In Deep (6 page)

“He can pull them back in any time?” Kelly asked, rubbing his chin.

“Yes. Show him, George.”

“All right.” The feather stalks became blank-tipped, then rapidly shrank, segment by segment. In less than two seconds, George was a smooth sphere again.

“Well, that makes for a little problem here,” said Kelly. “You see what I mean? If you can’t get a grip on him, how are you going to
punish
him like you say?”

“We’ve tried everything we could think of,” said Dominick. “We locked him up, kept him on short rations, didn’t talk to him… He doesn’t draw any pay, you know, so you can’t fine him.”

“Or downgrade him on the promotion lists, either,” said Womrath gloomily.

“No. And it’s a little late to use the Pavlov-Morganstern treatments we all had when we were children. We can’t prevent a crime he’s already committed. So our thought was, since you’re the games instructor—”

“We thought,” Womrath said diplomatically, “you might have noticed something that might be useful. You know, rough-housing and so on.”

Kelly thought this over. “Well, there’s low blows,” he said, “but I mean, hell—” He gestured futilely at George, who had just decided to put his auricles out again. “What would you—”

“No, that’s out of the question,” Dominick said heavily. “Well, I’m sorry, Kelly. It was nice of you to help out.”

“No, now, wait a minute,” said Kelly. “I got something coming to me, maybe.” He nibbled a thumbnail, staring down at the gorgon. “How would this be. I was thinking—sometimes the boys in the pool, they get kind of frisky, they take to ducking each other. Under the water. Now what I was thinking, he breathes air, doesn’t he? You know what I mean?”

Dominick and Womrath looked at each other. “It sounds possible,” said Dominick.

, “Out of the question. We don’t know what his tolerance is. Suppose Kelly should damage him severely, or even—”

.. “Oh,” said Dominick. “No, you’re right, we couldn’t take a chance.”

“I’ve been a games instructor for seventy-three years—two rejuvenations—” Kelly began, bristling.

“No, it isn’t that, Kelly,” said Womrath hastily. “We’re just thinking, George isn’t human. So how do we know how he’d react to a ducking?”

“On the other hand,” Dominick said, “gorgons
do
turn blue when they’re not happy—we have Rubinson’s assurance for that. It seems to me George wouldn’t be happy when smothering; that would be the whole point, wouldn’t it? Dr. Alvarez would supervise closely, of course. Really, Alvarez, I don’t see why not. Kelly, if you’ll tell what time would be most convenient for you—”

“Well,” said Kelly, looking at his thumbwatch, “hell, the pool is empty now—it’s ladies’ day, but all the girls are down in Section Seven, hanging around Mrs. Carver. I hear she’s still . hysterical.”

Struck by a thought, Alvarez was bending over to speak to the gorgon. “George, you breathe by spiracles, is that correct? Those little tubes all over your skin?”

“Yes,” said George.

“Well, do they work under water?”

“No.”

Dominick and Kelly were listening with interest.

“If we held you under water, would it hurt you?”

George flickered uncertainly, from rose to pale magenta. “Don’t know. Little bit.”

The three men leaned closer. “Well, George,” said Dominick tensely, “would that be a
punishment?
”

George flickered again, violently. “Yes. No. Maybe. Don’t know.”

They straightened again, disappointed; Dominick sighed gustily. “He always gives us those mixed-up answers.
I
don’t know. Let’s try it—what else can we do?”

Kelly found himself paired off with George,following Dominick and Dr. Alvarez, and preceding Womrath and an orderly named Josling who was wheeling one of the dispensary pul-motors. The up-curving corridors were deserted. Kelly lagged a little, adjusting his pace to George’s waddling steps. After a moment, he was surprised to feel something small and soft grip his fingers. He looked down; George the gorgon had put one seven-fingered “hand” into his. The gorgon’s flowerlike photoceptors were turned trustfully upward.

Kelly was taken by surprise. No children were allowed on the Satellite, but Kelly had been the father of eight in a previous rejuvenation. The confiding touch stirred old memories. “That’ll be all right,” said Kelly gruffly. “You just come along with me.”

The pool, as he had predicted, was empty. Ripples reflected faint threads of light up the walls. “The shallow end would be better,” said Kelly. His voice was hollow, and echoed back flatly. Pausing to peel off his coverall, he led George carefully down the steps into the pool. Half submerged, George floated. Kelly drew him gently out into deeper water.

