Highways in Hiding

G >> George Oliver Smith >> Highways in Hiding

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"Why not?" I grinned.

My mind wasn't in it. He beat me three out of four. I bedded down about
eleven, and to my surprise I slept well. They must have been shoving
something into me to make me sleep; I know me very well and I'm sure
that I couldn't have closed an eye if they hadn't been slipping me the
old closeout powder. For three nights, now, I'd corked off solid until
seven ack emma and I'd come alive in the morning fine, fit, and fresh.

But on the following morning, Mr. Mullaney was missing. I never saw him
again.

At noon, or thereabouts, the end of the ring finger on my left hand was
as solid as a rock. I could squeeze it in a door or burn it with a
cigarette; I got into a little habit of scratching kitchen matches on it
as I tried to dig into the solid flesh with my perception. I growled a
bit at my fate, but not much.

It was about this time, too, that the slight itch began to change. You
know how a deep-felt itch is. It can sometimes be pleasant. Like the
itch that comes after a fast swim in the salty sea and a dry-out in the
bright sun, when the drying salt water makes your skin itch with the
vibrant pleasure of just being alive. This is not like the bite of any
bug, but the kind that makes you want to take another dive into the
ocean instead of trying to scratch it with your claws. Well, the itch in
my finger had been one of the pleasant kinds. I could sort of scratch it
away by taking the steel-hard part of my finger in my other hand and
wiggle, briskly. But now the itch turned into a deep burning pain.

My perception, never good enough to dig the finer structure clearly, was
good enough to tell me that my crawling horror had come to the boundary
line of the first joint.

It was this pause that was causing the burning pain.

According to what I'd been told, if someone didn't do something about me
right now, I'd lose the end joint of my finger.

Nobody came to ease my pain, nor to ease my mind. They left me strictly
alone. I spent the time from noon until three o'clock examining my
fingertip as I'd not examined it before. It was rock hard, but strangely
flexible if I could exert enough pressure on the flesh. It still moved
with the flexing of my hands. The fingernail itself was like a chip of
chilled steel. I could flex the nail neither with my other hand nor by
biting it; between my teeth it had the uncomfortable solidity of a sheet
of metal that conveyed to my brain that the old teeth should not try to
bite too hard. I tried prying on a bit of metal with the fingernail;
inserting the nail in the crack where a metal cylinder had been formed
to make a table leg. I might have been able to pry the crack wider, but
the rest of my body did not have the power nor the rigidity necessary to
drive the tiny lever that was my fingertip.

I wondered what kind of tool-grinder they used for a manicure.

At three-thirty, the door to my room opened and in came Scholar Phelps,
complete with his benign smile and his hearty air.

"Well," he boomed over-cheerfully, "we meet again, Mr. Cornell."

"Under trying circumstances," I said.

"Unfortunately so," he nodded. "However, we can't all be fortunate."

"I dislike being a vital statistic."

"So does everybody. Yet, from a philosophical point of view, you have no
more right to live at the expense of someone else than someone else has
a right to live at your expense. It all comes out even in the final
accounting. And, of course, if every man were granted a guaranteed
immortality, we'd have one cluttered-up world."

I had to admit that he was right, but I still could not accept his
statistical attitude. Not while I'm the statistic. He followed my
thought even though he was esper; it wasn't hard to follow anyway.

"All right, I admit that this is no time to sit around discussing
philosophy or metaphysics or anything of that nature. What you are
interested in is you."

"How absolutely correct."

"You know, of course, that you are a carrier."

"So I've come to believe. At least, everybody I seem to have any contact
with either turns up missing or comes down with Mekstrom's--or both."

Scholar Phelps nodded. "You might have gone on for quite some time if it
hadn't been so obvious."

I eyed him. "Just what went on?" I asked casually. "Did you have a
clean-up squad following me all the time, picking up the debris? Or did
you just pick up the ones you wanted? Or did the Highways make you
indulge in a running competition?"

"Too many questions at once. Most of which answers would be best that
you did not know. Best for us, that is. Maybe even for you."

I shrugged. "We seem to be bordering on philosophy again when the
important point is what you intend to do to me."

