Bedzyk Saw Riila Go Mad, and watched her throw herself against the lucite port, till her pinhead was a red blotch of pulped flesh and blood. He sighed, and sucked deeply from his ma.s.sive bellows chest, and wondered how he, of all the Discards, had been silently nominated the leader. The ship hung in s.p.a.ce, between the Moon and Earth, unwanted, unnoticed, a raft adrift in the sea of night.
Around him in the ship"s saloon, the others watched Riila killing herself, and when her body fell to the rug, they turned away, allowing Bedzyk his choice of who was to dispose of her. He chose John Smith-the one with feathers where hair should have been-and the nameless one who clanged instead of talking.
The two of them lifted her heavy body, with its tiny pea of head, and carried it to the garbage port. They emptied it, opened it, tossed her inside, redogged and blew her out. She floated past the saloon window on her way sunward. In a moment she was lost.
Bedzyk sat down in a deep chair and drew breath whistlingly into his mighty chest. It was a ch.o.r.e, being leader of these people.
People? No, that was certainly not the word. These Discards. That was a fine willowy word to use. They were sc.r.a.p, refuse, waste, garbage themselves. How fitting for Riila to have gone that way, out the garbage port. They would all bid goodbye that way some day. He noted there was no "day" on the ship. But some good something- maybe day, maybe night-each of them would go sucking out that port like the garbage.
It had to be that way. They were Discards.
But people? No, they were not people. People did not have hooks where hands should have been, nor one eye, nor carapaces, nor humps on chests and backs, nor fins, nor any of the other mutations these residents of the ship sported. People were normal. Evenly matched sets of arms and legs and eyes. Evenly matched husbands, wives.
Evenly distributed throughout the Solar System, and evenly dividing the goods of the System between themselves and the frontier worlds at the Edge. And all happily disposed to let the obscene Discards die in their prison ship.
"She"s gone."
He had pursed his lips, had sunk his perfectly normal head onto his gigantic chest, and had been thinking.
Now he looked up at the speaker. It was John Smith, with feathers where hair should have been.
"I said: she"s gone." Bedzyk nodded without replying. Riila had been just one more in the tradition. They had already lost over two hundred Discards from the ship. There would be more.
Strange how these-he hesitated again to use the word people, finally settled on the word they used among themselves: creatures-these creatures had steeled themselves to the death of one of their kind. Or perhaps they did not consider the rest as malformed as themselves. Each person on the ship was different. No two had been affected by Sickness in the same way. The very fibers of the muscles had altered with some of these creatures, making their limbs useless; on others the pores had clogged on their skin surfaces, eliminating all hair. On still others strange juices had been secreted in the blood stream, causing weird growths to erupt where smoothness had been. But perhaps each one thought he was less hideous than the others. It was conceivable. Bedzyk knew his great chest was not nearly as unpleasant to look upon as, say, Samswope"s spiny crest and twin heads. In fact, Bedzyk mused wryly, many people might think it was becoming, this great wedge of a chest, all matted with dark hair and heroic-seeming. Uh-huh, the others are pretty miserable to look at, but not me, especially. Yes, it was conceivable.
In any case, they paid no attention now, if one of their group killed himself. They turned away; most of them were better off dead, anyhow.
Then he caught himself.
He was starting to get like the rest of them! He had to stop thinking like that. It wasn"t right. No one should be allowed to take death like that. He resolved, the next one would be stopped, and he would deliver them a stern warning, and tell the Discards that they would find landfall soon, and to buck up.
But he knew he would sit and watch the next time, as he had this time. For he had made the same resolve before Riila had gone.
Samswope came into the saloon-he had been on KP all "day" and both his heads were dripping with sweat-and picked his way among the conversing groups of Discards to the seat beside Bedzyk.
"Mmm." It was a greeting; he was identifying his arrival.
"Hi, Sam. How was it?"
