The Immortals Page 14

  Her fingers looked blistered. “You were lucky,” he said coldly. “Next time someone will die.”

  She turned her face toward his voice. Flowers found the movement strangely appealing. “What can you do when they need you?”

  It was too much like a physician’s response to the world’s plea for help. A doctor had the right to respond to the plea; she didn’t. He turned brusquely back to Shoemaker and began stripping away the instruments and stowing them in his bag. “I’ll have to carry him down to the ambulance. Can you carry the bag for me to light the way?”

  “You mustn’t take him. He hasn’t kept up payments on his contract. You know what they’ll do.”

  Flowers stopped in the act of snapping the bag shut. “If he’s a defaulter . . .” he began, his voice trembling on the verge of fury.

  “What would you do,” she asked quietly, “if you were dying and alone? Wouldn’t you call for help? Any help? Would you stop to weigh legalities? He had a contract once, and the payments ruined him, cost him his home in the country, drove him here to the sustenance life. But when he was sick, he turned to his old faith, as a dying Catholic calls for his priest.”

  Flowers recoiled from the comparison. “And he deprived several people of vital, lawful attention. The chances are he traded his life for that of someone else. That’s why the laws were passed. Those who pay for medical treatment shouldn’t be penalized by those who can’t—or won’t, which is usually the case. If Shoemaker can’t pay, he ought to be repossessed.” He stooped toward the old man.

  She pulled him back with surprising strength and slipped between them, bent backward, one arm thrown back protectively toward Shoemaker. Her eyes were cloudy embers in the lamplight. “Surely you’ve got enough blood, enough organs. They’ll kill him.”

  “There’s never enough,” Flowers said. “And there’s research, after that.” He put an impatient hand on her shoulder to push her aside. Under the dress material, the flesh felt warm and soft. “You must be an Antiviv.”

  “I am, but that’s only part of it. I’m asking for him, because he’s worth saving. Are you so inflexible, so perfect, that you can’t—forget?”

  He stopped pushing, looked down at his hand for a moment, and let it drop. He refused to fight with the girl for the man’s body.

  “All right,” he said.

  He picked up the black bag with a snap that locked it shut and started toward the door.

  “Wait!” she said.

  He looked back at her as she moved toward him blindly, her hand outstretched until her fingers touched the arm of his coat. “I want to thank you,” she said gently. “I thought there wasn’t any mercy left in the medical profession.”

  For a moment his viscera felt cold, anesthetized, and then the icy feeling melted in a surge of anger. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said brutally, shrugging her hand away. “I’m going to turn in his name to the Agency. I’m going to report you, too. That’s my duty.”

  Her hand fell to her side in a gesture of apology, for her own mistake and perhaps also for humanity itself. “We do what we must.”

  She moved forward past him, unbolted the door, and turned toward him, her back against the door. “I don’t think you’re as hard as you pretend to be.”

  That stopped him. He wasn’t hard. He resented the implication that he was, that medics in general were incapable of understanding, were devoid of sympathy.

  Those who must live in the midst of sickness and death, upon whose skill and judgment rest health and life and their concomitant, happiness, can’t be touched by the drama, the poignancy, the human values of every situation. It would be unendurable.

  “There’s an old man downstairs who needs help,” she said hesitantly. “Would you see him?”

  “Out of the question,” he answered sharply.

  Her head lifted for a moment. That was pride, he thought. Then she nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  The light was dangerous, she said, and offered to lead him. Her hand was warm and firm and confident. Three-quarters of the way down there was a landing, where the stairs turned left. A door opened in the darkness to the right of the landing.

  Flowers tore his hand loose and stuck it into his coat pocket onto the solid reassurance of the needle gun.

  Glimmering whitely in the dark rectangle of the door was a ghost of a face. “Leah?” it said. It was a girl’s voice. “I thought it was you. Give me your hand. Let me hold it for a moment. I thought I would never get through the night. . . .”

