Cooley drank, frowning.
“And remember,” said Baker, “there’s just about one choice that would do us any good against the Galactics. One pattern, out of millions. No. It won’t be technology that licks them—it’ll be guts.”
He was right. But he was wrong.
* * * *
Al Jenkins was in the Star-Ledger city room, gloomily reading a wire story about denunciations of the aliens issued by governors of eight states.
“What good is that?” he said, tossing it back onto the city editor’s desk. “Look at it”
Through the window, they could see the top of the alien building, shining in the distance. Tiny figures were crawling over the domed roof. The aliens had inflated a hemispherical membrane, and now the workers were going over it with the tools, forming a solid layer.
The dome was almost finished. Work on the interior of the building had stopped two days before.
“He knew what he was talking about,” said Jenkins. “We couldn’t stop them. We had three weeks to do it in, but we just couldn’t get together that fast.”
Cigarette ash was spilling down the front of his shirt. He scrubbed at it absently, turned, and walked out of the office. The editor watched him go without saying anything. . . .
One morning in July, two months after the aliens’ landing, a ragged mob armed with Galactic tools appeared near the spaceship. Similar mobs had formed several times during the last ten-night. When a native grew desperate, he lost what little intelligence he had.
The officer in charge, standing in the open doorway, looked them over disdainfully as they approached. There was no need for any defensive measures; they would try to club him with the tools, fail, and go away.
The native in the lead, a big, burly male, raised his tool like a pitchfork. The Galactic watched him with amusement
The next instant, he was dead, turned into bloody mush on the floor of the airlock.
The mob poured into the ship. Inside, the green-lit hallways were dim and vast as a cathedral. Bored Galactics looked out of doorways. Their bland expressions changed to gapes of horror. Some ran; some hid.
The tools cut them down.
The long corridors echoed to the rattle of running feet, to shouts of excitement and triumph, screams of dismay. The mob swept into every room; it was over in fifteen minutes.
The victors stopped, panting and sweaty, looking around them with the beginnings of wonder. The high-ceilinged rooms were hung with gleaming gold-and-green tapestries; the desks were carved crystal. Music breathed from somewhere, soothing and quiet.
A tray of food was steaming on a table. A transparent chart had been pulled out of a wall. Under each was a pulpy red smear, a puddle of disorganized tissue.
Baker and Cooley looked up and recognized each other. “Guts,” said Baker wryly.
“Technology,” said Cooley. “They underrated us—so did you.” He raised the tool he held, careful not to touch the butt. “Ten thousand tries, I hear—and ten thousand dead men. All right, have it your way. I call that guts, too.” He lifted his head, staring off into the distance, trying to imagine the hundreds of research stations, hidden in remote areas, with their daily, ghastly toll of human life. “Ten thousand,” he said. Baker was shaking with reaction. “We were lucky— it might have been a million. . . .” He tried to laugh. “Have to find a new name for this now. No more idiot stick.”
Cooley glanced at the floor.
“It depends,” he said grimly, “which end of the stick the idiot’s on.”
<
* * * *
JAMES E. GUNN
James E. Gunn is a young and talented Midwest writer whose greatest joy is to look over the prairies and lakes of his home state and imagine them torn under the tragedies that tomorrow may bring. It isn’t that he loves Kansas the less; it is just that he knows it so well—well enough to imagine it ruled by as strange a monarch as any story ever owned and yet to remain pure Kansas all the same. To meet this ruler, and to enjoy one of the finest short novels in recent science fiction, you have only to read-
THE IMMORTALS
The first patient was a young woman—an attractive enough creature, with blond hair worn long around her shoulders and a ripe body—if you could forgive the dirt and the odor.
Dr. Harry Elliott refrained from averting his nose. It would do no good. He was a physician with a sacred trust —even though (or perhaps especially because) he was only eighteen years old. Even a citizen was entitled to his care— even a citizen, without a chance at immortality, without even the prospect of a reprieve!
He looked her over thoughtfully. There was very little of interest in her case, no matter what disgusting ailment she might possess. The interesting areas of medicine—the research, say, that might synthesize the elixir of immortality —they had nothing to do with citizens or clinics. Harry Elliott’s greatest interest in the clinic was in getting done with it. Once his residency was complete, then research loomed ahead.
“Hello, doc-tor,” she said cheerfully. He muttered something, it didn’t matter what. Outside in the waiting room there were fifty like her. In the halls beyond, where the Blood Bank was handing out its $5 bills for guaranteed germ-ridden citizen blood, there were hundreds more. Well, they were essential; he had to remember that. The blood they sold so cheerfully for five dollars (which instantly they took and ran with to some shover of illicit antibiotics and nostrums) was a great pool of immunities. Out of filth came health. It was a great lesson, and one which young Harry Elliott tried to keep in mind.