"Metsoo-metz," he gibed, imitating Scalomina (the one-eyed ex-plumber, of Sicilian descent), tipping his hand in an obvious Scalominian gesture. "I"ll live. Unfortunately." He added the last word with only a little drop of humor."Did I ever tell you the one about the Candy-a.s.s Canadian Boil-Sucker?" He didn"t even smile as he said it; with either head. Bedzyk nodded wearily: he didn"t want to play that game. "Yeah, well," Samswope said wearily. He sat silently for several long moments, then added, with irony, "But did I tell you I was married to her?" His wife had turned him in.
Morbidity ran knee-deep on the ship.
"Riila killed herself a little bit ago," Bedzyk said carelessly. There was no other way to say it.
"I figured as much," Samswope explained. "I saw them carrying her past the galley to the garbage lock. That"s number six this week alone. You going to do anything, Bedzyk?"
Bedzyk twisted abruptly in his chair. He leveled a gaze at a spot directly between Samswope"s two heads. His words were bitter with helplessness and anger that the burden should be placed upon him. "What do you mean, what am I going to do? I"m a prisoner here, too. When they had the big roundup, I got s.n.a.t.c.hed away from a wife and three kids, the same as you got pulled away from your used car lot. What the h.e.l.l do you want me to do? Beg them not to bash their heads against the lucite, it"ll smear our nice north view of s.p.a.ce!"
Samswope wiped both hands across his faces simultaneously in a weary pattern. The blue eyes of his left head closed, and the brown eyes of his right head blinked quickly. His left head, which had been speaking till now, nodded onto his chest. His right head, the nearly-dumb one, mumbled incoherently-Samswope"s left head jerked up, and a look of disgust and hatred clouded his eyes. "Shut up, you-f.u.c.king moron!" He cracked his right head with a full fist.
Bedzyk watched without pity. The first time he had seen Samswope flail himself-would flagellate be a better term?-he had pitied the mutant. But it was a constant thing now, the way Samswope took his agony out on the dumb head. And there were times Bedzyk thought Samswope was better off than most. At least he had a release valve, an object of hate.
"Take it easy, Sam. Nothing"s going to help us, not a single, lousy th-"
Samswope snapped a look at Bedzyk, then catalogued the thick arms and huge chest of the man, and wearily murmured: "Oh, I don"t know, Bedzyk, I don"t know." He dropped his left head into his hands. The right one winked imbecilically at Bedzyk. Bedzyk shuddered and looked away.
"If only we could have made that landing on Venus," Samswope intoned from the depths of his hands. "If only they"d let us in."
"You ought to know by now, Sam," Bedzyk reminded him bitterly, "there"s no room for us in the System at all.
No room on Earth and nowhere else. They"ve got allocations and quotas and a.s.signments. So many to 10, so many to Callisto, so many to Luna and Venus and Mars and anyplace else you might want to settle down. No room for Discards. No room in s.p.a.ce, at all."
Across the saloon three fish-men, their heads encased in bubbling clear helmets, had gotten into a squabble, and two of them were trying to open the petc.o.c.k on the third"s helmet. This was something else again; the third fish-man was struggling, he didn"t want to die gasping. This was not a suicide, but a murder, if they let it go unchecked.
Bedzyk leaped to his feet and hurled himself at the two attacking fish-men. He caught one by the bicep and spun him. His fist was half-c.o.c.ked before he realized one solid blow would shatter the water-globe surrounding the fish-face, would kill the mutant. Instead, he took him around and shoved him solidly by the back of the shoulders, toward the compartment door. The fish-man stumbled away, breathing bubbly imprecations into his life water, casting furious glances back at his companions. The second fish-man came away of his own accord and followed the first from the saloon.
Bedzyk helped the last fish-man to a relaxer and watched disinterestedly as the mutant let a fresh supply of air bubbles into the circulating water in the globe. The fish-man mouthed a lipless thanks, and Bedzyk pa.s.sed it away with a gesture. He went back to his seat.
