"I'll honor your prescription, Doctor," the Chief said. "The

Star-crossed? Worse than that! Even Earth

itself was hopelessly out of reach for these

landlocked space-travelers who lived in a--

World in a Bottle

By ALLEN KIM LANG

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Galaxy Magazine October 1960.

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Pouring sweat and breathing shallow, I burned east on U.S. Twenty at

ninety miles an hour, wishing I could suck into my lungs some of the

wind that howled across the windshield.

I heard the siren in my phones. I glanced out the left side of my

helmet to find a blue-clad figure on a motorcycle looming up beside

me, waving me toward the shoulder. A law-abider to the last gasp of

asphyxia, I braked my little green beast over to the berm. The state

cop angled his bike across my left headlamp and stalked back to where I

sat, tugging a fat book of traffic-tickets out of his hip pocket.

"Unscrew that space-helmet, Sonny," he said. "You've just been

grounded."

"Grounded, I'll grant," I said, my voice wheezing from the speaker on

the chest of my suit; "but I can't take off the fishbowl, officer."

"Then maybe you'd better climb out of your flying saucer," the

policeman suggested. "And if you're toting pearl-handled ray-guns, just

leave 'em hang."

I got out of the car, keeping my hands in view, feeling like the

fugitive from a space-opera this cop evidently took me for. He examined

me the way a zoologist might examine the first live specimen of a new

species of carnivore; very interested, very cautious. After observing

the cut of my wash-and-wear plastic sterility-suit--known to us who

wear them as a chastity-suit--the policeman walked around me to examine

my reserve-air tank, which is cunningly curved and cushioned against my

spine so that I can lean back without courting lordosis. He inspected

the bubble of plastic that fit over my head like the belljar over a

museum specimen, and stared at the little valve on the left shoulder

of my suit, where used air was wheezing out asthmatically. "I guess

fallout has got you bugged," he said.

"Not fallout, bacteria," I explained. "I'm one of the Lapins from

Central University."

"That's nice," the policeman said. "And I'm one of the Bjornsons,

from Indiana State Police Post 1-A. What were you trying to do just

now, break Mach One on wheels? Or do you maybe come from one of these

foreign planets that don't know the American rules of the road?"

I breathed deep, trying to find myself some oxygen. "I was born right

here in Indiana," I said. "The reason I'm wearing this suit and helmet

is that I'm bacteriologically sterile."

"So maybe you could adopt a kid," Officer Bjornson suggested.

"Sterile like germ-free," I said. "Gnotobiotic. I grew up in the Big

Tank at Central University."

* * * * *

"You'll spend the night in the big tank at South Bend if you're snowing

me, Sonny," he said. "Let's see your driver's license." I got my

billfold out of the glove-compartment--a chastity-suit doesn't have

any pockets--and handed my license to Bjornson. "John Bogardus, M.D.,"

he read. "You're a doctor, eh? This says you live at BICUSPID, Central

University, South Bend. What's that BICUSPID, Doc? Means your practice

is limited to certain teeth?"

"I'm a resident in pathology, and I'm damned near out of air," I said,

annoyed at the prospect of suffocating while acting straight-man to

a state cop. "BICUSPID is the acronym for Bacteriological Institute,

Central University Special Projects in Infectious Disease. I'm a Lapin,

which is a human guinea-pig. I'm sorry, officer, that I broke the

Indiana speed-limit but my air-filter is clogged with condensation. If

I don't get back to the Big Tank at the University within the next few

minutes, I'll run out of air. And you'll have to spend the rest of the

evening testifying before St. Joseph's County Coroner."

"So what happens if you crack open your space-helmet and breathe the

air us peons use?" he asked.

"Pretty quick, I'd die," I said. "I've got no antibodies, no

physiological mechanism to combat inspired or ingested bacteria."

"That's the sort of answer that makes my job the joy it is," Bjornson

said. "Next thing you know, I'll be chasing drunken drivers from Mars."

"There's no intelligent native life on Mars," I said.

"You think maybe there are intelligent natives on U.S. Twenty?" he

asked, returning my license. "Okay, Doctor Bogardus, I've bought your

story. You leadfoot your bomb along after me, and we'll hit the Central

campus like we're crossing the payoff line at the Mille Miglia."

Bjornson cowboyed into the saddle of his bike, spurred it off and cut

siren-screaming down the concrete toward South Bend and Central U. I

jumped back into my sports-car and tailed him, the wind soaring past my

'phones like rocket exhaust. We cut through the field of Sunday drivers

in a horizontal power-dive. I was half-blinded by the sweat condensed

on my air-cooled face-plate. Formaldehyde bath or no, I'd have to cut

in my reserve-air pretty soon.

* * * * *

We made it while I was still breathing. I braked in front of the

BICUSPID entrance and walked as fast as I dared, dizzy and panting with

the concentration of CO_{2} bottled up with me in my chastity-suit.

Outside the door to the contaminated labs, I shook Bjornson's hand and

told him that I considered the expense of my Gross Income Tax justified

by his employment. I went inside then, climbed the steel steps to the

glass-walled shower. I cut in my suit-radio and announced my arrival.

"Bogardus here. I'm nearly out of wind; my filter's soaked. I'm cutting

in reserve-air. Anybody around to see that I scrub behind my ears?"

Dr. Roy McQueen, Director of BICUSPID, came out of his office, where

he'd monitored my announcement from the loudspeaker set above his desk,

and faced the glass door of the shower room. He waved to me and cut on

his microphone. "Okay, Johnny," he said.

