Until You Are Dead (12 page)

With the television set loaded into the trunk of the patrol car, Deal drove them back to the precinct house. As they pulled into the garage with their prisoner, he noticed several TV-news vans parked nearby. He let Hastings lead the subdued Brubaker toward the stairs to the booking area where the press would be congregated, then as they were almost to the steps he called Hastings' name and both men turned.

"Hold that pose," Deal said, aiming Hastings' camera at
policeman and prisoner.
Snick, whir. "One
of you is gonna like this picture!"

Hastings smiled handsomely even though he knew there was no film in the camera. Just to get in the practice.

M
arvin Millow lay quietly, feeling the somehow unfamiliar rhythm surge through his body. For a moment, just a fraction of a second, he'd thought he was dead, but now with logical disappointment and instinctive joy he realized the operation had been a success. It didn't surprise him, but still he'd hoped for death.

Millow was remembering vaguely now as he came out of the anesthetic that had blanked his mental processes for the past five days. He'd been eating dinner and watching the telescreen in his cell (some ridiculous ad about the new turbine cars) and suddenly the pain had shot through his chest. Then had come the clatter of his food tray on the cement floor, the hurried footsteps of the guards, the long, smooth ride on the motorized stretcher down the cell-lined halls as the other prisoners looked out with only mild interest. Their faces, Millow remembered, had been almost featureless, only pink blurs of expression behind the dizzying vertical gleaming bars rushing past.

Millow remembered his body being shifted around, an inhalator being fitted over his mouth and nose, the weakening struggle he'd put up, and now . . . now here he was, propped up slightly in his bed with his eyes open.

"How do you feel?" Dr. Steinmetz asked, and they both knew it really didn't matter, not even from a clinical standpoint.

Millow was alive.

"I didn't make it," Millow croaked in a distant, sad voice.

"You should be glad to be alive," Dr. Steinmetz said. He
was a plump, shiningly clean man with dark framed glasses over very intelligent eyes. "You should be thankful for the excellent medical attention you receive."

"Why," the slow, faltering voice asked from the bed, "so I can go back to my cell now and do the same things I've done for sixty-three years?"

Dr. Steinmetz was turning on his best bedside manner. "You got life imprisonment with no eligibility for parole," he said. "There was a time, under archaic law, when you would have been sentenced to death. You did kill a man."

"I did," Marvin Millow said wearily. "I did kill a man."

Dr. Steinmetz smiled down at him as if he'd achieved some minor victory.

"It was my heart this time, wasn't it?" Millow asked.

"Yes, but it's all right now."

"You've given me a plastic heart?"

Dr. Steinmetz nodded. "The newest synthetic. There's no danger at all of the body rejecting it."

Millow closed his eyes. Why should there be any danger from this, after what he'd been through over the years? First had come the leukemia, when he was in his sixties, and they had completely replaced his blood with a fluoral carbon emulsion that served him just as well or better. Then had come the liver transplant, the artificial kidney, the abortive suicide attempt that had required only a few stitches, and six years ago the artificial lung. Despite all this, Millow was, in his own way, healthier now than he'd been in his twenties. Of course he
looked
ninety-six years old. It was the responsibility of the state to maintain his health, but the taxpayers didn't pay for cosmetic surgery.

"Are you all right?" Dr. Steinmetz asked, but he wasn't really curious. He too had unshakeable faith in modern medicine.

Millow didn't bother to open his eyes. His chest ached deeply with each breath and his body throbbed, but he was "all right."

"Will they ever let me die, Doctor?"

"None of us are immortal," Steinmetz said. "On the outside you would have been dead twenty years ago. But here you're the state's responsibility." He was silent for a long moment. "You know, Marvin, you don't really
want
to die. None of us do."

"It seems that it should be my prerogative," Millow said with old bitterness.

"It should be," Steinmetz agreed. "And the man you killed should have had the same prerogative."

Millow opened his eyes and stared at the spotless white ceiling as the doctor left the small room and closed the door behind him.

The man he'd killed. But that had been so long ago. So very long ago. Was he now the same Marvin Millow who had carefully plotted and carried out the murder of his wife's lover? Could he ever have felt that strongly about anything, have had that much will? Could he ever have loved a woman as he must have loved Marian?

Millow remembered the Marian of his youth as if she'd been a character in a book he'd read years ago, or a cast member in a movie he'd seen at some time on the telescreen. That Marian didn't seem quite real to him now, didn't seem as if she ever had been real. Neither did Creighton, the man he'd killed. For that matter, had there ever been a tall, proud, dark-haired Marvin Millow who had breathed love so deeply he had killed for it? Of course there had been. But not anymore. Those fires had died now, and the ashes had long since blown away.

Marian had divorced him after the trial, and for over fifty years Millow hadn't seen her or heard from her. Then one day seven years ago, with terrifying suddenness, she had visited him. She had looked so much older that Millow hardly recognized her. So much older! Her blonde hair had turned a lusterless gray, her full lips had become thin and sunken, her once graceful figure was now thick and stocky. It could be that she finally came to see him because in a strange way she was indebted to him. He had loved her enough to kill for her. And yet there might have been something else, something he could never fathom.

Every Sunday then, for the next three years, Marian came and sat and talked to him through the clear Plexiglas shield. And then one Sunday she didn't come, and he heard that she'd died. That was all he heard, but he managed to clip her obituary from the newspaper, and he still had it, curled and yellowed, among his personal effects.

