. I ticked off the
stations--Glenwood, Greystone, Hastings-on-Hudson, Dobbs Ferry. Finally
there came Irvington, and the next stop was Tarrytown.

There was a taxi at the station. "Do you know," I asked the driver,
"where Rosemere is? I think it's an estate."

The hackman removed the stub of a cigar from his mouth. "Sure," he said,
"been living here all my life. You want to go to Rosemere?"

"That's right," I said, throwing the bags into the back seat.

"Don't you want to put them in the trunk compartment?" the driver asked.

"No!" I said. "No! They are perfectly okay."

"You're in an awfully big hurry, fellow," the driver ventured.

I didn't say anything. I kept wondering what sort of people lived in the
gatehouse. Probably, I thought, servants. Probably a butler and an
upstairs maid had had some sort of an affair.

"Stephen," Marge said, "sit back and take it easy. You can't make it go
any faster."

We crawled up the hill, and the cab stopped before stone gateposts with
a chain stretched between them, and a gravel drive beyond. "You want to
go to the big house?" the hackman asked. "I hear it's closed up. The
people go South this time every year."

"No," I said. "The gatehouse."

He unhooked the chain, and the cab crept up the driveway for fifty
yards. The gatehouse was a compact, squat, two-story cottage, solidly
constructed of field stone, with a mangy oak arched over the faded red
tiles of its roof. There was a forty-six Buick sedan parked in front,
with the little green marker that identifies the physician attached to
its license plate. I gave the hackman a dollar, he backed down the
driveway, and I pushed the bell and then knocked loudly on the door.

The door swung open, and Marge and I entered, carrying our weekend bags.
"You're Smith," said a stocky, red-faced, perspiring man, perhaps
forty-five, perhaps fifty. He was coatless, and his sleeves were rolled
to his elbows. He looked as if he had been working.

"I'm Smith," I said, "and this is Mrs. Smith."

"How d'you do," he said, "I'm Blandy. Can't shake hands. Just washed
'em. Ostenheimer told me about you. She didn't say anything about Mrs.
Smith."

"I just horned in," said Marge. "If I'm in the way--"

"Not at all. I've got a good nurse upstairs, but there are plenty of
things you can do later. Anyway, your first job is to take care of him."
Blandy nodded towards a corner which I had dismissed as being inhabited
completely by a grand piano. Then he puffed up the steps.

In the corner, half-hidden by the piano, and seated on a green hassock,
utterly uncomfortable and miserable, with his long chin cupped in his
hands, and his knees and elbows askew, was a man. I said, "Hello."

"Hello," he said, and got to his feet, unbelievably stretching out to
some six feet plus four or five or even six inches. "I'm Adam."

"You're what?"

"Adam. Homer Adam."

"You're the--"

"Yes, I'm going to have a baby. I mean Mary Ellen is." He kept putting
his hands into his coat pockets and taking them out again. They were
long, bony hands, and they were trembling. His shock of bright red hair
appeared to be attempting to fly off his scalp in all directions.

"Now, look, fellow," I said with what I believed to be cheerful
confidence, "take it easy. My name is Steve Smith, from the AP. I'm here
to help you. Don't be so nervous. You'd think there'd never been a baby
born before."

"There hasn't been, recently," Adam said. "That's just it."

Marge, who had been prowling the room, examining the hunting prints, the
fireplace, the bookcases, and the curtains, giggled. "I like him," she
said to nobody in particular. "He's nice."

From upstairs came a sharp, feminine cry, suddenly bitten off in the
middle. Adam began to shake. He collapsed on the sofa, and I was
startled by the small number of cubic feet he occupied, sitting down,
contrasted with his height, standing up.

"Look, Homer," I said, sitting down beside him, "I'm going to have to
ask you a lot of questions, so I might as well start now."

Marge produced highballs, and an hour later she appeared with
sandwiches. Just after dark the sounds from upstairs became more
businesslike, and then Dr. Blandy shouted: "Hey, down there. It's all
over. It's a girl--a fine girl! No trouble at all!"

"How much," I yelled back, "does she weigh?"

"What an inane question!" Marge said.

"I know, but you always ask it first."

Dr. Blandy shouted: "She's average and normal. When they're average and
normal I always say they weigh seven pounds."

I walked to the phone on the hall table and called Circle 6-4111, and
asked for Pogey. "J.C.," I said, "here is a flash." I enunciated each
word clearly: "Flash--a girl baby was born to Mr. and Mrs. Homer Adam in
Tarrytown, New York, at"--I glanced at my watch--"six fifty-one today!"

"You sane and sober, Steve?" J.C. inquired.

"Certainly."

"Did you say Adam?"

"Honest to Christ, J.C., it is Adam A-D-A-M."

"You will," J.C. ordered quietly, "give me a bulletin to follow flash.
You will then dictate a complete story, and don't hesitate to call in
with new leads and inserts. Why this is the biggest story--"

"Since the Creation," I suggested.

"No," he said quietly, "just the biggest since Mississippi."




CHAPTER THREE


The history of Homer Adam, until the day he became the world's lone
post-Mississippi father, would not have earned him more than a
three-paragraph obituary in his home-town newspaper, even if he had died
an unusual and violent death.

He was born in Hyannis, Nebraska, a small but prosperous cattle town.
His great-grandfather had crossed the plains in a covered wagon
(something of which the editorial writers made much when the
re-population schemes were being considered). His grandfather was a
cattleman, and his father was a wholesale grocer.

As a boy he was rather shy, and spent more time collecting stamps and
Indian artifacts than he did playing football or riding and hunting.
"You see," he confided in me, "I was much too tall for my age. The
older, but smaller boys used to beat me up. I think it gave me an
inferiority complex."

He wanted to be an archeologist, but his parents didn't think it was
practical. He compromised on geology, and they sent him to the Colorado
School of Mines, where his record was good enough to get him a job with
the Guggenheims immediately after graduation. When war came, the Draft
Board doctors, examining his gangling form, at first classified him as
4-F, but he probably would have attained 1-A eventually had not the
government found a use for his special qualifications and dispatched him
to Australia.

Living in a little mining town planted in the desert near Alice Springs
made him homesick, and he became a prodigious letter writer. He wrote
all his letters to Mary Ellen Kopp, a secretary in the Guggenheims' New
York office. When he returned from Australia they were married, after a
suitable engagement period.

These were the main facts, as he gave them to me while we sat in the
living room of the gatehouse, waiting for his baby to arrive. However,
they were not the principal things I wanted to know, but the birth of
the Adam daughter interrupted my questioning.

It was not until much later--after Mr. Adam had seen his baby, and Marge
had gone back to our West Tenth Street apartment (because there would be
no room for her in the gatehouse that night) and I had peeped in on the
mother and baby--that I found an opportunity to ask Homer the really
pertinent questions.

We were sitting in the living room, and I had shoved another highball
into Homer's hand, and had complimented him on both his wife and his
child. Mary Ellen was a buxom, lusty young woman who, Dr. Blandy assured
me, had gone through childbirth with considerable fortitude. "It was
simple," he said, "as popping a peanut out of the shell." And the baby,
as newborn babies go, could be classified as cute.

"I'm sorry," I explained, "that I have to ask all these questions at
this time. I know--and it's quite natural too--that you're excited and
upset. But it will save you a lot of trouble in the end, because you'll
only have to answer them one time. All the reporters in New York will
descend on this place before long, and I don't know who else besides,
and if you give me all the answers I can handle them. This way, it won't
bother you or your wife."

Homer shuddered, like a tall, thin, unkempt pine in a fitful breeze, and
swallowed his drink. "Why did this have to happen to me?" he moaned.

"Don't be a damn fool," I said. "You're a very lucky and remarkable man.
Why, you're the luckiest guy on earth."

"But what I cannot figure out," Homer said, "is how it happened. Please
give me another drink. I think I ought to get tight, because you see I'm
scared."

I poured him another drink, more rye than soda. He took a swallow and
choked on it, water filling his eyes. "Easy!" I cautioned. "Just tell
me, where were you on the day Mississippi exploded?"

"In Colorado," Homer replied. "The boss sent me to investigate the
possibility of reopening some old silver and lead workings."

"Exactly where in Colorado?"

"Well, near Leadville. I spent the whole day in the lowest level of
Eldorado No. 2. You know that's one of the deepest shafts in the world.
Certainly the deepest lead workings. I was very much surprised when I
went into Leadville that night--it was a Sunday--and they told me about
the flash in the sky, and later I heard on the radio about the
explosion."

I didn't have to know as much about physics as Professor Pell to guess
the reason for Homer Adam's miracle. "When the explosion came," I said,
"you were probably completely shielded from the world by lead?"

Mr. Adam considered this. "Yes," he said finally, "I suppose I was. The
lead and silver ore in the lowest level is as rich as you'll find
anywhere in the world. Hardly economical, though, because of--"

"Let's forget about it, from the mining viewpoint," I suggested. "Let's
consider it from the viewpoint of the rays from the explosion."

"If lead protects you against radioactive rays," said Homer, "I suppose
I was better protected, more than a mile down there, than any other man
in the world."

"It certainly seems so," I said, "considering the known facts. Was
there," I asked hopefully, wondering whether any other still potent
males existed, "anybody else down there with you?"

"Oh, no," Homer replied. "You see Elorado No. 2 has been abandoned for a
generation or more. There are watchmen at the mine, but they only
operate the elevators, and guard the machinery, and inspect the shafts
for drainage. They rarely go into the lower levels."

****

The next few days, I would just as soon forget. It was like the Dionne
quintuplets all over again, except that in this case it was the father,
not the mother, in the center ring. There were other considerable
differences, and one of them was that every human being, without
exception, had a vital interest in Mr. Adam. I describe it inadequately.
For the human race, the welfare and future of Mr. Adam was literally a
matter of life and death.

I was hounded, harassed, heckled, harried, quizzed, questioned,
cross-examined, badgered, and browbeaten by the ladies and gentlemen of
my own profession until I did not know which end was up, or care much.

The first thing I did was borrow a technique that had proved successful
in war coverage. I instituted a photographic pool system. This simply
meant that instead of dozens of photographers swarming over the
gatehouse, one still photographer and one newsreel cameraman were chosen
by lot. They made pictures for all companies, newspapers, and agencies.

I arranged press conferences for Homer Adam, Mary Ellen, Dr. Blandy, and
Mrs. Brundidge, the tight-lipped trained nurse who took a Scottish
general attitude of disapproval regarding all these proceedings. Mrs.
Brundidge was even persuaded to exhibit the baby (named Eleanor, for the
mother was a firm Democrat). At the same time I managed to furnish the
AP with enough exclusive material to keep J.C. Pogey satisfied, and yet
not so much that other newspapermen would raise a beef that would
exclude me from my strategic post in the gatehouse. Altogether, as I was
to learn, I made a pretty satisfactory public relations counsel.

The press conferences, as can be imagined, were largely biological, but
how else can a story like this be handled?

Shy as he was, and awkward, standing first on one leg and then on the
other like a peculiar species of red-headed crane, Homer sometimes
exhibited unexpected spunk and wit. Like when a sly, cynical, harridan
from one of the tabloids asked him: "Now, Mr. Adam, not that it's wrong,
but did you and your wife by any chance have premarital relations?"

Homer took a breath and replied, without anger: "You use awfully big
words, ma'am. If you mean did we sleep together before we were married,
the answer is no."

She jumped, and the other reporters laughed, and this annoyed her, and
she said: "I was only endeavoring to discover whether this child might
not have been the result of an exceptionally long pregnancy."

"That would have been sort of difficult," said Homer, "because almost up
to the very day we were married Mary Ellen was in New York, and I was in
Colorado."

"Well," said this unwholesome adjective artist, "there is also such a
thing as extra-marital relationships!"

I had the answer to that one, but I wanted to see the creature hang
herself, so for the moment I remained quiet. Homer stood very still, his
long, bony hands white and twisting, and no color in his face. Then Mike
Burgin, from the _Times_, said: "Look, madame"--and the way he
pronounced "madame" left no doubt as to what sort of madame he meant--"I
think you are out of line, and anyway this kid has already got red hair
just like his father."

"My desk," the dough-faced witch alibied, "told me to ask."

"Well, just so your desk will not work itself into a lather," I
interrupted, "tell your desk that we have already run complete blood
tests, and Homer Adam is undoubtedly the pappy."

****

After the press was reasonably satisfied, the Army moved in. The
American Army, when it has a war to fight, is an aggressive, eager,
brainy, and enormously efficient organization. But when there is no war,
the Army is something less than that. I suspect that its higher echelons
are staffed, except for the professional soldiers, by gentlemen fearful
of facing the competition of civilian life, officers to whom the
barracks has become a nice, safe refuge.

The Army moved in first, with a platoon of Military Police dispatched
from Fort Totten, after the Tarrytown Police Department, overworked and
bewildered, sent out urgent distress signals. The MP's found a job to
do, and they did it. They kept traffic moving outside the estate, and
they shooed away the over-inquisitive who climbed fences, and sometimes
frightened Mrs. Brundidge by staring through the kitchen windows,
bug-eyed, while she mixed Eleanor's formula.

Perhaps their most arduous and interesting chore was acting as buffers
between Homer Adam and the teen-age girls who had, en masse, deserted a
crooner known as "The Larynx," and a screen actor called "The Leer." Why
it was no man can explain, but the photographs of Homer Adam definitely
registered sex appeal to excitable, half-matured, single females. Until
the MP's established a _cordon sanitaire_ around the estate, their
uninhibited tactics frightened Homer into the shakes, alarmed Mary
Ellen, and disturbed the baby's digestion. They shocked Homer into the
shattering knowledge that he was no longer--and probably never would be
again--a private citizen enjoying the Fifth Freedom--Privacy.

But with the arrival of Colonel Merle Phelps-Smythe at Rosemere, Homer
began to understand fully his future role in the national, and possibly
the world scene.

Homer and I were playing gin and Blandy was kibitzing when the colonel
put his riding boots and spurs through the door. "Who's in charge here?"
he boomed. "I'm here to see Mr. Adam!"

"Why nobody's in charge," Homer said, rising derrick-like, "but I'm
Adam."

"Well, now, that's why I'm here," Phelps-Smythe explained. "I'm here
just exactly for that reason--because nobody's in charge. That's why the
Army sent me to take over." He stated his name with some formality, and
added: "I am the personal aide and Public Relations Officer of the
Commanding General, Eastern Defense Command, Zone of the Interior. From
now on"--he poked a fat forefinger at Homer's throat--"you are under the
protection of the Eastern Defense Command. General Kipp is personally
responsible for your safety, and I am personally responsible to General
Kipp."

He glared at Blandy and me as if he had just, single-handed and above
and beyond the call of duty, saved Homer Adam from violence at our
hands. I glared back. There is nothing a Smith abhors so thoroughly as a
hyphenated Smythe.

I would not have liked this hyphenated Smythe in any case. He had,
somehow, without the aid of a single combat decoration, made his chest
resemble a triple rainbow. He wore the Victory Ribbon from that old war,
the pre-Pearl Harbor ribbon, and the American, European, and Asiatic
Theater ribbons. But since no battle stars bloomed on these ribbons,
they appeared to me like the gaudy hotel stickers that the tourists of
the thirties exhibited on their luggage after doing Europe in three
weeks. In addition, he wore various exotic decorations that I vaguely
associated with Uruguay, the Dominican Republic, and the World's Fair.
Under these, dangled ladders of shooting badges, indicating that he was
a second-class pistol shot from the back of a horse, and a fair to
middling rifle shot, prone. There was an unidentified sunburst on the
right side of his stomach, just where the fat would be oozing out from
under the ribs, had it not been for his obvious girdle.

"How," I inquired, "does the Eastern Defense Command go about taking
over Mr. Adam?"

"In the first place--" the Colonel began, and then said: "You're that AP
man who has been messing up the publicity. Who authorized you to be here
anyway?"

"Me," said Homer meekly. "I did."

Blandy laughed. "And isn't this Mr. Adam's house?" he asked.

For a moment Phelps-Smythe was repulsed by this unexpected show of
resistance, but he quickly recovered.

"In the first place," he said, "perhaps you do not know it, but the
Joint Chiefs of Staff have decided, in the national interest, that Mr.
Adam is vital, strategic government property. The Joint Chiefs felt
themselves authorized in making this decision on the basis of future
national defense."

"Congress," logically concluded Dr. Blandy, "has been demanding that the
Administration do something about poor Homer, here, and that was the
only thing they could think up to do."

Homer sat down, his mild blue eyes blinking. "But I don't wish to be
taken over," he protested. "I just want to be left alone with Mary Ellen
and the baby. Is it my fault that all the rest of you are sterile?"

Phelps-Smythe put his hand on Homer's drooping shoulder. "Now, my boy,"
he said, "remember this is in the national interest. Consider--you are
just as much a military secret as the atomic bomb."

"Please don't mention atomic bombs," I said, remembering what
Mississippi had done to our future, "I'm allergic to them."

"Besides," the colonel went on, ignoring me, "your wife and child will
be taken care of until the present emergency is over. Funds have already
been provided."

"I'm not going to leave Mary Ellen and the baby!" said Homer with some
determination. "That, I simply won't do!"

"You won't have to leave immediately. You don't have to go to Washington
until the hearings."

"What hearings?"

"The Congressional hearings on what to do with you. You see, the Joint
Chiefs have simply declared you are vital and strategic. The War
Department was entrusted with your safety, and my commanding general was
given the job. But your final disposition will not be decided until
after the Congressional hearings."

Homer looked dazed and helpless. "I see," he murmured.

"You're pretty lucky at that," said the colonel. "At first, we were
going to put you down with the gold in Fort Knox. But the Surgeon
General decided it might be bad for your health. Now that I've seen you
in person, I think he was probably right. You weren't in the Army, were
you?"

"No," said Homer. "I wasn't in the Army. The FEA sent me to Australia to
locate quartz crystals. They were needed for radar."

"Well," said the colonel, "it's too bad you weren't in the Army, but I
guess that radar tieup will show you're okay. I mean you weren't a
conscientious objector, anyway."

"No, I wasn't a conscientious objector. Please, can I go upstairs and
see Mary Ellen?"

"Well, make it snappy," the colonel ordered. "I've got a lot of papers
for you to fill out. Incidentally, I'm taking you out to dinner tonight.
My commanding general wants to meet you."

****

I caught the next train back to the city. I found J.C. in his office and
told him that the Army had taken over, and my extra-curricular
activities in Tarrytown had come to an end. I also told him I felt
pretty sorry for Homer Adam.

"You'll feel sorrier," observed J.C., "when you see what happens to him
in Washington!"

"How's that?" I asked.

"You've been too close to things in Tarrytown," J.C. surmised, "to keep
up on what's been happening. First of all, there's a tug-of-war going on
between the National Research Council and the National Re-fertilization
Project as to who will get Adam."

"What do you mean, get him?"

"Well, both outfits think they can use Adam to start our birth rate
going again. They've hinted at all sorts of schemes. Some of them don't
sound completely unreasonable. At least they're no more unreasonable
than what has already happened to us."

"Poor Adam!"

"That isn't all. There's a battle going on between Congress and an
Inter-Departmental Committee as to who will decide policy on Adam. And
that isn't all, either, because there is a quite powerful group which
feels that the question of Adam is international, rather than national,
and should be turned over to the United Nations."

"Quite a story, wasn't it," I mentioned, hinting at a bonus.

J.C. got that faraway look in his eyes, staring out over the masonry
filled with pride that rises from the rock of Manhattan. "Quite a little
fuss," he said. "We are indeed blind and naive if we believe that in
this universe we will find living, feeling, happy, hurting, thinking
creatures on this tiny sphere alone--this speck of an earth revolving
around a dim star we call the sun, which is not even part of a
constellation.

"It is as if an ant heap had been stamped down, and all the ants within
cried that the world had come to an end."

Sometimes J.C. gave me the shivers.




CHAPTER FOUR


On a day in early December when an ice storm swept out of the northeast,
and stiffened and slowed the arteries of Manhattan, and I knew that J.C.
Pogey would want staffers covering the damage on the Jersey coast, I
developed a convenient chill and retired to Smith Field to wait out the
weather.

There is no vacation so exciting, so satisfactory, relaxing, and
inwardly pleasing as that of a small boy playing hookey from school. I
made the most of it. I clad myself in the soft, blue, silken pajamas
inherited from Lynn Heinzerling when we were roommates at the Hotel de
la Ville, in Rome, and he was ordered to Czecho-Slovakia; the wonderful
brocaded Arabian robe that Noel Monks had purchased on the Street Called
Straight, in Damascus, and willed to me when he flew Indiaward; and the
pliant red leather slippers, with upturned toes, that had cost me three
dollars, American gold seal, in the medina in Casablanca.

I cast myself upon Smith Field, set coffee dripping, and opened a
package of cigarettes and a bottle of rye. I touched a switch at the
side of the bed, and on the television screen there appeared an oval
blur, and then the blur resolved itself into the face of a man--a
full-jowled, hearty man who looked as if all he did was attend World
Series, Bowl games, the tennis championships at Forest Hills, and the
international shooting matches at Camp Perry. It turned out that this
was expert deduction, because the man said:

"This is Malcolm Parkinson. I am speaking to you from sun-drenched
Hialeah Park, Miami, Florida, and in a few moments I am going to focus
your television camera on this magnificent race course, and you will
see--yes, see--the first event on today's program..."

I picked up the telephone and called Sam's Cigar Store, at Sixth Avenue
and Tenth. "Send me," I requested, "a _Racing Form_ and _Bob's Best
Bets_."

"In this weather?" Sam demanded.

"The horses," I pointed out, "are not running up the Avenue of the
Americas."

"That I know," said Sam. "That I can see from here." He asked: "Tell me,
Mr. Smith, why don't they do something about Mr. Adam?"

"Who do you mean by they?"

"Them bureaucrats."

"What," I inquired, "would you have them do?"

"The missus keeps pestering me," said Sam. "She believes in A.I." A.I.
had become the popular abbreviation for artificial insemination.

"Well, there's bound to be a decision soon," I assured him.

"There better be, or there'll be hell to pay in this country. My wife
says she's not getting any younger. I tell you, Mr. Smith, she wants
kids."

When the _Racing Form_ arrived I began to dope the horses at Hialeah.
Like every frustrated sports writer, I believe I am a better handicapper
than any now operating at the tracks. I picked Fair Vision in the
second, and then called "Two Tone Jones," a gentleman of doubtful color
who operates a bookmaking establishment near Sheridan Square. I bet two
across the board on Fair Vision, poured myself a rye, and settled back
on the pillows to watch the race.

I found that watching the races, from a bed in New York, was more
satisfactory than watching them at the track, in Florida. Maniacs do not
jump up and down in front of you, deafening you with their shrill cries,
and interfering with your vision. Nobody picks your pocket. Nobody
tramps on your feet. You don't have to butt your way to the parimutuel
windows, tramping on other people, between each race. You don't have to
foam at the mouth while crawling through traffic jams, park your car,
pay $2.20 admission, avoid touts, buy programs, pencils, and peanuts, or
steer your wife away from the hundred-to-one shots. You don't have to
shiver in a white linen suit, and try to warm yourself by talking about
the cold wave up north.

You just lie there in bed and lose your money.

When I telephoned to place my bet on the fifth, Two Tone Jones said:
"You got a minute, Mr. Smith? I want to ask you a question."

"Certainly," I said graciously, for by then Two Tone Jones was one of my
considerable creditors.

"We're having a little argument up here," said Two Tone Jones. "You're a
pretty smart man, Mr. Smith, and maybe you can help us out."

"I'm not very smart about picking horses."

"Oh," said Two Tone, "we all have our bad days. Now what we want to
know, Mr. Smith, is what about this here artificial insemination?"

I drank some black coffee. "Well, what can I tell you about it?" I said.
I was pretty sick of this A.I. It reminded me of toddle tops, ouija
boards, every day in every way I feel better and better, two cars in
every garage, life begins at forty, and every other fad that ever
existed.

"Well, we just want to know about it," Two Tone complained.

"It is very simple," I said. "When normal intercourse isn't practical,
you just take a specimen of the male sperm, and plant it within the
female."

"Hasn't it been done with horses?" Two Tone asked.

"Oh, yes. Nowadays, when a horse is standing at stud, he doesn't have to
service a mare in person. His sperm is shipped, injected, and that is
all there is to it. Why, some of our best thoroughbred stock has been
planted in Argentine and Australia that way. It's much easier to ship an
ounce of sperm than a one-ton horse."

"Can it be done with men?" Two Tone demanded.

"Of course. I think there are eight thousand cases of artificial
insemination recorded in this country."

"That's what we wanted to know."

"Don't you read the papers?" I asked. "The papers have been talking
about nothing but A.I. ever since it was recommended by N.R.P."

"Well, we don't read that part of the papers," said Two Tone Jones. That
was that. I bet twenty to win on Eastbound, in the fifth, and he
finished absolutely last.

Marge returned home during the running of the sixth. Cliffdweller, which
I had backed to win and place, was on the rail and leading by two
lengths when Marge swung open the door of our bedroom. I hushed her with
a wave of my hand. "And now as they come into the stretch," Malcolm
Parkinson was saying, "it is still Cliffdweller, and he's running easy.
He's followed by Ragtime, June Bug, Third Fleet, and Firefly... now
at an eighth from the wire Cliffdweller still leads but--"

"Stephen Decatur Smith," Marge interrupted, "we have company!"

"Quiet!" I shouted, leaning forward, pounding my knees with my fists as
Cliffdweller labored towards the finish. At this point, it seemed that
the television screen had shifted to slow motion.

"Stephen!" Marge shouted.

The horses crossed the finish line. "It's a photo!" shouted Parkinson. I
fell back against the pillow.

"So this is why I haven't been able to get you on the telephone all
afternoon!" Marge said. "Sneaked off to the races!"

I looked up at her. She was remarkably businesslike and trim and tidy in
a blue suit and a white blouse that concealed, and yet promised, the
smooth curves underneath. She was a very admirable-looking woman, but
she was very angry. In a case like this, I believe that the best defense
is an offense. "Here I am, down in bed with a chill, and I get abused!"
I reproached her.

Marge smiled, and touched my forehead lightly with her fingers. She knew
that I wasn't ill, and she knew that I knew that she knew. "Come on! Get
off the Field and into the living room. I brought home some people."

Parkinson's cheerful, weathered face appeared on the screen. "Who?" I
asked absent-mindedly.

"In just a second," said Parkinson, "the judges will have inspected the
picture, and we will have the result of the sixth. Meanwhile, let me
tell you that I've never seen Hialeah more colorful than it is today,
here in the bright sunshine, with the brilliant plumage of the famous
flamingoes out by the lake. And remember that for relaxation like a trip
to the Southland, always smoke--"

"That man is a bad influence on you," Marge interrupted. "Shoo him away.
Anyway, it gives me the creeps to have strange men in the bedroom,
staring at us."

"Here's the results," said Parkinson. "It's Cliffdweller, by a whisker."

I flicked the switch and rolled off Smith Field, feeling better. Out in
the living room, their faces flushed by the cold wind, Maria Ostenheimer
and my friend of the Apennines and Polyclinic, Dr. Thompson, were
standing close to the fire. "Hello," I greeted them, "didn't know you
two knew each other."

"Our acquaintanceship," said Thompson, "is strictly professional--at
least thus far." Maria, delicately made, looked almost childlike
alongside his bulk. "We're on the same committee," she explained.

Marge inspected me thoughtfully, tapping a cigarette on the mantel.
"They've just come from Washington," she said. "They appeared before
both the Executive Inter-Departmental group and the Joint Congressional
Committee on behalf of the National Re-fertilization Project. They
testified for A.I."

"Well, Maria did," amended Thompson. "I'm more interested in another
aspect of the problem."

"All I've heard today," I complained, "is A.I." A startling, and
horrible possibility gripped me. I pointed my finger at Marge. "If you
think for one instant," I told her, "that we are going to fill this
apartment with lanky, red-headed children all subject to inferiority
complexes, and none of them mine, then you had better start thinking
again. You're not going to be any female guinea pig to test the
productive capacity of Mr. Adam!"

Thompson threw back his head and laughed. "Relax, Steve," he said,
"Relax!"

"Anyway," said Marge, acidly, "I understand that Washington has been
simply snowed under with applications. There are thousands ahead of me,
even if I wanted an Adam child. There are plenty of husbands whose sense
of responsibility to the human race is greater than their selfishness
and stupid jealousy!"

Maria cocked her head on the side and looked at me with her wise, dark
eyes. "I have just finished telling our distinguished statesmen," she
said, "that A.I. may be the only salvation for mankind. I say may"--her
words tripped out slowly and daintily, as if they were being carefully
marched across a narrow plank--"I say may because right at present A.I.
is the only solution which we _know_ will work. Artificial insemination
is bound to furnish at least a limited number of males in another
generation."

"Can you imagine," I exclaimed, "the whole world peopled with red-headed
beanpoles, all looking exactly like Homer Adam!"

"But that's not why we came to see you," Maria said, and for a small,
quite pretty and young, girl she was alarmingly grave. "We came to see
you about Homer Adam himself."

"What's the matter?" I asked. "Is he pining away without his Mary
Ellen?"

"Well, something like that," Maria said, still grave and troubled. "You
see, this business has naturally been a very great shock to him. And
they mauled and manhandled him fearfully when he got to Washington."

"That Phelps-Smythe!" said Thompson. "The first thing the Eastern
Defense Command did to Adam was fill him up with shots until he was a
walking pharmaceutical encyclopedia. They shot him full of paratyphoid,
typhus, yellow fever, influenza, cholera--as if he were going to catch
cholera at Fort Myer--smallpox, and I don't know what else besides."

"Phelps-Smythe," I remarked, "is a revolving son-of-a-bitch."

"And all the brass exhibits poor Mr. Adam at dinners," said Maria, "as
if he were a freak."

"Phelps-Smythe," I said, "is bucking for a star. If he pleases enough
generals, maybe one day he'll get to be a general himself. Ask any
correspondent who was in the Southwest Pacific. They'll tell you how it
works. They had a beaut out there."

Thompson held out his huge hands, six inches apart. "Adam," he said, "is
now no wider than that. Furthermore, he has developed a twitch."

"It is really very serious," said Maria. "As things are now, everything
depends on the well-being of one man--a sensitive man who apparently was
never very strong. If his health is ruined--either his physical health
or his mental health--it imperils the chances of successful artificial
insemination.

"Let me put it this way. Our present methods of A.I. are still fairly
crude. It is true that you will find millions of motile sperm cells in
one male specimen, but we have not yet found a way to isolate these
cells--keep each one of them alive, happy, and potent so that each one
has a chance of causing pregnancy. Artificial insemination is still a
matter of mass impregnation. You use millions of cells, but only one
does the job."

"What a waste!" I said.

"What a waste indeed, at this period in history," said Marge.

"Well, we're working on the isolation problems, but meanwhile we want to
start A.I. as quickly as possible," Maria continued. "Suppose something
happened to Homer Adam before we began? Anyway, we can not make
maximum--perhaps not even normal--use of Homer Adam until he again
becomes a tranquil, normal man. Even if we were able to use him in his
present state--which is doubtful--we might create a race of physical and
nervous wrecks."

I didn't sense what was coming. "What," I inquired, "has this got to do
with me?"

"I talked to Adam," said Thompson. "He likes you, he trusts you, and he
wonders what became of you. You made a very deep impression on him. What
did you do?"

"Nothing," I replied, "except let him beat me at gin rummy
occasionally."

Thompson grinned. "There is nothing so good for a man's ego as to
believe himself a shark at gin," he said.

"In any case," Maria concluded, "if the government decides that N.R.P.
be placed in charge of Homer Adam, rather than the N.R.C., we want you
to handle him."

"Oh my God!" I said. "Nominated to be nursemaid to the potential father
of his country!"

The controversy between the National Re-fertilization Project and the
National Research Council was essentially between the physicians and the
physicists--between the scientific workers in the animate and the
inanimate fields. The atom-poppers believed they needed Mr. Adam for
research which they hoped would undo the damage caused by the obscure
rays which enwrapped the world after the Mississippi explosion. They
needed Mr. Adam, they explained, much as they needed cyclotrons and
centrifuges.

How could an antidote to the ray be developed until they knew exactly
which ray had done the trick? And how could they isolate the ray which
strangely wrecked male cells, and left females undisturbed, unless they
had specimens for experimentation? And who was there, except Mr. Adam,
to furnish these specimens?

The N.R.P. physicians pointed out, even as Maria had, that A.I. was the
only sure way of keeping the globe populated. They hoped that the
physicists of N.R.C. would find a method of restoring the potency of all
men, but scientific research takes time. Meanwhile, they had on hand one
single, priceless human who was insurance against entire extinction.

What finally decided the Joint Congressional Investigating Committee,
and the Inter-Department Executive Committee, I am sure, was the
unspoken fear that the scientists would make another mistake, mess up
Mr. Adam, and then everybody would be finished. It was something that
nobody spoke of, directly, for fear of injuring the sensibilities of men
like Professor Pell, and damaging their professional reputation, but the
fear was always there.

So I was not surprised, a few days later, when I picked up a copy of the
New York _Post_ while walking to the subway after my noon breakfast in
Smith Field, to read the black headlines that covered the whole front
page:

                         PRESIDENT OKAYS A.I.!


                      N.R.P. Wins Over N.R.C. but
                         Scientists to Get Fund
                          to Continue Research


                       Would-be Mothers Volunteer
                           Throughout Nation


                            England Asks Aid

When I reached the office, J.C. set me to putting together the foreign
reactions in a single story. As usual there was no official comment from
Moscow, but _Pravda_ printed an oblique little box on its front page
pointing out that it was possible for the United States to make amends
for the world catastrophe caused by Mississippi, but that thus far the
United States had not approached the Soviet Union directly.

The word "directly" was the important word. It was seized upon, that
very day, in the Senate. Had anybody in the Administration, certain
Senators wished to know, been dealing secretly on sharing Homer Adam
with the Communists? If so, what arrangements had been discussed? It was
hoped that Homer Adam would not be shipped outside the territorial
limits of the United States.

Senator Salt plausibly replied that A.I. being what it was, it was not
necessary to ship Homer Adam anywhere, just the male germ.

Any peace-loving nation, Salt said, could be helped out without Homer
ever leaving Washington. Russia had as much right to hope for
perpetuating herself as any other nation--more than some he could
mention.

FROGHAM (D. Louisiana): Will the Senator yield?

SALT: I yield.

FROGHAM: Is it not a fact that we could forever dispose of this damnable
Communism, which is infecting the whole world and causing strikes and
disturbances and menacing the very foundations of the Republic, say
within two generations, by simply confining A.I. to those nations which
are willing to give us definite statements as to their future foreign
policies, and their territorial and ideological intentions?

