“It all depends,” Miss Winston said. “Your type of growth is definitely curable and they’ll definitely cure it. But there may be a slight holdup while they’re studying it. That’s your part of the bargain, after all. Now I’ll be on my way. I expect you’re sleepy, and the lab people will take over from here. It’s been a great pleasure.”
They shook hands and Dr. Oliver had trouble suppressing a yawn. He was very sleepy, but he tried to tell Miss Winston how grateful he was. She smiled deprecatingly, almost cynically, and said: “We’re using you too, remember? Well, goodbye.”
Dr. Oliver barely made it to his bed.
His nightmares were terrible. There was a flashing light, a ringing bell and a wobbling pendulum that killed him, killed him, killed him, inch by inch, burying him under a mountain of flashes and clangs and blows while he was somehow too drugged to fight his way out.
HE REACHED fuzzily in the morning for the Dialit, which wasn’t there. Good God! he marveled. Was one expected to get up for breakfast? But he found a button that brought a grinning Mexican with a breakfast tray. After he dressed the boy took him to los medicos.
The laboratory, far down a deserted corridor, was staffed by two men and a woman. “Dr. Oliver,” the woman said briskly. “Sit there.” It was a thing like a dentist’s chair with a suggestion of something ugly and archaic in a cup-shaped headrest.
Oliver sat, uneasily.
“The carcinoma,” one of the men said to the other.
“Oh yes.” The other man, quite ignoring Oliver as a person, wheeled over a bulky thing not much different in his eyes from a television camera. He pointed it at Oliver’s throat and played it noiselessly over his skin. “That should do it,” he said to the first man.
Oliver asked incredulously: “You mean I’m cured?” And he started to rise.
“Silence!” the woman snarled, rapping a button. Dr. Oliver collapsed back into the chair with a moan. Something had happened to him; something terrible and unimaginable. For a hideous split-second he had known undiluted pain, pure and uniform over every part of his body, interpreted variously by each. Blazing headache, eye-ache and ear-ache, wrenching nausea, an agony of itching, colonic convulsions, stabbing ache in each of his bones and joints.
“But—” he began piteously.
“Silence!” the woman snarled, and rapped the button again.
He did not speak a third time but watched them with sick fear, cringing into the chair.
They spoke quite impersonally before him, lapsing occasionally into an unfamiliar word or so.
“Not more than twenty-seven vistch, I should say. Cardiac.”
“Under a good—master, would you call it?—who can pace him, more.”
“Perhaps. At any rate, he will not be difficult. See his record.”
“Stimulate him again.”
Again there was the split-second of hell on earth. The woman was studying a small sphere in which colors played prettily. “A good surge,” she said, “but not a good recovery. What is the order?”
One of the men ran his finger over a sheet of paper—but he was looking at the woman. “Three military.”
“What kind of military, sobr’ ?”
The man hastily rechecked the sheet with his index finger. “All for igr’ i khom. I do not know what you would call it. A smallship? A killship?”
The other man said scornfully: “Either a light cruiser or a heavy destroyer.”
“According to functional analogy I would call it a heavy destroyer,” the woman said decisively. “A good surge is important to igr’ i khom. We shall call down the destroyer to take on this Oliver and the two Stosses. Have it done.”
“Get up,” one of the men said to Oliver.
He got up. Under the impression that he could be punished only in the chair he said: “What—?”
“Silence!” the woman snarled, and rapped the button. He was doubled up with the wave of pain. When he recovered, the man took his arm and led him from the laboratory. He did not speak as he was half-dragged through endless corridors and shoved at last through a door into a large, sunlit room. Perhaps a dozen people were sitting about and turned to look.
He cringed as a tall, blackhaired man said to him: “Did you just get out of the chair?”
“It’s all right,” somebody else said. “You can talk. We aren’t—them. We’re in the same boat as you. What’s the story—heart disease? Cancer?”
