Child Read online

  He called the office in the little corner drugstore which was his breakfast nook. “I’ll be home all day,” he told Tina.

  She was a little puzzled. So was Lew Knight, who grabbed the phone. “Hey, counselor, you building up a neighborhood practice? Kid Blackstone is missing out on a lot of cases. Two ambulances have already clanged past the building.”

  “Yeah,” said Sam. “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”

  The weekend was almost upon him, so he decided to take the next day off as well. He wouldn’t have any real work till Monday when the Somerset Ojack basket would produce his lone egg.

  Before he returned to his room, he purchased a copy of an advanced bacteriology. It was amusing to construct—with improvements!—unicellular creatures whose very place in the scheme of classification was a matter for argument among scientists of his own day. The Bild-A-Man manual, of course, merely gave a few examples and general rules; but with the descriptions in the bacteriology, the world was his oyster.

  Which was an idea: he made a few oysters. The shells weren’t hard enough, and he couldn’t quite screw his courage up to the eating point, but they were most undeniably bivalves. If he cared to perfect his technique, his food problem would be solved.

  The manual was fairly easy to follow and profusely illustrated with pictures that expanded into solidity as the page was opened. Very little was taken for granted; involved explanations followed simpler ones. Only the allusions were occasionally obscure—“This is the principle used in the phanphophlink toys,” “When your teeth are next yokekkled or demortoned, think of the Bacterium cyanogenum and the humble part it plays,” “If you have a rubicular mannikin around the house, you needn’t bother with the chapter on mannikins.”

  After a brief search had convinced Sam that whatever else he now had in his apartment he didn’t have a rubicular mannikin, he felt justified in turning to the chapter on mannikins. He had conquered completely this feeling of being Pop playing with Junior’s toy train: already he had done more than the world’s top biologists ever dreamed of for the next generation and what might not lie ahead—what problems might he not yet solve?

  “Never forget that mannikins are constructed for one purpose and one purpose only.” I won’t, Sam promised. “Whether they are sanitary mannikins, tailoring mannikins, printing mannikins or even sunevviarry mannikins, they are each constructed with one operation of a given process in view. When you make a mannikin that is capable of more than one function, you are committing a crime so serious as to be punishable by public admonition.”

  “To construct an elementary mannikin—”

  It was very difficult. Three times he tore down developing monstrosities and began anew. It wasn’t till Sunday afternoon that the mannikin was complete—or rather, incomplete.

  Long arms it had—although by an error, one was slightly longer than the other—a faceless head and a trunk. No legs. No eyes or ears, no organs of reproduction. It lay on his bed and gurgled out of the red rim of a mouth that was supposed to serve both for ingress and excretion of food. It waved the long arms, designed for some one simple operation not yet invented, in slow circles.

  Sam, watching it, decided that life could be as ugly as an open field latrine in midsummer.

  He had to disassemble it. Its length—three feet from almost boneless fingers to tapering, sealed-off trunk—precluded the use of the tiny disassembleator with which he had taken apart the oysters and miscellaneous small creations. There was a bright yellow notice on the large diassembleator, however—“To be used only under the direct supervision of a Census Keeper. Call formula A76 or unstable your id.”

  “Formula A76” meant about as much as “sunevviarry,” and Sam decided his id was already sufficiently unstabled, thank you. He’d have to make out without a Census Keeper. The big disassembleator probably used the same general principles as the small one.

  He clamped it to a bedpost and adjusted the focus. He snapped the switch set in the smooth underside.

  Five minutes later the mannikin was a bright, gooey mess on his bed.

  The large disassembleator, Sam was convinced as he tidied his room, did require the supervision of a Census Keeper. Some sort of keeper anyway. He rescued as many of the legless creature’s constituents as he could, although he doubted he’d be using the set for the next fifty years or so. He certainly wouldn’t ever use the disassembleator again; much less spectacular and disagreeable to shove the whole thing into a meat grinder and crank the handle as it squashed inside.

