It looked rich and impressive. Personally, though, Harry preferred Twentieth Century Modern. Clean chromium-and-glass lines were esthetically pleasing; moreover, they were from the respectable first days of medical science—that period when mankind first began to realize that good health was not merely an accident, that it could be bought if men were willing to pay the price.
Harry had seen Dean Mock before, but never to speak to. His parents couldn’t understand that. They thought he was the peer of everyone in the Medical Center because he was a doctor. He kept telling them how big the place was, how many people it contained: 75,000—100,000—only the statisticians knew how many. It didn’t do any good; they still couldn’t understand. Harry had given up trying.
The Dean didn’t know Harry. He sat behind the rolltop desk in his white jacket and studied Harry’s record cast up on the frosted glass insert. He was good at it, but you couldn’t deceive a man who had studied like that for ten years in this Center alone.
The Dean’s black hair was thinning. He was almost eighty years old, of course. He didn’t look it. He came of good stock, and he had the best of medical care. He was good for another twenty years, Harry estimated, without longevity shots. By that time, surely, with his position and his accomplishments, he would be voted a reprieve.
Once, in the confusion when a bomb had exploded in the power room, some of the doctors had whispered in the safe darkness that Mock’s youthful appearance had a more reasonable explanation than heredity, but they were wrong. Harry had searched the lists, and Mock’s name wasn’t on them.
Mock looked up suddenly and caught Harry staring at him. Harry glanced away quickly but not before he had seen in Mock’s eyes a look of—what—fright? desperation?
Harry couldn’t understand it. The raid had been daring, this close to the Center walls, but nothing new. There had been raids before; there would be raids again. Any time something is valuable, lawless men will try to steal it. In Harry’s day it happened to be medicine.
Mock said abruptly, “Then you saw the man? You could recognize him if you saw him again or if you had a good solidograph?”
“Yes, sir,” Harry said. Why was Mock making such a production out of it? He had already been over this with the head resident and the chief of the company police.
“Do you know Governor Weaver?” Mock asked.
“An Immortal!”
“No, no,” Mock said impatiently. “Do you know where he lives?”
“In the governor’s mansion. Forty miles from here, almost due west.”
“Yes, yes,” Mock said. “You’re going to carry a message to him. The shipment has been hijacked. Hijacked.” Mock had a nervous habit of repeating words. “It will be a week before another shipment is ready. A week. How we will get it to him I don’t know.” The last was muttered to himself.
Harry tried to make sense out of it. Carry a message to the governor? “Why don’t you call him?” he said, unthinking.
But the question only roused Mock out of his introspection. “The underground cables are cut! No use repairing them. Repair men get shot. And even if they’re fixed, they’re only cut again next night. Radio and television are jammed. Jammed. Get ready. You’ll have to hurry to get out the southwest gate before curfew.”
“Curfew is for citizens,” Harry said, uncomprehending. Was Mock going insane?
“Didn’t I tell you?” Mock passed the back of his hand across his forehead as if to clear away cobwebs. “You’re going alone, on foot, dressed as a citizen. A convoy would be cut to pieces. We’ve tried. We’ve been out of touch with the governor for three weeks. Three weeks! He must be getting impatient. Never make the governor impatient. It isn’t healthy.”
For the first time Harry really understood what the Dean was asking him to do. The governor! He had it in his power to cut half a lifetime off Harry’s search for immortality. “But my residency-”
Mock looked wise. “The governor can do you more good than a dozen boards. More good.”
Harry caught his lower lip between his teeth and counted off on his fingers. “I’ll need nose filters, a small medical kit, a gun-”
Mock was shaking his head. “None of those. Out of character. If you reach the governor’s mansion, it will be because you pass as a citizen, not because you defend yourself well or heal up your wounds afterward. And a day or two without filters won’t reduce your life expectancy appreciably. Well, Doctor? Will you get through?”
“As I hope for immortality!” Harry said earnestly.
“Good, good. One more thing. You must deliver the people you saw in the anteroom. The boy’s name is Christopher; the old man calls himself Pearce. He’s some kind of neighborhood leech. The governor has asked for him.”
“A leech?” Harry said incredulously.
Mock shrugged. His expression said that he considered the exclamation impertinent, but Harry could not restrain himself. “If we made an example of a few of these quacks-”
“The clinics would be more crowded than they are now. They serve a good purpose. Besides, what can we do? He doesn’t claim to be a physician. He calls himself a healer. He doesn’t drug, operate, advise, or manipulate. Sick people come to him and he touches them, touches them. Is that practicing medicine?”
Harry shook his head.
“If the sick people claim to be helped? Pearce claims nothing. He charges nothing. If the sick people are grateful, if they want to give him something, who is to stop them? Besides,” he muttered, frowning, “that outrider is going to live. Anyway, the Governor insists on seeing him.”
