Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  I was a bit nonplussed. A man of Sansome's reputation! It was like a United States Senator pleading for the opportunity to scrub out the men's room at the House of Representatives. Just the same, I wouldn't be stampeded or overawed. Several provocative explanations for the French doctor's concern came to mind.... Was he the repudiated father of Sara's unborn child? Or was he a practitioner of artificial insemination, with a rather unfortunate error to his credit?

  "Your request is unusual," I said cautiously, "but not entirely unreasonable. In order to justify it, I am sure you will be willing to explain your interest in this case, will you not, Doctor?"

  * * * * *

  He frowned, "I suppose I must. But you will believe little of it. My own staff agreed with my diagnosis, but they violently rejected my theory. Wait until they hear your diagnosis, doctor!" He unzipped his briefcase. "She probably protests that she has a malignant tumor, not a baby," he remarked as he laid thick sheafs of paper on my desk.

  "You are so very right," I said.

  "Madamoiselle is magnificent," he observed, running slender, wrinkled hands through his sparse gray hair. "But her obstinacy will not avail against evolution. No more than we doctors' monumental ignorance."

  "Evolution? Explain, please."

  "Here is the case history." He drummed on it with his short-clipped nails. "In it, you will find that Caffey came to us three months ago with her body cavity in the grasp of a small octopus of a soft form carcinoma. The pain reached from pelvis to chest."

  "Incredible!" I exclaimed.

  Sansome spread his hand on the record sheets. "Facts are never incredible," he reminded me gently. "What follows, however, will tax your credulity, and I beg of you to allow me to impose an outrageous concept whose only virtue appears to be its demonstrated validity."

  "Proceed."

  "In forty years of slicing away tumerous growths, I had become morbid at the dreadful incidence of recurrence and the obscene mortality rate. In spite of all our techniques, these cancers have increased with the persistence of Nature herself.

  "In a fit of prolonged depression brought on by a foolishly strenuous research of histories, my mind stumbled into a stupid preoccupation with a few isolated cases of exogenic pregnancy. One which fascinated me was the young 17-year-old boy from whose lung a surgeon removed a live three-month foetus. Somehow the obvious explanation refused to satisfy me. It was, of course, concluded that the foetus was an undeveloped twin to the boy himself.

  "This could be so; but on what facts was this assumption based? None. Only the absence of any other theory justified the concept. The surgeon had expected to find a hard carcinoma.

  "And it came to me suddenly that he had found his cancer!

  "My interpolation was this: Mankind is suffering an evolutionary change in his reproductive procedure. The high incidence of various tumors evidences Nature's experiments in developing a asexual reproduction."

  * * * * *

  Sansome's statement so flabbergasted me that I looked at him for signs of facetiousness or irrationality. His extreme fatigue was evident--but his calmness and clarity of self-expression in a foreign language indicated no mental confusion. A hoax of such magnitude was outside the realm of possibility for a surgeon of his distinction.

  The man was simply following a blind alley of reasoning, set off by his life-long frustration of battling cancer.

  I mustered my patience and drew him out, hoping he would find a contradiction in his own theory.

  "This is a rather staggering notion, Dr. Sansome," I said. "Have you been able to support it with--additional evidence?"

  "Until Miss Caffey," he said, "frankly, no. Not the kind of evidence that is acceptable. But the theory has much to defend it. In your own Journal of the A. M. A., May 7, 1932, Dr. Maud Slye published the first solid evidence that predisposition to so-called malignant tumor is hereditary. Is this not a better characteristic of a true mutation, rather than of a disease?"

  "Perhaps," I said. "But how does Mother Nature justify the desirability of a change from our present rather successful bisexual system? And isn't she being rather cruel in her methods? Think of the millions she has made suffer in her experiments."

  "Mother Nature," Sansome pronounced positively, "is neither kind nor cruel. She is manifestly indifferent to all but the goal of survival of the species. Our civilization has set out to thwart her with increasingly more effective methods of birth-control. In the light of survival, Nature is most justified in trying to bring millions of frustrated, childless humans to parenthood.

