The Lovers * Dark Is the Sun * Riders of the Purple Wage

by Philip José Farmer

  He laid his hand on her forehead. The skin was dry, hot, and rough.

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been feeling really well for two weeks, but I didn’t complain. I thought I’d get over it. Today, I felt so bad I just had to go back to bed after breakfast.’

  ‘We’ll get you well,’

  He sounded confident. Inside himself, he was lost. If she had contracted a serious disease, she could get no doctor, no medicine.

  For the next few days she continued to lie in bed. Her temperature fluctuated from 99.5 in the morning to 100.2 at night. Hal attended her as ably as he could. He put wet towels and ice bags on her head and gave her aspirin. She had stopped eating so much food; all she wanted was liquid. She was always asking for milk. Even the beetlejuice and the cigarettes were turned down.

  Her illness was bad enough, but her silences stung Yarrow into a frenzy. As long as he had known her, she had chattered lightly, merrily, amusingly. She could be quiet, but it was with an interested wordlessness. Now she let him talk; and when he quit, she did not fill his silence with questions or comments.

  In an effort to arouse her, he told her of his plan to steal a gig and take her back to her jungle home. A light came into her dulled eyes; the brown looked shiny for the first time. She even sat up while he put a map of the continent on her lap. She indicated the general area where she had lived, and then she described the mountain range that rose from the jungle and the tableland on its top where her aunts and sisters lived in the ruins of an ancient metropolis.

  Hal sat down at the little hexagon-shaped tabletop by the bed and worked out the coordinates from the maps.

  Now and then, he glanced up. She was lying on her side, her white and delicate shoulder rising from her nightgown, her eyes large in the shadows around them.

  ‘All I have to do is steal a little key,’ he said. ‘You see, the meter gauge on a gig is set at zero before every flight from the field. The boat will run fifty kilometers on manual. But, once the tape passes fifty, the gig automatically stops and sends out a location signal. That’s to keep anybody from running away. However, the autos can be unlocked and the signal turned off. A little key will do it. I can get it. Don’t worry.’

  ‘You must love me very much.’

  ‘You’re shib as shib I do!’

  He rose and kissed her. Her mouth, once so soft and dewy, felt dry and hard. It was almost as if the skin were turning to horn.

  He returned to his calculations. An hour later, a sigh from her made him look up. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slightly open. Sweat ran down her face.

  He hoped her fever had broken. No. The mercury had risen to 100.3.

  She said something.

  He bent down.

  ‘What?’

  She was muttering in an unknown language, the speech of her mother’s people. Delirious.

  Hal swore. He had to act. No matter what the consequences. He ran into the bathroom, shook from a bottle a ten-grain rockabye tablet, returned, and propped Jeannette up. With difficulty he managed to get her to wash the pill down with a glass of water.

  After he locked her bedroom door, he put on a hood and cloak and walked fast to the nearest wog pharmacy. There he purchased three 20-gauge needles, three syringes, and some anti-coagulant. Back in his apartment, he tried to insert the needle in her arm vein. The point refused to go in until the fourth attempt when, in a fit of exasperation, he pressed hard.

  During none of the jabbings did she open her eyes or jerk her arm.

  When the first fluid crept into the glass tube, he gasped with relief. Though he hadn’t known it, he had been biting his lip and holding his breath. Suddenly, he knew that he had for the last month been pushing a horrible suspicion back to the outlands of his mind. Now, he realized the thought had been ridiculous.

  The blood was red.

  He tried to arouse her in order to get a specimen of urine. She twisted her mouth over strange syllables, then lapsed back into sleep or a coma—he didn’t know which. In an anguish of despair, he slapped her face, again and again, hoping he could bring her to. He swore once more, for he realized all at once that he should have gotten the specimen before giving her the rockabye. How stupid could he get! He wasn’t thinking straight; he was too excited over her condition and what he had to do at the ship.

  He made some strong coffee and managed to get part of it down her. The rest dribbled down her chin and soaked her gown.

