Category Phoenix by Boyd Ellanby (i like reading books txt) 📕

"You won't have to envy her, Leah," said David going to the liquor cabinet. "I'm going to give you and the others a shot of the SDE-Martian Blue. Sometime Tuesday afternoon you should feel the first symptoms. But after forty-eight hours in the hospital, you'll be good as new. And you will all stop growing older."

They watched, fascinated, as he opened the cooling compartment of the liquor cupboard.

"I always like plenty of ice in my drinks," he remarked, drawing out a tray of cubes and opening a small door behind the tray. He removed several small bottles filled with a milky liquid, and a copper box of sterile needles and syringes.

"Who'll be first?"

There was a knock at the door, and David stopped.

"What is it?" he called.

"Me," came the watchguard's voice. "Just thought I'd do you a favor and tell you it's only ten minutes till checkout time. Time to get yourselves decent!"

They could hear the rumble of his laugh as he moved on down the hall. Trembling, David picked up a bottle, poured alcohol onto the rubber cap, and deftly filled the sterile syringe. He reached for a piece of cotton, dipped it in iodine, and looked up, waiting. Karl Haslam had already bared his left arm. David swabbed the spot on the upper deltoid.

Karl laughed. "Here I come, Methuselah!"

"All set?" asked David.

He plunged the needle home.

David ran up the steps of the Institute, two at a time, and hurried toward his office through the echoing corridors, where the usual watchguard sauntered on patrol.

"Morning, Jones."

"Good morning, Doctor. Pretty early, aren't you?"

"Wednesday's my busy day." He settled at his desk, miserably conscious of the open door and curious eyes behind him, opened his briefcase, then glanced at his wristwatch. More than an hour before his interview with Leader Marley.

Spreading some data sheets before him, he looked at them blankly as he tried to order his thoughts. His eyes were ringed with dark depressions, for he had had no sleep. There had been so many things to plan for, so many arrangements to make.

It was possible, of course, that this morning's talk would turn out to be mere routine. There might remain several weeks of freedom—but there might be only a few hours. He shrank from the complexity of the problem before him; he was a Research man, devoted to his test tubes and his culture growths, and would have been happy never to face any problem beyond them.

He had a moment's revulsion at the unfairness of the fact that a simple experiment in the lab, an addition to man's knowledge of the Universe, should have plunged him against his will into a situation far beyond his ability to handle. There had been, as Karl pointed out, the alternative of turning the SDE over to the Leader. That would have absolved him of all responsibility. But that was the trouble, he thought. Responsibility could not be confined to squiggles in his notebook, when those squiggles might affect the whole of society.

"Dr. Wong!"

He jumped and turned around hastily.

"Leah! What in the world?"

She stood in the doorway, glaring at him, breathing heavily as though she were trying to hold back sobs. Slowly she tottered to the desk and sank down into her chair by the stenograph.

"You doublecrosser!" she whispered.

He looked quickly at the doorway, but the guard had not come back. Leaning forward, he questioned her fiercely.

"What are you doing here? They told me yesterday that several people had come down with attacks of Blue Martian. Why aren't you in the hospital with the others?"

"Because I wasn't sick!"

"But I gave you—"

"Imagine how I felt," she raced on, "watching Dr. Haslam start having a chill, hearing Dr. Faur� complain about his awful headache, and listening to Dr. Hudson dial Intercom and call for a doctor. And all that time I was waiting, waiting for something to happen to me. And nothing did! What have you got against me, Dr. Wong, that you infect all the others and only pretend to do it to me? I don't want to grow old any more than they do!"

"But I wasn't pretending. Quiet, now, and let me think."

He waited until the watchguard had passed by the door, then raised his head.

"Look here, Leah. Evidently the infection didn't take. This is what must have happened. That treatment I gave you ten years ago must have made you permanently immune to Blue Martian, and the antibodies it formed in your cells simply protected you against this new invasion of the virus. It never occurred to me that the immunity would last so long. But don't worry, I'll find a way."

She looked suspicious. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that there's no reason why Blue Martian should be the only vehicle for giving you the SDE. There must be other viruses that will work equally well. It's only a question of finding one."

"And how long will that take you?"

"How long does anything take in Research? Maybe a week, maybe a year."

