A Woman a Day

  Thorleifsson grunted again, and he reached with his other hand for the handle of the scalpel. Evidently, he meant to pull it loose.

  Leif, however, had not stopped his charge. He slammed into the Uzzite and went down with him to the floor. Again, Thorleifsson grunted. Some of his wind had been knocked out. But he was too heavy and strong to be checked even by the wound and the impact. With his uninjured hand he tried to seize Leif’s genitals and crush them.

  Leif blocked the move by writhing away, but he lost his position on top.

  Thorleifsson rolled away, jumped up, and reached again for his minimatic.

  Leif launched himself through the air, feet first. He kicked out, and the toe of his sneaker struck the hand that had just drawn the gun. The gun flew away.

  Thorleifsson was, for a second, motionless, his left hand useless because the scalpel pierced it; his right, because of the kick against his wrist. Then Thorleifsson, silent as he had been since Leif entered the room, raised his hand to his mouth and bit down on the handle of the scalpel. And with a backward jerk of his head and a forward jerk of his hand, he pulled the scalpel loose. His expression did not change.

  Leif, after the kick, had managed to land on one foot and thus kept himself from falling on his back. For a second, he paused, and that was enough time for Thorleifsson to regain control of his right hand. Thorleifsson took the scalpel from his mouth and advanced, crouching, on Leif.

  Leif was undecided whether to run for the minimatic, which had fallen in the near corner of the room or continue his direct attack.

  The Uzzite decided for Leif. He stepped between Leif and the gun, and for the first time he spoke.

  “You... you filthy monster! How can you wear that—” he pointed with his bleeding hand at the golden lamech on Leif’s chest—”and yet be a traitor?”

  “What makes you think I’m the traitor?” said Leif. “Don’t you know that you have been denounced as an unrealist and that your fellow Uzzites are looking for you?”

  Thorleifsson’s face turned grey. The scalpel lowered.

  “What? How could it be?”

  Leif acted before Thorleifsson could recover from the shock of the lie. He tore the lamech from his shirtfront and threw it at the Uzzite’s face. The heavy golden badge struck the man in the eye.

  Thorleifsson did not cry out, perhaps because he was too stunned. Stunned because the accusation—which must have been unthinkable to him—paralyzed him or because a lamech had been thrown at him. The lamech was a symbol invested with centuries of authority and holiness. Even a man as cynical as an Uzzite was inclined to be would not be able to overcome entirely the conditioned reflexes installed in him as a child.

  Whatever the reason, he moved too slowly to defend himself when Leif seized the hand that held the scalpel.

  Leif twisted. Bones snapped. Thorleifsson cried out. The scalpel fell, but Leif caught it by the handle. He drove the point into Thorleifsson’s bulging belly, turned the scalpel a half twist, and pulled it out. And then he cut Thorleifsson’s throat.

  Chapter 8

  While Thorleifsson’s flesh and bones burned in the crematory, Leif removed all traces of blood from the floor and looked for anything else that might give away the Uzzite’s presence. Then, he took Mrs. Dannto’s body from the locker and placed it on the slab. As he worked he wondered about the lieutenant’s appearance. Had Candle-man sent him because he’d heard a report from Trausti? Or had one of the orderlies thought that Ingolf’s body looked suspiciously curved beneath the sheet?

  He didn’t know. It might be anything. Whatever it was, Leif intended working until the last possible moment.

  After he’d put on gown and mask and gloves, he prepared slides of blood and tissue. While the Labtech machine analyzed samples, Leif began his head-post, cutting fast. His time was short; he wouldn’t be able to do a half-decent job. But he had to find out something about this strange woman.

  Leif tried to shake off all interfering thoughts and concentrated on his work. Neither a philosopher nor morbidly inclined, he found himself oppressed by the silence, the harsh light, the cold, and the unresponsiveness of this pathetic specimen. Even the passion of the quest for knowledge did not absorb him enough. Soundless voices spoke; chill tongues choked moribund syllables; the penetration of the steel evoked a fluttering of protest, a shapeless naysaying.

