JAMES E. GUNN

James E. Gunn is a young and talented Midwest writer whose greatest joy is to look over the prairies and lakes of his home state and imagine them torn under the tragedies that tomorrow may bring. It isn’t that he loves Kansas the less; it is just that he knows it so well—well enough to imagine it ruled by as strange a monarch as any story ever owned and yet to remain pure Kansas all the same. To meet this ruler, and to enjoy one of the finest short novels in recent science fiction, you have only to read-

THE IMMORTALS

The first patient was a young woman—an attractive enough creature, with blond hair worn long around her shoulders and a ripe body—if you could forgive the dirt and the odor.

Dr. Harry Elliott refrained from averting his nose. It would do no good. He was a physician with a sacred trust —even though (or perhaps especially because) he was only eighteen years old. Even a citizen was entitled to his care— even a citizen, without a chance at immortality, without even the prospect of a reprieve!

He looked her over thoughtfully. There was very little of interest in her case, no matter what disgusting ailment she might possess. The interesting areas of medicine—the research, say, that might synthesize the elixir of immortality —they had nothing to do with citizens or clinics. Harry Elliott’s greatest interest in the clinic was in getting done with it. Once his residency was complete, then research loomed ahead.

“Hello, doc-tor,” she said cheerfully. He muttered something, it didn’t matter what. Outside in the waiting room there were fifty like her. In the halls beyond, where the Blood Bank was handing out its $5 bills for guaranteed germ-ridden citizen blood, there were hundreds more. Well, they were essential; he had to remember that. The blood they sold so cheerfully for five dollars (which instantly they took and ran with to some shover of illicit antibiotics and nostrums) was a great pool of immunities. Out of filth came health. It was a great lesson, and one which young Harry Elliott tried to keep in mind.

“I don’t feel good, Doc-tor,” she said sadly. “I’m always tired, like.”

He grunted and resisted an impulse to have her disrobe. Not because of any danger involved—what was a citizen’s chastity? A mythical thing like the unicorn. Besides, they expected it. From the stories the other doctors told, he thought they must come to the clinic for that purpose. But there was no use tempting himself. He would feel unclean for days.

She babbled as they always did. She had sinned against nature. She had not been getting enough sleep. She had not been taking her vitamins regularly. She had bought illicit terramycin from a shover for a kidney infection. It was all predictable and boring.

“I see,” he kept muttering. And then, “I’m going to take a diagnosis now. Don’t be frightened.”

He switched on the diagnostic machine. A sphygmomanometer crept up snakelike from beneath the Freudian couch and squeezed her arm. A mouthpiece inserted itself between her lips. A stethoscope kissed her breast. A skull cap cupped her head. Metal caps pressed her fingertips. Bracelets caressed her ankles. A band embraced her hips. The machine punctured, sampled, counted, measured, listened, compared, correlated. . . .

In a moment it was over. Harry had his diagnosis. She was anemic; they all were. They couldn’t resist that five dollars.

“Married?” he asked.

“Nah?” she said hesitantly.

“Better not waste any time. You’re pregnant.”

“Prag-nant?” she repeated.

“You’re going to have a baby.”

A joyful light broke across her face. “Aw! Is that all! I thought maybe it was a too-more. A baby I can take care of nicely. Tell me, Doctor, will it be boy or girl?”

“A boy,” Harry said wearily. The slut! Why did it always irritate him so?

She got up from the couch with lithe, careless grace, “Thank you, Doctor. I will go tell Georgie. He will be angry for a little, but I know how to make him glad.”

There were others waiting in their consultation rooms, contemplating their symptoms. Harry checked the panel: a woman with pleurisy, a man with cancer, a child with rheumatic fever. . . . But Harry stepped out into the clinic to see if the girl dropped anything into the donation box as she passed. She didn’t. Instead she paused by the shover hawking his wares just outside the clinic door.

“Get your aureomycin here,” he chanted, “your penicillin, your terramycin. A hypodermic with every purchase. Good health! Good health! Stop those sniffles before they lay you low, low, low. Don’t let that infection cost you your job, your health, your life. Get your filters, your antiseptics, your vitamins. Get your amulets, your good luck charms. I have here a radium needle which has already saved thirteen lives. And here is an ampule of elixir vitae. Get your ilotycin here. . . .”

The girl bought an amulet and hurried off to Georgie. A lump of anger burned in Harry’s throat.

The throngs were still marching silently in the street. In the back of the clinic a woman was kneeling at the operating table. She took a vitamin pill and a paper cup of tonic from the dispensary.

Behind the walls the sirens started. Harry turned toward the doorway. The gate in the Medical Center wall rolled up.

First came the outriders on their motorcycles. The people in the street scattered to the walls on either side, leaving a lane down the center of the street. The outriders brushed carelessly close to them—healthy young squires, their nose filters in place, their goggled eyes haughty, their guns slung low on their hips.

That would have been something, Harry thought enviously, to have been a company policeman. There was a dash to them, a hint of violence. They were hell on wheels. And if they were one-tenth as successful with women as they were reputed to be, there was no woman—from citizen through technician and nurse up to their suburban peers—who was immune to them.

Well, let them have the glamor and the women. He had taken the safer and more certain route to immortality. Few company policemen made it.

After the outriders came an ambulance, its armored ports closed, its automatic 40-millimeter gun roaming restlessly for a target. More outriders covered the rear. Above the convoy a helicopter swooped low.

“Raid!” somebody screamed—too late.

Something glinted in the sunlight, became a line of small, round objects beneath the helicopter, dropping in an arc toward the street. One after another they broke with fragile, popping sounds. They moved forward through the convoy.

Like puppets when the puppeteer has released the strings, the outriders toppled to the street, skidding limply as their motorcycles slowed and stopped on their single wheels.

The ambulance could not stop. It rolled over one of the fallen outriders and crashed into a motorcycle, bulldozing it out of the way. The 40-millimeter gun had jerked erratically to fix its radar sight on the helicopter, but the plane was skimming the rooftops. Before the gun could get the range the plane was gone.

Harry smelled something sharply penetrating. His head felt swollen and light. The street tilted and then straightened.

In the midst of the crowd beyond the ambulance an arm swung up. Something dark sailed through the air and smashed against the top of the ambulance. Flames splashed across it. They dripped down the sides, ran into gun slits and observation ports, were drawn into the air intake.

A moment followed in which nothing happened. The scene was like a frozen tableau—the ambulance and the motorcycles balanced in the street, the outriders and some of the nearest citizens crumpled and twisted on the pavement, the citizens watching, the flames licking up toward greasy, black smoke.

Then the side door of the ambulance fell open.

A medic staggered out, clutching something in one hand, beating at flames on his white jacket with the other.

The citizens watched silently, not moving to help or hinder. From among them stepped a dark-haired man. His hand went up. It held something limp and dark. The hand came down against the medic’s head.

No sound came to Harry over the roar of the idling motorcycles and ambulance. The pantomime continued, and he was part of the frozen audience as the medic fell and the man stooped, patted out the flames with his bare hands, picked the object out of the medic’s hand, and looked at the ambulance door.

There was a girl standing there, Harry noticed. From this distance Harry could tell little more than that she was dark-haired and slender.

The flames on the ambulance had burned themselves out. The girl stood in the doorway, not moving. The man beside the fallen medic looked at her, started to hold out a hand, and, letting it drop, turned and faded back into the crowd.

Less than two minutes had passed since the sirens began.

Silently the citizens pressed forward. The girl turned and went back into the ambulance. The citizens stripped the outriders of their clothing and weapons, looted the ambulance of its black bag and medical supplies, picked up their fallen fellows, and disappeared.

It was like magic. One moment the street was full of them. The next moment they were gone. The street was empty of life.

Behind the Medical Center walls the sirens began again.

It was like a release. Harry began running down the street, his throat swelling with wordless shouts.

Out of the ambulance came a young boy. He was slim and small—no more than seven. He had blond hair, cut very short, and dark eyes in a tanned face. He wore a ragged T-shirt that once might have been white and a pair of blue jeans cut off above the knees.

He reached an arm back into the ambulance. A yellowed claw came out to meet it and then an arm. The arm was a gnarled stick encircled with ropy blue veins like lianas. Attached to it was a man on stiff, stiltlike legs. He was very old. His hair was thin, white silk. His scalp and face were wrinkled parchment. A tattered tunic fell from bony shoulders, around his permanently bent back, and was caught in folds around his loins.

The boy led the old man slowly and carefully into the ruined street, because the old man was blind, his eyelids flat and dark over empty sockets. The old man bent painfully over the fallen medic. His fingers explored the medic’s skull. Then he moved to the outrider who had been run over by the ambulance. The man’s chest was crushed; a pink froth edged his lips as punctured lungs gasped for breath.

He was as good as dead. Medical science could do nothing for injuries that severe, that extensive.

Harry reached the old man, grabbed him by one bony shoulder. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The old man didn’t move. He held to the outrider’s hand for a moment and then creaked to his feet. “Healing,” he answered in a voice like the whisper of sandpaper.

“That man’s dying,” Harry said.

“So are we all,” said the old man.

Harry glanced down at the outrider. Was he breathing easier or was that illusion?

It was then the stretcher bearers reached them.

* * * *

Harry had a difficult time finding the Dean’s office. The Medical Center covered hundreds of city blocks, and it had grown under a strange stimulus of its own. No one had ever planned for it to be so big, but it had sprouted an arm here when demand for medical care and research outgrew the space available, a wing there, and arteries through and under and around.

He followed the glowing guidestick through the unmarked corridors, and tried to remember the way. But it was useless. He inserted the stick into the lock on the armored door. The door swallowed the stick and opened. As soon as Harry had entered, the door swung shut and locked.

He was in a bare anteroom. On a metal bench bolted to the floor along one wall sat the boy and the old man from the ambulance. The boy looked up at Harry curiously and then his gaze returned to his folded hands. The old man rested against the wall.

A little farther along the bench was a girl. She looked like the girl who had stood in the doorway of the ambulance, but she was smaller than he had thought and younger. Her face was pale. Only her blue eyes were vivid as they looked at him with a curious appeal and then faded. His gaze dropped to her figure; it was boyish and unformed, clad in a simple, brown dress belted at the waist. She was no more than twelve or thirteen, he thought

The reception box had to repeat the question twice: “Name?”

“Dr. Harry Elliott,” he said.

“Advance for confirmation.”

He went to the wall beside the far door and put his right hand against the plate set into it. A light flashed into his right eye, comparing retinal patterns.

“Deposit all metal objects in the receptacle,” the box said.

