Robert Silverberg The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964

by Robert Silverberg

  "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 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-gray ligaments. The doctor took a hypo, Number IX, preset 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 gaily 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 mere was a look that reminded him of the hollow-eyed, aunt-faced, dirty-blond 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 Slx 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 reconnect 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, the jury would convict her anyway, and the headlines would scream:

  "BLOND 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 clich6s 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. Angle 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 ten 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 gaz
e 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. "The 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 fingef 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 through 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 supernormal 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 "OK, 674101. 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. i ou 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 transduced through

  series of point-events of transfinite cardinality. Al had innocently a«ked 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.

  'Like to see him do this," thought Al darkly, as he telekinized him- to the combox, after a cautious look to see that there were no medics around. To the box he said: "Police chief," and then to the police chief "There's been a homicide committed with Medical Instrument Kit 674101. It was lost some months ago by one of my people, Dr. John Hemingway. He didn't have a clear account of the circumstances."

  The police chief groaned and said: "I'll call him in and question him." He was to be astonished by the answers, and was to learn that the homicide was well out of his jurisdiction.

  Al stood for a moment at the bag board by the glowing red light that had been sparked into life by a departing vital force giving, as its last act, the warning that Kit 674101 was in homicidal hands. With a sigh, Al pulled the plug and the light went out.

  "Yah," jeered the woman. "You'd fool around with my neck, but you wouldn't risk your own with that thing!"

  Angle smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to shock hardened morgue attendants. She set the Cutaneous Series knife to three centimeters before drawing it across her neck. Smiling, knowing the blade would cut only the dead horny tissue of the epidermis and the live tissue of the dermis, mysteriously push aside all major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue—

  Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal shearing through major and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue and pharynx, Angie cut her throat.

  In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the shrieking Mrs. Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had become crusted with rust, and the flasks which had held vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery alveoli and spare gray cells and coils of receptor nerves held only black slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of decomposition.

  BORN OF MAN AND WOMAN

  by Richard Matheson

  First Published in 1950

  X—This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch.

  This day it had water falling from upstairs. It fell all around. I saw that. The ground of the back I watched from the little window. The ground it sucked up the water like thirsty lips. It drank too much and it got sick and runny brown. I didn't like it.

  Mother is a pretty I know. In my bed place with cold walls around I have a paper things that was behind the furnace. It says on it SCREEN- STARS. I see in the pictures faces like of mother and father. Father says they are pretty. Once he said it.

  And also mother he said. Mother so pretty and me decent enough. Look at you he said and didn't have the nice face. I touched his arm and said it is alright father. He shook and pulled away where I couldnt reach.

  Today mother let me off the chain a little so I could look out the little window.

  Thats how I saw the water falling from upstairs.

  XX—This day it had goldness in the upstairs. As I know when I looked a* it my eyes hurt. After I look at it the cellar is red.

  1 think this was church. They leave the upstairs. The big machine swallows them and rolls out past and is gone. In the back part is the u«e mother. She is much small than me. I am I can see out the little wmdow all I like.

  n this day when it got dark I had eat my food and some bugs. I hear U8hs upstairs. I like to know why there are laughs for. I took the chain from the wall and wrapped it around me. I walked squish to the stairs They creak when I walk on them.

  My legs slip on them because I dom walk on stairs. My feet stick to the wood.

  I went up and opened a door. It was a white place. White as white jewels that come from upstairs sometime. I went in and stood quiet. I hear the laughing some more. I talk to the sound and look through to the people. More people than I thought was. I thought I should laugh with them.

  Mother came out and pushed the door in. It hit me and hurt. I fell back on the smooth floor and the chain made noise. I cried. She made a hissing noise into her and put her hand on her mouth. Her eyes got big.

  She looked at me. I heard father call. What fell he called. She said a iron board.

  Come help pick it up she said. He came and said now is that so heavy you need. He saw me and grew big. The anger came in his eyes. He hit me. I spilled some of the drip on the floor from one arm. It was not nice. It made ugly green on the floor.

  Father told me to go to the cellar. I had to go. The light it hurt some now in my eyes. It is not so like that in the cellar.

  Father tied my legs and arms up. He put me on my bed. Upstairs I heard laughing while I was quiet there looking on a black spider that was swinging down to me. I thought what father said. Ohgod he said. And only eight.

  XXX—This day father hit in the chain again before it had light. I have to try pull it out again. He said I was bad to come upstairs. He said never do that again or he would beat me hard. That hurts.

  I hurt. I slept the day and rested my head against the cold wall. I thought of the white place upstairs.

  XXXX—I got the chain from the wall out. Mother was ups
tairs. I heard little laughs very high. I looked out the window. I saw all little people like the little mother and little fathers too. They are pretty.

  They were making nice noise and jumping around the ground. Their legs was moving hard. They are like mother and father. Mother says all right people look like they do.

  One of the little fathers saw me. He pointed at the window. I let %° and slid down the wall in the dark. I curled up as they would not see. I heard their talks by the window and foots running. Upstairs there was a door hitting. I heard the little mother call upstairs. I heard heavy step8 and I rushed in my bed place. I hit the chain in the wall and lay down on my front.

  I heard mother come down. Have you been at the window she said. I heard the anger. Stay away from the window. You have pulled the chain out again.

  She took the stick and hit me with it. I didn't cry. I cant do that. But the drip ran all over the bed. She saw it and twisted away and made a noise. Oh mygodmygod she said why have you done this to me? I heard the stick go bounce on the stone floor.

  She ran upstairs. I slept the day.

  XXXXX—This day it had water again. When mother was upstairs I heard the little one come slow down the steps. I hidded myself in the coal bin for mother would have anger if the little mother saw me.

  She had a little live thing with her. It walked on the arms and had pointy ears. She said things to it.

  It was all right except the live thing smelled me. It ran up the coal and looked down at me. The hairs stood up. In the throat it made an angry noise. I hissed but it jumped on me.

  I didn't want to hurt it. I got fear because it bit me harder than the rat does. I hurt and the little mother screamed. I grabbed the live thing tight. It made sounds I never heard. I pushed it all together. It was all lumpy and red on the black coal.

  I hid there when mother called. I was afraid of the stick. She left. I crept over the coal with the thing. I hid it under my pillow and rested on it. I put the chain in the wall again.