  Either the caffeine or his desperate tone awoke her, for she opened her eyes long enough to look at him while he explained what he wanted her to do and where he was going afterward. After he had gotten the urine into a previously boiled jar, he wrapped the syringes and jar in a handkerchief and dropped them into the cloak pocket.

  He had wristphoned the Gabriel for a gig. A horn beeped outside. He took another look at Jeannette, locked the bedroom door, and ran down the stairs. The gig hovered above the curb. He entered, sat down, and punched the GO button. The boat rose to a thousand feet and then flashed at an 11-degree angle toward the park where the ship squatted.

  The medical section was empty, except for one orderly. The fellow dropped his comic and jumped to his feet.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Hal. ‘I just want to use the Labtech. And I don’t want to be bothered with making out triplicate forms. This is a little personal matter, see?’

  Hal had taken off his cloak, so the orderly could see the bright golden lamedh.

  ‘Shib,’ the orderly grunted.

  Hal gave him two cigarettes.

  ‘Geez, thanks,’ The orderly lit a cigarette, sat down, and picked up The Forerunner and Delilah in the Wicked City of Gaza.

  Yarrow went around the corner of the Labtech, where the orderly couldn’t see him, and set the proper dials. After he inserted his specimens, he sat down. Within a few seconds, he jumped up and began pacing back and forth. Meanwhile, the huge cube of the Labtech purred like a contented cat as it disgested its strange food. A half-hour later, it rumbled once and then flashed a green light: ANALYSIS COMPLETE.

  Hal pressed a button. Like a tongue out of a metal mouth, a long tape slid out. He read the code. Urine was normal. No infection there. Also normal were the pH and the blood count.

  He hadn’t been sure the ‘eye’ would recognize the cells in her blood. However, the chances had been strong that her red cells would be Terranlike. Why not? Evolution, even on planets separated by light years, follows parallel paths; the biconcave disk is the most efficient form for carrying the maximum of oxygen.

  Or at least he’d thought so until he’d seen the corpuscles of an Ozagenian.

  The machine chattered. More tape. Unknown hormone! Similar in molecular structure to the parathyroid hormone primarily concerned in the control of calcium metabolism.

  What did that mean? Could the mysterious substance loosed in her bloodstream be the cause of her trouble?

  More clicks. The calcium content of the blood was 40 miligram percent.

  Strange. Such an abnormally high percentage should mean that the renal threshold was passed and that an excess of calcium should be ‘spilling’ into the urine. Where was it going?

  The Labtech flashed a red light: FINISHED.

  He took a hematology textbook down from the shelf and opened it to the Ca section. When he quit reading, he straightened his shoulders. New hope? Perhaps. Her case sounded as if she had a form of hypercalcemia, which was manifested by any number of diseases ranging from rickets and steomalacia to chronic hypertropic arthritis. Whatever she had, she was suffering from a malfunction of the parathyroid glands.

  The next move was to the Pharm machine. He punched three buttons, dialed a number, waited for two minutes, and then lifted a little door at waist level. A tray slid out. On it was a cellophane sheath containing a hypodermic needle and a tube holding 30 cubic centimeters of a pale blue fluid. It was Jesper’s serum, a ‘one-shot’ readjustor of the parathyroid.

  Hal put on his cloak, stuck the package in the inside
pocket, and strode out. The orderly didn’t even look up.

  The next step was the weapons room. There he gave the storekeeper an order—made out in triplicate—for one 1 mm. automatic and a clip of one hundred explosive cartridges. The keeper only glanced over the forged signatures—he, too, was awed by the lamedh—and unlocked the door. Hal took the gun, which he could easily hide in the palm of his hand, and stuck it in his pants pocket.

  At the key room, two corridors away, he repeated the crime. Or rather, he tried to.

  Moto, the officer on duty, looked at the papers, hesitated, and said, ‘I’m sorry. My orders are to check on any requests with the Chief Uzzite. That won’t be possible for about an hour, though. He’s in conference with the Archurielite.’

  Hal picked up his papers.