“Cancer,” he said, swallowing. “They promised me—”
“They come through on it,” the tall man said. “They do come through on the cures. Me, I have nothing to show for it. I was supposed to survey for minerals here—my name’s Brockhaus. And this is Johnny White from Los Angeles. He was epileptic—bad seizures every day. But not any more. And this—but never mind. You can meet the rest later. You better sit down. How many times did they give it to you?”
“Four times,” Dr. Oliver said. “What’s all this about? Am I going crazy?”
The tall man forced him gently into a chair. “Take it easy,” he said. “We don’t know what it’s all about.”
“Goddamn it,” somebody said, “the hell we don’t. It’s the commies, as plain as the nose on your face. Why else should they kidnap an experienced paper salesman like me?”
Brockhaus drowned him out: “Well, maybe it’s the reds, though I doubt it. All we know is that they get us here, stick us in the chair and then—take us away. And the ones they take away don’t come back.”
“They said something about cruisers and destroyers,” Oliver mumbled. “And surges.”
“You mean,” Brockhaus said, “you stayed conscious all the way through?”
“Yes. Didn’t you?”
“No, my friend. Neither did any of us. What are you, a United States Marine?”
“I’m an English professor. Oliver, of Columbia University.”
Johnny White from Los Angeles threw up his hands. “He’s an English professor!” he yelled to the room. There was a cackle of laughter.
Oliver flushed, and White said hastily: “No offense, prof. But naturally we’ve been trying to figure out what—they—are after. Here we’ve got a poetess, a preacher, two lawyers, a salesman, a pitchman, a mining engineer, a dentist—and now an English professor.”
“I don’t know,” Oliver mumbled. “But they did say something about cruisers and destroyers and surges.” Brockhaus was looking skeptical. “I didn’t imagine it,” Oliver said stubbornly. “And they said something about ‘two Stosses.’ ”
“I guess you didn’t imagine it,” the tall man said slowly. “Two Stosses we’ve got.
Ginny! This man heard something about you and your old man.”
A WHITE-HAIRED MAN, stocky in build and with the big, mobile face of an actor, thrust himself past Brockhaus to confront Oliver. “What did they say?” he demanded.
A tired-looking blonde girl said to him: “Take it easy, Mike. The man’s beat.”
“It’s all right,” Oliver said to her. “They talked about an order. One of the men seemed to be reading something in Braille—but he didn’t seem to have anything wrong with his eyes. And the woman said they’d call down the destroyer to take on me and the two Stosses. But don’t ask me what it means.”
“We’ve been here a week,” the girl said. “They tell me that’s as long as anybody stays.”
“Young man,” Stoss said confidentially, “since we’re thrown together in this informal fashion I wonder if I could ask whether you’re a sporting man? The deadly dullness of this place—” He was rattling a pair of dice casually.
“Please, Mike!” the girl said in a voice near hysteria.
“Leave the man alone. What goods money here?”
“I’m a sporting man, Ginny,” he said mildly. “A friendly game of chance to break the monotony—”
“You’re a crook on wheels,” the girl said bitterly, “and the lousiest monte operator that ever hit the road.”
“My own daughter,” the man s
aid miserably. “My own daughter that got me into this lousy can—”
“How was I supposed to know it was a fake?” she flared. “And if you do die you won’t die a junkie, by God!” Oliver shook his head dazedly at their bickering.
“What will this young man think?” asked Stoss, with a try at laughing it off. “I can see he’s a person of indomitable will behind his mild exterior, a person who won’t let the chance word of a malicious girl keep him from indulging in a friendly—”
“Yeah! I might believe that if I hadn’t been hearing you give that line to farmhands and truck-drivers since I was seven. Now you’re a cold-reader. My aching torso.”
“Well,” Stoss said with dignity, “this time I happened to have meant it.”
Oliver’s head was throbbing. An indomitable will behind a mild exterior. It rang a bell somewhere deep inside him—a bell that clanged louder and louder until he felt his very body dissolve under its impact.
He dismissed the bizarre fantasy. He was Dr. Oliver of Columbia. He was Dr. Oliver of Columbia. He had always been.
