“You were in the clinics?” Pearce asked. And without waiting for an answer he went on, “Increasingly, the practice of medicine becomes the treatment of monsters. In the city they would die; in the suburbs they are preserved to perpetuate themselves. Let me look at your arm.”
Harry started. Pearce had said it so naturally that for a moment he had forgotten that the old man couldn’t see. The old man’s gentle fingers untied the bandage and carefully pulled the matted grass away. “You won’t need this any more.”
Harry put his hand wonderingly to the wound. It had not hurt for hours. Now it was only a scar. “Perhaps you really were a doctor. Why did you give up practice?”
Pearce whispered, “I grew tired of being a technician. Medicine had become so desperately complicated that the relationship between doctor and patient was not much different from that between mechanic and patient.”
Harry objected, “A doctor has to preserve his distance. If he keeps caring, he won’t survive. He must become calloused to suffering, inured to sorrow, or he couldn’t continue in a calling so intimately associated with them.”
“No one ever said,” Pearce whispered, “that it was an easy thing to be a doctor. If he stops caring, he loses not only his patient but his own humanity. But the complication of medicine had another effect. It restricted treatment to those who could afford it. Fewer and fewer people grew healthier and healthier. Weren’t the rest human, too?”
Harry frowned. “Certainly. But it was the wealthy contributors and the foundations that made it all possible. They had to be treated first so that medical research could continue.”
Pearce whispered, “And so society was warped all out of shape, to the god of medicine everything was sacrificed—all so that a few people could live a few years longer. Who paid the bill?
“And the odd outcome was that those who received care grew less healthy, as a class, than those who had to survive without it. Premies were saved to reproduce their weaknesses. Faults that would have proved fatal in childhood were repaired so that the patient reached maturity. Non-survival traits were passed on. Physiological inadequates multiplied, requiring greater care-”
Harry sat upright. “What kind of medical ethics are those? Medicine can’t count the cost or weigh the value. Its business is to treat the sick.”
“Those who can afford it. If medicine doesn’t evaluate then someone else will: power or money or groups. One day I walked out on all that. I went among the citizens, where the future was, where I could help without discrimination. They took me in; they fed me when I was hungry, laughed with me when I was happy, cried with me when I was sad. They cared, and I helped them as I could.”
“How?” Harry asked. “Without a diagnostic machine, without drugs or antibiotics.”
“The human mind,” Pearce whispered, “is still the best diagnostic machine. And the best antibiotic. I touched them. I helped them to cure themselves. So I became a healer instead of a technician. Our bodies want to heal themselves, you know, but our minds give counter-orders and death-instructions.”
“Witch doctor!” Harry said scornfully.
“Yes. Always there have been witch doctors. Healers. Only in my day have the healer and the doctor become two persons. In every other era the people with the healing touch were the doctors. They existed; they exist. Countless cures are testimony. Only today do we call it superstition. And yet we know that some doctors, no wiser nor more expert than others, have a far greater recovery rate. Some nurses—not always the most beautiful ones—inspire in their patients a desire to get well.
“It takes you two hours to do a thorough examination; I can do it in two seconds. It may take you months or years to complete a treatment; I’ve never taken longer than five minutes.”
“But where’s your control?” Harry demanded. “How can you prove you’ve helped them? If you can’t trace cause and effect, if no one else can duplicate your treatment, it isn’t science. It can’t be taught.”
“When a healer is successful, he knows,” Pearce whispered. “So does his patient. As for teaching—how do you teach a child to talk?”
Harry shrugged impatiently. Pearce had an answer for everything. There are people like that, so secure in their mania that they can never be convinced that the rest of the world is sane. Man had to depend on science—not superstition, not faith healers, not miracle workers. Or else he was back in the Dark Ages.
He lay back in the bed of leaves, feeling Marna’s presence close to him. He wanted to reach out and touch her but he didn’t.
Else there would be no law, no security. And no immortality.
* * * *
The bracelet awoke him. It tingled. Then it began to hurt. Harry put out his hand. The bed of leaves beside him was warm, but Marna was gone.
“Marna!” he whispered. He raised himself on one elbow. In the starlight that filtered through the trees above, he could just make out that the clearing was empty of everyone but himself. The spots where Pearce and the boy had been sleeping were empty. “Where is everybody?” he said, louder.
He cursed under his breath. They had picked their time and escaped. But why, then, had Christopher found them in the forest and brought them here? And what did Marna hope to gain? Make it to the mansion alone?
He started up. Something crunched in the leaves. Harry froze in that position. A moment later he was blinded by a brilliant light.
“Don’t move!” said a high-pitched voice. “I will have to shoot you. And if you try to dodge, the Snooper will follow.” The voice was cool and cultured. The hand that held the gun, Harry thought, would be as cool and accurate as the voice.
