Martian Time-Slip Read online

  “Who in the UN are authors of this bill?” he asked.

  “There are six members of the In-planet Health and Welfare Committee who are supposed to have written the bill.” She began writing. “Here are their names. Now, Mr. Steiner, what we’d like you to do is to write to these men, and have anybody you know who--“

  He barely listened. He paid for his flute, thanked her, accepted the folded piece of paper, and made his way out of the gift shop.

  Goddamn, how he wished he hadn’t gone in there! Did she enjoy telling such stories? Wasn’t there trouble enough in the world as it was, without old wives’ tales being peddled by middle-aged females who should not have had anything to do with public affairs in the first place?

  But in him a quiet voice said, She may be right. You have to face it. Gripping his heavy suitcases, he walked on, confused and frightened, hardly aware of the small new shops which he passed as he hurried toward Camp B-G and his waiting son.

  When he entered the great glass-domed solarium of Camp Ben-Gurion, there stood young, sandy-haired Miss Much in her work smock and sandals, with clay and paint splattered on her, a hectic expression knitting her eyebrows. She tossed her head and pushed her tousled hair back from her face as she came toward him. “Hello, Mr. Steiner. What a day we’ve had. Two new children, and one of them a holy terror.”

  “Miss Milch,” he said, “I was talking to Mrs. Esterhazy at her shop just now--“

  “She told you about the supposed bill at the UN?” Miss Milch looked tired. “Yes, there is such a bill. Anne gets every sort of inside piece of news, although how she does it I have no idea. Try to keep from showing any agitation around Manfred, if you possibly can; he’s been upset by the new arrivals today.” She started off, to lead Mr. Steiner from the solarium down the corridor to the playroom in which his son would be found, but he hurried after her, halting her.

  “What can we do about this bill?” he demanded breathlessly. He set down his suitcases, holding now only the paper bag in which Mrs. Esterhazy had put the wooden flute.

  “I don’t know that we can do anything,” Miss Milch said. She went on slowly to the door and opened it. The sound of children’s voices came shrill and loud to their ears. “Naturally, the authorities at New Israel and back Home in Israel itself have made furious protests, and so have several other governments. But so much of this is secret; the bill is secret, and it all has to be done sub rosa, so they won’t start a panic. It’s such a touchy subject. Nobody really knows what public sentiment is, on this, or even if it should be listened to.” Her voice, weary and brittle, dragged, as if she were running down. But then she seemed to perk up. She patted him on the shoulder. “I think the worst they would do, once they closed B-G, is deport the anomalous children back Home; I don’t think they’d ever go so far as to destroy them.”

  Steiner said quickly, “To camps back on Earth.”

  “Let’s go and find Manfred,” Miss Milch said. “All right? I think he knows this is the day you come; he was standing by the window, but of course he does that a lot.”

  Suddenly, to his own surprise, he burst out in a choked voice, “I wonder if maybe they might be right. What use is it to have a child that can’t talk or live among people?”

  Miss Milch glanced at him but said nothing.

  “He’ll never be able to hold a job,” Steiner said. “He’ll always be a burden on society, like he is now. Isn’t that the truth?”

  “Autistic children still baffle us,” Miss Milch said. “By what they are, and how they got that way, and by their tendency to begin to evolve mentally, all at once, for no apparent reason, after years of complete failure to respond.”

  “I think I can’t in good conscience oppose this bill,” Steiner said. “Not after thinking it over. Now that the first shock is over. It would be fair. I feel it’s fair.” His voice shook.

  “Well,” Miss Milch said, “I’m glad you didn’t say that to Anne Esterhazy, because she’d never let you go; she’d be after you making speeches at you until you came around to her side.” She held open the door to the big playroom. “Manfred is over in the corner.”