Harry hesitated and then pulled his stethoscope out of his jacket pocket, removed his watch, emptied his pants pockets of coins and pocket knife and hypospray.

Something clicked. “Nose filters,” the box said.

Harry put those into the receptacle, too. The girl was watching him, but when he looked at her, her eyes moved away. The door opened. He went through the doorway. The door closed behind him.

Dean Mock’s office was a magnificent room, twenty feet long and thirty feet wide, was decorated in a dark, mid-Victorian style. The furnishings all looked like real antiques, especially the yellow-oak rolltop desk and the mahogany instrument cabinet.

It looked rich and impressive. Personally, though, Harry preferred Twentieth Century Modern. Clean chromium-and-glass lines were esthetically pleasing; moreover, they were from the respectable first days of medical science—that period when mankind first began to realize that good health was not merely an accident, that it could be bought if men were willing to pay the price.

Harry had seen Dean Mock before, but never to speak to. His parents couldn’t understand that. They thought he was the peer of everyone in the Medical Center because he was a doctor. He kept telling them how big the place was, how many people it contained: 75,000—100,000—only the statisticians knew how many. It didn’t do any good; they still couldn’t understand. Harry had given up trying.

The Dean didn’t know Harry. He sat behind the rolltop desk in his white jacket and studied Harry’s record cast up on the frosted glass insert. He was good at it, but you couldn’t deceive a man who had studied like that for ten years in this Center alone.

The Dean’s black hair was thinning. He was almost eighty years old, of course. He didn’t look it. He came of good stock, and he had the best of medical care. He was good for another twenty years, Harry estimated, without longevity shots. By that time, surely, with his position and his accomplishments, he would be voted a reprieve.

Once, in the confusion when a bomb had exploded in the power room, some of the doctors had whispered in the safe darkness that Mock’s youthful appearance had a more reasonable explanation than heredity, but they were wrong. Harry had searched the lists, and Mock’s name wasn’t on them.

Mock looked up suddenly and caught Harry staring at him. Harry glanced away quickly but not before he had seen in Mock’s eyes a look of—what—fright? desperation?

Harry couldn’t understand it. The raid had been daring, this close to the Center walls, but nothing new. There had been raids before; there would be raids again. Any time something is valuable, lawless men will try to steal it. In Harry’s day it happened to be medicine.

Mock said abruptly, “Then you saw the man? You could recognize him if you saw him again or if you had a good solidograph?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said. Why was Mock making such a production out of it? He had already been over this with the head resident and the chief of the company police.

“Do you know Governor Weaver?” Mock asked.

“An Immortal!”

“No, no,” Mock said impatiently. “Do you know where he lives?”

“In the governor’s mansion. Forty miles from here, almost due west.”

“Yes, yes,” Mock said. “You’re going to carry a message to him. The shipment has been hijacked. Hijacked.” Mock had a nervous habit of repeating words. “It will be a week before another shipment is ready. A week. How we will get it to him I don’t know.” The last was muttered to himself.

Harry tried to make sense out of it. Carry a message to the governor? “Why don’t you call him?” he said, unthinking.

But the question only roused Mock out of his introspection. “The underground cables are cut! No use repairing them. Repair men get shot. And even if they’re fixed, they’re only cut again next night. Radio and television are jammed. Jammed. Get ready. You’ll have to hurry to get out the southwest gate before curfew.”

“Curfew is for citizens,” Harry said, uncomprehending. Was Mock going insane?

“Didn’t I tell you?” Mock passed the back of his hand across his forehead as if to clear away cobwebs. “You’re going alone, on foot, dressed as a citizen. A convoy would be cut to pieces. We’ve tried. We’ve been out of touch with the governor for three weeks. Three weeks! He must be getting impatient. Never make the governor impatient. It isn’t healthy.”

For the first time Harry really understood what the Dean was asking him to do. The governor! He had it in his power to cut half a lifetime off Harry’s search for immortality. “But my residency-”

Mock looked wise. “The governor can do you more good than a dozen boards. More good.”

Harry caught his lower lip between his teeth and counted off on his fingers. “I’ll need nose filters, a small medical kit, a gun-”

Mock was shaking his head. “None of those. Out of character. If you reach the governor’s mansion, it will be because you pass as a citizen, not because you defend yourself well or heal up your wounds afterward. And a day or two without filters won’t reduce your life expectancy appreciably. Well, Doctor? Will you get through?”

“As I hope for immortality!” Harry said earnestly.

“Good, good. One more thing. You must deliver the people you saw in the anteroom. The boy’s name is Christopher; the old man calls himself Pearce. He’s some kind of neighborhood leech. The governor has asked for him.”

“A leech?” Harry said incredulously.

Mock shrugged. His expression said that he considered the exclamation impertinent, but Harry could not restrain himself. “If we made an example of a few of these quacks-”

“The clinics would be more crowded than they are now. They serve a good purpose. Besides, what can we do? He doesn’t claim to be a physician. He calls himself a healer. He doesn’t drug, operate, advise, or manipulate. Sick people come to him and he touches them, touches them. Is that practicing medicine?”

Harry shook his head.

“If the sick people claim to be helped? Pearce claims nothing. He charges nothing. If the sick people are grateful, if they want to give him something, who is to stop them? Besides,” he muttered, frowning, “that outrider is going to live. Anyway, the Governor insists on seeing him.”

Harry sighed. “They’ll get away. I’ll have to sleep.”

Mock jeered, “A feeble old man and a boy?”

“The girl’s lively enough.”

“Marna?” Mock reached into a drawer and brought out a hinged silver circle. He tossed it to Harry. Harry caught it and looked at it.

“It’s a bracelet. Put it on.”

It looked like nothing more. Harry shrugged, slipped it over his wrist, and clamped it shut. It seemed too big for a moment, and then it tightened. His wrist tingled where it rested.

“It’s tuned to the one on the girl’s wrist, tuned. When the girl moves away from you, her wrist will tingle. The farther she goes, the more it will hurt. After a little she will come back. I’d put bracelets on the boy and the old man, but they only work in pairs. If someone tries to remove the bracelet forcibly the girl will die. Die. It links itself to the nervous system. The governor has the only key. You’ll tell him the girl is fertile.”

Harry stared at Mock. “What about this bracelet?”

“The same. That way it’s a warning device, too.”

Harry took a deep breath and looked down at his wrist. The silver gleamed now like a snake’s flat eyes.

“Why didn’t you have one on the medic?”

“We did. We had to amputate his arm to get it off.” Mock turned to his desk and started the microfilmed reports flipping past the window again. In a moment he looked up and seemed startled that Harry had not moved. “Still here? Get started. Wasted too much time now if you’re going to beat curfew.”

Harry turned and started toward the door through which he had come.

“One more thing,” Dean Mock said. “Watch out for ghouls, ghouls. And headhunters. Headhunters.”

* * * *

Shortly after they set out, Harry had evolved a method of progress for his little group that was mutually unsatisfactory.

“Hurry up,” he would say. “There’s only a few minutes left before curfew.”

The girl would look at him once and look away. Pearce, already moving more rapidly than Harry had any reason to expect, would say, “Patience. We’ll get there.”

None of them would speed up although it was vital to reach the City Gate before curfew. Harry would walk ahead rapidly, outdistancing the others. His wrist would begin to tingle, then to smart, to burn, and to hurt actively. The farther he left Marna behind, the worse the pain grew. Only the thought that her wrist felt just as bad sustained him.

After a little the pain would begin to ebb. He knew, then, without looking, that she had broken. When he would turn, she would be twenty feet behind him, no closer, willing to accept that much pain to keep from approaching him.

Then he would have to stop and wait for the old man. Once, she walked on past, but after a little she could stand the pain no more, and she returned. After that she stopped when he did.

It was a small triumph for Harry, but something to strengthen him when he started thinking about the deadly thing on his wrist and the peculiar state of the world in which the Medical Center had been out of touch with the governor’s mansion for three weeks, in which a convoy could not get through, in which a message had to be sent by a foot messenger.

Under other conditions, Harry might have thought Marna a lovely thing. She was slim and graceful, her skin was clear and unblemished, her features were regular and pleasing, and the contrast between her dark hair and her blue eyes was striking. But she was young and spiteful and linked to him by a hateful condition. They had been thrown together too intimately too soon and, besides! she was only a child.

They reached the City Gate with only a minute to spare.

On either side of them the chain link double fence stretched as far as Harry could see. There was no end to it, really. It completely encircled the town. At night it was electrified, and savage dogs roamed the space between the fences.

Somehow citizens still got out. They formed outlaw bands that attacked defenseless travelers. That would be one of the dangers.

The head guard at the gate was a dark-skinned, middle-aged squire. At sixty he had given up any hopes for immortality; he intended to get what he could out of this life. That included bullying his inferiors.

He looked at the blue, daylight-only pass and then at Harry. “Topeka? On foot.” He chuckled. It made his big belly shake until he had to cough. “If the ghouls don’t get you, the headhunters will. The bounty on heads is twenty dollars now. Outlaw heads only, but then heads don’t talk. Not if they’re detached from bodies. Of course, that’s what you’re figuring on doing—joining a wolf pack.” He spat on the sidewalk beside Harry’s foot.

Harry jerked back his foot in revulsion. The guard’s eyes brightened.

“Are you going to let us through?” Harry asked.

“Let you through?” Slowly the guard looked at his wrist-watch. “Can’t do that. Past curfew. See?”

Automatically Harry bent over to look. “But we got here before curfew--” he began. The guard’s fist hit him just above the left ear and sent Him spinning away.

“Get back in there and stay in there, you filthy citizens!” the guard shouted.

Harry’s hand went to his pocket where he kept the hypo-spray, but it was gone. Words that would blast the guard off his post and into oblivion trembled on his lips, but he didn’t dare utter them. He wasn’t Dr. Elliott any more, not until he reached the governor’s mansion. He was Harry Elliott, citizen, fair game for any man’s fist, who should consider himself lucky it was only a fist.

“Now,” the guard said suggestively, “if you were to leave the girl as security-” He coughed.

Marna shrank back. She touched Harry accidentally. It was the first time they had touched, in spite of a more intimate linkage that joined them in pain and release, and something happened to Harry. His body recoiled automatically from the touch, as it would from a burning-hot sterilizer. Marna stiffened, aware of him.

Harry, disturbed, saw Pearce shuffling toward the guard, guided by his voice. Pearce reached out, his hand searching. He touched the guard’s tunic, then his arm, and worked his way down the arm to the hand. Harry stood still, his hand doubled into a fist at his side, waiting for the guard to hit the old man. But the guard gave Pearce the instinctive respect due age and only looked at him curiously.