  He was reminded of the encounter early that morning with the pale-eyed and flare-nostriled four and the impact of the” Quo vadis?” that had stopped him in mid stride. Any other time he’d have bayed after those unique creatures with the relentlessness of the indefatigably curious. He was sure they held the key to something, but the maddening squirrel cage he was trapped in wouldn’t allow him to reach for it.

  He must be getting weary. Those last two thoughts were as mixed in metaphor as you could get. On the other hand, what was life but one mixed metaphor after another?

  He bent to his work. The mass of rich auburn hair rolled back under his fingers and thumbs. Underneath the soft flames was a thick and fat layer much like an orange peeling. He’d barely folded back the scalp before he was stopped by two small bumps hidden under her hair. They seemed to be composed of fatty tissue, perhaps nerve tissue. Leif severed them and inserted them in the Labtech for analysis; using the microscope, he viewed the holes left in her skull. The holes appeared to be the ends of nerve cables.

  Excited, forgetting the apprehension of the moment before, he finished stripping her cranium and applied the roaring edge of a circular saw to her skull. His unorthodox cutting pattern was intended to expose as much of the brain as possible for a hasty examination. When the membrane of the dura mater was exposed, the brain was similar in structure to a Terran’s. But he was convinced that a closer examination would show many differences.

  Fervently, he wished he had the chance to do some analysis. He didn’t. There was nothing else to do but go on and note the more radical departures. However, he wasn’t so fast that he escaped seeing that the nerves from the two scalp bumps connected both to the forebrain and the middle.

  The Labtech clicked for attention. Leif ignored it. He would read its findings later, and all at once. He was determined now to know this woman as he’d never been determined to know a live woman.

  She had been lovely as few women are, and now he, ruthless male, with the untiring and passionate knife, had deprived her of that loveliness in an even more shameful way than Death.

  “Forerunner,” he muttered to himself in the room’s cold silence, “what’s the matter with me? I’m no damn sentimental anthropomorphist, but something tonight has sure gotten into me.”

  He wondered if it could have been the reaction from killing the Uzzite. He doubted it, for he’d felt no revulsion at sinking the blade into that fat throat. The deed had been that of one soldier slaying another; both were acting in the line of duty. Besides, he’d deliberately murdered two high officials on the operating table. It had been his decision; he’d not done them on orders from Marsey. The two men had to be put out of the way so that CWC agents could move up in the hierarchy to take their place. Inasmuch as the two officials were lamech-bearers, they could not be accused of unreal thinking and thus sent to H. So Leif had murdered them. It was an indication of his professional ethics that he used the verb murdered and not a military euphemism.

  Whatever was bothering him, it had sliced into his skin as surely as his knife was dividing flesh from flesh.

  He shrugged again and bent over his work. The ribs had been raised, like a drawbridge. He counted twelve pair, true and false, the human number.

  The heart, the lungs, the liver, and the kidneys were, as near as he could determine, thoroughly human. So were the muscular and skeletal systems. He removed an eyeball and deposited it in the Labtech for analysis. Five minutes later, the Labtech clicked a dozen times, and a yellow light on the front panel flashed. Leif read the tape that stuck like a perforated tongue from an orifice in the front panel. The report was the same as
for the samples of blood and tissue. No abnormalities detectable. Which meant that the dead woman was a Terrestrial human being.

  Leif had two contradictions to consider. One, the woman had two biological deviations from the norm of homo sapiens—the two bodies on top of her head and the organ at the end of her vaginal canal. Two, it was almost beyond the limits of probability that an extraterrestrial female would so closely resemble an Earth female. Even the three types of humanoids found on other planets varied enough in external and internal characteristics for an untrained man to distinguish them in a glance. No XT would ever be mistaken, except at a distance, for a Terrestrial.

