Mr. Adam by Pat Frank Read Free Book Online Page A

don’t sound completely unreasonable. At least they’re no more unreasonable than what has already happened to us.”
    â€œPoor Adam!”
    â€œThat isn’t all. There’s a battle going on between Congress and an Inter-Departmental Committee as to who will decide policy on Adam. And that isn’t all, either, because there is a quite powerful group which feels that the question of Adam is international, rather than national, and should be turned over to the United Nations.”
    â€œQuite a story, wasn’t it,” I mentioned, hinting at a bonus.
    J.C. got that faraway look in his eyes, staring out over the masonry filled with pride that rises from the rock of Manhattan. “Quite a little fuss,” he said. “We are indeed blind and naive if we believe that in this universe we will find living, feeling, happy, hurting, thinking creatures on this tiny sphere alone—this speck of an earth revolving around a dim star we call the sun, which is not even part of a constellation.
    â€œIt is as if an ant heap had been stamped down, and all the ants within cried that the world had come to an end.”
    Sometimes J.C. gave me the shivers.

CHAPTER 4
    O n 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 theside 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:
    â€œThis 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. ”
    â€œIn this weather?” Sam demanded.
    â€œThe horses,” I pointed out, “are not running up the Avenue of the Americas.”
    â€œThat 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?”
    â€œWho do you mean by they?”
    â€œThem bureaucrats.”
    â€œWhat,” I inquired, “would you have them do?”
    â€œThe missus keeps pestering me,” said Sam. “She believes in A.I.” A.I. had become the popular abbreviation for artificial insemination.
    â€œWell, there’s bound to be a decision soon,” I assured him.
    â€œThere 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