‘I never told you that one exposure to JJ-180 meant addiction,’ Jonas said. ‘Eric must have told you that.’
‘With the lizards of the Jurassic Period,’ Kathy decided. Things with tiny brains and immense tails. Creatures with almost no mentalities; just reflex machines acting out the externals of living, going through the motions but not actually there. Right?’
‘Well,’ Jonas said, ‘it’s reegs that’ll be receiving the drug; I wouldn’t waste any tears on reegs.’
‘I’d waste a tear on anything,’ Kathy said, ‘that got hooked by JJ-180. I hate it; I wish—’ She broke off. ‘Don’t mind me; I’m just upset by Eric’s leaving. I’ll be okay.’ To herself she wondered when she would have an opportunity to look for Corning. And get more capsules of the drug. It was clear now that she had become an addict. By now she had to face it.
She felt only resignation.
——————————————————————————–
At noon, in the neat, modern, but excessively small conapt provided him by the mystifying working of the higher governmental authorities at Cheyenne, Dr Eric Sweetscent finished reading the medical charts of his new patient – referred to throughout the enormous body of writings merely as ‘Mr Brown.’ Mr Brown, he reflected as he locked the folio back in its unbreakable plastic box, is a sick man, but his sickness simply could not be diagnosed, at least in the customary way. Because – and this was the odd thing, for which Teagarden had not prepared him – the patient had shown, over the years, symptoms of major organic diseases, symptoms not associated with psychosomatic disorders. There had been at one time a malignancy in the liver which had metastasized – and yet Mr Brown had not died. And the malignancy had gone away. Anyhow it was not there now; tests during the last two years proved that. An exploratory operation had even been performed, finally, and Mr Brown’s liver had not even shown the degeneracy anticipated in a man of his age.
It was the liver of a youth of nineteen or twenty.
And this oddity had been observed in other organs subjected to acute examination. But Mr Brown was failing in his over-all powers; palpably, he was in the process of declining – he looked considerably older than his chronological age, and the aura around him was one of ill health. It was as if his body on a purely physiological level were growing younger while his essence, his total psychobiological Gestalt, aged naturally – in fact failed conspicuously.
Whatever physiological force it was that maintained him organically, Mr Brown was not receiving any benefit therefrom, except of course that he had not died of the malignant tumor in his liver or the earlier one detected in his spleen, or the surely fatal cancer of the prostate gland which had gone undetected during his third decade.
Mr Brown was alive – but just barely so. Throughout, his body was overworked and in a state of deterioration; take his circulatory system, for instance. Brown’s blood pressure was 220 – despite vasodilators administered orally; already his eyesight had been materially affected. And yet, Eric reflected, Brown would undoubtedly surmount this as he had every other ailment; one day it would simply go away, even though he refused to stay on the prescribed diet and did not respond to reserpine.
The outstanding fact was simply that Mr Brown had had at one time or another almost every serious disease known, from infarcts in his lungs to hepatitis. He was a perambulating symposium of illness, never well, never functioning properly; at any given time some vital portion of his body was affected. And then—
In some fashion he had cured himself. And without the use of artiforgs. It was as if Brown practiced some folk-style, homeopathic medicine, some idiotic, herbal remedy which he had never disclosed to his attending physicians. And probably never would.
Brown needed to be sick. His hypochondriasis was real; he did not merely have hysterical symptoms – he had true diseases which usually turned the patient into a terminal case. If this was hysteria, a variety of a purely psychological complaint, Eric had never run across it before. And yet, despite this, Eric had the intuition that all these illnesses had existed for a reason; they were engendered from the complexity, the undisclosed depths, of Mr Brown’s psyche.
Three times in his life Mr Brown had given himself cancer. But how? And – why?
Perhaps it arose from his death wish. And each time, Mr Brown halted at the brink, pulled himself back. He needed to be sick – but not to die. The suicide wish, then, was spurious.
This was important to know. If it was so, Mr Brown would fight to survive – would fight against the very thing he had hired Eric to bring about.
Therefore Mr Brown would be an exceedingly difficult patient. To say the least. And all this – beyond doubt – functioned at an unconscious level; Mr Brown was certainly unaware of his twin, opposing drives.
The door chimes of the conapt sounded. He went to answer – and found himself facing an official-looking individual in a natty business suit. Producing identification, the man explained, ‘Secret Service, Dr Sweetscent. Secretary Molinari needs you; he’s in a good deal of pain so we’d better hurry.’
‘Of course.’ Eric dashed to the closet for his coat; a moment later he and the Secret Service man were hiking toward the parked wheel. ‘More abdominal pains?’ Eric asked.
‘Now the pains seem to have shifted over to his left side,’ the Secret Service man said as he piloted the wheel out into traffic. ‘In the region of his heart.’
‘He didn’t describe them as feeling as if a great hand was pressing down on him, did he?’
‘No, he’s just lying there groaning. And asking for you.’ The Secret Service man seemed to take it matter-of-factly; evidently for him this was old and familiar. The Secretary, after all, was always sick.
Presently they had reached the UN White House and Eric was descending by in-track. If only I could install an artiforg, he reflected. It would end all this—
But it was clear to him, now that he had read the file, why Molinari refused artiforg transplant on principle. If he accepted a transplant he would recover; the ambiguity of his existence – hovering between illness and health – would cease. His twin drives would be resolved in favor of health. Hence the delicate psychic dynamism would be upset and Molinari would be delivered over to one of the two forces striving for mastery within him. And this he could not afford to do.
‘This way, doctor.’ The Secret Service man led him down a corridor, to a door at which several uniformed police stood. They stepped aside and Eric entered.
In the center of the room, in a vast rumpled bed, lay Gino Molinari, on his back, watching a television set fixed to the ceiling. ‘I’m dying, doctor,’ Molinari said, turning his head. ‘I think these pains are coming from my heart now. It probably was my heart all the time.’ His face, enlarged and florid, shone with sweat.
Eric said, ‘We’ll run an EKG on you.’
‘No, I had that, about ten minutes ago; it showed nothing. My illness is too goddam subtle for your instruments to detect. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. I’ve heard of people who’ve had massive coronaries and have taken EKGs and nothing showed up; isn’t that a fact? Listen, doctor. I know something that you don’t. You wonder why I have these pains. Our ally – our partner in this war. They’ve got a master plan which includes seizing Tijuana Fur & Dye; they showed me the document – they’re that confident. They’ve got an agent planted in your firm already. But I’m telling you in case I die suddenly from this ailment; I could go any minute, you know that.’
‘Did you tell Virgil Ackerman?’ Eric asked.
‘I started to but – Christ, how can you tell an old man something like that? He doesn’t understand what sort of things go on in an all-out war; this is nothing, this seizing of Terra’s major industries. This is probably only the beginning.’
‘Now that I know,’ Eric said, ‘I feel I should tell Virgil.’
‘Okay, tell him,’ Molinari grated. ‘Maybe you can find a way. I was going to when we were at Wash-35 but—’ He rolled in pain. ‘Do something for me, doctor; this is killing me!’
Eric gave him an intravenous injection of morprocaine and the UN Secretary quieted.
‘You just don’t know,’ Molinari mumbled in a lulled, relaxed voice, ‘what I’m up against with these ‘Starmen. I did my best to keep them off us, doctor.’ He added, ‘I don’t feel the pain now; what you did seems to have taken care of it.’
Eric asked, ‘When are they going ahead with seizing TF&D? Soon?’