The great, fresh wound extended diagonally across the abdomen and
branched up beneath the heart. The Doctor grasped a pair of small
scissors and swiftly clipped the temporary sutures. With forceps and
retractors he spread open the massive incision.
Mel closed his eyes against the sickness that seized him.
"Gangrene!" he said. "She's full of gangrene!"
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 homogeneous mass of greenish,
gelatinous material. Other organs, hardly differentiated from this mass,
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 space."
"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 passed the high school where Mel and Alice had attended classes
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 association 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 assured 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 principal 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 basement 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 circumstances.
"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 analysis 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.