  * * * * *

  "Meanwhile," he said, riffling the case history of Sara Caffey, "let us examine the evidence at hand. Our patient arrived in Paris positively cancerous. After confirming the diagnosis, I proposed an unprecedented treatment based on my theory. We know several body conditions which promote the rapid development of carcinoma, such as excess alkalinity and high blood sugar content and so forth. Instead of trying to reduce these and fight the tumor, I reversed the treatment and aided Miss Caffey's body to support and encourage its growth to what I predicted would be a new maturity.

  "And what happened?" He threw up his hands. "In two months, the tendrils of the octopus withdrew into the central body of the tumor. The tendency to spread in search for attenuated nourishment was reversed with the treatment. This alone was an accomplishment, for it would have made the growth operable in a short time.

  "Unfortunately, word of my unorthodox prescription reached a jealous colleague, and he set off such a quarrel at the Institute that Miss Caffey packed up and left with the generous misconception that she was saving me from embarrassment. I had no opportunity to assure her that the Cancer Institute would decide ultimately in my favor--which it shall when I return with a photostat of a certain birth certificate."

  He smiled for the first time, and his charm was so powerful that I sincerely wanted to believe in him. I could see no use in denying him his request, for his prescriptions were of an innocuous nature for a normally pregnant woman such as Sara Caffey. I trusted that a normal birth of a typical baby would finally dissuade him.

  I extended my hand again. "You are most welcome to stay with us, doctor," I told him. "The treatment you desire is within reason, and I admire your tenacity with your theory. I hope you will forgive me, however, if I say that I find your premises rather tenuous. I feel that we will witness a very normal birth, and ultimately Miss Caffey will find it to her peace of mind to confess a secret marriage, or, at most--an alliance of which she may be pathologically ashamed at the moment."

  Sansome grasped my hand with enthusiasm. "Bien! Tres bien!" he exclaimed. "This is more generous even than I expected. Certainly I do not expect a scientist of your station to swallow my theory at a gulp, Dr. Foley. I will admit that my persistence depends more than it should on intuition. But we shall see. I am grateful to you." And he kissed me firmly on each cheek.

  * * * * *

  A study of Sansome's carefully prepared case history on Sara Caffey did disturb me a little. I ordered a thorough reexamination, and was left with some puzzling conclusions at the apparent absence of tumorous growth, malignant or otherwise.

  Sara was enduring most of the classic symptoms of typical pregnancy, and was enjoying Dr. Sansome's treatment hugely. She guzzled the alkaline-producing fruit juices, fortified with carefully rationed dribbles of gin. She nibbled contentedly at the sweets which the Frenchman supplied anonymously. And she raised merry hell because we refused to operate.

  After two weeks, she threatened to leave. I was paged over the P. A. and got to her room in time to catch her trying to zip up her skirt.

  She looked at me impatiently, and then back to her abdomen. "Damned thing's getting out of hand."

  She had on an expensive tweed suit, and the smart, powder-blue cashmere coat I helped her into made her look her role of distinguished world traveler, syndicated columnist and woman of parts.

  She hunched her shoulders forward slightly, so the loose folds
of the coat concealed her protruding middle.

  "Thanks," she said casually. "I'll write you a check and be on my way."

  "Dr. Sansome will be disappointed," I said casually.

  "You heard from him?" she asked with interest.

  I nodded.

  She put her hands on her hips. "And you still persist with your fatuous idea that I'm going to have a baby?"

  "Let us say," I evaded, "that we have adopted Dr. Sansome's treatment on a wait-and-see basis. You said yourself that he refused to operate. We have definitely confirmed that much. Your condition is still inoperable, but you are coming along fine."

  "Well, now, why didn't you tell me that before." She threw off her coat and relieved the pressure of her waist zipper with a grateful sigh. "Now you're making sense. Send out for another Spillane. I'll go along with that. But no more of this drivel about transferring me to the maternity ward, see?"

