Collected Fiction, page 441
Rufus’ eyes opened a little and the extra lid slid back, not all the way. He gazed after his son, but calmly, as incurious as a man might feel who watches a cat withdraw, disinterest in an alien species clouding his eyes.
He came in that night very late, and very drunk. Morgan had been waiting with Bill in the parlor, and they went out in silence to the taxi to bring Rufus in. His limp body was graceful even in this extremity. The driver was nearly in hysterics. He would not touch his passenger. It was impossible to make out exactly why—something that Rufus had done, or had not done, or perhaps had only said, on the way home.
“What was he drinking?” the driver kept demanding in a voice that broke on the last word. “What could he have been drinking?”
They could not answer that, and could get no coherent reason from the man why they should. He went away as soon as Bill had paid him—he refused to accept or touch money from Rufus’ wallet—driving erratically with a great clashing of gears.
“Has this happened before?”
Morgan asked over Rufus’ lolling, dark-red head.
Bill nodded. “Not so bad, of course. He—remembers—things when he’s drunk, you know. Maybe he remembered something big this time. He always forgets again, and maybe that’s just as well, too.”
Between them Rufus moved a little, murmured a word, not in English, and waved both hands in an abortive gesture of expansion, rather as if vast landscapes were spread before him. He laughed clearly, not a drunken sound at all, and then collapsed entirely.
They put him to bed in the big carved bedstead upstairs, among the purple curtains. He lay as limply as a child, his familiar-strange face looking curiously like a solid mask with nothing at all behind it. They had turned to leave him, both of them tight-lipped and bewildered, and they were halfway across the room when Bill paused and sniffed the air.
“Perfume?” he asked incredulously. Morgan lifted his head and sniffed, too.
“Honeysuckle. Lots of it.” The heavy fragrance was suddenly almost sickening in its sweetness. They turned. Rufus was breathing with his mouth open, and the fragrance came almost palpably from the bed. They went back slowly.
Deep waves of perfume rose to meet them as he breathed. There was no smell of liquor at all, but the honeysuckle sweetness hung so heavy that it left almost a sugary taste upon the tongue. The two men looked blankly at one another.
“It’d suffocate anyone else,” Morgan said finally. “But we can’t very well get him away from it, can we?”
“I’ll open the windows,” Bill said with restraint. “There’s no way now to tell what’s going to hurt him.”
When they left the room the curtains were billowing gently in a breeze from the windows; the walls shuddered all around the room with the motion. In the silence Rufus’ perfumed breath was the only sound except for the stutter of the clock with its long jumping hand. Just as they reached the door there came a slight change in the quality of the fragrance Rufus was exhaling. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant, an indescribable shift from odor to odor as color might shift and blend from one shade to another. But the new odor was not like anything either man had ever smelled before.
Bill paused briefly, met Morgan’s eyes, then shrugged and went on out.
Downstairs in the study, Morgan said, “He’s moving fast.” He was silent awhile, then, “Maybe I’d better come in for awhile, Bill, until it’s over.”
Bill nodded. “I wish you would. It’ll be soon. Awfully soon, I think. They grow so fast—you can almost see a child growing. And Rufus condenses years into weeks.”
Biological time moved like a river, swifter and narrower as it nears the source. And temporal perception ran clearer and slower with every passing day. Rufus returned unperturbed in mind to his first childhood—or perhaps his third, by actual count, though memory of that senile past had almost vanished now. In youth, as in age, forgetfulness clouded his tranquil mind, partly because the days of his age were so far behind him now, but partly too because his brain was smoothing out into the untroubled immaturity of childhood. Born swiftly and smoothly along that quickening stream, he moved backward toward the infirmities of youth.
And now a curious urgency seemed to possess him. It was like the reasonless instinct that drives an animal to prepare the burrow for her young; the phenomenon of birth, approached from either side of the temporal current, seemed to evoke intuitive knowledge of what was to come, and what would be needed for its coming.
Rufus began to stay more and more in his room, resenting intrusion, resisting it politely. What he did was difficult to guess, though there was much chalk dust about the table with the chessboard top. And he worked on the clock, too. It had four hands now; the face was divided into concentric circles and the extra hand was a blur that spun around the painted dial. All this might have seemed the typical preoccupation of the adolescent mind with gadgetry, had there not been that urgency which no normal child needs to feel.
It was not easy any more to determine what went on in his rapidly changing body, since he resented and resisted examination, but they did discover that his metabolism had accelerated unbelievably. He exhibited none of the typical hyperthyroid traits, but the small gland in his throat was busily undoing now all the pituitaries had governed long ago, in the growth of his first childhood.
Normally the hyperthyroid’s tremendous appetite is insufficient to keep up with the rate at which he expends energy, as his abnormally accelerated metabolism devours his very tissues in a fierce effort to keep pace with itself. In Rufus, that devouring metabolism worked inwardly upon muscle and bone. He was no longer physically a big man; he lost weight and stature steadily, from within, burning his own bulk for fuel to feed that ravenous hunger. But with Rufus it was impossibly normal. He felt no resultant weakness.
