The experiment itself commenced with a small operation. The large artery in Andrew’s groin had to be moved to the outer side of his thigh. This was for mechanical ease, Paul explained.
“I’m not much of a surgeon, but no reputable doctor would perform such an operation so you have no choice. Are you still interested?”
“Yes.”
“Once we go this far, there will be no turning back.”
Andrew nodded brusquely, took the sedatives Paul gave him and climbed into bed. Paul snapped out the light, the door closed, all was quiet.
So, here he was suddenly. In this small room, this great bed, facing the large window that looked out on the meadow and part of the woods. The rising moon, three-quarters full, shed its placid light on the world, the curtains moved beside the partly opened window and it was as though nothing but this room had ever existed. I will not go out of this room on these legs, he thought, and abruptly the gamut opened before him.
Thoughts of life and death lined either side, thoughts a healthy man should never think. How fragile life was! One blow and it was gone. There lay the bones and tissues, but the life was gone, emptied out so easily. How vulnerable it was, how final its departure! How short its tenure seemed, at best. If something were to go wrong, it would be as though he had never lived at all. Consciousness was no more than an abstraction, a geometrical point in the void, preceded by mindless infinity, succeeded by mindless infinity. How mad, the commotion this abstraction could produce. Between the two infinities, what difference did a few years make? And yet how precious they seemed. It was worthless. A man would never buy anything so problematical. Yet he had.
This is not the way to think. You can die thinking such thoughts. You have to fight. Now, fight, he told himself. Cling. Think of being alive!
Oh, but pain. It was a problem. Those additional tests Paul had made. Painful. Pain required a certain mental attitude. You had to alienate yourself, draw apart from your body, set it out there where you could look at it and see it was just a kind of automobile. Made the pain bearable. The pain was bad when you confused it with yourself, whatever yourself was. What is the self? This mysterious seer, hearer, thinker, this insubstantial entity that desires to continue, that hates these wincing tissues on which it depends. Repulsive, failing, dying stuff. Suddenly, he felt as though he were perched precariously in a small boat tossed on a wild sea of organic matter that would drown him if he let it.
But I will not be drowned, he told himself. I’ll cling to this boat and tomorrow in the daylight it will be better.
When he awoke, leaves were swirling past the window. It was a windy October day and he felt hungry. He pressed the button and Paxil came in carrying a small tray with sterile implements on it.
“Well,” said Andrew heartily. “I feel ready for anything. Give me some breakfast and let’s get on with it.”
“The operation is over,” said Paul.
Andrew gaped at him, and in the silence Paul set down the tray on the table by the bed. Scissors, cotton, alcohol, a small vial with a plain darning needle stuck through the cork. Andrew turned away and instead looked at his hands. They were the same as always. But what matter if they were stiff and numb? They worked, didn’t they? He clenched them slowly. Good hands.
“Already past the point of no return, eh?”
“That’s right,” said Paul.
And then the reaction. This is not me. I’m in it, but it isn’t me. And the mad scramble back into the boat.
Paul lifted the bandage where the relocated artery pulsed. He swabbed a tiny patch of skin and picked up the vial.
“You see,” he said, extracting the cork with the needle, “in this process we take advantage of the fact that every cell of the body has in it the complete genetic equipment. We merely encourage one to divulge what it knows.” And he pricked the skin deeply.
“Is that all?”
“That’s the beginning.”
It itched, but Andrew, clinging to the cockleshell of his identity, refused to scratch it. The body was itching, not he.
“I’ll bring in your breakfast now,” said Paul, replacing things on the tray. “You’re going to have to eat quantities. Six meals a day. And unfortunately, special and not very tasty preparations. But it’ll be better in a couple of weeks. You won’t have to force yourself anymore. The new body is parasitic.”
Andrew said nothing. Instead, he watched with great attention as Paul recorked the vial. Small hard sounds of glass on metal, the movements of hands, footfalls as Paul went out.
Then what does one do with the mind?
One had to use these senses. They were all one had. But curse these sneaking side-glances at the machinery!
Leaves fell, dipping and kiting. Puffs of cloud drew their shadows over the blue hills. A flight of crows clamored noisily from tree to tree. One wondered what all the conversation was for. Why didn’t they just leave? It was as though they were saying, Where’s that report from the Florida labs? Dammit, Pete, I told you to take care of that. Their costs are running too high! Who’s that? Representative from Rupert Chemical. Get him out of here, damn spy!
He spent an hour watching a downy woodpecker go up and down the pitchpine just outside his window, picking and picking, softly and imperturbably, while the jays swooped, perched, bowed and brashly quoted prices. That woodpecker was like Paul. Research. The jays, salesmen, in and out all the time, bright-eyed and predatory. The starlings, speculators, always traveling in flocks.
