"Sylva never mentioned the name?"
"Sylva! N-no, she didn"t."
"Let"s go somewhere and have a drink. I"d like to talk to you." Something had pleased this man: Guy wondered what. "Well, okay," he said. "Only I don"t drink much, but well, okay."
They found a bar in the neighborhood with booths in the back. Keogh had a Scotch and soda and Guy, after some hesitation, ordered beer. Guy said, "You know her?"
"Most of her life. Do you?"
"What? Well, sure. We"re going to get married." He looked studiously into his beer and said uncomfortably, "What are you anyway, Mr. Keogh?"
"You might say," said Keogh, "I"m in loco parentis" in loco parentis" He waited for a response, then added, "Sort of a guardian." He waited for a response, then added, "Sort of a guardian."
"She never said anything about a guardian."
"I can understand that. What has she told you about herself?"
Guy"s discomfort descended to a level of shyness, diffidence, even a touch of fearwhich did not alter the firmness of his words, however they were spoken. "I don"t know you, Mr. Keogh. I don"t think I ought to answer any questions about Sylva. Or me. Or anything." He looked up at the man. Keogh searched deeply, then smiled. It was an unpracticed and apparently slightly painful process with him, but was genuine for all that. "Good!" he barked, and rose. "Come on." He left the booth and Guy, more than a little startled, followed. They went to the phone booth in the corner. Keogh dropped in a, nickel, dialed, and waited, his eyes fixed on Guy. Then Guy had to listen to one side of the conversation: "I"m here with Guy Gibbon." (Guy had to notice that Keogh identified himself only with his voice.) "Of course I knew about it. That"s a silly question, girl."
"Because it is is my business. my business. You You are my business." are my business."
"Stop it? I"m not trying to stop anything. I just have to know, that"s all."
"All right. All right... He"s here. He won"t talk about you or anything, which is good. Yes, very good. Will you please tell him to open up?"
And he handed the receiver to a startled Guy, who said tremulously, "Uh, h.e.l.lo," to it while watching Keogh"s impa.s.sive face.
Her voice suffused and flooded him, changed this whole unsettling experience to something different and good. "Guy, darling,"
"Sylva"
"It"s all right. I should have told you sooner, I guess. It had to come some time. Guy, you can tell Keogh anything you like. Anything he asks."
"Why, honey? Who is he, anyway?"
There was a pause, then a strange little laugh. "He can explain that better than I can. You want us to be married, Guy?"
"Oh yes!"
"Well all right then. n.o.body can change that, n.o.body but you. And listen, Guy. I"ll live anywhere, any way you want to live. That"s the real truth and all of it, do you believe me?"
"I always believe you."
"All right then. So that"s what we"ll do. Now you go and talk to Keogh. Tell him anything he wants to know. He has to do the same. I love you, Guy."
"Me too," said Guy, watching Keogh"s face. "Well, okay then,"" he added when she said nothing further. " "Bye." He hung up and he and Keogh had a long talk.
"It hurts him," she whispered to Dr. Rathburn.
"I know." He shook his head sympathetically. "There"s just so much morphine you can ram into a man, though."
"Just a little more?"
"Maybe a little," he said sadly. He went to his bag and got the needle. Sylva kissed the sleeping man tenderly and left the room. Keogh was waiting for her.
He said, "This has got to stop, girl."
"Why?" she responded ominously.
"Let"s get out of here."
She had known Keogh so long, and so well, that she was sure he had no surprises for her. But this voice, this look, these were something new in Keogh. He held the door for her, so she preceded him through it and then went where he silently led.
They left the castle and took the path through a heavy copse and over the brow of the hill which overlooked the barn. The parking lot, which had once been a barnyard, was full of automobiles. A white ambulance approached; another was unloading at the northeast platform. A m.u.f.fled generator purred somewhere behind the building, and smoke rose from the stack of the new stone boiler room at the side. They both looked avidly at the building but did not comment. The path took them along the crest of the hill and down toward the lake. They went to a small forest clearing in which stood an eight-foot Diana, the huntress Diana, chaste and fleet-footed, so beautifully finished she seemed not like marble at all, not like anything cold or static, "I always had the idea," said Keogh, "that n.o.body can lie anywhere near her."
