Nova 1

by Anthology

  I’m going to kill the son of a bitch.

  There’s no alternative to it. They permit me one death a year under the contract, possessed of an understanding that staggers me. We must kill to live. I thought this was not true. But I see it now. One cannot excise without giving back to the good, gold earth.

  Yes, yes, I am his orderly and after hours tonight I may creep into his dark with the drill reversed, restore where I laid waste, restore a thousandfold. Then I will emerge, go before the projector again and sit by his side, waiting for the morning. When they come they will see what I have done, clear it on their records to make sure that I have not exceeded my quota (I have not, Yancey is my first) and remove the corpus. He has no relatives.

  He’s next. I think they know it already, these doctors and nurses and administrators, because they are staying away from me with a look that connotes surprised respect. They know when a messenger is about to go over the line. There have been no conversations in these halls today, no sarcasm, none of that easy, feigned viciousness with which the living (they think) discharge themselves from the dead (they think). So they must know.

  Yancey doesn’t, of course. He lacks the intimation as all of them do, pre-or post-operative. Locked in his condition or its release. He calls it the Switchings of recovery.”

  “Clean in God’s hands, son?” he asks me, “or does the filth and decay of your function possess your soul; is your mind raddled and ruined? Corruption, corruption; but remember that the mind breaks first and only then the body; boy, you may be dying inside already with your filthy job and like that. Untenant your soul, throw away your drill, resign and let the breezes go free before you are incurable.” This is what he says to me.

  (I know he is senile; I know, I know. This has nothing to do with it. His cancer was not senile. It was bright, quivering, reaching for the heart’s moon, full of joy and first seeking. I am not concerned with the condition of the container.)

  Oh God, stay with me; oh God, I’m almost through now and ready for the photographs. Listen, listen, it is night, darkest night: in that cunning I steal upon Yancey. It is late in his corridors as well, illuminated in the metastatic loss only by phosphorescent dust and faint refractions from quarters below. In his room, in his night littered with prefiguration and doom, murky to the sounds of his stirring, Yancey s gut is where I laid it last, turned slightly to the side. I hear murmurs, the bloods whiskey travels home. It bathes my knife.

  I do it with the miniature knife rather than drill-reversal, it is the soundest, most painful way. One thrust into the stomach, another turn past the arteries, finally into the pancreas itself, hearing the panicked recession of the blood. When I am quite done I emerge, perch on his pillow, look at him. He has fallen heavily on his back, his eyes diminishing.

  “Why do, son?” he says, with what I suppose is his last breath. “Could you not escape your own corruption?”

  I try to point out that it is the other way; that, in fact, it was my unassailability which broke his corruption but my tiny lungs resist as inflation takes over. By the time I can speak again he is dead on the floor. I am pleased; pleased.

  And then, from deeply within, I feel my own new tumor full-come and now dancing for joy.

  MARY AND JOE

  by Naomi Mitchison

  It is a pleasure to welcome Naomi Mitchison to our ranks. She is a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet—who was always destined for science fiction. As the daughter of Professor J. S. Haldane, the sister of J. B. S. Haldane, and with her sons in scientific research—it would have been impossible for her to stay away. Here with a delicate, yet iron-strong master’s touch, she examines a theme that lesser authors shy away from in whinnying droves.

  Her husband looked up from his newspaper. “Jaycie seems to be getting into trouble again,” he said.

  She nodded. “Yes. I had a short letter from her. I wish—oh, Joe, I do wish she could take things a bit more lightly!”

  “Get herself married,” said Joe.

  Mary didn’t exactly answer that, but went on: “I know so well what she feels about politics. After all, we both had Liberal sympathies in our time—hadn’t we, Joe? But—it’s more than politics to her. Much more. And when she’s feeling like that she seems to forget all about human relationships.”