VIDMER (R. Massachusetts): If we only give A.I. to those nations which
know their future foreign policy, then we will have to exclude the
United States. (Laughter.)

The story from London was matter-of-fact. England expected that the
United States would share A.I., on a population basis, and in return
England would give the United States the full benefit of any happy
information reaching its own scientists. The British government felt it
was speaking for the whole Empire. It didn't say anything about Ireland.

In Paris, all the newspapers published editorials pointing out France's
great past cultural contributions to the world, and insisting that it
was a necessity that French culture continue.

Various good Germans talked of the benefits of a revival of German
industrial genius in succeeding generations.

The Japanese press talked of traditional American sportsmanship, and
pointed out that baseball was played in both countries.

All the little nations extolled their own virtues. But the Bucharest
press pointed out, coyly, that if A.I. was denied to Hungary, then that
would be a final solution to the question of Transylvania--which
everybody thought had already been solved.

The cables kept rolling in, but before night J.C. Pogey came over to my
desk, and motioned me into his office.

"Steve," he said, "I just got a call from the White House. Danny
Williams--the President's Secretary. Used to work for us. Well, they
want you down there to handle Adam."

"That's what I was afraid of," I said.

"It seems they think you did a good job in Tarrytown. Adam likes you."

"Yeah?"

"The N.R.P. asked for you. They're going to put you on their payroll.
We'll give you leave of absence."

"Haven't I got anything to say about this?" I demanded.

"Not much," said J.C. "Danny Williams put it this way--he said it was in
the interests of civilization. I don't like to lose you, but it is
exactly the same as if you were drafted."

"You don't care much, do you, J.C., whether civilization keeps or not?"

J.C. rubbed his thumbs behind his ears. "Dunno," he said. "Haven't made
up my mind yet."

I went home and packed. "They certainly called for you in a hurry,"
Marge said.

"Yes," I agreed, not wanting to leave her, and not wanting to leave
Smith Field, and wondering how long it would be before Homer Adam could
be cooled off and calmed to a point where he would become useful to
civilization, and N.R.P. would let me go.

"You behave down there," Marge commanded. "That town is full of
good-looking women, and they don't seem to have any inhibitions any
more."

"I'll behave," I promised.

"You'd better. I'm liable to pop in on you any time--any time at all.
And Stephen," she added, "do a good job, will you. It's awfully
important to me."

I telephoned to Abel Pumphrey, the Director of the National
Re-fertilization Project, that I was on the way down. Marge took me to
the train and kissed me goodbye as if I were off to Shanghai. The last
thing she said was, "You will do your best, won't you?"

Women are such queer people.




CHAPTER FIVE


I didn't have any illusions about my chore. I knew that at the very best
it would be thankless, and probably a perpetual headache, and something
which called for a psychiatrist rather than a newspaperman. But I felt a
sort of moral responsibility for Mr. Adam. I had been the first to
launch him into his career as the last productive male, and it seemed
only right that I should help guide his footsteps towards whatever
strange destiny awaited him. In addition, I was just plain curious.

I underestimated Washington. I didn't foresee any of the really
frightening events that presently engulfed me. When I look back at it
now, I was a toddling child who picks a river in flood as a nice place
for wading, and instantly is seized by the current and swept downstream.

For instance, I thought the National Re-fertilization Project would be
composed of a dozen or so people, with a committee of physicians like
Maria Ostenheimer and Tommy Thompson acting as advisers. It wasn't like
that at all. The N.R.P. was an enormous chunk of government, expanding
day by day. The creation of any new government agency is, in many
respects, like bringing in a new oil field. With the N.R.P., to which
the President had allotted unlimited emergency funds, it was as if gold
had been discovered in California all over again.

The day on which I arrived in Washington--December 18--is eaten into my
memory by the acid of shock, just as the men who were there will always
remember the date of Anzio, or Omaha Beach.

I hadn't expected anyone to meet me at the station, but when I went
through the gates into the concourse a neat young man with a pointed,
thin, suspicious nose--the type of nose I always associate with credit
managers--stopped me. "You're Mr. Smith?" he said.

"Uh-huh."

He held out his hand. "I'm Klutz--Percy Klutz, Deputy Director on the
administrative side." When he smiled his mouth looked like that of a
fresh-caught skate. "The Chief sent me down to meet you."

"That was nice of him," I said. The Chief would be Abel Pumphrey. I
wondered how he had recognized me, and asked. He said the AP Bureau had
produced a description, and a photograph. He wondered whether I'd had
lunch, and when I told him no, he suggested Harvey's. Outside the
station was a sedan, with a government seal, and N.R.P., stenciled on
its door.

We ordered clams and steaks and then Klutz said: "I suppose this is as
good a time as any to fill you in on the big picture. We're really
beginning to build an organization, now. Everybody thinks the Chief is
the coming man in the Administration. Of course, it has been an uphill
fight all the way. First the Interior Department tried to take over, and
then the Public Health Service claimed it was their baby. Right now
we're operating under the Executive Office of the President, so we don't
have much budget trouble. The real test will come when we go to Congress
for regular annual appropriations. I guess our big break was when we got
Adam away from the National Research Council."

"How is Homer Adam?" I inquired. "I'd like to see him as soon as
possible."

He looked at me, curiously, and then took a pencil from an inside pocket
and began drawing a chart on the tablecloth. "Now up at the top, of
course," he went on, ignoring my question, "is the President, and right
under the President--" his deft pencil drew a little box and began
filling it with names--"is the Inter-Departmental Advisory Committee.
They decide top policy."

"On what?" I asked. "I thought the idea was simply to get Adam in shape,
and then start producing babies."

"Oh, no!" Klutz said, startled. "The production end is only the smallest
part of it! That comes way down here--" he indicated the bottom of the
tablecloth--"in Operations."

"Now as you see," he went on, "the top policy group is composed of the
President himself, the Secretaries of State, War, Interior, and Navy--I
don't know why they put in Navy except that they put in War--the Surgeon
General, Director of National Research Council--we couldn't keep him off
it--and finally the Chief."

A strange light came into Klutz's eyes, and he began to sketch more
boxes, connected by lines horizontally and vertically, with lightning
precision. "Now right under the top policy group N.R.P. operates. I'm
over here to the right of the Chief, and under me I've got
Administration, Budget, Housing, Communications, and Transportation. I
don't fool around with policy, planning, or operations. I'm just the man
who keeps things running."

Klutz's pencil raced on. "Branching off this line that runs from the
Chief up to top policy we have the liaison officers from the other
departments or agencies--we're having a tough time finding suitable
quarters for all of them--and directly under the Chief we have the
Planning Board."

"Planning Board?"

"Certainly! You see, policy flows down to the Chief from the top group,
and then down to the Planning Board, which is composed of our own heads
of branches and divisions. The Planning Board issues the directives and
passes them on down to be implemented. Right off the Planning Board,
here, we have the Advisory Committee which is composed of leading
physicians and biologists and such from all over the country. They
aren't in government, of course. They're just to give us backing when we
need it."

Klutz hadn't touched his clams, and he didn't seem to notice when the
waiter whisked them off the table. "The Deputy Director falls right
under the Planning Board, and out from him you have our own liaison
officers, who operate on the Planning Level, including the one to
Congress, and our own advisory group on international problems which
communicates directly with the State Department and sends proposals to
the Planning Board. You see how nicely the channels flow."

"Yes. I see." I found I was watching like a child fascinated by a
sidewalk artist sketching the Battle of Bunker Hill.

"Right under the Deputy Director come the Assistant Directors for the
various branches," Klutz went on. "Research and Analytical. Statistical.
Public Relations. And of course, Operations. Then under the branches
there come the various divisions, which I'll just sketch in here in
small boxes, because I don't think they'd interest you just now."

"And where do I fit in?" I asked.

"Well, you see we've already got an Assistant Director for Public
Relations--Gableman. Did you ever meet him?"

"No, I don't think so."

"He's a very fine newspaperman," Klutz said, in some surprise. "I think
he started doing publicity for the WPA, and later he shifted to the
National Youth Administration. I think he also wrote for NRA. Anyway, he
was one of the young writers for the Office of Facts and Figures, and
then he graduated to the OWI. He went to the State Department from the
OWI, and we got him from them. Very fine newspaperman. Very experienced.
He's building up an excellent branch. I'm giving them a building of
their own very shortly."

"And me?"

"Well, frankly, you're rather a problem. You see we already have an
Assistant Director for Public Relations, so we'll make you Special
Assistant to the Director, and put you in here." He drew a line away
from the line that connected Pumphrey to the Planning Board, and put a
little box at the end of it, and wrote "Smith" inside the box. "I don't
know whether you'll operate on the policy, or the planning, or the
operations level," Klutz explained, "so in any case that will take care
of it."

"Is Homer Adam in that little box with me?" I demanded.

Klutz appeared uneasy, as if the lunch he hadn't eaten wasn't agreeing
with him. "Oh, no," he said, "Adam is way down here, at the bottom.
You're way up at the top." In a little square at the end of Operations
he wrote, "Adam."

I felt a powerful urge to finish my steak, leave the check for Klutz,
and catch the next train back for New York, but instead I said, "Now
look, bud. The only reason I came to this goddam town was to take care
of Adam. If I'm not going to take care of Adam, say so now, and I'll be
on my way. This wasn't my idea. It came from Adam first, and then from
the White House."

When I mentioned the White House, Klutz gulped, and instantly his manner
changed. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know that."

I recognized Klutz as one of those public servants who has no equals. He
has only superiors or inferiors. Everybody is neatly tagged either above
him, or below him. He keeps his nose nestled close under the coattails
of those above, and his feet firmly planted on the heads of those
underneath, and if he maintains this balance for thirty years he gets a
pension and retires to Chevy Chase. "Well, you know it now," I told him.

"I didn't bring up the matter of Adam," he explained, "because there
seems to have been some confusion about him in the directives. You see,
when Adam was turned over to N.R.P. the Army still managed to keep a
finger in the pie. They claimed that the presidential directive merely
gave N.R.P. the use of Adam, but that his security was still a matter
for the Army. We reached an agreement with the Army by which a committee
was set up."

"Another committee!"

"Yes. It was set up simply to direct overall policy on Adam, personally,
rather than Adam in the productive sense, and to hand down directives to
the Operations Branch. I represented N.R.P. on the committee and
Phelps-Smythe--"

"That bastard!" I remarked, and Klutz jumped.

"Well, he represented the Army. Phelps-Smythe and I reached an agreement
that you could also sit on the committee."

I told him what I thought of such an arrangement in a few words, all
short and Elizabethan, and Klutz said he thought Pumphrey should decide,
and I told him we might as well have a showdown right away.

The National Re-fertilization Project was camped in a group of buildings
near the intersection of 23rd and D streets, in Northwest Washington,
and it spread out into temporary structures, lately abandoned by the
Navy, that occupied adjacent parkland.

Within the Administration Building there was an impressive bustle--the
scuttling back and forth of girl messengers, the clatter of a typist
pool, the buzz of telephones, the passionate murmurs that rose from
conference rooms. Through the building there was the smell of fresh
paint, and a sense of growth and change.

A new government agency on the upgrade mushrooms within the capital like
a tropical plant. Its growth is exotic and surprising as an orchid, but
like a fungus it is a frail plant, likely to wither swiftly and die
under the cold breath of Congress or the Bureau of the Budget.

But the offices of Abel Pumphrey were cut off from the surrounding
uproar by soundproof walls, and furnished in the solid good taste of one
who has been firmly fastened to the public teat for years. Abel
Pumphrey's name kept appearing in the Congressional Directory long after
the bureaus and agencies he headed became half-forgotten combinations of
initials. He came to Washington as a liberal Republican, at the proper
time switched to being a conservative Democrat, but he was born a
bureaucrat. This means that he had thousands of acquaintances, no firm
allegiances or convictions, no enemies, and probably no close friends
with the possible exception of his wife.

He was picked as Director of N.R.P., immediately after W.S. Day, because
he was considered "safe." There wasn't any other place to put him at the
moment, and he had six children. At that time Mr. Adam had not been
discovered, much less acquired by N.R.P., so the task of
re-fertilization seemed more theoretical than practical. Now Pumphrey's
post had suddenly become extremely important, and of the most consuming
public interest, and Pumphrey was more than somewhat worried.

Outwardly, however, he seemed calm and cheery--an apple-red and
apple-round man with a Herbert Hoover collar squeezing his neck--when he
greeted me. "Well, well, Steve!" he said. We had never met before. "It's
certainly fine of you to come down here and help us out. Fine! Fine!
Percy here will get you all squared away. How about it, Percy?"

I didn't give Klutz a chance to speak. I said, "I'm afraid there's been
some misunderstanding. I came here to get Adam on his feet. That's all.
Nothing else. As far as I know, that's all the White House wants me to
do."

Every time I said White House, Klutz jumped. I decided to say it more
often. "Naturally," said Pumphrey. "I am in full accord with that.
Didn't you explain, Percy?"

"I told him about the directive," Klutz said, "and the little committee
we'd set up, and how he could sit on the committee."

I said, "No committees. I hate committees."

Pumphrey spread out his hands in a placating gesture. "Now Steve," he
said, "wouldn't it be better if there was a committee, even if you did
all the work and made all the actual, ah--contacts? The protection of
Adam is a very delicate matter, very delicate. Very delicate, and
ticklish. If anything happened, if there was, ah--any scandal, wouldn't
it be better if the War Department shared the responsibility?"

I said, "No."

Pumphrey drooped. "I suppose ultimately," he decided, "the
responsibility is that of the President. After all, he picked you for
this particular phase of our work. I'll ask him to clarify the
directive. Or maybe I'd better not. I'm not sure that it's not clear
now. Anyway, I'll call in Phelps-Smythe, and we'll tell him about it.
Phelps-Smythe is the Army's liaison officer over here. He's been
representing the Army on the committee, you know."

"I know," I said.

Phelps-Smythe hadn't changed since Tarrytown, neither he nor his
ribbons. He knew what was up, of course, and by the way he talked I
could tell he had discussed it with his general and decided upon a
course of action. After Pumphrey explained that the committee was ended,
he said, with the formality of a diplomat delivering a dmarche to a
hostile state:

"The War Department strongly disapproves of relaxing security measures
for the protection of Homer Adam. The War Department wishes to point out
that if anything happened to Adam the future of the nation would be
endangered."

"What you mean," I interrupted, "is that there wouldn't be any future
for the nation--or the world. Maybe that's why the President wants me,
and not you, to handle Adam."

I shouldn't have said it, I guess, but I couldn't resist. Phelps-Smythe
glared at me. I hoped he would have a stroke, but he didn't. Behind his
desk Pumphrey began to nibble nervously at the edge of his lips.

"The War Department," Phelps-Smythe continued, "wishes a written release
of all responsibility for the safety and protection of Adam. The War
Department wishes this release immediately, because we intend to
withdraw our guards and security patrols from the Shoreham at 6 o'clock
this evening."

"So that's where you've got Adam caged up?" I said.

Pumphrey didn't pay any attention. "Is the War Department going to make
anything public on this?" he asked Phelps-Smythe.

"Naturally."

"But it's liable to start a lot of controversy."

"That is not the fault of the War Department!"

Pumphrey sagged like a toy balloon from which enough air has escaped so
that it is no longer round and shining. "Very well," he sighed. "I'll
send the release around to your office, Colonel, as soon as I get a
chance to dictate and sign it."

"Thank you," said Phelps-Smythe, and left. I could have sworn he clicked
his heels.

Immediately Klutz turned to Pumphrey. "I'd better find Nate," he said.
"This looks like trouble."

It turned out that Nate was Gableman, the Assistant Director for Public
Relations, a dark and cadaverous young man with his hair two inches
longer than the barber ordinarily allows, and fingernails that matched
his hair, both in length and color. His eyes ran over me in quick
speculation and appraisal, he listened to Pumphrey's account of what had
happened thus far, and he said, "I should have been cut in on this right
away. What do you think a Public Relations man is for?"

"I'm sorry, Nate," Pumphrey said. "But it happened so fast."

"You haven't written that memorandum for Phelps-Smythe yet?"

"Oh, no. He just left."

Gableman's dark eyes came alive behind his spectacles. "Okay," he said.
"We'll move in a hurry. I'll get out a special press release right away.
You hold that memorandum until I'm ready. We'll get our story out
first."

"What is our story, Nate?" Pumphrey asked.

"Why, it's very simple. Abel Pumphrey, Director of the National
Re-fertilization Project, today announced that N.R.P. had taken over
complete personal control of Mr. Adam from the War Department, at the
President's request. You see, that puts the onus on the War Department.
They can't buck the President. He's Commander in Chief. Then we say that
Mr. Adam wasn't getting sufficient personal freedom under present
conditions. He should have all the rights and freedoms of every other
American. That gets us in good with the Liberals. Then we say that Steve
Smith here has been appointed a Special Assistant to Mr. Pumphrey and
entrusted with the safety of Adam. Smith and Adam are personal
friends--you are, aren't you?"

"Hardly old friends," I said.

"Well, anyway, personal friends. That shows we have Adam's best
interests at heart."

I could see that Gableman was a pretty smooth customer around the edges.
He may have learned all his newspapering as a government press agent,
but he was an expert in mimeograph warfare. "We might also hint," he
went on, "just to get in a dig at the War Department, that Adam hasn't
been doing so hot under the previous arrangement."

"Oh, I wouldn't do that!" Pumphrey protested. "It might bounce back on
us as well as the War Department."

"I should say not," said Klutz.

"It could start rumors," said Pumphrey. "It could start a panic. Why you
ought to see the letters I get from really big businessmen--I mean the
very biggest--on the importance of Adam. Do you know what would happen
if anything happened to Adam? Why the insurance companies would go bust.
The effect on the market--inconceivable--"

"Okay," Gableman agreed. "I hadn't considered that angle. I'll get to
work."

Klutz wanted me to take a look at my office, complete with secretary,
but I insisted on seeing Adam immediately. Pumphrey told me there would
be plenty of room for me in Adam's suite. There would be plenty of room
for a company of Marines, I gathered from the description.

This was correct. The Army hadn't yet withdrawn its security patrols
when I arrived at the Shoreham. There was an armored car, and two weapon
carriers mounting .50 calibre machine guns, strategically placed in the
hotel's driveway. It turned out that Adam occupied the entire fifth
floor of F wing. I had some trouble getting up there, because there were
MP's posted in all the hallways and at the elevators, but the captain in
charge had been informed I was on the way, and he finally agreed to let
me go up a few minutes before six, when the Army's Operation Adam
officially ended.

I found Adam in the living room customarily given over to the Duke of
Windsor, visiting Indian rajahs, and presidents from the banana
republics. For a hotel it is quite a room, gaudy with modern paintings,
cream-colored furniture, and silky white rugs. Magazines and newspapers
were tossed about it, however, so that at this moment it resembled the
picnic grounds in Central Park at the end of a summer Sunday. On a
folding serving table was an enormous tray loaded with lobster salad,
shrimp, hors d'oeuvres, and pastries, all resting in untouched and
pristine glory on heavy silver. A stuffed shirt of a voice, which
sounded like Kaltenborn, boomed out of a wall radio like a muffled drum.

I saw a mop of red hair protruding over the back of an armchair. It was
Adam. He was not asleep, nor could he be classified as being awake. He
appeared to be in a half-comatose state, slumped in upon himself like a
daddy longlegs at rest, his eyes glazed, and his mouth slack and open.
Then he saw me, wobbled to his feet, and held out his hand. I admit I
was shocked. He looked like one of those walking skeletons after seven
years in Dachau. He said, "Steve! You finally got here. Jesus, I'm glad
to see a human face!"

I tried to conceal my surprise at his wretched appearance. "Take it
easy," I said. "From now on things are going to change. Let's have a
drink."

"Oh, I'm not allowed to drink," said Homer. "Nothing but eggnogs. I get
sick when I think of eggnogs. I'll never be able to look a hen in the
face again."

"From now on," I told him, "you can have anything you damn well
please--anything at all."

"Really?" he said. "Honest to God?" It was pretty pathetic. His hands
were shaking, and tears had started into his eyes.

"You're damn right." I picked up a telephone, called room service, and
ordered a case of rye. If ever a bundle of nerves needed alcoholic
relaxation, it was Homer Adam.

He began to tell me the tale. "They treated me like a prize puppy dog.
They wouldn't let me off this floor, except when they came to put me on
exhibit. Then they'd dress me up, and lead me around to a party where I
didn't know anybody, and show me off like I deserved the blue ribbon.
I'm not a freak! I'm a normal human being."

"I'll say," I agreed.

"They'd discuss me like I was a stud horse--right in front of my face.
How long I could be expected to produce, and whether they should inject
testosterone, and stuff like that. It was embarrassing. You don't wonder
I've been off my feed?"

"No, I don't wonder at all."

The rye arrived, and I poured Homer a big slug. He kept on talking, and
I encouraged him. I'm no psychologist, but it was apparent there was a
lot he had to get off his chest. It was part of the cure.

Finally he said, "I don't mind doing what I can. I suppose it's my duty.
But they've got no right to keep me away from my family." His eyes
misted again, like the eyes of a child who has been needlessly and
wantonly injured. "I don't know if I ought to talk about it. It's sort
of personal, Steve."

"You go ahead and talk, Homer," I said. "You tell me every little tiny
thing. I'm here to listen."

"Well, it's me and Mary Ellen. She's the only girl I ever had. Know what
I mean?"

I nodded. "Uh-huh." I didn't smile.

Homer poured himself a drink. I could see that what he had to say needed
priming. I didn't try to hurry him. "When I say I never had a girl
except Mary Ellen I mean it literally," he continued finally. "I mean
she's the only woman I've ever been with--slept with. I always thought I
was funny-looking, because when I was a kid girls laughed at me on
account of I was so tall and thin. I guess I was funny-looking. Anyway,
I never had the guts to make a pass at a girl--never in all my life."

The full implication of what he was saying began to sink in. Nature, in
a final touch of irony, had picked an inhibited and sex-shy man to
become the new father of his country. To some men the thought of
possessing the entire female population as a private harem--even if most
of the conception would be of necessity by remote control--would have
been enormously satisfying to their ego. But to Homer it must have been
sheer horror. It was this that had frightened him into his present
decline, more than being jailed in the Shoreham's luxury, or being
trotted around to Washington's most important salons, and placed on
exhibition. "Go ahead and talk, Homer," I urged him.

"That's about all, except that I want Mary Ellen now more than I've ever
wanted anything in all my life. I need her, Steve. I've got to have
her!"

I thought to myself that if Homer's mother still lived it would be his
mother, in all likelihood, whom he would want. I tried to remember what
I had read about how an oedipus complex is transferred. "They haven't let
you see Mary Ellen?"

"Gosh, no. I begged them to let me go to Tarrytown for a day or two, or
to let her come down here. Mrs. Brundidge could take care of the baby
all right. But Colonel Phelps-Smythe and Mr. Klutz said absolutely not."

I wondered what was wrong with them, which shows how naive I was at the
time. "Don't worry, Homer, I'll get it fixed up," I promised. For the
first time, he smiled. He positively grinned. "Let's have another
drink," I suggested, "and then tackle that dinner over there, and then
let's go down to the Blue Room and look around."

"Sure!" he said. "Sure!"

He attacked the lobster as if he were starving, which I am quite sure he
was, and ate most of the shrimp, and wolfed three of the pastries. I
didn't do much talking. I kept trying to reconstruct the first ten years
of his life in Hyannis, Nebraska. I saw a gangling kid, preyed upon by
smaller but older boys, running to his mother for protection. I saw an
overgrown high school sophomore teased by the girls, and not
understanding that their teasing was as much invitation as anything
else. I saw a lonesome youth escaping into archeology, and finally
geology, who worked hard and earnestly so that in his mind there would
be nothing else but his work. Finally I saw a grown man who had thrust
human relationships into the well of his subconscious--a man whose
marriage was probably the passionate seeking for a second mother to whom
to run whenever he encountered the frightening facts of life.

This was the man chosen to re-populate the earth! I wasn't at all sure
that I should arrange for him to see Mary Ellen. Perhaps he should see
her for a day or two, but certainly he should not be with her
constantly. A different therapy was indicated. "You know, Homer," I
said, "what you told me about your personal life was very impressive. I
suppose you know by now that you were mistaken. I should think you would
be very attractive to women."

"Oh, no!" he said emphatically.

"I would think so."

"But why should I be?"

"Well, you're young, and you're tall. All the movie actors are tall.
Look at Gary Cooper."

"Yes. But they're not so thin."

"Well, look at Frank Sinatra. Anyway, you've got a good frame. All you
have to do is put some flesh on it."

Homer considered this. "I looked pretty good," he admitted, "when I was
in Australia. Lots of fresh air, and exercise. I felt good, too, and ate
well. I haven't had a bit of exercise since I've been in this darn
prison."

"We'll fix that," I promised. "Now go shave, and put on a fresh shirt,
and I'll take you out of this prison and show you how life is being
lived, at the moment."

Ten seconds after we entered the Blue Room I discovered that acting as
shepherd to Homer Adam would have complications, for Homer was no
ordinary white sheep who could fade into the flock. If you are some six
and one-half feet tall, and your hair flames like a stop light, and you
are constructed on the general lines of a flagpole, and if in addition
you are the most talked of mortal on earth, and your features are
familiar to everyone who has seen a newspaper, then it is very hard to
be inconspicuous.

When we turned up at the Blue Room and asked for a table, Pierre, the
headwaiter, recognized Adam and almost did nip-ups. He bobbed us to a
ringside table, swept away a notice that it was reserved, and then
fluttered over our order for a couple of drinks. Barnee, the bandmaster,
craned his neck, missed a beat, the trumpet went astray, and the rhythm
scattered like a covey of quail. Nobody seemed to notice.

The band pulled itself together, and the music again took form. People
were staring. If Homer had been a pink Bengal tiger, he could not have
caused more of a sensation. I noticed that the dancing couples were
converging towards us. Strangely, the women were maneuvering the men.

The music stopped, and there was absolute silence. Ordinarily, when the
music isn't playing in a night spot it is still pretty noisy, what with
the tinkle of glass and china, political and business arguments, the
throaty sound of verbal love-making, and occasional laughter. But this
time when the music stopped there was no sound at all. Then buzzing
began, like a swarm of bees, but not exactly. It had a strange timbre to
it. Finally I realized it was from three or four hundred women all
whispering at once.

"What's wrong with these people?" Homer asked.

"I dunno," I evaded.

"This is worse than a dinner party. It makes me feel dizzy--all these
people staring."

"Relax and drink your drink."

Homer obediently drank his drink. Across the floor I spotted Oscar
Finney, who stepped out of a reporter's cocoon to become a Hollywood
butterfly, officially titled Public Relations Counsellor, at a thousand
a week. With him was a golden-skinned creature partially clad in gold
lam. I'm always forgetting names, but I never forget a shape like that.
Once it belonged to Kitty Ruppe, who danced in the chorus line at an
uptown club. Now its name had been changed to Kathy Riddell, and Oscar
Finney had made it fairly famous as "The Frame." I say fairly famous,
because Kathy Riddell was one of those Hollywood stars who never seems
to appear in a movie, but you see her picture everywhere. She wasn't
enough of an actress to make a USO troupe, but every young man would
recognize her instantly, even from the rear, which is more than you can
say for Cornell or Hayes.

Finney waved to me. I waved back. "These women," Homer said suddenly,
"are giving me the creeps." I noticed that while the interest of many of
the men had turned elsewhere than towards our table, every woman had her
eyes fixed on Homer. Furthermore, they were being very womanly.

"What's wrong with them?" Homer asked.

"I think they want to have babies."

Homer's long neck stretched across the table, and his eyes grew round
like a boy who has requested the facts of life from an elder brother.
"Don't they--" he began. "I mean, are all the men--you know, isn't it
possible--?" He stopped, thought for a moment, and went on: "What I mean
to say is this, to be blunt. When you--we'll say you--when you go to
bed----" He faltered again. "When you go to bed with your wife, what--I
mean--"

"Oh, I see. Here's the way it is, Homer," I told him. "Everything is
just as usual, except one thing. Afterwards, nothing happens. Nothing at
all. No babies."

"Well, then why are these women--"

"It is a matter of instinct," I explained. "The instincts of man are
purely physical, and of the moment. With women, it is different. Most
women. I don't know about nymphomaniacs. But most women, essentially,
want babies. Sure, babies are only part of it to women. But it is an
essential part, where to the man it is no part at all. Get it?"

"Yes, I get it," said Homer, and sighed.

I looked up, and there was Oscar Finney, with The Frame. Her breasts
looked round as radar globes, and she was tuning them on Homer. You
can't chase old friends away from your table, and I did the
introductions, but I told myself I wasn't having any more rye, because
now was the time for all good men to be alert.

Kitty Ruppe, or Kathy Riddell, or The Frame--whatever you want to call
her--was either a very smart girl (which at the time seemed doubtful) or
she had been carefully coached. Anyway, apparently those radar globes
told her something, because she began talking archeology. She had read
in the papers how Homer intended being an archeologist, when he was
young, and so there was a bond between them.

"Oh," said Homer, "are you interested in archeology?"

Indeed she was, The Frame replied. Had Homer ever heard of Professor
Ruppe, at the University of Chicago? Well, that was her father.

Homer hesitated, and then he said he thought the name sounded familiar,
and wasn't he connected in some way with the Aztec excavations?
Absolutely, said The Frame, and she herself was particularly interested
in archeology in Mexico, and she was simply _fascinated_ by the finds in
the Temple of Huitzilopochtli. Homer said he was too.

It was quite the queerest supper club conversation I remember, but it
only made me more suspicious. This plant smelled all the way to the top
of the Washington Monument. No dope, he, my friend Oscar Finney. To hook
the name of any actress to Homer Adam was worth how many columns? How
many papers are there in the United States?

Presently I saw it was coming. It approached in the shape of one of
those "house" photographers you will find in night clubs and places like
the Blue Room. She wore a blue evening gown that matched the decor, and
the camera she held in her hand, flash bulb attached, seemed incongruous
as a debutante toting a forty-five. She asked us to move a little closer
together. When she raised her camera I let my right arm slide around the
back of The Frame's chair. Nobody noticed, except Finney. The flash
came, the girl drifted away, and Finney said:

"Steve, you've got an evil and suspicious mind."

"Just careful," I said.

Homer and The Frame looked at us, not understanding, and then their
conversation went back to Mexico. Oscar and I talked shop, and I fed
Homer drinks. It was a necessary adjunct to my program of relaxation.
You could almost see the layers of repression scale off his shoulders as
the drinks took hold, and his interest mounted in The Frame--or her
archeology. Two tables away I saw Senator Fay Sumner Knott. She had been
sitting there all the time, but I did not notice her until she began to
move, in the same way that a snake seems part of the ground until it
bunches itself to strike.

Of course you know Senator Knott. When she was nineteen she was the most
beautiful debutante in New York, when she was twenty-five she was the
loveliest young matron in London, and at thirty she was the smartest
divorce in Rhode Island, both in brains and looks. When she was
thirty-five she married the President of Executive Trust, thereby
becoming the most beautiful, the brainiest, and almost the richest woman
in the world. At least, that was her opinion. When Executive Trust died
she dipped a dainty toe into the mud puddle of politics, and lo, there
she was in the Senate.

Fay kept looking at Homer, but Homer kept his eyes on The Frame.
Presently Fay rose and walked past our table, slim and magic as a wand,
but holding her chin up-tilted to erase the lines in her neck. She
ignored The Frame as if her chair were vacant, smiled at Homer, nodded
at me, and just at the proper distance--close enough so that we could
hear but it would not be heard at other tables--said: "That stupid
little bitch!"

The Frame started out of her chair like a leopardess, but Oscar grabbed
her, and anyway Fay had already reached the door. I knew she was
trouble--big trouble. Homer was white, and his bony hands were shaking.
Oscar said: "What a pleasant job you've got, Steve! What a nice,
uncomplicated, pleasant job!"

Wasn't it, I agreed. I signed the check, herded Homer to an elevator,
and led him to his bedroom in the distinguished guest suite. I helped
him undress, fed him a couple of aspirins, made him drink two glasses of
carbonated water, and rolled him into bed. His feet stuck a half-foot
over the end, but there was nothing I could do about it.




CHAPTER SIX


Before I opened my eyes, the next morning, I could smell coffee, and for
some time there seemed no doubt that I was in Smith Field, and that
Marge had wakened me first. I didn't hear coffee bubbling, however, nor
did I hear the radio, nor did Marge tickle me behind the ears, the way
she usually did when it was time to get up. I just smelled coffee. I
opened my eyes and discovered that I was in the Adam suite, but that
something new had been added.

I won't describe her the way she first appeared to me, because that
would be unfair. I will describe her the way she was, and is. Jane
Zitter, in her way, is a wonderful girl. Wonderful. It is true that she
is not beautiful, in the sense that The Frame is beautiful, or Fay
Sumner Knott is beautiful, or Marge is beautiful. She has something
beyond regular features, a perfect complexion, or streamlined legs. Jane
Zitter is part of the workaday world. She is as much a part as a
freighter that carries its seven thousand tons of grain at a steady
eight knots. No glamour, just service.

She is a little person all around. She isn't very tall, and she isn't
filled out in the right places. About the best you can say for her
clothes is that they are neat, and her thick glasses make her eyes
larger and rounder than they actually are, so that she appears
perpetually startled.

She'll never get to be a secretary to a Secretary to the President. She
is simply a lubricant for the wheels of government. When the oil becomes
gritty with age it is changed, and nobody knows what happens to the old
and cracked and tired oil. All that matters is that the wheels still
turn.

I opened my eyes and Jane shoved a cup of coffee at me, black. "I
suppose you wonder who I am," she began.

"Oh, no! Not at all! I expect to wake up with strange females in my
bedroom."

"Mr. Smith, I hope I didn't make a mistake. I'm your secretary. My name
is Jane Zitter and I'm your secretary and everything was piling up so
that I thought it best that if Mr. Smith wouldn't go to the office then
the office had better go to Mr. Smith."

I told her I thought this was very nice of the office, and it was an
arrangement of which I approved, particularly if the office appeared
with black coffee. "But I really don't see why I have to have an office
at all," I added. "You see, I'm not a real executive of N.R.P. I'm just
a sort of glorified nursemaid."

Jane turned her startled eyes on my red pajamas. "But if you didn't have
an office, how would you answer your mail, and your telegrams, and
dictate your memoranda?"

"I'm not going to dictate any memoranda," I said firmly. "Not a one."

"But you have to dictate memoranda," Jane said. "People write you
memoranda, and you have to write them back. Why, already you've received
a whole envelope full, and I've got them with me, in case you care to
work here. You see, you're quite an important man, Mr. Smith, being
Special Assistant to the Director, and so you get copies of all the
really important memoranda that originate in National Re-fertilization,
plus the important inter-office and inter-departmental memos, even those
classified secret and top secret."

