The Nail and the Oracle (15 page)

“Just exactly how do you treat it?”

Weber raised his hands and let them fall. It was precisely the gesture Rathburn had made earlier, and Keogh wondered distantly whether they taught it in medical schools. “Something to kill the pain. Orchidectomy might make the patient last a little longer, by removing the supply of wild cells to the bloodstream. But it wouldn’t save him. Metastasis has already taken place by the time the first symptom appears. The cancer becomes generalized … perhaps the lung condition is only God’s mercy.”

“What’s ‘orchidectomy’?” asked Keogh.

“Amputation of the—uh—source,” said Rathburn uncomfortably.

“No!” cried the girl.

Keogh sent her a pitying look. There was that about him which was cynical, sophisticated, and perhaps coldly angry, at anyone who lived as he could never live, had what he could never have. It was a stirring of the grave ancient sin which old Cap’n Gamaliel had isolated in his perspicacious thoughts. Sure, amputate, if it’ll help, he thought. What do you think you’re preserving—his virility? What good’s it to you now?… but sending her the look, he encountered something different from the romantically based horror and shock he expected. Her thick level brows were drawn together, her whole face intense with taut concentration. “Let me think,” she said, oddly.

“You really should—” Rathburn began, but she shushed him with an impatient gesture. The three men exchanged a glance and settled back; it was as if someone, something had told them clearly and specifically to wait. What they were waiting for, they could not imagine.

The girl sat with her eyes closed. A minute crawled by. “Daddy used to say,” she said, so quietly that she must surely be talking to herself, “that there’s always a way. All you have to do is think of it.”

There was another long silence and she opened her eyes. There was a burning down in them somewhere; it made Keogh uneasy. She said, “And once he told me that I could have anything I wanted; all it had to be was … possible. And … the only way you can find out if a thing is impossible is to try it.”

“That wasn’t Sam Wyke,” said Keogh. “That was Keogh.”

She wet her lips and looked at them each in turn. She seemed not to see them at all. “I’m not going to let him die,” she said. “You’ll see.”

Sammy Stein came back two years later, on leave, and full of plans to join the Army Air Force. He’d had, as he himself said, the hell kicked out of him in China and a lot of the hellishness as well. But there was enough of the old Sammy left to make wild wonderful plans about going trespassing; and they knew just where they were going. The new Sammy, however, demanded a binge and a broad first.

Guy, two years out of high school, working for a living, and by nature neither binger nor wencher, went along only too gladly. Sam seemed to have forgotten about the “ol swimmin’ hole” at first, and halfway through the evening, in a local bar-and-dance emporium, Guy was about to despair of his ever remembering it, when Sam himself brought it up, recalling to Guy that he had once written Sam a letter asking Sam if it had really happened. Guy had, in his turn, forgotten the letter, and after that they had a good time with “remember-when”—and they made plans to go trespassing the very next day, and bring a lunch. And start early.

Then there was a noisy involvement with some girls, and a lot more drinks, and out of the haze and movement somewhere after midnight, Guy emerged on a sidewalk looking at Sammy shoveling a girl into a taxicab. “Hey!” he called out, “what about the you know, ol’ swimmin’ hole?”

“Call me Abacus, you can count on me,” said Sammy, and laughed
immoderately. The girl with him pulled at his arm; he shook her off and weaved over to Guy. “Listen,” he said, and gave a distorted wink, “if this makes—and it will—I’m starting no early starts. Tell you what, you go on out there and meet me by that sign says keep out or we’ll castigate you. Say eleven o’clock. If I can’t make it by then I’m dead or something.” He bellowed at the cab, “You gon’ kill me, honey?” and the girl called back, “I will if you don’t get into this taxi.” “See what I mean?” said Sammy in a grand drunken non-sequitur, “I got to go get killed.” He zigged away, needing no zag because even walking sidewise he reached the cab in a straight line, and Guy saw no more of him that leave.

