A Gift From Earth Page 9

  "Don't bite my head off. What trial? I found you on Alpha Plateau. That makes you guilty. They'll put you in the vivarium till they need you, and then they'll pour antifreeze in you and cart you away. You'll never wake up." It sounded as if the gateman was smacking his lips.

  Matt's head jerked around, with the terror showing in his eyes. The gateman jumped back at the sudden move. His gun steadied. It was a mercy-bullet pistol, with a tiny aperture in the nose and a C02 cartridge doubling as a handle. For a frozen moment Matt knew he was about to shoot.

  They'd carry his unconscious body to the vivarium, whatever that was. He wouldn't wake up there. They'd take him apart while he was sleeping. His last living moment dragged out and out ....

  The gun lowered. Matt shrank back from the gateman's expression. The gateman had gone mad. His wild eyes looked about him in horror, at the walls, at the doors, at the mercy-bullet gun in his hand, at everything but Matt Abruptly he turned and ran.

  Matt heard his wail drifting back. "Mist Demons I'm supposed to be on the gate!"

  At one-thirty another officer came to relieve Polly's guard.

  The newcomer's uniform was not as well pressed, but he himself seemed in better condition. His muscles were gymnasium muscles, and he was casually alert at one-thirty in the morning. He waited until the long-headed man had gone, then moved to inspect the dials along the edge of Polly's coffin.

  He was more thorough than the other. He moved methodically down the line, in no hurry, jotting the settings in a notebook. Then he opened two big clamps at two corners of the coffin and swung the lid back, careful not to jar it.

  The figure within did not move. She was wrapped like a mummy, a mummy with a snout, in soft swaddling cloth. The snout was a bulge over her mouth and nose, the mouth pads and the arrangements for breathing. There were similar protrusions over her ears. Her arms were crossed at her waist, straitjacket fashion.

  The Implementation officer looked down at her for long moments. When he turned, he showed his first signs of furtiveness. But he was alone, and no footsteps sounded in the hall.

  From the head end of the coffin protruded a padded tube with a cap even more heavily padded in sponge rubber. The officer opened the cap and spoke softly.

  "Don't be afraid. I'm a friend. I'm going to put you to sleep."

  He peeled the soft bandage from Polly's arm, drew his gun, and fired at the skin. Half a dozen red beads formed there, but the girl did not move. He could not have been sure that she heard him or that she felt the needles.

  He closed the lid and the cap of the speaking tube.

  He was perspiring freely as he watched the dials change. Presently he produced a screwdriver and went to work at the backs of the dials. When he finished, all eight dials read as they had read when he came in.

  They lied. They said that Polly Tournquist was awake but motionless, conscious but deprived of any sensory stimulus. They said she was going mad by increments. Whereas Polly Tournquist was asleep. She would be asleep for the eight hours of Loren's tour of duty.

  Loren wiped his face and sat down. He did not enjoy taking such risks, but it was necessary. The girl must know something, else she wouldn't be here. Now she could hold out for eight hours longer.

  The man they wheeled into the organ bank operating room was unconscious. He was the same man Jesus Pietro's squad had found resting on the dead-man switch, one of those he had questioned that afternoon. Jesus Pietro was through with him-he had been tried and condemned, but in law he was still alive. It was a legal point, nothing more.

  The operating room was big and busy. Against one long wall were twenty small suspended-animation tanks mounted on wheels, for moving medical supplies to and from the room next door. Doctors and internes worked quietly and skillfully at a multitude of operating tables. There were cold baths: open tanks of fluid kept at a constant 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Beside the door was a twenty-gallon tank half full of a straw-colored fluid.

  Two internes wheeled the convict into the operating room, and one immediately injected a full pint of the straw-colored fluid into his arm. They moved the table next to one of the cold baths. A woman moved over to help, carefully fastening a breathing mask over the man's face. The internes tilted the table. The convict slid into the bath without a splash.

  "That's the last " said one. "Oh, boy, I'm beat."

  The woman looked at him with concern, a concern that might have showed in her mouth behind the mask but that could not show in her eyes. Eyes have no expression. The interne's voice had shown almost total exhaustion. "Take off, the both of you," she said. "Sleep late tomorrow. We won't need you."