He looked unhappy. "Mr. Cornell, it is hard to remain unphilosophical in
a case like this. So many avenues of thought have been opened, so many
ideas and angles come to mind. We'll readily admit what you've probably
concluded; that you as a carrier have become the one basic factor that
we have been seeking for some twenty years and more. You are the
dirigible force, the last brick in the building, the final answer. Or,
and I hate to say it, were."

"Were?"

"For all of our knowledge of Mekstrom's we know so very little," he
said. "In certain maladies the carrier is himself immune. In some we
observe that the carrier results from a low-level, incomplete infection
with the disease which immunizes him but does not kill the bugs. In
others, we've seen the carrier become normal after he has finally
contracted the disease. What we must know now is: Is Steve Cornell, the
Mekstrom Carrier, now a non-carrier because he has contracted the
disease?"

"How are you going to find out?" I asked him.

"That's a problem," he said thoughtfully. "One school feels that we
should not treat you, since the treatment itself may destroy whatever
unknown factor makes you a carrier. The other claims that if we don't
treat you, you'll hardly live long enough to permit comprehensive
research anyway. A third school believes that there is time to find out
whether you are still a carrier, make some tests, and then treat you,
after which these tests are to be repeated."

Rather bitterly, I said, "I suppose I have absolutely no vote."

"Hardly," his face was pragmatic.

"And to which school do you belong?" I asked sourly. "Do you want me to
get the cure? Or am I to die miserably while you take tabs on my blood
pressure, or do I merely lose an arm while you're sitting with folded
hands waiting for the laboratory report?"

"In any case, we'll learn a lot about Mekstrom's from you," he said.
"Even if you die."

As caustically as I could, I said, "It's nice to know that I am not
going to die in vain."

He eyed me with contempt. "You're not afraid to die, are you, Mr.
Cornell?"

That's a dirty question to ask any man. Sure, I'm afraid to die. I just
don't like the idea of being not-alive. As bad as life is, it's better
than nothing. But the way he put the question he was implying that I
should be happy to die for the benefit of Humanity in general, and
that's a question that is unfairly loaded. After all, everybody is
slated to kick off. There is no other way of resigning from the
universe. So if I have to die, it might as well be for the Benefit of
Something, and if it happens to be Humanity, so much the better. But
when the case is proffered on a silver tray, I feel, "Somebody else, not
me!"

The next argument Phelps would be tossing out would be the one that
goes, "Two thousand years ago, a Man died for Humanity--" which always
makes me sick. No matter how you look at us, there is no resemblance
between Him and me.

I cut him short before he could say it: "Whether or not I'm afraid to
die, and for good or evil, now or later, is beside the point. I have,
obviously, nothing to say about the time, place, and the reasons."

We sat there and glared at one another; he didn't know whether to laugh
or snarl and I didn't care which he did. It seemed to me that he was
leading up to something that looked like the end. Then I'd get the
standard funeral and statements would be given out that I'd died because
medical research had not been able to save me and blah blah blah
complete with lack of funds and The Medical Center charity drive. The
result would mean more moola for Phelps and higher efficiency for his
operations, and to the devil with the rest of the world.

"Let's get along with it," I snapped. "I've no opinion, no vote, no
right of appeal. Why bother to ask me how I feel?"

Calmly he replied, "Because I am not a rough-shod, unhuman monster, Mr.
Cornell. I would prefer that you see my point of view--or at least
enough of it to admit that there is a bit of right on my side."

"Seems to me I went through that with Thorndyke."

"This is another angle. I'm speaking of my right of discovery."

"You're speaking of what?"

"My right of discovery. You as an engineer should be familiar with the
idea. If I were a poet I could write an ode to my love and no one would
forbid me my right to give it to her and to nobody else. If I were a
cook with a special recipe no one could demand that I hand it over
unless I had a special friend. He who discovers something new should be
granted the right to control it. If this Mekstrom business were some
sort of physical patent or some new process, I could apply for a patent
and have it for my exclusive use for a period of seventeen years. Am I
not right?"

"Yes, but--"

"Except that my patent would be infringed upon and I'd have no
control--"

I stood up suddenly and faced him angrily. He did not cower; after all
he was a Mekstrom. But he did shut up for a moment.

"Seems to me," I snarled, "that any process that can be used to save
human life should not be held secret, patentable, or under the control
of any one man or group."

