judgment business. The doctor wasn't a religious man, but you certainly found yourself thinking hard about some things when your time drew near— Angie was back, with a bit of paper in her hands. 'Five hundred dollars,' she said matter-offactly. 'And you realize, don't you, that we could go over her an inch at a time—at five hundred dollars an inch?'
'I've been meaning to talk to you about that,' he said.
There was bright fear in her eyes, he thought—but why?
'Angie, you've been a good girl and an understanding girl, but we can't keep this up forever, you know.'
'Let's talk about it some other time,' she said flatly. 'I'm tired now.'
'No-I really feel we've gone far enough on our own. The instruments—'
'Don't say it, doc!' she hissed. 'Don't say it, or you'll be sorry!' In her face there was a look that reminded him of the hollow-eyed, gaunt-faced, dirty-blond creature she had been. From under the charm-school finish there burned the guttersnipe whose infancy had been spent on a sour and filthy mattress, whose childhood had been play in the littered alley and whose adolescence had been the sweatshops and the aimless gatherings at night under the glaring street lamps.
He shook his head to dispel the puzzling notion. 'It's this way,' he patiently began. 'I told you about the family that invented the O.B.
forceps and kept them a secret for so many generations, how they could have given them to the world but didn't?'
'They knew what they were doing,' said the guttersnipe flatly.
'Well, that's neither here nor there,' said the doctor, irritated. 'My mind is made up about it. I'm going to turn the instruments over to the College of Surgeons. We have enough money to be comfortable. You can even have the house. I've been thinking of going to a warmer climate, myself.' He felt peeved with her for making the unpleasant scene. He was unprepared for what happened next.
Angie snatched the little black bag and dashed for the door, with panic in her eyes. He scrambled after her, catching her arm, twisting it in a sudden rage. She clawed at his face with her free hand, babbling curses. Somehow, somebody's finger touched the little black bag, and it opened grotesquely into the enormous board, covered with shining instruments, large and small. Half a dozen of them joggled loose and fell to the floor.
'Now see what you've done!' roared the doctor, unreasonably. Her hand was still viselike on the handle, but she was standing still, trembling with choked-up rage. The doctor bent stiffly to pick up the fallen instruments. Unreasonable girl! he thought bitterly. Making a scene— Pain drove in between his shoulderblades and he fell face down. The light ebbed. 'Unreasonable girl!' he tried to croak. And then:
'They'll know I tried, anyway—'
Angie looked down on his prone body, with the handle of the Number Six Cautery Series knife protruding from it. '—will cut through all tissues. Use for amputations before you spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme caution should be used in the vicinity of vital organs and major blood vessels or nerve trunks—'
'I didn't mean to do that,' said Angie, dully, cold with horror. Now the detective would come, the implacable detective who would reconstruct the crime from the dust in the room. She would run and turn and twist, but the detective would find her out and she would be tried in a courtroom before a judge and jury; the lawyer would make speeches, but the jury would convict her anyway, and the headlines would scream: 'BLOND KILLER GUILTY!' and she'd maybe get the chair, walking down a plain corridor where a beam of sunlight struck through the dusty air, with an iron door at the end of it. Her mink, her convertible, her dresses, the handsome man she was going to meet and marry— The mist of cinematic cliches cleared, and she knew what she would do next.
Quite steadily, she picked the incinerator box from its loop in the board—a metal cube with a different-textured spot on one side. '—to dispose of fibroses or other unwanted matter, simply touch the disk—'
You dropped something in and touched the disk. There was a sort of soundless whistle, very powerful and unpleasant if you were too close, and a sort of lightless flash. When you opened the box again, the contents were gone. Angie took another of the Cautery Series knives and went grimly to work. Good thing there wasn't any blood to speak of—She finished the awful task in three hours.
She slept heavily that night, totally exhausted by the wringing emotional demands of the slaying and the subsequent horror. But in the morning, it was as though the doctor had never been there. She ate breakfast, dressed with unusual care— and then undid the unusual care. Nothing out of the ordinary, she told herself. Don't do one thing different from the way you would have done it before. After a day or two, you can phone the cops. Say he walked out spoiling for a drunk, and you're worried. But don't rush it, baby—don't rush it.
Mrs. Coleman was due at ten A.M. Angie had counted on being able to talk the doctor into at least one more five-hundred-dollar session. She'd have to do it herself now—but she'd have to start sooner or later.
The woman arrived early. Angie explained smoothly: 'The doctor asked me to take care of the massage today. Now that he has the tissue-firming process beginning, it only requires somebody trained in his methods—' As she spoke, her eyes swiveled to the instrument case—
open! She cursed herself for the single flaw as the woman followed her gaze and recoiled.
'What are those things!' she demanded. 'Are you going to cut me with them? I thought there was something fishy—'
'Please, Mrs. Coleman,' said Angie, 'please, dear Mrs. Coleman—you don't understand about the …the massage instruments!'
'Massage instruments, my foot!' squabbled the woman shrilly. 'The doctor operated on me. Why, he might have killed me!'
Angie wordlessly took one of the smaller Cutaneous Series knives and passed it through her forearm. The blade flowed like a finger through quicksilver, leaving no wound in its wake. That should convince the old cow!
It didn't convince her, but it did startle her. 'What did you do with it?
The blade folds up into the handle—that's it!'
'Now look closely, Mrs. Coleman,' said Angie, thinking desperately of the five hundred dollars. 'Look very closely and you'll see that the, uh, the sub-skin massager simply slips beneath the tissues without doing any harm, tightening and firming the muscles themselves instead of having to work through layers of skin and adipose tissue. It's the secret of the doctor's method. Now, how can outside massage have the effect that we got last night?'
Mrs. Coleman was beginning to calm down. 'It did work, all right,' she admitted, stroking the new line of her neck. 'But your arm's one thing and my neck's another! Let me see you do that with your neck!'
Angie smiled— Al returned to the clinic after an excellent lunch that had almost reconciled him
to three more months he would have to spend on duty. And then, he thought, and then a blessed year at the blessedly super-normal South Pole working on his specialty—which happened to be telekinesis exercises for ages three to six. Meanwhile, of course, the world had to go on and of course he had to shoulder his share in the running of it.
Before settling down to desk work he gave a routine glance at the bag board. What he saw made him stiffen with shocked surprise. A red light was on next to one of the numbers—the first since he couldn't think when. He read off the number and murmured 'OK, 674101. That fixes you.' He put the number on a card sorter and in a moment the record was in his hand. Oh, yes—Hemingway's bag. The big dummy didn't remember how or where he had lost it; none of them ever did. There were hundreds of them floating around.
Al's policy in such cases was to leave the bag turned on. The things practically ran themselves, it was practically impossible to do harm with them, so whoever found a lost one might as well be allowed to use it. You turn it off, you have a social loss—you leave it on, it may do some good. As he understood it, and not very well at that, the stuff wasn't
'used up.' A temporalist had tried to explain it to him with little success that the prototypes in the transmitter had been transduced through a series of point-events of transfinite cardinality. Al had innocently asked whether that meant prototypes had been stretched, so to speak, through all time, and the temporalist had thought he was joking and left in a huff.
'Like to see him do this,' thought Al darkly, as he telekinized himself to the combox, after a cautious look to see that there were no medics around. To the box he said: 'Police chief,' and then to the police chief:
'There's been a homicide committed with Medical Instrument Kit 674101. It was lost some months ago by one of my people, Dr. John Hemingway. He didn't have a clear account of the circumstances.'
The police chief groaned and said: 'I'll call him in and question him.'
