Mr. Adam

CHAPTER 4

On a day in early December when an ice storm swept out of the northeast, and stiffened and slowed the arteries of Manhattan, and I knew that J.C. Pogey would want staffers covering the damage on the Jersey coast, I developed a convenient chill and retired to Smith Field to wait out the weather.

There is no vacation so exciting, so satisfactory, relaxing, and inwardly pleasing as that of a small boy playing hookey from school. I made the most of it. I clad myself in the soft, blue, silken pajamas inherited from Lynn Heinzerling when we were roommates at the Hotel de la Ville, in Rome, and he was ordered to Czecho-Slovakia; the wonderful brocaded Arabian robe that Noel Monks had purchased on the Street Called Straight, in Damascus, and willed to me when he flew Indiaward; and the pliant red leather slippers, with upturned toes, that had cost me three dollars, American gold seal, in the medina in Casablanca.

I cast myself upon Smith Field, set coffee dripping, and opened a package of cigarettes and a bottle of rye. I touched a switch at the side of the bed, and on the television screen there appeared an oval blur, and then the blur resolved itself into the face of a man—a full-jowled, hearty man who looked as if all he did was attend World Series, Bowl games, the tennis championships at Forest Hills, and the international shooting matches at Camp Perry. It turned out that this was expert deduction, because the man said:

“This is Malcolm Parkinson. I am speaking to you from sun-drenched Hialeah Park, Miami, Florida, and in a few moments I am going to focus your television camera on this magnificent race course, and you will see—yes, see—the first event on today’s program…”

I picked up the telephone and called Sam’s Cigar Store, at Sixth Avenue and Tenth. “Send me,” I requested, “a Racing Form and Bob’s Best Bets.”

“In this weather?” Sam demanded.

“The horses,” I pointed out, “are not running up the Avenue of the Americas.”

“That I know,” said Sam. “That I can see from here.” He asked: “Tell me, Mr. Smith, why don’t they do something about Mr. Adam?”

“Who do you mean by they?”

“Them bureaucrats.”

“What,” I inquired, “would you have them do?”

“The missus keeps pestering me,” said Sam. “She believes in A.I.” A.I. had become the popular abbreviation for artificial insemination.

“Well, there’s bound to be a decision soon,” I assured him.

“There better be, or there’ll be hell to pay in this country. My wife says she’s not getting any younger. I tell you, Mr. Smith, she wants kids.”

When the Racing Form arrived I began to dope the horses at Hialeah. Like every frustrated sports writer, I believe I am a better handicapper than any now operating at the tracks. I picked Fair Vision in the second, and then called “Two Tone Jones,” a gentleman of doubtful color who operates a bookmaking establishment near Sheridan Square. I bet two across the board on Fair Vision, poured myself a rye, and settled back on the pillows to watch the race.

I found that watching the races, from a bed in New York, was more satisfactory than watching them at the track, in Florida. Maniacs do not jump up and down in front of you, deafening you with their shrill cries, and interfering with your vision. Nobody picks your pocket. Nobody tramps on your feet. You don’t have to butt your way to the parimutuel windows, tramping on other people, between each race. You don’t have to foam at the mouth while crawling through traffic jams, park your car, pay $2.20 admission, avoid touts, buy programs, pencils, and peanuts, or steer your wife away from the hundred-to-one shots. You don’t have to shiver in a white linen suit, and try to warm yourself by talking about the cold wave up north.

You just lie there in bed and lose your money.

When I telephoned to place my bet on the fifth, Two Tone Jones said: “You got a minute, Mr. Smith? I want to ask you a question.”

“Certainly,” I said graciously, for by then Two Tone Jones was one of my considerable creditors.

“We’re having a little argument up here,” said Two Tone Jones. “You’re a pretty smart man, Mr. Smith, and maybe you can help us out.”

“I’m not very smart about picking horses.”

“Oh,” said Two Tone, “we all have our bad days. Now what we want to know, Mr. Smith, is what about this here artificial insemination?”

I drank some black coffee. “Well, what can I tell you about it?” I said. I was pretty sick of this A.I. It reminded me of toddle tops, ouija boards, every day in every way I feel better and better, two cars in every garage, life begins at forty, and every other fad that ever existed.

“Well, we just want to know about it,” Two Tone complained.

“It is very simple,” I said. “When normal intercourse isn’t practical, you just take a specimen of the male sperm, and plant it within the female.”

