by Anthology
I interjected, "And what do we do about it?"
He moved his head a bit and eyed me in the rear view mirror. "I hope we can help you, Cornell," he said in a tone of sympathy that was definitely intended to impress Officer Gruenwald with his medical appreciation of the doctor's debt to humanity. "I sincerely hope so. For in doing so, we will serve the human race. And," he admitted with an entirely human-sounding selfishness, "I may be able to deliver a thesis on the cure that will qualify me for my scholarate."
I took a fast stab: "Doctor, how does my flesh differ from yours?"
Thorndyke parried this attention-getting question: "Mine is of no consequence. Dig your own above and below the line of infection, Cornell. If your sense of perception has been trained fine enough, dig the actual line of infection and watch the molecular structure rearrange. Can you dig that fine, Officer? Cornell, I hate to dwell at length upon your misfortune, but perhaps I can help you face it by bringing the facts to light."
#Like the devil you hate to dwell, Doctor Mekstrom!#
In the rear view mirror, his lips parted in a bland smile and one eyelid dropped in a knowing wink.
I opened my mouth to make another stab in the open but Thorndyke got there first. "Officer Gruenwald," he suggested, "you can help by putting out your perception along the road ahead and seeing how it goes. I'd like to make tracks with this crate."
Gruenwald nodded.
Thorndyke put the goose-pedal down and the car took off with a howl of passing wind. He said with a grin, "It isn't very often that I get a chance to drive like this, but as long as I've an officer with me--"
He was above one forty by the time he let his voice trail off.
I watched the back of their heads for a moment. At this speed, Thorndyke would have both his mind and his hands full and the cop would be digging at the road as far ahead as his perception could dig a clear appreciation of the road and its hazards. Thorndyke's telepathy would be occupied in taking this perception and using it. That left me free to think.
I cast a dig behind me, as far behind me as my perception would reach. Nothing.
I thought furiously. It resulted in nothing.
I needed either a parachute or a full set of Mekstrom Hide to get out of this car now. With either I might have taken a chance and jumped. But as it was, the only guy who could scramble out of this car was Dr. James Thorndyke.
I caught his dropping eyelid in the rear view mirror again and swore at him under my breath.
Time, and miles, went past. One after the other, very fast. We hissed through towns where the streets had been opened for us and along broad stretches of highway and between cars and trucks running at normal speeds. One thing I must say for Thorndyke: He was almost as good a driver as I.
* * * * *
My second arrival at the Medical Center was rather quiet. I went in the service entrance, so to speak, and didn't get a look at the enamelled blonde at the front portal. They whiffed me in at a broad gate that was opened by a flunky and we drove for another mile through the grounds far from the main road. We ended up in front of a small brick building and as we went through the front office into a private place, Thorndyke told a secretary that she should prepare a legal receipt for my person. I did not like being bandied about like a hunk of merchandise, but nobody seemed to care what I thought. It was all very fast and efficient. I'd barely seated myself and lit a cigarette when the nurse came in with the document which Thorndyke signed, she witnessed, and was subsequently handed to Officer Gruenwald.
"Is there any danger of me--er--contracting--" he faltered uncertainly to Dr. Thorndyke.
"You'll notice that--" I started to call attention to Thorndyke's calmness at being in my presence and was going to invite Gruenwald to take a dig at the doctor's hide, but once more the doctor blocked me.
"None of us have ever found any factor of contagion," he said. "And we live among Mekstrom Cases. You'll notice Miss Clifton's lack of concern."
Miss Clifton, the nurse, turned a calm face to the policeman and gave him her hand. Miss Clifton had a face and a figure that was enough to make a man forget anything. She knew her part very well; together, the nurse and the policeman left the office together and I wondered just why a non-Mekstrom would have anything to do with an outfit like this.
Thorndyke smiled and said, "I won't tell you, Steve. What you don't know won't hurt anybody."
