Universe 6 - [Anthology] Read online

They discarded their trays in the recycling chute and walked to the elevator. Denton was silent as they rode to the ground floor of the huge hospital; he didn’t want to converse, irrationally afraid that the giddy elevator box might trap their words in the sliding doors, to carry them off to strangers.

  They emerged into the pastel curves of the hospital lobby, walking between artificial potted palms and people waiting with artificial expressions concealing worry. They went out the sussurating front doors, from the odor of disinfectant into June sunlight and the warm breathing of air-cars.

  “I’m glad all the engines are turbines now,” she remarked. “They’re so quiet. No tires on the street squealing and no growling pistons and just air to wash my face in. All the noise of traffic used to scare me when I was little.” They talked quietly of cars and the city and their jobs until they came to the park.

  Sitting under a tree, plucking absently at the grass, they were silent for a while, feeling the ambience of the bustling park.

  Until without provocation Donna began: “My parents died five years ago and—” Then she stopped and looked at him sideways. She shook her head.

  “Were you going to say something else?”

  She shook her head again, too quickly. He wanted to ask if they had put generators over her parents before they’d died; but he decided that the question might put him in a bad light.

  They sat in the park and watched bicyclers and children sift through the plasphalt paths. After a while a slush vendor rolled a sticky white cart past, and Denton got up to buy two drinks. He was just returning from the vendor, about thirty feet from where Donna waited under the tree, when someone put a hand on his right arm.

  “Can I talk to you?” A subdued tone. “Just for a minute?” It was a boy, perhaps sixteen, but at least three inches taller than Denton. The boy kept opening and closing his mouth pensively, questions anxious to spring from his lips. He was dressed in a denim body suit. His hands were thrust deep into his side-pockets, as if leashed. Denton nodded, glancing at the slushes to make certain that they wouldn’t melt on his hands. Probably the kid was proselytizing for one of the burgeoning Satanic cults.

  “You’re a generator guy, aren’t you? A compensator.”

  Denton nodded dumbly again.

  “My father’s under a generator; he’s dying. And he ain’t old or useless yet. He’s still . . . needed.” He paused to steady himself. “Can you . . . Maybe you could help him, turn off the machine for a while?” It was obvious that the boy wasn’t used to asking favors. He resented having to ask Denton for anything.

  Denton wished that he hadn’t worn his uniform out of the hospital.

  “I can’t do anything for your father. I’m not a doctor. And there are dozens of generators in use at the hospital now. I’ve probably never seen your old man. Anyway, it isn’t true that the generators steal strength from patients. It’s an old wive’s tale. It wouldn’t do your father one bit of good if I turned it off. Sorry—” He began to walk toward Donna.

  “What’s your name?” the boy asked from behind, all respect gone from his tone. Denton could feel the boy’s eyes on his back. He turned half around, miffed.

  “Denton,” he replied, immediately wishing that he had given a false name. He turned his back on the boy and walked back to Donna. He could feel an icy trail of slush melting over his hand.

  “What did that kid want?” Donna asked, sipping her slush.

  “Nothing. Directions to . . . the auditorium. He said he was going to the Satanist/Jeezus Freak confrontation.”

  “Really? He didn’t look to be armed.” She shrugged.

  The boy was watching them.

  Some of the slush had spilled onto Denton’s leg. Donna wiped at the red stain on his black uniform with a white handkerchief.

  * * * *

  He didn’t want to think of work now. He had a date to take her to the Media Stew tonight. Finally: the first relationship he’d attempted since Alice.

  But Denton decided it might be better to keep his mind on work. If he thought about her too much he would be nervous and contrived when he was with her. Maybe blow it. He tightened the belt around his one-piece jet uniform and went quietly into the arbiter’s office. The arbiter of compensators was short, Jewish, and a compulsive caviler. Mr. Buxton smiled as Denton bent over the worksheet titled week of june 19 through 26,1986.

  “What’s your hurry, Denton? You young cats are always in a hurry. You’ll be assigned soon enough. You might find it too soon. I haven’t written you into the chart yet.”

  “Leave me on Mr. Hurzbau’s generator, sir, if you would. I get along well with Hurzbau.”

  “What is this “get along’ junk? We bend the rule a little that says no fraternizing with the patients under generators . . . but familiarity is strictly verboten. You’ll go nuts if you—”

  Not wanting to become embroiled in another of Buxton’s lectures, Denton quickly capitulated. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to imply we knew each other well. What I meant was, Hurzbau doesn’t worry me much, or talk to me past the usual amenities. Could I have my assignment now? I don’t want the unwatched generator to overload.”

  “Somebody’s watching the generator all the time, naturally. It can’t over—”

  “That’s what I mean,” Denton interrupted impatiently. “The guy who’s watching it is going to overload if he has to work past his shift. He’ll blame me.”

  “You should cultivate patience. Especially with your job.” Buxton shrugged his wide shoulders and put a thick hand on his paunch. He regarded the chart, yawned, scratched his bushy black mustache, and began to fill his pipe.

  Denton, still standing, shifted uncomfortably. He wanted to get his shift over with.

  Buxton lit his pipe and blew gray smoke at Denton.