  * * * * *

  Ten nights later, she changed her mind. I passed her room after a late emergency case. The door was open and I heard her crying softly to herself. I stopped in. Her bed lamp was on, and for a change she looked all woman.

  I felt her pulse and asked, "What's the matter, Sara?"

  "I'm going to have a baby!" she sobbed. "I've been feeling something peculiar for some time. But tonight it kicked the hell out of me."

  "Want to talk about it?" I asked, still holding her wrist.

  She looked at me with genuine bafflement in her eyes. Her face was puckered up like a hurt child's. "But it's so impossible, doctor. I'm sorry I talked to you the way I have, but so help me, I'm a good girl."

  I almost said, Well, these things happen, but that would have sounded pretty silly. It was evident that she still wouldn't admit even to herself how and when it had happened.

  "Ever go on a good binge?" I suggested.

  "Not since I was sixteen," she exclaimed. "But I could use one right now. No, that might hurt the baby." She folded her arms protectively around her middle. "I don't get it. I don't get it at all. But if that's the way it is--" A crooked, pleased smile wrinkled tears from her cheeks. "Leave it to Sary to do things the unusual way."

  She looked up at me. "Did you know I was the first white woman to interview a Rajah's harem eunuch?"

  "Looks like you have a real story this time," I said, playing along with her.

  "Yeah. But who in hell will write it?"

  * * * * *

  Phillipe Sansome made himself eminently useful. He assisted in surgery every morning, refusing fees and pleading with everyone to maintain his anonymity. The staff was in on the conspiracy, and the nurses smiled indulgently at him behind his back. But Sansome was too great a man to ridicule. The general feeling was the same as mine. He was older than he thought, not in body, but in over-tired nerves and exhausted mind. None contested his skill with the scalpel; but none gave ten cents worth of credence to his twist on the theory of evolution.

  As Sara's confinement proceeded with precise conformity to my expectations, I thought Sansome would lose heart--but he didn't. He arranged to be present in the delivery room with as much interest as if we expected a breach birth of a two-headed panda.

  I was unfortunately called to Baltimore at the last minute. I flew both ways, but my haste was in vain. Sara gave birth while I was still aloft.

  I checked in with more excitement than I'd thought possible. I asked at the desk, "How's Caffey?"

  "Fine. Gave birth an hour ago. Beautiful little girl--"

  I didn't wait for more. I dashed upstairs to the maternity ward, where Sara had finally consented to be moved, and slipped into her room.

  She was tired, but conscious. She smiled at me peculiarly.

  "So it's a girl!" I exclaimed. "Wait until I see Sansome. A beautiful, healthy, normal baby!"

  A hand tapped me softly on the shoulder, and I turned to look into Sansome's triumphant eyes.

  "Without a navel," he said.

  * * *

  Contents

  A PLACE IN THE SUN

  By Stephen Marlowe

  Mayhem, the man of many bodies, had been given some weird assignments in his time, but saving The Glory of the Galaxy wasn't difficult--it was downright impossible!

  The SOS crackled and hummed through subspace at a speed which left laggard light far behind. Since subspace distances do not coincide with normal space distances, the SOS was first picked up by a Fomalhautian freighter bound for Capella although it had been issued from a point in normal space midway between the orbit of Mercury and the sun's corona in the solar system.

  The radioman of the Fomalhautian freighter gave the distress signal to the Deck Officer, who looked at it, blinked, and bolted 'bove decks to the captain's cabin. His face was very white when he reached the door and his heart pounded with excitement. As the Deck Officer crossed an electronic beam before the door a metallic voice said: "The Captain is asleep and will be disturbed for nothing but emergency priority."

  Nodding, the Deck officer stuck his thumb in the whorl-lock of the door and entered the cabin. "Begging your pardon, sir," he cried, "but we just received an SOS from--"

  * * * * *

  The Captain stirred groggily, sat up, switched on a green night light and squinted through it at the Deck Officer. "Well, what is it? Isn't the Eye working?"

  "Yes, sir. An SOS, sir...."

