World in a Bottle, Allen Kim Lang [children's ebooks free online txt] 📗

"Not fallout, bacteria," I explained. "I'm one of the Lapins from Central University."

"That's nice," the policeman said. "And I'm one of the Bjornsons, from Indiana State Police Post 1-A. What were you trying to do just now, break Mach One on wheels? Or do you maybe come from one of these foreign planets that don't know the American rules of the road?"

I breathed deep, trying to find myself some oxygen. "I was born right here in Indiana," I said. "The reason I'm wearing this suit and helmet is that I'm bacteriologically sterile."

"So maybe you could adopt a kid," Officer Bjornson suggested.

"Sterile like germ-free," I said. "Gnotobiotic. I grew up in the Big Tank at Central University."

"You'll spend the night in the big tank at South Bend if you're snowing me, Sonny," he said. "Let's see your driver's license." I got my billfold out of the glove-compartment—a chastity-suit doesn't have any pockets—and handed my license to Bjornson. "John Bogardus, M.D.," he read. "You're a doctor, eh? This says you live at BICUSPID, Central University, South Bend. What's that BICUSPID, Doc? Means your practice is limited to certain teeth?"

"I'm a resident in pathology, and I'm damned near out of air," I said, annoyed at the prospect of suffocating while acting straight-man to a state cop. "BICUSPID is the acronym for Bacteriological Institute, Central University Special Projects in Infectious Disease. I'm a Lapin, which is a human guinea-pig. I'm sorry, officer, that I broke the Indiana speed-limit but my air-filter is clogged with condensation. If I don't get back to the Big Tank at the University within the next few minutes, I'll run out of air. And you'll have to spend the rest of the evening testifying before St. Joseph's County Coroner."

"So what happens if you crack open your space-helmet and breathe the air us peons use?" he asked.

"Pretty quick, I'd die," I said. "I've got no antibodies, no physiological mechanism to combat inspired or ingested bacteria."

"That's the sort of answer that makes my job the joy it is," Bjornson said. "Next thing you know, I'll be chasing drunken drivers from Mars."

"There's no intelligent native life on Mars," I said.

"You think maybe there are intelligent natives on U.S. Twenty?" he asked, returning my license. "Okay, Doctor Bogardus, I've bought your story. You leadfoot your bomb along after me, and we'll hit the Central campus like we're crossing the payoff line at the Mille Miglia." Bjornson cowboyed into the saddle of his bike, spurred it off and cut siren-screaming down the concrete toward South Bend and Central U. I jumped back into my sports-car and tailed him, the wind soaring past my 'phones like rocket exhaust. We cut through the field of Sunday drivers in a horizontal power-dive. I was half-blinded by the sweat condensed on my air-cooled face-plate. Formaldehyde bath or no, I'd have to cut in my reserve-air pretty soon.

We made it while I was still breathing. I braked in front of the BICUSPID entrance and walked as fast as I dared, dizzy and panting with the concentration of CO2 bottled up with me in my chastity-suit. Outside the door to the contaminated labs, I shook Bjornson's hand and told him that I considered the expense of my Gross Income Tax justified by his employment. I went inside then, climbed the steel steps to the glass-walled shower. I cut in my suit-radio and announced my arrival. "Bogardus here. I'm nearly out of wind; my filter's soaked. I'm cutting in reserve-air. Anybody around to see that I scrub behind my ears?"

Dr. Roy McQueen, Director of BICUSPID, came out of his office, where he'd monitored my announcement from the loudspeaker set above his desk, and faced the glass door of the shower room. He waved to me and cut on his microphone. "Okay, Johnny," he said.

I sealed off my air-filter and cut in the reserve-air. That canned wind felt to my lungs like cold beer to the throat on a July day. I felt the oxygen percolating through me to my toes and finger-tips, tingling them back to life. Turning on the detergent shower, I sloshed around beneath it, washing the outside dust off my chastity-suit.

"You're dry by the tank," Dr. McQueen said into his hand microphone.

I picked up the long-handled shower brush and scrubbed back there. I showered the suit's armpits, the folds behind the knees, the soles of the suit's boots, scrubbing hard with the brush. "You're all wet, Johnny," the Chief said. "Got enough air for half an hour in the bathtub?"

"Yes, sir," I said, checking the gage of my reserve-air tank. Having scrubbed off most of the flora I'd picked up in the great wild world of Indiana, I climbed down through the manhole into the bathtub, a sump of formaldehyde solution eight feet deep. I sat on the iron bench at the bottom to soak. "How about switching on some music, Chief? I didn't think to bring anything waterproof to read."