"This is an argument that always comes up. You may, of course, be
correct. But happily for me, Mr. Cornell, I have the process and you
have not, and it is my own conviction that I have the right to use it on
those people who seem, in my opinion, to hold the most for the future
advancement of the human race. However, I do not care to go over this
argument again, it is tiresome and it never ends. As one of the ancient
Greek Philosophers observed, you cannot change a man's mind by arguing
with him. The other fact remains, however, that you do have something to
offer us, despite your contrary mental processes."

"Do go on? What do I have to do to gain this benefit? Who do I have to
kill?" I eyed him cynically and then added, "Or is it 'Whom shall I
kill?' I like these things to be proper, you know."

"Don't be sarcastic. I'm serious," he told me.

"Then stop pussyfooting and come to the point," I snapped. "You know
what the story is. I don't. So if you think I'll be interested, why not
tell me instead of letting me find out the hard way."

"You, of course, were a carrier. Maybe you still are. We can find out.
In fact, we'll have to find out, before we--"

"For God's Sake stop it!" I yelled. "You're meandering."

"Sorry," he said in a tone of apology that surprised me all the way down
to my feet. He shook himself visibly and went on from there: "You, if
still a carrier, can be of use to The Medical Center. Now do you
understand?"

Sure I understand, but good. As a normal human type, they held nothing
over me and just shoved me here and there and picked up the victims
after me. But now that I was a victim myself, they could offer me their
"cure" only if I would swear to go around the country deliberately
infecting the people they wanted among them. It was that--or lie there
and die miserably. This had not come to Scholar Phelps as a sudden flash
of genius. He'd been planning this all along; had been waiting to pop
this delicate question after I'd been pushed around, had a chance to
torture myself mentally, and was undoubtedly soft for anything that
looked like salvation.

"There is one awkward point," said Scholar Phelps suavely. "Once we have
cured you, we would have no hold on you other than your loyalty and your
personal honor to fulfill a promise given. Neither of us are naive, Mr.
Cornell. We both know that any honorable promise is only as valid as the
basic honor involved. Since your personal opinion is that this medical
treatment should be used indiscriminately, and that our program to
better the human race by competitive selection is foreign to your
feelings, you would feel honor-bound to betray us. Am I not correct?"

What could I say to that? First I'm out, then I'm in, now I'm out again.
What was Phelps getting at?

"If our positions were reversed, Mr. Cornell, I'm sure that you'd seek
some additional binding force against me. I shall continue to seek some
such lever against you for the same reason. In the meantime, Mr.
Cornell, we shall make a test to see whether we have any real basis for
any agreement at all. You may have ceased to be a carrier, you know."

"Yeah," I admitted darkly.

"In the meantime," he said cheerfully, "the least we can do is to treat
your finger. I'd hate to have you hedge a deal because we did not
deliver your cured body in the whole."

He put his head out of the door and summoned a nurse who came with a
black bag. From the bag, Scholar Phelps took a skin-blast hypo and a
small metal box, the top of which held a small slender, jointed platform
and some tiny straps. He strapped my finger to this platform and then
plugged in a length of line cord to the nearest wall socket. The little
platforms moved; the one nearest my wrist vibrated rapidly across a very
small excursion that tickled like the devil. The end platform moved in
an arc, flexing the finger tip from straight to about seventy degrees.
This moved fairly slow but regularly up and down.

"I'll not fool you," he said drily. "This is going to hurt."

He set the skin-blast hypo on top of the joint and let it go. For a
moment the finger felt cold, numb, pleasant. Then the shock wore away
and the tip of my finger, my whole finger and part of my hand shocked me
with the most excruciating agony that the hide of man ever felt. Flashes
and waves of pain darted up my arm to the elbow and the muscles in my
forearm jumped. The sensitive nerve in my elbow sang and sent darting
waves of zigzag needles up to my shoulder. My hand was a source of
searing heat and freezing cold and the pain of being crushed and twisted
and wrenched out of joint all at the same time.

Phelps wiped my wet face with a towel, loaded another hypo and let me
have it in the shoulder. Gradually the stuff took hold and the awful
pain began to subside. Not all the way, it just diminished from
absolutely unbearable to merely terrible.

I knew at that moment why a trapped animal will bite off its own foreleg
to get free of the trap.

