Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell Page A

seat.
    “The power varies. Ilga Kirps was a Viton hybrid. Extra-sensory perception is a Viton trait.”
    “What!” His fingers gnawing at the arms of his chair, Graham sat upright.
    “It is a Viton faculty,” repeated Beach, calmly. “Ilga Kirps was the fairly successful result of a Viton experiment. Your own case was less fruitful, perhaps because your operation was prenatal.”
    “Prenatal? By God, d’you mean—?”
    “I’ve outgrown the age of saying what I don’t mean,” Beach assured. “When I say prenatal, I mean just that! Further, I say that had we never been cursed with these luminosities, we should not also be cursed today with most of our complications in childbirth. When someone suffers, it’s not the unfortunate accident it’s believed to be! Why, Graham, I now accept the possibility of a phenomenon which all my life I’ve rejected as patently absurd, namely, that of virgin births. I accept that there may have been times when helpless, unsuspecting subjects have been artificially inseminated. The Vitons are continually meddling, experimenting, practising their super-surgery on their cosmic cattle!”
    “But why, why?”
    “To see whether it is possible to endow human beings with Viton abilities.” There was silence for a moment, then Beach added, dryly, “Why do men teach seals to juggle with balls, teach parrots to curse, monkeys to smoke cigarettes and ride bicycles? Why do they try to breed talking dogs, train elephants to perform absurd tricks?”
    “I see the parallel,” Graham acknowledged, morbidly.
    “I have here a thousand or more clippings telling about people mysteriously endowed with inhuman powers, suffering from abnormal or supernormal defects, giving birth to atrocious monstrosities which promptly have been strangled or hidden forever from human sight. Others who have endured inexplicable experiences, unnatural fates. Remember the case of Daniel Dunglass Home, the man who floated from a first-floor window before the astounded eyes of several prominent and trustworthy witnesses? His was a thoroughly authentic case of a person possessing the power of levitation—the Viton method of locomotion! You should read a book called Hey-Day of A Wizard. It tells all about Home. He had other weird powers as well. But he was no wizard. He was a Vitonesque-humanoid!”
    “Good heavens!”
    “Then there was the case of Kaspar Hauser, the man from nowhere,” Beach went imperturbably on. “Nothing comes out of a vacuum, and Hauser had an origin like anything else. Probably his was in a Viton laboratory. That, too, may have been the eerie destination of Benjamin Bathurst, British ambassador extraordinary to Vienna, who, on November 25, 1809, walked around the heads of a couple of horses—and vanished forever.”
    “I don’t quite see the connection,” Graham protested. “Why the devil should these super-creatures make people disappear?”
    Beach’s grin was cold and hard in the darkness. “Why do medical students make stray cats disappear? From what wondering, puzzled pond vanishes the frogs that later are to be dissected? Who snitches a pauper’s body from the morgue when the viscera runs out a mile farther down the street?”
    “Ugh!” said Graham, with frank distaste.
    “Disappearances are commonplace. For example, what happened to the crew of the Marie Celeste? Or the crew of the Rosalie? Were they suitable frogs snatched from a convenient pond? What happened to the Waratah? Did that man who, at the last moment, refused to sail on the Waratah have extra-sensory perception, or was he instinctively warned off because he was an unsuitable frog? What makes one man suitable, another not? Does the former live in continual peril; the latter enjoy lifelong safety? Is it possible that some peculiar, unidentifiable difference in our mutual make-ups means that I am marked for death while you remain untouchable?”
    “That’s something only time will show.”
    “Time!” spat Beach,