I could see she was genuinely serious, and so I decided to be serious
too because I didn't want my secretary to have any delusions that I was
a Klutz, or even a half-Klutz. "Look, Miss Zitter," I said, pushing
myself up in bed, "under no circumstances--not ever--will I write a
memorandum to anyone about anything. That is a pledge. May God strike me
dead if I do!"

"Oh, but Mr. Smith--"

"Never, so help me Christ!"

"But you don't understand, Mr. Smith. If you don't answer the memoranda,
or at least initial them, the files would never get cleared! You see,
here's the way it works. Suppose Mr. Klutz sent you a memo."

"God forbid!"

Jane went on persistently and patiently. "Well, suppose Mr. Klutz sent a
memo to Mr. Gableman, for action, with copies to you and the other
members of the Planning Board for information. Well, until everybody has
done something about that memo, it hasn't been cleared up or settled,
and the file clerks cannot put it in the files."

"It floats around in a kind of limbo?"

"Yes, exactly."

"Unless I initial a memo it can never die?"

"It can never die, Mr. Smith. It just keeps coming back to you and
coming back to you from the communications section, and they write
covering memos to you calling your attention to the first memo, and so
on, and this complicates things. Please, Mr. Smith, I hope you will do
something about this, because if you don't people will think I'm
inefficient, and I'll get some kind of bad report on my 201 file, and
I'll never be able to get my classification changed."

She appeared solemn, and a bit pitiful, and she was obviously such a
nice girl. "I'll make a deal," I said. "You learn to make my initials,
and you initial every memo that comes to the office. That's all you have
to do."

"Won't you ever read any of them?"

"Never!"

"Well, certainly you'll read some of the directives. Everybody reads the
directives, because they're classified secret."

"Never!"

Jane Zitter shook her head. "Oh, dear, Mr. Smith, the N.R.P. is such a
strange organization, and you are such a strange man! Sometimes I think
I should never have left Interior. I get six hundred more with N.R.P.
than I did with Interior, and I thought that working with N.R.P. would
be more progressive, and advanced, and even exciting. But I never
thought it would be anything like this." She looked again at my red
pajamas. "I suppose you're crazy," she reflected, "and I'll probably get
into trouble, but I won't let you down."

I remembered Homer, in his bedroom down the hall, and wondered whether
I'd fed him enough drinks to afflict him with a hangover. Jane seemed to
anticipate my question. "Mr. Adam," she said, "went out."

"Went out?"

"Oh, yes. He went out an hour ago. I told him I didn't know whether he
should or not, but he said you had said he could do anything he pleased.
And out he went."

"Did he say where?"

"He said somebody had called and he had made an engagement to discuss
archeology. He didn't say where or with whom. He just said, 'I'm going
to see a person about archeology.' He appeared very happy about it, and
chipper. He even tried to comb his hair."

"Oh, my," I said. "He's been kidnaped by The Frame!"

"The Frame!"

I scrambled out of bed. "Either turn your head or go into the next
room," I told Jane. "We've got to find out what this is all about." She
apparently didn't think I was especially dangerous, because she simply
turned her head.

I dressed in a hurry, although I wasn't actually worried. As a matter of
fact, the thought of Homer being interested in The Frame was in some
ways encouraging. At least one inhibition was breaking down, and for a
man in Homer's position such an inhibition was not good for the soul.
Further, it seemed a good sign that his lethargy and despondency could
be cured. He could go out with The Frame if he wanted--so long as
complications didn't develop. However, I wasn't going to allow any
Hollywood press agent to use Homer for creating headlines. If Homer
found relaxation and a measure of escape with The Frame, it was one
thing. But as a publicity stunt, it was out.

I called the Press Club, located Finney, and got him on the phone.
"Look, Oscar," I said, "that bimbo of yours is out with my boy Homer,
and it smells ungood."

"Oh, is that where she went?" Oscar said. "I've been trying to reach her
all morning, because I'm going to New York."

"You know damn well that's where she is," I said.

"No. Honest, Steve, I didn't." He sounded like he was telling the truth.

"Oscar," I warned him, "don't try to pull any stunts with Adam. This
business is too fundamental to mess it up just for the sake of a little
publicity."

Finney hesitated a moment before he answered. Finally he said, "Steve,
I'll lay it on the line. Kathy herself suggested it would be a smart
pitch to hook her up with Adam. She's been after me about it for days.
Last night when I saw you and Adam in the Blue Room I thought I'd go
ahead with it. Then I thought, no, I'd better not. For one thing, from
now on Kathy's got to make her name on the screen, and not in the
papers. And it might have bad repercussions, especially with the women.
She's not too popular with the women now, for a number of obvious
reasons, and if it looked as if she were trying to snag the only whole
male on earth, she might get decidedly unpopular. You saw how that
amateur Borgia acted last night. I told Riddell to lay off. I told her
that grabbing Adam would be like stealing the U.S. Mint, and it would be
bad box office. So she said okay, and if she's out with Adam, then it's
news to me. Do you know where they are?"

"Haven't the foggiest notion," I said, and added, "Don't get me wrong. I
don't mind Homer seeing Kitty--or Kathy--so long as it doesn't break
into print. It might be good for Homer."

"Have you ever seen a pregnant starlet?" Oscar inquired.

"Don't worry," I reassured him, "Homer is shy and harmless. Nothing like
that is going to happen."

"Riddell isn't harmless," Oscar said. "Furthermore, she might get ideas.
All the women seem to be crazy nowadays. There are plenty of girls out
on the Coast who wouldn't think of spoiling their figures by having
babies when babies could be begat by their own husbands with no trouble
at all. Now that they can't have 'em, they all want 'em."

I told Oscar I would be responsible. It occurred to me that for a
newspaperman who had always watched other people carrying the world's
burdens I was making myself responsible for a lot of things.

It wasn't hard to locate Adam and The Frame, for as I pointed out he was
not a person who could vanish into the stream of humanity without a
ripple. The doorman at the Shoreham remembered that Mr. Adam had taken a
cab to the Smithsonian Institution. Jane wondered why, and I told her
about the archeological mating of Homer and The Frame.

At the Smithsonian we went to the South American annex. It was a good
guess. We found Homer and the girl sitting on a stone bench, her tawny
hair barely brushing his shoulder, staring steadfastly at what appeared
to be a large and ornately carved stone altar. Behind them, glaring from
the wall, was a horrid wooden mask, with tusks, which could frighten
large adults.

I will say this for The Frame. She not only had a shape on which to hang
clothes, but apparently she possessed an instinct for what clothes to
hang on the shape. Now she looked as if she had just been voted the Best
Dressed Senior in her college. I don't recall exactly what she wore,
except that it was something with a wide belt and a flaring skirt, and
it gave her that collegiate look which blends so well with an interest
in archeology.

"Hello, people," I greeted them. "If you want to be alone I can think of
more comfy places, without goons like that." I nodded at the mask.

They didn't appear particularly happy to see us. "I hope you don't mind,
Steve," Homer protested. "You're not going to be a Phelps-Smythe, are
you? You said I could do whatever I wanted, you know."

"Of course, Homer," I soothed him, "But just let me know what's going
on. If you start wandering off, and I don't know where you are, people
might not understand. First thing you know you'll find yourself being
tailed by the FBI and the Secret Service and Army G-2, and maybe Abel
Pumphrey himself--it would frighten him so."

"We were followed," said The Frame. "I'm sure of it."

"Honest?"

"Absolutely," said Homer.

"By who?"

"I don't know. Kathy noticed him first. I never got a good look at him.
But he's somewhere in the building now."

"Don't worry," I said. "I'll find out about it. So long as you don't get
in a jam, what the hell? People can't object to you taking an interest
in some old stones or mummy cases."

Jane Zitter looked worried. "That might depend," she observed, "as to
who's acting as guide." I noticed that Jane and The Frame were eyeing
each other like a pair of strange tabbies, and remembered the
introductions. Then I asked, casually:

"And how is archeology today?"

"We were just discussing the legend of Tezcatlipoca," The Frame remarked
coolly. "Although one cannot really call it a legend, since it has been
so well authenticated."

"It must be fascinating."

"It is for poor Homer," said The Frame, "because he can see himself in
it."

Homer's lips smiled, but his eyes were sad as a spaniel's. "That is
quite true," he said, and explained.

It seems that one of the most bizarre Aztec rites was in honor of the
god Tezcatlipoca, the god of fertility and creation. He was depicted as
a young man, and handsome. Once each year the Aztecs picked a young man
to represent the god. For a year he lived in splendor, and led the most
exotic kind of life. His clothes were the finest, he was sprinkled daily
with perfume, and flowers were thrown in his path when he went abroad.
He was attended by the royal pages, and the people prostrated themselves
when they saw him.

Four beautiful girls, each bearing the name of a goddess--or more if he
wanted them--were his.

Things went along like this for a year, but at the end of a year they
took him to the top of their highest pyramid, and stretched him naked on
a sacrificial stone of jasper. "Just like this one," Homer said.

Then a red-robed priest zipped open his chest and cut out his heart with
a volcanic stone knife, holding it aloft towards the sun. The corpse was
thrown to the foot of the pyramid. "And then," Homer continued,
shuddering, "they ate him!"

"I would not worry too much about that last part," I told him. "They
might find some soup bones on you, but I don't see any steaks."

The Frame leaned against Homer. "I think he is perfectly fine as he is,"
she said. "You are just trying to fatten him up so you can use him for
your own purposes--all of you."

"Miss Riddell," I asked, "are you against A.I.?"

"Theoretically, no," replied The Frame. "I suppose the human race must
be perpetuated, although sometimes"--she glanced at Jane Zitter--"I
don't see why. But I don't think we are going about it properly, nor do
I believe proper consideration is given to Homer's feelings."

"I know things aren't perfect," I admitted. "Naturally Homer suffers
some inconvenience. But can you think of a better way than A.I. to
accomplish our purpose?"

"I certainly can!" The Frame said defiantly.

I said we'd talk it over again sometime, and I told Homer I'd see him at
dinner, and Jane and I left them to whatever it was they found in the
South American annex.

That afternoon Jane persuaded me to go to my office while she initialed
memos. It was quite an office I had, as a Special Assistant to the
Director of N.R.P., and I was surprised to find that in the really few
hours I had been in Washington it was already filling up with letters
and telegrams. While Jane did her paperwork, I read a few of them.

There was a letter from Senator Frogham. He congratulated me on my
appointment, and hoped he could be of service when a bill for continuing
N.R.P. came to the Senate floor--a gentle hint that N.R.P. could not
continue forever by presidential order alone.

He went on to say that many of his constituents had written concerning
the possibility of bearing an Adam child, and he felt the needs of his
state should be considered when the question of first priorities arose.

There was a long, carefully composed, registered letter from the
president of the National Insurance Council. He started by saying that
the country was on disaster's brink. People were not buying new
insurance policies, because as things presently stood, the future of
their progeny was uncertain. If this kept up, thousands of salesmen
would be thrown out of work, the companies themselves might collapse,
there would be inflation, depression, and the insurance business
generally would go to hell. In that case, the country was doomed.

The answer, he said, obviously was to take the sound view that Adam's
children be allotted to people willing to insure the future of those
children--the holders of insurance policies. Furthermore, any family
which applied for the seed of Adam should be forced to take out policies
on whatever children Adam's seed produced. Thus could disaster be
averted.

There was a telegram from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging that an
optimistic note be given to official releases on the health and
well-being of Mr. Adam. Whenever rumors spread that Mr. Adam was ill, or
that there was friction within N.R.P., or that Mr. Adam had been found
unsuitable for A.I.--and naturally such rumors kept cropping
up--securities collapsed. The Chamber of Commerce felt that above all,
everybody should be optimistic.

Both the C.I.O. and the A.F. of L. sent notes that they were confident
the rights of feminine union members would be protected when the time
came for A.I. to commence. Otherwise, there would be very real and
concrete danger of a wholly capitalistic world.

There was a letter from a Hellenic society pointing out that Greece's
population had been greatly reduced by war casualties, outlining
Greece's long record of service to mankind, and requesting priority for
Greece when the rights of small nations came under consideration. There
was the same type of request from the Poles, the Moslem League, the
Armenians, and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

It appeared that there was hardly a group of any kind in all the
world--and certainly none which maintained offices in Washington--which
couldn't present a good argument for special attention from the N.R.P. I
realized I had become a target, albeit a moving target, for lobbyists
and pressure groups. The announcement of my appointment automatically
set me up as a clay pigeon. The question of allotting the seed of Adam
was one I decided to duck.

Jane Zitter, who had been bulldozing her way through pink, green, and
red piles of paper on her desk, suddenly lifted her head and said,
"She's up to something. I can't figure it out."

"Who?"

"That girl--The Frame. She's clever."

"Sure she's clever," I admitted. "But it's perfectly obvious what she
wants. She wants Homer Adam. But then, so does everybody else, and most
of them are pretty damn selfish. You can tell by reading my mail. You've
got to hand it to The Frame. She goes out to get him, personally. She
doesn't write letters explaining why she, and no other woman, is
entitled to first crack at Homer. She has drive, and initiative."

Jane shook her head. "No, I think you're wrong. I suspect her of
everything. She might even be a Communist agent. Hollywood is full of
Communists, isn't it?"

"I don't know," I said. "I always thought Washington was full of
Commies. For all I know you might be a Communist."

"She's an actress," Jane said. "She's playing a part. She practically
ambushes Mr. Adam in the Blue Room, and then she attacks him on his only
vulnerable front, which is archeology. It is too perfect."

"I would not worry," I said. "Homer has a perfectly good wife in
Tarrytown, and only yesterday he was begging me to let him see her."

"He won't beg any more," Jane predicted.

As the days went by, it turned out she was correct. Homer didn't mention
Mary Ellen again. He took The Frame to the Aztec Gardens in the
Pan-American Union, and they spent hours deep under the stacks of the
Library of Congress, and in the basement of the Archives Building, and
in the gloomy reading rooms of the Pan-Hispanic Library. On the surface
it all looked like good, wholesome, scholarly companionship, but this
seemed hardly believable.

Whatever it was, I did not try to discourage it, for Homer visibly
blossomed. His face no longer resembled that of a fresh-dug cadaver, and
in a week he gained eight pounds, although when you distributed eight
pounds up and down the length of his frame it did not seem very much.

While they spent their days in the pursuit of Aztec culture, that wasn't
the way they spent their evenings. They went out together every night,
and each night Homer faithfully told me where they were going. It was
always the Footlight Club, a little place on Connecticut Avenue where
the steaks weren't bad, the drinks cheap, and you could dance to a
five-piece band. Of this I approved. I didn't want him trotting The
Frame around to any of the big places where they'd be conspicuous and
get their names in the papers.

But one evening Homer came home more mussed than usual. Ordinarily we
played a couple of games of gin before we turned in, but this night
Homer played two hands as if he had been knocked on the head. Then he
got up from the table and poured himself a drink. He turned to me and
said, "Kathy is going back to Hollywood tomorrow."

"That's too bad," I said. "I think she's been good for you."

He ran a hand through his hair, and I could see that he was trembling.
This was not encouraging. I thought he was finished with the shakes.
"Steve," he said, "is it possible for a man to be in love with two women
at the same time?"

"It has been done," I said.

"I think I am in love with Kathy."

When a man says he is in love with a woman there is nothing you can tell
him, except to congratulate him, and it did not seem that Homer should
be congratulated, considering the circumstances. I kept quiet.

"I suppose I love Mary Ellen, too," he went on. "At least I ought to.
She is my wife and until tonight I always thought I loved her very much.
But I'm not sure that I love Mary Ellen the way I love Kathy."

"No?"

"No. I think Mary Ellen and I got married because we were both a little
lonesome. We were two strays wandering around in a world where everyone
else was paired off. But with Kathy it is different. We were made for
each other. It isn't only archeology."

"It is rarely archeology."

Homer began to pace up and down. "It isn't only archeology," he
repeated. "It is everything. We were made for each other."

"Now what gave you that idea?"

"Kathy told me. We didn't go to the Footlight Club tonight. We went up
to Kathy's room in her hotel."

"Pardon me a moment," I said. I went into the bathroom, shut the door,
and banged my head against the wall. I came out again and asked Homer to
tell me exactly how far things had gone, and what happened, in detail.
He stammered, and cracked his knuckles, and got red in the face, and
finally said that things had gone as far as they could go, but that it
wasn't his fault.

"Now, look, Homer," I said, "you weren't raped, were you?"

"Well, not exactly," he said. "I'm not sure. Nothing like that ever
happened to me before. One minute we were discussing the Toltecs, and
the next minute we had all our clothes off."

I said the fatuous thing that mothers tell their daughters and fathers
their sons and husbands tell their wives: "Homer, this sounds like a
mere infatuation."

"Perhaps," Homer said miserably. "I don't know. I'm all mixed up."

I shoved Homer into a chair, sat down opposite him, put my hands on his
shoulders, and glared into his eyes like an optometrist. "Homer," I
said, "you are not going to like what I have to say, but I must tell it
to you."

"Go ahead."

"Homer, you are one of those rare men chosen for real sacrifice to the
world. You are a fine man, Homer, and certainly no one can blame you for
your personal feelings. But it is your destiny to be sacrificed, like
that Aztec god, what's his name--"

"Tezcatlipoca," Homer provided.

"No man has ever been sacrificed for so great a cause," I continued.
"Homer, first you must do your duty to mankind, and then remember your
wife and little Eleanor. After that, you can think of The Frame--Kathy.
I hardly need to tell you what the repercussions would be if your affair
with Kathy became public."

"You don't have to tell me," Homer said. "I know. That's what I don't
understand. Kathy doesn't seem to appreciate my position. She wanted me
to run away with her."

"Wanted you to run away! Where?"

"She didn't say. Just away. It scared me. I told her I couldn't do
it--that I had my obligations, and she said to think it over, and that
obviously we were destined to be together always, and that when I
decided I should call her."

"And you said?"

"I said I would think it over."

I began to breathe again. "Thank goodness, Homer, you are being
sensible. You have done a very noble thing, and it is a shame it will
forever be hidden from history."

That night I lay awake thinking. I really felt very solemn about it.
Plenty of men would have told the world to take a flying leap at a
galloping goose, and would have proceeded to do their own
re-fertilization in their own way. But Homer was a very decent,
public-spirited citizen. On the other hand I didn't quite understand The
Frame's procedure. She was a smart girl--smart enough to know that she
couldn't possibly get away with eloping with Homer permanently. Or could
she, say, if they got out of the country? The thought worried me.

I decided that the best way for Homer to keep his balance, and forget
about The Frame, was to bring Mary Ellen to Washington. I was afraid
that as soon as The Frame left, Homer would start pining away again, and
sink into his melancholia.

In the morning I went into Homer's room and found he was dressing.
"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I'm seeing Kathy off. She's catching the noon plane for Los Angeles."

"Homer," I said, "I don't think that is wise. Why prolong the agony?
You'll just make it tough on yourself. You've made your decision, now
stick with it."

Homer sat down on the bed, his bare, lathlike legs almost touching his
chin, and put his head in his hands. "I just wanted to see her this once
more," he said. "Just this one more time."

I felt like saying to hell with it, and taking him down to the airport
and putting him on the Coast plane, then I remembered Marge, and how
anxious she was that something come of this business, and all the other
women who were really sincerely troubled, and what a mess the world
would be in if Homer ran off with The Frame. "It would be bad, Homer," I
said. "It would be especially bad since I'm arranging for Mary Ellen to
come to Washington and stay here with you, at least until A.I. begins.
See what I mean?"

"Yes," he said, "I see."

"You do want to see Mary Ellen, don't you?"

"Why of course I want to see her. I'm all confused."

"Naturally you're confused. All of us get confused once in a while.
You've just had more than your share in a short space of time."

Homer groaned.

"Since you'll probably see Mary Ellen tonight, it would only make it
worse to see Kathy at noon, wouldn't it?"

"I suppose so, but I promised Kathy--"

I put my hand on his shoulder, feeling more or less like a heel. "You
don't worry about that," I said. "I'll go to the airport and see her
off, and tell her how things are. I'll take the responsibility."

"Will you?" Homer said gratefully. "Thanks, Steve." He hesitated a
moment and then asked: "Steve, what shall I tell Mary Ellen?"

"Tell her? Why tell her nothing! Not a word! Not a hint!"

"But that seems unfair."

"Homer, believe me, if there is one thing a woman would rather not hear
about a thing like that, it is the truth. If it ever comes up, deny
everything. That's an order!"

"But--"

"Homer, about this there can be no buts. If you want to lead a life of
utter and complete misery, just start confessing. But as long as you are
married to Mary Ellen and it looks like your marriage is going to last,
lie, lie, lie until your teeth drop out!"

Homer looked at me in shock and wonder, like a Boy Scout whose
Scoutmaster has uttered a bad word, but he nodded yes. However, when I
left for National Airport, I still had misgivings.

The wind was playing hide-and-seek around the ramp at the airport, and
it was an unseasonably warm day. The Frame was carrying her fur coat
across her arm, and the wind had shellacked her dress against her,
outlining a sight that could cast men into a trance. "Hello, Steve," she
said, smiling at my stares, "where's Homer?"

"He's not seeing you any more," I said. "His wife is coming down from
New York right away."

"Did he tell you about us?"

"Yes."

"Everything?"

"Yes."

She wasn't smiling any more. Her chin was set and her eyes, tawny,
golden-brown eyes which men forgot to notice, were steady. "Steve," she
said, "you remember me when I was a kid in New York, club-dancing, don't
you?"

"Sure."

"I suppose you thought I was a brainless little tramp. Well, Steve, all
kids are a little wild when they first go to New York. I got over that.
This isn't simply an infatuation."

"It has got to be simply an infatuation," I said. "There are things
you've forgotten. There's his wife and daughter, and there's A.I."

"Your foolish A.I.!" she said. She had the strangest expression on her
face. Some evangelists get it, and you used to see it in the pictures of
Nazis while they listened to Hitler, and madmen wear it. It is
fanaticism, and it is always frightening.

The loudspeakers were calling her flight. "Well, happy landings, Kathy,"
I said. "But I might as well be frank. I don't see any hope for it."

"You don't? Well, you try to stop me, Steve! You can't turn destiny
aside, or halt the will of God."

Everyone on the ramp stared when she boarded the plane. I knew what they
all were thinking. But as for me, she only made me shiver. You think you
know a lot about a person, and then you find out you don't know anything
about what goes on inside. I realized that Kitty Ruppe was much too
complicated a bit of feminine machinery for me to piece together all by
myself. On the way back to the Shoreham I stopped off at the FBI.




CHAPTER SEVEN


Mary Ellen arrived the next day. I had forgotten what an attractive girl
she was, in a healthy Midwest way, and perhaps Homer had, too, because
he seemed genuinely glad to see her. For a while I followed them about
like an unwelcome duenna, fearful that Homer would implicate himself
with The Frame by a thoughtless remark, but he appeared more
self-possessed than at any time since he had been installed in
Washington.

Mary Ellen was one of the few women I've ever seen who looks good with a
shiny nose. She was fresh and crisp as newly laundered linen, and she
had a lot of bounce. Things rocked along nicely, but the very sight of
Mary Ellen and Homer holding hands and behaving like they were on a
honeymoon made me feel lonesome and dispirited. On Sunday morning I put
Jane Zitter in charge of the menage Adam and flew to New York. I soothed
my conscience by telling myself I was duty bound to see Thompson and
Ostenheimer, and give them a report on Adam's progress.

My home, and my wife, made Washington feel unreal and faraway. Marge was
wearing a new dress when I arrived, one of those dresses that make you
keep watching. She was all smelled up with perfume, and it seemed to me
that her makeup was a bit too perfect, and her hair-do a little
professional. "You think we're going out tonight," I accused her, "but
we're not."

She kissed me experimentally. "Of course not, darling," she said. "We're
going to stay right here, and Maria and Tommy Thompson are coming over,
and we'll play bridge and talk." She kissed me again, as if she were
testing my breath for liquor, or something.

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

"Is there anything wrong with me wanting to kiss you?"

"No, certainly not. I like it. That's why I'm here."

"You've been having fun in Washington, haven't you dear?"

"Fun? Hell no. What a snafu."

"Your face is all full of lipstick," she said. She took a handkerchief
and went to work on me. "I thought it would be fun for you, with that
curvy wench--what's her name--The Frame?"

"The Frame! What about me and The Frame?"

"Oh, nothing. I just saw a picture of you and what's her name--The
Frame--in the _Journal-American_. The caption said something about Mr.
Adam, glimpsed with the Special Assistant to the Director of N.R.P., the
former newspaperman Stephen Decatur Smith, and The Frame, at a
fashionable supper club. Since you had your arm around The Frame, I
thought you must be having fun."

This is the kind of reward people get for trying to render a public
service. About a matter like this there is no use being serious. The
more earnest your pleas of innocence, the more guilty you seem. I said,
"That's what you get for reading the _Journal-American_."

"She must be charming," Marge said. "And she's probably very much
impressed with your official position. I really don't see why you
bothered to come to New York and visit me, except of course you probably
have business to discuss with Maria and Dr. Thompson."

"Of course I've got business to discuss with them," I said, "and of
course that's the only reason I came to New York. As a matter of fact, I
do not see how I can stay the night."

Marge kissed me again, and this time it wasn't testing. "Come on," she
said, "give." I told her about Homer and The Frame. It made her very
thoughtful. "Stephen," she said, "I think you're in trouble. If that
girl gets Homer, where will that leave the rest of us?"

"But she's not going to get Homer. His wife is with him now, and they
seem perfectly happy and contented."

"But that isn't much better."

I considered this a very queer statement. "Marge," I inquired,
"honestly, are you considering having a baby by A.I?"

"Perhaps," she said. I knew that meant yes. Instantly, I felt betrayed.
I felt like a cuckold, and I knew that every other husband whose wife
contemplated having an A.I. baby would feel the same. I know it wasn't
sensible, but there it was, as fundamental as Homer's desire for The
Frame, or Marge's urge to have children.

When Tommy Thompson and Maria arrived they seemed to be tiptoeing on a
pink cloud. His St. Bernard eyes followed her, proud and possessive and
devoted, and she sat beside him, and squirmed against his shoulder. A
love affair between two doctors, or between a doctor and a nurse, is
sometimes difficult to understand. How they can reconcile the terms of
medical anatomy with the delicate language of passion is something that
has never been fully explained, but they do it all the time.

Of course we talked about A.I. We played bridge, in the sense that
someone dealt cards and we looked at them, but mostly we talked. Except
Tommy didn't talk much. Tommy Thompson was thinking. He did his thinking
slowly. When you watched him you could almost hear his brain go click,
click, click like an old grandfather clock, just as creaky, and just as
right.

"I'll tell you," he said finally, "I don't think the world is going to
be permanently sterile. I think there's a chance for it."

"You mean through Mr. Adam?" Marge asked.

"Perhaps. He might get it started."

"What then?"

"Well," Tommy hesitantly explained, "you know I've been experimenting.
I'm not entirely satisfied that the male sperm is really dead. I think
he is stunned, knocked out, paralyzed, but I'm not sure he is dead. I
think I saw one wriggle."

"When you look through a microscope too long everything wriggles," said
Maria.

"No, I am sure I saw one wriggle." Tommy looked into his glass, as if he
saw one there. "I might as well tell you all about it. I've been working
eighteen hours a day on this idea of mine. If it is true that the male
germ isn't totally destroyed, then it is just a matter of nursing him
back--or jarring him back--into full vitality. I've got a compound--"

"Quack!" I interrupted. "Medicine man! Purveyor of snake oil!"

"It is a silly sort of business," he continued, ignoring me. "It is
mostly seaweed. High iodized content."

"That's very interesting," said Maria, suddenly alert. "Why don't you
try it out?"

"I am trying it out. But I need more experimental animals--mostly
husbands. How about you, Steve? Some of my colleagues at Polyclinic are
taking it."

"Not me," I said. "I'm no guinea pig."

Marge looked at me. "Go ahead and try it," she urged. "You ought to
contribute something to humanity."

"All over the world," I replied, "pathologists and biologists and
endocrinologists are undoubtedly working, just like Tommy here, on such
ideas. Maybe Tommy or one of the others will come up with something.
When he does, why naturally I'll take it. But right at the moment I
don't feel like filling my stomach with seaweed."

"You're a big help!" said Marge. "You're practically a traitor to the
human race!"

"If he changes his mind," Tommy told her, "I'll give him a bottle of the
stuff. It can't hurt him--at least I don't think it can hurt him because
it hasn't hurt any of the others. I prescribe forty drops a day, in this
test period, and none of the fellows at the hospital are sick yet. On
the other hand none of them seem to be starting any babies."

"He won't change his mind," Marge said. "He just doesn't want to have
any children--never has."

I didn't argue. What was the sense of arguing? Marge has that damnable
type of memory that goes back through the years and picks up evidence
that you have long forgotten, and drowns you in it.

I told Maria and Tommy about Homer's progress, touching lightly on the
episode of The Frame, and they agreed that it sounded as if he were
greatly improved, and probably on the way to recovery. They promised to
come down to Washington and look him over. Perhaps he was in shape for
the beginning of A.I., although they couldn't be sure until they'd given
him a thorough checkup.

At nine o'clock we listened to Winchell. He sounded breathless as if he
had run up twenty flights in Radio City. He started off with a flash
from London. The British Foreign Office had learned, he said, that two
unsterilized males had been discovered in Outer Mongolia. They had been
discovered several months ago, but the Russians were keeping it a
secret. It seems that they were miners, and like Adam they had been in
the lowest level of a deep lead workings when Mississippi blew up.

"That's very interesting," Tommy said. "I wonder if it's true?"

"It sounds plausible," said Maria.

"I don't think so," I said. "It isn't very likely that the British
Foreign Office would know what goes on in Outer Mongolia. There probably
have been some rumors floating around, and finally the rumors reached
London, and the Foreign Office allowed them to leak, just to sound out
the Russians as to whether they were true."

"If it is true, what effect would that have on the N.R.P.?" Marge asked.

"Oh, I think it would start a production race between us and the
Russians. And there would be a lot of pressure to utilize Adam
immediately. I'm glad he's better, because even the hint of an
unsterilized Russian is likely to send Washington spinning."

"It is sort of frightening," Marge said. "Those Mongols breed like mice,
don't they?"

"All things considered," Tommy said, "I think a good husky Mongol would
outbreed Adam three to one, from what I have seen of him."

"That's probably true," said Maria, "but if we're able to perfect
improved methods of A.I. utilizing a single germ for each
impregnation--which as you know is what I've been working on--why we can
meet their competition. However, they're just as advanced as we are in
those things and if they have two men to our one, and a bigger
population to work with, why I suppose they can keep their birth rate
well above ours."

I said it was all hypothetical anyway, until something definite was
known, and if it was true then that was good, because then both
countries would get together and pool their knowledge and perhaps save
the human race after all. Maria said she didn't think it would work out
that way, because all her experiments were viewed as military secrets,
and she supposed it was the same with the Russians.

I explained about military secrets, so far as I knew. It seems that
every major power has two operations, one called S.I.--Secret
Intelligence--and the other C.I.--Counter Intelligence. "Now that this
is peacetime," I said, "ordinarily those guys would be back in their
normal occupations as purveyors of buggy whips, peddlers of brushes,
operators of shooting galleries, and clam and oyster salesmen. But a
secret agent makes a lot of money and he doesn't have to account for it.
In every country in the world it is called 'unvouchered funds,' and a
secret agent supposedly pays out these unvouchered funds to people for
information."

"It sounds very profitable," Marge agreed.

"Oh, it is. It is a wonderful racket. It is sort of an international
club. All the fellows in S.I. try to penetrate other countries, and all
the fellows in C.I. try to keep other countries from penetrating us."

"We have very nice counter-intelligence men," Maria objected. "They come
to see me all the time. They put up baskets in our laboratories, and we
are supposed to throw all our notes in them, and then they come around
and burn the baskets. It is just like collecting the garbage, only
cleaner."

"Is that all they do?" asked Marge.

"Oh, no. They make you sign papers."

"The British," I explained, "are wise to the racket, and they do it
better. Most of the men in the British Secret Service have to hold other
jobs too. In that way the government gets some work out of them. It is
also a very good cover, because it is an honest cover. We aren't that
smart. A guy turns up in a place like Istanbul and claims to be a
reporter for _Field and Stream_, or _Vogue_, and everyone knows it is a
phoney cover, but nobody says anything about it, because it would hurt
the racket generally."

The telephone rang. It was Jane, in Washington. The N.R.P. was boiling,
she said. Everybody was excited about the news from Outer Mongolia. Both
Gableman and Mr. Pumphrey had called, and they wanted me to return to
Washington immediately. There was to be a special conference with the
State Department at ten in the morning, and the Planning Board would
meet at eleven, and at noon Mr. Pumphrey would call at the White House.
"But is it true about this Outer Mongolian business?" I asked.

"They don't know," Jane said. "But whether it is true or not, it is
bound to have repercussions in Congress, and that's what worries them."

"Nothing doing," I said. "Tell them I've got a very important business
engagement with the Advisory Committee, and we are discussing every
phase of the situation. Tell them I'll bring in the recommendations of
the Advisory Committee when I get back. Do you think that will fix it?"

"I hope so," Jane said, "but they are terribly excited."

She asked how soon I'd be back, and I said probably in a couple of days,
unless something really urgent developed. She said that was all right,
and she would call Mr. Gableman and Mr. Pumphrey and stress the
importance of my conferring with the medical advisers at this time. I
said she was a sweetheart, and that I would give her a kiss when I got
back, because I saw that Marge was listening.

"You don't make me a bit jealous," Marge said when I hung up. "That was
your secretary, and she doesn't worry me at all, if you gave me an
accurate description of her. However, I'm still not sure about that
Hollywood person."

Maria and Tommy left about one. Smith Field never seemed so wonderful.

When I awoke, sleet and rain were beating against our windows. Marge was
scratching me behind the ears, and I relaxed with the luxurious
determination to spend the day in bed and thumb my nose at the weather,
Washington, the N.R.P., A.I., and unsterilized Mongolians.

All our lives, most of us have been the targets of a devilish propaganda
campaign designed to rout us out of bed at the same hour as the beasts
of the field and the farmyard. Whoever invented the slogan "Early to bed
and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," was an
advertising genius. That slogan bullies most of us from childhood to old
age. It shows the power of repetition, which Goebbels so well
understood. We have heard "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man
healthy, wealthy, and wise" so often that we believe it without
question, although when you analyze it, it is obviously hokum. It is
hokum in all three claims, particularly the part about making you
wealthy. Who is it who gets to the office at eight on the dot--the
shipping clerk or the Chairman of the Board? I drowsed in Smith Field,
thinking how successful the inventor of that slogan would be if he were
alive today, and what he could do for cigarettes, soap, hair tonic, and
soda pop.

