Alternating Currents Read online

  And, of all things, a fully-equipped and crowded pediatric wing.

  I said, ‘I thought this was a VA facility.’

  ‘Exactly. Here comes our boy.’

  A Navy officer was coming in, hand and smile outstretched to Candace. ‘Hi, good to see you. And you must be Mr Gunnarsen.’

  Candace introduced us as we shook hands. The fellow’s name was Commander Whitling; she called him ‘Tom’. He said, ‘We’ll have to move. Since I talked to you there’s been an all-hands evolution scheduled for eleven - some high brass inspection. I don’t want to hurry you, but I’d like it if we were out of the way... this is a little irregular.’

  ‘Nice of you to arrange it,’ I said. ‘Lead on.’

  We went up a high-rise elevator and came out on the top floor of the building, into a corridor covered with murals of Disney and Mother Goose. From a sun deck came the tinkle of a music box. Three children, chasing each other down the hall, dodged past us, yelling. They made pretty good time, considering that two of them were on crutches. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ asked Commander Whitling sharply.

  I looked twice, but he wasn’t talking to me or the kids. He was talking to a man with a young face but a heavy black beard, who was standing behind a Donald Duck mobile looking inconspicuous and guilty.

  ‘Oh, hi, Mr Whitling,’ the man said. ‘Jeez. I must’ve got lost again looking for the PX.’

  ‘Carhart,’ said the commander dangerously, ‘if I catch you in this wing again you won’t have to worry about the PX for a year. Hear me?’

  ‘Well, jeez. All right, Mr Whitling.’ As the man saluted and turned, his face wearing an expression of injury, I noticed that the left sleeve of his bathrobe was tucked, empty, into a pocket.

  ‘You can’t keep them out,’ said Whitling and spread his hands. ‘Well, all right, Mr Gunnarsen, here it is. You’re seeing the whole thing.’

  I looked carefully around. It was all children - limping children, stumbling children, pale children, weary children. ‘But what am I seeing, exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Why, the Children, Mr Gunnarsen. The ones we liberated. The ones the Arcturans captured on Mars.’

  ~ * ~

  And then I connected. I remembered about the capture of the colony on Mars.

  Interstellar war is waged at the pace of a snail’s crawl, because it takes so long to go from star to star. The main battles of our war with Arcturus had been fought no farther from Earth than the surface of Mars and the fleet engagement around Orbit Saturn. Still, it had taken eleven years, first to last, from the surprise attack on the Martian colony to the armistice signed at Washington.

  I remembered seeing a reconstructed tape of that Martian surprise attack. It was a summer’s day - hot - at full noon, ice melted into water. The place was the colony around the Southern Springs. Out of the small descending sun a ship appeared.

  It was a rocket. It was brilliant gold metal, and it came down with a halo of gold radiation around its splayed front, like the fleshy protuberance of a star-nosed mole. It landed with an electrical crackle on the fine-grained orange sand, and out of it came the Arcturans.

  Of course, no one had known they were Arcturans then. They had swung around the sun in a long anecliptic orbit, watching and studying, and they had selected the small Martian outpost as the place to strike. In Mars gravity they were bipeds - two of their ropy limbs were enough to lift them off the ground - man tall, in golden pressure suits. The colonists came running out to meet them, and were killed. All of them. All of the adults.

  The children, however, had not been killed, not that quickly or that easily, at least. Some had not been killed at all, and some of those were here in Donnegan General Hospital.

  But not all.

  Comprehension beginning to emerge in my small mind I said, ‘Then these are the survivors.’

  Candace, standing very close to me, said, ‘Most of them, Gunner. The ones that aren’t well enough to be sent back into normal life.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Well, they mostly don’t have families - having been killed, you see. So they’ve been adopted out into foster-homes here in Belport. A hundred and eight of them, isn’t that right, Tom? And now maybe you get some idea of what you’re up against.’

  ~ * ~

  There was something like a hundred of the Children in that wing, and I didn’t see all of them. Some of them were not to be seen.

  Whitling just told me about, but couldn’t show me, the blood-temperature room, where the very young and very bad cases lived. They had a gnotobiotic atmosphere, a little rich in oxygen, a little more humid than the ambient air, plus pressure to help their weak metabolism keep oxygen spread in their parts. On their right, a little farther along, were the small individual rooms belonging to the worst cases of all. The contagious. The incurables. The unfortunates whose very appearance was bad for the others. Whitling was good enough to open polarizing shutters and let me look in on some of those where they lay (or writhed, or stood like sticks) in permanent solitary. One of the Arcturan efforts had been transplantation, and the project seemed to have been directed by a whimsical person. The youngest was about three; the oldest in late teens.

  They were a disturbing lot, and if I have glossed lightly over what I felt, it is because what I felt is all too obvious.

  Kids in trouble! Of course, those who had been put back into population weren’t put back as shocking as these. But they would pull at the heartstrings, they even pulled at mine; and every time a foster-parent’s neighbour, or a casual passer-by on the street, felt that heartstring tug he would feel, too, a single thought: The Arcturans did this.

