nightgown.
His wife was standing by the bed, saying: 'She can do 'Jingle Bells,' and—'
His left hand felt along the soft knitted fabric of the gown, up towards the diaper that folded, flat and smooth, across the bottom end of his child. No wrinkles. No kicking. No ...
'Maggie.' He tried to pull his hands from the neat fold in the diaper, from the wriggling body. 'Maggie.' His throat was dry; words came hard, low and grating. He spoke very slowly, thinking the sound of each word to make himself say it. His head was spinning, but he had to know before he let it go. 'Maggie, why ... didn't you ...
tell me?'
'Tell you what, darling?' Margaret's poise was the immemorial patience of woman confronted with man's childish impetuosity. Her sudden laugh sounded fantastically easy and natural in that room; it was all clear to her now. 'Is she wet? I didn't know.'
She didn 't know. His hands, beyond control, ran up and down the soft-skinned baby body, the sinuous, limbless body. Oh God, dear God—his head shook and his muscles contracted, in a bitter spasm of hysteria. His fingers tightened on his child—
Oh God, she didn't know...
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
'I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't it?'
When Luci answered, he saw only a part of her words as he read her lips:
'Darling... you're my husband... right to love you ... dangerous ... do it... dangerous ...
wait....'
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: 'I tell you, I'm going to cranch.'
Catching her expression, he became rueful and a little tender: 'Can't you understand what it means to me? To get out of this horrible prison in my own head?
To be a man again—hearing your voice, smelling smoke? To feel again—to feel my feet on the ground, to feel the air move against my face? Don't you know what it means?'
Her wide-eyed worrisome concern thrust him back into pure annoyance. He read only a few words as her lips moved: '... love you.. your own good ... don't you think I want you to be human? ... your own good ... too much ... he said ... they said....'
When he roared at her, he realized that his voice must be particularly bad. He knew that the sound hurt her no less than did the words: 'Do you think I wanted you to marry a Scanner? Didn't I tell you we're almost as low as the habermans? We're dead, I tell you. We've got to be dead to do our work. How can anybody go to the Up-and- Out? Can you dream what raw Space is? I warned you. But you married me. All right, you married a man. Please, darling, let me be a man. Let me hear your voice, let me feel the warmth of being alive, of being human. Let me!'
He saw by her look of stricken assent that he had won the argument. He did not use his voice again. Instead, he pulled his tablet up from where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it, using the pointed fingernail of his right forefinger—the Talking Nail of a Scanner—in quick cleancut script: 'Pis, drlng, whrs Crnching Wire?'
She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron. She let its field sphere fall to the carpeted floor. Swiftly, dutifully, with the deft obedience of a Scanner's wife, she wound the Cranching Wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest. She avoided the instruments set in his chest. She even avoided the radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had gone Up and into the Out. Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped the wire between his feet. She drew the wire taut. She snapped the small plug into the High Burden Control next to his Heart Reader. She helped him to sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head back into the cup at the top of the chair. She turned then, full-face toward him, so that he could read her lips easily. Her expression was composed.
She knelt, scooped up the sphere at the other end of the wire, stood erect calmly, her back to him. He scanned her, and saw nothing in her posture but grief which would have escaped the eye of anyone but a Scanner. She spoke: he could see her chest-muscles moving. She realized that she was not facing him, and turned so that he could see her lips.
'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.
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—'
