Norton, Andre - Anthology (23 page)

 
          
 
I nodded sympathetically. "I'll go with
you," I said.

 
          
 
A few minutes later we were walking side by
side along a narrow dirt road under the open sky. Crickets shrilled in dust
barrows under our feet, and warblers, wrens, and chickadees chirped from the
low branches of short-leaf palms and tulip trees. On both sides of us gently
rolling hills stretched away to glimmering, haze-obscured horizons.

           
 
I glanced at my companion in deep concern. He
moved like a man entranced, his body swaying a little as he advanced over the
sun-baked soil of the deeply rutted and winding roadway. My concern increased
when I perceived that he was silently muttering to himself.

 
          
 
With a shudder I tore my gaze from his white
face and stared straight before me. For a long time I continued to keep pace
with him in silence, my mind occupied with plans for getting him away from the
little laboratory and into an environment where the memories of his grim,
three-day ordeal would cease to play on his tormented nerves.

 
          
 
Suddenly he lurched against me. I heard him
gasp in horror. A chill premonition swept over me as I swung about, staring.
His features were contorted with fright, and he was trembling all over.

 
          
 
"It's still alive," he choked.
"It just spoke to me again. It has taken refuge inside my body."

 
          
 
"Richard," I exclaimed, "have
you gone mad?"

 
          
 
"No," he choked. "It is really
in my body. It says that when it came to Earth it berthed the space ship in my
right kidney."

 
          
 
"Impossible!" I gasped. "How
could it—"

 
          
 
"The space ship is microscopic, too. It
can pass freely through all the organs and tissues of a human body. For three
days the tiny vessel has been suspended in the pelvis of my right kidney by
radiant microscopic mooring lines."

 
          
 
His voice rose hysterically. "It
suspected that I intended to destroy it. It left the slide and listened while
we were discussing it. When I blasted the slide, it had already returned to the
space ship."

 
          
 
His eyes suddenly took on a glaze of terror.
"John—it has decided to kill me. It says that it will take off from my
body and carry me with it high above the Earth. It is mocking me, taunting me.
It says that I will perish in splendor, will shine as a star. When the ship
takes off, the energy blast will turn my body into a field of radiant force. I
will become a—"

 
          
 
Suddenly his speech congealed. He threw out
his arms and staggered violently backward. For four or five seconds he
continued to move away from me, his tottering steps swiftly increasing the
distance between us. He moved with an incredible acceleration, his limbs
trembling and jerking and his torso twisting about as though invisible forces
were tugging at every atom of his receding body, pulling him in divergent
directions and threatening to tear his fleshly tenement asunder.

 
          
 
There was an instant of utter silence while
the air about me seemed visibly to quiver; to quiver and shake and buckle into
folds like a film of violently agitated water. The gently sloping hills, the
clustering pines and tulip trees, and the winding road ahead all quivered in
ominous instability. Then, suddenly, the whole of this wavering, fearfully
silent world exploded in a blast of sound.

 
          
 
For a moment there was only
sound.
Then Richard Ashley rose from the Earth. In a burst of
salmon-colored flame, he shot high into the air, his body rotating like a
revolving pinwheel.

 
          
 
He rose with tremendous velocity. As he soared
toward the clouds, long tongues of sanguineous fire shot from his body,
ensheathing his limbs in
a radiance
so dazzling that
even the sunlight failed to obscure it. He became a vessel of lucent flame, a
day star throbbingly aglow. For an instant he flamed more redly than red
Aldebaran high in the pale heavens. Then, like a comet receding from its
zenith, the radiant force fields, which streamed luminously outward in all
directions from his skyward-soaring body, dimmed and dwindled and were lost to
view in the wide firmament.

 
          
 
Richard Ashley's body was never found. The local
police conducted a thorough search for it, and even attempted to wrest a
confession from me by cruel and illegal means. I had made up an absurd little
story which they did not believe, but were unable to disprove or discredit.
Eventually they were compelled to release me.

 
          
 
But though I am once more free to come and go
as I please, I have made the tragic discovery that anxiety can take on many and
terrible forms. Night and day I am haunted by a memory which I cannot erase
friom my mind; a fear which has assumed the compulsive character of a phobia. I
know that some day it and its kind will return across wide gulfs of space and
wage relentless war on all of humankind. In a peculiar, but very real, sense I
have become Richard Ashley's heir. When he vanished into the sky, he left
behind him a legacy of horror, which will darken my days until I am one again
with the blind flux of the mysterious universe.

            
Colds and viruses and
more exotic diseases have already not only demanded all the trained wisdom of
doctors and medical services, but have led researchers to extra duty in laboratories
to pursue the illusive agents of our aches and pains. On another planet what
are the chances for something new appearing? For example, what would you do,
Doctor, if a member of a space ships crew turned bright blue?

