El bolted from her seat without a word and dug a microsyringe from her hip pouch as she strode toward the man, who had by now collapsed into a blubbering, whimpering puddle of fear. She placed the ovoid device on the skin on the lateral aspect of his neck and squeezed.
"He’ll quiet down in a minute," she told a concerned steward as he rushed up. "Send him down to IMC Central on the next shuttle for emergency admission to Section Blue."
The steward nodded obediently, relieved that someone seemed to feel that things were under control. And sure enough, by the time two fellow workers had arrived, the portly man was quiet, although still racked with sobs.
"What the hell happened to him?" Dalt asked over El’s shoulder as the man was carried to a berth in the rear.
"A bad case of the horrors," she replied.
"No, I’m serious."
"So am I. It’s been happening all over the human sector of the galaxy, just like that: men, women, all ages; they go into an acute, unremitting psychotic state. They are biochemically normal and usually have unremarkable premorbid medical histories. They’ve been popping up for the past decade in a completely random fashion and there doesn’t seem to be a damn thing we can do about them," she said with a set jaw, and it was obvious that she resented being helpless in any situation, especially a medical one.
Dalt gazed at El and felt the heaviness begin. She was a remarkable woman, very intelligent, very opinionated, and so very much like Jean in appearance; but she was also very mortal. Dalt had resisted the relationship she was obviously trying to initiate and every time he weakened he merely had to recall Jean’s hate-contorted face when he had deserted her.
I think we ought to get out of microbiology, he told Pard as his eyes lingered on El.
("And into what?")
How about life prolongation?
("Not that again!")
Yes! Only this time we’ll be working at IMC Central with some of the greatest scientific minds in the galaxy.
("The greatest minds in the galaxy have always worked on that problem, and every ‘major breakthrough’ and ‘new hope’ has turned out to be a dead end. Human cells reach a certain level of specialization and then lose their ability to reproduce. Under optimum conditions, a century is all they’ll last; after that the DNA gets sloppy and consequently the RNA gets even sloppier. What follows is enzyme breakdown, toxic overload, and finally death. Why this happens, no one knows – and that includes me, since my consciousness doesn’t reach to the molecular level – and from recent literature, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone’ll know in the near future.")
But we have a unique contribution to make –
("You think I haven’t investigated it on my own, if not for any other reason than to provide you with a human companion of some permanence? It’s no fun, you know, when you go into those periods of black despair.")
I guess not. He paused. I think one’s on its way.
("I know. The metabolic warning flags are already up. Look: why not take up with this woman? You both find each other attractive and I think it will be good for you.")
Will it be good for me when she grows into a bitter old woman while I stay young?
("What makes you think she’ll want you around that long?") Pard jibed.
Dalt had no answer for that one.
THE SHUTTLE TRIP WAS UNEVENTFUL and when El offered to drive him from the spaceport to his hotel, Dalt reluctantly accepted. His feelings were in a turmoil, wanting to be simultaneously as close to and as far from this woman as possible. So to keep the conversation safe and light, he made a comment about the lack of flitters in the air.
"We’re still pretty much in the ground-car stage, although one of the car factories is reportedly gearing for flitter production. It’ll be nice to get one at a reasonable price; the only ones on Tolive now were shipped via interstellar freight and that is expensive!"
She pulled her car alongside a booth outside the spaceport perimeter, fished out a card, and held it up as she passed.
"What was that all about?"
"Toll."
Dalt was incredulous. "You mean you actually have toll roads on this planet?"
She nodded. "But not for long… not if we get a good supply of flitters."
"Even so, the roads belong to everybody–”
"No, they belong to those who built them."
"But taxes–”
"You think roads should be built with tax money?" El asked with a penetrating glance. "I use this road maybe once or twice a year; why should I pay anything for it the rest of the time? A group of men got together and built this road and they charge me every time I use it. What’s wrong with that?"
"Nothing, except you’ve got to fork over money every time you make a turn."
