Stranger in a Strange Land Read online

  He was still trying when the taxicab landed inside a courtyard and his signal was cut off by its walls. He tried to leave the cab, found that the door would not open—and was hardly surprised to discover that he was fast losing consciousness—

  VIII.

  JILL TOLD herself that Ben had gone off on another scent and had forgotten to let her know. But she did not believe it. Ben owed his success to meticulous attention to human details. He remembered birthdays and would rather have welched on a poker debt than have omitted a bread-and-butter note. No matter where he had gone, nor how urgently, he could have—would have!—taken two minutes in the air to record a message to her.

  He must have left word! She called his office at her lunch break and spoke with Ben’s researcher and office chief, Osbert Kilgallen. He insisted that Ben had left no message for her, nor had any come in since she had called.

  “Did he say when he would be back?”

  “No. But we always have columns on the hook to fill in when one of these things comes up.”

  “Well . . . where did he call you from? Or am I being snoopy?”

  “Not at all, Miss Boardman. He did not call; it was a statprint, filed from Paoli Flat in Philadelphia.”

  Jill had to be satisfied with that. She lunched in the nurses’ dining room and picked at her food. It wasn’t, she told herself, as if anything were wrong . . . or as if she were in love with the lunk . . .

  “Hey! Boardman! Snap out of the fog!”

  Jill looked up to find Molly Wheelwright, the wing’s dietitian, looking at her. “Sorry.”

  “I said, ‘Since when does your floor put charity patients in luxury suites?’ ”

  “We don’t.”

  “Isn’t K-12 on your floor?”

  “K-12? That’s not charity; it’s a rich old woman, so wealthy that she can pay to have a doctor watch her breathe.”

  “Humph! She must have come into money awfully suddenly. She’s been in the N.P. ward of the geriatrics sanctuary the past seventeen months.”

  “Some mistake.”

  “Not mine—I don’t allow mistakes in my kitchen. That tray is tricky—fat-free diet and a long list of sensitivities, plus concealed medication. Believe me, dear, a diet order can be as individual as a fingerprint.” Miss Wheelwright stood up. “Gotta run, chicks.”

  “What was Molly sounding off about?” a nurse asked.

  “Nothing. She’s mixed up.” It occurred to Jill that she might locate the Man from Mars by checking diet kitchens. She put the idea out of her mind; it would take days to visit them all. Bethesda Center had been a naval hospital back when wars were fought on oceans and enormous even then. It had been transferred to Health, Education, & Welfare and expanded; now it belonged to the Federation and was a small city.

  But there was something odd about Mrs. Bankerson’s case. The hospital accepted all classes of patients, private, charity, and government; Jill’s floor usually had government patients and its suites were for Federation Senators or other high officials. It was unusual for a private patient to be on her floor.

  Mrs. Bankerson could be overflow, if the part of the Center open to the fee-paying public had no suite available. Yes, probably that was it.

  She was too rushed after lunch to think about it, being busy with admissions. Shortly she needed a powered bed. The routine would be to phone for one—but storage was in the basement a quarter of a mile away and Jill wanted it at once. She recalled having seen the powered bed which belonged to K-12 parked in the sitting room of that suite; she remembered telling those marines not to sit on it. Apparently it had been shoved there when the flotation bed had been installed.

  Probably it was still there—if so, she could get it at once.

  The sitting room door was locked and she found that her pass key would not open it. Making a note to tell maintenance, she went to the watch room of the suite, intending to find out about the bed from the doctor watching Mrs. Bankerson.

  The physician was the one she had met before, Dr. Brush. He was not an interne nor a resident, but had been brought in for this patient, so he had said, by Dr. Garner. Brush looked up as she put her head in. “Miss Boardman! Just the person I need!”

  “Why didn’t you ring? How’s your patient?”

  “She’s all right,” he answered, glancing at the Peeping Tom, “but I am not.”

  “Trouble?”

  “About five minutes’ worth. Nurse, could you spare me that much of your time? And keep your mouth shut?”

