David Nickle - Eutopia

Jason unbuttoned his shirt. “What for?” he said.

Dr. Bergstrom turned to him, hands crossed before him. “It is the routine in Eliada,” he said. “We must make certain that you are as well as well can be, Jason. And then we must keep you that way.”

The doctor lit five more lamps, including one that had been hung in the middle of a bowl-shaped mirror, before he started in on Jason. The room took on a glow under all that flame; it turned everything the colour of gold.

Dr. Bergstrom demanded that Jason turn over his shirt and trousers, and he sniffed at them before setting them down on a chair by the door. Then he made Jason turn around in the light, with his arms out. He asked Jason how old he was and Jason told him seventeen, and Dr. Bergstrom nodded like that meant something. He took Jason by the arm then, and led him over to a big weight scale, and told Jason to stand on it. He moved weights along metal rods until they balanced, then looked at them and wrote down the number on a sheet of paper.

“Over here now,” he said, and motioned to a spot on the wall that had been marked off in feet and inches. He made Jason stand against it, and took a book from the shelf and measured Jason’s height, which Jason thought was five feet and seven inches but Dr. Bergstrom said was five feet and nine inches.

“Sit on the examination table,” he said, the mask puffing out with the wind of his speech.

Jason did as he was told. Dr. Bergstrom went over to the bench, and took something that looked like a hand-scythe, except that it was hinged like scissors and not sharp. Bergstrom told Jason to hold still, and he opened it like pincers on a bug, and set Jason’s head in the middle. The metal tips felt cold against his temples, and Jason worried it would poke into the soft skull there. It did not. He lifted it away, took it back to the bench, and set it against a ruler, and marked a notation. Then he repeated the procedure with the pincers at the back of Jason’s skull, at his jaw-line, his ears and the back of his neck.

“What are you measuring my head for?” asked Jason, but Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer.

“Smile,” he said. And then added impatiently: “So I can see your teeth.” He examined those, and asked Jason if he ever had a toothache, and when Jason said no, he nodded. He went back to the bench, wrote more things down, then opened one of the glass-covered cabinets. This time he pulled out a thin metal cylinder, and a brown glass bottle.

“Lie on your stomach,” he ordered, not looking back.

“You goin’ to take my temperature?” asked Jason. When Dr. Bergstrom didn’t answer, Jason went on: “When I was small, the doctor in Cracked Wheel took my temperature with a thermometer up my behind, because he feared I’d bite it and poison myself if I put it in my mouth. Well I ain’t going to bite it, so you can just—”

“I am not taking your temperature, Jason,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He was coming across the floor. Jason could see that he was holding the cylinder between two fingers. On one end was a sharp needle. A bead of fluid gleamed like liquid gold on its tip.

“Now hold still,” he said.

Jason did as he was told.

Jason blinked and coughed. He was lying down, on a hard bed very different from the examination table. His arms hurt. His vision was blurry; as was his understanding of exactly how he’d got there.

Memory became fragmented up to the moment. He recalled a sharp pain in his behind, and then a cool feeling, like his foot had gone to sleep. He may have said something.

He may have gotten up off the table. Stumbled around a bit. He may have fallen to the floor. He may have even got up again, made it a short way down the hall, and then fallen over again before the world vanished.

Best Jason could say was that, next thing he knew, he was here. Lying on a table or a bed or, judging from its hardness, somewhere in between the two. His clothes were gone, replaced by a thin cotton sheet. The things that hurt his arms and legs were leather straps tied on top of that sheet. They were tying him down.

Jason had to fight to control his breathing as he put it together. He didn’t know much about doctoring—what little he’d seen of it happened at the barber shop in Cracked Wheel. But he knew that sometimes the barber would use the straps to hold a fellow still for awful things like amputating a leg or digging out a stone.

What in hell were they doing tying Jason down like this? What was Dr. Bergstrom doing, sticking him with a poisoned needle without asking him first? Jason pushed against the straps. He didn’t expect it to free him and so was not surprised when it didn’t. It still made him mad.

He blinked, and his eyes got some of their focus back. He looked side to side. He was in a long whitewashed room, with a high ceiling and windows only near the top. There were other beds in here—maybe ten of them. But the rest were empty. At the far end, he could see two figures, caught in the dim moonlight that cut down through the windows, silhouetted in the glow of candlelight. They were huddled around it, talking to one another, turned away from Jason.

“Hey!” he hollered. “Hey!”

They both turned to him.

“Jason!” It was Aunt Germaine. The other one didn’t speak, but Jason figured it for Dr. Bergstrom.

The two of them hurried across the room. Jason, to show his displeasure, struggled theatrically against the restraints. When they arrived, he noted that both were wearing white gowns and masks over their mouths. “What is the matter,” said Jason in a low, angry voice, “I got a smell about me?”

Aunt Germaine stepped immediately to his side. She put two rubber-gloved hands on his own. It might have been the effect of night, but she looked paler, older than she had ever seemed before. Her hands seemed to be trembling. “Oh Nephew,” she said, “I am sorry.”

“Do not apologize, Mrs. Frost,” said Dr. Bergstrom. He stood somewhat further off, at the foot of the bed. “This was my decision. I will explain it to young Jason.”

“Of course.” Aunt Germaine squeezed Jason’s hand.

“Jason, you must understand that I would not take these measures lightly. But your aunt told me the story of what happened to your town, of—”

“Cracked Wheel.”

“Yes. She told me that a contagion—a sickness—came upon the people there over the winter. It was a sickness that spread very quickly—far more quickly than anything that we know. And its mortality rate—the rate at which it killed—was extremely high. Nearly everyone.”

“Except me,” said Jason. “Because I am immune.”

Dr. Bergstrom’s lips tightened in something cousin to a smile. “You seem healthy,” he said. “That I do grant you. But Jason—that does not mean you do not carry the disease.”

“My aunt and me figured that out,” said Jason. “We burned things and I kept bathed, even when it was fierce cold.”

Dr. Bergstrom shook his head. “The germ might nestle in your soft tissues. It might thrive in the warm places inside your ear—in your throat. Perhaps waiting for a moment to return.”

“That’s not how germs work.”

“And you are expert in this? No. I am sorry, young man. You must remain here for a time.”

“Where is here?”

Dr. Bergstrom crossed his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. “Quarantine,” he said. “For at least tonight.”

“Tied down?”

“There is no other way,” said Dr. Bergstrom. “As your, ah, aunt attested: you show a tendency to wander.”

“How am I going to relieve myself then?”

“No… other… way,” repeated Dr. Bergstrom slowly.

Jason turned to Aunt Germaine who still held his arm. “Aunt! Get me out of here!” He twisted again against the straps. Panic was moving through him like an ugly liquor, and he could hear it in his voice, and he hated it.