"Not necessarily. Members of a given community usually get together and pool their money for local streets, build them, and leave them at that; and business areas provide roads gratis for the obvious reason. As a matter of fact, a couple of our big corporations have built roads and donated them to the public – the roads are, of course, named after the companies and thus act as continuous publicity agents."
"Sounds like a lot of trouble to me. It’d be a lot simpler if you just made everyone ante up and–”
"Not on this planet it wouldn’t be. You don’t make Tolivians do anything. It would take a physical threat to make me pay for a road that I’ll never use. And we tend to frown on the use of physical force here."
"A pacifist society, huh?"
"Pacifist may not be–” she began, and then swerved sharply to make an exit ramp. "Sorry," she said with a quick, wry grin. "I forgot I was dropping you off at the hotel."
Dalt let the conversation lapse and stared out his side of the bubble at the Tolivian landscape. Nothing remarkable there: a few squat trees resembling conifers scattered in clumps here and there around the plain, coarse grass, a mountain range rising in the distance.
"Not exactly a lush garden-world," he muttered after a while.
"No, this is the arid zone. Tolive’s axis has little deviation relative to its primary, and its orbit is only mildly ellipsoid. So whatever the weather is wherever you happen to be, that’s probably what it’ll be like for most of the year. Most of our agriculture is in the northern hemisphere; industry keeps pretty much to the south and usually within short call of the spaceports."
"You sound like a chamber-of-commerce report," Dalt remarked with a smile.
"I’m proud of my world." El did not smile.
Suddenly, there was a city crouched on the road ahead, waiting for them. Dalt had spent too much time on Derby of late and had become accustomed to cities with soaring profiles. And that’s how the cities on his homeworld of Friendly had been. But this pancake of one-and two-story buildings was apparently the Tolivian idea of a city.
Spoonerville said a sign in Interworld characters. Pop: 78,000. They sped by rows of gaily colored houses, most standing alone, some interconnected. And then there were warehouses and shops and restaurants and such. The hotel stood out among its neighboring buildings, stretching a full four stories into the air.
"Not exactly the Centauri Hilton," Dalt remarked as the car jolted to a halt before the front entrance.
"Tolive doesn’t have much to offer in the way of tourism. This place obviously serves Spoonerville’s needs, ’cause if there was much of an overflow somebody’d have built another." She paused, caught his eyes, and held them. "I’ve got a lovely little place out on the plain that’ll accommodate two very nicely, and the sunsets are incredible."
Dalt tried to smile. He liked this woman, and the invitation, which promised more than sunsets, was his for the taking. "Thanks, El. I’d like to take you up on that offer sometime, but not now. I’ll try to see you at IMC tomorrow after my meeting with Dr. Webst."
"Okay." She sighed as he stepped out of the car. "Good luck." Without another word she sealed the bubble and was off.
("You know what they say about hell and fury
and scorned women,") Pard remarked.
Yeah, I know, but I don’t think she’s like that… got too good a head on her shoulders to react so primitively.
Dalt’s reserved room was ready for him and his luggage was expected to arrive momentarily from the spaceport. He walked over to the window which had been left opaque, flipped a switch, and made the entire outer wall transparent. It was 18.75 in a twenty-seven-hour day – that would take some getting used to after years of living with Derby’s twenty-two-hour day – and the sunset was an orange explosion behind the hills. It probably looked even better from El’s place on the plains.
("But you turned her down,") Pard said, catching the thought. ("Well, what are we going to do with ourselves tonight? Shall we go out and see what the members of this throbbing metropolis do to entertain themselves?")
Dalt squatted down by the window with his back against the wall. "I think I’ll just stay here and watch for a while. Why don’t you just go away," he muttered aloud.
("I can’t very well leave…”)
"You know what I mean!"
("Yes, I know what you mean. We go through this every time we have to uproot ourselves because your associates start giving you funny looks. You start mooning over Jean–”)
"I do not moon over her!"