  Yet, there was the unmistakable evidence of the alien organs.

  And he did not think that mutation would account for them. They were too complex and well organized to be the result of genetic malfunction or deviation. No, the organs were alien.

  And that reminded him that he had subjected to analysis by the Labtech machine a sample of every organ of Halla Dannto except that which had first aroused his curiosity. He had not wanted to put the organ into the machine, for that meant its destruction while it was being analyzed. Also, there were certain tests he wanted to give it which the machine could not.

  However, he could not keep it for a personal scrutiny. He would have little chance to work on it in the laboratory without fear of being spied upon. And he could be very embarrassed if he were asked to explain what the organ was and where it came from. Even if he pulled rank and declined to answer, he would cause suspicion and possibly an investigation.

  Sighing, he deposited the cylindrical mass of flesh and the attached nerve ganglia in the Labtech. He punched the controls which set the machine for the desired tests and then paced restlessly back and forth. Ten minutes later, the clicking sounded, the yellow light flashed, and a strip of tape thrust out from the recorder-hole.

  Leif read the brief, coded message.

  DATA LACKING. DIFFERENT QUESTIONS NEEDED.

  “Too bad,” muttered Leif. “I don’t know what questions to ask.”

  Death and the knife had analyzed Halla. The questions he would like to ask were not for machines to answer. Life... death... and the narrow margin between. Why... why... how?

  Pausing only for a silent reflection on the transience of beauty, Leif paid his respects to the dead woman, and consigned her remains to the crematorium.

  The body burned, the Labtech’s tapes wiped, Leif stripped off his working clothes and put them in the furnace. Then he hosed down the walls and the floors.

  The only object he did not cleanse was Ingolf, still waiting upon the cart. When the sterilization was complete, he pushed the corpse back into the hall and from there took the elevator up to 100.

  There he found Candleman, standing motionless outside 113.

  “Where have you been?”

  Leif raised his brows.

  “I consider that question impertinent,” he said, “but since I am anxious to contribute to clearing up the mystery of this accident, I’ll answer you.”

  Leif stepped to the door and knocked softly.

  Candleman said harshly, “Well, aren’t you going to speak?”

  Leif pretended to start. “Ah, yes, I was preoccupied.”

  He watched the man for a sign of annoyance, but the face was as fixed as a gargoyle’s.

  “I’ve been dissecting a man who died of a brain tumor,” he said. “Part of my work recently has been correlating changes in brain waves with injuries of certain parts of the brain. Most interesting.”

  Ava opened the door. At that moment a nurse, coming down the hall, called Leif. She held a slip of paper in her hand, and her brow was wrinkled.

  Turning, his hand on the knob so Candleman couldn’t get in, he said, “Yes?”

  “Dr. Barker, the head nurse of 100 noticed a discrepancy here. Two orderlies from 200 were called down to remove a Mr. Ingolfs body to PM. But she knows that two of our men did that. She noticed the discrepancy when 200’s supervisor QB’d her to ask if she’d check the orderlies’ movements. She suspects one of unreality.”

  Leif let his breath out softly. He’d lost this round. There was a ninety-to-one chance that the discrepancy would never have been detected in the mass of quadruplicate reports. But one of the boys was thought to be unreal; a term that could cover anything from murder to laziness or stupidity. Probably the latter.

  Candleman watched him closely, but that might not mean anything. Those fierce grey eyes fastened their claws on everything. There was a chance, however, that the Uzzite had told the nurse to carry this news to him so that he might surprise Leif in some telltale word or gesture.

  He looked her in the face. Her bright profile was presented to the Uzzite; she must have felt safe, for her left eyelid winked. Candleman had put her up to it.

  Leif’s policy of making friends with the personnel had paid off. That she was willing to take a chance with the dreaded Uzzite’s eyes on her warmed him. It just was not true, as some of his associates swore, that none of these people were worth saving.

  “Well,” said Candleman.

  Leif shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  They glared into each other’s eyes.