"Mind telling me what I'm slated for? The high jump? Going to watch me writhing in pain as my infection climbs toward my vitals? Going to amputate? Or are you going to cut it off inch by inch and watch me suffer?"
"Steve, some things you know already. One, that you are a carrier. There have been no other carriers. We'd like to know what makes you a carrier."
#The laboratory again?# I thought.
He nodded. "Also whether your final contraction of Mekstrom's Disease removes the carrier-factor."
I said hopefully, "I suppose as a Mekstrom I'll eventually be qualified to join you?"
Thorndyke looked blank. "Perhaps," he said flatly.
To my mind, that flat perhaps was the same sort of reply that Mother used to hand me when I wanted something that she did not want to give. I'd been eleven before I got walloped across the bazoo by pointing out to her that we'll see really meant no, because nothing that she said it to ever came to pass.
"Look, Thorndyke, let's take off our shoes and stop dancing," I told him. "I have a pretty good idea of what's been going on. I'd like an honest answer to what's likely to go on from here."
"I can't give you that."
"Who can?"
He said nothing, but he began to look at me as though I weren't quite bright. That made two of us, I was looking at him in the same manner.
My finger itched a bit, saving the situation. I'd been about to forget that Thorndyke was a Mekstrom and take a swing at him.
He laughed at me cynically. "You're in a very poor position to dictate terms," he said sharply.
"All right," I agreed reluctantly. "So I'm a prisoner. I'm also under a sentence of death. Don't think me unreasonable if I object to it."
"The trouble with your thinking is that you expect all things to be black or white and so defined. You ask me, 'am I going to live or die?' and expect me to answer without qualification. I can only tell you that I don't know which. That it all depends."
"Depends upon exactly what?"
He eyed me with a cold stare. "Whether you're worthy of living."
"Who's to decide?"
"We will."
I grunted, wishing that I knew more Latin. I wanted to quote that Latin platitude about who watches the watchers. He watched me narrowly, and I expected him to quote me the phrase after having read my mind. But apparently the implication of the phrase did not appeal to him, and so he remained silent.
I broke the silence by saying, "What right has any man or collection of men to decide whether I, or anyone else, has the right to live or die?"
"It's done all the time," he replied succinctly.
"Yeah?"
"Criminals are--"
"I'm not a criminal; I've violated no man-made law. I've not even violated very many of the Ten Commandments. At least, not the one that is punishable by death."
He was silent for a moment again, then he said, "Steve, you're the victim of loose propaganda."
"Who isn't?" I granted. "The entire human race is lambasted by one form of propaganda or another from the time the infant learns to sit up until the elderly lays down and dies. We're all guilty of loose thinking. My own father, for instance, had to quit school before he could take any advanced schooling, had to fight his way up, had to collect his advanced education by study, application, and hard practice. He always swore that this long period of hardship strengthened his will and his character and gave him the guts to go out and do things that he'd never have thought of if he'd had an easy life. Then the old duck turns right around and swears that he'll never see any son of his take the bumps as he took them."
"That's beside the point, Steve. I know what sort of propaganda you've been listening to. It's the old do-good line; the everything for anybody line; the no man must die alone line."
"Is it bad?"
Dr. Thorndyke shrugged. "You've talked about loose propaganda," he said. "Well, in this welter of loose propaganda, every man had at least the opportunity of choosing which line of guff he intends to adhere to. I'm even willing to admit that there is both right and wrong on both sides. Are you?"
I stifled a sour grin. "I shouldn't, because it is a mistake in any political argument to even let on that the other guy is slightly more than an idiot. But as an engineer, I'll admit it."
"Now that's a help," he said more cheerfully. "You're objecting, of course, to the fact that we are taking the right to pick, choose, and select those people that we think are more likely to be of good advantage to the human race. You've listened to that old line about the hypothetical cataclysm that threatens the human race, and how would you choose the hundred people who are supposed to carry on. Well, have you ever eyed the human race in slightly another manner?"
"I wouldn't know," I told him. "Maybe."
