The New Adam

Stanley Weinbaum

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781537808444
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

The New Adam finds himself not in Eden, but in a crowded world of men and women who look like him but who cannot comprehend his powers or his unique mentality. Nature had placed Edmund Hall a rung higher on the ladder of evolution than the men around him. How could he live in a world populated by creatures as far below him as the ape is below us?

BOOK III. THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

~

1. THE SEED PLANTED

‘LISTEN TO ME A MINUTE, Vanny!’ Paul was expostulating. ‘I’m serious. You’ve got to answer me.’

Vanny stopped humming, turned her pert features toward him.

‘All right. The answer is maybe.’

Paul stared at her a moment on the verge of anger, gave a gesture of exasperation, and strode to the window. Her laugh followed him. For a moment he stared down the street, where a bat whirled and circled the solitary arc light trying, no doubt, to look like a dragon. Paul spun about, faced the smiling girl.

‘You’re certainly expert at the fine art of torture,’ he said. Vanny wrinkled her nose at him, toying with the great black Persian cat beside her.

‘Listen to him, Eblis! He’s accusing your mistress.’ She turned back to Paul. ‘I’ve been studying Torquemada.’

‘You could teach him a few tricks!’

‘Don’t growl at me, Honey. All I’m suggesting is the use of a little intelligence.’

‘Bah! What’s the matter with me, Vanny? God knows I love you, and sometimes you seem to care for me. Why won’t you marry me?’

‘I thought we agreed last time to drop the discussion.’

‘But why won’t you?’

She cast him another impish smile. /* ‘Said then the little maid, You have very little said To induce a little maid for to wed, wed, wed. So pray say a little more, Or produce a little ore, ‘Ere I’ll make a little print in your bed, bed, bed!’ */

‘Vanny, you’re impossible!’

‘But I mean it, Paul. Two of us can’t live comfortably on what I’ve got, and your contribution would hardly suffice.’

Paul dropped to the davenport beside her, startling Eblis into an ebony flash to the floor.

‘I guess you’re right,’ he said, dropping his face to his hands. A tinge of sympathy passed over the girl’s face; she placed a hand on her companion’s shoulder, touched his light hair.

‘Snap out of it, Honey,’ she said. ‘All’s not lost save honor.’

Paul sat erect. ‘Very well, but I’m giving you fair warning, Vanny—this isn’t going on much longer! I’ll have you somehow.’

She dropped her shining black head to his shoulder. ‘You have my permission to try—try as hard as ever you can, Paul.’

For a time they were silent. Paul slipped his arm about her, drew her close, but he still brooded, morose and unhappy. Best start a new train of thought, reflected Vanny.

‘How’s the night-work, Paul?’

‘I’m through with it.’

‘Fired?’

‘No; I quit. Couldn’t stand it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Something’s wrong with that fellow, Vanny—something’s very wrong. Either he’s crazy, or—I don’t know, but there’s something unnatural about him. His snaky hands and all.’

‘I used to think his hands were lovely, at school.’

Paul did not answer. He was still sullen; something weighed heavily on him. Vanny looked at him with a tinge of pity.

‘What’s really the matter with you, Paul?’

‘Nothing I can tell.’

‘Don’t be silly. I’m no prude, and I have the average gift of understanding.’

‘It sounds foolish, Vanny—but I’m afraid of that fellow Edmond Hall.’

‘For Pete’s sake, why? You could crack him like a nut!’

‘Well, the other night—that’s when I quit—he wanted me to bring him here!’

Vanny stared at Paul’s distressed face, broke into a peal of laughter.

‘He wouldn’t be the first freak you’ve dragged around, Honey!’

‘All right,’ said Paul, again sullen. ‘You would have it, and there it is.’

‘But still, what’s the trouble? Why not bring him over some evening? You’re not jealous in advance, are you.’

‘Yes! I am!’

Vanny laughed again, with a taunt in her eyes.

‘Not in the way you think,’ said Paul.

‘Of course not.’ She was still teasing.

‘Oh, I don’t think you’d ever fall for him! He’s too devoid of sex appeal.’

‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Paul, ‘except that I feel he’s an ill-omened bird. He’s got a raven soul, and it croaks behind his every mood.’

‘Baa!’ said Vanny. ‘You get tiresome. Your soul’s an old woman soul, and doesn’t take second honors anywhere in croaking.’

She cast off his arm, rose, and pirouetted before him, ending in a curtsy.

‘Come on, Paul, Switch on the radio, and let’s dance.’

‘I don’t feel like dancing.’

Vanny crossed the room, spun the glowing dial. A dance orchestra swelled into melodious syncopation. She danced over to Paul, seized his hand and pulled him reluctantly erect, drawing herself into his arms as they swayed into the rhythm of the music.

‘Paul’—she threw back her head to look up at him—’why don’t you bring him over?’

‘Never!’

‘You don’t have to be jealous, Honey. I’d just like to meet him again.’

‘You never will through me!’

‘Well, you needn’t snap at me so!’

‘If you want to see him, call him up yourself!’

‘It would be a bit presumptuous, hardly having seen him for ten years—not since high school days.’ They swayed easily to the music. ‘However—perhaps I will!’

---

2. THE SEED SPROUTS

EDMOND felt no more anger at Paul’s defection than he felt at the rain or wind or force of gravity, or any other natural circumstance, Indeed, he had anticipated it, perceiving in Paul’s nature the emotional seeds from which the refusal sprang. Still, a quality in his own nature, either the goad of ennui or a certain grim persistence, led him to maintain Vanny as his objective. His usual merciless scrutiny of his own motives led him to a realization that a certain preference lay behind his persistence; this girl offered a rather rare aesthetic appeal that drew him more, perhaps, than his original plan contemplated.