How was it he still missed Marian, not the young Marian who was only a dream, but the Marian who had come to visit him faithfully every Sunday afternoon for those three years? A man who was dead in everything but body should miss no one.

The accelerated healing pain in Millow's chest was growing. Strangely, as if the pain had been anticipated, a young intern entered and injected him with a sedative.

D
ays passed in dizzying cycles of wakefulness and sleep. Then one morning when Millow awoke, Dr. Steinmetz was there, his eyes smiling behind the dark glass frames.

"You're progressing nicely, Marvin."

Millow said nothing. The pain was still in his chest, though not as bad, and he felt slightly nauseous most of the time.

"You should be well enough to have visitors soon," Steinmetz said, studying some X-rays he had in a yellow folder.

"Tell the warden he can see me anytime," Millow said, and immediately he was sorry he'd said it, for he saw that it gave Steinmetz some small satisfaction to see that the patient was recovering his sense of humor.

Millow drew a deep breath and focused his gaze on the doctor. "I almost died this time, didn't I?"

Dr. Steinmetz nodded. "It was rather close — until we got you to the operating room."

"I wish you had let me die," Millow said. "Just living is no reason to want to live. A man has to have
something,
some hope or interest in the future."

"You may be right," Steinmetz agreed, surprising Millow with his frank reply.

Millow let his head sink back into the soft white pillows. He only knew he didn't want to spend even one more endless night back in his cell, pacing on stiff, unwilling ninety six-year-old legs, while the thing inside him paced.

"I'll check with you the beginning of next week," Dr. Steinmetz said, pinching the yellow folder closed and smiling.

"I'll be here," Millow said as the doctor left and the door locked automatically behind him.

The room was as small and bland as Millow's cell, and like his cell there was no escape from it except death. But they were careful to eliminate even that avenue to freedom. Every item and furnishing in the rooms and cells of the prison were dull, soft and harmless as possible. If only one of the nurses or an intern would forget and leave a sharp instrument behind! A scissors, a glass bottle he could break! Anything! Millow sighed. He probably wouldn't even have time to bleed to death. They'd check him on the closed cir
cuit viewscanner and pump more of the cursed artificial blood in him to prolong his artificial life.

As he'd promised, Dr. Steinmetz came to see Millow at the beginning of the week. The doctor looked unusually cheerful, even for him.

"How's the unwilling patient today?"

"Feeling better, damn you!"

Steinmetz laughed. "Yes, you must be improving, though naturally there's still some pain. You were on the operating table a long time."

"It still hurts," Millow said, "but not as much."

"You'll be on your feet shortly," Steinmetz said, "and as brooding and unhappy as ever."

"That's comforting."

A buzzer sounded, one long, one short. Dr. Steinmetz, his features set in an absent smile, looked up. "That's for me," he said to himself as much as to Millow. "I'll be back shortly." He turned and left the room.

But the door! He hadn't shut the door quite hard enough to latch it, and there was a slender strip of darkness where Millow could see out into the dim hall.

And instantly Millow knew what he would do. He would step out into the hall, and he would run, as fast as he could, away from this dread room, away from their lifesaving, life prolonging drugs. And when he felt that he must stop, he'd run harder, until something in his ancient, half natural body gave. Millow's lined face broke into a grin as he climbed painfully from the bed. Death by running.

He tested his legs carefully. Yes, there was enough strength in them, just enough. Millow moved to the door and peered through the crack out into the hall. There was no one, no one in sight. A pang of exultation shot through his body and he was out, out into the hall and running.

At first nothing happened, and Millow's strength surprised him. He felt rather ridiculous as he ran unnoticed, like some white flannelled, geriatric track star, his bare feet plopping regularly on the tile floor. Then the pain came, hot and sharp, and Millow groaned despite himself. He could imagine stitches popping, tissue tearing, and he made his legs strain harder to propel him forward. The hall ended, and he turned down the corridor lined with cells, and he was aware of those blank, pale faces staring out at him as he passed. The corridor was silent but for the sound of his footfalls and his labored breathing. The pain invaded his body again and stayed longer, causing Millow's breath to catch, his legs to buckle. He was on the cool tile floor without realizing he'd fallen, and he struggled to his feet and began to run again. He made only a few steps before the pain sapped the will from his mind and he collapsed, rolling slowly onto his back. This time he couldn't rise.

Millow lay there, feeling the pain come and go, for only a minute before he was aware of rushing, echoing footsteps drawing nearer. Leather soles and heels scuffing on the smooth tile.

Dr. Steinmetz and two young interns were suddenly standing over him.
Steinmetz's face was angry and appraising as he bent over Millow and examined him. "Get a stretcher," he said calmly to one of the interns, who turned and ran.
Sighing deeply, Steinmetz stood, and the intern knelt and placed something soft beneath Millow's head.

"It's too late," Millow said in triumph, and he tasted blood in his mouth.

Steinmetz's face didn't change. He turned away for a moment, then turned again and knelt.

Millow felt the bite of a hypodermic needle.

"Can we get him to the operating room in time?" the young intern asked. "He's failing fast."

Failing fast
. . . The words were like a benediction. There was a vast and growing darkness in Millow.

D
arkness, gradually giving way to a burning red.

At first Millow thought he was dead, then with logical disappointment and instinctive joy he realized he was alive. He opened his eyes.

Dr. Steinmetz glanced up from whatever he was studying in the yellow folder and smiled down at Millow. "How's the unwilling patient today?"