The Immortals Page 13

Before he opened the door, he broke open a fresh filter packet and slipped the filters into his nostrils, taking time to see that they were a good fit. He slid the needle gun out of the holster on the ambulance door. The magazine was full. He set the ambulance controls for automatic defense and stepped into the night.

  He sniffed the air tentatively. It wasn’t conditioned, not by a wild stretch of imagination, but the odor wasn’t unbearable. A few minutes shouldn’t reduce his life expectancy appreciably. The smog swirled around him, clutching, trying to insinuate its deadly tendrils down into his lungs. Boyd was right: We swim in a sea of carcinogens.

  There were two ways to deal with the problem. You could climb out of the sea, or you could filter out the carcinogens. But while you were about the first, the ideal solution, you had to do your best for those who had to live in the sea.

  The rain had almost stopped, but Flowers pulled his coat tight at the collar. He had left his black bag in the ambulance, but even a flash of his white jacket could be dangerous here. He could run into hijackers or Antivivs, or just an ordinary citizen with a grudge.

  Flowers passed quickly in front of the broad, patched window, through the pool of yellow light, his cropped, bare head bent. His hand rested on the right-hand coat pocket where he could feel the comfortable shape of the needle gun.

  The street number was long gone from above the door. Flowers pushed his way through the airlock and into the brightness.

  The waiter was a thick-necked urban with a battered nose and a scar starting at his hairline and seaming the left side of his face down to his neck. He wore a filthy white jacket in obvious imitation of a doctor’s uniform.

  The man puffed carelessly on a cigarette that was almost lost between his fingers. Flowers’s brief thrill of horror turned to disgust. The urbans weren’t content merely to live in the sea; they had to add their own carcinogens.

  Flowers diagnosed the thin, weasel-faced customer automatically: Thyroid. Hypertension. He gave the man five years. The customer eyed Flowers slyly as he spooned something out of a bowl into his crooked mouth.

  “What’s for you?” asked the waiter eagerly. “Got a new health-food menu. Got a new tonic fresh from the lab—all the known vitamins, plus trace minerals, iron, and a new secret ingredient in an oral suspension of medicinal alcohol. You wanta see the lab sheets, analysis, testimonials?”

  “No,” Flowers began, “what I—”

  “Augmented fruit juice?” the waiter continued doggedly. “Vegetables? Got a drink contains the liquified whole vegetable, eighteen different kinds. One glassful gives you your weekly requirements of eleven vitamins, eight minerals and—”

  “All I want to—”

  “Say now,” said the waiter, his voice dropping conspiratorially, “I got some stuff under the counter—straight Kentucky bourbon, no vitamins, no minerals, just plain rotgut.”

  “All I want to know is the address here,” Flowers said.

  The waiter looked at him blankly. Suspicion was like a wall between them.

  Finally he jerked a thumb back the way Flowers had come. “That way,” he said, “that’s Benton.”

  “Thanks,” Flowers said coldly. He turned toward the door, danger at the back of his neck, prickling. He went out into the night.

  “Pssst!” Something hissed behind him.

  Flowers jerked and looked back. The hiss came from Thyroid, his weasel face screwed up ingratiatingly. Flowers stopped. The man sneaked close. “Where are you going? I can maybe tell you.”

  Flowers hesitated. “Tenth,” he said. “Thirty-four hundred block.” What possible harm?

  “Two blocks east, turn left. It’s straight north,” the man whispered huskily. Flowers muttered his thanks and turned away. He had just noticed that the man had no filters in his nose and felt embarrassed. “Look!” the man said quickly. “Want some penicillin?”

  Flowers stood rooted for a moment, too surprised to act. Then his right hand went casually into his pocket to grab the pistol butt while his left hand pressed two studs on his belt buckle. Faintly, listening for it, he heard the ambulance motor rev up. “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Penicillin,” the shover repeated urgently. “Hot stuff. Straight from the lab, and the price is right.”

  “How much?”