  “I suppose so. Let me use your phone and I’ll tell my assistant where I am.”

  “No!” he said urgently. “Just lock that door after I leave and don’t open it until you hear me rap ‘Shave and a Haircut’, that’s a good girl.”

  “All right, sir,” Jill said dubiously. “Am I to do anything for your patient?”

  “No, no, just sit and watch her in the screen. Don’t disturb her.”

  “Well, if anything happens, where will you be? In the doctors’ lounge?”

  “I’m going to the men’s washroom down the corridor. Now shut up, please—this is urgent.”

  He left and Jill locked the door. Then she looked at the patient through the viewer and ran her eye over the dials. The woman was asleep and displays showed pulse strong and breathing even and normal; Jill wondered why a “death watch” was necessary?

  Then she decided to see if the bed was in the far room. While it was not according to Dr. Brush’s instructions, she would not disturb his patient—she knew how to walk through a room without waking a patient!—and she had decided years ago that what doctors did not know rarely hurt them. She opened the door quietly and went in.

  A glance assured her that Mrs. Bankerson was in the typical sleep of the senile. Walking noiselessly she went to the sitting room. It was locked but her pass key let her in.

  She saw that the powered bed was there. Then she saw that the room was occupied—sitting in a chair with a picture book in his lap was the Man from Mars.

  Smith looked up and gave her the beaming smile of a delighted baby.

  Jill felt dizzy. Valentine Smith here? He couldn’t be; he had been transferred; the log showed it.

  Then ugly implications lined themselves up . . . the fake “Man from Mars” on stereo . . . the old woman, ready to die, but in the meantime covering the fact that there was another patient here . . . the door that would not open to her key—and a nightmare of the “meat wagon” wheeling out some night, with a sheet concealing that it carried not one cadaver, but two.

  As this rushed through her mind, it carried fear, awareness of peril through having stumbled onto this secret.

  Smith got clumsily up from his chair, held out both hands and said, “Water brother!”

  “Hello. Uh . . . how are you?”

  “I am well. I am happy.” He added something in a strange, choking speech, corrected himself and said carefully, “You are here, my brother. You were away. Now you are here. I drink deep of you.”

  Jill felt herself helplessly split between emotions, one that melted her heart—and icy fear of being caught. Smith did not notice. Instead he said, “See? I walk! I grow strong.” He took a few steps, then stopped, triumphant, breathless, and smiling.

  She forced herself to smile. “We are making progress, aren’t we? You keep growing stronger, that’s the spirit! But I must go—I just stopped to say hello.”

  His expression changed to distress. “Do not go!”

  “Oh, I must!”

  He looked woebegone, then added with tragic certainty, “I have hurted you. I did not know.”

  “Hurt me? Oh, no, not at all! But I must go—and quickly!”

  His face was without expression. He stated rather than asked. “Take me with you, my brother.”

  “What? Oh, I can’t. And I must go, at once. Look, don’t tell anyone I was here, please!”

  “Not tell that my water brother was here?”

  “Yes. Don’t tell anyone. Uh . . . I’ll com
e back. You be a good boy and wait and don’t tell anyone.”

  Smith digested this, looked serene. “I will wait. I will not tell.”

  “Good!” Jill wondered how she could keep her promise. She realized now that the “broken” lock had not been broken and her eye went to the corridor door—and saw why she had not been able to get in. A hand bolt had been screwed to the door. As was always the case, bathroom doors and other doors that could be bolted were arranged to open also by pass key, so that patients could not lock themselves in. Here the lock kept Smith in and a bolt of the sort not permitted in hospitals kept out even those with pass keys.

  Jill opened the bolt. “You wait. I’ll come back.”

  “I shall waiting.”

  When she got back to the watch room she heard the Tock! Tock! Ti-tock, tock! . . . Tock, tock! signal that Brush had said he would use; she hurried to let him in.

  He burst in, saying savagely, “Where were you, Nurse? I knocked three times.” He glanced suspiciously at the inner door.