“I don’t feel good, Doc-tor,” she said sadly. “I’m always tired, like.”
He grunted and resisted an impulse to have her disrobe. Not because of any danger involved—what was a citizen’s chastity? A mythical thing like the unicorn. Besides, they expected it. From the stories the other doctors told, he thought they must come to the clinic for that purpose. But there was no use tempting himself. He would feel unclean for days.
She babbled as they always did. She had sinned against nature. She had not been getting enough sleep. She had not been taking her vitamins regularly. She had bought illicit terramycin from a shover for a kidney infection. It was all predictable and boring.
“I see,” he kept muttering. And then, “I’m going to take a diagnosis now. Don’t be frightened.”
He switched on the diagnostic machine. A sphygmomanometer crept up snakelike from beneath the Freudian couch and squeezed her arm. A mouthpiece inserted itself between her lips. A stethoscope kissed her breast. A skull cap cupped her head. Metal caps pressed her fingertips. Bracelets caressed her ankles. A band embraced her hips. The machine punctured, sampled, counted, measured, listened, compared, correlated. . . .
In a moment it was over. Harry had his diagnosis. She was anemic; they all were. They couldn’t resist that five dollars.
“Married?” he asked.
“Nah?” she said hesitantly.
“Better not waste any time. You’re pregnant.”
“Prag-nant?” she repeated.
“You’re going to have a baby.”
A joyful light broke across her face. “Aw! Is that all! I thought maybe it was a too-more. A baby I can take care of nicely. Tell me, Doctor, will it be boy or girl?”
“A boy,” Harry said wearily. The slut! Why did it always irritate him so?
She got up from the couch with lithe, careless grace, “Thank you, Doctor. I will go tell Georgie. He will be angry for a little, but I know how to make him glad.”
There were others waiting in their consultation rooms, contemplating their symptoms. Harry checked the panel: a woman with pleurisy, a man with cancer, a child with rheumatic fever. . . . But Harry stepped out into the clinic to see if the girl dropped anything into the donation box as she passed. She didn’t. Instead she paused by the shover hawking his wares just outside the clinic door.
“Get your aureomycin here,” he chanted, “your penicillin, your terramycin. A hypodermic with ev
ery purchase. Good health! Good health! Stop those sniffles before they lay you low, low, low. Don’t let that infection cost you your job, your health, your life. Get your filters, your antiseptics, your vitamins. Get your amulets, your good luck charms. I have here a radium needle which has already saved thirteen lives. And here is an ampule of elixir vitae. Get your ilotycin here. . . .”
The girl bought an amulet and hurried off to Georgie. A lump of anger burned in Harry’s throat.
The throngs were still marching silently in the street. In the back of the clinic a woman was kneeling at the operating table. She took a vitamin pill and a paper cup of tonic from the dispensary.
Behind the walls the sirens started. Harry turned toward the doorway. The gate in the Medical Center wall rolled up.
First came the outriders on their motorcycles. The people in the street scattered to the walls on either side, leaving a lane down the center of the street. The outriders brushed carelessly close to them—healthy young squires, their nose filters in place, their goggled eyes haughty, their guns slung low on their hips.
That would have been something, Harry thought enviously, to have been a company policeman. There was a dash to them, a hint of violence. They were hell on wheels. And if they were one-tenth as successful with women as they were reputed to be, there was no woman—from citizen through technician and nurse up to their suburban peers—who was immune to them.
Well, let them have the glamor and the women. He had taken the safer and more certain route to immortality. Few company policemen made it.
After the outriders came an ambulance, its armored ports closed, its automatic 40-millimeter gun roaming restlessly for a target. More outriders covered the rear. Above the convoy a helicopter swooped low.
“Raid!” somebody screamed—too late.
Something glinted in the sunlight, became a line of small, round objects beneath the helicopter, dropping in an arc toward the street. One after another they broke with fragile, popping sounds. They moved forward through the convoy.
Like puppets when the puppeteer has released the strings, the outriders toppled to the street, skidding limply as their motorcycles slowed and stopped on their single wheels.
The ambulance could not stop. It rolled over one of the fallen outriders and crashed into a motorcycle, bulldozing it out of the way. The 40-millimeter gun had jerked erratically to fix its radar sight on the helicopter, but the plane was skimming the rooftops. Before the gun could get the range the plane was gone.
Harry smelled something sharply penetrating. His head felt swollen and light. The street tilted and then straightened.
In the midst of the crowd beyond the ambulance an arm swung up. Something dark sailed through the air and smashed against the top of the ambulance. Flames splashed across it. They dripped down the sides, ran into gun slits and observation ports, were drawn into the air intake.
A moment followed in which nothing happened. The scene was like a frozen tableau—the ambulance and the motorcycles balanced in the street, the outriders and some of the nearest citizens crumpled and twisted on the pavement, the citizens watching, the flames licking up toward greasy, black smoke.
