S is for Space

“McGuire! Pull the blinds! Before the sun comes back!”

McGuire obeyed.

Smith’s heart slowed down to its sluggish, infrequent breathing.

“Sunlight’s bad for Smith. It counteracts something. I don’t know what or why, but it’s not good—” Rockwell relaxed. “Lord, I wouldn’t want to lose Smith. Not for anything. He’s different, making his own standards, doing things men have never done. Know something, Murphy?”

“What?”

“Smith’s not in agony. He’s not dying either. He wouldn’t be better off dead, no matter what Hartley says. Last night as I arranged Smith on the stretcher, readying him for his trip to this sanitarium, I realized, suddenly, that Smith likes me.”

“Gah. First Hartley. Now you. Did Smith tell you that?”

“He didn’t tell me. But he’s not unconscious under all that hard skin. He’s aware. Yes, that’s it. He’s aware.”

“Pure and simple—he’s petrifying. He’ll die. It’s been weeks since he was fed. Hartley said so. Hartley fed him intravenously until the skin toughened so a needle couldn’t poke through it.”

Whining, the cubicle door swung slowly open. Rockwell started. Hartley, his sharp face relaxed after hours of sleep, his eyes still a bitter gray, hostile, stood tall in the door. “If you’ll leave the room,” he said, quietly, “I’ll destroy Smith in a very few seconds. Well?”

“Don’t come a step closer.” Rockwell walked, feeling irritation, to Hartley’s side. “Every time you visit, you’ll have to be searched. Frankly, I don’t trust you.” There were no weapons. “Why didn’t you tell me about the sunlight?”

“Eh?” Soft and slow Hartley said it. “Oh—yes. I forgot. I tried shifting Smith weeks ago. Sunlight struck him and he began really dying. Naturally, I stopped trying to move him. Smith seemed to know what was coming, vaguely. Perhaps he planned it; I’m not sure. While he was still able to talk and eat ravenously, before his body stiffened completely, he warned me not to move him for a twelve-week period. Said he didn’t like the sun. Said it would spoil things. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. He ate like an animal, a hungry, wild animal, fell into a coma, and here he is—” Hartley swore under his breath. “I’d rather hoped you’d leave him in the sun long enough to kill him inadvertently.”

McGuire shifted his two hundred fifty pounds. “Look here, now. What if we catch Smith’s disease?”

Hartley looked at the body, his pupils shrinking. “Smith’s not diseased. Don’t you recognize degeneration when you see it? It’s like cancer. You don’t catch it, you inherit a tendency. I didn’t begin to fear and hate Smith until a week ago when I discovered he was breathing and existing and thriving with his nostrils and mouth sealed. It can’t happen. It mustn’t happen.”

McGuire’s voice trembled. “What if you and I and Rockwell all turn green and a plague sweeps the country—what then?”

“Then,” replied Rockwell, “if I’m wrong, perhaps I am, I’ll die. But it doesn’t worry me in the least.”

He turned back to Smith and went on with his work.

A bell. A bell. Two bells, two bells. A dozen bells, a hundred bells. Ten thousand and a million clangorous, hammering, metal dinning bells. All born at once in the silence, squalling, screaming, hurting echoes, bruising ears!

Ringing, chanting with loud and soft, tenor and bass, low and high voices. Great-armed clappers knocking the shells and ripping air with the thrusting din of sound!

With all those bells ringing, Smith could not immediately know where he was. He knew that he could not see, because his eyelids were sealed tight, knew he could not speak because his lips had grown together. His ears were clamped shut, but the bells hammered nevertheless.

He could not see. But yes, yes, he could, and it was like inside a small dark red cavern, as if his eyes were turned inward upon his skull. And Smith tried to twist his tongue, and suddenly, trying to scream, he knew his tongue was gone, that the place where it used to be was vacant, an itching spot that wanted a tongue but couldn’t have it just now.

No tongue. Strange. Why? Smith tried to stop the bells. They ceased, blessing him with a silence that wrapped him up in a cold blanket. Things were happening. Happening.

Smith tried to twitch a finger, but he had no control. A foot, a leg, a toe, his head, everything. Nothing moved. Torso, limbs—immovable, frozen in a concrete coffin.