“Hasn’t it been done with horses?” Two Tone asked.

“Oh, yes. Nowadays, when a horse is standing at stud, he doesn’t have to service a mare in person. His sperm is shipped, injected, and that is all there is to it. Why, some of our best thoroughbred stock has been planted in Argentine and Australia that way. It’s much easier to ship an ounce of sperm than a one-ton horse.”

“Can it be done with men?” Two Tone demanded.

“Of course. I think there are eight thousand cases of artificial insemination recorded in this country.”

“That’s what we wanted to know.”

“Don’t you read the papers?” I asked. “The papers have been talking about nothing but A.I. ever since it was recommended by N.R.P.”

“Well, we don’t read that part of the papers,” said Two Tone Jones. That was that. I bet twenty to win on Eastbound, in the fifth, and he finished absolutely last.

Marge returned home during the running of the sixth. Cliffdweller, which I had backed to win and place, was on the rail and leading by two lengths when Marge swung open the door of our bedroom. I hushed her with a wave of my hand. “And now as they come into the stretch,” Malcolm Parkinson was saying, “it is still Cliffdweller, and he’s running easy. He’s followed by Ragtime, June Bug, Third Fleet, and Firefly… now at an eighth from the wire Cliffdweller still leads but—”

“Stephen Decatur Smith,” Marge interrupted, “we have company!”

“Quiet!” I shouted, leaning forward, pounding my knees with my fists as Cliffdweller labored towards the finish. At this point, it seemed that the television screen had shifted to slow motion.

“Stephen!” Marge shouted.

The horses crossed the finish line. “It’s a photo!” shouted Parkinson. I fell back against the pillow.

“So this is why I haven’t been able to get you on the telephone all afternoon!” Marge said. “Sneaked off to the races!”

I looked up at her. She was remarkably businesslike and trim and tidy in a blue suit and a white blouse that concealed, and yet promised, the smooth curves underneath. She was a very admirable-looking woman, but she was very angry. In a case like this, I believe that the best defense is an offense. “Here I am, down in bed with a chill, and I get abused!” I reproached her.

Marge smiled, and touched my forehead lightly with her fingers. She knew that I wasn’t ill, and she knew that I knew that she knew. “Come on! Get off the Field and into the living room. I brought home some people.”

Parkinson’s cheerful, weathered face appeared on the screen. “Who?” I asked absent-mindedly.

“In just a second,” said Parkinson, “the judges will have inspected the picture, and we will have the result of the sixth. Meanwhile, let me tell you that I’ve never seen Hialeah more colorful than it is today, here in the bright sunshine, with the brilliant plumage of the famous flamingoes out by the lake. And remember that for relaxation like a trip to the Southland, always smoke—”

“That man is a bad influence on you,” Marge interrupted. “Shoo him away. Anyway, it gives me the creeps to have strange men in the bedroom, staring at us.”

“Here’s the results,” said Parkinson. “It’s Cliffdweller, by a whisker.”

I flicked the switch and rolled off Smith Field, feeling better. Out in the living room, their faces flushed by the cold wind, Maria Ostenheimer and my friend of the Apennines and Polyclinic, Dr. Thompson, were standing close to the fire. “Hello,” I greeted them, “didn’t know you two knew each other.”

“Our acquaintanceship,” said Thompson, “is strictly professional—at least thus far.” Maria, delicately made, looked almost childlike alongside his bulk. “We’re on the same committee,” she explained.

Marge inspected me thoughtfully, tapping a cigarette on the mantel. “They’ve just come from Washington,” she said. “They appeared before both the Executive Inter-Departmental group and the Joint Congressional Committee on behalf of the National Re-fertilization Project. They testified for A.I.”

“Well, Maria did,” amended Thompson. “I’m more interested in another aspect of the problem.”

“All I’ve heard today,” I complained, “is A.I.” A startling, and horrible possibility gripped me. I pointed my finger at Marge. “If you think for one instant,” I told her, “that we are going to fill this apartment with lanky, redheaded children all subject to inferiority complexes, and none of them mine, then you had better start thinking again. You’re not going to be any female guinea pig to test the productive capacity of Mr. Adam!”

Thompson threw back his head and laughed. “Relax, Steve,” he said. “Relax!”

“Anyway,” said Marge, acidly, “I understand that Washington has been simply snowed under with applications. There are thousands ahead of me, even if I wanted an Adam child. There are plenty of husbands whose sense of responsibility to the human race is greater than their selfishness and stupid jealousy!”

