Damon Knight - Orbit 17

For the benefit of humanity (and one hundred dollars an injection) he had received at many various times heavy doses of things with names like syncillin, staphcillin, and kanamycin sulfate. He had had the distinction of inhaling a lungful of CS gas long before either the cops or the IRA had ever heard of it. And once, walking home stoned on meprobamate, he had fallen full length in front of a taxi, been run clean over by all four wheels, and pronounced DOA in the emergency room of a busy hospital.

But this kind of adventure was in Heller’s more or less distant past. Lately the medical experiments for which he volunteered had become markedly more sophisticated. He was frequently asked nowadays to sign releases permitting surgical removal of bits of tissue from his already ravaged body, or surgical implantation of mysterious electronic items. It was not unusual for Heller to find himself buzzing, clicking, or performing strange acts which he had not premeditated.

Yet for all this he was not unlike more ordinary members of the human race, especially in that he had not so much made a conscious choice of what to do with his life as simply allowed life’s tide of vicissitudes to creep over him and finally engulf him.

Eight years before, he had come to the campus of Windy Hill Polytechnic as a freshman (undeclared major; a victim of overchoice, he was confused by the array of things it was possible to study). Having neither affluent connections (he was an orphan) nor a scholarship, he had been steered by the student employment office to the Fun Palace, which was the popular name for an impressive medical research complex lavishly funded by some foundation, or perhaps some number of foundations, judging by the grandeur of the plant and the abundance of expensive experiments constantly going on there.

Or anyway thought to be going on there. The Palace had been built at the outside edge of the semirural campus, with staff dwellings in a wooded area behind it. This secluded setting provided enough isolation for the medics that they needed to associate only in passing with the rest of the university faculty and staff.

So all that any outsider really knew was that individual projects seemed to be reaching a conclusion while others were starting, laboratory task forces being organized, disorganized, and reorganized ad infinitum. And in addition to human resources like Heller, the Fun Palace regularly consumed hundreds of tanks of oxygen and other strange gases, crates of chemicals, tons of extraordinary pieces of equipment, and many, many cages of white mice, chameleons, fruit flies, cockroaches, rabbits, monkeys of all sizes, and cats.

When Olay got on the list as a regular volunteer and found that some weeks he made as much as six or seven hundred dollars with no sweat (and only occasional pain), he was hooked. As the academic quarters rolled past, he began to take fewer courses so he could volunteer for more experiments, and eventually and inevitably he dropped away from his studies altogether to devote full time to his work.

Experiments might begin and end, researchers appear and disappear, but Heller Olay went on, as much a fixture around the labs as the electroencephalograph which had several times measured off his alpha and theta rhythms during states of sleeping, waking, dreaming, hypnosis, mathematical problem-solving, and sexual excitation.

From the first Heller was the perfect man for the job, passive, cooperative, sometimes even quietly enthusiastic, grooving whenever possible on whatever was done to him, always ready to acknowledge that his own favorite experiment was the one currently being performed, even including the one in which he’d been shut into a small, lightless cell for several weeks.

Lately, however, working with the relentless Meeford and the inexplicable Dr. Swoos, to whose bust Heller felt drawn in moments when he was up to having feelings at all, he had been overcome by a sweeping malaise, a haziness of purpose, a steep falling off of energy. A chronic low humming sounded in his head, though he was reasonably certain none of the implantations and prostheses connected with past experiments remained installed.

He had, in fact, felt miserable enough to think of going to a doctor until, even in his bemused condition, he had been struck with the recollection that he was already up to the eyes in doctors, was actually spending a twenty-four-hour day among them. Since he’d become such a regular at the Fun Palace, he’d been permitted to move into a dorm in the woods ordinarily reserved for bachelor staff members and assistants. Dr. Swoos herself was a neurosurgeon, and as project director she headed up a whole parade of neurologists, pathologists, psychologists, ophthalmologists, biochemists, biophysicists, and what not. And since there was already on file such a wealth of precise information on the inner workings of his body, it would seem safe to suppose that whatever was now wrong with him could be easily pinpointed without further analysis. Heller had only to choose which doctor to ask about it.

But as things turned out, this choice was taken out of his hands. The same day that he climbed down off the tower after having refused (quite rightly) to jump, and was shambling toward the exit door, Dr. Swoos called him back and invited him into a small office opening off the main part of the laboratory. She closed the door, ostensibly so that Meeford, if he were still around, wouldn’t overhear, and threw Heller a white lab coat, not quite clean, to cover his nakedness.

They sat on opposite sides of a desk regarding each other uneasily. Morgane Swoos, hunched slightly forward from the hips so that she could rest her onerous bosom on the desk top, drummed two fingers against a lamp base for a time and then said abruptly, “Olay, you do trust me, don’t you?”

Heller, who had never known a mother, gazed for several seconds at the mammary display before him and was finally moved to declare, “Sure thing, Dr. Swoos. Right. I trust you.”

Not that his declaration of faith was quite so unsupported as it might sound. He knew little enough about her, but what he had heard was reassuring. She had a reputation around the Fun House as an indefatigable perfectionist. If something didn’t suit her exactly—and few things did—she would move whatever parts of earth and heaven she needed to in order to make things right.

Uncharacteristically hesitant now, however, Dr. Swoos chose a point on the ceiling on which to fix her focus as she said, “I’m not in clinical practice, of course, and this sort of business is a little out of my line, but I feel it’s my moral obligation to warn you that you are not a well man.”

“I know,” said Heller. “I was already thinking of going to a doc—”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Dr. Swoos said quickly. “There’s nothing a doctor from the—ah—outside could tell you that we don’t already know. See here, Olay, I don’t want to upset you, but then some things are better laid on the line, don’t you agree?”

“What things?” said Heller.

“I mean to say, you’re a physical wreck, Olay. Liver—arteries —spleen—heart. Frankly, I don’t believe you’ve got six months.”

The humming in Heller’s head suddenly intensified. Without warning, his eyes crossed, making it seem that Morgane Swoos’s two breasts had, with a scissoring movement, suddenly changed places. A chill sense of unreality settled like a light snowfall over his nervous system. In spite of all these distractions, there was no avoiding the surge of real shock, real fear.

“However,” the woman was now going on encouragingly, “there seems to be nothing wrong with your brain. We’ve completed all the tests. Your judgments are generally acceptable, you seem to know the difference between illusion and reality, which, believe me, gets more difficult for most of us every day.” She drummed against the lamp more gently.