9 Tales of Space and Time Read online

  “I’ll . . . I’ll think . . . I think I’ll go back, Dad. If I can, if they’ll let me back in.”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  “I’d better be going,” she said uneasily. “Miss Stemy leaves at noon Saturday, still? I want to catch her before she leaves.”

  “We’ll eat about one o’clock, then. You’ll be back?”

  “Yes. I’ll be back to eat. ‘By.”

  On her way downtown, she detoured by Dr. Wing’s office, hoping vainly to catch a glimpse of him, realizing as she passed the building that it was for this that she had been extra careful before the mirror. At the library she saw Miss Stemy sorting books behind the loan desk. Meekly she waited until the librarian looked up. “Miss Stemy, I . . . I’m . . . I owe you an apology.”

  “Well! Bettyann!” She came to the desk. “Bettyann, hello!”

  Miss Stemy drew a sharp look of annoyance from the bearded gentleman in the periodical room.

  “About Smith,” Bettyann whispered. “I want to explain. I don’t want you to think I’m running out.”

  “Bettyann? Pha! Certainly not. Ridiculous. You’re going back, though?”

  “. . . Yes. I don’t know. I—”

  “Now, listen. Of course you are.”

  “Well . . .”

  “You’ll miss it. I know. Confidentially, I had a little difficulty myself. But they didn’t want to let me back.” She lowered her voice to an almost inaudible whisper. “Really. Were my parents mad! Believe me, I had to get back in. It was a lab course that did it. How I hated that lab! We had an instructor from—where the devil, Princeton? I’ll never forget him, though. We called him Reggie, not to his face . . . I was in hot water.”

  “I wanted you to understand. It wasn’t college. I was doing all right.”

  “Jane showed me your mid-term grades. All right!”

  “I wanted you to understand. I owe you so much, for the scholarship . . .”

  “You don’t owe me anything. Goodness sakes!”

  And then Bettyann was outside. She wanted to cry. Everyone was being so nice to her. She felt she had done nothing to deserve it. She felt that she brought only trouble to every life she touched and to everyone who tried to help her. She protested against fate: It’s not my fault, she thought. Then, hardening her lips: But it is. I fouled everything up, somehow. If . . . If . . .

  He’s got to get better, she thought. He’s just got to. I just didn’t go far enough last time. He’s not going to die. He’s not! He’s not! I won’t let him!

  She was half running toward old man Starke’s house. When she reached it, she was out of breath. She drew in oxygen through her skin and she breathed deeply, waiting, and when the nurse came, her breathing was soft and even.

  “Hello,” the nurse said. “Back?”

  “May I come in?”

  “He’s right where he was the day before yesterday.”

  “Thank you.”

  Nothing had changed. The old man lay motionless. The room was oppressive with the odor and the harsh sound of his breathing. The nurse had not bothered to accompany her, and she crossed (as if in a compulsive dream) to the bed.

  She reached out. She wanted to cringe away from her own body. Never in her life had she confronted a more terrifying moment. It was made terrifying now by both memory and anticipation.

  She touched the skin of his neck. Her finger tips explored, and her hand changed, and she placed her palm flat upon him. He stirred restlessly. The hand became misty and fluid.

  She was probing now with shock and sickness into a living red horror. Her eyes closed. Her lips moved soundlessly, saying, Please, oh, please, God, over and over. She forced herself to concentrate with every atom of her being. There, there, there.

  Please, oh, please . . .

  Now, now . . . not too much, don’t spend it all, don’t use it all . . .

  Oh, God.

  Too much energy.

  Easy. Easy.

  Just a little more.

  You must! she thought. How much energy am I using? Easy. A little more. There . . . Her breathing was shallow.

  Red, terrible death, please . . .

  Don’t stop now! No, you can’t, you mustn’t! Go on! Finish it!

  He’s got to live!

  Please.