I sealed off my air-filter and cut in the reserve-air. That canned wind

felt to my lungs like cold beer to the throat on a July day. I felt the

oxygen percolating through me to my toes and finger-tips, tingling them

back to life. Turning on the detergent shower, I sloshed around beneath

it, washing the outside dust off my chastity-suit.

"You're dry by the tank," Dr. McQueen said into his hand microphone.

I picked up the long-handled shower brush and scrubbed back there. I

showered the suit's armpits, the folds behind the knees, the soles

of the suit's boots, scrubbing hard with the brush. "You're all wet,

Johnny," the Chief said. "Got enough air for half an hour in the

bathtub?"

"Yes, sir," I said, checking the gage of my reserve-air tank. Having

scrubbed off most of the flora I'd picked up in the great wild world of

Indiana, I climbed down through the manhole into the bathtub, a sump

of formaldehyde solution eight feet deep. I sat on the iron bench at

the bottom to soak. "How about switching on some music, Chief? I didn't

think to bring anything waterproof to read."

"You'll hear music from me," Dr. McQueen said. "This is a big day for

BICUSPID, Johnny. It's the first time one of you kids ever came home

from a date with a police escort. What happened? Anne's old man decide

he didn't want a plastic-wrapped son-in-law? He call the law to throw

you off his front porch?"

"My air-filter got bolixed," I explained into the microphone, "so

I leaned on the gas pedal pretty heavy on the way home. A friendly

gendarme named Bjornson turned up."

"You should be more careful, Johnny. I'd hate to have to post you."

Like the rest of us, Dr. McQueen did post-mortems on the germ-free

animals who died of old age or stir-fever in the Big Tank, or had to be

sacrificed as routine sterility controls. Last winter, for the first

time, the Chief had had to autopsy one of us Lapins.

Poor Mike Bohrman had gone off his rocker and stripped off his

sterility-suit in the snow. All we wear underneath is a pair of shorts.

That's the way Mike had run around, almost naked in a northern Indiana

February. It was hours before he'd been missed.

He went to the hospital with severe frostbite, but he died two days

later of pneumonia complicated by streptococcal septicemia. "Stick

around down there, Johnny," the Chief said. "I'm coming down to join

you."

* * * * *

I heard him turning the monitor microphone over to one of the

technicians out in the contaminated labs. Oh hell, I thought. Here

comes a chewing-out that would leave me raw up to the duodenum.

The worst thing about being told off when you've done something dumb

is the futility of being told about it. Nobody knew better than I that

it was stupid to stay outside the Big Tank for eight solid hours.

Hydraulic pressure aside, a chastity-suit isn't designed to hold a man

more than about four.

It took Dr. McQueen a quarter hour to get suited up and scrubbed. Then

he came down the ladder to join me in the pale green soup, his air-hose

snaking along behind him like strayed umbilical cord. He sat on the

bench beside me. Before he cut in his suit radio, he leaned close

and touched his helmet to mine. "Damn it, Johnny! If you don't stop

chasing after that dame in Valpo, I'll toss mothballs in the gas-tank

of your silly little car." Then he toggled his radio. "Testing," he

said, for the benefit of the monitoring technician listening out in the

contaminated labs. "This is McQueen. Someone suited up?"

"Safety man is suited and scrubbing, Chief," the monitor said. "I read

you loud and clear. Now, let's hear from you, Brother Bogardus."

"This is John Bogardus, the Voice of Purity," I said, "broadcasting

from the bottom of Central University's lovely BICUSPID pool. You want

I should dedicate my next record to the gang at the brewery?"

"Happy to hear you testify, canned-goods," the technician said. "The

I.U. game is on the radio now. You want me to pipe it to the phones so

you can hear our team smear 'em?"

"I'll take your word for it that they'll do that," I said. "My sport

is balk-line billiards." Eighty years ago, Central University's gate

receipts from football had made possible the first BICUSPID program

in gnotobiotics, using mice and roaches and hamsters. Despite this

historical tie between me and football, I felt no special affinity for

the game.

"Trouble with you, canned-goods, is you've got no school spirit," the

monitor complained. "If you or the Chief feel your feet getting wet,

just whistle. I'll be here."

"Will do." For all the thousands of times I'd been through this

antiseptic drill, I was happy to know that a lifeguard was suited up

above our poisonous bathtub, ready to fish either of us out should our

suits spring a leak. If formaldehyde-methanol started seeping into my

chastity-suit, I knew I'd have an overwhelming desire to undress.

Dr. McQueen cleared his throat, a sound which broadcast very like a

growl. "Okay, Johnny. Let's have a synopsis of your Sunday outing."

* * * * *

"It's springtime, Chief," I said. "You know what the month of May does

to a young man's fancy, and reticuloendothelial system, and all."

"I wish you'd stop seeing her," the Chief said. "You've got fifteen of

the most nubile girls in the Midwest living in the Big Tank with you.

Sweet, intelligent--available. So why did you have to get the hots for

an outsider?"

"It's that ol' debbil incest-taboo, Chief," I said. "I've slept amongst

those fifteen canned peaches for the last twenty-three years. The

result is that my warmest feeling toward any of them is brotherly love.

Who itches to shack with a sibling?"

"Your only alternative seems to be a lifetime of cold showers," McQueen

said. "Speaking of canned peaches, have you seen Mary deWitte today?"

"No."

"Mary has extramural interests, too," he said. "Her intended is a

basketball player in pre-Law. A fellow roughly fifteen feet tall. Mary

has been gone all day. I presume that she's been visiting this legal

obelisk; and I'm beginning to feel the twinges of fatherly anxiety. But

tell me about Anne, Johnny."

