A Gift From Earth

When they finished with this convict, the organ banks would be full. In law he was still alive. But his body temperature fell fast, and his heartbeat was slowing. Eventually it stopped. The patient's temperature continued to fall. In two hours it was well below freezing, yet the straw-colored fluid in his veins kept any part of him from freezing.

In law he was still alive. Prisoners had been reprieved at this point and revived without medical ill effects, though they walked in terror for the rest of their days.

Now they lifted the convict onto an operating table. His skull was opened; an incision was made in his neck, cutting the spinal cord just below the brain stem. The brain was lifted out, carefully, for the membranes surrounding it must not be damaged. Though the doctors might deny it, there was a kind of reverence attached to the human brain, and to this moment. At this moment the convict became legally dead.

In a New York hospital a cardiectomy would have been performed first, and the prisoner would have been dead when it was over. On We Made It he would have been dead the moment his body temperature reached 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a legal point. You had to draw the line somewhere.

They flash-burned his brain and saved the ashes for urn burial. His skin came next, removed in one piece, still living. Machines did most of the work, but the machines of the Plateau were not advanced enough to work without human control. The doctors proceeded as if they were disassembling a delicate, very valuable, vastly complex jigsaw puzzle. Each unit went into a suspended-animation tank. Someone then took a tiny sample with a hypodermic, and tested it for a wide variety of rejection reactions. A transplant operation was never cut-and-dried. A patient's body would reject foreign parts unless each rejection reaction was balanced by complex biochemicals. When the tests were over, each unit was labeled in full detail and wheeled next door, into the organ banks.

Matt was lost. He wandered through the halls looking for a door labeled Vivarium. Some of the doors he passed had labels; some did not. The Hospital was huge. Chances were, he could wander for days without finding the vivarium the gateman had mentioned.

Solitary individuals passed him in the corridors, in police uniforms or in white gowns and white masks pulled down around their necks. if he saw someone coming, Matt shrank against the wall and remained perfectly still until the intruder passed. Nobody noticed him. His strange invisibility protected him well.

But he wasn't getting anywhere.

A map, that's what he needed.

Some of these doors must lead to offices. Some or all offices must have maps in them, perhaps built into wall or desk. After all, the place was so complicated. Matt nodded to himself. Here was a door, now, with a strange symbol and some lettering: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Maybe ...

He opened the door. And froze halfway through it, shocked to the core.

Glass tanks filled the room like floor-to-ceiling aquarium tanks, each subdivided into compartments. They were arranged like a labyrinth, or like the bookcases in a public library. In the first moments Matt couldn't recognize anything he saw in those tanks, but in their asymmetrical shapes and in their infinite dark shades of red, their nature was unmistakable.

He stepped all the way inside. He had abandoned control of his legs, and they moved of themselves. These flattish dark-red objects, those translucent membranes, the soft-looking blobs of alien shapes, the great transparent cylindrical tanks filled with bright-red fluid ... Yes, these had been human beings. And there were epitaphs:

Type AB, RH+. Glucose content .... Rd Corp count ...

Thyroid gland, male. Rejection classes C, 2, pn, 31. Overactive for body weight less than ...

Left humerus, live. Marrow type 0, Rh-, N, 02. Length ... IMPORTANT: Test for fit in sockets before using.

Matt closed his eyes and rested his head against one of the tanks. The glass surface was cold. It felt good against his perspiring forehead. He had always had too much empathy. Now there was a grief in him, and he needed time to mourn these strangers. Mist Demons grant they were strangers.

Pancreas. Rejection classes F, 4, pr, 21. DIABIETIC TENDENCIES: Use for pancreatic fluid secretion only. DO NOT TRANSPLANT

A door opened.

Matt slid behind the tank and watched from around the corner. The woman wore gown and mask, and she pushed something on wheels. Matt watched her transfer things from the cart into various of the larger tanks.

Somebody had just died.

And the woman in the mask was a monster. If she'd taken off her mask to reveal foot-long poison-dripping fangs, Matt couldn't have feared her more.

Voices came through the open door.

"We can't use any more muscle tissue." A woman's voice, high and querulous, with a crew lilt. The lilt didn't quite ring true, though Matt couldn't have said where it failed.

A sarcastic male voice answered. "What shall we do, throw it away?"

"Why not?"

Seconds of silence. The woman with the cart finished her work and moved toward the door. Then: "I've never liked the idea. A man died to give us healthy, living tissue, and you want to throw it away like' The closing door cut him off.

Like the remnants of a ghoul's feast, Matt finished for him.

He was turning toward the hall door when his eye caught something else. Four of the tanks were different from the others. They sat near the hall door, on flooring whose scars and shaded color showed where suspended-animation tanks had stood. Unlike the suspended-animation tanks, these did not have heavy machinery-filled bases. Instead, machinery rested in the tanks themselves, behind the transparent walls. It might have been aerating machinery. The nearest tank contained six small human hearts.

Unmistakably they were hearts. They beat. But they were tiny, no bigger than a child's fist. Matt touched the surface of the tank, and it was blood warm. The tank next to it held five-lobed objects which had to be livers; but they were small, small.

That did it. In what seemed one leap, Matt was out in the hall. He leaned against the wall, gasping, his shoulders heaving, his eyes unable to see anything but those clusters of small hearts and livers.

Someone rounded the corner and came to an abrupt stop.

Matt turned and saw him: a big, soft man in an Implementation-police uniform. Matt tried his voice. It came out blurred but comprehensible: "Where's the vivarium?"

The man stared, then pointed. "Take a right and you'll find a flight of stairs. Up one flight, take a right, then a left, and watch for the sign. It's a big door with an alarm light; you can't miss it."

"Thanks." Matt turned toward the stairs. His stomach hurt, and there was a shivering in his hands. He wished he could drop where he was, but he had to keep going.

Something stung his arm.

Matt turned and raised his arm in the same instant. Already the sting was gone; his arm was as numb as a haunch of meat. Half a dozen tiny red drops bedewed his wrist.

The big, soft man regarded Matt with a puzzled frown. His gun was in his hand.

The galaxy spun madly, receding.

Corporal Halley Fox watched the colonist fall, then bolstered his gun. What was the world coming to? First the ridiculous secrecy about the ramrobot. Then, two hundred prisoners swept up in one night, and the whole Hospital going crazy trying to cope. And now! A colonist wandering the Hospital corridors, actually asking for the vivarium!

Well, he'd get it. Halley Fox lifted the man and slung him over his shoulder, grunting with the effort. Only his face was soft. Report it and forget it. He shifted his burden and staggered toward the stairs.