Samswope was ma.s.saging the dumb head. "Those three"ll never grow up."
Bedzyk fell into the chair. "You wouldn"t be too happy living inside a goldfish bowl yourself, Swope."
Samswope stopped ma.s.saging the wrinkled yellow skin of the dumb head, seemed prepared to snap a retort, but a blip and clear-squawk from the intercom stopped him.
"Bedzyk! Bedzyk, you down there?" It was the voice of Harmony Teat up in the drive room. Why was it they always called him? Why did they persist in making him their arbiter?
"Yeah, I"m here, in the salon. What"s up?"
The squawk-box blipped again and Harmony Teat"s mellow voice came to him from the ceiling. "I just registered a ship coming in on us, off about three-thirty. I checked through the ephemeris and the shipping schedules.
Nothing supposed to be out there. What should I do? You think it"s a customs ship from Earth?"
Bedzyk heaved himself to his feet. He sighed. "No, I don"t think it"s a customs ship. They threw us out, but I doubt if they have the imagination or gall to extract t.i.the from us for being here. I don"t know what it might be, Harmony. Hold everything and record any signals they send. I"m on my way upship."
He strode quickly out of the salon, and up the cross-leveled ramps toward the drive room. Not till he had pa.s.sed the hydroponics level did he realize Samswope was behind him. "I, uh, thought I"d come along, Bed,"
Samswope said apologetically, wringing his small, red hands. "I didn"t want to stay down there with those-those freaks." His dumb head hung off to one side, sleeping fitfully.
Bedzyk did not answer. He turned on his heel and casually strode up decks, not looking back.There was no trouble. The ship identified itself when it was well away. It was an Attache Carrier from System Central in b.u.t.te, Montana, Earth. The supercargo was a SpecAttache named Curran. When the ship pulled alongside the Discard vessel and jockeyed for grappling position, Harmony Teat (her long gray-green hair reaching down past the spiked projections on her spinal column) threw on the attract field for that section of the hull. The Earth ship clunked against the Discard vessel, and the locks were synched in.
Curran came across without a suit.
He was a slim, incredibly tanned young man with a crew cut clipped so short, a patch of nearly-bald showed at the center of his scalp. His eyes were alert, and his manner was brisk and friendly, that of the professional dignitary in the Foreign Service.
Bedzyk did not bother with amenities.
"What do you want?"
"Who may I be addressing, sir, if I may ask?" Curran was the perfect model of diplomacy.
"Bedzyk is what I was called on Earth." Cool, disdainful, I-may-be-hideous-but-I-still-have-a-little-pride.
"My name is Curran, Mr. Curran, Mr. Bedzyk. Alan Curran of System Central. I"ve been asked to come out and speak to you about-"
Bedzyk settled against the bulkhead opposite the lock, not even offering the Attache an invitation to return to the saloon.
"You want us to get out of your sky, is that it? You stinking, lousy..." He faltered in fury. He could not finish the sentence, so steeped in anger was he. "You set off too many bombs down there, and eventually some of us with something in our bloodstreams react to it, and we turn into monsters. What do you do...you call it the Sickness and you pack us up whether we want to go or not, and you shove us into s.p.a.ce."
"Mr. Bedzyk, I-"
"You what? You d.a.m.ned well what, Mr. System Central? With your straight, clean body and your nice home on Earth, and your allocations of how many people live where to keep the balance of culture just so! You what? You want to invite us to leave? Okay, we"ll go," he was nearly screeching, his face crimson with emotion, his big hands knotted at his sides in fear he would strike this emissary.
"We"ll get out of your sky. We"ve been all the way out to the Edge, Mr. Curran, and there"s no room in s.p.a.ce for us anywhere. They won"t let us land even on the frontier worlds where we can pay our way. Oh no, contamination, they think. Okay, don"t shove, Curran, we"ll be going."
