by Leo Tolstoy
It never entered his head to analyze the details of the sick man’s situation, to consider how that body was lying under the quilt, how those emaciated legs and thighs and spine were lying huddled up, how those long waves of undulating flesh were appearing and disappearing, and whether they could not be made more comfortable, whether anything could not be done to make things, if not better, at least less bad. It made his blood run cold when he began to think of all these details. He was absolutely convinced that nothing could be done to prolong his brother’s life or to relieve his suffering. To be in the sickroom was agony to Levin; not to be there still worse. And he was continually, on various pretexts, going out of the room and coming in again, because he was unable to remain alone.
But Kitty thought, and felt, and acted quite differently. On seeing the roiling flesh of the sick man, she pitied him. And pity in her womanly heart did not arouse at all that feeling of horror and loathing that it aroused in her husband, but a desire to act, to find out all the details of his state, and to remedy them. And since she had not the slightest doubt that it was her duty to help him, she had no doubt either that it was possible, and immediately set to work. The very details, the mere thought of which reduced her husband to terror, immediately engaged her attention. She sent for the doctor, and set Tatiana and Socrates and Marya Nikolaevna to sweep and dust and scrub, as slow, crossed-wire Karnak was quite useless in this regard. She herself washed up something, washed out something else, laid something under the quilt. Something was by her directions brought into the sickroom, something else was carried out. She herself went several times to her room, regardless of the men she met in the corridor, got out and brought in sheets, pillowcases, towels, and shirts.
The sick man, though he seemed and was indifferent about it, was not angry, but only abashed, and on the whole, as it were, interested in what she was doing with him. Coming back from the doctor to whom Kitty had sent him, and putting back on his layers of prophylactic gear, Levin, on opening the door, came upon the sick man at the instant when, by Kitty’s directions, they were changing his linen. The long, white ridge of his spine, with the huge, prominent shoulder blades and jutting ribs and vertebrae, was bare, and covered in a rough constellation of black and greenish scabs; Marya Nikolaevna and the waiter were struggling with the sleeve of the nightshirt, and could not get the long, limp arm into it. Kitty, hurriedly closing the door after Levin, was not looking that way, but the sick man groaned, and she moved rapidly toward him.
“Make haste,” she said.
“Oh, don’t you come,” said the sick man angrily. “I’ll do it myself…”
“What say?” queried Marya Nikolaevna. But Kitty heard and saw he was ashamed and uncomfortable at being naked before her.
“I’m not looking, I’m not looking!” she said, putting the arm in. “Marya Nikolaevna, you come to this side, you do it,” she added.
Levin found a new doctor, not the one who had been attending Nikolai Levin, as the patient was dissatisfied with him. With Socrates and Tatiana secreted away in Levin and Kitty’s room, the new doctor came and sounded the patient; he consulted his II/Prognosis/M4, prescribed medicine, and with extreme minuteness explained first how to take the medicine and then what diet was to be kept to. He advised eggs, raw or hardly cooked, and seltzer water, with warm milk at a certain temperature.
“But what is wrong with him?” asked Levin, wringing his hands.
“It is unquestionably a unique case,” the doctor began, glancing warily at Nikolai’s stomach, where a grotesque convexity was even then fighting upward, like a frog squirming within a mud bank. “I must tell you, however, that as to the nature of his condition, I have not the slightest idea.”
When the doctor and his II/Prognosis/M4 had gone away, the sick man said something to his brother, of which Levin could distinguish only the last words: “Your Katya.” By the expression with which he gazed at her, Levin saw that he was praising her.
“I’m much better already,” he said. “Why, with you I would have gotten well long ago. How nice it is!” he took her hand and drew it toward his lips, but as though afraid she would dislike such contact, he changed his mind, let it go, and only stroked it. Kitty took his hand in both of hers and pressed it.
“Now turn me over on the left side and go to bed,” he said.