  Seeing his son from a distance, Steiner thought, You would never know to look at him. The large, well-formed head, the curly hair, the handsome features. . . The boy was bent over, absorbed in some object which he held. A genuinely goodlooking boy, with eyes that shone sometimes mockingly, sometimes with glee and excitement . . . and such terrific coordination. The way he sprinted about, on the tips of his toes, as if dancing to some unheard music, some tune from inside his own mind whose rhythms kept him enthralled.

  We are so pedestrian, compared to him, Steiner thought. Leaden. We creep along like snails, while he dances and leaps, as if gravity does not have the same influence on him as it does on us. Could he be made from some new and different kind of atom?

  “Hi, Manny,” Mr. Steiner said to his son.

  The boy did not raise his head or show any sign of awareness; he continued fooling with the object.

  I will write to the framers of the bill, Steiner thought, and tell them I have a child in the camp. And that I agree with them.

  His thoughts frightened him.

  Murder, of Manfred--he recognized it. My hatred of him coming out, released by this news. I see why they’re debating it in secret; many people have this hate, I bet. Unrecognized inside.

  “No flute for you, Manny,” Steiner said. “Why should I give it to you, I wonder? Do you give a damn? No.” The boy did not look up or give any indication of hearing. “Nothing,” Steiner said. “Emptiness.”

  While Steiner stood there, tall, slender Dr. Glaub in his white coat, carrying his clipboard, approached. Steiner became suddenly aware of him and started.

  “There is a new theory about autism,” Dr. Glaub said. “From Bergholzlei, in Switzerland. I wished to discuss it with you, because it seems to offer us a new avenue with your son, here.”

  “I doubt it,” Steiner said.

  Dr. Glaub did not seem to hear him, he continued, “It assumes a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual, so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it, in fact, he is unable to perceive it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledegook-- you know? Just extremely high-pitched mishmash. Now, this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber, where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slowed down--do you see? Both sound and video slowed, at last so slow that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehend the sounds as human speech.”

  Wearily, Steiner said, “Fascinating. There’s always something new, isn’t there, in psychotherapy?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Glaub said, nodding. “Especially from the Swiss; they’re ingenious in comprehending the world-views of disturbed persons, of encapsulated individuals cut off from ordinary means of communication, isolated--you know?”

  “I know,” Steiner said.

  Dr. Glaub, still nodding, had moved on, to stop by another parent, a woman, who was seated with her small girl, both of them examining a cloth picture book.

  Hope before the deluge, Steiner thought. Does Dr. Glaub know that any day the authorities back on Earth may close Camp B-G? The good doctor labors on in idiotic innocence . . . happy in his schemes.

  Walking after Dr. Glaub, Steiner waited until there was a pause in the conversation and then he said, “Doctor, I’d like to discuss this new theory a little further.”

  “Yes, yes,” Dr. Glaub said, excusing himself from the woman and her child; he led Steiner over to one side, where they could talk privately. “This concept of time-rates may open a doorway to minds so fatigued by the impossible task of communicating in a world where everything happens with such rapidity that--“

  Steiner interrupted, “Suppose your theory works out. How can you help such an individual function? Did you intend for
him to stay in the closed chamber with the slowed-down picture screen the rest of his life? I think, Doctor, that you’re all playing games, here. You’re not facing reality. All of you at Camp B-G; you’re so virtuous. So without guile. But the outside world--it’s not like that. This is a noble, idealistic place, in here, but you’re fooling yourselves. So in my opinion you’re also fooling the patients; excuse me for saying it. This slowed-down closed chamber, it epitomizes you all, here, your attitude.”