The Stosses had drifted to a window, still quarreling. Brockhaus said after a pause: “It’s a funny thing. He was on heroin. You should see his arms. When he first got here he went around begging and yelling for a fix of dope because he expected that he’d want it. But after a few hours he realized that he didn’t want it at all. For the first time in twelve years, he says. Maybe it was the shocks in the chair. Maybe they did it intentionally. I don’t know. The girl—there’s nothing wrong with her. She just came along to keep the old man company while he took the marvelous free cure.”
A slight brunette woman with bangs was saying to him shyly: “Professor, I’m Mitty Worth. You may have heard of me—or not. I’ve had some pieces in the New New Review.”
“Delighted,” Dr. Oliver said. “How did they get you?”
Her mouth twisted. “I was doing the Michoacan ruins. There was a man—a very handsome man—who persuaded me that he had made an archaeological find, that it would take the pen of a poet to do it justice—” She shrugged. “What’s your field, professor?”
“Jacobean prose writers.”
Her face lit up. “Thank God for somebody to talk to. I’m specially interested in Tom Fuller myself. I have a theory, you know, about the Worthies of England. Everybody automatically says it’s a grab-bag, you know, of everybody who happened to interest Fuller. But I think I can detect a definite structure in the book—”
Dr. Oliver of Columbia groped wildly in his memory. What was the woman running on about?
“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the work,” he said.
Mitty Worth was stunned.
“Or perhaps,” Oliver said hastily, “I’m still groggy from the—the laboratory. Yes, I think that must be it.”
“Oh,” Mitty Worth said, and retreated.
Oliver sat and puzzled. Of course his specialty was the Jacobean prose writers. The foolish woman had made a mistake. Tom Fuller must be in another period. The real writers of Jacobean prose were—
Were—?
Dr. Oliver of Columbia, whose field was the Jacobean prose writers, didn’t know any of them by name.
I’m going crazy, he decided wildly. I’m Oliver of Columbia. I wrote my thesis on—
What?
THE OLD FAKER was quite right. He was an indomitable will behind a mild exterior, and a ringing bell had something to do with it, and so did a flashing light and a wobbling pendulum, and so did Marty Braun who could keep a tin can bouncing ten yards ahead of him as he walked firing from the hip, but Marty had a pair of stargauge .44’s and he wasn’t a gun nut himself even if he could nip the ten-ring four out of five—
The world of Dr. Oliver was dissolving into delirium when his name was sharply called.
Everybody was looking at him as if he were something to be shunned, something with a curse laid on it. One of—them—was standing in the door. Dr. Oliver remembered what they could do. He got up hastily and hastily went through an aisle that cleared for him to the door as if by magic.
“Stand there,” the man said to him.”
“The two Stoss people,” he called. The old man and his daughter silently joined him.
“You must walk ahead of me,” said the man.
They walked down the corridor and turned left at a command, and went through a handsome oak door into the sunlight. Gleaming in the sunlight was a vast diskshaped thing.
Dr. Oliver of Columbia smiled suddenly and involuntarily. He knew now who he was and what was his mission.
He was Special Agent Charles Barker of Federal Security and Intelligence. He was in disguise—the most thorough disguise ever effected. His own personality had been obliterated by an unbroken month of narcohypnosis, and for another unbroken month a substitute personality, that of the ineffectual Dr. Oliver, had been shoved into his head by every mechanical and psychological device that the F.S.I. commanded. Twenty-four hours a day, waking and sleeping, records had droned in his ears and films had unreeled before his glazed drugged eyes, all pointing toward this moment of post-hypnotic revelation.
People vanished. People had always vanished. Blind Homer heard vague rumors and incorporated them in his repertory of songs about the recent war against the Trojans: vague rumors about a one-eyed thing that kidnapped men—to eat, of course.