“Weak lungs,” Pearce whispered. “Watch them. Pneumonia might kill before antibiotics could help. And in the lower left lobe, a hint of cancer-”

“Aw, now!” The guard jerked his hand away, but his voice , was frightened.

“X-ray,” Pearce whispered. “Don’t wait.”

“There ain’t nothing wrong with me,” the guard stammered. “You—you’re trying to scare me.” He coughed.

“No exertion. Sit down. Rest.”

“Why, I’ll—I’ll-” He began coughing violently. He jerked his head at the gate. “Go on,” he said, choking. “Go out there and die.”

The boy, Christopher, took the old man’s hand and led him through the open gateway. Harry caught Marna’s upper arm—again the contact—and half helped her, half pushed her through the gate, keeping his eye warily on the guard. But the man’s eyes were turned inward toward something far more vital.

As soon as they were through, the gate slammed down behind them and Harry released Marna’s arm as if it were distasteful to hold it. Fifty yards beyond, down the right-hand lanes of the disused six-lane divided highway, Harry said, “I suppose I ought to thank you.”

Pearce whispered, “That would be polite.”

Harry rubbed his head where the guard had hit him. It was swelling. He wished for a medical kit. “How can I be polite to a charlatan?”

“Politeness is cheap.”

“Still—to lie to the man about his condition. To say—cancer-” Harry had a hard time saying it. It was a dirty word, the one disease, aside from death itself, for which medical science had found no final cure.

“Was I lying?”

Harry stared sharply at the old man and then shrugged. He looked at Marna. “We’re all in this together. We might as well make it as painless as possible. If we try to get along, we might even all make it alive.”

“Get along?” Marna said. Harry heard her speak for the first time; her voice was low and melodious even in anger. “With this?” She held up her arm. The silver bracelet gleamed in the last red rays of the sun.

Harry said harshly, raising his wrist, “You think it’s any better for me?”

Pearce whispered, “We will cooperate, Christopher and I—I, Dr. Elliott, because I am too old to do anything else and Christopher because he is young and discipline is good for the young.”

Christopher grinned. “Grampa used to be a doctor before he learned how to be a healer.”

“Pride dulls the senses and warps the judgment,” Pearce whispered.

Harry held back a comment. Now was no time to argue about medicine and quackery.

The road was deserted. The once-magnificent pavement was cracked and broken. Grass sprouted tall and thick in the cracks. The weeds stood like young trees along both edges, here and there the big, brown faces of sunflowers, fringed in yellow, nodding peacefully.

To either side were the ruins of what had once been called the suburbs. Then the distinction between that and the city had been only a line drawn on a map; there had been no fences. But when these had gone up, the houses outside had soon crumbled.

The real suburbs were far out. First it was turnpike time to the city that had become more important than distance, then helicopter time. Finally time had run out for the city. It had become so obviously a sea of carcinogens and disease that the connection to the suburbs had been broken. Shipments of food and raw materials went in and shipments of finished materials came out, but nobody went there any more —except to the medical centers. They were located in the cities because their raw material was there: the blood, the organs, the diseases, the bodies for experiment . . .

Harry walked beside Marna, ahead of Christopher and Pearce, but the girl didn’t look at him. She walked with her eyes straight ahead, as if she were alone. Harry said finally, “Look, it’s not my fault. I didn’t ask for this. Can’t we be friends?”

She glanced at him just once. “No!”

His lips tightened, and he dropped back. He let his wrist tingle. What did he care if a thirteen-year-old girl disliked him?

* * * *

The western horizon was fading from scarlet into lavendar and purple. Nothing moved in the ruins or along the road. They were alone in an ocean of desolation. They might have been the last people on a ruined earth.

Harry shivered. Soon it would be hard to keep to the road. “Hurry!” he snapped at Pearce, “if you don’t want to spend the night out here with the ghouls and the headhunters.”

“There are worse companions,” Pearce whispered.

By the time they reached the motel, the moonless night was completely upon them and the old suburbs were behind. The sprawling place was dark except for a big neon sign that said “M TEL,” a smaller sign that said “Vacancy,” and, at the gate in the fence that surrounded the whole place, a mat that said “Welcome,” and a frosted glass plate that said, “Push button.”

Harry was about to push the button when Christopher said urgently, “Dr. Elliott. Look!” He pointed toward the fence at the right with a stick he had picked up half a mile back.

“What?” Harry snapped. He was tired and nervous and dirty. He peered into the darkness. “A dead rabbit.”

“Christopher means the fence is electrified,” Marna said, “and the mat you’re standing on is made out of metal. I don’t think we should go in there.”

“Nonsense!” Harry said sharply. “Would you rather stay out here at the mercy of whatever roams the night? I’ve stopped at these motels before. There’s nothing wrong with them.”

Christopher held out his stick. “Maybe you’d better push the button with this.”

Harry frowned, took the stick, and stepped off the mat. “Oh, all right,” he said ungraciously. At the second try, he pushed the button.

The frosted glass plate became a television eye. “Who rings?”

“Four travelers bound for Topeka,” Harry said. He held up the pass in front of the eye. “We can pay.”

“Welcome,” said the speaker. “Cabins thirteen and fourteen will open when you deposit the correct amount of money. What time do you wish to be awakened?”

Harry looked at his companions. “Sunrise,” he said.

“Good night,” said the speaker. “Sleep tight.”

The gate rolled up. Christopher led Pearce around the Welcome mat and down the driveway beyond. Marna followed. Irritated, Harry jumped over the mat and caught up with them.

A single line of glass bricks along the edge of the driveway glowed fluorescently to point out the direction they should go. They passed a tank trap and a machine-gun emplacement, but the place was deserted.

When they reached cabin thirteen, Harry said, “We won’t need the other one. We’ll stay together.” He put three twenty-dollar uranium pieces into the coin slot.

“Thank you,” the door said. “Come in.”

As the door opened, Christopher darted inside. The small room held a double bed, a chair, a desk, and a floor lamp. In the corner was a small, partioned bathroom with an enclosed shower, a lavatory, and a toilet. The boy went immediately to the desk, found a plastic menu card, returned to the door. He helped Pearce into the room and then waited by the door until Harry and Marna were inside. He cracked the menu into two pieces. As the door swung shut, he slipped one of the pieces between the door and the jamb. He started back toward Pearce, stumbled against the lamp and knocked it over. It crashed and went out. They were left with only the illumination from the bathroom light.

“Clumsy little fool!” Harry said sharply.

Marna was at the desk, writing. She turned and handed the paper to Harry. Impatiently he edged toward the light and looked at it. It said:

Christopher has broken the eye, but the room is still bugged. We can’t break that without too much suspicion. Can I speak to you outside?

“That is the most ridiculous-” Harry began.

“This seems adequate.” Pearce’s voice was noticeably penetrating. “You two can sleep in fourteen.” His blind face was turned intently toward Harry.

Harry sighed. If he didn’t humor them, he would get ho rest at all. He opened the door and stepped into the night with Marna. The girl moved close to him, put her arms around his neck and her cheek against his. Without his volition, his arms went around her waist. Her lips moved against his ear; a moment later he realized that she was speaking.

“I do not like you, Dr. Elliott, but I do not want us all killed. Can you afford another cabin?”

“Of course, but—I’m not going to leave those two alone.”

“That’s beside the point. Naturally it would be foolish for us not to stick together. Please, now. Ask no questions. When we go in fourteen, take off your jacket and throw it casually over the lamp. I’ll do the rest.”

Harry let himself be led to the next cabin. He fed the door. It greeted them and let them in. The room was identical with thirteen. Marna slipped a piece of plastic between the door and the jamb as the door closed. She looked at Harry expectantly.

He shrugged, took off his jacket, and tossed it over the lamp. The room took on a shadowy and sinister appearance. Marna knelt, rolled up a throw rug, and pulled down the covers on the bed. She went to the wall phone, gave it a little tug, and the entire flat vision plate swung out on hinges. She reached into it, grabbed something, and pulled it out. There seemed to be hundreds of turns of copper wire on a spool.

Marna went to the shower enclosure, unwinding wire as she went. She stood outside the enclosure and fastened one end of the wire to the hot water faucet. Then she strung it around the room like a spider’s web, broke it off, and fastened the free end to the drain in the shower floor. This she threaded through the room close to but not touching the first wire.

She tiptoed her way out between the wires, picked, up the throw rug, and tossed it on the bed.

“Well, ‘night,” she said, motioning Harry toward the door and to be careful of the wires. When Harry reached it without mishap, Marna turned off the lamp, removed the jacket, and slipped over to join him.

She let the door slam behind them and sighed a big sigh.

“Now you’ve fixed it,” Harry whispered savagely. “Neither of the showers will work, and I’ll have to sleep on the floor.”

“You wouldn’t want to take a shower anyway,” Marna said. “It would be your last one. They’re wired.” Resentfully, and feeling foolish, Harry returned with Marna to cabin thirteen, where he dumped the boy in with the old man, and aggressively occupied one entire bed for himself.

Harry couldn’t sleep. First it had been the room, shadowed and silent, and then the harsh breathing of the old man and the softer breaths of Christopher and Marna. As a resident, he was not used to sleeping in the same room with other persons.

Then his arm had tingled—not much but just enough to keep him awake. He had got out of bed and crawled to where Marna was lying on the floor. She, too, had been awake. Silently he had urged her to share the bed with him, gesturing that he would not touch her, he had no desire to touch her, and if he had, he swore by Hippocrates that he would restrain himself. He only wanted to ease the tingling under the bracelet so that he could go to sleep.

She motioned that he could lie on the floor beside her, but he shook his head. Finally she relented enough to move to the floor beside the bed. By lying on his stomach and letting his arm dangle, Harry relieved the tingling and fell into an uneasy sleep.

He had dreams. He was performing a long and difficult lung resection. The microsurgical controls slipped in his sweaty fingers; the scalpel sliced through the aorta. The patient started up on the operating table, the blood spurting from her heart. It was Marna. She began to chase him down long hospital halls.

The overhead lights kept getting farther and farther apart until Harry was running in complete darkness through warm, sticky blood that kept rising higher and higher until it closed over his head.

Harry woke up, smothering, fighting against something that enveloped him completely, relentlessly. There was a sound of scuffling nearby. Something spat and crackled. Someone cursed.

Harry fought, futilely. Something ripped. Again. Harry caught a glimpse of a grayer darkness, struggled toward it, and came out through a long rip in the taut blanket, which had been pulled under the bed on all four sides.

“Quick!” Christopher said, folding up his pocket knife. He headed for the door where Pearce was already standing patiently.

Marna picked up a metal leg which had been unscrewed from the desk. Christopher slipped the chair out from under the doorknob and silently opened the door. He led Pearce outside. Marna followed. Dazedly, Harry followed her.

In cabin fourteen someone screamed. Something flashed blue. A body fell. Harry smelled the odor of burning flesh.

Marna ran ahead of them toward the gate. She rested the ferule of the desk leg on the ground and let the metal bar fall toward the fence. The fence spat blue flame. It ran, crackling, down the leg. The leg glowed redly and sagged. Then everything went dark, including the neon sign above them and the light at the gate.

“Help me!” Marna panted.

She was trying to lift the gate. Harry put his hands underneath and lifted. The gate moved a foot and stuck.

Up the drive someone yelled hoarsely, without words. Harry strained at the gate. It yielded, rolled up silently. Harry put up his hand to hold it while Marna got through and then Pearce and the boy. Harry edged through and let it drop.

A moment later the electricity flickered on again. The desk leg melted through and dropped away.

Harry looked back. Coming toward them was a motorized wheelchair. In it was something lumpy and monstrous, a nightmarish menace—until Harry recognized it for what it was: a basket case, a quadruple amputee complicated by a heart condition. An artificial heart-and-lung machine rode on the back of the wheelchair like a second head. Behind galloped a gangling scarecrow creature with hair that flowed out behind. It wore a dress in imitation of a woman. . . .

Harry stood there watching, fascinated, while the wheelchair stopped beside the gun emplacement. Wires reached out from one of the chair arms like medusan snakes, inserted themselves into control plugs. The machine gun started to chatter. Something plucked at Harry’s sleeve.

The spell was broken. He turned and ran into the darkness.

* * * *

Half an hour later he was lost. Marna, Pearce, and the boy were gone. All he had left was a tired body, an arm that burned, and a wrist that hurt worse than anything he could remember.

He felt his upper arm. His sleeve was wet. He brought his fingers to his nose. Blood. The bullet had creased him.

He sat disconsolately on the edge of the turnpike, the darkness as thick as soot around him. He looked at the fluorescent dial of his watch. Three-twenty. A couple of hours until sunrise. He sighed and tried to ease the pain in his wrist by rubbing around the bracelet. It seemed to help. In a few minutes it dropped to a tingle.

“Dr. Elliott,” someone said softly.

He turned. Relief and something like joy flooded through his chest. There, outlined against the dim starlight, were Christopher, Marna and Pearce.

“Well,” Harry said gruffly, “I’m glad you didn’t try to escape.”

“We wouldn’t do that, Dr. Elliott,” Christopher said.

“How did you find me?” Harry asked.

Marna silently held up her arm.

The bracelet. Of course. He had given them too much credit, Harry thought sourly. Marna sought him out because she could not help herself, and Christopher, because he was out here alone with a senile old man to take care of and he needed help.

Although, honesty forced him to admit, it had been himself and not Christopher and Pearce who had needed help back there a mile or two. If they had depended on him, their heads would be drying in the motel’s dry-storage room, waiting to be turned in for the bounty. Or their still-living bodies would be on their way to some organ bank somewhere.

“Christopher,” Harry said to Pearce, “must have been apprenticed to a bad-debt evader.”

Pearce accepted it for what it was: a compliment and an apology. “Dodging the collection agency traps and keeping out of the way of the health inspector,” he whispered, “make growing up in the city a practical education. You’re hurt.”

Harry started. How did the old man know? Even with eyes, it was too dark to see more than silhouettes. Harry steadied himself. It was an instinct, perhaps. Diagnosticians got it, sometimes, he was told. After they had been practicing for years. They could smell disease before the patient lay down on the couch. From the gauges they got only confirmation.

Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe the old man smelled the blood with a nose grown keen to compensate for his blindness.

The old man’s fingers were on his arm, surprisingly gentle. Harry pulled his arm away roughly. “It’s only a crease.”

The charlatan’s fingers found his arm again. “It’s bleeding. Find some dry grass, Christopher.”

Marna was close. She had made a small, startled movement toward him when Pearce had discovered his wound. Harry could not accept her actions for sympathy; her hate was too tangible. Perhaps she was wondering what she would do if he were to die.

Pearce ripped the sleeve away.

“Here’s the grass, Grampa,” Christopher said.

How did the boy find dry grass in the dark? “You aren’t going to put that on the wound!” Harry said quickly.

“It will stop the bleeding,” Pearce whispered.

“But the germs—”

“Germs can’t hurt you, unless you want them to.”

He put the grass on the wound and bound it with the sleeve. “That will be better soon.”

He would take it off, Harry told himself, as soon as they started walking. Somehow, though, it was easier to let it alone now that the harm was done. Then he forgot about it.

When they started walking again, Harry found himself beside Marna. “I suppose you got your education dodging health inspectors in the city, too?” he said drily.

She shook her head. “No. There’s never been much else to do. Ever since I can remember I’ve been trying to escape. I got free once.” Her voice was filled with remembered happiness. “I was free for twenty-four hours, and then they found me.”

“But I thought-” Harry began. “Who are you?”

“Me? I’m the governor’s daughter.” She said it so bitterly that Harry recoiled.

* * * *

Sunrise found them on the turnpike. They had outdistanced the last ruined motel. Now, on either side of the turnpike, were rolling, grassy hills, valleys filled with trees, and the river winding muddily beside them, sometimes so close they could throw a rock into it, sometimes turning beyond the hills out of sight.

The day was warm. Above them the sky was blue with only a trace of fleecy cloud on the western horizon. Occasionally a rabbit would hop across the road in front of them and vanish into the brush on the other side. Once they saw a deer lift its head beside the river and stare at them curiously.

Harry stared back with hunger in his eyes.

“Dr. Elliott,” Christopher said.

Harry looked at him. In the boy’s soiled hand was an irregular lump of solidified brown sugar. It was speckled with lint and other unidentifiable accretions, but at the moment it was the most desirable object Harry could think of. His mouth watered and he swallowed hard. “Give it to Pearce and the girl. They’ll need their strength. And you, too.”

“That’s all right,” Christopher said. “I have more.” He held up three other pieces in his left hand. He gave one to Marna and one to Pearce. The old man bit into his with the brown stubs that served him as teeth.

Harry picked off the largest pieces of foreign matter and then could restrain his hunger no more. Breakfast was unusually satisfying.

They kept walking, not moving rapidly but steadily. Pearce never complained. He kept his bent old legs tottering forward, and Harry gave up trying to move him faster.

They passed a hydroponic farm with an automated canning factory close beside it. No one moved around either building. Only the belts turned, carrying the tanks toward the factory to be harvested or away from it refilled with nutrients, replanted with new crops.

“We should pick up something for lunch,” Harry said. It would be theft but in a good cause. He could get his pardon directly from the governor.

“Too dangerous,” Christopher said.

“Every possible entrance,” Marna said, “is guarded by spy beams and automatic weapons.”

“Christopher will get us a good supper,” Pearce whispered.

They saw a suburban villa on a distant hill, but there was no one around it. They plodded on along the grass-grown double highway toward Lawrence.

Suddenly Christopher said, “Down! In the ditch beside the road!”

This time Harry moved quickly, without questions. He helped Pearce down the slope—the old man was very light— and threw himself down into the ditch beside Marna. A minute later motors raced by not far away. As the sound dwindled, Harry risked a glance above the top of the ditch. A group of motorcycles was disappearing on the road toward the city. “What was that?” Harry asked, shaken.

“Wolfpack!” Marna said, hatred and disgust mingled in her voice.

“But they looked like company police,” Harry objected.

“When they grow up they will be company policemen,” Marna said.

“I thought the wolfpacks were made up of escaped citizens,” Harry said.

Marna looked at him scornfully. “Is that what they tell you?”

“A citizen,” Pearce whispered, “is lucky to stay alive when he’s alone. A group of them wouldn’t last a week.”

They got back up on the turnpike and started walking again. Christopher was nervous as he led Pearce. He kept turning to look behind them and glancing from side to side. Soon Harry was edgy too.

“Down!” Christopher shouted.

Something whistled. A moment later Harry was struck a solid blow in the middle of the back. It knocked him hard to the ground. Marna screamed.

Harry rolled over, feeling as if his back were broken. Christopher and Pearce were on the pavement beside him, but Marna was gone.

A rocket blasted a little ahead and above. Then another. Pearce looked up. A powered glider zoomed toward the sky. Marna was dangling from it, her body twisting and struggling to get free. From a second glider swung empty talons—padded hooks like those which had closed around Marna and had almost swooped up Harry.

Harry got to his knees, clutching his wrist. It was beginning to send stabs of pain up his arm like a prelude to a symphony of anguish. The only thing that kept him from falling to the pavement in writhing torment was the black anger that surged through his veins. He shook his fist at the turning gliders, climbing on smoking jets.

“Dr. Elliott!” Christopher said urgently.

With blurred eyes Harry looked for the voice. The boy was in the ditch again. So was the old man.

“They’ll be back! Get down!” the boy said.

“But they’ve got Marna!” Harry said.

“It won’t help if you get killed.”

One glider swooped like a hawk toward a mouse. The other, carrying Marna, continued to circle as it climbed. Harry rolled toward the ditch. A line of chattering bullets chipped at the pavement where he had been.

“I thought,” he gasped, “they were trying to take us alive.”

“They hunt heads, too,” Christopher said.

“Anything for a thrill,” Pearce whispered.

“I never did anything like that,” Harry moaned. “I never knew anyone who did.”

“You were busy,” Pearce said.

It was true. Since four years old he had been in school constantly, most of that time in medical school. He had been home only for a brief day now and then; he scarcely knew his parents any more. What would he know of the pastimes of young squires? But this—this wolf pack business!

The first glider was a small cross in the sky; Marna, a speck hanging from it. It straightened and glided toward Lawrence. The second followed.

Suddenly Harry began beating the ground with his aching arm. “Why did I dodge? I should have let myself be captured with her. She’ll die.”

“She’s strong,” Pearce whispered, “stronger than you or Christopher, stronger than almost anyone. But sometimes strength is the cruelest thing. Follow her. Get her away.”

Harry looked at the bracelet from which pain lanced up his arm and through his body. Yes, he could follow her. As long as he could move he could find her. But feet were so slow against glider wings.

“The motorcycles will be coming back,” Christopher said. “The gliders will have radioed them.”

“But how do we capture a motorcycle?” Harry asked. The pain wouldn’t let him think clearly.