  ‘Never mind. My business’ll hold. Be back in the morning,’

  On the way home, he planned what he would do. After injecting Jesper’s serum into Jeannette, he would move her into the gig. The floor beneath the gig’s control panel would have to be ripped up, two wires would be unhooked, and one connected to another lead. That would remove the fifty-mile limit. Unfortunately, it would also set off an alarm back in the Gabriel.

  He hoped that he could take off straight up, level off, and dive behind the range of hills to the west of Siddo. The hills would deflect the radar. The autopilot could be set long enough for him to demolish the box that would be sending out the signal by which the Gabriel might track him down.

  After that, with the gig hedgehopping, he could hope to be free until daybreak. Then, he’d submerge in the nearest lake or river deep enough until nightfall. During the darkness, he could rise and speed toward the tropics. If his radar showed any signs of pursuit, he could plunge again into a body of water. Fortunately, there was no sonar equipment on the Gabriel.

  He left the long needle-shaped gig parked by the curb. His feet pounded the stairs. The key missed the hole the first two tries. He slammed the door without bothering to lock it again.

  ‘Jeannette!’

  Suddenly, he was afraid that she might have gotten up while delirious and somehow opened the doors and wandered out.

  A low moan answered him. He unlocked the bedroom door and shoved it open. She was lying with her eyes wide.

  ‘Jeannette. Do you feel better?’

  ‘No. Worse. Much worse.’

  ‘Don’t worry, baby. I’ve got just the medicine that’ll put new life in you. In a couple of hours you’ll be sitting up and yelling for steaks. And you won’t even want to touch that milk. You’ll be drinking your Easyglow by the gallon. And then—’

  He faltered as he saw her face. It was a stony mask of distress, like the grotesque and twisted wooden masks of the Greek tragedians.

  ‘Oh, no … no I’ she moaned. ‘What did you say? Easyglow?’ Her voice rose. ‘Is that what you’ve been giving me?’

  ‘Shib, Jeannette. Take it easy. You liked it. What’s the difference? The point is that we’re going—’

  ‘Oh, Hal, Hal! What have you done?’

  Her pitiful face tore at him. Tears were falling; if ever a stone could weep, it was weeping now.

  He turned and ran into the kitchen where he took out the sheath, removed the contents, and inserted the needle in the tube. He went back into the bedroom. She said nothing as he thrust the point into her vein. For a moment, he was afraid the needle would break. The skin was almost brittle.

  ‘This stuff cures Earthpeople in a jiffy,’ he said, with what he hoped was a cheery beside manner.

  ‘Oh, Hal, come here. It’s—it’s too late now.’

  He withdrew the needle, rubbed alcohol on the break, and put a pad on it. Then he dropped to his knees by the bed and kissed her. Her lips were leathery.

  ‘Hal, do you love me?’

  ‘Won’t you ever believe me? How many times must I tell you?’

  ‘No matter what you’ll find out about me?’

  ‘I know all about you.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You can’t. Oh, Great Mother, if only I’d told you! Maybe you’d have loved me just as much, anyway. Maybe—’

  ‘Jeannette! What’s the matter?’

  Her lids had closed. Her body shook in a spasm. When the violent trembling passed, she whispered with stiff lips. He bent his head to hear her.

  ‘What did you say? Jeannette! Speak!’

  He shook her. The fever must have died, for her shoulder was cold. And hard.

  The words came low and slurring.

  ‘Take me to my aunts and sisters. They’ll know what to do. Not for me … but for the—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Hal, will you always love—’

  ‘Yes, yes. You know that! We’ve got more important things to do than talk about that.!

  If she heard him, she gave no sign. Her head was tilted far back with her exquisite nose pointed at the ceiling. Her lids and mouth were closed, and her hands were her side, palms up. The breasts were motionless. Whatever breath she might have was too feeble to stir them.

  18

  Hal pounded on Fobo’s door until it opened.

  The empathist’s wife said, ‘Hal, you startled me!’

  ‘Where’s Fobo?’

  ‘He’s at a college board meeting.’

  ‘I’ve got to see him at once.’

  Abasa yelled after him, ‘If it’s important, go ahead! Those meetings bore him, anyway!’

