The Immortals Page 16

  “City Hall,” said the sergeant. “Come on.”

  “What am I doing in City Hall? I’m not going anywhere until you answer my questions.”

  “Hear that, Dan? He ain’t going anywhere. Ain’t that the truth? Go tell Coke we’re here.”

  The other officer, big and sullen-faced, slipped through a pair of glass doors at the other end of the hall. The sergeant grinned and ostentatiously adjusted a pistol in the holster at his side.

  That one, Flowers thought with a shudder, wouldn’t be loaded with anesthetic slivers. “You’ve got no right to keep me here against my will.”

  “Who’s keeping you here against your will?” the sergeant asked, surprised. “You want to leave? Go. Of course, you gotta be careful about little accidents on the way, like tripping on the stairs. It’s a long way down.”

  This degradation of the police power of the city paralyzed Flower’s will.

  The wizened little man who came back with Dan peered at Flowers speculatively. “He’s just a medic,” he said petulantly, his bruised mouth curving down in disappointment.

  “You expect us to be choosy?” the sergeant complained.

  “Well,” Coke said timidly, “I hope it’s all right. Follow me.” He motioned to Flowers.

  The medic compressed his lips defiantly. “No!”

  The sergeant’s hand moved in a blur of speed. It hit Flowers’s face, palm open, with a solid, meaty sound. The room reeled; Flowers’s knees buckled. Anger burst over him redly, and he straightened, his arms ready for battle.

  Dan stepped forward, grinning, and kicked him in the groin.

  The pain blurred everything as Flowers lay curled on the floor, trying to get his breath. Gradually the pain ebbed, and his muscles relaxed enough to let his legs fall away from his belly. Flowers forced himself to his knees on the cold marble floor and struggled up. He found the sergeant’s arm around him, helping him stand.

  “There now,” the officer said casually, “we’re going to be sensible, aren’t we?”

  Flowers gritted his teeth and did not groan. He let himself be led through swinging glass doors into a large room bisected by a long, darkly polished counter. Against the right wall was a bench. On the bench was a thin, weasel-faced man.

  The weasel face smirked at Flowers. Thyroid, Flowers thought dazedly. The shover. Free. Laughing. While he was held by the police, in agony.

  By the time they reached the heavy walnut door in the right wall, Flowers could walk without crippling pain. “Where are we going?” he got out between clenched teeth.

  “The Boss needs a doctor,” Coke said, trotting past him to open the door. Beyond was darkness. “It’s about time he should wake up.”

  The Boss? “Who’s he?”

  The gray little man stared at him incredulously. “John Bone!”

  “Coke!” screamed a voice thinned with pain. “Coke! Where are you?”

  “Here, Boss!” Coke said in a frightened voice. “Here with a medic!”

  He scurried across the room to draw curtains away from tall windows. The smog-smeared light crept across the floor, onto the wide bed with its tumbled covers. A man was sitting upright among them. He was cadaverously thin, his face a blade, his arms and legs mere sticks.

  “A medic!” he screamed. “Who wants a medic? I’m dying. I need a doctor!”

  “This is all we could get,” Coke said as if he had been born cringing.

  “Oh, all right,” Bone said. “He’ll have to do.” He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and fitted them into baby-blue mules. “Come on, Medic. Treat me!”

  “Where’s your contract?” Flowers asked.

  “Contract!” Bone screamed. “Who’s got a contract? If I had a contract, do you think I’d be hijacking medics?”

  “No contract, no treatment.”

  The hand hit him on the back of the neck like a club. Flowers sagged and almost fell. Distantly he heard his own voice saying, “That won’t do any good.”

  When the blackness went away, he was sitting in a chair near the bed. He turned his head painfully. The policemen were standing behind him, one on each side. In the doorway the shover was lurking, watching eagerly. Coke was in front of him. Pacing back and forth between the chair and the window was Bone, his mules clacking against the marble floor and then clumping on the thick carpeting.

  “I want treatment, Medic! Can’t you see I’m dying?”

  “We’re all dying,” Flowers said.

