I had gone over, somewhat bored, to find a scrawny, quivering wretch in the Awaiting Execution cell block, groveling around, pleading not to be exterminated. He had been picked up while attempting to burglarize the residence of the Pausch Hills Chief of Police! It was such a stupid act that I didn’t think even the Apparatus would want him, but I interviewed him anyway. I told him he was too stupid and he tried to prove to me that he wasn’t: that he had done some smart things in his day. So I demanded that he convince me.
It seems that two or three years before he had been robbing an estate on the outskirts of Pausch Hills and, elbow-deep in the silverware, he found himself challenged by a small female holding a big gun. But to his amazement, she didn’t call the bluebottles. She seemed glad to see him. She even had him sit down and have some bubblebrew to quiet his nerves.
Apparently she had wanted to be a widow for a long time. Her husband was a retired and invalid industrialist and she was a young female who was the last of a long string of demised wives.
Rather than reside in a hospital where he belonged, her aged but filthy rich husband had caused to be built a small structure on the back edge of the property—actually, a complete hospital in miniature. And there he invalided along in company with a doctor and a communications system that ran all the staff of the main house. No one could move anywhere on the property without him knowing about it or supervising it from his sickbed.
The aged husband had another twenty years to go and his present wife wasn’t getting any younger. So she looked on this fresh-caught burglar as something sent from the heavens.
She wanted her husband murdered.
So they arranged that she would go on a visit to her mother’s, this scrawny burglar nut would enter the miniature hospital, make it look like a burglary, murder the husband convincingly and she would pay him five hundred credits.
It had all gone off as planned. But this stupid nut hadn’t counted on one thing: the Widow Tayl was a nymphomaniac. She had then tried to blackmail him in return for regular company in bed. He couldn’t stand her! He had run off to Flisten and had only now come back.
The stupid fool had gotten no blackmail evidence on her. He didn’t have any evidence now. So it was pretty useless.
I was clever, however. I had him write it all down in confession form. Then I went and got it stamped as a deathbed confession and told the guards to run him through the garbage shredder on schedule at dawn. He was too stupid even for the Apparatus.
It wasn’t enough to extort money with, but the paper was worth something. I didn’t even turn it in as, with his death, all his records were destroyed anyway. One idle day I had gone to see the Widow Tayl.
It was a nice, five-acre suburban estate with a large house up front and way back in some trees was this fully equipped miniature hospital. She was preserving it, a sign on the gate said, in memoriam to her dear departed spouse.
I should have been warned when a young man burst out the side door and sped away on his speedwheel when I, in uniform, knocked at the front.
The Widow Tayl heard me out, was glad to be reassured that I really was her friend, told me the place was always at my disposal and tried to get me into the bedroom. No fear there. Just lust. I stayed away from the place.
But now I had a use for it and shortly my driver landed in the back yard target. And there in the trees sat the miniature hospital. And there was the Widow Tayl, scantily dressed, by her swimming bath, deelighted! to see me.
She started to spring up.
The corner of her robe was caught under the chair leg.
The robe fluttered to the pool edge.
I turned brick red.
The Widow Tayl’s hand fished for the robe and got it back. A sybarite statue at the edge of the heart-shaped pool was leering as water poured from his mouth. He looked like he had seen all this before.
She had her robe back on now, laughing prettily as she adjusted it.
The Widow Tayl was not bad-looking: she was about thirty-five, a blonde with smoky blue eyes. Her lips were too slack. She had two big warts on her face. Under the robe her breasts could be seen as far too sagging, but there was nothing slack in the way her eyes were now devouring me.
She bade me sit down by the side of the heart-shaped pool and a servant who was smirking brought a tray of drinks.
I explained, while we sipped sparklewater, that I had been bribed—she would understand that—to perform a service for a Lord whose name must not be mentioned. He had a son who HATED women and there would be no heirs unless something was done. Oh, she surely could understand that something had to be done about that! And I explained that a secret doctor was going to perform a secret operation on this secret young man that would alter his attitude toward women. She thought this was an emphatically patriotic action and the place was, as always, at my disposal.
That wasn’t all that was at my disposal. We inspected the three rooms of the “hospital.”
We paused by the bed where her late husband had had his throat so expertly cut.
“You must lie down and see how soft it is,” said the Widow Tayl.
I felt my hair shoot up with alarm as I heard her continue. “You will never find a bed so serviceable!”
Her naked foot was hooked behind my heel as I tried to go backwards.
Tayl’s robe hit the floor.
My right boot hit the far wall and fell with a thud.
A standing lamp began to reel.