That was hard to take, mostly because there was no special moment at which he knew Sammy wasn’t coming. He arrived ten minutes late, after making a super-human effort to get there. His stomach was sour from the unaccustomed drinking, and he was sandy-eyed and ache-jointed from lack of sleep. He knew that the greater probability was Sammy had not arrived yet or would not at all; yet the nagging possibility existed that he had come early and gone straight in. Guy waited around for a full hour, and some more minutes until the little road was clear of traffic and sounds of traffic, and then plunged alone into the woods, past the N
O
A
DMITTANCE
sign, and in to the wall. He had trouble finding the two trees, and once over the wall, he could not get his bearings for a while; he was pleased, of course, to find the unbelievably perfect lawns still there by the flawless acre, the rigidly controlled museums of carven box, the edge-trimmed, rolled-gravel walks meandering prettily through the woods. The pleasure, however, was no more than confirmation of his memory, and went no further; the day was spoiled.

Guy reached the lake at nearly one o’clock, hot, tired, ravenously hungry and unpleasantly nervous. The combination hit him in the stomach and made it echo; he sat down on the bank and ate. He wolfed down the food he had brought for himself and Sammy’s as well—odds and ends carelessly tossed into a paper sack in the bleary early hours. The cake was moldy but he ate it anyway. The orange juice was warm and had begun to ferment. And stubbornly, he determined to swim, because that was what he had come for.

He chose the beach with the golden sand. Under a thick cover of junipers he found a stone bench and table. He undressed here and scuttled across the beach and into the water.

He had meant it to be a mere dip, so he could say he’d done it. But around the little headland to the left was the rectangular cove with the diving platform; and he remembered the harbor of model ships; and then movement diagonally across the foot of the lake’s L caught his eye, and he saw models—not the anchored ships this time, but racing sloops, which put out from an inlet and crossed its mouth and sailed in again; they must be mounted on some sort of underwater wheel or endless chain, and moved as the breeze took them. He all but boiled straight across to them, then decided to be wise and go round.

He swam to the left and the rocky shore, and worked his way along it. Clinging close (the water seemed bottomless here) he rounded the point and came face to face (literally; they touched) with a girl.

She was young—near his age—and his first impression was of eyes of too complex an architecture, blue-white teeth with pointed canines quite unlike the piano-key regularity considered beautiful in these times, and a wide cape of rich brown hair afloat around her shoulders. By then his gasp was completed, and in view of the fact that in gasping he had neglected to remove his mouth from the water, he was shut off from outside impressions for a strangling time, until he felt a firm grasp on his left biceps and found himself returned to the side of the rock.

“Th-thanks,” he said hoarsely as she swam back a yard and trod water. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he added inanely.

“I guess I’m not either. But I thought you lived here. I thought you were a faun.”

“Boy am I glad to hear that. I mean about you. All I am is a trespasser. Boy.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“It was just a finger of speech,” he said, using one of the silly expressions which come to a person as he grows, and blessedly pass. She seemed not to react to it at all, for she said gravely, “You have the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They are made of aluminum.
And your hair is all wiggly.”

He could think of nothing to say to that, but tried; all that emerged was, “Well, it’s early yet,” and suddenly they were laughing together. She was so strange, so different. She spoke in a grave, unaccented, and utterly incautious idiom as if she thought strange thoughts and spoke them right out. “Also,” she said, “you have lovely lips. They’re pale blue. You ought to get out of the water.”

“I can’t!”

She considered that for a moment, treading away from him and then back to the yard’s distance. “Where are your things?”

He pointed across the narrow neck of the lake which he had circumnavigated.

“Wait for me over there,” she said, and suddenly swam close, so close she could dip her chin and look straight into his eyes. “You got to,” she said fiercely.

“Oh I will,” he promised, and struck out for the opposite shore. She hung to the rock, watching him.

