More Than Superhuman Read online

  Juniko shrugged and smiled to himself whenever he heard his father expound on the price and realities of politics. Who cared about cost? Such problems could be worked out. Juniko felt even more scathing of the short-sighted biologists who were enthralled by the restricting concept of cloning future Shakespeares and other geniuses, which the Tator said he was willing to have done in all instances where it would serve the public interest.

  'Naturally, that, also,' Juniko thought to himself, smiling with scorn.

  But his goodness, his ideal, transcended all such minuscule imaginations.

  Let there come an end to sorrow! — to needless suffering, deprivation of body, mutilation of mind, starvation of soul.

  Let sad things cease! — and in their place, a smile upon each human face!

  And so, to begin — subtly, cautiously — the change must come in circles around the throne, spiraling downward through the nobility to the fringe group and finally, systematically, to the great mass of the People themselves.

  The heartbeat — his father's — that stands between the slave. Now world and the brave New world to come must not be allowed to clone endlessly into the future. One day that heart will falter, and when it does, the Tator will call for his eldest son, for he trusts no one to perform the cloning act but his smiling, loyal Juniko.

  * *

  An assassin's ray! The heat sears the flesh of the Tator from the waist up, scorches the hair from his head, evaporates one eye. More dead than alive, Juniko's writhing father screams for his son and is rushed to the secret laboratory.

  The Tator dies with a smile on what is left of his crisped and contorted face as his last conscious feeling is of the knife slice that will preserve the necessary portion of his flesh to ensure his rebirth. He will be back!

  But black, eternal oblivion is his fate. Smiling sorrowfully, royal Juniko feeds the fatal piece of his father's flesh to the Palace piranhas...

  * *

  The new regime begins.

  Curiously, some people actually resent cloning, resist self-duplication, not realizing it will be beneficial for them. They go so far — too far! — as to try to escape from Phrenophalia, to flee to Zarnocopia to the west or seek asylum in Megatropolis to the east.

  (Of course, to go north or south would be unthinkable.)

  The robopo always bring them back, of course: 'The Metal Police always get their man.' Or woman.

  And 'afterward', all clones admitted how wrong they had been and how right Juniko.

  * *

  From the beginning Juniko had one personal thought, one small concession to ego: There should be a tiny differentiation between the created and the creator. Not much, nothing overtly egotistical — Phroide forbid! — but ... instead of laughing like all the rest, he would ... smile. Simply — smile.

  Thus, the ever-laughing people would be able to recognize their benefactor. And, recognizing, love him.

  Since, from birth, he had always been a smiler; had smiled perhaps with a little fear, perhaps even propitiatingly when his father stormed; had smiled with secret joy over his great plans and had smiled with pleasure as those deific dreams came to fruition — accordingly, there was no need for a Juniko clone. Juniklone — and he added one more smile to his life total as the portmanteau crossed his mind for the first time.

  After his father's death and his ascendancy to Tatorship, he bit by bit came to realize a strange phenomenon: There were a few natural laugh-prones around the Palace, people who always had, they confessed to him, had an innate desire to laugh and laugh all day long but had restrained themselves because of his father. Juniko was glad to spare such individuals the expense of cloning. He even felt better because such natural rictal stock existed. Natural-born laughers were the automatic answer to any criticism from pre-clones who otherwise might dare to cavil at the idea that everybody but Juniko needed a clone.

  In fact, thank God for the naturals! He welcomed them all with his warm heart; treated them like personal cloneys.

  It was beautiful: Juniko even had to laugh to himself occasionally. There he would be among a group of happy laughers, and all of a sudden his own perpetual smile would break and rictivate, elevate to laughter, and he would laugh uncontrollably along with the rest.

  Phrenophalia became a funderful world of laughing people — until one day the Secretary of Offense (soldiers now laughed all the way to the wars) was laughingly telling something to Juniko and Juniko caught a strange look in the man's eyes.

  The face was laughing. The eyes were not.

  A fantastic, shattering reality struck Juniko: He's not laughing with me, he's laughing at me!

  Juniko fought off a bad feeling, the feeling of, shek! — people are really no damn good after all.

  Juniko, Tator of Phrenophalia, continued to smile before his people, of course, but it was a Pagliacci smile, for inside him now grew a grief ineffable, a sadness beyond name. And an awareness that he had actually noticed the phenomenon from the beginning but had valiantly forced himself to blindness, mentally blotting out the fact that the human race was really rotten.

  As he thought these dark thoughts, he walked like a zombie along a corridor of the Palace. As everywhere else, it was bedecked with a multiplicity of mirrors. Reflected in one of these he saw that his smile had taken on some of the old fixed quality that had been there so often when his father was alive.

  The silent, internal conflict ended in what he finally decided had to be a win for the world. It was necessary, he realized, to learn to distinguish between the people who were laughing for the joy of it and those whose laughter was ill-meant.

  Juniko was not immediately able to decide what should be done with those evil subjects whose abuse of laughter had despoiled his idyll. And that was his fatal mistake, for his paranoia began to become evident to those close to him, who remembered the example of Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and performed an enormous number of crimes. Nobody wanted another Caligula, except perhaps Caligula's sister; but the problem was not complicated, as Juniko did not have a female sibling.