He started to turn away, was nearly down the pa.s.sageway, when Curran"s solid voice stopped him: "Bedzyk!"
The wedge-chested man turned. Curran was unsticking the seam that sealed his jumper top. He pulled it open and revealed his chest.
It was covered with leprous green and brown sores. His face was a blasted thing, then. He was a man with Sickness, who wanted to know how he had acquired it-how he could be rid of it. On the ship, they called Curran"s particular deformity "the funnies."
Bedzyk walked back slowly, his eyes never leaving Curran"s face. "They sent you to talk to us?" Bedzyk asked, wondering.
Curran resealed the jumper, and nodded. He laid a hand on his chest, as though wishing to be certain the sores would not run off and leave him. A terror swam brightly in his young eyes.
"It"s getting worse down there, Bedzyk," he said as if in a terrible need for hurrying. "There are more and more changing every day. I"ve never seen anything like it-"
He hesitated, shuddered.
He ran a hand over his face, and swayed slightly, as though whatever memory he now clutched to himself was about to make him faint. "I-I"d like to sit down."
Bedzyk took him by the elbow, and led him a few steps toward the saloon. Then Dresden, the girl with the gla.s.s hands-who wore monstrous cotton-filled gloves-came out from the connecting pa.s.sage leading to the salon, and Bedzyk thought of the hundred weird forms Curran would have to face. In his condition, that would be bad. He turned the other way, and led Curran back up to the drive room. Bedzyk waved at a control chair. "Have a seat."
Curran looked collegiate-boy shook-up. He sank into the chair, again touching his chest in disbelief. "I"ve been like this for over two months...they haven"t found out yet; I"ve tried to keep myself from showing it..."
He was shivering wildly.
Bedzyk perched on the shelf of the plot-tank, and crossed his legs. He folded his arms across his huge chest and looked at Curran. "What do they want down there? What do they want from their beloved Discards?" He savored the last word with the taste of alum.
"It"s, it"s so bad you won"t believe it, Bedzyk." He ran a hand through his crew cut, nervously. "We thought we had the Sickness licked. There was every reason to believe the atmosphere spray Terra Pharmaceuticals developed would end it. They sprayed the entire planet, but something they didn"t even know was in the spray, and something they only half-suspected in the Sickness combined, and produced a healthier strain.
"That was when it started getting bad. What had been a hit-and-miss thing-with just a few like yourselves, with some weakness in your bloodstreams making you susceptible-became a rule instead of an exception. People started changing while you watched. I-I," he faltered again, shuddered at a memory.
"My, my fiancee," he went on, looking at his Attache case and his hands, "I was eating lunch with her inRockefeller Plaza"s Sky top. We had to be back at work in b.u.t.te in twenty minutes, just time to catch a cab, and she-she-changed while we were sitting there. Her eyes, they, they-I can"t explain it, you can"t know what it was like seeing them water and run down her ch-cheeks like that, it was-" his face tightened up as though he were trying to keep himself from going completely insane.
Bedzyk sharply curbed the hysteria. "We have seven people like that on board right now. I know what you mean. And they aren"t the worst. Go on, you were saying?"
Such prosaic acceptance of the horror brought Curran"s frenzy down. "It got so bad everyone was staying in the sterile shelters. The streets always empty; it was horrible. Then some quack physician out in Cincinnati or somewhere like that came up with an answer. A serum made from a secretion in the bloodstreams of-of-"
Bedzyk added the last word for him: "Of Discards?"
Curran nodded soberly.
Bedzyk"s hard-edged laugh rattled against Curran"s thin film of calm. He jerked his eyes to the man sitting on the plot-tank. A furious expression came over him.
"What are you laughing at? We need your help! We need all you people as blood donors."
Bedzyk stopped laughing abruptly. "Why not use the changed ones from down there." He jerked a thumb at the big lucite viewport where Earth hung swollen and multi-colored. "What"s wrong with them-" and he added with malice "-with you?" Curran twitched as he realized he could so easily be lumped in with the afflicted.
