More Than Human

He was eight when he built his first radio, a crystal set for which he even wound the coils. He suspended it from the bedsprings so it could not be seen except by lifting the bed itself, and buried an earphone inside the mattress so he could lie awake at night and hear it. His father the doctor discovered it and forbade his ever touching so much as a piece of wire in the house again. He was nine when his father the doctor located his cache of radio and electronics texts and magazines and piled them all up in front of the fireplace and made him burn them, one by one; they were up all night. He was twelve when he won a Science Search engineering scholarship for his secretly designed tubeless oscilloscope, and his father the doctor dictated his letter of refusal. He was a brilliant fifteen when he was expelled from pre-medical school for playfully cross-wiring the relays in the staff elevators and adding some sequence switches, so that every touch of a control button was an unappreciated adventure. At sixteen, happily disowned, he was making his own living in a research laboratory and attending engineering school.

He was big and bright and very popular. He needed to be very popular, and this, like all his other needs, he accomplished with ease. He played the piano with a surprisingly delicate touch and played swift and subtle chess. He learned to lose skilfully and never too often at chess and at tennis and once at the harassing game of being ‘first in the Glass, first in the School’. He always had time-time to talk and to read, time to wonder quietly, time to listen to those who valued his listening, time to rephrase pedantries for those who found them arduous in the original. He even had time for ROTC and it was through this that he got his commission.

He found the Air Force a rather different institution from any school he had ever attended, and it took him a while to learn that the Colonel could not be softened by humility or won by a witticism like the Dean of Men. It took him even longer to learn that in Service it is the majority, not the minority, who tend to regard physical perfection, conversational brilliance, and easy achievement as defects rather than assets. He found himself alone more than he liked and avoided more than he could bear.

It was on the anti-aircraft range that he found an answer, a dream, and a disaster…

Alicia Kew stood in the deepest shade by the edge of the meadow. ‘Father, Father, forgive me!’ she cried. She sank down on the grass, blind with grief and terror, torn, shaken with conflict.

‘Forgive me,’ she whispered with passion. ‘Forgive me,’ she whispered with scorn.

She thought, Devil, why won’t you be dead? Five years ago you killed yourself, you killed my sister, and still it’s ‘Father, forgive me.’ Sadist, pervert, murderer, devil… man, dirty poisonous man!

I’ve come a long way, she thought, I’ve come no way at all. How I ran from Jacobs, gentle Lawyer Jacobs, when he came to help with the bodies; oh, how I ran, to keep from being alone with him, so that he might not go mad and poison me. And when he brought his wife, how I fled from her too, thinking women were evil and must not touch me. They had a time with me, indeed they did; it was so long before I could understand that I was mad, not they… it was so long before I knew how very good, how very patient, Mother Jacobs was with me; how much she had to do with me, for me. ‘But child, no one’s worn clothes like those for forty years!’ And in the cab, when I screamed and couldn’t stop, for the people, the hurry, the bodies, so many bodies, all touching and so achingly visible; bodies on the streets, the stairs, great pictures of bodies in the magazines, men holding women who laughed and were brazenly unfrightened… Dr Rothstein who explained and explained and went back and explained again; there is no poison sweat, and there must be men and women else there would be no people at all… I had to learn this, Father, dear devil Father, because of you; because of you I had never seen an automobile or a breast or a newspaper or a railroad train or a sanitary napkin or a kiss or a restaurant or an elevator or a bathing suit or the hair on – oh forgive me, Father.

I’m not afraid of a whip, I’m afraid of hands and eyes, thank you Father. One day, one day, you’ll see, Father, I shall live with people all around me, I shall ride on their trains and drive my own motor car; I shall go among thousands on a beach at the edge of a sea which goes out and out without walls, I shall step in and out among them with a tiny strip of cloth here and here and let them see my navel, I shall meet a man with white teeth, Father, and round strong arms, Father, and I shall oh what will become of me, what have I become now, Father forgive me.