  For after killing the potentially dangerous adults they had caged the tractable small ones as valuable research specimens.

  And I had hoped to counteract this with five hundred Arcturan pets!

  Whitling was all this time taking me around the wing, and I could hear in his voice the sound of what I was up against; because he loved and pitied those kids. ‘Hi, Terry,’ he said on the sun deck, bending over a bed and patting its occupant on his snow-white hair. Terry smiled up at him. ‘Can’t hear us, of course,’ said Whitling. ‘We grafted in new auditory nerves four weeks ago - I did it myself - but they’re not surviving. Third try, too. And of course, each attempt is a worse risk than the one before: antibodies.’

  I said, ‘He doesn’t look more than five years old.’ Whitling nodded. ‘But the attack on the colony was—’

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ said Whitling. ‘The Arcturans were, of course, interested in reproduction too. Ellen - she left us a couple of weeks ago - was only thirteen, but she’d had six children. Now, this is Nancy.’

  Nancy was perhaps twelve, but her gait and arm coordination were those of a toddler. She came stumbling in after a ball, stopped and regarded me with dislike and suspicion. ‘Nancy’s one of our cures,’ Whitling said proudly. He followed my eyes. ‘Oh, nothing wrong there,’ he said. ‘Mars-bred. She hasn’t adjusted to Earth gravity, is all; she isn’t slow, the ball’s bouncing too fast. Here’s Sam.’

  Sam was a near-teenager, giggling from his bed as he tried what was obviously the extremely wearing exercise of lifting his head off the mattress. A candy-striped practical nurse was counting time for him as he touched chin to chest, one and two, one and two. He did it five times, then slumped back, grinning. ‘Sam’s central nervous system was almost gone,’ Whitling said fondly. ‘But we’re making progress. Nervous tissue regeneration, though, is awfully—’ I wasn’t listening; I was looking at Sam’s grin, which showed black and broken teeth. ‘Diet deficiency,’ said Whitling, following my look again.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen enough, now I want to get out of here before they have me changing diapers. I thank you, Commander Whitling. I think I thank you. Which is the way out?’

  ~ * ~

  4

  I didn’t want to go back to Haber’s office. I was af
raid of what the conversation might be like. But I had to get a fill-in on what had been happening with our work and I had to eat.

  So I took Candace back to my room and ordered lunch from room service.

  I stood at the thermal window looking out at the city while Candace checked with the office. I didn’t even listen, because Candace knew what I would want to know, I just watched Belport cycle through an average dull Monday at my feet. Belport was a radial town, with an urban centre-cluster of the mushroom-shaped buildings that were popular twenty years ago. The hotel we were in was one, in fact, and from my window I could see three others looming above and below me, to right and left, and beyond them the cathedral spires of the apartment condominia of the residential districts. I could see a creeping serpent of gaily coloured cars moving along one of the trafficways, pinpointed with sparks of our pro-referendum campaign parades. Or one of the opposition’s. From four hundred feet it didn’t seem to matter.

  ‘You know, honey,’ I said as she clicked off the 3-V, ‘there isn’t any sense in this. I admit the kids are sad cases, and who can resist kids in trouble? But they don’t have one solitary damned thing to do with whether or not the Arcturans should have a telemetry and tracking station on the lake.’

  Candace said, ‘Weren’t you the man who told me that logic didn’t have anything to do with public relations?’ She came to the window beside me, turned and half-sat on the ledge and read from her notes: ‘Survey index off another half-point... Haber says, be sure to tell you that’s a victory, would have been off two points at least without the Arcats. Supplier letters out. Chicago approves budget overdraft. And that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The door chimed, and she left me to let the bellmen in with our lunch. I watched her without much appetite, except maybe for one thing that I knew wasn’t on the menu, Candace herself. But I tried to eat.

  Candace did not seem to be trying to help me eat. In fact, she did something that was quite out of character for her. All the way through lunch she kept talking, and the one subject she kept talking about was the kids. I heard about Nina, who was fifteen when she came to Donnegan General and had been through the occupation all the way - who wouldn’t talk to anybody, and weighed fifty-one pounds, and screamed unless she was allowed to hide under the bed. ‘And after six months,’ said Candace, ‘they gave her a hand-puppet, and she finally talked through that.’

  ‘How’d you find all this out?’ I asked.

  ‘From Tom. And then there were the germ-free kids ...’ She told me about them, and about the series of injections and marrow transplants that they had needed to restore the body’s immune reaction without killing the patient. And the ones with auditory and vocal nerves destroyed, apparently because the Arcturans were investigating the question of whether humans could think rationally in the absence of articulate words. The ones raised on chemically pure glucose for dietary studies. The induced bleeders. The kids with no sense of touch, and the kids with no developed musculature.

  ‘Tom told you all this?’

