The Science Fiction Megapack

by Bova, Ben; Brown, Frederic

  The make-up editor was back, dancing with impatience as he tried to catch the M.E.’s eye. The interphone buzzed with the red light which indicated that the editor and publisher wanted to talk to him. The M.E. thought briefly of a special series on this Dr. Full, decided nobody would believe it and that he probably was a phony anyway. He spiked the story on the “dead” hook and answered his interphone.

  Dr. Full had become almost fond of Angie. As his practice had grown to engross the neighborhood illnesses, and then to a corner suite in an uptown taxpayer building, and finally to the sanitarium, she seemed to have grown with it. Oh, he thought, we have our little disputes —

  The girl, for instance, was too much interested in money. She had wanted to specialize in cosmetic surgery — removing wrinkles from wealthy old women and whatnot. She didn’t realize, at first, that a thing like this was in their trust, that they were the stewards and not the owners of the little black bag and its fabulous contents.

  He had tried, ever so cautiously, to analyze them, but without success. All the instruments were slightly radioactive, for instance, but not quite so. They would make a Geiger-Müller counter indicate, but they would not collapse the leaves of an electroscope. He didn’t pretend to be up on the latest developments, but as he understood it, that was just plain wrong. Under the highest magnification there were lines on the instruments’ superfinished surfaces: incredibly fine lines, engraved in random hatchments which made no particular sense. Their magnetic properties were preposterous. Sometimes the instruments were strongly attracted to magnets, sometimes less so, and sometimes not at all.

  Dr. Full had taken X rays in fear and trembling lest he disrupt whatever delicate machinery worked in them. He was sure they were not solid, that the handles and perhaps the blades must be mere shells filled with busy little watchworks — but the X rays showed nothing of the sort. Oh, yes — and they were always sterile, and they wouldn’t rust. Dust fell off them if you shook them: now, that was something he understood. They ionized the dust, or were ionized themselves, or something of the sort. At any rate, he had read of something similar that had to do with phonograph records.

  She wouldn’t know about that, he proudly thought. She kept the books well enough, and perhaps she gave him a useful prod now and then when he was inclined to settle down. The move from the neighborhood slum to the uptown quarters had been her idea, and so had the sanitarium. Good, good, it enlarged his sphere of usefulness. Let the child have her mink coats and her convertible, as they seemed to be calling roadsters nowadays. He himself was too busy and too old. He had so much to make up for.

  Dr. Full thought happily of his Master Plan. She would not like it much, but she would have to see the logic of it. This marvelous thing that had happened to them must be handed on. She was herself no doctor; even though the instruments practically ran themselves, there was more to doctoring than skill. There were the ancient canons of the healing art. And so, having seen the logic of it, Angie would yield; she would assent to his turning over the little black bag to all humanity.

  He would probably present it to the College of Surgeons, with as little fuss as possible — well, perhaps a small ceremony, and he would like a souvenir of the occasion, a cup or a framed testimonial. It would be a relief to have the thing out of his hands, in a way; let the giants of the healing art decide who was to have its benefits. No, Angie would understand. She was a goodhearted girl.

  It was nice that she had been showing so much interest in the surgical side lately — asking about the instruments, reading the instruction card for hours, even practicing on guinea pigs. If something of his love for humanity had been communicated to her, old Dr. Full sentimentally thought, his life would not have been in vain. Surely she would realize that a greater good would be served by surrendering the instruments to wiser hands than theirs, and by throwing aside the cloak of secrecy necessary to work on their small scale.

  Dr. Full was in the treatment room that had been the brownstone’s front parlor; through the window he saw Angle’s yellow convertible roll to a stop before the stoop. He liked the way she looked as she climbed the stairs; neat, not flashy, he thought. A sensible girl like her, she’d understand. There was somebody with her — a fat woman, puffing up the steps, overdressed and petulant. Now, what could she want?

  Angie let herself in and went into the treatment room, followed by the fat woman. “Doctor,” said the blonde girl gravely, “may I present Mrs. Coleman?” Charm school had not taught her everything, but Mrs. Coleman, evidently nouveau riche, thought the doctor, did not notice the blunder.