  Impasse.

  But at that moment the click of angry heels echoed down the hall. A little blond-headed man with a big nose bounced before Leif.

  “Dr. Barker, what’s this I hear about you doing a post on Ingolf?”

  “That’s true, Dr. Shant.”

  Shant shrilled, “You’re crowding me, Dr. Barker! I asked that I be allowed to do the post.”

  “He died of cerebral tumor; I’d been eegieing him for several weeks,” said Leif. “I was interested. Furthermore, as head gapt of this hospital, I don’t have to get your permission.”

  Shant bounced up and down, tapdanced, heels clicking. “Nevertheless, you should have been ethical enough to ask me to assist.”

  “Shant, you weary me. Shuffle off, will you?”

  Leif felt someone pushing the door from within. He stepped aside enough to let Ava by.

  Ava’s finger was on the lips; the big shimmering eyes were concerned.

  “Gentlemen, I must ask you to be quiet. Mrs. Dannto needs all the sleep she can get.”

  Candleman flowed out of his crouch. Straightening his long back, he said, “You’re right. The welfare of the Archurielite’s wife comes first. I suggest, Dr. Barker, that you spend more time attending her and less to dissections.”

  “I don’t tell you how to conduct your profession. Please keep your long nose out of mine,” snapped Leif.

  Shant and the nurse gasped. You didn’t talk to an Uzzite like that.

  Candleman’s face was passive as a wax dummy’s.

  “Anything that concerns the Archurielite is my business.

  And I’m beginning to think that some of your actions are very much my concern.”

  “Think as you please,” said Leif. He propelled Ava into the room and then stepped in after her.

  When the door was shut, Ava said, “You fool!”

  “Do you want me to cringe?” said Leif. “How do you think I got where I am today? I tell you, if you act like you’re not afraid, these people think you must be somebody, and they’re scared of you.”

  “You go too far.”

  “Never mind. Remember, I’m your superior. Refrain from telling me off, even if you are—” he laughed— “my wife.”

  “Halla,” he said to the girl as she sat up, “I want you to take a lotus pill.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Are you or are you not under my orders?”

  “I am, as long as they don’t interfere with my prime directives. One of them is to keep my real identity secret. I think you’re showing too much curiosity.”

  “Take this.”

  “It’s not a truth drug?”

  “Take it. Or I’ll break your arm while you’re still conscious.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Yo
u mean it?”

  “Shib, I do. Do you think that bloodhound outside isn’t going to check the X-ray files and see if your arm really is broken?”

  “Why can’t you pick out somebody’s X-rays from the files and show them to him?”

  “We can’t take that chance. He’ll check on that angle. We’re in too much of a jam now. What with two Ingolfs and the fact that Trausti or Palsson might talk.”

  “Two Ingolfs?”

  “Never mind,” he said, as he realized he’d almost exposed the fact that her sister was dead. “The less you know about that, the better. You’re supposed to be Mrs. Dannto, remember? Even if Ava and I are tripped up over something else, you keep on acting as if you only know us professionally.”

  “Do I look that stupid?”

  Ava moved around Leif and began undoing the splint. Halla paid Ava no attention, but looked straight at him. “Will the break spoil the symmetry of my arm?”

  He was surprised, not because a woman would wonder about disfigurement instead of pain, but because she should voice her concern without false modesty, so matter-of-factly.

  “They’ll never be able to tell the difference. In fact,” he added, smiling, “it’ll probably be straighter than before. Art improves on life, you know.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Chapter 9

  A MOMENT AFTER Halla swallowed the pills and the water, her lids drooped, and she began breathing softly. Except for the flush in her cheeks and that indefinable look of fullness which the quick have and the dead lack, she was an exact facsimile of her twin as she had first lain on the slab.

  He shoved a chair to her bedside, picked up her arm, laid it across the arm of the chair, grabbed her wrist and elbow, and brought the lower part of her limb against the hard plastic.