"It’s real, all right," Dalt told Giff. "It’s the original."
Giff’s mouth twisted with skepticism. "And I’m president of the Federation."
Dalt rose to his feet, lifting the gravcuff with him. "Your boss is looking for a man who’s been alive for two or three centuries, isn’t he? Well I’m the man."
"We know that."
"I’m a man who never sickens, never ages… now what kind of a healer would The Healer be if he couldn’t heal himself ? After all, death is merely the culmination of a number of degenerative disease processes."
Giff mulled this over, accepting the logic but resisting the conclusion. "What about the patch of silver hair and the golden hand?"
"Pull this skullcap off and take a look. Then get some liquor from the cabinet over there and rub it on my left wrist.
After a full minute’s hesitation, wherein doubt struggled in the mire of the afterglow of the cassette, Giff accepted the challenge and cautiously pulled the skullcap from Dalt’s head. "Nothing! What are you trying–”
"Look at the roots," Dalt told him. "You don’t think I can walk around with that patch undyed, do you?"
Giff looked. The roots in an oval patch at the top of Dalt’s head were a silvery gray. He jumped away from Dalt as if stung, then walked slowly around him, examining him as if he were an exhibit in a museum. Without a word, he went to the cabinet Dalt had indicated before and drew from it a flask of clear orange fluid.
"I… I’m almost afraid to try this," he stammered, opening the container as he approached. He poised the bottle over Dalt’s wrists where they were inserted into the gravcuff, hesitated, then took a deep breath and poured the liquor. Most of it splashed on the floor but a sufficient amount reached the target.
"Now rub," Dalt told him.
Without looking up, Giff tucked the flask under his arm and began to massage the fluid into the skin of Dalt’s left wrist and forearm. The liquor suddenly became cloudy and flesh-colored. Giff took a fold of his coveralls and wiped the solution away. From a sharp line of demarcation at the wrist on down over the back of the hand, the skin was a deep, golden yellow.
"You are The Healer!" His eyes met Dalt’s squarely for the first time. "Forgive me! I’ll open the cuff right now."
In his frantic haste to retrieve the key from his coveralls, Giff allowed the liquor flask to slip from beneath his arm and it smashed on the floor.
"Hey! That was real glass!" Dalt said.
Giff ignored the crash and the protest. The key was in his hand and he was inserting it into its slot. The pressure around Dalt’s wrists was suddenly eased and as he pulled his hands free, Giff caught the now-deactivated cuff.
"Forgive me," he repeated, shaking his head and fixing his eyes on the floor. "If I’d had any idea that you might be The Healer, I would’ve had nothing to do with this, I swear! Forgive–”
"Okay! Okay! I forgive you!" Dalt said hurriedly. "Now, do you have a blaster?"
Giff nodded eagerly, reached inside his coveralls, and handed over a small hand model, cheap but effective at close range.
"Good. Now all we’ve got to do–”
"Hey!" someone yelled from the other side of the room. "What’s going on?"
Dalt spun on reflex, his blaster raised. Hinter stood there with his own blaster ready. It flashed and then Dalt felt a searing pain as the beam from Hinter’s weapon burned a hole through his chest two centimeters to the left of his sternum. As his knees buckled, everything went black and silent.
II
RUSHING TO THE UPPER LEVEL at the sound of Giff’s howl, Kanlos came upon a strange tableau: the prisoner – Dalt, or whatever his name was – was lying on his back with the front of his shirt soaked with blood and a neat round hole in his chest… very dead. Giff kneeled over him, sobbing and clutching the empty gravcuff to his abdomen; Hinter stood mutely to the side, blaster in hand.
"You fool!" he screamed, white-faced with rage. "How could you be so stupid!"
Hinter took an involuntary step backward. "He had a blaster! I don’t care how valuable a guy is, when he points a blaster in my direction, I shoot!"
Kanlos strode toward the body. "How’d he get a blaster?"
Hinter shrugged. "I heard something break up here and came to investigate. He was out of the cuff and holding the blaster when I came in."