Around noon I flicked on the television, and who should be there,
looking directly into my eyes, but Senator Fay Sumner Knott. Marge said,
"Isn't that a charming suit? I saw one like that at Best's the other
day, only it was a different shade."

"Hush," I said, "I can't hear what she's saying."

"Oh, switch it off," said Marge. "She's only talking politics in the
Senate. She _is_ photogenic, isn't she?"

Then I heard something about N.R.P., and I concentrated on listening,
instead of watching. For months, very likely, Fay had been waiting to
insert her stinger into the Administration. If she hadn't miscalculated
her timing, I shuddered to consider the consequence. As it was, it was
bad enough.

She was, obviously, just at the beginning of her speech in the Senate
Chamber. The first thing I heard distinctly was that the N.R.P. was a
total failure, and worse, a public scandal.

"I speak at a critical moment," she said. "News has just reached us that
in Outer Mongolia there are two men capable of perpetuating the human
race. Now I do not begrudge the Communists the right to continue, but
think what it would mean if the world were swarming with Communistic
Mongols?"

She smiled, and paused so that her listeners would have time for the
picture to sink in. "Our most critical and vital resource," she went on,
"is one man--Mr. Adam. And what has the Administration done about Mr.
Adam?

"The Administration is apparently unaware of the fact that people are
dying every day, and nobody is being born--at least here in the United
States. We don't know how many are being born in Russia. Not only has
the N.R.P. failed to promote the conception of a single baby--although
it has been provided with unlimited funds--but it has as yet announced
no definite plans for utilizing Mr. Adam."

Not only that, Fay continued, but the Administration had allowed Mr.
Adam to consort with a number of women. She herself had seen Mr. Adam
drinking with a notorious actress. She understood, "from the highest
military authorities," that there was a woman living with Mr. Adam even
now.

She said she very much regretted being forced to expose this scandalous
state of affairs. She was not one to interfere in anyone's private life.
However, this was a matter of transcendent importance to the nation, and
it was particularly important to the nation's womanhood. Was the eternal
hope of motherhood to be forever condemned by the soiled politicians
who, for the time being, composed the Administration clique?

Marge said, "Stephen, isn't this awful!"

"No," I said. "I think it's wonderful. Wait until people find out that
the woman with whom he is living is only his wife."

"That doesn't make any difference."

"Don't be silly."

N.R.P. was nothing more or less than a gigantic boondoggle, Fay told us,
and a swindle. Mr. Adam was being allowed to run wild on the taxpayers'
money. She began to go into details. She mentioned "a woman known as The
Frame, whose real name is Kitty Ruppe, and whose screen name is Kathy
Riddell."

"I think she's catty," Marge said. "She's just jealous. I'd never vote
for her."

"In her state," I pointed out, "there are more men than women. Otherwise
she'd never have been elected in the first place."

Fay began to talk about tte--ttes in the Footlight Club. It occurred
to me that Mr. Adam's movements had been pretty closely watched, and
when I pieced this together with her reference to "high military
authorities," I could smell Phelps-Smythe.

The television's eye shifted so that it encompassed the whole Senate
Chamber. An announcer's voice said, "The Senate Chamber, which was
almost empty when Senator Knott began to speak, has been rapidly
filling." You could see that was true, and I recognized several members
of the House standing in the background, a certain indication that this
was the day's main attraction on Capitol Hill.

The announcer said that Senator Knott had yielded the floor to Senator
Frogham, and immediately Frogham's face, jowls hanging down like a tired
bloodhound, appeared on our screen. He started off by saying that he was
shaken by his colleague's revelations, although hardly entirely
surprised. "This is a terrible blow at our democratic and capitalistic
system. What's going to happen to free enterprise and everything? How
can we tell our school children they can grow up to be President when
there aren't any school children?" He suggested that the Senate form a
committee to investigate the N.R.P., with Senator Knott as chairman.

Senator Knott reappeared, and said it had been a mistake to take Mr.
Adam out of the hands of the military in the first place, and that she
was sure that there was sabotage, "probably inspired by a foreign
power," within the N.R.P.

I shut her off and climbed out of Smith Field. "Where are you going?"
Marge asked.

"We're going to Florida. I just resigned."

"Oh, no you didn't," Marge said. "You're not going to let a bunch of
politicians chase you out of your job. Remember, there are a lot of
people depending on you--Maria, and Thompson, and poor Mr. Adam. You
can't just run away and leave Mr. Adam in this mess."

I put on my trousers. The telephone rang, Marge answered it, and said it
was Mr. Gableman, for me. "Tell him I'm not in. Tell him I just had
apoplexy."

"Stephen," Marge said sweetly into the telephone, "wants me to tell you
that he's not in or he has just had apoplexy."

I took the telephone and said, "It's me, Smith. I quit."

"Oh, you heard about it," said Gableman. "Well, you can't quit now while
we're under fire. That's the worst possible thing to do. That's what
starts an organization disintegrating. Anyway, what's the dope? We've
got to get out a press release, fast. Who's the woman staying with
Adam?"

"His wife."

"His wife!" I could hear Gableman sigh. "Why, that's not bad! That's not
bad at all. But what about this tomato, The Frame?"

"Purely platonic," I lied. "It just turns out that they're both
interested in archeology."

"Even if that's true, which I doubt, we're not going to say anything
about it," said Gableman. "We will just give out a simple, dignified
statement that Mr. and Mrs. Adam are living together. That'll create
sympathy, and it'll make Knott seem like a gossipy bitch. But what about
The Frame?"

"You don't have to worry about her," I told him, "because her studio
doesn't want her to get involved. They know it would be bad box office."

"Well, then, there's hardly anything to worry about at all. It will all
blow over in a couple of days."

"I suppose so," I said.

"We'll ride this out, all right, but you'd better come on back right
away."

Suddenly I thought of Mary Ellen, and Adam, and Jane Zitter, and I
wondered what was going on in suite 5-F, and whether Mary Ellen had
scalped Homer by now, and whether he had confessed, and what the Knott
blast would do to his nerves. "Okay," I agreed. "I'll get out to La
Guardia and catch the first plane."

Marge said, "Thank goodness, you aren't ducking your responsibilities."

"It's not that," I said. "I'm just curious."

Marge helped me fix my tie. "Darling," she said, "won't you try some of
Tommy Thompson's tonic, or whatever it is? I do wish you would try
something because I do want you to be the father of my children."

"Preposterous!" I told her. "There are probably a thousand varieties of
snake oil being consumed all over the world, and none of them are going
to do any good. Your only chance of becoming a mother is for Homer to be
the papa, unless, of course, it is true about the two Mongolians, and
the Russians agree to share them with us. And when you consider how many
women there are in the world, I don't think your chances are very good.
Honestly I don't."

"I am going to have a baby," Marge said. "I am, I am!"




CHAPTER EIGHT


On the Washington plane I sat next to a man who said his name was
Seymour Foreman, and that he was in real estate in Hartford. He asked me
if I'd heard the news and I said I had. He said it was a terrible state
of affairs, and that by God he was going to retire and spend the rest of
his life fishing. He complained that now that he was able to get
building materials in quantity, and architects could let their
imagination run in designing new and smart low-cost homes, nobody wanted
to build houses any more. "It is this way," he explained: "People don't
build houses for themselves. They build for their children. And if
they're not having any more children they're not having any more new
homes. I don't see why Washington doesn't lash this Adam down and at
least start token production."

I told him, logically I thought, that Adam was like an oil well. You had
to be very patient and careful in bringing in the well, else the
production might gush for only a short time, and then stop altogether.
By practising conservation, the future of the race could be assured.
This was particularly important when you considered that research was
going forward to utilize all Mr. Adam's capabilities, instead of A.I.
being forced to use the present wasteful methods.

That was all right, Foreman pointed out, but meanwhile the real estate
and construction business was getting shaky. If he were in automobiles,
or washing machines, or drug stores, or haberdasheries it would be
different. Some businesses were not affected. But who wanted to invest
in an apartment house when there was a good chance that two generations
hence it would be inhabited solely by the rats, and a few surviving
octogenarians? The trouble with real estate, there wasn't any future in
it.

I said, "Mr. Foreman, that is the whole point. If we don't handle Mr.
Adam properly, there will be anarchy."

"Well," he growled, "Washington had better get on the ball, or there
won't be a businessman in the United States--big or little--who will
support the Administration in the next elections."

"What difference will that make?" I inquired. "The Republicans are just
as sterile as the Democrats. The only solution is to make A.I. work."

Mr. Foreman looked at me sharply, as if he had not really seen me
before. "Do you work for the government?" he asked.

"Yes," I admitted. "Temporarily."

"Do you know anybody in the N.R.P.?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, you better tell them the public is damned sick and tired of this
fooling around. Now you take my daughter. She graduates from college
this year, and majored in Home Economics. Boy, is she mad!"

In seventy minutes I learned a good many things I hadn't realized before
about how things had gone since W.S. Day. For instance, practically
nobody was getting married, but lots of people were living together.
Manufacturers of baby shoes, in Massachusetts, had already closed down,
and the toy business was acknowledged on the rocks. The Hays Office, in
Hollywood, had banned all reference to motherhood, or babies, as being
too painful a subject to portray on the screen. Fanny Brice, in the
interests of good taste, abandoned her radio role of Baby Snooks. The
school teachers had formed an association, looking towards the future,
to concentrate on adult education. Harvard University was spending
several millions to gather a compendium of all man's knowledge, and bury
it in time capsules, in case A.I. failed, Darwin was right, and man
would again evolve from some lower species. The undertakers seemed to
have the only business with a future.

Eight-column banner headlines greeted me in Washington. They all said
the same thing--"ADAM LIVING WITH WIFE!"--which showed that within a few
hours the shrewd Gableman had managed to counteract Fay Knott's blast in
the Senate. But apprehension harried me until I entered the Adam suite
in the Shoreham.

When I rang the bell Jane opened the door a crack, and then released a
chain latch. "What's the matter?" I asked.

"Reporters. Photographers. In regiments."

"Did you let them in?"

"Sure. I didn't want them to pound the place into splinters. No
interviews, though. I told them any official statement would have to
come from either you or Mr. Gableman. Just pictures."

"What kinds of pictures?"

"Chummy pictures. Pictures of Homer and Mary Ellen together."

"Doing what?"

"Oh, in the kitchen washing dishes--she washing and him drying; and Mary
Ellen sitting on the side of a chair while he read; and playing gin
rummy--all sort of homelike."

I kissed Jane on the nose. Jane's nose isn't quite sure what part of her
face it ought to grace, but at that moment it seemed beautiful. There is
nothing like a nice, chummy picture to drive the snakes of scandal out
of the home. "You're a smart girl," I said, "and the Civil Service
Commission shall hear about this, in an expurgated version, and the
first thing you know you will have your classification raised."

"That's wonderful," Jane said.

"How's Mary Ellen taking it? What has she done to Adam?"

"It's amazing," Jane said. "It's positively amazing. She didn't do a
thing to him. She just said she thought she understood, and that so far
as she was concerned she knew it was strictly archeological, and he
shouldn't worry about it. They're in the kitchen now, having a drink."

I went into the little kitchenette, one of those hotel affairs with a
lot of glasses, very few plates, and hardly any silver. There they were,
as Jane said, having a drink. But Homer was about as relaxed as a high
tension wire, and he was holding his glass as if he were afraid it would
jump out of his hand. Conversely, Mary Ellen appeared unworried and gay.
She was wearing a starched, cotton something that was so perfect you
wanted to surround her with cellophane and put her on the back cover of
a magazine as the happy wife with vacuum cleaner.

"Hello, Steve," Homer said, keeping his eyes on the floor.

"Hello, Steve," said Mary Ellen. "I was just telling Homer he shouldn't
worry. All big men have this sort of thing happen to them. Look at
Lincoln. They maligned him, too. I do think Homer is Lincolnesque, don't
you, Steve?"

"Sure," I said, "at least."

"He shouldn't let this thing worry him. It's all politics, isn't it
Steve?"

"Oh, absolutely," I said. I kept wondering what was going on in her
head, back of the wide-set gray eyes.

Homer lifted his head, started to speak, thought better of it, and
gulped at his drink instead. I knew what Homer was thinking. He was a
convulsive tangle of remorse, guilt, and downright fear. "Oh Lord," he
managed finally, "I wish I was like other men."

"Other men," I said gallantly, "wish they were like you."

"I want to speak to Steve alone for a moment," Mary Ellen said. "You
don't mind, Homer?"

"Oh, no, certainly not," Homer said, and he went out of the kitchenette
faster than I had ever seen him move before.

Mary Ellen didn't speak immediately. She whirled the ice in her glass,
lit a fresh cigarette, and then looked at me directly a few seconds with
those level gray eyes. I recognized the look. I've had it from Marge a
few times. It is grim business. "It was pretty lucky for the N.R.P. that
I happened to be in Washington, here with Homer, when this thing blew up
in the Senate today," she said. "Or did you plan it that way?"

"Who do you think I am, Machiavelli, Junior?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if you didn't
encourage Homer to run around with that girl just to get his mind off
the responsibilities of his home, so he'd go quietly when you were ready
to lead him to the slaughter."

I had to know how much she knew. "Exactly what do you think went on
between Homer and Kathy Riddell?" I asked.

"I think I can tell you exactly," Mary Ellen said calmly. "I think she
seduced him--probably only once--after very careful preparation."

"Did Homer tell you that?"

"Certainly not! And if he started to tell me about it I wouldn't let
him, because if he ever told me I'd have to give him up. And that I am
not going to do!" I knew she meant it. "Poor Homer," she continued, "is
transparent as that window pane. He's so honest, and decent, and gentle,
and kind that when he tries to lie you just have to feel sorry for him.
Why I knew--the first night I got here. He told me about this Kathy--and
her archeology--and how nice it was to meet someone with mutual
interests, and asked me whether I minded."

"You knew?"

"Certainly I knew. Women always know, although most times they won't
even admit it to themselves, and they try to tell themselves that there
is a chance they're mistaken, and they don't want to make any false
accusations. They do that because their husband's infidelity presents a
problem they're afraid of facing. They'd rather pretend it didn't
happen. They're weak. I'm not."

"No," I agreed, "you're certainly not weak, Mary Ellen."

The straight line of her chin held firm, but her eyes suddenly misted.
"You see, I love Homer. I'll always love him. That's why I can't afford
to be weak, or delude myself, if I'm ever going to get him back. I'm
just a plain woman, Steve. I'm no glamour-puss. I'm only going to have
one man who really, honestly loves me, and that man is Homer. So by
golly I'm going to fight for him."

"That's fine, and most laudable, and I'm in favor of it," I told her,
"but look at the position--"

"You're going to tell me about humanity, and my duty to the country, but
it doesn't affect me at all. I don't like the idea of Homer being used
to fertilize ten million women, by the artificial insemination method,
any better than I like the idea of him sleeping with The Frame."

"I think you're being narrow-minded. It is an entirely different matter.
As a matter of fact, after our medical advisory committee eliminates
waste from the methods of A.I., there isn't any reason why you and Homer
shouldn't lead an entirely normal married life. The doctors will need
him, perhaps, only a few days out of each month."

"I still don't like it," Mary Ellen said. "Have you ever considered my
side of it?"

"Only in a general way," I admitted. "But now I begin to understand how
you feel."

"At first I was just overwhelmed and terribly frightened," Mary Ellen
explained. "I didn't dare argue about anything, or say a word about my
rights. It was just too--colossal. Then when they took Homer away I
couldn't think of anything to do. I'd cry all night, every night. If it
hadn't been for Mrs. Brundidge--she made me get a grip on myself. Then I
made all sorts of wild plans. I was going to kidnap Homer, or appeal to
the Supreme Court. But I knew I wouldn't get any sympathy, especially
from the women. People would just say I was jealous, and selfish. Well,
I am jealous, damn it!"

I wondered how much Mary Ellen was going to complicate the plans of
N.R.P. "What do you propose to do?" I asked.

"I know that there isn't anything I can do at the moment about A.I.,"
Mary Ellen said. "All I want, now, is for Homer to stay in love with me.
I'm more afraid of one woman than I am of millions."

"I think you're wise."

"You'll help me, won't you, Steve?"

"I certainly will." I agreed. "After all, I'm working for the
government, and I have a job to do for the N.R.P., and I can't let them
down. But from now on, you can depend on me to keep a tight rein on
Homer. I'll admit I thought it was a good idea, at the time, for Homer
to go out with The Frame. He has all sorts of inhibitions, as you
probably know better than I do, and I thought if a good-looking girl
gave him a lot of attention it would help break them down. I didn't have
any idea it would go as far as it did."

"And I can stay here?"

"You can stay," I promised, "as long as the doctors agree it is okay."

It was a promise I couldn't make good. In a few days the storm caused by
Fay Sumner Knott's charges concerning _l'affaire_ Frame died down, but
at once a new and disquieting murmur spread over the land.

It burst into public, of all places, on the prim editorial page of the
Washington evening _Star_. The _Star_ began by saying it had always been
in favor of the Home, and Marriage, just as it had always been against
Evil, and Disease. But in view of the fact that it had received so many
letters on the subject it felt obligated to present the views of what
appeared to be a large portion of its readers.

The _Star_ carefully backed into its editorial by recalling that during
the war the government maintained a rigid control of strategic and
critical materials. It recalled the stern measures taken to guard our
precious supply of uranium at the time that the atomic bomb was being
developed. Mr. Adam was a far more important substance than uranium, and
there was obviously less of Mr. Adam than there was of uranium.

The _Star_ then delicately inquired whether the government was doing its
full duty to future generations when Mr. and Mrs. Adam lived under the
same roof, and presumably occupied the same bed. Adam, the _Star_ said,
was a vital and limited national property, and in this case the rights
of the nation, and indeed of the world, must be placed above Marriage
and the Home.

The Washington _Times-Herald_ said practically the same thing, but in a
somewhat different way, on the following day, under a caption which
read: "Is This Treason?"

The _Times-Herald_ said that it didn't matter much whether Homer Adam
was involved with The Frame, or whether he was involved with his wife.
In either case, it was negligence on the part of the Administration. It
was certainly sabotage, and possibly treason.

The _Times-Herald_ significantly recalled the story of the two unspoiled
Mongolians, which Moscow had never denied. Had Communist agents
infiltrated into the upper brackets of N.R.P.? It certainly looked like
it. And if they had, what better way was there for the Communists to
conduct a war of extermination against the United States than to
sabotage Mr. Adam?

The answer, of course, was very simple. Place Mr. Adam under the
strictest military guardianship, and conduct a nice, short, preventive
war against Russia before it was too late.

On the day following--a Thursday--all the newspapers bristled with
letters-to-the-editor, mostly of female origin, protesting against Mrs.
Adam, and the reporters on Capitol Hill said Congress was being swamped
with mail.

Homer and Mary Ellen naturally were aware of what was going on, and they
were both fretful and jumpy. On this Thursday I had driven them to Mount
Vernon in an N.R.P. sedan, ostensibly so they could soak up some
colonial atmosphere, but actually to keep them away from the radio. I
tried talking about everything else except what was on their minds, but
I could see it wasn't working. When we returned, Jane called from the
office: "I've been trying to get you all day," she said. "Hell is
popping. Everybody is taking turns stabbing you in the back, as if you
were a human dart board. They all say you're responsible."

"I am," I said.

"They're after your job," Jane warned.

"They can have my job, and they can take it, and--"

I noticed that Mary Ellen was at my shoulder. "Mr. Pumphrey just sent
you a memo--a red memo--" Jane continued. "He says it is imperative that
you attend the meeting of the Planning Board at ten tomorrow."

"All right," I said. "I'll be there."

The Planning Board, on Friday morning, looked like the directors of a
bank who have just been informed that the cashier has departed with all
the liquid assets. When I entered, they regarded me as if I were the
cashier. Gableman and Klutz shifted as far as possible from my chair, to
avoid contamination. Pumphrey, his baggy face a mottled purple, stared
at me as if I had just made an attack on his life. "I am very glad to
see you here, Mr. Smith," he said. "I hardly need to tell you that this
is a crisis!"

Sitting as observers, their chairs against the wall, and looking pious
and complacent as good little boys watching a fight from the other side
of the street, sat the liaison officers for the War, State, Interior,
and Navy Departments, the Public Health Service, and the National
Research Council. In a corner, inconspicuous as possible, sat Danny
Williams, the President's Secretary, who used to be on the Washington
Bureau of AP. He was unsmiling and grave, but when I glanced at him, one
owlish eye closed in a wink. They were all watching me. I didn't say
anything.

"We all have had the greatest confidence in you," Pumphrey said. "But
now we feel we have been betrayed. Do you hear that, Mr.
Smith--betrayed!"

"I don't see what's so terrible in letting Homer Adam stay with his wife
for a while," I said. "You asked me to get him into shape so that we
could start A.I. That's what I've been doing. If any of you think you
can handle Homer better, I'll be perfectly happy to step out. I'll be
more than happy. I'll be delirious with joy."

Into the eyes of Percy Klutz came the wild gleam I had seen before. "It
is exactly as I thought all along," said Klutz. "It is too big a task
for one man. What we need is an entire new organization, and I have
drawn up an entire new organizational chart."

Before anyone could stop him he sprang to his feet, and unrolled a
six-foot chart from a map case on the wall. "Now," he said, "you will
see that everything is almost the same, except up at the top, here,
where we had Mr. Smith, and down here in Operations. We restore the
committee, as originally planned, to direct policy on Mr. Adam. It will
be a somewhat larger committee than first suggested, so it will include
the State Department. Is that all right with you, Colonel
Phelps-Smythe?"

Phelps-Smythe, who had been sitting with folded arms, his chair tilted
back, enjoying himself, came erect, and said, "That's all right with the
War Department. My general has instructed me to say that the War
Department's chief concern is in security. Now I don't have to point out
that if the War Department had been left in charge of Adam's field
security, nothing like this would have happened."

"Oh, I've provided for that," said Klutz. "Right down here." He
indicated a row of boxes at the bottom of the chart. "I'll get to that
in a minute. First, we will take care of Mr. Smith. You don't mind, do
you, Mr. Smith?"

"I don't mind."

"Well, Mr. Smith continues as Special Assistant to the Director, but his
functions change somewhat. He becomes more of a liaison man between the
policy-making committee and the operations end. You see, he will have a
number of assistants who will take actual charge of Mr. Adam. There will
be assistants in charge of security, housing, recreation, health, and so
forth."

"That doesn't sound bad, Percy," said Abel Pumphrey.

"Just a matter of simple reorganization," said Percy proudly. "Every
agency has them."

"Do you think it will quiet all this criticism?" Pumphrey asked. He
looked at Gableman.

"I should think so," said Gableman, "provided Adam is separated from
Mrs. Adam."

"What do you say, Mr. Smith?"

"I say it stinks," I said. "If you put Adam in a straitjacket again,
he'll just get sick, or go nuts. Then where will you be?"

Danny Williams, who hadn't said anything thus far, spoke. "Instead of
all this chart business," he asked, "wouldn't it be better if Adam just
started having babies?"

"Naturally," said Abel Pumphrey, "that's ah, what we're all after.
That's our motto--production, production, and more production."

"Well, Steve," Williams asked me, "do you think Adam is in good enough
shape to start producing?"

"I think he's about ready," I replied, "but I wouldn't like to say for
certain until the medical advisers okayed it."

"And if A.I. started, all this criticism would end, wouldn't it?" said
Pumphrey.

"Oh, absolutely," said Gableman, "providing, as I said, his wife was out
of the picture."

"That's what the President thought," said Williams. "The President
thought that if Adam's health had improved we should just put him into
production. I suppose that both from a political and a medical
standpoint we had better separate Mr. and Mrs. Adam for the time being.
But I don't think there's any need for all this reorganization."

That, of course, settled it. At least I thought it did. Klutz, dejected
as an inventor who has been told his perpetual motion machine won't
work, rolled up his chart. Phelps-Smythe looked sour and grumbled
something I didn't quite catch, but which obviously concerned me. I said
that if the doctors okayed it, production could begin Monday.

When I returned to Adam's suite Mary Ellen was packing. She was crying
without any noise. Tears kept coming into her eyes, and she'd wipe them
with the back of her hand, but she wasn't letting even a sniffle escape
her. Finally she turned to me and said, "You don't have to tell me to
get out. I knew when you got that call last night that I'd have to go."

"Now take it easy, Mary Ellen," I told her. "It could be a lot worse."

"What did they decide?" she asked.

"Well, they decided that A.I. had to start right away. That was the
first thing. And they thought it best that you and Homer separate for a
while. Anyway, it would be pretty embarrassing for you to stay just at
this time, now wouldn't it, Mary Ellen?"

"I don't think so," she said in a small voice. "I don't think it would
be so terribly embarrassing."

"Oh, sure it would," I told her, trying to sound convincing. "Anyway,
this separation is just temporary. Just as soon as production levels
off, and is placed on a sound basis, you and Homer will be able to be
together again."

"I wish I thought so."

"What makes you think it won't happen?"

She stood up, very straight, unashamed of her tears and her anger. "It's
that girl--The Frame. She's after him again!"

"After him?"

"She called him from California this morning. What does she want? Why
does she keep after him?"

"What do any of them want? She wants to have a baby, I guess."

"No, it's deeper than that. Steve, I'm afraid. I'm terribly afraid!"

I remember the glimpse of the fanatic, The Frame's face had unmasked
just before she boarded her plane. In a vague sort of way, I was afraid,
too, but all I said was, "Stop worrying. I'll take care of anything that
comes up. Did you say anything to Homer?"

"No. I was with him in the living room when the call came in, and
afterwards I asked who it was, and he told me, and all I could say,
naturally, was how nice that she had called."

"What did he tell her?"

"He Just grunted, and said yes and no. Of course he knew I was
listening."

"Where's Homer now?"

"In the kitchen, brooding."

I went into the kitchenette. Homer was staring into a tumbler of milk as
if he expected something to poke its head out of it. I told him about
the meeting of the Planning Board. It didn't seem to affect him any more
than if I were describing a Friday afternoon session of the Hyannis,
Nebraska, PTA. I said, "I understand Kathy called this morning."

"Yes," and then: "Steve, I can't forget her. I keep thinking about her
all the time."

"Mary Ellen," I told him, "loves you. Mary Ellen is taking a terrific
beating, without complaining. Mary Ellen is my nomination as a swell
wife."

"Oh, I know it, Steve. Mary Ellen is wonderful. But how can I help it if
I keep thinking of Kathy? I can't control my thoughts, can I?"

"I suppose not," I said. I told him he'd get his final physical the next
day, and that A.I. would begin on Monday, if everything went according
to schedule. He didn't seem to mind. He kept staring at things without
seeing them, and I wondered what The Frame had told him that made him
act like he was the central figure in a hashish dream.

We took Mary Ellen to the station and put her on the New York train.
They seemed to have a lot of things to say to each other, but they
didn't mean anything. She would write every day, and tell him how
Eleanor was getting along. He would write every day, too. She hoped he
wouldn't have to be away from the baby so long--he should see how she
was changing. He said he was sure Steve would fix it up for him to visit
Tarrytown, but not just now of course. She said she didn't think this
A.I. would be as bad as he expected. He said he supposed he would get
used to it.

I told Mary Ellen that pretty soon she should buy some spring clothes,
and send me the bill, because all that was included in the N.R.P.
budget, and she should buy all she wanted.

She leaned down from the train steps and kissed him. She kissed him
hard, and clung to him. I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking
that probably she would not see him again.

Back in the hotel, I telephoned Tommy Thompson, and he promised to be in
Washington in the morning. "I'll bring a surprise for you," he said.

Homer and I played gin until midnight. The twelve o'clock news led off
with an excited announcement that, doctors willing, A.I. would begin on
Monday. As yet, the identity of the first A.I. mother, "destined to
again carry forward the banners of humanity," had not been revealed.




CHAPTER NINE


Dr. Thompson arrived in the morning. He didn't come alone. He brought
Marge, Maria Ostenheimer, and J.C. Pogey. "This is the visiting
delegation," he explained. "I hope you have room for us."

I told him to look around, and pick their own bedrooms. We had them to
spare. "All except you," I told Marge. "You know where you sleep."

"Yes, darling," Marge said, docilely.

"Why are you being so nice to me? What are you up to?"

"Why, nothing, sweetheart. Aren't you glad to see me?"

"Certainly I'm glad to see you, but when you get sugary like this I know
that you're up to something, or you've done something bad."

Maria said that was nonsense, and that, as she always knew, I was a
nasty and suspicious man. J.C. Pogey went prowling around, and said that
the Adam suite was a classic example of government waste. He had counted
eight bedrooms, and six baths, and there were only three people living
in it, if you included Jane, who sometimes spent the night.

"I'll tell you how it is," I explained. "If A.I. doesn't work, we're
going to use it as a sort of high-class male brothel." Marge said I
ought to be ashamed, and that I had shocked Homer, and indeed this was
true, for his face was the color of his hair.

I noticed that Tommy kept watching Homer, closely, not saying anything.
But I wasn't worried, because Homer appeared to be in good spirits, his
seizures of the shakes seemed to have deserted him, and he was even
talkative.

At eleven o'clock Tommy and I took Homer to the U.S. Public Health
Service for his examination. There were nine or ten doctors,
representing all the departments and agencies that had their hand on the
erratic pulse of this important human. They inspected him for an hour,
and then went into conference for a few minutes, and then they came out
and Tommy told me, "He's okay. We're getting out an official
report--that is, the Surgeon General will get it out--but the main thing
is that you can use Homer Adam on a limited scale."

"What do you mean, 'limited scale'?" I asked.

"Well, so long as everything goes along evenly, we can use Adam for the
impregnation of, say, two or three women a week. After he gains more
weight and his metabolism perks up he can be used more frequently,
providing that there are no glandular disturbances. Of course, if he
were subjected to great emotional shock, or his general physical
condition started to get worse instead of better, then we'd have to call
it off. But for now, you can go ahead."

I almost shouted. I'm afraid I ran to the telephone like a cub reporter
with his first flash. I called Abel Pumphrey, and gave him the news, and
then I called Danny Williams at the White House. Danny was a little
cagey, and made me repeat everything Tommy had said, and then he asked
me: "I suppose you feel your job's over now?"

I said, "I have only one life to give for my country, and believe me,
bud, I have given it!"

"Oh, no you haven't," he told me. "We'll be satisfied when A.I. is
S.O.P."[A]

-----

[A] Artificial insemination is standard operating procedure.

-----

"That's not fair, Danny," I pleaded. "I only agreed to get Adam in
condition for production. I've got my own life to lead."

"I could give you a lecture," Danny said, "on national responsibility.
But I do not think it is necessary. You know damn good and well that
your job hasn't ended. What about your wife? Do you want her to be
childless? For that matter, do you want to be childless? Do you want to
pass out of this world without perpetuating the name of--" he
hesitated--"Stephen Decatur Smith, the second."

"Okay, Danny," I surrendered. "But when things are S.O.P., I'm
finished."

"When it is all over," Danny said, "the President will no doubt give you
an award of the Legion of Merit."

I remembered Colonel Phelps-Smythe. I started out to tell Danny what he
could do with the Legion of Merit, pointed end first, but at that moment
Tommy touched me on the shoulder, and said the car was there, and he and
Homer were waiting.

So we went back to the party. Perhaps I had better explain. It wasn't a
party when we left, but it was a party when we got back. You cannot put
a lot of people in a large number of rooms with an unlimited assortment
of free liquor, and an excuse, and not have a party. The excuse was the
beginning of A.I., and they had anticipated the verdict before we
returned. As a matter of fact, when I look back on it, any other verdict
seemed impossible. On that day, even if Homer Adam were drawing his last
breath, gasping like a fish long out of water, still he would have been
approved for A.I. I guess we were all pretty desperate.

Everybody treated Homer as if he had just made a winning touchdown, and
he seemed to like it. You cannot exactly say that he stuck out his
chest, but at least his habitual slump straightened, in the manner of
all men who have been thumped and probed by the doctors, and told they
will live. But he stayed around the telephone. Whenever our phone rang,
Homer answered. Long before I'd arranged to have all our calls screened.
That is, I'd left a selected list of people who could call and get
straight through. Other calls were referred to N.R.P. Finally Homer
answered the telephone and didn't call me, or Jane, or J.C. Pogey, or
anyone else to it. He simply seemed to curl around it. I edged towards
him, but I didn't hear much. Just yes, and no, and grunts.

When he had finished, I went downstairs to the switchboard. "There was
just a call for Mr. Adam," I said. "Where did it come from?"

"Oh, that one. From L.A."

"Who authorized calls from L.A. up into 5-F?"

"Why, Mr. Smith," the girl said, surprised. "Mr. Adam himself did! We
don't screen any calls from Miss Kathy Riddell."

"How long has that been going on?"

"Why, ever since Miss Riddell was in Washington."

I said "thank you," and went back upstairs. There wasn't much, or
anything, that I could do about it. I didn't want to start anything that
would send Homer off on some unpredictable tangent. I simply wanted to
maintain the status quo. Anyway, in a few days it wouldn't matter, I
thought. Homer would be so busy re-populating the earth that not even
The Frame would interest him.

I don't think J.C. Pogey was a good influence on Homer. That afternoon
we were all sitting around, and Marge was acting as bartender, and Tommy
Thompson was telling us about his experiments which he hoped would
revive the male germ through medicine. It seems his first batch of
seaweed lotion, or whatever it was, hadn't been successful. Some fellows
got sick, but no wives got pregnant. So he had revised the formula.

"Wouldn't it be grand if it worked," Homer said. "Imagine, I could--why
I could do whatever I wanted. I'd be just like everybody else!"

"I don't see anything good about it," said J.C., "any more than I see
any real sense in torturing Homer Adam, here, simply because he was the
victim of an oversight. You--" he pointed a lean finger at
Tommy--"exhaust yourself trying to combat destiny. Why don't you take
that girl--" he shifted his finger towards Maria--"out into the woods
somewhere and forget all about the so-called human race. This little
globe we live on has grown old, as I have, and God has simply decided to
eliminate it. When Mississippi blew up God could just as easily have
allowed the world to blossom as a nova. Instead, he is going to let it
die like the last coal in the grate. Why fight it?"

Maria had been sitting on the arm of Tommy's chair, one small hand on
his massive shoulder. She waited for Tommy to speak, and when he did
not, she said, quietly, "I think I can tell you why Tommy works, and why
I work, Mr. Pogey. We are fighting for more than our lives. We are
fighting to keep intact the thread that ties us to the hereafter. Man's
only link with immortality is through his children. That's why we want
the world to keep on having babies."