  “Durghemmer today,” Buxton said.

  Denton frowned, dismayed. Durghemmer the leech.

  “Durghemmer . . .” Denton spoke the name into the air so that it would permanently leave his lips. “No. No, really, Buxton, I—”

  “Just as I thought. Another weakling. I can never find anybody willing to take care of Durghemmer’s generator, but I’ll be damned if I’ll end up doing it myself. So, Denton—”

  “I can’t. Really. I have a date tonight. Very delicate Psychological Balance involved. Durghemmer would ruin me.” Denton looked with all his actor’s pathos into his supervisor’s eyes. Buxton stared at his hands, then relit his pipe.

  “Okay. This time I let you off,” he said. “Take Hurzbau. But don’t talk to him unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’m not supposed to, but I’ll put Durghemmer’s generator on automatic for tonight. It’s dangerous but what the hell. But— Everybody’s got to circulate sooner or later, Ron.”

  “Sure,” said Denton, relieved. “Later.” He took his punch-card from the rack on Buxton’s office wall.

  * * * *

  Denton read the dials punctiliously, reminding himself that this particular generator provided power for at least three hundred people. Amplitude was climbing. Poor Hurzbau. But thoughts like those, he told himself, were precisely the sort he didn’t want. Good luck to Hurzbau.

  Denton adjusted the position of the scoop over the bed. The scoop of the generator was a transparent bell enclosing the bed upon which Hurzbau rested. It was made of nonconductive fiberglass, veined with copper and platinum wiring which converged in a cable at its peak and twined like a thick metal vine through branches of metal supports into an opening in the cylindrical crystal in the generator’s flat top.

  The bulk of the rectangular generator transformer was opened in a honeycomb of metallic hexagons of the side facing the bed. On the other side Denton sat in his swivel chair, in his black uniform, in his controlled aplomb, behind his desk of dials and meters. Denton was officially the compensator, adjusting the rise and fall of energy absorbed by the generator so that a steady, predictable flow went out to the electrical transmitters.

  Having checked the meters, Dento
n tried to relax for a while. He looked abstractedly around the room. The chamber was small, all white, with only the few paintings which Hurzbau’s relatives had hung to cheer him up. The paintings were of pastoral scenes from places mostly now entombed in plasphalt.

  Denton wondered why anyone had bothered with the paintings. Hurzbau couldn’t see them except as vague blurs through the plastic scoop. Nothing extraneous to the function of the generator was allowed under the scoop. Not even bedclothes. Hurzbau’s naked, cancer-eaten body was kept warm with heaters.

  Half of Hurzbau’s face was eaten away by cancer. He had once been overweight. He had gone from 220 pounds to 130 in four months. The right half of his face was sunken in to a thin mask of skin clinging to the skull, and his right eye was gone, the socket stuffed with cotton. He could talk only with difficulty. His right arm was withered and unusable, though his left was strong enough to prop him up on his elbow, allowing him to seek Denton’s attention.

  “Compensator . . .” he rasped, barely audible through the plastic. Denton switched on the intercom.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked, a trifle brusquely. “Would you like me to call the nurse? I am not privileged to give out medical aid personally. . . .”

  “No. No nurse. Denton? That your name?”

  “Yes. Ronald Denton. I told you yesterday, I believe. How are—” He’d almost forgotten, but he caught himself in time. He knew how Hurzbau was ... the invalid was in constant pain with six weeks to live, optimum. “Do you want to take some metrazine? That I can get.”

  “No. You know what, Denton?” His voice was a raven’s croak.

  “Look, I’ve been told I’m overfraternizing with the patients. That’s not really my job. We have a capable staff psychiatrist and a priest and—”

  “Who says you’re not a priest, Denton? The other compensators don’t talk to me at all. You’re the only one who says a damn thing to me. . . .” Hurzbau swallowed, his dessicated features momentarily contorting so that the left half of his face matched the malformation of the right. “You know, Denton, I could have gotten the cancer vaccine but I thought I’d never have need for it. Not me.” He made some sandpapery noises which might have been akin to laughter. “And it’s a sure thing if you get the cancer vaccine you can’t get cancer, and I turned down a sure thing. Too much bother.”

  Denton suddenly felt cold toward the dying man. He recoiled inwardly, as if Hurzbau were a deformed siren trying to lure him under the scoop. It was true in a way: Hurzbau wanted sympathy. And sympathy would mean that Denton would have to imagine himself in Hurzbau’s place. He shuddered. He had worked at the generator for six months but never before had a patient confided in him. He had to cut it off, even if it was at Hurzbau’s expense.

  But he was deterred by a look in the old man’s eyes: a red fight from the burning, blackened wick of Hurzbau’s nerve-endings.

  “Denton, tell me something. . . .” An almost visible wave of pain swept over Hurzbau’s shrunken body; the parchment-thin skin of his face twisted as if it were about to rip. “Denton, I want to know. The generators, do they make me weaker? I know they . . . take energy . . . from my dying. . . .Do they . . . feed off me? Do they make me die so that—”

  “No!” Denton was surprised at the stridency of his own exclamation. “No, you’ve got it turned around. It takes energies emitted because of your dying, but it doesn’t come directly from you.”

