The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (41 page)

Then the nurses found him in an outside room.

They assumed that he was alive, since he was not dead, but they could not prove that he was alive, either.

That heightened the puzzle.

The doctors were called in. Real doctors, not machines. They were very important men. Citizen Doctor Timofeyev, Citizen Doctor Grosbeck and the director himself, Sir and Doctor Vomact. They took
the case.

(Over on the other side of the hospital Elizabeth waited, unconscious, and nobody knew it at all. Elizabeth, for whom he had jumped space, and pierced the stars, but nobody knew it
yet!)

The young man could not speak. When they ran eye-prints and fingerprints through the Population Machine, they found that he had been bred on Earth itself, but had been shipped out as a frozen
and unborn baby to Earth Four. At tremendous cost, they queried Earth Four with an “instant message,” only to discover that the young man who lay before them in the hospital had been
lost from an experimental ship on an intergalactic trip.

Lost.

No ship and no sign of ship.

And here he was.

They stood at the edge of space, and did not know what they were looking at. They were doctors and it was their business to repair or rebuild people, not to ship them around. How should such men
know about space
₃
when they did not even know about space
₂
, except for the fact that people got on the planoform ships and made trips through it? They were looking for
sickness when their eyes saw engineering. They treated him when he was well.

All he needed was time, to get over the shock of the most tremendous trip ever made by a human being, but the doctors did not know that and they tried to rush his recovery.

When they put clothes on him, he moved from coma to a kind of mechanical spasm and tore the clothing off. Once again stripped, he lay himself roughly on the floor and refused food or speech.

They fed him with needles while the whole energy of space, had they only known it, was radiating out of his body in new forms.

They put him all by himself in a locked room and watched him through the peephole.

He was a nice-looking young man, even though his mind was blank and his body was rigid and unconscious. His hair was very fair and his eyes were light blue but his face showed character –
a square chin; a handsome, resolute sullen mouth; old lines in the face which looked as though, when conscious, he must have lived many days or months on the edge of rage.

When they studied him the third day in the hospital, their patient had not changed at all.

He had torn off his pajamas again and lay naked, face down, on the floor.

His body was as immobile and tense as it had been on the day before.

(One year later, this room was going to be a museum with a bronze sign reading, “Here lay Rambo after he left the Old Rocket for space
₃
,” but the doctors still had no
idea of what they were dealing with.)

His face was turned so sharply to the left that the neck muscles showed. His right arm stuck out straight from the body. The left arm formed an exact right angle from the body, with the left
forearm and hand pointing rigidly upward at 90° from the upper arm. The legs were in the grotesque parody of a running position.

Doctor Grosbeck said, “It looks to me like he’s swimming. Let’s drop him in a tank of water and see if he moves.” Grosbeck sometimes went in for drastic solutions to
problems.

Timofeyev took his place at the peephole. “Spasm, still,” he murmured. “I hope the poor fellow is not feeling pain when his cortical defenses are down. How can a man fight pain
if he does not even know what he is experiencing?”

“And you, sir and doctor,” said Grosbeck to Vomact, “what do you see?”

Vomact did not need to look. He had come early and had looked long and quietly at the patient through the peephole before the other doctors arrived. Vomact was a wise man, with good insight and
rich intuitions. He could guess in an hour more than a machine could diagnose in a year; he was already beginning to understand that this was a sickness which no man had ever had before. Still,
there were remedies waiting.

The three doctors tried them.

They tried hypnosis, electrotherapy, massage, subsonies, atropine, surgital, a whole family of the digitalinids, and some quasi-narcotic viruses which had been grown in orbit where they mutated
fast. They got the beginning of a response when they tried gas hypnosis combined with an electronically amplied telepath; this showed that something still went on inside the patient’s mind.
Otherwise the brain might have seemed to be mere fatty tissue, without a nerve in it. The other attempts had shown nothing. The gas showed a faint stirring away from fear and pain. The telepath
reported glimpses of unknown skies. (The doctors turned the telepath over to the Space Police promptly, so they could try to code the star patterns which he had seen in a patient’s mind, but
the patterns did not fit. The telepath, though a keen-witted man, could not remember them in enough detail for them to be scanned against the samples of piloting sheets.)

