Judith Merril - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

“Nobody does, you fool,” cried Doctor Vomact. “It’s not punishment. People don’t like it down on Shayol, and it’s better, I guess, to get convicts instead of volunteers. But there isn’t anybody against you at all.”

“No jailers?” asked Mercer, with a whine in his voice.

“No jailers, no rules, no prohibitions. Just Shayol, and B’dikkat to take care of you. Do you still want your mind and your eyes?”

“I’ll keep them,” said Mercer. “I’ve gone this far and I might as well go the rest of the way.”

“Then let me put the cap on you for your second dose,” said Doctor Vomact.

The doctor adjusted the cap just as lightly and delicately as had the nurse; he was quicker about it. There was no sign of his picking out another cap for himself.

The inrush of pleasure was like a wild intoxication. His burning skin receded into distance. The doctor was near in space, but even the doctor did not matter. Mercer was not afraid of Shayol. The pulsation of happiness out of his brain was too great to leave room for fear or pain.

Doctor Vomact was holding out his hand.

Mercer wondered why, and then realized that the wonderful, kindly cap-giving man was offering to shake hands. He lifted his own. It was heavy, but his arm was happy, too.

They shook hands. It was curious, thought Mercer, to feel the handshake beyond the double level of cerebral pleasure and dermal pain.

“Goodbye, Mr. Mercer,” said the doctor. “Goodbye and a good goodnight… “

The ferry satellite was a hospitable place. The hundreds of hours that followed were like a long, weird dream.

Twice again the young nurse sneaked into his bedroom with him when he was being given the cap and had a cap with him. There were baths which calloused his whole body. Under strong local anesthetics, his teeth were taken out and stainless steel took their place. There were irradiations under blazing lights which took away the pain of his skin. There were special treatments for his fingernails and toenails. Gradually they ‘changed into formidable claws; he found himself stropping them on the aluminum bed one night and saw that they left deep marks.

His mind never became completely clear.

Sometimes he thought that he was home with his mother, that he was little again, and in pain. Other times, under the cap, he laughed in his bed to think that people were sent to this place for punishment when it was all so terribly much fun. There were no trials, no questions, no judges. Food was good, but he did not think about it much; the cap was better. Even when he was awake, he was drowsy.

At last, with the cap on him, they put him into an adiabatic pod — a one-body missile which could be dropped from the ferry to the planet below. He was all closed in, except for his face.

Doctor Vomact seemed to swim into the room. “You are strong, Mercer,” the doctor shouted, “you are very strong! Can you hear me?”

Mercer nodded.

“We wish you well, Mercer. No matter what happens, remember you are helping other people up here.”

“Can I take the cap with me?” said Mercer.

For an answer, Doctor Vomact removed the cap himself. Two men closed the lid of the pod, leaving Mercer in total darkness. His mind started to clear, and he panicked against his wrappings.

There was the roar of thunder and the taste of blood.

The next thing that Mercer knew, he was in a cool, cool room, much chillier than the bedrooms and operating rooms of the satellite. Someone was lifting him gently onto a table.

He opened his eyes.

An enormous face, four times the size of any human face Mercer had ever seen, was looking down at him. Huge brown eyes, cowlike in their gentle inoffensiveness, moved back and forth as the big face examined Mercer’s wrappings. The face was that of a handsome man of middle years, clean-shaven, hair chestnut-brown, with sensual, full lips and gigantic but healthy yellow teeth exposed in a half-smile. The face saw Mercer’s eyes open, and spoke with a deep friendly roar.

“I’m your best friend. My name is B’dikkat, but you don’t have to use that here. Just call me Friend, and I will always help you.”

“I hurt,” said Mercer.

“Of course you do. You hurt all over. That’s a big drop,” said B’dikkat.

“Can I have a cap, please,” begged Mercer. It was not a question; it was a demand; Mercer felt that his private inward eternity depended on it.

B’dikkat laughed. “I haven’t any caps down here. I might use them myself. Or so they think. I have other things, much better. No fear, fellow, I’ll fix you up.”

Mercer looked doubtful. If the cap had brought him happiness on the ferry, it would take at least electrical stimulation of the brain to undo whatever torments the surface of Shayol had to offer.

B’dikkat’s laughter filled the room like a bursting pillow.

“Have you ever heard of condamine?”

“No,” said Mercer.

“It’s a narcotic so powerful that the pharmacopoeias are not allowed to mention it.”

“You have that?” said Mercer hopefully.

“Something better. I have super-condamine. It’s named after the New French town where they developed it. The chemists hooked in one more hydrogen molecule. That gave it a real jolt. If you took it in your present shape, you’d be dead in three minutes, but those three minutes would seem like ten thousand years of happiness to the inside of your mind.” B’dikkat rolled his brown cow eyes expressively and smacked his rich red lips with a tongue of enormous extent.

“What’s the use of it, then?”

“You can take it,” said B’dikkat. “You can take it after you have been exposed to the dromozoa outside this cabin. You get all the good effects and none of the bad. You want to see something?”

What answer is there except yes, thought Mercer grimly; does he think I have an urgent invitation to a tea party?

“Look out the window,” said B’dikkat, “and tell me what you see.”

The atmosphere was clear. The surface was like a desert, ginger-yellow with streaks of green where lichen and low shrubs grew, obviously stunted and tormented by high, dry winds. The landscape was monotonous. Two or three hundred yards away there was a herd of bright pink objects which seemed alive, but Mercer could not see them well enough to describe them clearly. Further away, on the extreme right of his frame of vision, there was the statue of an enormous human foot, the height of a six-story building. Mercer could not see what the foot was connected to. “I see a big foot,” said he, “but—”

“But what?” said B’dikkat, like an enormous child hiding the denouement of a hugely private joke. Large as he was, he could have been dwarfed by any one of the toes on that tremendous foot.

“But it can’t be a real foot,” said Mercer.

“It is,” said B’dikkat. “That’s Go-Captain Alvarez, the man who found this planet. After six hundred years he’s still in fine shape. Of course, he’s mostly dromozootic by now, but I think there is some human consciousness inside him. You know what I do?”

“What?” said Mercer.

“I give him six cubic centimeters of super-condamine and he snorts for me. Real happy little snorts. A stranger might think it was a volcano. That’s what super-condamine can do. And you’re going to get plenty of it. You’re a lucky, lucky man, Mercer. You have me for a friend, and you have my needle for a treat. I do all the work and you get all the fun. Isn’t that a nice surprise?”

Mercer thought, You’re lying! Lying! Where do the screams come from that we have all heard broadcast as a warning on Punishment Day? Why did the doctor offer to cancel my brain or to take out my eyes?

The cow-man watched him sadly, a hurt expression on his face. “You don’t believe me,” he said, very sadly.