Collected Short Fiction, page 131
It took one minute and twenty-three seconds. During the next second, Grayle noticed the adhesive tape on the patient’s forearm. He frowned and tore it loose. Beneath it was a compress dark with blood and a small, welling slit in the median-basilic vein.
“Who’s been with this man?”
“Me,” the girl said clearly. One hand was resting gently on die box that held the lamp.
Beneath the head of the cot was a quart jar. In it was a pint of blood, clotting now but still faintly warm. Grayle put it down slowly. “Why did you perform a phlebotomy on this man?”
“There was no other way to save his life,” she said gently.
“This isn’t die dark ages,” Grayle said. “You might have killed him.”
“The way I heard it, Medic,” she told him softly, “in some cases blood-letting is effective when nothing else will work—cerebral hemorrhage, for instance. It lowers the blood pressure temporarily and gives the blood in the ruptured vessel a chance to clot.”
Involuntarily, Grayle glanced into the bag. From the bottom, the diagnosis was shining up fluorescently. It was cerebral hemorrhage, all right, and the prognosis was hopeful. The hemorrhage had stopped.
He took a compress out of a pocket in the bag, pulled the tab, and watched die wrapper disintegrate. He pressed it firmly over the cut. It clung to the skin as he took his hand away.
“There are laws against practicing medicine without a license,” he said slowly. “I’ll have to report this.”
“Should I have let him die?”
“There are doctors to treat him.”
“He called one. It took you an hour and a half to get here. If I had waited, he’d have died.”
It wasn’t as if the girl were arguing with him, Grayle thought. It was more like explanation, like an attempt to make him understand. “I came as fast as I could. It’s no joke to find a place like this at night.”
“I’m not criticizing.” She put her hand back until she felt the chair behind her and sank down into it, lightly, gracefully, and folded her white hands in her lap. “You asked me why I bled him. I told you.”
Grayle was silent. The girl’s logic was impeccable, but she was wrong all the same. There weren’t any reasonable excuses for breaking the law. The practice of medicine had to be the monopoly of men who were carefully, painfully trained for it and indoctrinated in the ancient ethics. No one else could be permitted to tamper with the most sacred thing in the world.
She rose and walked toward him confidently, put a hand on his shoulder, and leaned past him to touch Shoemaker’s forehead. “Yes,” she said, and her voice was firm with an unusual certainty. “He’ll get well now. He’s a good man. We mustn’t let him die.”
The girl’s nearness was a warm fragrance, stirring, provocative. Grayle felt his blood pressure mount. Why not? he thought; she’s only an urban. But he couldn’t, and it wasn’t just a medic’s honor or even, perhaps, that she was blind.
He didn’t move, but she drew away, took back her hand, as if she sensed the emotions fermenting inside him.
“I’ve got to get him to the hospital,” Grayle said. “Besides the hemorrhage, there’ll be infection.”
“I scrubbed the arm with soap and then with alcohol,” she said. “I sterilized the knife in the lamp flame and scorched the bandage over the lamp chimney.”
Her fingers looked blistered. “You were lucky,” the medic said coldly. “Next time someone will die.”
She turned her face toward his voice. Grayle found the movement strangely appealing. “What can you do when they need you?”
It was too much like a physician’s response to the world’s plea for help. A doctor had a right to respond to the plea; she didn’t. He turned brusquely back to Shoemaker and began stripping off the instruments and stowing them away. “I’ll have to carry him down to the ambulance. Can you carry the bag for me to light the way?”
“You mustn’t take him. He hasn’t kept up payments on his contract. You know what they’ll do.”
Grayle stopped in the act of snapping the bag shut. He was shocked. “If he’s a defaulter,” he began, his voice trembling on the verge of anger.
“What would you do,” she asked quietly, “if you were dying and alone? Wouldn’t you call for help? Any help? Would you stop to weigh legalities? He had a contract once, and the payments ruined him, cost him his home in the country, drove him here to the sustenance life. But when he was sick, he turned to his old faith, as a dying Catholic calls for his priest.”
Grayle recoiled from the comparison. “And he deprived several people of vital, lawful attention,” he said bitingly. “The chances are that he traded his life for that of someone else. That’s why the laws were passed. If Shoemaker can’t pay, he ought to be repossessed.” He stooped toward the man.
She pulled him back with surprising strength. “Surely you’ve got enough blood, enough organs. They’ll kill him.”
“There’s never enough,” Grayle said. “And there’s research, after that.” He put an impatient hand on her shoulder to push her aside. Under the dress material, the flesh felt warm and soft. “You must be an Antiviv or you wouldn’t call it killing.”
“I am, but that’s only part of it. I’m asking for him, because he’s worth saving. Are you so inflexible, so perfect, that you can’t—forget?”
He stopped pushing, looked down at his hand for a moment, and let it drop. It wasn’t defeat—not exactly. He merely refused to fight with the girl for the man’s body.
“All right,” he said.
He picked up the black bag with a snap that locked it shut and started toward the door.
“Wait!” she said.
He looked back at her as she moved toward him blindly, her hand outstretched until her fingers touched the arm of his coat. “I want to thank you,” she said gently. “I thought there wasn’t any mercy left in the medical profession.”