  “There now,” said Leah. She put out a hand toward the face. “You’re going to be all right. Don’t let yourself believe anything else.”

  Flowers snapped on the light of the black bag. It hit the girl in the doorway like a blow; she recoiled, moaning, her arm over her eyes.

  Flowers turned the light off—he had seen enough. The girl, in her thin, mended nightdress, was a bundle of bones wrapped tautly in pale skin. Except for two feverish spots of color in her cheeks, her face was dead-white.

  She was dying of tuberculosis.

  Tuberculosis. The white plague. It had made a new assault on humanity a century ago, when the old bacilli had developed immunity to the drugs that had once threatened to wipe it out. But today! Why do they do it!

  “Go up and stay with Phil,” Leah said. “He needs you. He’s had a stroke, but he’s better now.”

  “All right, Leah,” the girl said. Her voice seemed stronger, more confident. She slipped past them silently and climbed the stairs.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Flowers’s voice was strained and puzzled. “Tuberculosis is no problem. We have narrow-band antibiotics that can cure it easily. Why do they let themselves die?”

  She stopped in front of the worm-eaten plywood partition and raised her face toward him. “Because it’s cheaper. It’s all they can afford.”

  “Cheaper to die?” Flowers exclaimed incredulously. “What kind of economy is that?”

  “The only kind of economy they know. The only kind the hospitals will let them practice. You’ve made good health too expensive. A few months of bed rest,” she said wearily, “a hundred grams of neo-dihydrostreptomycin, a thousand grams of PAS, perhaps some collapsed-lung therapy, some rib resections. That girl has never seen more than fifty dollars all at once. If she lived to be a hundred she couldn’t save half the money necessary for the treatment. She’s got children to support. She can’t stop working for a day, much less for months—”

  “There are clinical contracts,” Flowers said impatiently.

  “They don’t cover the kind of treatment she needs,” Leah said wistfully. A door opened behind her. “Good night, Medic.” Then she was gone.

  At the door he turned back impetuously, words pouring to his lips: If there isn’t enough to go around, who are you going to treat—the indigent or the prosperous, the wasters or the savers, the bottomless pits or those who can finance the future, more medicine, more health for everyone?

  But the words died on his lips. The panel in the partition had come ajar. In the room behind it was a battered old aluminum chaise lounge—Twentieth Century Modern. An old man was propped upright in it, so straight and still that Flowers thought for a moment the man was dead. He was a very old man. Flowers thought that he had never seen a man as old, although geriatrics was one of the Medical Center’s leading specialties. His hair was pure white and thick; his face was seamed, like old leather, the flesh sagging away from the strong facial bones.

  Beside the chair Leah had sunk to her knees. She had one of the bony hands in hers, pressed to her cheek, her eyelids closed over their clouded corneas.

  Flowers found himself standing in the doorway, the panel swinging noiselessly away from him. There was something familiar about that old face, something he couldn’t place, pin down. As he was thinking about it, he noticed with a shock that the old man’s eyes had opened. It was like a return from the dead. The old eyes had life in them, faded brown though they were, and th
e wrinkled old skin seemed to smooth and grow firm. The body warmed and grew strong as the face smiled gently.

  “Come in, Medic,” the old man whispered.

  Leah’s face came up, her sightless eyes open; she turned toward him. She smiled, too. It was a warming thing, like sunlight.

  “You came back to help,” Leah said.

  Flowers shook his head slowly and then remembered that she couldn’t see. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  “There’s nothing anyone can do,” the old man whispered. “Even without your gadgets, Medic, you know what’s wrong with me. You can’t mend a whole body, not with all your skill and all your fancy instruments. The body wears out. With most of us it happens part by part. With a few it goes all at once.

  “You could give me a new heart from some unfortunate defaulter, but my arteries would still be thickened with arteriosclerosis. And if, somehow, you replaced those without killing me, I would still have a fibrotic liver, scarred lungs, senile ductless glands, probably a few carcinomas. And even if you gave me a new body, you still couldn’t help me, because down deep, where your knives can’t reach and your instruments can’t measure, is the me that is old beyond repair.”