"I met her at a concert last fall," I said, not giving a damn about

the safety man and the monitor kibitzing. "Anne didn't bug at my

chastity-suit the way most of the hens on campus do. This impressed

me. She liked the way I talked, even though she could hear my voice

only from the speaker on the chest of my suit. I liked fine the way she

listened. So we had a date. Lots of dates. Said goodnight by shaking

hands--Please Excuse My Glove.

"One evening we drove down to the beach at Hudson Lake. As we lay there

on the sand, I pointed out for Anne the red disk of Mars. I told her

about the men up there, at New Caanan and Bing City and Bitterwater,

working to uncover one world while they built a new one. I told her

about the mystery of the Immermann skull, and what it might mean. I

pointed to the stars and named them for her. All the time, Chief, I

knew that I could touch Betelgeuse or Phobos as easily as I could touch

Anne.

"Anyway, we went swimming together, just like we were in Technicolor

and Vista Vision. I screwed the cap on my air-filter and breathed from

the reserve tank. Anne wore a bikini. I might as well have been aboard

a midget submarine. After that evening, we decided not to go swimming

any more; and Anne started wearing strict and conservative clothes."

"What happened today, Johnny?" McQueen asked me.

"What could happen?" I demanded. "We broke up. She's contaminated,

poor girl. She's been aswarm with bacteria and yeasts and molds and

miscellaneous protista ever since the obstetrician slapped her on the

rump, while I'm Boy Galahad, fifty-six one-hundredths percent purer

than Ivory Soap. My strength is as the strength of ten, so I told Anne

at noon today that she'll have to find herself a new boy friend. She

needs a guy who can eat the other half of the pizza with her, someone

who can lend her his comb and breathe the air she breathes. It took me

weeks to steel my soul to the prospect of kissing Anne off--there's an

ironic metaphor for you, Chief--but I did it."

"I'm sorry, Johnny," McQueen said.

"I'm afraid I've diluted the antiseptic with my tears," I said. "Just

singing those old formaldehyde blues."

I'd soaked for the regulation half-hour now, and the gage of my reserve

tank was on red, so I got up to go. "I can see myself at ninety-five,"

I said. "I'll be patriarch of the Big Tank. The oldest male virgin on

campus. See you inside, Chief."

I climbed up the ladder through the second manhole over the

formaldehyde sump and stepped out into the sterile precincts of the Big

Tank. Home.

* * * * *

I stepped into a shower-booth, let the water blast the formaldehyde

off my chastity-suit, popped off my helmet and stripped. Air against

sweat-steamed skin felt good. I showered again, naked. I blotted

myself dry and dressed in fresh shorts, all the clothing a man needed

in the air-conditioned Elysium of the Big Tank. I carried my suit

into the locker room to refit it for my next trip outside. Snapping

its collar to the bushing of the compressed-air supply and turning

on the pressure, I inflated my suit so that it stood on its headless

shoulders, ready for inspection.

The wet air-filter that had almost asphyxiated me had been caused,

I discovered, by a break in the moisture-trap of the unit. Careful

checking assured me that the filter had failed-safe bacteriologically.

No outside bugs were in my suit. I might have suffocated, but my corpse

would have remained uncorrupted. Such a comfort.

I replaced the trap and filter with a fresh unit and fit a charged

bottle of air onto the back of the suit. Then I gave every inch of

my chastity-suit an inspection for worn spots, for bubbles forming

on its moist surface--an inspection as painstaking and as sure as a

window washer's check of his working harness, or an exhibition jumper's

folding of his parachute. Satisfied that the suit was all set for my

next adventure into the world of normal, septic human beings, I racked

it and the helmet in my locker and walked out into the garden.

There I stretched out on the grass under the ultra-violets, refreshing

my tan while I waited for Dr. McQueen to come up from the sump.

The garden was my favorite room in the Big Tank. It was in establishing

the garden that I'd discovered that my Machiavellian mind is

articulated to a pair of green thumbs. The crafty bit came over coffee

in the cafeteria. I, of course, just sat there to listen and talk; not

even C.U. Cafeteria coffee is aseptic enough for a Lapin to drink, even

if there were some way to get a cup of the stuff inside the helmet of a

sterility-suit. Anyway, I chided these two graduate students from the

botany department about the research possibilities they were missing

by not growing any gnotobiotic green stuff. I gave them the Boom-Food

pitch. Would cabbages, grown in an environment free of bacteria, grow

large as king farouks? I hit them with the Advance the Frontiers of the

Biological Science line: could soil-nitrates be utilized by legumes in

the absolute absence of _Nitrobacteriaceae_?

* * * * *

The two botanists leaped to my vegetable bait like a brace of starving

aphids. A couple days after I'd commenced my con, three tons of quartz

sand were shipped through the Big Tank's main autoclave. The lifeless

stuff was poured over a grill of perforated pipes. The pipes were

connected to a brew-tank of hydroponic juices, and the wet sand was

planted with germ-free seeds of grass, tomatoes, carrots, and other

useful herbs. We Lapins had a ball, planting the aseptic seeds in the

dirtless dirt eagerly as a band of ribbon-hungry 4-H'ers. What had been

our sun-room blossomed, after a decent period of germination, into our

lawn and garden.

For some reason, the garden of our Eden never got an apple-tree. But

we did have lettuce on our sterile sandwiches now, and fresh tomatoes,

infinitely superior in texture and taste to the "radared" fruit--almost

pureed by the high-energy beams that made it germ-free--that we'd grown

up on.