From the depths of his bag he found a bottle and poured a half-tumbler
for me; it went down like a whiskey-flavored soft drink. It had about as
much kick as when you pour a drink of water into a highball glass that
still holds a dreg of melted ice and diluted liquor. But it burned like
fury once it hit my stomach and my mind began to wobble. He'd given me a
slug of the pure quill, one hundred proof.

As some sort of counter-irritant, it worked. Very gradually the awful
pain in my hand began to subside.

"You can take that manipulator off in an hour or so," he told me. "And
in the meantime we'll get along with our testing."

I gathered that they could stop this treatment anywhere along the
process if I did not measure up.

XVIII

Midnight. The manipulator had been off my hand for several hours, and it
was obvious that my Mekstrom's was past the first joint and creeping up
towards the next. I eyed it with some distaste; as much as I wanted to
have a fine hard body, I was not too pleased at having agony for a
companion every time the infection crossed a joint. I began to wonder
about the wrist; this is a nice complicated joint and should, if
possible, exceed the pain of the first joint in the ring finger. I'd
heard tell, of course, that once you've reached the top, additional
torture does not hurt any greater. I'd accepted this statement as it was
printed. But now I was not too sure that what I'd just been through was
not one of those exceptions that take place every now and then to the
best of rules.

I was still in a dark and disconsolate mood. But I'd managed to eat, and
I'd shaved and showered, and I'd hit the hay because it was as good a
place to be as anywhere else. I could lie there and dig the premises
with my esper.

There were very few patients in this building, and none were done up
like the character in the Macklin place. They moved the patients to some
other part of the grounds when the cure started. There weren't very many
nurses, doctors, scholars, or other personnel around, either.

Outside along one side of a road was a small lighted house that was
obviously a sort of guard, but it was casual instead of being formal and
military in appearance. The ground, instead of being patrolled by human
guards (which might have caused some comment) was carefully laid off
into checkerboard squares by a complicated system of photobeams and
induction bridges.

You've probably read about how the job of casing a joint should be done.
I did it the same way. I dug back and forth, collecting the layout from
the back door of my building towards the nearest puff of dead area. This
coign of safety billowed outward from the pattern towards the building
like an arm of cumulus cloud and the top of it rose like a column to a
height above my range. It sort of leaned forward but it did not lean far
enough to be directly above the building. The far side of the column was
just like the rear side; even though I'm well trained, it always
startles me when I perceive the far side of a smallish dead area. I'm
inclined like everybody else to consider perception on a line-of-sight
basis instead of on a sort of all-around grasp.

I let my thinker run free. If I could direct a breakout from this joint
with a lot of outside help, I'd have a hot jetcopter pilot come down the
dead-area column with a dead engine. The Medical Center did not have any
radar, probably on the proposition that too high a degree of security
indicated a high degree of top-secret material to hide. So I'd come down
dead engine, land, and wait it out. Timing would have to be perfect,
because I, the prisoner, would have to make a fast gallop across a
couple of hundred yards of wide open psi area, scale a tall fence topped
with barbed wire, cross another fifty yards into the murk, and then find
my rescuer. The take off would be fast once I'd located the 'copter in
the murk, and everything would depend upon a hot pilot who felt
confident enough in his engine and his rotorjets to let 'em go with a
roar and a lift without warmup.

During which time, unfortunately for all plans, the people at The
Medical Center would have been reading my mind and would probably have
that dead patch well patrolled with big, rough gentlemen armed with
stuff heavy enough to stop a tank.

Lacking any sort of device or doodad that would conceal my mind from
prying telepaths, about the only thing I could do was to lay here in my
soft bed and daydream of making my escape.

Eventually I went to sleep and dreamed that I was hunting Mallards with
a fly-rod baited with a stale doughnut. The only thing that bothered me
was a couple of odd-looking guys who thought that the way to hunt
Mallards was with shotguns, and their dress was just as out of taste as
their equipment. Who ever hunted ducks from a canoe, dressed in
windbreakers and hightopped boots? Eventually they bought some ducks
from me and went home, leaving me to my slumbers.

* * * * *

About eight in the morning, there was a tentative tap on my door. While
I was growling about why they should bother tapping, the door opened and
a woman came in with my breakfast tray. She was not my nurse; she was
the enamelled blonde receptionist.