Harry sighed. “They’ll get away. I’ll have to sleep.”
Mock jeered, “A feeble old man and a boy?”
“The girl’s lively enough.”
“Marna?” Mock reached into a drawer and brought out a hinged silver circle. He tossed it to Harry. Harry caught it and looked at it.
“It’s a bracelet. Put it on.”
It looked like nothing more. Harry shrugged, slipped it over his wrist, and clamped it shut. It seemed too big for a moment, and then it tightened. His wrist tingled where it rested.
“It’s tuned to the one on the girl’s wrist, tuned. When the girl moves away from you, her wrist will tingle. The farther she goes, the more it will hurt. After a little she will come back. I’d put bracelets on the boy and the old man, but they only work in pairs. If someone tries to remove the bracelet forcibly the girl will die. Die. It links itself to the nervous system. The governor has the only key. You’ll tell him the girl is fertile.”
Harry stared at Mock. “What about this bracelet?”
“The same. That way it’s a warning device, too.”
Harry took a deep breath and looked down at his wrist. The silver gleamed now like a snake’s flat eyes.
“Why didn’t you have one on the medic?”
“We did. We had to amputate his arm to get it off.” Mock turned to his desk and started the microfilmed reports flipping past the window again. In a moment he looked up and seemed startled that Harry had not moved. “Still here? Get started. Wasted too much time now if you’re going to beat curfew.”
Harry turned and started toward the door through which he had come.
“One more thing,” Dean Mock said. “Watch out for ghouls, ghouls. And headhunters. Headhunters.”
* * * *
Shortly after they set out, Harry had evolved a method of progress for his little group that was mutually unsatisfactory.
“Hurry up,” he would say. “There’s only a few minutes left before curfew.”
The girl would look at him once and look away. Pearce, already moving more rapidly than Harry had any reason to expect, would say, “Patience. We’ll get there.”
None of them would speed up although it was vital to reach the City Gate before curfew. Harry would walk ahead rapidly, outdistancing the others. His wrist would begin to tingle, then to smart, to burn, and to hurt actively. The farther he left Marna behind, the worse the pain grew. On
ly the thought that her wrist felt just as bad sustained him.
After a little the pain would begin to ebb. He knew, then, without looking, that she had broken. When he would turn, she would be twenty feet behind him, no closer, willing to accept that much pain to keep from approaching him.
Then he would have to stop and wait for the old man. Once, she walked on past, but after a little she could stand the pain no more, and she returned. After that she stopped when he did.
It was a small triumph for Harry, but something to strengthen him when he started thinking about the deadly thing on his wrist and the peculiar state of the world in which the Medical Center had been out of touch with the governor’s mansion for three weeks, in which a convoy could not get through, in which a message had to be sent by a foot messenger.
Under other conditions, Harry might have thought Marna a lovely thing. She was slim and graceful, her skin was clear and unblemished, her features were regular and pleasing, and the contrast between her dark hair and her blue eyes was striking. But she was young and spiteful and linked to him by a hateful condition. They had been thrown together too intimately too soon and, besides! she was only a child.
They reached the City Gate with only a minute to spare.
On either side of them the chain link double fence stretched as far as Harry could see. There was no end to it, really. It completely encircled the town. At night it was electrified, and savage dogs roamed the space between the fences.
Somehow citizens still got out. They formed outlaw bands that attacked defenseless travelers. That would be one of the dangers.
The head guard at the gate was a dark-skinned, middle-aged squire. At sixty he had given up any hopes for immortality; he intended to get what he could out of this life. That included bullying his inferiors.
He looked at the blue, daylight-only pass and then at Harry. “Topeka? On foot.” He chuckled. It made his big belly shake until he had to cough. “If the ghouls don’t get you, the headhunters will. The bounty on heads is twenty dollars now. Outlaw heads only, but then heads don’t talk. Not if they’re detached from bodies. Of course, that’s what you’re figuring on doing—joining a wolf pack.” He spat on the sidewalk beside Harry’s foot.
Harry jerked back his foot in revulsion. The guard’s eyes brightened.
“Are you going to let us through?” Harry asked.
“Let you through?” Slowly the guard looked at his wrist-watch. “Can’t do that. Past curfew. See?”
Automatically Harry bent over to look. “But we got here before curfew--” he began. The guard’s fist hit him just above the left ear and sentHim spinning away.
“Get back in there and stay in there, you filthy citizens!” the guard shouted.
Harry’s hand went to his pocket where he kept the hypo-spray, but it was gone. Words that would blast the guard off his post and into oblivion trembled on his lips, but he didn’t dare utter them. He wasn’t Dr. Elliott any more, not until he reached the governor’s mansion. He was Harry Elliott, citizen, fair game for any man’s fist, who should consider himself lucky it was only a fist.
“Now,” the guard said suggestively, “if you were to leave the girl as security-” He coughed.
