Manikins

"YOU'RE SURE SHE'S NOT dangerous?"

"Not at all. Not to you, anyway."

Evelyn closed the sliding window in the door and made an effort to control the

misgivings that tugged at her. It was a little late to discover in herself a

queasiness about crazy people.

She looked around and discovered with relief that it wasn't the patients she

feared. It was the fortress atmosphere of the Bedford Institution. The place was

a nightmare of barred windows, padded rooms, canvas sheets and straightjackets

and hypodermics and burly attendants. It was a prison. With all the precautions

it was only natural that she should feel nervous about the people it was built

to contain.

She peeked into the room again. The woman inside was so small, so quiet and

composed to be the cause of all this fuss.

Doctor Burroughs closed the thick file he had been scanning. Barbara Endicott.

Age: 28. Height: 5' 3". Weight: 101. Diagnosis: Paranoid Schizophrenic. Remarks:

Subject is to be considered dangerous. Remanded for observation from criminal

court, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, murder. Intense hostility to men. There

was more, much more. Evelyn had read some of it.

"She's got a massively defended psychosis. As usual, granting the illogical

assumptions, the delusional system is carefully worked out and internally

consistent."

"I know," Evelyn said.

"Do you? Yes, I suppose you do, from books and films." He closed the file and

handed it to her. "You'll find it's a little different actually talking to one

of them. They're sure of the things they say in a way that no sane person is

ever likely to be. We all live with our little doubts, you know. They don't.

They've seen the truth, and nothing will convince them otherwise. It takes a

strong grip on reality to deal with them. You're likely to be a bit shaken when

you're through with her."

Evelyn wished he'd finish and open the door. She had no worries about her sense

of reality. Did he really worry that the woman would unsettle her with the kind

of rubbish that was down in that file?

"We've had her on electroshock treatments for the last week," he said. He

shrugged, helplessly. "I know what your teachers have said about that. It wasn't

my decision. There's just no way to reach these people. When we run out of

reason and persuasion, we try the shocks. It's not doing her any good. Her

psychosis is as defended as it ever was." He rocked back on his heels, frowning.

"I guess you might as well go on in. You're perfectly safe. Her hostility is

directed only at men." He gestured to the white-suited attendant, who looked

like an NFL lineman, and the man turned a key in the lock. He opened the door,

standing back to let her pass.

Barbara Endicott sat in a chair by the window. The sunlight streamed through and

the bars made a cross-hatched pattern over her face. She turned, but did not get

up.

"Hello, I'm... I'm Evelyn Winters." The woman had turned away as soon as she

started talking. Evelyn's confidence, feeble enough in this forbidding place,

threatened to leave her entirely.

"I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind. I'm not a doctor, Barbara."

The woman turned back and looked at her.

"Then what are you doing in that white coat?"

Evelyn looked down at the lab smock. She felt silly in the damn thing.

"They told me I had to wear it."

"Who is 'they?' " Barbara asked, with the hint of a chuckle. "You sound

paranoid, my dear."

Evelyn relaxed a little. "Now that should have been my question. 'They' are the

staff of this... place." Damn it, relax! The woman seemed friendly enough now

that she saw Evelyn wasn't a doctor. "I guess they want to know if I'm a

patient."

"Right. They'd give you one of these blue outfits if you were."

"I'm a student. They said I could interview you."

"Shoot." Then she smiled, and it was such a friendly, sane smile that Evelyn

smiled back and extended her hand. But Barbara was shaking her head.

"That's a man thing," she said, indicating the hand. " 'See? I have no weapons.

I'm not going to kill you.' We don't need that, Evelyn. We're women."

"Oh, of course." She awkwardly stuffed the hand into the pocket of the lab coat,

clenched. "May I sit down?"

"Sure. There's just the bed, but it's hard enough to sit on."

Evelyn sat on the edge of the bed, the file and notebook in her lap. She poised

there, and found that her weight was still on the balls of her feet, ready to

leap away. The bleakness of the room assaulted her. She saw flaking gray paint,

yellow window glass set in a well behind a mesh screen, gun-metal bolts securing

it to the wall. The floor was concrete, damp and unfriendly. The room echoed

faintly. The only furniture was the chair and the bed with gray sheets and

blanket.