("Call it what you will, you mope around like a Lentemian crench that’s lost its calf. But it’s really not Jean. She’s got nothing to do with these mood swings; she’s dead and gone and you’ve long since accepted that. What’s really bothering you is your own immortality. You refuse to let people know that you will not grow old with the years as they do–”)
"I don’t want to be a freak and I don’t want that kind of notoriety. Before you know it, someone will come looking for the ‘secret’ of my longevity and will stop at nothing to get it. I can do very well without that, thank you."
("Fine. Those are good reasons, excellent reasons for wanting to pass yourself off as a mortal among mortals. That’s the only way we’ll ever really get to do what we want to do. But that’s only on the surface. Inside you must come to grips with the fact that you cannot live as a mortal. You haven’t the luxury of ascribing an infinite span to a relationship, as do many mortals, for ‘the end of time’ to them is the same as the end of life, which is all too finite. In your case, however, ‘the end of time’ may occur with you there watching it. So, until you can find yourself another immortal as a companion, you’ll just have to be satisfied with relatively short-term relationships and cease acting so resentful of the fact that you won’t be dying in a few decades like all your friends.")
"Sometimes I wish I could die."
("Now, we both know that you don’t mean that, and even if you were sincere, I wouldn’t allow it.")
Go away, Pard!
("I’m gone.")
And he was. With Pard tucked away in some far corner of his brain – probably working on some obscure philosophical problem or remote mathematical abstraction – Dalt was finally alone.
Alone. That was the key to these periodic black depressions. He was all right once he had established an identity on a new world, made a few friends, and put himself to work on whatever it was he wanted to do at that particular time in his life. He could thus delude himself into a sense of belonging that lasted a few decades, and then it began to happen: the curious stares, the probing questions. Soon he’d find himself on an interstellar liner again, between worlds, between lives. The sense of rootlessness would begin to weigh heavily upon him.
Culturally, too, he was an outsider. There was no interstellar human culture as yet to speak of; each planet was developing its own traditions and becoming proud of them. No one could really feel at home on any world except one’s own, and so the faux pas of an off-worlder was well tolerated in the hope of receiving the same consideration after a similar blunder on his homeworld. Dalt was thus unconcerned about any anachronisms in his behavior, and with the bits and pieces he was taking with him from every world he lived on, he was fast becoming the only representative of a true interstellar human culture.
Which meant that no world was actually home – only on interstellar liners did he feel even the slightest hint of belonging. Even Friendly, his birth world, had treated him as an off-worlder, and only with great difficulty did he manage to find a trace or two of the familiar in his own hometown during a recent and very discouraging sentimental journey.
Pard was right, of course. He was almost always right.
Dalt couldn’t have it both ways, couldn’t be an immortal and retain a mortal’s scope. He’d have to broaden his view of existence and learn to think on a grander scale. He was still a man and would have to live among other men, but he would have to develop an immortal’s perspective in regard to time, something he had as yet been unable and/or unwilling to do. Time set him apart from other men and had to be reckoned with. Until now he had been living a lot of little lives, one after the other, separate, distinct. Yet they were all his, and he had to find a way to fuse them into a single entity. He’d work on it. No hurry… there was plenty of time –
There was that word again. He wondered when he would end. Or if he would end. Would the moment ever come when he’d want to stop living? And would he be allowed to do so? Pard’s earlier statement had made him uneasy. They shared a body and thus an existence, as the result of an accident. What if one partner decided he wanted out? It would never be Pard – his intellectual appetite was insatiable. No, if anyone would ever want to call it quits, it would be Dalt. And Pard would forbid it. Such a situation appeared ludicrous on the surface but might very well come to be, millennia hence. How would they resolve it? Would Pard find a way to grant Dalt’s wish by somehow strangling his mind, thereby granting his death wish – for in Pard’s philosophy, the mind is life and life is the mind – and leaving Pard as sole tenant of the body?