‘I weave nets to entrap myself,’ he reflected, answering at the same moment in another part of his mind, ‘Surely I am strong enough to break any snare of my own creating.’

Thus he set about the task of rebuilding an acquaintanceship of his past. He wished to arrange an apparently casual meeting, confiding thereafter in designs of his own, and he was content for the present to trust to chance to provide the encounter.

For several mornings he drove his car along Sheridan Road, past Vanny’s accustomed bus-stop, but failed to meet her. Once he fancied he glimpsed her entering a lumbering bus several blocks ahead of him. He did not pursue; the chancy seeming of the meeting would have been destroyed—a subtlety he preferred to preserve.

In his complex mentalities he reflected, ‘Paul has beyond doubt informed this girl of my suggestion; let her vanity be a little flattered by my interest, and then a little piqued by my lack of it. This at least will give our ultimate encounter a spice of attention.’ Thus he reflected, and afterwards parked his car on a side street; spending the better part of the day watching a school of minnows that sported though the lagoon in Lincoln Park. He thought idly of many things, amusing himself for a time trying to imagine a feat impossible to perform in the world of the Material.

‘All things are possible,’ he concluded, ‘given time and a price, and the greater the span of time, the smaller is the price required—and this in effect is but saying that in eternity whatever can happen must happen. Flammarion glimpsed this truth, but his specious theory of past eternity and future is obviously fallacious.’

The meeting was not entirely unexpected by Vanny. She sat at a table in Kelsey’s Venice, with Walter Nussman. The orchestra, ensconced in its gondola, drifted silent in the fifteen-foot pool. Vanny was a little flushed, her black eyes a trifle brighter than usual; she had already taken four highballs from Walter’s rather capacious flask. Walter was becoming a bit solicitous; indeed, Vanny seldom indulged very freely, yet here she was sipping her fifth, and the evening still young. ‘Why don’t you quit worrying about Paul, Vanny? He’ll be around as usual!’

‘Listen, Grandpa! My worries are my personal property! For your information, I’m not worrying anyway.’

‘What’s the trouble between you? As your elder, I always thought you two made such an attractive couple.’

‘We had a spat—and besides, I won’t be coupled with anybody! I’m a trust-buster!’

‘Huh?’

‘He was acting in restraint of trade, and I’m the Sherman Law. Verstehen Sie?‘

‘You’re pickled,’ said Walter, with a judicial air. ‘You’re soused, pie- eyed, blotto, besotted!’

Something in his remark seemed deliriously funny to the girl; she laughed unrestrainedly.

‘Why I am not! I’m as sober as you are!’

‘My God!’ said Walter. ‘Then we’d better leave at once!’

Vanny raised her glass as the orchestra emitted a blare of introductory chords. Walter seized the opportunity.

‘Put it down and let’s dance.’

‘Sure,’ said Vanny. ‘You just whirl me around. That’s as good as a drink.’

They moved on toward the floor, joining the throng already swinging into the time of the music. Vanny was just a shade unsteady.

‘Put some pep into it!’ she complained; but the sedate Walter danced as he always danced, marking time as if the staccato blues were a Teutonic march. After a while Vanny succeeded in losing herself in the music; she hummed the piece to herself—the perennial St. Louis Blues—and achieved the sensation of drifting bodiless on a gently undulating sea. She closed her eyes. Walter’s methodical steps required no effort to follow; all her consciousness flowed into the single sensation of rhythmic movement. She was dizzily content; there was a faint realization of the forgetting of something unpleasant. Paul! That was it. Well, let him do the remembering; she was well enough able to get along.

The undulations seemed to be lengthening, rising to a peak, and then a long downward slide. Not nearly so pleasant. Better open her eyes—so. The room was swaying a little; she forced her eyes to focus more sharply, and gazed without surprise into the eyes of Edmond Hall. She flashed him a smile of recognition; he responded. Alone at a table; did he always come to these places just to sit and drink?

‘There’s Edmond Hall,’ she said.

Walter spun her around and gazed over her shoulder.

‘The cat-eyed gent sitting alone? Is he the electrical inventor?’

‘You don’t have to spin me around so! I don’t like it.’

‘I had to write a Sunday feature about his radio tube,’ said Walter. ‘Wrote it without an interview, too; he was in Europe. There’s something deep about it. Half the authorities I called on said the thing didn’t exist, and the rest said it was a fake. Finally got a little information out of this fellow Alfred Stein at Northwestern.’ He chuckled. ‘The paper’s still getting peeved letters from professorial cranks!’

The music stopped. They joined the general exit from the floor. Seated again, Vanny toyed with the remains of her highball. It was nearly flat, she added a little ginger ale.

‘I went to school with him,’ she said.

‘With whom? Oh—Edmond Hall.’

‘He’s funny, but not as bad as Paul makes out.’

‘Can’t prove anything by me,’ said Walter. ‘Didn’t we see him once before—at Spangli’s?’

‘Yes. Paul was working for him then.’

She sipped the amber-fired glass before her.

‘Listen, Walter. He likes me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m telling you. You’re my father confessor. That’s what started Paul and me quarreling. That’s why Paul quit his job. Hall wanted to come over. And I said I’d ask him.’

‘I never saw you at the confidential stage before! You’ll be crying on my shoulder next.’

‘I’m all right. I’m going to ask him over to our table.’

‘That’s your privilege, my dear.’

Vanny turned; Edmond was still regarding her with cold amber eyes. She smiled and beckoned, and the...

Table of contents

• PROLOGUE
• INTRODUCTION
• BOOK I. THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE
• BOOK II. POWER
• BOOK III. THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE