Sandhill Street: The Loss of Gentleness

Chapter 16 Dr. Provocation

  Mr. Power intended that the City’s citizens go to bed with a feeling of security, and the vast majority did, but at eleven that night few in the Sandhill Street neighborhood had any thought of bed. They were sitting up in their living rooms, listening to the roar of City trucks that were filling in the great pit in Sluggards’ Lot, and watching late night news reports that barely mentioned events in their neighborhood. And what little the reporters said gave a very different account than what the Sandhill Street folk had just seen.

  No one had been hospitalized, but some who, like Prevarica, had been flattened by the Reluctance 8 shell were affected in ways that would affect them for the rest of their lives. They had hastily covered up their deformities caused, or rather revealed, by the blast, but the very fact that they had to cover them had torn away their complaisance. Even those who had escaped such a fate were shocked and reeling from what they had seen, heard, and smelled. Nothing could ever be quite the same in their neighborhood, where truth had broken out like a plague.

  Gentleness, on the other hand, was sleeping both soundly and sweetly in his prison bunk at that same hour, when the guards came in and told him to get dressed. He hurriedly obeyed and was escorted in shackles down to a basement level he had not seen before, along a hallway, and into a room dominated by a sort of bed: a high, comfortless, sheetless thing rather like a doctor’s examination table. The difference was that that this table had straps to hold someone to it.

  Several people awaited him, none of whom he recognized, and no attempt was made to explain anything to him until the guards who had brought him had removed his shackles and strapped him to the table—neck, chest, waist, wrists, knees, and ankles—and had withdrawn outside the door. Then a tall woman wearing a lab coat approached him, a woman in her fifties who carried herself with an air of professionalism.

  “Mr. Orchard, I am Dr. Provocation.” She gestured to a slim man in an expensive suit who was talking quietly into a cell phone, “This is Lawyer Temptation, who assists the City. Mr. Fear is on the City Council and is the official observer.” The heavy, middle-aged man nodded to him. “My assistant is Grudge.” This short, red-haired fellow, almost a boy, did not turn from where he was preparing something on a nearby table.

  “Yes, everything is ready but the formal paperwork,” the Lawyer was saying into his phone. “OK, yes, it’s been a little more than an hour, but it can’t be much longer. We had to get some people out of bed for this, including Judge Hate-good, but we’re getting the signatures now, walking it through. I don’t know, maybe fifteen minutes. Yes, I’ll stay on the line.”

  “It has been an interesting study,” Dr. Provocation continued to Gentleness, “how to kill a Heavenite. We wasted a lot of time and money in the early days working with one blanket theory after another until we realized that, unlike our citizens, you don’t all have the same body chemistry. That explained our many failures as well as our sometimes spectacular successes.”

  Grudge rolled up Gentleness’ sleeve and poked him with a needle. The boys’ eyes widened and he drew in breath sharply.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Dr. Provocation said. “Grudge is only drawing a blood sample. The actual execution cannot take place for a few minutes yet.”

  Breathing hard, Gentleness asked about seeing a minister.

  “Yes, a minister will be available shortly for your religious comfort. We called Pastor Hypocrisy about twenty minutes ago.”

  Gentleness told her not to bother the pastor, that he had changed his mind, thank you.

  “Whatever you wish. Lawyer Temptation, the papers?”

  “On their way,” he said. “We’ll have to wait a bit.”

  Grudge put Gentleness’ blood sample in a small machine that stood on the work table and flipped a switch. The machine hummed. A few minutes passed while no one said or did anything, but Gentleness’ heart thumped as if he were running a race. Then a green light glowed on the front of the machine and the humming stopped. By turning his head as far as he could, Gentleness could just see a row of numbers on the machine’s LED readout.

  The doctor approached the table as Grudge stepped back. “Splendid, just as I predicted,” she said. She turned back to Gentleness. “The answer for you, Mr. Orchard, is five cc’s of sanctimonium serum. Now some would call that a huge dose, using an elephant gun on a squirrel; but they fail to note that, in a case like this, there is no such thing as too much, only too little.”

  Grudge had taken some equipment from a cabinet, including a syringe with a rather long needle. Dr. Provocation looked to the door and exhaled with impatience.

  “Lawyer Temptation, are they bringing the papers?”

  “On the way,” he said. “OK, maybe half an hour.”