Damon Knight - Orbit 17

“I have this humming in my head.”

“Blood pressure,” Dr. Swoos decided. “Certainly it’s nothing mental.” She removed her gaze from the ceiling to stare reflectively into Heller’s scared face, then returned it to the ceiling. “I’m putting this badly,” she apologized, “but I’m trying to convey to you not only the seriousness of your physical condition, but the (I hope) welcome news that you have no need to despair. If you will put yourself entirely into our hands, we can—you see, we’re on the very threshold of a—you’re in the singular position to volunteer, if you will, for an experiment that will be mutually —let me put it this way: do you have any close relatives, anyone who cares about you?”

Heller thought about Jolene, then remembered they had parted on bad terms and he’d since heard she had left the campus. He thought about Janice but couldn’t even recall her last name, nor how to get in touch with her. In (relative) health, he’d thought her not worth the pursuit, and news of his grave condition now didn’t seem to reverse the judgment. As for family, there had once been a second cousin in San Diego, but for the life of him Heller couldn’t recall the cousin’s first name, not to mention the last. “No, no one,” he told his interrogator.

At this point in their conversation Dr. Swoos drew from the lap drawer of the desk a prepared document with an “X” ready at the spot where he was to sign. Heller was so accustomed to releases, contracts, and hold-harmless agreements that he more or less automatically reached for the ball-point Morgane Swoos held out to him. She did not, however, release her grasp on the other end of the pen until she had said: “You do understand, don’t you, Olay, that this will be the most serious experiment you’ve ever participated in? That it will have profound results for you quite aside from being a solution to your medical problems? In fact the document you are about to sign is a carte blanche if ever there was one.”

“All I care is will the new experiment keep me from conking out dead in six months?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

Heller signed.

Even around the Fun Palace, where acts of high lunacy were SOP (at least in the view of detractors), the new pet of Dr. Morgane Swoos caused a lot of comment. The animal accompanied her everywhere, trotting smartly at the end of a shiny red leash, scrambling in and out of her convertible, bringing in the morning paper and the quart of milk (two trips, of course) from the front doorstep of her cottage on the Palace grounds.

And she was devoted to it, no doubt of that. She was often seen leaning down in a frenzy of sentiment to press its willing head against her breast, and when she spoke to it, her tone was never condescending or commanding but always earnest, respectful, with overtones of both pride and tenderness.

“Heller, you swine,” she said, “you are my creature and I love you. Can you ever forgive me? Sure, the love may have begun as guilt. (No pun, darling, and anyway, you’re a boar. No pun there, either. Sorry.) But now I’m mad about you and what’s to be done? In a way I’ve defeated myself, but then I hadn’t planned on such deep personal involvement.”

Heller said nothing.

“You do understand why this particular choice, don’t you? A dog’s so unimaginative, so obvious, and one of the big cats—a panther or lion—would cause too much talk. Not that there isn’t talk now. I’d have to be deaf as an amoeba not to know that. But I’m used to talk. People—men especially—have always talked about me because of my—oh, hell, I mustn’t burden you with my hangups. It’s just that talk is all I’ve ever really inspired. When it comes time for something more, men always back down. I mean, they like the idea, but at the countdown they get scared of me somehow. Between my work and my figure, I’ve lived a lonely life, Heller.”

They were at home. It was evening. Heller sprawled on a hearth rug at her side, looking up at her, listening. She sprawled on the sofa naked, looking down at him, talking.

“But I was going to tell you why this particular choice. To put it in simplified terms you can understand, it’s the metabolism. Your metabolism now is very close to what it was before, which has helped reduce the trauma of the change. The diet remaining almost identical helps, you see. A convenience, too. We can eat together.”

Heller grunted.

“Not that something else couldn’t have been managed. The field has opened up marvelously, and with the addition of my own contributions, almost anything is possible. There are days when I could kick myself that I didn’t choose a dog after all. Some kind of enormous dog. Or wolf, perhaps a timber wolf. For my own selfish purposes, you understand. Because—now please don’t be shocked—in the annals of animal sodomy that makes more sense.” She looked at him severely. “I’m not joking, you know. I may be outrageous but I am almost never unserious.”

Here Morgane Swoos, her flesh flowing warmly around her, slipped off the sofa and onto the rug and took her companion in her arms. For a moment they lay quietly together, the only sound the crackling from the blaze in the fireplace, which was also the only source of light in the room.

Then she said, “Of course there are certain advantages even now. For one thing we’ve come to know each other well, far better than we could when I was a project director and you were just a laboratory animal. It happens I’m still directing the project, though. And come to think of it, I guess you’re still just a laboratory animal.” She hugged him close, and in another minute she had begun to sob. She sobbed for a long time; her breasts, which naked suggested something more than the foothills of the Alleghenies, though in fairness something less than the Grand Te-tons, trembled and heaved.

At length she stopped weeping and said, “Don’t worry, darling. I’ll think of something.” At her own words she seemed to brighten and finally giggled. “I suppose I should feel like Circe.” Heller didn’t answer.

“At least you’re not a male chauvinist pig, are you?” she teased him, running her hands lightly over his broad belly.

Heller made no sound except a faint snuffling.

After still another moment she decided he was asleep, and dragged down a blanket from the sofa to cover them both.

It wasn’t so much the shock and anxiety of waking up changed; there were tranquilizers for that. It wasn’t even the loss of dignity; his years around the Fun House had already divested him of the last traces of conventional dignity. No, what it was was the goddamned lowdownness of his field of observation. Even the lack of binocular vision wasn’t so troublesome as the fact that everything now seemed to go on several feet above his head. Signs, conversations, gestures, meaningful exchanges of glances—he missed all these and more. And the new information he picked up in compensation—that cockroaches, earwigs, sowbugs, and other such traffic swarmed boldly in the darker corners of the medical buildings, even though the floors were washed regularly with antiseptic solution, and that most of the women who worked in and around the labs had bad legs—didn’t really seem worth the trouble.

In a lesser way he was affected too by arcane impulses, as on the occasion when Morgane had detached the leash to let him wander free in the park while she sat reading on a bench. It had rained hard the night before and there were puddles everywhere, none so evocative as the one at a small construction site where a gazebo was being built in the midst of a tulip bed. Heller did not want to approach this shallow trench, where rainwater had combined with the loose loam of the flowerbed to make a thick porridge. All his best thinking, in fact, was directed against his action, but once he was in up to his neck, the feel of the cool, slushy mud on his skin made him groan with delight. Even Morgane had been fascinated, had come running over, notebook at the ready, to make a complete record of the incident.