“Can’t you get me more blankets?” he begged. “You don’t want me to die of pneumonia, do you?”
Dr. Rankin opened the blinds and asked, “What’s this like?”
“Night,” chattered Stone. “A new idea to save electricity— hooking up the blinds to the light switch?”
The doctor closed the blinds and sat down beside the bed. He was sweating as he reached for the signal button and pressed it. A nurse came in, blinking in their direction.
“Why don’t you turn on the light?” she asked.
“Huh?” said Stone. “They are.”
“Nurse, I’m Dr. Rankin. Get me a piece of sandpaper, some cotton swabs, an ice cube and Mr. Stone’s lunch.”
“Is there anything he shouldn’t eat?”
“That’s what I want to find out. Hurry, please.”
“And some blankets,” Stone put in, shaking with the chill.
“Blankets, Doctor?” she asked, startled.
“Half a dozen will do,” he said. “I think.”
It took her ten minutes to return with all the items. Stone wanted them to keep adding blankets until all seven were on him. He still felt cold.
“Maybe some hot coffee?” he suggested.
The doctor nodded and the nurse poured a cup, added the spoon and a half of sugar he requested, and he took a mouthful. He sprayed it out violently.
“Ice cold!” he yelped. “And who put salt in it?”
“Salt?” She fumbled around on the tray. “It’s so dark here—”
“I’ll attend to it,” Dr. Rankin said hurriedly. “Thank you.”
She walked cautiously to the door and went out.
“Try this,” said the doctor, after filling another cup.
“Well, that’s better!” Stone exclaimed. “Damned practical joker. They shouldn’t be allowed to work in hospitals.”
“And now, if you don’t mind,” said the doctor, “I’d like to try several tests.”
Stone was still angry at the trick played on him, but he cooperated willingly.
Dr. Rankin finally sagged back in the chair. The sweat ran down his face and into his collar, and his expression was so dazed that Stone was alarmed.
“What’s wrong, Doctor? Am I going to—going to—”
“No, no. It’s not that. No danger. At least, I don’t believe there is. But I can’t even be sure of that any more.”
“You can’t be sure if I’ll live or die?”
“Look.” Dr. Rankin grimly pulled the chair closer. “It’s broad daylight and yet you can’t see until I darken the room. The coffee was hot and sweet, but it was cold and salty to you, so I added an ice cube and a spoonful of salt and it tasted fine, you said. This is one of the hottest days on record and you’re freezing. You told me the sandpaper felt smooth and satiny, then yelled that somebody had put pins in the cotton swabs, when there weren’t any, of course. I’ve tried you out with different colors around the room and you saw violet when you should have seen yellow, green for red, orange for blue, and so on. Now do you understand?”
“No,” said Stone frightenedly. “What’s wrong?”
“All I can do is guess. I had to remove that sliver of bone from your brain. It apparently shorted your sensory nerves.”
“And what happened?”
“Every one of your senses has been reversed. You feel cold for heat, heat for cold, smooth for rough, rough for smooth, sour for sweet, sweet for sour, and so forth. And you see colors backward.”
Stone sat up. “Murderer! Thief! You’ve ruined me!”
The doctor sprang for a hypodermic and sedative. Just in time, he changed his mind and took a bottle of stimulant instead. It worked fine, though injecting it into his screaming, thrashing patient took more strength than he’d known he owned. Stone fell asleep immediately.
There were nine blankets on Stone and he had a bag of cement for a pillow when he had his lawyer, Manny Lubin, in to hear the charges he wanted brought against Dr. Rankin. The doctor was there to defend himself. Mrs. Stone was present in spite of her husband’s objections—”She always takes everybody’s side against me,” he explained in a roar.
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Lubin,” the doctor said, after Stone had finished on a note of shrill frustration. “I’ve hunted for cases like this in medical history and this is the first one ever to be reported. Except,” he amended quickly, “that I haven’t reported it yet. I’m hoping it reverses itself. That sometimes happens, you know.”
“And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?” raged Stone. “I’ll have to go out wearing an overcoat in the summer and shorts in the winter—people will think I’m a maniac. And they’ll besure of it because I’ll have to keep the store closed during the day and open at night—I can’t see except in the dark. And matching materials! I can’t stand the feel of smooth cloth and I see colors backward!” He glared at the doctor before turning back to Lubin. “How would you like to have to put sugar on your food and salt in your coffee?”
“But we’ll work it out, Edgar dear,” his wife soothed. “Arnold and I can take care of the store. You always wanted him to come into the business, so that ought to please you—”
“As long as I’m there to watch him!”
“And Dr. Rankin said maybe things will straighten out.”
“What about that, Doctor?” asked Lubin. “What are the chances?”
Dr. Rankin looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. This has never happened before. All we can do is hope.”