Dominick and the others arranged themselves along the brink in interested attitudes. Kelly cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “the way it generally happens, one of the boys will grab ahold of another one, like this—” He put his hands on the smooth floating globe, and hesitated.

“Go ahead now, Kelly,” called Dominick. “Remember, you have a direct order to do this.”

“Sure,” said Kelly. “Well—” he turned to the gorgon. “Hold your breath now!” He pressed downward. The gorgon seemed lighter than he had expected, like an inflated ball; it was hard to force it under.

Kelly pushed harder. George went under briefly and slipped out of Kelly’s hands, bobbing to the surface. The gorgon’s speaking trumpet cleared itself of water with a
phonk
and said, “Nice. Do again, Kelly.”

Kelly glanced over at Dominick, who said, “Yes. Again.” Dr. Alvarez stroked his thin beard and said nothing.

Kelly took a deep sympathetic breath, and shoved the gorgon under. A few bubbles came to the surface; George’s speaking trumpet broke water, but made no sound. Down below, Kelly could see his own pale hands gripping the gorgon’s body; the water made them look bloodless; but not George; he was a clear, unblemished pink.

There was a discouraged silence when Kelly brought him back up.

“Listen,” said Dominick, “I’ve got another idea. George, can you breathe through that speaking trumpet, too?”

“Yes,” said George cheerfully.

There was a chorus of disgusted “Oh, wells.” Everybody brightened perceptibly. Josling polished his pul-motor with a rag. “Go ahead, Kelly,” said Dominick. “And this time, you hold him under.”

George went down for the third time. The bubbles swirled upward. The gorgon’s speaking trumpet swayed toward the surface, but Kelly leaned farther over, blocking it with his forearm. After a moment, all of George’s appendages began to “contract. Kelly craned his neck downward anxiously. Was a hint of blue beginning to show?

“Keep him down,” said Alvarez sharply.

George was a blank sphere again. Then one or two of the limbs began to reappear; but they looked different somehow.

“Now?” said Kelly.

“Give him a second more,” said Dominick, leaning over precariously. “It seems to me—”

Kelly’s back muscles were knotted with tension. He did not like the way George’s new limbs seemed to be flattening out, trailing limply—it was as if something had gone wrong in the works.

“I’m bringing him up,” he said hoarsely.

To Kelly’s horror, when he lifted his hands. George stayed where he was. Kelly made a grab for him, but the gorgon slipped out from under his fingers. The new limbs stiffened and sculled vigorously; George darted away, deep under the water.

Leaning, open-mouthed, Dominick slipped and went into the pool with a majestic splash. He floundered and rose up, a moment later, streaming with water like a sea lion. Kelly, wading anxiously toward him, stopped when he saw that Dominick was safe. Both men looked down. Between them and around them swam George, darting and drifting by turns, as much at home in the pool as a speckled trout.

“Fins!” said Dominick, stack-jawed. “And
gills!
”

It may as well be said that Dr. Walter Alvarez was a misanthrope. He did not like people; he liked diseases. Down there on Planet Seven, once the trade mission was established, he could confidently expect enough new and startling ailments to keep him happy as a lark for years. Up here, all he got was sprained ankles, psychosomatic colds, hives and indigestion. There was one cook’s helper named Samuels who kept coming back every Wednesday with the same boil on the back of his neck. It got so that in spite of himself, Alvarez spent the whole week dreading Wednesday. When he saw Samuels’s earnest face coming through the door, something seemed to wind itself a little tighter inside him.

Some day, when Samuels opened his mouth to say. “Hey, Doc—” Samuels always called him “Doc”—the something inside him was going to break with a sound like a banjo string. What would happen then, Dr. Alvarez was unable to imagine.

When the gorgon had first been brought up to the Satellite, there had been two or three delightful little fungus infections, then nothing. A great disappointment. Alvarez had isolated and cultured almost a hundred microorganisms found in smears he had taken from George, but they were all nonviable in human tissue. The viable bacteria, viruses, parasites that always turned up on a life-infested planet, were evidently lurking in some organism other than the gorgons. They swam, at night, across the optical field of Dr. Alvarez’s dreaming mind—rod-shaped ones, lens-shaped ones, wriggly ones, leggy ones and ones with teeth.