Barbara Endicott was small, dark-haired, with the smooth perfection of features

that reminded Evelyn of an oriental. She looked pale, probably from two months

in the cell. Under it, she had robust health. She sat in a checkerboard of

sunlight, soaking up what rays passed through the glass. She wore a blue

bathrobe with nothing underneath, belted at the waist, and cloth slippers.

"So I'm your assignment for the day. Did you pick me, or someone else?"

"They told me you'd only speak to women."

"That's true, but you didn't answer my question, did you? I'm sorry. I didn't

mean to make you nervous, really. I won't be like that again. I'm acting like a

crazy woman."

"What do you mean?"

"Being bold, aggressive. Saying whatever I want to. That's how all the crazy

people around here act. I'm not crazy, of course." Her eyes were twinkling.

"I can't tell if you're putting me on," Evelyn admitted, and suddenly felt much

closer to the woman. It was an easy trap to fall into, thinking of deranged

people as mentally defective, lacking in reasoning powers. There was nothing

wrong with Barbara Endicott in that direction. She could be subtle.

"Of course I'm crazy," she said. "Would they have me locked up here if I

wasn't?" She grinned, and Evelyn relaxed. Her back loosened up; the bedspring

creaked as she settled on them.

"All right. Do you want to talk about it?"

"I'm not sure if you want to hear. You know I killed a man, don't you?"

"Did you? I know the hearing thought you did, but they found you incapable of

standing trial."

"I killed him, all right. I had to find out."

"Find out what?"

"If he could still walk with his head cut off."

And there it was; she was an alien again. Evelyn suppressed a shudder. The woman

had said it in such a reasonable tone of voice, without any obvious try for

shock value. And indeed, it had not affected her as strongly as it might have a

few minutes ago. She was revolted, but not scared.

"And what made you think he might be able to?"

"That's not the important question," she chided. "Maybe it's not important to

you, but it is to me. I wouldn't have done a thing like that unless it was

important to know."

"To know... oh. Well, did he?"

"He sure did. For two or three minutes, he blundered around that room. I saw it,

and I knew I was right."

"Will you tell me what led you to think he could?"

Barbara looked her over.

"And why should I? Look at you. You're a woman, but you've swallowed all the

lies. You're working for them."

"What do you mean?"

"You've painted yourself up. You've scraped the hair off your legs and covered

them with nylon, and you're walking inefficiently with a skirt to hobble your

legs and heels designed to make you stumble if you run from them when they try

to rape you. You're here doing their work for them. Why should I tell you? You

wouldn't believe me."

Evelyn was not alarmed by this turn in the conversation. There was no hostility

in what Barbara was saying. If anything, there was pity. Barbara would not harm

her, simply because she was a woman. Now that she understood that, she could go

on with more assurance.

"That may be true. But don't you owe it to me, as a woman, to tell me about this

threat if it's really so important?"

Barbara slapped her knees in delight.

"You got me, doc. You're right. But that was sure tricky, turning my own

delusions against me."

Evelyn wrote in her notebook: Can be glib when discussing her

delusional-complex. She is assured enough of her rightness to make jokes about

it.

"What are you writing?"

"Huh? Oh..." Be honest, she'll know if you lie. Be straight with her and match

her irreverence. "...just notes on your condition. I have to make a diagnosis to

my instructor. He wants to know what kind of crazy you are."

"That's easy. I'm paranoid schizophrenic. You don't need a degree to see that."

"No, I guess not. All right, tell me about it."

"Basically, what I believe is that the Earth was invaded by some kind of

parasite at some point back in pre-history. Probably in cave-dwelling days. It's

hard to tell for sure, since history is such a pack of lies. They rewrite it all

the time, you know."

Again, Evelyn didn't know if she was being played with, and the thought amused

her. This was a complex, tricky woman. She'd have to stay on her toes. That

speech had been such an obvious paranoid construction, and Barbara was well

aware of it.

"I'll play your game. Who is 'they?' "

" 'They' is the all-purpose paranoid pronoun. Any group that is involved in a

conspiracy, conscious or not, to 'get' you. I know that's crazy, but there are

such groups."

"Are there?"

"Sure. I didn't say they had to be holding meetings to plot ways to bedevil you.

They don't. You can admit the existence of groups whose interests are not your

own, can't you?"

"Certainly."