  All admitted that Juniko the Original did have some good points, so his joint executioners agreed to reincarnate him via clonage and, opting for a nonparanoid Juniko the Second, a part of him was preserved and regrown after his assisted demise.

  The world held its breath; watched and waited and wondered.

  * *

  Here, in the twenty-second century, Phrenophalia of course is no longer on the map. Some of our senior citizens remember when it was laughed right off it. That was the first time Juniko Two had a rebirthday party with all his little happy, joyous, laughing friends, all hollers and horns and Serpentine and games and goodies and funny hats and candy and cake and ice cream and —

  Suddenly!

  Inexplicably!

  Juniko Two was not laughing, was not even smiling, was not even crying. Juniko Jr. was —

  Screaming!

  It would have been comical if it hadn't been tragical.

  You intuit what had happened, of course.

  He was the first I Scream Clone!

  The end (of a shaggy clone story).

  [ -: CONTENTS :-]

  * * *

  Research Alpha

  A. E. VAN VOGT and JAMES H. SCHMITZ

  I

  Barbara Ellington felt the touch as she straightened up from the water cooler. It was the lightest of touches, but quite startling — momentary, tiny flick of something ice-cold against the muscle of her right arm at the shoulder.

  She twisted quickly and rather awkwardly around from the cooler, then stared in confusion at the small well-dressed, bald-headed man who stood a few feet behind her, evidently awaiting his turn for a drink.

  'Why, good afternoon, Barbara,' he said pleasantly.

  Barbara was now feeling embarrassment. 'I... ' she began incoherently. 'I didn't know anyone else was near, Dr Gloge. I'm finished now!'

  She picked up the briefcase she had set against the wall when
she stopped for a drink and went on along the bright lit corridor. She was a tall, lean-bodied girl — perhaps a little too tall, but, with her serious face and smooth brown hair, not unattractive. At the moment, her cheeks burned. She knew she walked with wooden, self-conscious stiffness, wondering if Dr Gloge was peering after her, puzzled by her odd behavior at the water cooler.

  'But something did touch me,' she thought.

  At the turn of the corridor, she glanced back. Dr Gloge had had his drink and was walking off unhurriedly in the opposite direction. Nobody else was in sight.

  After she'd turned the corner, Barbara reached up with her left hand and rubbed the area of her upper arm where she had felt that tiny, momentary needle of ice. Had Dr Gloge been responsible for — well, for whatever it had been? She frowned and shook her head. She'd worked in Gloge's office for two weeks immediately after she'd been employed here. And Dr Henry Gloge, head of the biology section at Research Alpha, while invariably polite, even courteous, was a cold, quiet, withdrawn character, completely devoted to his work.

  He was not at all the kind of man who would consider it humorous to play a prank on a stenographer.

  * *

  And it hadn't, in fact, been a prank.

  From Dr Henry Gloge's point of view, the encounter with Barbara Ellington in the fifth-floor hallway that afternoon had been a very fortunate accident. A few weeks earlier he had selected her to be one of two unwitting subjects for Point Omega Stimulation.

  His careful plans had included a visit to her bedroom apartment when she was not there. He had installed equipment that might be of value later in his experiment. And it was not until these preliminaries were accomplished that he had headed for the steno pool, only to find that Barbara had been transferred out of the department.

  Gloge dared not risk inquiring about her. For if the experiment had undesirable results, no one must suspect a connection between a lowly typist and himself. And even if it ware successful, secrecy might continue to be necessary.

  Gloge chafed at the delay. When on the fourth day of his search for her he suddenly recognized her walking along a hallway fifty feet ahead of him, it seemed as if fate was on his side after all.

  As the girl paused at a water cooler, he came up behind her. Quickly he made sure that no one else was in view. Then he drew the needle jet gun and aimed it at her shoulder muscles. The gun carried a gaseous compound of the Omega serum, and the only sign of a discharge, when he fired it, was a thin line of mist from the needle end to her skin.

  His task then accomplished, Gloge hastily slipped the instrument into the holster inside his coat and buttoned his coat.

  * *

  Barbara, still carrying her briefcase, presently came to the offices of John Hammond, special assistant to the president of Research Alpha, which lay on the fifth floor of what was generally considered the most important laboratory complex on Earth. Alex Sloan, the president, was on the floor above.

  Barbara paused before the massive black door with Hammond's name on it. She gazed possessively at the words

  Scientific Liaison and Investigation lettered on the Panel. Then she took a small key from her briefcase, slipped it into the door lock, and pressed to the right.

  The door swung silently back. Barbara stepped through into the outer office, heard the faint click as the door closed behind her.

  There was no one in sight. The desk of Helen Wendell, Hammond's secretary, stood across the room with a number of papers on it. The door to the short hall which led to Hammond's private office was open. From it Barbara heard Helen's voice speaking quietly.