One morning Dr. Alvarez awoke with a desperate resolve. It was a Tuesday. Alvarez went directly to the infirmary, relieved Nurse Trumble, who was on duty, and, opening a locked cabinet, filled a hypodermic from an ampule of clear straw-colored fluid. The trade name of this substance was Betsoff; it was a counter-inhibitant which stunned the censor areas of the forebrain chiefly affected by the Pavlov-Morganstern treatments. (By an odd coincidence, the patentee was a Dr. Jekyll) Alvarez injected two c.c.’s of it directly Into the median basilic vein and sat down to wait.

After a few minutes his perpetual bad humor began to lift. He felt a pleasant ebullience; the colors of things around him seemed brighter and clearer. “Ha!” said Alvarez. He got up and went to his little refrigerator, where, after some search, he found half a dozen of the cultures he had made of microorganisms taken from gorgon smears. They were quiescent, of course—deep-frozen. Alvarez warmed them cautiously and added nutrients. All morning, while the usual succession of minor complaints paraded through the infirmary, the cultures grew and multiplied. Alvarez was jovial with his patients; he cracked a joke or two, and handed out harmless pills all around.

By noon, four of the cultures were flourishing. Alvarez carefully concentrated them into one, and loaded another hypodermic with the resulting brew. To his liverated intelligence, the matter was clear: No organism, man or pig or gorgon, was altogether immune to the microbes it normally carried in its body. Upset the balance by injecting massive colonies of any one of them, and you were going to have a sick gorgon—i.e. Alvarez thought, a punished gorgon.

The treatment might also kill the patient, but Alvarez lightheartedly dismissed this argument as a quibble. (Or quabble?) Armed with his hypo, he went forth looking for George.

He found him in the small assembly room, together with Dominick, Womrath, and a mechanic named Bob Ritner.

They were all standing around a curious instrument, or object of art, built out of bar aluminum. “It’s a rack,” Ritner explained proudly. “I saw a picture of it once in a kid’s book.”

The chief feature of the “rack” was along, narrow table, with a windlass at one end. It looked like a crude device for stretching something.

“We thought the time had come for stern measures,” Dominick said, mopping his head.

“In the olden days,” Ritner put in, “they used these on the prisoners when they wouldn’t talk.”

“I talk,” said George unexpectedly.

“It’s another punishment, George,” Dominick explained kindly. “Well, Alvarez, before we go ahead, I suppose you want to examine your patient.”

“Yes, just so, ha ha!” said Alvarez. He knelt down and peered keenly at George, who swiveled his photoceptors interestedly around to stare back. The doctor prodded George’s hide; it was firm and resilient. The gorgon’s color was a clear pink; the intricate folds of his auricles seemed crisp and alert.

Alvarez took a hand scale from his kit; it was preset for A-level gravity. “Climb up here, George.” Obediently, the gorgon settled himself on the pan of the scale while Alvarez held it up. “Hm,” said Alvarez. “He’s lost a good deal of weight.”

“He has?” asked Dominick hopefully.

“But he seems to be in unusually good condition—better than a week ago, I would say. Perhaps just a little sugar solution to pep him up—” Alvarez withdrew the hypo from his kit, aimed it at George’s smooth skin and pressed the trigger.

Dominick sighed. “Well, I suppose we might as well go ahead. George, just hop up there and let Ritner tie those straps onto you.”

George obediently climbed onto the table. Ritner buckled straps around four of his limbs and then began to tighten the cylinder. “Not too much,” said George anxiously.

“I’ll be careful,” Ritner assured him. He kept on winding the cylinder up. “How does that feel?” George’s “arms” and “legs” were half again their usual length, and still stretching.

“Tickles,” said George.

Ritner went on turning the handle. Womrath coughed nervously and was shushed. George’s limbs kept on getting longer; then his body started to lengthen visibly.

“Are you all right, George?” Dominick asked.

“All right.”

Ritner gave the handle a last despairing twist. George’s elongated body stretched all the way in comfort from one end of the rack to the other: there was no place else for him to go.

“Nice,” said George. “Do again.” He was glowing a happy pink.

Ritner, who seemed about to cry, petulantly kicked his machine. Alvarez snorted and went away. In the corridor, unseen, he jumped up and clicked his heels together. He was having a wonderful time; his only regret was that it was not tomorrow. Come to think of it, why wait till Wednesday?

Commandant Charles Watson Carver, S.S., had been trained to make quick and courageous decisions. Once you began to entertain a doubt of your own rightness, you would hesitate too much, begin to second-guess yourself, fall prey to superstition and anxiety, and end up without any power of decision at all.