by Jerry
Kersch nodded with complaisance. “The blood reservoir, jocularly referred to as the ‘header-tank’ or ‘gristle-graft’ by many of my staff, was entirely my own innovation. Only the Mark III Mutilants have it so far, and it weighs less when full—with a half litre of blood—than a third of the average weight of the left arm that we usually amputate and discard. The unsatisfactory prone position can now be abandoned, the fuselage can be slenderized, and, of course, safety equipment is thrown overboard with the legs.”
I swayed. “N . . . no parachute?”
“A man fights best when the alternative is certain extinction. Safety devices tempt only the morally weak.”
“But . . . but this blood tank. It’s revolti . . .” I stopped myself in time, but Kersch seemed oblivious.
He was saying: “Yes, ah yes. Plastic gristle, to put it in the layman’s jargon, directly above the brain. When gs are applied, the blood drains from the upper parts of the body in an unmodified human; blood drains from the tank to the upper parts of the Mutilant’s body. It has a sealed screw cap of rigid P.V.C. at the top, and this can be removed for purposes of transfusion after heavy blood losses. We top them up, so to speak. The graft rather detracts from the subject’s appearance, but by then he is invariably beyond caring about such trivialities as personal attractiveness.”
Kersch laughed dryly. “That brings us to the more difficult aspect of human modification: the emotional complications that follow. Do you know,” he said, “that most subjects view modification not only with distaste, but with fear and horror—simply because it precludes sex relationship from their future activities? This emotion is so strong, stemming as it does from the philoprogenitive instinct necessary for racial or special preservation—and self-preservation is simply a projection of that—so strong, I repeat, that we found not a single true volunteer for the Mark IV modifications!”
“Didn’t you?” I muttered, weakly.
“No, simply because it involved a neuterisation of the sex hormones. And do you know how I obviated this mental resistance?”
I shook my head from side to side, side to side, side to side . . . The rushing noises of unconsciousness were descending upon me. I was about to faint, I told myself, and groped blindly for support.
Thinly, as though from a distant point within a vast and hollow cave, I heard Kersch reply to my headshaking. “By hypnosis, of course. In this way the subject is not actually forced to undergo the operations. He volunteers, under hypnotic pressure, and later feels no resentment against myself or the other surgeons. We tell him whom to resent.”
As I sagged back against the wall, Kersch lowered me gently to something—I don’t remember what—and the hopeless, sickly trembling of faintness gave way to a feeling of relief that I was past resistance and now the responsibility of another and more capable mind.
“This is where I am invaluable,” he was saying, gently. “The patient trusts me, and, I being a surgeon as well as a hypnotist, it is possible to maintain the subject in a state of submission throughout the whole of a series of major operations. When the trance effect is removed, and the patient sees for the first time what has been done to him, he sometimes dies of shock. We are reducing the mortality rate by more gradual de-trancing, as it were, and the subject is given more time to grasp the unpleasant truth and to comprehend the effect it must have upon his now reduced expectation of life. Naturally, he is appalled at what he learns. He is literally gruesome to behold. Every emotion turns to hatred and bitterness. Then we focus that hatred upon our enemies, de-sex the subject, store him in one of the crew-rooms in a drug-induced coma until such time as he is required for flying, and give him a number. It is really only military service taken a step further. The inoculations and drug tests, the blind obedience to unreasonable commands, the guinea-pig gas researchers, the suicidal duties—remember? That, my dear fellow, is as far as we had got two years ago. I expect you wonder how far we have got now!”
“Nghhh,” I said. His eyes fascinated me. “Nghh . . . now. . . nnnow?”