  “A buck per hundred thousand. Look!” He stuck out a grimy hand; the yellow restaurant light filtered over it, over the metal-capped ampule that nestled in the palm. “Here’s three hundred thousand units all ready to go to work. Suppose you get an infection tonight. It can lay you away for good. With this little ampule here, you catch it yourself. Three bucks, okay? Save a day’s work, and you got your money back.”

  Flowers looked curiously at the 10 cc. ampule. Any penicillin in it was cut heavily. A dollar per hundred thousand units was less than wholesale.

  The shover rolled the ampule across his palm in a gesture meant to be irresistible. “Three bucks, and I throw in a syringe. You can’t beat that. Well”—he pulled his hand back as if he were going to thrust it into his pocket and walk away—“it’s your life. End up in a hospital.”

  Flowers stepped backward into the darkness, closer to the ambulance, and listened for the beat of rotors. The night was silent. “There’s worse places,” he said.

  “Name one,” the shover challenged, and edged closer. “Tell you what. I’ll make it two-fifty. How about it now—two-fifty, eh? Two-fifty and the hypo?”

  Finally the price dropped to two bucks. By then the shover was close. Too close, Flowers thought. He backed away. The shover grabbed at the coat to hold him. The coat fell open.

  Flowers damned the fool who had failed to magnetize the closure properly. The shover staggered back from the white jacket and looked wildly around for help that was unavailable.

  Flowers pulled out the pistol. “That’s far enough,” he said firmly.

  The shover came back immediately, like a ball on a string. “Look, say. I mean there’s no reason we can’t do business. I give you the penicillin, you forget we ever met, eh?”

  “How much have you got?”

  The shover looked as if he wanted to lie but didn’t dare. “Ten million. Take it. Take it all.”

  “Keep your hands out of your pockets.” Ten million. A hundred bucks. That was a load for a shover of his caliber. “Where did you get it?”

  The man shrugged helplessly. “You know how it is. Somebody passes it to me, and how do I know where it comes from? Stolen maybe. Diverted at the factory. Like that.”

  “Bone?”

  The shover looked startled. He glanced apprehensively into the shadows. “What do you think? Come on, medic, give me a break. You wouldn’t really shoot me, would you? A medic and all?”

  “Sure I would,” Flowers said evenly. “Who’d care?”

  The light came on like a detergent spray, cleansing the darkness. Flowers heard the rotors overhead and blinked blindly.

  “Don’t move,” said the bull voice. “You’re under arrest.”

  The shover dashed for the darkness. Flowers aimed carefully. The needle caught him in the back of the neck, just below the basi-occipital bone. He took one more step and crumpled, half in darkness. The police sergeant listened to Flowers’s description of events with unconcealed impatience. “You shouldn’ta shot him,” he said. “What’s the man done, he should get shot?”

  “Shoving,” Flowers began firmly, counting on his fingers with the muzzle of the needle gun. “Bribery. Adulterating, too, if you’ll analyze that ampule.” It was in the middle of the broken sidewalk, miraculously whole. The sergeant stooped for it reluctantly.

  “That’s no proof,” he said sourly. “You think we got nothing better to do than answer false alarms? I ought to run you in for disturbing the peace and false arrest.” He glanced again at the ambulance, speculatively, and back to the needle gun.

  “Proof?” Flowers echoed, scowling darkly. “What do you need? There’s a man with ten million units of penicillin. There’s my testim
ony. There’s this.” He pressed the Playback button on his belt buckle.

  The voice was rich and cultured. “Contraindications are known ilotycin sensitivity and—”

  Flowers hit the stud hastily and reeled off a few feet of tape before he started it again.

  “Penicillin,” said the shover’s husky whisper. “Hot stuff. Straight from the lab, and the price is right. . . .”

  When it was finished, Flowers erased the tag end of Dr. Curry’s lecture on internal medicine and added his own affidavit, “I, Benjamin Flowers, seventh-year medic, do hereby swear by Aesculapius and Hippocrates that . . .”

  The officer’s reluctant confirmation made it legal, and Flowers dropped the bobbin-sized spool into the officer’s meaty hand. “That should be plenty. There’s your prisoner.”

