He’d been shot. That was the answer, of course. The major had shot him and he was in a hospital. But where had he been hit? Arm? Both arms seemed to be all right. Leg? Both legs were all right, too. No pain. No bandages. No casts.
The colonel said: «He came to for just a minute, Doc, and now he’s off again.»
«He’ll be all right,» said Doc. «Just give him time. You gave him too big a charge, that’s all. It’ll take a little time.»
«We must talk to him.»
«You’ll have to wait.»
There was silence for a moment.
Then: «You’re absolutely sure he’s human?»
«We’ve gone over every inch of him,» said Doc. «If he isn’t human, he’s too good an imitation for us ever to find out.»
«He told me he had cancer,» the colonel said. «Claimed he was dying of cancer. Don’t you see, if he wasn’t human, if there was something wrong, he could always try to make it look …»
«He hasn’t any cancer. Not a sign of it. No sign he ever had it. No sign he ever will.»
Even with his eyes shut, Peter felt that he was agape with disbelief and amazement. He forced his eyes to stay closed, afraid that this was a trick.
«That other doctor,» the colonel said, «told Peter Chaye four months ago he had six more months to live. He told him …»
Doc said, «Colonel, I won’t even try to explain it. All I can tell you is that the man lying on that bed hasn’t got cancer. He’s as healthy a man as you would wish to find.»
«It isn’t Peter Chaye, then,» the colonel stated in a dogged voice. «It’s something that took over Peter Chaye or duplicated Peter Chaye or …»
Doc said, «Now, now, Colonel. Let’s stick to what we know.»
«You’re sure he’s a man, Doc?»
«I’m sure he’s a human being, if that is what you mean.»
«No little differences? Just one seemingly unimportant deviation from the human norm?»
«None,» Doc said, «and even if there were, it wouldn’t prove what you are after. There could be minor mutational difference in anyone. The human body doesn’t always run according to a blueprint.»
«There were differences in all that stuff the machine gave away. Little differences that came to light only on close examination—but differences that spelled out a margin between human and alien manufacture.»
«All right, then, so there were differences. So those things were made by aliens. I still tell you this man is a human being.»
«It all ties in so neatly,» the colonel declared. «Chaye goes out and buys this place—this old, abandoned farm. He’s eccentric as hell by the standards of that neighborhood. By the very fact of his eccentricity, he invites attention, which might be undesirable, but at the same time his eccentricity might be used to cover up and smooth over anything he did out of the ordinary. It would be just somebody like him who’d supposedly find a strange machine. It would be …»
«You’re building up a case,» said Doc, «without anything to go on. You asked for one little difference in him to base your cockeyed theory on—no offense, but that’s how I, as a doctor, see it. Well, now let’s have one little fact—fact, mind you, not guess—to support this idea of yours.»
«What was in that barn?» demanded the colonel. «That’s what I want to know. Did Chaye build that machine in there? Was that why it was destroyed?»
«The sheriff destroyed the barn,» the doctor said. «Chaye had nothing to do with it.»
«But who gave the gun to the sheriff? Chaye’s machine, that’s who. And it would be an easy matter of suggestion, mind control, hypnotism, whatever you want to call it …»
«Let’s get back to facts. You used an anesthetic gun on this man. You’ve held him prisoner. By your orders, he had been subjected to intensive examination, a clear invasion of his privacy. I hope to God he never brings you into court. He could throw the book at you.»
«I know,» the colonel admitted reluctantly. «But we have to bust this thing. We must find out what it is. We have got to get that bomb back!»
«The bomb’s what worries you.»
«Hanging up there,» the colonel said, sounding as if he’d shuddered. «Just hanging up there!»
«I have to get along,» replied the doctor. «Take it easy, Colonel.»
The doctor’s footsteps went out the door and down the corridor, fading away. The colonel paced up and down a while then sat down heavily in a chair.
Peter lay in bed, and one thought crashed through his brain, one thought again and again:
I’m going to live!
But he hadn’t been.
He had been ready for the day when the pain finally became too great to bear.
He had picked his ground to spend his final days, to make his final stand.
And now he had been reprieved. Now, somehow, he had been given back his life.
He lay in the bed, fighting against excitement, against a growing tenseness, trying to maintain the pretense that he still was under the influence of whatever he’d been shot with.
An anesthetic gun, the doctor had said. Something new, something he had never heard of. And yet somewhere there was a hint of it. Something, he remembered, about dentistry—a new technique that dentists used to desensitize the gums, a fine stream of anesthetic sprayed against the gums.
Something like that, only hundreds or thousands of times stronger?
Shot and brought here and examined because of some wild fantasy lurking in the mind of a G-2 colonel.
Fantasy? He wondered. Unwitting, unsuspecting, could he have played a part? It was ridiculous, of course. For he remembered nothing he had done or said or even thought which gave him a clue to any part he might have played in the machine’s coming to the Earth.
Could cancer be something other than disease? Some uninvited guest, perhaps, that came and lived within a human body? A clever alien guest who came from far away, across the unguessed light-years?
And that, he knew, was fantasy to match the colonel’s fantasy, a malignant nightmare of distrust that dwelt within the human mind, an instinctive defense mechanism that conditioned the race to expect the worst and to arm against it.
There was nothing feared so much as the unknown factor, nothing which one must guard against so much as the unexplained.
We have to bust this thing, the colonel had said. We must find out what it is.
And that, of course, was the terror of it—that they had no way of knowing what it was.
He stirred at last, very deliberately, and the colonel spoke.
«Peter Chaye,» he said.
«Yes, what is it, Colonel?»
«I have to talk to you.»
«All right, talk to me.»
He sat up in the bed and saw that he was in a hospital room. It had the stark, antiseptic quality, the tile floor, the colorless walls, the utilitarian look—and the bed on which he lay was a hospital bed.
«How do you feel?» the colonel asked.
«Not so hot,» confessed Peter.
«We were a little rough on you, but we couldn’t take a chance. There was the letter, you see, and the slot machines and the stamp machines and all the other things and …»
«You said something about a letterhead.»
«What do you know about that, Chaye?»
«I don’t know a thing.»
«It came to the President,» said the colonel. «A month or so ago. And a similar one went to every other administrative head on the entire Earth.»
«Saying?»
«That’s the hell of it. It was written in no language known anywhere on Earth. But there was one line—one line on all the letters—that you could read. It said: ‘By the time you have this deciphered, you’ll be ready to act logically.’ And that was all anybody could read—one line in the native language of every country that got a copy of the letter. The rest was in gibberish, for all we could make of it.»