The Immortals (29 page)

The four of them fell upon the remainder. Even without salt, it was the most delicious meal Harry had ever eaten. When it was finished, he licked his fingers, sighed, and leaned back on a pile of old leaves. He felt more contented than he could remember being since he was a child. He was a little thirsty, because he had refused to drink from the brook that ran through the woods close to their improvised camp, but he could stand that. A man couldn't surrender all his principles. It would be ironic to die of typhoid so close to his chance at immortality. That the governor would confer immortality upon him—or at least put him into a position where he could earn it—he did not doubt. After all, he had saved the governor's daughter. Marna was a pretty little thing. It was too bad she was still a child. An alliance with the governor's family
would not hurt his chances. Perhaps in a few years—He pushed the notion away. Marna hated him.

Christopher shoveled dirt over the fire with a large piece of bark. Harry sighed again and stretched luxuriously. Sleeping would be good tonight.

Marna had washed at the brook. Her face was clean and shining. “Will you sleep here beside me?” Harry asked her, touching the dry leaves. He held up his bracelet apologetically. “This thing keeps me awake when you're very far away.”

She nodded coldly and sat down nearby—but far enough so that they did not touch. Harry said, “I can't understand why we've run across so many teratisms. I can't remember ever seeing one in my practice at the Medical Center.”

“You were in the clinics?” Pearce asked. And without waiting for an answer he went on, “Increasingly, the practice of medicine becomes the treatment of defectives, genetic monstrosities. In the city they would die; in the suburbs they are preserved to perpetuate themselves. Let me look at your arm.”

Harry started. Pearce had said it so naturally that for a moment he had forgotten that the old man couldn't see. The old man's gentle fingers untied the bandage and carefully pulled the matted grass away. “You won't need this anymore.”

Harry put his hand wonderingly to the wound. It had not hurt for hours. Now it was only a scar. “Perhaps you really were a doctor. Why did you give up practice?”

Pearce whispered, “I grew tired of being a technician.
Medicine had become so desperately complicated that the relationship between doctor and patient was not much different from that between mechanic and equipment.”

Harry objected. “A doctor has to preserve his distance. If he keeps caring, he won't survive. He must become callous to suffering, inured to sorrow, or he couldn't continue in a calling so intimately associated with them.”

“No one ever said,” Pearce whispered, “that it was an easy thing to be a doctor. If he stops caring, he loses not only his patient but his own humanity. But the complication of medicine had another effect. It restricted treatment to those who could afford it. Fewer and fewer people grew healthier and healthier. Weren't the rest human, too?”

Harry frowned. “Certainly. But it was the wealthy contributors and the foundations that made it all possible. They had to be treated first so that medical research could continue.”

Pearce whispered, “And so society was warped all out of shape; everything was sacrificed to the god of medicine—all so that a few people could live a few years longer. Who paid the bill?

“And the odd outcome was that those who received care grew less healthy, as a class, than those who had to survive without it. Premies were saved to reproduce their weaknesses. Faults that would have proved fatal in childhood were repaired so that the patient reached maturity. Nonsurvival traits were passed along. Physiological inadequates multiplied, requiring greater care—”

Harry sat upright. “What kind of medical ethics are those? Medicine can't count the cost or weigh the value. Its business is to treat the sick—”

“Those who can afford it. If medicine doesn't make decisions about the rationing of care, then something else will: power or money or groups. One day I walked out on all that. I went among the citizens, where the future was, where I could help without discrimination. They took me in; they fed me when I was hungry, laughed with me when I was happy, cried with me when I was sad. They cared, and I helped them as I could.”

“How?” Harry asked. “Without a diagnostic machine, without drugs or antibiotics.”

“The human mind,” Pearce whispered, “is still the best diagnostic machine. And the best antibiotic. I touched them. I helped them to cure themselves. So I became a healer instead of a technician. Our bodies want to heal themselves, you know, but our minds give counter-orders and death instructions.”

