It would please me no end to report here that the gang at the Medical
Center were crude, rough, vicious, and that they didn't give a damn
about human suffering. Unfortunately for my sense of moral balance, I
can't. They didn't cut huge slices out of my hide without benefit of
anaesthesia. They didn't shove pipe-sized needles into me, or strap me
on a board and open me up with dull knives. Instead, they treated me as
if I'd been going to pay for my treatment and ultimately emerge from the
Center to go forth and extol its virtues. I ate good food, slept in a
clean and comfortable bed, smoked free cigarettes, read the best
magazines--and also some of the worst, if I must report the whole
truth--and was permitted to mingle with the rest of the patients,
guests, victims, personnel, and so forth that were attached to my ward.
I was not at any time treated as though I were anything but a willing
and happy member of their team. It was known that I was not, but if any
emotion was shown, it was sympathy at my plight in not being one of
them. This was viewed in the same way as any other accident of birth or
upbringing.
In my room was another man about my age. He'd arrived a day before me,
with an early infection at the tip of his middle toe. He was, if I've
got to produce a time-table, about three-eights of an inch ahead of me.
He had no worries. He was one of their kind of thinkers.
"How'd you connect?" I asked him.
"I didn't," he said, scratching his infected toe vigorously. "They
connected with me."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I was sleeping tight and not even dreaming. Someone rapped on my
apartment door and I growled myself out of bed and sort of felt my way.
It was three in the morning. Guy stood there looking apologetic. 'Got a
message for you,' he tells me. 'Can't it wait until morning?' I snarl
back. 'No,' he says. 'It's important!' So I invite him in. He doesn't
waste any time at all; his first act is to point at an iron floor lamp
in the corner and ask me how much I'd paid for it. I tell him. Then this
bird drops twice the amount on the coffee table, strides over to the
corner, picks up the lamp, and ties the iron pipe into a fancy-looking
bowknot. He didn't even grunt. 'Mr. Mullaney,' he asks me, 'How would
you like to be that strong?' I didn't have to think it over. I told him
right then and there. Then we spent from three ayem to five thirty going
through a fast question and answer routine, sort of like a complicated
word-association test. At six o'clock I've packed and I'm on my way here
with my case of Mekstrom's Disease."
"Just like that?" I asked Mr. Mullaney.
"Just like that," he repeated.
"So now what happens?"
"Oh, about tomorrow I'll go in for treatment," he said. "Seems as how
they've got to start treatment before the infection creeps to the first
joint or I'll lose the joint." He contemplated me a bit; he was a
perceptive and I knew it. "You've got another day or more. That's
because your ring finger is longer than my toe."
"What's the treatment like?" I asked him.
"That I don't know. I've tried to dig the treatment, but it's too far
away from here. This is just a sort of preliminary ward; I gather that
they know when to start and so on." He veiled his eyes for a moment. He
was undoubtedly thinking of my fate. "Chess?" he asked, changing the
subject abruptly.
"Why not?" I grinned.
My mind wasn't in it. He beat me three out of four. I bedded down about
eleven, and to my surprise I slept well. They must have been shoving
something into me to make me sleep; I know me very well and I'm sure
that I couldn't have closed an eye if they hadn't been slipping me the
old closeout powder. For three nights, now, I'd corked off solid until
seven ack emma and I'd come alive in the morning fine, fit, and fresh.
But on the following morning, Mr. Mullaney was missing. I never saw him
again.
At noon, or thereabouts, the end of the ring finger on my left hand was
as solid as a rock. I could squeeze it in a door or burn it with a
cigarette; I got into a little habit of scratching kitchen matches on it
as I tried to dig into the solid flesh with my perception. I growled a
bit at my fate, but not much.
It was about this time, too, that the slight itch began to change. You
know how a deep-felt itch is. It can sometimes be pleasant. Like the
itch that comes after a fast swim in the salty sea and a dry-out in the
bright sun, when the drying salt water makes your skin itch with the
vibrant pleasure of just being alive. This is not like the bite of any
bug, but the kind that makes you want to take another dive into the
ocean instead of trying to scratch it with your claws. Well, the itch in
my finger had been one of the pleasant kinds. I could sort of scratch it
away by taking the steel-hard part of my finger in my other hand and
wiggle, briskly. But now the itch turned into a deep burning pain.
My perception, never good enough to dig the finer structure clearly, was
good enough to tell me that my crawling horror had come to the boundary
line of the first joint.
It was this pause that was causing the burning pain.
According to what I'd been told, if someone didn't do something about me
right now, I'd lose the end joint of my finger.
Nobody came to ease my pain, nor to ease my mind. They left me strictly
alone. I spent the time from noon until three o'clock examining my
fingertip as I'd not examined it before. It was rock hard, but strangely
flexible if I could exert enough pressure on the flesh. It still moved
with the flexing of my hands. The fingernail itself was like a chip of
chilled steel. I could flex the nail neither with my other hand nor by
biting it; between my teeth it had the uncomfortable solidity of a sheet
of metal that conveyed to my brain that the old teeth should not try to
bite too hard. I tried prying on a bit of metal with the fingernail;
inserting the nail in the crack where a metal cylinder had been formed
to make a table leg. I might have been able to pry the crack wider, but
the rest of my body did not have the power nor the rigidity necessary to
drive the tiny lever that was my fingertip.