  Bone stopped and stared fiercely at Flowers. “Sure. But some of us can put it off longer if we’re smart. I’m smart. I want treatment. I can pay. Why shouldn’t I have treatment? Why should I be discriminated against? You think nobody ever got treatment who wasn’t entitled to it?”

  “The only thing I know is that there are ethical standards and I’m bound to them. What difference does it make?” Flowers said defiantly. “You don’t need a doctor; you need a psychiatrist. The only disease you’ve got is hypochondria. Everybody knows that.”

  Bone turned to stare at Flowers with dark unreadable eyes. “So,” he said softly. “A hypochondriac, am I? I am not dying, eh? Who is to say? These pains in my belly, they are imaginary? My head is sick? Well, maybe. Come here. I want to show you something.”

  Flowers didn’t move quickly enough. A rough hand shoved him out of the chair, propelled him across the room. He stopped beside Bone in front of one of the tall windows. The dawn had come in earnest, and the city lay beneath them, gilded by the sun, the signs of decay hidden.

  “Look!” Bone said, encompassing the city within the sweep of his arm. “My city! I am the last of a dying breed, the political boss. After me, the deluge. There will be no more city. It will fall apart. Isn’t that a sad thing?”

  Flowers looked at the city, knowing its ruins, and thought it would be a very good thing if it were all destroyed by fire or flood, wiped off the earth just as medicine had wiped out smallpox, diphtheria, malaria, and a hundred other infectious diseases—only in a different way, of course.

  “The City,” Bone mused. “It is a strange thing. It has a life of its own, a personality, emotions. I woo her. I rage at her, I beat her. But underneath it all there is love. She is dying, and there is no medicine to save her.” There were real tears in Bone’s eyes.

  “I can’t help her,” Bone said softly, beating his fist gently against the paneled wall beside the window. “I can only weep. What has killed her? That cancer there upon the hill! The doctors have killed her. Medicine has killed her.”

  Flowers looked where the skeletal finger pointed, toward the hill rising like an island of sunlight out of a sea of night. The reddish, slanting rays gleamed on the stout walls and sky-reaching towers of Hospital Hill.

  “You killed it,” Bone said, “with your talk of carcinogens and urban perils. ‘Get out of the city!’ you said, and wealth left, moved into the country, built its automatic factories, and left us bloodless, cancer eating at our veins. And inside, the hospitals grew, gobbling block after block, taking a quarter of the city off the tax rolls and then a third. Medicine killed her.”

  “All medicine did was present the facts and let the public act upon them as it saw fit,” Flowers said stiffly.

  Bone beat at his forehead with the side of a fist. “You’re right, you’re right. We did it ourselves. I wanted you to see that. We gave ourselves into the hands of the physicians, saying, ‘Save us! Make us live!’ And you did not ask, ‘How live? Why?’

  “ ‘Take these pills,’ you said, and we swallowed them. ‘You need X rays,’ you said, ‘and radioactive iodine and antibiotics and specifics for this and that,’ and we took them with our tonics and our vitamins.” His voice dropped into a chant. “Give us this day our daily vitamins. . . . ‘With microsurgery we can give you another year of life,’ you said; ‘with blood banks, another six months; with organ and artery banks, a month, a week.’ We forced them on you because we were afraid to die. What do you call this morbid fear of disease and death? Give it a
name: hypochondria!

  “Call me a hypochondriac,” Bone went on, “and you are only saying that I am a product of my environment. More intimately than you, than anyone, I am connected to my city. We are dying together, society and I, and we will die crying out to you, ‘Save us! Save us or we die!’ ”

  “I can’t do anything,” Flowers insisted. “Can’t you understand that?”

  Bone took it with surprising calm as he turned his dark eyes toward Flowers. “Oh, you will,” he said, offhandedly. “You think now that you won’t, but there will come a time when the flesh conquers, when it screams that it can endure no more, when the nerves will grow weary of pain and the will agonized with waiting, and you will treat me.”

  He studied Flowers casually, from head slowly toward the feet. His eyes grew bright. Flowers thought he would not look, but he couldn’t resist. He glanced down. His jacket had come open. Below its immaculate whiteness was the button-and-spool of the belt buckle. Bone reached curiously toward the buckle. Before Flowers’s tension could achieve action, his arms were caught from behind, pinned back.

