The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum Part 6

"I had just left Grand Mercy Hospital," she said, "where I had been ill for some months. I had crossed the park when suddenly a woman in black rushed at me, thrust an empty wallet into my hands, and vanished. A moment later I was surrounded by a screaming crowd, and-well, that's all."

"An empty wallet, you say?" asked the defense lawyer. "What of the money found in your own bag, which my eminent colleague believes stolen?"

"It was mine," said the girl, "about seven hundred dollars." Bach hissed, "That's a lie! She had two dollars and thirty-three cents on her when we took her in."

"Do you mean you think she's the same Kyra Zeiss we had at the hospital?" gasped Scott.

"I don't know. I don'

t know anything, but if I ever touch that d.a.m.ned serum of yours--Look! Look, Dan!" This last was a tense whisper.

"What?"

"Her hair! When the sun strikes it!"

Scott peered more closely. A vagrant ray of noon sunlight filtered through a high window, and now and again the sway-ing of a shade permitted it to touch the metallic radiance of the girl's hair. Scott stared and saw; slightly but unmistakably, whenever the light touched that glowing aureole, her hair darkened from bright aluminum to golden blond!

Something clicked in his brain. There was a clue somewhere -if he could but find it. The pieces of the puzzle were there, but they were woefully hard to fit together. The girl in the hospital and her reaction to incisions; this girl and her reaction to light.

"I've got to see her," he whispered. "There's something I have to find Listen!"

The speaker was orating. "And we ask the dismissal of the whole case, your honor, on the grounds that the prosecution has utterly failed even to identify-the defendant."

The judge's gavel crashed. For a moment his aging eyes rested on the girl with the silver eyes and incredible hair, then: ".

Case dismissedt"'

he snapped.

Jury discharged!"

There was a tumult of voices. Flashlights shot instantan-eous sheets of lightning. The girl on the witness stand rose with perfect poise, smiled with lovely, innocent lips, and moved away. Scott *sited until she pa.s.sed close at hand.

"Miss Zelas!" he called.

She paused. Her strange silver eyes lighted with nnnnis-takable recognition. "Dr. Scott!" said the voice of tinkling metal. "And Dr. Bach!"

She was, then. She was the same girl. This was the drab sloven of the isolation ward, this weirdly beautiful creature of exotic coloring. Staring, Scott could trace now the very ident.i.ty of her features, but changed as by a miracle.

He pushed through the mob of photographers, press men, and curiosity seekers. "Have you a place to stay?" he asked. "Dr. Bach's offer still stands." i She smiled. "I am very grateful," she murmured, and then, to the crowd of reporters: "The doctor is an old friend of mine." She was completely at ease, unruffled, poised.

Something caught Scott's eye, and he purchased a paper, glancing quickly at the photograph, the one taken at the mo-ment the girl had removed her hat. He started; her hair showed raven black! There was a comment below the picture, too, to the effect that "her striking hair photographs much darker than it appears to the eye."

He frowned. "This way," he said to he girl, then goggled in surprise again. For in the broad light of noon her com-plexion was no longer the white of alabaster, it was creamy tan, the skin of one exposed to long hours of sunlight; her eyes were deep violet, and her hair-that tiny wisp uncon-cealed by her hat-was as black as the basalt columns of h.e.l.l!

Kyra had insisted on stopping to purchase a subst.i.tute for the worn black suit, and had ended by acquiring an entire outfit. She sat now curled in the deep davenport before the fireplace in Dr. Bach'slibrary, sheathed in silken black from her white throat to the tiny black pumps on her feet. She was almost unearthly in her weird beauty, with her aluminum hair, silver eyes, and marble-pale skin against the jet silk covering.

She gazed innocently at Scott. "But why shouldn't I?" site asked. "The court returned my money; I can buy what I please with it."

"Your money?" he muttered. "You had less than three dollars when you left the hospitaL"

"But this is mine now."

"Kyra," he said abruptly, "where did you get that money'?" Her face was saintlike in its purity. "From the old man." "You-you did murder him!"

"Why, of course I did."

He choked. "My Lord!" he gasped. "Don't you realize we'll have to tell?"

She shook her head, smiling gently from one to the other of them. "No, Dan. You won't tell, for it wouldn't do any good. I can't be tried twice for the same crime. Not in America."

"But why, Kyra? Why did you-"

"Would you have me resume the life that sent me into your hands? I needed money; money was there; I took it." "But murder!""It was the most direct way."

"Not if you happened to be punished for it," he returned grimly.

"But I wasn't," she reminded him gently.

He groaned. "Kyra," he said, shifting the subject suddenly, "why do your eyes and skin and hair darken in sunlight or when exposed to flashlight?"

She smiled. "Do they?" she asked. "I hadn't noticed." She yawned, stretched her arms above her head and her slim legs before her. "I think I shall sleep now," she announced. She swept her magnificent eyes over them, rose, and disappeared into the room Dr. Bach had given her-his own.

Scott faced the older man, his features working in emotion. "Do you see?" he hissed. "Good Lord, do you see?" "Do you, Dan?"

