No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (8 page)

I sat down, flabbergasted.

I remembered old Eli had told me he sold those salts to Dr. Vincent out at the Sunward sanitarium.

Back at my shaving once again, I knew there was just one thing to do. I had to see Dr. Vincent right away.

And when I went to see him I would carry a short steel bar. One that would fit my coat pocket. There would be a use for it.

Seeing Dr. Vincent was easier said than done. Few people saw him. Both he and his predecessor, Dr. Brown, were noted for their reluctance to appear in public. Too engrossed in their work, they had always said.

Anderson, Brown and Vincent, three strange men. Anderson under the stele that rose before the sanitarium entrance. Brown, undoubtedly dead, but with his later life, after he had left the sanitarium, shrouded in mystery. Vincent, present head of the institution, practically unknown to the medical profession except by reputation.

Three men who had dedicated their lives to finding a cure for the space sickness. Men who, so far, had failed. To them, from all the far corners of the Solar System came the space dopes, the men stricken by the dread disease which even now spelled the swift doom of all on whom it fastened. Not so swiftly now, perhaps, but nevertheless certain.

For the sanitarium had made some progress. By its treatment with radiations it could ease the pain, could slow up the ravages, give each victim a few more months to live, an easier death. But that was all. The space sickness still was fatal. There was no cure.

I had visited the sanitarium only once before—when I first had come to New Chicago. The New York office had wanted a feature story about the place and I had gotten it, but not from Dr. Vincent. I had not, in fact, seen Dr. Vincent. The soft-voiced robot secretary had told me he was very busy. An equally soft-voiced robot attendant had taken me in tow, had shown me the building, explained its workings, discussed learnedly the work of Dr. Vincent. It was a good story.

Practically all the attendants, I knew, were robots.

“We do not make mistakes,” the soft-voiced metal-man had told me. “Here, where mistakes are fatal, we are better than a human being.”

Which sounded like a good explanation, but left one sort of hanging in the air.

This time, as the time before, I had no trouble getting to the secretary who guarded Vincent’s office. And this time, as the time before, I got the same answer.

“Dr. Vincent is very busy. What is it you want?”

I leaned closer, across the desk, cutting off access to the row of call buttons.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” I said and even as I spoke I yanked the short steel bar out of my pocket and struck.

I put everything I had into that blow and I knew just where to hit, right between the robot’s gleaming eyes.

The one blow was enough. It dented in the heavy metal, smashed the delicate mechanism. The robot slid off the chair, clanged onto the floor.

For long seconds I stood there, hoping against that the walls were soundproofed. They must have been, for there was no scurry of feet outside, no sound from Vincent’s inner office.

Walking softly, thanking my stars the doors did not boast newfangled locks but the simple latches of the day when the sanitarium had been built, I locked the outer door, then strode across the room and twisted the knob to Vincent’s office. It turned in my hand and I stepped inside.

A man sat at a desk directly opposite the door. A man well past middle age, with snow-white hair. He was busy and did not look up when I came in. If he had heard me at all, he probably thought I was the secretary.

“Dr. Anderson?” I asked.

“Why, yes. What can I—”

And then he jerked his head up and stared at me.

I laughed at him softly.

“I thought so,” I said.

Muscles jerked around his jaws, as if he were trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

“Who are you?” he asked hoarsely.

“A friend of old Eli’s,” I told him.

“He sent you?”

“No, he didn’t send me. Eli is dead.”

He started out of his chair at that. “What’s that you say? Old Eli is dead? Are you certain?”

“The news,” I told him, “has been in the papers. The radio carried it.”

“I get no papers,” he said. “I have no time to read them. The radio over there,” he jerked his head toward an old set in the corner, “hasn’t been turned on for months.”

“It is the truth,” I said. “Murdered. And the salts were stolen.”

The man behind the desk went pale.

“The salts stolen!”

“Someone,” I said, “who guessed what they were.”