The doctors went back to their drugs and tried ancient, simple remedies – morphine and caffeine to counteract each other, and a rough massage to make him dream again, so that the telepath
could pick it up.

There was no further result that day, or the next.

Meanwhile the Earth authorities were getting restless. They thought, quite rightly, that the hospital had done a good job of proving that the patient had not been on Earth until a few moments
before the robots found him on the grass. How had he gotten on the grass?

The airspace of Earth reported no intrusion at all, no vehicle marking a blazing arc of air incandescing against metal, no whisper of the great forces which drove a planoform ship through
space
₂
.

(Crudelta, using faster-than-light ships, was creeping slow as a snail back toward Earth, racing his best to see if Rambo had gotten there first.)

On the fifth day, there was the beginning of a breakthrough.

Elizabeth had passed
.

This was found out only much later, by a careful check of the hospital records. The doctors only knew this much: Patients had been moved down the corridor, sheet-covered figures immobile on
wheeled beds.

Suddenly the beds stopped rolling.

A nurse screamed.

The heavy steel-and-plastic wall was bending inward. Some slow, silent force was pushing the wall into the corridor itself.

The wall ripped.

A human hand emerged.

One of the quick-witted nurses screamed, “
Push
those beds!
Push
them out of the way.”

The nurses and robots obeyed.

The beds rocked like a group of boats crossing a wave when they came to the place where the floor, bonded to the wall, had bent upward to meet the wall as it tore inward. The peace-colored glow
of the lights flicked. Robots appeared.

A second human hand came through the wall. Pushing in opposite directions, the hands tore the wall as though it had been wet paper.

The patient from the grass put his head through.

He looked blindly up and down the corridor, his eyes not quite focusing, his skin glowing a strange red-brown from the burns of open space.

“No,” he said. Just that one word.

But that “No” was heard. Though the volume was not loud, it carried throughout the hospital. The internal telecommunications system relayed it. Every switch in the place went
negative. Frantic nurses and robots, with even the doctors helping them, rushed to turn all the machines back on – the pumps, the ventilators, the artificial kidneys, the brain re-recorders,
even the simple air engines which kept the atmosphere clean.

Far overhead an aircraft spun giddily. Its “off” switch, surrounded by triple safeguards, had suddenly been thrown into the negative position. Fortunately the robot-pilot got it
going again before crashing into Earth.

The patient did not seem to know that his word had this effect.

(Later the world knew that this was part of the “drunkboat effect.” The man himself had developed the capacity for using his neuro physical system as a machine control.)

In the corridor, the machine robot who served as policeman arrived. He wore sterile, padded velvet gloves with a grip of sixty metric tons inside his hands. He approached the patient. The robot
had been carefully trained to recognize all kinds of danger from delirious or psychotic humans; later he reported that he had an input of “danger, extreme” on every band of sensation.
He had been expecting to seize the prisoner with irreversible firmness and to return him to his bed, but with this kind of danger sizzling in the air, the robot took no chances. His wrist itself
contained a hypodermic pistol which operated on compressed argon.

He reached out toward the unknown, naked man who stood in the big torn gap of the wall. The wrist-weapon hissed and a sizeable injection of condamine, the most powerful narcotic in the known
universe, spat its way through the skin of Rambo’s neck. The patient collapsed.

The robot picked him up gently and tenderly, lifted him through the torn wall, pushed the door open with a kick which broke the lock and put the patient back on his bed. The robot could hear
doctors coming, so he used his enormous hands to pat the steel wall back into its proper shape. Work-robots or under-people could finish the job later, but meanwhile it looked better to have that
part of the building set at right angles again.

Doctor Vomact arrived, followed closely by Grosbeck.

“What happened?” he yelled, shaken out of a lifelong calm. The robot pointed at the ripped wall.

“He tore it open. I put it back,” said the robot.

The doctors turned to look at the patient. He had crawled off his bed again and was on the floor, but his breathing was light and natural.

