Dr. Bloodmoney (3 page)

As he finished the job he realized that someone was standing behind him, had come up to watch; he turned, and it was Jim Fergesson, his employer, saying nothing but just standing there with a peculiar expression on his face, his hands stuck in his pockets.

“All done,” Hoppy said nervously.

Fergesson said, “Let’s see.” He took hold of the changer, lifted it up into the overhead fluorescent light’s glare.

Did he see me? Hoppy wondered. Did he understand, and if so, what does he think? Does he mind, does he really care? Is he—horrified?

There was silence as Fergesson inspected the changer.

“Where’d you get the new spring?” he asked suddenly.

“I found it lying around,” Hoppy said, at once.

It was okay. Fergesson, if he had seen, had not understood. The phocomelus relaxed and felt glee, felt a superior pleasure take the place of his anxiety; he grinned at the two repairmen, looked about for the next job expected of him.

Fergesson said, “Does it make you nervous to have people watch you?”

“No,” Hoppy said. “People can stare at me all they want; I know I’m different. I’ve been stared at since I was born.”

“I mean when you work.”

“No,” he said, and his voice sounded loud—perhaps too loud—in his ears. “Before I had a cart,” he said, “before the Government provided me anything, my dad used to carry me around on his back, in a sort of knapsack. Like a papoose.” He laughed uncertainly.

“I see,” Fergesson said.

“That was up around Sonoma,” Hoppy said. “Where I grew up. We had sheep. One time a ram butted me and I flew through the air. Like a ball.” Again he laughed; the two repairmen regarded him silently, both of them pausing in their work.

“I’ll bet,” one of them said after a moment, “that you rolled when you hit the ground.”

“Yes,” Hoppy said, laughing. They all laughed, now, himself and Fergesson and the two repairmen; they imagined how it looked, Hoppy Harrington, seven years old, with no arms or legs, only a torso and head, rolling over the ground, howling with fright and pain—but it was funny; he knew it. He told it so it would be funny; he made it become that way.

“You’re a lot better set up now, with your cart,” Fergesson said.

“Oh yes,” he said. “And I’m designing a new one, my own design; all electronic—I read an article on brain-wiring, they’re using it in Switzerland and Germany. You’re wired directly to the motor centers of the brain so there’s no lag; you can move even quicker than—a regular physiological structure.” He started to say,
than a human
. “I’ll have it perfected in a couple of years,” he said, “and it’ll be an improvement even on the Swiss models. And then I can throw away this Government junk.”

Fergesson said in a solemn, formal voice, “I admire your spirit.”

Laughing, Hoppy said with a stammer, “Th-thanks, Mr. Fergesson.”

One of the repairmen handed him a multiplex FM tuner. “It drifts. See what you can do for the alignment.”

“Okay,” Hoppy said, taking it in his metal extensors. “I sure will. I’ve done a lot of aligning, at home; I’m experienced with that.” He had found such work easiest of all: he barely had to concentrate on the set. It was as if the task were made to order for him and his abilities.

Reading the calendar on her kitchen wall, Bonny Keller saw that this was the day her friend Bruno Bluthgeld saw her psychiatrist Doctor Stockstill at his office in Berkeley. In fact, he had already seen Stockstill, had had his first hour of therapy and had left. Now he no doubt was driving back to Livermore and his own office at the Radiation Lab, the lab at which she had worked years ago before she had gotten pregnant: she had met Doctor Bluthgeld, there, back in 1975. Now she was thirty-one years old and living in West Marin; her husband George was now vice-principal of the local grammar school, and she was very happy.

Well, not
very
happy. Just moderately—tolerably—happy. She still took analysis herself—once a week now instead of three times—and in many respects she understood herself, her unconscious drives and paratactic systematic distortions of the reality situation. Analysis, six years of it, had done a great deal for her, but she was not cured. There was really no such thing as being cured; the “illness” was life itself, and a constant growth (or rather a viable growing adaptation) had to continue, or psychic stagnation would result.