"Explain," he said, nudging the sobbing Giff with his foot.
"He was The Healer!"
"Don’t be ridiculous!"
"He was! He proved it to me."
Kanlos considered this. "Well, maybe so. We traced him back to Tolive and that’s where The Healer first appeared. It all fits. But why did you let him loose?"
"Because I am a Son of The Healer!" Giff whispered. "And now I’ve helped kill him!"
Kanlos made a disgusted face. "Idiots! I’m surrounded by fools and incompetents! Now we may never find out how they kept him alive this long." He sighed with exasperation. "All right. We’ve still got a few rooms left to search."
Hinter turned to follow Kanlos. "What about him?" he said, indicating Giff.
"Useless button-head. Forget him."
They went below, leaving Giff crouched over the body of The Healer.
III
(C’MON. WAKE UP!")
Wha’ happen?
("Hinter burned a hole right through your heart, my friend.")
Then how come I’m still alive?
("Because the auxiliary heart I constructed in your pelvis a couple of hundred years ago has finally come in handy.")
I never knew about that.
("I never told you. You know how you get when I start making improvements.")
I’ll never object again. But what prompted you to build a second heart?
("I’ve always been impressed by what happened to Anthon when you blasted a hole in his chest, and it occurred to me that it just wasn’t safe to have the entire circulatory system dependent on a single pump. So I attached the auxiliary organ to the abdominal aorta, grew a few bypass valves, and let it sit there… just in case.")
I repeat: I’ll never object again.
("Good. I’ve got a few ideas about the mineral composition of your bones that I–”)
Later. What do we do now?
(We send the button-head home, then we take care of those two below. But no exertion; we’re working on only one lung."
How about waiting for them with the blaster?
("No. Better idea: Remember the sights we came across in the minds of all those people with the horrors?")
I’ve never quite been able to forget.
("Neither have I, and I believe I can recreate enough of them to fill this house with a concentrated dose of the horrors… concentrated enough to insure that those two never bother us or anyone else again.")
Okay, but let’s get rid of Giff.
IV
WITHOUT WARNING, THE BODY in front of Giff suddenly rolled over and achieved a sitting position.
"Stop that blubbering and get out of here," it told him.
Giff’s mouth hung open as he looked at the obviously alive and alert man before him with the gory front and the hole in his chest where his heart should be. He looked torn between the urge to laugh with joy and scream with horror. He resolved the conflict by vomiting.
When his stomach had finally emptied itself, he was told to go to the roof, take the emergency chute down to the ground, and keep on going.
"Do not," the body emphasized, "repeat: do not dally around the grounds if you value your sanity."
"But how…” he began.
"No questions. If you don’t leave now I won’t be responsible for what happens to you."
Without another word but with many a backward glance, Giff headed for the roof. At last look, he saw the body climb unsteadily to its feet and walk toward one of the chairs.
Dalt sank into a chair and shook his head. "Dizzy!" he muttered.
("Yeah. It’s a long way from the pelvis to the brain. Also, ther
e’s some spasm in the aortic arch that I’m having trouble controlling. But we’ll be all right.")
I’ll have to trust you on that. When do we start with the horrors?
("Now. I’ll block you out because I’m not sure that even you can take this dose.")
I was hoping you’d say that, Dalt thought with relief, and watched everything fade into formless grayness.
And from the bloody, punctured body slumped in the chair there began to radiate evil, terror, horror. A malignant trickle at first, then a steady stream, then a gushing torrent.
The men below stopped their search and began to scream.
V
DALT FINISHED INSPECTING the lower rooms and was fully satisfied that the two gurgling, drooling, blank-eyed creatures that had once been Kanlos and Hinter were no longer a threat to his life and his secret. He walked outside into the cool night air in a vain attempt to soothe his laboring right lung and noticed a form slumped in the bushes.
Giff. From the contorted position of his body it was evident he had fallen from the roof and broken his neck.
"Looks like this Son of The Healer couldn’t follow directions," Dalt said. "Must’ve waited up on the roof and then went crazy when the horrors began and ran over the edge."
("Lot’s son.")
"What’s that supposed to mean?"
("Nothing. Just a distorted reference to an episode in an ancient religious book.") Pard switched the subject. ("You know, it’s amazing that there’s actually a cult of Healer-followers awaiting his return.")
"Not really so amazing. We made quite an impression… and left a lot undone."
("Not because we wanted to. There was outside interference.")
"Right. But that won’t bother us now, with the war going on."
("You want to go back to it, don’t you?")
"Yes, and so do you."
("Guess you’re right. I’d like to learn to probe a little deeper this time. And maybe find out whoever or whatever’s behind the horrors.")
"You’ve hinted at that before. Care to explain?"
("That’s all it is, I’m afraid: a hint… a glimpse of something moving behind the scenes. I’ve no theory, no evidence. Just a gnawing suspicion.")
"Sounds a little farfetched to me."
("We’ll see. But first we’ll have to heal up this hole in the chest, get the original heart working again – if I may quote you: ‘What kind of a healer would The Healer be if he couldn’t heal himself!’ – and try to think up some dramatic way for The Healer to reappear.")
After a quick change of clothes, they went to the roof and steered their flitter into the night, leaving it to the Meltrin authorities to puzzle out two babbling idiots, a broken button-head, and a respected physicist named Cheserak who had vanished without a trace.
They blamed it on the Tarks, of course.
HEALER - Part V
HEAL THY NATION
Age 1231
The horrors persisted at varying levels of virulence for well over a millennium and during that period certain individuals with the requisite stigmata of flamestone, snowy patch of hair, and golden hand, purporting to be The Healer, appeared at erratic intervals. The efforts of these impostors were somehow uniformly successful in causing remissions of the malady. And although this was vigorously dismissed as placebo effect by most medical authorities (with the notable exception of IMC, which, for some unaccountable reason, refused to challenge the impostors), the explanation fell on deaf ears. The Children of The Healer would have none of it. Rational explanations were meaningless to them.
And so the cult grew, inexorably. It crossed planetary, commonwealth, and even racial barriers (we have already discussed the exploits among the Lentemians and among the Tarks during the postwar period), spreading in all directions until… the horrors stopped.
As suddenly and as inexplicably as the phenomenon had begun, the horrors came to a halt. No new cases have been reported for the last two centuries and the cult of The Healer is apparently languishing, kept alive only by the fact that various individuals in Healer regalia have been spotted on vid recordings in public places here and there about the planets. (The only consistency noted in regard to these sightings is that, when interviewed later, no one in these scenes could ever remember seeing a man who looked like The Healer.)
The Children of The Healer say that he awaits the day when we shall need him again.
We shall see.
from The Healer: Man & Myth
by Emmerz Fent
I
FEDERATION CENTRAL: FIRST-ADJUTANT’S OFFICE, Federation Defense Force. Ros Petrical paced the room. He was fair, wiry, and prided himself on his appearance of physical fitness. But he wasn’t trying to impress the other occupant of his office. That was Bilxer, an old friend and the Federation currency coordinator, who had been passing the time of day when the report came in. Bilxer’s department was responsible for tabulating and reporting – for a fee, of course – the fluctuations in the relative values of the member planets’ currencies. There had, however, been a distinct and progressive loss of interest in the exchange rates through recent generations of currency coordinators, and consequently Bilxer found himself with a surfeit of time on his hands.
Petrical, until very recently, could hardly complain about being overworked during his tenure as first adjutant. At the moment, however, he wished he had studied finance rather than military science. Then he would be stretched out on the recliner like Bilxer, watching someone else pace the floor.
"Well, there goes the Tark theory," Bilxer said from his repose. "Not that anyone ever truly believed they were behind the incidents in the first place."
"Incidents! That’s a nice way of dismissing cold, calculated slaughter!"
Bilxer shrugged off Petrical’s outburst as semantic nitpicking. "That leaves the Broohnins."