"The more important thing is it doesn't matter if they're really an explicit

conspiracy, or just have the same effect because that's the way they function.

It doesn't have to be personal, either. Each year, the IRS conspires to rob you

of money that you earned, don't they? They're in a plot with the President and

Congress to steal your money and give it to other people, but they don't know

you by name. They steal from everybody. That's the kind of thing I'm talking

about."

Justifies her fear of external, inimical forces by pointing to real antagonistic

groups.

"Yes, I can see that. But we all know the IRS is out there. You're talking about

a secret that only you see. Why should I believe you?"

Her face got more serious. Perhaps she was realizing the strengths of her

opponent. Her opponent always had the stronger arguments, it was the nature of

things. Why are you right and everyone else wrong?

"That's the tough part. You can offer me reams of 'proof' that I'm wrong, and I

can't show you anything. If you'd been there when I'd killed that fellow, you'd

know. But I can't do it again." She drew a deep breath, and seemed to settle in

for a long debate.

"Let's get back to these parasites," Evelyn said. "They're men? Is that what

you're saying?"

"No, no." She laughed, without humor. "There's no such thing as a man, the way

you're thinking about it. Only women who've been taken over at birth by these,

these..." she groped in the air for a word hideous enough to express her

distaste. She couldn't find it. "Things. Organisms. I said they invaded the

Earth, but I'm not sure. They might be from here. There's no way to know,

they've taken over too completely."

Leaves flexibility in her rationale. Yes, that would fit with what the books

said. It would be hard to stump her, to ask her a question she couldn't answer

in terms of her delusion. She admitted not knowing everything about the subject,

and she was free to reject whole categories of argument as having been tampered

with, like history.

"So how is it... no, wait. Maybe you'd better tell me more about these

parasites. Where do they hide? How is it that no one but you is aware of them?"

She nodded. She now seemed totally serious. She could not joke about this

subject when they got this specific.

"They're not strictly parasites. They're sort of symbiotic. They don't kill

their hosts, not quickly. They even help the host in the short run, making them

stronger and larger and more capable of domination. But in the long run, they

sap the strength of the host. They make her more susceptible to disease, weaken

her heart. As to what they look like, you've seen them. They're blind, helpless,

immobile worms. They attach themselves to a woman's urinary tract, filling and

covering the vagina and extending nerves into the ovaries and uterus. They

inject hormones into her body and cause her to grow up with deformities, like

facial hair, enlarged muscles, reduced thinking capacity, and wildly defective

emotions. The host becomes aggressive and murderous. Her breasts never develop.

She is permanently sterile."

Evelyn scribbled in her notebook to cover her emotions. She wanted to laugh; she

felt like crying. Who could figure the human mind? She shuddered to think of the

pressures that must have driven this outwardly normal woman to such a bizarre

way of looking at the universe. Father? Lover? Was she raped? Barbara had been

unhelpful in talking about these things, maintaining that they were no one's

business but her own. Besides, they had no bearing on what she saw as the facts

of the case.

"I hardly know where to begin," Evelyn said.

"Yes, I know. It's not the sort of thing they'd allow you to seriously consider,

is it? It's too alien to what you've been led to believe. I'm sorry. I hope I

can help you."

Damn! she wrote, then scratched it out. Puts questioners on the defensive. Shows

sympathy with their inability to see things as she sees them.

"Call it the new biology," Barbara said, getting up and slowly walking back and

forth in the confined space. Her loose slippers slipped off her heels with each

step. "I began to suspect it several years ago. The world just didn't make sense

any other way. You've got to begin to doubt what you've been told. You've got to

trust the evidence of your intellect. You've got to allow yourself to look

through your woman's eyes as a woman would, not as an imperfect man would.

They've trained you to believe in their values, their system. What you begin to

realize is that they are imperfect women, not the other way around. They can't

reproduce themselves, shouldn't that tell you something? 'Males' live on our

bodies as parasites, they use our fertility to perpetuate their species." She

turned to Evelyn, and her eyes were burning. "Can you try to look at it that

way? Just try? Don't try to be a man; redefine! You don't know what you are. All

your life you've struggled to be a man. They've defined the role you should

play. And you're not made for it. You don't have that parasite eating at your

brain. Can you accept that?"

"I can, for the sake of argument."

"That's good enough."

