The Bleeding Man (10 page)

"It was not a
child like expected. He bled. His chest was bleeding. I had expected hot roaring fires. I had
expected a child of frightful appearance. It was but a small baby that bled and could not
talk.

"The father pulled
the baby up and beat him into breathing. He laid the baby on the bed and went out­side the house.
After a little while, my sister by law got to her feet, swaying on dizzy legs, and she stag­gered
out after him. I tried to stop the bleeding of the baby chest but I was too scared about my
brother and sister by law. I ran outside. They laid side by side in the black dirt of the garden.
They were dead and five days decayed.

"I took the little
one into my home, but the bleeding sickened my old woman and she died. So I took the bleeding one
to the traveling show. The white people there did not sicken and die at the sight of his
bleeding.

"In lines all
around the tent they would stand to pay good money to see the bleeding one. They all wanted to
see him bleeding and they were not sickened by it and they did not die. But the government people
came and took the bleeding man from me and made me sign little pieces of paper and gave me money
so they could do what they do. I turned him over to the government ones and that is all there is
to the story and it is the truth.

"Now I come every
week to talk to him. I know he is too powerful to have a name. I am waiting for him. I am telling
so I will not have to tell it again and so that this warning is given to all who would have
dealings with him. He is not ready to do what he will one day do. Do not walk in his shadow.
Leave him alone, for he is not you. For twenty-three years he has been gathering power. That is
all I have to say."

He switched off
the tape machine, smiling to himself because there was no one to hear it. He closed the door
carefully behind him and went looking for Dr. Santell and his twelve dollars.

Miss Dow pushed
open the door cautiously. She was not sure if she had the stomach for what she was doing. But
making up her mind, she stepped into the room. She kept telling herself that he was perfectly
harmless.

The drain in the
center of the floor was stopped up with clotted blood. He stood in a shallow pool of his own
blood. His body was motionless, his breathing just barely perceptible by a slight rising and
falling of his chest. The blood flowed steadily to the floor.

"Can you hear me?"
she asked nervously. She shut the door behind her. She kept her eyes on his face. He stared at
her but gave no sign that he had heard her. He seemed to be in no pain, despite the stream of
blood flowing down his chest.

"I'm not going to
hurt you." She approached him slowly with a small glass lab beaker. Averting her eyes slightly,
she placed the glass container below the wound. She felt a little foolish for having spoken to
him. It was obvious to her now that he was little better than a cretin and that he could not
understand a word she said.

She stood there
awkwardly, the glass beaker filling with his blood. The naked man seemed unaware of her presence,
yet still she felt an unreasonable fear. There was something frightening about the still figure.
Some­thing threatening, otherworldly in the steady flow of blood down his chest. He did not seem
vulnerable. Rather it was as if the world were too insignificant for him to notice it.

She backed away
with a full glass of his blood. She felt better with each step she took. He stared at her, no
expression on his face, his eyes unusually bright. She had felt very uncomfortable under his
stare.

Miss Dow had
turned and started out the door, watching him all the while. Suddenly he moved. She turned
quickly. Fear rose in her like a tide. The bleeding man cupped a hand beneath the wound in his
chest. Slowly, he brought his hands to his lips and drank. Miss Dow fainted.

Dr. Santell found
her in the doorway. A tiny red pool of fresh blood was beginning to blacken on the floor beside
her head. The glass beaker she had brought into the room was gone. "What happened?" asked Dr.
Santell, bending over the couch, his voice oddly gentle despite its gruffness. "Here—take a sip
of this," he said, offering her a small glass of whiskey. "It'll steady your nerves."

She was too weak
to refuse. The whiskey burned her throat and made her cough. He made her take another sip. It
almost made her gag, but seemed to help. A touch of color reappeared in her face.

"He—he—he drank
his own blood!" she whispered, tottering on the edge of hysteria.

Dr. Santell leaned
forward eagerly. His features sharpened, his manner became intent and forceful. "Are you sure?"
he demanded.

"Yes, I'm sure,"
she said with a trace of her normal sharpness.

"Are you
sure—absolutely sure—he drank his own blood?" he asked again, impatiently. The answer seemed
unusually important to him.

"Of course, I'm
sure, damn it! It was absolutely disgusting!" She wrinkled up her nose. "That revolting animal
did it on purpose! Just because I collected a beaker of—"

Dr. Santell
suddenly became greatly agitated. "You collected a glass of blood?" he asked.

She nodded,
bewildered by his strange behavior.

"God! It's
happened again," he muttered. "It's hap­pened again!" A look of dread passed over his
face.

"What the devil
are you talking about?" demanded Miss Dow.

"When I heard you
scream, I started running. I was the first one to reach you. You were sprawled in the doorway.
There was a big bloodstain beside your head on the floor. There was no glass on the floor of the
room and it wasn't in the hallway."

"Don't be
ridiculous! I had it with me. Isn't this an awfully big fuss to be making over a—"

Dr. Santell turned
his back on her and dialed se­curity.

"Hobeman? This is
Santell. Have room 473 searched for a glass beaker. Delay his feeding time if you have to, but
find that beaker!" He shut off the view screen.

He looked at Miss
Dow. Her face was blank with bewilderment. Before she could ask a question he began. "Something
strange has developed in the last few weeks. Our monitors have been picking up un­usual activity
levels. They aren't sophisticated enough to tell us exactly what's happening but his heartbeat
and galvanic skin responses have been fluctuating wildly."

"But what does
that have to do with the glass?" asked Miss Dow.

"I'm coming to
that. A week ago, during one of his strange activity levels, the observation port on the wall of
his room disappeared."