“I’m not moving,” Harry said. “Who are you?”
The voice ignored him. “There were four of you. Where are the other three?”
“They heard you coming. They’re hanging back, waiting to rush you.”
“You’re lying,” the voice said contemptuously.
“Listen to me!” Harry said urgently. “You don’t sound like a citizen. I’m a doctor. Ask me a question about medicine, anything at all. I’m on an urgent mission. I’m taking a message to the governor.”
“What is the message?”
Harry swallowed hard. “The shipment was hijacked. There won’t be another ready for a week.”
“What shipment?”
“I don’t know. If you’re a squire, you’ve got to help me.”
“Sit down.” Harry sat down. “I have a message for you. Your message won’t be delivered.”
“But-” Harry started up.
From somewhere behind the light came a small explosion —little more than a sharply expelled breath. Something stung Harry in the chest. He looked down. A tiny dart clung there between the edges of his jacket He tried to reach for it and couldn’t. His arm wouldn’t move. His head wouldn’t move either. He toppled over onto his side, not feeling the impact. Only his eyes, his ears, and his lungs seemed unaffected. He lay there, paralyzed, his mind racing.
“Yes,” the voice said calmly, “I am a ghoul. Some of my friends are headhunters, but I hunt bodies and bring them in alive. The sport is greater. So is the profit. Heads are worth only twenty dollars; bodies are worth more than a hundred. Some with young organs like yours are worth much more.
“Go, Snooper. Find the others.”
The light went away. Something crackled in the brush and was gone. Slowly Harry made out a black shape that seemed to be sitting on the ground about ten feet away.
“You wonder what will happen to you,” the ghoul said. “As soon as I find your companions, I will paralyze them, too, and summon my stretchers. They will carry you to my helicopter. Then, since you came from Kansas City, I will take you to Topeka.”
A last hope died in Harry.
“That works best, I’ve found,” the high-pitched voice continued. “Avoids complications. The Topeka hospital I do business with will buy your bodies, no questions asked. You are permanently paralyzed, so you will never feel any pain, a
lthough you will not lose consciousness. That way the organs never deteriorate. If you’re a doctor, as you said, you know what I mean. You may know the technical name for the poison in the dart; all I know is that it is like the poison of the digger wasp. By use of intravenous feeding, these eminently portable organ banks have been kept alive for years until their time comes.”
The voice went on, but Harry didn’t listen. He was thinking that he would go mad. They often did. He had seen them lying on slabs in the organ bank, and their eyes had been quite mad. Then he had told himself that the madness was why they had been put there, but now he knew the truth. He would soon be one of them.
Perhaps he would strangle before he reached the hospital, before they got the tube down his throat and the artificial respirator on his chest and the needles into his arms. They strangled sometimes, even under care.
He would not go mad, though. He was too sane. He might last for months.
* * * *
He heard something crackle in the brush. Light flashed across his eyes. Something moved. Bodies thrashed. Someone grunted. Someone else yelled. Something wentpouf! Then the sounds stopped except for someone panting.
“Harry!” Marna said anxiously. “Harry! Are you all right?”
The light came back as the squat Snooper snuffled into the little clearing again. Pearce moved painfully through the light. Beyond him were Christopher and Marna. On the ground near them was a twisted creature. Harry couldn’t figure out what it was and then he realized it was a dwarf, a gnome, a man with thin little, legs and a twisted back and a large, lumpy head. Black hair grew sparsely on top of the head, and the eyes looked out redly, hating the world.
“Harry!” Marna said again, a wail this time.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. It was a momentary flash of pleasure, not being able to answer, and then it was buried in a flood of self-pity.
Marna picked up the dart gun and threw it deep into the brush. “What a filthy weapon!”
Reason returned to Harry. They had not escaped after all. Just as he had told the ghoul, they had only faded away in order to rescue him if they could. But they had returned too late.
The paralysis was permanent; there was no antidote. Perhaps they would kill him. How could he make them understand that he wanted to be killed?
He blinked his eyes rapidly.
Marna had moved to him. She cradled his head in her lap. Her hand moved restlessly, smoothing his hair.
Carefully, Pearce removed the dart from his chest and shoved it deep into the ground. “Be calm,” he said. “Don’t give up. There is no such thing as permanent paralysis. If you will try you can move your little finger.” He held up Harry’s hand, patted it.
Harry tried to move his finger, but it was useless. What was the matter with the old quack? Why didn’t he kill him and get it over with? Pearce kept talking, but Harry didn’t listen. What was the use of hoping? It would only make his torment worse.
“A transfusion might help,” Marna said.
“Yes,” Pearce agreed. “Are you willing?”
“You know what I am?”