"Have you ever watched the proceedings of one of those big trials where some conkpot has blown the brains out of a half-dozen citizens by pointing a gun and emptying it at a crowd? If you have, you've been appalled by the sob sisters and do-gooders who show that the vicious character was momentarily off his toggle. We mustn't execute a nut, no matter how vicious he is. We've got to protect him, feed him, and house him for the next fifty years. Now, not only is he doing Society absolutely no damned good while he's locked up for fifty years, he's also eating up his share of the standard of living. Then to top this off, so long as this nut is alive, there is the danger that some soft-hearted fathead will succeed in getting him turned loose once more."
"Agreed," I said. "But you're again talking about criminals, which I don't think applies in my case."
"No, of course not," he said quickly. "I used it to prove to you that this is one way of looking at a less concrete case. Carry this soft headed thinking a couple of steps higher. Medical science has made it possible for the human race to dilute its strength. Epileptics are saved to breed epileptics; haemophiliacs are preserved, neurotics are ironed out, weaknesses of all kinds are kept alive to breed their strain of weakness."
"Just what has this to do with me and my future?" I asked.
"Quite a lot. I'm trying to make you agree that there are quite a lot of undeserving characters here on Earth."
"Did I ever deny it?" I asked him pointedly, but he took it as not including present company.
But I could see where Thorndyke was heading. First eliminate the lice on the body politic. Okay, so I am blind and cannot see the sense of incarcerating a murderer that has to be fed, clothed, and housed at my expense for the rest of his natural life. Then for the second step we get rid of weaklings, both physical and mental. I'll call Step Two passably okay, but--? Number Three includes grifters, beggars, bums, and guys out for the soft touch and here I begin to wonder. I've known some entertaining grifters, beggars, and bums; a few of them chose their way of life for their own, just as I became a mechanical engineer.
The trouble with this sort of philosophy is that it starts off with an appeal to justice and logic (I'm quoting myself), but it quickly gets dangerous. Start knocking off the bilge-scum. Then when the lowest strata of society is gone, start on the next. Carry this line of reasoning out to straight Aristotelian Logic and you come up with parties like you and me, who may have been quite acceptable when compared to the whole cross-section of humanity, but who now have no one but his betters to compete with.
I had never reasoned this out before, but as I did right there and then, I decided that Society cannot draw lines nor assume a static pose. Society must move constantly, either in one direction or the other. And while I object to paying taxes to support some rattlehead for the rest of his natural life, I'd rather have it that way than to have someone start a trend of bopping off everybody who has not the ability to absorb the educational level of the scholar. Because, if the trend turned upward instead of downward, that's where the dividing line would end.
Anarchy at one end, is as bad as tyranny at the other--
"I'm sorry you cannot come to a reasonable conclusion," said Dr. Thorndyke. "If you cannot see the logic of--"
I cut him off short. "Look, Doc," I snapped, "If you can't see where your line of thinking ends, you're in bad shape."
He looked superior. "You're sour because you know you haven't got what it takes."
I almost nipped. "You're so damned dumb that you can't see that in any society of supermen, you'd not be qualified to clean out ash trays," I tossed back at him.
He smiled self-confidently. "By the time they start looking at my level--if they ever do--you'll have been gone long ago. Sorry, Cornell. You don't add up."
Well, that was nothing I didn't know already. In his society, I was a nonentity. Yet, somehow, if that's what the human race was coming to under the Thorndyke's and the Phelps', I didn't care to stay around.
"All right," I snapped. "Which way do I go from here? The laboratory, or will you dispense with the preliminaries and let me take the high slide right now before this--" I held up my infected finger, "gets to the painful stages."
With the air and tone of a man inspecting an interesting specimen impaled on a mounting pin, Thorndyke replied:
"Oh--we have use for the likes of you."
