by Jerry
She was still in the same position when, days later, somebody sat heavily down beside her. “Myri. You must know who this is. Open your eyes, Myri. Come out of there.”
After he had said this, in the same gentle voice, some hundreds of times, she did open her eyes a little. She was in a long, high room, and near her was a fat man with a pale skin. He reminded her of something to do with space and thinking. She screwed her eyes shut.
“Myri. I know you remember me. Open your eyes again.” She kept them shut while he wait on talking.
“Open your eyes. Straighten your body.”
She did not move.
“Straighten your body, Myri. I love you.”
Slowly her feet crept down the bed and her head lifted.
PASSAGE TO MALISH
Theodore L. Thomas
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But what happens when a man becomes so powerful that he can snuff off a galaxy as simply as swatting a fly?
THE three-minute alarm rang, and Jim Cooper walked to his acceleration couch. He strapped himself in and looked at his watch. A full minute before takeoff to Malish. A fly buzzed past him, and then returned and sat on his knee. He loosened one hand, wondering to himself why the manifold marvels of science seemed unable to eliminate the common housefly throughout the galaxy. He swatted it, killed it, and tightened the straps and waited for the heavy hand of acceleration. It came.
When the force eased, he freed himself and walked to the salon and inspected the furnishings. You could learn a lot about a spaceship from the salon furnishings, and what he saw here was comforting. No gilding, no frills, no false walls or ceilings, no heavy picture frames, just the fittings needed for convenience and comfort. Good chairs and tables, lots to read, cards laid out, checkers, and chess, and chenters, a few viewers, a good film library. The Gafka Line was a good efficient line if Cooper’s experience was sound, and it was. His month aboard the ship would not be too burdensome.
He stepped to the library and selected a book on the Flora and Fauna of Malish. Cooper knew what he wanted. There was very little anybody could teach him about anti-friction bearings; he had been selling them throughout the galaxy for ten years. And so he always made a point of learning as much as he could about the life on the next planet on his itinerary. A good salesman ought to know the customs and habits of his potential customers.
Cooper selected the best chair in the salon, and sat on it. Custom dictated that the chair selected on the first day remained the chosen chair for the balance of the voyage. Others came into the salon, looking quickly about to see the appointments and to find good chairs. These were the experienced travelers, and Cooper looked them over. Many were salesman like himself, galactic peddlars, out to solve somebody else’s problems and to sell him some goods. That heavy-set one now, he must sell power equipment. There was something about a power equipment salesman that you could spot across the room, deep chested, and with a stomach that protruded even beyond the chest. Cooper had a theory that a man finally came to look like the products he sold—oh, not exactly like them, but like some characteristic of the product if you knew what to look for. A farm machinery salesman, now, always looked untidy and dusty. Cooper looked over the other passengers, and made up his mind that the trip would be a bad one.
TWO WEEKS later he had verified most of his original guesses. He also knew a great deal about the planet Malish. He was reading biographical sketches of some of Malish’s outstanding citizens one afternoon when the lights in the salon went out. Cooper reacted instinctively. He found himself at the suit locker in the corner, even in the dark. The emergency lights came on, and Cooper stopped pulling on a suit long enough to toss several to nearby people sitting frozen in their chairs. The voice of the Captain came from a speaker. “Minor power failure, ladies and gentlemen. Put on the emergency suits; the practice will do you good. But we hope to have the mainpower on in a few moments.”
Cooper completed donning the suit, although he felt there was no need. This Captain would not talk in such a manner if anything serious were wrong. Cooper helped some of the younger passengers, making light talk with them, steering their thoughts away from the fact that any failure of any kind whatsoever in deep space was not something to be laughed off.
Ten minutes later the main lights came on, and the Captain’s voice said, “Well, we found it, and we think we know what caused it, but in the interests of safety we have decided to put in on the planet Mittobarb. This takes us a little out of the galactic lanes and will delay your arrival on Malish by about eight days. But it seems prudent. We recommend removal of the suits, unless some of you feel safer in them.”