A table of instruments was shaking and every instrument on it clattered.
The lamp crashed on the floor.
The double window blew open inward with a terrific blast of wind.
The outer door looked solid. I got to it and put my hand on it to steady myself. I was totally shot.
The sybarite looked like he was laughing as he sprayed out water into the pool.
You have to be careful who you blackmail.
An hour later, flying away from the place, though jaded, I was still cheerful. I had my objective. It even had its potentials: supposing Heller got tangled with the Widow Tayl, Krak discovered it and killed Heller. Lovely thought.
The driver had not failed to notice my disarrayed clothes. He said, “Is that the route I’m going to get rich on? Or did you pay her in counterfeits?” My, he was insolent these days. Couldn’t he admit, even to himself, that my personal charm and good looks had anything to do with it? “But she looks like she’d grab anything,” he went on.
“Land near a bookstore!” I ordered. I had to keep my mind concentrated on this project. It was intricate.
In the bookstore I browsed around the technical section. I found a book by Professor Gyrant Slahb called Cells I Have Known and sure enough, there was his picture on the back of it! I covertly tore it off the book, sauntered around a bit more and then we were aloft again, hovering.
I got out of the bag the things I needed and using the mirror, working back and forth between the picture and my face, applied the techniques of Apparatus school “Visual Deception 21-24, Advanced Age.” With the false wrinkle skin, it was easy. I turned to the driver and showed him my face and the picture. “How’s that?”
“Hey, that’s quite an improvement,” he said. He really was storing up some owed cuffs!
I shed my uniform and donned the “wise, old scientist” pants and overgarment. Very convincing.
I pulled out the portable scriber. They are handy rigs. They have a paper feed from the bottom and they use different types. I didn’t have to spend much time forging this contract: I would be dealing with somebody very unschooled in administration, who had no access to computer consoles.
The driver was shortly heading for Slum City. Some public-spirited, pompous (bleep) had once tried to build a whole hospital complex “for the poor.” It was a sprawling ruin, eighty acres in extent. All around its outskirts were small “professional buildings” where doctors completed ruining the cases the hospital had botched. There are lots of parking places, most of them empty,
for who wants to get wrecked even at the low prices of Slum City? But there was enough traffic for it to obscure one more airbus.
We parked some distance away from the wanted address. I hobbled to it, heavily leaning on my cane.
The office of DR. PRAHD BITTLESTIFFENDER, as the sign said, was in the rattiest of a series of dilapidations. You had to go around fifty garbage cans, assorted dead animals and up three fire escapes to get to it—an obstacle course which patients would have to run: natural selection—it was easy to cure anyone who could make it to the office.
There was no waiting room. There was no nurse. There was just a brand-new diploma. Perfect. As I stepped further in, I thought the place was empty until a pile of newssheets moved on the couch. It was new Dr. Bittlestiffender. He also lived here!
I sank tiredly down on a stool. I really was a bit weary after the Widow Tayl. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the stool trying to tip over.
Young Dr. Bittlestiffender stood up. He was a tall young fellow, long-boned, almost gawky. He had a remarkably pale head of hair that stood up at all angles like bleached straw. His eyes, bright green, were eager and professional. Women might consider him handsome, but he looked gaunt, half starved; that very clean operating coat he wore was obviously stolen from the hospital and, from the absence of others in the place, was probably the only indoor clothes he had. Good, good, better, better. My luck was holding.
I ignored his professional greeting. I said, in a quavering, aged voice, “Young man, you probably have never heard of me. I am Professor Gyrant Slahb.”
The effect was dramatic. His eyes popped. He almost came to attention and saluted.
I drew out the false identoplate and shakily extended it. “As I am unknown to you, please look at this so you can be sure.”
He did look at it. But he was stammering. “But . . . but . . . P-Professor! I am honored! I . . . I first got interested in cellology reading your nursery texts! Er . . . oh . . .”
He rushed to his desk and opened a bottom drawer and got out two jolt canisters. He rushed over to a culture heater and looked anxiously for a flask that was empty. He dropped the canisters in his effort. Two flasks fell and broke.
“I came to find,” I quavered, “if you were competent in your profession.”
He forgot about the jolt. He raced to a cabinet and slammed open some drawers. He drew out a stack of papers, saw they were the wrong ones, dropped them, found the right ones and, stumbling on a broken floorboard, got them into my lap rather suddenly.
“I . . . I am not like this,” he said. “You have startled me. I . . . er . . . I haven’t eaten for two days!”
