by Anthology
But the other had been scrutinizing Wood. “College man, ain’t you?” he asked as Wood trudged away from the employment office.
Wood paused and ran his hand over his stubbled face. Dirty cuffs stood away from his fringing sleeves. He knew that his hair curled long behind his ears. “Does it still show?” he asked bitterly.
“You bet. You can spot a college man a mile away.”
Wood’s mouth twisted. “Glad to hear that. It must be an inner light shining through the rags.”
“You’re a sucker, coming down here with an education. Down here they want poor slobs who don’t know any better . . . guys like me, with big muscles and small brains.”
Wood looked up at him sharply. He was too well dressed and alert to have prowled the agencies for any length of time. He might have just lost his job; perhaps he was looking for company. But Wood had met his kind before. He had the hard eyes of the wolf who preyed on the jobless.
“Listen,” Wood said coldly, “I haven’t a thing you’d want.
I’m down to thirty cents. Excuse me while I sneak my books and toothbrush out of my room before the super snatches them.”
The other did not recoil or protest virtuously. “I ain’t blind,” he said quietly. “I can see you’re down and out.”
“Then what do you want?” Wood snapped ill-temperedly. “Don’t tell me you want a threadbare but filthy college man for company——”
His unwelcome friend made a gesture of annoyance. “Cut out the mad-dog act. I was turned down on a job today because I ain’t a college man. Seventy-five a month, room and board, doctor’s assistant. But I got the air because I ain’t a grad.”
“You’ve got my sympathy,” Wood said, turning away.
The other caught up with him. “You’re a college grad. Do j you want the job? It’ll cost you your first week’s pay . . . my cut, see?”
“I don’t know anything about medicine. I was a code expert in a stock-broker’s office before people stopped having enough money for investments. Want any codes deciphered? That’s the best I can do.”
He grew irritated when the stranger stubbornly matched his dejected shuffle.
“You don’t have to know anything about medicine. Long as you got a degree, a few muscles and a brain, that’s all the doc wants.”
Wood stopped short and wheeled.
“Is that on the level?”
“Sure. But I don’t want to take a deadhead up there and get turned down. I got to ask you the questions they asked me.”
In face of a prospective job, Wood’s caution ebbed away. He felt the three dimes in his pocket. They were exceedingly slim and unprotective. They meant two hamburgers and two cups of coffee, or a bed in some filthy hotel dormitory. Two thin meals and sleeping in the wet March air; or shelter for a night and no food——
“Shoot!” he said deliberately.
“Any relatives?”
“Some fifth cousins in Maine.”
“Friends?”
“None who would recognize me now.” He searched the stranger’s face. “What’s this all about? What have my friends or relatives got to do——”
“Nothing,” the other said hastily. “Only you’ll have to travel a little. The doc wouldn’t want a wife dragging along, or have you break up your work by writing letters. See?”
Wood didn’t see. It was a singularly lame explanation; but he was concentrating on the seventy-five a month, room and board—food.
“Who’s the doctor?” he asked.
“I ain’t dumb.” The other smiled humorlessly. “You’ll go there with me and get the doc to hand over my cut.”
Wood crossed to Eighth Avenue with the stranger. Sitting in the subway, he kept his eyes from meeting casual, disinterested glances. He pulled his feet out of the aisle, against the base of the seat, to hide the loose, flapping right sole. His hands were cracked and scaly, with tenacious dirt deeply embedded. Bitter, defeated, with the appearance of a mature waif. What a chance there was of being hired! But at least the stranger had risked a nickel on his fare.
Wood followed him out at 103rd Street and Central Park West; they climbed the hill to Manhattan Avenue and headed several blocks downtown. The other ran briskly up the stoop of an old house. Wood climbed the steps more slowly. He checked an urge to run away, but he experienced in advance the sinking feeling of being turned away from a job. If he could only have his hair cut, his suit pressed, his shoes mended! But what was the use of thinking about that? It would cost a couple of dollars. And nothing could be done about his ragged hems.