Cooper peeled off his suit without hesitation. He recognized competence when he saw it, and he had no fears for the safety of the ship. He was just finishing a book on Malishian Weather Cycles when the ship landed at Mittobarb.
In the port Cooper immediately began to arrange for alternate passage to Malish in accordance with the instructions of the ship’s purser. Just as he stepped to the window of the ticket seller of the Carnnar Line, they ran out of space on all Malish-bound ships. He moved to a line in front of Krants Transportation and watched those ahead of him get their tickets, many of them to Malish. But then as he stepped up and stated his destination, he was told that all space was gone.
Cooper nodded and stepped back and stared at the smooth floor for no longer than ten seconds, pulling at his lower lip. Then he bought a paper and ordered a drink and sat down at a corner table at the bar and waited while he read. He did not wait long.
Somebody sat down at the other side of the table, but Cooper did not put down the newspaper and look at him. Instead Cooper said, “I don’t know your name, mister, but I know you are a Knaolite, and you’ve certainly gone to a lot of trouble to collect yourself one little anti-friction bearing salesman.” Then he put down the paper and looked at the man across the table. He was a Knaolite, all right. The bright black eyes, the high domed head, the thin silver hair, the larger-than-normal body, the slight hands, the calm manner. All the characteristics were there.
The Knaolite said, “They told me you were a reasonably intelligent man, and I see they were right. My name is Case, Arthur Case.” He held out his hand.
Cooper silently shook it, and it became apparent he had no intention of saying anything. Case said, “I know how I would have come to the same conclusion. Do you mind telling me how you did?”
Cooper nodded. “I’m not a statistician, by any means, but I flatly don’t believe in coincidences. One.” He began ticking off numbers on his fingers. “A space ship makes a side-trip for an emergency landing. Unlikely these days, but still possible. Two, a line runs out of space as I step up. Unlikely, but possible, but by now I’m beginning to wonder. Three, a second line runs out of space as I step up. Now the coincidence is beyond all reason. The odds are very large. Alternative? Somebody wants me on Mittobarb, incredible as it may seem. Who? Why, no one else in this sector of space could have the ability to work out a thing like this except somebody from Knaol.”
“Don’t you believe in coincidence?”
“Never. A few times in my life I’ve been fooled, but most of the time when coincidences happen, somebody’s pushing the odds. At least I’ve found that that is the way to bet.”
Case smiled at him. “Interesting viewpoint, not so much for its accuracy as for its boldness.” Cooper felt no resentment. He said, “Have you considered that it might be accurate for me?” Case raised his eyebrows and looked soberly at Cooper. Cooper realized he had surprised this man who was surprised at few things. Still, Cooper held his peace, waiting for Case to tell him why he was here. Case seemed to know what he was thinking.
“We need your help,” Case said.
COOPER said nothing. There was nothing to be said when the most knowledgable and capable group in the galaxy confessed the need for help from a bearings salesman. There was a great deal here that did not meet the eye. So Cooper waited.
Case said, “Our data were not complete until after your ship left for Malish; that’s why we did not get to you sooner. We went through all this nonsense here at the airport on the chance that some of our people might be able to spot anything less than a casual contact and become worried.” Cooper said nothing. “Your qualifications seem to be right, and let me clarify these qualifications. We need a man with good sense, a reasonable intelligence, no delusions or illusions, no need for a feeling of power, calm, and at peace with himself. You’d be surprised how rare a man like that is. We don’t have any at all on Knaol. You’re it, the best of the type we can find. See that?”
Cooper nodded.
“Will you help us?”
Cooper nodded.
“I don’t know whether the job will be easy or tough. You could get killed, but I doubt it.”
Cooper’s mind raced. He trusted this man from Knaol—or any man from Knaol—and if Cooper were needed by the planet Knaol, why that was all there was to it. But what was happening? And as he asked himself the question he saw the answer.
