Short Fiction Fritz Leiber (free e books to read .txt) 📖

“Oh, yes, and Jamieson had a feeble paper on what he called individualization in marine worms. Barr, have you ever thought much about the larger aspects of the problem of individuality?”

Jack jumped slightly. He had let his thoughts wander very far.

“Not especially, sir,” he mumbled.

The house was still. A few minutes after the professor’s arrival, Mrs. Kesserich had gone off with an anxious glance at Jack. He knew why and wished he could reassure her that he would not mention their conversation to the professor.

Kesserich had spent perhaps a half hour briefing him on the more important papers delivered at the conferences. Then, almost as if it were a teacher’s trick to show up a pupil’s inattention, he had suddenly posed this question about individuality.

“You know what I mean, of course,” Kesserich pressed. “The factors that make you you, and me me.”

“Heredity and environment,” Jack parroted like a freshman.

Kesserich nodded. “Suppose⁠—this is just speculation⁠—that we could control heredity and environment. Then we could recreate the same individual at will.”

Jack felt a shiver go through him. “To get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits. That’d be far beyond us.”

“What about identical twins?” Kesserich pointed out. “And then there’s parthenogenesis to be considered. One might produce a duplicate of the mother without the intervention of the male.” Although his voice had grown more idly speculative, Kesserich seemed to Jack to be smiling secretly. “There are many examples in the lower animal forms, to say nothing of the technique by which Loeb caused a sea urchin to reproduce with no more stimulus than a salt solution.”

Jack felt the hair rising on his neck. “Even then you wouldn’t get exactly the same pattern of hereditary traits.”

“Not if the parent were of very pure stock? Not if there were some special technique for selecting ova that would reproduce all the mother’s traits?”

“But environment would change things,” Jack objected. “The duplicate would be bound to develop differently.”

“Is environment so important? Newman tells about a pair of identical twins separated from birth, unaware of each other’s existence. They met by accident when they were twenty-one. Each was a telephone repairman. Each had a wife the same age. Each had a baby son. And each had a fox terrier called ‘Trixie.’ That’s without trying to make environments similar. But suppose you did try. Suppose you saw to it that each of them had exactly the same experiences at the same times⁠ ⁠…”

For a moment it seemed to Jack that the room was dimming and wavering, becoming a dark pool in which the only motionless thing was Kesserich’s sphinx-like face.

“Well, we’ve escaped quite far enough from Jamieson’s marine worms,” the biologist said, all brisk again. He said it as if Jack were the one who had led the conversation down wild and unprofitable channels. “Let’s get on to your project. I want to talk it over now, because I won’t have any time for it tomorrow.”

Jack looked at him blankly.

“Tomorrow I must attend to a very important matter,” the biologist explained.

Morning sunlight brightened the colors of the wax flowers under glass on the high bureau that always seemed to emit the faint odor of old hair combings. Jack pulled back the diamond-patterned quilt and blinked the sleep from his eyes. He expected his mind to be busy wondering about Kesserich and his wife⁠—things said and half said last night⁠—but found instead that his thoughts swung instantly to Mary Alice Pope, as if to a farthest island in a world of people.

Downstairs, the house was empty. After a long look at the cabinet⁠—he felt behind it, but the key was gone⁠—he hurried down to the waterfront. He stopped only for a bowl of chowder and, as an afterthought, to buy half a dozen newspapers.

The sea was bright, the brisk wind just right for the Annie O. There was eagerness in the way it smacked the sail and in the creak of the mast. And when he reached the cove, it was no longer still, but nervous with faint ripples, as if time had finally begun to stir.

After the same struggle with the underbrush, he came out on the rocky spine and passed the cove of the sea urchins. The spiny creatures struck an uncomfortable chord in his memory.

This time he climbed the second island cautiously, scraping the innocent-seeming ground ahead of him intently with a boathook he’d brought along for the purpose. He was only a few yards from the fence when he saw Mary Alice Pope standing behind it.

He hadn’t realized that his heart would begin to pound or that, at the same time, a shiver of almost supernatural dread would go through him.

The girl eyed him with an uneasy hostility and immediately began to speak in a hushed, hurried voice. “You must go away at once and never come back. You’re a wicked man, but I don’t want you to be hurt. I’ve been watching for you all morning.”

He tossed the newspapers over the fence. “You don’t have to read them now,” he told her. “Just look at the datelines and a few of the headlines.”

When she finally lifted her eyes to his again, she was trembling. She tried unsuccessfully to speak.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve been the victim of a scheme to make you believe you were born around 1916 instead of 1933, and that it’s 1933 now instead of 1951. I’m not sure why it’s been done, though I think I know who you really are.”

“But,” the girl faltered, “my aunts tell me it’s 1933.”

“They would.”

“And there are the papers⁠ ⁠… the magazines⁠ ⁠… the radio.”

“The papers are old ones. The radio’s faked⁠—some sort of recording. I could show you if I could get at it.”

“These papers might be faked,” she said, pointing to where she’d let them drop on the ground.

“They’re new,” he said. “Only old papers get yellow.”

“But why would they do it to me? Why?”

“Come with me to the mainland, Mary. That’ll set you straight quicker than anything.”

“I couldn’t,” she