Thunder and Roses (3 page)

“And what?”

He laughed, a burst of it, a compelling radiation which left little pieces of itself as smiles on the faces of the people around them. “And
the sweating choirboys who had to pump the organ when he composed. How they must have hated him!”

A train came groaning into the station and stopped, snicking its doors open. “Watch them,” said Robin, his quick eyes taking inventory of the people who jostled each other out of the train. “Not one in fifty is seeing anything. No one knows how far apart these pillars are, or the way all these rivets are set, or the cracks in the concrete under their feet. They’re all looking at things separated from them in space and time—the offices they have left, the homes they’re going to, the people they will see. Hardly any of them are consciously here,
now
. They’re all ghosts, and we’re a couple of Peeping Toms.”

“Robin, Robin, you’re such a
child!
”

“To you, of course. You’re older than I am.”

“Four days.” It was a great joke between them.

“Four thousand years,” he said soberly. They found a seat. “And I’m not a child. I’m a hyperthymus. You said so yourself.”

“You won’t be for very much longer,” said Dr. Margaretta Wenzell. “Dr. Warfield and I will see to that.”

“What are you doing it for?”

“You’ll find out when we send the bill.”

“I know it isn’t that.”

“Of course not,” she said. Her remark tasted badly in her mouth. “It’s just … Robin, how long have you had that suit?”

“Uh … suit?” He looked vaguely at the sleeve. “Oh, about three years. It’s a good suit.”

“Of course it is.” It was, too. She remembered that he had gotten it with prize money from a poetry contest. “How many weeks room rent do you owe?”

“None!” he said triumphantly. “I rewired all the doorbells in the apartment house and fixed Mrs. Gridget’s vacuum cleaner and composed a song for her daughter’s wedding reception and invented a gadget to hold her cookbook under the kitchen shelf, with a little light that goes on when she swings it out. Next thing I knew she handed me a rent receipt. Wasn’t that swell of her?”

“Oh,” said Peg weakly. She clutched grimly at the point she was trying to make. “How much are you in debt?”

“Oh, that,” he said.

“That.”

“I guess ten-twelve thousand.” He looked up. “Kcans Yppans. What are you driving at?”

“
What
did you say?”

He waved at the car card opposite. “Snappy Snack. Spelled backwards. Always spell things backward when you see them on car cards. If you don’t, there’s no telling what you might be mising.”

“Oh, you blithering
idiot!
”

“Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I was getting to this,” she said patiently. “There doesn’t seem to be anything you can’t do. You write, you paint, you compose, you invent things, you fix other things, you—”

“Cook,” he said, as she stopped for breath; and he added idly, “I make love, too.”

“No doubt,” said the gland specialist primly. “On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything you’ve accomplished with all of these skills.”

“They’re not skills. They’re talents. I have no skills.”

Peg saw the distinction, and smiled. It was quite true. One had to spend a little time in practice to acquire a skill. If Robin couldn’t do promisingly the first time he tried something, he would hardly try again. “A good point. And that is what Dr. Warfield and I want to adjust.”

“ ‘Adjust,’ she says. Going to shrivel up all the pretty pink lobulae in my thymus. The only thymus I’ve got, too.”

“And about time. You should have gotten rid of it when you were thirteen. Most people do.”

“And then I’ll be all grim and determined about everything, and generate gallons of sweat, and make thousands of dollars, so that at age thirty I can go back to school and get that high school diploma.”

“Haven’t you got a high school diploma?” asked Peg, her appalled voice echoing hollowly against her four post-graduate degrees.

“As a senior,” smiled Robin, “I hadn’t a thing but seniority. I’d been there six years. I didn’t graduate from school; I was released.”

“Robin, that’s
awful!
”

“Why is it awful? Oh—I suppose it is.” He looked puzzled and crestfallen.

Peg put her hand on his arm. It had nothing to do with logic, but something in her was wrenched when Robin looked hurt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, Robin. What you learn, and what you do with it, are really more important than
where
you learn.”

