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

down the happy couple, though, damned if I know what I'll do next. Shall I stand outside the bridal chamber with a syringeful of broad-spectrum antibiotics, waiting for Mary to sneeze?"

"They'll have a short marriage," I said.

"Mary knows how likely it is that she'll never grow old," Dr. McQueen said. "But I suspect that she hasn't said a word to her husband. I'd better go now, John. My plane leaves in twenty minutes."

"Don't let this prey on you too much, Chief," I said. "We Lapins have free will, too. We're old enough to bear the responsibilities for our own actions."

"Thank you, Johnny." Dr. McQueen hung up.

I returned to the table with no enthusiasm for the remaining half of my steak. "What's up, Johnny?" the Firebird asked me.

"Now we are twenty-eight," I said. "They were married in Chicago at one o'clock."

"How wonderful!" the Firebird exulted.

She stood and pounded our table-top with the vase, scattering damp daisies on the cloth. "Quiet, everybody! I've got an announcement." The chatter over dessert simmered down. "Mary deWitte got married today—here's to the bride!" Firebird slopped two ounces of White Horse into her glass and downed them at a heroic gulp. She sat, sputtering. The chatter at the other tables crescendoed as our colleagues reminded one another of the significance of the Firebird's news.

"Will you also propose the toast at Mary's wake?" I asked.

"What a hideous thing to say!"

"It was, Firebird," I said. "Forgive me, please. This thing has left me in a wounding mood."

"Is Mary really in such danger?" Firebird asked.

"She may last a week, not much more. Today she'll meet Klebsiella, probably; perhaps E. coli and Shigella. Pretty soon she'll start to sniffle with the first common cold she's ever experienced. Polio virus and the ECHO group may get to her first, and establish themselves before there is sufficient growth of bacterial flora to give them competition. Her intestinal walls are thin and weak, so she may suffer megacolon as a result of gas-producing fermentation. From a pathologist's point of view, I'll find it most instructive to learn the manner of Mary Lofting's death. From the standpoint of a friend and fellow Lapin, though, I'll think her death a damned shame."

"I'm getting a little drunk, Johnny," the Firebird said, "and a little maudlin. So, say you're right. After all, you're the doctor and I'm just a dumb dietitian. But don't you think maybe it's worth while, what Mary's done? Condemning herself to die, I mean, because she's really in love, and death is what she's got to pay for a few days' happiness. Don't you think the price is fair, Johnny?"

"If I did, I'd be paying it," I said.... "No, Firebird. Seizing a little love and poetry before the sacrifice is great stuff for epics, but it doesn't make much sense to me. When I'm married I'll want to see my children all the way through Spock and Gesell. I'll want to grow old with my wife, if you'll excuse the corn."

"We Flesh-Pressers have a natural reverence for corn," the Firebird said. "It's part of the syndrome. Johnny, if you really want what you just said, want those things badly enough to set up a marriage on half a love, give me a call. Anytime. Even though I don't set your blood aflame." She stood up, a little unsteady, and rubbed her hand across her eyes in a tardy effort to hide tears. "Save the brushoff till tomorrow, Johnny," she said. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, sweet Firebird," I said. She turned and walked quickly from the dining-room.

Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astronomer, left his three companions to bring his coffee over and sit with me. Bud was the Lapin who'd have been a Central U. fullback as an undergraduate, if only Dr. McQueen had let him play the game in a chastity-suit. "What will happen to Mary deWitte, John?" he asked.

"She'll die," I said.

"One flight in the sunlight, then her wings fall off. We Lapins are a fragile race. May I?" I nodded. Dorsey poured some of the Scotch into Firebird's empty water-glass and sipped it.

"The men who devised the Nuremberg Principles failed us when they forgot to underwrite the romantic aspirations of human guinea-pigs," I said. "As a result of their oversight, it seems that McQueen's Beasts have made a bigger contribution to sociology than to bacteriology. We've demonstrated that familiarity doesn't breed. Here we are, now, fourteen pairs of healthy Americans in their middle twenties, and neither a marriage nor a pregnancy amongst us. Why?"

"Tell me, John," Dorsey said.

"I'll tell you why," I said. "It's because we're fond of our foster-sisters, but we're also a little bored with them. And they with us. We men know every canned peach's flirtations and frailties and conversational gambits so thoroughly that one of us could no more marry one of them than the average outsider could marry his kid sister."

"Even that's been done, John, just for principle's sake," Dorsey said. "The Pharaohs wed their sisters because no one else was exalted enough for the honor. Our predicament is not dissimilar. The primal urge, John, will in time overwhelm the curse of contiguity."

"Could be," I said. "But it's not just sex that's agonizing me, Bud. Prison has whole constellations of frustration. However warm and understanding our guards may be, this is still a prison, and half of us are stir-crazy. Why did Mike Bohrman take off his chastity-suit last winter, to walk barefoot through the snow with only his suit-shorts on, till he collapsed from the cold? It was a prison-break, Bud. So was Mary deWitte's witless marriage. They were both suicide, the lifer's one way over the wall."

"Stir-crazy?" Dorsey asked. "You're exaggerating, John."

"Open your eyes, Bud," I said. "Look at Karl Fyrmeister's hands, for example. I'm violating no medical confidence to tell you that Karl got his dermatitis as the result of compulsive hand-washing. There's a fine neurotic symptom for a germ-free Lapin! If I'm exaggerating our collective un-sanity, Bud, tell me why Lucy Cashdollar has become an apprentice alcoholic. Why does Fizz Ewell, with an I.Q. that must range in the 150's and the most brilliant record the Nuclear Engineering Department has ever seen, spend six hours a day working crossword puzzles? Why do you have that tic of your left orbicularis oculi? Why am I an insomniac, with a nasty barbiturate habit? Look around, Bud. You'll see that our little home has turned into something of a snakepit. Our neuroses are only garter snakes so far; but they'll grow into cobras, given time and further frustration to feed on."