She was determined not to become stagnant. Right now she was in the process of reading
The Decline of the West
in the original German; she had gotten fifty pages read, and it was well worth it. And who else that she knew had read it, even in the English?

Her interest in German culture, in its literary and philosophical works, had begun years ago through her contact with Doctor Bluthgeld. Although she had taken three years of German in college, she had not seen it as a vital part of her adult life; like so much that she had carefully learned, it had fallen into the unconscious, once she had graduated and gotten a job. Bluthgeld’s magnetic presence had reactivated and enlarged many of her academic interests, her love of music and art … she owed a great deal to Bluthgeld, and she was grateful.

Now, of course, Bluthgeld was sick, as almost everyone at Livermore knew. The man had profound conscience, and he had never ceased to suffer since the error of 1972— which, as they all knew, all those who had been a part of Livermore in those days, was not specifically his fault; it was not his personal burden, but he had chosen to make it so, and because of that he had become ill, and more ill with each passing year.

Many trained people, and the finest apparati, the foremost computers of the day, had been involved in the faulty calculation—not faulty in terms of the body of knowledge available in 1972 but faulty in relationship to the reality situation. The enormous masses of radioactive clouds had not drifted off but had been attracted by the Earth’s gravitational field, and had returned to the atmosphere; no one bad been more surprised than the staff at Livermore. Now, of course, the Jamison-French Layer was more completely understood; even the popular magazines such as
Time and US News
could lucidly explain what had gone wrong and why. But this was nine years later.

Thinking of the Jamison-French Layer, Bonny remembered the event of the day, which she was missing. She went at once to the TV set in the living room and switched it on. Has it been fired off yet? she wondered, examining her watch. No, not for another half hour. The screen lighted, and sure enough, there was the rocket and its tower, the personnel, trucks, gear; it was decidedly still on the ground, and probably Walter Dangerfield and Mrs. Dangerfield had not even boarded it yet.

The first couple to emigrate to Mars, she said to herself archly, wondering how Lydia Dangerfield felt at this moment … the tall blond woman, knowing that their chances of getting to Mars were computed at only about sixty per cent. Great equipment, vast diggings and constructions, awaited them, but so what if they were incinerated along the way? Anyhow, it would impress the Soviet bloc, which had failed to establish its colony on Luna; the Russians had cheerfully suffocated or starved—no one knew exactly for sure. In any case, the colony was gone. It had passed out of history as it had come in, mysteriously.

The idea of NASA sending just a couple, one man and his wife, instead of a group, appalled her; she felt instinctively that they were courting failure by not randomizing their bets. It should be a few people leaving New York, a few leaving California, she thought as she watched on the TV screen the technicians giving the rocket last-minute inspections. What do they call that? Hedging your bets? Anyhow, not all the eggs should be in this one basket … and yet this was how NASA had always done it: one astronaut at a time from the beginning, and plenty of publicity. When Henry Chancellor, back in 1967, had burned to particles in his space platform, the entire world had watched on TV—grief-stricken, to be sure, but nonetheless they had been permitted to watch. And the public reaction had set back space exploration in the West five years.

“As you can see now,” the NBC announcer said in a soft but urgent voice, “final preparations are being made. The arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Dangerfield is expected momentarily. Let us review just for the sake of the record the enormous preparations made to insure—”

Blah, Bonny Keller said to herself, and, with a shudder, shut off the TV. I can’t watch, she said to herself.

On the other hand, what was there to do? Merely sit biting her nails for the next six hours—for the next two weeks, in fact? The only answer would have been
not
to remember that this was the day the First Couple was being fired off. However, it was too late now not to remember.

She like to think of them as that, the
first couple
… like something out of a sentimental, old-time, science-fiction story. Adam and Eve, once over again, except that in actuality Walt Dangerfield was no Adam; he had more the quality of the last, not the first man, with his wry, mordant wit, his halting, almost cynical manner of speech as he faced the reporters. Bonny admired him; Dangerfield was no punk, no crewcut-haired young blond automaton, hacking away at the Air Forces’ newest task. Walt was a real person, and no doubt that was why NASA had selected him. His genes—they were probably stuffed to overflowing with four thousand years of culture, the heritage of mankind built right in. Walt and Lydia would found a Nova Terra … there would be lots of sophisticated little Dangerfields strolling about Mars, declaiming intellectually and yet with that amusing trace of sheer jazziness that Dangerfield had.

