The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (42 page)

“I have,” Vomact declared, “already felt him. You are right. We will try typhoid and condamine for half a day. Twelve hours from now let us meet each other at this place. I
will tell the nurses and the robots what to do in the interim.”

They both gave the red-tanned spread-eagled figure on the floor a parting glance. Grosbeck looked at the body with something like distaste mingled with fear; Vomact was expressionless, save for
a wry wan smile of pity.

At the door the head nurse awaited them. Grosbeck was surprised at his chief’s orders.

“Ma’am and nurse, do you have a weapon-proof vault in this hospital?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “We used to keep our records in it until we telemetered all our records into Computer Orbit. Now it is dirty and empty.”

“Clean it out. Run a ventilator tube into it. Who is your military protector?”

“My what?” she cried, in surprise.

“Everyone on Earth has military protection. Where are the forces, the soldiers, who protect this hospital of yours?”

“My sir and doctor!” she called out. “My sir and doctor! I’m an old woman and I have been allowed to work here for three hundred years, but I never thought of that idea
before. Why would I need soldiers?”

“Find who they are and ask them to stand by. They are specialists too, with a different kind of art from ours. Let them stand by. They may be needed before this day is out. Give my name as
authority to their lieutenant or sergeant. Now here is the medication which I want you to apply to this patient.”

Her eyes widened as he went on talking, but she was a disciplined woman and she nodded as she heard him out, point by point. Her eyes looked very sad and weary at the end but she was a trained
expert herself and she had enormous respect for the skill and wisdom of the Sir and Doctor Vomact. She also had a warm, feminine pity for the motionless young male figure on the floor, swimming
forever on the heavy floor, swimming between archipelagoes of which no man living had ever dreamed before.

Crisis came that night.

The patient had worn handprints into the inner wall of the vault, but he had not escaped.

The soldiers, looking oddly alert with their weapons gleaming in the bright corridor of the hospital, were really very bored, as soldiers always become when they are on duty with no action.

Their lieutenant was keyed up. The wirepoint in his hand buzzed like a dangerous insect. Sir and Doctor Vomact, who knew more about weapons than the soldiers thought he knew, saw that the
wirepoint was set to
HIGH
, with a capacity of paralyzing people five stories up, five stories down or a kilometer sideways. He said nothing. He merely thanked the lieutenant
and entered the vault, closely followed by Grosbeck and Timofeyev.

The patient swam here too.

He had changed to an arm-over-arm motion, kicking his legs against the floor. It was as though he had swum on the other floor with the sole purpose of staying afloat, and had now discovered some
direction in which to go, albeit very slowly. His motions were deliberate, tense, rigid, and so reduced in time that it seemed as though he hardly moved at all. The ripped pajamas lay on the floor
beside him.

Vomact glanced around, wondering what forces the man could have used to make those handprints on the steel wall. He remembered Grosbeck’s warning that the patient should die, rather than
subject all mankind to new and unthought risks, but though he shared the feeling, he could not condone the recommendation.

Almost irritably, the great doctor thought to himself – where could the man be going?

(To Elizabeth, the truth was, to Elizabeth, now only sixty meters away. Not till much later did people understand what Rambo had been trying to do – crossing sixty mere meters to reach
his Elizabeth when he had already jumped an un-count of light-years to return to her. To his own, his dear, his well-beloved who needed him !)

The condamine did not leave its characteristic mark of deep lassitude and glowing skin: perhaps the typhoid was successfully contradicting it. Rambo did seem more lively than before. The name
had come through on the regular message system, but it still did not mean anything to the Sir and Doctor Vomact. It would. It would.

Meanwhile the other two doctors, briefed ahead of time, got busy with the apparatus which the robots and the nurses had installed.

Vomact murmured to the others, “I think he’s better off. Looser all around. I’ll try shouting.”

So busy were they that they just nodded.

Vomact screamed at the patient, “Who are you? What are you? Where do you come from?”

The sad blue eyes of the man on the floor glanced at him with a surprisingly quick glance, but there was no other real sign of communication. The limbs kept up their swim against the rough
concrete floor of the vault. Two of the bandages which the hospital staff had put on him had worn off again. The right knee, scraped and bruised, deposited a sixty-centimeter trail of blood –
some old and black and coagulated, some fresh, new and liquid – on the floor as it moved back and forth.

Vomact stood up and spoke to Grosbeck and Timofeyev. “Now,” he said, “let us see what happens when we apply the pain.”

The two stepped back without being told to do so.

Timofeyev waved his hand at a small white-enameled orderly-robot who stood in the doorway.

The pain net, a fragile cage of wires, dropped down from the ceiling.

It was Vomact’s duty, as senior doctor, to take the greatest risk. The patient was wholly encased by the net of wires, but Vomact dropped to his hands and knees, lifted the net at one
corner with his right hand, thrust his own head into it next to the head of the patient. Doctor Vomact’s robe trailed on the clean concrete, touching the black old stains of blood left from
the patient’s swim throughout the night.

Now Vomact’s mouth was centimeters from the patient’s ear.

Said Vomact, “Oh.”

The net hummed.

The patient stopped his slow motion, arched his back, looked steadfastly at the doctor.

Doctors Grosbeck and Timofeyev could see Vomact’s face go white with the impact of the pain machine, but Vomact kept his voice under control and said evenly and loudly to the patient,
“
Who – are – you
?”

The patient said flatly, “Elizabeth.”

The answer was foolish but the tone was rational.

Vomact pulled his head out from under the net, shouting again at the patient, “
Who – are – you
?”