“Witch doctor!” Harry said scornfully.

“Yes. Always there have been witch doctors. Healers. Only in my day have the healer and the doctor become two persons. In every other era the people with the healing touch were the doctors. They existed then; they exist now. Countless cures are testimony. Only today do we call it superstition. And yet we know that some doctors, no wiser or more expert than others, have patients with a far greater recovery rate. Some nurses—not always the best-looking ones—inspire in their patients a desire to get well.

“It takes you two hours to do a thorough examination; I can do it in two seconds. It may take you months or years to complete a treatment; I've never taken longer than five minutes.”

“But where's your control?” Harry demanded. “How can you prove you've helped them? If you can't trace cause and effect, if no one else can duplicate your treatment, it isn't science. It can't be taught.”

“When a healer is successful, he knows,” Pearce whispered. “So does his patient. As for teaching—how do you teach a child to talk?”

Harry shrugged impatiently. Pearce had an answer for everything. There are people like that, so secure in their mania that they can never be convinced that the rest of the world is sane. Man had to depend on science—not on superstition, not on faith healers, not on miracle workers. Or else he was back in the Dark Ages.

He lay back in the bed of leaves, feeling Marna's presence close to him. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn't.

Else there would be no law, no security, no immortality. . . .

*  *  *

The bracelet woke him. It tingled. Then it began to hurt. Harry put out his hand. The bed of leaves beside him was warm, but Marna was gone.

“Marna!” he whispered. He raised himself on one elbow. In the starlight that filtered through the trees above, he could just make out that the clearing was empty of everyone but himself. The places where Pearce
and the boy had been sleeping were empty. “Where is everybody?” he said, more loudly.

He cursed under his breath. They had picked their time and escaped. But why, then, had Christopher found them in the forest and brought them here? And what did Marna hope to gain? Make it to the mansion alone?

He started up. Something crunched in the leaves. Harry froze in that position. A moment later he was blinded by a brilliant light.

“Don't move!” said a high-pitched voice. “I will have to shoot you. And if you try to dodge, the Snooper will follow.” The voice was cool and precise. The hand that held the gun, Harry thought, would be as cool and accurate as the voice.

“I'm not moving,” Harry said. “Who are you?”

The voice ignored him. “There were four of you. Where are the other three?”

“They heard you coming. They're hanging back, waiting to rush you.”

“You're lying,” the voice said contemptuously.

“Listen to me!” Harry said urgently. “You don't sound like a citizen. I'm a doctor—ask me a question about medicine, anything at all. I'm on an urgent mission. I'm taking a message to the governor.”

“What is the message?”

Harry swallowed hard. “The shipment was hijacked. There won't be another ready for a week.”

“What shipment?”

“I don't know. If you're a squire, you've got to help me.”

“Sit down.”

Harry sat down.

“I have a message for you. Your message won't be delivered.”

“But—” Harry started up.

From somewhere behind the light came a small explosion—little more than a sharply expelled breath. Something stung Harry in the chest. He looked down. A tiny dart clung there between the edges of his jacket. He tried to reach for it and couldn't. His arm wouldn't move. His head wouldn't move, either. He toppled over onto his side, not feeling the impact. Only his eyes, his ears, and his lungs seemed unaffected. He lay there, paralyzed, his mind racing.

“Yes,” the voice said calmly, “I am a ghoul. Some of my friends are headhunters, but I hunt bodies and bring them in alive. The sport is greater. So is the profit. Heads are worth only twenty dollars; bodies are worth more than a hundred. Some with young organs like yours are worth much more.

“Go, Snooper. Find the others.”

The light went away. Something crackled in the brush and was gone. Slowly Harry made out a black shape that seemed to be sitting on the ground about ten feet away.

“You wonder what will happen to you,” the ghoul said. “As soon as I find your companions, I will paralyze them, too, and summon my stretcher. They will carry you to my helicopter. Then, since you came from Kansas City, I will take you to Topeka.”