"Part of it. Part of it, anyway.

"And I see part as well."

"Well," said Scott, "here it is as I see it. That serum-that accursed serum of mine-has somehow accentuated this girl's adaptability to an impossible degree. What is it that differ-entiates life from non-living matter? Two things, irritation and adaptation. Life adapts itself to its environment, and the greater the adaptability, the more successful the organism.

"Now," he proceeded, "all human beings show a very con-siderable adaptivity. When We expose ourselves to sunlight, our skin shows pigmentation-we tan. That's adaptation to an environment containing sunlight. When a man loses his right hand, he learps to use his left. That's another adaptation. When a person's skin is punctured, it heals and rebuilds, and that's another angle of the same thing. Sunny regions produce dark-skinned, dark-haired people; northern lands pro-duce blonds-and that's adaptation again.

"So what's happened to Kyra Zelas, by some mad twist I don't understand, is that her adaptive powers have been in-creased to an extreme. She adapts instantly to her environ-ment; when sun strikes her, she tans at once, and in shade she fades immediately. In sunlight her hair and eyes are those of a tropical race; in shadow, those of a Northerner. And-good Lord, I see it now-when she was faced with danger there in the courtroom, faced by a jury and judge who were men, she adapted to that! She met that danger, not only by changed appearance, but by a beauty so great that she couldn't have been convicted!" He paused.

"But how? How?"

"Perhaps medicine can tell how," said Bach, ".

Undoubtedly mania the creature of his glands. The differences between races -white, red, black, yellow, is doubtless glandular. And per- haps the most effective agent of adaptation is the human brain and neural system, which in itself is controlled partly by a little greasy ma.s.s on the floor of the brain's third ventricle, before the cerebellum, and supposed by the ancients to he the seat of the soul, "I mean, of course, the pineal gland. I suspect that what your serum contains is the long-soughthormone pinealin, and that it has caused hypertrophy of Kyra's pineal gland. And Dan, do you realize that if her adaptability is perfect, she's not only invincible, but invulnerable?"

"That's true!" gulped Scott. "Why, she couldn't be electro-cuted, because she'd adapt instantly to an environment con- taining an electric current, and she couldn't be killed by a shot, because she'd adapt to that as quickly as to your needle p.r.i.c.ks. And poison but there must be a limit some-where!"

"There doubtless is," observed Bach. "I hardly believe she could adapt herself to an environment containing a fifty-ton locomotive pa.s.sing over her body. And yet there's an impor-tant point we haven't considered. Adaptation itself is of two kinds."

"Two kinds?"

"Yes. One kind is biological; the other, human. Naturally a bipchemist like you would deal only with the first, and equally naturally a brain surgeon like me has to consider the second as well. Biological adaptation is what all life plant, animal, and human-possess, and it is merely conform-ing to one's environment. A chameleon, for instance, shows much the same ability as Kyra herself, and so, in lesser degree, does the arctic fox, white in winter, brown in summer; or the snowshoe rabbit, for that matter, or the weasel. All life conforms to its environment to a greatextent, because if it doesn't, it dies. But human life does more."

"More?"

"Much more. Human adaptation is not only conformity to environment, but also the actual ,changing of environment to fit human needs! The first cave man who left his cave to builda gra.s.s hut changed his environment, and so, in exactly the same sense, did Steinmetz, Edison, and as far as that goes, Julius Caesar and Napoleon. In fact, Dan, all human invention, genius, and military leadership boils down to that one fact -changing the environment instead of conforming to it."

He paused, then continued, "Now we know that Kyra possesses the biological adaptivity. Her hair and eyes prove that. But what if she possesses the other to the same degree? If she does, G.o.d knows what the result will be. We can only watch to see what direction she takes-watch and hope."

"But I don't see," muttered Scott, "how that could be gland-ular."

"Anything can be glandular. In a mutant-and Kyra's as much a mutant as your white-eyed fruit flies-anything is possible." He frowned reflectively. "If I dared phrase a philo-sophical interpretation, I'd say that Kyra-perhaps-repre-sents a stage in human evolution. A mutation. If one ventured to believe that, then de Vries and Weissman are justified."

"The mutation theory of evolution, you mean?"

"Exactly. You see, Dan, while it is very obvious from fossil remains that evolution occurred, yet it is very easy to prove it couldn't possi bly have occutred!"

"How?"

"Well, it couldn't have occurred slowly, as Darwin believed, for many reasons. Take the eye, for instance. He thought that very gradually, over thousands of generations, some sea creature developed a s'p6t '.

err its skin that was sensitive to light, and that this gave it an advantage over its blind fel-lows.

Therefore its kind survived and others perished. But see here. If this eye developed slowly, why did the very first ones, the ones that couldn't yet see, have any better chance than the others? And take a wing.

What good is a wing until you can fly with it? Just because a jumping lizard had a tiny fold of skin between foreleg and breast wouldn't mean that that lizard could survive where others died. What kept the wing developing to a point where it could actually have value?"

"What did?"