  And an infinity later she turned and started away. Her thoughts spun crazily. Her knees dissolved. The doorway was forever. The individual is so weak, she thought, so weak: can’t change anything, hopeless, lost, so weak, so helpless . . . She felt herself falling. She tried to cry out in angry protest, and no sound came. She heard but she did not feel the heavy thud of something striking the floor.

  Please, she whimpered to herself in colossal blackness and echoing silence.

  Please.

  Old man Starke’s breathing changed. It seemed easy and regular and grateful, sighing soft counterpoint to the voices in the room.

  Dr. Wing had arrived in less than ten minutes, before even the ambulance appeared.

  “Move her, move her,” Dr. Wing said. Diabetic coma? Had he overlooked that? Was he getting so careless that . . .? No. “Hurry up, get her in the ambulance.” No. The sugar. She had eaten sugar before.

  In the ambulance he searched for her heartbeat. It was faint and regular and steady and weak. Slow. The pulse seemed to be dying.

  At the hospital he made the decision—had made it in fact on the way, subconsciously, but voiced it for himself for the first time to the nurse in the corridor: “Glucose.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “We’re going to have to feed this one intravenously.”

  In the white antiseptic room he laid bare her arm while the nurse wheeled in the holder for the glucose. He inserted the needle and taped it in place. He put a padded board along the back of her arm to hold the arm rigid. He was surprised to find his forehead damp.

  Damn her, he thought: damn her! (Not really, he thought, no, not really.) But suppose . . .?

  What’s wrong with her?

  “I’ll phone her parents. You watch her here, nurse.”

  Bettyann was unconscious still when Jane and Dave came. They were white-faced and frightened. Dr. Wing went out to get them.

  “How is she?” Dave demanded.

  “I think she’s going to be all right now.”

  “What is it?” Jane asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “It’s just like the day before yesterday. I don’t, I don’t honestly know.” He was appalled by his ignorance and unwilling, before friends at least, to retreat behind the defenses of professional reserve and omniscient confidence.

  “We’d better get some specialists in here then,” Dave said.

  “Yes, I . . . Yes.” He felt hurt and defeated and exhausted and he wanted to sit down. “There’s a Dr. Albertson in Joplin. If it’s glandular . . .”

  “Let’s get him over here.”

  “He couldn’t do any more than I am, right now. I’m going to consult him on the phone . . .”

  “I’m not blaming you, Jerry,” Dave said.

  “I know you’re not.”

  “We shouldn’t have let her go out,” Jane said. “She should have stayed home in bed. She was sick when she came home. I could tell.”

  “May we see her?”

  “Yes.”

  They went to her room. She lay motionless.

  Dr. Wing crossed to her and felt her pulse. Jane and Dave stood hushed. Jane bit back tears.

  Wing turned and nodded reassuringly. He led them into the corridor. “Her pulse is stronger . . . She’ll be all right. She’s got a beautiful heart. I’ll stay here. I don’t see any sense in you waiting, though. Go on home.”

  “I couldn’t,” Jane said.

  They went to the waiting room. They sat down. Wing offered Dave a cigarette. Dave nodded an abstracted thanks and bent to the flame. Wing put the lighter away and studied his hands.

  “I think, just like last time, she’ll wake up in a little while practically starved,” he said.
“I think she’ll be all right in the morning. This time we’re going to keep her in bed until we can find out something.”

  “Maybe we could get this Joplin doctor over here,” Dave said.

  “Let’s wait,” Wing said. “Let’s let it wait, as long as she continues to improve. After I talk to him on the phone, he’ll know whether it’s necessary to come over or not.”

  Jane and Dave came to see her at ten o’clock Sunday. Bettyann was awake. “Don’t stay too long,” Wing told them. They sat for five minutes in her room, talking quietly.

  Bettyann was tired and listless. She tried to reassure them. She was ashamed of herself for what she was doing to them. She began to cry. “I didn’t intend . . . I didn’t intend . . .”

  She tried to choke back the tears.