He sat down slowly, as if every ounce of strength had drained from his body. Huddled behind his desk he looked an old, old man.

“You’ve been afraid of this for years,” I said.

He nodded dumbly.

Silence hung between us, a long and empty silence and looking at the man, I felt sorry for him.

“Afraid of it,” he said, “for two reasons. But I guess it doesn’t matter any more. I’ve failed. There is no cure. There was just one hope left and that has failed—”

I paced swiftly across the room.

“Look,” I shot at him, “are you actually admitting that you are Dr. Anderson?”

He looked at me. “Why not?”

I stammered a little. “I thought you would put up a fight.”

“There’s no use of fighting any more,” he said. “Two hundred years is too long for any man to live. Especially when he fails year after year at the goal he had set himself.”

“Dr. Anderson,” I said, half speaking to myself, half to him. “Dr. Brown and now Dr. Vincent.”

He smiled faintly. “All three of them. It was easily arranged. I built the sanitarium, I owned it. I was accountable to no one. I named my successor and my successor named his successor. Why should the world wonder? The men who were named were men from the laboratory in this place. Obscure men, of course, but men familiar with the work.”

He smiled wanly at me. “Clever?”

“But the staff?” I asked.

“Except at first, there has been none. Just myself and the patients and the robots. The robots don’t talk, the patients die.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk. “And who are you?”

I took a long breath. “Sherm Marshall of the Solar Press.”

“And you want a story?”

I nodded, fearful of what would happen next.

And the thing that happened was the last thing I expected.

“Sit down,” he said. “Since you are here, you may as well know what has been going on.”

“That’s swell of you, Doctor,” I said, waiting for the lightning to strike.

No lightning struck.

“Have you ever kept a thing bottled up inside yourself so long you wanted to shriek?” he asked. “Have you ever ached to tell something that you knew and still you couldn’t tell it?”

I nodded.

“That’s me,” said Dr. Anderson.

He sat silent so long I thought he had forgotten me, but finally he went on.

“I came here with a theory that the radiations thrown out by the Sun, properly screened for selectivity, would have a curative effect upon the victims of space sickness. It worked, to an extent. It alleviated the malady, but it was not a cure. It didn’t go far enough. It gave a few added months, in some cases a few added years, of life, but that was all. I knew that I had failed.

“It was about the time I came to this realization that old Eli stumbled in. His car had broken down, his spacesuit was down to the last half-hour of oxygen. With him he had some peculiar salts—a queer earth such as he had never seen before. He had only a sample. I offered to analyze it for him and he left it. Quite by accident I discovered its properties.

“At about the time a very close friend of mine was brought here with the sickness. It was then that the full force of my failure was brought home to me. I knew my friend would die despite all that I could do. But he had hopes that I could save him—and that only made it worse.”

He stopped and stared at something on the opposite wall, but there was nothing there.

So I reminded him: “These salts of Eli’s? They prolonged life?”

It was as if something had struck him with a whip. He started and then settled back.

“Yes, they do,” he said. “The extent of their possibilities I cannot say. I can tell you roughly what they do, but I don’t understand just how—

“Perhaps we had better start at the beginning.

“If one is to accept the hypothesis that death is the result of the final hydrolysis of the proteins in the protoplasm, then it would seem reasonable that anything which would arrest hydrolysis or would catalyze resynthesis of the proteins would hold death at bay.

“The salts apparently do this, but whether they merely arrest the process of hydrolysis, preventing one from growing older, or whether they completely resynthesize a portion of the original proteins contained in the protoplasm I cannot even guess.

“If resynthesis actually does occur, then one might speculate upon the possibility that a larger dosage, by resynthesizing all or nearly all of the proteins would cause a man to grow younger instead of merely stopping him from growing older.”

He smiled. “I never experimented. I was satisfied with arresting old age.”

I didn’t say a thing. I almost held my breath. It seemed incredible the man could be sitting there, telling me that story. There was something wrong. Either he was wacky or I was batty—or maybe both.