  Her husband grinned a bit. “Not like Simon. Nor yet my little Martha! What time did that kid get back from her date? Oh, well . . .” He finished his coffee. “I must be off, Mary. I’ll take the car right? How’s your stuff going?”

  “Not bad,” she said. “We’ve got all the routine tests for the new skin grafts to check before we can get on. These internal ones are a bit tricky.”

  “Poor old rabbits!” said Joe lightly and shrugged himself into his coat. He respected Mary’s work, knew about it, but somehow didn’t care much for it.

  Mary, however, was thinking about the next series of experiments and checks while she cleared up the breakfast dishes. Dear Joe, couldn’t he ever learn to put his stubs into the ashtray! She left a tidy place for Martha, who was running the bath upstairs and singing to herself, saw that there was plenty of cereal left in the packet, and all the time the shape of the work was clear in her mind.

  The basic genetics were reasonably simple, though not as simple as they had seemed ten years earlier. But then, nothing was! At its simplest, blood from two different blood groups, with all that this implies, cannot live together in the same body. Equally, cells of one genetic constitution will not accept cells of another —and are all genetically different, except for identical twins and (if we happen to be laboratory mice) pure-line strains. If living tissue is grafted onto a host animal, the grafted cells produced antigens and the host cells in reply produce antibodies which destroy the grafted cells. As long as the cells come from genetically different individuals, this natural process goes on. But it can be checked; this had to be done for surgical transplants. The host cells producing the antibodies could be killed by radiation, or checked by a series of drugs which most hospitals of that period called XQ, or else could be, in a sense, paralyzed by certain methods of presentation.

  All this meant a long series of experiments, often involving the death of the host animal; yet they had to go on before the essential knowledge was complete and could be used on humans without dangerous reactions. Grafts from a genetically different individual can take in certain favored situations, such as the cornea of the eye and in bone structure; some organs transplanted better than others. The choice of donor mattered a lot; Mary was working on this, especially on the possibility of using an anti-lymphatic serum. In practical terms, to delay rejection by the antibodies was important; but this involved a series of experiments, mostly during the last year or two on rabbits in utero, with typed donors. Naturally, the parent-to-child transfer was not likely to be successful, even at a very immature stage, since there was necessarily a great difference between the genes of one parent and the genes of the child which were mixed with another quite different set.

  Sometimes, too, she worked with individual graft hosts, not only in utero, but at a still earlier stage, in the egg. One experiment, with all the apparatus which it involved, and which Mary rather enjoyed devising, led to another. This was the field in which she had worked for a couple of decades, exchanging views with other workers in the same field and occasionally going to conferences when the family could spare her. It was an absorbing and in many ways a happy life.

  On her way to the big teaching hospital where she worked she bought another newspaper. It looked as if these strikes were going to develop the way Jaycie had said they would in her letter. It is odd, she thought to herself, how often things do work out the way Jaycie says. But if they bring in troops . . . She couldn’t really think about it sensibly. She hadn’t got the data. Jaycie hadn’t been home for six months; it wasn’t that she didn’t get on with the others, and dear Joe always going out of his way to be nice and welcoming, but—well, sometimes it seemed as if nothing they did at hom
e was worth her attention. She would try, especially with Martha, yes, she would try, but it was like a clumsy grown-up talking to kids! Jaycie could be annoying. Yes. And yet —people followed her. A great many people really. And whatever happened her mother loved her.

  The newspapers were beginning to get on to Jaycie now. They had ignored her at first. Put things down to anyone and everything else. After all, it was a bit awkward for them having to do with a woman who was beautiful but apparently had no sex life; they didn’t know what to try and smear her with. But now— Mary wished she knew, wished she could read between the lines. Were they frightened? She had been too busy these last ten years or so to think much about politics. When Jaycie turned up: yes. But when she left, Mary went back to her work thankfully as though to something simple and relatively clean—though some people wouldn’t think so! Back to thinking about problems of genetics and immunology. And an undertow in her mind always busy on the other children and dear Joe and something especially nice for supper and perhaps a show at the weekend and the new hyacinth bulbs to plant. But now it looked as if all Jaycie had said last time was going to develop into something she would need to think about, something real. And dangerous.

