Tales From Gavagan's Bar (18 page)

             
"How do the changes happen?" persisted Jeffers.

             
"Mutation," said Doc Brenner. "There isn't any one simple answer—or rather, we don't know what the real answer is. All we know is that in each generation a few individuals show some variation from the normal, and if the change helps them get along better, there are more and more who have it."

             
"Like breeds of dogs, you mean?" said Jeffers.

             
"That's the trouble with things the way they are now," said Mr. Gross, putting down the chaser of his Boilermaker. "Dogs everywhere. If we had a decent administration in Washington, now—"

             
"Approximately," said Brenner. "The breeds aren't yet separate species. But they illustrate the point that something which begins as a more or less accidental mutation can become fixed through careful breeding together of individuals that have the most of it. Most changes in species are pretty gradual. I wouldn't expect you, for instance, to have a child with leopard-colored spots."

             
"I would," said Mr. Gross. "My wife's got a second cousin that-"

             
"Doesn't it ever work the other way?" said Jeffers. "Quick, I mean."

             
"Yes," said Brenner. "I know of a case, or think I know of a case—I can't be certain, because the records disappeared along with the girl. A real major mutation in human anatomy. Perhaps a view of the coming race, if she could have married the right man."

             
Jeffers looked at his watch. Fill up the glasses again, will you, Mr. Cohan?" he said. "I want to hear about this. Was it something like having six fingers?"

             
"A good deal more than that," said Brenner. "I admit that the whole thing was unsatisfactory. It could be that one of her parents had been around a nuclear fission laboratory, so that the germ plasm became violently altered and she was just a freak. That sometimes happens. It could be that she was a genuine mutant; it could even be that I was too quick about
putting things together and imagining the result. It all happened long ago, when I was young and charming, and I haven't heard anything of it since; while, if the thing had been real, I'd have expected to.

             
"At that time I was interning in St. Matthew's, and they brought this girl in with a case of polio and put her in an iron lung. Her name was Avis Fowler, and both I and Ozzie Stroud, who was interning along with me at the time, were much interested in her."

             
Gross leaned his bulk on the bar and behind a hamlike hand addressed Mr. Cohan: "Who is that toward the end of the bar that is so interested in what the old crowd is saying?"

             
The bartender glanced in the direction of a neat gentleman with shell-rimmed glasses and a beard of the type affected by the late Admiral William Sowden Sims. "I wouldn't know h
im from Brian Boru, that I wouldn't," he replied in a stage whisper. "But any man is free to stay in Gavagan's so long as he behaves himself."

             
"I don't like it," said Gross.

             
"Excuse me," said Doc Brenner.

             
"Don't mention it," said Gross.

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This A
vis Fowler's chart [Brenner continued] said she was eighteen; she was dark-haired and had one of those thin, triangular faces that can be so very pretty when you get used to them. When she could speak, which wasn't very much at first, but got to be a good deal more, because she made a perfectly wonderful recovery—when she could speak, it was evident that she was just as bright as she was beautiful. For a girl of her age she had read a lot; she knew about music, and she had a kind of elfish humor when we discussed the kind of philosophy young people talk about.

             
Only—there was something queer about her. You know how it is with most young girls that age. Social contacts are very important to them, they're interested in personalities and emotions, particularly their own. Avis Fowler was different. As far as I could make out, she had no social contacts outside her family. She never mentioned another
             
person or doing anything except by herself. The only personalities and emotions she would discuss were those of people in books; and when, as young men do, I hinted that I might be falling in love with her, she didn't react at all normally. She acted frightened, not in the coy way girls usually behave, but perfectly terrified, as though I had suggested something dreadful, like pushing the head nurse out the window.

             
"You mustn't ever talk like that again," she said, and when I asked why not, she began to cry.

             
Her parents were apparently pretty well fixed, because she had a private room and day and night nurses while her case was serious. I asked Ozzie Stroud one night about the patient in 303, mentioning that she was rather mysterious.

             
"Oh, Avis Fowler," he said. "Yes, that's a fascinating case, isn't it? Have you seen the X-rays?"

             
As a matter of fact, I hadn't. I told him I wasn't interested in her anatomy, except as a work of art, but in her background and personality. "She doesn't seem to have been to school since she was about thirteen," I said, "and she isn't going to college."

             
"The family has done quite a lot of travelling," he said, and just then something interrupted.

             
It didn't occur to me at the time that his remark showed a considerable degree of intimacy with Avis Fowler. In the egotistical fashion of young men, I was assuming I had the inside track with her because she seemed always glad to see me, and I could talk about books and music, while Ozzie was a pretty solemn character, interested in very little outside his profession. In fact, I didn't even wake up when I noticed some flowers in her room one day, and she said Dr. Stroud had sent them, he was very much interested in her case; and then went right ahead talking about
Northanger Abbey,
which we had been discussing.