  “I saw your patient turn over,” she lied quickly. “I was arranging her collar pillow.”

  “Damn it, I told you simply to sit at my desk!”

  Jill knew suddenly that the man was frightened; she counterattacked. “Doctor,” she said coldly, “your patient is not my responsibility. But since you entrusted her to me, I did what seemed necessary. Since you questioned it, let’s get the wing superintendent.”

  “Huh? No, no—forget it.”

  “No, sir. A patient that old can smother in a water bed. Some nurses will take any blame from a doctor—but not me. Let’s call the superintendent.”

  “What? Look, Miss Boardman, I popped off without thinking. I apologize.”

  “Very well, Doctor,” Jill answered stiffly. “Is there anything more?”

  “Uh? No, thank you. Thanks for standing by for me. Just . . . well, be sure not to mention it, will you?”

  “I won’t mention it.” You bet your sweet life I won’t! But what do I do now? Oh, I wish Ben were in town! She went to her desk and pretended to look over papers. Finally she remembered to phone for the powered bed she had been after. Then she sent her assistant on an errand and tried to think.

  Where was Ben? If he were in touch, she would take ten minutes relief, call him, and shift the worry onto his broad shoulders. But Ben, damn him, was off skyoodling and letting her carry the ball.

  Or was he? A fret that had been burrowing in her subconscious finally surfaced. Ben would not have left town without letting her know the outcome of his attempt to see the Man from Mars. As a fellow conspirator it was her right—and Ben always played fair.

  She could hear in her head something he had said: “—if anything goes wrong, you are my ace in the hole . . . honey, if you don’t hear from me, you are on your own.”

  She had not thought about it at the time, as she had not believed that anything could happen to Ben. Now she thought about it. There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk “his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor” on an outcome dubious. Jill Boardman encountered her challenge and accepted it at 3:47 that afternoon.

  The Man from Mars sat down when Jill left. He did not pick up the picture book but simply waited in a fashion which may be described as “patient” only because human language does not embrace Martian attitudes. He held still with quiet happiness because his brother had said that he would return. He was prepared to wait, without moving, without doing anything, for several years.

  He had no clear idea how long it had been since he had shared water with this brother; not only was this place curiously distorted in time and shape, with sequences of sights and sounds not yet grokked, but also the culture of his nest took a different grasp of time from that which is human. The difference lay not in longer lifetimes as counted in Earth years, but in basic attitude. “It is later than you think” could not be expressed in Martian—nor could “Haste makes waste,” though for a different reason: the first notion was inconceivable while the latter was an unexpressed Martian basic, as unnecessary as telling a fish to bathe. But “As it was in the Beginning, is now and ever shall be” was so Martian in mood that it could be translated more easily than “two plus two makes four”—which was not a truism on Mars.

  Smith waited.

  Brush came in and looked at him; Smith did not move and Brush went away.

  When Smith heard a key in the outer door, he recalled that he had heard this sound somewhat before the last visit of his water brother, so he shifted his metabolism in preparation, in case the sequence occurred again. He was astonished when the outer door opened and Jill slipped in, as he had not been aware that it was a door. But he grokked it at once and gave himself over to the joyful fullness which comes only in the presence of one’s nestlings, one’s water brothers, and (under certain circumstances) in the presence of the Old Ones.

  His joy was muted by awareness that his brother did not share it—he seemed more distressed than was possible save in one about to discorporate because of shameful lack or failure. But Smith had learned that these creatures could endure emotions dreadful to contemplate and not die. His Brother Mahmoud underwent a spiritual agony five times daily and not only did not die but had urged the agony on him as a needful thing. His Brother Captain van Tromp suffered terrifying spasms unpredictably, any one of which should have, by Smith’s standards, produced immediate discorporation to end the conflict—yet that brother was still corporate so far as he knew.

  So he ignored Jill’s agitation.

  Jill handed him a bundle. “Here, put these on. Hurry!”

  Smith accepted the bundle and waited. Jill looked at him and said, “Oh, dear! All right, get your clothes off. I’ll help.”

