“Mad,” she said.
“Unorthodox,” Vergil corrected.
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Vergil. What kind of cells are these? Just parts of your blood you’ve been working on?”
“They can think, Mother.”
Again, unshockable, she didn’t react in any way he could perceive. “Together—I mean, all of them, or each one?”
“Each one. Though they tended to group together in the last experiments.”
“Are they friendly?”
Vergil looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. “They’re lymphocytes, Mother. They don’t even live in the same world we do. They can’t be friendly or unfriendly in the way we mean the words. Everything’s chemicals for them.”
“If they can think, then they feel something, at least if my life experience is any good. Unless they’re like Frank. Of course, he didn’t think much, so the comparison is not exact.”
“I never had time to find out what they’re like, or whether they can reason as much as… as their potential.”
“What is their potential?”
“Are you sure you’re understanding this?”
“Do I sound like I’m understanding?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m doubtful. I don’t know what their potential is. It’s very large, though.”
“Verge, there’s always been method to your madness. What did you hope to gain by doing this?”
That stopped him. He despaired of ever communicating on that level—the level of achievement and goals—with his mother. She had never understood his need to accomplish. For her, goals were met by not ruffling the neighbors’ feathers too often. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Forget it.”
“It’s forgotten. Where shall we eat dinner tonight?”
“Let’s eat Moroccan,” Vergil said.
“Belly dancers it is.”
Of all the things he didn’t understand about April, the real topper was his childhood bedroom. Toys, bed and furniture, posters on the wall, his room had been preserved not as he had left it, but as it had been when he was twelve years old.
The books he had read had been pulled out of boxes in the attic and lined up on the shelves of the single bookcase that had once sufficed to hold his library. Paperback and bookclub science fiction vied with comics and a small, important cluster of science and electronics books.
Movie posters—no doubt very valuable now—showed Robbie the Robot clutching a much amplified Anne Frances and stalking across a jagged planetscape, Christopher. Lee snag-snarling with red eyes, Keir Dullea staring in wonder from his spacesuit helmet.
He had taken those posters down at age nineteen, folded them and stashed them in a drawer. April had put them back up after he left for college.
She had even resurrected his checked hunters-and-hounds bedspread. The bed itself was worn and familiar, seducing him back to a childhood he wasn’t sure he had ever had, much less left behind.
He remembered his pre-adolescence as a time of considerable fear and worry. Fear that he was some kind of sex maniac, that he had been responsible for his father’s exit, worry about measuring up in school. And along with the worry, exaltation. The light-headed and peculiar joy he had felt on half-twisting a strip of paper, pasting the ends together and manufacturing his first moebius strip; his ant farm and Heathkits; his discovery of ten years’ worth of Scientific Americans in a trash can in the alley behind the house.
In the dark, just as he was on the edge of sleep, his back began to crawl. He scratched abstractedly, then sat up in bed with a whispered curse and curled the hem of his pajama top into a tight roll, drawing it up and down, back and forth with both hands to ease the itch.
He reached up to his face. It felt totally unfamiliar, somebody else’s face—bumps and ridges, nose extended, lips protruding. But with his other hand, it felt normal. He rubbed the fingers of both hands together. The sensations weren’t right. One hand was far more sensitive than usual, the other almost numb.
Breathing heavily, Vergil stumbled into the upstairs bathroom and switched on a light. His chest itched abominably.
The spaces between his toes seemed alive with invisible ants. He hadn’t felt so miserable since he had had chicken pox at eleven, a month before his father’s departure. With the un-speculating concentration of misery, Vergil stripped off his pajamas and crawled into the shower, hoping for relief under cold water.
The water spluttered in a weak stream from the old plumbing and rippled across his head and neck, over his shoulders and back, rivulets snaking down his chest and legs. Both hands were exquisitely, painfully sensitive now, and the water seemed to come in needles, warming and then cooling, burning and then freezing. He held his arms out and the air itself felt bumpy.
He stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, sighing with relief as the irritation subsided, rubbing the offending areas of his skin with his wrists and the backs of his hands until they were angry red. His fingers and palms tingled and the tingling diminished to a low, blood-pumping throb of returning normality.
He emerged and toweled off, then stood naked by the bathroom window, feeling the cool breeze and listening to crickets. “God damn,” he said slowly and expressively. He turned and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His chest was splotchy and red from scratching and rubbing. He rotated and peered over his shoulder at his back.
From shoulder to shoulder, and criss-crossing down his spine, faint pale lines just beneath the surface of his skin drew a crazy and unwelcome road-map. As he watched, the lines slowly faded until he wondered whether they had been there at all.
Heart pounding heavily in his chest, Vergil sat on the lid of the toilet and stared at his feet, chin in both hands. Now he was really scared.
He laughed deep in the back of his throat.
“Put the little suckers to work, hm?” he asked himself in a whisper.
“Vergil, are you all right?” his mother asked from the other side of the bathroom door.
“I’m fine,” he said. Better and better, every day.
“I will never understand men, as long as I live and breathe,” his mother said, pouring herself another cup of thick black coffee. “Always tinkering, always getting into trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble, Mother.” He didn’t sound convinced, even to himself.
“No?”
He shrugged. “I’m healthy, I can go for a few more months without work—and something’s bound to turn up.”
“You’re not even looking.”
That was true enough. “I’m getting over a depression.” And that was an outright lie.
“Bull,” April said. “You’ve never been depressed in your life. You don’t even know what it means. You should be a woman for a few years and just see for yourself.”
The morning sun illuminated the filmy curtains covering the kitchen window and filled the kitchen with subdued, cheerful warmth. “Sometimes you act like I’m a brick wall,” Vergil said.
“Sometimes you are. Hell, Verge, you’re my son. I gave you life—I think we can X out Frank’s contribution—and I watched you grow older for twenty-two years steady. You never did grow up, and you never did get a full deck of sensibilities. You’re a brilliant boy, but you’re just not complete.”
“And you,” he said, grimacing, “are a deep well of support and understanding.”
“Don’t rile the old woman, Verge. I understand and sympathize as much as you deserve. You’re in real trouble, aren’t you? This experiment.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep harping on that. I’m the scientist, and I’m the only one affected, and so far—” He closed his mouth with an audible snap and crossed his arms. It was all quite insane. The lymphocytes he had injected were beyond any doubt dead or decrepit by now. They had been altered in test-tube conditions, had probably acquired a whole new set of histocompatibility antigens, and had been attacked and devoured by their unaltered fellows weeks ago. Any other supposition was simply not supported by reason.