“Think of it as a long freeway,” Dangerfield had once said in an interview, answering a reporter’s query about the hazards of the trip. “A million miles of ten lanes … with no oncoming traffic, no slow trucks. Think of it as being four o’clock in the morning … just your vehicle, no others. So like the guys says, what’s to worry?” And then his good smile.

Bending, Bonny turned the TV set back on.

And there, on the screen, was the round, bespectacled face of Walt Dangerfield; he wore his space suit—all but the helmet—and beside him stood Lydia, silent, as Walt answered questions.

“I hear,” Walt was drawling, with a chewing-movement of his jaw, as if he were masticating the question before answering, “that there’s a LOL in Boise, Idaho who’s worried about me.” He glanced up, as someone in the rear of the room asked something. “A LOL?” Walt said, “Well, —that was the great now-departed Herb Caen’s term for Little Old Ladies … there’s always one of them, everywhere. Probably there’s one on Mars already, and we’ll be living down the street from her. Anyhow, this one in Boise, or so I understand, is a little nervous about Lydia and myself, afraid something might happen to us. So she’s sent us a good luck charm.” He displayed it, holding it clumsily with the big gloved fingers of his suit. The reporters all murmured with amusement. “Nice, isn’t it?” Dangerfield said. “I’ll tell you what it does; it’s good for rheumatism.” The reporters laughted. “In case we get rheumatism while we’re on Mars. Or is it gout? I think it’s gout, she said in her letter.” He glanced at his wife. “Gout, was it?”

I guess, Bonny thought, they don’t make charms to ward off meteors or radiation. She felt sad, as if a premonition had come over her. Or was it just because this was Bruno Bluthgeld’s day at the psychiatrist’s? Sorrowful thoughts emanating from that fact, thoughts about death and radiation and miscalculation and terrible, unending illness.

I don’t believe Bruno has become a paranoid schizophrenic, she said to herself. This is only a situation deterioration, and with the proper psychiatric help—a few pills here and there—he’ll be okay. It’s an endocrine disturbance manifesting itself psychically, and they can do wonders with that; it’s not a character defect, a psychotic constitution, unfolding itself in the face of stress.

But what do I know, she thought gloomily. Bruno had to practically sit there and tell us “they” were poisoning his drinking water before either George or I grasped how ill he was … he merely seemed depressed.

Right this moment she could imagine Bruno with a prescription for some pill which stimulated the cortex or suppressed the diencephalon; in any case the modern Western equivalent for contemporary Chinese herbal medicine would be in action, altering the metabolism of Bruno’s brain, clearing away the delusions like so many cobwebs. And all would be well again; she and George and Bruno would be together again with their West Marin Baroque Recorder Consort, playing Bach and Handel in the evenings … it would be like old times. Two wooden Black Forest (genuine) recorders and, then herself at the piano. The house full of baroque music and the smell of home-baked bread, and a bottle of Buena Vista wine from the oldest winery in California…

On the television screen Walt Dangerfield was wise-cracking in his adult way, a sort of Voltaire and Will Rogers combined. “Oh yeah,” he was saying to a lady reporter who wore a funny large hat. “We expect to uncover a lot of strange life forms on Mars.” And he eyed her hat, as if saying, “There’s one now, I think.” And again, the reporters all laughed. “I think it moved,” Dangerfield said, indicating the hat to his quiet, cool-eyed wife. “It’s coming for us, honey.”

He really loves her, Bonny realized, watching the two of them. I wonder if George ever felt toward me the way Walt Dangerfield feels toward his wife; I doubt it, frankly. If he did, he never would have allowed me to have those two therapeutic abortions. She felt even more sad, now, and she got up and walked away from the TV set, her back to it.