  But this was the hospital stop. She had come by bus, for it was an easy journey and she didn’t care for driving herself. She was apt to get abstracted and slow down, so that people hooted at her, but here in the bus she could work. She knew the conductor would call to her, amused if she was deep in calculations when it came to her stop: “This is you, doctor!”

  She got out, nodded to a colleague, and walked a bit abstractedly along the corridor with the marble bust of the Founder, on which young Bowles had, as usual, hung his hat. There was a lot of routine work and checking. She could do it with half her mind. But instead of concentrating on the next phase she kept on thinking about Jaycie. Had she done the right thing to tell her? Had she? Had she? Or would it have been better to let her believe the same thing dear Joe believed, the story about a sudden overwhelming fascination—women’s magazine stuff really. But easy to make up and equally easy to believe. Much easier than—whatever the truth was. You couldn’t expect anyone to believe that and still remain normal. And she had so wanted that: the lovely solid, warm, normalness of dear Joe. If she hadn’t told Joe the lie to which he never afterward referred they mightn’t have had their life together, they mightn’t have had Simon and darling naughty Martha. No. No. Any other way didn’t bear thinking about.

  Yet perhaps she should have told Jaycie the same—lie. If she had done that, Jaycie too might have grown up to be a normal girl. She might have fallen in love and married, and then there would have been grandchildren, lovely normal babies and the happiness that goes with them. Or if Jaycie hadn’t felt like that she could have done some absorbing professional job. She could have been a scientist like her mother perhaps or an architect like Simon, one of the thousand satisfying things which are open to modem men and women alike.

  Why had she told Jaycie? Mary thought back, frowning. It was that time when Jaycie was so depressed about being a woman, about the undoubted fact that there were rather fewer females than males of undoubted genius. That it is so much harder for a woman to take the clear, unswerving line toward—whatever it might be—because women are ordinarily more pliable, more likely to be interrupted, more aware of other people’s feelings and apt to be deflected by them: especially if they are loved people. She remembered Jaycie sitting curled up on the sofa, her chin dropped on her hand; and she herself had been standing beside the fire, so much wanting to help, but knowing that Jaycie needed more than the comfort of a mother’s arms around her.

  Jaycie had said: “I suppose, Mother, that’s what it means to be a Son of God, as they used to say. You go straight to the light. You know.” And Mary had said yes and had felt something gripping at her, a rush of adrenaline no doubt! Jaycie had said: “No daughters of God, of course!” and had laughed a little. And then she had stood up and looked straight toward her mother and said: “But I too, I know. Directly.”

  And then Mary had to speak, had to tell her. It was, after all, true. And since then Jaycie had never curled up again on the sofa. Never seemed to want the comforting arms. And Mary had hardly liked to touch her. Only on the rare nights when Jaycie slept at home Mary used to go up to her room when she was asleep, so deeply and peacefully it seemed, and stand there and want to take the one who had been her baby into her arms and share and share and comfort. But luckily she had managed the self-control never to do anything of the kind. Because if she had tried it Jaycie wouldn’t ever have come home again. She was fairly sure of that.

  Mary had forgotten to make her own sandwiches, so she went down to the canteen for lunch. There were rather more newspapers than usual being read. Young Bowles was having an argument with another of the lecturers; they frowned at her, but perhaps not deliberately. The Professor made some sympathetic remark to her about Jaycie. Nice old bird, the Prof. But who did he think Jaycie’s father was? Simple enough: that wasn’t the kind of thing he thought about.

  Things looked worse in the headlines of the evening editions. Mary seldom bought an evening paper, but this time she felt she had to. “Look, old girl, don’t worry,” said Joe. “They—they always write this sort of bilge. Makes people buy their rotten old papers. Nobody takes it seriously.”