Christopher had already pulled up his T-shirt. Around his thin waist was wrapped turn after turn of nylon cord. “Sometimes we fish,” he said. He stretched the cord across the two-lane pavement in the concealment of grass grown tall in a crack. He motioned Harry to lie flat on the other side. “Let them pass, all but the last one,” he said. “Hope that he’s a straggler, far enough behind so that the others won’t notice when we stand up. Wrap the cord around your waist. Get it up where it will catch him around the chest.”

Harry lay beside the pavement while his left arm felt as though it were a swelling balloon, and the balloon was filled with pain. He looked at it once, curiously, but it was still the same size.

After an eternity came the sound of motors, many of them. As the first passed, Harry cautiously lifted his head. There was a straggler. He was about a hundred feet behind the others; he was speeding now to catch up.

The others passed. As the straggler got within twenty feet Harry jumped up, bracing himself against the impact. Christopher sprang up at the same instant. The young squire had no time to move; he had time only to look surprised before he hit the cord. The cord pulled Harry out into the middle of the pavement, his heels skidding. Christopher had tied his end to the trunk of a young tree.

The squire smashed into the pavement—but the motorcycle slowed and heeled over into the bank of weeds. Beyond, far down the road, the others didn’t look back.

Harry untangled himself from the cord and ran to the squire. He was as old as Harry and as big. He had a harelip and a withered leg. His skull was crushed. He was dead.

Harry closed his eyes. He had seen men die before, but he had never been the cause of it. It was like breaking his Hippocratic Oath.

“Some must die,” Pearce whispered. “It is better for the evil to die young.”

Harry stripped quickly and got into the squire’s clothes and goggles. He strapped the pistol down on his hip and turned to Christopher and Pearce. “What about you?”

“We won’t try to escape,” Pearce said.

“I don’t mean that. Will you be all right?”

Pearce put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Christopher will take care of me. And he will find you after you have rescued Marna.”

The confidence in Pearce’s voice strengthened Harry. He did not pause to question that confidence. He mounted the motorcycle, settled himself into the saddle seat, and turned the throttle. The motorcycle took off violently.

It was tricky, riding on one wheel, but he had had experience on similar vehicles in the Subterranean Medical Center thoroughfares.

His arm hurt, but it was not like it had been before when he was helpless. Now it was a guidance system. As he rode, he could feel the pain lessen. That meant he was getting closer to Marna.

* * * *

It was night before he found her. The other motorcycles had completely outdistanced him, and he had swept past the side road several miles before the worsening pain warned him. He cruised back and forth before he finally located the curving ramp that led across the cloverleaf ten miles east of Lawrence.

From this a ruined asphalt road turned east, and the pain in Harry’s arm had dropped to an ache. The road ended in an impenetrable thicket. Harry stopped just before he crashed into it. He sat immobile on the seat, thinking.

He hadn’t considered what he was going to do when he found Marna; he had merely taken off in hot pursuit, driven half by the painful bracelet upon his wrist, half by his emotional involvement with the young girl.

Somehow—he could scarcely trace back the involutions of chance to its source—he had been trapped into leading this pitiful expedition from the Medical Center to the governor’s mansion. Moment by moment it had threatened his life—and not, unless all his hopes were false, just a few years but eternity. Was he going to throw it away here on a quixotic attempt to rescue a girl from the midst of a pack of cruel young wolves?

But what would he do with the thing on his wrist? What of the governor? And what of Marna?

“Ralph?” someone asked out of the darkness, and the decision was taken out of his hands.

“Yes,” he muttered. “Where is everybody?”

“Usual place—under the bank.”

Harry moved toward the voice, limping. “Can’t see a thing.”

“Here’s a light.”

The trees lighted up, and a black form loomed in front of Harry. Harry blinked once, squinted, and hit the squire with the edge of his palm on the fourth cervical vertebra. As the man dropped, Harry picked the everlight out of the air, and caught the body. He eased the limp form into the grass and felt the neck. It was broken all right, but the squire was still breathing. He straightened the head, so that there would be no pressure on nerve tissue, and looked up.

Light glimmered and flickered somewhere ahead. There was no movement, no sound; apparently no one had heard him. He flickered the light on, saw the path, and started through the young forest.

The campfire was built under a clay overhang so that it could not be seen from above. Roasting over it was a whole young deer being slowly turned on a spit by one of the squires. Harry found time to recognize the empty ache in his midriff for what it was: hunger.

The rest of the squires sat in a semicircle around the fire. On the far side was Marna, seated, her hands bound behind her. Her head was raised; her eyes searched the darkness around the fire. What was she looking for? Of course. For him. She knew by the bracelet on her wrist that he was near.

He wished that he could signal her in some way, but there was no way. He studied the squires: one was an albino, a second a macrocephalic, a third a spastic. The others might have had physical impairments that Harry could not see. All except one, who seemed older than the rest and leaned against the edge of the clay bank. He was blind, but inserted surgically into his eye sockets were electrically operated binoculars. He carried a power pack on his back with leads to the binoculars and to an antenna in his coat.

Harry edged cautiously around the forest edge beyond the firelight toward where Marna was sitting.

“First the feast,” the albino gloated, “then the fun.”

The one who was turning the spit said, “I think we should have the fun first—then we’ll be good and hungry.”

They argued back and forth, good-naturedly for a moment and then as others chimed in, with more heat. Finally the albino turned to the one with the binoculars. “What do you say, Eyes?”

In a deep voice, Eyes said, “Sell the girl. Young parts are worth top prices.”

“Ah,” said the albino slyly, “but you can’t see what a pretty little thing she is, Eyes. To you she’s only a pattern of white dots against a gray cathode-ray tube. To us she’s white and pink and black and-”

“One of these days,” Eyes said in a calm voice, “you’ll go too far.”

“Not with her, I won’t.”

A stick broke under Harry’s foot. Everyone stopped talking and listened. Harry eased his pistol out of its holster.

“Is that you, Ralph?” the albino said.

“Yes,” Harry said, limping out into the edge of the firelight, keeping his head in the darkness, his pistol concealed in a fold of pants at his side.

“Can you imagine,” the albino said, “the girl says she’s the governor’s daughter?”

“I am,” Marna said clearly. “He will have you cut to pieces slowly for what you are going to do.”

“But I’m the governor dearie,” said the albino in a falsetto, “and I don’t give a-”

Eyes said sharply, “That’s not Ralph. His leg’s all right.”

Harry cursed his luck. The binoculars were equipped to pick up X-ray reflections as well as radar. “Run!” he shouted in the silence that followed.

His first shot was for Eyes. The man was turning, and it struck his power pack. He began screaming and clawing at the binoculars that served him for eyes. But Harry wasn’t watching. He was releasing the entire magazine into the clay bank above the fire. Already loosened by the heat from the fire, the bank collapsed, smothering the fire and burying several of the squires sitting close to it.

Harry dived to the side. Several bullets went through the space he had just vacated.

He scrambled for the forest and started running. He kept slamming into trees, but he picked himself up and ran again. Somewhere he lost his everlight. Behind, the pursuit thinned and died away.

He ran into something soft and warm that yielded before him. It fell to the ground. He tripped over it and toppled, his fist drawn back.

“Harry!” Marna said.

His fist turned into a hand that went around her, pulled her tight. “Marna!” he gasped. “I didn’t know. I didn’t think I could do it. I thought you were-”

Their bracelets clinked together. Marna, who had been soft beneath him, suddenly stiffened and pushed him away. “Let’s not get slobbery about it,” she said angrily. “I know why you did it. Besides, they’ll hear us.”

Harry drew a quick, outraged breath and then let it sigh out. What was the use? She’d never believe him. Why should she? He wasn’t sure himself why he had done it. Now that it was over and he had time to realize the risks he had taken, he began to shiver. He sat there in the dark forest, his eyes closed, and tried to control his shaking.

Marna put her hand out hesitantly, touched his arm, started to say something, stopped, and the moment was past.

“B-b-brat-t-t!” he chattered. “N-n-nasty, un—ungrateful, b-b-brat!” And then the shakes were gone.

She started to move. “Sit still!” he whispered. “We’ve got to wait until they give up the search.”

At least he had eliminated the greatest danger: Eyes with his radar, X-ray vision that was just as good by night as by day.

They sat in the darkness and waited, listening to the forest noises. An hour passed. Harry was going to say that perhaps it was safe to move when he heard something rustling nearby. Animal or enemy? Marna, who had not touched him again or spoken, clutched his upper arm with a panic-strengthened hand. Harry doubled his fist and drew back his arm.

“Dr. Elliott?” Christopher whispered. “Marna?”

Relief surged over Harry like a warm, enervating current “You wonderful little imp! How’d you find us?”

“Grampa helped me. He has a sense for that. I have a little, but he’s better. Come.” Harry felt a small hand fit itself into his. Christopher began to lead them through the darkness. At first Harry was distrustful and then, as the boy kept them out of bushes and trees, he moved more confidently. The hand became something he could depend on. He knew how Pearce felt and how bereft he must be now.

Christopher led them a long way before they reached another clearing. A bed of coals glowed dimly beneath a sheltering bower of green leaves. Pearce sat near the fire slowly turning a spit fashioned from a green branch. It rested on two forked sticks. On the spit two skinned rabbits were golden brown and sizzling.

Pearce’s sightless face turned up as they entered the clearing. “Welcome back,” he said.

Harry felt a warmth inside him that was like coming home.

Marna fell to her knees in front of the fire, raising her hands to it to warm them. Rope dangled from them, frayed in the center where she had methodically picked it apart while she had waited by another fire. She must have been cold, Harry thought, and I let her shiver through the forest while I was warm in my jacket.

But there was nothing to say.

When Christopher removed the rabbits from the spit, they almost fell apart. He wrapped four legs in damp green leaves and tucked them away in a cool hollow between two tree roots. “That’s for breakfast,” he said.

The four of them fell to work on the remainder. Even without salt, it was the most delicious meal Harry had ever eaten. When it was finished, he licked his fingers, sighed, and leaned back on a pile of old leaves. He felt more contented than he could remember. He was a little thirsty because he had refused to drink from the brook that ran through the woods close to their improvised camp, but he could stand that A man couldn’t surrender all his principles. It would be ironic to die of typhoid so close to his chance at immortality.

That the governor would confer immortality upon him— or at least put him into a position where he could earn it—he did not doubt. After all, he had saved the governor’s daughter.

Marna was a pretty little thing. It was too bad she was still a child. An alliance with the governor’s family would not hurt his chances. Perhaps in a few years—He put the notion away from him. Marna hated him.