J.C. Pogey shook his head in unhappy denial. "You're taking the short
view," he said. "I take the long view. This particular sphere is only
one of unnumbered millions stretching out across uncountable light
years. Some of these spheres probably carry creatures which also fancy
they have souls, and that they are linked with the Almighty. We would be
very self-centered to think otherwise."

"I'll agree," Maria argued, "that there must be some kind of life on
other planets, perhaps in other constellations, but you can't call it
human."

"Depends on what you term human," said J.C. Pogey. "Now I can imagine a
human being on some other globe. He might have four heads and eight
arms. If we saw him we'd consider him a monstrosity, simply because he
would be a bit unusual. But think how much better off he would be than
we humans who have only one head and two arms. One brain might be a whiz
at mathematics and a second at literature and another at philosophy and
the fourth might just like to raise hell. Think of the fun he'd have."

Marge said she thought J.C. was crazy, and that furthermore he made her
feel frightened, but Homer was listening, fascinated. "If that's true,"
he said, "it wouldn't be so bad if I--failed, would it?"

"Not at all," J.C. said.

"Don't listen to him, Homer," Marge said. "He's just a nasty
sacrilegious old man."

"On the contrary," said J.C., "the only thing that makes me retain my
sanity, and my belief in the Deity, is that this is a third-class world
which God doesn't take very seriously. It is like a rotten fruit that
has hung too long upon the tree. God has simply become bored with
running this world, and is closing it down."

"Then you don't think A.I. will work?" Homer asked, with the utter faith
of a woman asking a question of a swami.

"Frankly, no," J.C. replied. "I think you are just an accident, Homer,
an oversight that will be remedied. You shouldn't have been down in that
shaft when Mississippi blew up."

I could see that Homer was impressed. "Now look, J.C.," I said. "Stop
putting those silly ideas into Homer's head. Just because you're too old
to have children yourself, you shouldn't discourage everybody else in
the world."

J.C. snorted. "I don't believe it," he said. "Fate's against it."

"A.I. starts Monday," I said. "On Monday everything begins again."

A few hours later I began to think J.C. Pogey was right. Gableman and
Klutz came to see us. I thought they were coming in to join the
celebration, but they seemed distraught and worried. "Bring Mr. Gableman
and Mr. Klutz a drink," I told Marge. "And honey, change the brand.
Every drink I've had this afternoon tastes funny."

"Has it, dear?" Marge asked. "I'm sorry. Perhaps I'm mixing them wrong.
I'll do better."

Gableman signaled me with a nod, and we went into a huddle in a corner.
"Hell to pay," he said. "The office is a madhouse."

"What's wrong?"

Klutz said, "Well, this thing took us rather suddenly--I mean putting
Adam into production right away--and quite truthfully, we don't seem to
be prepared for it."

"I don't see why not," I told him. "Everything is simple enough now.
Homer is okay. I'll just take him down to the lab Monday morning, and by
Monday night some worthy female will be pregnant."

"That's just it," Klutz said. "How do we pick the worthy female?"

"You don't mean to tell me," I said, "that with practically every woman
in the United States wanting to become a mother--even women who never
wanted to be mothers before--that you have trouble picking one!"

Klutz drew a pencil from his pocket, and paper. He seemed incapable of
thought or speech unless they were accompanied by doodles. "It is far
more complicated than that!" he said. "It is complicated beyond anything
anyone imagined! It is a major matter of policy that should have been
decided, long ago, by the Inter-Departmental Committee, on the highest
level, mind you. For whomever we pick as the first A.I. mother, all the
other women will raise a howl, and it is bound to have political
repercussions!"

"That sounds insane," I commented. I looked up, and saw Homer's gaunt
form behind me, swaying slightly. He was listening, and he did not seem
amused.

"Oh, no," said Gableman. "It is not insane at all. Consider the factors
involved. In the first place--and this is really minor--there is the
matter of geography. Every state wants priority on production, and the
honor of furnishing the first A.I. mother."

"That shouldn't be hard," I pointed out. "After all, while Homer's
capacity is to be limited for the time being, each section of the
country can be represented in the first group of mothers selected."

Gableman ran his long, unwashed hands through his long, oily hair. "As I
said," he persisted, "that is the simplest part. Then you get into race,
religion, and social and economic position. The Negro question is
particularly vexing. Do you know what the Southern Democrats in the
Senate are doing? They're planning to legislate N.R.P. out of existence
unless we follow an All White policy. And the Negro press is screaming
that we will be murdering the race unless we follow at least a policy of
fifty-fifty.

"And take religion. There are some people who think that this is a fine
opportunity to eliminate the Catholics, or the Jews, and naturally the
Catholics and Jews are afraid of just this and they are demanding
guarantees against extinction."

I noticed that J.C. Pogey and Marge had joined our little group. Pogey's
face showed no emotion, but I knew he was laughing inside himself. "I
think it is ridiculous," I said. "The thing to do is get it started.
Why, look at Marge here. She's an average woman, and most of all she
wants things to begin again, don't you dear?"

"I wouldn't mind having an Adam child, if that's what you mean," Marge
said, smiling at Homer. "As a matter of fact, I'd like one very much."

"Now that wouldn't do at all, if I may say so," Gableman said seriously.
"Then people would charge the Administration with a sort of new-fangled
nepotism."

Klutz's pencil continued to work. "And that isn't by any means all," he
went on. "That is just the beginning. Suppose we pick a nice, average,
Presbyterian, white, not rich not poor housewife, of good character.
Well, all the unmarried women will say she's already had her chance, and
didn't do anything about it, and that they, the unmarried women who
never had a chance should have one now. Then, of course, the veterans'
wives have been asking for priority--and certainly this should be
considered, with elections coming up next year--but so have the Wacs and
the Waves. Who should have the priority, the wives or the service-women?
Dear, dear, I should think that this is the most perplexing problem that
N.R.P. has ever faced." Klutz stared at us. Obviously, it was so
monumental he could say no more.

Gableman took it up. "When the State Department heard that A.I. was
authorized to begin Monday, it immediately protested to the President,
because it had not been kept fully informed. The State Department is
conducting the most delicate negotiations on how to share Adam. It is so
delicate because of the two Mongolians."

"May I say something?" Homer asked timidly.

Gableman didn't hear him. "You see, the international situation is this
way. The State Department doesn't want to be accused of appeasing
Russia, but if there actually are two Mongolians then we want to be
big-hearted, and offer Russia a good slice of Adam. However, nobody
knows whether there are two Mongolians or not, and until the State
Department finds out, they do not want to be committed to a program.
They have given us an order to do nothing hasty."

"Pardon me a moment," Homer interrupted. "I was just going to say--"

"Yes," Klutz said. "I am afraid we have been caught flat-footed. I think
we should have a group of experts draw up recommendations to present to
the Planning Board, which in turn will work out a proposal which will be
presented to the Inter-Departmental Committee, which then can draw up a
directive for the approval of the President."

"Wait a moment!" Homer shouted. It was the first time I, or I suppose
anyone else, had ever heard Homer Adam shout. It shocked us all into
silence. Even Homer himself could not speak for a few seconds. But
observing the surprising effect upon us all, apparently gave him
courage, because he thrust out his chin as far as it would go and
demanded: "Did it ever occur to you people that I might want to have
something to say about this matter? It's me that's doing it, you know!"

Nobody said anything. "Why can't I pick my own brides?" Homer demanded.

"Oh, but you cannot really call them brides," Klutz protested. "It is
doubtful whether you'll ever see any of them at all."

"The children," Homer said, "are going to be my children, and I think I
should have something to say about what the mothers look like."

"Perhaps," Gableman suggested smoothly, "Mr. Adam is thinking of one
certain person?"

"And what if I am?" said Homer. He looked angry enough to fight. "You
stand up there and talk about splitting me up and dealing me out as if I
were a tax rebate. Perhaps, so long as I am to be given away, I can give
away a little of myself."

Marge shoved herself in front of me. "I think Homer is absolutely
right," she said. "I think for the first one he should choose whoever he
wants."

"You keep out of this!" I ordered her. "This is official business, and
anyway I think you've got your mind set on being unfaithful to me."

Klutz held up his hands. "Now, Mr. Adam," he pleaded, "please be
reasonable. The N.R.P.--and I am sure I am speaking for Mr. Pumphrey and
the Planning Board--could not possibly allow you to allocate yourself.
We would be accused of permitting you to set yourself up as a
dictator--which indeed you would be. Why, if you picked the mothers,
there wouldn't be much use of N.R.P. continuing at all, would there? It
would be contrary to the national interest."

Gableman rubbed his face, and his lower jaw worked as if in rhythm with
deep thought. "Gentlemen, I think I can offer a solution," he said. "Why
not pick the first A.I. mothers by lot, just the way soldiers are picked
by the draft?"

"That sounds like a very sound idea," Klutz agreed. "The only thing is
we'd have to register all the women who wanted to be mothers, which
would consume much time. And in addition, if every single prospect for
motherhood was allowed to register, the first choice might be one who
would be extremely controversial, and then where would we be? I'm not
sure N.R.P. could survive an unlucky choice."

"Well, let's put it in the lap of Congress," Gableman said. "We'll have
each Senator and Congressman nominate two women--just like they nominate
candidates for West Point--and then we'll give them numbers, and the
President can pick a number out of that goldfish bowl we always use for
those things."

"Say, that's fine," Klutz agreed. "I think that does it. But what about
the international drawings, if we have any?"

"Oh, we'll leave that to the UN," said Gableman, "although the State
Department won't like it."

"Well, thank goodness that's settled," said Klutz.

Homer, silent and white-faced, walked out of the room, down the hall,
into his own bedroom, and shut the door. I didn't feel good about the
way we'd treated Homer, but obviously, for his own best interests, I
felt he should not be allowed to participate in this phase of things.

Later that evening a Special Agent from the FBI came to 5-F. He brought,
as a safe hand messenger, the dossier of The Frame which I'd requested
the day she left for the Coast. You'd think newspapermen would quit
being surprised. They discover that kindly old gentlemen rape, and
sometimes chop up, little girls; and church deacons garnish their wives'
soup with arsenic over a period of years; and the impoverished old lady
who has been on relief has three hundred thousand in cash stuffed in her
mattress; and the lieutenant general who is a hero at home is a heel at
the front. Newspapermen ought to quit being surprised, but they never
do, and I was surprised at the dossier on The Frame. I had no more read
the book of her life correctly than the man browsing through the
library, who picks up a volume and reads an occasional sentence and
paragraph here and there--skipping whole chapters--and lays it down in
ten minutes.

I didn't even know how long she had lived. I thought The Frame was 25 or
26. She was 31. I didn't know she had been an honor student at her high
school in Chicago, and later at the University of Chicago, although of
course I knew her father was Professor Ruppe, the archeologist and
scientist. She had taken her B.S. at Chicago, and then come to New York
and danced.

In New York, too, she had a weird sort of double life, for even while
she danced at that seedy uptown tourist trap she was taking a master's
degree at Columbia.

In 1940 she had gone to Hollywood. She had become engaged to Dr. Alfred
Magruder, the atomic physicist from Berkeley. He had been killed in the
Mississippi explosion.

For two of the war years The Frame had been employed, along with her
fianc and her father, on the Manhattan Project. After the war she
returned to Hollywood, making occasional visits to Bohrville.

She was the author of a number of brilliant papers on nuclear fission.
On the Manhattan Project she had served as secretary and assistant to
the renowned Dr. Felix Pell. The dossier ended: "Loyalty and patriotism
unquestioned."

So that was The Frame! She seemed a most improbable person, and yet I
knew the FBI would not be mistaken in any detail. Long after everyone
else in the Adam suite had retired, I sat in the living room, staring
into the shadowy vastness of Rock Creek Park, and trying to fit The
Frame into the puzzle of Homer Adam. No matter how I arranged the
pieces, she didn't seem to fit--except in one way, and that way so
sinister that I instantly wanted to throw it out of my mind, just as the
mind rejects and quickly forgets a dream too horrible to remember.

Yet it kept coming back--the possibility that The Frame's interest in
Homer Adam was essentially directed at doing away with him, and in this
way completing the death of mankind. I kept telling myself that, all in
all, The Frame wasn't a bad sort of a girl, and the phrase in the FBI
report, "loyalty and patriotism unquestioned," I revolved over and over,
and yet the thought kept coming back to me.

It was altogether improbable. And yet was it any more improbable than
Mississippi blowing up and wrecking me by an unseen, unfelt radiation
without my even knowing it? Was it any more improbable than dropping a
bit of material the size of an egg on a great city, and thereby reducing
some hundreds of thousands of human beings to a few pinches of ashes?

It was not reasonable for The Frame to plot such a thing. And yet it is
not reasonable for grown, mature men who go to church on Sundays, and
are kind to their families, to spend the better part of their lives
seriously plotting, in General Staff conferences, how to eliminate
another nation, and most of its people, in the fewest number of days and
hours.

I kept looking for a motive. She might be crazy, of course. She was
probably a genius, and most of us believe that genius is a little crazy.
Or perhaps, having lost her chance of happiness, she wished all others
reduced to her level. This is a very peculiar, and often unnoticed,
instinct of people. We saw it one day, in March, 1933, when the nation's
economic inequalities were suddenly leveled by the bank holiday. Since
for a time nobody had anything, and all were alike in poverty, everyone
was relieved and happy.

I felt that I had to know more about The Frame's relations with Homer
Adam, and right away. I went into his room. He had his face almost
buried in the pillow, his long arms stretched around the crumpled pillow
as if he had been crushing it. His feet extended, toes down, over the
edge of the bed. He was asleep, and I shook him awake. "Hey?" he said.
"What's the trouble?"

"Wake up, Homer, I want to talk to you."

"All right, Steve. Go ahead. Talk."

"You're not mad at me, are you?"

"No. Why?"

"I thought you would be sore because I didn't stick up for you when you
said you wanted to pick the first A.I. mother."

"Oh no, I'm not sore. I was just trying to do someone a favor."

"I suppose you wanted to pick Kathy for the first A.I. mother. In a way,
I don't blame you. But I couldn't conscientiously encourage your
request. It would cause a great stir, and it wouldn't be fair to Mary
Ellen."

Homer turned over and sat up, his hair wild. He blinked the remnants of
sleep out of his eyes and said, "Oh, no. I wasn't thinking of Kathy. I
wasn't thinking of Kathy at all."

"Well, who were you thinking about?"

Homer seemed uncomfortable as if the bed were infested with red ants.
"I'd rather not say."

"Oh, come on, Homer, you can tell me!"

"No, I don't think I'd better."

"Why, that's silly, Homer. If you are really set on picking some
particular person, maybe I can fix it up. Perhaps it's Mary Ellen.
Perhaps you'd like to have another child yourself. Nobody could blame
you for that."

Homer didn't look at me. He looked at his hands, and he looked at the
door, and he looked everywhere but at me. "No, it was not Mary Ellen,"
he said. He hesitated, and then blurted out, "If you have to know,
Steve, it was Marge."

"Marge!" I tried to pull myself together. I knew that I should be urbane
about it, and perhaps nonchalant, and that by no means should I alarm
Homer, but I knew I wasn't succeeding.

"Please, Steve," Homer pleaded. "Please don't be angry. I was only
trying to repay all your favors and your kindness. And I know that more
than anything else Marge wants to have children, and she's always been
so nice to me, and she said that she would be delighted to have an Adam
child. She's hinted herself, several times today. She's always said
she'd be proud to have one."

"Oh, she has, has she?"

"Yes. You see, Steve, that's all I have to give."

Well, I thought, I have to be broad-minded, and Homer is really being
very decent and sincere, and there isn't any reason to be jealous. "That
is really very decent and generous of you, Homer," I said. "I am
touched. But I think that on behalf of the Smith family I must decline.
As a matter of fact, as Gableman pointed out, people would call it
nepotism, and charge graft and favoritism within the Administration.
Why, it would be just like an official of the Department of the Interior
deeding himself oil land owned by the government."

"Yes, I suppose so," said Homer. "But it seems to me that every time I
want to do anything, myself, somebody blocks me. I ought to have some
rights."

"Homer," I advised him, "I think you had just better dedicate yourself
to unselfish service. You will be happier." I remembered my original
mission in waking him. "Homer," I asked, "does Kathy want to have
children?"

"No. I'm quite sure she doesn't."

"How sure?"

"Oh, I am absolutely sure. Absolutely. She said she wasn't ready to have
children yet."

That answer fitted in with the theory I could not ignore. "Did Kathy
ever suggest that you shouldn't go through with A.I.?"

Homer considered a few moments before he spoke, his bony fingers picking
at the mauve blanket. "Not exactly," he said. "She said I was being used
improperly, and she doesn't have a very high regard for the N.R.P."

"Did Kathy ever talk to you about nuclear fission, or anything like
that?"

"Oh, no! All we've ever talked about was archeology--and us. If you
don't mind Steve, I'd rather not go into it any further. You know how it
is--it's very personal with me. I think at least that part of my life is
private property."

"I can't help but agree with you," I told him. His answers left me not
far from where I was in the beginning. Forget it, I said to myself.
Forget it. If The Frame wanted to destroy Homer, she'd had plenty of
opportunity that night in the hotel. I promised myself I would forget
it, and that, as Maria always insisted, I had a naturally suspicious
mind, and yet I knew I would not forget it.

"Honestly," Homer said. "You're not sore about my suggesting--about
Marge?"

"Not a bit, Homer. Go on to sleep. Just dismiss it from your mind."

"Thanks, Steve," he said, and fell back on the pillow.

I went to my bedroom and turned on the light and Marge instantly raised
her head and said, "Stephen, this is a fine time to be getting to bed.
It is--" she looked at her watch--"nearly three o'clock. If that's all
you think of me you can just get into your own bed."

"Don't worry," I told her. "I will!"

"Stephen, what on earth is the matter with you?"

"There are a number of kinds of infidelity," I said, taking off my shoes
and slamming them on the floor. "It isn't necessary to be physically
unfaithful. You can be unfaithful in spirit. One is as bad as the
other."

"Stephen, stop talking in riddles."

"You know what I'm talking about."

She made a face at me. "All right, then, stay over there in your own
bed."

"You certainly have changed a lot," I said, "since this morning. This
morning you were silky sweet to me. Now, you don't want me to touch
you."

"I didn't say I didn't want you to touch me."

"Yes you did. You told me to get into my own bed."

She sat up, looking very pink and round and powdered and clean and
smooth. "Stephen, you don't know a damn thing about women!"

I turned out the light.




CHAPTER TEN


It was one of those awakenings when you know something is wrong, and for
a while you cannot figure out what it is, and then you discover that it
is yourself. My head felt floaty, as if it were filled with helium and
wanted to disengage itself from my trunk, and my elbows and knees ached.
When I sat up I definitely had white flashes and spots in front of my
eyes. "Oh," I groaned. "I feel awful."

"That's too bad," said Marge, looking at me with deep interest. "What's
the matter, hangover?"

"I didn't drink enough to have a hangover."

"Oh, I think you did," Marge said.

"No I didn't. I think I'm sick."

"Oh, I hope not," Marge said apprehensively. "I certainly hope not. I'll
bring you some aspirin, and coffee."

The coffee tasted horrible. "You put salt in here," I accused her,
"instead of sugar."

"No I didn't. Really I didn't, Stephen. Just stay in bed and you'll feel
better. I'm sure you'll feel better."

"Call Tommy Thompson," I said. "I think I've got pneumonia, or
something."

She got Thompson in a hurry. He was sleepy-eyed, and wearing a maroon
dressing gown I suspect he had filched from the Army. He held my wrist,
and felt my forehead, and looked under my eyelids. "Pulse is a little
rapid," he said. "I don't see anything else wrong."

"When I look at things," I said, "they won't stand still. Things keep
jumping around."

"Nerves," Thompson said. "Just plain nerves. You'll feel better in a
little while. You ought to relax for a few days. Why don't you and Marge
fly down to Florida?"

"Oh, no," I said. "We're in the last lap, now. I'm not going to leave
here and have something happen. I want to get this job wrapped up, and
finished. Then we'll take a vacation, won't we, dear?"

"It would be lovely," Marge said.

After thirty or forty minutes I began to feel better, as Thompson had
predicted. But all day long everything I ate and drank tasted salty.

Tommy and Maria and J.C. Pogey went back to New York on the
Congressional that afternoon, and Homer and Marge and Jane went to the
station to see them off. The last thing Pogey said, he said to Homer.
"Son," he told him, "if everything doesn't work out the way it is
planned, don't feel too badly about it. Not your fault. It just wasn't
set up to be that way." I never saw such an incorrigible pessimist.

Monday, on which we had hoped to begin A.I., passed, and the other days
of the week trooped past after it. Generally, people seemed satisfied
with the N.R.P. plan for selecting the first A.I. mother, and those who
would be next in line. But Moscow wasn't satisfied, and said so very
plainly. The Russians didn't mind selecting an American for the first
A.I. mother, but the second ought to be Russian, and the third perhaps
might go to Great Britain. As to the smaller states, they weren't to be
considered until much, much later. As a matter of fact, the Russians
didn't see any need for including Poles, Rumanians, Hungarians, Turks,
Egyptians, or Persians in the plan at all. Those lands, the Russians
said, could be re-populated any time, and the Soviet Union would be glad
to attend to it. The State Department countered by asking Russia, for
the tenth time, whether it was true about the two Mongolians. The
Russians said this was strictly an internal matter.

Domestically, things were better. The Congress viewed the plan as an
unexpected and welcome gift of patronage. Whenever a Congressman has a
chance to give away something that doesn't belong to him, it is so much
gravy. It was a splendid opportunity to pay off political debts, win
social favor, and endear themselves with women's organizations. It was
just ticklish enough, politically, to be exciting. And since the N.R.P.
had placed a week's deadline on the nominations, they could always plead
that the Administration forced them to choose in haste, in case their
nominations failed to meet public approval. Some made their choices
public--when they were absolutely certain they were politically
foolproof. But most said they wouldn't divulge the names until the
drawings.

In that week we took Homer down to the Eastern Shore, for fishing, and
to Bowie for the opening of the spring racing season, and to the
National Theater, and for a trip through the Shenandoah Valley, and by
the time the next Monday rolled around Homer really appeared fairly
healthy. I do not mean that he could go out and chop down trees. I
merely mean that he looked as if he could beget a number of babies.

On noon Monday we went to the Capitol. That is, Marge and I went to the
Capitol. We left Homer at the hotel, at his own insistence. He was
fearful, and I suppose rightly, that he would receive an ovation if he
were discovered sitting in a gallery while the drawing took place, and
he was deathly afraid of public attention.

The drawing was held on the floor of the House, and the scene was so
familiar, with its warlike connotation, that it seemed like looking at
an old newsreel. Only this time it wasn't Wilson or Roosevelt wearing
the blindfold.

When the preliminaries were over, the President reached his hand into
the goldfish bowl and drew out a capsule and handed it to the Clerk of
the House. He opened it, unfolded a slip of paper, and shouted into the
banked microphones: "Number 646. The number is 646!"

Up from the well of the House there floated an excited feminine scream.
"What was that?" Marge asked.

"Just an overwrought female," I said.

"I don't know," said Marge. "Do you know what it sounded like to me. It
sounded just like when a woman wins a door prize at a bridge party, or
right after she yells 'Bingo.' I wonder who had number 646?"

I noticed an unusual commotion in the Press Gallery. Ordinarily the
Press Gallery moves swiftly and efficiently to get out the flash, but
now it seemed to be erupting in all directions. "I'll find out what
happened," I told Marge, left my seat, and worked my way down the
corridor.

I ran into Bingham, the UP man. "How about a statement?" he asked before
I had a chance to speak.

"On what?"

"Don't you know who he picked?"

"No."

"Number 646," Bingham said, "is held by Fay Knott."

"You mean one of her candidates?"

"No, by her, personally."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I feel sick. You'll have to excuse me." I did feel
sick. The baroque tiled walls of the corridor were all leaning in
towards me. I blundered my way back to Marge. "Let's go," I told her,
"646 is Fay Sumner Knott. What a catastrophe! What a disaster!" I
thought of the President. "That poor unlucky man," I said. "That poor,
poor unlucky man!"

When we reached our car Marge asked, "But why did she nominate herself?
I don't think that is fair."

"I suppose," I said, "Fay Sumner Knott couldn't find any other woman in
her own state as admirable as herself. That's the way she figures, you
know."

"What's going to happen?" Marge asked. "Can't you get it cancelled, or
something? Is it really so bad?"

"Wait until I break the news to Homer," I said.

We reached the hotel and we went up to 5-F. Jane opened the door for us
and I walked in, feeling that there should be signs around saying,
"Achtung--Minen!"

Homer was waiting in the living room, with the early editions of the
afternoon papers strewn around his chair. "Well," he said, "what's the
verdict?"

"Senator Knott," I said.

"What about her?" Homer asked.

"She won the draw. She's going to be A.I. Mother Number One."

Homer started to rise, lost control of his legs, and sat down again, his
mouth hanging open. "No!" he said when he could speak. "No! No! I won't
do it, Steve. I won't have anything to do with this any more. Why she's
the worst--the absolute worst--I'm going away right now." He got to his
feet, and started for the door.

"Now wait a minute, Homer," I pleaded, clinging to his arm. "Wait a
minute and let me tell you something." He was hard to stop as a
telegraph pole that wants to go somewhere, but I slowed him down before
he reached the door. "Homer," I said, "there are a lot of things to
consider--an awful lot!"

I led him back to his chair, and he sat down and he put his head in his
hands. Every few seconds he'd shake his head and pull his hair. "Homer,"
I said, "what is to be will be. It was all done fair and square, and you
can bet that the President didn't want to pull her number out of the
goldfish bowl because he doesn't like her any better than you do or I
do. But this is a democracy, Homer, and that's the way we have to do
things."

"It is a democracy for everyone except me," Homer protested. "I've got a
hundred and forty million dictators sitting on my neck and I don't like
it and I'm going away."

"It isn't as bad as you think," I told him, and motioned to Marge and
told her to quick bring some liquor. "It could be much worse, Homer.
Suppose you had to marry her and live with her? But you don't. You don't
even have to see her. Actually, it doesn't make any difference to you
whether she is number one or number eleven million eight hundred
thousand six hundred and forty-two, now does it?"

"It makes a difference that she has a number at all," Homer said.
"Imagine, when she has a child that will be my child too!"

"Well, all your children are bound to look pretty much alike, you know,
Homer," I argued. "As a matter of fact you probably won't be able to
tell one from the other in a few years."

"I've thought of that too," Homer replied, "and believe me I don't like
it."

Marge brought drinks. Her hand was unsteady when she gave them to us. I
remember that Marge liked Homer, and she always felt she had a personal
stake in him. "Now drink your drink and let's talk this over sensibly,"
I said.

"That's another thing I don't like," Homer went on stubbornly. "How
would you like to go out on the street and everyone would have the same
face and all of them would be like yours?"

"Well," I admitted, "I think it would be confusing, but at the same time
that just illustrates how impersonal this matter has got to be to you."

Homer drew a deep breath, and drank his highball without taking his
glass from his lips and just at that moment Gableman came in, followed
by Abel Pumphrey, and both of them looked fresh and happy. Pumphrey
grabbed Homer's hand and began to pump it and said, "Well, well, now
we're on our way, aren't we, Homer? The worst is over, and there's all
clear sailing ahead."

"That's what you think!" Homer said. "The worst is just beginning."

"No, you mustn't feel like that," said Mr. Pumphrey. "My boy, it was
almost a miracle, having Senator Knott become A.I. Mother Number One.
Almost a miracle! There can't be any criticism of N.R.P. about that
pick--no, sir. It shows that the Administration is absolutely unbiased,
allowing a member of the opposition to win the draw. And the Senate will
like it, too. They'll all be proud to have one of their members become a
mother."

Homer could not speak. I forced another drink into his hand.

Gableman showed a mouth full of rotting teeth in a wide grin. "Senator
Knott is down in the lobby right now," he said. "She's coming up in just
a moment to pose with you. She is an extremely attractive woman, isn't
she, Homer? Even if she did cause us a little trouble some time ago, I
don't think the President could have made a luckier choice, that is,
from the political standpoint."

Homer choked on his drink and gasped, "Did you say she was coming up
here?"

"Yes, just as soon as all the photographers and newsreel men arrive,"
said Gableman.

Suddenly Homer relaxed, in the manner of a fighter loosening up in his
corner. "If she comes in here," he said, very softly, "I'll strangle
her."

"You'll what?" said Abel Pumphrey, the veins jumping up from under his
Herbert Hoover collar.

"I'll tear her to pieces and throw her up for grabs," Homer said, "like
this." He extended his long arms and showed how.

I decided it was time to intervene. "Gentlemen," I said, "Mr. Adam is
overwrought. He has been unnerved by the strain. I think you had better
excuse him. You had better go on downstairs and tell Senator Knott that
Mr. Adam is sorry, because if she comes up here I really do think he
will slap her around." I led them to the door, and got them outside.

"What's wrong with him?" Gableman asked. "Has he gone nuts?"

"My gracious," said Abel Pumphery, "I never realized he was so
temperamental. Why, he acts as if he thought he was the biggest man in
N.R.P.! If anyone should have retained a grudge because of what Senator
Knott said in the Senate, it should have been me. But I took it in my
stride, and now I welcome Senator Knott as the ideal American A.I.
mother. She has beauty, brains, and, ah, money. What more can Adam want,
particularly when he doesn't have to actually, ah, to actually have any
connubial contact with her."

"I think it's a little personal," said Gableman. "I'll always figure
that Adam and that actress had a good deal more in common than
archeology."

"I would watch him closely," Abel Pumphrey advised. "Very closely
indeed. I simply don't understand him. I don't understand him at all."

Homer was still in his chair in the living room. "Well, I got rid of
them," I told him.

"Thanks, Steve, but I really don't think I'll go through with it." He
spoke very quietly, calm as a banker who has reached a decision not to
make a questionable loan.

"I'll tell you frankly, Homer, I don't think there's much of a chance
that Fay Knott will produce a baby anyway. She was married a couple of
times, and nothing happened. When her second husband died, people said
he froze to death."

"It is the principle of the thing," Homer said.

"That's exactly it--a matter of principle," I argued. "Is it right for
any one man to put himself in the place of God, and condemn the world to
slow death? You don't want to be in that position, do you?"

"I'm not putting myself in that position," Homer said. "I just don't
want to have anything to do with that woman."

Marge sat on the edge of his chair, her long, sleek legs swinging, and
ran her fingers through Homer's hair. It was the first time I had ever
seen her touch another man like that, and I found that whatever I had to
say had gone from my lips. "Think of the other women, Homer," Marge
said. "Think of me and all the other women who will just curl up and die
inside if they lose hope. You know, you're the hope of every woman,
Homer--even those you'll never be able to satisfy."

Homer didn't answer. He kept his eyes on the floor. I knew he was
thinking. I thought, I guess Marge put it over all right, and then I
said, "We'll go down to the lab about noon tomorrow, Homer. We'll take
it easy until then. Now buck up. It isn't really going to be as bad as
you think. For the time being you're going to have a very easy program,
and every day they don't need you in the lab we'll go to the races. You
like the races, don't you?"

Presently Jane Zitter came in. She had been getting the latest bulletins
from the Capitol on her bedroom radio. She was flushed with what I
presume was a vicarious maternal instinct, and she began to recite the
list of those fortunate enough to be drawn in the first group after Fay
Knott. There was a National Committeewoman from California, the winner
of last year's Atlantic City beauty contest, several childless widows of
veterans, the wife of a railway president, and the granddaughter of a
Vanderbilt.

"You see," I told Homer, "you should think of those people, instead of
Knott. Think of how disappointed they would be if anything happened."

He nodded. I sighed. I thought my battle was won. I began to think of
plans. Marge and I would take a sea voyage to Honolulu, or perhaps to
Rio. The world would be a good place to live in again. Eventually, I
might even allow Marge to persuade me to okay an A.I. baby. The
telephone rang, Homer unfolded and answered it, and presently he began
his ritual of yeses, noes, and grunts that showed The Frame was on the
other end. I mentally kicked myself for not having asked the FBI to put
a tap on our phone. I'd have given anything to have known what The Frame
was telling Homer, but his face was immobile and unrevealing.

That night we played bridge, and at nine o'clock I flicked on the wall
radio, and who should be there but Gabriel Heatter. "Oh, there's good
news tonight," he said like the peal of an organ. "Yes, there's good
news tonight. Dare I say it? Yes, I think I will dare say it. Mankind
marches on! Tomorrow there begins the greatest experiment in all
history. Will it succeed? Will it fail? It must succeed! Yes, everyone
in the sound of my voice knows that. It must succeed!"

"You see what honest Gabe says," I told Homer.

"And Heatter predicts that it will succeed," Heatter said. "Heatter
wants you to remember that Heatter predicted the end of Hitler--and
Mussolini. And now Heatter predicts it will succeed! Nine months from
tomorrow we will all breathe easy again! Nine months from tomorrow that
fine and inspiring example of American womanhood, Senator Fay Sumner
Knott, will again lift aloft the glorious torch of motherhood. Ninth
months from tomorrow there will be a miracle--a baby will be born!"

Homer smiled. I didn't like the way he smiled, "What are you thinking,
Homer?" I asked.

"Oh, nothing," Homer replied. "Nothing at all, really."

Heatter insidiously switched from a description of Homer's hair, to the
need of all men for hair tonic, and I shut him off. "What do you think
of honest Gabe?" I asked Homer, feeling uneasy about that smile.

"I like to listen to him," Homer replied. "He is so optimistic."

"Yes," Jane agreed. "During the Battle of the Bulge I don't know how I
could have carried on without Heatter."

"I don't think he's a newscaster at all," I said. "I think he's a
chanter in a choir. But I like to listen to him, as Homer does, because
he is so optimistic. I feel that so long as Heatter and his partner,
God, have everything in hand, I don't have to worry."

Homer yawned. "If you'll excuse me," he said, "I think I'll go to bed.
I've got a hard day ahead, you know."

I told him I thought that was a splendid idea, and he was to forget all
his worries. "You just go into this as if it was a business," I said.
"The laboratory will be your office, and on certain days you have to go
to the office. All the rest of the time you will be free. Just consider
yourself a capitalist who only has to go to the office two or three
times a week, and spend an hour or two. You know, it isn't so bad,
Homer, when you look at it that way."

Homer smiled as if nothing were funny. "Good night," he said. "Good
night."

Jane Zitter went to bed, and that left Marge and me. "Well, I guess that
flap is over," I said. I began to talk about Honolulu, and Rio, and the
gaudy beauty of Sydney harbor, and the minaret-speared moon rising over
old Stambul, and the comparative stenches of Naples, Venice, and Cairo.