And at last, breakfast came in on a wheeled tray pushed by Erna, the mountain girl, who looked at him white-eyed and served him at arm’s length.
Three days later there was a pimple on his leg. He got out of the boat long enough to touch it gingerly with an exploratory forefinger.
“What’s that?”
“That is how it begins,” said Paul.
Andrew turned to the window irritably. November was forecast by gray gusts of rain. “I wish it were spring.”
A month later, when the first snow lay feathered like a herring-cloud among the brown weeds of the meadow, the pimple had become a huge lump, the size of a grapefruit, and the pain had begun in earnest. It was a queer kind of pain, as though everything in him were being sucked through a pinhole.
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” Paul would say, each time he asked the fretful question.
But his suspicions grew. Then the practical self would take command again. You had to stick to the conviction that everything was fine! Maybe it wasn’t, but if not, it still was not practical to dwell on it. Stick with the paying premise.
“I’ve got to have something to do!”
“If you don’t mind Erna, I’ll send her in to play cards with you or something.”
“Anything!”
So Erna, the freckled, long-legged girl, sidled in with a pack of cards, and they played endless, wordless games of Russian bank, in between endless, tasteless meals. And, during the hour each morning, afternoon and evening, when Erna was up at the barn helping Paul with the experimental animals, Andrew played obsessive solitaire.
By February the lump was the size of a bushel basket and had separated itself from him except for a gristly shining skin-covered tube, that pulsed with his heart like an obscene umbilicus.
“That’s what it is,” said Paul.
“Cover it up!” Andrew ordered. “I don’t want to see it!”
Paul and Erna rigged a curtain between Andrew’s side and the lump’s side of the bed.
Yet, when the March winds started roaring over the quonset, he could no longer bear being in ignorance. He swept aside the curtain to see, and Paul came running at his sudden cry.
“My God, is that it? What’s gone wrong?”
It lay like a huge grub beside him, the head all frontal lobes, so large they wrinkled forward between the blind tumescent bulbs that should have been eyes. Its small caterpillarlike arms were curved in over the wrinkled chest.
“Nothing is w
rong. It’s just shaped like a fetus at this stage.”
“It’s hideous!”
Paul jerked the curtain across the bed again and laid a barbiturate on the table. “Take that and stop thinking.”
Andrew gulped it down and replaced the water glass with a trembling hand. “That isn’t me,” he said hoarsely. “That could never be me.”
“Try to stop thinking.”
“What have you done to me?”
“What you insisted I do.”
“I want to stop. Cut it off. Kill it. Get rid of it!”
“If I did, you would die.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You would die. Your body processes are altered now.” He went out and returned with a mirror which he handed Andrew in silence. Glaring at him, Andrew took it, then he glanced in it, handed it back. He didn’t want to see. He had shriveled like a burnt leaf. His skin was leathery and stretched tight over the high bones of his cheeks and forehead and chin, sucked in in prunelike wrinkles around his mouth and eyes. He was aware suddenly of how very weak he had become. He closed his eyes tightly, withdrawing to the tiny boat, clinging to it, rocking and rocking in the now loathsome sea, hearing the suck and surge of his old body’s fluids, the receding tide of his blood.
He had made a mistake. He should not have left his business behind. That was the function of his mind, to keep him from being overwhelmed by this decaying carcass.
He demanded a Times, and Erna made a special trip in the pickup to get it. Thereafter, every day she went in to the distant county seat and brought one back to him. He began to write to his secretary, and large envelopes arrived in the mail once a day. It preoccupied him, and he congratulated himself on getting back to his proper activities again. But by June he was too weak to continue.
That day, when he admitted he could not write any longer, or even leaf stiffly through the contents of the latest brown envelope, Paul pushed back the curtain again. At first, Andrew refused to look.
“It has changed,” Paul assured him. “Take a look.”
At last Andrew turned his head on the pillow.
Beside him, head in the opposite direction, lay a young man.
“That isn’t me.”
“It’s you, all right.”
“It doesn’t look like me. I never looked like that.” He struggled to sit up, but was too feeble. Paul came around and helped him.
“The differences are only wear and tear,” said Paul. “This is a fully mature body, but it’s unmarked by experience. The feet, for example. No calluses, no deformities. They’ve never worn shoes. And the face. Even the face of a four-year-old child is altered to a certain extent by thought.”
Andrew gazed at it, rapt. It was eerie, lovely, locked in prenatal composure. “All the orifices are still shut,” he whispered.
“They’ll open shortly now,” said Paul.
Andrew hunched forward as far as he could. “Let me see the hands.”
Paul lifted one hand and held it up for Andrew to see the palm, smooth, flexible, traced like a baby’s with innumerable tiny lines. Andrew studied it avidly.
“I wonder how it will be to touch things again and be able to feel them,” he said, letting Paul help him lie down again.