The biggest news in the galaxy for the last month had been the brief contact with another race of intelligent beings. Out of the Magellanic Cloud, the Large Cloud, had come a different kind of being. It was said that very little headway had been made in establishing any kind of relationship with them. There had been some trouble.
Cooper said, “Does this have to do with the people from the Large Cloud?”
Case nodded affirmatively.
“Expecting trouble?”
Case said, “We don’t know yet. We think our best chance of stopping any possible trouble will be to have somebody go visit them—say, a ball bearing salesman, like yourself—and if there is anything brewing, stop it.”
“You have a surprising amount of confidence in my ability.”
“Well, we will help you considerably. You will go through an operation we’ve worked out. You will be a very unusual man when we get finished. It’ll take about six weeks to complete the operation, so I suggest we start if you are ready.”
“Six weeks to recover from an operation?” asked Cooper.
The answer established all over again Cooper’s reluctance to comment on events and things about which he had no knowledge. “Oh no,” said Case. “There’s no recovery period. The operation itself goes on continuously for six weeks.”
COOPER’S room was comfortable. He settled down the first night on Knaol in a new dwelling unit used to house the men who were completing construction of the new hospital. In the morning, Case took him for a walk. The hospital was a five-story building covering an acre of land, but its size was still deceptive. Most of it lay underground. Cooper and Case walked through the underground complex of heat pumps, mixing vats, control boards, chemical reactors and distillation columns, materials handling and storage facilities, control laboratories, and living quarters for the hospital crew. Upstairs the rooms were unlike the rooms Cooper had ever seen in any hospital. Most were rooms formed by banks of flexible tubes of a wide variety of colors; the tube banks were the walls.
Standing on the fourth floor, looking out across the countryside, Cooper could see the numerous auxiliary buildings surrounding the main hospital, all connected by large covered tubes to the main building. There must have been a hundred buildings. Cooper stared out and around at the giant installation, puzzled. Case had told him that the hospital was about ready, that only another day was needed to finish one small part. Yet there were no patients, nor any sign of any. And the hospital stood in an isolated area, deep in a tropical jungle on the equator of Knaol. Cooper considered these things, and an unwanted answer formed in his mind. He refused to let it develop. He said to Case, not looking at him, “Where are the patients?”
He felt Case’s surprised look, and he heard Case say, “Didn’t you know? You are the only patient. We built this so we could perform the surgical procedures I mentioned. Come along. I’ll show you the operating room.”
They went down to the first floor and passed through two sets of doors separated by a small room. Cooper recognized it as an air lock. They stepped into a huge room in the shape of a flattened sphere six stories high and two hundred feet along the long axis. Great control boards hung from the walls on extensible supports, and large colored transparent tubing laced back and forth everywhere. Dangling from the center of the ceiling, suspended in the center of the huge room was a transparent, ten-foot sphere from which emanated many bundles of power lines and transparent tubing. Case pointed to it. “That’s where you’ll be, resting comfortably in a bath of nutrient solution. In fact, this whole room will be filled with liquid. The surgeons themselves are immersed in the fluid, breathing through tubes—less tiring that way.”
Cooper looked around. Now he could see how the entire hospital centered on this one room; everything fed to it or was controlled by it. For the first time he understood the magnitude of the project. He permitted himself to say, “It’s not exactly the kind of set-up to remove a hangnail.”
Case ignored him, staring at the center sphere, rubbing his chin. Cooper heard him say, half to himself, “Only once before, a long time ago, has this been done. We don’t even talk about it here on my planet.”
Cooper had heard too, vague comments, whispy rumors, never spoken in earnest, of a man in the dim past, a man with strange powers and abilities, who helped set the galaxy aright at a time when trouble began to brew among the stars. Cooper wondered—was it a man who had been through this? Or was it all myth?
Case moved back through the lock and pointed to some of the laboratories that were closest to the operating theater, “They’ve been working there for a month,” he said, “growing some cellular structures that are quite interesting.”
Cooper nodded and said, “After my work is done, what happens.”
