Up the Walls of the World

by James Tiptree Jr.

“To you all, thanks,” Tivonel replies, warmly rippling Iznagel’s name-lights as she turns away. “Goodbye.” As she had suspected, the start of the trail is indeed that upwind interface.

  She jets out past the Station, remembering to start at decorous speed. As she passes the Station rafts, her field brushes an unnoticed life-eddy from the group beyond. She reads a genial appreciation of the rescue mission—and a very clear, unflattering image of her own wild self, dirty and food-smeared as they had arrived here. Tivonel chuckles. People up here aren’t so careful to control their minds. Ahum!

  How will she really stand being back in crowded, civilized Deep?

  No matter! As the first wind-blast takes her she forgets all worry in the exhilaration of using her strong body. Twisting and jetting hard, she reaches the interface and shoots upwind along it, the lights of her mantle laughing aloud. Why worry about anything? She has so much to do, marvels to see, life to live, and sex to find. She is Tivonel, merry creature of the Great Winds of Tyree, on her life way.

  Chapter 3

  Doctor Daniel Dann is on his life way too. But he is not merry.

  He finishes dating and signing the printouts from Subject R-95, thinking as usual that they don’t need an M.D. on this asinine project. And telling himself, also as usual, that he should be glad they do. If he decides to go on existing.

  Subject R-95 is wiping imaginary electrode-paste out of his hair. He is a husky, normal-looking youth with a depressed expression.

  “All the dead aerosols,” he remarks tonelessly.

  Nancy, the assistant technician, looks at him questioningly.

  “Great piles of them. Mountains,” R-95 mutters. “All the bright colored aerosol cans, all dead. You push them but they don’t spray. They look fine, though. It’s sad.”

  “Was that what you received?” Nancy asks him.

  “No.” R-95 has lost interest. It’s only another of his weird images, Doctor Dann decides. R-95 and his twin brother R-96, have been with Project Polymer three years now. They both act stoned half the time. That makes Dann uneasy, for the best of reasons.

  “Doctor! Doctor Dann!”

  The front-office girl is rapping on the cubicle glass. Dann goes out to her, ducking to make sure he clears the substandard doorway.

  “Lieutenant Kirk has cut his leg open, Doctor! He’s in your office.”

  “Okay, Nancy , hold the last subject. I’ll be back.”

  Dann lopes down the corridor, thinking, My God, a genuine medical emergency. And Kendall Kirk—how suitable.

  In his office he finds Kirk crouched awkwardly in a chair, holding a bloody wad of paper towel against his inner thigh. His pant leg is hanging cut and sodden.

  “What happened?” Dann asks when he has him on the table.

  “Fucking computer,” Kirk says furiously. “What’d it do to me? Is—Am I—”

  “Two fairly superficial cuts across the muscle. Your genitals are okay if that’s what you mean.” Dann investigates the trouser fabric impressed into the wound, meanwhile idly considering the fury in Kirk’s voice, the computer room, and, obliquely, Miss Omali. “You say a computer did this?”

  “Ventilator fan-blade blew off.”

  Dann lets his fingers work, visualizing the computer banks. Motors somewhere behind the lower grills, about thigh level, could be fans. It seems bizarre. Much as he dislikes Kendall Kirk, the man has come close to being castrated. Not to mention having an artery sliced.

  “You were lucky it wasn’t an inch one way or the other.”

  “You telling me.” Kirk’s voice is savage. “Does this mean stitches?”

  “We’ll see. I’d prefer to make do with butterfly clamps if you’ll keep off the leg awhile.”

  Kirk grunts and Dann finishes up in silence. At this hour of the morning his hands move in pleasing autonomy—maximum blood level of what he thinks of as his maintenance dosage. A normal working day. But the accident is giving him odd tremors of reality, not dangerous so far. He dislikes Kendall Kirk in a clinical, almost appreciative way. Specimen of young deskbound Naval intelligence executive: coarse-minded, clean-cut, a gentleman to the ignorant eye. Evidently not totally impressive to his seniors or he wouldn’t be assigned to this ridiculous project. Since Kirk came, ah, on board, Project Polymer has begun to exhibit irritating formalities. But old Noah loves it.

