Collected Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Rosel G Brown

  At the hospital the nurses would follow him around surreptitiously just to hear him say things like, “Madam, your schild hhas honly ha bad hattack of whwhhwhhooping schhoughh.” He really went off on something like the “wh” in whooping cough, because when Martians aspirate all out they use their extra lungs and you can hear them close with a “flap” before the word goes on.

  Dr. Hisel had his faults and surgical nurses frequently collapsed after his operations. As a Martian, Dr. Hisel was accustomed to strong-impulse telepathy, and frequently just held his hand out, expecting the nurse to know what to put in it. And a look would pass from the surgical nurse to the circulating nurse and around among the interns and finally Dr. Hisel would say, “For Hhhwhran’s sake! Scalpel!” And then if the nurse slapped the scalpel into his hand, as she had been taught, he’d roar like a bull, because he peeled off his epithelium before an operation instead of using gloves. And then, he didn’t say, “stat,” for haemostat, as other doctors do. He said “haemo,” which usually came out as a flap of his extra lungs.

  So his directives frequently sounded like—Pause. For Hhhwhran’s sake! Scalpel. Qcqvttt! Pause. Scissors. Flap. Unprintable word! (Mostly aspirates with uvular overtones).

  It was for this and similar reasons, besides a purely personal prejudice, that Dr. Crayton, who was head of Bayside Memorial Hospital, decided that Hisel should be dispensed with.

  It is no easy matter to dispose of a staff doctor. Firing is considered gauche. The best method is to find him a better offer from elsewhere. But Hisel did not rise to better offers. He was engrossed in his work and he knew his way around the hospital and he had a good robotic apartment and a good mechanic for his car and a good laundry. It never occurred to him to want anything else. Certainly not money.

  “I don’t want to leave,” he would tell Dr. Crayton. “I like it h(flap)ere. I like you.”

  And Dr. Crayton, though he had the ice-locked heart required of a good administrator, was still human enough to feel like a heel. He had to wait until Hisel left his office to plan his next move.

  With a planetary immigrant there is always a way.

  “Your mother,” Dr. Crayton told Hisel, “didn’t sign your Martian emigration papers.”

  “I was forty-two,” Hisel said, “when I emigrated. My mother was dead.”

  “I know,” said Dr. Crayton, who hadn’t really. “It’s a technicality. But it’s the sort of thing the League for Pure Blood gets hold of and they’ll make a stink about it and cause a lot of unpleasantness for you and the hospital.”

  “I have,” Hisel pointed out, “the purest blood in the county. Martian blood is of necessity sterile of Terran bugs. I have growing in my colon the Martian adapted lichen . . .”

  “Of course. You miss the point. What the League for Pure Blood means . . . never mind. The point is that perhaps you’d be happier returning to Mars now instead of waiting until . . .”

  “I do not intend to return,” Dr. Hisel said. “I am happy here. There is so little real disease on Mars. Mere congenital defects. You have no idea how I rejoiced over my first real appendectomy, knowing it was not a mere synthetic model. Here you have more disease than you can use. For a doctor it is a paradise!”

  “Yes, yes. But there’s still this legal technicality. There’s no getting around it, Hisel. Sorry, old boy.”

  “How about Whox at Minnesota? I know his mother didn’t sign his emigration papers. I was a second generation mutation, but he was one of the few successful flask babies.”

  “Whox is married to a Terran girl,” Dr. Crayton said somewhat hesitantly.

  “You are so kind,” Hisel said. “I know a hint when I hear one.”

  Dr. Hisel’s courtships were brief. “Will you marry me so that I can become a permanent Terran citizen?” he asked the surgical nurse after a trying operation.

  “Qcqvttt!” she said, and left trembling.

  On the advice of a sympathetic scrub nurse, who was eight months pregnant, Dr. Hisel tried a more subtle approach.

  “It is a lovely night for romance,” Dr. Hisel said, directing his date’s gaze to the starry sky.

  “But def!” she giggled. “Look at that moon! It looks like . . . like . . .”

  Dr. Hisel slipped his arm around her, as he had been directed. “It looks like a gangrenous gall bladder,” he supplied tenderly.

  It was the same with one girl after another.