  As he locked the door behind him on his way to a gentle binge, he made a mental note to purchase some fresh sheets the next morning. He’d have to sleep on the floor tonight.

  Wrist-deep in Somerset Ojack minutiae, Sam was conscious of Lew Knight’s stares and Tina’s puzzled glances. If they only knew, he exulted! But Tina would probably just think it “marr-vell-ouss!” and Lew Knight might make some crack like “Hey! Kid Frankenstein himself.” Come to think of it, though, Lew would probably have worked out some method of duplicating, to a limited extent, the contents of the Bild-A-Man set and marketing it commercially. Whereas he—well, there were other things you could do with the gadget. Plenty of other things.

  “Hey, counselor,” Lew Knight was perched on the corner of his desk, “what are these long weekends we’re taking? You might not make as much money in the law, but does it look right for an associate of mine to sell magazine subscriptions on the side?”

  Sam stuffed his ears mentally against the emery-wheel voice. “I’ve been writing a book.”

  “A law book? Weber On Bankruptcy?”

  “No, a juvenile. Lew Knight, The Neanderthal Nitwit”

  “Won’t sell. The title lacks punch. Something like Knights, Knaves and Knobheads is what the public goes for these days. By the way, Tina tells me you two had some sort of understanding about New Year’s Eve and she doesn’t think you’d mind if I took her out instead. I don’t think you’d mind either, but I may be prejudiced. Especially since I have a table reservation at Cigale’s where there’s usually less of a crowd of a New Year’s Eve than at the Automat.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Good,” said Knight approvingly as he moved away. “By the way, I won that case. Nice juicy fee, too. Thanks for asking.”

  Tina also wanted to know if he objected to the new arrangements when she brought the mail. Again, he didn’t. Where had he been for over two days? He had been busy, very busy. Something entirely new. Something important.

  She stared down at him as he separated offers of used cars guaranteed not to have been driven over a quarter of a million miles from caressing reminders that he still owed half the tuition for the last year of law school and when was he going to pay it?

  Came a letter that was neither bill nor ad. Sam’s heart momentarily lost interest in the monotonous round of pumping that was its lot as he stared at a strange postmark: Glunt City, Ohio.

  Dear Sir:

  There is no firm in Glunt City at the present time bearing any name similar to “Bild-A-Man Company” nor do we know of any such organization planning to join our little community. We also have no thoroughfare called “Diagonal”; our north-south streets are named after Indian tribes while our east-west avenues are listed numerically in multiples of five.

  Glunt City is a restricted residential township; we intend to keep it that. Only small retailing and service establishments are permitted here. If you are interested in building a home in Glunt City and can furnish proof of white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon ancestry on both sides of your family for fifteen generations, we would be glad to furnish further information.

  Thomas H. Plantagenet, Mayor.

  P.S. An airfield for privately owned jet and propeller-driven aircraft is being built outside the city limits.

  That was sort of that. He would get no refills on any of the vials and bottles even if he had a loose slunk or two with which to pay for the stuff. Better go easy on the material and conserve it as much as
possible. But no disassembling!

  Would the “Bild-A-Man Company” begin manufacturing at Glunt City some time in the future when it had developed into an industrial metropolis against the constricted wills of its restricted citizenry? Or had his package slid from some different track in the human time stream, some era to be born on an other-dimensional Earth? There would have to be a common origin to both, else why the English wordage? And could there be a purpose in his having received it, beneficial—or otherwise?

  Tina had been asking a question. Sam detached his mind from shapeless speculation and considered her quite-the-opposite features.

  “So if you’d still like me to go out with you New Year’s Eve, all I have to do is tell Lew that my mother expects to suffer from her gallstones and I have to stay home. Then I think you could buy the Cigale reservations from him cheap.”

  “Thanks a lot, Tina, but very honestly I don’t have the loose cash right now. You and Lew make a much more logical couple anyhow.”

