Harlan Ellison - Paingod and Other Delusions

He walked into the operating room.

A standard simple operation. No one in the bubble.

The phymech assistant stood silently waiting by the feeder trough. As Bergman walked across the empty room, the cubicle split open across the way, and a rolling phymech with a tabletop — on which was the patient — hurried to the operating table. The machine lowered the tabletop to the operating slab, and bolted it down quickly. Then it rolled away.

Bergman stared at the patient, and for a minute his resolve left him. She was a thin young girl with laugh-lines in her face that could never be erased … except by death.

Up till a moment ago Bergman had known he would do it, but now … Now he had to see whom he was going to do this thing to, and it made his stomach feel diseased in him, his breath filled with the decay of foul death. He couldn’t do it.

The girl looked up at him, and smiled with light blue eyes, and somehow Bergman’s thoughts centered on his wife, Thelma, who was nothing like this sweet, frail child. Thelma, whose insensitivity had begun in his life as humorous, and decayed through the barren years of their marriage till it was now a millstone he wore silently. Bergman knew he couldn’t do what had to be done. Not to this girl.

The phymech applied the anaesthesia cone from behind the girl’s head. She caught one quick flash of tentacled metal, her eyes widened with blueness, and then she was asleep. When she awoke, her appendix would be removed.

Bergman felt a wrenching inside him. This was the time. With Calkins so suspicious of him, with the phymechs getting stronger every day, this might be the last chance.

He prayed to God silently for a moment, then began the operation. Bergman carefully made a longitudinal incision in the right lower quadrant of the girl’s abdomen, about four inches long. As he spread the wound, he saw this would be just an ordinary job. No peritonitis … they had gotten the girl in quickly, and it hadn’t ruptured. This would be a simple job, eight or nine minutes at the longest.

Carefully, Bergman delivered the appendix into the wound. Then he securely tied it at the base, and feeling the tension of what was to come building in him, cut it across and removed it.

He began to close the abdominal walls tightly.

Then he asked God for forgiveness, and did what had to be done. It was not going to be such a simple operation, after all.

The scalpel was an electro-blade — thin as a whisper — and as he brought it toward the flesh, his plan ran through his mind. The spin of a bullet, the passage of a silver fish through quicksilver, the flick of a thought, but it was all there, in totality, completeness and madness …

He would sever an artery, the robot would sense what was being done, and would shoulder in to repair the damage. Bergman would slash another vein, and the robot would work at two jobs. He would slash again, and again, and yet again, till finally the robot would overload, and freeze. Then Bergman would overturn the table, the girl would be dead, there would be an inquiry and a trial, and he would be able to blame the robot for the death … and tell his story … make them check it … make them stop using phymechs till the problem had been solved.

All that as the electro-blade moved in his hand.

Then the eyes of the girl fastened to his own, closed for a moment to consider what he was doing. In the darkness of his mind, he saw those eyes and knew finally:

What good was it to win his point, if he lost his soul?

The electro-blade clattered to the floor.

He stood there unmoving, as the phymech rolled near silently beside him, and completed the routine closure.

He turned away, and left the operating room quickly.

He left the hospital shortly after, feeling failure huge in his throat. He had had his opportunity, and had not been brave enough to take it. But was that it? Was it another edge of that inner cowardice he had shown before? Or was it that he realized nothing could be worth the taking of an innocent girl’s life? Ethics, softheartedness, what? His mind was a turmoil.

The night closed down stark and murmuring around Bergman. He stepped from the light blotch of the lobby, and the rain misted down over him, shutting him away from life and man and everything but the dark wool of his inner thoughts. It had been raining like this the night Calkins had intimidated him. Was it always to rain on him, throughout his days?

Only the occasional whirr of a heater ploughing invisibly across the sky overhead broke the steady machine murmur of the city. He crossed the silent street quickly.

The square block of darkness that was Memorial was dotted with the faint rectangles of windows. Lighted windows. The hollow laughter of bitterness bubbled up from his belly as he saw the lights. Concessions to Man … always concessions by the Almighty God of the Machine.

Inside Bergman’s mind, something was fighting to be free. He was finished now, he knew that. He had had the chance, but it had been the wrong chance. It could never be right if it started from something like that girl’s death. He knew that, too … finally. But what was there to do?

And the answer came back hollowly: Nothing.

Behind him, where he could not see it, a movement of metal in the shadows.

Bergman walked in shadows, also. Thoughts that were shadows. Thoughts that led him only to bleak futility and despair. The Zsebok Mechanical Physicians. Phymechs.

The word exploded in his head like a Roman candle, spitting sparks into his nerve ends. He never wanted to destroy so desperately in his life. All the years of fighting for medicine, and a place in the world of the healer … they were wasted.

He now knew the phymechs weren’t better than humans … but how could he prove it? Unsubstantiated claims, brought to Calkins, would only be met with more intimidation, and probably a revoking of his license. He was trapped solidly.

How much longer could it go on?

Behind him, mechanical ears tuned, robot eyes fastened on the slumping, walking man. Rain was no deterrent to observation.

The murmur of a beater’s rotors caused Bergman to look up. He could see nothing through the swirling rain-mist, but he could hear it, and his hatred reached out. Then: I don’t hate machines, I never did. Only now that they’ve deprived me of my humanity, now that they’ve taken away my life. Now I hate them. His eyes sparked again with submerged loathing as he searched the sky beneath the climate dome, hearing the whirr of the beater’s progress meshing with the faint hum of the dome at work; he desperately sought something against which he might direct his feelings of helplessness, of inadequacy.

So intent was he that he did not see the old woman who stepped out stealthily from the service entrance of a building, till she had put a trembling hand on his sleeve.

The shadows swirled about the shape watching Bergman — and now the old woman — from down the street.

“You a doctor, ain’cha?”

He started, his head jerking around spastically. His dark eyes focused on her seamed face only with effort. In the dim light of the illumepost that filtered through the rain, Bergman could see she was dirty and ill-kempt. Obviously from the tenements in Slobtown, way out near the curve-down edge of the climate dome.

She licked her lips again, fumbling in the pockets of her torn jumpette, nervous to the point of terror, unable to drag forth her words.

“ Well . What do you want?” Bergman was harsher than he had intended, but his banked-down antagonism prodded him into belligerence.

“I been watchin’ for three days and Charlie’s gettin’ worse and his stomach’s swellin’ and I noticed you been comin’ outta the hospital every day now for three days …” The words tumbled out almost incoherently, slurred by a gutter accent. To Bergman’s tutored ear — subjected to these sounds since Kohlbenschlagg had taken him in — there was something else in the old woman’s voice: the helpless tones of horror in asking someone to minister to an afflicted loved one.