After three solid days’ sleep and a week of good food and daily tranquilizers, the doctor’s tremors began to subside and he felt almost human again. He continued to rest. Time had no meaning here; he might have recuperated for two weeks or two years, but one day he felt well enough to walk down to the lake shore and take an old rowboat out to fish for awhile. Clouds played tag with the sun; when the doctor beached the boat again, he found himself whistling. Walking up the hill from the lake, he was suddenly aware of the world about him again, and once again he gave thought to grappling with the terrible power he seemed to have acquired.
Two tall men in grey topcoats were waiting for him as he reached the house. “Dr. Olie?”
“Yes.”
One of them extended FBI identification. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come with us. We need you.”
“How did you find me?”
“Your trail was easy to follow. Now, if you will just come with us—”
“But why?” Dr. Olie protested. “You can’t just come and cart off a private citizen—”
“I’m sorry. We have orders. You see, there has been a disaster—an assassination attempt on the President. He is failing rapidly, and the White House physician has sent for you, against considerable protest.”
The trip to Washington was swift, first in a large black car and then by helicopter. Before he knew what had happened, Dr. Olie was being rushed along carpeted corridors, through a maze of rooms and into a sickroom where a small grey man lay in coma with a bullet lodged in his brain. Swiftly the doctor examined his patient. Moments later the President was sitting up in bed, shaking his head in confusion and asking to be carried to a chair. A day later the President’s recovery was so complete that careful X ray examination failed even to locate the bullet.
An attempt was made to keep the episode secret, but there was a leak to the Press from somewhere high in the Administration. Overnight Dr. Stephen Olie was famous. Congress paused in their deliberations to declare him a National Resource while the United Nations claimed him for humanity. Leading clergymen the world over debated the moral issue of whom he should save first, since it was obviously impossible for him to go to the aid of every desperately ill patient. On one occasion, in the cause of peace, he was whisked into a bulky foreign aircraft and flown nonstop to the Kremlin to cure a certain high-ranking official of his cirrhosis. The newspapers debated the morality of that, also.
A committee was set up, composed of two physicians, two Senators and Adlai Stevenson, to determine who should have priority on Dr. Olie’s services. The committee could not agree. Meanwhile, Dr. Olie was kept busy 20 hours a day treating long lines of patients on a first-come, first-serve basis. On the second day a riot broke out; the doctor was saved from the lethally grateful embrace of the mob only with the greatest difficulty. He was taken to a master bedroom in Blair House and put to bed, given vitamin injections and subjected to electrocardiograms. Double shifts of special nurses babied him. Presently he forced them to let him sit up in a chair and was left alone to stare out the window at the grey buildings of the city (except for the Secret Service men who were assigned to insure his personal protection).
For three days he sat, hardly moving, barely eating, searching to find a solution to the dilemma as frustration, rage and desperation arose in his mind.
For another three days he sat staring at his hands. Once, he had wished for a miracle—an idle, hopeless, vagrant thought—and the miracle somehow had come about. And now, hour by hour, as committees, newspapers, television programs, governments, clergymen, doctors and lawyers all clamored for his services he was hating that vagrant thought, wishing desperately to retract it. If only he had never wished it. If only the magic could be gone—
His brooding was interrupted by a representative from the White House. He was most regretful to interrupt the doctor’s rest, but a famous Senator had developed laryngitis on the eve of a critical filibuster and the President requested that Dr. Olie see him. Dr. Olie declined.
The representative blinked. “But sir, it’s an important part of the Administration’s program. The President personally asks—”
“I said no,” the doctor replied.
“But I’m afraid the President insists—”
Dr. Stephen Olie rose slowly from his chair, feeling a chill going through his body. Then something seemed to break in his mind; in a moment of blind, screaming rage he fought them off, smashing his fists against the wall, throwing chairs through windows, tearing his clothes and cursing, as the Secret Service men—doubtless afraid of damaging the holder of the Great Gift—fell back and looked at him, fearfully.
He felt filled with rage and hate. He had not asked that the gift be given to him; he had not even realized it when it at first was. Every trace of love or even compassion for humanity seemed to leave him, now—a mob, greedy and grasping for life, avid for it, having together no thoughts or hopes except for themselves—not caring if their incessant demands and ceaseless pressure to be healed drained the healer dry and left him dead of fatigue; just so long as they themselves were made whole.
Save me! was the relentless cry. Save me! And not one, not a single damned one of them, paused to say (with even a trace of concern): Physician, heal thyself . . .
And as the rage and hatred mounted up in him he felt-suddenly—a great change. This time it was unmistakable, though the why of it was as unanswerable as the why of the other, earlier change. Or the how. And with the change descended a great calm. Strangely, he now felt better. Different, certainly, but better.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’ll see the senator now. I am much better. . . .