  “Miss Aquella told me so much about you, doctor, and your remarkable system!” she gushed.

  Before he could answer, Angie smoothly interposed: “Would you excuse us for just a moment, Mrs. Coleman?”

  She took the doctor’s arm and led him into the reception hall. “Listen,” she said swiftly, “I know this goes against your grain, but I couldn’t pass it up. I met this old thing in the exercise class at Elizabeth Barton’s. Nobody else’ll talk to her there. She’s a widow. I guess her husband was a black marketeer or something, and she has a pile of dough. I gave her a line about how you had a system of massaging wrinkles out. My idea is, you blindfold her, cut her neck open with the Cutaneous Series knife, shoot some Firmol into the muscles, spoon out some of that blubber with an Adipose Series curette and spray it all with Skintite. When you take the blindfold off she’s got rid of a wrinkle and doesn’t know what happened. She’ll pay five hundred dollars. Now, don’t say ‘no,’ doc. Just this once, let’s do it my way, can’t you? I’ve been working on this deal all along too, haven’t I?”

  “Oh,” said the doctor, “very well.” He was going to have to tell her about the Master Plan before long anyway. He would let her have it her way this time.

  Back in the treatment room, Mrs. Coleman had been thinking things over. She told the doctor sternly as he entered: “Of course, your system is permanent, isn’t it?”

  “It is, madam,” he said shortly. “Would you please lie down there? Miss Aquella, get a sterile three-inch bandage for Mrs. Coleman’s eyes.” He turned his back on the fat woman to avoid conversation, and pretended to be adjusting the lights. Angie blindfolded the woman, and the doctor selected the instruments he would need. He handed the blonde girl a pair of retractors, and told her: “Just slip the corners of the blades in as I cut —” She gave him an alarmed look, and gestured at the reclining woman. He lowered his voice: “Very well. Slip in the corners and rock them along the incision. I’ll tell you when to pull them out.”

  Dr. Full held the Cutaneous Series knife to his eyes as he adjusted the little slide for three centimeters depth. He sighed a little as he recalled that its last use had been in the extirpation of an “inoperable” tumor of the throat.

  “Very well,” he said, bending over the woman. He tried a tentative pass through her tissues. The blade dipped in and flowed through them, like a finger through quicksilver, with no wound left in the wake. Only the retractors could hold the edges of the incision apart.

  Mrs. Coleman stirred and jabbered: “Doctor, that felt so peculiar! Are you sure you’re rubbing the right way?”

  “Quite sure, madam,” said the doctor wearily. “Would you please try not to talk during the massage?”

  He nodded at Angie, who stood ready with the retractors. The blade sank in to its three centimeters, miraculously cutting only the dead horny tissues of the epidermis and the live tissue of the dermis, pushing aside mysteriously all major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue, declining to affect any system or organ except the one it was — tuned to, could you say? The doctor didn’t know the answer, but he felt tired and bitter at this prostitution. Angie slipped in the retractor blades and rocked them as he withdrew the knife, then pulled to separate the lips of the incision. It bloodlessly exposed an unhealthy string of muscle, sagging in a dead-looking loop from blue-grey ligaments. The doctor took a hypo, number IX, pre-set to “g” and raised
it to his eye level. The mist came and went. There probably was no possibility of an embolus with one of these gadgets, but why take chances? He shot one cc. of “g” — identified as “Firmol” by the card — into the muscle. He and Angie watched as it tightened up against the pharynx.

  He took the Adipose Series curette, a small one, and spooned out yellowish tissue, dropping it into the incinerator box, and then nodded to Angie. She eased out the retractors and the gaping incision slipped together into unbroken skin, sagging now. The doctor had the atomizer — dialed to “Skintite” — ready. He sprayed, and the skin shrank up into the new firm throat line.