“We operate again and make you as you are now, down to the last atom. You then go on about your business remembering anything that might have happened as if it had happened to someone else.”
Cooper nodded and said, “Let’s have lunch.” And the two of them walked to the dining hall in an adjoining building. They walked around the outlying installations that afternoon, so Cooper did not see the liquid begin to flow into the operating theater. Cooper went to sleep that night, and he did not wake up the next morning. He did not wake up for six weeks, and when he did there was a brief moment when he thought it was merely the morning after he had gone to sleep.
But in the meantime:
HE WAS carried to the theater and placed in an adjoining room where a team of surgeons prepared him for submersion in the small sphere, the operation he was ready, equipped with external lungs, with all his normal breathing apparatus by-passed. When he had been checked out in the small sphere, the operation proper began.
The biological surgeons swam to him and began work with the hollow scapels through which flowed coagulents or nutrients, as the situation demanded. They began the tedious job of exploration, fixing the precise location of organs and parts of organs, for no two human bodies are the same. It took a day for the detailed mapping of this particular human body. The surgeons worked in relays. At no time were there less than eight surgeons directly at work on Cooper. Each surgeon worked for four hours, and then was relieved by a fresh man so he could go rest and recuperate. On four, off twelve the shifts went, but it was more tiresome than the hours indicated. Two hours before each surgeon was due to reenter the theater he had to seat himself in the communication room to bring himself up to date on what had happened since he had left.
The activity began to spread through the entire project. The chemists and biologists working with the solutions began to pick up the tempo as the first subtle changes in the solutions began to be made. On the fourth day the control laboratories handling the ingredients for the main solutions went on twenty-four hour shift duty. The flow of organs began.
Up from the growth rooms came the miniaturized hearts, six of them, any one of them having a vastly great
er capacity than a human heart of normal size, each of them fabricated of polymeric tissue, the polymer having a silicon backbone. Each heart was carefully installed in a separate area around the peritoneal cavity; five spares seemed none too many. Each had its own circulatory system, independent yet interconnected with the rest.
A dozen kidneys, each the size of a pea, yet each of normal capacity, were placed. A series of livers, many spleens, four separate digestive systems, and dozens of minute living power sources were implanted around the center regions.
The operation was under the technical control of a board of surgeons who made the decisions and controlled the tempo and progress of the work. As each step was completed, it was the board who decided that it was proper to go on to the next. It was one of the chief responsibilities of the board to see that Cooper’s individuality was never disoriented during the operation.
The organs were completed in two weeks, and the work turned to the nervous system. New teams of specialists began their work, and the members of the board changed, too. Here was the finest work of all, for the normal brain cells were replaced with cells of one-tenth the normal size, but hundreds of times the utility. The entire nervous system was rebuilt into a strong tough organization having alternate circuitry capable of standing up under loads never endured by a living creature. All of it was interwoven with a network of living semiconductors and tiny, pulsing transformers, capacitances and inductances. Storage cells, great batteries of them, were placed everywhere, in many instances serving double duty as insulating sheaths. In another three weeks the nervous system was complete.
THE musculature went fast, since most of it involved installation of whole units. Commitment of the hospital installation had long since been total. Some eight thousand people worked around the clock to maintain the surgical procedures which never stopped moving at top speed in the theater. Literally tons of chemicals and pieces of equipment and tools and measuring and testing devices and glassware and steelware and plasticware flowed into the hospital every day, and all of it had to be coordinated to channel the individual flows to the places where they were needed. Distillation columns never stopped turning out the needed fractions of a hundred kinds of liquids. Reactors constantly performed their polymerizations, hydrolyses, amminolysis, alcoholysis, dehydration, and a dozen other unit operations. Control chemists grew hollow-eyed to insure the purity of the materials that flowed in great streams to the theater. Physicists lost weight as they verified the characteristics of the tiny living power packs and all the other living hardware that went into the theater. Biologists of twenty different specialities were everywhere.