  “Could you—” Hurzbau began, but he fell back on the bed, unable to keep himself propped up any longer. Drawn by inexplicable impulse, Denton got out of the control seat and walked around to the end of the bed. He looked down into the fading man’s eyes, judging the advance of histolysis by the growth of an almost visible smoldering glow of pain. Hurzbau’s mouth worked silently, furiously. Finally, tugging at the intravenous feeding tube imbedded in his left arm, he managed: “Denton . . . could you fix the generator if it broke down?”

  “No. I don’t know how it works. I just compensate for metrical oscillation—”

  “Uh-huh. Then can you really say that it doesn’t take away from my life if you don’t know for sure how it works? You know what they tell you. But how do you know it’s the truth?”

  Hurzbau began to choke, spitting up yellow fluid. A moisture detector at the bedside prompted a plastic arm to stretch from the table of automatic instruments ensconced left of Hurzbau’s head. The arm swabbed the pillow and Hurzbau’s lips with a sponge. The light flared faintly in the dying man’s eyes and with his good arm he swiped angrily at the mechanical swab.

  “Damn, damn,” he muttered, “I’m not a pool ball.” The plastic strut fled back to its clamp.

  Denton turned away, deliberately breaking the minor rapport developing between the two of them. But doubts insinuated through his stiffly starched black uniform. Maybe Hurzbau had been a criminal whom they’d deliberately infected as an energy reserve— But no, Durghemmer had been a respected politician, never convicted of anything; so how could one explain his interment under the generator? The man under the generator on the floor below had been a policeman. No. The principle behind the generators was taught in high school, and there were classes on the inner construction of the machines in vocational schools. There would be no way for the arbiters to hide anything from anyone. . . . There was no secret. But he understood Hurzbau’s apprehensions. Even from his vantage point, perpetually on the bed, Hurzbau could see the two red dials side by side like mocking eyes, their needles climbing visibly whenever he got weaker.

  He got weaker, the machine got stronger.

  “Maybe it’s something they’re keeping under wraps, Denton,” Hurzbau ventured suddenly. He spasmed then, rising almost to a sitting position, every muscle strained so that his skin was elasticized vitreously taut, making his withered frame mottle red. From between gritted teeth came Hurzbau’s whisper, slightly metallic through the intercom: “How is there room for this much pain in this little body? There’s enough to fill a warehouse. How does it all fit?” Denton turned off the intercom.

  He rang for the nurse. The old man fell back, relaxing. Without wanting to, Denton glanced at the needle on the generator facing. It was climbing. He could hear the scoop humming. He ran around to the control panel and dialed to compensate for the upsurge in entropic energy. When the machine took in a great deal of energy at one time, it reacted with a high-frequency oscillating tone, very much like shrill laughter.

  The generator chuckled, the old man grew weaker, the needles jumped higher. Hurzbau’s body began to jerk and with each erratic rictus Denton’s stomach contracted with revulsion. He had thought he was used to the onset of death.

  * * * *

  Denton tightened the arm draped casually about Donna’s creamy shoulders. She was asleep, or pretended to be. His casual posture lied about his inner turmoil. Inside, he seethed, remembering Donna’s long boyish body like a graceful jet of water, thrashing with his. She’d responded only to the lightest touches. The visions of Donna alternated with memories of Hurzbau which Denton strove to suppress. But Hurzbau had thrashed in agony as she had writhed in ecstasy. Denton sat abruptly up to light a cigarette, throwing a tobacco smokescreen between himself and the recollection of the dying man.

  He glanced down at Donna, saw her looking at him out of slitted eyes. She smiled hastily and looked away.

  “What time is it?” she asked, her voice weary.

  “One-a.m.”

  “What was your play about, anyway?”

  “Do you want to read it? I have a copy—”

  “No.” Then she added, “I’m interested, but I don’t like to read much these days. I had to read immensely before my internship. Medical textbooks ruined my appetite. I like live plays better. Why don’t you perform it for me?”

  He raised a hand melodramatically over her head and with an exaggeratedly visionary look that made her laugh, he quoth:

  “ ‘We have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. . .”‘

  “Oh, I see.
That’s from your play? You wrote that, eh?”

  “Well, it’s one I wrote a few centuries ago—”

  “SHUT UP IN THERE I GOTTA GET SOME SLEEP! YOU ALREADY MADE ENOUGH NOISE GRUNTIN’ TO KEEP THE WHOLE BUILDING AWAKE TILL DECEMBER!” a male voice shouted from the next apartment.

  “The walls are thin,” Denton whispered apologetically. But Donna was crying. She was sitting up, taller than Denton by half a head, rocking back and forth. He put an arm on her leg but she pushed away and got out of bed, throwing the bedclothes askew.

  “Listen,” Denton said frantically, “I’m sorry about that creep next door. Let’s go somewhere—”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m going home. I had a good time and all that, you’re a good lover, only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  She had her suit on already, she was putting on her shoes. He wondered what he had done. Better stop her before she gets dressed or she’ll feel obligated to leave once she’s gone that far. She was putting on her coat.