Below the skin, the surface layers of fatty tissue, the substance of the tissue changed from the dark red of the wounded tissue to a dark and greenish hue that spoke of deadly decay.
But Dr. Winters was shaking his head. "No. It"s not gangrene. That"s the way we found the tissue. That appears to be its--normal condition, if you will."
Mel stared without believing, without comprehending.
Dr. Winters probed the wound open further. "We should see the stomach here," he said. "What is here where the stomach should be I cannot tell you. There is no name for this organ. The intestinal tract should lie here. Instead, there is only this h.o.m.ogeneous ma.s.s of greenish, gelatinous material. Other organs, hardly differentiated from this ma.s.s, appear where the liver, the pancreas, the spleen should be."
Mel was hearing his voice as if from some far distance or in a dream.
"There are lungs--of a sort," the Doctor went on. "She was certainly capable of breathing. And there"s a greatly modified circulatory system, two of them, it appears. One circulates a blood substance in the outer layers of tissue that is almost normal. The other circulates a liquid that gives the remainder of the organs their greenish hue. But how circulation takes place we do not know. She has no heart."
Mel Hastings burst out in hysterical laughter. "Now I know you"re crazy Doc! My tender, loving Alice with no heart! She used to tell me, "I haven"t got any brains. I wouldn"t have married a dumb reporter if I did. But so I"ve got a heart and that"s what fell in love with you--my heart, not my brains." She loved me, can"t you understand that?"
Dr. Winters was slowly drawing him away. "I understand. Of course I understand. Come with me now, Mr. Hastings, and lie down for a little while. I"ll get you something to help take away the shock."
Mel permitted himself to be led away to a small room nearby. He drank the liquid the Doctor brought, but he refused to lie down.
"You"ve shown me," he said with dull finality. "But I don"t care what the explanation is. I knew Alice. She was human all right, more so than either you or I. She was completely normal, I tell you--all except for this idea she had the last year or so that we"d gone together on a vacation to Mars at one time."
"That wasn"t true?"
"No. Neither of us had ever been out in s.p.a.ce."
"How well did you know your wife before you married her?"
Mel smiled in faint reminiscence. "We grew up together, went to the same grade school and high school. It seems like there was never a time when Alice and I didn"t know each other. Our folks lived next door for years."
"Was she a member of a large family?"
"She had an older brother and sister and two younger sisters."
"What were her parents like?"
"They"re still living. Her father runs an implement store. It"s a farm community where they live. Wonderful people. Alice was just like them."
Dr. Winters was silent before he went on. "I have subjected you to this mental torture for just one reason, Mr. Hastings. If it has been a matter of any less importance I would not have told you the details of your wife"s condition, much less asking you to look at her. But this is such an enormous scientific mystery that I must ask your cooperation in helping to solve it. I want your permission to preserve and dissect the body of your wife for the cause of science."
Mel looked at the Doctor in sudden sharp antagonism. "Not even give her a burial? Let her be put away in bottles, like--like a--"
"Please don"t upset yourself any more than necessary. But I do beg that you consider what I"ve just proposed. Surely a moment"s reflection will show you that this is no more barbaric than our other customs regarding our dead.
"But even this is beside the point. The girl, Alice, whom you married is like a normal human being in every apparent external respect, yet the organs which gave her life and enabled her to function are like nothing encountered before in human experience. It is imperative that we understand the meaning of this. It is yours to say whether or not we shall have this opportunity."
Mel started to speak again, but the words wouldn"t come out.
"Time is critical," said Dr. Winters, "but I don"t want to force you to an instantaneous answer. Take thirty minutes to think about it. Within that time, additional means of preservation must be taken. I regret that I must be in such haste, but I urge that your answer be yes."
Dr. Winters moved towards the door, but Mel gestured for him to remain.
"I want to see her again," Mel said.
"There is no need. You have been tortured enough. Remember your wife as you have known her all her life, not as you saw her a moment ago."
"If you want my answer let me see her again."
Dr. Winters led the way silently back to the cold room. Mel drew down the cover only far enough to expose the face of Alice. There was no mistake. Somehow he had been hoping that all this would turn out to be some monstrous error. But there was no error.
Would she want me to do what the Doctor has asked? he thought. She wouldn"t care. She would probably think it a very huge joke that she had been born with innards that made her different from everybody else. She would be amused by the profound probings and mutterings of the learned doctors trying to find an explanation for something that had no explanation.
Mel drew the sheet tenderly over her face.
"You can do as you wish," he said to Dr. Winters. "It makes no difference to us--to either of us."
The sedative Dr. Winters had given him, plus his own exhaustion, drove Mel to sleep for a few hours during the afternoon, but by evening he was awake again and knew that a night of sleeplessness lay ahead of him. He couldn"t stand to spend it in the house, with all its fresh reminders of Alice.
He walked out into the street as it began to get dark. Walking was easy; almost no one did it any more. The rush of private and commercial cars swarmed overhead and rumbled in the ground beneath. He was an isolated anachronism walking silently at the edge of the great city.