  He sends Kirk home and goes back to release the remaining subject. En route he can’t resist detouring past Miss Omali’s computer room. The door is, as usual, closed.

  The last subject is T-22, a cheery fiftyish blue-haired woman Dann thinks of as The Housewife: she looks like a million TV ads. For all he knows she may be a lion-tamer. He does not compare her to the one housewife he has known intimately and whom he hopes never to think of again.

  “I’m just dying to know how many I got right, Doctor Dann!” T-22 twinkles up at him while he detaches her from Noah’s recording rig. “Some of the letters were so vivid. When will we know?”

  Dann has given up trying to persuade her that he’s not in charge. “I’m sure you made a fine score, Mrs.—uh…”

  “But when will we really find out?”

  “Well, it, ah, the data go through computation first, you know.” Vaguely he recalls that this test has something to do with coded messages and multiple receivers, redundancy. No matter. Noah’s so-called telepathic sender is at some secret Navy Place miles away. Kirk’s doing; he seems to have friends in the intelligence establishment. Part of his charm.

  Dann bids farewell to The Housewife and ducks out, nearly running over Noah. Doctor Noah Catledge is the father of Polymer and all its questionable kin. He skips alongside down the corridor, taking two steps to Dann’s long one.

  “Well Dan, we’re about to make you earn your keep any day now,” Noah burbles. He seems unusually manic.

  “What, are you going to publish?”

  “Oh, heavens no, Dan. We’re much too classified. There will be some controlled internal dissemination of course, but first we have the formal presentation to the Committee. That’s where you come in. I tell you I’m damn glad we have highly qualified people to certify every step of the procedure this time. No more stupid hassles over the paradigm.” He swats up at Dann’s back in his enthusiasm.

  “What have you actually got hold of, Noah?” Dann asks incuriously.

  “Oh, my!” Noah’s eyes beam with hyperthyroid glee. “I really shouldn’t, you know.” He giggles. “Dan, old friend, the breakthrough!”

  “Good work, Noah.” Dann has said it a dozen times.

  “The breakthrough…” Noah sighs, dream-ridden. “We’re getting multiple-unit signals through, Dan. Solid. Solid. Redundandcy, that’s the key. That’s the golden key! Why didn’t I think of it before?”

  “Congratulations, Noah. Great work.”

  “Oh—I want you to be ready to leave town for a couple of days, Dan. All of us. The big test. They’re actually giving us a submarine. Don’t worry, you won’t be in it, ha ha! But I can’t tell you where we go. Navy secret!”

  Dann watches him bounce away. What the hell has happened, if anything? Impossible to believe that his pop-eyed tuft-haired little gnome has achieved a “breakthrough” in whatever he thinks he’s doing here. Dann refrains from believing it.

  He turns into his office, considering what he knows of Project Polymer. Polymer is Noah’s last, forlorn hope; he has spent a lifetime on psi-research, parapsychology, whatever pompous name for nothing. Dann had met him years back, had watched with amused sympathy as the old man floundered from one failing budgetary angel to the next. When his last university funding dried up, Noah had somehow wangled a small grant out of the National Institute of Mental Health, which had recently expanded into Polymer.

  It was in the NIMH days that he asked Dann to join him, after the—after the events which are not to be recalled. The old man must have realized Dann couldn’t bear to go back to normal practice. Not even in a new place. Something, god knows what, had held Dann back
from suicide, but the idea of coming close to normal, living people—was—is—insupportable. Rough sympathy lurks under Noah’s grey tufts; Dann is grateful in a carefully unfelt way. The impersonal nonsense of Parapsychology, this office and its crazy people, have been a perfect way to achieve suspended animation. Not real, not a part of life. And never to forget Noah’s narcotics locker and his readiness to try any psychoactive drugs.

  Dann’s work has turned out to be absurdly simple, mainly hooking Noah’s subjects onto various biomonitoring devices and certifying the readouts, and serving as house doctor for Noah’s tatty stable of so-called high-psi subjects. Dann neither believes nor disbelieves in psi powers, is only certain that he himself has none. It was a quiet, undemanding life with a handy-dandy prescription pad. Until Polymer and Kendall Kirk came along.