Dorsey's left eye twitched as though my mentioning his tic had triggered it. He self-consciously raised his fingers to the vellicating muscle, more to hide than to soothe it.

"While our keepers were sending Lapins through every major discipline offered on the campus," he said, "it seems they'd have done well to have trained one of us in psychiatry."

"For what?" I demanded. "So we could have someone right here in the Tank to spoon out our soothing-syrups? Man, we've got a right to be stir-crazy. We're life prisoners and we've committed no crime." I stopped to get my calm back. "Bud," I asked, "do you know what I want more than anything else, next to Anne?"

"Of course I do," Dorsey said. "Like you've pointed out, John, we've got no secrets from each other. Your big itch is to step aboard one of the Orion ships. You want to join up for the chase after interplanetary white whales."

"It's only natural," I said. "When we were kids, Bud, we saw the same TV programs, the same space-adventure movies, as the kids who are now the men in space. Every boy in America was conditioned to long for a space-suit. I'm one of the ones who could have made it, Bud. I love medicine, and I think I'm going to be a damned fine pathologist; but I'd turn in my M.D. for an Ordinary Spaceman's ticket without a second's hesitation. When I read, two years ago, that Immermann had discovered that human skull in the oxide rubble below Roosevelt Ridge in Syrtis Major, I cried for the first time since I was six years old. Twenty thousand years ago there was man on Mars. And I'm confined to Earth for life."

"How much do you know about the Immermann skull, John?" Dorsey asked me.

"What I've said. Is there more?"

"One point," Dorsey said. "My field, radio astronomy, is a deep-space sort of specialty; but I do from time to time condescend to read the Journal of Aerology and the other parochial, solar-system publications. Somewhere I read that there's something odd about that skull Colonel Immermann dug up."

"If you're suggesting that it was a second Piltdown hoax, planted in that Martian talus to jar larger Air Force appropriations from Congress, keep it from me," I said. "I cherish the illusion that the Immermann is genuine, and a mystery."

"It isn't phony, and it's sure as hell a mystery," Dorsey said. "Colonel Immermann's initial report of the skull's discovery was verified by every member of the Orion Gamma's crew, a gang recruited mostly from Service-Academy grads and other high moral types. The peculiarity I'm talking about isn't forensic. It's functional. If you were to mix in the Immermann skull with an assortment of skulls of modern western men, age forty or thereabouts, only one characteristic would allow you to pick it out from the mixture again. 'Look, Mom—No Cavities!' Like us Lapins, Immermann Man had acarious teeth."

"Because he was germ-free?" I suggested.

"It's possible. Or his medical science may have gotten oral bacteria under control with drugs. Maybe he preserved his teeth by diet, or with fluorides in his drinking-water. Perhaps his mother never let him eat candy when he was a kid," Dorsey said. "Who knows? Good teeth and all, though, our Immermann Man died twenty thousand years ago. Why? Was he germ-free, as you suggest; and was he killed by some species of Martian micro-organism that's since gone extinct from drought and a shortage of hosts? The big question, to my mind, is why none of our explorers has yet found any sign of the rest of the expedition."

"Expedition?" I asked.

"A man could hardly have been alone on Mars," Dorsey said.

"From where?"

"Pick any 'F'- or 'G'-type star with planets," Dorsey said. "After all, it's easier to posit extra-solar man than to suppose a flint-drive spaceship was devised by some early neolithic von Brauns."

"I'd never expected to see an astrophysicist take off on such a flight of improbabilia," I said.

"John, would you like to hear a thread-recording I just got from the radio observatory at Adelaide?" Dorsey asked.

"Hi-fi?"

"The radio sky is strictly spark-gap quality, no fi at all," Dorsey said, getting up to lead the way from the dining-room. "This transmission you're going to hear doesn't have anything to do with the ordinary 21.12-centimeter neutral-hydrogen radiation; but of course you realize that our big paraboloid bowls can catch anything from hydrogen hiss to low-flying bats. Remember the Christmas celebration at New Caanan that was telecast to earth a couple years back? That show was caught by the six-hundred-foot receiver at Green Bank, West Virginia, and rebroadcast by C.B.S."

We entered the Big Tank's common room, where a few of our colleagues sat reading or writing notes for tomorrow's classes—talking; playing chess or bridge; or sitting behind the closed glass doors of the TV alcove watching the picture through stereo spectacles. We entered the alcove at the other end of the room, where the record-player and music library were, and closed the door.

Dorsey took a three-inch spool of magnetic thread from his shirt pocket and fit it to the playback head of the machine.

"I'm interested in your uninstructed reaction, John," he said. "So don't ask me any questions till you've heard the whole sequence."

"Spin it, professor," I said.

The Australian thread had a noisy background, sounding like a dozen rashers of bacon tossed into a too-hot skillet. Over this hissing, the code began to sound. "DIT ... DIT ... DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT ... DIT-DIT-DIT-DIT...." I dutifully entered my count of each burst of DIT's in my pocket notebook. The sequence went: 1, 1; 2, 4; 3, 9; 4, 16; 5, 25; 6, 36; then 5, 2, 49; 8, 64. There the count stopped climbing and commenced again with the pair of ones, to repeat the whole set again.