He was sick of it. He would have liked to have turned his back on the city and left it forever. Alice had felt the same. But there was nowhere to go. News reporting was the only thing he knew, and news occurred only in the great, ugly cities of the world. The farmlands, such as he and Alice had known when they were young, produced nothing of interest to the satiated denizens of the towns and cities. Nothing except food, and much of this was now being produced by great factories that synthesized protein and carbohydrates. When fats could be synthesized the day of the farmer would be over.
He wondered if there weren"t some way out of it now. With Alice gone there was only himself, and his needs were few. He didn"t know, but suddenly he wanted very much to see it all again. And, besides, he had to tell her folks.
The ancient surface bus reached Central Valley at noon the next day. It all looked very much as it had the last time Mel had seen it and it looked very good indeed. The vast, open lands; the immense ripe fields.
The bus pa.s.sed the high school where Mel and Alice had attended cla.s.ses together. He half expected to see her running across the campus lawn to meet him. In the middle of town he got off the bus and there were Alice"s mother and father.
They were dry-eyed now but white and numb with shock. George Dalby took his hand and pumped it heavily. "We can"t realize it, Mel. We just can"t believe Alice is gone."
His wife put her arms around Mel and struggled with her tears again. "You didn"t say anything about the funeral. When will it be?"
Mel swallowed hard, fighting the one lie he had to tell. He almost wondered now why he had agreed to Dr. Winters" request. "Alice--always wanted to do all the good she could in the world," he said. "She figured that she could be of some use even after she was gone. So she made an agreement with the research hospital that they could have her body after she died."
It took a moment for her mother to grasp the meaning. Then she cried out, "We can"t even bury her?"
"We should have a memorial service, right here at home where all her friends are," said Mel.
George Dalby nodded in his grief. "That was just like Alice," he said. "Always wanting to do something for somebody else--"
And it was true, Mel thought. If Alice had supposed she was not going to live any longer she would probably have thought of the idea, herself. Her parents were easily reconciled.
They took him out to the old familiar house and gave him the room where he and Alice had spent the first days of their marriage.
When it was night and the lights were out he felt able to sleep naturally for the first time since Alice"s accident. She seemed not far away here in this old familiar house.
In memory, she was not, for Mel was convinced he could remember the details of his every a.s.sociation with her. He first became conscious of her existence one day when they were in the third grade. At the beginning of each school year the younger pupils went through a course of weighing, inspection, knee tapping, and cavity counting. Mel had come in late for his examination that year and barged into the wrong room. A shower of little-girl squeals had greeted him as the teacher told him kindly where the boy"s examination room was.
But he remembered most vividly Alice Dalby standing in the middle of the room, her blouse off but held protectingly in front of her as she jumped up and down in rage and pointed a finger at him. "You get out of here, Melvin Hastings! You"re not a nice boy at all!"
Face red, he had hastily retreated as the teacher a.s.sured Alice and the rest of the girls that he had made a simple mistake. But how angry Alice had been! It was a week before she would speak to him.
He smiled and sank back deeply into the pillow. He remembered how proud he had been when old Doc Collins, who came out to do the honors every Fall, had told him there wasn"t a thing wrong with him and that if he continued to drink his milk regularly he"d grow up to be a football player. He could still hear Doc"s words whistling through his teeth and feel the coldness of the stethoscope on his chest.
Suddenly, he sat upright in bed in the darkness.
Stethoscope!
They had tapped and inspected and listened to Alice that day, and all the other examination days.
If Doc Collins had been unable to find a heartbeat in her he"d have fainted--and spread the news all over town!
Mel got up and stood at the window, his heart pounding. Old Doc Collins was gone, but the medical records of those school examinations might still be around somewhere. He didn"t know what he expected to prove, but surely those records would not tell the same story Dr. Winters had told.
It took him nearly all the next day. The grade school princ.i.p.al agreed to help him check through the dusty attic of the school, where ancient records and papers were tumbled about and burst from their cardboard boxes.
Then Paul Ames, the school board secretary, took Mel down to the District Office and offered to help look for the records. The old building was stifling hot and dusty with summer disuse. But down in the cool, cobwebbed bas.e.m.e.nt they found it.... Alice"s records from the third grade on up through the ninth. On every one: heart, o.k.; lungs, normal. Pulse and blood pressure readings were on each chart.
"I"d like to take these," said Mel. "Her doctor in town--he wants to write some kind of paper on her case and would like all the past medical history he can get."
Paul Ames frowned thoughtfully. "I"m not allowed to give District property away. But they should have been thrown out a long time ago--take "em and don"t tell anybody I let you have "em."
"Thanks. Thanks a lot," Mel said.
And when she was fourteen or fifteen her appendix had been removed. A Dr. Brown had performed the operation, Mel remembered. He had taken over from Collins.
"Sure, he"s still here," Paul Ames said. "Same office old Doc Collins used. You"ll probably find him there right now."
Dr. Brown remembered. He didn"t remember the details of the appendectomy, but he still had records that showed a completely normal operation.