Dalt shuddered. Pard’s ethics would, of course, prevent him from doing such a thing unless Dalt absolutely demanded it. But still it was hardly a comforting thought. Even in the dark fog of depression that enveloped him tonight, Dalt realized that he loved life and living very much. Planning to make the most of tomorrow and every subsequent tomorrow, he drifted off to sleep as the second of Tolive’s three moons bobbed above the horizon.
III
A SOMEWHAT HARRIED Steven Dalt managed to arrive at the administrative offices of IMC in time for his 09.5 appointment with Dr. Webst. His back ached as he took a seat in the waiting room, and he realized he was hungry.
A bad morning so far – if this was any indication of how the rest of the day was going to be, he decided he’d be better off returning to the hotel, crawling into bed, and spending it in the fetal position. He’d awakened late and cramped in that corner by the window, with his baggage sitting inside the door. He’d had to rummage through it to find a presentable outfit and then rush down to the lobby and find a taxi to take him to the IMC administration building. He did not want to keep Dr. Webst waiting. Dalt seemed to be placing greater and greater importance on punctuality lately. Perhaps, he mused, the more aware he became of his own timelessness, the more conscious he became of the value of another man’s time.
("Well, what’ll it be?") Pard asked suddenly.
Welcome back.
("I should be saying that to you. Once again: What’ll it be?")
What are you talking about?
("Us. Are we sticking with the microbes or do we go into gerontology or what?")
I’m not sure. Maybe we won’t stay here at all. They hired us for antimicrobial research and may not want us for anything else. But I think I’ve had enough of microbes for now.
("I must agree. But what shall we try next?")
I haven’t given it too much thought yet –
("Well, get thinking. We’ll be seeing Dr. Webst in a moment and we’d better have something to tell him.")
Why don’t we just improvise?
Pard seemed to hesitate, then, ("Okay, but let’s be as honest as possibl
e with him, ’cause we start getting paid as of this morning.")
So, a few credits won’t break IMC.
("It would be unethical to accept payment for nothing.")
Your rigidity wears on me after a while, Pard.
("Value received for value given – don’t forget it.")
Okay, okay, okay.
The door to Dr. Webst’s office dilated and a tall, fair young man with an aquiline profile stepped through. He glanced at Dalt, who was the room’s only occupant, paused, then walked over and extended his hand. "Dr. Dalt?"
"The ‘Dalt’ part is correct, but I have no doctorate." Actually, this was untrue; he held two doctorates in separate fields but both had been granted a number of lives ago.
"Mister Dalt, then. I’m Dr. Webst." They performed the ancient human ritual known as the handshake and Dalt liked Webst’s firm grip.
"I thought you’d be older, Doctor," Dalt said as they entered Webst’s sparsely appointed office.
Webst smiled. "That’s funny… I was expecting an older man, too. That paper you published a year ago on Dasein II fever and the multiple pathogens involved was a brilliant piece of work; there was an aura of age and experience about it."
"Are you in infectious diseases?" Dalt asked quickly, anxious to change the subject.
"No, psych is my field."
"Really? I made part of the trip from Derby in the company of Ellen Lettre. Know her?"
"Of course. Our department has high hopes for Dr. Lettre – an extremely intelligent woman." He paused at his desk and flashed a rapid series of memos across his viewer. "Before I forget, I got a note from personnel about your forms. Most of them are incomplete and they’d like to see you sometime today."
Dalt nodded. "Okay, I’ll see if I can make it this afternoon." This was often a problem – personal history. He had changed his name a couple of times but preferred to be known as Steven Dalt. Usually he went from one field of endeavor to another totally unrelated to the first and thus obviated the need for references; he would start at the bottom as he had at the university on Derby, and with Pard as his partner, it wouldn’t be long before the higher-ups realized they had a boy genius among them. Or, he’d go into a risky field such as chispen fishing on Gelk, where the only requirement for employment was the guts to go out on the nets… and no questions asked.