“Laryngitis, hmm?” he said, happily, as the senator croaked at him. “Well, let’s just see what we can do.”
Smiling, feeling the power surge in him, he felt the senatorial pulse and touched the senatorial throat. The senator took a horrible gasp, turned blue and dropped dead at his feet.
The Secret Service men stared at Dr. Olie, moved toward him, moved—except for one—away from him. The exception clasped him grimly on the shoulder. And at once fell, choking, to the floor. In a second he was still. Dr. Olie shrugged.
“It’s really very simple,” he said, answering the unvoiced question. “You’ve all heard of the power of life and death.” Those in the room shrank back still farther from him. He got up from his chair, stretched. “Now,” he said, “it’s complete, you see. Now it’s complete. . . .”
No one tried to stop him as he walked out. The word had spread rapidly. He went to his hotel room and there, humming tunelessly, he cut his common carotid artery with a razor blade.
<
* * * *
Somewhere along the way, in the work on each of these Annuals, the shape begins to appear.
It is in the nature of speculation that it cannot dwell continuously on one subject: there is just so much that one man’s knowledge and imagination can do with a theme; then he needs either fresh information or a fresh topic. Perhaps because writers inside the field stimulate each other, perhaps under the impact of outside events, the same kind of topical drift seems to occur in SF as a whole. Each Annual, at least, has proved to have some distinct emphasis of its own; each one is different from the others.
To some degree, these pattern shifts are predictable—or at least recognizably expectable, when they occur. I have mentioned the new writers entering the field, and the closing gaps between “culture camps.” These changes, I believe, are part of a much wider and more important phenomenon.
I think there is a desperate and determined—if often intuitive and unconscious—effort on behalf of thinking, imaginative people, from all backgrounds, in all intellectual and social microcosms, to place themselves in a “whole culture,” to “despecialize,” while there is still time; to widen, by whatever efforts they can make, the intellectual environment that limits our evolution toward sapience and sanity.
Certainly, the direction of the broad SF field these
past ten years has been continuously and (one cannot but feel) meaningfully toward areas most likely to attract just these newcomers: the examination of human behavior, both individually and in groups; an investigation into the nature of interpersonal communication; an attempt to formulate a relationship between man and the technological environment he has created, and is continuing to create, for himself; and the study of man in his most immediate natural environment—that is to say, the mind-body relationship.
It is in, or out of, this last trend that the big qualitative change occurred this year. I expected to find a large number of automation stories, learning-process stories, political-sociological-anthropological stories—perhaps a few psychiatry and/ or religion stories. I was not prepared for a broad-spectrum probing of the essential nature of life and death; the meaning and mechanics of mortality; the significance of procreation and of child-rearing; the metaphysics, and biophysics of death.
* * * *
THE LAST LONELY MAN
John Brunner
“Don’t see you in here much any more, Mr. Hale,” Geraghty said as he set my glass in front of me.
“Must be eighteen months,” I said. “But my wife’s out of town and I thought I’d drop by for old time’s sake.” I looked down the long bar and round at the booths against the opposite wall, and added, “It looks as though you don’t see anybody much any more. I never saw the place so empty at this time of evening. Will you have one?”
“Sparkling soda, if you please, Mr. Hale, and thank you very much.” Geraghty got down a bottle and poured for himself. I never knew him to drink anything stronger than a beer, and that rarely.
”Things have changed,” he went on after a pause. “You know what caused it, of course.”
I shook my head.
“Contact, naturally. Like it’s changed everything else.”
I stared at him for a moment, and then I had to chuckle. I said, “Well, I knew it had hit a lot of things—like the churches in particular. But I wouldn’t have thought it would affect you.”
“Oh, yes.” He hoisted himself on a stool behind the bar; that was new since I used to come here regularly. Eighteen months ago he wouldn’t have the chance to sit down all evening long; he’d be dead on his feet when the bar closed. “I figure it this way. Contact has made people more careful in some ways, and less in others. But it’s cut out a lot of reasons for going to bars and for drinking. You know how it used to be. A bartender was a sort of professional open ear, the guy to spill your troubles to. That didn’t last long after Contact came in. I knew a tenderhearted bartender who went on being like that for a while after Contact. He got himself loaded to here with lonely guys—and gals too.” Geraghty laid his palm on the top of his head.
“Occupational risk!” I said.
“Not for long, though. It hit him one day what it would be like if they all came home to roost, so he went and had them all expunged and started over with people he chose himself, the way anyone else does. And round about then it all dried up. People don’t come and spill their troubles any more. The need has mostly gone. And the other big reason for going to bars—chance company—that’s faded out too. Now that people know they don’t have to be scared of the biggest loneliness of all, it makes them calm and mainly self-reliant. Me, I’m looking round for another trade. Bars are closing down all over.”