“Yes … but not
when
. I mean, you can learn too late. I know lots of things, but the things I don’t know seem to have to do with getting along in the world. Isn’t that what you mean by ‘awful’? Isn’t that what you and Dr. Warfield are going to change?”

“That’s it. That’s right. Robin. Oh, you’re such a strange person!”

“Strange?”

“I mean … you know, I was sure that Mel Warfield and I would have no end of trouble in persuading you to take these thymus treatments.”

“Why?”

With a kind of exasperation she said, “I don’t think you fully realize that the change in you will be drastic. You’re going to lose a lot that’s bad about you—I’m sure of that. But you’ll see things quite differently. You … you—” She fought for a description of what Robin would be like without his passionate interest in too many things, and her creative equipment bogged down. “You’ll probably see things quite differently.”

He looked into her eyes thoughtfully. “Is that bad?”

Bad? There never was a man who had less evil about him, she thought. “I think not,” she said.

He spread his hands. “I don’t think so either. So why hesitate? You have mentioned that I do a lot of things. Would that be true if I got all frothed up every time I tried something I’d never tried before?”

“No. No, of course not.” She realized that it had been foolish of her to mix ordinary practical psychology into any consideration of Robin English. Obviously gland imbalances have frequent psychological symptoms, and in many of these cases the abnormal condition has its own self-justifying synapses which will set up a powerful defense mechanism when treatment is mentioned. Equally obviously,
this wouldn’t apply to Robin. Where most people seem to have an inherent dislike of being changed, Robin seemed to have a subconscious yearning for just that.

He said, “We get off at the next station.”

“I know.”

“I just wanted to tell you.”

“Where to get off?”

In utter surprise, he said “Me?” and it was the most eloquent monosyllable she had ever heard. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder consciously what he thought of her. It hadn’t seemed to matter, before. What was she, in his eyes? She suddenly realized that she, as a doctor meeting a man socially, had really no right to corner him, question him, analyze and diagnose the way she had over the past few weeks. She couldn’t abide the existence of a correctable condition in her specialty, and this was probably the essence of selfishness. He probably regarded her as meddling and dominating. She astonished herself by asking him, point-blank.

“What do I think of you?” He considered, carefully. He appeared not to think it remarkable that she could have asked such a question. “You’re a taffy-puller.”

“I’m a
what?
”

“A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn’t you ever see one?”

“I don’t think so,” she breathed. “But—”

“You see them down on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the ‘handle’ of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one ‘handle’ and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again.” Robin’s eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. “Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn’t a speck of taffy on it. Not a drop, not a smidgin. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of
guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished con rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of that fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and pulled out and squashed flat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they’re being mauled around the way the bubbles were.” He sighed. “There’s almost too much contrast—that competent, beautiful machinist’s dream handling—what? Taffy—no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I’d feel better if the machine handled one of Dali’s limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn’t matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You’re a taffy-puller. You’ve never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.”

She sat quietly, letting the vivid picture he had painted fade away. Then, sharply, “Haven’t I!” she cried. “I’ve let us ride past our station!”

Dr. Mellett Warfield let them in himself. Towering over his colleague, he bent his head, and the light caught his high white forehead, which, with his peaked hairline, made a perfect Tuscan arch. “Peg!”

“Hello, Mel. This is Robin English.”

Warfield shook hands warmly. “I
am
glad to see you. Peg has told me a lot about you.”

“I imagine she has,” grinned Robin. “All about my histones and my albumins and the medullic and cortical tissues of my lobulae. I love that word. Lobulae. I lobule very much, Peg.”

“Robin, for Pete’s sake!”

Warfield laughed. “No—not only that. You see, I’d heard of you before. You designed that, didn’t you?” He pointed. On a side table was a simple device with two multicolored disks mounted at the ends of a rotating arm, and powered by a little electric motor.

“The Whirltoy? Robin, I didn’t know that!”

