“Ready at last?”
He smiled a yes
.
She turned her back to him again. (Luci could never bear to watch him Under-the-wire.) She tossed the wiresphere into the air. It caught in the force-field, and hung there. Suddenly it glowed. That was all. All—except for the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his senses. Coming back, across the wild threshold of pain.
I
When he awakened under the wire, he did not feel as though he had just cranched. Even though it was the second cranching within the week, he felt fit. He lay in the chair. His ears drank in the sound of air touching things in the room. He heard Luci breathing in the next room, where she was hanging up the wire to cool. He smelt the thousand-and-one smells that are in anybody’s room: the crisp freshness of the germ-burner, the sour-sweet tang of the humidifier, the odor of the dinner they had just eaten, the smells of clothes, furniture, of people themselves. All these were pure delight. He sang a phrase or two of his favorite song:
“Here’s to the haberman, Up and Out!
“Up—oh!—and Out—oh!—Up and Out! …”
He heard Luci chuckle in the next room. He gloated over the sounds of her dress as she swished to the doorway.
She gave him her crooked little smile. “You sound all right. Are you all right, really?”
Even with this luxury of senses, he scanned. He took the flash-quick inventory which constituted his professional skill. His eyes swept in the news of the instruments. Nothing showed off scale, beyond the Nerve Compression hanging in the edge of Danger
. But he could not worry about the Nerve box. That always came through Cranching. You couldn’t get under the wire without having it show on the Nerve box. Some day the box would go to Overload
and drop back down to Dead
. That was the way a haberman ended. But you couldn’t have everything. People who went to the Up-and-Out had to pay the price for Space.
Anyhow, he should worry! He was a Scanner. A good one, and he knew it. If he couldn’t scan himself, who could? This cranching wasn’t too dangerous. Dangerous, but not too dangerous.
Luci put out her hand and ruffled his hair as if she had been reading his thoughts, instead of just following them: “But you know you shouldn’t have! You shouldn’t!”
“But I did!” He grinned at her.
Her gaiety still forced, she said: “Come on, darling, let’s have a good time. I have almost everything there is in the icebox—all your favorite tastes. And I have two new records just full of smells. I tried them out myself, and even I liked them. And you know me—”
“Which?”
“Which what, you old darling?”
He slipped his hand over her shoulders as he limped out of the room. (He could never go back to feeling the floor beneath his feet, feeling the air against his face, without being bewildered and clumsy. As if cranching was real, and being a haberman was a bad dream. But he was a haberman, and a Scanner.) “You know what I meant, Luci … the smells, which you have. Which one did you like, on the record?”
“Well‑l‑l,” said she, judiciously, “there were some lamb chops that were the strangest things—”
He interrupted: “What are lambtchots?”
“Wait till you smell them. Then guess. I’ll tell you this much. It’s a smell hundreds and hundreds of years old. They found about it in the old books.”
“Is a lambtchot a Beast?”
“I won’t tell you. You’ve got to wait,” she laughed, as she helped him sit down and spread his tasting dishes before him. He wanted to go back over the dinner first, sampling all the pretty things he had eaten, and savoring them this time with his now-living lips and tongue.
When Luci had found the Music Wire and had thrown its sphere up into the force-field, he reminded her of the new smells. She took out the long glass records and set the first one into a transmitter.
“Now sniff!”
A queer frightening, exciting smell came over the room. It seemed like nothing-in this world, nor like anything from the Up-and-Out. Yet it was familiar. His mouth watered. His pulse beat a little faster; he scanned his Heart box. (Faster, sure enough.) But that smell, what was it? In mock perplexity, he grabbed her hands, looked into her eyes, and growled:
“Tell me, darling! Tell me, Or I’ll eat you up!”
“That’s just right!”
“What?”
“You’re right. It should make you want to eat me. It’s meat.”
“Meat. Who?”
“Not a person,” said she, knowledgeably, “a beast. A beast which people used to eat. A lamb was a small sheep—you’ve seen sheep out in the Wild, haven’t you?—and a chop is part of its middle—here!” She pointed at her chest.
Martel did not hear her. All his boxes had swung over toward Alarm
, some to Danger
. He fought against the roar of his own mind, forcing his body into excess excitement. How easy it was to be a Scanner when you really stood outside your own body, haberman-fashion, and looked back into it with your eyes alone. Then you could manage the body, rule it coldy even in the enduring agony of Space. But to realize that you were a body, that this thing was ruling you, that the mind could kick the flesh and send it roaring off into panic! That was bad.
He tried to remember the days before he had gone into the Haberman Device, before he had been cut apart for the Up-and-Out. Had he always been subject to the rush of his emotions from his mind to his body, from his body back to his mind, confounding him so that he couldn’t Scan? But he hadn’t been a Scanner then.
He knew what had hit him. Amid the roar of his own pulse, he knew. In the nightmare of the Up-and-Out, that smell had forced its way through to him, while their ship burned off Venus and the habermans fought the