For a moment his viscera felt cold, anesthetized, and then the ice melted in a surge of anger. He didn’t want any credit for something he wasn’t going to do. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said bluntly. “I’m going to turn in his name to the Agency. I’m going to report you, too. That’s my duty.”
Her hand fell to her side in a gesture of apology, for her own mistake and perhaps also for the nature of humanity. “We do what we must.”
She moved forward past him, unbolted the door, and turned toward him, her back against the door. “I don’t think you’re as hard as you pretend to be.”
That stopped him. He wasn’t hard, incapable of understanding or sympathy. Those who must live in the midst of sickness and death, upon whose skill and judgment rest health and life, can’t afford to be touched by the drama, the human values of every situation. It would be unendurable.
“There’s an old man downstairs who needs help,” she said hesitantly. “Would you see him?”
“Out of the question,” he snapped angrily.
Her head lifted for a moment. That was pride, he thought. But then it nodded resignedly. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
The light was dangerous, she said, and offered to lead him. Her hand was warm and firm and confident. Three-fourths of the way down, the stairs hesitated at a landing, and turned left to reach the hall. A door opened in the darkness to the right of the landing.
Grayle tore his hand loose and stuck it into his coat pocket onto the solid reassurance of the needle gun.
Glimmering whitely in the dark rectangle of the door was a ghost of a face. “Leah?” it said. It was a girl’s voice. “I thought it was you. Give me your hand. I thought I would never get through the night. . . .”
“There now,” said Leah. She put out a hand toward the face. “You’re going to be all right.”
With a sudden flash of irritation, Grayle snapped on the light of the black bag. It hit the girl like a blow; she recoiled, her arms over her eyes, moaning.
Grayle flicked off the light. He had seen enough. The girl in her thin, mended nightdress was a bundle of bones wrapped tautly in pale skin. Except for two feverish spots of color in her cheeks, her face was dead white.
She was dying of tuberculosis.
Tuberculosis. Today! Why do they do it!
“Go up and stay with Phil,” Leah said. “He needs you. He’s had a stroke, but he’s better now.”
“All right, Leah,” the girl said. She slipped past them silently and climbed the stairs.
“What’s the matter with them?” Grayle’s voice was strained and puzzled. “Tuberculosis is no problem. We can cure it easily. Why do they let themselves die?”
She stopped in front of the worm-eaten plywood partition and raised her face toward him. “Because it’s cheaper. It’s all they can afford.”
“Cheaper to die?” Grayle exclaimed incredulously. “What kind of economy is that?”
“The only kind of economy they know. The only kind the hospitals will let them practice. You’ve made good health too expensive. The way she is now, she needs a few months of bedrest, a hundred grams of dihydrostreptomycin, a thousand grams of PAS, perhaps some collapsed lung therapy, some rib resections. That girl has never seen more than fifty dollars all at once. If she lived to be a hundred she couldn’t save half the money necessary for the treatment. She’s got children to support. She can’t stop working for a day, much less months—”
“There are clinical contracts,” Grayle said impatiently.
“They don’t cover the kind of treatment she needs,” Leah said wistfully. A door opened behind her. “Goodnight, Medic.” Then she was gone.
That wasn’t right, Grayle thought as he turned toward the front door. That wasn’t the way it should be. But was it the way it was?
He turned back impetuously, words pouring to his lips like: If there isn’t enough to go around, who are you going to treat—the indigent or the prosperous, the bottomless pits or those who can finance the future, with more medicine, more health for everyone?
But the words died on his lips. The panel in the partition had come ajar. In the room behind it was a battered, antique aluminum chaise longue—Twentieth Century Modern. An old man was propped upright in it, so straight and still that Grayle thought for a moment that he was dead.
He was a very old man—Grayle thought that he had never seen a man as old, although geriatrics was one of Medical Center’s leading specialties. His hair was pure white and thick; his face was seamed like old leather, sagging away from strong facial bones as if it were eager to be gone.
Beside the chair Leah had sunk to her knees. She had one of his bony hands in hers, pressed to her cheek; her eyelids closed over their clouded corneas.
There was something familiar about that old face, something Grayle couldn’t isolate, pin down. He noticed with a shock that the oilman’s eyes were open now.
“Come in, Medic,” the old man whispered.
Leah’s face came up, her sightless eyes open; she turned toward him. She smiled, too. It was a warming thing, like sunlight.
“You came back to help,” Leah said.
Grayle shook his head slowly and then remembered that she couldn’t see. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“There’s nothing anyone can do,” the old man whispered. “Even without your gadgets, Medic, you know what’s wrong with me. I’m one hundred and twenty-five years old. You could give me a new heart from some unfortunate defaulter, but my arteries would still be thickened with arteriosclerosis. And if you replaced those without killing me, I would still have a fibrotic liver, scarred lungs, senile ductless glands, probably a few carcinomas. And even if you gave me a new body, you still couldn’t help me, because down deep, where your knives can’t reach and your instruments can’t measure, is the me that is old beyond repair.”
“I can’t stand it, Russ,” Leah moaned, pressing her forehead against the old man’s hand.