  "If we're close enough to help, subspace or normal space, take the usual steps, lieutenant. Surely you don't need me to--"

  "The usual steps can't be taken, sir. Far as I can make out, that ship is doomed. She's bound on collision course for Sol, only twenty million miles out now."

  "That's too bad, lieutenant," the Captain said with genuine sympathy in his voice. "I'm sorry to hear that. But what do you want me to do about it?"

  "The ship, sir. The ship that sent the SOS--hold on to your hat, sir--"

  "Get to the point now, will you, young man?" the Captain growled sleepily.

  "The ship which sent the SOS signal, the ship heading on collision course for Sol, is the Glory of the Galaxy!"

  For a moment the Captain said nothing. Distantly, you could hear the hum of the subspace drive-unit and the faint whining of the stasis generator. Then the Captain bolted out of bed after unstrapping himself. In his haste he forgot the ship was in weightless deep space and went sailing, arms flailing air, across the room. The lieutenant helped him down and into his magnetic-soled shoes.

  "My God," the Captain said finally. "Why did it happen? Why did it have to happen to the Glory of the Galaxy?"

  "What are you going to do, sir?"

  "I can't do anything. I won't take the responsibility. Have the radioman contact the Hub at once."

  "Yes, sir."

  The Glory of the Galaxy, the SOS ship heading on collision course with the sun, was making its maiden run from the assembly satellites of Earth across the inner solar system via the perihelion passage which would bring it within twenty-odd million miles of the sun, to Mars which now was on the opposite side of Sol from Earth. Aboard the gleaming new ship was the President of the Galactic Federation and his entire cabinet.

  * * * * *

  The Fomalhautian freighter's emergency message was received at the Hub of the Galaxy within moments after it had been sent, although the normal space distance was in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand light years. The message was bounced--in amazingly quick time--from office to office at the hub, cutting through the usual red tape because of its top priority. And--since none of the normal agencies at the Hub could handle it--the message finally arrived at an office which very rarely received official messages of any kind. This was the one unofficial, extra-legal office at the Hub of the Galaxy. Lacking official function, the office had no technical existence and was not to be found in any Directory of the Hub. At the moment, two young men were seated inside. Their sole job was to maintain liaison with a man whose very existence was doubted by most of the human inhabitants of the Galaxy but whose importance could not be measu
red by mere human standards in those early days when the Galactic League was becoming the Galactic Federation.

  The name of the man with whom they maintained contact was Johnny Mayhem.

  "Did you read it?" the blond man asked.

  "I read it."

  "If it got down here, that means they can't handle it anywhere else."

  "Of course they can't. What the hell could normal slobs like them or like us do about it?"

  "Nothing, I guess. But wait a minute! You don't mean you're going to send Mayhem, without asking him, without telling--"

  "We can't ask him now, can we?"

  "Johnny Mayhem's elan is at the moment speeding from Canopus to Deneb, where on the fourth planet of the Denebian system a dead body is waiting for him in cold storage. The turnover from League to Federation status of the Denebian system is causing trouble in Deneb City, so Mayhem--"

  "Deneb City will probably survive without Mayhem. Well, won't it?"

  "I guess so, but--"

  "I know. The deal is we're supposed to tell Mayhem where he's going and what he can expect. The deal also is, every inhabited world has a body waiting for his elan in cold storage. But don't you think if we could talk to Mayhem now--"

  "It isn't possible. He's in transit."

  "Don't you think if we could talk to him now he would agree to board the Glory of the Galaxy?"

  "How should I know? I'm not Johnny Mayhem."

  "If he doesn't board her, it's certain death for all of them."

  "And if he does board her, what the hell can he do about it? Besides, there isn't any dead body awaiting his elan on that ship or any ship. He wouldn't make a very efficacious ghost."

  "But there are live people. Scores of them. Mayhem's elan is quite capable of possessing a living host."

  "Sure. Theoretically it is. But damn it all, what would the results be? We've never tried it. It's liable to damage Mayhem. As for the host--"

  "The host might die. I know it. But he'll die anyway. The whole shipload of them is heading on collision course for the sun."