  When Leah turned her face back toward Flowers, he was shocked to see tears trickling from the blind eyes. “Can’t you do something?” Her voice broke. “Aren’t you good for anything?”

  “Leah!” Even the old man’s whisper was reproof.

  “It leaves a permanent recording in the ambulance library,” Flowers explained reasonably. “I can’t afford that; neither can you.”

  She pressed her forehead fiercely against the back of the old man’s hand. “I can’t stand it, Russ. I can’t bear to lose you.”

  “Tears are wasted on a man who has outlived his generation,” Russ said, “and almost his own era.” He smiled at Flowers; it was almost a benediction. “I’m one hundred and twenty-five years old.” He drew his hand gently from Leah’s firm young hands and folded his across his lap. They lay there as if they no longer belonged to him. “That’s a long time.”

  Leah stood up angrily. “There must be something you can do—with all your magnificent knowledge, all the expensive gadgets we bought you!”

  “There’s the elixir,” he said thoughtlessly.

  Russ smiled again, reminiscently perhaps. “Ah, yes—the elixir. I had almost forgotten. Elixir vitae.”

  “Would it help?” Leah demanded.

  “No,” Flowers said firmly.

  He had said too much already. Laymen weren’t equipped for medical information; it confused them; it blurred the medical picture. What patients needed more than anything else was not an understanding of their conditions but implicit faith in their doctors. When every treatment is familiar, none is effective. It is better for medicine to be magical than to be commonplace.

  Besides, the elixir was still only a laboratory phenomenon. Perhaps it would never be more than that. The stuff was a synthesis of a rare blood protein—a gamma globulin—which had been discovered in the bloodstreams of no more than a handful of persons in the whole world. This protein, this immunity factor, seemed to pass on its immunity as if death itself were a disease. . . .

  “A tremendously complicated process,” he said. “Prohibitively expensive.” He turned accusingly toward Russ. “I can’t understand why you didn’t have new corneas grafted onto her eyes.”

  “I couldn’t take the sight of anyone else,” Leah said softly, reproachfully.

  “There’s accidental deaths,” Flowers pointed out.

  “How can the recipient be sure?”

  “Don’t you want her to see?” Flowers demanded of Russ.

  “If wanting were enough,” the old man whispered, “she would have had my eyes many years ago. But there’s the expense, my boy. It all comes back to that.”

  “Stupidity!” Flowers turned to leave.

  “Wait, boy,” Russ whispered. “Come here a moment.”

  Flowers turned and walked to the old man’s chair; he looked down at Leah and back to Russ. The old man held out his hand, palm up. Automatically Flowers put out his hand to meet it, let his hand rest upon it. As the hands met, Flowers felt a curious sensation, almost electrical, as if something had stimulated a nerve into sending a message up his arm to his brain and carrying an answer back.

  Russ’s hand dropped back limply. He lowered his head wearily against the back of the chaise lounge, his eyes closed. “A good man, Leah, troubled but sincere. We might do worse.”

  “No,” Leah said firmly, “he must not come here again. It wouldn’t be wise.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Flowers said. He wouldn’t be back; he hadn’t felt like this since he was a little boy listening to his father tell him about medicine.

  “Some empty time,” Russ said distantly, “you might think of this, a conclusion I reached many years ago: There can be too many doctors and not enough healers.”

  Leah rose gracefully from the floor. “I’ll see you to the door.”

  Her unconscious use of the phrase brought pity chokingly into Flowers’s throat. It was a tragedy because she was beautiful—he thought of her now as beautiful—and peacefully beautiful inside. Reporting her was going to be painful.

  He wondered how his hand had felt to her: hot, sweaty, nervous? How had he seemed to her?

  He paused at the outside door. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help your grandfather.”