  ‘And lots more, Gunner. And remember, these are the survivors. Some of the kids who were deliberately—’

  ‘How long have you known Tom?’

  She put down her fork, sugared her coffee and took a sip, looking at me over the cup. ‘Oh, since I’ve been here. Two years. Since before the kids came, of course.’

  ‘Pretty well, I judge.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘He really likes those kids, I could see that. And so do you.’ I swallowed some more of my own coffee, which tasted like diluted pig swill, and reached for a cigarette and said, ‘I think maybe I waited too long about the situation here, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Why, yes, Gunner,’ she said carefully, ‘I think you maybe missed the boat.’

  ‘I tell you what else I think, honey. I think you’re trying to tell me something, and it isn’t all about Proposition Four on the ballot next week.’

  And she said, not irrelevantly, ‘As a matter of fact, Gunner, I’m going to marry Tom Whitling on Christmas day.’

  ~ * ~

  I sent her back to the office and stretched out on my bed, smoking and watching the smoke being sucked into the wall-vents. It was rather peaceful and quiet because I’d told the desk to hold all calls until further notice, and I wasn’t feeling a thing.

  Perfection is so rare, it is interesting to find a case in which one has been perfectly wrong all the way.

  If I had taken out my little list then I could have checked off all the points. One way or another. I hadn’t fired Haber, and in fact I really didn’t want to any more, because he wasn’t much worse than I was at this particular job; the record showed it. I had investigated the Children, all right. A little late. I had investigated Connick, the number one opponent to the proposition, and what I had found would hurt Connick, all right, but I couldn’t really see how it would help do our job. And I certainly wasn’t going to marry Candace Harmon.

  Come to think of it, I thought, lighting another cigarette from the stub of the old one, there had been a fifth item, and I had blown that one too.

  The classics of public relations clearly show how little reason has to do with M/R, and yet I had allowed myself to fall into that oldest and most imbecilic of traps set for flacks. Think of history’s master-strokes of flackery: ‘The Jews stabbed Germany in the back!’ ‘Seventy-eight (or fifty-nine, or one hundred and three) card-carrying communists in the State Department!’ ‘I will go to Korea!’ It is not enough for a theme to be rational; indeed it is wrong for a theme to be rational, if you want to move men’s glands, because, above all else, it must seem new, and fresh, and of such revolutionary simplicity that it illuminates an enormous, confused, and disagreeable problem in a fresh and hopeful light. Or so it must seem to the Average Man. And since he has spent any number of surly, worried hours groping for some personal salvation in the face of a bankrupt Germany, or a threat of subversion, or a war that is going nowhere, no rational solution can ever meet those strictures ... since he has already considered all the rational solutions and found either that they are useless or that the cost is more than he wants to pay.

  So what I should have concentrated on in Belport was the bright, irrational, distractive issue. The Big Lie, if you will. And I had hardly found even a Sly Insinuation.

  It was interesting to consider in just how many ways I had done the wrong thing. Including maybe the wrongest of all: I had let Candace Harmon get away. And then in these thoughts, myself almost despising, haply the door chimed and I opened it, and there was this fellow in Space Force olive-greens saying, ‘Come along, Mr Gunnarsen, the Truce Team want to talk to you.’

  ~ * ~

  For one frozen moment there, I was nineteen years old again. I was a Rocketman 3/c on the Moon, guarding the Aristarchus base against invaders from outer space. (We thought that to be a big joke at the time. Shows how unfunny a joke can turn.) This fellow was a colonel, and his name was Peyroles, and he took me down the corridor, to a private elevator I had never known was there, up to the flat dome of the mushroom and into a suite which made my suite look like the cellar under a dog-run Old Levittown. The reek was overpowering. By then I had gotten over my quick response to the brass and I took out a ker-pak and held it to my nose. The colonel did not even look at me.

  ‘Sit down!’ barked the colonel, and left me in front of an unlighted fireplace. Something was going on; I could hear voices from another room, a lot of them:

  ‘- burned one in effigy, and by God we’ll burn a real one—’

  ‘- smells like a skunk—’

  ‘- turns my stomach!’ And that last fellow, whoever he was, was pretty near right, at that - although actually in the few seconds since I entered the suite I had almost forgotten the smell. It was funny how you got used to it. Like a ripe cheese: the first whiff knocked you sick, but pretty soon the olfactory nerves got the hang of the thing and built up a defence.

  ‘- all righ
t, the war’s over and we have got to get along with them, but a man’s home town—’

  Whatever it was that was going on in the other room, it was going on loudly. Tempers were always short when Arcturans were around, because the smell, of course, put everybody on edge. People don’t like bad smells. They’re not nice. They remind us of sweat and excrement, which we have buttressed our lives against admitting as real, personal facts. Then there was a loud military yell for order - I recognized the colonel, Peyroles - and then a voice that sounded queerly not-quite-human, although it spoke in English. An Arcturan? What was his name, Knafti? But I had understood they couldn’t make human sounds.