XVII
It would please me no end to report here that the gang at the Medical Center were crude, rough, vicious, and that they didn't give a damn about human suffering. Unfortunately for my sense of moral balance, I can't. They didn't cut huge slices out of my hide without benefit of anaesthesia. They didn't shove pipe-sized needles into me, or strap me on a board and open me up with dull knives. Instead, they treated me as if I'd been going to pay for my treatment and ultimately emerge from the Center to go forth and extol its virtues. I ate good food, slept in a clean and comfortable bed, smoked free cigarettes, read the best magazines--and also some of the worst, if I must report the whole truth--and was permitted to mingle with the rest of the patients, guests, victims, personnel, and so forth that were attached to my ward.
I was not at any time treated as though I were anything but a willing and happy member of their team. It was known that I was not, but if any emotion was shown, it was sympathy at my plight in not being one of them. This was viewed in the same way as any other accident of birth or upbringing.
In my room was another man about my age. He'd arrived a day before me, with an early infection at the tip of his middle toe. He was, if I've got to produce a time-table, about three-eights of an inch ahead of me. He had no worries. He was one of their kind of thinkers.
"How'd you connect?" I asked him.
"I didn't," he said, scratching his infected toe vigorously. "They connected with me."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I was sleeping tight and not even dreaming. Someone rapped on my apartment door and I growled myself out of bed and sort of felt my way. It was three in the morning. Guy stood there looking apologetic. 'Got a message for you,' he tells me. 'Can't it wait until morning?' I snarl back. 'No,' he says. 'It's important!' So I invite him in. He doesn't waste any time at all; his first act is to point at an iron floor lamp in the corner and ask me how much I'd paid for it. I tell him. Then this bird drops twice the amount on the coffee table, strides over to the corner, picks up the lamp, and ties the iron pipe into a fancy-looking bowknot. He didn't even grunt. 'Mr. Mullaney,' he asks me, 'How would you like to be that strong?' I didn't have to think it over. I told him right then and there. Then we spent from three ayem to five thirty going through a fast question and answer routine, sort of like a complicated word-association test. At six o'clock I've packed and I'm on my way here with my case of Mekstrom's Disease."
"Just like that?" I asked Mr. Mullaney.
"Jus
t like that," he repeated.
"So now what happens?"
"Oh, about tomorrow I'll go in for treatment," he said. "Seems as how they've got to start treatment before the infection creeps to the first joint or I'll lose the joint." He contemplated me a bit; he was a perceptive and I knew it. "You've got another day or more. That's because your ring finger is longer than my toe."
"What's the treatment like?" I asked him.
"That I don't know. I've tried to dig the treatment, but it's too far away from here. This is just a sort of preliminary ward; I gather that they know when to start and so on." He veiled his eyes for a moment. He was undoubtedly thinking of my fate. "Chess?" he asked, changing the subject abruptly.
"Why not?" I grinned.
My mind wasn't in it. He beat me three out of four. I bedded down about eleven, and to my surprise I slept well. They must have been shoving something into me to make me sleep; I know me very well and I'm sure that I couldn't have closed an eye if they hadn't been slipping me the old closeout powder. For three nights, now, I'd corked off solid until seven ack emma and I'd come alive in the morning fine, fit, and fresh.
But on the following morning, Mr. Mullaney was missing. I never saw him again.
At noon, or thereabouts, the end of the ring finger on my left hand was as solid as a rock. I could squeeze it in a door or burn it with a cigarette; I got into a little habit of scratching kitchen matches on it as I tried to dig into the solid flesh with my perception. I growled a bit at my fate, but not much.
It was about this time, too, that the slight itch began to change. You know how a deep-felt itch is. It can sometimes be pleasant. Like the itch that comes after a fast swim in the salty sea and a dry-out in the bright sun, when the drying salt water makes your skin itch with the vibrant pleasure of just being alive. This is not like the bite of any bug, but the kind that makes you want to take another dive into the ocean instead of trying to scratch it with your claws. Well, the itch in my finger had been one of the pleasant kinds. I could sort of scratch it away by taking the steel-hard part of my finger in my other hand and wiggle, briskly. But now the itch turned into a deep burning pain.