  The shover was on his hands and knees, weaving his head back and forth like a sleepy elephant. Flowers put one foot on his back and shoved him over. “I’m going to follow up on this case,” he said. “I want to see this man get the full penalty. I’ve got your badge number. I wouldn’t let him escape or lose any of the evidence.”

  The sergeant’s voice dropped to a whine. “You don’t have to get tough. I’ll do my job. You should understand, though—a man’s got to live. These is hard times. Why, that man’s probably trying to meet payments on a medical contract! Look at it from our angle. If we was to run in every shover in town, we’d have ’em stacked eight deep in the city jail. How’d we feed ’em? How’d we keep ’em there if they didn’t want to stay?”

  “That’s your problem, Sergeant. It’s rats like that who are chewing away the foundations of medical treatment. If drugs and antibiotics circulate without supervision, the life span will plummet to seventy or lower. We have enough trouble with antibiotic sensitivity and resistant bacteria strains without this.”

  Flowers looked down again at the shover. He was sitting up, bewildered. He rubbed the back of his neck and pulled his hand away to stare at it. “I ain’t dead,” he said.

  “My business is saving life, not taking it,” Flowers said harshly.

  The shover looked up at the voice and snarled. “You! You lousy body snatcher! Quack! You ain’t gonna get away with this! John Bone’ll take care of you, butcher!”

  “Here, now!” the sergeant broke in sharply, hauling the shover to his feet. “That’s enough out of you.”

  But his hands were surprisingly gentle. Flowers’s lips twisted wryly.

  Over the muffled throb of the helicopter’s rotors, the shover shouted at him, “You and your kind—you’re responsible for all this!”

  * * *

  The searchlight swept along the front of the porch roof and picked out two numbers hanging rusty and askew. Luckily they were the last two.

  The house stood beside a vacant lot crammed with disintegrating pipe and machinery and the decaying derrick of a gas-drilling outfit. At one time the yard had been paved; now it was little better than powdery gravel as Flowers drove up to the front steps.

  He turned off the lights and sat in the darkness staring up at the place. There were two stories and an attic. A dilapidated porch reached across the front. The windows stared dark and blind into the night.

  Had the resident made a mistake? It would be typical.

  Then he saw a dim flicker behind the west second-floor window.

  Carefully, Flowers climbed the rotten wooden steps. The light built into the black bag splashed against the old door. Flowers knocked. There was no answer. The only sound was the comforting vibration of the ambulance motor.

  He tried the antique brass handle. The door swung open. He pulled out the needle gun and entered cautiously. To the right an archway had been boarded off with worm-eaten plywood. Ahead was a flight of stairs.

  As he climbed noiselessly, the light gleamed from hand-turned spindles, polished by generations of small hands. When he could afford a place of his own in the country, he told himself, he would have something in it like that—old, haunted by a thousand memories of the past. If he found some really good examples of early woodwork in this hovel, he could buy the place or have it condemned by the public health department.

  At the top of the stairs were six doors. Flowers turned right. The door he tried was locked. It rattled under his hand.

  He listened uneasily to the noises of the house. It creaked and squeaked and stirred as if it had acquired a life of its own over the centuries. His shoulders twitched.

  The door opened.

  The light from the black bag spilled over the girl like quicksilver. She stared into it, unblinking. Flowers stared back. She was perhaps five feet five. Her dark hair would have been very long, he thought, if it had been allowed to fall free, but it was braided and wound around her head like a coronet.

  Her face was delicate and slender, the skin very white, the features regular. Her dress was yellow, flowing, belted in to a small waist; it was impractical and unflattering and completely unlike the straight, narrow fashions women were wearing these days. But there was something suggestive about the hint of figure beneath the cloth and the bare, white feet. His pulse climbed ten beats per minute.

  Only then did he notice that she was blind. Her corneas were opaque, darkening the pale blue of her eyes.

  “Are you the medic?” Her voice was low and gentle.

  “Yes.”

  “Come in before you arouse our roomers. They might be dangerous.”

  As the girl bolted the door behind him, Flowers surveyed the room, which was reasonably spacious. Once it had been a bedroom; now it was a one-room apartment containing two chairs, a gas burner, an upended crate serving as a table for a smoking kerosene lamp, and a cot made of wood and canvas.