  “He’s not my grandfather—he’s my father. I was born the year he was one hundred. He wasn’t old then. He was middle-aged, everyone thought. It’s only these last few months he’s grown old. I think it’s a surrender we make when we grow very tired.”

  “How do you live—with him sick, and—”

  “And me blind? People are generous.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re grateful, I suppose. For the times when we can help them. I collect old remedies from grandmothers and make them up; I brew ptisans; I’m a midwife when I’m needed; I sit up with the sick, help those I can, and bury those I can’t. You can report this, too, if you wish.”

  “I see,” Flowers said, turning away and swinging back, irresolute. “Your father—I’ve seen him somewhere. What’s his name?”

  “He lost it more than fifty years ago. Here in the city, people call him healer.” She held out her hand toward him. Flowers took it reluctantly. This was the end of it. The hand was warm; his hand remembered the warmth. It would be a good hand to hold if you were sick.

  “Goodbye, Medic,” she said. “I like you. You’re human. So few of them are. But don’t come back. It wouldn’t be good for any of us.”

  Flowers cleared his throat noisily. “I said I wouldn’t,” he said; even to him it sounded petulant and childish. “Goodbye.”

  She stood in the doorway as he turned, shifted the bag into his right hand, and picked his way down the porch stairs. It was a good bag, and it felt solid in his hand. It was on semipermanent loan from the Center. Against its black side were two words imprinted in gold: BENJ. FLOWERS. Someday there would be two more letters added: M.D.

  A few months more and he would have earned them; he would buy the bag, make a down payment on his library, pass the state examination. He would have a license from the state to practice medicine upon the bodies of its citizens. He would be a doctor.

  For the first time since he could remember, the prospect didn’t excite him.

  A man was lying almost under the front wheel of the ambulance. Beside him, on the broken pavement, was a crowbar. Flowers rolled the man over. His eyes were closed, but he was breathing easily. He had got too close and the supersonics had knocked him out.

  He should call the police about this, too, but he felt too tired for another battle with the police.

  He pulled the body out of the path of the wheels and opened the ambulance door. There was a whisper of movement behind him.

  “Medic!” Leah screamed. Her voice was distant and frightened.

  Flowers sta
rted to turn, but it was too late. The night came down and covered him.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes to darkness, and the thought was instantaneous: This is what it is to be blind. This is what Leah knows always.

  His head throbbed. There was an egg-sized lump on the back of it, where someone had hit him. The hair was matted with dried blood. He winced as his fingers explored the depth of the cut, but it wasn’t too bad. He decided that there was no concussion.

  He didn’t feel blind. Probably there was no light.

  He had a faded, uncertain memory—as of something lost in childhood mists—of a wild ride through city streets; of a heavy door that swung upward, clanging; of an entrance into a place cavernous, musty, echoing; of being carried—on what? the ambulance stretcher?—up a short flight of stairs, through something awkward, up more steps, down dark halls, and being lowered to the floor.

  Someone had said something. “He’s coming around. Shall I tap him again?”

  “Never mind. Just roll him out until we need him. He won’t go anywhere.”

  Thump! Blackness again.

  * * *

  Concrete was under him, cold and hard. He got to his feet, feeling shaky, aching all over, not just his head. He took a cautious step forward, and another, holding one hand straight out in front, fingers extended, the other arm curled protectively over his face.

  At the fifth step his fingers touched a vertical surface. Concrete again. A wall. He turned and moved along the wall to a corner and along a second wall that was shorter and had a door in it. The door was solid metal; it had a handle, but the handle wouldn’t turn. The other walls were unbroken. When he had finished the circuit, he had a mental picture of a windowless room about fifteen feet long by nine feet wide.

  He sat down and rested.

  Somebody had booby-trapped him, knocked him out, brought him to this concrete box, locked him in.

  It could have been only one person. The man he had pulled from under the wheel. He had crept in close to the ambulance, so slowly that the detectors hadn’t reacted. When Flowers had come, they had clicked off, and the man had been released to club him. A crowbar might make a wound like that.