She looked up at the Diana.
"Not even to themselves," said Keogh, and plumped down on a marble bench.
"Let"s have it," she said.
"You want to make Guy Gibbon happen all over again. It"s a crazy idea and it"s a big one too. But lots of things were crazier, and some bigger, and now they"re commonplace. I won"t argue on how crazy it is, or how big."
"What then?"
"I"ve been trying, the last day or so, to back way out, far off, get a look at this thing with some perspective. Sylva, you"ve forgotten something."
"Good," she said. "Oh, good. I knew you"d think of things like this before it was too late."
"So you can find a way out?" Slowly he shook his head. "Not this time. Tighten up the Wyke guts, girl, and make up your mind to quit."
"Go ahead."
"It"s just this. I don"t believe you"re going to get your carbon copy, mind you, but you just might. I"ve been talking to Weber, and by G.o.d you just about might. But if you do, all you"ve got is a container, and nothing to fill it with. Look, girl, a man isn"t blood and bone and body cells, and that"s all."
He paused, until she said, "Go on, Keogh."
He demanded, "You love this guy?"
"Keogh!" She was amused.
"Whaddaya love?" he barked. "That skrinkly hair? The muscles, skin? His nat"ral equipment? The eyes, voice?"
"All that," she said composedly.
"All that, and that"s all?" he demanded relentlessly. "Because if your answer is yes, you can have what you want, and more power to you, and good riddance. I don"t know anything about love, but I will say this: that if that"s all there is to it, the h.e.l.l with it."
"Well of course course there"s more." there"s more."
"Ah. And where are you going to get that, girl? Listen, a man is skin and bone he stands in, plus what"s in his head, plus what"s in his heart. You mean to reproduce Guy Gibbon, but you"re not going to do it by duplicating his carca.s.s. You want to duplicate the whole man, you"re going to have to make him live the same life again. And that you can"t do."
She looked up at the Diana for a long time. Then, "Why not?" she breathed.
"I"ll tell you why not," he said angrily. "Because first of all you have to find out who he is." who he is."
"I know who he is!"
He spat explosively on the green moss by the bench. It was totally uncharacteristic and truly shocking. "You don"t know a particle, and I know even less: I had his back against a wall one time for better than two hours, trying to find out who he is. He"s just another kid, is all. Nothing much in school, nothing much at sports, same general tastes and feelings as six zillion other ones like him. Why him, Sylva? Why him? What did you ever see in a guy like that to be worth the marrying?"
"I... didn"t know you disliked him."
"Oh h.e.l.l, girl, I don"t! I never said that. I can"tI can"t even find anything to dislike."
"You don"t know him the way I do."
"There, I agree. I don"t and I couldn"t. Because you don"t know anything eitheryou feel, feel, but you don"t but you don"t know. know. If you want to see Guy Gibbon again, or a reasonable facsimile, he"s going to have to live by a script from the day he"s born. He"ll have to duplicate every experience that this kid here ever had." If you want to see Guy Gibbon again, or a reasonable facsimile, he"s going to have to live by a script from the day he"s born. He"ll have to duplicate every experience that this kid here ever had."
"All right," she said quietly.
He looked at her, stunned. He said, "And before he can do that, we have to write the script. And before we can write it, we have to get the material somehow. What do you expect to doset up a foundation or something dedicated to the discovery of each and every moment this this unnoticeable young man ever lived through? And do it secretly, because while he"s growing up he can"t ever know? Do you know how much that would cost, how many people it would involve?"
"That would be all right," she said.
"And suppose you had it, a biography written like a script, twenty years of a lifetime, every day, every hour you could account for; now you"re going to have to arrange for a child, from birth, to be surrounded by people who are going to play this script outand who will never let anything else happen to him but what"s in the script, and who will never let him know."
"That"s it! That"s it!" she cried.