  How the hell had Noah connected with the Department of Defense? The old man is smart, give him A for dedication. Somehow he’d ferreted out the one practical application of telepathy that the D.O.D. would spring for—a long-wanted means of communicating with submerged submarines. Apparently they actually tried it once, and the Soviets have reported some results. Always unreliable of course. Now Noah has sold the Navy on trying biofeedback monitoring and redundancy produced by teams of receivers. The project has always seemed to Dann exquisitely futile, suitable only for a madman like Noah and a dead man like himself.

  But it seems his underwater tranquility is about to be disturbed. Dann will have to go somewhere for this crazy test. Worse, he’ll have to support Noah before that committee. Can he do it? Dread shakes him briefly, but he supposes he can; he owes something to Noah. The old man was stupid enough to use his unqualified mistress for the previous medical work and was accordingly pilloried. Now he has the highly-qualified Doctor Dann. The highly irregular Doctor Dann. Well, Dann will come through for him if he can.

  He finds himself still shaking and cautiously supplements his own psychoactivity with a trace of oxymorphone. Poor Noah, if that comes out.

  The afternoon is passing. Thursdays are set aside for screening potential subjects. This time there are two sets of twin girls; Noah is strong on twins. Dann takes their histories, dreamily amused by their identical mannerisms.

  The last job is the regular check on E-100, a bearded Naval ensign who is one of the Polymer team. E-100 is a lot younger than he looks. He is also tragic: leukemia in remission. The Navy has barred him from active duty but Noah has got him on some special status. E-100 refuses to believe the remission is temporary.

  “I’ll be back at sea pretty soon now, right Doc?”

  Dann mumbles banalities, thankful for the dream-juice in his bloodstream. As E-100 leaves, Dann sees Lieutenant Kirk limp by. Devotion of duty, or what? Well, the cuts aren’t serious. What the devil went on in that computer room, though? Fans flying off? Incredible. The lesions aren’t knife cuts, say. Vaguely stimulated, Dann suspects events having to do with a certain tall, white-coated figure. Kendall Kirk and Miss Omali? He hopes not.

  He is packing up for the day when his door moves quietly. He looks around to find the room is galvanized. Standing by his desk is a long, slim, white-and-black apparition. Miss Margaret Omali herself.

  “Sit down, please—” Lord, he thinks, the woman carries a jolt. Sex…yes, but an unnameable tension. She’s like a high-voltage condenser.

  The apparition sits, with minimal fuss and maximal elegance. A very tall, thin, reserved, aristocratic poised young black woman in a coarse white cotton lab coat. Nothing about her is even overtly feminine or flamboyant, only the totality of her shouts silently, I am.

  “Problems?” he asks, hearing his voice squeak. Her hair is a short curly ebony cap, showing off the small head on her long perfect neck. Her eyelids seem to be supernaturaly tall and Egyptian. She wears no jewelry whatever. The flawless face, the thin hands, stay absolutely still.

  “Problem,” she corrects him quietly. “I need something for headaches. I think they must be migraine. The last one kept me out two days.”

  “Is this something new?” Dann knows he should get her file but he can’t move. Probably nothing in it anyway; Miss Omali was transferred to them a year ago, with her own medical clearance. Another of Noah’s highly qualified people, degree in computer math or whatever. She has only been in Dann’s office once before, for the October flu shots. Dann thought her the most exotic and beautiful human creature he had ever laid eyes on. He had immediately quarantined the thought. Among other reasons—among many and terminal other reasons—he is old enough to be at least her father.

  “Yes, it’s new,” she is saying. Her voice is muted and composed, and her speech, Dann realizes, is surprisingly like his own middleclass Western white. “I used to have ulcers.”

  She is telling him that she understands the etiology.

  “What happened to the ulcers?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “And now you have these headaches. As you imply, they could be stress-symptoms too. If it’s true migraine, we can help. Which side is affected?”

  “It starts on the left and spreads. Very soon.”

  “Do you have any advance warning?”

  “Why, yes. I feel… strange. Hours before.”

  “Right.” He goes on to draw out enough symptomatology to support a classical migraine picture: the nausea, the throb, the visual phenomena, the advance “aura.” But he will not be facile—not here.

