Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace

A drunk. Probably not dangerous, though there is a vague sense of menace about him, “I didn’t know I was such a celebrity here.”

“Celebrity. Celebrity. Yeah, you’re fucking famous. At least to me you are. I spotted you from all the way across Broadway. Not that you’ve changed so much.” The man is definitely drunk. He has that heavy, overly ingratiating warmth; he is practically hanging from Shadrach’s arm. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“Should I?”

“Depends. You knew me pretty well once.”

Shadrach searches the jowly, ravaged face. Distantly familiar, but no name comes to mind. “Harvard,” he guesses. “It must have been Harvard. Right?”

“Two points. Keep going.”

“Medical school?”

“Try the college.”

“That’s harder. That goes back better than fifteen years.”

“Take fifteen years off me. And about twenty kilos. And the beard. Shit, you haven’t changed at all. Of course you live an easy life. I know what you’ve been doing.” The man shuffles his feet and, without relinquishing his grip on Shadrach’s arm, twists away, coughs, hawks, spits. Bloody sputum. He grins. “Piece of my gut there, eh? Lose a little more every day. You really don’t recognize me. What the hell, all us white boys look alike.”

“Want to give me more hints?”

“Big one. We were on the track team together.”

“Shotput,” Shadrach says instantly, feeling the datum rise out of God knows what recess of his memory banks and certain that it is correct.

“Two points. Now the name.”

“Not yet. I’m groping for it.” He transforms this ruin into a young man, beardless, brawn where he has fat today, in T-shirt and shorts, hefting the gleaming metal globe, going into the bizarre little wind-up dance of the shotputter, making his heave—

“The NCAA meet, Boston, ’95. Our sophomore year. You won the sixty-meter sprint in six seconds even. Very nice. And I took the shotput at twenty-one meters. Our pictures in all the newspapers. Remember? The first big track event after the Virus War, a sign that things were getting back to normal. Hah. Normal. You were one hell of a runner, Shadrach. I bet you still are. Shit, I couldn’t even lift the shot now. What’s my name?”

“Ehrenreich,” Shadrach says immediately. “Jim Ehrenreich.”

“Six points! And you’re the big man’s doctor now. You said you’d be of some use to humanity, you weren’t going into medicine just to make a buck, eh? And you were right on. Serving humanity, keeping our glorious leader alive. Why do you look so surprised ? You think nobody knows the name of the Chairman’s doctor?”

“I don’t try to get much publicity,” Shadrach says.

“True. But we know a little about what goes on in Ulan Bator. I was Committee, you know. Until last year. Where are you heading? Chinatown? Let’s walk together. Standing still like this, it’s bad for my legs, the varicose veins. I was Committee, third from the top in Northern California, even had a vector-access rating. Of course they dropped me. But don’t worry: you won’t get into trouble talking to me. Even with those Citpols standing over there watching. I’m not a fucking pariah, you know. I’m just ex-Committee. I’m allowed to taik to people.”

“What happened?”

“I was dumb. I had this friend, she was Committee too, very low echelon, and her brother caught the rot. She said to me, Can you jigger the computer, get a bigger requisition of the Antidote, save my brother? Sure, I said, I would, I’ll do it, only for you, kid. I knew this computer man. He could jigger the numbers. So I asked him, and he did it, at least I thought he was doing it, but it was only a trap, a sucker deal, pure entrapment — the Citpols stepped in, asked me to account for the extra Antidote allotment I had requested—” Ehrenreich blinks cheerfully, “They sent her to the organ farm. Her brother died. Me they simply dropped, no further punishment. Very fucking lucky. On account of my years of devoted service to the Permanent Revolution. I even get a little allowance, enough to keep me in vodka. But it was a waste, Shadrach, a stupid waste. They should have sent me to the organ farm too, while I was still whole. Because now I’m dying. You know that, don’t you?”

“They say that if you’ve been on the Antidote, and you go off it, you generally get the rot right away. It’s like the pent-up force of the disease busts loose and conquers you.”

“I’ve heard that, yes,” Shadrach says.

“How long do I have? You can tell that, can’t you?”

“Not without examining you. Maybe not even then. I’m not exactly an expert on the rot.”

“No. No. You wouldn’t be. Not in Ulan Bator. You don’t get enough exposure there. I’ve had it six months. My beard was black when I got it. I had all my hair then. I’m going to die, Shadrach.”

“We’re all going to die. Except maybe for Genghis Mao.”

“You know what I mean. I’m not even thirty-seven years old and I’m going to die. I’m going to rot and die. Because I was dumb, because I wanted to help the brother of a friend. I had it made, I was home safe, the Antidote in my arm every six months.”

“You really were dumb,” Shadrach tells him. “Because nothing you could have done would have helped your friend’s brother.”

“Eh?”

“The Antidote doesn’t cure. It immunizes. Once the lethal stage sets in, that’s it. The disease can’t be reversed. Didn’t you know that? I thought everybody knew that.”

“No. No.”

“You smashed your career for nothing. Threw away your life for nothing.” “No,” Ehrenreich says. He looks stunned. “It can’t be true. I don’t believe it.”

“Look it up.”

“No,” he says. “I want you to save me, Shadrach. I want you to prescribe the Antidote for me.”

“I just told you—”

“You knew what I was going to ask. You were trying to head me off.”

“Please, Jim—”

“But you could get the stuff. You’re probably traveling with a hundred ampoules in your little black bag. Shit, man, you’re Genghis Mao’s own doctor! You can do anything. It’s not like being third from the top in a regional office. Look, we were on the same team, we won trophies together, we had our pictures in the paper—”

“It wouldn’t work, Jim.”

“You’re afraid to help me.”

“I ought to be, after what you just told me. You got dropped for illegal diversion of the Antidote, you say, and then you turn around and ask me to do the same thing.”

“It’s different. You’re the doctor of—”

“Even so. There’s no point in giving you the Antidote, for reasons that I’ve just explained. But even if there were, I couldn’t get any for you. I’d never get away with it.”

“You don’t want to risk your ass. Even for an old friend.”

“No, I don’t. And I don’t want to be made to feel guilty for refusing to do something that doesn’t make any sense.” There is nothing gentle in Shadrach’s voice. “The Antidote is useless to you now. Absolutely entirely useless. Get that straight and keep it straight.”

“You wouldn’t even try some on me? Just for an experiment?”

“It’s useless. Useless.”

After a long pause Ehrenreich says, “You know what I wish, old buddy? That you find yourself in bad trouble someday, that you find yourself right on the edge of the cliff and you’re hanging on by your fingernails. And some old buddy of yours comes along, and you yell out to him, Save me, save me, the shits are killing me! And he tromps on your hand and keeps on walking. That’s what I wish. So you’d find out what it’s like. That’s what I wish.”

Shadrach shrugs. He can feel no anger toward a dying man. Nor does he choose to talk about his own problems. He says simply, “If I could heal you, I would. But I can’t.”