Collected Short Fiction, page 612
Flat on his back, with his arm strapped to the table and a crisp, cool sheet covering his legs, Ryeland lay. He was watching his blood slowly fill a liter beaker up to a measured mark. His blood was wine-purple colored, and it seemed to flow very slowly.
There was nothing at all painful about the process. Of course, it wasn’t exactly pure pleasure. There was a queer jumpy sensation in his skin, a sort of warning of something that might hurt—as though the nerve-ends, evolved to cope with grosser wounds and warn of instant dangers, did not know quite what to tell the brain, and could only express a sort of worry. The tube made a faint vulgar sound from time to time, like a siphon sucking air, but there was no other noise. The nurse had left him. It was amazing how still the world was . . .
And it was amazing how clearly Ryeland could think.
He was tranquil.
More than that, he knew he was tranquil.
More still, he was beginning to realize that he had been tranquil—stupidly, crazily tranquil—ever since he had arrived in the Body Bank! And so was everyone else! It accounted for the cheerful amputees and his heedless roommates at the Dixie Presidents. Tranquil! But it was not natural, and so it was due to drugs.
Ryeland lay lazily watching the thick froth at the top of the beaker of his blood and marveled that he had not seen it before. Even the man who wrote the diary had never seen it, though he had come so close. Drugs!
The Plan of Man understood that there were circuits in the human brain not subject to reason. Self-preservation was one of them. The Machine would not risk a sudden flare-up of that instinct. The Machine must have known that, whatever the mood of the Body Bank’s raw materials as they went in, however carefully conditioned to their duties under the Plan of Man, the threat of dismemberment and death could upset all conditioning.
Therefore the Machine had taken steps. The obvious step—how was it that no one had seen it?—was to flood the cadavers with tranquilizing drugs.
The nurse came in. She tapped the beaker lightly with a finger, fussed with the tubes, and in a moment deftly removed the needle from Ryeland’s arm. She was humming to herself. She pressed an alcohol pad over the little puncture in his arm and ordered: “Hold it that way to keep the pad in place.” Ryeland was hardly listening. Tranquilizing drugs, he thought, like an echo; it explained everything. It explained why D.W.H.’s careful plans had come to nothing; before they could mature, the drive that would make them reality had been sapped. It explained why Ryeland himself had loafed for irretrievable days. The only astonishing thing was that he had found out.
The nurse straightened his arm, plucked off the pad and pointed. “Out that way.”
Ryeland started obediently out the door, then stopped, shocked to alertness at last.
An orderly was guiding an electric stretcher down the hall. On it, his eyes closed, lay the nervous man from Ryeland’s group of donors. He looked to be asleep. Surely he had lost something—but what? Arms were there, legs showed under the sheet, there was no mark on the motionless face.
Ryeland said to the nurse: “Excuse me. That fellow. What happened with him?”
The nurse peered past him. “Oh, that one.” A shade came down over her eyes. “That was a big one. Did you know him?”
“Yes.”
“I see.” After a second she said briskly: “We needed a whole spine. There wasn’t much point in trying to salvage any of the rest of him.” Ryeland stumbled out into the corridor, following the corpse of the nervous man, who never again would have to be nervous. He glanced over his shoulder at the nurse and said: “Good-by.”
She said: “I’ll be seeing you.”
Outside Heaven, thirteen billion human beings worked, studied, loved, quarreled and in general fulfilled their tiny assigned missions under the Plan of Man. In Saskatchewan an engineer turned a switch and the side of a mountain lifted itself, grumbled and slid into a lake, revealing an open vein of low-grade uranium ore, one of the last deposits left to tap. In the hillside town of Fiesole, in Italy, a Technicorps colonel made a field inspection of the new reservoir. The water level had risen a gratifying nineteen inches since his last report. He observed, from his flat-bottomed boat, how a certain jumbled pile of masonry he remembered seeing was now almost entirely submerged; it was the Pitti Palace, but he had never heard the name. (The Ponte Vecchio was already twenty feet under the bottom of his boat.) Under Honduras, a subtrain shaft collapsed and eighteen hundred migratory agricultural workers were simultaneously cremated and dissolved in molten rock. The Planner, returned from the Moon, signed an order which would ultimately lower the level of the Mediterranean sea ninety feet, creating thousands of miles of new land around its dwindled shores and providing an enormous hydroelectric station at the Straits of Gibraltar . . .