  Dr. Glaub listened, nodding, with an intent expression on his face. “We have practical equipment promised,” he said, when Steiner had finished. “From Westinghouse, back on Earth. Rapport with others in society is achieved primarily through sound, and Westinghouse has designed for us an audio recorder which picks up the message directed at the psychotic individual--for example, your boy Manfred-- then, having recorded this message on iron-oxide tape, replays it almost instantly for him at lower speed, then erases itself and records the next message and so on, with the result that a permanent contact with the outside world, at his own rate of time, is maintained. And later we hope to have in our hands here a video recorder which will present a constant but slowed-down record to him of the visual portion of reality, synchronized with the audio portion. Admittedly, he will be one step removed from contact with reality, and the problem of touch presents difficulties--but I disagree when you say this is too idealistic to be of use. Look at the widespread chemical therapy that was tried not so long ago. Stimulants speeded up the psychotic’s interior time-sense so that he could comprehend the stimuli pouring in on him, but as soon as the stimulant wore off, the psychotic’s cognition slowed down as his faulty metabolism reestablished itself--you know? Yet we learned a good deal from that; we learned that psychosis has a chemical basis, not a psychological basis. Sixty years of erroneous notions were upset in a single experiment, using sodium amytal--“

  “Dreams,” Steiner interrupted. “You will never make contact with my boy.” Turning, he walked away from Dr. Glaub.

  From Camp B-G he went by bus to a swanky restaurant, the Red Fox, which always bought a good deal of his wares. After he had finished his business with the owner he sat for a time at the bar, drinking a beer.

  The way Dr. Glaub had babbled on--that was the kind of idiocy that had brought them to Mars in the first place. To a planet where a glass of beer cost twice what a shot of Scotch cost, because it had so much more water in it.

  The owner of the Red Fox, a small, bald, portly man wearing glasses, seated himself next to Steiner and said, “Why you looking so glum, Norb?”

  Steiner said, “They’re going to close down Camp B-G.”

  “Good,” the owner of the Red Fox said. “We don’t need those freaks here on Mars; it’s bad advertising.”

  “I agree,” Steiner said, “at least to a certain extent.”

  “It’s like those babies with seal flippers back in the ‘60s, from them using that German drug. They should have destroyed all of them; there’s plenty of healthy normal children born, why spare those others? If you had a kid with extra arms or no arms, deformed in some way, you wouldn’t want it kept alive, would you?”

  “No,” Steiner said. He did not say that his wife’s brother back on Earth was a phocomelus; he had been born without arms and made use of superb artificial ones designed for him by a Canadian firm which specialized in such equipment.

  In fact he said nothing to the little portly man; he drank his beer and stared at the bottles behind the bar. He did not like the man at all, and he had never told him about Manfred. He knew the man’s deepseated prejudice. Nor was he unusual. Steiner could summon up no resentment toward him; he merely felt weary, and did not want to discuss it.

  “That was the beginning,” the owner said. “Those babies born in the early ‘60s--are there any of them at Camp B-G--I’ve never set foot inside there and I never will.”

  Steiner said, “How could they be at B-G? They’re hardly anomalous; anomalous means one of a kind.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the man admitted. “I see what you mean. Anyhow, if they’d destroyed them years ago we wouldn’t have such places as B-G, because in my mind there’s a direct link between the monsters born in the ‘60s and all the freaks supposedly born due to radiation ever since; I mean, it’s all due to substandard genes, isn’t it? Now, I think that’s where the Nazis were right. They saw the need of weeding out the inferior genetic strains as long ago as 1930; they saw--“

  “My son,” Steiner began, and then stopped. He realized what he had said. The portly man stared at him. “My son is there,” Steiner at last went on, “means as much to me as your son does to you. I know that someday he will emerge into the world once more.”

  “Let me buy you a drink, Norbert,” the portly man said, “to show you how sorry I am; I mean, about the way I talked.”

  Steiner said, “If they close B-G it will be a calamity too great for us to bear, we who have children in there. I can’t face it.”

  “I see what you mean,” the portly man said. “I understand your feeling.”

  “You are superior to me if you understand how I feel,” Steiner said, “because I can make no sense out of it.” He set down his empty beer glass and stepped off the stool. “I don’t want another drink,” he said. “Excuse me; I have to leave.” He picked up his heavy suitcases.