  As he replaced the instruments, Angie removed Mrs. Coleman’s bandage and gayly announced: “We’re finished! And there’s a mirror in the reception hall —”

  Mrs. Coleman didn’t need to be invited twice. With incredulous fingers she felt her chin, and then dashed for the hall. The doctor grimaced as he heard her yelp of delight, and Angie turned to him with a tight smile. “I’ll get the money and get her out,” she said. “You won’t have to be bothered with her any more.”

  He was grateful for that much.

  She followed Mrs. Coleman into the reception hall, and the doctor dreamed over the case of instruments. A ceremony, certainly — he was entitled to one. Not everybody, he thought, would turn such a sure source of money over to the good of humanity. But you reached an age when money mattered less, and when you thought of these things you had done that might be open to misunderstanding if, just if, there chanced to be any of that, well, that judgment business. The doctor wasn’t a religious man, but you certainly found yourself thinking hard about some things when your time drew near —

  Angie was back, with a bit of paper in her hands. “Five hundred dollars,” she said matter-of-factly. “And you realize, don’t you, that we could go over her an inch at a time — at five hundred dollars an inch?”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said.

  There was bright fear in her eyes, he thought — but why?

  “Angie, you’ve been a good girl and an understanding girl, but we can’t keep this up forever, you know.”

  “Let’s talk about it some other time,” she said flatly. “I’m tired now.”

  “No — I really feel we’ve gone far enough on our own. The instruments —”

  “Don’t say it, doc!” she hissed. “Don’t say it, or you’ll be sorry!” In her face there was a look that reminded him of the hollow-eyed, gaunt-faced, dirty-blonde creature she had been. From under the charm-school finish there burned the guttersnipe whose infancy had been spent on a sour and filthy mattress, whose childhood had been play in the littered alley and whose adolescence had been the sweatshops and the aimless gatherings at night under the glaring street lamps.

  He shook his head to dispel the puzzling notion. “It’s this way,” he patiently began. “I told you about the family that invented the O.B. forceps and kept them a secret for so many generations, how they could have given them to the world but didn’t?”

  “They knew what they were doing,” said the guttersnipe flatly.

  “Well, that’s neither here nor there,” said the doctor, irritated. “My mind is made up about it. I’m going to turn the instruments over to the College of Surgeons. We have enough money to be comfortable. You can even have the house. I’ve been thinking of going to a warmer climate, myself.” He felt peeved with her for making the unpleasant scene. He was unprepared for what happened next.

  Angie snatched the little black bag and dashed for the door, with panic in her eyes. He scrambled after her, catching her arm, twisting it in a sudden rage. She clawed at his face with her free hand, babbling curses. Somehow, somebody’s finger touched the little black bag, and it opened grotesquely into the enormous board, covered with shining instruments, large and small. Half a dozen of them joggled loose and fell to the floor.

  “Now see what you’ve done!” roared the doctor, unreasonably. Her hand was still viselike on the handle, but she was standing still, trembling with choked-up rage. The doctor bent stiffly to pick up the fallen instruments. Unreasonable girl! he thought bitterly. Making a scene —

  Pain drove in between his shoulderblades and he fell face-down. The light ebbed. “Unreasonable girl!” he tried to croak. And then: “They’ll know I tried, anyway —

  Angie looked down on his prone body, with the handle of the Number Six Cautery Series knife protruding from it. “— will cut through all tissues. Use for amputations before you spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme caution should be used in the vicinity of vital organs and major blood vessels or nerve trunks —”

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” said Angie, dully, cold with horror. Now the detective would come, the implacable detective who would reconstruct the crime from the dust in the room. She would run and turn and twist, but the detective would find her out and she would be tried in a courtroom before a judge and jury; the lawyer would make speeches, but the jury would convict her anyway, and the headlines would scream: “BLONDE KILLER GUILTY!” and she’d maybe get the chair, walking down a plain corridor where a beam of sunlight struck through the dusty air, with an iron door at the end of it. Her mink, her convertible, her dresses, the handsome man she was going to meet and marry —

  The mist of cinematic clichés cleared, and she knew what she would do next. Quite steadily, she picked the incinerator box from its loop in the board — a metal cube with a different-textured spot on one side. “— to dispose of fibroses or other unwanted matter, simply touch the disk —” You dropped something in and touched the disk. There was a sort of soundless whistle, very powerful and unpleasant if you were too close, and a sort of lightless flash. When you opened the box again, the contents were gone. Angie took another of the Cautery Series knives and went grimly to work. Good thing there wasn’t any blood to speak of — She finished the awful task in three hours.