Evelyn was treading cautiously. "Uh, just what do I have to do to... 'see things

as a woman?' I feel like a woman right now."

"Feel! That's it, just feel. You know what 'woman's intuition' is? It's the

human way to think. They've laughed at it to the point where we automatically

distrust it. They had to; they've lost the capacity to see a truth intuitively.

I can see you don't like that phrase. You wouldn't. It's been laughed at so much

that an 'enlightened woman' like yourself doesn't believe it exists. That's what

they want you to think. All right, don't use the word 'intuition.' Use something

else. What I'm talking about is the innate capacity of a human being to feel the

truth of a matter. We all know we have it, but we've been trained to distrust

it. And it's gotten screwed up. Haven't you ever felt you're right for no reason

you could name except that you knew you were right?"

"Yes, I guess I have. Most people do." Rejects logical argument as being part of

her oppression. She decided to test that.

"What I've been... trained to do, is to apply the rules of logic to analyze a

question. Right? And you say it's no good, despite thousands of years of human

experience?"

"That's right. It's not human experience, though. It's a trick. It's a game, a

very complicated game."

"What about science? Biology, in particular."

"Science is the biggest game of all. Have you ever thought about it? Do you

seriously feel that the big questions of the universe, the important truths that

should be easily in our grasp, will be solved by scientists haggling over how

many neutrinos can dance on the head of a pin? It's a tail-eating snake,

relevant only to itself. But once you accept the basic ground rules, you're

trapped. You think that counting and sorting and numbering will teach you

things. You have to reject it all and see the world with new eyes. You'll be

astounded at what is there, ready for you to pick up."

"Genetics?"

"Hogwash. The whole structure of genetics has been put there to explain an

untenable position: that there are two sexes, neither of them worthwhile alone,

but together they're able to reproduce. It doesn't hold up when you think about

it. Genes and chromosomes, half from each parent: no, no, no! Tell me, have you

ever seen a gene?"

"I've seen pictures."

"Hah!" That seemed enough for the moment. She paced the floor, overwhelmed by

the scope of it. She turned again and faced Evelyn.

"I know, I know. I've thought about it enough. There's this... this basic set of

assumptions we all live by. We can't get along without accepting almost all of

it, right? I mean, I could tell you that I don't believe in... Tokyo, for

instance, that Tokyo doesn't exist simply because I haven't been there to see it

for myself. The news films I've seen were all clever hoaxes, right? Travelogues,

books, Japanese; they're all in a conspiracy to make me think there's such a

place as Tokyo."

"You could make a case for it, I guess."

"Sure I could. We all exist, all of us, in our own heads, looking out through

the eyeballs. Society isn't possible unless we can believe in second-hand

reports of certain things. So we've all conspired together to accept what other

people tell us unless we can think of a reason why we're being lied to. Society

can be seen as a conspiracy of unquestioning acceptance of unprovable things. We

all work together at it, we all define a set of things as needing no proof."

She started to say more, but shut her mouth. She seemed to be considering if she

should go on. She looked speculatively at Evelyn.

Evelyn shifted on her cot. Outside, the sun was setting in a haze of red and

yellow. Where had the day gone? What time had she come into this room, anyway?

She was unsure. Her stomach grumbled at her, but she wasn't too uncomfortable.

She was fascinated. She felt a sort of lassitude, a weakness that made her want

to lie down on the bed.

"Where was I? Oh, the untested assumptions. Okay. If we can't accept anything

that's told us, we can't function in society. You can get away with not

accepting a lot. You can believe the world is flat, or that there are no such

things as photons or black holes or genes. Or that Christ didn't rise from the

grave. You can go a long way from the majority opinion. But if you evolve an

entirely new world picture, you start to get in trouble."

"What's most dangerous of all," Evelyn pointed out, "is starting to live by

these new assumptions."

"Yes, yes. I should have been more careful, shouldn't I? I could have kept this

discovery to myself. Or I could have gone on wondering. I was sure, you see, but

in my foolishness I had to have proof. I had to see if a man could live with his

head cut off, against what all the medical books had told me. I had to know if

it was the brain that controlled him, or if it was that parasite."

Evelyn wondered what to ask as Barbara quieted for a moment. She knew it wasn't

necessary to ask anything. The woman was off now; she would not wind down for

hours. But she felt she ought to try and guide her.