He leapt to his feet and swore at her. He said, "I"m not planning this, you lovestruck lunatic, I"m objecting to it!"
"Is there any more?" she cried eagerly. "Keogh, Keogh, trytry hard. How do we start? What do we do first? Quick, Keogh."
He looked at her, thunderstruck, and at last sank down on the bench and began to laugh weakly. She sat by him, held his hand, her eyes shining. After a time he sobered, and turned to her. He drank the shine of those eyes for a while; and after, his brain began to function again... on Wyke business...
"The main source of who he is and what he"s done," he said at last, "won"t be with us much longer... We better go tell Rathburn to get him off the morphine. He has to be able to think."
"All right," she said. "All right."
When the pain got too much to permit him to remember any more, they tried a little morphine again. For a while they found a balance between recollection and agony, but the agony gained. Then they severed his spinal cord so he couldn"t feel it. They brought in peoplepsychiatrist, stenographers, even a professional historian.
In the rebuilt barn, Weber tried animal hosts, cows even, and primateseverything he could think of. He got some results, though no good ones. He tried humans too. He couldn"t cross the bridge of body tolerance; the uterus will not support an alien fetus any more than the hand will accept the graft of another"s finger.
So he tried nutrient solutions. He tried a great many.
Ultimately he found one that worked. It was the blood plasma of pregnant women.
He placed the best of the quasi-ova between sheets of sterilized chamois. He designd automatic machinery to drip tiie plasma in at arterial tempo, drain it at a veinous rate, keep it at body temperature.
One day fifty of them died, because of the chloroform used in one of the adhesives. When light seemed to affect them adversely, Weber designed containers of bakelite. When ordinary photography proved impractical, he designed a new kind of film sensitive to heat, the first infrared film.
The viable fetuses he had at sixty days showed the eye-spot, the spine, the buds of arms, a beating heart. Each and every one of them consumed, or was bathed in, over a gallon of plasma a day, and at one point there were one hundred and seventy-four thousand of them. Then they began to die offsome malformed, some chemically unbalanced, many for reasons too subtle even for Weber and his staff.
When he had done all he could, when he could only wait and see, he had fetuses seven months along and growing well. There were twenty-three of them. Guy Gibbon was dead quite a while by then, and his widow came to see Weber and tiredly put down a stack of papers and reports, urged him to read, begged him to call her as soon as he had.
He read them, he called her. He refused what she asked.
She got hold of Keogh. He refused to have anything to do with such an idea. She made him change his mind. Keogh made Weber change his mind.
The stone barn hummed with construction again, and new machinery. The cold tank was four by six feet inside, surrounded by coils and sensing devices. They put her in it.
By that time the fetuses were eight and a half months along. There were four left.
One made it.
Author"s note: To the reader, but especially to the reader in his early twenties, let me ask: did you ever have the feeling that you were getting pushed around? Did you ever want to do something, and have all sorts of obstacles thrown in your way until you had to give up, while on the other hand some other thing you wanted was made easy for you? Did you ever feel that certain strangers know Who you are? Did you ever meet a girl who made you explode inside, who seemed to like youand who was mysteriously plucked out of your life, as if she shouldn"t be in the script? To the reader, but especially to the reader in his early twenties, let me ask: did you ever have the feeling that you were getting pushed around? Did you ever want to do something, and have all sorts of obstacles thrown in your way until you had to give up, while on the other hand some other thing you wanted was made easy for you? Did you ever feel that certain strangers know Who you are? Did you ever meet a girl who made you explode inside, who seemed to like youand who was mysteriously plucked out of your life, as if she shouldn"t be in the script?
Well, we"ve all had these feelings. Yet if you"ve read the above, you"ll allow it"s a little more startling than just a story. It reads like an a.n.a.logy, doesn"t it? I mean, it doesn"t have to be a castle, or the ol" swimmin" hole, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent... author.
Because it could be about time for her to wake up, aged only two or three years for her twenty-year cold sleep. And when she meets you, it"s going to be the biggest thing that ever happened to you since the last time.
The End