It was morning, the sun was streaming in the window brightly and the
fresh morning air of Spring stirred the curtains gently. It was quite
warm and the smell that came in from the outside was alive with newborn
greenery. It felt good just to be alive.
The hanging bottles and festoons of rubber hose were gone. The crude
manipulators had been stowed somewhere and the bottles of medicine and
stuff were missing from the bureau. There wasn't even a thermometer in a
glass anywhere within the range of my vision, and frankly I was so glad
to be alive again that I did not see any point to digging through the
joint with my perception to find the location of the medical junk.
Instead, I just wanted to get up and run.
I did take a swing at the clothes closet and found my stuff. Then I took
a mild pass at the house, located the bathroom and also assured myself
that no one was likely to interrupt me.
I was going to shave and shower and dress and go downstairs. I was just
shrugging myself up and out of bed when Nurse Farrow came bustling up
the stairs and into the room with no preamble.
"Hi!" I greeted her. "I was going to--"
"Surprise us," she said quickly. "I know. So I came up to see that you
don't get into trouble."
"Trouble?" I asked, pausing on the edge of the bed.
"You're a Mekstrom, Steve," she told me unnecessarily. Then she caught
my thought and went on: "It's necessary to remind you. You have to learn
how to control your strength, Steve."
I flexed my arms. They didn't feel any different. I pinched my muscle
with my other hand and it pinched just as it always had. I took a deep
breath and the air went in pleasantly and come out again.
"I don't feel any different," I told her.
She smiled and handed me a common wooden lead pencil. "Write your name,"
she directed.
"Think I'll have to learn all over?" I grinned. I took the pencil, put
my fist down on the top of the bureau above a pad of paper and chuckled
at Farrow. "Now, let's see, my first initial is the letter 'S' made by
starting at the top and coming around in a sweeping, graceful curve like
this--"
It didn't come around in any curve. As the lead point hit the paper it
bore down in, flicked off the tip, and then crunched down, breaking off
the point and splintering the thin, whittled wood for about an eighth of
an inch. The fact that I could not control it bothered me inside and I
instinctively clutched at the shaft of the pencil. It cracked in three
places in my hand; the top end with the eraser fell down over my wrist
to the bureau top and rolled in a rapid rattle to the edge where it fell
to the floor.
"See?" asked Farrow softly.
"But--?" I blundered uncertainly.
"Steve, your muscles and your nervous system have been stepped up
proportionately. You've got to re-learn the coordination between the
muscle-stimulus and the feedback information from the work you are
doing."
I began to see what she meant. I remembered long years ago at school,
when we'd been studying some of the new alloys and there had been a
sample of a magnesium-lithium-something alloy that was machined into a
smooth cylinder about four inches in diameter and a foot long. It looked
like hard steel. People who picked it up for the first time invariably
braced their muscles and set both hands on it. But it was so light that
their initial effort almost tossed the bar through the ceiling, and even
long after we all knew, it was hard not to attack the bar without using
the experience of our mind and sense that told us that any bar of metal
_that_ big had to be _that_ heavy.
I went to a chair. Farrow said, "Be careful," and I was. But it was no
trick at all to take the chair by one leg at the bottom and lift it chin
high.
"Now, go take your shower," she told me. "But Steve, please be careful
of the plumbing. You can twist off the faucet handles, you know."
I nodded and turned to her, holding out a hand. "Farrow, you're a
brick!"
She took my hand. It was not steel hard. It was warm and firm and
pleasant. It was--holding hands with a woman.
Farrow stepped back. "One thing you'll have to remember," she said
cheerfully, "is only to mix with your own kind from now on. Now go get
that shower and shave. I'll be getting breakfast."
Showering was not hard and I remembered not to twist off the water-tap
handles. Shaving was easy although I had to change razor blades three
times in the process. I broke all the teeth out of the comb because it
was never intended to be pulled through a thicket of piano wire.
Getting dressed was something else. I caught my heel in one trouser leg
and shredded the cloth. I broke the buckle on my belt. My shoelaces went
like parting a length of wet spaghetti. The button on the top of my
shirt pinched off and when I gave that final jerk to my necktie it
pulled the knot down into something about the size of a pea.
Breakfast was very pleasant, although I bent the fork tines spearing a
rasher of bacon and removed the handle of my coffee cup without half
trying. After breakfast I discovered that I could not remove a cigarette
from the package without pinching the end down flat, and after I
succeeded in getting one into my mouth by treating both smoke and match
as if they were made of tissue paper, my first drag on the smoke lit a
howling furnace-fire on the end that consumed half of the cigarette in
the first puff.
"You're going to take some school before you are fit to walk among
normal people, Steve," said Gloria with amused interest.
"You're informing me?" I asked with some dismay, eyeing the wreckage
left in my wake. Compared to the New Steve Cornell, the famous bull in
the china shop was Gentle Ferdinand. I picked up the cigarette package
again; it squoze down even though I tried to treat it gentle; I felt
like Lenny, pinching the head off of the mouse. I also felt about as
much of a bumbling idiot as Lenny, too.
My re-education went on before, through, and after breakfast. I
manhandled old books from the attic. I shredded newspapers. I ruined
some more lead pencils and finally broke the pencil sharpener to boot. I
put an elbow through the middle panel of the kitchen door without even
feeling it and then managed to twist off the door knob. Generally
operating like a one-man army of vandals, I laid waste to the Farrow
home.
Having thus ruined a nice house, Gloria decided to try my strength on
her car. I was much too fast and too hard on the brakes, which of course
was not too bad because my foot was also too insensitive on the
go-pedal. We took off like a rocket being launched and then I tromped on
the brakes (Bending the pedal) which brought us down sharp like hitting
a haystack. This allowed our heads to catch up with the rest of us; I'm
sure that if we'd been normal-bodied human beings we'd have had our
spines snapped. Eventually I learned that everything had to be handled
as if it were tissue paper, and gradually re-adjusted my reflexes to
take proper cognizance of the feedback data according to my new body.
We returned home after a hectic twenty miles of roadwork and I broke the
glass as I slammed the car door.
"It's going to take time," I admitted with some reluctance.
"It always does," smiled Farrow as cheerfully as if I hadn't ruined
their possessions.
"I don't know how I'm going to face your folks."