"I was wondering," she finally ventured, "why you didn't need a second case.

A... a check from the other side. Why didn't you kill a woman, too, to see

if..." The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Of all the things she should

have kept her mouth shut about, and to a homicidal paranoid! She was painfully

aware of her throat. She controlled her hand, which wanted to go to her neck in

feeble protection. She has no weapons, but she could be very strong...

But Barbara didn't pick up the thought. She didn't appear to notice Evelyn's

discomfort.

"Foolish!" she exploded. "I was foolish. Of course I should have taken it on

faith. I felt I was right; I knew I was right. But the old scientific

orientation finally drove me to the experiment. Experiment." She spat the word

out. She paused again, calming down, and seemed to think back.

"Kill a woman?" She shook her head and gave Evelyn a wry smile. "Dear, that

would be murder. I'm not a killer. These 'men' are already dead from my

viewpoint; killing them is a mercy, and a defensive act. Anyhow, after I'd done

the first experiment I realized I had really proved nothing. I had only

disproved the assumption that a man cannot live with his head cut off. That left

a whole range of possibilities, you see? Maybe the brain is not in the head.

Maybe the brain isn't good for anything. How do you know what's inside you? Have

you ever seen your brain? How do you know that you're not really a wired-up

midget, two inches tall, sitting in a control room in your head? Doesn't it feel

like that sometimes?"

"Ah..." Barbara had hit on a common nerve. Not the midget, which was only a

fanciful way of putting it, but the concept of living in one's head with

eye-sockets as windows on the universe.

"Right. But you reject the gut feelings. I listen to them."

The light in the room was rapidly failing. Evelyn looked at the bare bulb in the

ceiling, wondering when it would come on. She was getting sleepy, so tired. But

she wanted to hear more. She leaned back farther on the cot and let her legs and

arms relax.

"Maybe you should..." she yawned, wider and wider, unable to control it. "Excuse

me. Maybe you should tell me more about the parasites."

"Ah. All right." She went back to her chair and sat in it. Evelyn could barely

see her in the shadows. She heard a faint creaking, as of wooden slats on a

rocking chair. But the chair wasn't a rocker. It wasn't even made of wood.

Nevertheless, Barbara's shadow was moving slowly and rhythmically, and the

creaking went on.

"The parasites, I've already told you what they do. Let me tell you what I've

managed to deduce about their life-cycle."

Evelyn grinned in the dark. Life-cycle. Of course they'd have one. She leaned on

one elbow and rested her head on the wall behind her. It would be interesting.

"They reproduce asexually, like everything else. They grow by budding, since the

new ones are so much smaller than the mature ones. Then doctors implant them

into women's wombs when they know they're pregnant, and they grow up with the

embryo."

"Wait a minute," Evelyn sat up a little straighter. "Why don't they implant them

on all children? Why are girls allowed to... oh, I see."

"Yes. They need us. They can't reproduce by themselves. They need the warmth of

the womb to grow in, and we have the wombs. So they've systematically oppressed

the women they've allowed to remain uninfested so they'll have a docile, ready

supply of breeders. They've convinced us that we can't have children until we've

been impregnated, which is the biggest lie of all."

"It is?"

"Yes. Take a look."

Evelyn peered through the gloom and saw Barbara, standing in profile. She was

illuminated by a sort of flickering candlelight. Evelyn did not wonder about it,

but was bothered by a strange feeling. It was rather like wondering why she was

not curious.

But before even that ephemeral feeling could concern her, Barbara loosened the

cloth belt on her wrap and let it fall open. There was a gentle swell in her

belly, unmistakably an early pregnancy. Her hand traced out the curve.

"See? I'm pregnant. I'm about four or five months along. I can't say for sure,

you see, because I haven't had intercourse for over five years."

Hysterical pregnancy, Evelyn thought, and groped for her notebook. Why couldn't

she find it? Her hand touched it in the dark, then the pencil. She tried to

write, but the pencil broke. Did it break, she wondered, or was it bending?

She heard the creaking of the floorboards again, and knew Barbara had sat down

in her rocker. She looked sleepily for the source of light, but could not find

it.

"What about other mammals?" Evelyn asked, with another yawn.