  Jane went to her and touched her face and Dave cleared his throat uneasily.

  After they had gone, she lay staring at the smooth white ceiling. You spoil everything, she thought. You do. Everything.

  She slept, awoke hungry, ate, and felt infinitely improved.

  The cost of the hospital room weighed heavily on her. I’ll make it up to them, she promised herself over and over. It’s not right, she thought, I’ll . . . I’ll get a job. I’ll . . . Oh, I don’t know. I feel so awful about everything. I can’t do anything right.

  Listlessly she plucked at the sheet. She stared down at her body, and for a moment she hated the sight of it.

  Wing came again at four o’clock. “Hello, young lady. Feeling all right?”

  “Fine,” she smiled.

  “Now, now. Lie back there!” He drew up a chair to her bedside and sat down. She was still smiling at him. Her eyes had followed his every movement.

  “I wondered where you’d been?” she said. “I hoped you’d be by this afternoon.”

  “I intended to come earlier. I got tied up. And how are you now? Better than this morning?”

  “Yes.” She wanted to reach out and touch him. “I’m much better, now.”

  Looking into her face, into her eyes, deep and innocent, into her youth, Wing felt a surge of new life. Gone was the sense of weariness and frustration that had been building a shell of insensitivity against his emotions. He felt tender and kind, and the world seemed full of a potent and beautiful magic. He cleared his throat in embarrassment. “Well, well,” he said. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk.”

  Without taking her eyes from his, she lay back. She moved her hand in coy distraction. She half pouted at him. “Why so solemn”

  “I? Am I, now? Tired, perhaps.” He was disappointed that there was no outward transformation in his face. For a moment she had undone reality, and now she called it back. I shouldn’t work so hard, he thought. I guess it’s beginning to show. But it’s tiredness that isn’t physical, Bettyann . . . He looked around the clean bright room . . . It’s gone, he marveled.

  Poor dear, she thought. “Have—have you seen Mr. Starke today?”

  “He’s about the same.”

  Those were terrible words, filled with ice, and they slammed into her with brutal force.

  He can’t be! she cried to herself. Not, not after I’ve done all I can! Her thoughts swirled desperately to escape defeat.

  I stopped it! I did, I know I did. You’ve got to see that. Use X rays again, something, anything. I’ve stopped it. Follow up on that!

  She looked away from Wing suddenly. She could almost sense his mind throbbing with life, she could almost touch it. She closed her eyes, and she reached out toward that living mind, and she touched fingers of thought to it. I’ve arrested the cancer. Do whatever is necessary now, finish the job, heal him.

  She concentrated, seeking to give the appeal substance and project it across the distance between two minds. Then to reinforce the thought, she brought up all her wordless knowledge of cancer and held it before her for an instant and hurled it at him with all the strength of her mind. See! she cried, see! This is what cancer is!, what it looks like, and this is how I stopped the growth. I don’t understand it, its nature, its causes, I only know what I felt and what I did. I haven’t any specialized knowledge. But you have. Use my information. Take it. Here! Here! Now see what you have to do!

  “Am I so hard to look at?” he said. And no sooner were the words released than he felt foolish. “Well,” he said, all business, “let’s feel your pulse and listen to your heart and take a little blood. Turn around, now.”

  She looked back at him. “No, Dr. Wing. You’re not . . . hard to look at.”

  He discovered that her eyes were disconcerting. He tried to remember something that he had heard not long ago and which at the time he had scarcely noted. “I love you,” she had said. I wonder of whom she was thinking, he thought with a passionate objectivity that denied his own existence down to his very finger tips.

  After he had completed his examination, Wing left and phoned Dave. “She’s fine,” he said. “By God, as near as I can tell, there’s nothing wrong with her. I’m going to run some more lab tests tomorrow, but there’s no sense in her staying here. Why don’t you have Jane come over and get her in the morning, okay? Fine. Yes, I’ll stop by tomorrow and look at her again. And see that she stays in bed, too. I don’t want her wandering around again.”