The lesser mammals with whom we twenty-nine Lapins shared the Big

Tank, the rabbits and guinea-pigs and hamsters and like small fowl,

didn't go much for fresh vegetables, having developed a palate for an

autoclaved diet. The monkeys, though, proved to be real competitors for

carrots and raw sweet corn. They had to be locked out of the garden,

rather as certain of their disobedient relatives had been.

I reached out from my supine, sun-drenched position to pull a turnip.

I shook off the moist sand and wiped the hydroponic wetness off my

shorts, to munch grittily while I waited for the Chief to join me.

As soon as he'd soaked in the formaldehyde mixture for half an hour,

Dr. McQueen came up through the manhole. Under the shower he squirted

the chemical B.O. off his modified sterility-unit, then came out into

the garden to join me, dragging his air-hose. We sat side by side on

the park bench I'd built beside the onion-patch. (I was fond of my

onions. They were the only living things in the Big Tank with the

honest stink of life to them). "Where did you plant the marijuana,

Johnny?" the Chief asked me. His voice was muffled by the wetness of

his suit-speaker.

"Now, there's a pregnant idea," I said. "We won't plant muggles, Chief.

We'll plant tobacco. All we Lapins need to keep us happy is a good

solid vice like smoking." I looked at the Chief. "Why'd you follow me

here, Dr. McQueen? I know I've been naughty."

"Self-pity doesn't become a man, Johnny," he said.

"And why the hell not?" I demanded, my blood-pressure ready to

challenge any manometer in sight. "If I can feel compassion for some

poor joker on TV, why can't I hurt a little for myself--for John

Bogardus, swaddled from his darling by a damned plastic diving-suit? I

was--I am--in love with Anne, Doctor."

"Your marriage-night would kill you, John," he said.

* * * * *

I jumped up with ready-made fists, then flopped down onto the grass,

laughing at the picture I saw. Battle of the Century. In this corner,

wearing helmet, chastity-suit, and thirty-five feet of air-hose

Roy McQueen, Ph. D. In the far corner, clad only in brown trunks

(grass-stained on the seat, folks), John Bogardus, M.D. "It makes a

grand old dirty joke, doesn't it?"

"It makes a painful reality," Dr. McQueen said. "I know how you must

lie awake nights, thinking about gradually acclimatizing yourself to

the contaminated world in which Anne lives. You know, though, that the

death-rate with the lower animals who've tried this acclimatization is

steep. Even the survivors don't survive very long, because of their low

gut-tone and their tardy antibody response. I suppose, though, that

the imminence of death is as helpless before love as the locksmith."

Dr. McQueen sighed. "If it's what you want, Johnny, I'll ignore

everything we both know about the probable consequences and help you

break out of here.... Think how embarrassed you'd feel, though, if you

died of a _B. subtilis_ septicemia or a fulminant chicken-pox the day

before the wedding."

"I could have married Anne, and made her either an unkissed bride or an

early widow," I said. "Neither of these alternatives struck me as an

attractive career for the woman I love, so I left her. It's so logical

it's practically simple arithmetic. Anne put up a fight to keep me,

Chief; it was most warming to my amour-propre. Women aren't logical

like us men of science. What a stinking situation!"

"It is," Dr. McQueen said. "But remember, John, lovers outside the Big

Tank often get just as star-crossed as you and Anne."

"And they have dental caries to contend with, which we don't," I said.

"Somehow, Chief, we'll get this experiment into its second generation,

past the miseries of the gnotobiotic first-born, we Adams and Eves who

were delivered into purity by aseptic Caesarian section. Maybe we'll

have to toss coins or draw cards to pair up for parent-hood. But any

kids we raise will be spared that indignity. Know how I've got it

figured, Chief? We've got to make provision for exogamous matings,

right? Novelty, in other words, is essential to romance. Here's the way

we'll work it. We'll set half the babies, boys and girls together, on

one side of a wall, half on the other side. We'll have established two

tribes of kids, each growing up in ignorance of the other; and we'll

keep them strictly apart till they're in their middle teens. Then,

maybe the night of the Junior Prom, we'll cut a door-way in that wall

and introduce them to each other."

* * * * *

Dr. McQueen smiled. "That will be a splendid evening, John. And a

situation to make an anthropologist's mouth water. You may have found

the answer to one of your children's major problems. I only wish we had

as simple a solution to the current troubles of John Bogardus."

"Don't blame yourself for what's happened to me," I said. "I've carried

on pretty bad today, but that doesn't mean that I or any of the other

Lapins blame you for causing us to be birthed into the Big Tank. It had

to be done. Once Dr. Reyniers had made gnotobiotics possible, a colony

of germ-free humans became available. You did a good and honest job of

bringing us colonists up, Chief. As good a job as anyone could do."

"Thank you, John," he said. "I often wonder, though, whether the

Nuremberg Principles really gave us the right to build and populate

this germless microcosm. We told your mothers when they volunteered

that the results of raising humans gnotobiotically would be important.

They have indeed. Thousands of lives have been saved by what we've

learned here. We saw to it, as we'd also promised your mothers, that

your health hasn't suffered by reason of experiments, that you've been

given the education you need to earn a good living, and especially

that your dignity as human beings has always been respected. The core

question is, did we have the right to involve fellow humans, not yet

born, in a process the end of which we couldn't entirely predict?

Enough of this, though. My conscience is my own problem. For your

immediate relief I can offer only: keep busy."

"Work is dandy, but liquor's quicker," I said. "A wound of the heart

calls for a therapeutic drunk."

"I'll honor your prescription, Doctor," the Chief said. "The moment

I get outside, I'll Seitz you some of my own Scotch." He stood up

and caught hold of his air-hose. "Forgive me for behaving so like

Pollyanna, John," he said. "I wish I could offer you relief more potent

than Scotch and sympathy."

