Anything You Can Do! by Randall Garrett (smart books to read .txt) 📗

during Stanton's recitation, dropped the remains of the cigar into an ash receptacle. "Accurate but incomplete," he said quietly. "You must have made some guesses." He looked from Bart Stanton to Dr. Farnsworth. "I'd like to hear them."

Farnsworth finished off the last of his coffee. "We've talked about it," he admitted. "Although I must say the hypothesis Bart has come up with would never have occurred to me. I'm still not sure I credit it, but" ... he shrugged ... "I can't say that I disbelieve it, either."

Mannheim turned his eyes back to Stanton. His silence was a question.

"Logically, my theory mightn't hold much water," Stanton admitted. "But the evidence seems to be conclusive enough to me." He got up, went over to the coffee urn, and refilled his cup. "It seems incredible to me that the combined intelligence and organizational ability of the UN Government is incapable of finding anything out about one single alien, no matter how competent he may be," he said as he returned to his seat.

"Somehow, somewhere, someone must have gotten a line on the Nipe. He must have a base for his operations, and someone should have found it by this time.

"If there is such a base, then it must be possible to blast him out of it without resorting to the kind of work it took to produce—me.

"I may be faster and more sensitive and stronger than the average man, but that doesn't mean that I have superhuman abilities to the extent that I can do in two or three years what the combined forces of the Government couldn't do in ten. Certainly you wouldn't rely too heavily on it.

"And yet, apparently, you are.

"To me that can only mean that you've got another ace up your sleeve. You know we're going to get the Nipe before I die. You either have a sure way of tracing him or else you already know where he is.

"Which is it?"

Colonel Mannheim sighed. "We know where he is. We've known for six years."

IV INTERLUDE

The woman's eyes were filled with tears, for which the doctor was privately thankful. At least the original shock had worn off.

"And there's nothing we can do? Nothing?" There was a slight catch in her voice.

"I'm afraid not. Not yet. There are research teams working on the problem, and one day ... perhaps...." Then he shook his head. "But not yet." He paused. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Stanton."

The woman sat there on the comfortable chair and looked at the specialist's diploma that hung on the doctor's wall—and yet, she didn't really see the diploma at all. She was seeing something else—a kind of dream that had been shattered.

After a moment, she began to speak, her voice low and gentle, as though the dream were still going on and she were half afraid she might waken herself if she spoke too loudly.

"Jim and I were so glad they were twins. Identical twin boys. He said—I remember, he said, 'We ought to call 'em Ike and Mike.' And he laughed a little when he said it, to show he didn't mean it.

"I remember, I was propped up in the bed, the afternoon they were born, and Jim had brought me a new bed jacket, and I said I didn't need a new one because I would be going home the next day, and he said: 'Hell, kid, you don't think I'd just buy a bed jacket just for hospital use, do you? This is for breakfasts in bed, too.'

"And that's when he said he'd seen the boys and said we ought to name them Ike and Mike."

The tears were coming down Mrs. Stanton's cheeks heavily now, and grief made her look older than her twenty-four years, but the doctor said nothing, letting her spill out her emotions in words.

"We'd talked about it before, you know—as soon as the obstetrician found out that I was going to have twins. And Jim ... Jim said that we shouldn't name them alike unless they were identical twins or mirror twins. If they were fraternal twins, we'd just name them as if they'd been ordinary brothers or sisters or whatever. You know?" She looked at the doctor, pleading for understanding.

"I know," he said.

"And Jim was always kidding. If they were girls, he said we ought to call them Flora and Dora, or Annie and Fanny, or maybe Susie and Floozie. He was always kidding about it. You know?"

"I know," said the doctor.

"And then, when they were identical boys, he was very sensible about it. 'We'll call them Martin and Bartholomew,' he said. 'Then if they want to call themselves Mart and Bart, they can, but they won't be stuck with rhyming names if they don't want them.' Jim was very thoughtful that way, Doctor. Very thoughtful."

She suddenly seemed to realize that she was crying, and took a handkerchief out of her sleeve to dab at her eyes and face.

"I'll have to quit crying," she said, trying to sound brave and strong. "After all, it could have been worse, couldn't it? I mean, the radiation could have killed my boys, too. Jim's dead, yes, and I've got to get used to that. But I still have two boys to take care of, and they'll need me."

"Yes, Mrs. Stanton, they will," said the doctor. "They'll both need you. And you'll have to be very gentle and very careful with both of them."

"How ... how do you mean that?" she asked.

The doctor settled back in his chair and chose his words carefully. "Identical twins tend to identify with each other, Mrs. Stanton. There is a great deal of empathy between people who are not only of the same age, but genetically identical. If they were both healthy, there would be very little trouble in their education at home or at school. Any of the standard texts on psychodynamics in education will show you the pitfalls to avoid when dealing with identical siblings.

"But these boys are no longer identical. One is normal, healthy, and lively. The other is ... well, as you have seen, he is slow, sluggish, and badly co-ordinated. That condition may improve with time, but, until we know more about such damage than we do now, he will be an invalid."