Miss Dow's face
registered shock. "Disappeared? How is that possible?"

Dr. Santell was
grim. "I have no idea. We found traces of melted glass on the floor of the room. But what
disturbs me the most is that we could detect no coronary activity. For two hours his blood was
circu­lating, but his heart wasn't functioning."

"He's not human,
is he?" said Miss Dow.

"I don't know,"
said Dr. Santell, staring off into space. "I just don't know."

He pushed the
carts through the door. The bleeding man stared at him as he had stared for the seven years he
had been there.

"Soup's on, Joe,"
said the man with the feeding carts.

Two men hidden
from view by the door were exam­ining two streaks of melted glass on the floor.

"Hey, hold up
there," said one of the men. "He's not to be fed until we've finished our search."

"I
won't get in the way. What's disappeared this
time?"

"Nothing
important," grumbled one of the men. "Just a glass jar from the lab."

"Shame on you,
Joe," said the cartman, waving a finger at the motionless figure in the center of the room. "You
oughtn't to be stealing stuff like that." He opened the top of his cart and took out a pair of
gloves.

"It won't hurt if
I feed him, will it? I don't have to hose him down until you guys have finished," he said,
pulling the gloves over his hands.

"Go ahead. We
aren't going to find anything any­way."

The cartman opened
a panel on the side of the cart and brought out a bowl of raw meat. He sat it on the floor in
front of the bleeding man. From the other cart he got a large bowl of uncooked vegetables and a
large wooden ladle.

He detached a
water hose from the wall and started backing toward the bleeding man, uncoiling the hose as he
walked. When he got to the end of the hose, he turned around.

The bleeding man
had overturned the feeding bowls with his feet. He was drinking his own blood from cupped
hands.

"This is what you
are looking for," said Dr. Santell, handing Miss Dow a clipboard. "His blood type is O lateral.
We've run hundreds of tests on it and it seems to be perfectly normal blood, a little more
resistant to some diseases than ordinary blood but otherwise nor­mal. It's too bad the government
won't let us use his blood. He's a universal donor and at the rate he pro­duces blood, I'll bet
he could supply Intercity all by himself."

"But that's just
the point. We
are
going to use his blood," said Miss Dow. "We are going to use a lot more
besides. That's why I was sent here."

"The government's
changed its policy then?" asked Dr. Santell. "Why?"

"We've given
transfusions of his blood to prisoners and it seems to have no bad effects. Tell me, you've
studied him for seven years. Do you have any idea how something like him is possible?"

Dr. Santell lit a
synthetic cigarette slowly. He gave her a curious look.

"Did you listen to
Nahtari's explanation?"

"That lunacy,"
sniffed Miss Dow. "I think we should pay a little more attention to a chromosomal mutation theory
than some wild story from some primitive like Nahtari."

Dr. Santell
shrugged. "It doesn't really matter what caused it. I couldn't even make an educated guess. His
version is the only evidence we have."

"Confine yourself
to specifics, please," said Miss Dow. "What biological evidence do we have?"

"There is
biological evidence pointing to chromo­somal differentiation. He has sixty-four paired
chromo­somes. I have been unable so far to determine their exact structure. He seems to have all
the normal ones. Technically, that makes him a member of our species, I suppose. But it's those
extra chromosomes that are so unusual. They seem to be entirely new structures, un­like anything
we are familiar with. It must be some­thing outside our experience. I think I pointed this out in
more detail in my report."

"But technically,
he is human?" asked Miss Dow.

"I would say he
is," said Dr. Santell.

"Very well. Then I
am going to give the final go-ahead on this project," said Miss Dow.

"And what project
is that?"

"We're going to
transfer him to the military dome at Intercity where he will be dissected for tissue
regen­eration. Hopefully, his cellular matrix will produce like functioning biological
constructs."

"What!" Dr.
Santell jumped to his feet. "You're not serious! That would be murder! Matrix reconstruction from
tissue cultures has never advanced beyond the experimental stage! We don't have the technology to
stimulate the reproduction of brain and nerve tissue! Good lord, woman, you can't
seriously—"

"I am quite aware
of our shortcomings in the field of tissue regeneration," said Miss Dow coldly. "For years, our
work in this area has been little better than a waste of time and materials. We have yet to
produce a suc­cessful unit with a well-developed nervous system. Nor have we been able to
successfully clone an individual. These matters, however, are not relevant to this
case."

"Not relevant!
You'll kill him! And to what purpose? A line of research that you yourself admitted has been a
waste of time!" stormed Dr. Santell, his face flushed with anger.

"Be careful, Dr.
Santell," she cautioned him. "I don't think I am happy with your choice of words. We are not
going to kill him. Many of our first tissue-regenera­tion experiments are still alive—alive after
a fashion, that is. Their bodies still function, their cells still grow, it is only their minds
that are dead." She smiled.

"It's still
murder! You have no right!" Dr. Santell looked away from Miss Dow. He had suddenly realized that
the things he was saying could be considered treason.

"When's the last
time you had an attitude check, Dr. Santell?" asked Miss Dow. "I almost thought I. heard you say
something that was opposed to the wishes of our government. You did agree that my pa­tient can be
made ready for transport tomorrow morn­ing, didn't you?"

"Of course," said
Dr. Santell. "He will be ready."

"And did I hear
you use the word
murder,
Dr. San­tell? I
did
hear you use the word! I'm sure
General Talbot will be most interested in your attitude."

Dr. Santell turned
and began walking out of the room. He knew that he was in trouble and nothing he could say would
make it any better.