  Lew Knight wouldn’t have done that. Lew cut throats with carefree zest. But Tina did seem to go with Lew as a type.

  Why? Until Lew had developed a raised eyebrow where Tina was concerned, it had been Sam all the way. The rest of the office had accepted the fact and moved out of their path. It wasn’t only a question of Lew’s greater success and financial well-being: just that Lew had decided he wanted Tina and had got her.

  It hurt. Tina wasn’t special; she was no cultural companion, no intellectual equal; but he wanted her. He liked being with her. She was the woman he desired, rightly or wrongly, whether or not there was a sound basis to their relationship. He remembered his parents before a railway accident had orphaned him: they were theoretically incompatible, but they had been terribly happy together.

  He was still wondering about it the next night as he flipped the pages of “Twinning yourself and your friends.” It would be interesting to twin Tina.

  “One for me, one for Lew.”

  Only the horrible possibility of an error was there. His mannikin had not been perfect: its arms had been of unequal length. Think of a physically lopsided Tina, something he could never bring himself to disassemble, limping extraneously through life.

  And then the book warned: “Your constructed twin, though resembling you in every obvious detail, has not had the slow and guarded maturity you have enjoyed. He or she will not be as stable mentally, much less able to cope with unusual situations, much more prone to neurosis. Only a professional carnuplicator, using the finest equipment, can make an exact copy of a human personality. Yours will be able to live and even reproduce, but cannot ever be accepted as a valid and responsible member of society.”

  Well, he could chance that. A little less stability in Tina would hardly be noticeable; it might be more desirable.

  There was a knock. He opened the door, guarding the box from view with his body. His landlady.

  “Your door has been locked for the past week, Mr. Weber. That’s why the chambermaid hasn’t cleaned the room. We thought you didn’t want anyone inside.”

  “Yes.” He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. “I’ve been doing some highly important legal work at home.”

  “Oh.” He sensed a murderous curiosity and changed the subject.

  “Why all the fine feathers, Mrs. Lipanti—New Year’s Eve party?

  She smoothed her frilly black dress self-consciously. “Y-yes. My sister and her husband came in from Springfield today and we were going to make a night of it. Only… only the girl who was supposed to come over and mind their baby just phoned and said she isn’t feeling well. So I guess we won’t go unless somebody else, I mean unless we can get someone else to take care… I mean, somebody who doesn’t have a previous engagement and who wouldn’t—” Her voice trailed away in assumed embarrassment as she realized the favor was already asked.

  Well, after all, he wasn’t doing anything tonight. And she had been remarkably pleasant those times when he had to operate on the basis of “Of course I’ll have the rest of the rent in a day or so.” But why did any one of the Earth’s two billion humans, when in the possession of an unpleasant buck, pass it automatically to Sam Weber?

  Then he remembered Chapter IV on babies and other small humans. Since the night when he had separated the mannikin from its constituent parts, he’d been running through the manual as an intellectual exercise. He didn’t feel quite up to making some weird error on a small human. But twinning wasn’t supposed to be as difficult.

  Only by Gog and by Magog, by Aesculapius the Physician and Kildare the Doctor, he would not disassemble this time. There must be other methods of disposal possible in a large city on a dark night. He’d think of something.

  “I’d be glad to watch the baby for a few hours.” He started down the hall to anticipate her polite protest. “Don’t have a date tonight myself. No, don’t mention it, Mrs. Lipanti. Glad to do it.”

  In the landlady’s apartment, her nervous sister briefed him doubtfully. “And that’s the only time she cries in a low, steady way so if you move fast there won’t be much damage done. Not much, anyway.”

  He saw them to the door. “I’ll be fast enough,” he assured the mother. “Just so I get a hint.”

  Mrs. Lipanti paused at the door. “Did I tell you about the man who was asking after you this afternoon?”

