Gordon Dickson - The Human Edge

When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the doctor’s woolly face, looking down at him—he had learned to recognize that countenance in the same way a sheep-herder eventually comes to recognize individual sheep in his flock. Eldridge felt very weak, but calm.

“You tried hard—” said the doctor. “But you see, you didn’t make it. There’s no way out that way for you.”

Eldridge smiled.

“Stop that!” said the doctor sharply. “You aren’t fooling us. We know you’re perfectly rational.”

Eldridge continued to smile.

“What do you think you’re doing?” demanded the doctor. Eldridge looked happily up at him.

“I’m going home,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “You don’t convince me.” He turned and left. Eldridge turned over on his side and dropped off into the first good sleep he’d had in months.

In spite of himself, however, the doctor was worried. He had the guards doubled, but nothing happened. The days slipped into weeks again and nothing happened. Eldridge was apparently fully recovered. He still spent a great deal of time walking up and down his cage and grasping the bars as if to pull them out of the way before him—but the frenzy of his earlier pacing was gone. He had also moved his cot over next to the small, two-foot square hatch that opened to admit the mechanical arm bearing his meals, and would lie there, with his face pressed against it, waiting for the food to be delivered. The doctor felt uneasy, and spoke to the commander privately about it.

“Well,” said the commander, “just what is it you suspect?”

“I don’t know,” confessed the doctor. “It’s just that I see him more frequently than any of us. Perhaps I’ve become sensitized—but he bothers me.”

“Bothers you?”

“Frightens me, perhaps. I wonder if we’ve taken the right way with him.”

“We took the only way.” The commander made the little gesture and sound that was his race’s equivalent of a sigh. “We must have data. What do you do when you run across a possibly dangerous virus, doctor? You isolate it—for study, until you know. It is not possible, and too risky to try to study his race at close hand, so we study him. That’s all we’re doing. You lose objectivity, doctor. Would you like to take a short vacation?”

“No,” said the doctor, slowly. “No. But he frightens me.”

Still, time went on and nothing happened. Eldridge paced his cage and lay on his cot, face pressed to the bars of the hatch, and staring at the outside world. Another year passed; and another. The double guards were withdrawn. The doctor came reluctantly to the conclusion that the human had at last accepted the fact of his confinement and felt growing within him that normal sort of sympathy that feeds on familiarity. He tried to talk to Eldridge on his regularly scheduled visits, but Eldridge showed little interest in conversation. He lay on the cot watching the doctor as the doctor examined him, with something in his eyes as if he looked on from some distant place in which all decisions were already made and finished.

“You’re as healthy as ever,” said the doctor, concluding his examination. He regarded Eldridge. “I wish you would, though—” He broke off. “We aren’t a cruel people, you know. We don’t like the necessity that makes us do this.”

He paused. Eldridge considered him without stirring.

“If you’d accept that fact,” said the doctor, “I’m sure you’d make it easier on yourself. Possibly our figures of speech have given you a false impression. We said you are immortal. Well, of course, that’s not true. Only practically speaking, are you immortal. You are now capable of living a very, very, very long time. That’s all.”

He paused again. After a moment of waiting, he went on.

“Just the same way, this business isn’t really intended to go on for eternity. By its very nature, of course, it can’t. Even races have a finite lifetime. But even that would be too long. No, it’s just a matter of a long time as you might live it. Eventually, everything must come to a conclusion—that’s inevitable.”

Eldridge still did not speak. The doctor sighed.

“Is there anything you’d like?” he said. “We’d like to make this as little unpleasant as possible. Anything we can give you?”

Eldridge opened his mouth.

“Give me a boat,” he said. “I want a fishing rod. I want a bottle of applejack.”

The doctor shook his head sadly. He turned and signaled the guards. The cage door opened. He went out.

“Get me some pumpkin pie,” cried Eldridge after him, sitting up on the cot and grasping the bars as the door closed. “Give me some green grass in here.”

The doctor crossed the bridge. The bridge was lifted up and the monitor screen lit up. A woolly face looked out and saw that all was well. Slowly the outer door swung open.

“Get me some pine trees!” yelled Eldridge at the doctor’s retreating back. “Get me some plowed fields! Get me some earth, some dirt, some plain, earth dirt! Get me that! ”

The door shut behind the doctor; and Eldridge burst into laughter, clinging to the bars, hanging there with glowing eyes.

“I would like to be relieved of this job,” said the doctor to the commander, appearing formally in the latter’s office.

“I’m sorry,” said the commander. “I’m very sorry. But it was our tactical team that initiated this action; and no one has the experience with the prisoner you have. I’m sorry.”

The doctor bowed his head; and went out.

Certain mild but emotion-deadening drugs were also known to the woolly, bearlike race. The doctor went out and began to indulge in them. Meanwhile, Eldridge lay on his cot, occasionally smiling to himself. His position was such that he could see out the window and over the weaving curtain of the barrier that ringed his building, to the landing field. After a while one of the large ships landed and when he saw the three members of its crew disembark from it and move, antlike, off across the field toward the buildings at its far end, he smiled again.

He settled back and closed his eyes. He seemed to doze for a couple of hours and then the sound of the door opening to admit the extra single guard bearing the food for his three o’clock mid-afternoon feeding. He sat up, pushed the cot down a ways, and sat on the end of it, waiting for the meal.

The bridge was not extended—that happened only when someone physically was to enter his cage. The monitor screen lit up and a woolly face watched as the tray of food was loaded on the mechanical arm. It swung out across the acid-filled moat, stretched itself toward the cage, and under the vigilance of the face in the monitor, the two-foot square hatch opened just before it to let it extend into the cage.

Smiling, Eldridge took the tray. The arm withdrew, as it cleared the cage, the hatch swung shut and locked. Outside the cage, guards, food carrier and face in the monitor relaxed. The food carrier turned toward the door, the face in the monitor looked down at some invisible control board before it and the outer door swung open.

In that moment, Eldridge moved.

In one swift second he was on his feet and his hands had closed around the bars of the hatch. There was a single screech of metal, as—incredibly—he tore it loose and threw it aside. Then he was diving through the hatch opening.

He rolled head over heels like a gymnast and came up with his feet standing on the inner edge of the moat. The acrid scent of the acid faintly burnt at his nostrils. He sprang forward in a standing jump, arms outstretched—and his clutching fingers closed on the end of the food arm, now halfway in the process of its leisurely mechanical retraction across the moat.