Then the side door of the ambulance fell open.
A medic staggered out, clutching something in one hand, beating at flames on his white jacket with the other.
The citizens watched silently, not moving to help or hinder. From among them stepped a dark-haired man. His hand went up. It held something limp and dark. The hand came down against the medic’s head.
No sound came to Harry over the roar of the idling motorcycles and ambulance. The pantomime continued, and he was part of the frozen audience as the medic fell and the man stooped, patted out the flames with his bare hands, picked the object out of the medic’s hand, and looked at the ambulance door.
There was a girl standing there, Harry noticed. From this distance Harry could tell little more than that she was dark-haired and slender.
The flames on the ambulance had burned themselves out. The girl stood in the doorway, not moving. The man beside the fallen medic looked at her, started to hold out a hand, and, letting it drop, turned and faded back into the crowd.
Less than two minutes had passed since the sirens began.
Silently the citizens pressed forward. The girl turned and went back into the ambulance. The citizens stripped the outriders of their clothing and weapons, looted the ambulance of its black bag and medical supplies, picked up their fallen fellows, and disappeared.
It was like magic. One moment the street was full of them. The next moment they were gone. The street was empty of life.
Behind the Medical Center walls the sirens began again.
It was like a release. Harry began running down the street, his throat swelling with wordless shouts.
Out of the ambulance came a young boy. He was slim and small—no more than seven. He had blond hair, cut very short, and dark eyes in a tanned face. He wore a ragged T-shirt that once might have been white and a pair of blue jeans cut off above the knees.
He reached an arm back into the ambulance. A yellowed claw came out to meet it and then an arm. The arm was a gnarled stick encircled with ropy blue veins like lianas. Attached to it was a man on stiff, stiltlike legs. He was very old. His hair was thin, white silk. His scalp and face were wrinkled parchment. A tattered tunic fell from bony shoulders, around his permanently bent back, and was caught in folds around his loins.
The boy led the old man slowly and carefully into the ruined street, because the old man was blind, his eyelids flat and dark over empty sockets. The old man bent painfully over the fallen medic. His fingers explored the medic’s skull. Then he moved to the outrider who had been run over by the ambulance. The man’s chest was crushed; a pink froth edged his lips as punctured lungs gasped for breath.
He was as good as dead. Medical science could do nothing for injuries that severe, that extensive.
Harry reached the old man, grabbed him by one bony shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The old man didn’t move. He held to the outrider’s hand for a moment and then creaked to his feet. “Healing,” he answered in a voice like the whisper of sandpaper.
“That man’s dying,” Harry said.
“So are we all,” said the old man.
Harry glanced down at the outrider. Was he breathing easier or was that illusion?
It was then the stretcher bearers reached them.
* * * *
Harry had a difficult time finding the Dean’s office. The Medical Center covered hundreds of city blocks, and it had grown under a strange stimulus of its own. No one had ever planned for it to be so big, but it had sprouted an arm here when demand for medical care and research outgrew the space available, a wing there, and arteries through and under and around.
He followed the glowing guidestick through the unmarked corridors, and tried to remember the way. But it was useless. He inserted the stick into the lock on the armored door. The door swallowed the stick and opened. As soon as Harry had entered, the door swung shut and locked.
He was in a bare anteroom. On a metal bench bolted to the floor along one wall sat the boy and the old man from the ambulance. The boy looked up at Harry curiously and then his gaze returned to his folded hands. The old man rested against the wall.
A little farther along the bench was a girl. She looked like the girl who had stood in the doorway of the ambulance, but she was smaller than he had thought and younger. Her face was pale. Only her blue eyes were vivid as they looked at him with a curious appeal and then faded. His gaze dropped to her figure; it was boyish and unformed, clad in a simple, brown dress belted at the waist. She was no more than twelve or thirteen, he thought
The reception box had to repeat the question twice: “Name?”
“Dr. Harry Elliott,” he said.
“Advance for confirmation.”
He went to the wall beside the far door and put his right hand against the plate set i
nto it. A light flashed into his right eye, comparing retinal patterns.
“Deposit all metal objects in the receptacle,” the box said.
Harry hesitated and then pulled his stethoscope out of his jacket pocket, removed his watch, emptied his pants pockets of coins and pocket knife and hypospray.
Something clicked. “Nose filters,” the box said.
Harry put those into the receptacle, too. The girl was watching him, but when he looked at her, her eyes moved away. The door opened. He went through the doorway. The door closed behind him.
Dean Mock’s office was a magnificent room, twenty feet long and thirty feet wide, was decorated in a dark, mid-Victorian style. The furnishings all looked like real antiques, especially the yellow-oak rolltop desk and the mahogany instrument cabinet.
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