Swimming, reaching hard, stretching for distance warmed him, and the chill and its accompanying vague ache diminished. Then he had a twinge of stomach-ache, and he drew up his knees to ease it. When he tried to extend himself again, he could, but it hurt too much. He drew up his knees again, and the pain followed inward so that to flex again was out of the question. He drew his knees up still tighter, and tighter still followed the pain. He needed air badly by then, threw up his head, tried to roll over on his back; but with his knees drawn up, everything came out all wrong. He inhaled at last because he had to, but the air was gone away somewhere; he floundered upward for it until the pressure in his ears told him he was swimming downward. Blackness came upon him and receded, and came again; he let it come for a tired instant, and was surrounded by light, and drew one lungful of air and one of water, and got the blackness again; this time it stayed with him …

Still beautiful in her bed, but morphine-clouded, fly-papered, and unstruggling in viscous sleep, he lay with monsters swarming in his veins …

Quietly, in a corner of the room, she spoke with Keogh:

“You don’t understand me. You didn’t understand me yesterday when I cried out at the idea of that—that operation. Keogh, I love him, but I’m
me
. Loving him doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking. Loving him means I’m more me than ever, not less. It means I can do anything I did before, only more, only better. That’s why I fell in love with him. That’s why I am in love with him. Weren’t you ever in love, Keogh?”

He looked at the way her hair fell, and the earnest placement of her thick soft brows, and he said, “I haven’t thought much about it.”

“There’s always a way. All you have to do is think of it,” she quoted. “Keogh, I’ve accepted what Dr. Rathburn said. After I left you I went to the library and tore the heart out of some books … they’re right. Rathburn and Weber. And I’ve thought and I’ve thought … trying the way Daddy would, to turn everything upside down and backwards, to look for a new way of thinking. He won’t die, Keogh; I’m not going to let him die.”

“You said you accepted—”

“Oh, part of him. Most of him, if you like. We all die, bit by bit, all the time, and it doesn’t bother us because most of the dead parts are replaced. He’ll … he’ll lose more parts, sooner, but—after it’s over, he’ll be himself again.” She said it with superb confidence—perhaps it was childlike. If so, it was definitely not childish.

“You have an idea,” said Keogh positively. As he had pointed out to the doctors, he knew her.

“All those—those things in his blood,” she said quietly. “The struggle they go through … they’re trying to survive; did you ever think of it that way, Keogh? They want to live. They want most terribly to go on living.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“His body wants them to live too. It welcomes them wherever they lodge. Dr. Weber said so.”

“You’ve got hold of something,” said Keogh flatly, “and whatever it is I don’t think I like it.”

“I don’t want you to like it,” she said in the same strange quiet voice. He looked swiftly at her and saw again the burning deep in
her eyes. He had to look away. She said, “I want you to hate it. I want you to fight it. You have one of the most wonderful minds I have ever known, Keogh, and I want you to think up every argument you can think of against it. For every argument I’ll find an answer, and then we’ll know what to do.”

“You’d better go ahead,” he said reluctantly.

“I had a pretty bad quarrel with Dr. Weber this morning,” she said suddenly.

“This m—when?” He looked at his watch; it was still early.

“About three, maybe four. In his room. I went there and woke him up.”

“Look, you don’t do things like that to Weber!”

“I do. Anyway, he’s gone.”

He rose to his feet, the rare bright patches of anger showing in his cheeks. He took a breath, let it out, and sat down again. “You’d better tell me about it.”

“In the library,” she said, “there’s a book on genetics and it mentions some experiments on Belgian hares. The does were impregnated without sperm, with some sort of saline or alkaline solution.”

“I remember something about it.” He was well used to her circuitous way of approaching something important. She built conversational points, not like a hired contractor, but like an architect. Sometimes she brought in portions of her lumber and stacked them beside the structure. If she ever did that, it was material she needed and would use. He waited.

“The does gave birth to baby rabbits, all female. The interesting thing was that they were identical to each other and to the mother. Even the blood-vessel patterns in the eyeball were so similar that an expert might be fooled by photographs of them. ‘Impossibly similar’ is what one of the experimenters called it. They had to be identical because everything they inherited was from the mother. I woke Dr. Weber up to tell him about that.

“And he told you he’d read the book.”

“He wrote it,” she said gently. “And then I told him that if he could do that with a Belgian hare, he could do it with—” she nodded toward her big bed—“him.”

Then she was quiet, while Keogh rejected the idea, found it stuck to his mind’s hand, not to be shaken off; brought it to his mind’s eye and shuddered away from it, shook again and failed, slowly brought it close and turned it over, and turned it again.