  Again? “A sort of tall, old man in a long, black overcoat?”

  “With the most frightening way of staring into your face and talking under his breath. Do you know him?”

  “Not exactly. What did he want?”

  “Well, he asked if there was a Sam Weaver living here who was a lawyer and had been spending most of his time in his room for the past week. I told him we had a Sam Weber—your first name is Sam?—who answered to that description, but that the last Weaver had moved out over a year ago. He just looked at me for a while and said, ‘Weaver, Weber—they might have made an error,’ and walked out without so much as a goodbye or excuse-me. Not what I call a polite gentleman.”

  Thoughtfully Sam walked back to the child. Strange how sharp a mental picture he had formed of this man! Possibly because the two women who had met him thus far had been very impressionable, although to hear their stories the impression was there to be received.

  He doubted there was any mistake: the man had been looking for him on both occasions; his knowledge of Sam’s vacation from foolscap this past week proved that. It did seem as if he weren’t interested in meeting him until some moot point of identity should be established beyond the least shadow of a doubt. Something of a legal mind, that.

  The whole affair centered around the “Bild-A-Man” set, he was positive. This skulking investigation hadn’t started until after the gift from 2353 had been delivered—and Sam had started using it.

  But till the character in the long, black overcoat paddled up to Sam Weber personally and stated his business, there wasn’t very much he could do about it.

  Sam went upstairs for his Junior Biocalibrator.

  He propped the manual open against the side of the bed and switched the instrument on to full scanning power. The infant gurgled thickly as the calibrator was rolled slowly over its fat body and a section of metal tape unwound from the slot with, according to the manual, a completely detailed physiological description.

  It was detailed. Sam gasped as the tape, running through the enlarging viewer, gave information on the child for which a pediatrician would have taken out at least three mortgages on his immortal soul. Thyroid capacity, chromosome quality, cerebral content. All broken down into neat subheads of data for construction purposes. Rate of skull expansion in minutes for the next ten hours; rate of cartilage transformation; changes in hormone secretions while active and at rest.

  This was a blueprint; it was like taking canons from a baby.

  Sam left the child to a puzzled contemplation of its navel and sped upstairs. With the tape as a guide, he clipped sections of the molds into the required smaller
sizes. Then, almost before he knew it consciously, he was constructing a small human.

  He was amazed at the ease with which he worked. Skill was evidently acquired in this game; the mannikin had been much harder to put together. The matter of duplication and working from an informational tape simplified his problems, though.

  The child took form under his eyes.

  He was finished just an hour and a half after he had taken his first measurements. All except the vitalizing.

  A moment’s pause, here. The ugly prospect of disassembling stopped him for a moment, but he shook it off. He had to see how well he had done the job. If this child could breathe, what was not possible to him! Besides he couldn’t keep it suspended in an inanimate condition very long without running the risk of ruining his work and the materials.

  He started the vitalizer.

  The child shivered and began a low, steady cry. Sam tore down to the landlady’s apartment again and scooped up a square of white linen left on the bed for emergencies. Oh well, some more clean sheets.

  After he had made the necessary repairs, he stood back and took a good look at it. He was in a sense a papa. He felt as proud.

  It was a perfect little creature, glowing and round with health.

  “I have twinned,” he said happily.

  Every detail correct. The two sides of the face correctly inexact, the duplication of the original child’s lunch at the very same point of digestion. Same hair, same eyes—or was it? Sam bent over the infant. He could have sworn the other was a blonde. This child had dark hair which seemed to grow darker as he looked.

  He grabbed it with one hand and picked up the Junior Biocalibrator with the other.

  Downstairs, he placed the two babies side by side on the big bed. No doubt about it. One was blonde; the other, his plagiarism, was now a definite brunette.

  The biocalibrator showed other differences: Slightly faster pulse for his model. Lower blood count. Minutely higher cerebral capacity, although the content was the same. Adrenalin and bile secretions entirely unalike.