  On the cot was a middle-aged man, sixtyish, his eyelids closed, his breathing noisy in the bare room.

  “Philip Shoemaker?” Flowers asked.

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  He noticed her eyes again. In the sun they would be the color of wild hyacinth.

  “Daughter?”

  “No relation.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “He’s sick,” she said simply.

  Flowers studied her face. Its peace and calmness told him nothing.

  As he sat down on the chair beside the cot, he unlocked his black bag. Quickly, without wasted motion, he brought out a handful of instruments, trailing their wires. One small pickup went over the old man’s heart; another was fastened to his wrist; a third, to the palm. He wrapped a sphygmomanometer band around the bicep and watched it grow taut, slipped a mouthpiece between pale lips, fitted something like a skullcap to the head. . . .

  When he was finished, Shoemaker was a fly caught in a web, transmitting feeble impulses to the spider lurking in the bag. This spider, though, was linked to the ambulance below by intangible lines, and together they would pour life back into the fly, not suck it away.

  It took one minute and twenty-three seconds. During the next second, Flowers noticed the adhesive tape on the patient’s forearm. He frowned and tore it loose. Beneath was a compress dark with blood and a small, welling slit in the median-basilic vein.

  “Who’s been here since this man fell ill?”

  “Me,” the girl said clearly. One hand was resting gently on the box that held the lamp.

  Beneath the head of the cot was a quart jar. In it was a pint of blood, clotting now but still warm. Flowers put it down slowly. “Why did you perform a phlebotomy on this man?”

  “There was no other way to save his life,” she said gently.

  “This isn’t the Dark Ages,” Flowers said. “You might have killed him.”

  “Study your lessons better, Medic,” she told him softly. “In some cases bloodletting is effective when nothing else will work—in cerebral hemorrhage, for instance. It lowers the blood pressure temporarily and gives the blood in the ruptured vessel a chance to clot.”

  Involuntarily Flowers glanced into the bag. From the bottom, the diagnosis fluoresced at him. It was
cerebral hemorrhage, all right, and the prognosis was hopeful. The hemorrhage had stopped.

  He took a compress out of a pocket in the bag, pulled the tab, and watched the wrapper disintegrate. He pressed it firmly over the cut. It clung to the skin as he took his hand away. “There are laws against practicing medicine without a license,” he said slowly. “I’ll have to report this.”

  “Should I have let him die?”

  “There are doctors to treat him.”

  “He called one. It took you an hour and a half to get here. If I had waited, he’d have died.”

  “I came as fast as I could. It’s no joke to find a place like this at night.”

  “I’m not criticizing.” She put her hand back until she felt the chair behind her and sank down into it, lightly, gracefully, and folded her white hands in her lap. “You asked me why I bled him. I told you.”

  Flowers was silent. The girl’s logic was impeccable, but she was wrong all the same. There weren’t any reasonable excuses for breaking the law. The practice of medicine had to be the monopoly of men who were carefully, exactingly trained for it and indoctrinated in the ancient ethics. No one else could be permitted to tamper with the most sacred thing in the world.

  “You were lucky,” he said. “You might have guessed wrong.”

  “There are no degrees to death.”

  She rose and walked toward him confidently, put a hand on his shoulder, and leaned past him to touch Shoemaker’s forehead. “No,” she said, and her voice was firm with an odd certainty. “He’ll get well now. He’s a good man. We mustn’t let him die.”

  The girl’s nearness was a warm fragrance, stirring, provocative. Flowers felt his blood pressure mount. Why not? he thought; she’s only an urban. But he couldn’t, and it wasn’t just a medic’s honor or even, perhaps, that she was blind.

  He didn’t move, but she drew away, took back her hand, as if she sensed the emotions fermenting inside him.

  “I’ve got to get him to the hospital,” Flowers said. “Besides the hemorrhage, there’ll be infection.”

  “I scrubbed the arm with soap and then with alcohol,” she said. “I sterilized the knife in the lamp flame and scorched the bandage over the lamp chimney.”