“I don’t know a child psychologist or a pediatrician who hasn’t got one,” said Warfield. “I wouldn’t part with that one for fifty times
what it cost me—which is less than it’s worth. I have yet to see the child, no matter how maladjusted, glandular, spoiled, or what have you, who isn’t fascinated by those changing colors. Even the colorblind children can’t keep their eyes off it because of the changing patterns it makes.”

Peg looked at Robin as if he had just come in through the wall. “Robin … the patent on that—”

“Doesn’t exist,” said Warfield. “He gave it to the Parents’ Association.”

“Well, sure. I made mine for fun. I had it a long time before a friend of mine said I ought to sell the idea to a toy manufacturer. But I heard that the Parents’ Association sent toys to hospitals and I sort of figured maybe kids that needed amusement should have it, rather than only those whose parents could afford it.”

“Robin, you’re crazy. You could have—”

“No, Peg,” said Warfield gently. “Don’t try to make him regret it. Robin … you won’t mind if I call you Robin … what led you to design the rotors so that they phase over and under the twentieth-of-a-second sight persistence level, so that the eye is drawn to it and then the mind has to concentrate on it?”

“I remember Zeitner’s paper about that at the Society for Mental Sciences,” said Peg in an awed tone. “ ‘A brilliant application of optics to psychology.’ ”

“It wasn’t brilliant,” said Robin impatiently. “I didn’t even know that that was what it was doing. I just messed with it until I liked it.”

A look passed between Warfield and Peg. It said, “What would he accomplish if he ever really tried?”

Warfield shook his head and perched on the edge of a table. “Now listen to me, Robin,” he said, gently and seriously. “I don’t think Peg’ll mind my telling you this; but it’s important.”

Peg colored slightly. “I think I know what you’re going to say. But go ahead.”

“When she first told me about you, and what she wanted to try, I was dead set against it. You see, we know infinitely more about the ductless glands nowadays than we did—well, even this time last
year. But at the same time, their interaction is so complex, and their functions so subtle that there are dozens of unexplored mysteries. We’re getting to them, one by one, as fast as they show themselves and as fast as we can compile data. The more I learn the less I like to take chances. When Peg just told me about you as a talented young man whose life history was a perfect example of hyper-thymus—infantilism, I think was the word she used—”

“Da! Also goo!” laughed Robin. “She might have been kind enough to call it, say, a static precocity.”

“Please don’t tease me about it, Robin.”

“Oh. Sorry. Go on, Mel.” Peg smiled at Warfield’s slight start. She had done the same thing, for the same reason, the first time Robin called her “Peg.”

“Anyhow, I certainly had no great desire to follow her suggestion—shoot you full of hormones and sterones to help you reorganize your metabolism and your psychology. After all, interesting as these cases are, a doctor has to ration his efforts. There are plenty of odd glandular situations walking around in the guise of a human beings. In addition, I had no personal interest in you. I have too much work to do to indulge a Messiah complex.

“But Peg was persistent. Peg can be
very
persistent. She kept bringing me late developments. I didn’t know whether you were a hobby or an inverted phobia of hers. With some effort I managed to remain uninterested until she brought me those blood analyses.”

“I’ll never get over my disappointment about what she did with those blood specimens,” said Robin soberly.

“Disappointment? Why?”

“I had hoped she was a vampire.”

“Go on, Mel. Don’t try to keep up with him.”

“It wasn’t until I found out that you wrote ‘The Cellophane Chalice’—and mind you, I never did like poetry, but that was
different
—and that you also”—he ticked them off on his fingers—“wrote the original continuity for that pornographic horror of a comic strip ‘Gertie and the Wolves,’ did the pipe-cleaner figurines that were photographed to illustrate ‘The Tiny Hans Anderson,’ dropped a sackful of pine oil into the fountain at Radio City purely
because you wanted to see thirty thousand gallons of bubbles, got thrown in the pen for it and while there saved the lives of two prisoners and a guard by slugging it out with a homicidal maniac in the bull pen; composed ‘The Lullaby Tree’ … by the way, how was it Rollo Vincente got all the credit—and the money—for that song? It was Number One on the hit list for sixteen weeks.”