She had lost some of her enamelled sophistication. It was not evident in
her make-up, her dress, or her hair-do. These were perfection. In fact,
she bore that store-window look that made me think of an automaton,
triggered to make the right noises and to present the proper expression
at the correct time. As though she had never had a thought of her own or
an emotion that was above the level of very mild interest. As if the
perfection of her dress and the characterless beauty of her face were
more important than anything else in her life.

But the loss of absolute plate-glass impersonality was gone, and it took
me some several moments to dig it out of her appearance. Then I saw it.
Her eyes. They no longer looked glassily out of that clear oval face at
a point about three inches above my left shoulder, but they were
centered on me from no matter what point in the room she'd be as she
went about the business of running open the blinds, checking the this
and that and the other like any nurses' helper.

Finally she placed my tray on the bed-table and stood looking down at
me.

From my first meeting with her I knew she was no telepath, so I bluntly
said, "Where's the regular girl? Where's my nurse?"

"I'm taking over for the time," she told me. Her voice was strained;
she'd been trying to use that too-deeply cultured tone she used as the
professional receptionist but the voice had cracked through the training
enough to let some of her natural tone come through.

"Why?"

Then she relaxed completely, or maybe it was a matter of coming unglued.
Her face allowed itself to take on some character and her body ceased
being that rigid window-dummy type. "What's your trouble--?" I asked her
softly. She had something on her mind that was a bit too big for her,
but her training was not broad enough to allow her to get it out. I
hoped to help, if I could. I also wanted to know what she was doing
here. If Scholar Phelps was thinking about putting a lever on me of the
female type, he'd guessed wrong.

She was looking at me and I could see a fragment of fright in her face.

"Is it terrible?" she asked me in a whisper.

"Is what terrible?"

"Me--Me--Mekstrom's D--Disease--" The last word came out with a couple
of big tears oozing from closed lids.

"Why?" I asked. "Do I look all shot to bits?"

She opened the eyes and looked at me. "Does it hurt?"

I remembered the agony of my finger and tried to lie. "A little," I told
her. "But I'm told that it was because I'd waited too long for my first
treatment." I hoped that I was correct; maybe it was wishful thinking,
but I claim that right. I didn't want to go through the same agony every
time we crossed a joint.

I reached over to the bedside table and found my cigarettes. I slipped
two up and offered one of them to her. She put a tentative hand forward,
slowly, a scared-to-touch reluctance in her motion. This changed as her
hand came forward. It was the same sort of reluctance that you feel when
you start out to visit the dentist for a roaring tooth. The closer you
get to the dentist's office the less inclined you are to finish the job.
Then at some indeterminate point you cross the place of no return and
from that moment you go forward with increased determination.

She finally made the cigarette package but she was very careful not to
touch my hand as she took out the weed. Then, as if she'd reached that
point of no return, her hand slipped around the package and caught me by
the wrist.

We were statue-still for three heartbeats. Then I lifted my other hand,
took out the cigarette she'd missed, and held it forward for her. She
took it. I dropped the pack and let my hand slip back until we were
holding hands, practically. She shuddered.

I flipped my lighter and let her inhale a big puff before I put the next
question: "Why are you here and what goes on?"

In a flat, dry voice she said, "I'm--supposed--to--" and let it trail
away without finishing it.

"Guinea pig?" I blurted bluntly.

She collapsed like a deflated balloon. Next, she had her face buried in
my shoulder, bawling like a hurt baby. I stroked her shoulder gently,
but she shuddered away from my hand as though it were poison.

I shoved her upright and shook her a bit. "Don't blubber like an idiot.
Sit there and talk like a human being!"

It took her a minute of visible effort before she said, "You're supposed
to be a--carrier. I'm supposed to find out--whether you are--a carrier."

Well, I'd suspected something of that sort.

Shakily she asked me, "How do I get it, Mr. Cornell?"

I eyed her sympathetically.

Then I held up my left hand and looked at the infection. This was the
finger that had been gummed to bits by the Mekstrom infant back in
Homestead. With a shrug of uncertainty, I lifted her hand to my mouth. I
felt with my tongue and dug with my perception until I had a tiny fold
of her skin between my front teeth. Then sharply, I bit down, drawing
blood. She jerked, stiffened, closed her eyes and took a deep breath but
she did not cry out.

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