“Ah, now,” Kersch repeated. “Now we are about to produce the Mark XV Mutilant. It will be many stages beyond what you have seen today, and we anticipate for it complete freedom from blackout at over sixty gs. The thing—one can hardly give it human identity—will be in constant agony, I am afraid, as a result of the eighty-three surgical operations that must be performed upon it, and its carefully directed hatred will exceed in concentrated intensity any emotion ever before contained by a single, human mind. The operations involve removal of all redundant tissue and of unnecessary bone and muscle; the shortening and byepassing of arteries and veins. Digestive organs are discarded, and therapy, together with fluid injection, will replace pre-transmogrification methods of energy intake. I tell you, not only will the Mark XV Mutilant mark the beginning of a new, surgically evolved race, but he will be scarcely recognisable as a humanoid at all.”
His eyes ablaze now with fanaticism, Kersch could hardly control the twitching of his face. “We are about to begin on him now,” he whispered, and as the full import of his words permeated my numbed senses I realised that I had left the struggle too late. I felt my stomach-muscles collapse with fear, felt the blood pound within my temples. I wanted to retch up my guts in the cold, fresh air. I wanted to lie in the soft grass and see a pastel sky above me. Instead, I saw his eyes burning through the red haze into my retreating mind; probing, feeling, directing; expanding, multiplying . . .
I felt myself ascending. Up, up through the dark roots of cumulus clouds; up through the tendrils of swirling mist and grey-white dampness; up, up, up through lessening strata of semi-darkness and suddenly, unexpectedly, into an area of intense and blinding light. I felt the blast of heat, heard the roar. Struggling to release myself from the ejector seat, I tore with frantic, searching hands at its frame to which I was strapped. Blood ran in my mouth and I passed out again . . . I tried to shut off the power before the turbines burst. The control lever was gone but the machine continued to strain upwards, accelerating at a terrifying pace, and I waited with every nerve taut for the sudden explosion of the impellors. The machine seemed to roll on its back and begin to tumble into the dark void below. Back into the abyss; the hiatus of experiences remembered only by the dead.
Again she climbed. I felt for the control column. It was no longer there. “Gone!” I shouted, and through the cotton-wool layers of unconsciousness I heard a voice answer. My eyes fought for vision. My agony-racked body strived for the energy to lift eyelids sealed with blood. Merciless pain; the burning from within—wasn’t that the effect of radioactivity? My eyes flickered open, and instead of the blue-white sky they saw the opalescent glow of a hospital ceiling and the face of an old man looking impassively down.
“Doc,” I whispered. “D . . . did I faint?”
The face registered no concern and made no reply.
“I . . . I was dreaming.
Flying, and the stick got shot away.” I felt the beginnings of relief—then memory flooded back and I struggled to arise. My limbs were strapped at my sides. Strapped! I tried to see if they were strapped—or missing. “Did I faint? Is it a nightmare, tell me?”
Doc Lestrange shook his head. “You must relax until Doctor Kersch is ready for you . . .”
“Kersch!” I interrupted. “You don’t mean . . . you can’t. . .”
The Doctor nodded slowly. “These things are as necessary as any other form of military preparedness or medical research. As necessary as vivisection. Relax, you are almost ready for the brain-wash and final hypnosis.”
I struggled madly. “Brainwash! You haven’t made me . . .”
The Doctor nodded slowly, and I thought I saw him brush aside a threatening human emotion that was softening his features.
“Relax,” he ordered in a firm and impersonal voice. “Do not attempt to look beneath the screen until you are told to do so. You are receiving high-frequency radio therapy and in a matter of hours your skin will have healed over.
You will be given massage immediately prior to hypnosis. After that the pain will diminish considerably. Hail progress!”
“For God’s sake tell me—what am I? Am I . .?”
The Doctor nodded. “Mark XV,” he said.
NO MORE THE STARS
Irving E. Cox, Jr.
ETERNALLY, MAN SEEKS IN THE STARS THE THING HE COULD FIND AT HOME.
IN AN HOUR—as soon as it was dark—they would raid the chart vault.
The decision was made; the waiting over. Lawson repeated that to himself as he stood with the late afternoon crowd on the slow-moving outer band of the slide-walk. Two hours more and they would be gone.
Escape! They would escape from this regimentation and mediocrity.