  “I am not successful with women,” Hisel told Dr. Crayton sadly. “Is there no other way for me to become a permanent citizen?”

  “Sorry, old boy.”

  Still, you know, Hisel not only got to be a full-fledged citizen. He created such a stir that the immigration quota for Martians rose forty per cent and the League for Pure Blood couldn’t even find a photographer willing to do their microslides.

  It was partly pure chance, as almost everything is, if you think about it.

  Hisel, who spent his small amount of leisure time reading the medical columns in the micronews and watching medical events on TV, was, of course, watching Dr. Crayton’s televised interratrial septal defect repair from the doctors’ lounge. It was one of those things that really looks dramatic, but usually goes pretty easily these days. Ordinarily.

  It would have been obvious even to someone not familiar with Martian facial expressions that something was wrong. The massive eyebrows drew together, the cheeks puffed out roundly and then sucked in. The tank-like chest pushed in and out.

  “Flap,” Dr. Hisel began. “Flap, flap!”

  “Hot gall bladder!” the bright-plumed piroquot called from its perch in the corner. “Hemorrhage! Jaundice! Purulence!”

  “Flap!”

  “Scissors!” said Dr. Crayton.

  He began to cut away, ignoring Dr. Hisel who had peeled himself from waist to neck and was using a towel clamp to pull the rest of his current epithelium from his hands.

  “Stat,” Dr. Crayton barked. “Suture!”

  Dr. Crayton turned his head to hear what the anesthetist was whispering in a modulated scream, so that he, but not the television audience would hear.

  At this point Dr. Hisel calmly pinched one of the tubes leading to the heart-lung machine, removed the end of the tube from the balloon-like affair, made a quick incision at his own carotid and inserted the tube. Then he pinched the other tube and inserted into the jugular on the other side of his neck.

  “Pace maker!” Dr. Crayton cried, shouting over his shoulder. “IPs a transfusion re . . .” He turned and spotted Hisel, who was grinning like something out of a Medieval Bestiary and breathing on all four lungs.

  “You may proceed,” he said, “with the operation.” He was carefully pushing the polyethylene tubes down into his aorta and vena cava. “Otherwise,” he pointed out, referring to his own actions, “the patient would probably have died.”

  Blood from the heart-lung machine had squirted all down the side of Dr. Crayton’s uniform and he was damp across the shirt from his own sweat. “Stat!” he demanded finally, routine coming to his rescue.

  “MN reaction,” Dr. Crayton explained. “But how did you know before we did?”

  “The patient,” Dr. Hisel said, “was under anesthetic hypnosis. Apparently he had been told not to talk or move. He could therefore neither voice his discomfort nor manifest his chill by tremor or thrashing of his extremities. In the exigency of the moment, he was able to exert strong-impulse telepathy, no doubt because it was impossible for him to express himself any other way, and I was able to pick up the impulse, amplified by the television. He telepathed one word—‘help.’ ”

  “She,” Dr. Crayton corrected. “Suture.”

  If it had been a closed circuit broadcast, Dr. Hisel would have gotten written up in the Journal of the A.M.A., those hospitals, (like Bayside Memorial) not yet testing for rare blood factors would have started to do so, and that would probably have been the end of it.

  The general public, however, takes no such pallid approach to dramatic events
. There was an immediate demand not for better blood testing or improved anesthetic hypnosis, but for more Martians.

  “Your patient,” the now eight-and-a-half-month pregnant scrub nurse told Dr. Hisel, “is a very pretty she.”

  “She is not my patient,” Dr. Hisel said. “She is Dr. Crayton’s patient.”

  “But she wants to see you,” the scrub nurse said, duckwalking over to the desk to switch on an intercom to room 34. “She’s not married. Her name is Miss Stancel. And Dr. Hisel, she’s awfully grateful.”

  “Ah! I will propose,” Dr. Hisel said, ending with a resounding flap!

  “Not right away, Doctor. It’s so hard to get the idea across to you. The first time, you just talk to her.”

  Thus began Dr. Hisel’s romance and there was about him, the nurses decided, an air of polyethylene, etheric orange blossoms. There was a general softening of the heart concerning Dr. Hisel, even among the nurses in surgery, and Miss Stancel got more service than rich old Mrs. “Three-shift” Carson received.