"Such spiritual Band-aids are all the help there is, Chief. Thank you

for them."

He slapped me on the shoulder with his gloved right hand, then walked

through the shower-room, trailing his black air-hose, and dropped down

the manhole into the formaldehyde sump on his way back out into the

world.

I sat on my bench in my artificial garden in the middle of the great

steel womb I'd been delivered into, and I thought about my Anne.

* * * * *

"If I had a chisel and about four tons of Carrara marble," the girl

standing behind me said, "I'd hack me out a statue on your model, and

call it _The Thinker_." Dorothy--the Firebird--Damien plumped her

little backside onto the bench beside me and scintillated eagerness to

converse.

I didn't want to talk to anyone at the moment, certainly not to the

Firebird. To employ a metaphor from an appetite less exalted than love,

seeing the Firebird after losing Anne was too much like being offered

hamburger after having had a filet mignon snatched from under nose.

Still, as my peripheral vision took in the Firebird's brilliantly

distributed five-foot-three, I realized that my metaphor was false.

That flame-colored hair and impish, freckled face; that halter taut

as a double-barreled ballista cocked to fire twin rounds; I turned my

attention to the girlscape beside me, quite innocent of covetousness,

my interest purely aesthetic. No hamburger, this. Firebird Damien was

filet mignon.

But she wasn't Anne.

Suddenly I was contrite toward my fellow captive. "You're looking

splendid, Miss Damien," I said.

"And you got a face peeled off the iodine bottle. Tell mamma where it

hurts."

"Don't delve, doll."

"Woman-trouble?" she asked.

"The term is tautological," I said. "_Woman_ and _trouble_ are

synonyms. If the language had any logic the words would rhyme."

The Firebird put a freckled arm across my shoulder and squeezed my

deltoid with her resting hand. I shrugged. "Don't try to shake me

loose, Johnny," she said. "I'm trying to find out what sort of people

you are. Whether you're a Shrinker or a Flesh-Presser."

"Obviously, you're of the Shrinker persuasion," I said.

"Hoo-hah! Shrinkers are the other race from me," the Firebird said.

"They're the people who quail at shaking hands, who never slap a back

nor playfully pinch. They hate to be crowded, don't like to be touched.

My sort of people, though, tend to cuddle like puppies, or like cattle

in a thunderstorm; we take comfort in the closeness of other humans.

We're not erotic about this, Johnny. Not necessarily erotic, I mean.

We have our moments, too, or the Shrinkers would long since have

taken over the world in spite of their dreadful handicap. We're the

people who make brilliant barbers. The kind who say hello to you with

a Roman handshake and a clasp on the shoulder. We're the doctors with

the healing touch, the most tender nurses. We're the Flesh-Pressers."

She gently squeezed my shoulder-muscle again to demonstrate. "Tell me

what's the matter, Johnny. Maybe I can help."

* * * * *

"No magic touch will cure my trouble," I said. "Anne and I are through.

It was hopeless. I was like the goldfish in love with the cat. So I

called our romance to a halt today and drove home in my little green

sports-car, feeling a little green and hardly sporty at all. Please

don't mention this again, Firebird; not till I'm old and bald and my

wound has healed to a thin white scar."

"Can I say one thing?"

"You will, so do."

"I'm really sorry, Johnny."

"Thank you, Firebird," I said. "The Chief promised to send some

therapeutic juices through the Seitz filter. If you've a mind to sample

a little sterile White Horse, perhaps tie one on with me this evening,

you'd be most welcome."

"I'll be proud and happy," the Firebird said. She scooted even closer.

I found her propinquity not at all unpleasant. Was I perhaps of the

Flesh-Presser clan myself? The girl smelled good, the faint wholesome

feminine odor of my Lapin foster-sisters--a perfume an outside wench,

host to a universe of bacteria, could approximate only with Pepsodent

and the most meticulous attention to her underarms, I gather from TV.

"How am I to entertain you, sir?" the Firebird asked me. "I have

current gossip, vintage scandal, clever anecdotes lifted from the

steaming pages of my autoclaved _Reader's Digest_, imitations of

bird-songs--heavy on the mating-calls, these--and sheer adoration."

She paused. "Scratch that last offering, Johnny," she said. "It's

un-hygienic for a girl to wear her heart on her sleeve, even here."

"I've lost touch with the Big Tank social whirl these last few weeks,"

I said. "I've been spending all my alive-time in the greater world of

Valparaiso, Indiana. Bring me abreast of the local gossip, Firebird, if

you please."

"Gladly. First there's the case of Mary deWitte. She's still on the

trail of her basketball star--a fellow named Lofting--confident that

somehow they'll manage to compromise her hateful purity.... Maybe I

shouldn't have mentioned Mary," she said, seeing that I was frowning.

"I was just thinking," I said. "Miss deWitte and I might get together

to establish an Amour Anonymous group in the Big Tank."

"If you do, Johnny," the Firebird said softly, "write me up a card as a

charter member."

"The Chief was talking about Mary deWitte only a few minutes ago," I

said. "Hasn't she accepted the fact that we Lapins can't hope to breed

with those jungle weeds outdoors?"

"Have you accepted that fact, Johnny?" the Firebird asked.

"Apt question," I admitted. "Sure. I've decided that Anne is as

unavailable to me as Mars is. I don't know which makes me more bitter,

Firebird; losing Anne or being denied the chance at the stars. Now that

the solar system is getting man's footprints all over it, now that the

Orion ships are slamming out to Mars and back on a busline's schedule,

and the biggest ship of all is being fitted for deep space at the

back of the moon, the constellations don't seem much further off than

Chicago. But not for me."