  When they finished with this convict, the organ banks would be full. In law he was still alive. But his body temperature fell fast, and his heartbeat was slowing. Eventually it stopped. The patient's temperature continued to fall. In two hours it was well below freezing, yet the straw-colored fluid in his veins kept any part of him from freezing.

  In law he was still alive. Prisoners had been reprieved at this point and revived without medical ill effects, though they walked in terror for the rest of their days.

  Now they lifted the convict onto an operating table. His skull was opened; an incision was made in his neck, cutting the spinal cord just below the brain stem. The brain was lifted out, carefully, for the membranes surrounding it must not be damaged. Though the doctors might deny it, there was a kind of reverence attached to the human brain, and to this moment. At this moment the convict became legally dead.

  In a New York hospital a cardiectomy would have been performed first, and the prisoner would have been dead when it was over. On We Made It he would have been dead the moment his body temperature reached 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a legal point. You had to draw the line somewhere.

  They flash-burned his brain and saved the ashes for urn burial. His skin came next, removed in one piece, still living. Machines did most of the work, but the machines of the Plateau were not advanced enough to work without human control. The doctors proceeded as if they were disassembling a delicate, very valuable, vastly complex jigsaw puzzle. Each unit went into a suspended-animation tank. Someone then took a tiny sample with a hypodermic, and tested it for a wide variety of rejection reactions. A transplant operation was never cut-and-dried. A patient's body would reject foreign parts unless each rejection reaction was balanced by complex biochemicals. When the tests were over, each unit was labeled in full detail and wheeled next door, into the organ banks.

  Matt was lost. He wandered through the halls looking for a door labeled Vivarium. Some of the doors he passed had labels; some did not. The Hospital was huge. Chances were, he could wander for days without finding the vivarium the gateman had mentioned.

  Solitary individuals passed him in the corridors, in police uniforms or in white gowns and white masks pulled down around their necks. if he saw someone coming, Matt shrank against the wall and remained perfectly still until the intruder passed. Nobody noticed him. His strange invisibility protected him well.

  But he wasn't getting anywhere.

  A map, that's what he needed.

  Some of these doors must lead to offices. Some or all offices must have maps in them, perhaps built into wall or desk. After all, the place was so complicated. Matt nodded to himself. Here was a door, now, with a strange symbol and some lettering: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Maybe ...

  He opened the door. And froze halfway through it, shocked to the core.

  Glass tanks filled the room like floor-to-ceiling aquarium tanks, each subdivided into compartments. They were arranged like a labyrinth, or like the bookcases in a public library. In the first moments Matt couldn't recognize anything he saw in those tanks, but in their asymmetrical shapes and in their infinite dark shades of red, their nature was unmistakable.

  He stepped all the way inside. He had abandoned control of his legs, and they moved of themselves. These flattish dark-red objects, those translucent membranes, the soft-looking blobs of alien shapes, the grea
t transparent cylindrical tanks filled with bright-red fluid ... Yes, these had been human beings. And there were epitaphs:

  Type AB, RH+. Glucose content .... Rd Corp count ...

  Thyroid gland, male. Rejection classes C, 2, pn, 31. Overactive for body weight less than ...

  Left humerus, live. Marrow type 0, Rh-, N, 02. Length ... IMPORTANT: Test for fit in sockets before using.

  Matt closed his eyes and rested his head against one of the tanks. The glass surface was cold. It felt good against his perspiring forehead. He had always had too much empathy. Now there was a grief in him, and he needed time to mourn these strangers. Mist Demons grant they were strangers.

  Pancreas. Rejection classes F, 4, pr, 21. DIABIETIC TENDENCIES: Use for pancreatic fluid secretion only. DO NOT TRANSPLANT

  A door opened.

  Matt slid behind the tank and watched from around the corner. The woman wore gown and mask, and she pushed something on wheels. Matt watched her transfer things from the cart into various of the larger tanks.

  Somebody had just died.