"You'll hear music from me," Dr. McQueen said. "This is a big day for BICUSPID, Johnny. It's the first time one of you kids ever came home from a date with a police escort. What happened? Anne's old man decide he didn't want a plastic-wrapped son-in-law? He call the law to throw you off his front porch?"

"My air-filter got bolixed," I explained into the microphone, "so I leaned on the gas pedal pretty heavy on the way home. A friendly gendarme named Bjornson turned up."

"You should be more careful, Johnny. I'd hate to have to post you." Like the rest of us, Dr. McQueen did post-mortems on the germ-free animals who died of old age or stir-fever in the Big Tank, or had to be sacrificed as routine sterility controls. Last winter, for the first time, the Chief had had to autopsy one of us Lapins.

Poor Mike Bohrman had gone off his rocker and stripped off his sterility-suit in the snow. All we wear underneath is a pair of shorts. That's the way Mike had run around, almost naked in a northern Indiana February. It was hours before he'd been missed.

He went to the hospital with severe frostbite, but he died two days later of pneumonia complicated by streptococcal septicemia. "Stick around down there, Johnny," the Chief said. "I'm coming down to join you."

I heard him turning the monitor microphone over to one of the technicians out in the contaminated labs. Oh hell, I thought. Here comes a chewing-out that would leave me raw up to the duodenum.

The worst thing about being told off when you've done something dumb is the futility of being told about it. Nobody knew better than I that it was stupid to stay outside the Big Tank for eight solid hours. Hydraulic pressure aside, a chastity-suit isn't designed to hold a man more than about four.

It took Dr. McQueen a quarter hour to get suited up and scrubbed. Then he came down the ladder to join me in the pale green soup, his air-hose snaking along behind him like strayed umbilical cord. He sat on the bench beside me. Before he cut in his suit radio, he leaned close and touched his helmet to mine. "Damn it, Johnny! If you don't stop chasing after that dame in Valpo, I'll toss mothballs in the gas-tank of your silly little car." Then he toggled his radio. "Testing," he said, for the benefit of the monitoring technician listening out in the contaminated labs. "This is McQueen. Someone suited up?"

"Safety man is suited and scrubbing, Chief," the monitor said. "I read you loud and clear. Now, let's hear from you, Brother Bogardus."

"This is John Bogardus, the Voice of Purity," I said, "broadcasting from the bottom of Central University's lovely BICUSPID pool. You want I should dedicate my next record to the gang at the brewery?"

"Happy to hear you testify, canned-goods," the technician said. "The I.U. game is on the radio now. You want me to pipe it to the phones so you can hear our team smear 'em?"

"I'll take your word for it that they'll do that," I said. "My sport is balk-line billiards." Eighty years ago, Central University's gate receipts from football had made possible the first BICUSPID program in gnotobiotics, using mice and roaches and hamsters. Despite this historical tie between me and football, I felt no special affinity for the game.

"Trouble with you, canned-goods, is you've got no school spirit," the monitor complained. "If you or the Chief feel your feet getting wet, just whistle. I'll be here."

"Will do." For all the thousands of times I'd been through this antiseptic drill, I was happy to know that a lifeguard was suited up above our poisonous bathtub, ready to fish either of us out should our suits spring a leak. If formaldehyde-methanol started seeping into my chastity-suit, I knew I'd have an overwhelming desire to undress.

Dr. McQueen cleared his throat, a sound which broadcast very like a growl. "Okay, Johnny. Let's have a synopsis of your Sunday outing."

"It's springtime, Chief," I said. "You know what the month of May does to a young man's fancy, and reticuloendothelial system, and all."

"I wish you'd stop seeing her," the Chief said. "You've got fifteen of the most nubile girls in the Midwest living in the Big Tank with you. Sweet, intelligent—available. So why did you have to get the hots for an outsider?"

"It's that ol' debbil incest-taboo, Chief," I said. "I've slept amongst those fifteen canned peaches for the last twenty-three years. The result is that my warmest feeling toward any of them is brotherly love. Who itches to shack with a sibling?"

"Your only alternative seems to be a lifetime of cold showers," McQueen said. "Speaking of canned peaches, have you seen Mary deWitte today?"

"No."

"Mary has extramural interests, too," he said. "Her intended is a basketball player in pre-Law. A fellow roughly fifteen feet tall. Mary has been gone all day. I presume that she's been visiting this legal obelisk; and I'm beginning to feel the twinges of fatherly anxiety. But tell me about Anne, Johnny."

"I met her at a concert last fall," I said, not giving a damn about the safety man and the monitor kibitzing. "Anne didn't bug at my chastity-suit the way most of the hens on campus do. This impressed me. She liked the way I talked, even though she could hear my voice only from the speaker on the chest of my suit. I liked fine the way she listened.