"You think you're bitter, bud, you should hear me with my hair down,"

the Firebird said. "But we've had dirges enough for one evening. Your

whiskey should be filtered through by now. Let's go wet our Scotch

apéritif, and have dinner."

"I'm not hungry," I said. "I just ate a turnip."

"Will turnips make you big and strong? You need solider food, like

Scotch. That's my professional opinion, Doctor." She got up and tugged

at my hand. "Come on, Johnny. I'm not about to let you sit here all

evening and brood."

"Is this your prescription, sweet Firebird?" I asked. "That I'm to

go back to the madding crowd, mingle with my twenty-eight fellows in

aseptic togetherness? Well, you're probably right." I got up from my

park-bench to walk with her, hand-in-hand, to the dining room, stopping

en route at my room for a shirt. Dinner was a formal affair in the Big

Tank, shirts for the gentlemen and shoes for all.

* * * * *

The other Lapins were already eating. They greeted me and especially

the Firebird with jokes and fellowshippy sounds.

I felt very much at home with them. There was Bud Dorsey, our

weight-lifting astrophysicist, his magnificent u.v.-blackened body a

study in the surface musculature of the human male. At his table was

Karl Fyrmeister, who has a practically complete collection of the

airmail stamps of the world to console him on long winter evenings.

All the stamps are quite sterile. Karl was talking with Gloria Moss,

whose academic specialty was group dynamics. She demonstrated muscular

dynamics so attractively that when she walked about the campus in her

chastity-suit she drew whistles, a truly remarkable accolade when you

consider that the c-suit is somewhat less faithful to the wearer's

form than a poncho. Keto Hannamuri sat the four-place table with Bud

and Karl and Gloria. He was my fellow-medic among McQueen's Beasts, a

pediatrician. Kids loved him. Wearing his sterility-suit as he made his

Ped Ward rounds, that Oriental smile showing through the face-plate of

his mask, Keto seemed to the television-nurtured youngsters the very

model of the friendly extra-solar alien, complete with space-suit.

Besides his flair for showmanship, Keto was a remarkably fine doctor.

As we passed his table, he slapped the Firebird's short-shorted

callipygia in a kin-ship-gesture of the Flesh-Presser clan.

I felt a sudden overwhelming love for all these people, my

brothers-and-sister-in-exile. I took my tray to sit down quick with the

Firebird before my reserve, depleted by the emotional beating I'd taken

at noon, gave way.

The menu featured radared steak. The meat was germ-free and somewhat

tenderized by the high-energy beams. (A purist in culinary proteins

might go so far as to say denatured.) The nearest any Lapin came to

ingesting a bacterium was here at the table, where we ate billions

of bacterial corpses. The bugs achieved a post-mortem revenge by

triggering the production of faint bacterial antibodies in our blood.

Besides the steaks and the myriads of murdered microbes, we had an

aseptic salad prepared from Tank-grown hydroponic vegetation, dressed

with Roquefort, the cheese that vies with penicillin in my private hall

of fame as the noblest product ever a mold gave man. The Scotch that

Dr. McQueen had promised to send was on hand, Seitz-filtered into a

sterile White Horse bottle. Not really caring to dilute my poignancies

with alcohol, I passed the whiskey among the tables nearby.

* * * * *

The Firebird was managing to stay quite close to me, though technically

remaining on her own side of the table, eating and talking and now

and then flashing me such a glance of yearning that I was pierced by

the sight of her and by a remembered line of e. e. cummings's: "...

your slightest look easily will unclose me though I have closed myself

as fingers...." Just as suddenly, I realized that mine was a highly

pathological state of mind, the rinse-phase of the brain-wash. Autism

can be produced as surely by loneliness or unrequitable love as by

injections of LSD-25.

So I turned my attention to my environment, consciously flexing my

muscles of mental health. I answered the Firebird's sallies with

automatic flippancy. I ate my steak, savoring its flavor. And I looked

about the dining-room, examining it as though I'd never eaten there

before.

The Lapins' dining-room in the Big Tank is about the size of a railroad

restaurant car. (Not that I've ever been aboard a train to make the

comparison. The stringencies of the sterility-suit tie such of us to

the Big Tank on a short leash: the most sanitary of outside washrooms

would prove a pesthole to a Lapin.) The kitchen, which was under the

supervision of the Firebird, our dietitian, could have been squeezed

into a telephone booth. It served chiefly as receiving-station for

the autoclave and the radar-room, through which all our food came.

With its ten little four-place tables, each covered with a gypsy

red-checkerboard cloth, set with a green glass vase of Tank-grown

daisies, our dining-room was friendly enough. The Tank-ness of it,

though, was emphasized by a mural along one wall, a fantasy of stars

and men and microbes that half a dozen of us had planned and painted

one week. Where the mural was now had once been a picture window,

overlooking a green stretch of Central campus, a source of comfort

to us all. An Air Force jet, though, pulling out of a dive invisibly

above us, had sonic-boomed a crack in both panes of the double glass of

the window, causing a general alert as we realized that some airborne

_Proteus_ or fortunate _Staphylococcus_ or lonely _Aspergillis_ might

have invaded our fortress through this almost microscopic breach in our

walls.

Careful decontamination had saved our sterility, but now the Big Tank

had no window.

"I was saying...." the Firebird said, in a firm voice.

"Sorry, doll. You were saying?"

"That Mary deWitte isn't here. Do you suppose she's still outside? She

checked out her sterility-suit about the same time you did."