             
You see, Ozzie naturally would be interested in her as a case. She was making one of the most rapid recoveries from polio on record, and I heard Doc Tayloe, the resident, one day bemoaning the fact that she wasn't a clinical patient, so
we could keep her there under observation and find out what it was in her bodily chemistry had produced this result. Ozzie was in the room at the time. He said: "Doctor, may I suggest that it could be a by-product of the other mutation?"

             
Mr. Cohan, will you fill the glasses again?

             
You see, I'm recalling all these things now, because they seem to fit together. At the time, that remark about "the other mutation" blew right past me. Avis Fowler didn't look like a mutant of any kind to me. She had the usual number of arms and legs, and very shapely ones, too, and that was what I was mainly interested in with regard to her. I was intending to specialize in surgery in those days, and a recovery from polio, however wonderful, was outside my orbit.

             
It was a month, and I'd swear a month almost to the day, after I saw Stroud's flowers in her room, that the incident of the egg came up. By this time, Avis Fowler could move around the room a little, though not quite enough to leave it. On the afternoon of the egg incident, I dropped in on Avis. She was in bed and looked rather pale. When I spoke to her, she seemed cross and out of sorts, didn't want to talk about anything. When I tried to find out what was wrong, she began to act afraid, like the time before, and asked for Ozzie. I told her, which was the truth, that he was out on an emergency case over on the West Side and probably wouldn't be back till after dark. She said: "Oh," and turned her head in the other direction. I thought for a moment she was going to cry again, but she only gave a little sigh and then turned back to me.

             
"Come back and see me tomorrow, will you, Bill?" she said. "It's all right, anyway."

             
A man is reduced to a pretty helpless condition when women behave like that. I went away, wondering what gives, and the next thing was that the nurse who had just taken Avis her supper and prepared her for sleeping called me into the hall.

             
She had a wastebasket in her hand, and she looked puzzled. "Dr. Brenner," she said, "you were visiting the patient in 303 this afternoon, weren't you?"

             
I said yes, but only as a friend, not because she was my patient.

             
"Well, it's the oddest thing," she said. "Whatever in the world is this?"

             
She reached into the wastebasket, came up with a handful of cleansing tissue, and then held it out to show me what was left. It was an egg; quite definitely an egg, about so big. [Doc Brenner held out his hands to indicate an object the size of a child's football.] It didn't seem to have a shell, only a kind of tough, leathery skin that gave a little when I touched it.

             
You can imagine the kind of wild surmises that leaped into my head. This would explain everything; why Avis had left school at thirteen, why she had stayed away from other people, why she had been frightened, the business about mutations, Ozzie's interest in her. But I wasn't going to tell the nurse any of that. Naturally; nurses talk too much. The poor girl would have been badgered to death, and just when she was getting over a case of polio. Thinking fast, I said: "Oh, that's just something Dr. Stroud was experimenting with. It's all right."

             
I would have given anything to get possession of that egg, but I didn't dare ask for it after it had been found in the wastebasket. Even that would have roused too much curiosity. But I went to see Doc Tayloe.

             
Unfortunately, he was busy at the time, and it was nearly an hour before I could get to him. I told him about the nurse with the egg in the basket. "I've been waiting for this!" he said, tremendously excited. "Where is it?"

             
We ran down together to waste disposal, but it was too late; the egg was gone. After we were back in his office, he swore me to secrecy and told me that he had suspected from Avis Fowler's X-rays that she was a genuine human mutant, an egg-laying woman. Of course, the hospital's first duty was to cure her of polio, so he hadn't done anything about it at the time. But this was pretty conclusive; not conclusive enough to write a paper about till we had an actual egg, but enough to make us watch for the next one. [Doc Brenner stopped and drank from his Scotch and Soda with an
expression of unhappiness.]

             
["Didn't you get it?" said Jeffers. "Another round, Mr. Cohan."]

             
No. We forgot Ozzie Stroud. When I came to the hospital the next day, almost the first thing I found out was that Avis Fowler was gone. She had left word with the night floor nurse to have Ozzie come and see her as soon as he got in, and as soon as he did so, he did a lot of telephoning. About midnight, Avis's parents showed up with a wheel-chair and a hired ambulance and took her away. Ozzie countersigned the release papers and went with them. I haven't heard from him or of him since. He never came back to the hospital and he isn't a member of any of the medical societies. He just disappeared, and so did the Fowlers. Doc Tayloe couldn't get any information at the last address given for them on the records. Not that I blame them. They probably wanted Avis to lead a reasonably normal life.

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"You ought to hire a detecative," said Gross. "Some of them private detecatives can find out anything, like the time old man Webster wanted to know who put the clam chowder in the bass drum."

             
The bus boy emerged from the phone booth and said somethi
ng to the man in the Admiral Sims beard, who got off his stool.