            
"No, Tom, you're
making the mistake so many others do." Dr. Edwards smiled; he was very
happy to have the chance to launch a discourse on his favorite theme.
"There can't be any new diseases. You see, the human organism is capable of
acting in only certain ways. For example, the blood pressure can go up, it can
come down, or it can remain the same. The temperature can be elevated, it can
be subnormal, or it can be normal. And so it goes for every function of the
body—it can change only within the limits of its own capacity to
function."

 
          
 
No doubt about it—Edwards was feeling quite
pleased with
himself
. And it was well deserved. The
medical expedition under his direction to the planet Minotaur had just solved a
most unusual problem involving the death of all members of Expedition I.

 
          
 
He tilted back in his chair in the control
room and continued. "When we study exotic diseases, the difficulty,
therefore, is to find the causative agent. The disease itself is probably
greatly similar to one with which we have been familiar on Earth for hundreds
of years."

 
          
 
"Oh, I see," said Tom. "The
roads it may travel on might be new, but it's still the same old model that's
doing the traveling."

 
          
 
"Exactly," replied Bob. "To
give you another example: the body is capable of only certain color changes.
The skin might turn brown, due to the presence of melanin, one of the normally
found pigments. Or it might turn any one of the colors seen in the degradation
of hemoglobin. You know, those fascinating hues, which change from dark blue to
green to yellow, which we all saw adorning your left eye last year.

 
          
 
"No," he continued, without giving
Tom a chance to explain how he got that shiner, "we could never expect to
see a man turn, say, an aquamarine blue. There just isn't a precursor for that
color in the body. So we'll never see an exotic disease where the skin is
aquamarine, or we'll never see a disease where a man reacts outside of the
normal limitations of response."

 
          
 
"So that's it," mused Tom.
"Yes, what is it?" He turned around as a knock came at the door.

 
          
 
It was one of the crew members. "Sorry to
interrupt, sir, but I'd like to have Dr. Edwards take a look at me.

           
 
My skin is kind of a funny color."

 
          
 
Edwards turned around. Like the Bay of Naples
on a sunny day, or Lake Superior in July, the man's skin was a beautiful vivid
aquamarine blue.

 
          
 
Bob's jaw dropped. He had just said that such
a color couldn't possibly occur, yet here it was! Tom couldn't help smiling at
Bob's obvious discomfiture. "Dr. Edwards," he asked archly,
"wouldn't you say that Slawson's skin is aquamarine blue?"

 
          
 
"Yes," answered Bob—and you could
see he hated to admit it—"I guess you could call it that."

 
          
 
"My, my," said Tom, "I didn't
realize that 'never' was such a short time!"

 
          
 
Bob wasn't annoyed by Tom's sly digs—he
deserved them; but he was immediately preoccupied with the medical problem
which had just slapped him in his distinguished face. He pondered for a few
minutes, meanwhile making little smacking sounds with his lips. Finally he
reached over and flipped on the switch of the intraship communication system.

 
          
 
"Schultz—come up to the radio room as
fast as you can get here."

 
          
 
"Yes, sire," replied ^Schultz, with
his usual exaggerated pseudo-deference.

 
          
 
While waiting for Schultz, Bob turned to the
crewman, standing there patiently. "How do you feel, Slawson?"

 
          
 
"Not too bad, sir," he replied; you
could see that he wasn't going to dramatize his illness. "I noticed that I
was a little short of breath when I walked up, but outside of that I'm
O.K."

 
          
 
Dr. Wilhelm Schultz then dashed in. He checked
any questions he might have had at a signal from Edwards, who continued his
questioning.

 
          
 
"When did you first notice that your skin
was this color?"

           
 
"Just a few minutes
ago.
Just after I got back in the ship."

 
          
 
Three pairs of eyebrows were immediately
elevated; could Minotaur be dangerous, in spite of the negative laboratory
tests?

 
          
 
"Oh, you were outside?" asked Bob,
mildly. He wasn't going to let his anxiety to get the facts influence the
judicious manner of getting a history.

 
          
 
"Yes, sir," answered Slawson.
"When we got the word that we could go outside, that it was all clear,
I
just went out and walked around the ship. I ... I hope
that was all right, sir," he added apologetically.

 
          
 
"That was all right, Slawson," Bob
replied. "But it looks as if we doctors were all wrong. What do you think
about this, Schultzie?"

 
          
 
"It looks pretty obvious that he got his
bee-ootiful pigmentation from outside, all right. Going to take
precautions?"

 
          
 
"You're right, Dutchman. Kelly, please
order that the ship be sealed, immediately." Bob waited a moment until Tom
had finished snapping his brisk, crisp orders into the intercom mike.
"Then you'd better have all the circulating air in the ship
triple-filtered; use the emergency bank of precipitrons, too."