"That's a good nine hours ago," I said, glancing at the clock set over

Saturn on our mural. "Either Mary has been on a restricted-fluids diet,

or True Love has made her careless of visceral discomfort."

"Don't be coarse, Johnny."

"The demands of the kidney are as exigent as those of the heart,

Firebird," I said. "I think I'd better call Dr. McQueen."

"You'll only cause trouble for her and Lofting," Firebird said.

"I've decided that it's better to be lovesick than dead," I explained,

getting up from the table.

* * * * *

I went to the phone in the corner of the dining-room and dialed Dr.

McQueen's home. "Chief? John Bogardus. Mary deWitte still hasn't come

home to roost. I think we'd better find her before she does something

splendid and foolish."

"Like perhaps marrying her contaminated basketball-player and setting

out on a suicidal honeymoon?" Dr. McQueen suggested. "You're right,

John; we should prevent that sort of thing. The rub is, we're too

late. I got a phone-call from Mary a few minutes after I got home

this evening. She abandoned her sterility-suit in a downtown Chicago

hotel room at noon today, and married her fledgling lawyer in a civil

ceremony at one o'clock. I tried to find out from her where she was,

but she just said she was very happy and hung up."

"Hell! What are we going to do?"

"I'm flying to Chicago, where I'll ask the help of the police in

finding Mary," the Chief said. "Once I've run down the happy couple,

though, damned if I know what I'll do next. Shall I stand outside the

bridal chamber with a syringeful of broad-spectrum antibiotics, waiting

for Mary to sneeze?"

"They'll have a short marriage," I said.

"Mary knows how likely it is that she'll never grow old," Dr. McQueen

said. "But I suspect that she hasn't said a word to her husband. I'd

better go now, John. My plane leaves in twenty minutes."

"Don't let this prey on you too much, Chief," I said. "We Lapins have

free will, too. We're old enough to bear the responsibilities for our

own actions."

"Thank you, Johnny." Dr. McQueen hung up.

I returned to the table with no enthusiasm for the remaining half of my

steak. "What's up, Johnny?" the Firebird asked me.

"Now we are twenty-eight," I said. "They were married in Chicago at one

o'clock."

"How wonderful!" the Firebird exulted.

She stood and pounded our table-top with the vase, scattering damp

daisies on the cloth. "Quiet, everybody! I've got an announcement."

The chatter over dessert simmered down. "Mary deWitte got married

today--here's to the bride!" Firebird slopped two ounces of White Horse

into her glass and downed them at a heroic gulp. She sat, sputtering.

The chatter at the other tables crescendoed as our colleagues reminded

one another of the significance of the Firebird's news.

"Will you also propose the toast at Mary's wake?" I asked.

* * * * *

"What a hideous thing to say!"

"It was, Firebird," I said. "Forgive me, please. This thing has left me

in a wounding mood."

"Is Mary really in such danger?" Firebird asked.

"She may last a week, not much more. Today she'll meet _Klebsiella_,

probably; perhaps _E. coli_ and _Shigella_. Pretty soon she'll

start to sniffle with the first common cold she's ever experienced.

Polio virus and the ECHO group may get to her first, and establish

themselves before there is sufficient growth of bacterial flora to

give them competition. Her intestinal walls are thin and weak, so she

may suffer megacolon as a result of gas-producing fermentation. From

a pathologist's point of view, I'll find it most instructive to learn

the manner of Mary Lofting's death. From the standpoint of a friend and

fellow Lapin, though, I'll think her death a damned shame."

"I'm getting a little drunk, Johnny," the Firebird said, "and a little

maudlin. So, say you're right. After all, you're the doctor and I'm

just a dumb dietitian. But don't you think maybe it's worth while, what

Mary's done? Condemning herself to die, I mean, because she's really in

love, and death is what she's got to pay for a few days' happiness.

Don't you think the price is fair, Johnny?"

"If I did, I'd be paying it," I said.... "No, Firebird. Seizing a

little love and poetry before the sacrifice is great stuff for epics,

but it doesn't make much sense to me. When I'm married I'll want to see

my children all the way through Spock and Gesell. I'll want to grow old

with my wife, if you'll excuse the corn."

"We Flesh-Pressers have a natural reverence for corn," the Firebird

said. "It's part of the syndrome. Johnny, if you really want what you

just said, want those things badly enough to set up a marriage on half

a love, give me a call. Anytime. Even though I don't set your blood

aflame." She stood up, a little unsteady, and rubbed her hand across

her eyes in a tardy effort to hide tears. "Save the brushoff till

tomorrow, Johnny," she said. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, sweet Firebird," I said. She turned and walked quickly from

the dining-room.

Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astronomer, left his three companions

to bring his coffee over and sit with me. Bud was the Lapin who'd have

been a Central U. fullback as an undergraduate, if only Dr. McQueen had

let him play the game in a chastity-suit. "What will happen to Mary

deWitte, John?" he asked.

"She'll die," I said.

"One flight in the sunlight, then her wings fall off. We Lapins are a

fragile race. May I?" I nodded. Dorsey poured some of the Scotch into

Firebird's empty water-glass and sipped it.

* * * * *

"The men who devised the Nuremberg Principles failed us when they

forgot to underwrite the romantic aspirations of human guinea-pigs," I

said. "As a result of their oversight, it seems that McQueen's Beasts

have made a bigger contribution to sociology than to bacteriology.

We've demonstrated that familiarity doesn't breed. Here we are, now,

fourteen pairs of healthy Americans in their middle twenties, and

neither a marriage nor a pregnancy amongst us. Why?"

"Tell me, John," Dorsey said.