  And the woman in the mask was a monster. If she'd taken off her mask to reveal foot-long poison-dripping fangs, Matt couldn't have feared her more.

  Voices came through the open door.

  "We can't use any more muscle tissue." A woman's voice, high and querulous, with a crew lilt. The lilt didn't quite ring true, though Matt couldn't have said where it failed.

  A sarcastic male voice answered. "What shall we do, throw it away?"

  "Why not?"

  Seconds of silence. The woman with the cart finished her work and moved toward the door. Then: "I've never liked the idea. A man died to give us healthy, living tissue, and you want to throw it away like — ' The closing door cut him off.

  Like the remnants of a ghoul's feast, Matt finished for him.

  He was turning toward the hall door when his eye caught something else. Four of the tanks were different from the others. They sat near the hall door, on flooring whose scars and shaded color showed where suspended-animation tanks had stood. Unlike the suspended-animation tanks, these did not have heavy machinery-filled bases. Instead, machinery rested in the tanks themselves, behind the transparent walls. It might have been aerating machinery. The nearest tank contained six small human hearts.

  Unmistakably they were hearts. They beat. But they were tiny, no bigger than a child's fist. Matt touched the surface of the tank, and it was blood warm. The tank next to it held five-lobed objects which had to be livers; but they were small, small.

  That did it. In what seemed one leap, Matt was out in the hall. He leaned against the wall, gasping, his shoulders heaving, his eyes unable to see anything but those clusters of small hearts and livers.

  Someone rounded the corner and came to an abrupt stop.

  Matt turned and saw him: a big, soft man in an Implementation-police uniform. Matt tried his voice. It came out blurred but comprehensible: "Where's the vivarium?"

  The man stared, then pointed. "Take a right and you'll find a flight of stairs. Up one flight, take a right, then a left, and watch for the sign. It's a big door with an alarm light; you can't miss it."

  "Thanks." Matt turned toward the stairs. His stomach hurt, and there was a shivering in his hands. He wished he could drop where he was, but he had to keep going.

  Something stung his arm.

  Matt turned and raised his arm in the same instant. Already the sting was gone; his arm was as numb as a haunch of meat. Half a dozen tiny red drops bedewed his wrist.

  The big, soft man regarded Matt with a puzzled frown. His gun was in his hand.

  The galaxy spun madly, receding.

  Corporal Halley Fox watched the colonist fall, then bolstered his gun. What was the world coming to? First the ridiculous secrecy about the ramrobot. Then, two hundred prisoners swept up in one night, and the whole Hospital going crazy trying to cope. And now! A colonist wandering the Hospital corridors, actually asking for the vivarium!

  Well, he'd get it. Halley Fox lifted the man and slung him over his shoulder, grunting with the effort. Only his face was soft. Report it and forget it. He shifted his burden and staggered toward the stairs.

  6: The Vivarium

  At dawn the graded peak of Mount Lookitthat swam beneath a sea of fog. For those few who were already abroad, the sky merely turned from black to gray. This was not the poison mist below the void edge but a continuous cloud of water vapor, thick enough to let a blind man win a shooting match. Crew and colonists, one and all, as they stepped outside their homes, their homes vanished behind them. They walked and worked in a universe ten yards in diameter.

  At seven o'clock Implementation police moved into the trapped forest, a squad at each end. Yellow fog lights swept the tongue of forest from the nearest sections of wall. The light barely reached the trees. Since the men who had been on watch that night had gone home, the searchers had no idea what animal they were searching for. Some thought it must be colonists.

  At nine they met in the middle, shrugged it each other and left. Nothing human or animal lived in the trapped woods, nothing bigger than a big insect. Four aircars nevertheless rose into the fog and sprayed the wood from end to end.

  At nine-thirty ...

  Jesus Pietro cut the grapefruit in half and held one half upside down. The grapefruit meat dropped in sections into his bowl. He asked, "Did they ever find that rabbit?"

  Major Jansen stopped with his first sip of coffee halfway to his lips. "No, sir, but they did find a prisoner."

  "In the woods?"