  “It’s so childish of them—calling names!” she said, and stupidly found herself crying.

  “Jaycie wouldn’t give a damn for that, would she now?” said Joe cheerfully. But all the same, he thought, if only she and her crowd knew when to stop!

  “I bet Jaycie likes it!” Martha chipped in and, of course, in a way that hit the nail on the head.

  Three days. And suddenly the headlines got bigger, blotting out any other news. Now she was stuffing things into a small bag and Joe beside her was talking. “I won’t try and stop you, Mary, if you feel you must.” And she wasn’t listening to him; wasn’t thinking about him. She was only thinking about Jaycie.

  They hadn’t done anything really out of the ordinary to Jaycie. And the police as a matter of fact hadn’t been the worst. But nobody who wants things to go on as they are—and that goes for most of us—cares for someone who is intent on changing them and looks likely to succeed. An agitator is bad enough; a successful agitator is not to be borne. There was something about Jaycie that made her audiences believe her; she never lied to them, not even at a big meeting with the lights on and the voices clamoring, the time when lies come easy to most people. But Jaycie stayed steady and unmoved by that temptation. You couldn’t catch her out.

  But it was not during the actual arrest that most of the damage had been done, nor even when she was questioned. At first the police had been rather inhibited at doing their worst on a woman. But—she got them annoyed. Not reacting the way they wanted. Then they let go a bit. But the really nasty thing was the accident —at least they said afterward that it was an accident—with the petrol. Apart from everything else, Jaycie had lost considerable areas of superficial tissue and skin, including some on the face. Too much for safety. Very much too much.

  It had perhaps not been intended that she should get to an ordinary hospital. But Jaycie had more friends than was usually supposed, and in some curious places. Someone took fright and reversed an order. The body of Jaycie was bundled into an ambulance; she might well die before getting to hospital. That was to be hoped. But she didn’t.

  At the hospital they knew Mary by reputation; most of them had read one or two of her papers at least. But someone who has been a printed name at the end of a scientific paper looks different when she is the mother of a young woman who is probably dying of shock and what have you and who has been considerably disfigured. Who will be up for trial if she recovers. But she won’t. Even in the hospital some of them felt that this would be just as well. Doctors and surgeons no less than other citizens have a considerable interest in the preservation of the existing order of things. They were, of course,
extremely busy in Casualties. That was to be expected after the last few days. But it did account for the fact that the house surgeon paid little attention to what was happening at this particular screened bed. Mary got the ward sister to agree. Then she took the skin grafts off her own thighs under a local anesthetic. It was not really at all difficult. She had often worked with this type of scalpel like an old-fashioned cutthroat razor. It took the strips off neatly, though it is always a rather peculiar feeling to do such things to oneself. The slight reluctance of the skin to the blade and then the curious ease of the shaving off of the strips can be felt by the operating hand but not by the anesthetized tissue. The sister brings the necessary dressings. The new, still living skin is in place over the cleaned bums on the young woman’s thin, partly broken body.

  The ward sister couldn’t help noticing the extreme care with which the mother was laying on the skin grafts over burned cheek and neck and forehead, above all the comer of the mouth.

  “I couldn’t have done it,” she said afterward over a nice cup of tea. “Not on my own child. My own daughter. Nice-looking she must have been, you could tell that. And there was the mother going straight ahead, not batting an eye. And bound to be in pain herself. And all for nothing! Those grafts’ll never take, and that poor thing will look a proper mess if she lives. And that’s not likely. In a proper surgical transplant, we’d either do radiation or at least we’d type the patient up and give her a shot of XQ. Well, you know how things are this week. Couldn’t be done. And the mother must have known.” She shook her head.

  “Well, I for one wouldn’t have bothered to do it!” said another nurse who had been reading the papers.

  “And what wouldn’t you have done, may I ask?” said the ward sister, standing up with the finished cup in her hand.