'De Vries and Weissman say nothing did. They answer that evolution must have progressed in jumps, so that when the eye appeared, it was already efficient enough to have survival value, and likewise the wing. Those jumps they named mutations. And in that sense, Dan, Kyra's a mutation, a jump from the human to-something else. Perhaps the superhuman."

Scott shook his head in perplexity. He was thoroughly puzzled, completely baffled, and more than a little unnerved. In a few moments more he bade Bach good night, wandered home, and lay for hours in sleepless thought.

The next day Bach managed a leave of absence for both of them from Grand Mercy, and Scottmoved in. This was in part simply out of Isis fascinated interest in the case of Kyra Zelas, but in part it was altruistic. She had confessedly mur-dered one man; it occurred to Scott that she might with no more compunction murder Dr. Bach, and he meant to be at hand to prevent it.

He had been in her company no more than a few hours before Bach's words on evolution and mutations, took on new meaning. It was not only Kyra's chameleonlike coloring, nor her strangely pure and saintlike features, nor even her incredible beauty. There was something more; he could not at once identify it, but decidedly the girl Kyra was not quite human.

The event that impressed this on him occurred in the late afternoon. Bach was away somewhere on personal business, and Scott had been questioning the girl about her own im-pressions of her experience.

"But don't you know you'

ve changed?' he asked. "Can't you see the difference in yourself?"

"NotI. It is the world that has changed."

"But your hair was black. Now it's light as ashes." "Was it?" she asked. "Is it?"

He groaned in exasperation. "Kyra," he said, "you must know something about yourself."

Her exquisite eyes turned their silver on him. "I do," she said. "I know that what I want is mine, and"

:her pure lips tsmiled "I think, I want you, Dan."

It seemed to him that she changed at that moment Her beauty was not quite as it had been, but somehow more wildly intoxicating than before. He realized what it meant; her en-vironment now contained a man she loved, or thought she loved, and she was adapting to that, too. She was becoming -he shivered slightly-irresistible!

Bach must have realized the situation, but he said nothing. As for Scott, it was sheer torture, for he realized only toowell that the girl be loved was a freak, a biological sport, and worse than that, a cold murderess and a creature not exactly human. Yet for the next several days things went smoothly. Kyra slipped- easily into the routine; she was ever a willing subject for their inquiries and investigations.

Then Scott had an idea. Ho produced one of the guinea pigs that he had injected, and they found that the creature evinced the same reaction as Kyra to cuts. They killed the thing by literally cutting it in half with an ax, and Bach examined its brain.

"Right!" he said at last. "It's hypertrophy of the pineal." He stared intently at Scott. "Suppose," he said, "that we could reach Kyra's pineal and correct the hypertrophy. Do you suppose that might return her to normal?"

Scott suppressed a pang of fear. "But why? She can't do any harm as long as we guard her here. Why do we have to gamble with her life like that?"

Bach laughed shortly. "For the first time in my life. I'm glad I'm an old man," he said. "Don't you see we have to do some-thing? She's a menace. She'

s dangerous. Heaven only knows how dangerous. We'll have to try."

Scott groaned and a.s.sented. An hour later, under the pre-text of experiment, he watched the old man inject five grains of morphia into the girl's arm, watched her frown and blink -and adjust. The drug was powerless.

It was at night that Bach got his next idea. "Ethyl chloride!" he whispered. "The instantaneous anaesthetic. Perhaps she can't adjust to lack of oxygen. We'll try."

Kyra was asleep, Silently, carefully, the two crept in, and Scott stared down 'in utter fascination at the weird beauty of her features, paler than ever in the faint light of midnight. Carefully, so carefully, Bach held the cone above her sleeping face, drop by drop he poured the volatile, sweet-scented liquid into it.

Minutes pa.s.sed.

"That should anaesthetize an elephant," he whispered at last, and jammed the cone full upon her face.

She awoke. Fingers like slim steel rods closed on his wrist, forcing his hand away. Scott seized the cone, and her hand clutched his wrist as well, and he felt the strength of her grasp.

"Stupid," she said quietly, sitting erect. "This is quite use-less-look!"

She s.n.a.t.c.hed a paper knife from the table beside the bed. She bared her pale throat to the moonlight, and then, suddenly, drove the knife to its hilt into her bosom!

Scott gulped inhorror as she withdrew it A single spot of blood showed on her flesh, she wiped it away, and displayed her skin, pale, unscarred, beautiful."Go away," she said softly, and they departed.

The next day she'

made no reference to the incident. Scott and Bach spent awbrried morning in the laboratory, doing no work, but simply talking. It was a mistake, for when they returned to the library, she was gone, having, according to Mat Getz, simply strolled out of the door and away. A hectic and hasty search of the adjacent blocks brought no sign of her.

At 'dusk she was back, pausing hatless in the doorway to permit Scott, who was there alone, to watch the miraculous change as she pa.s.sed from sunset to chamber, and her hair faded from mahogany to aluminum.

"h.e.l.lo," she said smiling. "I killed a child."

"What? My Lord, Kyra!"

"It was an accident. Surely you don't feel that I should be punished for an accident, Dan, do you?"

He was staring in utter horror. "How-'