“Hope, nothing!” Stone stormed. “I want to sue him. He had no right to go meddling around and turn me upside down. Any jury would give me a quarter of a million!”
“I’m no millionaire, Mr. Stone,” said the doctor.
“But the hospital has money. We’ll sue him and the trustees.”
There was a pause while the attorney thought. “I’m afraid we wouldn’t have a case, Mr. Stone.” He went on more rapidly as Stone sat up, shivering, to argue loudly. “It was an emergency operation. Any surgeon would have had to operate. Am I right, Dr. Rankin?”
The doctor explained what would have happened if he had not removed the pressure on the brain, resulting from the concussion, and the danger that the bone splinter, if not extracted, might have gone on traveling and caused possible paralysis or death.
“That would be better than this,” said Stone.
“But medical ethics couldn’t allow him to let you die,” Lubin objected. “He was doing his duty. That’s point one.”
“Mr. Lubin is absolutely right, Edgar,” said Mrs. Stone.
“There, you see?” screamed her husband. “Everybody’s right but me! Will you get her out of here before I have a stroke?”
“Her interests are also involved,” Lubin pointed out “Point two is that the emergency came first, the aftereffects couldn’t be known or considered.”
Dr. Rankin brightened. “Any operation involves risk, even the excising of a corn. I had to take those risks.”
“You had to take them?” Stone scoffed. “All right, what are you leading up to, Lubin?”
“We’d lose,” said the attorney.
Stone subsided, but only for a moment. “So well lose. But if we sue, the publicity would ruin him. I want to sue!”
“For what, Edgar dear?” his wife persisted. “We’ll have a hard enough time managing. Why throw good money after bad?”
“Why didn’t I marry a woman who’d take my side, even when I’m wrong?” moaned Stone. “Revenge, that’s what, And he won’t be able to practice, so he’ll have time to find out if there’s a cure . . . and at no charge, either! I won’t pay him another cent!”
The doctor stood up eagerly. “But I’m willing to see what can be done right now. And it wouldn’t cost you anything, naturally.”
“What do you mean?” Stone challenged suspiciously.
“If I were to perform another operation, I’ll be able to see which nerves were involved. There’s no need to go into the technical
side right now, but it is possible to connect nerves. Of course, there are a good many, which complicates matters, especially since the splinter went through several layers—”
Lubin pointed a lawyer’s impaling finger at him. “Are you offering to attempt to correct the injury—gratis?”
“Certainly. I mean to say, I’ll do my absolute best. But keep in mind, please, that there is no medical precedent.”
The attorney, however, was already questioning Stone and his wife. “In view of the fact that we have no legal grounds whatever for suit, does this offer of settlement satisfy your claim against him?”
“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Stone cried.
Her husband hesitated for a while, clearly tempted to take the opposite position out of habit. “I guess so,” he reluctantly agreed.
“Well, then it’s in your hands, Doctor,” said Lubin.
Dr. Rankin buzzed excitedly for the nurse. “I’ll have him prepared for surgery right away.”
“It better work this time,” warned Stone, clutching a handful of ice cubes to warm his fingers.
* * * *
Stone came to foggily. He didn’t know it, but he had given the anesthetist a bewildering problem, which finally had been solved by using fumes of aromatic spirits of ammonia. The four blurred figures around the bed seemed to be leaning precariously toward him.
“Pop!” said Arnold. “Look, he’s coming out of it! Pop!”
“Speak to me, Edgar dear,” Mrs. Stone beseeched.
Lubin said, “See how he is, Doctor.”
“He’s fine,” the doctor insisted heartily, his usual bedside manner evidently having returned. “He must be—the blinds are open and he’s not complaining that it’s dark or that he’s cold.” He leaned over the bed. “How are we feeling, Mr. Stone?”
It took a minute or two for Stone to move his swollen tongue enough to answer. He wrinkled his nose in disgust.
“What smells purple?” he demanded.
<
* * * *
JUDITH MERRIL
A few writers have made their reputations on a single book; but the number who have done so on one short story is very nearly zero. Nevertheless, within a matter of weeks after her first published story appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, Judith Merril was one of the most talked about and uniformly popular writers in the science-fiction field. Its name was That Only a Mother; it’s a lovely and horrifying little piece, and included editing two anthologies (Shot in it set the pace for a career that has so far the Dark—Bantam—and Beyond Human Ken—Random House), the two Cyril Judd novels in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth, aforementioned, and one of the few science-fiction novels that can fairly be called a critical success: Shadow on the Hearth (Doubleday).For one more from Miss Merril’s agile typewriter, look below to...
So Proudly We Hail
...at the twilight’s last gleaming...