And within him, more secretly, perhaps the white corpuscles in his blood may have undergone change and multiplication, to attack his internal organs and work their changes there, much as the phagocytes of a pupa work histolysis inside the chrysalis, reducing what lies within to a plasma in which the imago to come lies already implicit in solution. But what lay implicit and hidden in the changing body of Rufus Westerfield was a secret still locked in the genes which time had so curiously disarranged.
All this was retrogression, and yet in a sense it was progress if determined, orderly procedure toward a goal means anything. The time-stream narrowed about him, flowing backward toward its source.
“He’s now, I should say, about fifteen,” said Bill. “It’s hard to tell—he never comes out of his room any more, even to meals, and I don’t see him unless I insist on it. He’s changing a good deal.”
“How do you mean?”
“His features . . . I don’t know. Sharper and finer, not childish at all. His bones seem quite flexible, all of them. Abnormal. And he’s running a fever so high you can feel the heat without even touching him. It doesn’t seem to bother him much. He just feels a little tired most of the time, like a child who’s growing too fast.” He paused and looked at his interlaced fingers. “Where will it end, Pete? Where can it end? There’s no precedent. I can’t believe he’ll just—”
“No precedent?” interrupted Morgan. “I remember the time when you thought I was following Mephistopheles’ footsteps.”
Bill looked at him. “Faust—” he said vaguely. “But Faust went back to a definite age and stopped there.”
“I wonder.” Morgan’s voice was half sardonic. “If the legend’s all in code, maybe Mephisto’s bill, when he presented it, had something to do with—this. Maybe what the legend coded as the loss of a soul was something like what’s happening to Rufus now. Perhaps he lost his body, not his soul. Still, they were devious, those alchemists. ‘Body’ for ‘soul’ is pretty obvious.”
“Too obvious. We haven’t seen the end yet. Before we do, we’ll know. I’m willing to admit the moral now . . . too much knowledge can be too dangerous to handle without losing . . . well, something important. But the penalty . . . we’ll have to wait for that.”
“Um-m,” Morgan said. “You say he isn’t like a child now? Remember, I haven’t been in his room at all.”
“No. Whatever kind of childhood he . . . they have, it isn’t much like ours. But I haven’t really seen him very clearly. He keeps it so dark in there.”
“I wish I knew,” Morgan said longingly. “I’d like very much to . . . suppose we couldn’t just walk in and turn the lights on, Bill?”
Bill said quickly, “No! You promised, Pete. We’re going to let him alone. It’s the least we can do, now. He knows, you see. Reason or instinct—I can’t tell which. Either way, it’s no reason or instinct our species would understand. But he’s the only one in the house who’s sure of himself at this stage. We’ve got to let him play it his way.”
Morgan nodded regretfully. “All right. I wish he weren’t . . . hadn’t ever been Rufus. We’re handicapped. I wish he were just a specimen. I’m getting some funny ideas. About his—species. Did you ever think, Bill, how different the child is from the adult in appearance? Every proportion’s abnormal, from an adult standpoint. We’re so used to the sight of babies they look human to us even from birth, but someone from Mars might not recognize them as the same species at all. Has it occurred to you that if Rufus went back to . . . to infancy . . . and then reversed the process and grew up again, he’d probably grow up into something alien? Something we couldn’t even recognize?”
Bill glanced up with a sudden gleam of excitement. “Do you think that might happen?”
“How can I tell? The time-stream’s too uncharted for that. He might run against some current that would start him back downstream again at any moment. Or he might not. For his sake, I hope not. He couldn’t live in this world. We’ll never know what sort of world he belongs in. Even his memories of it, the things he said, were too distorted to mean anything. When he was willing to talk about it, he was still trying to force the alien memories into the familiar pattern of his past, and what came out was gibberish. We won’t know, and neither will he. Just as well for us, too, if he doesn’t grow up again. There’s no criterion for guessing what shape his adult form would have. It might be as different from ours as . . . as the larva is from the butterfly.”
“Mephistopheles knew.”
“I expect that’s why he was damned.”
He could no longer eat anything at all. For a long while he had subsisted on a diet of milk and custards and gelatines, but as the internal changes deepened his tolerance grew less and less. Those changes must by now have gone entirely beyond imagining, for outwardly, too, he had changed a great deal.
He kept his curtains drawn, so that toward the end Bill could hardly see anything more than a small, quick shadow in the plum-colored darkness, turning a pale triangle of face from the light when the door opened. His voice was still strong, but its quality had changed almost indescribably. It was at once thinner and more vibrant, with a sort of wood-wind fluttering far back in the throat. He had developed a curious impediment of speech, not a lisp, but something that distorted certain consonants in a way Bill had never heard before.
On the last day he did not even take his tray into the room. There was no point in handling food he could not digest, and he was busy, very busy. When Bill knocked the thin, strong, vibrant voice told him pleasantly to go away.
“Important,” said the voice. “Don’t come in now, Bill. Mustn’t come in. Very important. You’ll know when—” and the voice went smoothly into some other language that made no sense. Bill could not answer. He nodded futilely, without a word, at the blank panels, and the voice within did not seem to think a reply from him necessary, for the busy sounds went on.