CHAPTER 12
THE NEXT DAY the sick man received the sacrament and extreme function from a priest, who stood, with his cross raised before him, a precautionary three feet away from the sickbed. During the ceremony Nikolai Levin prayed fervently. His great eyes, rotating in opposite directions from each other, tried but failed to fasten on the holy image that was set out on a card table covered with a colored napkin. For Levin it was agonizingly painful to behold the supplicating, hopeful eyes and the emaciated body, wasted and covered in its pattern of sores, making the sign of the cross on his tense, pockedmarked brow, and the prominent shoulders and hollow, gasping chest, which could not feel consistent with the life the sick man was praying for. During the sacrament Levin did what he, an unbeliever, had done a thousand times. He said, addressing God, “If Thou dost exist, make this man to recover” (of course this same thing has been repeated many times), “and Thou wilt save him and me.” When the priest had gone, Socrates came forth from hiding and Levin loaded his Third Bay with the same hopeful prayer, playing it over and over again.
After extreme unction the sick man became suddenly much better. He did not cough once in the course of an hour, and no fresh turgescence troubled his midsection. He smiled, kissed Kitty’s hand, thanking her with tears, and said he was comfortable, free from pain, and that he felt strong and had an appetite. He even raised himself when his soup was heated in a primitive I/Warmer/1, and asked for a cutlet as well. Hopelessly ill as he was, obvious as it was at the first glance that he could not recover, Levin and Kitty were for that hour both in the same state of excitement, happy, though fearful of being mistaken. Even Karnak emitted a harsh, happy garble, pinpricks of hopeful orange registering in the mud brown of his eyebank.
“Is he better?”
“Yes, much.”
“It’s wonderful.”
“There’s nothing wonderful in it.”
“Anyway, he’s better,” they said in a whisper, smiling to one another.
This self-deception was not of long duration. The sick man fell into a quiet sleep, but he was woken up half an hour later by a violent, wracking cough, accompanied by the abrupt return of the flesh-bulging phenomenon, extending this time from his stomach all along the length of his frame, from his neck down to his thighs. And all at once every hope vanished in those about him and in himself. The reality of his suffering crushed all hopes in Levin and Kitty and in the sick man himself, leaving no doubt, no memory even of past hopes.
At eight o’clock in the evening Levin and his wife were drinking tea in their room when Marya Nikolaevna ran in to them breathlessly. She was pale, and her lips were quivering. “He is dying!” she whispered. “I’m afraid he will die this minute.”
Both of them ran to him. He was lying in the bed, rocking back and forth, his stomach bulging and puckering, a new system of sores visible on his neck and arms, his long back bent, and his head hanging low.
“How do you feel?” Levin asked in a whisper.
“It is inside me,” Nikolai said enigmatically but with extreme distinctness, screwing the words out of himself.
Levin took Nikolai to mean that lurking inside him was the spirit of death, which was determined to consume him.
“Inside me,” Nikolai said again.
“Why do you think so?” said Levin, so as to say something.
“Inside-inside-it wants to come out,” he repeated, as though he had a liking for the phrase. “It must come out. It’s the end.”
Marya Nikolaevna went up to him.
“You had better lie down; you’d be easier,” she said.
“I shall lie down soon enough,” he pronounced slowly, a great,
thick pocket of flesh bubbling up from his torso. “When I’m dead.”
Levin laid his brother on his back, sat down beside him, and gazed at his face, holding his breath. The dying man lay with closed eyes, but the muscles twitched grotesquely from time to time on his forehead, living creatures dancing within the skin. Levin involuntarily thought with him of what it was that was happening to him now, but in spite of all his mental efforts to go along with him he saw by the expression of that calm, stern face that for the dying man all was growing clearer and clearer that was still as dark as ever for Levin.
“Yes, yes, so,” the dying man articulated slowly at intervals, speaking with difficulty through a tongue that swelled and receded, swelled and receded.
“My God,” said Levin sotto voce to Socrates. “What manner of death is this?”
