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 tic.
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 his 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!”<
br />
“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 cameraman—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 ol
d 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.