"That's the trouble with radiation damage, Mrs. Stanton. Even when we can save the victim's life, we cannot always save his health.

"You can see, I think, what sort of psychic disturbances this can bring about in such a pair. The ill boy tends to identify with the well one and, unfortunately, the reverse is true. If they are not properly handled during their formative years, Mrs. Stanton, both can be badly damaged emotionally."

"I ... I think I understand," the woman said. "But what sort of thing should I look out for?"

"I suggest that you get a good man in psychic development," the doctor said. "I'd hesitate to prescribe. It's out of my field. But, in general, most of your trouble will be caused by a tendency for the pair to swing into one of two extremes.

"Mutual antagonism can arise if one becomes jealous of the other's health, while the healthy one becomes jealous of the extra consideration shown his crippled brother.

"Or, on the other hand, the healthy boy may identify so closely with his brother that he feels every hurt or slight, real or imagined. He becomes over-solicitous, over-protective. At the same time, the other brother may come to depend completely on the healthy twin.

"In both these situations, there is a positive feedback which constantly worsens the situation. It requires a great deal of careful observation and careful application of the proper educational stimuli to keep the situation from developing toward either extreme. You'll need expert help, if you want both boys to display the full abilities of which they are potentially capable."

"I see. Could you give me the name of a good man, Doctor?"

The doctor nodded and picked up a book on his desk. "I'll give you several names. You can pick the one you like. They're all good men. There are many good women in the field, too, but in this case, I think a man would be best. Of course, if one of them thinks a woman is indicated, that's up to him. As I said, that isn't my field."

He opened the small book and riffled through it to find the names he wanted.

V

The image of the Nipe on the glowing screen was clear and finely detailed. It was, Bart thought, as though one were looking through a window into the Nipe's nest itself. Only the tremendous depth of focus of the lens which caught the picture gave the illusion a sense of unreality. Everything—background and foreground alike—was sharply in focus.

The Nipe moved in slow motion, giving the watchers the eerie feeling that he was moving through a thicker, heavier medium than air, in a place where the gravity was much less than that of Earth.

"Speed the tape up to normal," said Colonel Mannheim to the man who was operating the machine. "If there's anything Mr. Stanton wants to look at more closely, we can run it through again."

As if in obedience to the colonel's command, the Nipe seemed to shake himself a little and go about his business more briskly, and the air and gravity seemed to revert to those of Earth.

"What's he doing?" Stanton asked. The Nipe was doing something with an odd-looking box that sat on the floor in front of him.

"He's got a screwdriver that he's modified to give it a head with an L-shaped cross-section, and he's wiggling it around inside that hole in the box. But what he's doing is a secret between God and the Nipe at this point," the colonel said glumly.

Stanton glanced away from the screen for a moment to look at the other men who were there. Some of them were watching the screen, but most of them seemed to be watching Stanton, although they looked away as soon as they saw his eyes on them.

Trying to see what kind of a bloke this touted superman is, Stanton thought. Well, I can't say I blame 'em.

He brought his attention back to the screen.

So this was the Nipe's hideaway. He wondered if it were furnished in the fashion that a Nipe's living quarters would be furnished on whatever planet the multilegged horror called home. Probably it had the same similarity as Robinson Crusoe's island home had to a middle-class Nineteenth Century English home.

There was no furniture at all, as such. Low-slung as he was, the Nipe needed no tables for his work, and sleeping was a form of metabolic rest that he evidently found unnecessary, although he would sometimes just remain quiet for periods of time ranging from a few minutes to a couple of hours.

"We had a hard time getting the first cameras in there," the colonel was saying. "That's why we missed some of the early stages of his work. There! Look at that!"

"That attachment he's making?"

"That's right. Now, it looks as though it's a meter of some kind, but we don't know whether it's a test instrument or an integral part of the machine he's making. The whole thing might be a test instrument. After all, he had to start out from the very beginning—making the tools to make the tools to make the tools, you know."

"It's not quite as bad as all that," said one of the other men, who had been briefly introduced to Stanton as Fred Meyer. "After all, he had our technology to draw upon. If he'd been wrecked on Earth two or three centuries ago, he wouldn't have been able to do a thing."

"Granted," the colonel said agreeably, "but it's quite obvious that there are parts of our technology that are just as alien to him as parts of his are to us. Remember how he went to all the trouble of building a pentode vacuum tube for a job that could have been done by transistors. His knowledge of solid-state physics seems to be about a century and a half behind ours."

"Not completely, Colonel," Meyer said. "That gimmick he built last year—the one that blinded those people in Bagdad—had five perfect emeralds in it, connected in series with silver wire."

"That's true. Our technologies seem to overlap in some areas, but in others there's total alienness."

"Which one would you say was ahead of the other?" Stanton asked.

"Hard to say," said Colonel Mannheim, "but I'd put my money on his technology as encompassing more than ours—at least insofar as the physical sciences are concerned."

"I agree," said Meyer, "he's got things in that little nest of his that—" He stopped and shook his head slowly, as though he couldn't find words.

"I'll say this," Bart Stanton said musingly, "our friend,