* * *
Three more days of agony followed; the sick man was still in the same condition. The sense of longing for his death was all felt by everyone now at the pitiable sight of the patient, writhing and moaning; all thought of capture, of the danger to the Class Ills, was forgotten in the face of such evident distress. Nikolai arched his back and gritted his teeth; he clutched at his pulsing stomach. Only at rare moments, when the Galena Box’s salutary hum gave him an instant’s relief from the pain, he would sometimes, half asleep, utter what was ever more intense in his heart than in all the others: “Oh, if it were only the end!” or, more ominously, “It is inside… it is inside… inside…” Occasionally, tired old Karnak plopped down on the floor and imitated his master’s agonized posture, his rusted end-effectors clutching across his dinged and dented midsection.
Such was the consuming horror of Nikolai’s suffering that when, on the tenth day from their arrival at the town, Kitty felt mildly unwell, Levin could not contain an anxious expression, which his wife immediately understood. “But you do not fear,” she began, choking back sobs, “that I have contracted Nikolai’s illness?”
“Of course not, dear. It cannot be so.” He gathered her to him for an embrace; only when he had brought her to bed and laid her down for a replenishing midday rest, did he carefully study her neck and forehead, for any signs of the terrible rippling that marked his brother’s flesh. But no; Kitty was untainted.
After dinner Kitty again donned her protective accoutrements and went as usual with her work to the sick man. He looked at her sternly when she came in, and smiled contemptuously when she said she had been unwell. That day he was alive with sores, his whole body covered with them, all of them throbbing and red like so many angry craters.
“How do you feel?” she asked him.
“Worse,” he articulated with difficulty. “In pain!”
“In pain, where?”
“Everywhere.” He gestured to his body, covered in ulcerated divots and loose flaps of skin.
“It will be over today, you will see,” said Marya Nikolaevna. Though it was said in a whisper, the sick man, whose hearing Levin had noticed was very keen, must have heard. Levin said hush to her, and looked round at the sick man. Nikolai had heard; but these words produced no effect on him. His eyes, ringed though they were with tiny sores on his cheeks and eyelids, had still the same intense, reproachful look.
“Why do you think so?” Levin asked her, when she had followed him into the corridor.
“He has begun picking at himself,” said Marya Nikolaevna.
“How do you mean?”
“Like this,” she said, scratching wildly at her arms and legs, as if clawing at something beneath the skin.
Marya Nikolaevna’s prediction came true. Toward night the sick man was not able to lift his hands, and could only gaze before him with the same intensely concentrated expression in his eyes. Even when his brother or Kitty bent over him, so that he could see them, he looked just the same. Kitty sent for the priest to say the prayer for the dying.
While the priest was administering the blessing, the dying man suddenly buckled violently, his hands thrashing, his body contorting up and back, shaking like a bridge wracked by high water. The priest attempted to continue the prayer as the dying man thrashed madly on the bed, every sore on his body pulsing vividly; indeed, as he stretched and his eyes rolled madly in his head, the little sores started to spurt cobalt bile like hideous little dragon mouths spitting gouts of fire. The priest scrabbled for his Holy Book and desperately continued chanting, reaching forward with a tremulous hand to try and place the cross to Nikolai’s cold forehead, but the dying man was bucking forward and back, slapping at his stomach, which bulged forward to an obscene degree. He moaned terribly, and Karnak emitted an awful, high-pitched shriek of distress.
“It is inside,” cried Nikolai. “Inside…”
At that moment the door was kicked open, and two young and handsome men with regimental-grade smokers burst into the sickroom.
“We are representatives of the Ministry of Robotics and State Administration. We have come today to… dear Heavenly Father!”