"Impossible!" Petrical said, flicking the air with his hand. He was agitated, knew it, and cursed himself for showing it. "You heard the report. The survivors in that Tark village–”
"Oh, they’re leaving survivors now?" Bilxer interjected. "Must be mellowing."
Petrical glared at his guest and wondered how they had ever become friends. He was talking about the deaths of thousands of rational creatures and Bilxer seemed to assign it no more importance than a minor devaluation of the Tark erd. Something evil was afoot among the planets. For no apparent reason, people were being slaughtered at random intervals in random locations at an alarming rate. The first incidents had been trifling – trifling, at least, on an interstellar scale. A man burned here, a family destroyed there, isolated settlements annihilated to a man; then the graduation to villages and towns.
It was then that reports began to filter into Fed Central and questions were asked. Petrical had painstakingly traced the slaughters, reported and unreported, back over seven decades. He had found no answers but had come up with a number of questions, the most puzzling of which was this: If the marauders wanted to wipe out a village or a settlement, why didn’t they do it from the atmosphere? A single small peristellar craft could leave a charred hole where a village had been with little or no danger to the attackers. Instead, they arrived on-planet and did their work with antipersonnel weapons.
It didn’t make sense… unless terror was part of the object. The attack teams had been very efficient – they had never left a witness. Until now.
"The survivors," Petrical continued in clipped tones, "described the marauders as vacuum-suited humanoids – no facial features noted – appearing out of nowhere amid extremely bizarre atmospheric conditions, and then methodically slaughtering every living thing in sight. Their means of escape? They run toward a certain point and vanish. Granted, the Broohnins are unbalanced as far as ideology goes, but this just isn’t their style. And besides, they don’t have the technology for such a feat."
"Somebody does."
Petrical stopped pacing. "Yeah, somebody does. And whatever they’ve got must utilize some entirely new physic
al principle." He stepped behind his desk and slumped into the seat. His expression was gloomy as he spoke. "The Tarks are demanding an emergency meeting of the General Council."
"Well, it’s up to you to advise the director to call one. Do you dare?"
"I don’t have much choice. I should have pushed for it some time ago, but I held off, waiting for these slaughters to take on a pattern. As yet, they haven’t. But now that the Tarks have been hit, I’m up against the wall."
Bilxer rose and ambled toward the door. "It’s fairly commonly accepted that the Federation is dead, a thing of the past. A nice noisy emergency session could lay that idea to rest."
"I’m afraid," Petrical sighed, "that the response to this emergency call will only confirm a terminal diagnosis."
II
JOSIF LENDA INVENTORIED THE ROOM as he awaited Mr. Mordirak’s appearance. The high, vaulted ceiling merged at its edges with row upon row of sealed shelves containing, of all things, books. Must be worth a fortune. And the artifacts: an ornately carved desk with three matching plush chairs, stuffed animals and reptiles from a dozen worlds staring out from corners and walls, interspersed with replicas of incredibly ancient weapons for individual combat… maybe they weren’t replicas. The room was windowless with dusky indirect lighting and Lenda had that feeling that he had somehow been transported into the dim past.
In spite of – and no doubt because of – his almost pathological reclusiveness, Mr. Mordirak was probably Clutch’s best-known citizen. A man of purportedly incredible wealth, he lived in a mansion that appeared to have been ripped out of Earth’s preflight days and placed here upon a dizzy pinnacle of stone amid the planet’s badlands. As far as anyone could tell, he rarely left his aerie, and when he did so, he demonstrated a remarkable phobia for image recorders of any type.
Lenda felt a twinge of apprehension as he heard a sound on the other side of the pair of wooden doors behind the desk. He desperately needed the aid of a man of Mordirak’s stature, but Mordirak had remained studiously aloof from human affairs since the day, nearly a half century ago, when he had suddenly appeared on Clutch. Rumors had flashed then that he had bought the planet. That was highly unlikely, but there grew up about the man an aura of power and wealth that persisted to this day. All Lenda needed was one public word of support from Mordirak and his plans for a seat in the Federation Assembly would be assured.