A last hope died in Harry's chest.

“That works best, I've found,” the high-pitched voice continued. “Avoids complications. The Topeka hospital I do business with will buy your bodies, no questions asked. You are permanently paralyzed, so you will never feel any pain, although you will not lose consciousness. That way the organs never deteriorate. If you're a doctor, as you said, you know what I mean. You may know the technical name for the poison in the dart; all I know is that it was synthesized from the poison of the digger wasp. By use of intravenous feeding, these eminently portable organ banks have been kept alive for years until their time comes. . . .”

The voice went on, but Harry stopped listening. He was thinking that he would go mad. They often did. He had seen them lying on slabs in the organ bank, and their eyes had been quite mad. Then he had told himself that the madness was why they had been put there, but now he knew the truth. He would soon be one of them.

Perhaps he would strangle before he reached the hospital, before they got a breathing tube down his throat and the artificial respirator on his chest and the tubes into his arms. They strangled sometimes, even under care.

He would not go mad, though. He was too sane. His mind might last for months.

He heard something crackle in the brush. Light flashed across his eyes. Something moved. Bodies thrashed. Someone grunted. Someone else yelled. Something went
pouf!
Then the sounds stopped, except for someone panting.

“Harry!” Marna said anxiously. “Harry! Are you all right?”

The light came back as the squat Snooper shuffled into the little clearing again. Pearce moved painfully through the light. Beyond him was Christopher and Marna. On the ground near them was a twisted creature. Harry couldn't figure out what it was, and then he realized it was a dwarf, a gnome, a man with thin, little legs and a twisted back and a large, lumpy head. Black hair grew sparsely on top of the head, and the eyes looked out redly, hating the world.

“Harry!” Marna said again, a wail this time.

He didn't answer. He couldn't. It was a momentary flash of pleasure, not being able to answer, and then it was buried in a flood of self-pity.

Marna picked up the dart gun and threw it deep into the brush. “What a filthy weapon!”

Reason returned to Harry. They had not escaped after all. Just as he had told the ghoul, they had only faded away so that they could rescue him if an opportunity came. But they had returned too late.

The paralysis was permanent; there was no antidote. Perhaps they would kill him. How could he make them understand that he wanted to be killed?

He tried to speak through his eyes.

Marna had moved to him. She cradled his head in her lap. Her hand moved restlessly, smoothing his hair.

Carefully Pearce removed the dart from his chest and shoved it deep into the ground. “Be calm,” he said. “Don't give up. There is no such thing as permanent paralysis. If
you will try, you can move your little finger.” He held up Harry's hand, patted it.

Harry tried to move his finger, but it was useless. What was the matter with the old quack? Why didn't Pearce kill him and get it over with? Pearce kept talking, but Harry did not listen. What was the use of hoping? It only made the pain worse.

“A transfusion might help,” Marna said.

“Yes,” Pearce agreed. “Are you willing?”

“You know what I am?”

“Of course. Christopher, search the ghoul. He will have tubing and needles on him for emergency treatment of his victims.” Pearce spoke to Marna again. “There will be some commingling. The poison will enter your body.”

Marna's voice was bitter. “You couldn't hurt me with cyanide.”

There were movements and preparations. Harry couldn't concentrate on them. Things blurred. Time passed like the movement of a glacier.

As the first gray light of morning came through the trees, Harry felt life moving painfully in his little toe of his left foot. It was worse than anything he had ever experienced, a hundred times worse than the pain from the bracelet. The pain spread to his other toes, to his feet, up his legs and arms toward his trunk. He wanted to plead with Pearce to restore the paralysis, but by the time his throat relaxed, the pain was almost gone.

When he could sit up, he looked around for Marna. She was leaning against a tree trunk, her eyes closed, looking paler than ever. “Marna!” he said. Her eyes
opened wearily; an expression of joy flashed across them as they focused on him, and then they clouded.