“Come on!” the stranger called.
Wood tensed his back and stood looking at the house while the other brusquely rang the doorbell. There were three floors and no card above the bell, no doctor’s white glass sign in the darkly curtained windows. From the outside it could have been a neglected boardinghouse.
The door opened. A man of his own age, about middle height, but considerably overweight, blocked the entrance. He wore a white laboratory apron. Incongruous in his pale, soft face, his nimble eyes were harsh.
“Back again?” he asked impatiently.
“It’s not for me this time,” Wood’s persistent friend said. “I got a college grad.”
Wood drew back in humiliation when the fat man’s keen glance passed over his wrinkled, frayed suit and stopped distastefully at the long hair blowing wildly around his hungry, unshaven face. There—he could see it coming: “Can’t use him.”
But the fat man pushed back a beautiful collie with his leg and held the door wide. Astounded, Wood followed his acquaintance into the narrow hall. To give an impression of friendliness, he stooped and ruffled the dog’s ears. The fat man led them into a bare front room.
“What’s your name?” he asked indifferently.
Wood’s answer stuck in his throat. He coughed to clear it. “Wood,” he replied.
“Any relatives?” Wood shook his head.
“Friends?”
“Not any more.”
“What kind of degree?”
“Science, Columbia, 1925.”
The fat man’s expression did not change. He reached into his left pocket and brought out a wallet. “What arrangement did you make with this man?”
“He’s to get my first week’s salary.” Silently, Wood observed the transfer of several green bills; he looked at them hungrily, pathetically. “May I wash up and take a shave, doctor?” he asked.
“I’m not the doctor,” the fat man answered. “My name is Clarence, without a mister in front of it.” He turned swiftly to the sharp stranger. “What are you hanging around for?” Wood’s friend backed to the door. “Well, so long,” he said. “Good break for both of us, eh, Wood?”
Wood smiled and nodded happily. The trace of irony in the stranger’s hard voice escaped him entirely.
“I’ll take you upstairs to your room,” Clarence said when Wood’s business partner had left. “I think there’s a razor there.”
They went out into the dark hall, the collie close behind them. An unshaded light bulb hung on a single wire above a gate-leg table. On the wall behind the table an oval, gilt mirror gave back Wood’s hairy, unkempt image. A worn carpet covered the floor to a door cutting off the rear of the house, and narrow stairs climbed in a swift spiral to the next story. It was cheerless and neglected, but Wood’s conception of luxury had become less exacting.
“Wait here while I make a telephone call,” Clarence said. He closed the door behind him in a room opposite the stairs. Wood fondled the friendly collie. Through the panel he heard Clarence’s voice, natural and unlowered.
“Hello, Moss? . . . Pinero brought back a man. All his answers are all right . . . Columbia, 1925 . . . Not a cent, judging from his appearance . . . Call Talbot? For when? . . . O.K. . . . You’ll get back as soon as you get through with the board? . . . O.K. . . . Well, what’s the difference? You got all you wanted from them, anyhow.”
Wood heard the receiver’s click as it was replaced an
d taken off again. Moss? That was the head of Memorial Hospital—the great surgeon. But the article about the catatonics hinted something about his removal from the hospital.
“Hello, Talbot?” Clarence was saying. “Come around at noon tomorrow. Moss says everything’ll be ready then . . . O.K., don’t get excited. This is positively the last one! . . . Don’t worry. Nothing can go wrong.”
Talbot’s name sounded familiar to Wood. It might have been the Talbot that the Morning Post had written about—the seventy-six-year-old philanthropist. He probably wanted Moss to operate on him. Well, it was none of his business.
When Clarence joined him in the dark hall, Wood thought only of his seventy-five a month, room and board; but more than that, he had a job! A few weeks of decent food and a chance to get some new clothes, and he would soon get rid of his defeatism.