Maria cocked her head on the side and looked at me with her wise, dark eyes. “I have just finished telling our distinguished statesmen,” she said, “that A.I. may be the only salvation for mankind. I say may”—her words tripped out slowly and daintily, as if they were being carefully marched across a narrow plank—“I say may because right at present A.I. is the only solution which we know will work. Artificial insemination is bound to furnish at least a limited number of males in another generation.”

“Can you imagine,” I exclaimed, “the whole world peopled with redheaded beanpoles, all looking exactly like Homer Adam!”

“But that’s not why we came to see you,” Maria said, and for a small, quite pretty and young girl she was alarmingly grave. “We came to see you about Homer Adam himself.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is he pining away without his Mary Ellen?”

“Well, something like that,” Maria said, still grave and troubled. “You see, this business has naturally been a very great shock to him. And they mauled and manhandled him fearfully when he got to Washington.”

“That Phelps-Smythe!” said Thompson. “The first thing the Eastern Defense Command did to Adam was fill him up with shots until he was a walking pharmaceutical encyclopedia. They shot him full of paratyphoid, typhus, yellow fever, influenza, cholera—as if he were going to catch cholera at Fort Myer—smallpox, and I don’t know what else besides.”

“Phelps-Smythe,” I remarked, “is a revolving son-of-a-bitch.”

“And all the brass exhibits poor Mr. Adam at dinners,” said Maria, “as if he were a freak.”

“Phelps-Smythe,” I said, “is bucking for a star. If he pleases enough generals, maybe one day he’ll get to be a general himself. Ask any correspondent who was in the Southwest Pacific. They’ll tell you how it works. They had a beaut out there.”

Thompson held out his huge hands, six inches apart. “Adam,” he said, “is now no wider than that. Furthermore, he has developed a twitch.”

“It is really very serious,” said Maria. “As things are now, everything depends on the well-being of one man—a sensitive man who apparently was never very strong. If his health is ruined—either his physical health or his mental health—it imperils the chances of successful artificial insemination.

“Let me put it this way. Our present methods of A.I. are still fairly crude. It is true that you will find millions of motile sperm cells in one male specimen, but we have not yet found a way to isolate these cells—keep each one of them alive, happy, and potent so that each one has a chance of causing pregnancy. Artificial insemination is still a matter of mass impregnation. You use millions of cells, but only one does the job.”

“What a waste!” I said.

“What a waste indeed, at this period in history,” said Marge.

“Well, we’re working on the isolation problems, but meanwhile we want to start A.I. as quickly as possible,” Maria continued. “Suppose something happened to Homer Adam before we began? Anyway, we can not make maximum—perhaps not even normal—use of Homer Adam until he again becomes a tranquil, normal man. Even if we were able to use him in his present state—which is doubtful—we might create a race of physical and nervous wrecks.”

I didn’t sense what was coming. “What,” I inquired, “has this got to do with me?”

“I talked to Adam,” said Thompson. “He likes you, he trusts you, and he wonders what became of you. You made a very deep impression on him. What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I replied, “except let him beat me at gin rummy occasionally.”

Thompson grinned. “There is nothing so good for a man’s ego as to believe himself a shark at gin,” he said.

“In any case,” Maria concluded, “if the government decides that N.R.P. be placed in charge of Homer Adam, rather than the N.R.C., we want you to handle him.”

“Oh my God!” I said. “Nominated to be nursemaid to the potential father of his country!”

The controversy between the National Re-fertilization Project and the National Research Council was essentially between the physicians and the physicists—between the scientific workers in the animate and the inanimate fields. The atom-poppers believed they needed Mr. Adam for research which they hoped would undo the damage caused by the obscure rays which enwrapped the world after the Mississippi explosion. They needed Mr. Adam, they explained, much as they needed cyclotrons and centrifuges.

How could an antidote to the ray be developed until they knew exactly which ray had done the trick? And how could they isolate the ray which strangely wrecked male cells, and left females undisturbed, unless they had specimens for experimentation? And who was there, except Mr. Adam, to furnish these specimens?

The N.R.P. physicians pointed out, even as Maria had, that A.I. was the only sure way of keeping the globe populated. They hoped that the physicists of N.R.C. would find a method of restoring the potency of all men, but scientific research takes times. Meanwhile, they had on hand one single, priceless human who was insurance against entire extinction.