Marge listened, placid and enigmatic as a lovely model in a department
store window. "Do you really believe it?" she said finally. "Do you
really believe that anything like that is going to happen, ever again? I
don't think you really believe it. I think you're just whistling to keep
up your courage."

"Certainly I believe it," I protested. "By the middle of summer
everything will be back to normal, including us. We'll have a glorious
time."

"Would you like to know what I think?" Marge asked.

"What do you think?"

"I think that if Fay Sumner Knott has a baby you will be able to call it
an immaculate conception."

"You're a cynic, like J.C. Pogey."

"We'll see."

We kept on arguing until long after midnight, with Marge insisting that
things wouldn't work out right. She said she didn't like the way Homer
was acting, and I said I didn't either but I wasn't going to do anything
rash that would upset him. She said she had a premonition, and I said
that I didn't believe in premonitions or ghosts or poltergeists. She
said I was a stubborn double-dyed jackass and I said she was a neurotic
old woman who probably looked under the bed every night when I wasn't
home. She reminded me of all the times she had been right and I had been
wrong, and I said that just as many times I had been right and she had
been wrong, but I didn't keep all those times in a catalogue, the way
she did, because it would embarrass her. She said I could sleep in my
own bed, and I said that was fine with me, and I did.

When I awoke Marge was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at me.
She leaned over and kissed me and said, "I'll say I'm sorry if you'll
say you're sorry."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's a dream of a morning," she said. "It's spring. Birds and
everything." Some robins were trying out their voices, and the sun was
beating in through the open window, and the breeze from the park smelled
of growing things.

It was ten o'clock. We put on our robes and went into the living room
and picked up the morning papers. "I'm running up a little breakfast,"
Jane called from the kitchenette. "How do you want your eggs?"

"Poached, honey," I yelled back. "Marge too. Where's Homer?"

"Oh, he went out for a walk in the park," Jane said.

"He did? How long ago?"

"He went out at nine. Said he'd be back for breakfast. Isn't it a
glorious morning?"

"Perfect. How did he look?"

"I've never seen him look better. He absolutely sparkled. He looked like
a schoolboy going out to buy candy for his first date."

"That's fine," I said. Marge looked at me, her head cocked on one side,
"Yes, isn't it," she agreed.

"The eggs will be ready in two minutes," Jane yelled.

I picked up the _Post_ and glanced from headline to headline. No matter
how much I concentrated, I couldn't retain a word or a phrase. "Hadn't
you better go out and find Homer?" Marge suggested sweetly.

"Oh, I don't think so," I said. "He might be on any path in Rock Creek
Park, and we'd just miss each other. Anyway, he'll be right back."

"Do you think so, dear?"

"What's wrong with Homer taking a walk in the park? He's often taken a
walk in the park."

"There's nothing wrong with it, dear, so long as he comes back."

Jane brought a plate and put it on my lap. Two eggs, nestling on
buttered toast, stared at me like accusing yellow eyes. Suddenly I
wasn't hungry. I put the plate aside. "Don't you think you had better go
out and find him now, dear?" Marge suggested again. I didn't like the
way she said "dear." It was like a knife blade sliding across my throat.
I didn't like anything about this morning. I felt that the sun, the
birds, the grass and the buds were all laughing at me. I noticed that
Jane was watching me, and that little beads of perspiration were
standing out on her face, and that her fingers were tightly intertwined.

I got up and said, "Yes, I think I'd better go out and find him." I
dressed in a hurry. It didn't seem necessary to put on a tie.

Out in front of the hotel I looked carefully up and down the street.
Wouldn't it be smarter, I thought, just to wait here for him? There were
a dozen roads and pathways that led into Rock Creek Park, in the space
of a few blocks, and he might be on any one of them. I tried waiting. I
waited for five minutes. Any second, now, he will turn up. Any second I
will see that red head bobbing along. I started walking towards
Connecticut Avenue, changed my mind, and went in the other direction.
Back of the hotel a road curved through the park, and I found myself
hurrying down this road. I walked perhaps a half-mile before I stopped.
This is stupid, I told myself. This is utterly stupid. He's probably
back at the hotel right now, and Jane and Marge are laughing at me.

I walked back to the hotel. "Did you see Mr. Adam come in?" I asked the
doorman.

"No, Mr. Smith. I saw him go out, earlier, but I haven't seen him come
in."

"What did he do when he went out?"

"I don't think I noticed. He just walked away."

"Did he meet anybody?"

"Let me see. No, he didn't meet anybody. He just walked away. Of course,
Mr. Smith, he might have come back through one of the other entrances.
Maybe he came in through the terrace, and the swimming pool. If he went
walking in the park, that's the quickest way back, you know."

"Oh, certainly," I said. "Thanks." Naturally, if he went walking in the
park, he'd return through the back. He'd probably come back while I
waited outside. If he came through the back, the desk clerk would
probably have seen him.

I went over to the desk and asked the clerk if he had seen Mr. Adam this
morning.

"Why yes, Mr. Smith," he said. "I saw him at about nine. He left an
envelope for you. He said you'd be down later to pick it up." He reached
into a letter box and brought out an envelope and handed it to me just
as if it were an ordinary envelope.

"Thanks," I said. I suppose I smiled. People always smile when the desk
clerk hands them an envelope, even when it's an eviction notice, or an
advertisement, or a bill. I put it in my pocket, and my legs carried me
to the elevator. I said, "Five, please," as if nothing had happened.

The operator said, "Aren't you feeling well, Mr. Smith?"

"Oh, not so good," I said. "Not so bad but not so good."

I found myself standing in front of the door to 5-F. I thought, maybe
it's only a note saying he'll be a little late, and I'm making a fool of
myself. I thought, maybe I'd better open it here before I go in. I
pulled it out of my pocket and looked at it. It was a hotel envelope and
on the face of it was scrawled, _Steve Smith_. That didn't tell me
anything. I thought, if he's running away, the quicker I find out about
it the better. I started to open it and then put it back in my pocket.
You're yellow, I told myself. I took it out of my pocket again. I opened
the door and walked into 5-F.

"Well?" Marge asked.

"He didn't come back?" I said. She didn't answer. "He left a--there was
a letter or something down at the desk." I tried to open it, but I
didn't seem to be making any progress.

"Let me have it!" Marge demanded. She took the envelope from me, and
slid a sharp thumbnail under the flap and it popped open with no trouble
at all. Inside was a single sheet of paper, with writing on both sides.
She spread it out on the table, and I read it over her shoulder. Homer
had written:

    Dear Steve,

    Please consider this my resignation from N.R.P. Under the
    Constitution and by any other laws I have got as much right to
    resign as anyone else, and I resign, as of now.

    I hate to do it, because I know it will get you into trouble.
    You have been a good friend, and believe me if it gets you into
    trouble I am sorry, but I am sure you can get out of it.

    I might as well tell you, because you will find out soon enough.
    I am going away with Kathy. We are going away and we are not
    coming back. I tried my best to do my duty, and I wouldn't have
    minded so much if Senator Knott hadn't been picked as Mother
    Number One. That was too much. And as Kathy pointed out to me,
    the first A.I. child might very well inherit all the bad traits
    of both Senator Knott and me, and I don't feel that we have the
    right to impose any such thing upon the world.

    I am inclined to agree with Mr. Pogey that the world is, and by
    rights ought to be, extinct. And so long as it is going to be
    extinct, why prolong the agony?

    I am sorry to leave Mary Ellen and little Eleanor, but there is
    money enough to care for them. I think Mary Ellen will
    understand that my only chance for happiness is to resign and go
    away with Kathy. She is the only one who has the courage to help
    me. So, goodbye, Steve.

                                                             Homer.

    P.S. Give my love to Marge, and tell Jane goodbye for me.

I picked up the telephone. "Who are you going to call?" Marge asked.

"I have had it!" I told her. I think I spoke without undue passion, and
with determination. "I have had it, and I am going to call the airport,
and we will get on a plane to New York right away. We'll retire to Smith
Field and pretend none of it happened."

Marge took the telephone out of my hand and slammed it on its cradle.
"Oh, no you're not!" she told me. "You can't! You're responsible, Steve.
If you run out, now, I'll leave you. I swear it. I'll leave you flat."

Jane was reading Homer's note. She finished it, it fluttered in her
hand, and she quietly slid to the floor. "Do you see what you've done?"
Marge said. "She's fainted. Get a wet towel, you dope, and start
thinking!"




CHAPTER ELEVEN


My every instinct warned me to get out of that hotel fast, and keep
going, but since I could not do this, there were obvious steps to be
taken. First I called the N.R.P., and asked for Abel Pumphrey. His
secretary answered, and asked who was calling and I told her and she
said, "Couldn't you call back a little later, Mr. Smith. Mr. Pumphrey is
very busy right now."

I said it was urgent, and she said Mr. Pumphrey had said he did not want
to be disturbed, because he was working on his radio script with Mr.
Gableman. "You know he's speaking tonight on a national hookup," she
said, "on the beginning of A.I."

"This will concern his speech," I said, "very vitally."

"In that case," she said, "I'd better put you through."

"Who's this?" Pumphrey's voice said. "Oh, it's you, Smith. I'm terribly
busy right now, couldn't you--"

"Homer Adam," I said, "has run away."

There was a choking sound at the other end of the line, and then, "I
don't think I understood you, Smith--Steve--did you say--"

"Homer Adam has run away. He has gone. He has vanished."

There were loud, strange noises on the other end of the line, and
disconnected words and phrases, but they were not coming from Abel
Pumphrey.

"What's happening," Marge asked.

"I don't know. Sounds like the place was suddenly invaded by furniture
movers."

I kept on saying hello, hello into the telephone, and after a number of
minutes a voice on the other end said, "Hello, hello, is this Smith?
Gableman. What did you do to Mr. Pumphrey?"

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's out cold. I think he's had a heart attack. We're sending him to
the hospital."

"I told him about Homer Adam. He just resigned. He ran away. He's gone."

"Oh! Oh, no!" Gableman groaned as if he had a stomach-ache, and then he
said, "I'll be right over. Don't do anything until I get there."

"I'm going to call the FBI," I said. "I have to. Sorry about Pumphrey."

"My gosh, when this gets out! Do you think we can find him in a hurry?"

"I don't know. I don't know whether we'll ever find him."

"Well, tell the FBI not to make it public until they have to, because if
it's made public we'll all be ruined, and we might find him." He hung
up.

Marge said, "That was a peculiar conversation. What happened?"

"Oh, Pumphrey had a heart attack, and Gableman is coming over."

"If he dies," Marge said, "you'll be a murderer!"

I asked the operator for the FBI, and then I told Marge that if she ever
said another thing like that I would resign, like Homer, and go away,
and if Pumphrey had a bad heart, and was fated to pass out on this
lovely spring morning, then I couldn't be blamed. Marge began to
sniffle, and Jane, now recovered, put her arm around her shoulder, and I
felt like a heel.

I got through to Inspector Root, at the FBI. Tex Root is a spare little
man, quick and wiry as a blacksnake whip. Nothing ever surprises him,
because usually he keeps about two thoughts ahead of everyone else. I
had gone to Root when I needed a dossier on The Frame, and now when I
told him about Homer vanishing he said, "Did that gal get him?"

"It looks that way," I said.

"I thought she might," he said. "Now don't get yourself into an uproar.
This may not be as bad as it looks. I guess you want to keep it quiet,
heh?"

"It might prevent a number of lynchings and murders and I don't know
what else."

"So it might," Tex Root agreed. I knew he would be smiling. "All right,
we won't put out a public alarm--not yet. You're positive he's with the
Riddell woman?"

"He left a note."

"Okay, we'll put special agents on the railroads, and air lines, and air
charter ships, and bus lines--but I'm pretty sure she's too smart to use
them. And I'll be up in five minutes."

Gableman arrived first. He wasn't alone. With him was Klutz, bubbling
incoherently with excitement and apprehension. "How's Pumphrey?" I
greeted them, feeling guilty.

"His condition is undetermined," said Klutz. "It's awful, isn't it? Why,
if anything happens to Mr. Pumphrey, there's no telling what the results
might be. The whole organization might come to pieces. I don't see how
he could be replaced, I really don't."

"Looks bad, all right," Gableman said. "There's already been so much
talk about putting N.R.P. under Interior, or Public Health, that if
something happened to Mr. Pumphrey such a switch might be inevitable. Of
course, it wouldn't affect me personally. Interior has been after me to
come over to them, and State wants me back, but we do have such a nice,
tight little organization in N.R.P. that I'd hate to leave."

"So would I," said Klutz. "And the worst of it is I'd probably have to
stay on until the last to supervise the liquidation."

Gableman shook his head and sat down. "I just don't see how I can save
this situation," he said. "If we don't find Adam immediately we won't be
able to keep it quiet. As a matter of fact I don't know whether we'll be
able to keep it quiet in any case. Colonel Phelps-Smythe is sure to hear
about it, and he'll go running to the War Department, and there's no
telling what they'll do."

Tex Root arrived. I was glad to see him. Not only did he look sane, but
you knew that he would remain that way. I gave him Homer's note, and he
read it aloud, twice, and then he said, "They can't get away with it."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Why, they're as conspicuous as, well, as if Joe Stalin and Winston
Churchill were loose. More. Everywhere they go, they'll be recognized.
Particularly since this is A.I. Day. Suppose they turned up in Kansas
City? Somebody would say, 'Why, there's Mr. Adam! And The Frame! Why,
he's supposed to be in Washington today, starting A.I.' And the heat
would be on."

"That sounds logical," I admitted.

"It is logical," said Tex Root, "but only if we send out a general
alarm. If we put out a general alarm the chances are we'd locate them in
six hours."

Gableman started to pace the floor. "Yes, but can you imagine what would
happen if it was broadcast that Mr. Adam had vanished? Why--" The vision
of the consequences seemed to render him speechless.

"I can imagine," said Tex Root quietly. "It would be like Pearl Harbor,
only worse. I think people would get killed. For instance, I think Kathy
Riddell would probably get killed, and I think some of you people in
N.R.P. would get killed, and those who didn't would wish they were dead.
People feel very strongly about Homer Adam, and A.I. I know. I'm a
married man. It was bad enough when people discovered that Adam was
living with his wife. I don't know what they'd do if they learned he'd
eloped with an actress."

"Exactly!" said Gableman. "There'd be chaos."

Tex Root thought it over, his neat, lean fingers tapping the arm of his
chair. "However," he concluded, "it is the duty of the Bureau to find
him, and as quickly as possible. I will treat it exactly as if it were a
kidnaping. If Adam hasn't turned up by midnight, and our Special Agents
haven't found any trace of him, we'll have to make it public."

"That's reasonable," I agreed. I sat down and gave him a fill-in on
everything I knew about Homer Adam, and The Frame. Everything. When I
got to the part about their mutual interest in Aztec archeology Root
nodded. "It could be," he said, "that they're headed for Mexico. If they
are, we'll soon know about it."

He called his office, and dictated additional instructions. "You see,"
he said, "we'll not only check up on every commercial service going to
Mexico, but we'll check all private planes that might be chartered for
such a flight."

I told him about The Frame's phone calls to Homer, and together we went
to the hotel switchboard. One of the girls remembered that Miss Riddell
had called the previous evening. It wasn't a long distance call. It was
local. She didn't know from where. Usually, Miss Riddell's calls came
from out of town. But they had been local for the past three days.

"That tells us something," Root said when we returned to 5-F. "She was
here last night. Where does she stay when she's in Washington?" I told
him and he called her hotel, but the hotel didn't know anything about
Miss Riddell's being in the city. "She's been keeping under cover," he
said. "Shows she planned this carefully. I don't think we'll find them
by midnight. We may not find them for a long, long time. She's a very
clever girl. Very."

The telephone rang and Jane Zitter answered it. "It's the N.R.P.
laboratory," she said. "The doctors are ready for Mr. Adam. They've been
waiting."

I had forgotten. It was past noon. "Tell them," I began, "tell
them--what would you tell them, Gableman?"

"Oh," said Gableman. "Oh, Lord, please let me think. Tell them that Mr.
Adam can't make it today."

"That's pretty lame," I said. "We've got to do better than that. And
we'll certainly have to do better than that later in the day, or this
evening, when Fay Sumner Knott calls and asks for her impregnation."

"Oh," Gableman groaned, "why did I ever leave the State Department?
Nothing like this ever happened in the State Department."

"Hold the wire a moment, please," Jane said into the phone.

"Has anybody got any ideas?" I asked.

"Can't you think up an international complication?" Marge suggested.

"That's it!" said Gableman. "An international complication. Tell them
that Mr. Adam cannot make it today, because of international
complications. Tell them there are some things that have to be cleared
before A.I. begins."

Jane told the laboratories. "What things will have to be cleared?" I
asked. "We'll have to make this real."

"That's not hard," said Gableman. "I can think of a hundred things that
have to be cleared. Why, we've got whole stacks of protests in our
files. We just got a beaut from the Russians last night. They charge
that Fay Sumner Knott has been unfriendly to the Soviet Union, and as a
matter of fact they cannot find anyone on the whole list who is friendly
to the Soviet Union, and they protest the whole thing. And the French
are indignant, and so are the Chinese. They all claim that unless some
priority is given to other countries, there isn't any guarantee that the
United States isn't pursuing a unilateral policy."

"That ought to do it," I said, "at least temporarily. That will hold us
until midnight, anyway."

"All right," Gableman agreed, "I'll go back to the office and fight a
delaying action. But I want you to understand that if nothing has
happened before midnight, I'm through. At midnight I'm going to leave
the office and I will never return. Tomorrow you will find me with
Interior."

Klutz said, rising, "Mr. Smith, if you had only taken my advice in the
first place, and allowed Mr. Adam to operate under the aegis of a
committee, with the War Department sharing responsibility, we wouldn't
be in this mess. I'd like you to know that you have endangered my
career, Mr. Smith."

I started to speak, but I thought better of it because Marge and Jane
were there. Gableman and Klutz left, and I went into the kitchenette and
found Tex Root spreading cheese on crackers. "If you're hungry," I
suggested, "we can have lunch sent up."

"I'm not hungry," Tex said. "I was just thinking, and when I eat
crackers I think best."

"And what are you thinking?" I asked.

"I was just thinking it's just like my wife said. You get a shortage of
anything, and people start to make a black market out of it."

"You don't mean that The Frame grabbed Homer for a black market in
babies?"

"Well, that's what my wife would say, right away. It would be
practically instinctive. But I'm not sure of it. There may be other
motives, besides selling stuff on the black market, but they're hard to
find."

I could imagine The Frame as being a lot of things, but somehow she
didn't strike me as being avaricious for money. I said, "I think you're
being cynical."

"Oh, you do? Well, turn on the radio."

"What's the radio got to do with it?"

Tex Root bit off half a cracker, munched it, and then stuffed the other
half in his mouth. In a muffled voice he said, "Homer Adam affects the
stock market, doesn't he?"

"Sure," I replied. "When Adam's well, stocks are up. When they're down,
it's a pretty good sign that either Adam is sick, or N.R.P. is in
trouble."

"And so far as the public knows, this is a big day--a boom day--isn't
it?"

"Certainly. This is A.I. Day."

"And stocks should go up?"

"Oh, I suppose. Moderately perhaps. After all, A.I. Day has been pretty
well discounted by the professional traders."

"What would you think if you turned on the radio and found stocks had
collapsed?"

I thought this over. "If it was really a general collapse, it could only
mean that war had started or the insiders thought Adam was ended."

"All right," said Tex Root, "I dare you to turn on the radio."

I turned it on. It played music, and then a girl sang a little ditty
about how to keep moths out of closets, and then the National
Association of Industry announced it was presenting Mr. Henry Mullet,
Jr., on the air, to give his version of the news, "completely uncensored
and as he sees it."

"Now watch," said Tex Root. Sure enough, Mr. Henry Mullet, Jr., started
off by stating that the stock market had collapsed, but on its face,
with heavy selling inspired by rumors from Washington. He didn't say
what the rumors were.

"Now you see why I'm cynical," said Tex Root. "You think you can keep it
a secret about Homer Adam disappearing, but so long as more than one
person knows about it, it's no secret. And everybody who finds out about
it, plays it smart. They sell humanity short."

I didn't like the phrase about selling humanity short, and said so. He
said I ought to learn to be a realist. He reminded me that during the
war everyone made money out of ships and airplanes except the fellows
who died in them, and that after the war everyone made money out of
houses except the people who needed them for living. I said I didn't see
what that had to do with black markets, and he said it illustrated the
economics of shortages. He said it showed there were other reasons why
The Frame might want to grab Homer Adam besides the ones we'd already
considered.

The telephone kept ringing, and every time it rang I hoped it would be
for Tex Root, but it never was.

Klutz called to tell me that Mr. Pumphrey was better, and in fact out of
danger. His high blood pressure had boiled over, and the doctors advised
him to take a month off, but he would live.

Gableman called to say that he had put out a release announcing that
A.I. Day was postponed twenty-four hours, but that it had not been well
received, and the press wanted to know specifically why. "This business
of international complications," he explained, "is getting hard to work.
The press associations always cable Moscow, and Moscow never knows what
is up and issues a denial, and then the State Department gets huffy and
denies having received the denial. One of these days that sort of thing
will get me in bad. That is why I would rather work for Interior."

Dinnertime went by. Tex Root and Marge and Jane devoured chicken
sandwiches and drank milk, but I wasn't feeling hungry. Midnight was
getting no further away, and I was having visions. Very shortly I would
be the most unpopular man in the world. I was the man on the spot. There
wasn't anything that could save me. There was no evading it. I kept
telling myself that during a crisis like this a man's viewpoint becomes
distorted, and everything appears worse than it actually is. Then Danny
Williams called from the White House and I discovered that things can
actually be as bad as they seem.

"The President," Danny said, "is having a conniption fit. I don't blame
him. Why weren't we notified?"

"I thought somebody in the office would tell you," I apologized. It
didn't sound right. I knew, and Danny knew, that no one in N.R.P. would
want to be a bearer of black news.

"We didn't know a damn thing about it until the War Department called."

"Oh, do they know about it?"

"Certainly they know about it. Everyone in Washington knew about it,
except the President. He wants your scalp, but I told him to wait. I
hear the FBI has given you a midnight deadline."

"That's right, and it doesn't look good."

"Well, if he's not back by midnight the War Department is going to take
over. They're drawing up an executive order now. This is serious,
Steve."

"I know."

"I'm sorry, Steve, but that's the way it has to be."

I said okay, and hung up. I felt tired. "We're all washed up," I told
Marge. "Your husband is in disgrace. You might as well start packing."

"Says who?" she asked, trying to sound insouciant.

"Says the President of the United States."

"Oh," she said in a small voice. "Oh, I'm so sorry for you, Steve.
What'll they do to you?"

"Officially, nothing. Unofficially, I don't even want to guess. When you
consider what the American public did to a baseball player who failed to
touch second base, and a football player who once ran the wrong way, I
can't even imagine what they'll do to me."

Gableman called again, to say that Fay Sumner Knott was behaving like a
bride whose husband was out with another woman on the first night of the
wedding. "I just want to tell you," he said, "that I'm cleaning out my
desk and moving. I don't want to have any part of what is going to
happen."

At ten o'clock Tex Root called the FBI. His Special Agents hadn't
developed even a likely lead. After Kathy Riddell arrived in Washington
four days before, she had simply dropped into void, just as Homer Adam
had vanished when he walked into the carefully manicured woods of Rock
Creek Park. "Why wait?" I suggested. "Why not blow off the lid now? She
probably picked him up in a car, and the longer we wait to broadcast the
news, the further away they'll be."

Tex Root picked up a magazine. "No," he decided. "I said twelve and
we'll wait until twelve. Anyway, the local police can't do much in the
dark."

"The local police?"

"Yes. They'll have to search the park, and drag the creek. That's normal
procedure."

"You mean, you think he might be--murdered?"

Root looked up from his magazine. "Well, that's a possibility, isn't
it?"

Jane began to cry. She had been sitting in her chair, very quietly, and
at first she tried to hide her tears, but then the sounds escaped her,
and finally she could no longer hold back the steady sobs that shook her
body like a great, unseen hand. Marge put an arm around her, and got her
into a bedroom. Marge came back and said she hoped they wouldn't need a
doctor, but unless Jane calmed down in a few minutes we'd have to call
one. "What's the trouble with her?" Root asked.

"She doesn't like Kathy Riddell. She's afraid of her. She thinks she's a
bad woman. And Jane is very fond of Homer."

"I don't think Kathy is so bad," I said. I knew when I said it that it
was a final and a very weak defense against the fears that had been
trying to burst into my consciousness. I remembered, again, how she had
looked at the airport, and how I had been chilled by that glimpse of
fanaticism. "Tex," I said finally, "would you think I was crazy if I
suggested that perhaps Kathy Riddell planned to do away with Homer Adam?
Would you think I was crazy if I suggested that this isn't as simple as
Homer getting disgusted, and running off with her because he believes he
loves her? I mean, in view of your report on her patriotism and
loyalty?"

"What are you getting at?" he asked.

"Well suppose--now just suppose--that there was a group of scientists
who wanted to murder not Homer Adam, but civilization? Suppose the
Mississippi explosion wasn't an accident at all. Suppose it was planned,
and Homer's escape upset the plan. So to carry out their plans
completely, they have to block A.I., and that means doing away with
Homer."

"That's horrible!" said Marge. "It makes my spine crawl. I'm
frightened."

The lines seemed to deepen in Tex Root's thin face. "I can imagine one
crazy nuclear physicist," he said, "but not a whole bunch of them. As a
class, they are about the sanest people I know. And remember that I
worked on Manhattan Project security, and I know them pretty well."

"Yes," I said. "You're right."

"Besides, Kathy Riddell lost her fianc when Mississippi blew up."

"Sure, forget I ever mentioned it. I guess my thinking is pretty wild."

"No, I'm not going to forget it," Tex Root said. "This is a very
peculiar world, and the most peculiar thing in it is the human mind. Now
if Kathy Riddell was involved in any such plot, she wouldn't be the
brains behind it, now would she? She was a pretty small cog in the
development of fission, no more important than Jane Zitter is to N.R.P.
But she would be a useful tool for a particular job."

"Yes," I agreed. "Her equipment for seduction is probably unrivalled."

"All right. Now we're getting somewhere. Who would be her bosses?" Root
ticked them off on his fingers as he named them. "Logically, there's her
father, Professor Ruppe from the University of Chicago. There are Canby
and Welles, in Berkeley. She worked with both of them. And of course
there's the old master, Felix Pell, in New York."

"He's the one I don't like," I said. "To me he looks like a movie
villain."

Tex Root laughed. "So to you he looks like a villain! Why, he's one of
the sweetest old men I ever met in my life! And two generations of
graduates at Columbia will tell you the same thing. He's a leader in
practically every civilized movement that comes out of New York City,
he's contributed most of his income to charities--I think he even gave
away his Nobel prize money--and besides he's got five children and I
don't know how many grandchildren."

"Still he looks like a villain."

Root moved out of his chair and picked up the phone at my elbow. "We'll
give it a check," he said. "We'll soon know." He put in calls for
Professor Ruppe, in Chicago, and Dr. Pell, in New York. He got through
to Chicago almost instantly. There was a good deal of talking, but not
with Professor Ruppe, and he put down the telephone and said, "Ruppe
isn't in. He's in Washington. He can be reached through the Carnegie
Institute. Well, that's interesting, but that's all."

Then the New York call went through, and Root talked, politely, for a
few moments, and asked questions. When he finished he put the telephone
down gently, almost reverently, as if it were a delicate and noble
instrument. "I can't believe it," he said, in a soft voice that retained
just a touch of drawl. "I can hardly believe it! Why old Dr. Pell is in
Washington, too. He's staying at the home of Peter Pflaum. Pflaum runs
Carnegie's cyclotron."

I snatched the phone book and fingered my way into the P's. Pflaum lived
on Rapidan Place, N.W. It is a little, recently created street hardly
two blocks long. It is a ten minute walk from the hotel, and it runs
just to the edge of the park. "How beautifully simple," I said. "He just
walked out of the hotel, crossed the park, and into their house--right
into their hands. He was blind as an ant that follows a trail of sugar
into the flypaper. The poor guy!"

"Now wait a minute," Root said. "Up to now this is just coincidence. We
may be way off."

"Do you believe it?"

"I don't believe anything until I see it. But let's get started. I've
got my car parked outside." He reached for his topcoat, and the phone
tinkled again and Marge answered and said it was for Inspector Root.

"Damn," Root said, and picked up the telephone, buttoning his topcoat
with his free hand. "Yes, Colonel," he said, and after that all I could
catch were snatches of conversation. "I don't think it's necessary...
but that's hardly evidence... up to now I don't find anything to make
me see spies... certainly I realize the War Department is responsible
for security, but so is the FBI... all right, Colonel, it's all yours
at twelve o'clock, but until then I'll use my own judgment."

"What's up?" I asked.

"That was your pal Phelps-Smythe. He wants me to hold you."

"Hold me?" My insides wrapped themselves into a tight little knot. "For
what?"

"Now don't worry. The way he puts it is hold you for your own
protection, but actually he's convinced the whole thing is a Communist
plot. G-2 has made a check on your secretary, Jane Zitter, and they've
discovered she was on a Dies Committee list some years ago. It seems she
got literature from the League for Peace and Democracy. I told him it
could be but I didn't see how that made you a Communist, and he said
look what happened in Canada, and this smelled like the same thing, and
he wants me to hold you."

"So are you holding me?"

"He is not a Communist!" Marge protested. "He makes too much money to be
a Communist, and not enough to be a capitalist, and besides he's too
lazy."

"Thank you, dear," I told her. "I think that is a remarkable defense."

"Come on, let's get out of here," said Root. "If we stay here any longer
I'll be wacky as the rest of you people."

And we left.




CHAPTER TWELVE


The drive across the park didn't take more than five minutes, but in
five minutes you can have a lot of nightmares. I wish I'd never seen the
Frankenstein pictures. I could imagine finding Homer Adam in the attic,
strapped to all kinds of intricate and horrid machines. And I could
imagine our finding a few charred bones in the basement. I could also
imagine our discovering that he had been dissolved in acid, and
dispatched to heaven via the bathtub drain. But the worst thing I could
imagine was that these men, being handy with an atom, would simply
disintegrate him without trace. No, that wasn't quite the worst thing.
The absolute worst was that we wouldn't find Homer or Kathy at all.

When we came out of the park, and turned into Rapidan, Tex Root switched
off our lights, and eased his sedan to the curb. We got out, he glanced
at a house number, and said, "That will be it down the street there--the
one with the lights."

It was a large house of modern, undistinguished architecture, set within
gracious grounds. It was an ample house that spoke of guest rooms and
library, of a den and a play room, and the square of poplars behind it
probably shielded a tennis court. It was a house within which you would
expect to find a retired senator, or a justice of the District of
Columbia courts, or a lobbyist for steel or rubber, or a college
chancellor, or perhaps a scientist with an independent income, like
Peter Pflaum. Both floors were lighted, but on the lower floor the
Venetian blinds were down, and drawn so that a narrow grid of light
escaped.

"Well," I said, as we walked up the path to the door, "what do we do
now?"

"We ring," said Tex Root, and he rang. He waited a moment, and he rang
again, holding his thumb against the opalescent button. He held his
thumb there until the door opened. It opened only a few inches.

There was a man's face in the opening, a broad, pleasant, middle-aged
face wearing glasses. "Yes?" the man said.

"Are you Mr. Pflaum?" Root said.

"Yes, I'm Pflaum. But I'm very busy right now. We're having a little
conference here. I don't believe I know you, but if you care to see me
you will find me in my office any time after ten o'clock tomorrow."

"I'm really sorry to disturb you, Mr. Pflaum," Root said, "but I'm
afraid I must see you now. I'm from the FBI."

Pflaum's polite smile set, as if it were there to stay. "Couldn't you
see me tomorrow? I can't imagine what the FBI--"

"No, Mr. Pflaum, I couldn't. I want to apologize in advance, but I have
to come in."

Pflaum started to say something more, but he looked at Root's face, and
what he saw there told him it was useless. His smile disappeared, and he
opened the door, and he said "What is it you want?" but he said it as if
he knew what we wanted.

"We're looking for Mr. Adam," Root said.

"How on earth--how on earth did you know?"

Root didn't answer. He pushed past Pflaum, and I followed him. I
realized that while we waited outside I had heard voices, but that when
we entered, they stopped.

"Where is he?" Root demanded, as we walked down the hall. I saw that
Pflaum was following us. "In there," he said, "that doorway on the
right."

I don't know what I expected to see when I walked into the Pflaum
library, except I knew I would see Homer Adam. I suppose I expected he
would be bound and gagged, or perhaps plain dead. But whatever it was I
expected, it wasn't what I saw. I think that I was as surprised at
seeing Homer and Kathy, as they were at seeing me.

Unlike most libraries, this one was constructed for reading and
research. The bookshelves covered the walls, and reached from the floor
to the ceiling. There was a mobile stepladder in a corner, and in
another corner an enormous desk, stacked with books, pamphlets, and
clippings. Pflaum must have been sitting at this desk, when we rang, for
it was the only unoccupied chair in the room.

In a little semi-circle, chairs facing the desk, were Pell, a tall man
with a Vandyke who I felt would be Professor Ruppe, and a much younger
man whom I did not recognize. In another chair sat The Frame, a
cigarette almost, but not quite, touching her parted lips. Closest to
the desk, his ungainly hands gripping the arms of his chair, was Homer
Adam. He looked bewildered, but hardly more bewildered than usual.

I knew that I should say something, but I felt puzzled, and out of
place, as if I had invaded a family conference. Except for the presence
of Homer, that was the way it seemed. "Hadn't I better get some chairs
for you gentlemen?" Pflaum said incongruously. "Don't you want to sit
down?"

I didn't see Root take the gun out of his shoulder holster, but suddenly
there it was, in his hand, a Smith and Wesson magnum, and I remember
wondering how such a small man could conceal such a cannon on his person
without it being noticeable. "Don't move!" Root said, in a low voice but
firmly. "I know this is an obsolete type of weapon, not fit for wiping
out whole populations, but it will blow a hole through you, big as your
arm, and that's exactly what I'm going to do if anyone moves."

Somehow, this relieved the tension. It put us all back in our proper
places. We weren't guests any more. We were there to save Homer Adam.

"But I don't understand," said Pflaum, "how in the world you ever
guessed--"

"You don't have to understand," Root said. "But there are a lot of
things that I'll have to understand."

"Now just a moment," said Pell, his massive head jerking on his scrawny
neck. "Nobody here has committed any crime, and I think it's an outrage
for you to come in here like this and threaten us with that weapon as if
we were gangsters. After all, we're all associates of the National
Research Council."

