It was with shock that I realized I was alone with Prahd and Nurse Bildirjin!
In a very businesslike fashion, they stripped off my clothes. They laid me out on an operating table. Nurse Bildirjin busied herself with strapping down my wrists and ankles. It was all too reminiscent of recent traumatic experiences.
“What are you going to do?” I begged. “No gas! Don’t put me out.”
“Relax,” said Prahd. “We are simply here in our professional capacity.” He was looking at me. “My, my, what a mess!”
Nurse Bildirjin said hopefully, “What were you in? A train wreck combined with an airplane crash? All cut and black and blue. Doc, maybe he wandered into a sausage factory and they mistook him properly for a pig.”
“What are these pits on your stomach?” said Prahd. “The ones with the black bits at the bottom?”
I looked down at my stomach. “Powder grains,” I said. “Black powder.”
“Well, well,” said Prahd. “Very uncosmetic. They will have to come out. Get on it, Nurse Bildirjin, if you please.”
“Really?” she said with delight. “Isn’t that surgical, Doctor?”
“No, no,” said Prahd. “Very minor compared to the rest of this.”
She efficiently got some instruments and a pan and began to take out the first black grain.
YOW!
“Now, the rest of this is more important,” said Prahd. He began to pass a scope over my body. “Hah! Three cracked ribs. One chipped pelvis bone. Numerous blood blisters . . .”
He was taking notes. Nurse Bildirjin had some huge pliers. “I think this will be faster!” She dug in and closed them.
YEEE-OW!
“That’s one. Now for the next.”
“How many are there?” said Prahd.
“Oh, maybe two or three hundred,” said Nurse Bildirjin.
“Do you have to make such big holes?” I screamed.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I might leave some. Very unsightly.” She was digging for the next one. My Gods, this was far worse than the original blast! “Doctor, in your professional opinion,” she said conversationally as she worked, “don’t you think he is a bit dinky?”
Prahd nodded. “Yes, I would say an inch is below average. Well, well! What is this? What is this? A crushed testicle!”
“That was when I was a boy!” I said. “YEE-OW! Please, Nurse Bildirjin, not such big bites! Those powder grains are awfully small. A farmer kicked me for drowning all his breeding animals. It was a school vacation job and I was just trying to see if they could swim. He was a very . . . YEEEEE-OWWWW!”
“Well, that may have been done when you were a boy,” said Prahd. “But now the other testicle seems to be in bad shape, too. That must be an awfully tough town, New York. And especially hard on testicles.”
“It is, it is,” I said. “The primitives are . . . YEEEEEEEE-OWWWWWWWWW! . . . real (bleep) breakers.”
“I really think I had better put you under general gas,” said Prahd. “There’s hours and hours of surgery and cellular handling here. And Nurse Bildirjin seems to be working very slowly today.”
“I think this would go along faster,” she said, “if I just burned them out. See, when this electric probe touches one in the pan here, it explodes.” It went Zzzt! and smoke rose. “Now I will just go over here and turn on some pop music. . . .”
That was all it took. I fainted.
PART THIRTY-FOUR
Chapter 4
I awoke.
I couldn’t see!
I had no sense of body weight!
In fact, I didn’t have any sense at all!
Maybe I was dead!
I blinked my eyes. Yes, I could feel myself blinking my eyes.
Maybe they had thrown the rest of my body away. Maybe I was just a head!
Gods knew what a Voltarian cellologist would do. After all, I had known Dr. Crobe and how he loved to make human freaks. Maybe I was some sort of monster now. Maybe I looked like a cat or an octopus or Miss Pinch.
Worse than that: Earth psychologists and psychiatrists teach that all anyone is, is a bunch of cells evolved up the evolutionary track, that the person himself is just what his cells and body make him. There could be no doubt of the validity of their teachings, for one could be shot for not believing them. If Prahd had changed my cells, it followed by Earth psychology that my personality would suffer a total shift! So what new personality would I have? Something sweet and kind—Gods forbid! Or something whining and propitiative, like Izzy—which, of course, would be even less acceptable.