  By the time Yarrow had taken the steps three at a time and beelined across the nearby campus, his lungs were on fire. He didn’t slacken his pace; he hurtled up the steps of the administration building and burst into the board room.

  When he tried to speak, he had to stop and suck in deep breaths.

  Fobo jumped out of his chair.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You—you’ve—got to come. Matter—life—death!’

  ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ Fobo said.

  The ten wogs nodded their heads and resumed the conference. The empathist put on his cloak and skull-cap with its artificial antennae and led Hal out.

  ‘Now, what is it?’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got to trust you. I know you can’t promise me anything. But I think you won’t turn me in to my people. You’re a real person, Fobo.’

  ‘Get to the point, my friend.’

  ‘Listen. You wogs are as advanced as we in endocrinology, even, if you lag way behind in other sciences. And you’ve got an advantage. You have made some medical examinations and tests on her. You should know something about her anatomy and physiology and metabolism. You—’

  ‘Jeannette? Oh, Jeannette Rastignac! The lalitha!’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been hiding her in my apartment.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know? But how? I mean—’

  The wog put his hand on Hal’s shoulder.

  ‘There’s something you should know. I meant to tell you tonight after I got home. This morning a man named Art Hunah Pukui rented an apartment in a building across the street. He claimed he wanted to live among us so he could learn our language and our mores more swiftly.

  ‘But he’s spent most of his time in this building carrying around a case which I imagine contains various devices to enable him to hear from a distance the sounds in your apartment. However, the landlord kept an eye on him, so he wasn’t able to plant any of his devices.’

  ‘Pukui is an Uzzite.’

  ‘If you say so. Right now he’s in his apartment watching this building through a powerful telescope.’

  ‘And he could be listening to us right now, too,’ Hal said. ‘His instruments are extremely sensitive. Still, the walls are heavily soundproofed. Anyway, forget about him!’

  Fobo followed him into his rooms. The wog felt Jeannette’s forehead and tried to lift her lid to look at her eye. It would not bend.

  ‘Hmm! Calcification of the outer skin layer is far advanced.’

  With one hand he threw the sheet from her figure and with the other he
grabbed her gown by the neckline and ripped the thin cloth down the middle. The two parts fell to either side. She lay nude, as silent and pale and beautiful as a sculptor’s masterpiece.

  Her lover gave a little cry at what seemed like a violation. But he said nothing because he realized that Fobo’s move was medical. In any case, the wog would not have been sexually interested.

  Puzzled, he watched. Fobo had tapped his fingertips against her flat belly and then put his ear against it. When he stood up, he shook his head.

  ‘I won’t deceive you, Hal. Though we’ll do the best we can, we may not be good enough. She’ll have to go to a surgeon. If we can cut her eggs out before they hatch, that, plus the serum you gave her, may reverse the effect and pull her out.’

  ‘Eggs?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. Wrap her up. I’ll run upstairs and phone Dr. Kuto.’

  Yarrow folded a blanket around her. Then he rolled her over. She was as stiff as a show-window dummy. He covered her face. The stony look was too much for him.

  His wristphone shrilled. Automatically, he reached to flick the stud and just in time drew his hand back. It shrilled loudly, insistently. After a few seconds of agony, he decided that if he didn’t answer, he would stir up their suspicion far faster.

  ‘Yarrow!’

  ‘Shib?’

  ‘Report to the Archurielite. You will be given fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Shib.’

  Fobo came back in and said, ‘What’re you going to do?’

  Hal squared his mouth and said, ‘You take her by the shoulders, and I’ll carry her feet. Rigid as she is, we won’t need a stretcher.’

  As they carried her down the steps, he said, ‘Can you hide us after the operation, Fobo? We won’t be able to use the gig now.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the wog said enigmatically over his shoulder. ‘The Earthmen are going to be too busy to run after you.’

  It took sixty seconds to get her into the gig, hop to the hospital, and get her out.

  Hal said, ‘Let’s put her on the ground a minute. I’ve got to set the gig on auto and send her back to the Gabriel. That way, at least, they won’t know where I am.’

  ‘No. Leave it here. You may be able to use it afterward.’