I wanted to pinch myself to make sure it wasn’t all a dream, because, if it wasn’t, here was the biggest story the world had ever read.

Here was the sort of thing Ponce de Leon, the old Earth explorer, had dreamed about. Here, in hard truth, was an age-old myth that had echoed down the world for ages.

He was quiet so long that I finally spoke. “So you took some of the salts. Possibly so you could continue your work?”

“That’s it,” he said. “I talked it over with my friend, the one who expected me to help him—the one I knew I couldn’t help

“He understood and agreed to do his part. I was to prolong my life so I could continue with my work. He was to continue his so I could use him as a subject for experiments. It wasn’t an easy decision for him to make, for it meant years of torturing illness. The salts seemed to help him to some extent, perhaps repairing some of the ravages of the disease and for a while we thought they might be the cure. But they failed us, too. He lived—it’s true—but he wasn’t cured.”

“But why was it necessary to continue his life?” I asked. “Necessary for the experiments, I mean. Certainly you had plenty of other patients to experiment upon.”

“They died too fast,” said Anderson. “A few months, a few years at the most. I needed long range observation.”

He matched fingertips, speaking slowly, as if choosing his words with care.

“Perhaps you wonder why I did not pass my work along, why I did not select someone else and train them so they could pick up where I left off. Maybe that would have been the best. I’ve often blamed myself for not doing it instead of this. But my research had become an obsession. It wasn’t all pride or scientific ardor. There was the human angle to it, too. No man could have seen those poor devils, doomed, without a single chance, and not wanted to do something for them. They weren’t just patients. They were human beings, crying for someone to do something—and no one had. I tried to—God knows how I tried.

“I was afraid, you see, that someone else, no matter how carefully selected, might not be able to carry on with the singleness of purpose that seemed necessary—that somewhere along the way they might falter, might get sick of the job. That couldn’t be, that was the one thing that simply could not happen. Someone at least had to keep on trying to help those men for whom there was no help.”

“So you killed yourself off,” I said. “You let yourself be buried. You saw the stele erected in your honor. You became Dr. Brown and later Dr. Vincent. And yet, when I called you Dr. Anderson you answered.”

“I’ve always been Anderson,” he said. “The robots, of course, call me by the name I go by at the moment, but my friend who has stood by me all these years always calls me Anderson.”

He grimaced. “He never could get used to my other names.”

“And Eli?”

“Eli was easy to manage. I made him believe he had a malignant ailment, cautioned him he must come here at regular intervals for injections. The injections, of course, were his own salts. They have to be taken at intervals. After a time the hydrolysis would reach a point where it was necessary to set the catalytic action back to work again.”

He rose from the desk and paced up and down the room.

“But now Eli is dead. And I have failed. And someone else knows about the salts.”

He stopped in front of me.

“Do you realize what the knowledge of the salts will do to the Solar System?” he demanded. “Can you see what I have feared all these years?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “The salts would be the greatest blessing the world has ever known—”

He stared at me.

“Greatest blessing, did you say?” he whispered.

His fists clenched and unclenched by his side.

“They would be the greatest curse that could fall on mankind. Can you see what men would do to get them? No crime too foul, no treachery too great. Can you imagine what those in power would charge for them? Charge in money and service and power? The man who had them would rule the Solar System, for he could hold forth or withdraw the hope of eternal youth, of eternal life.

“Can you even remotely imagine the economic consequences? Men beggaring themselves for a few more years of life. Life insurance companies crashing as the people grabbed at the hope of living forever. For if a man is to live forever why bother with insurance? And when the insurance companies crashed they would drag others with them—companies that hold their paper—and other companies that—But why go on. Surely you must see.

“Envision the wars that might result. The mad hunt for the magic salts—”

“Wait a minute,” I shouted at him. “You’re forgetting that the man who killed Eli probably didn’t find out where Eli got the salts. He stole the salts that Eli had, but he probably doesn’t know—”