A Gift From Earth

The impulse that came then was one he never managed to explain, even to himself.

He cleared his throat. "Something is helping me," he said in an almost normal voice. "I know that. I need help to get through this gate. I have to get into the Hospital."

Noises came from inside the wall, the faintest of sounds: regular footsteps, distant voices. They were the business of the Hospital and had nothing to do with Matt.

Outside the wall nothing changed.

"Get me in there," he pleaded, to himself or to something outside himself. He didn't know which. He knew nothing.

On the Plateau there was no religion.

But suddenly Matt knew that there was just one way to get inside. He stepped off the access road and began hunting. Presently he found a discarded chunk of concrete, dirty and uneven. He carried it back and began pounding it against the iron gate.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANGI A head appeared on the wall. "Stop that, you half-witted excuse for a colonist bastard!"

"Let me in."

The head remained. "You are a colonist."

"Right."

"Don't move! Don't you move a muscle!" The man fumbled with something on the other side of the wall. Both hands appeared, one holding a gun, the other a telephone receiver. "Hello? Hello? Answer the phone, dammit! ... Watts? Hobart. A fool of a colonist just came walking up to the gate and started pounding on it. Yes, a real colonist! What do I do with him? .... All right, I'll ask."

The head looked down. "You want to walk or be carried?"

"I'll walk," said Matt.

"He says he'll walk. Why should he get his choice? ... Oh. I guess it's easier at that. Sorry, Watts, I'm a little shook. This never happened to me before."

The gateman hung up. His head and gun continued to peer down at Matt. After a moment the gate slid back into the wall.

"Come on through," said the gateman. "Fold your hands behind your neck."

Matt did. A gatehouse had been built against the wall on the inside. The gateman came down a short flight of steps. "Stay ahead of me," he ordered. "Start walking. That's the front entrance, where all the lights are. See? Walk toward that."

It would have been hard to miss the front entrance. The great square bronze door topped a flight of broad, shallow steps flanked by Doric pillars. The steps and the pillars were either marble or some plastic substitute.

"Stop looking back at me," snapped the gateman. His voice shook.

When they reached the door, the gateman produced a whistle and blew into it. There was no sound, but the door opened. Matt went through.

Once inside, the gateman seemed to relax. "What were you doing out there?" he asked.

Matt's fear was returning. He was here. These corridors were the Hospital. He hadn't thought past this moment. Deliberately so; for if he had, he would have ran. The walls around him were concrete, with a few metal grilles at floor level and four rows of fluorescent tubing in the ceiling. There were doors, all closed. An unfamiliar odor tinged the air, or a combination of odors.

"I said, "What were--"

"Find out at the trial!"

"Don't bite my head off. What trial? I found you on Alpha Plateau. That makes you guilty. They'll put you in the vivarium till they need you, and then they'll pour antifreeze in you and cart you away. You'll never wake up." It sounded as if the gateman was smacking his lips.

Matt's head jerked around, with the terror showing in his eyes. The gateman jumped back at the sudden move. His gun steadied. It was a mercy-bullet pistol, with a tiny aperture in the nose and a C02 cartridge doubling as a handle. For a frozen moment Matt knew he was about to shoot.

They'd carry his unconscious body to the vivarium, whatever that was. He wouldn't wake up there. They'd take him apart while he was sleeping. His last living moment dragged out and out....

The gun lowered. Matt shrank back from the gateman's expression. The gateman had gone mad. His wild eyes looked about him in horror, at the walls, at the doors, at the mercy-bullet gun in his hand, at everything but Matt Abruptly he turned and ran.

Matt heard his wail drifting back. "Mist Demons I'm supposed to be on the gate!"

At one-thirty another officer came to relieve Polly's guard.

The newcomer's uniform was not as well pressed, but he himself seemed in better condition. His muscles were gymnasium muscles, and he was casually alert at one-thirty in the morning. He waited until the long-headed man had gone, then moved to inspect the dials along the edge of Polly's coffin.

He was more thorough than the other. He moved methodically down the line, in no hurry, jotting the settings in a notebook. Then he opened two big clamps at two corners of the coffin and swung the lid back, careful not to jar it.

The figure within did not move. She was wrapped like a mummy, a mummy with a snout, in soft swaddling cloth. The snout was a bulge over her mouth and nose, the mouth pads and the arrangements for breathing. There were similar protrusions over her ears. Her arms were crossed at her waist, straitjacket fashion.

The Implementation officer looked down at her for long moments. When he turned, he showed his first signs of furtiveness. But he was alone, and no footsteps sounded in the hall.

From the head end of the coffin protruded a padded tube with a cap even more heavily padded in sponge rubber. The officer opened the cap and spoke softly.

"Don't be afraid. I'm a friend. I'm going to put you to sleep."

He peeled the soft bandage from Polly's arm, --drew his gun, and fired at the skin. Half a dozen red beads formed there, but the girl did not move. He could not have been sure that she heard him or that she felt the needles.

He closed the lid and the cap of the speaking tube.

He was perspiring freely as he watched the dials change. Presently he produced a screwdriver and went to work at the backs of the dials. When he finished, all eight dials read as they had read when he came in.

They lied. They said that Polly Tournquist was awake but motionless, conscious but deprived of any sensory stimulus. They said she was going mad by increments. Whereas Polly Tournquist was asleep. She would be asleep for the eight hours of Loren's tour of duty.

Loren wiped his face and sat down. He did not enjoy taking such risks, but it was necessary. The girl must know something, else she wouldn't be here. Now she could hold out for eight hours longer.

The man they wheeled into the organ bank operating room was unconscious. He was the same man Jesus Pietro's squad had found resting on the dead-man switch, one of those he had questioned that afternoon. Jesus Pietro was through with him-he had been tried and condemned, but in law he was still alive. It was a legal point, nothing more.

The operating room was big and busy. Against one long wall were twenty small suspended-animation tanks mounted on wheels, for moving medical supplies to and from the room next door. Doctors and internes worked quietly and skillfully at a multitude of operating tables. There were cold baths: open tanks of fluid kept at a constant 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Beside the door was a twenty-gallon tank half full of a straw-colored fluid.

Two internes wheeled the convict into the operating room, and one immediately injected a full pint of the straw-colored fluid into his arm. They moved the table next to one of the cold baths. A woman moved over to help, carefully fastening a breathing mask over the man's face. The internes tilted the table. The convict slid into the bath without a splash.

"That's the last " said one. "Oh, boy, I'm beat."

The woman looked at him with concern, a concern that might have showed in her mouth behind the mask but that could not show in her eyes. Eyes have no expression. The interne's voice had shown almost total exhaustion. "Take off, the both of you," she said. "Sleep late tomorrow. We won't need you."