He even forgot his wonder at the lack of shingles and waiting-room signs that a doctor’s house usually had. He could only think of his neat room on the third floor, overlooking a bright back yard. And a shave——
Dr. Moss replaced the telephone with calm deliberation. Striding through the white hospital corridor to the elevator, he was conscious of curious stares. His pink, scrupulously shaven, clean-scrubbed face gave no answer to their questioning eyes. In the elevator he stood with his hands thrust casually into his pockets. The operator did not dare to look at him or speak.
Moss gathered his hat and coat. The space around the reception desk seemed more crowded than usual, with men who had the penetrating look of reporters. He walked swiftly past.
A tall, astoundingly thin man, his stare fixed predatorily on Moss, headed the wedge of reporters that swarmed after Moss.
“You can’t leave without a statement to the press, doc!” he said.
“I find it very easy to do,” Moss taunted without stopping.
He stood on the curb with his back turned coldly on the reporters and unhurriedly flagged a taxi.
“Well, at least you can tell us whether you’re still director of the hospital,” the tall reporter said.
“Ask the board of trustees.”
“Then how about a theory on the catatonics?”
“Ask the catatonics.” The cab pulled up opposite Moss. Deliberately he opened the door and stepped in. As he rode away, he heard the thin man exclaim: “What a cold, clammy reptile!”
He did not look back to enjoy their discomfiture. In spite of his calm demeanor, he did not feel too easy himself. The man on the Morning Post, Gilroy or whatever his name was, had written a sensational article on the abandoned catatonics, and even went so far as to claim they were not catatonics. He had had all he could do to keep from being involved in the conflicting riot of theory. Talbot owned a large interest in the paper. He must be told to strangle the articles, although by now all the papers were taking up the cry.
It was a clever piece of work, detecting the fact that the victims weren’t suffering from catatonia at all. But the Morning Post reporter had cut himself a man-size job in trying to understand how three men with general paralysis could be abandoned without a trace of where they had come from, and what connection the incisions had on their condition. Only recently had Moss himself solved it.
The cab crossed to Seventh Avenue and headed uptown.
The trace of his parting smile of mockery vanished. His mobile mouth whitened, tight-lipped and grim. Where was he to get money from now? He had milked the hospital funds to a frightening debt, and it had not been enough. Like a bottomless maw, his researches could drain a dozen funds.
If he could convince Talbot, prove to him that his failures had not really been failures, that this time he would not slip up——
But Talbot was a tough nut to crack. Not a cent was coming out of his miserly pocket until Moss completely convinced him that he was past the experimental stage. This time there would be no failure!
At Moss’s street, the cab stopped and the surgeon sprang out lightly. He ran up the steps confidently, looking neither to the left nor to the right, though it was a fine day with a warm yellow sun, and between the two lines of old houses Central Park could be seen budding greenly.
He opened the door and strode almost impatiently into the narrow, dark hall, ignoring the friendly collie that bounded out to greet him.
“Clarence!” he called out. “Get your new assistant down. I’m not even going to wait for a meal.” He threw off his hat, coat and jacket, hanging them up carelessly on a hook near the mirror.
“Hey, Wood!” Clarence shouted up the stairs. “Are you finished?”
They heard a light, eager step race down from the third floor.
“Clarence, my boy,” Moss said in a low, impetuous voice, “I know what the trouble was. We didn’t really fail at all. I’ll show you . . . we’ll follow exactly the same technique!”
“Then why didn’t it seem to work before?”
Wood’s feet came into view between the rails on the second floor. “You’ll understand as soon as it’s finished,” Moss whispered hastily, and then Wood joined them.
Even the short time that Wood had been employed was enough to transform him. He had lost the defeatist feeling of being useless human flotsam. He was shaved and washed, but that did not account for his kindled eyes.
“Wood . . . Dr. Moss,” Clarence said perfunctorily.
Wood choked out an incoherent speech that was meant to inform them that he was happy, though he didn’t know anything about medicine.