Christopher shoveled dirt over the fire with a large piece of bark. Harry sighed again and stretched luxuriously. Sleeping would be good tonight.

Marna had washed at the brook. Her face was clean and shining. “Will you sleep here beside me?” Harry asked her, touching the dry leaves. He held up his bracelet apologetically. “This thing keeps me awake when you’re very far away.”

She nodded coldly and sat down beside him—but far enough away so that they did not touch.

Harry said, “I can’t understand why we’ve run across so many teratisms. I can’t remember ever seeing one in my practice at the Medical Center.”

“You were in the clinics?” Pearce asked. And without waiting for an answer he went on, “Increasingly, the practice of medicine becomes the treatment of monsters. In the city they would die; in the suburbs they are preserved to perpetuate themselves. Let me look at your arm.”

Harry started. Pearce had said it so naturally that for a moment he had forgotten that the old man couldn’t see. The old man’s gentle fingers untied the bandage and carefully pulled the matted grass away. “You won’t need this any more.”

Harry put his hand wonderingly to the wound. It had not hurt for hours. Now it was only a scar. “Perhaps you really were a doctor. Why did you give up practice?”

Pearce whispered, “I grew tired of being a technician. Medicine had become so desperately complicated that the relationship between doctor and patient was not much different from that between mechanic and patient.”

Harry objected, “A doctor has to preserve his distance. If he keeps caring, he won’t survive. He must become calloused to suffering, inured to sorrow, or he couldn’t continue in a calling so intimately associated with them.”

“No one ever said,” Pearce whispered, “that it was an easy thing to be a doctor. If he stops caring, he loses not only his patient but his own humanity. But the complication of medicine had another effect. It restricted treatment to those who could afford it. Fewer and fewer people grew healthier and healthier. Weren’t the rest human, too?”

Harry frowned. “Certainly. But it was the wealthy contributors and the foundations that made it all possible. They had to be treated first so that medical research could continue.”

Pearce whispered, “And so society was warped all out of shape, to the god of medicine everything was sacrificed—all so that a few people could live a few years longer. Who paid the bill?

“And the odd outcome was that those who received care grew less healthy, as a class, than those who had to survive without it. Premies were saved to reproduce their weaknesses. Faults that would have proved fatal in childhood were repaired so that the patient reached maturity. Non-survival traits were passed on. Physiological inadequates multiplied, requiring greater care-”

Harry sat upright. “What kind of medical ethics are those? Medicine can’t count the cost or weigh the value. Its business is to treat the sick.”

“Those who can afford it. If medicine doesn’t evaluate then someone else will: power or money or groups. One day I walked out on all that. I went among the citizens, where the future was, where I could help without discrimination. They took me in; they fed me when I was hungry, laughed with me when I was happy, cried with me when I was sad. They cared, and I helped them as I could.”

“How?” Harry asked. “Without a diagnostic machine, without drugs or antibiotics.”

“The human mind,” Pearce whispered, “is still the best diagnostic machine. And the best antibiotic. I touched them. I helped them to cure themselves. So I became a healer instead of a technician. Our bodies want to heal themselves, you know, but our minds give counter-orders and death-instructions.”

“Witch doctor!” Harry said scornfully.

“Yes. Always there have been witch doctors. Healers. Only in my day have the healer and the doctor become two persons. In every other era the people with the healing touch were the doctors. They existed; they exist. Countless cures are testimony. Only today do we call it superstition. And yet we know that some doctors, no wiser nor more expert than others, have a far greater recovery rate. Some nurses—not always the most beautiful ones—inspire in their patients a desire to get well.

“It takes you two hours to do a thorough examination; I can do it in two seconds. It may take you months or years to complete a treatment; I’ve never taken longer than five minutes.”

“But where’s your control?” Harry demanded. “How can you prove you’ve helped them? If you can’t trace cause and effect, if no one else can duplicate your treatment, it isn’t science. It can’t be taught.”

“When a healer is successful, he knows,” Pearce whispered. “So does his patient. As for teaching—how do you teach a child to talk?”

Harry shrugged impatiently. Pearce had an answer for everything. There are people like that, so secure in their mania that they can never be convinced that the rest of the world is sane. Man had to depend on science—not superstition, not faith healers, not miracle workers. Or else he was back in the Dark Ages.

He lay back in the bed of leaves, feeling Marna’s presence close to him. He wanted to reach out and touch her but he didn’t.

Else there would be no law, no security. And no immortality.

* * * *

The bracelet awoke him. It tingled. Then it began to hurt. Harry put out his hand. The bed of leaves beside him was warm, but Marna was gone.

“Marna!” he whispered. He raised himself on one elbow. In the starlight that filtered through the trees above, he could just make out that the clearing was empty of everyone but himself. The spots where Pearce and the boy had been sleeping were empty. “Where is everybody?” he said, louder.

He cursed under his breath. They had picked their time and escaped. But why, then, had Christopher found them in the forest and brought them here? And what did Marna hope to gain? Make it to the mansion alone?

He started up. Something crunched in the leaves. Harry froze in that position. A moment later he was blinded by a brilliant light.

“Don’t move!” said a high-pitched voice. “I will have to shoot you. And if you try to dodge, the Snooper will follow.” The voice was cool and cultured. The hand that held the gun, Harry thought, would be as cool and accurate as the voice.

“I’m not moving,” Harry said. “Who are you?”

The voice ignored him. “There were four of you. Where are the other three?”

“They heard you coming. They’re hanging back, waiting to rush you.”

“You’re lying,” the voice said contemptuously.

“Listen to me!” Harry said urgently. “You don’t sound like a citizen. I’m a doctor. Ask me a question about medicine, anything at all. I’m on an urgent mission. I’m taking a message to the governor.”

“What is the message?”

Harry swallowed hard. “The shipment was hijacked. There won’t be another ready for a week.”

“What shipment?”

“I don’t know. If you’re a squire, you’ve got to help me.”

“Sit down.” Harry sat down. “I have a message for you. Your message won’t be delivered.”

“But-” Harry started up.

From somewhere behind the light came a small explosion —little more than a sharply expelled breath. Something stung Harry in the chest. He looked down. A tiny dart clung there between the edges of his jacket He tried to reach for it and couldn’t. His arm wouldn’t move. His head wouldn’t move either. He toppled over onto his side, not feeling the impact. Only his eyes, his ears, and his lungs seemed unaffected. He lay there, paralyzed, his mind racing.

“Yes,” the voice said calmly, “I am a ghoul. Some of my friends are headhunters, but I hunt bodies and bring them in alive. The sport is greater. So is the profit. Heads are worth only twenty dollars; bodies are worth more than a hundred. Some with young organs like yours are worth much more.

“Go, Snooper. Find the others.”

The light went away. Something crackled in the brush and was gone. Slowly Harry made out a black shape that seemed to be sitting on the ground about ten feet away.

“You wonder what will happen to you,” the ghoul said. “As soon as I find your companions, I will paralyze them, too, and summon my stretchers. They will carry you to my helicopter. Then, since you came from Kansas City, I will take you to Topeka.”

A last hope died in Harry.

“That works best, I’ve found,” the high-pitched voice continued. “Avoids complications. The Topeka hospital I do business with will buy your bodies, no questions asked. You are permanently paralyzed, so you will never feel any pain, although you will not lose consciousness. That way the organs never deteriorate. If you’re a doctor, as you said, you know what I mean. You may know the technical name for the poison in the dart; all I know is that it is like the poison of the digger wasp. By use of intravenous feeding, these eminently portable organ banks have been kept alive for years until their time comes.”

The voice went on, but Harry didn’t listen. He was thinking that he would go mad. They often did. He had seen them lying on slabs in the organ bank, and their eyes had been quite mad. Then he had told himself that the madness was why they had been put there, but now he knew the truth. He would soon be one of them.

Perhaps he would strangle before he reached the hospital, before they got the tube down his throat and the artificial respirator on his chest and the needles into his arms. They strangled sometimes, even under care.

He would not go mad, though. He was too sane. He might last for months.

* * * *

He heard something crackle in the brush. Light flashed across his eyes. Something moved. Bodies thrashed. Someone grunted. Someone else yelled. Something went pouf! Then the sounds stopped except for someone panting.

“Harry!” Marna said anxiously. “Harry! Are you all right?”

The light came back as the squat Snooper snuffled into the little clearing again. Pearce moved painfully through the light. Beyond him were Christopher and Marna. On the ground near them was a twisted creature. Harry couldn’t figure out what it was and then he realized it was a dwarf, a gnome, a man with thin little, legs and a twisted back and a large, lumpy head. Black hair grew sparsely on top of the head, and the eyes looked out redly, hating the world.

“Harry!” Marna said again, a wail this time.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. It was a momentary flash of pleasure, not being able to answer, and then it was buried in a flood of self-pity.

Marna picked up the dart gun and threw it deep into the brush. “What a filthy weapon!”

Reason returned to Harry. They had not escaped after all. Just as he had told the ghoul, they had only faded away in order to rescue him if they could. But they had returned too late.

The paralysis was permanent; there was no antidote. Perhaps they would kill him. How could he make them understand that he wanted to be killed?

He blinked his eyes rapidly.

Marna had moved to him. She cradled his head in her lap. Her hand moved restlessly, smoothing his hair.

Carefully, Pearce removed the dart from his chest and shoved it deep into the ground. “Be calm,” he said. “Don’t give up. There is no such thing as permanent paralysis. If you will try you can move your little finger.” He held up Harry’s hand, patted it.

Harry tried to move his finger, but it was useless. What was the matter with the old quack? Why didn’t he kill him and get it over with? Pearce kept talking, but Harry didn’t listen. What was the use of hoping? It would only make his torment worse.

“A transfusion might help,” Marna said.

“Yes,” Pearce agreed. “Are you willing?”

“You know what I am?”

“Of course. Christopher, search the ghoul. He will have tubing and needles on him for emergency treatment of his victims.” Pearce spoke to Marna again. “There will be some commingling. The poison will enter your body.”

Marna’s voice was bitter. “You couldn’t hurt me with cyanide.”

There were movements and preparations. Harry couldn’t concentrate on them. Things blurred. Time passed like a glacier.

As the first gray light of morning came on tiptoes through the trees, Harry felt life moving painfully in his little finger. It was worse than anything he had ever experienced, a hundred times worse than the pain from the bracelet. The pain spread to his other fingers, to his feet, up his legs and arms toward his trunk. Harry wanted to plead with Pearce to restore the paralysis, but by the time his throat relaxed, the pain was almost gone.