For while the man was speaking, Nikolai sat bolt upright, and his skin tore clean from his body like the wrapping ripped from a Class I plaything, his flesh flying free and scattering about the floor of the room like paper and ash. All present, including the two Toy Soldiers, stood frozen as Nikolai Dmitrich issued his last gurgling scream before his head lolled backward at a terrible angle. The remains of his body were shook free like a useless husk: shook free by a hunched, slavering inhuman being, more than six feet in height, its flexing, green-gray exoskeleton rippling with knobby stubs. The monstrosity, now standing astride the sickbed, had some dozens of eyes, clustered around a jagged, reptilian snout ending in a crooked, dirty-yellow beak. A thick, scaly tail swept about the room, while four stubby arms, each ending in a grasping three-fingered talon, lashed out in various directions.
Levin cried out and threw himself in front of Kitty; the priest wept and murmured prayers into his beard. Tatiana leaped in a rapid jeté from where she had been hiding, along with Socrates, behind the curtain in the rear of the room-and landed on one of the Toy Soldiers.
“Ah! Help!” shouted the Toy Soldier, as the Class III, her normal pink hue tinged with furious orange, clawed at his eyes with her long, manicured groznium fingernails. “Help!”
His colleague was unable to respond: for, as the others watched, transfixed, the unearthly creature let out a high, shrieking war cry, bounded off the bed, flexed its gigantic claws in midair, and landed on the other Toy Soldier, who had only just gathered the presence of mind to raise the smoker and draw aim. Before he could fire, the beast snapped its beak shut on the man’s head like the jaws of a trap.
The monster reared back with the soldier’s body dangling limply from its mouth, smashed its fat tree trunk of a tail against the wall, and stomped off through the broken door.
Tatiana meanwhile remained crouched over the other Toy Soldier, battering away robotically with clenched fists, dozens of blows a second, until at last the man stopped moving. The lissome Class III then sat coiled over his body for a long moment, the urgent flash of her eyebank slowly returning to its normal, even pulse.
NIKOLAI DMITRICH ISSUED HIS LAST GURGLING SCREAM BEFORE HIS HEAD LOLLED BACKWARD AT A TERRIBLE ANGLE
Through all of this, Levin stared with forlorn confusion at the sickbed where formerly his brother had lain-now but a tangle of sodden sheets, dotted with pieces of scalp, flesh in ill-colored hunks, small, gray piles of shed skin. Socrates gingerly helped Tatiana to her feet, and then bent to examine the battered body of the Toy Soldier, plucking a visionary-hundredfold from the metallic instrument tangle of his beard.
Kitty regarded her Class III with confusion, love, and fear. “I… I cannot express my thanks, that you took such a risk in defending our safety, as well as your own. But, but Tati…,” she trailed off, and Levin was forced to complete the thought for her: “Tatiana, you have violated the Iron Laws. No robot may strike a human being! How could your programming have allowed such an action?”
“I am uncer
tain,” said Tatiana slowly, anxiously smoothing out her tutu with one trembling end-effector.
“I shall explain,” answered Socrates, looking up from the Toy Soldier’s unmoving form. “This is not the corpse of a human being. This is groznium. These men were robots.”
* * *
As he and Kitty bid a tearful farewell to their brave beloved-companions, and began along the road home to Pokrovskoe, Dmitrich Levin was left to contend with twin mysteries: the grisly death of his brother, apparently as the result of having somehow become a sort of human hatching ground for an abominable alien creature; and the revelation that the Ministry’s new elite cadre, the very persons charged with collecting the nation’s Class Ills for adjustment, were not persons at all but perfectly humanoid robots. These mysteries revived in Levin that sense of horror in the face of the insoluble enigma that had come upon him that autumn evening when his brother had slept beside him. This feeling was now even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable of apprehending the meaning of life and death, and its inevitability rose up before him more terrible than ever.
But now, thanks to his wife’s presence, that feeling did not reduce him to despair. In spite of death and fear, he felt the need of life and love. He felt that love saved him from despair, and that this love, under the menace of despair, had become still stronger and purer. The one mystery of death, still unsolved, had scarcely passed before his eyes, when another mystery had arisen, as insoluble, urging him toward love and toward life.
When they arrived home, the provincial doctor confirmed his earlier suppositions in regard to Kitty’s health: her indisposition was a symptom indicating that she was with child.