“Well, yes, or at least he did it. But we’ll get him on appeal, only that makes it a little more complicated. Her lawyer got a chance to argue, and he pointed out that Trish did file a mission report. So there’s some question whether she actually completed the mission, do you see? Meanwhile-“
Sometimes I think Morton is too humanly programmed; he does know how to draw out a discussion so. “Meanwhile what, Morton?”
“Well, since the recent, ah, episode, there seems to be another complication. Gateway Corp wants to go slow until they figure out just where they are with this fever business, so they’ve accepted service of an injunction. Neither you nor Food Factory Inc. is supposed to proceed with exploitation of the factory.”
I blew up. “Shit, Mort! You mean we can’t use it after we bring it all the way in from orbit?”
“I’m afraid I mean more than that,” he apologized. “You’re enjoined to stop moving it. You’re enjoined to refrain from interfering with its normal activities in any way, pending a declarative judgment. That’s Bover’s action, on the grounds that if you prevent it from producing food by moving to a new comet cluster you’re endangering his interest. Now, we can get that vacated, I’m sure. But by then Gateway Corp will have some sort of action to stop doing everything until they get a handle on the fever.”
“Oh, God.” I put down my fork. I wasn’t hungry any more. “The only good thing,” I said, “is that’s an order they can’t enforce.”
“Because it will take so long to get a message to the Herter-Hall party, yes, Robin,” he nodded. “On the-“
He disappeared, zit. He slid diagonally away out of the tank, and Harriet appeared. She looked terrible. I have good programs for my computer help. But they don’t always bring good news. “Robin!” she cried. “There’s a message from Mesa General Hospital in Arizona-it’s your wife!”
“Essie? Essie? Is she sick?”
“Oh, worse than that, Robin. Total somatic cessation. She was killed in a car crash. They’ve got her on life support, but-There’s no prognosis, Robin. She isn’t responding.”
I didn’t use my priorities. I didn’t want to take the time. I went straight to the Washington office of the Gateway Corp. who went to the Secretary of Defense, who squeezed space for me out of a hospital plane leaving Boiling in twenty-five minutes, and I made it.
The flight was three hours, and I was in suspended animation all the way. There were no comm facilities for passengers in the plane. I didn’t even want them. I just wanted to get there. When my mother died and left me it hurt, but I was poor and confused and used to hurting. When the love of my life, or at any rate the woman who seemed to come to be the love of my life after she was safely gone, also left me-without quite dying, because she was stuck in some awful astrophysical anomaly and far out of reach forever-that also hurt. But I was hurting all over anyway then. I wasn’t used to happiness, hadn’t formed the habit of it. There is a Carnot law to pain. It is measured not by absolutes but the difference between source and ambience, and my ambience had been too safe and too pleasurable for too long to equip me for this. I was in shock.
Mesa General was a low-rise, dug into the desert outside Tucson. All you could see as we came up to it were the solar installations on the “roof,” but under them were six subterranean floors of hospital rooms, labs, and operating theaters. They were all full. Tucson is a commuting city, and the madness had struck at drive time.
When I finally got a floor nurse to stop and answer a question, what I heard was that Essie was still on the heart-lung, but might be taken off at any moment. It was a question of triage. The machines might better be used for other patients, whose chances were better than hers.
I am shamed to say how fast conceptions of fairness went out the window when it was my own wife who was on the machines. I hunted out a doctor’s office-he wouldn’t be using it for some time-kicked out the insurance adjustor who had borrowed his desk and got on the wires. I had two senators on the line at once before Harriet broke in with a report from our medical program.
Essie’s pulse had begun to respond. They now thought her chances were good enough to justify giving her the additional chance of staying on the machines for a while.
Of course, Full Medical helped. But the waiting room outside had all its benches full of people waiting for treatment, and I could see from the neck-bands that some of them were Full Medical too; the hospital was simply swamped.
I could not get in to see her. Intensive Care was No Visitors, and no visitors meant not even me; there was a Tucson city policeman at the door, forcing himself to stay awake after a very long, hard day and feeling mean. I fiddled with the absent doctor’s desk set until I found a closed-circuit line that looked into Intensive Care, and I just left it on. I couldn’t see how well Essie was doing. I couldn’t even tell for sure which mummy she was. But I kept looking at it. Harriet called in from time to time to pass on little news items. She didn’t bother with messages of sympathy and concern; there were plenty of those, but Essie had written me a Robinette Broadhead program to deal with social time-wasters, and Harriet gave callers an image and a worried smile and a thank you without bothering to cut me in to the circuit. Essie had been very good at that kind of programming-Past tense. When I realized I was thinking of a past-tense Essie is when I felt really bad.
After an hour a Gray Lady found me and gave me bouillon and crackers, and a little later I spent forty-five minutes in line for the public men’s room; and that was about all the diversion I had on the third floor of Mesa General until, at last, a candystriper poked her head in the door and said, “Senor Broad’ead? Por favor.” The cop was still at the door of Intensive Care, fanning himself with his sweaty Stetson to stay awake, but with the candystriper leading me firmly by the hand he did not interfere.
Essie was under a positive-pressure bubble. There was a transparent patch just at her face, so that I could see a tube coming out of her nostril and a wad of bandaging over the left side of her face. Her eyes were closed. They had bundled her dirty-gold hair into a net. She was not conscious.
Two minutes was all they allowed, and that wasn’t enough time for anything. Not enough even to figure out what all the lumpy, bulky objects under the translucent part of her bubble were all about. Not enough at all for Essie to sit up and talk to me or to change expression. Or even to have one.
In the hall outside, her doctor gave me sixty seconds. He was a short, pot-bellied old black man wearing blueeyed contact lenses, and he looked at a piece of paper to see who it was he was talking to. “Oh, yes, Mr. Blackhead,” he said. “Your wife is receiving the best of care, she is responding to treatment, there is some chance she will be conscious for a short time toward evening.”
I didn’t bother to correct him about the name and picked the three top questions on the list: “Will she be in pain? What happened to her? Is there anything she needs?-I mean anything.”
He sighed and rubbed his eyes. Evidently the contacts had been in too long. “Pain we can take care of, and