When he could sit up, he looked around for Marna .She was leaning back against a tree trunk, her eyes closed, looking paler than ever. “Marna!” Her eyes opened wearily; an expression of joy flashed across them as they focused on him, and then they clouded.

“I’m all right,” she said.

Harry scratched his left elbow where the needle had been. “I don’t understand—you and Pearce—you brought me back from that—but-”

“Don’t try to understand,” she said. “Just accept it.”

“It’s impossible,” he muttered. “What are you?”

“The governor’s daughter.”

“What else?”

“A Cartwright,” she said bitterly.

His mind recoiled. One of the immortals! He was not surprised that her blood had counteracted the poison. Cartwright blood was specific against any foreign substance. “How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” she said. She looked down at her slim figure. “We mature late, we Cartwrights. That’s why Weaver sent me to the Medical Center, to see if I was fertile. A fertile Cartwright can waste no breeding time.”

There was no doubt: she hated her father.

“He will have you bred,” Harry repeated stupidly.

“He will try to do it himself,” she said without emotion. “He is not very fertile; that is why there are only three of us. My grandmother, my mother and me. Then we have some control over conception. Particularly after maturity. We don’t want his children, even though they might make him less dependent on us. I’m afraid—” her voice broke—”I’m afraid I’m not mature enough.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” Harry demanded.

“And have you treat me like a Cartwright?” Her eyes glowed with anger. “A Cartwright isn’t a person, you know. A Cartwright is a walking blood-bank, a living fountain of youth, something to be possessed, used, guarded, but never allowed to live. Besides”—her head drooped—”you don’t believe me. About Weaver.”

“But he’s the governor!” Harry exclaimed. He saw her face and turned away. How could he explain? You had a job and you had a duty. You couldn’t go back on those. And then there were the bracelets. Only the governor had the key. They couldn’t survive long linked together like that. They would be separated again, by chance or by force, and he would die.

He got to his feet. The forest reeled for a moment and then settled back. “I owe you thanks again,” he said to Pearce.

“You fought hard to preserve your beliefs,” Pearce whispered, “but there was a core of sanity that fought with me, that said it was better to be a whole man with crippled beliefs than a crippled man with whole beliefs.”

Harry stared soberly at the old man. He was either a real healer who could not explain how he worked his miracles or the world was a far crazier place than Harry had ever imagined. “If we start moving now,” he said, “we should be in sight of the mansion by noon.”

As he passed the dwarf, he looked down, stopped, and looked back at Marna and Pearce. Then he stopped, picked up the misshapen little boy, and walked toward the road.

The helicopter was beside the turnpike. “It would be only a few minutes if we flew,” he muttered.

Close behind him Marna said, “We aren’t expected. We would be shot down before we got within five miles.”

Harry strapped the dwarf into the helicopter seat. The ghoul stared at him out of hate-filled eyes. Harry started the motor, pressed the button on the autopilot marked “Return,” and stepped back. The helicopter lifted, straightened and headed southeast.

Christopher and Pearce were waiting on the pavement when Harry turned. Christopher grinned suddenly and held out a rabbit leg. “Here’s breakfast.”

They marched down the turnpike toward Lawrence.

* * * *

The governor’s mansion was built on the top of an L-shaped hill that stood tall between two river valleys. Once it had been the site of a great university, but taxes for supporting such institutions had been diverted into more vital channels. Private contributions had dwindled as the demands of medical research and medical care had intensified. Soon there was no interest in educational fripperies, and the university died.

The governor had built his mansion there some seventy-five years ago when Topeka became unbearable. Long before that it had become a lifetime office—and the governor would live forever.

The state of Kansas was a barony—a description that would have meant nothing to Harry, whose knowledge of history was limited to the history of medicine. The governor was a baron, and the mansion was his keep. His vassals were the suburban squires; they were paid with immortality or its promise. Once one of them had received an injection, he had two choices: remain loyal to the governor and live forever, barring accidental death, or die within thirty days.

The governor had not received a shipment for four weeks. The squires were getting desperate.

The mansion was a fortress. Its outer walls were five-foot-thick pre-stressed concrete faced with five-inch armor plate. A moat surrounded the walls; it was stocked with piranha.

An inner wall rose above the outside one. The paved, unencumbered area between the two could be flooded with napalm. Inside the wall were hidden guided missile nests,

The mansion rose, ziggurat fashion, in terraced steps. On each rooftop was a hydroponic farm. At the summit of the buildings was a glass penthouse; the noon sun turned it into silver. On a mast towering above, a radar dish rotated.

Like an iceberg, most of the mansion was beneath the surface. It dived through limestone and granite almost a mile deep. The building was almost a living creature; automatic mechanisms controlled it, brought in air, heated and cooled it, fed it, watered it, watched for enemies and killed them if they got too close. . . .

It could be run by a single hand. At the moment it was.

There was no entrance to the place. Harry stood in front of the walls and waved his jacket. “Ahoy, the mansion! A message for the governor from the Medical Center. Ahoy, the mansion!”

“Down!” Christopher shouted.

An angry bee buzzed past Harry’s ear and then a whole flight of them. Harry fell to the ground and rolled. In a little while the bees stopped.

“Are you hurt?” Marna asked quickly.

Harry lifted his face out of the dust. “Poor shots,” he said grimly. “Where did they come from?”

“One of the villas,” Christopher said, pointing at the scattered dwellings at the foot of the hill.

“The bounty wouldn’t even keep them in ammunition,*’ Harry said.

In a giant, godlike voice, the mansion said, “Who comes with a message for me?”

Harry shouted from his prone position, “Dr. Harry Elliott I have with me the governor’s daughter, Marna, and a leech. We’re under fire from one of the villas.”

The mansion was silent. Slowly then a section of the inside wall swung open. Something flashed into the sunlight, spurting flame from its tail. It darted downward. A moment later a villa lifted into the air and fell back, a mass of rubble.

Over the outer wall came a crane arm. From it dangled a large metal car. When it reached the ground a door opened.

“Come into my presence,” the mansion said.

The car was dusty. So was the penthouse where they were deposited. The vast swimming pool was dry; the cabanas were rotten; the flowers and hushes and palm trees were dead.

In the mirror-covered central column, a door gaped at them like a dark mouth. “Enter,” said the door.

The elevator descended deep into the ground. Harry’s stomach surged uneasily; he thought the car would never stop, but eventually the doors opened. Beyond was a spacious living room. It was decorated in shades of brown. One entire wall was a vision screen.

Marna ran out of the car. “Mother!” she shouted. “Grandmother!” She raced through the apartment. Harry followed her more slowly.

There were six bedrooms opening off a long hall. At the end of it was a nursery. On the other side of the living room were a dining room and a kitchen. Every room had a wall-wide vision screen. Every room was empty.

“Mother?” Marna said.

The dining room screen flickered. Across the giant screen flowed the giant image of a creature who lolled on pneumatic cushions. It was a thing incredibly fat, a sea of flesh rippling and surging. Although it was naked, its sex was a mystery. Its breasts were great-pillows of fat, but there was a sprinkling of hair between them. Its face, moon though it was, was small on the fantastic body; in it eyes were stuck like raisins.

It drew sustenance out of a tube; then, as it saw them, it pushed the tube away with one balloonlike hand. It giggled. The giggle was godlike.

“Hello, Marna,” it said in the mansion’s voice. “Looking for somebody? Your mother and your grandmother thwarted me, you know. Sterile creatures! I connected them directly to the blood bank; now there will be no delay about blood.”

“You’ll kill them!” Marna gasped.

“Cartwrights? Silly girl! Besides, this is our bridal night, and we would not want them around, would we, Marna?”

Marna shrank back into the living room, but the creature looked at her from that screen, too. It turned its raisin eyes toward Harry. “You are the doctor with the message. Tell me.”

Harry frowned. “You—are Governor Weaver?”

“In the flesh, boy.” The creature chuckled. It made waves of fat surge across his body and back again.

Harry took a deep breath. “The shipment was hijacked. It will be a week before another shipment is ready.”

Weaver frowned and reached a stubby finger toward something beyond the camera’s range. “There!” He looked back at Harry and smiled the smile of an idiot. “I just blew up Dean Mock’s office. He was inside it at the time. It’s justice, though. He’s been sneaking shots of elixir for twenty years.”

“Elixir? But-!” The information about Mock was too unreal to be meaningful; Harry didn’t believe it. It was the mention of elixir that shocked him.

Weaver’s mouth made an “O” of sympathy. “I’ve shocked you. They tell you the elixir has not been synthesized. It was. Some one hundred years ago by a doctor named Russell Pearce. You were planning on synthesizing it, perhaps, and thereby winning yourself immortality as a reward. No—I’m not telepathic. Fifty out of every one hundred doctors dream that dream. I’ll tell you, Doctor. I am the electorate. I decide who shall be immortal, and it pleases me to be arbitrary. Gods are always arbitrary. That is what makes them gods. I could give you immortality. I will; I will. Serve me well, Doctor, and when you begin to age, I will make you young again. I could make you dean of the Med Center. Would you like that?”

Weaver frowned again. “But no—you would sneak elixir like Mock, and you would not send me the shipment when I need it for my squires.” He scratched between his breasts. “What will I do?” he wailed. “The loyal ones are dying off. I can’t give them their shots, and then their children are ambushing their parents. Whitey crept up on his father the other day; sold him to a junk collector. Old hands keep young hands away from the fire. But the old ones are dying off, and the young ones don’t need the elixir, not yet. They will, though. They’ll come to me on their knees, begging, and I’ll laugh at them and let them die. That’s what gods do, you know.”

Weaver scratched his wrist. “You’re still shocked about the elixir. You think we should make gallons of it, keep everybody young forever. Now think about itl We know that’s absurd, eh? There wouldn’t be enough of anything to go around. And what would be the value of immortality if everybody lived forever?” His voice changed suddenly, became businesslike. “Who hijacked the shipment? Was it this man?”

A picture flashed on the lower quarter of the screen.

“Yes,” Harry said. His brain was spinning. Illumination and immortality, all in one breath. It was coming too fast. He didn’t have time to react.

Weaver rubbed his doughy mouth. “Cartwright! How can he do it?” There was a note of godlike fear in the voice. “To risk—forever. He’s mad—that’s it, the man is mad. He wants to die.” The great mass of flesh shivered; the body rippled. “Let him try me. I’ll give him death.”

Cartwright, Harry thought. Weaver must mean Marshall Cartwright, the original Immortal. But why would Cartwright attack the convoy, risk—eternity? Because, perhaps, he had learned that eternity was worthless without courage, without honor, without love. By hijacking the elixir shipment he had dealt Weaver a deadly blow.