 
          
 
"All right, Bob," assented Tom, as
he stood up. "But what was that you were saying about it being impossible
for a man to turn blue? Boy, are you going to have some explaining to do!"

 
          
 
"Get out of here," grinned Bob.
"Go take care of your tin can."

 
          
 
When Tom left, Bob immediately got back to
business. "Sit down, Slawson, and let's go into this a little further.
What did you do when you left the ship? Try to remember everything—no matter
how trivial."

           
 
Slawson sat down; he leaned forward, with his
elbows on his knees, knitting his brows in concentration. "Let's see, now.
I was all by myself—I was the only one off duty at the time. I went out through
the air lock, closing the inner door after me and leaving the outer door open.
I took a few steps, so I was out of the shadow of the ship and just looked
around. I remember thinking how good it was to see the sun . . . the suns, I
mean . . . after that storm we had." He broke off his narrative
momentarily to ask, "Is that the sort of stuff you want to hear,
sir?"

 
          
 
"Go ahead, boy; you're doing fine,"
Bob assured him.

 
          
 
"Then I just sort of wandered around the
ship, looking at the plants and stuff. My hobby is botany, sir," he added,
shyly. "I squatted down on the ground to see if there were any insects
like ants or earthworms. But a worm isn't an insect, is it?" he asked
confusedly.

 
          
 
"The earthworm, Lumbricus terrestris, is
a member of the phylum Annelida. Get on with your story," snapped Schultz.

 
          
 
"Yes, sir," answered Slawson meekly;
he was, strangely, apparently consoled by this fact of taxonomy. "Well, I
didn't see anything on the ground, so I walked around a little more. I wasn't
more than twenty or twenty-five meters from the ship at any time. Then I saw
some flowers that were just budding out and went over to look at them. They
weren't as pretty as our own flowers ... no odor, either—"

 
          
 
This remark was immediately seized upon by
Edwards.
"No odor, eh?
So you smelled them? What
did these flowers look like?"

 
          
 
"Yes, sir—I just took a little bitty
sniff. And I didn't look at them very closely, so I can't tell you much about
them. There were seven petals with dentate edges, of a sort of chartreuse
color. There were seven stamens with large lobulated anthers. The leaves were
lanceolate, with stipules."

 
          
 
Schultz looked at Edwards. "So he didn't
look at them closely, says he. What kind of a botanical lecture would he have
given us if he had looked at them?"

 
          
 
"Let him alone, Schultz," said Bob.
"He's interested, so he can't help being observant. What else did you do,
Slaw-son?"

 
          
 
"That's all, sir. I was sort of cold, so
I thought I'd come back to the ship and get a jacket and see if one of the boys
wanted to go out for a walk. When I opened my locker, I noticed the color of my
skin, so I reported to you immediately."

 
          
 
Bob looked at Schultz, inquiringly. "Looks
like we have our clue, doesn't it? Let's go down to the lab and go to work.
Come on, Slawson."

 
          
 
The three men made their way to the
laboratory, where they found Thomas, the pathologist. This was to be
expected—he was never far or long away from his beloved, immaculate laboratory.
As the three entered, he was looking through a microscope.

 
          
 
"Gentlemen," he greeted them in his
precise way. "When I heard the order to seal ship, I thought you might be
suspicious of the air, so I began to do another check. What do you
suspect?"

 
          
 
Instead of answering, Bob merely stepped from
in front of Slawson, made that casual gesture which means, "Look what we
have here!"

 
          
 
Thomas' face was a study in pleasure—the
pleasure of being presented with a new, interesting problem. "Well!"
he said.
"Most unusual.
And you think that this
coloration comes from the air?"

 
          
 
Bob shrugged. "All we know is that he
apparently got it outside. It might be from a flower—but we can't afford to
take any chances." He smiled wryly. "Seems as how Minotaur is not the
safe, peaceful planet we thought."

 
          
 
"What did you find in the air,
Dave?" Schultz asked the pathologist.

 
          
 
"I found a few granules of what might be
pollen, but very few, not over three per cubic meter. It seems rather doubtful
that we could get a reaction like this from airborne pollen," he answered.
"But let's see what we can find out about Slawson.
Any
particular tests that you have in mind?"

 
          
 
Bob pursed his lips thoughtfully. "We'd
better have the usual blood count and urinalysis. And . . . let's see . . . you
have a spectroscope, as I recall—we'd better see what that shows. And I'd
better get Livingston here to do a skin biopsy so we can tell where the color
is." He stepped to the intercom and called the surgeon.

 
          
 
By the time Livingston arrived, Thomas and his
efficient assistants had the specimens and were beginning the analysis. Slawson
meekly obeyed the order to get undressed and lay down on the operating table,
prepared to submit himself to the tender mercies of the surgeon.

 
          
 
"Do you want this skin specimen from any
particular site?" Jack asked.