Lawson grinned at the vacuous faces of the throng. He was looking upon the farce called civilization for the last time. It was their world, this thing he loathed. Let them have it, the nameless mass of happy nonentities; let them live with it and die with it. Tomorrow he would be free.
And then Adam Endicott slipped out of a cross-walk and caught desperately at Lawson’s sleeve. “The police raided the cellar, Lawson!”
The dream began to die. “When?” Lawson whispered.
“Twenty minutes ago.”
“How many—?”
“Nearly all of us. I broke away and ran to warn you. Madge hadn’t come yet.”
“We’ll have to find her and get out of the city fast. There’s still a chance—”
“For only three of us?” Endicott laughed sourly.
“One man can pilot a ship.”
Lawson and Endicott took the high-speed slide-walk from the clanging, cluttered industrial area to the suburbs on the outskirts. Tall apartment spires were set in green parks. The glass-like walls of the buildings reflected the red of the dying sun. Hordes of noisy children crammed the playgrounds beside the apartments, and the park walks were filled with brown-uniformed workers returning from the five-hour afternoon shift in the city factories.
Lawson and Endicott cut across the lawn toward the block-three buildings where Madge Brown, as an unmarried woman, was granted a single apartment.
“She may not be here,” Endicott said. “I tried to get her on the teleview right after the raid and I couldn’t.”
“Then we’ll wait,” Lawson answered. Madge Brown meant as much to him as his dream of escape. He knew that; yet it was a strange infatuation, for until four weeks ago he had not known her. Madge had been the last to join the conspiracy.
“It was an inside job,” Endicott told him grimly.
“One of us blew the story to the police?”
“It’s obvious. They knew just how to find the cellar; they knew exactly when we were going to be there.” Lawson fingered his lip thoughtfully. “I suppose they’d have had me, too, if I hadn’t been held up waiting for the slide-walk out of the plant.”
“That’s how I got away—because I was late.”
“But we all believed in the same thing, Endicott. For two years we’ve been planning this together!”
“Most of us, Lawson.”
“You don’t mean—?” Lawson stopped and faced Endicott with clenched fists. “Not Madge.”
“She’s the only one who didn’t show up at the cellar.”
“You’re wrong! She hated this world as much as we do.”
“So she said.” Endicott licked his lips. “I know how you feel, Lawson. Sometimes the truth hurts. What do we really know about her? Madge Brown—just a dame you picked up one night in a recreation block. We took her in on your say-so. But who is she? Where’d she come from?”
Suddenly the words sang in Lawson’s soul with the tinny jangle of hysteria. It was more than he could take, to lose his faith in Madge and the dream of escape simultaneously. His fist shot out, lashing Endicott’s jaw. Lawson turned and ran blindly toward the walk in front of the block-three apartments.
From the lobby he rang her apartment, but the teleview remained blank. While he waited in the booth, he heard the distant cry of a police siren. Fear clutched at his mind. How could the police have traced him here so soon?
Considering the cumbersome inefficiency of this world it was impossible. There would have been a dozen bureaucratic forms to fill out first. Endicott must have called the police. It was Endicott, then, who had betrayed the conspiracy, not Madge.
Lawson got the picture, then—or thought he did. Only Lawson and Madge had escaped the police raid, and Endicott was using Lawson to lead him to Madge, since no record of addresses had been kept. Clearly, Endicott had to present the police with a clean sweep before he was paid the Judas fee.
Lawson left the apartment lobby. He had more chance to evade the police in the park outside. Across the lawn beyond the playground he saw the police van, its black panels turned to fire in the sunset light. Two gray-uniformed officers, armed with neuro guns, were pushing Adam Endicott into the cage.
Lawson darted into the shrubs that sheltered the walk. He stood watching the arrest, helpless with impotent hatred. Lawson was unarmed and superstitiously awed by the dreaded neuro guns. No citizen could legally possess a weapon—and the handful which the conspiracy had managed to acquire had been lost in the raid on the cellar. There was literally nothing Lawson could do to save Endicott. The van doors banged shut. Now Lawson knew beyond any possibility of doubt that it was not Endicott who had sold out to the police. And that left only Madge.