A moment later came the dread discovery that he was no longer breathing. Not with his lungs, anyway.

“BECAUSE I HAVE NO LUNGS!” he screamed. Inwardly he screamed and that mental scream was drowned, webbed, clotted, and journeyed drowsily down in a red, dark tide. A red drowsy tide that sleepily swathed the scream, garroted it, took it all away, making Smith rest easier.

I am not afraid, he thought. I understand that which I do not understand. I understand that I do not fear, yet know not the reason.

No tongue, no nose, no lungs.

But they would come later. Yes, they would. Things were—happening.

Through the pores of his shelled body air slid, like rain needling each portion of him, giving life. Breathing through a billion gills, breathing oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and using it all. Wondering. Was his heart still beating?

But yes, it was beating. Slow, slow, slow. A red dim susurrance, a flood, a river surging around him, slow, slower, slower. So nice.

So restful.

The jigsaw pieces fitted together faster as the days drifted into weeks. McGuire helped. A retired surgeon-medico, he’d been Rockwell’s secretary for a number of years. Not much help, but good company.

Rockwell noted that McGuire joked gruffly about Smith, nervously; and a lot. Trying to be calm. But one day McGuire stopped, thought it over, and drawled, “Hey, it just came to me! Smith’s alive. He should be dead. But he’s alive. Good God!”

Rockwell laughed. “What in blazes do you think I’m working on? I’m bringing an X-ray machine out next week so I can find out what’s going on inside Smith’s shell.” Rockwell jabbed with a hypo needle. It broke on the hard shell.

Rockwell tried another needle, and another, until finally he punctured, drew blood, and placed the slides under the microscope for study. Hours later he calmly shoved a serum test under McGuire’s red nose, and spoke quickly.

“Lord, I can’t believe it. His blood’s germicidal. I dropped a streptococci colony into it and the strep was annihilated in eight seconds! You could inject every known disease into Smith and he’d destroy them all, thrive on them!”

It was only a matter of hours until other discoveries. It kept Rockwell sleepless, tossing at night, wondering, theorizing the titanic ideas over and over. For instance—

Hartley’d fed Smith so many cc’s of blood-food every day of his illness until recently. NONE OF THAT FOOD HAD EVER BEEN ELIMINATED. All of it had been stored, not in bulk-fats, but in a perfectly abnormal solution, an x-liquid contained in high concentrate form in Smith’s blood. An ounce of it would keep a man well fed for three days. This x-liquid circulated through the body until it was actually needed, when it was seized upon and used. More serviceable than fat. Much more!

Rockwell glowed with his discovery. Smith had enough x-liquid stored in him to last months and months more. Self-sustaining.

McGuire, when told, contemplated his paunch sadly.

“I wish I stored my food that way.”

That wasn’t all. Smith needed little air. What air he had he seemed to acquire by an osmotic process through his skin. And he used every molecule of it. No waste.

“And,” finished Rockwell, “eventually Smith’s heart might even take vacations from beating, entirely!”

“Then he’d be dead,” said McGuire.

“To you and I, yes. To Smith—maybe. Just maybe. Think of it, McGuire. Collectively, in Smith, we have a self-purifying blood stream demanding no replenishment but an interior one for months, having little breakdown and no elimination of wastes whatsoever because every molecule is utilized, self-evolving, and fatal to any and all microbic life. All this, and Hartley speaks of degeneration!”

Hartley was irritated when he heard of the discoveries. But he still insisted that Smith was degenerating. Dangerous.

McGuire tossed his two cents in. “How do we know that this isn’t some super-microscopic disease that annihilates all other bacteria while it works on its victim. After all—malarial fever is sometimes used surgically to cure syphilis; why not a new bacillus that conquers all?”

“Good point,” said Rockwell. “But we’re not sick, are we?”

“It may have to incubate in our bodies.”

“A typical old-fashioned doctor’s response. No matter what happens to a man, he’s ‘sick’—if he varies from the norm. That’s your idea, Hartley,” declared Rockwell, “not mine. Doctors aren’t satisfied unless they diagnose and label each case. Well, I think that Smith’s healthy; so healthy you’re afraid of him.”