"I'll tell you why," I said. "It's because we're fond of our

foster-sisters, but we're also a little bored with them. And they with

us. We men know every canned peach's flirtations and frailties and

conversational gambits so thoroughly that one of us could no more marry

one of them than the average outsider could marry his kid sister."

"Even that's been done, John, just for principle's sake," Dorsey said.

"The Pharaohs wed their sisters because no one else was exalted enough

for the honor. Our predicament is not dissimilar. The primal urge,

John, will in time overwhelm the curse of contiguity."

"Could be," I said. "But it's not just sex that's agonizing me, Bud.

Prison has whole constellations of frustration. However warm and

understanding our guards may be, this is still a prison, and half of us

are stir-crazy. Why did Mike Bohrman take off his chastity-suit last

winter, to walk barefoot through the snow with only his suit-shorts on,

till he collapsed from the cold? It was a prison-break, Bud. So was

Mary deWitte's witless marriage. They were both suicide, the lifer's

one way over the wall."

"Stir-crazy?" Dorsey asked. "You're exaggerating, John."

"Open your eyes, Bud," I said. "Look at Karl Fyrmeister's hands, for

example. I'm violating no medical confidence to tell you that Karl got

his dermatitis as the result of compulsive hand-washing. There's a

fine neurotic symptom for a germ-free Lapin! If I'm exaggerating our

collective un-sanity, Bud, tell me why Lucy Cashdollar has become an

apprentice alcoholic. Why does Fizz Ewell, with an I.Q. that must range

in the 150's and the most brilliant record the Nuclear Engineering

Department has ever seen, spend six hours a day working crossword

puzzles? Why do you have that tic of your left orbicularis oculi?

Why am I an insomniac, with a nasty barbiturate habit? Look around,

Bud. You'll see that our little home has turned into something of a

snakepit. Our neuroses are only garter snakes so far; but they'll grow

into cobras, given time and further frustration to feed on."

* * * * *

Dorsey's left eye twitched as though my mentioning his tic had

triggered it. He self-consciously raised his fingers to the vellicating

muscle, more to hide than to soothe it.

"While our keepers were sending Lapins through every major discipline

offered on the campus," he said, "it seems they'd have done well to

have trained one of us in psychiatry."

"For what?" I demanded. "So we could have someone right here in the

Tank to spoon out our soothing-syrups? Man, we've got a right to be

stir-crazy. We're life prisoners and we've committed no crime." I

stopped to get my calm back. "Bud," I asked, "do you know what I want

more than anything else, next to Anne?"

"Of course I do," Dorsey said. "Like you've pointed out, John, we've

got no secrets from each other. Your big itch is to step aboard

one of the Orion ships. You want to join up for the chase after

interplanetary white whales."

"It's only natural," I said. "When we were kids, Bud, we saw the same

TV programs, the same space-adventure movies, as the kids who are

now the men in space. Every boy in America was conditioned to long

for a space-suit. I'm one of the ones who could have made it, Bud. I

love medicine, and I think I'm going to be a damned fine pathologist;

but I'd turn in my M.D. for an Ordinary Spaceman's ticket without a

second's hesitation. When I read, two years ago, that Immermann had

discovered that human skull in the oxide rubble below Roosevelt Ridge

in Syrtis Major, I cried for the first time since I was six years old.

Twenty thousand years ago there was man on Mars. And I'm confined to

Earth for life."

"How much do you know about the Immermann skull, John?" Dorsey asked me.

"What I've said. Is there more?"

"One point," Dorsey said. "My field, radio astronomy, is a deep-space

sort of specialty; but I do from time to time condescend to read

the _Journal of Aerology_ and the other parochial, solar-system

publications. Somewhere I read that there's something odd about that

skull Colonel Immermann dug up."

"If you're suggesting that it was a second Piltdown hoax, planted

in that Martian talus to jar larger Air Force appropriations from

Congress, keep it from me," I said. "I cherish the illusion that the

Immermann is genuine, and a mystery."

* * * * *

"It isn't phony, and it's sure as hell a mystery," Dorsey said.

"Colonel Immermann's initial report of the skull's discovery was

verified by every member of the _Orion Gamma's_ crew, a gang recruited

mostly from Service-Academy grads and other high moral types. The

peculiarity I'm talking about isn't forensic. It's functional. If you

were to mix in the Immermann skull with an assortment of skulls of

modern western men, age forty or thereabouts, only one characteristic

would allow you to pick it out from the mixture again. 'Look, Mom--No

Cavities!' Like us Lapins, Immermann Man had acarious teeth."

"Because he was germ-free?" I suggested.

"It's possible. Or his medical science may have gotten oral bacteria

under control with drugs. Maybe he preserved his teeth by diet, or

with fluorides in his drinking-water. Perhaps his mother never let him

eat candy when he was a kid," Dorsey said. "Who knows? Good teeth and

all, though, our Immermann Man died twenty thousand years ago. Why?

Was he germ-free, as you suggest; and was he killed by some species

of Martian micro-organism that's since gone extinct from drought and

a shortage of hosts? The big question, to my mind, is why none of our

explorers has yet found any sign of the rest of the expedition."

"Expedition?" I asked.

"A man could hardly have been alone on Mars," Dorsey said.

"From where?"

"Pick any 'F'- or 'G'-type star with planets," Dorsey said. "After all,

it's easier to posit extra-solar man than to suppose a flint-drive

spaceship was devised by some early neolithic von Brauns."

"I'd never expected to see an astrophysicist take off on such a flight

of improbabilia," I said.

"John, would you like to hear a thread-recording I just got from the

radio observatory at Adelaide?" Dorsey asked.

"Hi-fi?"