What had been changed? If I knew Prahd and Nurse Bildirjin, it would be something utterly underhanded and with some ghastly twist!
There was a sort of dim glow around. An eerie light was coming hazily through the slits of something. Gradually I could get a half-seen impression of my immediate environment.
I was in a sort of a long tub, midway between ceiling and floor. Only my head was out. The rest of me was suspended, probably by antigravity coils, in fluid: my body was not touching anything solid.
There were lights burning in the tub, probably emitting some strange wavelength. It was these, escaping through slits, that furnished the dim, greenish glow in the room. Cell catalysts of some kind? I had no real idea.
Accidentally, I moved my eyes to the right.
A window!
Through it I could see the pale sickle of a wintry moon. That was the moon of Earth! I was still on Blito-P3.
I concentrated. Maybe I could estimate how much time had gone by. If it took four and a half hours to come out from under gas—a fact of which I was uncertain—I must have been on that operating table for eight to ten hours! A very long time.
WHAT HAD THEY DONE TO ME?
It seemed to confirm my worst suspicions. A monster! Did I have flippers for feet? Did I now have tentacles for hands? Maybe a beak instead of a nose?
Horrors! What personality changes would follow such shifts?
Oh, Gods, I should never have come near those two fiends!
I had no question at all whether or not it was awful. That followed as the night the day. The only question was about the exact horror design. Dracula? Did I now have long teeth and live only on fresh blood? Would I be able to live with myself comfortably under the dictates of this new personality? I worked my jaws experimentally to see if they were now designed for severing jugular veins.
My face was bandaged right up to the eyes!
WHAT HAD THEY DONE???????????
I fussed and fumed and fretted through that dark and horrible night.
At least three centuries of worry later, dawn came. Only another century after that, possibly about nine according to the bleak sun through the window, Dr. Prahd Bittlestiffender came in.
I found I could turn my head and speak. “You put me out!”
He smiled. A very bad sign. He began to read meters and gauges around the suspended tub. When he had noted them all down on a chart, he looked at me and said, “I had to. You kept screaming even when you fainted. Nurse Bildirjin couldn’t even hear her favorite radio program. It’s the Hoochi-Hoochi Boys and Their Electric Cura Irizvas. She’s only sixteen, you know, and she’s a fan of theirs. They come on every day at . . .”
I knew the tactic. Trying to get me off the subject and lull my suspicions. “You did something dreadful,” I snarled. “You cellologists are all alike!”
“No, no. The work was just very extensive, that’s all. You have no idea how bashed up you’ve let yourself become in that strange career you have. Old, old injuries and wounds. A lot of improperly treated bone breaks. You apparently have not been in the habit of seeking professional care. I even took a coin out of your kidney.”
“Aha!” I said. “You did all this just to recover a coin and enrich yourself!”
“No, no. It was only a two-cent piece from the Planet Modon. Somebody must have shot it at you. I put it in your wallet so your accounts will balance. But all that aside, it was this last esc
apade that could have crippled you for the rest of your days. I even had to replace three square feet of skin entirely: it had some of the strangest things in it. In that town you call New York, the one that kept coming up in your screams, you surely must have been running with a rough crowd.”
“You didn’t do anything else?”
“No, I just put you together.”
The day I believe a cellologist won’t ever dawn. “You didn’t change anything?”
“Well, I had to work on your genitals a bit.”
“I knew it!” I screamed. “I knew you’d do something awful if you could put me out!”
“No, no. All I did was normalize things a bit. Purely routine cellological work. Well, bye-bye now. One of the gangsters I fixed doesn’t like his new face: says it reminds him of somebody called J. Edgar Hoover. But that isn’t odd because that’s where I got it from. I need better picture books. I’ll get some on my own when my pay starts.”
I frowned so sourly at this hint that he left.
