'Look,' the woman said. She was emptying her wallet. 'Membership card in the Investment Counselors' Guild. U.M.T. honorable discharge, even if it is a reduced photostat. City license to do business. Airline credit card. Residential rental permit. Business rental permit. City motor vehicle parking permit. Blood-donor card.'
He turned them over in his hands. The plastic-laminated things were unanswerable, and he gave himself up to relief and exultation. 'I'm in, Miss Winston,' he said fervently. 'You should have seen the fellow they showed me after an operation like mine.'
The Slave He shuddered as he remembered Jimmy and his 'splendid adjustment.'
'I don't have to,' the woman said, putting her wallet away. 'I saw my mother die. From one of the types of cancer they haven't licked yet. I get the usual commission on funds I handle for them, but I have a little personal interest in promoting the research end….'
'Oh. I see.'
Suddenly she was brisk. 'Now, Dr. Oliver, you've got to write whatever letters are necessary to explain that you're taking a little unplanned trip to think things out, or whatever you care to say. And pack enough things for a week. You can be on the jet in an hour if you're a quick packer and a quick letter-writer.'
'Jet to where?' he asked, without thinking.
She smiled and shook her head.
Dr. Oliver shrugged and went to his typewriter. This was one gift horse he would not look in the mouth. Not after Jimmy.
Two hours later the fat sophomore Gillespie arrived full of lies and explanations with his overdue theme on the Elizabethan dramatists, which was full of borrowings and evasions. On Dr. Oliver's door was pinned a small note in the doctor's handwriting: Dr. Oliver will be away for several days for reasons of health.
Gillespie scratched his head and shrugged. It was all right with him; Dr.
Oliver was practically impossible to get along with, in spite of his vague reputation for brilliance. A schizoid, his girl called him. She majored in Psych.
CHAPTER III
THE MOORHEAD FOUNDATION proved to be in Mexico, in a remote valley of the state of Sonora. A jetliner took Dr. Oliver and Miss Winston most of the way very fast. Buses and finally an obsolete gasoline-powered truck driven by a Mexican took them the rest of the way very slowly. The buildings were a remodeled rancheria enclosed by a low, thick adobe wall.
Dr. Oliver, at the door of his comfortable bedroom, said: 'Look, will I be treated immediately?' He seemed to have been asking that question for two days, but never to have got a plain yes or no answer.
'It all depends,' Miss Winston said. 'Your type of growth is definitely curable and they'll definitely cure it. But there may be a slight holdup while they're studying it. That's your part of the bargain, after all. Now I'll be on my way. I expect you're sleepy, and the lab people will take over from here. It's been a great pleasure.'
They shook hands and Dr. Oliver had trouble suppressing a yawn. He was very sleepy, but he tried to tell Miss Winston how grateful he was.
She smiled deprecatingly, almost cynically, and said: 'We're using you too, remember? Well, goodbye.'
Dr. Oliver barely made it to his bed.
His nightmares were terrible. There was a flashing light, a ringing bell and a wobbling pendulum that killed him, killed him, killed him, inch by inch, burying him under a mountain of flashes and clangs and blows while he was somehow too drugged to fight his way out.
HE REACHED fuzzily in the morning for the Dialit, which wasn't there.
Good God! he marveled. Was one expected to get up for breakfast? But he found a button that brought a grinning Mexican with a breakfast tray. After he dressed the boy took him to los medicos.
The laboratory, far down a deserted corridor, was staffed by two men and a woman.
'Dr . Oliver,' the woman said briskly. 'Sit there.' It was a thing like a dentist's chair with a suggestion of something ugly and archaic in a cup-shaped headrest.
Oliver sat, uneasily.
'The carcinoma,' one of the men said to the other.
'Oh yes.' The other man, quite ignoring Oliver as a person, wheeled over a bulky thing not much different in his eyes from a television camera. He pointed it at Oliver's throat and played it noiselessly over his skin. 'That should do it,' he said to the first man.
Oliver asked incredulously: 'You mean I'm cured?' And he started to rise.
'Silence!' the woman snarled, rapping a button. Dr. Oliver collapsed back into the chair with a moan. Something had happened to him; something terrible and unimaginable. For a hideous split-second he had known undiluted pain, pure and uniform over every part of his body, interpreted variously by each. Blazing headache, eye- ache and ear-ache, wrenching nausea, an agony of itching, colonic convulsions, stabbing ache in each of his bones and joints.
'But—' he began piteously.
'Silence!' the woman snarled, and rapped the button again.
He did not speak a third time but watched them with sick fear, cringing into the chair.
They spoke quite impersonally before him, lapsing occasionally into an unfamiliar word or so.
'Not more than twenty-seven vistch, I should say. Cardiac.'
'Under a good—master, would you call it?—who can pace him, more.'
'Perhaps. At any rate, he will not be difficult. See his record.'
'Stimulate him again.'
Again there was the split-second of hell on earth. The woman was studying a small sphere in which colors played prettily. 'A good surge,'
she said, 'but not a good recovery. What is the order?'
One of the men ran his finger over a sheet of paper—but he was looking at the woman. 'Three military.'
'What kind of military, sobr'?'
The man hastily rechecked the sheet with his index finger. 'All for igr' i khom. I do not know what you would call it. A smallship? A kill-ship?'
The other man said scornfully: 'Either a light cruiser or a heavy destroyer.'
'According to functional analogy I would call it a heavy destroyer,' the woman said decisively. 'A good surge is important to igr' i khom. We shall call down the destroyer to take on this Oliver and the two Stosses.
Have it done.'
'Get up,' one of the men said to Oliver.
He got up. Under the impression that he could be punished only in the chair he said: 'What—?'
'Silence!' the woman snarled, and rapped the button. He was doubled up with the wave of pain. When he recovered, the man took his arm and led him from the laboratory. He did not speak as he was half-dragged through endless corridors and shoved at last through a door into a large, sunlit room. Perhaps a dozen people were sitting about and turned to look.
He cringed as a tall, black-haired man said to him: 'Did you just get out of the chair?'
'It's all right,' somebody else said. 'You can talk. We aren't—them.
We're in the same boat as you. What's the story—heart disease?
Cancer?'
'Cancer,' he said, swallowing. 'They promised me—'
'They come through on it,' the tall man said. 'They do come through on the cures. Me, I have nothing to show for it. I was supposed to survey for minerals here—my name's Brockhaus. And this is Johnny White from Los Angeles. He was epileptic—bad seizures every day. But not any more. And this—but never mind. You can meet the rest later. You better sit down. How many times did they give it to you?'
'Four times,' Dr. Oliver said. 'What's all this about? Am I going crazy?'
The tall man forced him gently into a chair. 'Take it easy,' he said. 'We don't know what it's all about.'
'Goddamn it,' somebody said, 'the hell we don't. It's the commies, as plain as the nose on your face. Why else