Muffled and intermittent, they continued all day, along with a preoccupied humming of queer, unmelodious tunes which he seemed to handle much better now, as if his throat were adjusting to the curious tonal combinations.
Toward evening, the air in the house began to grow tense in an indescribable way. The whole building was full of a sense of impending crisis. He who had been Rufus was acutely aware that the end had nearly come, and his awareness drew the very atmosphere taut with suspense. But it was an orderly, unhurried imminence that filled the house. Forces beyond any control, set in motion long ago, were moving to their appointed fulfillment behind the closed door upstairs, and the focus of this impending change went quietly about his preparations, like someone who knows himself in the hands of a power he trusts and would not alter if he could. Softly, humming to himself, he prepared in secret to meet it.
Morgan and Bill waited in chairs outside the closed door as night came on, listening to sounds within. No one could have slept in that taut air. From time to time one of them called, and the voice answered amiably but in preoccupation so deep that the answers were haphazard. Also they were becoming more muffled, difficult to understand.
Twice Morgan rose and laid a hand upon the knob, avoiding Bill’s anxious eyes. But he could not bring himself to turn it. He could almost think the tension in the air would hold the door against him if he tried to push it open. But he did not try.
As the hours neared midnight, sounds from within came at longer and longer intervals. And the sense of tension mounted intolerably. It was like hurricane weather, as forces high in the upper air gathered for an onslaught.
The time came when there had been no stirring for what seemed a very long time, and Bill called, “Are you all right?”
Silence. Then, slowly and from far away, a reluctant rustling and the sound of a muffled voice, inarticulate, murmuring a syllable or two.
The two men looked at each other. Morgan shrugged. Bill in his turn half rose and reached for the knob, but he did not touch it. The hurricane was still gathering in the upper air; they might not know when the time for action came, but they could sense, at least, when the time was not.
Silence again. When Bill could wait no longer, he called once more, and this time there was no answer. They listened. A faint, faint stirring, but no voice.
The next time he called, not even a stirring replied.
The night hours went by very slowly. Neither of the two men was aware of drowsiness—the air was too taut for that. Sometimes they talked quietly, keeping their voices low, as if whatever lay beyond the door were still within reach of sound.
Once Morgan said, “Remember, quite a while ago, I was wondering if Rufus was biologically unusual?”
“I remember.”
“We decided then he wasn’t. I’ve been thinking, Bill. Maybe I’ve got a glimmer of what’s coming now. Rufus, say, simply switched to another time-line as he retrogressed. Any human might. Any human almost certainly would. Your ancestors wouldn’t have to be abnormal or nonterrestrial, and you wouldn’t have any more mutation-possibilities than anybody else. It’s just that by growing young, you cut over to another circuit. Normally we’d never even know it existed. The relation between our Rufus and the . . . the Rufus of that other place must exist, but we’d never have known about it.” He looked at the door without expression for a moment. Then he shook himself a little.
“That’s beside the point. What I’m thinking is that the farther back he goes, the closer he’s getting to the main-line track of that—other place. When he touches it—”
They knew, then, what they were waiting for. When two worlds touch, something has to happen.
Bill sat and sweated. Has everybody got that potential? he wondered. Has Morgan got it? Have l? If anybody has, wouldn’t I have? Inheritance. No wonder I felt Rufus was pulling me awry as he moved back along the track toward—What would I be like then? Not myself. An equivalent. Question mark.
Equivalent. Ambiguous. Nothing I want to know about now.
But maybe when I’m seventy, eighty, I won’t think so. Without taste or teeth or vision, all senses dulled, I might remember the way—I might—
He was aware of a curious, secret shame, and shrugged the thought away. For a while. For a long while. For many years, perhaps.
They were silent after that. The night moved on.
And still the tension held. Held, and mounted. They smoked a great deal, but they did not leave the door. They could not begin to guess what it was they waited for, but the tension held them where they were. And the long hours of the night passed midnight and moved slowly toward dawn.
Dawn came, and they still waited. The house was tight and silent; the air seemed too taut to move through or draw into the lungs. When light began to come through the window’s, Morgan got up with a great effort and said, “How about some coffee?”
“You make it. I’ll wait here.”
So Morgan went downstairs, moving with almost palpable difficulty that was perhaps wholly psychic, and measured water and coffee in the kitchen with hands that were all thumbs. The coffee had begun to send out its own particular fragrance, and the light was strong beyond the windows, when a sudden, perfectly indescribable sound rang through the house.
Morgan stood rigid, listening to that vibrating, ringing noise as it died slowly away. It came from upstairs, muffled by walls and floors between. It struck bewilderingly upon the ears and quivered into silence with perceptible receding eddies, like rings widening in water. And the tension of the air suddenly broke.
Morgan remembered sagging a little all over at that sudden release, as if it were the tautness in the atmosphere that had held him up during the long wait. He had no recollection at all of moving through the house or up the stairs. His next clear impression was of Bill, standing motionless before the opened door.