  Miss Stancel (Violet), however, was found in tears on the day of her discharge. The scrub nurse, now on the verge of labor and therefore not allowed in surgery, came prepared to propose in case Dr. Hisel had neglected to do so.

  “I told him not to propose right away,” she confided to Miss Stancel. “But I happen to know . . .”

  “Gloop!” Miss Stancel sobbed from a soft, white throat. “He did propose.”

  “Well?”

  It was easy to see what he saw in her. It was a little harder to imagine what she saw in him. But such is the way of Providence.

  “He took it back.” Miss Stancel carelessly blew her nose on the lace negligee she had just removed.

  “But why, for heaven’s sake?”

  “He said it was unnecessary to get married.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” The scrub nurse glanced at her watch, beginning to time her pains. “Why is it unnecessary to get married?”

  “Because . . . gloop . . . he’s already been made a permanent Terran citizen.”

  “Oh, Lord. Look, I’m going into labor. But don’t give up. I’ll dig into his records when I get out of the delivery room. With a planetary immigrant there is always a way.”

  THE END

  JUST A SUGGESTION

  Madison Ave., you’d say, has tried pretty nearly all the basic advertising ideas there are. Here is one, however, that we have not seen in action—and rather hope we never do. . . .

  DO YOU WANT YOUR GARDEN TO BE THE ENVY OF ALL YOUR NEIGHBORS? GO AHEAD. YOU CAN BUY SEEDS LIKE THAT ANYWHERE. BUT THINK ABOUT IT A MINUTE. MAYBE THEY’LL ENVY YOU. BUT WILL THEY LIKE YOU? WHAT KIND OF GUY DO YOU WANT TO BE, ANYWAY?

  YOU KNOW THE ANSWER TO THAT ONE! BUT DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN BUY THE SEEDS THAT DO NOT SUCCEED? THE SEEDS THAT MAKE YOUR NEIGHBORS FEEL GOOD?

  WELL, WE CAN ANSWER THAT ONE. TRY DABNEY’S DEFECTIVE SEEDS. P.O. BOX 80, ROUTE 34 LITTLE CREEK, MO. REMEMBER SCRAGGLY, BUT NOT TOO SCRAGGLY.

  “Well?” asked Lion looking over at his wife. She had been peeling off her Terran head mask and was massaging the kinks out of her capital pseudopod.

  “Oof!” she telepathed. “That feels better. I don’t think I can stand one more sewing circle. The hands are the worst of all. I simply can’t manage them. And, dear, I almost can’t hear little Mrs. Schmidt. Her mind keeps dying out. She literally doesn’t think.”

  “That’s fine!” said Lion. “I mean fine that she doesn’t think. But darling, what do you think of my new Depth Motivation?”

  “Now the trunk corset,” Llona said. “Peel it slowly. My rigid cartilages have been scraping together all evening.”

  “Llona, you weren’t listening to me! I’ve spent weeks working on this. It may be the final step. Don’t you care?”

  “Care? Of course I care. I care about you, Lion. And you’ve spent practically our whole honeymoon doing nothing but talk shop while I suffer in. these skin tights and feed those wretched chickens and listen to that horrid mammal go moo-moo-moo all the time.” Llona began to shake. “You don’t l-l l . . .”

  “Stop it!” Lion cried, clasping the midsection where his brain was located. “You know I can’t stand over thirty c/s.”

  Bradley put down the magazine and laughed. And when he had finished laughing he thought about it a little.

  “Say, Mona!” he called.

  “59, 60,” Mona said. “61, just-a-minute, 62.”

  “I want to show you something. It gives me an idea.”

  “75, 76, 77,” Mona said.

  “For God’s sake!” Bradley cried. She slapped the magazine down on the coffee table and strode into the bedroom. “Can’t you stop brushing your hair just once when I have something important to say?”

  “100,” Mona said. “All right, what is it?” She took out her bobby pins and began to wind her pin curls, every other one counterclockwise, for a Froth Set.

  “Well, look, Mona, I just read this crazy advertisement for crummy seeds so your neighbors won’t envy your garden. Now, most people read that advertisement and they just laugh or if they’re real stupid maybe they take it literally and send for the seeds. They raise these scraggly looking plants so their neighbors feel a little bit superior to them and like them instead of envying them. Now, listen to my idea, Mona.”