Marna shrank back. She touched Harry accidentally. It was the first time they had touched, in spite of a more intimate linkage that joined them in pain and release, and something happened to Harry. His body recoiled automatically from the touch, as it would from a burning-hot sterilizer. Marna stiffened, aware of him.
Harry, disturbed, saw Pearce shuffling toward the guard, guided by his voice. Pearce reached out, his hand searching. He touched the guard’s tunic, then his arm, and worked his way down the arm to the hand. Harry stood still, his hand doubled into a fist at his side, waiting for the guard to hit the old man. But the guard gave Pearce the instinctive respect due age and only looked at him curiously.
“Weak lungs,” Pearce whispered. “Watch them. Pneumonia might kill before antibiotics could help. And in the lower left lobe, a hint of cancer-”
“Aw, now!” The guard jerked his hand away, but his voice , was frightened.
“X-ray,” Pearce whispered. “Don’t wait.”
“There ain’t nothing wrong with me,” the guard stammered. “You—you’re trying to scare me.” He coughed.
“No exertion. Sit down. Rest.”
“Why, I’ll—I’ll-” He began coughing violently. He jerked his head at the gate. “Go on,” he said, choking. “Go out there and die.”
The boy, Christopher, took the old man’s hand and led him through the open gateway. Harry caught Marna’s upper arm—again the contact—and half helped her, half pushed her through the gate, keeping his eye warily on the guard. But the man’s eyes were turned inward toward something far more vital.
As soon as they were through, the gate slammed down behind them and Harry released Marna’s arm as if it were distasteful to hold it. Fifty yards beyond, down the right-hand lanes of the disused six-lane divided highway, Harry said, “I suppose I ought to thank you.”
Pearce whispered, “That would be polite.”
Harry rubbed his head where the guard had hit him. It was swelling. He wished for a medical kit. “How can I be polite to a charlatan?”
“Politeness is cheap.”
“Still—to lie to the man about his condition. To say—cancer-” Harry had a hard time saying it. It was a dirty word, the one disease, aside from death itself, for which medical science had found no final cure.
“Was I lying?”
Harry stared sharply at the old man and then shrugged. He looked at Marna. “We’re all in this together. We might as well make it as painless as possible. If we try to get along, we might even all make it alive.”
“Get along?” Marna said. Harry heard her speak for the first time; her voice was low and melodious even in anger. “With this?” She held up her arm. The silver bracelet gleamed in the last red rays of the sun.
Harry said harshly, raising his wrist, “You think it’s any better for me?”
Pearce whispered, “We will cooperate, Christopher and I—I, Dr. Elliott, because I am too old to do anything else and Christopher because he is young and discipline is good for the young.”
Christopher grinned. “Grampa used to be a doctor before he learned how to be a healer.”
“Pride dulls the senses and warps the judgment,” Pearce whispered.
Harry held back a comment. Now was no time to argue about medicine and quackery.
The road was deserted. The once-magnificent pavement was cracked and broken. Grass sprouted tall and thick in the cracks. The weeds stood like young trees along both edges, here and there the big, brown faces of sunflowers, fringed in yellow, nodding peacefully.
To either side were the ruins of what had once been called the suburbs. Then the distinction between that and the city had been only a line drawn on a map; there had been no fences. But when these had gone up, the houses outside had soon crumbled.
The real suburbs were far out. First it was turnpike time to the city that had become more important than distance, then helicopter time. Finally time had run out for the city. It had become so obviously a sea of carcinogens and disease that the connection to the suburbs had been broken. Shipments of food and raw materials went in and shipments of finished materials came out, but nobody went there any more —except to the medical centers. They were located in the cities because their raw material was there: the blood, the organs, the diseases, the bodies for experiment . . .
Harry walked beside Marna, ahead of Christopher and Pearce, but the girl didn’t look at him. She walked with her eyes straight ahead, as if she were alone. Harry said finally, “Look, it’s not my fault. I didn’t ask for this. Can’t we be friends?”
She glanced at him just once. “No!”
His lips tightened, and he dropped back. He let his wrist tingle. What did he care if a thirteen-year-old girl disliked him?
* * * *
The west
ern horizon was fading from scarlet into lavendar and purple. Nothing moved in the ruins or along the road. They were alone in an ocean of desolation. They might have been the last people on a ruined earth.
Harry shivered. Soon it would be hard to keep to the road. “Hurry!” he snapped at Pearce, “if you don’t want to spend the night out here with the ghouls and the headhunters.”
“There are worse companions,” Pearce whispered.
By the time they reached the motel, the moonless night was completely upon them and the old suburbs were behind. The sprawling place was dark except for a big neon sign that said “M TEL,” a smaller sign that said “Vacancy,” and, at the gate in the fence that surrounded the whole place, a mat that said “Welcome,” and a frosted glass plate that said, “Push button.”
Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Page 13