“What did you give him?” cried Vomact to the robot.

“Condamine,” said the robot, “according to rule 47-B. The drug is not to be mentioned outside the hospital.”

“I know that,” said Vomact absentmindedly and a little crossly. “You can go along now. Thank you.”

“It is not usual to thank robots,” said the robot, “but you can read a commendation into my record if you want to.”

“Get the blazes out of here!” shouted Vomact at the officious robot.

The robot blinked. “There are no blazes but I have the impression you mean me. I shall leave, with your permission.” He jumped with odd gracefulness around the two doctors, fingered
the broken doorlock absentmindedly, as though be might have wished to repair it; and then, seeing Vomact glare at him, left the room completely.

A moment later soft muted thuds began. Both doctors listened a moment and then gave up. The robot was out in the corridor, gently patting the steel floor back into shape. He
was a tidy robot, probably animated by an amplified chicken-brain, and when he got tidy he became obstinate.

“Two questions, Grosbeck,” said the sir and doctor Vomact.

“Your service, sir!”

“Where was the patient standing when he pushed the wall into the corridor, and how did he get the leverage to do it?”

Grosbeck narrowed his eyes in puzzlement. “Now that you mention it, I have no idea of how he did it. In fact, he could not have done it. But he has. And the other question?”

“What do you think of condamine?”

“Dangerous, of course, as always. Addiction can – ”

“Can you have addiction with no cortical activity?” interrupted Vomact.

“Of course,” said Grosbeck promptly. “Tissue addiction.”

“Look for it, then,” said Vomact.

Grosbeck knelt beside the patient and felt with his fingertips for the muscle endings. He felt where they knotted themselves into the base of the skull, the tips of the shoulders, the striped
area of the back.

When he stood up there was a look of puzzlement on his face. “I never felt a human body like this one before. I am not even sure that it
is
human any longer.”

Vomact said nothing. The two doctors confronted one another. Grosbeck fidgeted under the calm stare of the senior man. Finally he blurted out,

“Sir and doctor, I know what we
could
do.”

“And that,” said Vomact levelly, without the faintest hint of encouragement or of warning, “is what?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time that it’s been done in a hospital.”

“What?” said Vomact, his eyes – those dreaded eyes! – making Grosbeck say what he did not want to say.

Grosbeck flushed. He leaned toward Vomact so as to whisper, even though there was no one standing near them. His words, when they came, had the hasty indecency of a lover’s improper
suggestion:

“Kill the patient, sir and doctor. Kill him. We have plenty of records of him. We can get a cadaver out of the basement and make it into a good simulacrum. Who knows what we will turn
loose among mankind if we let him get well?”

“Who knows?” said Vomact without tone or quality to his voice. “But citizen and doctor, what is the twelfth duty of a physician?”

“‘Not to take the law into his own hands, keeping healing for the healers and giving to the state or the Instrumentality whatever properly belongs to the state or the
Instrumentality.’” Grosbeck sighed as he retracted his own suggestion. “Sir and doctor, I take it back. It wasn’t medicine which I was talking about. It was government and
politics which were really in my mind.”

“And now . . . ?” asked Vomact.

“Heal him, or let him be until he heals himself.”

“And which would you do?”

“I’d try to heal him.”

“How?” said Vomact.

“Sir and doctor,” cried Grosbeck, “do not ride my weaknesses in this case! I know that you like me because I am a bold, confident sort of man. Do not ask me to be myself when
we do not even know where this body came from. If I were bold as usual, I would give him typhoid and condamine, stationing telepaths nearby. But this is something new in the history of man. We are
people and perhaps he is not a person any more. Perhaps he represents the combination of people with some kind of a new force. How did he get here from the far side of nowhere? How many million
times has he been enlarged or reduced? We do not know what he is or what has happened to him. How can we treat a man when we are treating the cold of space, the heat of suns, the frigidity of
distance? We know what to do with flesh, but this is not quite flesh any more. Feel him yourself, sir and doctor! You will touch something which nobody has ever touched before.”