  He left the hospital, and, as he drew his coat more securely around him, crossing to his car, he paused and looked up. The sky was clear. The moon was pale and misty. The sun was a huge globe of fire sinking away to some distant dawn. The air was crisp and cold and probed icily into his lungs. He breathed deeply and stood unmoving. He was listening for something, although he did not know for what. From far off he heard the sound of children at play and then the lone voice of an adult calling, “Jimmie! Jimmie! Suppertime 1

  Smiling, he went to his car.

  He thought with renewed affection of the neglected laboratory in the back of his office. I’m still young, he thought. I’ve just gotten lazy. Or tired. Tired, I guess.

  New ideas suddenly began to break around him, and he greeted them with an enthusiasm he had not felt for years. His mind was extremely alert. Now, old man Starke . . .

  For a moment he seemed poised before a startling discovery. It was almost as if he had somehow, in one clear instant of insight, grasped the basic nature of cancer and understood it. Half a dozen possible approaches to a cure tumbled over one another. If one were to—if a man attempted—if you could only . . .

  He could almost visualize the individual malignant cells. And if one could only isolate this factor, here, here . . .

  He halted the car at a stop sign. His concentration was interrupted. Ah, hell, he thought. That’s over. What can I do? I haven’t kept up with the research; not the way I should. The way—I—should. Hell, there’s too much going on to keep up with. A man can’t. Even if I really had something, I’d probably go off half cocked.

  No, there are too many smart cookies who aren’t getting anywhere. I’m a GP, although I used to think . . . I suppose all the good ideas don’t come from bright young men in laboratories. Pasteur didn’t even have a degree. Still . . .

  Ah, you! Don’t even trust your own biopsis. Can’t even diagnose a simple . . . Simple? Well, what the devil is wrong with her?

  He set the car in motion again. Yes, but you can fix a broken arm!

  Maybe I should, he thought, give the old man an exposure of X rays. Have to move him out of there, though . . . No. What’s the point in it? I mean. Ought to take another bit of tissue. Might find out something.

  Find out what?

  Hell, I don’t know.

  Seemed to be better, that’s funny. Quite a bit better. You don’t suppose . . . No!

  Although—didn’t I read about an occasional spontaneous cure of cancer? Where did I read that? The . . . oh, yes, somebody checked. Always (the checker said, the specialist said) an incorrect diagnosis explains it. That’s probably right. Still.

  Where did I get that silly idea of trying X rays? It’s far too deep and deadly for X ra
ys.

  But I could use the microscope, all right. That wouldn’t hurt anything.

  Haul it out.

  Damn, damn, damn, he thought wearily.

  No, it’s not for me, he thought. I’m a GP, and I’ll let it go at that. What’s a good idea? Anybody can have a good idea. Need knowledge. That’s the whole thing. What you know . . .

  My God, I wish Peters would finally pay his damned bill! I’m getting sick and tired of it. It isn’t as if he hasn’t got the money. If Evelyn didn’t keep bringing it up . . . Hell of a nurse in that respect: what does she want me to do, go out and dun him personally? (Serve him right, serve him right if I did.) Like to tell him—what does she bother me with stuff like that for? Wish she wouldn’t. Wish. Stuff like that’s not my department.

  He rubbed his hand over his eyes.

  We’ll send Bettyann off home Monday. Keep her there in bed. Under observation. Out of trouble. Keep her away from old man Starke . . . Why?

  Damned if I know . . . But keep her away from him.

  She’s a strange one. She’s—when she looks at you. Soft skin. Damned pretty girl. Those lips . . .

  He drew up before his house. Suddenly his mind seemed filled with her.

  Bettyann, he said, half aloud. Bettyann. I wish . . .

  My God, he thought, she’s twenty years younger than you are! But it would be nice, though. To have her look after you, I mean. Just to know you could see her, have her around every day.