"Isn't kidnaping a crime any more?" said Root.

"There has been no kidnaping," Pell protested. "Mr. Adam came here
voluntarily, and we were just having a little discussion concerning some
most important matters."

Homer tried to rise, but whenever Homer tried to get out of a deep chair
it was a nerve-wracking struggle, particularly when the situation was
critical, for at those times his legs refused to co-ordinate. "Sit down,
Homer," I told him. "Sure, he came here voluntarily, but I'll bet this
is the last place he expected to be. Isn't that right, Homer?"

"Steve," he began. "Steve, I'm terribly sorry. I'm not quite sure what's
happening."

"Naturally he's not sure what's happening," I said. "He thinks he is
escaping from the N.R.P--for which I can't blame him much--and eloping
with The Frame here, for which I don't blame him much either, and what
happens? He finds himself locked up with a bunch of crazy professors.
Say, what's your name?" I asked the young man whose name I didn't know.

"I'm John Canby, from the University of California," he said, starting
to rise. Root's gun waved him back into his chair.

I said, "It's certainly a nice, cozy little rendezvous, isn't it? What
were they up to, Homer? What were they going to do to you?"

"I don't know," Homer replied. "I really don't understand it at all. I
didn't know it was supposed to be this way. The way I understood it,
Kathy and I were to stay here for a few days, and then we were to drive
to Mexico."

"You are so damn innocent, Homer," I said. "You're just like a steer
being led into the stockyards. Well, if you don't know what was going to
happen to you, I'll enlighten you. This pack of respectable, scientific
ghouls was going to eliminate you. And I'll tell you why, Homer. They
don't like the human race. They want to give the world back to the
lizards."

The Frame came to her feet, blazing mad, one strand of hair falling
across her face, and Root's gun shifted accurately towards her middle.
"That's a lie," she screamed. "That's a horrible lie!"

"It's outrageous," said Pell. He was white and trembling. "I'll sue
you!"

I went over to the desk and put my knuckles on it and looked them over.
"Root ought to knock you off right now, you murderous bunch of bastards!
But maybe it'll be better to let the people handle you. I've got a lot
of faith in the people, when they get mad. They're violent. They'll tear
you to shreds. Particularly you--" I looked at The Frame. "The women
will handle you!"

"You don't really believe--" The Frame began. There was astonishment and
fear in her voice. It made me feel good.

"Believe! I know. Wait until they find out! Wait until they find out
that the same bunch of fiends who blew up Mississippi, and sterilized
all the men, also kidnaped Mr. Adam. In twenty-four hours there won't be
enough of you left to be worth burying!"

Homer managed to struggle to his feet. His face was so white that I
could see freckles where I had never seen freckles before. "Kathy," he
said. "Kathy, that wasn't the plan, was it? It wasn't that. Tell me it
wasn't anything like that. Is that why you have that apparatus
upstairs?"

She looked at him, across the heads of her father and Pell, and said,
gravely and with all anger gone from her, "No, Homer, it wasn't anything
like that. Those machines are for elementary experimentation to test the
effect of radioactive rays on the male germ. We were going to take the
utmost precautions not to harm you."

Professor Ruppe spoke for the first time. He was, except for Root, the
calmest of us all. "Kitty," he said, "I can see that what we have done,
and what we hoped to do, would be hopelessly misunderstood. Hadn't you
better tell it all?"

"I think that's best," said Pflaum. "I don't want any mobs tearing my
arms out by the roots, or hanging me to a flagpole in front of the
Capitol."

"Yes," I agreed. "It would be nice to know what's really going on."

"Do you agree, Dr. Pell?" The Frame asked.

"What is this, a round table discussion?" Root asked. "If you've got
anything to say you'd better say it quick."

"I agree," Pell said. His head lolled forward on his chest, as if his
neck could no longer support it.

The Frame brushed the hair from her face. "In the first place," she
began, "I feel we ought to apologize to Homer. It is true that I
persuaded him to leave N.R.P., well, under false pretenses. But it was
the only thing we could think of, if we were to act in time. We were
just getting around to explaining to Homer when you came in." She
regarded Homer directly, even brazenly, I thought, and said, "When I'm
finished, I'm not sure that Homer won't agree with our point of view."

"Just forget the propaganda," I said, "and start putting one plain word
after another."

"Very well, Steve, don't be so damn overbearing! Here's the way it is,
as we see it. The aftereffects of the Mississippi explosion were
terrible, certainly, and yet civilization was presented with its one
great opportunity to really begin over again--to really create a
splendid and decent world, peopled entirely by splendid and decent
humans."

"All of them with their master's degree in science," I suggested.

"If you don't shut up," she said, "I shan't continue."

"Go ahead. So what happened?"

"You ought to know. You were in the middle of it, and partly
responsible. It was bad enough that the government gave Homer to the
N.R.P., and approved A.I., instead of turning him over to the National
Research Council. But to make matters worse, no provision whatsoever was
made for the scientific selection of future mothers. Here we were
presented with this magnificent opportunity, and what do we do? A
blindfolded man reaches into a goldfish bowl, and the future of the race
is decided literally by blind chance. Not only that, but consider some
of the creatures the Congress picked to possess a number in that bowl.
When mated to Homer, what else could they produce but red-headed
monsters?"

"Oh, I see," I said with what I hoped was sarcasm. "So you people
decided to snatch Homer, and present him with a restricted and exclusive
clientele. Perhaps you were going to farm him out among your brain-heavy
friends, and populate the world with a lot of fine specimens like Dr.
Pell here."

The Frame actually looked shocked. "Oh, no!" she protested. "We weren't
going to use Homer at all! Not for direct conception. Why, I think Homer
himself would be the first to agree that it is a mistake for him to
father children--any children at all--if we are to produce a superior
race for posterity."

"Gosh, Kathy," Homer said, "I never thought you felt that way about me.
I know I'm not very pretty, and I wasn't a Quiz Kid, but I don't think
you've got any right to say I'm unfit to have children."

"Don't you?" The Frame asked, the corners of her mouth touched with
humor. She paused, and added: "Homer, I think you're sweet, and I'm
really very fond of you. Intellectually, I think you'd do, but
physically--"

"Don't pay any attention to her, Homer," I advised him, watching the
impact of her words crush him back into his chair. "This theory of a
superior race isn't original at all. Hitler had one too. The only
difference is that Hitler had his master race all set up, and she wants
to start hers from scratch."

"I wouldn't put it that way," said Professor Ruppe. "I think most
intelligent men will acknowledge the soundness of our theories."

I noticed that Tex Root's gun was no longer in his hand. It had vanished
as miraculously as it had appeared. "This is all very interesting," Root
said, "but if you weren't going to use Adam, what or who were you going
to use?"

"We were going to use Adam, but not for A.I., or any other kind of
conception," The Frame explained. "Homer is a source of priceless
experimental matriel--the only source. We simply intended to borrow
Homer for a few days, for experimental purposes. We had reached a stage
in our experiments where it was absolutely necessary to have Homer for a
few days. And we knew that once A.I. started we'd never again, perhaps,
have a chance to use him. If we were able to use Homer for a short time
we felt that we'd find a way--oh, it might take years--but eventually
we'd find a way to restore the fertility of other men. Then, we could
choose the best males and females, and in a few generations we'd have
enough perfect humans so that paired with the inevitably poor stock
produced by A.I., matters would not be hopeless."

"And Homer--what were you going to do with him?" I asked.

"We hadn't thought much about that. You see, after his services were no
longer necessary, we could proceed with our work, which is the only
important thing. I suppose we would have simply told Homer to walk
home."

"And the repercussions from such action?"

Kathy shrugged. "After he returned, everyone would have been relieved,
and it would be forgotten. Anyway, most people would believe it was
simply a clandestine affair. Wouldn't they, Steve?"

I think I whistled. "Kathy," I said, "you're a wicked, ruthless woman."

"All women are ruthless," she replied, "when they're really after
something. And as for being wicked--the N.R.P. is wicked, but what we
are attempting is, I feel, simply acting as instruments of the will of
God."

Her eyes were shining, as I had seen them before. I asked Root, "How
about them, Tex? What are you going to do with them?"

Root considered this, carefully appraising The Frame, and her father,
and Pell, and Canby. He was measuring them, I knew, for signs of deceit
and trickery, as an experienced tailor measures with his eyes a length
of cloth. "I don't see how I can hold them for kidnaping," he said.
"Anyway, it sounds more like an intramural scrap within the government
than anything else. That is, unless Adam wants to bring charges against
them. Even then, I don't see what charges he can bring, except maybe
breach of promise."

"Oh, no. No charges," said Homer. "All I want to do is get out of here."

He was desperate with shame. "Well," I told The Frame, "you may be
stacked, and you're certainly clever, but when it comes to the snatch
racket you're a dope." I suppose I said it more in revenge for the hurt
she had inflicted on Homer than anything else.

"This isn't over," she said quietly, "not yet."

I looked at my watch, and was amazed to find it wasn't yet twelve. It
seemed that we had been away from the hotel for a day or two. I thought
of Mary Ellen, and what news of this might do to her. "Root," I said, "I
think we'd better keep this whole thing as quiet as possible, don't
you?"

"That's okay with me," Root said.

"Please," said Pell. "Please, no publicity. It is bad enough as it is. I
do feel, now, that perhaps we went too far. But we were only doing what
we thought was the sole right thing to do."

"Well, please don't try it any more," I warned him, "because from now on
if anything happens to Adam something is going to happen to you too.
Something fatal."

Kathy was smiling again, in a way that wasn't funny. "I'm sure
everything will work out all right. I'm quite sure, now. Please go home,
because you bore me."

Outside the night air was cool and clean. "Smells good, doesn't it,
Homer?" I said.

He didn't answer. "I'm not sore at you, Homer. I'm not blaming you a
bit. It wasn't your fault."

We got into Root's sedan, Homer and I in the back. He didn't say
anything. I felt he should say something. "Homer," I said, "there's been
no damage. Things have just been delayed for a day."

He put his head in his hands and pulled at his hair. "Oh, what a fool I
was," he said, the words forcing their way out of him. "What a fool,
fool, fool!"

"Don't feel that way Homer. You're not the first guy who has been taken
by a scheming bitch. It happens to millions, every year. Lots of them
smarter than you. Usually, they're after money, or want to get their
names in the Social Register, or run a business from behind the scenes.
With you, there was a different motive, but in every other way it was
exactly the same. Just tell yourself, 'I've been taken,' and then forget
about it."

He didn't answer. He kept his face buried in his hands.

Root parked the car in the hotel driveway and we all got out and Homer
walked to the elevator silent and stiff-legged as if he were going to a
place of execution.

Marge was waiting for us at the door. "Just like Cinderella, on the
stroke of twelve!" she said. "Homer, I'm so glad to see you back."

He walked past her without speaking, and she looked at his face and
didn't say anything more. He walked to his bedroom, and lunged inside
and shut the door behind him.

"What's wrong with him?" she asked. "What happened? Should I bring him a
drink, or anything?"

"We'd better leave him alone," I said. "He's had a harrowing
experience." Root went to the telephone, and called his office, and
began talking, and while he was on the phone I told Marge what had
happened.

When Root was finished with the phone I took it. I called Gableman, at
his home, and told him Homer was back. "I'm very glad to hear it," he
said, with about as much interest as if he had just heard that his
second cousin, in Des Moines, had been elected secretary of the Kiwanis.
"But I'm through, Steve. I've taken that job in Interior, and I think if
you are smart you will remove yourself from N.R.P. and go back to the
AP. If I know anything about the government at all, I know that it is
neither smart nor healthy to stay with N.R.P. Good night, Steve."

I called Klutz. He said he was delighted, but his voice sounded shaky.
He said he hoped there wouldn't be any publicity, and I assured him
there wouldn't be any. He said that was fine, and he would visit Mr.
Pumphrey in the hospital first thing in the morning and tell him the
good news, and he was sure this would speed Mr. Pumphrey's recovery.

I called Danny Williams. He said he'd pass the word along to the
President right away. He asked me what had happened, and I told him I
didn't think I could describe it adequately over the telephone, but that
anyway Homer was back, and seemed undamaged.

When I was finished Root was putting on his topcoat, and nibbling at the
edge of a cracker. "Well, good night," he said. "If anything more
happens don't call me. Call somebody else--anybody. This business is too
much for me."

"Are you completely satisfied," I said, "that they weren't really going
to knock him off?"

"No," he admitted, "not completely."

"I'm not either," I told him. "I still think that Pell is a villain."

Tex Root shook his head. "Spies, I can catch," he said. "Kidnaping for
ransom is a cinch. Murder and bond thefts and embezzlement are normal
activities. But this is different. This, I don't like. I can't tell who
is a criminal, and who isn't, and I can't tell right from wrong. For all
I know this Kathy Riddell--and she is a remarkable woman, isn't
she?--well, she may be perfectly right. All my life I'll wonder whether
what I've done tonight didn't put the world back ten thousand years.
Good night, Steve. Good night, Marge. Pleasant dreams."

"Wait a minute," I said. "What do you think I ought to do?"

"If I were you," he said, before he closed the outer door, "I would
retreat to Little America."

I went into Homer's room. He was undressed, and in bed, the pillow
pulled over his head so I could not tell whether or not he was asleep,
and his feet hanging nakedly over the bed's end. As I put out his light
I told myself that we really should get a special extra long bed for
Homer.

Out in the living room Marge was folding up dresses. "What are you
doing," I asked.

"Packing," she said.




CHAPTER THIRTEEN


I didn't sleep late the next morning. A sense of urgency ploughed me out
of bed before Marge was awake. I tiptoed into Homer's room, and gently
opened the door. He was asleep, and snoring, but his bed looked as if it
had been occupied by a threshing machine. I ran up coffee and toast in
the kitchenette, and then caught Arthur Godfrey's first news. "Well," he
said cheerily, "in case you celebrated A.I. Day yesterday you can have
all the fun all over again, because it is going to be today. The White
House announced early this morning that everything will go ahead
according to schedule, but it will be twenty-four hours late."

Homer came into the kitchenette. He was wearing a striped dressing gown,
ludicrously short, and when he leaned against the refrigerator somehow
he looked liked a beach umbrella that has been stacked for the season.
"Can I have some coffee?" he said.

"Certainly, Homer." I gave him plenty of sugar and cream. "Well, feel
better today?" I asked.

"Oh, I feel all right, Steve, but I don't think you're going to feel
very well."

"Why not?"

"In case you think this is A.I. Day, you had better think again," Homer
said quietly. "At least so far as I am concerned. What I said yesterday
about resigning goes double. I'm through."

"Now, Homer--"

"Sorry, Steve. It's all over."

"Now, Homer, why get those notions in your head? You know as well as I
do that there isn't any way out of it. Look at the trouble you got into
yesterday when you went off half-cocked. Why make it more difficult for
yourself."

"I've thought it all out, Steve. It isn't going to be difficult for me.
But from now on it is going to be damn difficult for women."

I didn't like the way he was talking. He was too sure of himself. "For
women?" I said.

"Yes. To hell with them. To hell with them all."

"Why, Homer, you of all people shouldn't be talking like that."

Homer drank his coffee, unconcerned, and refilled his cup, "Why not?"

"Because you're fated to have so much to do with them."

"Oh, no I'm not. From now on I'm going to have no more to do with them
than is absolutely necessary--excepting Mary Ellen and little
Eleanor--of course."

"But won't that still be quite a lot?"

"No. You see, I've figured it all out. If I don't want to go through
with A.I. there isn't any way you can force me, now is there?"

Somehow, this was a possibility I had never considered. I said, "No, I
suppose there isn't, but--"

"Well, I'm not going through with it. If you take me to the laboratories
today, it will be because you are dragging me there by the heels, and if
you get me there I can assure you that nothing will happen, except
perhaps some surgical equipment and instruments will get broken up."

"Oh, Homer!" I said, not without admiration.

"Will they suffer!" he gloated. "Will they scream!"

Marge came in, sleepy and a little surprised to find us there, and said,
"What a cozy little kaffeeklatsch. Can I join you?"

"Yes, but you'll wish you hadn't," I told her. "Homer has decided not to
go on. He has said to hell with it all, particularly women."

"Well, can you blame him?" Marge said, with her delightful
inconsistency. "If I were Homer I wouldn't have anything to do with
women either."

Homer leaned over, in something resembling a bow. "In my list of
exceptions to what I just said, I will include Marge."

"You see, Homer," I argued, "most women are pretty decent, like Marge.
You just had the misfortune to encounter a particularly wicked and
talented wench."

"To hell with them all," Homer said. "I don't think there is any use in
discussing the subject further. I want to go back to Tarrytown."

"Now, Homer," I told him, "please don't get me in any more trouble. It's
true I can't force you to go through with A.I., but on the other hand I
cannot take the responsibility of letting you return to Tarrytown. If
anything is done, it will have to be done officially. All I can do is
report your decision to N.R.P., and the White House."

"Okay, Steve," he agreed calmly. "Let's have some more coffee."

I could hear the phone ringing in the living room, and Jane answered,
and called for me, and said it was Mr. Klutz. I picked it up, and said
"Good morning, Percy."

"Good morning, indeed," said Klutz. "I just reached the office, and the
Planning Board is meeting in a few moments, and I'd like to report to
them on Mr. Adam. How does he feel this morning?"

"He feels fine. Never saw him look better."

"Ah, that's splendid. Poor Mr. Pumphrey was so cheered when I told him
Adam had returned. I think that within a few days he'll have completely
recovered."

"I don't," I said.

"You what?"

"I don't think Mr. Pumphrey will quickly recover, if news of Adam has
anything to do with it, because you see, Percy, Homer Adam has decided
not to go through with A.I."

I could hear Klutz gasp. "Him!" he shouted. "What right has he to decide
such a thing? That's a matter for the Inter-Departmental Committee, and
the Congress, and the Planning Board! He's got nothing to do with it!"

"Oh, I'm afraid he has," I said.

"Absurd!"

"Well, if you think it is absurd," I suggested, "take him down to the
laboratories today and try to make him do something he doesn't want to
do."

Homer was standing at my elbow, listening. He was smiling. "Steve," he
said, "you certainly have caught on to the idea."

On the other end of the line Klutz was babbling, but he wasn't making
any sense. Finally he said, "I'll present the matter to the Planning
Board, and I'll let you know their decision."

"What can they decide?"

"Ah, what's that? What can the Planning Board decide? Well, they can
turn the whole business over to the Inter-Departmental Committee, and
then if necessary it can follow the proper channel to the attention of
the President."

"And the President, what can he do about it?"

"Why, he can--now look, Mr. Smith, you'd better do something about this.
You're responsible for him, you know."

"Sorry, there's not a thing I can do."

Klutz didn't say anything for so long a time I thought the line was
dead, but finally he managed to speak. "I believe," he said, "I will
take my annual leave. I haven't taken my annual leave for several years,
and I have accumulated eighty-one days. I am afraid this is too much for
me, and I need a rest. But first I will inform the Planning Board, and
then I am going to take my annual leave. Goodbye, Mr. Smith."

Homer sprawled in a chair, grinning. "Well," he said, "how did the
little son-of-a-bitch take it?"

I think all of us jumped, because Homer rarely, if ever, used any
expressions more powerful than hell or damn. I knew then that he was a
changed man. He had grown up. "He's going on leave, which means that
he's running away," I said, and then I added, "Homer, just between you
and me and Marge and Jane, I don't blame you a bit, and whatever you do,
I'm for you."

"I am too," said Jane. "Homer, I don't know whether you're doing the
right thing, or the wrong thing, but at least you are doing it yourself,
and for you I think that's important."

"I do too," said Marge. "You know how I feel about having babies. But
Homer, you do whatever you think best. Don't you let Steve shove you
around any more."

"Me?" I said. "I'm not going to shove him around. But I am going to take
him to the White House, and let him tell Danny Williams, or maybe the
President, about it. I don't want this on my head."

"Sure. Glad to," said Homer. "Let's dress and go."

So we dressed, and I called Danny Williams, and told him it was vital,
or more so, and he said the President could squeeze Homer in at 11:15,
between the new Minister from Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who
at that moment were disturbed by the prospect that the war being
officially declared over, a good many officers would be forced to revert
to their permanent rank. I told Danny Williams what Homer had decided,
and he told me not to worry, because the Boss would handle it. I said I
hoped so. As I look at it now, I don't know whether I hoped so or not.

The White House ritual is precise and exact. It is a super assembly line
designed to turn out the maximum number of interviews with the President
in the minimum time. I put Homer into one end of the assembly line, and
then for fifteen minutes I chatted with Danny Williams--in the office
that Steve Early used to inhabit--until he came out. When he came out he
was still grinning. I knew that he had won, and I felt sort of proud of
him, but I also believed the world had ended.

Danny Williams sensed it too. As he walked us to our car he said,
"Steve, I'll call you later."

It wasn't much later, because Homer had laid an explosive with a short
fuse on the President's desk. When we got back to the hotel Jane said,
"You're to call the White House immediately."

So I called Danny Williams, and he had lost his usual calm and was
sputtering like an eight-cylinder engine trying to run on kerosene.
"Look, Steve," he said, "this is catastrophic. Do you know what Adam
told the Boss?"

"Sure I know," I said. "He told him he wasn't going through with it. He
said he was resigning."

"Oh, that isn't all," Danny Williams said. "He told the President--I
don't think I'd better tell you what he told the President, not over the
phone."

"Was it something about women?" I suggested.

"It certainly was something about women. I must say the Boss is shocked.
He thinks Adam is a little tetched, and he is gravely concerned about
allowing A.I. to continue, even if we bring Adam around. As a matter of
fact he has decided to postpone A.I. indefinitely, and turn Adam over to
the National Research Council. They claim they need him."

"Oh, boy! Oh, boy, oh boy!"

"What's the matter?"

"Well, if you think Adam is allergic to women, wait until he finds out
he's going to be handed over to the scientists."

Danny began to sputter again. "Up here in the White House," he said,
"we're getting damn sick and tired of Adam's temperament. We're for the
rights of individual citizens, and the Constitution, and all that, but
the rights of the nation transcend the rights of the citizen, on
occasion, and believe me this is the occasion."

"I'm sure Adam would agree with that, in theory, but when you practice
it on him he doesn't like it, and he's liking it less every minute. His
is a very special case."

"Not any more it isn't. From now on the status of Adam is that of a
valuable experimental animal. Now that sounds crude and harsh, I know,
but that's the way it has to be. The Army will have charge of his
feeding and his welfare, and if necessary, they can hold him just
exactly as a political prisoner would be held. And the N.R.C. can
perform whatever experiments they see fit. That's final. The executive
order will be out today."

"So be it," I said. "For my part, I will be delighted to get out of this
town--this madhouse in marble. I think if I stayed one more day they'd
have me in St. Elizabeth's. However, I don't think you can change a
man's feelings or his character by executive order, and I am afraid
there is going to be trouble, or more trouble."

"That's a chance we have to take," Danny said. "And I want to tell you
that we appreciate your help. The President will send you a letter."

"I'd frame it," I told him, "for my grandchildren, except that I'm not
going to have any grandchildren. And I don't like to be pessimistic, but
I don't think you are either, Danny."

Homer and Marge and Jane were tilting early highballs in the
kitchenette. Marge and Jane were trying to persuade Homer to describe
the White House conference, and Homer was naturally somewhat reticent,
if not downright evasive. "Well," I told them, "I've been fired, but
Homer, you've got a new job."

"I was hoping he'd fire me too," said Homer. "I certainly tried to get
fired."

"Oh, no, Homer, you're the indispensable man."

"What's the new job?" he asked.

I hesitated. I want to present Homer's new job in the best possible
light, simply because I didn't want him blowing up on my hands. "In the
first place," I said, "you don't have to worry about A.I. any more. A.I.
is finished, and Fay Sumner Knott becomes Would-be A.I. Mother Number
One."

"Now we're getting somewhere," Homer said.

"From now on," I continued, "you will work for the National Research
Council."

"You mean Pell and his gang?"

"Well, I believe Dr. Pell is a director of N.R.C."

"You can just call the White House about my new job," Homer said firmly.
"Tell them I quit."

"It isn't that simple, Homer. You can't quit. As I said, you're the
indispensable man."

"What do you mean, I can't quit?"

"I mean--well, I might as well tell you exactly what it is--you are
practically the same as under house arrest. You have lost your rights.
You are like one hundred and sixty pounds of U-235."

I had expected Homer to blow up, but he appeared completely cool, and an
elfin grin lit his face up again. "They'll regret it," he said.

"Now, Homer, there isn't any use trying to be belligerent, because the
Army has been placed in charge of you."

"If they want another Pearl Harbor," Homer said, "that's what they're
going to get."

He finished his drink, and poured himself another. A queer metamorphosis
had taken place in Homer Adam, working from the inside out. His timidity
was gone, and as he stood there, drink in hand, his tousled hair an
arrogant flame, he looked to me like some of those wild Irishmen you
will find in Cherry Hill bars, ready to stack all the other customers in
a corner just for the hell of it.

By the time General Kipp, commanding Eastern Defense Command, Zone of
the Interior, arrived with Colonel Phelps-Smythe, Homer was a little
tight around the edges. Their entrance was rather awkward, as if it
hadn't been properly rehearsed. They were accompanied by second
lieutenants, complete with sidearms, and a photographer.

General Kipp, perspiring and unhappy, grasped Homer's hand, and shook
it, and the photographer unloosed a bulb. "My dear Mr. Adam," Kip said
woodenly, as if he were making a radio speech and had difficulty reading
the script, "I hope you are well."

"Take the glass out of his hand," said Phelps-Smythe. A second
lieutenant took the glass out of Homer's hand, and they started again.
"My dear Mr. Adam," the general repeated, "I hope you are well."

"Give me back my drink," said Homer.

"Give him back his drink," the general ordered the second lieutenant.

The photographer took another shot, and the second lieutenant gave the
drink back to Homer.

"How are things?" the general inquired.

"Things are very drunk out today," Homer said.

"What's that?" said Phelps-Smythe. "What was that you said, Adam?"

"You can take the National Research Council, plus three large
cyclotrons, and you can--" I don't think there is any use repeating what
Homer told Phelps-Smythe, because such things are said every day. But
Homer Adam's saying them was new. So I listened.

Phelps-Smythe puffed out like a turkey gobbler trying to impress his
hens with his bravery. "Adam," he said, "we are through with all this
damn foolishness. From now on, Adam, you'll take orders! By God, you
will!"

"He will indeed!" General Kipp agreed.

"No," said Adam, "I won't."

Phelps-Smythe felt around in his pockets and came up with a mimeographed
sheet of paper, legal size. He put his heels together and read from it
as if it were the Articles of War. "This," he began, "is the directive
prepared by the War Department and signed by the President:

    Subject: Homer Adam.

    1. Homer Adam, civilian, is hereby declared Class AAA Strategic
    Material vital to the defense of the United States.

    2. The Department of War will be responsible for the maintenance
    and security of this property.

    3. Homer Adam, civilian, will at all times be subservient to,
    and conduct himself according to whatever rules and regulations
    shall be promulgated by the Chief of Staff, or Adjutant General,
    to carry out the purpose of Paragraphs 1 and 2.

    4. The National Research Council shall have the opportunity to
    use said Homer Adam for purposes of research upon the approval
    of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but this in no way shall interfere
    with Paragraph 2."

Phelps-Smythe folded his directive, and tucked it into a hip pocket.
"There," he said, "now you see."

"Now I see what?" said Homer.

"Now you see where things stand. I guess that directive is pretty air
tight, isn't it, General?"

"I'll say it is," said General Kipp. "That doesn't leave any doubt about
who's in control. The N.R.C. can't do a damn thing until they've got
approval from the Joint Chiefs."

Adam was thinking. "Does that mean," he asked, "that nothing is going to
happen?"

"Certainly not!" Phelps-Smythe said. "That only means that before the
N.R.C. can do anything it has to have the approval of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, which means Army, Navy, and Air. And of course before the
Joint Chiefs approve anything it will require a staff study from each
branch of the service, and proposals will have to be made by the experts
in each branch, and it probably will require special surveys to find the
effect on the existing situation. Furthermore, public opinion must be
considered. That's why we have a Public Relations Branch, and in
addition, the international situation cannot be overlooked. And of
course the whole thing will have to be co-ordinated with the War Plans
Division. Isn't that so, General?"

"That is it, precisely," said General Kipp.

"Why can't I take a little vacation?" Homer asked.

"Vacation!" shouted Phelps-Smythe. "Vacation! Now let me tell you, young
man, this foolishness is all over. From now on your life is strictly
business. Right at the first, I think we'll send you to one of the O.C.
camps and give you a little basic training. Do you good. Just what you
need. Knock this cockiness out of you."

"I won't do it," said Homer.

"You won't do it!" exploded Phelps-Smythe. "From now on you haven't got
anything to say about what you'll do or won't do."

"Oh, yes I have," said Homer. "If you keep on being nasty, I won't eat."

Phelps-Smythe started to say something, but General Kipp checked him and
told Homer, "Now we don't want any trouble, Adam. We're only doing our
duty as soldiers, you know. Come on, let's get going."

So they took Homer away. Just as he left, Phelps-Smythe turned to me and
said, "Remember, Smith--you and that Red secretary of yours--all this is
Top Secret."

Marge made a face at him, but I don't think he noticed it.

We caught the Congressional back to New York. It didn't take us long to
get out of the hotel, because Marge had done most of the packing the
night before. This I laid to intuition, but she denied it, and said it
was only common sense. She claimed that I was addled, perhaps by strain,
and wasn't able to see things with the proper perspective. She said that
immediately after a man is kicked in the teeth by a woman, a great
clarity creeps into his brain, and that this clarity persists until scar
tissue--in the shape of another woman--grows over his memory.

Just before we got on the train I bought a late edition of an evening
paper. The headline said: "ADAM BALKS; A.I. OUT!" and under this was
another headline, which read: "Army Takes Over; President for N.R.C."
There was a front page editorial, entitled, "No Cause for Alarm."




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


So we settled down in the brownstone house on West Tenth Street, first
floor, the bed known as Smith Field, and resumed our normal mode of
living. I found myself doing eight hours of rewrite a day, and liking
it. It was like occupational therapy. I wrote about the opening of the
state trout season, and I covered the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue, and
I wrote a piece about the selection of the country's ten best-dressed
men.

I rewrote our cables from Delhi and Chungking about the famine, but of
course that could hardly be considered news, because it was a running
story, the same day after day. I wrote about the over-production of
pigs, and the shortage of meat; the bumper wheat crop, and the possible
rationing of bread; the need for subsidies for the Southern cotton
farmers, and the black market in textiles; our record employment, and
our record poverty. In God's Country everything was normal, and for a
considerable space of time nothing disturbed our American Way of Life.

I kept an eager eye open for dispatches from Washington about Mr. Adam.
In the AP report, you could always find the slug, "Adam." Even when
there was no news of Homer, I knew that somebody in the AP Bureau in
Washington had to sit down and write a piece about him, and his
progress, every night, and around noon some reporter sat himself before
a typewriter, confronted by a slug saying, "New lead Adam."

So I kept watching Adam, just as a released suspect in a murder keeps
alert for news of the crime. Mostly, the Adam stories were wooden and
almost newsless. The N.R.C. was confident that, now it had been placed
in charge of Adam, science would solve the riddle of what had happened
to the world post-Mississippi. The N.R.C. had enlisted all the top
scientists of the country in the scientific battle for re-fertilization.
The N.R.C. requested more funds from the President, and claimed it must
expand to meet the crisis.

Having once been stricken with the disease, I found the symptoms
familiar. I was not overly surprised when one day I read, in a single
paragraph on page twenty-two of the _World-Telegram_, that Percy Klutz,
formerly of N.R.P., had joined N.R.C. as administrative assistant. Nor
was I surprised when I read that Nate Gableman, an experienced public
relations expert, had been loaned to N.R.C. by the Department of the
Interior, where he had just arrived from N.R.P. Prior to that, Gableman
had held a number of government positions. About a half dozen of them
were listed.

However, that was all S.O.P. What was truly puzzling were some of the
stories out of the War Department. There was a little squib that said
the War Department was sending Homer Adam to Camp Blanding, in Florida,
to absorb sunshine and recreation, because his duties in Washington had
been so arduous. There were stories about meetings of the Joint Chiefs,
at which a number of things were discussed, including Arctic maneuvers,
and Mr. Adam. The War Department sometimes said its Arctic maneuvers
were not directed at any specific power, but really at the elements, but
it never explained about Mr. Adam. Finally, there were stories about the
difficulties of using Mr. Adam, and hints that Adam wasn't really
essential, at all. He could be useful, it was admitted, but the N.R.C.
didn't regard him as absolutely essential.

One day Marge and I went to a double-header between the Yanks and the
Nats. We were propped up on our pillows in Smith Field, watching the
remnants of the immortal Yankees make fools of themselves around second
base, and I was telling Marge about Ruth and Gehrig and Dickey, and
without warning my favorite sports announcer, Malcolm Parkinson, poked
his ruddy face into our bedroom, and said, inspecting a sheet of yellow
teletype paper:

"Well, folks, I'm sorry to have to interrupt this ball game, but we've
just received an important news flash. But before I read this flash I
want to tell you that for calm nerves--nerves able to withstand the
shock of modern living--smoke..." And he went on, and on. Finally he
finished his commercial, and said, "And here is that flash, folks. Homer
Adam ruined! Yes, sir, a flash from Washington tells us that Homer Adam
has been ruined. That is all for now, but as we receive additional
details we'll give them to you, so you might as well keep tuned to this
exciting ball game, with the Yanks gamely fighting against a driving
Washington team which at this moment has a six run lead. And the next
batter for the Nats is..."

I switched him off, and his face faded off the screen, looking a bit
disturbed. "I knew it!" I said. "I knew it would happen."

"You knew what?" Marge asked.

"I knew that they'd sterilize Homer!"

"How do you know he was sterilized? All they said was that he was
ruined."

"How else could he be ruined?"

"Oh!" Marge said. "Isn't that awful!"

I turned on our bedside radio. It was beside itself. It rattled as if
men from Mars had appeared, and it wished to duck under the sheets. It
said that the War Department had informed the President that the
National Research Council had sterilized Mr. Adam. It said this had
happened several weeks ago. It said that the announcement was withheld
until it was utterly certain that Mr. Adam had been sterilized. It said
that the National Research Council announced it was a complete accident.
The War Department agreed with the N.R.C. that it was a complete
accident, and the President agreed with the War Department. Nobody was
to blame.

Marge stared at the radio as if it were foul and repugnant and
untouchable. "There it goes," she whispered.

"There goes what?"

"Everything. Just everything. That pitiful little man!"

"He's not pitiful," I said, simply for something to say.