“Of course. Christopher, search the ghoul. He will have tubing and needles on him for emergency treatment of his victims.” Pearce spoke to Marna again. “There will be some commingling. The poison will enter your body.”
Marna’s voice was bitter. “You couldn’t hurt me with cyanide.”
There were movements and preparations. Harry couldn’t concentrate on them. Things blurred. Time passed like a glacier.
As the first gray light of morning came on tiptoes through the trees, Harry felt life moving painfully in his little finger. It was worse than anything he had ever experienced, a hundred times worse than the pain from the bracelet. The pain spread to his other fingers, to his feet, up his legs and arms toward his trunk. Harry wanted to plead with Pearce to restore the paralysis, but by the time his throat relaxed, the pain was almost gone.
When he could sit up, he looked around for Marna .She was leaning back against a tree trunk, her eyes closed, looking paler than ever. “Marna!” Her eyes opened wearily; an expression of joy flashed across them as they focused on him, and then they clouded.
“I’m all right,” she said.
Harry scratched his left elbow where the needle had been. “I don’t understand—you and Pearce—you brought me back from that—but-”
“Don’t try to understand,” she said. “Just accept it.”
“It’s impossible,” he muttered. “What are you?”
“The governor’s daughter.”
“What else?”
“A Cartwright,” she said bitterly.
His mind recoiled. One of the immortals! He was not surprised that her blood had counteracted the poison. Cartwright blood was specific against any foreign substance. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” she said. She looked down at her slim figure. “We mature late, we Cartwrights. That’s why Weaver sent me to the Medical Center, to see if I was fertile. A fertile Cartwright can waste no breeding time.”
There was no doubt: she hated her father.
“He will have you bred,” Harry repeated stupidly.
“He will try to do it himself,” she said without emotion. “He is not very fertile; that is why there are only three of us. My grandmother, my mother and me. Then we have some control over conception. Particularly after maturity. We don’t want his children, even though they might make him less dependent on us. I’m afraid—” her voice broke—”I’m afraid I’m not mature enough.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Harry demanded.
“And have you treat me like a Cartwright?” Her eyes glowed with anger. “A Cartwright isn’t a person, you know. A Cartwright is a walking blood-bank, a living fountain of youth, something to be possessed, used, guarded, but never allowed to live. Besides”—her head drooped—”you don’t believe me. About Weaver.”
“But he’s the governor!” Harry exclaimed. He saw her face and turned away. How could he explain? You had a job and you had a duty. You couldn’t go back on those. And then there were the bracelets. Only the governor had the key. They couldn’t survive long linked together like that. They would be separated again, by chance or by force, and he would die.
He got to his feet. The forest reeled for a moment and then settled back. “I owe you thanks again,” he said to Pearce.
“You fought hard to preserve your beliefs,” Pearce whispered, “but there was a core of sanity that fought with me, that said it was better to be a whole man with crippled beliefs than a crippled man with whole beliefs.”
Harry stared soberly at the old man. He was either a real healer who could not explain how he worked his miracles or the world was a far crazier place than Harry had ever imagined. “If we start moving now,” he said, “we should be in sight of the mansion by noon.”
As he passed the dwarf, he looked down, stopped, and looked back at Marna and Pearce. Then he stopped, picked up the misshapen little boy, and walked toward the road.
The helicopter was beside the turnpike. “It would be only a few minutes if we flew,” he muttered.
Close behind him Marna said, “We aren’t expected. We would be shot down before we got within five miles.”
Harry strapped the dwarf into the helicopter seat. The ghoul stared at him out of hate-filled eyes. Harry started the motor, pressed the button on the autopilot marked “Return,” and stepped back. The helicopter lifted, straightened and headed southeast.
Christopher and Pearce were waiting on the pavement when Harry turned. Christopher grinned suddenly and held out a rabbit leg. “Here’s breakfast.”
They marched down the turnpike toward Lawrence.
* * * *
The governor’s mansion was built on the top of an L-shaped hill that stood tall between two river valleys. Once it had been the site of a great university, but taxes for supporting such institutions had been diverted into more vital channels. Private contributions had dwind
led as the demands of medical research and medical care had intensified. Soon there was no interest in educational fripperies, and the university died.
The governor had built his mansion there some seventy-five years ago when Topeka became unbearable. Long before that it had become a lifetime office—and the governor would live forever.
The state of Kansas was a barony—a description that would have meant nothing to Harry, whose knowledge of history was limited to the history of medicine. The governor was a baron, and the mansion was his keep. His vassals were the suburban squires; they were paid with immortality or its promise. Once one of them had received an injection, he had two choices: remain loyal to the governor and live forever, barring accidental death, or die within thirty days.
Star Science Fiction 4 - [Anthology] Page 16