But on the isle of Cuba, no echo of these rumblings penetrated. Everything was calm. Everything was pleasant. And Steve Ryeland fought against it as hard as he could. He quarreled vigorously with his Dixie Presidents. The senior cadaver was hurt, shocked and mortified; as a consequence, half an hour later he lost count of trumps and suffered an eight-hundred point penalty in the afternoon’s bridge game. Ryeland was well pleased. Quarreling stimulated his adrenals. He went out to find someone else to quarrel with.
His logical candidate was Angela, and he found her where he had left her, sunning herself in front of her cottage. “Steve, dear,” she whispered, but he did not want to be charmed.
He said brutally: “I just made my first donation. Guess what it was?” He gave her a chance to scan him and look perturbed, then said: “Nothing much, only blood. Lucky, eh?”
It was terribly bad manners. She said, “Yes, Steve, that’s lucky. Must we talk about it? Oh, I know! Let’s go down to the lake again. It’s warm today, and there’s bound to be a breeze at the fountains—”
“That’s all you care about, isn’t it?”
“Steve!”
“Food and comfort. Are those the only things that matter to you?” Angela said petulantly, “Steve, you’re in an unpleasant mood this afternoon. If you don’t want to come with me I’ll go alone.”
“Do you care?”
She opened her mouth, closed it, looked at him and shook her head. She was angry; but she was also untouched by it. As Ryeland was an irritation, she removed herself from it.
He stood there thoughtfully. Even after Angela had flounced away, as best a woman with neither arms nor legs can flounce, he stood there, thinking. Knowing that there were tranquilizers flooding his bloodstream was one thing, knowing what to do about it was something else. He could keep his adrenal glands combating the drug by quarreling, even by exercising, but it was wearing. It would be better to keep the drug from his system in the first place . . .
It was very simple.
It needed only one thing, Ryeland saw. He would merely have to stop eating and drinking entirely.
By lunchtime the next day he began to see the flaws in that scheme.
He had worked it out very carefully. He had to eat something, otherwise he would die, and that would be no improvement at all. He settled on eating sugar. That day after the noon formation he entered the mess-hall, carried his tray to a corner—and abandoned it there, untouched. He filled his pockets with sugar, as inconspicuously as he could. It was a calculated risk. All foods were suspect, sugar included. But even the thorough Machine would not be likely to bother with sugar.
Of course, water was out of the question. Already Ryeland was beginning to feel parched. He thought of making a still, somehow, and purifying the water from the lake. It would attract attention . . . but he was getting very thirsty.
He went to see Angela and tried to take his mind off his thirst. They roamed about, the girl in her remarkably agile wheeled chair. She found him hard to endure that day. They sat by the lake and Steve Ryeland stared at it longingly. Water, lovely and clear. Beautiful water. Sweet water! But it was the source for all the drinking water in Heaven, and undoubtedly it was already treated. He talked about swimming and clinking ice in a glass and the spray from the prow of a boat until Angela, faintly exasperated, said: “Go swimming, then. No, don’t worry about me.” Gentle smile. “I’d rather not, for reasons which are apparent, but you go ahead. It’s what you want, isn’t it?”
And it was; but Ryeland refused vigorously until he thought of something and then went to get a pair of trunks. Why not go swimming? It was a trick torpedoed sailors had learned centuries before. If one merely lay in the water and relaxed, it would help control thirst. It wouldn’t help much. But it would help a little—perhaps it would keep him alive until his brain was clear and he could think surely enough to find a way out. But, oh, that water was tempting!