  “Clockwise,” Mona said.

  “Are you listening?”

  “Counterclockwise. Of course, Honey.”

  Bradley sat down on the side of the bed and began running his hands through his hair, because he could think better that way.

  “Look at my career this way, Mona. I’ve come up through the ranks like twenty other men twenty-eight years at Brandt Sheet Metal. Five of us are going to be vice-presidents. One of us is going to get to be president.”

  Mona held a pin curl down firmly with her left forefinger and turned to give her husband a look of absolute faith. “You are going to get to be president.”

  Even after five years of marriage and two children, Bradley never failed to be shaken by that look. It made him feel like he wore a Santa Claus suit. And like all uniforms, it had to be lived up to.

  Mona unwound the curl carefully, because she had forgotten whether she had stopped on clockwise or counterclockwise.

  “I hope I am,” Bradley said. “Anyway, as I was going to say, what do those other nineteen men have that I don’t have? Nothing. What do I have that they don’t have. Nothing. By this time, Mona, the duds and the misfits have been weeded out. The eggheads are gone. The morons are gone. And just us jolly good fellows are left.”

  “Clockwise!” Mona said. “Darling, why do you sound cynical?”

  “Because—well, because I went to Brandt Sheet Metal prepared to work my ears off and race my brain twenty-four hours a day and bust through hell itself, if necessary, to get ahead. That’s the way I am. When I want something, I go after it whole hog.”

  “I know,” Mona said, sliding in the last bobby pin. She didn’t set her fringe of bangs and when Bradley came over to look at her in the mirror, her reflected eyes smiled up at him through the light curls.

  Bradley grasped the sides of her chair, as though he were holding on to his thoughts. “But I’ve been realizing—I guess even for years I’ve been realizing this slowly—there are some things work and sweat and brains and will power won’t get you.”

  “Such as what?” Mona asked, smiling softly at some secret thought as she got out her cold cream.

  “Such as upper echelon promotion at Brandt Sheet Metal.” Bradley, sure of his thought now, let go of the chair to walk up and down. “The men they watch,” he said, “are the men that can cooperate. The men that don’t jar up the group thinking. And it really boils down to this, honey. The men they watch are the men everybody likes.”

  “Then all you have to do is Win Friends and Influence People.”

  “It’s more subtle than that. It takes more than a likable moron to get where I’ve got at Brandt Sheet
Metal. We’re all smart. We’re all likable. We all try to be just a little bit better than the other fellow. But not so much as to be offensive. A slightly better-cut suit. A slightly better-worded letter. A slightly more eager expression.”

  Mona was massaging the pink cream with slower and slower strokes, watching her husband in the mirror. “It’s hard for me to forgive any woman,” she said, “who has naturally curly hair.”

  “That’s it!” he said, pushing her chin back to look into her face and then holding his sticky fingers out helplessly, like a child in the aftermath of a chocolate bar. “There’s no way to be slightly better without being offensive. We all know what each other is doing and why we’re doing it and—look, honey, I don’t hate these guys. They’re good guys. What I mean is . . . I want to be different in some really inoffensive way. I want to sneak up behind management and hit them in the head before anybody knows what’s going on.”

  “Is this the idea you started out on while I was brushing my hair?”

  “It is. Mona, I’m going to stop trying to be a little better than everybody else. I’m going to be a little worse.”

  Mona wiped off her cold cream and began methodically taking the bobby pins out of her hair.

  “You just spent half an hour putting those things in!” Bradley said.

  “I’m having lunch with Geraldine Baldwin tomorrow.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t want her to think I have naturally curly hair.”

  Link Creston threw the report across the polished desk and it flapped to the floor. This irritated Victor Grant to the point where he bit the fever blister on his thin lips and hoped he’d get blood poisoning.

  Victor walked over and picked up the report, because it was only three feet from where he stood, whereas Link would have had to hoist his bulk out of his chair and walk all the way around the desk and this would make Victor seem sensitive and picayunish about his status.

  Whereas they were all supposed to be pulling together on this thing and For God’s sake I’m not the boss. I just make more money than you.