Oh, I didn’t like the looks of things at all. I know when people are hiding things from me. But I was helpless. I could only move my eyes and my neck and talk through the bandages on my face.
I was more certain than ever that Prahd had done me in.
The only question was, exactly how?
PART THIRTY-FOUR
Chapter 5
Throughout that whole morning, I lay suspended in that (bleeped) tub and stewed and fumed.
I could see a Turkish tree through the window and the nameplate—Zanco Cell Catalyst Growth Machine, Model 16 Magnaspeed—on the tub rim above my face. The tree did not have the power to occupy the mind very long. The nameplate, in Voltarian script, was far more thought stimulating. WHAT was it growing? Bird feet?
I couldn’t see my body. And after the two-thousandth reading, the nameplate was no more informative than it had been the first time.
One’s imagination can become overactive.
Firmly, I steeled myself to shut off speculation on future form and the effect it inevitably would have upon my personality and character.
I wondered if I would be fed. I wasn’t hungry but maybe starving me to death was part of their dastardly plot.
The shadows on the tree said it must be about noon.
The door opened.
Nurse Bildirjin! She was dressed in a starched white nurse’s uniform and cap. She was not carrying a tray. She had a notebook and chart in her hands. She went around reading all the meters or whatever there was to record on the outside of the tub. She sent a glance or two at my face. She looked awfully sly!
I decided to speak, regardless of consequences. Maybe I could get some information out of her.
“Where’s my food?” I said.
“Oh, you don’t have to eat. You’re connected to the fluids and containers in the tub.”
“Give me a mirror,” I said.
“I’m sorry. It’s not allowed. Patients can get upset.”
“What did you two do to me?” I grated.
She faked a look of utter surprise.
I knew she wouldn’t answer. I changed the subject. “I’m going crazy just floating here.”
“Oh,” she said, “I thought you had arrived there a long time ago, Sultan Bey.” She gave a nasty, sniggering laugh at her own joke.
I didn’t laugh.
“But,” she said, “I wouldn’t want any complaints being circulated about our care of patients.”
She left. She came back in about three minutes. She was carrying a radio on a strap. She hung it somewhere on the wall above and behind my head. She put some earphones on her ears. As she tuned in, leaking from under the pads I could hear the Istanbul hot pop station.
She put the earphones over my ears. She turned it up very loud. She left.
I don’t care for commercials about bubble gum and camel feed. But everybody in Turkey these days seemed to be listening to hot pop.
I couldn’t take the earphones off or change the station.
As the hours wore on, I found that the Goat Guys must be especially popular for they played their records frequently. And at least once in every hour, they played their latest hit. With flutes and drums and snarls and roars, it went:
You are my monster,
I am your camel.
You make me crazy,
The way you play.
I only wonder,
Why my dear mother
Bought strychnine
And asked you here today.
At first, I was sort of detached about it. Then I began to realize that they must be playing it for me as a sort of request. It fitted my case pretty exactly when you got right down to it. I even invented a sort of personality test to go with it. Each time the news came on, I would fill in the interval of Arabs not getting along with Arabs with searching probes into my reactions to the word strychnine.
Since the cells and body are the only things which determine personality, and if I could detect any change of reaction in myself to the word strychnine, it followed that from this I would be able to work out exactly what they had done to me physically. It didn’t work.
Fortunately, the station was off the air for several hours each night and I could get some sleep.
About three times a day someone would come in and read the meters. But as I had earphones on, they presumed I couldn’t hear anything they said and so didn’t bother to answer anything I said.
For the next eight days, the only real change I could detect was a snowstorm that whitened up the tree for a day. The boughs then gradually, bit by bit, from wind, lost the whiting.
I began to believe that for the rest of eternity I would just float here without sensation, detached from every world except that of hot pop and camel feed, while somewhere in another world, Arabs fought Arabs and mothers bought strychnine.
But, one morning, just as I had become accustomed to it, my life in the Zanco Model 16 Magnaspeed came to an abrupt and shocking end.