He lay in the shallows and played a sort of game. It was for high stakes, his whole life riding on the turn of the wheel. He let the water come up to his chin. He let it touch his lip. He even let a few drops of it into his mouth; then he filled his mouth and held the water there.
It would be so easy to swallow! So simple to ease his thirst! And surely, he said reasonably to himself, his eyes closed against the thirst, swishing the water back and forth with his cheeks and enjoying the sensation, surely one little drink would be of no real importance.
Sputtering and coughing, he floundered out of the lake.
That had been a close one. But he had learned something; the thirst was a counter-irritant; already he was fully aware of things that had been tempered and dull even an hour before. The puncture inside his elbow hurt. The nurse had been clumsy with the needle. The denims had chafed his thighs raw—a poor fit, miserably poor—and what a joy, he exulted, to be able to realize it.
Angela was looking at him suspiciously. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded.
“Nothing.”
“You act—oh. I don’t know. As if the Machine canceled your orders here. As though you were going to get rid of your collar.”
And even that was not impossible, thought Ryeland. If only he could hold out until somehow, some way there was a chance. He toweled himself dry and said, “Why not? Donderevo did it.”
“Steve,” she scolded, “that’s unplanned thinking! I’m disappointed in you. Nobody else can escape the way Donderevo did, and even if you could, your duty to the Plan—”
“Wait a minute.” He stopped toweling and turned to look at her. “What did you say? What do you know about Donderevo?”
“I know how he escaped. After all, this is where he escaped from.” Ryeland heard a ripping sound, and glanced down to see that his hands, without command from his brain, had clenched so tightly on the towel that it had parted. He dropped it to the ground and whispered: “How?”
Angela writhed carelessly, angling her head to start the motors that turned her chair away from the sun. She frowned thoughtfully, then said, “Well, I don’t suppose it would do any harm. You can’t possibly duplicate his escape. No one can.”
“Angela! How did he do it?”
“Not by any method you can follow, Steve.” Her smile teased him. “He found a group on the staff here who could be tempted into unplanned thinking—and he tempted them, with talk of space outside the Plan. He managed to corrupt them, with promises of freedom and wealth in the reefs of space. He bribed them to remove his collar—surgically.”
“Huh?”
“The thing was expertly planned, she said. “The disloyal surgeons forged the requisitions, and issued false documents. Donderevo was called out of the lineup one morning, exactly in the ordinary way. In one operating theater, he was disassembled, down to the head and the spine. All the parts were rushed into the adjoining theater—and put back together, without the iron collar.
“But don’t go getting any ideas,” she warned him. “Because the plot was eventually discovered. The surgeons who had participated were promptly junked. Unfortunately, by that time Donderevo had escaped.”
“How did he get away?”
“That was the most important part,” she said. “You see, the surgeons made a rather ingenious effort to cover their tracks. They used junk parts to assemble a complete patchwork man inside the collar. This junk man took Donderevo’s place, until it was too late to trace him.”
Ryeland shivered in the warm sunshine. That method of escape seemed gruesomely drastic, even if it had been open to him, which it was not.
“Let’s do something more amusing,” Angela urged him.
“There’s one more thing I want to know.” He looked at her, caught with an unpleasant fascination. “How did you happen to know all this?”
She stretched her torso lazily in the sunshine, with a slow, graceful, serpentine movement.
“I suppose I can tell you, Steve.” She smiled at him confidentially. “After all, it’s no secret between us that I once worked for the Plan Police. The fact is that I first came here on the Donderevo case. It was not broken until I had managed to persuade one of the guilty surgeons to use the same method to help me escape.”
She yawned, smiling with a feline satisfaction.
“If you came here as a spy, why are you—”
He stopped, feeling a horrified embarrassment.
“Why am I still here? Don’t be ashamed to ask that, Steve. I’m here because by the time I finished my task I was—well—as you see me. Naturally the Plan could not divert resources for my sake . . . so . . . I was declared surplus. Oh, I won’t deny it disturbed me a little, at first. But I came to accept it. And you will too, Steve. You see, you have no other choice.”