"And maybe ten! I can't wait, Dr. Wong. I'm thirty-five now; I'm growing older. What good will a long life do me, if it only preserves me as the middle-aged woman I'll be by then? And all those years that I'll be getting older and older, there'll be Tanya, lively and pretty, to remind me that I was once like that, too. I can't face it!"

"The watchguard will hear you!" Haggard-faced, he watched her shaking shoulders, hearing her muffled sobs.

"You're a criminal, Dr. Wong! It was a crime, what you did to Tanya and me."

"I didn't realize in the beginning or I'd never have touched the thing. I know it now, even better than you do, but what can I do?"

She looked up and wiped her eyes, her mouth set hard. "I know what I can do. I can report you to the Leader."

"What good will that do? You know how terrible you feel now about being left out—though I swear I never meant it to be like this. But just try to imagine. If you report me so that Leader Marley gets the secret of SDE, then thousands of people will be put in just the same situation you are in. You're only one person suffering. But then there'd be hundreds of thousands, millions! Surely you wouldn't want to have that on your conscience?"

"Do you think I'd care?"

"You would when you felt calmer. You're wrought up, ill. Let me send you home. Promise me you'll go home quietly, talk it over with Tanya, and not say anything to anyone else. I'll think of a way out for you. Just be patient."

"Patient!"

He thought of calling Karl Haslam. Karl would know best how to deal with her, how to bring her back to reason. He reached toward the intercom, then dropped his hand in despair. Karl was in the hospital, with Faur� and Hudson, shivering with the cold of Blue Martian fever. But he had to get her away.

He pressed the intercom dial. "Dr. Wong speaking. Miss Hachovnik is ill and is being sent home. Please send an aircab for her at once."

He helped Leah to her feet, and spoke pleadingly.

"Promise you'll be good, Leah?"

The fury in her eyes nearly knocked him down. Without a word, without a gesture, she walked out.

David felt as though he'd been put through a wringer as he followed Officer Magnun into the Leader's suite at State House. Several nights of sleeplessness, the worries of planning for a refuge, and the scene with Leah had left him limp and spiritless. The girl was a danger, he knew, but she was only one of many.

He nodded at Dr. Lanza, who was busy reading reports from BureauMed, and saluted Leader Marley, who was talking with a watchguard.

Marley looked up briefly. "Sit down, Wong."

David folded himself into a chair, grateful for a few moments in which to collect himself, while Marley gave the last of his orders.

"Put them in the Vermont granite quarries, and keep them at work for the next year."

"As you say, Leader. With the usual secrecy, of course?"

"No, you blockhead! These are a bunch of nobodies. Use all the publicity you can get. Keep a punishment a secret and how can it have any effect on other people? No, I want full radio and news coverage and telecast showings as they swing the first pick at the first rocks. People have got to realize that the Leader knows best, that treason doesn't pay. No matter how clever they think they are, they'll always get caught. Understand?"

"As you say, Leader."

"Then get going." As the guard left the room, Leader Marley turned to David. "What fools people are!"

He ran his beefy hands through a shock of black hair, blinked his eyes, and wrinkled the heavy black brows that met over his nose. Wonderingly, he shook his massive head as he drew his gleaming needler from his breast pocket and played with it, tossing it from hand to hand while he talked.

"I'm probably the most generous Leader the State has had since the Atomic Wars, Wong, and I never withhold a privilege from someone who has deserved it. But people mistake me when they think that I am weak and will overlook treason."

"Your generosity is a byword, Leader Marley," said Wong. "But some people are incapable of acting for their best interests even when you have defined it for them. Who are these latest traitors?"

"Oh, nobody really important, of course, except as they waste time which they owe to the State. Just attempts at illegal study. An Office Category who had found a basement room in a deserted building and was spending all his evening hours there practicing the violin. A Theater man who was illegally trying to learn carpentry. And a teacher of mathematics who had forged a key to the Linguistics library, and had been getting in every night to study a dead language—Cuneiform, Latin, something like that, utterly without practical value. This last one is an old man, too, and ought to have known better. People must be made to realize that if they want the privilege of useless study, they will have to earn it. And I am very broadminded in such cases."

"Nobody has better reason to know that than I, Leader Marley, and I am always grateful to you."

Marley coughed and straightened the jacket over his bearlike chest as he put back his needler.

"Now to business. Where's that