What finally decided the Joint Congressional Investigating Committee, and the Inter-Department Executive Committee, I am sure, was the unspoken fear that the scientists would make another mistake, mess up Mr. Adam, and then everybody would be finished. It was something that nobody spoke of, directly, for fear of injuring the sensibilities of men like Professor Pell, and damaging their professional reputation, but the fear was always there.

So I was not surprised, a few days later, when I picked up a copy of the New York Post while walking to the subway after my noon breakfast in Smith Field, to read the black headlines that covered the whole front page:

When I reached the office, J.C. set me to putting together the foreign reactions in a single story. As usual there was no official comment from Moscow, but Pravda printed an oblique little box on its front page pointing out that is was possible for the United States to make amends for the world catastrophe caused by Mississippi, but that thus far the United States had not approached the Soviet Union directly.

The word “directly” was the important word. It was seized upon, that very day, in the Senate. Had anybody in the Administration, certain Senators wished to know, been dealing secretly on sharing Homer Adam with the Communists? If so, what arrangements had been discussed? It was hoped that Homer Adam would not be shipped outside the territorial limits of the United States.

Senator Salt plausibly replied that A.I. being what is was, it was not necessary to ship Homer Adam anywhere, just the male germ.

Any peace-loving nation, Salt said, could be helped out without Homer ever leaving Washington. Russia had as much right to hope for perpetuating herself as any other nation—more than some he could mention.

FROGHAM (D. Louisiana): Will the Senator yield?

SALT: I yield.

FROGHAM: Is it not a fact that we could forever dispose of this damnable Communism, which is infecting the whole world and causing strikes and disturbances and menacing the very foundations of the Republic, say within two generations, by simply confining A.I. to those nations which are willing to give us definite statements as to their future foreign policies, and their territorial and ideological intentions?

VIDMER (R. Massachusetts): If we only give A.I. to those nations which know their future foreign policy, then we will have to exclude the United States. (Laughter.)

The story from London was matter-of-fact. England expected that the United States would share A.I., on a population basis, and in return England would give the United States the full benefit of any happy information reaching its own scientists. The British government felt it was speaking for the whole Empire. It didn’t say anything about Ireland.

In Paris, all the newspapers published editorials pointing out France’s great past cultural contributions to the world, and insisting that it was a necessity that French culture continue.

Various good Germans talked of the benefits of a revival of German industrial genius in succeeding generations.

The Japanese press talked of traditional American sportsmanship, and pointed out that baseball was played in both countries.

All the little nations extolled their own virtues. But the Bucharest press pointed out, coyly, that if A.I. was denied to Hungary, then that would be a final solution to the question of Transylvania—which everybody thought had already been solved.

The cables kept rolling in, but before night J.C. Pogey came over to my desk, and motioned me into his office.

“Steve,” he said, “I just got a call from the White House. Danny Williams—the President’s Secretary. Used to work for us. Well, they want you down there to handle Adam.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said.

“It seems they think you did a good job in Tarrytown. Adam likes you.”

“Yeah?”

“The N.R.P. asked for you. They’re going to put you on their payroll. We’ll give you leave of absence.”

“Haven’t I got anything to say about this?” I demanded.

“Not much,” said J.C. “Danny Williams put it this way—he said it was in the interests of civilization. I don’t like to lose you, but it is exactly the same as if you were drafted.”

“You don’t care much, do you, J.C., whether civilization keeps on or not?”

J.C. rubbed his thumbs behind his ears. “Dunno,” he said. “Haven’t made up my mind yet.”

I went home and packed. “They certainly called for you in a hurry,” Marge said.

“Yes,” I agreed, not wanting to leave her, and not wanting to leave Smith Field, and wondering how long it would be before Homer Adam could be cooled off and calmed to a point where he would become useful to civilization, and N.R.P. would let me go.

“You behave down there,” Marge commanded. “That town is full of good-looking women, and they don’t seem to have any inhibitions any more.”

“I’ll behave,” I promised.

“You’d better. I’m liable to pop in on you any time—any time at all. And Stephen,” she added, “do a good job, will you. It’s awfully important to me.”

I telephoned to Abel Pumphrey, the Director of the National Re-fertilization Project, that I was on the way down. Marge took me to the train and kissed me goodbye as if I were off to Shanghai. The last thing she said was, “You will do your best, won’t you?”

Women are such queer people.