  “A spool,” Bone said, “and something on it.” With an experienced finger, he punched the button for Rewind and then Playback. As the voices came disembodied into the room, he leaned back against the paneled wall, listening with a thin, speculative smile on his pale lips. When it ended, his smile broadened lazily. “Pick up the girl and the old man. I think they might be useful.”

  Flowers understood him instantly. “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “They mean nothing to me. I don’t care what happens to them.”

  “Then why protest?” Bone asked blandly. He turned his eyes toward the police officers. “Keep him close. In the broken elevator, there’s an idea.”

  A minute later big brass doors clanged behind Flowers, and he was in darkness again.

  But this was darkness with a difference. This was night gingerly supported above a pit of nothingness. It gave him a prickling, swelling feeling of terror. . . .

  He found himself trembling in front of the doors, hammering against them with futile, aching fists, screaming. . . .

  He forced himself to sit down in a corner of the car. He forced himself to forget that it was a car, hanging broken over a void. There was no escape.

  He remembered punching the old buttons of the control panel. In his frenzy he had torn off a fingernail trying to pry the door open.

  He found the black bag that, like the faithful physician he hoped to become, he had never relinquished and flipped on the light. He rummaged for a bandage, pressed it across the finger where the nail had been.

  Then he sat in the dark. It was uncomfortable; he didn’t like it. But it was better to sit in darkness with the knowledge of light available if it was needed than to be without any chance of light at all.

  Two hours later the doors swung open, and Leah was thrust between them. His watch told him the time; otherwise he would not have believed that a day had not passed.

  The girl staggered as the doors closed and Flowers was as blind as she. He sprang to his feet, though, caught her before she fell, and held her tightly. She fought against him, twisting in his arms, lashing out wildly with her arms and feet.

  “It’s me,” Flowers said repeatedly, “the medic.” When she stopped struggling, Flowers started to release her, but she stiffened, clutched at his arm, and held herself, trembling against him.

  Holding her was a curious sensation for Flowers. Putting his arms around her was a comforting thing, not professional, skillful, or impersonal like his medical skill. This was clumsy; it offered part of himself.

  “Where are we?” she whispered.

  “A broken elevator car in City Hall,” he said huskily. “John Bone.”

  “What does Bone want?” she asked. Her voice was almost steady; it made him feel stronger, abler, listening to it.

  “Treatment.”

  “And you won’t.” It was a statement. “You’re consistent, anyway. I reported your kidnapping to Medical Center. Maybe they’ll help.”

  Hope flamed up, but reality put it out. Center would have no way of locating him, and they wouldn’t tear apart the city for one minor medic. He was on his own.

  “Did Bone get your father, too?”

  “No,” Leah said evenly. “The Agency got him. They saw Russ when they came about the kidnapping. One of them recognized him. They took him in.”

  “That’s fantastic!” Flowers exclaimed incredulously. “But where did they take him?”

  “The Experimental Ward.”

  “Not Doctor Pearce!”

  “You remember now who he was. So did they. They used his old, reciprocal contract as an excuse because the terminating date was set arbitrarily at one hundred. Doctors didn’t used to live that long. I guess they still don’t.”

  “But he’s famous!”

  “That’s why they want him; he knows too much, and too many people remember him. They’re afraid the Antivivisection Party will get hold of him and use him against the Profession in some way. They’ve been looking for him thirty years now—ever since he walked out of the hospital and went into the city and never came out.”

  “I remember now,” Flowers said. “It was like Ambrose Bierce, they said. He was lecturing to a class—on hematology, I think—and he stopped in the middle of a sentence, and he said, ‘Gentlemen, we have gone too far; it is time to retrace our steps and discover where we went astray.’ Then he walked out of the classroom and out of the hospital, and no one ever saw him again. No one ever knew what he meant.”

  “Those days are forgotten. He never talks—talked about them. I thought the hiding was over. I thought they had finally given him up. . . . Why does John Bone want me?”