“You’d make a good Contact consultant,” I suggested, not more than half-joking. He didn’t take it as a joke, either.
“I’ve considered it,” he said seriously. “I might just do that. I might just.”
I looked around again. Now Geraghty had spelled it out for me, I could see how it must have happened. My own case, even if I hadn’t realized it till now, was an illustration. I’d spilled troubles to bartenders in my time, gone to bars to escape loneliness. Contact had come in about three years ago, about two years ago it took fire and everyone but everyone lined up for the treatment, and a few months after that I quit coming here, where I’d formerly been as much of a fixture as the furniture. I’d thought nothing of it— put it down to being married and planning a family and spending money other ways.
But it wasn’t for that. It was that the need had gone.
In the old style, there was a mirror mounted on the wall behind the bar, and in that mirror I could see some of the booths reflected. All were empty except one, and in that one was a couple. The man was nothing out of the ordinary, but the girl—no, woman—took my eye. She wasn’t so young; she could be forty or so, but she had a certain something. A good figure helped, but most of it was in the face. She was thin, with a lively mouth and laughter wrinkles round the eyes, and she was clearly enjoying whatever she was talking about. It was pleasant to watch her enjoying it. I kept my eyes on her while Geraghty held forth.
“Like I say, it makes people more careful, and less careful. More careful about the way they treat others, because if they don’t behave, their own Contacts are liable to expunge them, and then where will they be? Less careful about the way they treat themselves, because they aren’t scared much of dying any more. They know that if it happens quick, without pain, it’ll just be a blur and then confusion and then picking up again and then melting into someone else. No sharp break, no stopping. Have you picked anyone up, Mr. Hale?”
“Matter of fact, I have,” I said. “I picked up my father just about a year ago.”
“And was it okay?”
“Oh, smooth as oil. Disconcerting for a while—like having an itch I couldn’t scratch—but that passed in about two or three months and then he just blended in and there it was.”
I thought about it for a moment. In particular, I thought about the peculiar sensation of being able to remember how I looked in my cradle, from outside, and things like that. But it was comforting as well as peculiar, and anyway there was never any doubt about whose memory it was. All the memories that came over when a Contact was completed had indefinable auras that labeled them and helped keep the receiver’s mind straight.
“And you?” I said.
Geraghty nodded. “Guy I know in the Army. Just a few weeks back he had a car smash. Poor guy lived for ten days with a busted back, going through hell. He was in bad shape when he came over. Pain—it was terrible!”
“Ought to write your Congressman,” I said. “Get this new bill through. Hear about it?”
“Which one?”
“Legalize mercy killing provided the guy has a valid Contact. Everyone has nowadays, so why not?”
Geraghty looked thoughtful. “Yes, I did hear about it. I wasn’t happy about it. But since I picked up my buddy and got his memory of what happened—well I guess I’m changing my mind. I’ll do like you say.”
We were quiet for a bit then, thinking about what Contact had done for the world. Geraghty had said he wasn’t happy at first about this euthanasia bill—well, I and a lot of other people weren’t sure about Contact at first, either. Then we saw what it could do, and had a chance to think the matter out, and now I felt I didn’t understand how I’d gone through so much of my life without it. I just couldn’t think myself back to a world where when you died you had to stop. It was horrible!
With Contact, that problem was solved. Dying became like a change of vehicle. You blurred, maybe blacked out, knowing you would come to, as it were, looking out of somebody’s eyes that you had Contact with. You wouldn’t be in control any more, but he or she would have your memories, and for two or three months you’d ease around, fitting yourself to your new partner and then bit by bit there’d be a shift of viewpoint, and finally a melting together, and click. No interruption; just a smooth painless process taking you on into another instalment of life as someone who was neither you nor someone else, but a product of the two.
For the receiver, as I knew from experience, it was at worst uncomfortable, but for someone you were fond of you could take far more than discomfort.
Thinking of what life had been like before Contact, I found myself shuddering. I ordered
another drink—a double this time. I hadn’t been out drinking for a long while.
I’d been telling Geraghty the news for maybe an hour, and I was on my third or fourth drink, when the door of the bar opened and a guy came in. He was medium-sized, rather ordinary, fairly well-dressed, and I wouldn’t have looked at him twice except for the expression on his face. He looked so angry and miserable I couldn’t believe my eyes.
He went up to his booth where the couple were sitting— the one where the woman was that I’d been watching—and planted his feet on the ground facing them. All the attractive light went out of the woman’s face, and the man with her got half to his feet as if in alarm.
“You know,” Geraghty said softly, “that looks like trouble. I haven’t had a row in this bar for more than a year, but I remember what one looks like when it’s brewing.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology] Page 41