  “May I ask when you had your last physical checkup from your own doctor?”

  “I had a PHS check two years ago. I don’t have a personal doctor.” The tone is not hostile, but not friendly either. Mocking?

  “In other words, you haven’t been examined since these started. Well, we can check the obvious. I’ll need a blood sample and a pressure reading.”

  “Hypertension in the black female population?” she asks silkily. Hostility now, loud and clear. “Look, I don’t want to make a thing of this, Doctor. I merely have these headaches.”

  She is about to leave. Panicked, he changes gear.

  “Please, I know, Miss Omali. Please listen. Of course I’ll give you a prescription to relieve the pain. But you must realize that headaches can indicate other conditions. What if I sent you out of here with a pain-killer and a pocket of acute staph infection? Or an incipient vascular episode? I’m asking the bare minimum. The pressure reading won’t take a minute. The lab will have a white count for us Tuesday. A responsible doctor would insist on ah EKG too, with our equipment here it would be simple. I’m skipping all that for now. Please.”

  She relaxes slightly. He hauls out his sphygnomamometer, trying not to watch her peel off the lab coat. Her dress is plain, severely neutral. Ravishing. She exposes a long blue-black arm of aching elegance; when he wraps the cuff onto it he feels he is touching the limb of some uncanny wild thing.

  Her pressure is one-twenty over seventy, no problem. What his own is he doesn’t like to think. Is there an ironic curve on those Nefertiti lips? Has his face betrayed him? When he comes to draw the blood sample it takes all his strength to hold steady, probing the needle in her femoral vein. Okay, thank God. The rich red—her blood—comes out strongly.

  “Pressure’s fine. You’re what, twenty-eight?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  So young. He should be writing all this down, but some echo in her voice distracts him. Pain under that perfect control. The ghost of the doctor he once was wakes in him.

  “Miss Omali.” He finds his old slow smile, the gentle tone that had been open sesame to hurts. “Of course this isn’t my business, but have you been under some particular stress that could account for the emergence of these headaches?”

  “No.”

  No open sesame here. He feels chilled, as if he’d poked at some perilous substance.

  “I see.” Smiling, busying himself with the handy prescription pad, burbling about his job being to keep them healthy and how much better to get at causes than to take drugs for symptoms. The hypocrisy of his voice
sickens him. She sits like a statue.

  “Drop in Tuesday morning for the lab report. Meanwhile, if you feel one starting, take these right away. It’s a caffeine-ergotarnine compound. If the pain develops anyway, take this.” Angry with everything, he has not given her the morphine derivative he’d planned but only a codeine compound.

  “Thank you.” Her lab coat is over her arm like a queen’s furs. Exit queen. The office collapses in entropy, intolerably blank.

  Dann throws everything out of sight and heads out, stopping at the second floor to leave her blood sample in the medical pickup station. Her blood, rich, bright, intimate. Blood sometimes affects him unprofessionally.

  When he comes out of the building doors he glimpses her again. She is bending to step into a cream-colored Lincoln Continental. The driver is a golden-skinned young woman. Somehow this depresses him more than if it had been a man. How rich, how alien is her world. How locked to him. The cream Mark IV vanishes among ordinary earthly cars. Drop dead, Doctor Dann.

  But he is not depressed, not really. It was all unreal. Only very beautiful. And there is Tuesday morning ahead.

  The thought continues to sustain him through his evening torpors, his numb night: a silver fishling in the dead sea of his mind. It is still with him as he goes through the Friday morning test routines.

  The subjects are excited about the forthcoming Big Test. Noah has told them they will go in a Navy plane, and Lieutenant Kirk makes an officious speech about security. Six will go: the Housewife, the tragic Ensign, R-95 (who is sullen with worry because his twin is going out in the submarine), two girls whom Dann thinks of as the Princess and the Frump, and K-30, a dwarfish little man. Dann wants only to ask who else is going; he does not dare. Surely they won’t need a computer wherever this silly place is. He feels vaguely sorry for Noah when all this will end, as it must, in ambiguous failure. Perhaps there will be enough ambiguity to save his face.

  The morning’s results are very bad.

  As he is debating lunch, or more accurately ritalin-and-lunch, his phone rings.