  Barbara Ellington had been assigned to Hammond — actually, to Helen Wendell — only ten days before. Aside from the salary increase, part of her interest in the position had been the intriguing if somewhat alarming figure of John Hammond himself, and an expectation that she would find herself in the center of the behind-the-scene operations of Scientific Liaison and Investigation. In that, she had so far been disappointed.

  Barbara walked over to Helen Wendell's desk, took some papers from her briefcase, and was putting them into a basket when her eye caught the name of Dr Henry Gloge on a note in the adjoining basket. Entirely on impulse — because she had seen the man only minutes before — she bent over the paper.

  The note was attached to a report. It was a reminder to Hammond that he was to see Dr Gloge today at three-thirty in connection with Gloge's Omega project. Barbara glanced automatically at her watch; it was now five minutes to three.

  Unlike most of the material she handled, this item was at least partly understandable. It referred to a biological project. Point Omega Stimulation. Barbara couldn't remember having heard of such a project while she was working under Dr Gloge. But that was hardly surprising — the biological section was one of the largest in Research Alpha. From what she was reading, the project had to do with 'the acceleration of evolutionary processes' in several species of animals, and the only real information in the report seemed to be that a number of test animals had died and been disposed of.

  Was the great John Hammond spending his time on this sort of thing?

  Disappointed, Barbara put the report back into the basket and went on to her own office.

  As she sat down at her desk, Barbara noticed a stack of papers which hadn't been there when she had left on her errand. Attached to them was a note in Helen's large, clear handwriting. The note said:

  —:—

  Barbara,

  This came in unexpectedly and must be typed today. It obviously will require several hours of overtime. If you have made special arrangements for the evening, let me know and I'll have a typist sent up from the pool to do this extra work.

  —:—

  Barbara felt an instant ping of possessive jealousy. This was her job, her office; She definitely did not want some other girl coming in.

  Unfortunately, she did have a date. But to keep an intruder from taking her place in John Hammond's office, even if only for a few hours, was the more important matter. That was her instant decision, needing no second thought But she sat still a moment, biting her lip; for that moment she was a woman considering how to put off a male who had a quick temper and no patience. Then she picked up the telephone and dialed a number.

  For some months now, Barbara had settled her hopes for the future on Vince Strather, a technician in the photo lab. When his voice came on the telephone, she told him what had happened, finished contritely, 'I'm afraid I can't get out of it very well, Vince, so soon after starting here.'

  She could almost feel Vince absorbing the impact of the denial she was communicating; she had discovered quickly in their brief romance that he was trying to move her toward premarital intimacy, a step she was wholly determined not to take.

  She was relieved now, when he accepted her explanation. She replaced the receiver, feeling very warm toward him, 'I really do love him!' she thought.

  It was a few moments later that she suddenly felt dizzy.. The feeling was peculiar, not like her usual headaches. She could feel it build up, a giddy, light swirling which seemed both within and without her, as if she were weightless, about to drift out of the chair, turning slowly over and over.

  Almost simultaneously, she became aware of a curious exhilaration, a sense of strength and well-being, quite unlike anything she could remember. The sensations continued for perhaps twenty seconds; then they faded and were gone, almost as abruptly as they had come.

  Confused and somewhat shaken, Barbara straightened up in her chair. For a moment she considered taking aspirin. But there seemed no reason for that. She didn't feel ill. It even seemed to her that she felt more awake and alert.

  She was about to return to her typing when she became aware of a movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked up and saw that John Hammond had paused in the doorway of her little office.

  Barbara froze, as she always did in his presence; then slowly she turned to face him.

  Hammond stood there, staring at her t
houghtfully. He was a man about six feet tall, with dark brown hair and. steel-gray eyes. He seemed to be about forty years old, and he was built like an athlete. Yet it was not his appearance of physical strength but the fine intelligence of his face and eyes that had always impressed her during the ten days since she had been assigned to his office. She thought now, not for the first time: This is what really great people are like.

  'Are you all right, Barbara?' Hammond asked. 'For a moment, I thought you were going to fall out of your chair.'

  It was highly disturbing to Barbara to realize that her dizzy spell had been observed. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Hammond,' she murmured shyly. 'I must have been daydreaming.'

  He gazed at her a moment longer, then nodded, turned, and walked off.

  II

  On leaving Barbara, Gloge went down several floors and stationed himself behind a pile of shipping crates. These were in a passage across from the locked door of the main photo-lab storeroom. On the dot of 3.15, a door farther along the passage opened. A lanky, scowling, redheaded young man wearing a stained white smock over his street clothes, pushing a loaded handtruck ahead of him, appeared and turned down the passage toward Gloge and the laboratory storeroom.

  It was the end of the lab shift. Gloge had discovered that one of the regular duties of Vincent Strather, Barbara Ellington's boyfriend, was to return certain materials to the store room at this hour.

  Peering through the slats of a crate, Dr Gloge watched Strather's approach. He was, he realized, much more tense and nervous now than he had been when he had given Barbara the injection. Of himself, Vincent Strather was not the kind of subject Dr Gloge would have chosen — the young man was too angry, too bitter. But the fact that he was Barbara's friend and that they spent their spare time together should be useful in the further steps of the experiment — so it seemed to Dr Gloge.