Great gray plain of poured concrete, level and bare, save for the network of construction at the center. There, ensnared in wood and metal, shadow-shrouded, the clumsy bottom of the tapered rocket rested on the Earth. Far above, the nose pierced the thin air, a bloody beacon in the sunset.
A spiral ramp curved out from the high loading port, sweeping across the concrete to where the human builders of the spacebird lived and worked: twelve hollow cubes poured from the same concrete on which they stood.
Behind one lighted window, scattered groups of men and women lingered over the evening meal. They drummed their fingers, and shifted nervously between each other and the lurid light outside. They talked in quick soft voices, laughed too loud; sipped steaming coffee, or bit into bread and meat that could not satisfy the hungers they were feeling.
.. .in the rocket’s red glare ...
The words kept running through her head, absurdly appropriate, two solid centuries after they were written by a man who also had to wait till dawn. The old words hummed in her head, replacing the others—the ones she’d saved up for tonight. The ones she had to speak, soon, now:
“I guess I better tell you now.”
In the wall mirror, Sue could see her own lips form the words, making precise movements against the set mask of her face. The careful mask of civilized conformity, red-and-white satin out of jars and boxes that could hide the pallor of fear and the blush of desire, both. She could see the words, but she couldn’t hear them. She had no way of telling whether she spoke aloud, or whether the shapes in the mirror were only an echo of the intention in her mind.
He didn’t hear. In the mirror she could see him too, his head turned from her to look out the window, watching the metal monster where it waited, crouched to spring at dawn.
He doesn’t even know I’m here.
The thought came bitterly, perversely reassuring. She gulped at too-hot coffee, seeing over the rim of the cup the familiar thrusting angle of his shoulder, the slight backward tilt of his head.
But he’d know if I wasn’t here, she reassured herself, and the coffee was bitter in her mouth.
“I guess I better tell you now,” she said again, and this time she knew she spoke aloud. She could feel her mouth moving to make the words: the lips, tongue, teeth, jaw, muscles of the cheek, working habitual patterns of speech beneath the mask. “I guess I better not wait any longer,” she said, and watched him start to turn, reluctantly, back toward her.
“Sure, Baby. What is it?”
She knew the suppressed impatience of that tone as she knew, intimately, every sound his mouth could make and every shape it had. His face was in profile, and she saw the pushed-out firmness of the lower lip that could completely hide the sensitivity of the upper; the stubborn set of jaw that made you forget how quickly the forehead wrinkled with trouble or tension. When she looked into his eyes, she knew what she would find there, too: a veil of tenderness not quite able to conceal the glitter of irritation.
“What is it, Baby?” he asked. “What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. “Drink your coffee,” she said, grotesquely wifelike. “You won’t get any coffee on Mars, you know.”
“Huh?” He shook his head once sharply, like a man immersed in sleep or fog. His eyes opened wide, and he looked down at the coffee cup with astonishment; shrugged and picked it up; sipped once, symbolically, not to disagree; then put it down to look away again.
Sudden brilliance flashed through the window, and she turned too, watching over his shoulder while the lights came on outside, to play through the night on the monster. She looked at the man, and past him, to the embodied dream outside, trying to see what he saw, to suffer the same bewitchment. But the dream was his. It was no longer, even by sharing, hers.
. . . o’er the ramparts we watched ...
On the ramp, a gang of workmen was loading the last stack of crates into the ship, hauling and pushing, making wide gestures, shouting to each other in a last burst of eager energy.
Man and wife, they watched the scene together, and fascination held them both. It seemed impossible that he could sit there, close enough to touch, and still not know how great a distance the rocket had already made between them.
He was hypnotized, she thought, spellbound by the mesmeric movements of the work gang and the flashing lights outside.
* * * *
He stared out the window, not thinking or feeling, not wanting to know, not letting her tell him. Whatever it was, it was nothing. Nothing that mattered. The rocket outside was proof enough of that: a symbol of lightness triumphant; a tower of silver that would roar skyward on bolts of lightning at dawn, carrying five hundred motes of humanity beyond blackness to the planet Mars. Married couples, mostly, like Sue and himself. Healthy and skilled, trained for the job over years of preparing; big men and big women with brawn and brains and courage and a sense of humor in time of adversity. The kind of people to build a frontier in the sky and make it thrive.
He had spent his whole life preparing himself for this. His whole life, and the last five years of it with Sue. She’d w
anted it as he did ...
Or had she?
Face it, jerk! He felt her eyes on the back of his head, and had to struggle not to turn around. She was scared, that’s all. Worried. Natural enough.
A woman gets that way, that’s all. He knew what she was thinking. No sense talking about it, not any more. They’d be in it soon enough, and she’d see it wasn’t as bad as her fears had built it up to be.
Or else she’d turn out to be right. It would be bad. A lot of it was bound to be. Okay! Why drag it out? Why make it worse before it happened?
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