Weaver looked at Harry again and scratched his neck. “How did you get here, you four?”

“We walked,” Harry said tightly.

“Walked? Fantastic!”

“Ask a motel manager just this side of Kansas City or a pack of wolves that almost got away with Marna or a ghoul that paralyzed me. They’ll tell you we walked.”

Weaver scratched his mountainous belly. “Those wolf-packs. They can be a nuisance. They’re useful, though. They keep the countryside tidy. But if you were paralyzed, why is it you are here instead of waiting to be put to use on some organ bank slab?”

“The leech gave me a transfusion from Marna.” Too late Harry saw Marna motioning for him to be silent.

Weaver’s face clouded. “You’ve stolen my blood. Now I can’t bleed her for a month. I will have to punish you. Not now but later when I have thought of something fitting the crime.”

“A month is too soon,” Harry said. “No wonder the girl is pale if you bleed her every month. You’ll kill her.”

“But she’s a Cartwright,” Weaver said in astonishment, “and I need the blood.”

Harry’s lips tightened. He held up the bracelet on his wrist. “The key, sir?”

“Tell me,” Weaver said, scratching under one breast, “is Marna fertile?”

“No, sir.” Harry looked levelly into the eyes of the Governor of Kansas. “The key?”

“Oh, dear,” Weaver said. “I seem to have misplaced it. You’ll have to wear the bracelets yet a bit. Well, Marna. We will see how it goes tonight, eh, fertile or no? Find something suitable for a bridal night, will you? And let us not mar the occasion with weeping and moaning and screams of pain. Come reverently and filled with a great joy, as Mary came unto God.”

“If I have a child,” Marna said, her face white, “it will have to be a virgin birth.”

The sea of flesh surged with anger. “Perhaps there will be screams tonight. Yes. Leech! You—the obscenely old person with the boy. You are a healer.”

“So I have been called,” Pearce whispered.

“They say you work miracles. Well, I have a miracle for you to work.” Weaver scratched the back of one swollen hand. “I itch. Doctors have found nothing wrong with me, and they have died. It drives me mad.”

“I cure by touch,” Pearce said. “Every person cures himself; I only help.”

“No man touches me,” Weaver said. “You will cure me by tonight. I will not hear of anything else. Otherwise I will be angry with you and the boy. Yes, I will be very angry with the boy if you do not succeed.”

“Tonight,” Pearce said, “I will work a miracle for you.”

Weaver smiled and reached out for a feeding tube. His dark eyes glittered like black marbles in a huge dish of custard. “Tonight, then!” The image vanished from the screen.

“A grub,” Harry whispered. “A giant white grub in the heart of a rose. Eating away at it, blind, selfish, and destructive.”

“I think of him,” Pearce said, “as a fetus who refuses to be born. Safe in the womb, he destroys the mother, not realizing that he is thereby destroying himself.” He turned slightly toward Christopher. “There is an eye?”

Christopher looked at the screen. “Every one.”

“Bugs.”

“All over.”

Pearce said, “We will have to take the chance that he will not audit the recordings or that he can be distracted long enough to do what must be done.”

Harry looked at Marna and then at Pearce and Christopher. “What can we do?”

“You’re willing?” Marna said. “To give up immortality? To risk everything?”

Harry grimaced. “What would I be losing? A world like this?”

“What is the situation?” Pearce whispered. “Where is Weaver?”

Marna shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. My mother and grandmother never knew. He sends the elevator. There are no stairs, no other exits. And the elevators are controlled from a console beside his bed. There are thousands of switches. They also control the rest of the building, the lights, water, air, heat, and food supplies. He can release toxic or anesthetic gases or flaming gasoline. He can set off charges not only here but in Topeka and Kansas City or send rockets to attack other areas. There’s no way to reach him.”

“You will reach him,” Pearce whispered.

Marna’s eyes lighted up. “If there were some weapon I could take! But there’s an inspection in the elevator—magnetic and fluoroscopic detectors.”

“Even if you could smuggle in a knife, say,” Harry said, frowning, “it would be almost impossible to hit a vital organ. And even though he isn’t able to move his body, his arms must be fantastically strong.”

“There is, perhaps, one way,” Pearce said. “If we can find a piece of paper, Christopher will write it out for you.”

* * * *

The bride waited near the elevator doors, dressed in white satin and old lace. The lace was pulled up over the head for a veil. In front of the living room screen, in a brown velour grand rapids overstuffed chair, sat Pearce. At his feet, leaning against his bony knee, was Christopher.

The screen flickered, and Weaver was there, grinning his divine-idiot’s grin. “You’re impatient, Marna. It pleases me to see you so eager to rush into the arms of your bridegroom. The wedding carriage arrives.”

The doors of the elevator sighed open. The bride stepped into the car. As the doors began to close, Pearce got to his feet, pushing Christopher gently to one side, and said, “You seek immortality, Weaver, and you think you have found it. But what you have is only a living death. I am going to show you the only real immortality.”

The car dropped. It plummeted to the tune of the wedding march from Lohengrin. Detectors probed at the bride and found only cloth. The elevator began to slow. After it came to a full stop, the doors remained closed for a moment, and then, squeaking, they opened.

The stench of decay flowed into the car. For a moment the bride recoiled, and then she stepped forward out of the car. The room had once been a marvelous mechanism: a stainless steel womb. Not much bigger than the giant pneumatic mattress that occupied the center, the room was completely automatic. Temperature regulators kept it at blood heat. Food came directly from the processing rooms through the tubes without human aid. Daily sprays of water swept dirt and refuse to collectors around the edge of the room that disposed of it. An overhead spray washed the creature who occupied the mattress. Around the edges of the mattress like a great, circular organ with ten thousand keys was a complex control console. Directly over the mattress, on the ceiling, was a view screen.

Some years before, apparently, a water pipe had broken through some shift in the earth, a small leak that made the rock swell, or a hard freeze. The cleansing sprays no longer worked, and the occupant of the room was afraid to have intruders trace the trouble or he no longer cared.

The floor was littered with decaying food, with cans and wrappers, with waste matter. As the bride stepped into the room cockroaches rose in a cloud and scattered. Mice scampered into hiding places.

The bride pulled the long white satin skirt up above her hips. She unwound a thin, nylon cord from her waist. There was a loop fastened into the end. She shook it out until it hung free.

Then she looked to see what Weaver was doing. He was watching the overhead screen with almost hypnotic concentration. Pearce was talking. “Aging is not a physical disease; it is mental.. The mind grows tired and lets the body die. Only half the Cartwrights’ immunity to death lies in their blood; the other half is their unflagging will to live.

“You are one hundred and fifty-three years old. I tended your father, who died before you were born. I gave him, unwittingly, a transfusion of Marshall Cartwright’s golden blood.”

Weaver whispered, “But that would make you-” His voice was thin and high; it was not godlike at all. It was ridiculous coming from that vast mass of flesh.

“Almost two hundred years old,” Pearce said. His voice was stronger, richer, deeper, no longer a whisper. “Without ever a transfusion of Cartwright blood, ever an injection of the elixir vitae. The effective mind can achieve conscious control of the autonomic nervous system, of the very cells that make up the blood stream and the body.”

The bride craned her neck to see the screen on the ceiling. Pearce looked odd. He was taller. His legs were straight and muscular. His shoulders were broader. As the bride watched, muscle and fat built up beneath his skin, firming it, smoothing out wrinkles. His facial bones receded beneath young flesh and skin. Silky white hair thickened and grew darker.

“You wonder why I stayed old,” Pearce said, and his voice was resonant and powerful. “It is something one does not use for oneself. It comes through giving, not taking.”

His sunken eyelids puffed, paled, opened. And Pearce looked out at Weaver, tall, strong, and straight—no more than thirty, surely. There was power latent in that face— power leashed, gentled, under control. But Weaver recoiled from it

Then, onto the screen, walked Marna.

Weaver’s eyes bulged. His head swiveled toward the bride. Harry tossed off the veil and swung the looped cord lightly between two fingers. The importance of his next move was terrifying. The first throw had to be accurate, because he might never have a chance for another. His surgeon’s fingers were deft, but he had never thrown a lariat. Christopher had described how he should do it, but there had been no chance to practice.

And if he were dragged within reach of those doughy arms! A hug would smother him.

And in that startled moment, Weaver’s head lifted with surprise and his hand stabbed toward the console. Harry flipped the cord. The loop dropped over Weaver’s head and tightened around his neck.

Quickly Harry wrapped the cord several times around his hand and pulled it tight. Weaver jerked against it, tightening it further. The thin cord disappeared into the neck’s soft flesh. Weaver’s stubby fingers clawed at it, tearing the skin, as his body thrashed on the mattress.

He had, Harry thought, an immortal at the end of his fishing line—a great white whale struggling to free itself so that it could live forever, smacking the pneumatic waves with fierce lunges and savage tugs. For him it became dreamlike and unreal.

Weaver, by some titanic effort, had turned over. He had his hands around the cord now. He rose onto soft, flowing knees and pulled at the cord, dragging Harry forward toward the mattress. Weaver’s eyes were beginning to bulge out of his pudding-face.

Harry dug his heels into the floor. Weaver came up, like the whale leaping its vast bulk incredibly out of the water, and stood, shapeless and monstrous, his face purpling. Then, deep inside, a heart gave up, and the body sagged. It flowed like a melting wax image back to the mattress on which it had spent almost three-quarters of a century.

Harry dazedly unwrapped the cord from his hand. It had cut deep into the skin; blood welled out. He didn’t feel anything as he dropped the cord. He shut his eyes and shivered. After a period of time he never remembered, he heard someone calling him. “Harry!” Marna cried. “Are you all right? Harry, please!”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. Yes, I’m all right.”

“Go to the console,” said the young man who had been Pearce. “You’ll have to find the right controls, but they should be marked. We’ve got to release Marna’s mother and grandmother. And then we’ve got to get out of here ourselves. Marshall Cartwright is outside, and I think he’s getting impatient.”

How did Pearce know? Harry thought dazedly. But he knew the answer. Pearce’s powers did not stop with healing. Allied to-that, perhaps stemming from that, were other perceptions of people and locations, and things, sometimes of thoughts themselves. Christopher, too. He had picked it up.

Harry nodded, but he did not move. It would take a strong man to go out into a world where immortality was a fact rather than a dream. He would have to live with it and its terrifying problems. They would be greater than anything he had imagined.

He moved forward to begin the search.