“You don’t have to,” Moss replied silkily. “We’ll teach you more about medicine than most surgeons learn in a lifetime.”
It could have meant anything or nothing. Wood made no attempt to understand the meaning of the words. It was the hint of withdrawn savagery in the low voice that puzzled him. It seemed a very peculiar way of talking to a man who had been hired to move apparatus and do nothing but the most ordinary routine work.
He followed them silently into a shining, tiled operating room. He felt less comfortable than he had in his room; but when he dismissed Moss’s tones as a characteristically sarcastic manner of speech, hinting more than it contained in reality, his eagerness returned. While Moss scrubbed his hands and arms in a deep basin, Wood gazed around.
In the center of the room an operating table stood, with a clean sheet clamped unwrinkled over it. Above the table five shadowless light globes branched. It was a compact room. Even Wood saw how close everything lay to the doctor’s hand—trays of tampons, swabs and clamps, and a sterilizing instrument chest that gave off puffs of steam.
“We do a lot of surgical experimenting,” Moss said. “Most of your work’ll be handling the anaesthetic. Show him how to do it, Clarence.”
Wood observed intently. It appeared simple—cut-ins and shut-offs for cyclopropane, helium and oxygen; watch the dials for overrich mixture; keep your eye on the bellows and water filter——
Trained anaesthetists, he knew, tested their mixture by taking a few sniffs. At Clarence’s suggestion he sniffed briefly at the whispering cone. He didn’t know cyclopropane—so lightning-fast that experienced anaesthetists are sometimes caught by it——
Wood lay on the floor with his arms and legs sticking up into the air. When he tried to straighten them, he rolled over on his side. Still they projected stiffly. He was dizzy with the anaesthetic. Something that felt like surgical plaster pulled on a sensitive spot on the back of his neck.
The room was dark, its green shades pulled down against the outer day. Somewhere above him and toward the end of the room, he heard painful breathing. Before he could raise himself to investigate, he caught the multiple tread of steps ascending and approaching the door. He drew back defensively.
The door flung open. Light flared up in the room. Wood sprang to his feet—and found he could not stand erect. He dropped back to a crawling position, facing the men who watched him with cold interest.
“He tried to stand up,” the old man stated.
“What’d you think I’d do?” Wood snap
ped. His voice was a confused, snarling growl without words. Baffled and raging, he glared up at them.
“Cover him, Clarence,” Moss said. “I’ll look at the other one.”
Wood turned his head from the threatening muzzle of the gun aimed at him, and saw the doctor lift the man on the bed. Clarence backed to the window and raised the shade. Strong noonlight roused the man. His profile was turned to Wood.
His eyes fastened blankly on Moss’s scrubbed pink face, never leaving it. Behind his ears curled long, wild hair.
“There you are, Talbot,” Moss said to the old man. “He’s sound.”
“Take him out of bed and let’s see him act like you said he would.” The old man jittered anxiously on his cane.
Moss pulled the man’s legs to the edge of the bed and raised him heavily to his feet. For a short time he stood without aid; then all at once he collapsed to his hands and knees. He stared full at Wood.
It took Wood a minute of startled bewilderment to recognize the face. He had seen it every day of his life, but never so detachedly. The eyes were blank and round, the facial muscles relaxed, idiotic.
But it was his own face——
Panic exploded in him. He gaped down at as much of himself as he could see. Two hairy legs stemmed from his shoulders, and a dog’s forepaws rested firmly on the floor.
He stumbled uncertainly toward Moss. “What did you do to me?” he shouted. It came out in an animal howl. The doctor motioned the others to the door and backed away warily.
Wood felt his lips draw back tightly over his fangs. Clarence and Talbot were in the hall. Moss stood alertly in the doorway, his hand on the knob. He watched Wood closely, his eyes glacial and unmoved. When Wood sprang, he slammed the door, and Wood’s shoulder crashed against it.
“He knows what happened,” Moss’s voice came through the panel.