"Uh-huh. The same. I don't know if it's only one sort of parasite which is

adaptable to any species of mammal, or if there's one breed for each. But there

are no males. Nowhere. Only females, and infested females."

"Birds?"

"I don't know yet," she said, simply. "I suspect that the whole concept of the

sexes is part of the game. It's such an unlikely thing. Why should we need two?

One is enough."

Leaves flexibility, she wrote. But no, she hadn't written, had she? The notebook

was lost again. She burrowed down into the pile of blankets or furs on the cot,

feeling warm and secure. She heard a sliding sound.

There in the peephole, ghostly in the candlelight, was a man's face. It was the

attendant, looking in on them. She gasped, and started to sit up as the light

got brighter around her. There was the sound of a key grating in a lock.

Barbara was kneeling at the side of the bed. Her robe was still open, and her

belly was huge. She took Evelyn's hands and held them tight.

"The biggest giveaway of all is childbirth," she whispered. The light wavered

for a moment and the metallic scraping and jiggling of the doorknob lost pitch,

growled and guttered like a turntable losing speed. Barbara took Evelyn's head

in her arms and pulled her down to her breasts. Evelyn closed her eyes and felt

the taut skin and the movement of something inside the woman. It got darker.

"Pain. Why should giving birth involve pain? Why should we so often die

reproducing ourselves? It doesn't feel right. I won't say it's illogical; it

doesn't feel right. My intuition tells me that it isn't so. It's not the way it

was meant to be. Do you want to know why we die in childbirth?"

"Yes Barbara, tell me that." She closed her eyes and nuzzled easily into the

warmth.

"It's the poison they inject into us." She gently rubbed Evelyn's hair as she

spoke. "The white stuff, the waste product. They tell us it's the stuff that

makes us pregnant, but that's a lie. It warps us, even those of us they do not

inhabit. It pollutes the womb, causes us to grow too large for the birth canal.

When it comes time for us to be born, girl and half-girl, we must come through a

passage that has been savaged by this poison. The result is pain, and sometimes

death."

"Ummm." It was very quiet in the room. Outside, the crickets were starting to

chirp. She opened her eyes once more, looked for the door and the man. She

couldn't find them. She saw a candle sitting on a wooden table. Was that a

fireplace in the other room?

"But it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't. Virgin birth is quite painless.

I know. I'll know again very soon. Do you remember now, Eve? Do you remember?"

"What? I..." She sat up a little, still holding to the comforting warmth of the

other woman. Where was the cell? Where was the concrete floor and barred window?

She felt her heart beating faster and began to struggle, but Barbara was strong.

She held her tight to her belly.

"Listen, Eve. Listen, it's happening."

Eve put her hand on the swollen belly and felt it move. Barbara shifted

slightly, reached down and cradled something wet and warm, something that moved

in her hand. She brought it up to the light. Virgin birth. A little girl, tiny,

only a pound or two, who didn't cry but looked around her in curiosity.

"Can I hold her?" she sniffed, and then the tears flowed over the little human.

There were other people crowding around, but she couldn't see them. She didn't

care. She was home.

"Are you feeling any better now?" Barbara asked. "Can you remember what

happened?"

"Only a little," Eve whispered. "I was... I remember it now. I thought I was...

it was awful. Oh, Barbara, it was terrible. I thought..."

"I know. But you're back. There's no need to be ashamed. It still happens to all

of us. We go crazy. We're programmed to go crazy, all of us in the infected

generation. But not our children. You relax and hold the baby, darling. You'll

forget it. It was a bad dream."

"But it was so real!"

"It was what you used to be. Now you're back with your friends, and we're

winning the struggle. We have to win; we've got the wombs. There's more of our

children every day."

Our children. Her own, and Barbara's and... and Karen's, yes, Karen. She looked

up and saw her old friend, smiling down at her. And Clara, and there was June,

and Laura. And over there with her children was Sacha. And... who was that?

It's...

"Hello, Mother. Do you feel better now?"

"Much better, dear. I'm all right. Barbara helped me through it. I hope it won't

happen again." She sniffed and wiped her eyes. She sat up, still cradling the

tiny baby. "What are you naming her, Barb?"

Barbara grinned, and for the last time Eve could see the ghostly outline of that

cell, the blue robe, Doctor Burroughs. It faded out forever.

"Let's call her Evelyn."