  She slept heavily that night, totally exhausted by the wringing emotional demands of the slaying and the subsequent horror. But in the morning, it was as though the doctor had never been there. She ate breakfast, dressed with unusual care — and then undid the unusual care. Nothing out of the ordinary, she told herself. Don’t do one thing different from the way you would have done it before. After a day or two, you can phone the cops. Say he walked out spoiling for a drunk, and you’re worried. But don’t rush it, baby — don’t rush it.

  Mrs. Coleman was due at 10:00 A.M. Angie had counted on being able to talk the doctor into at least one more five-hundred-dollar session. She’d have to do it herself now — but she’d have to start sooner or later.

  The woman arrived early. Angie explained smoothly: “The doctor asked me to take care of the massage today. Now that he has the tissue-firming process beginning, it only requires somebody trained in his methods —” As she spoke, her eyes swiveled to the instrument case — open! She cursed herself for the single flaw as the woman followed her gaze and recoiled.

  “What are those things!” she demanded. “Are you going to cut me with them? I thought there was something fishy —”

  “Please, Mrs. Coleman,” said Angie, “please, dear Mrs. Coleman — you don’t understand about the . . . the massage instruments!”

  “Massage instruments, my foot!” squabbled the woman shrilly. “That doctor operated on me. Why, he might have killed me!”

  Angie wordlessly took one of the smaller Cutaneous Series knives and passed it through her forearm. The blade flowed like a finger through quicksilver, leaving no wound in its wake. That should convince the old cow!

  It didn’t convince her, but it did startle her. “What did you do with it? The blade folds up into the handle — that’s it!”

  “Now look closely, Mrs. Coleman,” said Angie, thinking desperately of the five hundred dollars. “Look very closely and you’ll see that the, uh, the sub-skin massager simply slips beneath the tissues without doing any harm, tightening and firming the muscles themselves instead of having to work throu
gh layers of skin and adipose tissue. It’s the secret of the doctor’s method. Now, how can outside massage have the effect that we got last night?”

  Mrs. Coleman was beginning to calm down. “It did work, all right,” she admitted, stroking the new line of her neck. “But your arm’s one thing and my neck’s another! Let me see you do that with your neck!”

  Angie smiled —

  Al returned to the clinic after an excellent lunch that had almost reconciled him to three more months he would have to spend on duty. And then, he thought, and then a blessed year at the blessedly super-normal South Pole working on his specialty — which happened to be telekinesis exercises for ages three to six. Meanwhile, of course, the world had to go on and of course he had to shoulder his share in the running of it.

  Before settling down to desk work he gave a routine glance at the bag board. What he saw made him stiffen with shocked surprise. A red light was on next to one of the numbers — the first since he couldn’t think when. He read off the number and murmured “Okay, 674,101. That fixes you.” He put the number on a card sorter and in a moment the record was in his hand. Oh, yes — Hemingway’s bag. The big dummy didn’t remember how or where he had lost it; none of them ever did. There were hundreds of them floating around.

  Al’s policy in such cases was to leave the bag turned on. The things practically ran themselves, it was practically impossible to do harm with them, so whoever found a lost one might as well be allowed to use it. You turn it off, you have a social loss — you leave it on, it may do some good. As he understood it, and not very well at that, the stuff wasn’t “used up.” A temporalist had tried to explain it to him with little success that the prototypes in the transmitter had been transducted through a series of point-events of transfinite cardinality. Al had innocently asked whether that meant prototypes had been stretched, so to speak, through all time, and the temporalist had thought he was joking and left in a huff.