They kept the curtain back, after that so that Andrew, propped up on pillows, could watch the last changes taking place, the slow unsealing of the eyelids, the lips.
“Why doesn’t he wake up?” Andrew asked.
“This is not your son,” said Paul. “This is you, remember?”
“How do I get in there?”
“Wait and see.”
Andrew was becoming too weak to worry. He avoided looking at his hands, which were so dessicated that the details of the bone structure could be seen through the darkening skin. Erna had to feed him, spoonful by spoonful, a long tedious process that seemed to do him no good at all anymore. Between meals he would sink into a torpor from which he roused sluggishly to be aware that for half-conscious hours he had been carrying on a long dialogue with himself, feebly insisting, heavily denying.
Live! Live!
Oh, it’s too weary, it’s too far away. I’m too tired.
That’s the trap of the flesh, the weakness of the mind. Don’t believe it. Don’t listen to it. Live!
And he would pick up the enormous load of his identity and struggle back to seeing once more.
And drift away again, down and down, deeper and deeper . . .
* * * *
It was warm again and he could smell the meadow, a fragrance compounded of warm grasses and a hint of wild strawberry, immensely sweet. He lay breathing it in, feeling for the first time in months a sense of ease, the quitting of innumerable pains and aches. I’m dead, he thought. And the faraway voice of Paul saying over and over again, “Andrew!” seemed the last echo out of time. So it does go on, he thought. This little I in the dinghy. Well, I’m glad to be out of it. How good to have no sensation but this pleasant scent ...
And then he opened—his eyes? But there was Paul, bent over the blackened shell, touching it gently, speaking to it. Loathsome thing. How could he bear to bend so close to it?
And then he blinked. Blinked what? Slowly down, glance over these limbs?
He could not speak.
There, Paul, you bloody genius, it hasn’t worked. Something has gone wrong and I can’t even tell you that I anticipated it and did not arrange to endow you with half my worldly goods.
Ah, there at last. Paul was looking toward him. If he couldn’t speak, he could smile. He knew he must be smiling, because Paul straightened slowly and came toward him, his academic frown shattered into wonder, his hand extended tentatively.
“Are you there?” Paul’s voice gently inquiring, curious, concerned.
Andrew smiled again.
“Can you speak?”
Can this head be moved? It’s extremely heavy, ah, but it can be shaken back and forth on the pillow, with effort, yet the effort is not painful, merely difficult.
“Don’t be anxious,” said Paul. “These delicate neural complexities of speech will need some training. Everything is there. You just need a little time. Erna!”
The girl came running, glanced at him wildly, turned away, turned back. He could have laughed, if he had been able, watching the comic graceful pirouette of alarm and curiosity and amazement.
“We must get some fluids going,” said Paul to her. “That thing—” a thumb over his shoulder toward the other form in the bed “—is not quite defunct. We can keep it operating a little longer and give him a margin.”
She vanished out the door, returned quickly with the bottled fluid and the rack. They suspended it over the other one, jabbed the needle into the papery vein.
“Get this one something to sip at. We’ve got to get it functioning!”
Erna ran out again while Paul wrapped a blood-pressure band and listened to his heart, meanwhile glancing at him with eyes that seemed filled with new unsuspected perplexities, eyes newly gentle, newly troubled and searching. Had something gone wrong?
Paul folded his stethoscope, patted his hand and waited until Erna returned with a tall glass of fruit juice. “Hold it for him,” he said to her, and she sat down beside the bed and put the straw in his mouth. Andrew drank greedily, and instantly was filled with such an intensity of pleasure that tears sprang to his eyes. All that was new and waiting and ripe functioned smoothly, joyously, and was in turn rejoiced by the cool liquid flowing into the receptive stomach. Andrew tongued aside the straw for a moment to smile reassuringly at Paul. It works, he wanted to say. You see, it does work. Don’t worry. All will be well. Poor old Paul.
Old Paul?
Andrew squinted at him, trying to manage the unsteady focusing of these sharp new eyes with their exquisitely flexible lenses. Ah, there it was! The tiny webbing of lines around Paul’s eyes. And the papery look of the skin under his chin. Old Paul. My God. Andrew turned his head and gazed at Erna, really seeing her for the first time
. Here was genuine youth. This luminous skin, the high round contours of cheeks outlined in light, contours to be understood not by their bones or their lines, but by the simple fruit-like bloom of skin.
Andrew lifted one hand uncertainly. It wavered but it rose, and he studied the skin of his forearm. There it was. The moist pellucid bloom of youth.
So Paul had not lied. He had never passed through the process. He really was the fortunate possessor of a type of organism that aged very inconspicuously.
“We’ll teach you to talk,” Paul was saying. “That can be Erna’s job.”
Orbit 4 - Anthology Page 13