People continued to vanish through the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the growth of population and the invention of census machines. When the census machines were perfected everything was known statistically about everybody, though without invasion of privacy, for the machines dealt in percentages and not personalities. Population loss could be accounted for; such and such a percentage died, and this percentage pigged it drunkenly in Riveredge, and that percentage deserted wife and kids for a while before it was inevitably, automatically traced—
And there was a percentage left over. People still vanished.
The F.S.I. noted that three cancer patients in Morningside Heights, New York, had vanished last year, so they gave (Temporary) Special Agent Charles Barker a cancer by nagging a harmless throat polyp with dyes and irritants, and installed him in Morningside Heights to vanish—and do something about it.
The man marched the two Stosses and Barker-Oliver into the spaceship.
Minutes later a smashing takeoff acceleration dashed them unconscious to the deck.
CHAPTER IV
IN AN EARTHLY NAVY they would have called Gori “Guns” in the wardroom. He didn’t look like an officer and a gentleman, or a human being for that matter, and the batteries of primary and secondary weapons he ruled over did not look like cannon. But Gori had a pride and a class feeling that would have made familiar sense in any navy. He voiced it in his needling of Lakhrut: a brother officer but no fighting man; a sweat-soaked ruler of the Propulsion Division whose station was between decks, screwing the last flicker of drive from the units.
Languidly Gori let his fingertips drift over a page of text; he was taking a familiarization course in propulsion. “I don’t understand,” he said to Lakhrut, “why one shouldn’t treat the units with a little more formality. My gun-pointers, for example—”
Lakhrut knew he was being needled, but had to pretend otherwise. Gori was somewhat his senior. “Gun-pointers are one thing,” he said evenly. “Propulsion units are another. I presume you’ve worked the globes.”
Gori raised his fingers from the page in surprise. “Evidently you—people between decks don’t follow the Games,” he said. “I have a Smooth Award from the last meet but one.”
“What class vessel?”
“Single-seater. And a beauty! Built to my orders, stripped to a bare hull microns in thickness.”
“Then you know working the globes isn’t easy. But—with all respect—I don’t believe you know that working a globe under orders, shift after shift, with no stake in the job and no hope or relief ever is most infernally heartbreaking. You competed for the Smooth Award and won it and s
lept for a week, I dare say, and are still proud—don’t misunderstand me: rightly proud—of the effort.
But the propulsion units aren’t competing for anything. They’ve been snatched away from their families—I’m not certain; I believe a family system prevails—and they don’t like it. We must break them of that. Come and see the new units.”
Gori reluctantly followed Lakhrut to the inport where unconscious figures were being stacked.
“Pah! They stink!” he said. “A matter of diet. It goes away after they’ve been on our rations for a while.”
Gori felt one of the figures curiously. “Clothes,” he said in surprise. “I thought—” Lakhrut told him wearily: “They have been wearing clothes for quite a while now. Some five thousand of their years.” That had been a dig too. Gori had been reminding him that he was not greatly concerned with the obscure beasts between decks; that he, Lakhrut, must clutter his mind with such trivial details while Gori was splendidly free to man his guns if there should be need. “I’ll go and see my driver,” he snapped.
When he left, Gori sat down and laughed silently.
Lakhrut went between decks to the banks of units and swiftly scanned them. Number Seven was sleeping, with deep lines of fatigue engraved on his mind. He would be the next to go; indeed he should have been shot through the spacelock with Three, Eight-Female and Twelve. At the first opportunity—His driver approached.
“Baldwin,” he snapped at the driver, “will you be able to speak with the new units?”
Baldwin, a giant who had been a mere propulsion unit six months ago and was fiercely determined never to be one again, said in his broken speech: “Believe it. Will make to understand somewise. They may not—converse—my language called English. Will make to understand somewise.”
BARKER AWOKE staring into dull-red lights that looked unbelievably like old-fashioned incandescent lamps. Beside him a girl was moaning with shock and fear. In the dull light he could make out her features: Ginny Stoss. Her father was lying unconscious with his head in her lap.
A brutal hand yanked him to his feet—there was gravity! But there was no time to marvel over it. A burly giant in a gray kilt was growling at him: “You speak English?”
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