  She was forced both to undress and dress him. He was wearing hospital gown, bathrobe, and slippers, not because he wanted to but because he had been told to. He could handle them by now, but not fast enough to suit Jill; she skinned him quickly. She being a nurse and he never having heard of the modesty taboo—nor would he have grasped it—they were not slowed by irrelevancies. He was delighted by false skins Jill drew over his legs. She gave him no time to cherish them, but taped the stockings to his thighs in lieu of garter belt. The nurse’s uniform she dressed him in she had borrowed from a larger woman on the excuse that a cousin needed one for a masquerade. Jill hooked a nurse’s cape around his neck and reflected that it covered most sex differences—at least she hoped so. Shoes were difficult; they did not fit well and Smith found walking in this gravity field an effort even barefooted.

  But she got him covered and pinned a nurse’s cap on his head. “Your hair isn’t very long,” she said anxiously, “but it is as long as some girls wear it and will have to do.” Smith did not answer as he had not fully understood the remark. He tried to think his hair longer but realized that it would take time.

  “Now,” said Jill. “Listen carefully. No matter what happens, don’t say a word. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t talk. I will not talk.”

  “Just come with me—I’ll hold your hand. If you know any prayers, pray!”

  “Pray?”

  “Never mind. Just come along and don’t talk.” She opened the outer door, glanced outside, and led him into the corridor.

  Smith found the many strange configurations upsetting in the extreme; he was assaulted by images he could not bring into focus. He stumbled blindly along, with eyes and senses almost disconnected to protect himself against chaos.

  She led him to the end of the corridor and stepped on a slide-away leading crosswise. He stumbled and would have fallen if Jill had not caught him. A chambermaid looked at them and Jill cursed under her breath—then was very careful in helping him off. They took an elevator to the roof, Jill being sure that she could never pilot him up a bounce tube.

  There they encountered a crisis, though Smith was not aware. He was undergoing the keen delight of sky; he had not seen sky since Mars. This sky was bright an
d colorful and joyful—a typical overcast Washington day. Jill was looking for a taxi. The roof was deserted, as she had hoped since nurses going off duty when she did were already headed home and afternoon visitors were gone. But the taxis were gone too. She did not dare risk an air bus.

  She was about to call a taxi when one headed in for a landing. She called to the roof attendant. “Jack! Is that cab taken?”

  “It’s one I called for Dr. Phipps.”

  “Oh, dear! Jack, see how quick you can get me one, will you? This is my cousin Madge—works over in South Wing—and she has laryngitis and must get out of this wind.”

  The attendant scratched his head. “Well . . . seeing it’s you, Miss Boardman, you take this and I’ll call another for Dr. Phipps.”

  “Oh, Jack, you’re a lamb! Madge, don’t talk; I’ll thank him. Her voice is gone; I’m going to bake it out with hot rum.”

  “That ought to do it. Old-fashioned remedies are best, my mother used to say.” He reached into the cab and punched the combination for Jill’s home from memory, then helped them in. Jill got in the way and covered up Smith’s unfamiliarity with this ceremonial. “Thanks, Jack. Thanks loads.”

  The cab took off and Jill took a deep breath. “You can talk now.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Huh? Whatever you like.”

  Smith thought this over. The scope of the invitation called for a worthy answer, suitable to brothers. He thought of several, discarded them because he could not translate, settled on one which conveyed even in this strange, flat speech some of the warm growing-closer brothers should enjoy. “Let our eggs share the same nest.”

  Jill looked startled. “Huh? What did you say?”

  Smith felt distressed at the failure to respond in kind and interpreted it as failure on his own part. He realized miserably that, time after time, he brought agitation to these creatures when his purpose was to create oneness. He tried again, rearranging his sparse vocabulary to enfold the thought differently. “My nest is yours and your nest is mine.”

  This time Jill smiled. “Why, how sweet! My dear, I am not sure I understand you, but that is the nicest offer I have had in a long time.” She added, “But right now we are up to our ears in trouble—so let’s wait, shall we?”