PART THIRTY-FOUR
Chapter 6
It was about 11:00 AM by the cold sun in the window.
Prahd walked in.
He was followed by two orderlies and a cart of instruments, gas canisters and masks.
The clatter smashed through “You Are My Monster.” I looked at this invasion in sudden fear.
Prahd took the earphones off me. “I’ve come to disconnect you,” he said.
He held up his right hand.
An orderly put an anesthesia mask in it.
“But . . .” I started to say.
The mask was over my face and I was out!
I came to after what seemed to be a space of two seconds.
I was lying in a bed. I was in a different room. I had a sheet over me. Over and under the sheet there were straps. I could not move my arms or legs or lift my body.
They had done something else to me! I was sure of it. But no, nothing much could happen in two seconds.
I turned my head. A very thin, low sun was coming in the window. It must be afternoon. It hadn’t been two seconds. It had been 11:00 AM. It must now be 3:00 PM. Plenty of time to do something else nasty!
I found I could flex something at the end of my arms. I managed to get a hand in view. Oh, thank Gods! Not flippers. They were fingers! I could move and control them. They weren’t fakes. They were mine.
Somewhere toward the bottom of the bed I could feel the canvas ankle cuffs. I stirred that extremity. The sheet lifted slightly. By craning my neck I could see toes. I wiggled them. Oh, thank Gods they were not hoofs! They were my toes! I tried the other one. Toes on both feet! Oh, thank Gods!
A clatter at the door.
Nurse Bildirjin came in pushing a cart with food on it. She was all starched and crisp looking. All smiles. Was there something sly in that smile? “How about some breakfast?” she said.
BREAKFAST! Oh, my Gods, they had been working on me another twenty hours! I looked anxiously at the food. Maybe they had given me the stomach of a go
at. Was it hay on that cart? No, just a couple of boiled eggs and some kahve. However, it did not dispel my fears. I knew they had done something.
She didn’t let me use my hands, which was suspicious enough. She fed me with a spoon and gave me the kahve through a straw. And all the time she was humming a little tune. I recognized it: “You Are My Monster”! Oh Gods, what had they done?
I tried to read it on her face. She was a very pretty girl, though young. Raven black hair, a tan complexion, even, white teeth, full lips, big black eyes capable of considerable expression. And very well developed in spite of her being only sixteen. But she was a woman and treachery could not be far off. Anybody can tell you that treachery and beauty go hand in hand. That’s why you have to kill songbirds wherever found. But where women are concerned, it’s the other way around. Where killing is concerned, they always choose me as the first target of choice. Piled onto earlier experience, Krak with her hypnohelmets, Miss Pinch with her red pepper and even dear Utanc with her credit cards proved that beyond any doubt whatever! I was learning to be wary. Nurse Bildirjin undoubtedly had something up her sleeve!
She straightened up her tray and gave it a push toward the door. She smiled at me very cheerfully: a very bad sign!
Then she went to the foot of the bed.
She lifted the sheet slightly and looked up under it. “That’s what I wanted to see,” she said.
Oh, Gods! What had she looked at?
They HAD done something!
It was too much for my already unbalanced wits. I screamed, “PRAHD! PRAHD! PRAHD!”
Nurse Bildirjin was smiling all over herself. “If you mean Doktor Muhammed,” she said, citing his Earth name, “I’ll get him for you. Oh, this is great.”
In under a minute young Dr. Prahd (alias Doktor Muhammed Ataturk) came in, followed by Nurse Bildirjin.
He walked over and exposed my chest. There were a couple cup bandages there. He pulled them off and took some chest hair with them.
“You had me under another twenty hours!” I raved at him. “What have you done now that you haven’t already done?!”
He pulled the sheet down further, found two more cups on my abdomen and pulled them off. “Tube holes. They’ve healed very nicely. After you come out of a Magnaspeed, the tube holes have to be closed and healed.”