“No.”
“Coffin cure proceeding satisfactorily. No adverse medical reactions from suspect. Grounds reports a false alarm at twelve-oh-eight, caused by a rabbit blundering into the electric-eye barrier. No evidence of anything moving on the grounds.”
“Then how do they know it was a rabbit?”
“Shall I ask, sir?”
“No. They guessed, of course. Good night.” Jesus Pietro turned on his back and waited for sleep.
His thoughts drifted…
…He and Nadia hadn’t been getting together much lately. Shouldn’t he start taking testosterone shots? A transplant wouldn’t be necessary; many glands were not put in suspended animation, but were kept running, as it were, with a complex and exact food/blood supply and a system for extracting the hormones. He could put up with the inconvenience of shots.
…Though his father hadn’t.
A younger Jesus Pietro had spent much time wondering about his own conception. Why had the old man insisted that the doctors connect the vas deferens during his gonad transplant? An older Jesus Pietro thought he knew. Even sixty years ago, despite the centuries-old tradition of large families, the Plateau had been mostly uninhabited. Breeding must have seemed a duty to Haneth Castro, as it had to all his ancestors. Besides, how must the old man have felt, knowing that at last he could no longer sire children?
An older Jesus Pietro thought he knew.
His thoughts were wandering far, blurred with impending sleep. Jesus Pietro turned on his side, drowsily comfortable.
…Rabbit?
Why not? From the woods.
Jesus Pietro turned on his other side.
…What was a rabbit doing in the trapped woods?
What was anything bigger than a field mouse doing in the woods?
What was a rabbit doing on Alpha Plateau? What would it eat?
Jesus Pietro cursed and reached for the phone. To Master Sergeant Watts he said, “Take an order. Tomorrow I want the woods searched thoroughly and then deloused. If they find anything as big as a rat, I want to know about it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That alarm tonight. What sector?”
“Let me see. Where the—ah. Sector six, sir.”
“Six? That’s nowhere near the woods.”
“No, sir.”
And that was that. “Good night, Master Sergeant,” said Jesus Pietro, and hung up. Tomorrow they’d search the woods. Implementation was becoming decidedly slack, Jesus Pietro decided. He’d have to do something about it.
The wall slanted outward, twelve feet of concrete crosslaced with barbed wire. The gate slanted too, at the same angle, perhaps twelve degrees from vertical. Solid cast-iron it was, built to slide into the concrete wall, which was twelve feet thick. The gate was closed. Lights from inside lit the upper edges of wall and gate, and tinged the sky above.
Matt stood under the wall, looking up. He couldn’t climb over. If they saw him, they’d open the gate for him…but they mustn’t see him.
They hadn’t yet. The train of logic had worked. If something that glows in the dark stops glowing when it’s been in the dark too long, hang it near a light. If a car goes up when it’s rightside up, it’ll go down fast when it’s upside down. If the cops see you when you’re hiding, but don’t when you’re not, they’ll ignore you completely when you walk up the middle of a lighted road.
But logic ended here.
Whatever had helped him wasn’t helping him now.
Matt turned his back on the wall. He stood beneath the overhanging iron gate, his eyes following the straight line of the road to where its lights ended. Most of the houses were dark now. The land was black all the way to the starry horizon. On his right the stars were blurred along that line, and Matt knew he was seeing the top of the void mist.
The impulse that came then was one he never managed to explain, even to himself.
He cleared his throat. “Something is helping me,” he said in an almost normal voice. “I know that. I need help to get through this gate. I have to get into the Hospital.”
Noises came from inside the wall, the faintest of sounds: regular footsteps, distant voices. They were the business of the Hospital and had nothing to do with Matt.
Outside the wall nothing changed.
“Get me in there,” he pleaded, to himself or to something outside himself. He didn’t know which. He knew nothing.
On the Plateau there was no religion.
But suddenly Matt knew that there was just one way to get inside. He stepped off the access road and began hunting. Presently he found a discarded chunk of concrete, dirty and uneven. He carried it back and began pounding it against the iron gate.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
A head appeared on the wall. “Stop that, you half-witted excuse for a colonist bastard!”
“Let me in.”
The head remained. “You are a colonist.”
“Right.”
“Don’t move! Don’t you move a muscle!” The man fumbled with something on the other side of the wall. Both hands appeared, one holding a gun, the other a telephone receiver. “Hello? Hello? Answer the phone, dammit!…Watts? Hobart. A fool of a colonist just came walking up to the gate and started pounding on it. Yes, a real colonist! What do I do with him?…All right, I’ll ask.”
The head looked down. “You want to walk or be carried?”
“I’ll walk,” said Matt.
“He says he’ll walk. Why should he get his choice?…Oh. I guess it’s easier at that. Sorry, Watts, I’m a little shook. This never happened to me before.”
The gateman hung up. His head and gun continued to peer down at Matt. After a moment the gate slid back into the wall.
“Come on through,” said the gateman. “Fold your hands behind your neck.”
Matt did. A gatehouse had been built against the wall on the inside. The gateman came down a short flight of steps. “Stay ahead of me,” he ordered. “Start walking. That’s the front entrance, where all the lights are. See? Walk toward that.”
It would have been hard to miss the front entrance. The great square bronze door topped a flight of broad, shallow steps flanked by Doric pillars. The steps and the pillars were either marble or some plastic substitute.
“Stop looking back at me,” snapped the gateman. His voice shook.
When they reached the door, the gateman produced a whistle and blew into it. There was no sound, but the door opened. Matt went through.
Once inside, the gateman seemed to relax. “What were you doing out there?” he asked.
Matt’s fear was returning. He was here. These corridors were the Hospital. He hadn’t thought past this moment. Deliberately so; for if he had, he would have ran. The walls around him were concrete, with a few metal grilles at floor level and four rows of fluorescent tubing in the ceiling. There were doors, all closed. An unfamiliar odor tinged the air, or a combination of odors.
I said, “What were—”
“Find out at the trial!”
“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 CO2 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 interns 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 interns 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 interns 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 intern’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 great 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?”