This story deals with science-fiction's oldest subject--space-travel.
Yet the author's treatment of the subject is so completely different
that it makes "SCANNERS" one of the most outstanding stories to appear
in any magazine!
****
Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger.
He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the
table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci's face
that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if
his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan
himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included
his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back
with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He
talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its
blare and preferred to have him write.
"I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It's my worry, isn't
it?"
When Luci answered, he saw only a part of her words as he read her
lips: "Darling ... you're my husband ... right to love you ...
dangerous ... do it ... dangerous ... wait ...."
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her
again: "I tell you, I'm going to cranch."
Catching her expression, he became rueful and a little tender: "Can't
you understand what it means to me? To get out of this horrible prison
in my own head? To be _feel_ again--to feel my feet on the ground, to
feel the air a man again--hearing your voice, smelling smoke? To move
against my face? Don't you know what it means?"
Her wide-eyed worrisome concern thrust him back into pure annoyance.
He read only a few words as her lips moved: "... love you ... your own
good ... don't you think I want you to be human? ... your own good ...
too much ... he said ... they said ...."
When he roared at her, he realized that his voice must be particularly
bad. He knew that the sound hurt her no less than did the words: "Do
you think I wanted you to marry a Scanner? Didn't I tell you we're
almost as low as the habermans? We're dead, I tell you. We've got to
be dead to do our work. How can anybody go to the Up-and-Out? Can you
dream what raw Space is? I warned you. But you married me. All
right, you married a man. Please, darling, let me be a man. Let me
hear your voice, let me feel the warmth of being alive, of being human.
Let me!"
He saw by her look of stricken assent that he had won the argument. He
did not use his voice again. Instead, he pulled his tablet up from
where it hung against his chest. He wrote on it, using the pointed
fingernail of his right forefinger--the Talking Nail of a Scanner--in
quick cleancut script: "Pls, drlng, whrs Crnching Wire?"
She pulled the long gold-sheathed wire out of the pocket of her apron.
She let its field sphere fall to the carpeted floor. Swiftly,
dutifully, with the deft obedience of a Scanner's wife, she wound the
Cranching Wire around his head, spirally around his neck and chest.
She avoided the instruments set in his chest. She even avoided the
radiating scars around the instruments, the stigmata of men who had
gone Up and into the Out. Mechanically he lifted a foot as she slipped
the wire between his feet. She drew the wire taut. She snapped the
small plug into the High Burden Control next to his Heart Reader. She
helped him to sit down, arranging his hands for him, pushing his head
back into the cup at the top of the chair. She turned then, full-face
toward him, so that he could read her lips easily. Her expression was
composed.
She knelt, scooped up the sphere at the other end of the wire, stood
erect calmly, her back to him. He scanned her, and saw nothing in her
posture but grief which would have escaped the eye of anyone but a
Scanner. She spoke: he could see her chest-muscles moving. She
realized that she was not facing him, and turned so that he could see
her lips.
"Ready at last?"
He smiled a _yes_.
She turned her back to him again. (Luci could never bear to watch him
Under-the-wire.) She tossed the wiresphere into the air. It caught in
the force-field, and hung there. Suddenly it glowed. That was all.
All--except for the sudden red stinking roar of coming back to his
senses. Coming back, across the wild threshold of pain.
I
When he awakened under the wire, he did not feel as though he had just
cranched. Even though it was the second cranching within the week, he
felt fit. He lay in the chair. His ears drank in the sound of air
touching things in the room. He heard Luci breathing in the next room,
where she was hanging up the wire to cool. He smelt the
thousand-and-one smells that are in anybody's room: the crisp freshness
of the germ-burner, the sour-sweet tang of the humidifier, the odor of
the dinner they had just eaten, the smells of clothes, furniture, of
people themselves. All these were pure delight. He sang a phrase or
two of his favorite song:
"Here's to the haberman, Up and Out!
"Up--oh!--and Out--oh!--Up and Out!..."
He heard Luci chuckle in the next room. He gloated over the sounds of
her dress as she swished to the doorway.
She gave him her crooked little smile. "You sound all right. Are you
all right, really?"
Even with this luxury of senses, he scanned. He took the flash-quick
inventory which constituted his professional skill. His eyes swept in
the news of the instruments. Nothing showed off scale, beyond the
Nerve Compression hanging in the edge of "Danger." But he could not
worry about the Nerve box. That always came through Cranching. You
couldn't get under the wire without having it show on the Nerve box.
Some day the box would go to _Overload_ and drop back down to _Dead_.
That was the way a haberman ended. But you couldn't have everything.
People who went to the Up-and-Out had to pay the price for Space.
Anyhow, he should worry! He was a Scanner. A good one, and he knew
it. If he couldn't scan himself, who could? This cranching wasn't too
dangerous. Dangerous, but not too dangerous.
Luci put out her hand and ruffled his hair as if she had been reading
his thoughts, instead of just following them: "But you know you
shouldn't have! You shouldn't!"
"But I did!" He grinned at her.
Her gaiety still forced, she said: "Come on, darling, let's have a good
time. I have almost everything there is in the icebox--all your
favorite tastes. And I have two new records just full of smells. I
tried them out myself, and even I liked them. And you know me--"
"Which?"
"Which what, you old darling?"
He slipped his hand over her shoulders as he limped out of the room.
(He could never go back to feeling the floor beneath his feet, feeling
the air against his face, without being bewildered and clumsy. As if
cranching was real, and being a haberman was a bad dream. But he was a
haberman, and a Scanner.) "You know what I meant, Luci.... the
smells, which you have. Which one did you like, on the record?"
"Well-l-l," said she, judiciously, "there were some lamb chops that
were the strangest things--"