The naked man replied, speaking very clearly:

Vomact frowned and murmured to the robot, “More pain. Turn it up to pain ultimate.”

The body threshed under the net, trying to resume its swim on the concrete. A loud wild braying cry came from the victim under the net. It sounded like a screamed distortion of the name
Elizabeth, echoing out from endless remoteness.

It did not make sense.

Vomact screamed back,
“Who – are – you?”

With unexpected clarity and resonance, the voice came back to the three doctors from the twisting body under the net of pain:

“I’m the shipped man, the ripped man, the gypped man, the dipped man, the hipped man, the tripped man, the tipped man, the slipped man, the flipped man, the nipped man, the ripped
man, the clipped man – aah!” His voice choked off with a cry and he went back to swimming on the floor, despite the intensity of the pain net immediately above him.

The doctor lifted his hand. The pain net stopped buzzing and lifted high into the air.

He felt the patient’s pulse. It was quick. He lifted an eyelid. The reactions were much closer to normal.

“Stand back,” he said to the others.

“Pain on both of us,” he said to the robot.

The net came down on the two of them.

“Who are you?”
shrieked Vomact, right into the patient’s ear, holding the man halfway off the floor and not quite knowing whether the body which tore steel walls might
not, somehow, tear both of them apart as they stood.

The man babbled back at him: “I’m the most man, the post man, the host man, the ghost man, the coast man, the boast man, the dosed man, the grossed man, the toast man, the roast man,
no! no! no!”

He struggled in Vomact’s arms. Grosbeck and Timofeyev stepped forward to rescue their chief when the patient added, very calmly and clearly:

“Your procedure is all right, doctor, whoever you are. More fever, please. More pain, please. Some of that dope to fight the pain. You’re pulling me back. I know I am on Earth.
Elizabeth is near. For the love of God, get me Elizabeth! But don’t rush me. I need days and days to get well.”

The rationality was so startling that Grosbeck, without waiting for orders from Vomact, as chief doctor, ordered the pain net lifted.

The patient began babbling again: “I’m the three man, the he man, the tree man, the me man, the three man, the three man . . .” His voice faded and he slumped unconscious.

Vomact walked out of the vault. He was a little unsteady.

His colleagues took him by the elbows.

He smiled wanly at them: “I wish it were lawful . . . I could use some of that condamine myself. No wonder the pain nets wake the patients up and even make dead people do twitches! Get me
some liquor. My heart is old.”

Grosbeck sat him down while Timofeyev ran down the corridor in search of medicinal liquor.

Vomact murmured, “How are we going to find
his
Elizabeth? There must be millions of them. And he’s from Earth Four too.”

“Sir and doctor, you have worked wonders,” said Grosbeck. “To go under the net. To take those chances. To bring him to speech. I will never see anything like it again.
It’s enough for any one lifetime, to have seen this day.”

“But what do we do next?” asked Vomact wearily, almost in confusion.

That particular question needed no answer.

The Lord Crudelta had reached Earth.

His pilot landed the craft and fainted at the controls with sheer exhaustion.

Of the escort cats, who had ridden alongside the space craft in the miniature spaceships, three were dead, one was comatose and the fifth was spitting and raving.

When the port authorities tried to slow the Lord Crudelta down to ascertain his authority, he invoked Top Emergency, took over the command of troops in the name of the Instrumentality, arrested
everyone in sight but the troop commander, and requisitioned the troop commander to take him to the hospital. The computers at the port had told him that one Rambo, “sans origine,” had
arrived mysteriously on the grass of a designated hospital.

Outside the hospital, the Lord Crudelta invoked Top Emergency again, placed all armed men under his own command, ordered a recording monitor to cover all his actions if he should later be
channeled into a court-martial, and arrested everyone in sight.

The tramp of heavily armed men, marching in combat order, overtook Timofeyev as he hurried back to Vomact with a drink. The men were jogging along on the double. All of them had live helmets and
their wirepoints were buzzing.

Nurses ran forward to drive the intruders out, ran backward when the sting of the stun-rays brushed cruelly over them. The whole hospital was in an uproar.

The Lord Crudelta later admitted that he had made a serious mistake.

The Two Minutes’ War broke out immediately.

You have to understand the pattern of the Instrumentality to see how it happened. The Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a strict code. Each was a
plenum of the low, the middle and the high justice. Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the Instrumentality and to keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a
mistake or committed a wrong – ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace himself if he assumed
this responsibility. The only difference between ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list,
while those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were listed on a very honorable list, but still killed.

With three Lords, the situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the Instrumentality, they were
exempt from punishment, though not from blame or even reduction to citizen status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a
dignified reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.

This was all the business of the Instrumentality. The Instrumentality had the perpetual slogan: “Watch, but do not govern; stop war, but do not wage it; protect, but do not control; and
first, survive!”

The Lord Crudelta had seized the troops – not his troops, but the light regular troops of Manhome Government – because he feared that the greatest danger in the history of man might
come from the person whom he himself had sent through space
₃
.

He never expected that the troops would be plucked out from his command – an overriding power reinforced by robotic telepathy and the incomparable communications net, both open and secret,
reinforced by thousands of years in trickery, defeat, secrecy, victory, and sheer experience, which the Instrumentality had perfected since it emerged from the Ancient Wars.

Overriding, overridden!

These were the commands which the Instrumentality had used before recorded time began. Sometimes they suspended their antagonists on points of law, sometimes by the deft and deadly insertion of
weapons, most often by cutting in on other peoples’ mechanical and social controls and doing their will, only to drop the controls as suddenly as they had taken them.

But not Crudelta’s hastily called troops.

The war broke out with a change of pace.