  “You’ve been coming in here all this time,” the owner said, “and we talked about that camp a lot, and you never told me you had a son in there. That wasn’t right.” He looked angry, now.

  “Why wasn’t it right?”

  “Hell, if I had known I wouldn’t have said what I said; you’re responsible, Norbert--you could have told me, but you deliberately didn’t. I don’t like that one bit.” His face was red with indignation.

  Carrying his suitcases, Steiner left the bar.

  “This is not my day,” he said aloud. Argued with everybody; I’ll have to spend the next visit here making apologies . . . if I come back at all. But I have to come back; my business depends on it. And I have to stop at Camp B-G; there is no other way.

  Suddenly it came to him that he should kill himself. The idea appeared in his mind full blown, as if it had always been there, always a part of him. Easy to do it, just crash the ‘copter. He thought, I am goddamn tired of being Norbert Steiner; I didn’t ask to be Norbert Steiner or sell blackmarket food or anything else. What is my reason for staying alive? I’m not good with my hands, I can’t fix or make anything; I can’t use my mind, either, I’m just a salesman. I’m tired of my wife’s scorn because I can’t keep our water machinery going--I’m tired of Otto who I had to hire because I’m helpless even in my own business.

  In fact, he thought, why wait until I can get back to the ‘copter? Along the street came a huge, rumbling tractor-bus, its sides dull with sand; it had crossed the desert just now, was coming to New Israel from some other settlement. Steiner set down his suitcases and ran out into the street, directly at the tractor-bus.

  The bus honked; its airbrakes screeched. Other traffic halted as Steiner ran forward with his head down, his eyes shut. Only at the last moment, with the sound of the air horn so loud in his ears that it became unbearably painful, did he open his eyes; he saw the driver of the bus gaping down at him, saw the steering wheel and the number on the driver’s cap. And then--

  In the solarium at Camp Ben-Gurion, Miss Milch heard the sounds of sirens, and she paused in the middle of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, which she was playing on the piano for the children to dance to.

  “Fire!” one of the little boys said, going to the window. The other children followed.

  “No, it’s an ambulance, Miss Much,” another boy said, at the window, “going downtown.”

  Miss Much resumed playing, and the children, at the sound of the rhythms coming from the piano, straggled back to their places. They were bears at the zoo, cavorting for peanuts; that was what the music suggested to them, Miss Milch told the
m to go ahead and act it out.

  Off to one side, Manfred stood heedless of the music, his head down, a thoughtful expression on his face. As the sirens wailed up loudly for a moment, Manfred lifted his head. Noticing that, Miss Milch gasped and breathed a prayer. The boy had heard! She thumped away at the Tchaikovsky music even more loudly than before, feeling exultation: she and the doctors had been right, for through sound there had come about a contact with the boy. Now Manfred went slowly to the window to look out; all alone he gazed down at the buildings and streets below, searching for the origin of the noise which had aroused him, attracted his attention.

  Things are not so hopeless after all, Miss Milch said to herself. Wait until his father hears; it shows we must never talk of giving up.

  She played on, loudly and happily.

  4

  David Bohlen, building a dam of wet soil at the end of his family’s vegetable garden under the hot midafternoon Martian sun, saw the UN police ‘copter settle down and land before the Steiners’ house, and he knew instantly that something was going on.

  A UN policeman in his blue uniform and shiny helmet stepped from the ‘copter and walked up the path to the Steiners’ front door, and when two of the little girls appeared the policeman greeted them. He then spoke to Mrs. Steiner and then he disappeared on inside, and the door shut after him.

  David got to his feet and hurried from the garden, across the stretch of sand to the ditch; he leaped the ditch and crossed the patch of flat soil where Mrs. Steiner had tried unsuccessfully to raise pansies, and at the corner of the house he suddenly came upon one of the Steiner girls; she was standing inertly, picking apart a stalk of wur-weed, her face white. She looked as if she were going to be sick.