When Leah turned her face back toward Grayle, he was shocked to see tears trickling from the blind eyes. “Can’t you do something?” she demanded fiercely.
“Medicine can’t give anyone the will to live.”
Leah stood up angrily. “There must be something you can do—with all your magnificent knowledge, all the expensive gadgets we bought you!”
“There’s the elixir,” he said thoughtlessly.
Russ smiled again, reminiscently, perhaps. “Ah, yes—the elixir. I had almost forgotten. Elixir vitae.”
“Would it help?” Leah demanded.
“Probably not,” Grayle said firmly. He had said too much already. Laymen weren’t equipped for medical information; it blurred the medical picture.
Besides, the elixir was still only a research phenomenon. The stuff was a synthesis of a rare blood protein which had been discovered in the bloodstreams of no more than a handful of persons in the whole world. This protein, this immunity factor, seemed to pass on its immunity as if death itself were a disease. But as yet it could not be duplicated in the laboratory, and the supply was hardly enough for research purposes.
“A tremendously complicated process,” he said. “And not available to the public.” He turned accusingly toward Russ. “I can’t understand why you didn’t have new corneas grafted onto her eyes.”
“I couldn’t take the sight of anyone else,” Leah said softly.
“There’s accidental deaths,” Grayle pointed out.
“How are you going to differentiate? No, if it’s wrong, it’s wrong for every case.”
“Don’t you want her to see?” Grayle demanded of Russ.
“If wanting were enough,” the old man whispered, “she would have had my eyes many years ago. But there’s the expense, my boy. It all comes back to that.”
“Stupidity!” Grayle snorted and turned to leave.
“Wait, boy,” Russ whispered. “Come here a moment.”
Grayle turned and walked to the old man’s chair, looked down at Leah and back to Russ. The old man held out his hand, palm up. Automatically, Grayle put out his hand to meet it, let his hand rest upon it. As the hands met, Grayle felt a curious sensation, almost electrical, as if something had stimulated a nerve into sending a message up his arm to his brain and carrying an answer back.
Russ’s hand dropped back limply. He lowered his head wearily against the back of the chaise longue, his eyes closed. “A good man, Leah, troubled but sincere. We might do worse.”
“No,” Leah said firmly, “he must not come here again.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Grayle said.
“Some empty time,” Russ said distantly, “you might think of this, boy—a conclusion I reached many years ago: There are too many doctors and not enough healers.”
Leah rose gracefully from the floor. “I’ll see you to the door.”
Her unconscious use of the phrase brought a lump of pity into Grayle’s throat. It was tragedy because she was beautiful—and peacefully beautiful inside. Reporting her was going to be painful.
He wondered how his hand had felt to her; how had she known him: hot, sweaty, nervous?
He paused at the outside door, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help your grandfather.”
“He’s my father. I was born the year he was one hundred. He wasn’t old. He was middle-aged, everyone thought. It’s only these last few months he’s grown old. I think it’s a surrender we make when we grow very tired.”
“How do you live—with him sick and . . .?”
“And me blind?” she supplied. “People are generous.”
“Why?”
“They’re grateful, I suppose. For the times when we can help them. I collect old remedies from grandmothers and make them up; I brew ptisans; I’m a midwife when I’m needed; I sit up with the sick, help those I can and bury those I can’t. You can report this, too, if you wish.”
“I see,” Grayle said, turning away and swinging back, irresolute. “Your father—I’ve seen him somewhere. What’s his name?”
“He lost it more than fifty years ago. Here in die city, people call him Healer.” She held out her hand toward him. Grayle took it reluctantly, thinking that this was the end of it. The hand was warm; his hand remembered the warmth. It would be a good hand to hold if you were sick, he thought.
“Good-by, Medic,” she said soberly. “I like you. You’re human. So few of them are. But don’t come back. It wouldn’t be good for any of us.”
Grayle cleared his throat noisily. “I said I wouldn’t,” he said; even to him it sounded petulant and childish. “Good-by.”
She stood in the doorway, as he turned, shifted the bag into his right hand, and picked his way down the porch steps.
A man was lying almost under the front wheel of the ambulance. Beside him, on the broken pavement, was a crowbar. Grayle rolled die man over. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing easily. He had got too close and the supersonics shield had knocked him out.
Grayle knew he should call the police about this, too, but he felt too tired for another battle. They would only turn the man loose.
He pulled the body out of the path of the w-heels and opened the ambulance door. There was a whisper of movement behind him.
“Medic!” Leah screamed. Her voice was distant and frightened.
Grayle started to turn, but it was too late. The night came down and covered him.
He opened his eyes to darkness, and the thought was instantaneous: This is what it is to be blind. This is what Leah knows always.
And he wondered if he were blind.
His head throbbed excruciatingly. There was an eggsized lump on the back of it, where someone had hit him. The hair was matted with dried blood. He winced as his fingers explored the depth of the cut, but it wasn’t too bad. He decided that there wasn’t any concussion.
He didn’t feel blind. It was likely that he was in a lightless room.
He had a faded, uncertain memory—as of something lost in childhood mists—of a wild ride through city streets, of being carried—up steps, down dark halls.