Oh, was my luck in! But not all luck. It was knowing your field. That’s the way these new graduates are. After ten years of study and five years of doing the work the hospital doctors should have been doing, they are turned out to starve in the glory of total, private, administrative and financial independence. For which they have had not the faintest training: what senior cellologist wants competition? Yet they grind out thousands of them every year.
I looked at what he had offered. It was a schedule of difficult operations with the statistical results. Ninety-nine and a half percent successful! That was high! It’s usually thirty percent. No wonder the older independents didn’t favor him!
But the hospital examiners had not spared the adjectives in his examinations. They practically recommended him as fit to alter the cells of the Emperor! There were even fifty cases of introducing foreign objects along nerves to regulate vision and hearing!
He didn’t know what was coming. He stood there like a starving animal about to be tossed some meat.
Maybe he was too good for Heller. Maybe I was being too smart. A little lingering infection or a wrong cell generating the wrong fluids might be just what Heller needed. But I had gone this far.
“I know,” I said, “that you have begun a successful practice and that you would not be willing to be torn away from it or your friends or loving females. . . .”
“Professor! Please, please. I . . . I got to confess. I don’t have any friends or loving females. If you want me to do something . . .”
Dinnerlessness talks loud. I was a bit sorry I had put such a high figure on the paper.
But it was too late now.
I fumblingly, with age-palsied hands, found the contract.
“When the government asked for my recommendation, I told them that I could not honestly recommend until I had personally spoken with you.” I seemed very doubtful. “You seem like a nice young man and it appears from the records that you are competent enough. . . .” I hesitated.
He was almost dying on his feet, so great was his anxiety. But that’s the way these young fellows get—they are so used to standing up and getting examined that they get into perpetual hysteria about having to pass.
“It is not,” I said, “always comfortable to be on some foreign strand, far from home. The air might be good, the local women attractive and compliant, the gravity fine, the food enticing; the pay might be good but, truly, there is nothing to spend it on; really, on such posts there is nothing to do but work with strange cases of complex problems and putter about in the hope of making some universe-shaking discovery.”
He groaned in near ecstasy. The vacuum he was setting up almost pulled the paper out of my hand.
“The drawback, in this case,” I continued, “was the nature of the post—extreme secrecy. One breath of exposure and it could shake the whole Confederacy. It required a doctor who could end off his affairs quietly, attracting no attention, and simply fade from his present scene unremarked. The slightest secrecy breach would, of course, cancel the post!”
Oh, he could be secret. The whole profession was built on it. He could fade. He could fade without a trace.
“And then there was the first case. The test case,” I continued. “They said they were going to set up a test case and told me not to mention it. But amongst us professionals, I could not expose you to a test without informing you. I made that a condition. But they said that even the slightest hint, to the patient or to anyone, would cancel the contract.”
Oh, that was no problem! None at all!
“Now,” I quavered, “do you think you could successfully introduce foreign objects undetectably along optical and hearing nerves? That’s the test case.”
Oh, no trouble. Do it in his sleep!
“You might not like the contract,” I quavered. I handed it over.
He snapped it out of my hand so fast it almost tore.
I knew what it said. I had just typed it.
SECRET HUMANITARIAN SECTION
GOVERNMENT OF VOLTAR
KNOW ALL:
As of this date, one PRAHD BITTLESTIFFENDER,
Graduate Cellologist, is appointed CHIEF CELLOLOGIST
to Sensitive Secret Station X.
His salary shall be FIVE THOUSAND CREDITS (C5,000)
per year with all expenses paid.
After the successful completion of a test case, upon the outcome of which this contract is contingent, he shall thereafter proceed as ordered to the place ordered to perform the duties which will be ordered.
Signed:____________________________________________
Authenticated:_______________________________________
“Oh,” he cried, scarcely daring to say more.
“Sign on the line there,” I said. I gave him a pen and he raced over to his rickety desk and signed it. He found and stamped his identoplate on it.
I held out my hand and he reluctantly gave the contract back. I took the Professor Gyrant Slahb identoplate and put it on the “authenticated” line.
“Now there are some other things,” I said. “I want you to make up two lists. The first is everything you will need to outfit a small, temporary hospital for one operation. The other is everything you will need for a small but complete hospital in a remote location that has no equipment, no supplies.”
Oh, there was nothing complex
about that. He scribbled and scribbled. I will say this: he knew his business to a point where he didn’t have to refer to a single text.
Finally, he was done and gave me the lists.
“Now,” I said, “the person who will be in charge of you, the person whose orders you must follow, is named Officer Soltan Gris of the General Services. You must require that he show you his identoplate so you can be sure it is he as this is very secret work. He will approach you. You are not to contact him.