“Blessed be—”
“Listen! Will she be all right? I’m getting out of here!” He climbed unsteadily to his feet.
“I don’t know, son. Infection’s the real threat, and shock. If we’d got to her sooner, she’d have been safer. And if she was in the ultimate stage of neuroderm, it would help.”
“Why?”
“Oh, various reasons. You’ll learn, someday. But listen, you look exhausted. Why don’t you come back to the hospital with us? The third floor is entirely vacant. There’s no danger of infection up there, and we keep a sterile room ready just in case we get a nonhyper case. You can lock the door inside, if you want to, but it wouldn’t be necessary. Nuns are on the floor below. Our male staff lives in the basement. There aren’t any laymen in the building. I’ll guarantee that you won’t be bothered.”
“No, I’ve got to go,” he growled, then softened his voice: “I appreciate it though, Father.”
“Whatever you wish. I’m sorry, though. You might be able to provide yourself with some kind of transportation if you waited.”
“Uh-uh! I don’t mind telling you, your island makes me jumpy.”
“Why?”
Paul glanced at the priest’s gray hands. “Well… you still feel the craving, don’t you?”
Mendelhaus touched his nose. “Cotton plugs, with a little camphor. I can’t smell you.” He hesitated. “No, I won’t lie to you. The urge to touch is still there to some extent.”
“And in a moment of weakness, somebody might—”
The priest straightened his shoulders. His eyes went chilly. “I have taken certain vows, young man. Sometimes when I see a beautiful woman, I feel desire. When I see a man eating a thick steak on a fast-day, I feel envy and hunger. When I see a doctor earning large fees, I chafe under the vow of poverty. But by denying desire’s demands, one learns to make desire useful in other ways. Sublimation, some call it. A priest can use it and do more useful work thereby. I am a priest.”
He nodded curtly, turned on his heel and strode away. Halfway to the cottage, he paused. “She’s calling for someone named Paul. Know who it might be? Family perhaps?”
Paul stood speechless. The priest shrugged and continued toward the lighted doorway.
“Father, wait…”
“Yes?”
“I—I am a little tired. The room… I mean, will you show me where to get transportation tomorrow?”
“Certainly.”
Before midnight, the party had returned to the hospital. Paul lay on a comfortable mattress for the first time in weeks, sleepless, and staring at the moonlight on the sill. Somewhere downstairs, Willie was lying unconscious in an operating room, while the surgeon tried to repair the torn tendon. Paul had ridden back with them in the ambulance, sitting a few feet from the stretcher, avoiding her sometimes wandering arms, and listening to her delirious moaning.
Now he felt his skin crawling with belated hypochondria. What a fool he had been—touching the rope, the boat, the wheelbarrow, riding in the ambulance. There were a thousand ways he could have picked up a few stray microorganisms lingering from a dermie’s touch. And now, he lay here in this nest of disease….
But strange—it was the most peaceful, the sanest place he’d seen in months. The religious orders simply accepted the plague—with masochistic complacency perhaps—but calmly. A cross, or a penance, or something. But no, they seemed to accept it almost gladly. Nothing peculiar about that. All dermies went wild-eyed with happiness about the “lovely desire” they possessed. The priests weren’t wild-eyed.
Neither was normal man equipped with socially-shaped sexual desire. Sublimation?
“Peace,” he muttered, and went to sleep.
A knocking at the door awoke him at dawn. He grunted at it disgustedly and sat up in bed. The door, which he had forgotten to lock, swung open. A chubby nun with a breakfast tray started into the room. She saw his face, then stopped. She closed her eyes, wrinkled her nose, and framed a silent prayer with her lips. Then she backed slowly out.
“I’m sorry, sir!” she quavered through the door. “I—I knew
He heard her scurrying away down the hall. Somehow, he began to feel safe. But wasn’t that exactly what they wanted him to feel! He realized suddenly that he was trapped. He had left the shotgun in the emergency room. What was he—guest or captive? Months of fleeing from the gray terror had left him suspicious.
Soon he would find out. He arose and began dressing. Before he finished, Mendelhaus came. He did not enter, but stood in the hallway beyond the door. He smiled a faint greeting, and said, “So you’re Paul?”
He felt heat rising in his face. “She’s awake, then?” he asked gruffly.
The priest nodded. “Want to see her?”
“No, I’ve got to be going.”
“It would do her good.”
He coughed angrily. Why did the black-cassocked dermie have to put it that way? “Well it wouldn’t do me any good!” he snarled. “I’ve been around too many gray-leather hides already!”
Mendelhaus shrugged, but his eyes bore a hint of contempt. “As you wish. You may leave by the outside stairway—to avoid disturbing the sisters.”
“To avoid being touched, you mean!”
“No one will touch you.”
Paul finished dressing in silence. The reversal of attitudes disturbed him. He resented the seeming “tolerance” that was being extended him. It was like asylum inmates being “tolerant” of the psychiatrist.
“I’m ready!” he growled.
Mendelhaus led him down the corridor and out onto a sunlit balcony. They descended a stone stairway while the priest talked over his shoulder.
“She’s still not fully rational, and there’s some fever. It wouldn’t be anything to worry about two years ago, but now we’re out of most of the latest drugs. If sulfa won’t hold the infection, we’ll have to amputate, of course. We should know in two or three days.”
He paused and looked back at Paul, who had stopped on the stairway. “Coming?”
“Where is she?” Paul asked weakly. “I’ll see her.”
The priest frowned. “You don’t have to, son. I’m sorry if I implied any obligation on your hart. Really. you’ve done enough. I gather that you saved her life. Very few nonhypers would do a thing like that. I—”
“Where is she?” he snapped angrily.
The priest nodded. “Downstairs. Come on.”
As they re-entered the building on the ground floor, the priest cupped his hands to his mouth and called out, “Nonhyper coming! Plug your noses, or get out of the way! Avoid circumstances of temptation!”
When they moved along the corridor, it was Paul who felt like the leper. Mendelhaus led him into the third room.
Willie saw him enter and hid her gray hands beneath the sheet. She smiled faintly, tried to sit up, and failed. Williamson and a nun-nurse who had both been standing by the bedside turned to leave the room. Mendelhaus followed them out and closed the door.
There was a long, painful pause. Willie tried to grin. He shuffled his feet.
“They’ve got me in a cast,” she said conversationally.
“You’ll be all right,” he said hastily. “It won’t be long before you’ll be up. Galveston’s a good place for you. They’re all dermies here.”
She clenched her eyes tightly shut. “God! God! I hope I never hear that word again. After last night… that old woman in the rocking chair… I stayed there all alone and the wind’d start the chair rocking. Ooh!” She looked at him with abnormally bright eyes. “I’d rather die than touch anybody now… after seeing that. Somebody touched her, didn’t they, Paul? That’s why she did it, wasn’t it?”
He squirmed and backed toward the door. “Willie… I’m sorry for what I said. I mean—”
“Don’t worry, Paul! I wouldn’t touch you now.” She clenched her hands and brought them up before her face,