Only Madge! Lawson saw the police officers help her out of the cab. They walked with her to the apartment building. As they passed the shrub where Lawson was hidden, he heard her voice distinctly.
“. . . and there’s only one more-jimmy Lawson. He’ll show up at my apartment, I think. I’ll bring him in myself.”
The full weight of the truth crushed Lawson’s soul with a kind of numbing fury. For a moment he felt nothing. He saw Madge enter the lobby and, by instinct, he crept away across the lawn. When he came to a walk, he began to run. He ran without direction or destination until his lungs were screaming for relief and pinpoints of fire hung before his eyes.
He dropped panting on the grass. He had come to the edge of the parkland and the suburban area of the city. Below him, beyond the fringe of trees, were the bright lights and the crowded slide-walks of the industrial area. On the roof of a factory building he saw a faded campaign poster, forgotten for almost two years. It was tattered, but still the grinning face of Kim Rennig was visible in the smoke-blue reflection of city lights.
Rennig, Madge and the conspiracy: they swam together in a nightmare, without ending and without hope. From the deep well of his bitterness, Lawson abruptly remembered the beginning of his dream of escape.
At first the dream was Lawson’s alone. But it was by no means original with him. As recently as forty years ago the sleek sky cruisers had still soared up from the space port beyond the city. It was only after the gray-uniformed dictatorship had been clamped tight on the world that the government had rigidly supervised interstellar flight, and finally prohibited it entirely.
The government claimed that the population had been seriously depleted by colonization flights which had robbed each generation of its strongest, its most ambitious and intelligent men and women. But Lawson never accepted that explanation. The real truth, as he saw it, was that the colonization of the infinite empty worlds of the universe presented a constant invitation to freedom to the dissatisfied and the oppressed. The gray dictatorship could not really control the home world so long as any man with a smattering of initiative could escape. Consequently, all possibility of interstellar flight had to be cut off.
That happened with the election of Kim Rennig to the planetary presidency two years ago. It was not that Rennig—a mild-mannered, emotionless man—was in any way personally responsible. He simply represented the ultimate end of a trend, and he had been elected by an overwhelming vote. The opposition, speaking vigorously for freedom, for man’s right to colonize where he chose, to grow as much as he dared, had not polled quite f
ive per cent of the ballots.
“How can people be such fools?” Lawson demanded when the final election returns flashed on the wall screen in the factory where he worked.
“Because we’re afraid.” The answer came from one of the blankfaced nonentities in the throng: the slight, stooped man Lawson later knew as Adam Endicott. As the crowd broke up and the workers went back to their machines, Endicott added, “The average man is always disturbed by change, and the colonies represent an unknown constant; of change. We don’t know where they are or what worlds they may be building. They’re cut off from us and that makes us feel we’ve lost a part of ourselves.”
“Don’t tell me,” Lawson sneered, “that these idiots who elected Rennig went through that involved reasoning.”
“Of course not. They do it by instinct.”
“And destroy freedom by default!”
“Freedom is an abstract. It means nothing to most of us.”
“You’re taking this as if it had nothing to do with you personally.”
“What else can I do? It’s impossible to escape now.”
“Not impossible,” Lawson replied slowly. “We still have the power of cosmic energy and the sky ships. All we need is initiative and—”
“And a star chart,” Endicott intervened dryly. “When you figure out how to break into the government vaults, let me know.”
Lawson’s dream of escape began with that conversation. For days on end he mulled over the factors of the problem. No legal prohibition of interstellar flight could have been effective except that all galactic charts were possessed by the government and the science of astronomy had been a bootleg subject for a quarter of a century. There were thousands of sky ships lying abandoned on deserted fields; anyone with a small outlay of funds could have built one.