  “He hopes he can force me to treat him—by—”

  “Threatening me? Did you laugh at him?”

  “No. No, I didn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Maybe I didn’t think fast enough.”

  Slowly Leah pulled her hand away, and they sat silently in the darkness. Flowers’s thoughts were painful; he could scarcely bear to consider them.

  “I’m going to look at your eyes,” he said suddenly.

  He got out his ophthalmoscope and leaned toward the girl, focusing the spot of light on the clouded cornea. She sat still, let him pull up her eyelids, pull down the soft skin of her cheek. He nodded slowly to himself and put the instrument away.

  “Is there any hope, Doctor?” she asked.

  He lied. “No,” he said.

  It was unethical; it gave him a queer, dizzy feeling, as if he had thrown mud at the hospital wall, but it was mixed with a strange feeling of elation. It was mercy. Of course she could see—if she had an operation costing several thousand dollars more than she would ever have. It was mercy to kill that hope quickly and finally.

  Maybe it wasn’t ethical, but he’d just begun to realize there were times when a doctor must treat the patient and not the disease. In spite of what the professors said. Each patient was an individual with his own problems and his own treatment, and only part of both were medical.

  “I don’t understand,” he said abruptly, “why the people let John Bone continue here with his corruption and his graft and his violence.”

  “That is only one side, and a side few people see. To most of them he is the patron—or, in longer translation, the one who does things for us. What are you going to do about him?”

  “Treat him,” Flowers said quietly. “There’s no point in being quixotic about this.”

  “But, Medic—” she began.

  “Ben,” he said. “Ben Flowers. I don’t want to talk about it. Someone might be listening.”

  After that there was more silence than talking, but it was a warm sort of silence, warmer perhaps than speech, and her hand came creeping back into his.

  When the policeman opened the door, it was night again. Flowers had only a glimpse of the hall before they were hustled in to see Bone in the dark-paneled ro
om. The political boss had a warm red robe wrapped around his body, but he still looked chilled.

  Bone watched Flowers’s eyes studying the room, and he said, “This used to be the city manager’s office. The mayor’s office is on the other side. I use that one for business, this one for pleasure, although there isn’t much business anymore—or pleasure, either, for that matter. So this is the girl. Blind. I should have known that. Well, Medic, what is it to be?”

  Flowers shrugged. “I’ll treat you, of course.”

  Bone rubbed his thin hands together with a dry, sandpaper sound. “Good, good.” Suddenly he stopped and smiled. “But how can I be sure that you will treat me properly? Maybe we should show the medic what my lack of treatment will mean to the girl?”

  “That isn’t necessary,” Flowers said quickly. “I’m not a fool. You’re filming this. After I treat you, you’ll use it as blackmail to get future treatment. If you aren’t satisfied, you can turn it over to the county society. Besides,”—his voice deepened suddenly, surprisingly—“touch the girl, and I won’t lift a finger to save your life!”

  The light in Bone’s eyes might have been admiration. “I like you, Medic,” he said. “Throw in with me. We’d make a pair.”

  “No, thanks,” Flowers said scornfully.

  “Think it over. Let me know if you change your mind,” Bone said. “But let’s get down to business.” His voice was eager.

  “Have the ambulance motor started,” Flowers said.

  Bone nodded at the sergeant. “Do it!”

  They waited, the four of them, stiff with a watchful uncertainty. When the depths of the bag glowed dimly, Flowers began fastening the instruments to Bone’s emaciated body. Where’s Coke? he wondered.

  He read the diagnosis, removed the instruments, and slowly stowed them away. Thoughtfully he explored the pockets of the bag.

  “What is it?” Bone asked anxiously. “Tell me what’s wrong!”

  Flowers’s face was sober. “It’s nothing to be concerned about,” he said, trying to hide his concern, but failing. “You need a tonic. You’re taking vitamins already, I’m sure. Double the dose.” He pulled out a bottle of pink pills. “Here’s some barbiturate-amphetamine pills to put you to sleep at night and wake you up in the morning. And here’s some extra ones.” He handed Bone a second bottle; in it the pills were round, flat, and green. “Take one of these three times a day.”