XII
Accept the fate he would not, though he was powerfully tempted. A rain shower in the middle of the night woke him and he ran out, careless that he woke his cabin mates and left them staring, to find a standpipe under the eaves and drink, drink, drink. It gave him the strength he needed. The next morning he could see a difference. He held out his hand before him and it shook. It shook! He was nervous.
He was also very hungry.
Water was not, for the moment, a problem. He had found a jug that would do and carefully filled it from the drain of a dozen roofs. It tasted of zinc and tar. But he was off the drug . . .
And hungry.
He did not dare to eat in the commissary.
Oporto came to see him at breakfast and that little dark face missed nothing. “Not hungry, Steve?”
Ryeland pushed aside his untouched plate—ham hash! lovely, irresistible coffee!—and said, “No. I’m not hungry.” Later, in the hut of the Dixie Presidents, Oporto still tagging along, the little man pointed at the jug of rain water. “What’s that?”
“It’s water. In case I get thirsty,” said Ryeland, allowing himself a small drink.
Oporto’s face remained thoughtful.
Ryeland found a sense of doom pressing in on him, a fear that dried his mouth and bothered his digestion—damaged already by the curious nature of the few substances he dared eat. He enjoyed it. He welcomed the flutterings of terror between his shoulderblades. He looked around him at the other cadavers of Heaven, and they were zombies, dead-alive, the victims of asphodel. They laughed and smiled and walked about (when they had what was needful to walk with), but they were dead men. Not Ryeland. He was alive, and in a panic. And very hungry.
He managed to shake Oporto just before the second shape-up, and seized time to study some of the entries in the journal:
Oct. 16. The only examination given to the discarded parts in the trash pile is visual. They are under the observation of a guard stationed on the watch balcony of the North Clinic. Sometimes he isn’t there, but I do not know why.
Nov. 5. Today I was in the North Clinic on the fifth floor, where the guard is stationed. I found out why he is sometimes absent, I think. Twice he was called in to help move patients; apparently this is part of his job. Since I was strapped to the table with a spinal tap I couldn’t watch closely, but it seems evident that each time he is called inside he will remain there for at least half a minute, and that the periods at which he is most likely to be called are those when the operation schedule is heavy. Probably the three hours or so following each shape-up would be the best time. The morning and lunch shape-ups are no good. First, I would not be able to conceal my absence for more than a couple of hours; second, they don’t usually dump the scraps until night anyway. That leaves only the night. Unfortunately not much operating is done then . . . Today it was the left leg, including the femur.
Dec. 3. Unusually heavy callouts at the shape-up this morning. The rumor is that there was a nuclear explosion in Baja California and a great many spare parts will be needed. I wonder. Tonight?
Ryeland turned the page, but he already knew what he would find.
The next entry was the last. It had been close for D.W.H., but not quite close enough.
Hunger was beginning to prey on him seriously. His system began to refuse the sugar.
Operto was openly suspicious now. He walked with Ryeland all over Heaven. Down by the palm-fringed lake he sat with his back against a boulder and watched Ryeland grimly hurling rocks at the hanging coconuts. Ryeland did not succeed in knocking one down, but he did, after visiting a few clumps of palms, find one that had fallen. “I guess you like coconut milk a lot,” Oporto said sulkily, seeing how greedily Ryeland hammered off the outer husk and bashed in the shell.
“I love it.” Actually the nut was overripe, and the milk had a foul taste.
“Tastes good with garlic, huh?” Oporto was referring to some wild roots Ryeland had found, dark green spears thrusting out of the grass with a cluster of muddy little strong-favored knobs underground; Oporto had found him nibbling them experimentally.
Ryeland said: “Leave me alone, will you? I—ah—don’t feel very well.”
Oporto sighed. “I’m not surprised.” But he wandered away after a while.
Ryeland dismissed him from his mind. He felt weak and starved. It was only psychological, he told himself; why, shipwrecked mariners had lasted for months and years on little more than what he had so easily come by!
