James Gunn - The Immortals

“You killed it,” Bone said, “with your talk of carcinogens and urban perils. ‘Get out of the city!’ you said, and wealth left, moved into the country, built its automatic factories, and left us bloodless, cancer eating at our veins. And inside, the hospitals grew, gobbling block after block, taking a quarter of the city off the tax rolls and then a third. Medicine killed her.”

“All medicine did was present the facts and let the public act upon them as it saw fit,” Flowers said stiffly.

Bone beat at his forehead with the side of a fist. “You’re right, you’re right. We did it ourselves. I wanted you to see that. We gave ourselves into the hands of the physicians, saying, ‘Save us! Make us live!’ And you did not ask, ‘How live? Why?’

“ ‘Take these pills,’ you said, and we swallowed them. ‘You need X rays,’ you said, ‘and radioactive iodine and antibiotics and specifics for this and that,’ and we took them with our tonics and our vitamins.” His voice dropped into a chant. “Give us this day our daily vitamins… ‘With microsurgery we can give you another year of life,’ you said; ‘with blood banks, another six months; with organ and artery banks, a month, a week.’ We forced them on you because we were afraid to die. What do you call this morbid fear of disease and death? Give it a name: hypochondria!

“Call me a hypochondriac,” Bone went on, “and you are only saying that I am a product of my environment. More intimately than you, than anyone, I am connected to my city. We are dying together, society and I, and we will die crying out to you, ‘Save us! Save us or we die!’ ”

“I can’t do anything,” Flowers insisted. “Can’t you understand that?”

Bone took it with surprising calm as he turned his dark eyes toward Flowers. “Oh, you will,” he said, offhandedly. “You think now that you won’t, but there will come a time when the flesh conquers, when it screams that it can endure no more, when the nerves will grow weary of pain and the will agonized with waiting, and you will treat me.”

He studied Flowers casually, from head slowly toward the feet. His eyes grew bright. Flowers thought he would not look, but he couldn’t resist. He glanced down. His jacket had come open. Below its immaculate whiteness was the button-and-spool of the belt buckle. Bone reached curiously toward the buckle. Before Flowers’s tension could achieve action, his arms were caught from behind, pinned back.

“A spool,” Bone said, “and something on it.” With an experienced finger, he punched the button for Rewind and then Playback. As the voices came disembodied into the room, he leaned back against the paneled wall, listening with a thin, speculative smile on his pale lips. When it ended, his smile broadened lazily. “Pick up the girl and the old man. I think they might be useful.”

Flowers understood him instantly. “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “They mean nothing to me. I don’t care what happens to them.”

“Then why protest?” Bone asked blandly. He turned his eyes toward the police officers. “Keep him close. In the broken elevator, there’s an idea.”

A minute later big brass doors clanged behind Flowers, and he was in darkness again.

But this was darkness with a difference. This was night gingerly supported above a pit of nothingness. It gave him a prickling, swelling feeling of terror…

He found himself trembling in front of the doors, hammering against them with futile, aching fists, screaming…

He forced himself to sit down in a corner of the car. He forced himself to forget that it was a car, hanging broken over a void. There was no escape.

He remembered punching the old buttons of the control panel. In his frenzy he had torn off a fingernail trying to pry the door open.

He found the black bag that, like the faithful physician he hoped to become, he had never relinquished and flipped on the light. He rummaged for a bandage, pressed it across the finger where the nail had been.

Then he sat in the dark. It was uncomfortable; he didn’t like it. But it was better to sit in darkness with the knowledge of light available if it was needed than to be without any chance of light at all.

Two hours later the doors swung open, and Leah was thrust between them. His watch told him the time; otherwise he would not have believed that a day had not passed.

The girl staggered as the doors closed and Flowers was as blind as she. He sprang to his feet, though, caught her before she fell, and held her tightly. She fought against him, twisting in his arms, lashing out wildly with her arms and feet.

“It’s me,” Flowers said repeatedly, “the medic.” When she stopped struggling, Flowers started to release her, but she stiffened, clutched at his arm, and held herself, trembling against him.

Holding her was a curious sensation for Flowers. Putting his arms around her was a comforting thing, not professional, skillful, or impersonal like his medical skill. This was clumsy; it offered part of himself.

“Where are we?” she whispered.

“A broken elevator car in City Hall,” he said huskily. “John Bone.”

“What does Bone want?” she asked. Her voice was almost steady; it made him feel stronger, abler, listening to it.

“Treatment.”

“And you won’t.” It was a statement. “You’re consistent, anyway. I reported your kidnapping to Medical Center. Maybe they’ll help.”

Hope flamed up, but reality put it out. Center would have no way of locating him, and they wouldn’t tear apart the city for one minor medic. He was on his own.

“Did Bone get your father, too?”

“No,” Leah said evenly. “The Agency got him. They saw Russ when they came about the kidnapping. One of them recognized him. They took him in.”

“That’s fantastic!” Flowers exclaimed incredulously. “But where did they take him?”

“The Experimental Ward.”

“Not Doctor Pearce!”

“You remember now who he was. So did they. They used his old, reciprocal contract as an excuse because the terminating date was set arbitrarily at one hundred. Doctors didn’t used to live that long. I guess they still don’t.”

“But he’s famous!”

“That’s why they want him; he knows too much, and too many people remember him. They’re afraid the Antivivisection Party will get hold of him and use him against the Profession in some way. They’ve been looking for him thirty years now—ever since he walked out of the hospital and went into the city and never came out.”

“I remember now,” Flowers said. “It was like Ambrose Bierce, they said. He was lecturing to a class—on hematology, I think—and he stopped in the middle of a sentence, and he said, ‘Gentlemen, we have gone too far; it is time to retrace our steps and discover where we went astray.’ Then he walked out of the classroom and out of the hospital, and no one ever saw him again. No one ever knew what he meant.”

“Those days are forgotten. He never talks—talked about them. I thought the hiding was over. I thought they had finally given him up… Why does John Bone want me?”

“He hopes he can force me to treat him—by—”

“Threatening me? Did you laugh at him?”

“No. No, I didn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe I didn’t think fast enough.”

Slowly Leah pulled her hand away, and they sat silently in the darkness. Flowers’s thoughts were painful; he could scarcely bear to consider them.

“I’m going to look at your eyes,” he said suddenly.

He got out his ophthalmoscope and leaned toward the girl, focusing the spot of light on the clouded cornea. She sat still, let him pull up her eyelids, pull down the soft skin of her cheek. He nodded slowly to himself and put the instrument away.