  "No, sir. He was pounding on the gate with a rock. The gate man took him inside the Hospital, but from there it becomes a little unclear — "

  "Jansen, it's already unclear. What was this man doing pounding on the gate?" A horrible thought struck him. "Was he a crew?"

  "No, sir. He was Matthew Keller. Positive identification."

  Grapefruit juice spilled on the breakfast rack. "Keller?"

  "The same."

  "Then who was in the car?"

  "I doubt we'll ever know, sir. Shall I ask for volunteers to examine the body?"

  Jesus Pietro laughed long and loud. Jansen was pure colonist, though he and his ancestors had been in service so long that their accents and manners were almost pure crew. It would never do for him to joke with his superiors in public. But in private he could be amusing ... and he had the sense to know the difference.

  "I've been trying to think of a way to shake up Implementation," said Jesus Pietro. "That might do it. Well. Keller came up to the gate and began pounding on it with a rock?"

  "Yes, sir. The gateman took him in charge after calling Watts. Watts waited half an hour before he called the gatehouse again. The gateman couldn't remember what happened after he and the prisoner reached the Hospital. He was back on duty, and he couldn't explain that either. He should have reported to Watts, of course. Watts put him under arrest."

  "Watts shouldn't have waited half an hour. Where was Keller all this time?"

  "A Corporal Fox found him outside the door to the organ banks, shot him, and carted him off to the vivarium."

  "Then he and the gateman are both waiting for us. Good. I'll never sleep again until I get this straightened out." Jesus Pietro finished his breakfast in a remarkable hurry.

  Then it occurred to him that the mystery was deeper than that. How had Keller reached Alpha Plateau at all? The guards wouldn't have let him past the bridge.

  By car? But the only car involved —

  Hobart was scared. He was as frightened as any suspect Jesus Pietro had seen, and he took no interest in hiding it. "I don't know! I took him through the door, the big door. made him walk ahead so he couldn't jump me."

  "And did he?"

  "I can't remember anything like that."

  "A bump on the head might have given you amnesia. Sit still." Jesus Pietro walked around the chair to examine Hobart's scalp. His impersonal gentleness was frightening in itself. "No bumps, no bruises. Does your head
hurt?"

  "I feel fine."

  "Now, you walked in the door. Were you talking to him?"

  The man bobbed his graying head. "Uh-huh. I wanted know what he was doing banging on the gate. He wouldn't say."

  "And then?"

  "All of a sudden I — " Hobart stopped, swallowed convulsively.

  Jesus Pietro put an edge in his voice. "Go on."

  Hobart started to cry.

  "Stop that. You started to say something. What was it?"

  "All of a sudden I — gulp — remembered I was s'posed t'be at the gate."

  "But what about Keller?"

  "Who?"

  "What about your prisoner?"

  "I can't remember!"

  "Oh, get out of here." Jesus Pietro thumbed a button. "Take him back to the vivarium. Get me Keller."

  Up a flight of stairs, take a right then a left —

  VIVARIUM

  Behind the big door were rows of contour couches, skimpily padded. All but two couches had occupants. There were ninety-eight prisoners here, of all ages from fifteen to fifty-eight, and all were asleep. Each was wearing, a headset. They slept quietly, more quietly than the usual sleeper, breathing shallowly, their peaceful expressions untroubled by bad dreams. It was a strangely restful place. They slept in rows of ten, some snoring gently, the rest silent.

  Even the guard looked sleepy. He sat in a more conventional chair to one side of the door, with his double chin drooping on his chest, his arms folded in his lap.

  More than four centuries ago, at some time near the middle of the nineteen hundreds, a group of Russian scientists came up with a gadget that might have made sleep obsolete. In some places it did. By the twenty-fourth century it was a rare corner of the known universe that did not know of the sleepmaker.

  Take three electrodes, light electrodes. Now pick a guinea pig, human, and get him to lie down with his eyes closed. Put two electrodes on his eyelids, and tape the third to the nape of his neck. Run a gentle, rhythmic electric current from eyelids to nape, through the brain. Your guinea pig will drop off immediately. Turn the current off in a couple of hours, and he will have had the equivalent of eight hours' sleep.