"We"re no good. We were changed by this new mutated Sickness. The secretion is different in our blood than it is in yours. You were stricken by the primary Sickness, or virus, or whatever they call it. We have a complicated one. But the way the research has outlined it, the only ones who have what we need, are you Dis-" he caught himself "-you people who were shipped out before the Sickness itself mutated."
Bedzyk snorted contemptuously. He let a wry, astonished smirk tickle his lips. "You Earthies are fantastic."
He shook his head in private amus.e.m.e.nt.
He slipped off the plot-tank"s ledge and turned to the port, talking half to himself, half to a nonexistent third person in the drive room. "These Earthies are unbelievable! Can you imagine, can you picture it?" Astonishment rang in his disbelief at the proposal. "First they hustle us into a metal prison and shoot us out here to die alone, they don"t want any part of us, go away they say. Then when the trouble comes to them too big, they run after us, can you help us please, you dirty, ugly things, help us nice clean Earthies." He spun suddenly. "Get out of here! Get off this ship!
We won"t help you.
"You have your allotments and your quotas for each world-"
Curran broke in, "Yes, that"s it. If the population goes down much more, they"ve been killing themselves, riots, it"s terrible, then the balance will be changed, and our entire System culture will bend and fall and-"
Bedzyk cut him off, finishing what he had been saying, "-yes, you have your dirty little quotas, but you have no room for us. Well, we"ve got no room for you! Now get the h.e.l.l off this ship. We don"t want to help you!"
Curran leaped to his feet. "You can"t send me away like this! You don"t speak for all of them aboard. You can"t treat a Terran emissary this way-" Bedzyk had him by the jumper, and had propelled him toward the closed companionway door before the Attache knew quite what was happening. He hit the door and rebounded. As he stumbled back toward Bedzyk, the great-chested mutant s.n.a.t.c.hed the briefcase from beside the control chair and slammed it into Curran"s stomach. "Here! Here"s your offer and your lousy demands, and get off this ship! We don"t want any part of y-"
The door crashed open, and the Discards were there.
They filled the corridor, as far back as the angle where cross-pa.s.sages ran off toward the salon and galley.
They shoved and nudged each other to get a view into the drive room; Samswope and Harmony Teat and Dresden were in the front, and from somewhere Samswope had produced an effectively deadly little rasp-pistol. He held it tightly, threateningly, and Bedzyk felt flattered that they had come to his aid.
"You don"t need that, Sam-Mr. Curran was just leav-"
Then he realized. The rasp was pointed not at Curran, but at him.
He stood frozen, one hand still clutching Curran"s sleeve, as Curran bellied the briefcase to himself.
"Dresden overheard it all, Mr. Curran," Samswope said in a pathetically ingratiating tone. "He wants us to rot on this barge." He gestured at Bedzyk with his free hand as the dumb head nodded certain agreement. "What offer can you make us, can we go home, Mr. Curran...?" There was a whimpering and a pleading in Samswope"s voice that Bedzyk had only sensed before.
He tried to break in, "Are you insane, Swope? Putty, that"s all you are! Putty when you see a fake hope that you"ll get off this ship! Can"t you see they just want to use us! Can"t you understand that?"
Samswope"s face grew livid and he screamed, "Shut up! Just shut up and let Curran talk! We don"t want to die on this ship. You may like it, you little tin G.o.d, but we hate it here! So shut up and let him talk!"
Curran spoke rapidly then: "If you allow us to send a medical detachment up here to use you as blood donors, I have the word of the System Central that you will all be allowed to land on Earth and we"ll have a reservation for you so you can live some kind of normal lives again-"
"Hey, what"s the matter with you?" Bedzyk again burst in, trying vainly to speak over the hubbub from the corridor. "Can"t you see he"s lying? They"ll use us and then desert us again!"