"He is. He is, too, pitiful. When I think what's happened to him it
makes me feel unclean, as if I'd seen a murder, and hadn't done anything
to stop it."

"We all did our best," I said.

"Did we?" she asked, not of me, but of herself. "Did we really?"

I felt a little wave of anger and resentment ripple over me, like the
first chill that heralds the onset of fever. I wasn't exactly sure at
whom I was angry, but somebody had hurt and damaged my wife, and I
wanted to strike back. I wondered who had sterilized Adam, and how, and
why. Somehow, the radio didn't go into that part of it. The radio
contented itself with announcing that Homer Adam had been ruined, and
then erudite commentators rushed to the microphones to assure us that
the ruination of Adam wasn't necessarily fatal to mankind. Their
conjectures were that Adam had already contributed as much as he could
to science, and anyway, Russia had never denied possessing the two
potent Mongolians. Looking at the whole matter logically, and without
undue hysteria, it could be seen that the loss of Adam's services wasn't
so important after all. Perhaps the situation in Indo-China was of more
immediate importance, and they spoke learnedly of the situation in
Indo-China.

Our telephone rang, and it was J.C. Pogey, and he wanted to know whether
I'd heard the news, and I said I had, and he said, "I think you'd better
handle the local angle on the Adam story?"

"What local angle?" I asked.

He said there were a good many local angles. He reminded me that some of
the N.R.C. directors lived in New York, and that they should be
interviewed, and Adam himself had returned to Tarrytown, according to
the Washington Bureau. The story wasn't by any means cleaned up. As a
matter of fact, the details of Adam's sterilization remained a mystery.
I said I'd get right on it, and as I shaved and dressed the pattern
began to take shape in my mind. The first person I was going to visit
was Felix Pell. He might be the last, too.

I tried to remember where I had cached the Browning. It was my one
souvenir of the war, a handsomely machined, Belgian-made automatic. I
rummaged through the hall closet until I found it, and Marge saw me drop
it into my coat pocket. "Stephen! Why are you taking that gun?" she
demanded.

I didn't reply.

"Don't be ridiculous. If the police find that gun they'll throw you in
jail because of the Sullivan law. Anyway, you can't hit anything with it
more than ten feet away."

"What I'm going to shoot," I said, "won't be more than ten feet away."

Marge stared at me, astonished as if I'd just announced I was a
bigamist. "Stephen," she said, "are you serious?"

"I am," I said.

"I won't let you go out of the house with that weapon."

I took her by the shoulders. Maybe I was a little rough. I said,
"Darling, up to now I have been a mild and civilized man. But now I have
a killing to do."

I left before she could say anything more.

I went up to Columbia, and the home of Felix Pell. The maid opened the
door a crack, and I could see it was secured by a chain latch. On
occasion, I think it is fair to use deception. Mostly I think it is
crude and stupid, but once in a while, when the stakes are high enough,
it is the only thing to do. "Quickly," I said, "undo that chain and let
me in. Before the reporters come. They'll be here in a minute."

She blinked at me, and said, "Dr. Pell told me especially he doesn't
want to see reporters." She unhooked the latch and let me in.

"Naturally not," I said.

"I don't think he wants to see anybody," she said. "Who are you?"

"Tell him Mr. Smith is calling," I said, "on a matter of greatest
importance." She scuttled upstairs, and I followed her. I followed her
into Pell's bedroom, morose with old-fashioned walnut furniture. Pell
was propped up in bed, his picturesque head supported by pillows. He
glared at me, one eye winking erratically. Since I had last seen him, he
had developed a tick.

The maid looked at Pell, and she looked at me, and she saw that we knew
each other, and she vanished. "How did you get in here?" he demanded.

The standard defense, in a killing, is that everything either goes
black, or it goes red, and in any case the first thing the killer knows
is that the other person is dead and he is standing there with a smoking
gun in his hand. The verdict, his attorney hopes, will be temporary
insanity. It isn't exactly like that. It is simply that things are hazy,
and move with annoying slowness. I took the Browning out of my pocket.
The hammer caught in the lining, and it seemed a long time before I
ripped it loose. I thumbed the safety, and it released with a definite
click. A nice, final, decisive sound, that click. "This isn't going to
be much satisfaction for anyone except me," I said, "but for me it will
be fun."

"You're out of your head," Pell said clinically. "You're unbalanced."

I was going to shoot him through the middle of the chest, just under the
chin, where the hem of his old-fashioned nightgown met the pallid flesh.
Then I was going to shoot him again, in the same place, to make sure.
"So you finished off Homer Adam," I said. "You were very thorough, and
very clever. And it was all a deplorable accident! A most deplorable
accident!"

"No, it wasn't an accident," Pell said.

"I know it wasn't an accident. You finished off Homer Adam, and everyone
else, deliberately, just as I'm going to slam a nine-millimeter slug
through you deliberately."

He dropped back against the pillows. "All right," he said, "go ahead."
He folded his dried, tallow-yellow hands, one against the other, and
repeated, "Go ahead. I am tired. I am very tired and there is nothing
more I can do. I don't suppose it matters whether I die quickly, now, or
that I live for several months or years. Please when you shoot be sure I
am dead, because I do not want to die slowly."

This was not what I had expected him to say. He was saying all the wrong
things. "Tell me," I said, "what have you and your buddies got against
humanity that made you do it?"

Dr. Pell groaned. "Against humanity? Why, I haven't got anything against
humanity," he said. "I have always felt that I'd devoted my life to
humanity. I know you won't believe it now, and considering what you
know--the limitations of what you know--I can hardly blame you. Now
please go ahead and shoot me."

The Browning was beginning to feel heavy in my hand, and I felt rather
ridiculous, standing there, threatening this old man. I let it fall to
my side. "That doesn't make sense. You admit that Homer Adam wasn't
sterilized by accident, and yet you say--"

"He certainly was not sterilized by accident," Dr. Pell said, anger
cracking his voice. "He did it himself!"

"Did it himself?"

"Yes, he committed what amounted to sexual suicide."

This was a possibility that I had not considered. But it was so very
possible, and so intriguing, that I knew I could not kill Pell until I
found out whether it was so. I shoved the gun back into my pocket,
knowing immediately that I would never shoot Pell now, and said, "Tell
me about it."

"It is all so exasperating, and so confusing, that I don't like to
discuss it," Pell said. "I wish you would please go ahead and kill me,
because if I am forced to write a paper on this business I shall
certainly lose my mind."

"What's so exasperating and confusing?"

Pell saw that there was no chance that I would shoot him, and he said,
with resignation, "I suppose I'd better tell you about it, because I
don't think you will leave until I do. In the first place, there were
the complications. As you know, we only needed Adam for a few days of
tests, but I was never able to get my hands on him. I found that all I
was doing was attending meetings and conferences. I believe it was a
conspiracy."

"That wasn't a conspiracy," I said. "It was just ordinary procedure."

"Obstacles sprouted from the streets," Pell went on. "People sat up
nights thinking up reasons why we couldn't begin operations."

"I know what you mean."

"We were patient. Finally all the boards and committees and panels had
approved all their plans, and Adam was delivered to the laboratory. He
was calm, and in good health. We were very careful, because much of our
equipment and apparatus was designed to reproduce the rays and
radiations which we believe were unloosed in the Mississippi explosion.
The first thing we did was warn Adam not to walk in certain areas, or go
near certain machines."

"And?"

"He was very clever. He waited until we were all distracted with
something else--I believe it was the official cameramen--and then he
sauntered off. By the time we found him he had sterilized himself
thoroughly. He's lucky he's not dead."

"Are you sure?"

"Certainly we're sure. We made every conceivable test. It was the most
bewildering, exasperating experience I've ever had in my life. Why did
he do it?"

I said I didn't know, but I was going to find out. I started to
apologize for coming up to shoot Dr. Pell, but when I tried to form the
proper words into a sentence it sounded silly, and all I said was that I
was sorry things turned out the way they did, and I hoped he would soon
be out of bed.

I caught an evening commuters' train for Tarrytown, and then a cab to
the gatehouse at Rosemere. The press had left its spoor, a little pile
of used flashlight bulbs, on the front steps. I wondered whether Adam
had told the truth, as I rang the bell, and decided probably not,
because he had probably been carefully briefed on what to say before he
left Washington--an accident, a most unfortunate accident.

Homer opened the door. "Steve!" he said, draping a skinny arm around my
shoulders. "I was wondering when you'd get here. It's good to see you.
Hey, Mary Ellen," he called upstairs. "Steve finally got here."

She said she was changing diapers, and she would be down presently. "Now
that we're not working for the government any more," Homer explained,
"we had to let Mrs. Brundidge go, except twice a week."

"Well, while we're here alone," I told him, "tell me why you did it?"

Homer sat down suddenly. His cranelike legs were not made to support him
in moments of stress. "How did you know about it?" he asked. "I was
hoping no one would know. It is a secret. Everybody said it was not only
secret, but top secret, because if it got out it would cause so much
trouble, and so many people would be accused of negligence. I don't want
to get anybody into trouble."

"Don't worry," I said. "You're not getting anybody into trouble. I've
just been talking to Dr. Pell. I was about to shoot Dr. Pell, because I
thought he had deliberately sterilized you, and then he said you did it
yourself."

"I did," Homer admitted.

"But why? Were you getting back at Kathy?"

Homer glanced at the stairs. "Not so loud," he warned. "Mary Ellen
doesn't know there was anything really serious between Kathy and me, and
if she hears you mention her, she might suspect something."

"All right, I'll be careful," I agreed, amused at the ignorance of the
average male.

"No, it wasn't Kathy," he said in a low, hoarse voice.

"The way you talked about women, I thought--well, I thought you were
still vengeful."

"Oh, I think I got over that," Homer said. "As you explained, every man
gets taken once in his life."

"Perhaps you were simply fed up with the delays," I suggested,
remembering Pell's account of his troubles.

"Oh, no. I got used to delays when the N.R.P. had me."

"Then what in hell was it."

Homer began to knead his tousled mop of hair with his fingers, and I
knew he was finding it difficult to answer. "I'll tell you," he said
finally. "It was just me."

"Just you?"

"It was just that I wanted to be like everyone else. All my life I have
wanted to be like everyone else, and now I am like everyone else, and
for the first time I feel completely right. You know a lot about me,
Steve. You know I was always different. I was different when I was a
little boy, and I was different when I was adolescent, and I was
different when I grew up. Now I'm not different any more."

I tried to sort it out in my head. "When did you decide this?" I asked.

"I'm not sure. I don't think you decide things like that all at once.
This is the kind of decision that you climb and scratch for, and when
you've finally got it then you know it's all yours. I knew I had reached
my decision when Dr. Pell took me into the N.R.C. laboratories. I knew,
then, that I was either going to be sterile, like everyone else, or I
was going to be dead. I don't know what made me decide, right at that
moment. Maybe it was the machines."

"The machines? You mean, you knew that the machines gave you your
opportunity?"

"No. Not exactly that. But when I saw the machines I hated them. They
were so damn smug. There were a lot of big, pot-bellied machines with
snouts and arms, and they all looked alive, and smug. They were exactly
like the machines in Pflaum's house, and I felt they had been patiently
waiting for me. I hated them, and I wanted to put them out of business,
and all of a sudden I knew that if I was out of the way the machines
would die. That was when I walked into the range of the radiations. I
think it was the Gamma rays first."

"Homer," I said, "it sounds perfectly correct and reasonable to me, but
I am glad no psychiatrist is listening."

"I'm glad you don't think there's something wrong with me," Homer said.
"There isn't anything wrong with me, now. Why, I'm just like everyone
else." It was strange, the way he relished the phrase. It was as if he
had happily and unexpectedly been elected to a college fraternity, after
a semester of loneliness.

"Yes, Homer, you're just like everyone else," I agreed. "Just exactly."

Mary Ellen came down the steps, carrying the Adam offspring. I reflected
on what would have happened had Eleanor been a boy, and said something
about it, and Homer said, "Thank goodness she was a girl, because if she
had been a boy, he would have had to go through the same thing I had to
go through when he grew up."

Mary Ellen said she knew she should feel sorry about what had happened
to Homer, but she didn't at all, really. She knew this was selfish, but
on the other hand she felt certain something would turn up. She asked
what had happened to the two Mongolians, and I said that nobody knew.
She said that on one of the nights when Mrs. Brundidge was over she and
Homer would come to the city, and visit, and I said that was fine, and I
was sure Marge would enjoy having them. She said she hoped the
government and the press would leave them alone from now on, because it
would be difficult enough getting back into their old routine, and I
said that in a few weeks everything would quiet down.

Eleanor began to squall, and Mary Ellen said she was hungry, and took
her back upstairs, and Homer said he hoped I wouldn't write anything
about what had really happened in the N.R.C. laboratories, because it
would get him into trouble. I told him that somebody would get hold of
the story, sooner or later, but that when they did nobody would believe
it, and if I wrote it now nobody would believe it, so I wasn't going to
write it.

I called J.C. Pogey, and then I went home. If I expected Marge to be
apprehensive about what I'd done to Dr. Pell I was mistaken. She was
putting together a ham steak and pineapple slices, and whistling at her
work. "Before you come in here," she said, "you put that gun in the
closet, and take out the clip, and be sure there's no bullet in the
chamber."

"Aren't you going to ask me whether I killed him?" I said.

"I know you didn't."

I realized I hadn't told her where I was going. "Know I didn't kill
who?"

"Why, Dr. Pell, of course. Who else would you be wanting to kill? I
called him right after you left his house. He said you were headstrong
and not too bright, but ordinarily harmless."

I told her about Homer. "That's what I thought," she said, "from the way
Dr. Pell talked."

After dinner we retired to Smith Field, and the radio began to bleat
about the new catastrophe--but always with optimistic overtones. It fell
upon the theme that Homer was not indispensable, and worried that for a
time, and then it began to chew the story of the two Mongolians. In the
space of a few hours the two Mongolians became supremely important to
the American people.

The Secretary of State had been asked about the status of the two
Mongolians, and he said he had the greatest confidence in the fair play
of the Russian government, our loyal allies, and he was sure the
U.S.S.R. would not hoard them. The Secretary of State suggested that
hereafter any unsterilized males should be turned over to the United
Nations. If I remember his words correctly, he said, "How can we expect
the United Nations to become a strong and independent force for the
benefit of all mankind unless it possesses access to the resources of
all nations?" It was a brilliant thought, and I was surprised that he
hadn't thought of it before.

He pointed out what aid the United States had given Russia, during the
war, and went all the way back to the Alaska purchase to recall our
constant good relations with Russia. The very spirit of Communism, he
pointed out, was devoted to the good of all peoples, and he reminded
Russia that the two unsterilized Mongols were citizens of the world, as
well as of the U.S.S.R.

There was a dispatch from Chungking hinting that the two Mongolians
might not be Russian at all, but Chinese, and requesting that the case
be put before the Security Council. London immediately announced it
would vote along with China.

And then, just before midnight, a dispatch from Moscow said that the
Russian government didn't know a thing about unsterilized Mongolians.
The story of the two Mongolians, Moscow said, was undoubtedly part of an
anti-Communist plot.

An announcer talked about a laxative that was so soothing for those over
thirty-five, and I said I thought it was horrible advertising
psychology, and Marge asked why, and I said because it automatically
eliminated everyone under thirty-five as a prospective customer. Marge
said that wasn't the reason I didn't like it. The reason was because I
was over thirty-five, and resented it whenever anyone reminded me of it.
And I admitted that was another reason I didn't like it. And Marge said
she thought it was good advertising, now that Adam was finished and the
two Mongolians were phoney, because eventually everybody would be over
thirty-five.

I don't think she liked the idea, because she was still awake, with her
head couched in her arm, when I fell asleep.

I suppose everyone turned out his lights at the usual hour that night.
Certainly there was no wailing in the streets.




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


With Adam ruined, the two Mongolians a myth, the N.R.C. baffled and
helpless, and the N.R.P. on the verge of liquidation, the situation was
black as a British communiqu the day before Dunkirk. Yet the customs
and habits of man kept him revolving in his orbit as inexorably as
planets are bound to the sun. The world would not die in agony and
convulsions. It would simply expire of old age.

The most popular slogan of the day was "Take it easy," and _Life Begins
at Forty_ again went to the top of the list of best sellers. The only
people who were extremely sensitive to the passing of each childless day
were women approaching an age where they would no longer be able to bear
children. They formed associations, and demanded that Congress and the
Administration do something, but there was nothing to do.

Everyone acquired a little bit of the philosophy of J.C. Pogey, and
Pogey himself said mankind was behaving exactly as he had expected. "It
is this way," he explained. "If the threat of destruction couldn't jolt
us out of our rut--and that threat was apparent long before
Mississippi--then the fact of destruction can't be expected to change us
much either."

Everything rocked along as usual. The Miami Chamber of Commerce
announced that it was planning its biggest season, and that next winter,
for certain, Miami would not be overrun with gangsters and racketeers.
The airlines started five-day excursions to Paris and Cairo. There was
an abundance of nylon stockings, but it became unfashionable to wear
them. The housing crisis miraculously passed. Everything was
normal--except in my own home.

In my own home the situation suddenly and violently departed from
normal. It was Marge. Her entire disposition and character changed, and
for the worse.

At first I put it down to delayed shock from the catastrophe that had
overtaken Homer. Marge had been more than fond of Homer. Like so many
weak men with stronger women, he apparently had appealed to all her
protective instincts. In addition, she really had had a good deal of
faith in A.I., probably acquired from talking to Maria Ostenheimer. Yet
she had accepted the sterilization of Homer Adam without undue emotion.

Now she grew irritable, and touchy, and I blamed it on delayed shock.
She was gradually realizing, I believed at first, that Homer's suicidal
disaster had doomed her to a barren marriage.

The habit and pattern and tradition of our life together--the small
things that two people do together that make them one--were blemished or
vanished entirely. These are very small things indeed, but of surpassing
importance. There are the private jokes; and the ritual of who wakes
first, and puts on the coffee; and who gets what part of the Sunday
papers; and my growls because she uses my razor.

The business of the razor ordinarily used to go like this: When I
started shaving I would discover that my razor had had it. I would curse
and say that there were a few things a man could have in private, and
one of them was a razor, and that if she wanted to shave her legs she
could easily run over to the drug store on the Avenue of the Americas
and buy a razor all her own. And she would say she had bought countless
razors, but hers were always dull, and mine was always sharp. And I
would say that was because I put fresh blades in mine, and she would say
that was part of a man's duty, and I would say I was going to cure her
entirely, and take up electric shaving.

And there, ordinarily, was where it ended. But one day in June I was
covering an exhibition of electric gadgets and a manufacturer presented
all the reporters with electric razors.

The next morning I was running it over my chin when Marge saw me and
immediately burst into tears. "You horrid man," she said. "You don't
love me any more."

"I don't what?"

"You don't love me any more. For years you've tortured me with threats
about buying an electric razor, and now you have gone and done it,
simply to show your contempt for me."

I looked at her, and saw she actually was crying. An absurd and maudlin
scene developed, at the end of which I threw my electric razor into the
trash barrel.

Then there was the matter of getting up nights. Ordinarily Marge sleeps
as if she had been hit on the head, until morning, but she began to
develop a habit of waking up, at four or five, and then waking me up. "I
want a bag of peanuts," she would say, nudging me or kicking me from the
other side of Smith Field. Sometimes she would wake up and say she
wasn't sure the front door was locked, or would I please get up and
bring her a raw egg.

It was all inexplicable, and most unlike her.

The worst of it was her newly acquired jealousy and suspicion. Marge had
never been jealous. For one thing, it is silly and futile for a
newspaperman's wife to be jealous, just as it is silly and futile for a
doctor's wife to be jealous. The uncertain hours and nature of his job
provide a newspaperman with so many unimpeachable alibis that if a wife
suspects him she will just run herself crazy, and never prove anything.
In the second place, Marge simply wasn't jealous. I don't know whether
it was confidence in herself, or in me.

Now, each night when I returned from work, she began to drop little
fishhooks of questions into her conversation, trying to catch some
fancied admission that would prove me unfaithful.

She fished in all the years of our marriage. Incidents that I had long
forgotten, and girls of whom I had only the vaguest memory became
subjects for hysterical accusations and violent scenes. One evening
Marge casually put a magazine aside and said, "That secretary of yours
in Washington, Jane Zitter--you saw a lot of her, didn't you?"

"Yes," I said. "She was a big help. Swell girl."

"Stephen, you sort of lived with her, didn't you?"

I saw what was coming. "Now look, Marge," I said. "There wasn't anything
between Jane and me except that she was my secretary, and a very good
one, too. And if you've got to exercise these silly notions of yours,
pick on somebody besides poor Jane."

"Well, you're pretty excited about it, aren't you," she said
significantly. "Actually, she did live with you, didn't she?"

I knew I was going to blow up, and I began to pace the floor to relieve
the pressure. "Marge, you know as well as I do that sometimes Jane spent
the night up in the hotel. In her own bedroom. In her own bed. Nobody
with her. Now lay off!"

"You're shouting at me again," she said. "You always shout when you've
done something you can't explain. Just because you make a lot of noise
doesn't make you less guilty."

I was tired of it. I was tired of Marge and her incessant third degree.
But I didn't say anything more. I put on my hat, and went outside, and
it was good to be alone. I realized that lately I had been leaving for
work earlier than necessary, and returning home as late as possible. I
walked over to Fifth Avenue, and then down to Washington Square. I found
an empty bench, and sat down and tried to think.

I told myself that I was letting my nerves harass me into a point where
I would reach an impasse with Marge, and there would be a divorce,
although a divorce since W.S. Day seemed almost as futile as marriage.
Then I began to analyze her actions. I tried to place myself in the role
of a disinterested spectator. And particularly I began to analyze her
spasms of jealousy and suspicion. I told myself that there could be no
doubt of it, Marge was ill--mentally ill. She had all the symptoms.

It was quite the most horrible and dismaying conclusion I ever reached.
I had never realized, before, that insanity in one close to you is far
worse than physical illness, for when a person's mind goes they are
completely gone from you, as in death, and yet their body remains. Of
course I had to be certain, and once I was certain I must see that she
got the very best neurotheraphy. I told myself that it probably wasn't
incurable. I would ask Maria Ostenheimer and Tommy Thompson over the
next night and, without alarming Marge, they could tell whether it was
so.

Before I returned home I stopped at a drug store, and called Maria, and
told her the whole story, as unemotionally as possible, and from the
questions she asked I could see that she was worried, and she promised
to come over the next evening for bridge, and she would bring Tommy.

I went to sleep that night trying to remember what I knew of Marge's
family. Certainly her mother and father were quite sane, but I knew
hardly anything of her grandparents. Maybe it didn't matter.

So Maria and Tommy came over the next night--a Tuesday--ostensibly for
bridge, but actually to put Marge under quiet observation for a few
hours. It started off tamely enough, but it developed into quite a
remarkable evening.

We started playing bridge in the usual way, talking about the usual
things--the Transylvania question, and Manchuria, and wasn't it a shame
about A.I.--but I could see that Maria and Tommy were watching Marge
closely as if they had her in the hospital. They watched the
co-ordination of her hands, they watched her eyes, and they dropped deft
little, seemingly unrelated, questions into the stream of our
conversation. And Marge, I do believe, appeared completely normal for
the first hour or so, until she suddenly put down her cards and
exclaimed, "I must have a dill pickle!"

"What's that?" Tommy asked.

"I must have a dill pickle!" Marge repeated. "If I don't have a dill
pickle I shall go mad. Stephen, go to the delicatessen at once and get
some dill pickles!"

"But, Marge," I protested, "that's absurd. We can't break up the game
just because you have a sudden yen for a dill pickle!"

"Stephen, you hate me, don't you? But I must have a pickle."

"I think," Maria interrupted quietly, "that you had better go get a
pickle, Stephen."

So I trotted around to the delicatessen and bought some dill pickles.
"Don't slice them," Marge ordered when I got back. "I want them whole."
I expected her to devour them whole, on the spot, but she bit into one,
nibbled at a small piece of it, and then shoved them aside.

"Is that all you want?" I asked, indignant at all the trouble for one
puny bit of pickle.

"That's all," she said. "Whose deal?"

I looked at Maria and Tommy. Obviously they were puzzled. Perhaps
startled is a better word. Particularly Maria. "Darling," she asked
Marge in a soothing voice, "do you often get a sudden hankering for a
certain kind of food, like that? So you feel you must have it,
absolutely must?"

"She certainly does," I said, "at the oddest hours."

"Shut up!" Marge told me. "Shut up! Haven't I any privacy in my own
house?"

Tommy didn't say anything. He began to deal the cards. Maria kept her
eyes on Marge, a queer, puzzled expression--you might call it
compassion--shining out of her small dark face.

And then, in perhaps thirty minutes, Marge got up from the table, and
slipped on her coat, and said, "You people will excuse me for a few
minutes, won't you?"

"Where are you going?" I said. "Marge, we've got company. We're playing
bridge."

"No, Stephen, I'll go myself," Marge said. "I don't want to bother you.
It's so much trouble for you to go out and get something for me."

"Now Marge," I said, "just tell me what you want and I'll get it." I
found that I was afraid if she went out she would not come back. I
recalled all the stories I'd written in my life about wives who got up
from the bridge table, or left a cocktail party, and turned up at
Bayonne, N. J., or Birmingham, ten days later with a beautiful and
impenetrable amnesia.

"I was just going out and get some lemons," Marge said. "I've got a
frightful craving for lemons."

"Aren't there some in the refrigerator?" I said.

"No, I'm afraid I ate them all," Marge said. "For days, I've been
devouring lemons. Dozens of them."

Maria said, as if she was repeating a witch's incantation, "Pickles and
lemons, lemons and pickles." She touched Marge's arm and said, "Dear, I
want to see you alone for a moment, in the bedroom."

"But my lemons," Marge said.

They went into the bedroom together. "What do you think of that
performance?" I asked Tommy. I was shocked, but at the same time I was
glad it had happened, because it gave Maria and Tommy such a perfect
insight into the strange things that had been going on in the Chez
Smith.

Tommy hunched his enormous shoulders and let his chin sink on his chest.
"There's something in the back of my mind," he said.

"Don't you agree," I said, "that there is something wrong, mentally?
These wild whims for food--and the jealousy. Of course you won't get a
chance to see her when she starts accusing me, because she won't do it
until you're gone. But it's really pathetic."

Tommy shook his head. "She's not crazy" he said. "She's emotionally
disturbed, but she's not crazy. There's something pushing against her
subconscious that gives us these symptoms. Brought into the open, they'd
probably disappear. I just can't imagine what it would be, unless--"

"Unless what--"

"Skip it," Tommy said brusquely, and then Maria poked her head out of
the bedroom door, and said would Tommy please come in for a moment. She
sounded excited. Tommy went into the bedroom, and shut the door behind
him, and my imagination began to play a rhythm of fear and apprehension
inside my head.

Now you could see, I told myself, that it was serious. Maria taking
Marge into the bedroom, like that, showed that she suspected something.
And calling Tommy into consultation showed that she wanted him to
confirm it. Once I thought I heard a sound like a frightened squeal.
They remained in the bedroom for what seemed an unreasonably long time,
although probably it was no more than fifteen minutes, and by the time
they came out I was pacing the floor, a drink in my hand, and my hand
was shaking.

I began, definitely, to hear noises from the bedroom. It sounded like
Marge's laughter, but it was probably groans. Then they all came out, in
a silent, tense little line, like the first three coming out of the jury
room. Maria was first, Tommy second, and Marge last. If I remember
correctly, they were all crying, or laughing, or both.

They walked over to me and Tommy took me by the shoulders and said,
"Unless we are both mistaken, and we are both willing to stake our
reputation on it, Marge is going to have a baby!"

I remember staring down at the shattered glass that I had held in my
hand, and the pool of soda bubbling around it. I found that Tommy was
holding me up. "Stephen!" Marge said. "Stephen, what's the matter?"

"He's out on his feet," Tommy said. "He'll be all right in a second.
Bring him another drink."

I drank it, and I looked at all of their faces and I could see that they
weren't joking. For a long time all I could say was, "Impossible!" and
then I sat down and began to think.

I thought very rapidly, and asked how long Marge had been pregnant, and
Maria said about two months--probably a little longer--and I ticked the
months off on my fingers, backwards, and arrived at Marge in
Washington--with Homer Adam. Marge said, "I know just what you're
thinking, Stephen Decatur Smith, and it isn't so. You're a suspicious,
dirty old man."

"Oh, my," I said, "if it wasn't Homer, then who was it?"

"Him!" she said. She put her arms around Tommy's neck and kissed him on
the mouth.

"Oh, no, it wasn't him," I said. "He's in exactly the same shape I'm in.
You can't fool me, Marge. It was Homer. I can't say that I blame you. If
you really wanted a baby, that was the only reliable way to have one."

"Oh, you darn fool," said Marge. "You don't understand at all, do you?"

"Naturally I don't understand. What husband ever does understand?"

"Shall I explain?" Tommy asked.

"No, I'll tell him," Marge said, "although I really shouldn't. I really
should let him think it was Homer."

"Go ahead," I said. "From now on I can take anything."

"It was Tommy's tonic--that seaweed stuff. It worked."

"Ha-ha. Ho-ho," I laughed. "I didn't take any!"

"Oh, yes, you did," Marge said. "You took a whole bottle. Do you
remember that day in Washington you felt so bad? That day I spiked all
your drinks, and the next morning I poured the rest of it into your
coffee."

"My gosh," Tommy interrupted. "You were only supposed to give him forty
drops a day. That's powerful stuff!"

"I know," Marge said, "but I wasn't going to be in Washington long, and
so I gave him the whole bottle."

I felt affronted and outraged, as anyone does who discovers that
somebody has been tampering with their food or drink. "You might have
killed me," I said. "From now on I suppose I'll have to have a taster in
this house."

Maria looked at me, almost in wonder. "But she didn't kill you," she
said, "and you're going to be a father!"

Gradually, very gradually, for the mind cannot absorb so much at once,
the full import and meaning of what had happened began to penetrate. For
no good reason I began to shake Tommy's hand. "Congratulations," I told
him. "You did it!"

He didn't seem to be listening. He said, as if talking to himself, "I
wonder whether it was giving him the whole bottle at once, or whether it
was mixing it with the rye, or whether it was mixing it with the coffee.
I wonder whether it wasn't a freak, a phenomenon that won't be repeated.
I wonder whether it wouldn't have happened spontaneously anyway. I
wonder whether any of the guys at the hospital--"

"You can start figuring all that out tomorrow," Maria told him. "Right
now, it's just wonderful."

Marge asked me whether I wasn't going to kiss her, and I kissed her for
such a long time that Maria and Tommy stood by, fascinated, and watched,
and Marge said she supposed she had been acting like a fool for a month
or two, but she couldn't help it and now that she knew what was the
matter I didn't have to worry any more.

"I ought to call the office," I said, "and give them a flash."

"I wouldn't--not yet," Maria warned. "Both Tommy and I are absolutely
certain, and yet there's always that infinitesimal possibility of a
mistake. We'll have a rabbit test made tomorrow, and then you can write
your story." That sounded reasonable.

I do not remember much about the rest of that evening. But just before
Maria left she asked Tommy, as if it were a matter of no importance,
whether he himself had been taking the seaweed stuff, and Tommy said
yes, of course, and as she tucked a hand under his elbow she said,
"Tommy, I think we ought to get married, right away. I'm a little
worried."




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


I suppose the rest is history, rather than a personal narrative.

The positive reports on the rabbit test came through Wednesday night,
and I called J.C. Pogey and said I had a flash, and he said it was about
time that somebody produced a flash, because the world was rotting, and
for the first time in his life he was getting bored with his job. I said
that from now on he wouldn't be bored, because the flash was that I was
going to have a baby.

"_You_ are going to have a baby," said J.C. "If that happens I quit."

"Well, Marge is," I said.

"Whose?" he demanded sharply, no doubt thinking the same thing that I
had thought when I first heard the news.

"Mine," I told him, and I told him how.

J.C. Pogey is a great newspaperman. He immediately foresaw all the
possibilities that Tommy Thompson had foreseen--principally that it was
just an isolated accident. He said, "We're not going overboard on this
story. We'll just present it factually as it has happened thus far. We
will not speculate."

But of course the world went quite mad, in spite of J.C. Pogey.

It turned out that the world was justified. Tommy Thompson discovered
that his seaweed tonic, given in a dose not quite lethal and without the
aid of alcohol or caffeine, jolted the paralyzed male germ into
activity. In hardly any time all the interns at Polyclinic, and all
Tommy's friends, were potent and careful.

The government immediately took over all production, and Phelps-Smythe,
now a general, was entrusted with security. This was a most important
post, because there was no doubt that the Russians were trying to steal
the secret. They actually admitted it themselves.

There are plans, not entirely approved, for making Thompson's tonic
available to every male in all the world, even the Outer Mongolians. But
as things stand now the program is moving along like a boxcar with flat
wheels being jostled into a siding.

All these plans have not been put into effect, because of the
complications. At first the Thompson tonic was placed in the hands of
N.R.C., but later N.R.P. was revived, combining all the best men of both
organizations, under Abel Pumphrey.

While matters are not proceeding with great speed, it is quite
understandable. After all the domestic issues are ironed out, there is
the foreign problem. There is a group that believes that UN should
handle a good deal of it. But the Administration has decided that it is
of much too vital importance for UN. Being a young organization, perhaps
UN can handle things like the Transylvania boundary dispute, but
certainly should not be entrusted with the secret of Thompson's tonic.
All the commentators agree that Thompson's tonic is dynamite.

The Frame has abandoned her screen career, and is racing around the
country presenting, in lectures, her proposals for founding a perfect
race.

Homer Adam has resumed commuting to New York from Tarrytown. Suddenly he
has become no more famous than Wrong Way Corrigan, Jess Willard, or Papa
Dionne. Poor Homer is indeed a has-been, for he sterilized himself so
thoroughly that not even Thompsons' tonic can help him. This, he does
not seem to mind.

It was eighteen months after our twins were born that J.C. Pogey made
his last visit to us. It was the same day that Turkey announced it would
fight if Russia tried to take the Straits; the Atlantic fleet set out
for maneuvers near Iceland; Britain announced it was backing up the
fortifications of Gibraltar; and France announced her expansion of bases
in North Africa. It was just an ordinary day.

J.C. watched the twins playing in the play pen. Little Abel (I don't
know why Marge insisted on naming him after Abel Pumphrey) was sitting
down, playing with his blocks, and minding his own business. Little
Stephen had found a tack hammer somewhere, and with it in his hand he
was advancing on Abel as if to scalp him.

J.C. watched, fascinated, and he said, "This is where I came in," and
left. We never saw him again.






[End of Mr. Adam, by Pat Frank]