"I wonder if I could get a copy of that record and have you sign it," Mel said. He explained about the interest of Dr. Winters in her case without revealing the actual circ.u.mstances.
"Glad to," said Dr. Brown. "I just wish things hadn"t turned out the way they have. One of the loveliest girls that ever grew up here, Alice."
The special memorial service was held in the old community church on Sunday afternoon. It was like the drawing of a curtain across a portion of Mel"s life, and he knew that curtain would never open again.
He took a bus leaving town soon after the service.
There was one final bit of evidence, and he wondered all the way back to town why he had not thought of it first. Alice"s pregnancy had ended in miscarriage, and there had never been another.
But X-rays had been taken to try to find the cause of Alice"s difficulty. If they showed that Alice was normal within the past two years-- * * * * *
Dr. Winters was mildly surprised to see Mel again. He invited the reporter in to his office and offered him a chair. "I suppose you have come to inquire about our findings regarding your wife."
"Yes--if you"ve found anything," said Mel. "I"ve got a couple of things to show you."
"We"ve found little more than we knew the night of her death. We have completed the dissection of the body. A minute a.n.a.lysis of each organ is now under way, and chemical tests of the body"s substances are being made. We found that differences in the skeletal structure were almost as great as those in the fleshy tissues. We find no relationship between these structures and those of any other species--human or animal--that we have ever found."
"And yet Alice was not always like that," said Mel.
Dr. Winters looked at him sharply. "How do you know that?"
Mel extended the medical records he had obtained in Central Valley. Dr. Winters picked them up and examined them for a long time while Mel watched silently.
Finally, Dr. Winters put the records down with a sigh. "This seems to make the problem even more complex than it was."
"There are X-rays, too," said Mel. "Alice had pelvic X-rays only a little over two years ago. I tried to get them, but the doctor said you"d have to request them. They should be absolute proof that Alice was different then."
"Tell me who has them and I"ll send for them at once."
An hour later Dr. Winters shook his head in disbelief as he turned off the light box and removed the X-ray photograph. "It"s impossible to believe that these were taken of your wife, but they corroborate the evidence of the other medical records. They show a perfectly normal structure."
The two men remained silent across the desk, each reluctant to express his confused thoughts. Dr. Winters finally broke the silence. "It must be, Mr. Hastings," he said, "--it must be that this woman--this utterly alien person--is simply not your wife, Alice. Somehow, somewhere, there must be a mistake in ident.i.ty, a subst.i.tution of similar individuals."
"She was not out of my sight," said Mel. "Everything was completely normal when I came home that night. Nothing was out of place. We went out to a show. Then, on the way home, the accident occurred. There could have been no subst.i.tution--except right here in the hospital. But I know it was Alice I saw. That"s why I made you let me see her again--to make sure."
"But the evidence you have brought me proves otherwise. These medical records, these X-rays prove that the girl, Alice, whom you married, was quite normal. It is utterly impossible that she could have metamorphosed into the person on whom we operated."
Mel stared at the reflection of the sky in the polished desk top. "I don"t know the answer," he said. "It must not be Alice. But if that"s the case, where is Alice?"
"That might even be a matter for the police," said Dr. Winters. "There are many things yet to be learned about this mystery."
"There"s one thing more," said Mel. "Fingerprints. When we first came here Alice got a job where she had to have her fingerprints taken."
"Excellent!" Dr. Winters exclaimed. "That should give us our final proof!"
It took the rest of the afternoon to get the fingerprint record and make a comparison. Dr. Winters called Mel at home to give him the report. There was no question. The fingerprints were identical. The corpse was that of Alice Hastings.
The nightmare came again that night. Worse than Mel could ever remember it. As always, it was a dream of s.p.a.ce, black empty s.p.a.ce, and he was floating alone in the immense depths of it. There was no direction. He was caught in a whirlpool of vertigo from which he reached out with agonized yearning for some solidarity to cling to.
There was only s.p.a.ce.
After a time he was no longer alone. He could not see them, but he knew they were out there. The searchers. He did not know why he had to flee or why they sought him, but he knew they must never overtake him, or all would be lost.
Somehow he found a way to propel himself through empty s.p.a.ce. The searchers were growing points of light in the far distance. They gave him a sense of direction. His being, his existence, his universe of meaning and understanding depended on the success of his flight from the searchers. Faster, through the wild black depths of s.p.a.ce-- He never knew whether he escaped or not. Always he awoke in a tangle of bedclothes, bathed in sweat, whimpering in fear. For a long time Alice had been there to touch his hand when he awoke. But Alice was gone now and he was so weary of the night pursuit. Sometimes he wished it would end with the searchers--whoever they were--catching up with him and doing what they intended to do. Then maybe there would be no more nightmare. Maybe there would be no more Mel Hastings, he thought. And that wouldn"t be so bad, either.
He tossed sleeplessly the rest of the night and got up at dawn feeling as if he had not been to bed at all. He would take one day more, and then get back to the News Bureau. He"d take this day to do what couldn"t be put off any longer--the collecting and disposition of Alice"s personal belongings.