Дэймон Найт - Orbit 4

Craftily, Andrew kept quiet. There always came a time when you had to be quiet and let a man talk himself into doing what you wanted.

“I’ve succeeded with animals, but a human being— with the unpredictable human mind. I ought to be willing to sacrifice you, since you’ve already found me expendable. Here you are urging me, offering yourself. I can’t imagine why I hesitate.”

“Liar,” said Andrew calmly, watching his obviously youthful face.

For a moment they were both quiet, eyeing each other with mutual skepticism.

“You have no idea what it entails, Andrew,” said Paul at last. “You see, your investigators didn’t get it quite right. I don’t lengthen the life of your organism. I have a procedure by which you produce yourself a new one.”

Andrew puffed at his cigar. “What’s the difference?”

“The psychological hazard. It’s terrifying.”

“You can do it, then!”

“It’s also very painful.”

“Worse than dying?”

“It would take a year.”

“Give me six weeks to get my business in order.”

“You’re determined, then?”

Andrew carefully scraped the ash off his cigar into the saucer on the desk. Now why was the man so carefully decontaminating himself of all trace of responsibility? Was there more he had not disclosed? Or was it a last attempt to frighten him off? Oh, I know you, Paul. You’d complete an experiment if it cost your own life, much less saving mine. “Yes.”

When Andrew returned to the laboratory, the hardwoods were turning color and the katydids had replaced the locusts. He brought with him a physician’s report, which Paul had insisted upon, attesting to the soundness of his heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

Changes had occurred at the laboratory during the interval. A new cinderblock wing jutted from the end of the quonset. It housed a small operating room and the room which Andrew would occupy for a year.

“I have some tests of my own to make, first,” Paul told him, and for two weeks Andrew submitted to brief agonizing encounters with tubes, needles and the rest of the distasteful panoply of research. The experience of suffering was new to him. Not even the accident to his hands had hurt very much—too much nerve tissue had been destroyed. Now, for the first time in his healthy life, he suffered the intrusion of reality upon his intellectual horizon, a reality that probed deeper and deeper into the fortress of his mind, laying waste whole concepts by the quick dazzle of pain, the hollow echoes of relief. He was astounded and exasperated at the ease with which his body could dominate his attention. His buffeted ego retched, too, as he lay vomiting after one particularly trying exploration. He might have quit the whole attempt then and there had it not been for the old cold habits of his years in commercial chemistry. One did not easily relinquish the fruit of a three year search. Any new enterprise was like a boil, growing more tense and painful until it finally erupted in success.

The experiment itself commenced with a small operation. The large artery in Andrew’s groin had to be moved to the outer side of his thigh. This was for mechanical ease, Paul explained.

“I’m not much of a surgeon, but no reputable doctor would perform such an operation so you have no choice. Are you still interested?”

“Yes.”

“Once we go this far, there will be no turning back.”

Andrew nodded brusquely, took the sedatives Paul gave him and climbed into bed. Paul snapped out the light, the door closed, all was quiet.

So, here he was suddenly. In this small room, this great bed, facing the large window that looked out on the meadow and part of the woods. The rising moon, three-quarters full, shed its placid light on the world, the curtains moved beside the partly opened window and it was as though nothing but this room had ever existed. I will not go out of this room on these legs, he thought, and abruptly the gamut opened before him.

Thoughts of life and death lined either side, thoughts a healthy man should never think. How fragile life was! One blow and it was gone. There lay the bones and tissues, but the life was gone, emptied out so easily. How vulnerable it was, how final its departure! How short its tenure seemed, at best. If something were to go wrong, it would be as though he had never lived at all. Consciousness was no more than an abstraction, a geometrical point in the void, preceded by mindless infinity, succeeded by mindless infinity. How mad, the commotion this abstraction could produce. Between the two infinities, what difference did a few years make? And yet how precious they seemed. It was worthless. A man would never buy anything so problematical. Yet he had.

This is not the way to think. You can die thinking such thoughts. You have to fight. Now, fight, he told himself. Cling. Think of being alive!

Oh, but pain. It was a problem. Those additional tests Paul had made. Painful. Pain required a certain mental attitude. You had to alienate yourself, draw apart from your body, set it out there where you could look at it and see it was just a kind of automobile. Made the pain bearable. The pain was bad when you confused it with yourself, whatever yourself was. What is the self? This mysterious seer, hearer, thinker, this insubstantial entity that desires to continue, that hates these wincing tissues on which it depends. Repulsive, failing, dying stuff. Suddenly, he felt as though he were perched precariously in a small boat tossed on a wild sea of organic matter that would drown him if he let it.

But I will not be drowned, he told himself. I’ll cling to this boat and tomorrow in the daylight it will be better.

When he awoke, leaves were swirling past the window. It was a windy October day and he felt hungry. He pressed the button and Paul came in carrying a small tray with sterile implements on it.

“Well,” said Andrew heartily. “I feel ready for anything. Give me some breakfast and let’s get on with it.”

“The operation is over,” said Paul.

Andrew gaped at him, and in the silence Paul set down the tray on the table by the bed. Scissors, cotton, alcohol, a small vial with a plain darning needle stuck through the cork. Andrew turned away and instead looked at his hands. They were the same as always. But what matter if they were stiff and numb? They worked, didn’t they? He clenched them slowly. Good hands.

“Already past the point of no return, eh?”

“That’s right,” said Paul.

And then the reaction. This is not me. I’m in it, but it isn’t me. And the mad scramble back into the boat.

Paul lifted the bandage where the relocated artery pulsed. He swabbed a tiny patch of skin and picked up the vial.

“You see,” he said, extracting the cork with the needle, “in this process we take advantage of the fact that every cell of the body has in it the complete genetic equipment. We merely encourage one to divulge what it knows.” And he pricked the skin deeply.

“Is that all?”

“That’s the beginning.”

It itched, but Andrew, clinging to the cockleshell of his identity, refused to scratch it. The body was itching, not he.

“I’ll bring in your breakfast now,” said Paul, replacing things on the tray. “You’re going to have to eat quantities. Six meals a day. And unfortunately, special and not very tasty preparations. But it’ll be better in a couple of weeks. You won’t have to force yourself anymore. The new body is parasitic.”

Andrew said nothing. Instead, he watched with great attention as Paul recorked the vial. Small hard sounds of glass on metal, the movements of hands, footfalls as Paul went out.

Then what does one do with the mind?

One had to use these senses. They were all one had. But curse these sneaking side-glances at the machinery!