“Then why were you sent here?”
“They can’t cure me,” he said. “They use Earth as a leper colony.”
This was all very unsatisfying. All these centuries we’d hoped for higher technology, wisdom. And what tumbled down from space? Outpatients. I sighed, tamping my pipe down with my thumb. “You want our medical opinion?”
“Now you understand. On my world the sickness is called by various names, but none as accurate as ‘the Plague.’ What I mean to say, Dr. Popper, Henry — may I call you Henry? — is that I have been exiled until either this disease passes or your culture discovers a remedy. Your research in this area skyrocketed in Vienna in 1884, Gottingen in 1916, then at Duquesne, Stony Brook, and Northwestern ten years ago. Don’t be alarmed. It’s not contagious. The Plague is not a disorder of your world, to my knowledge. It can’t be passed physically, or picked up by sitting on toilet seats at the Trailways station.”
“Of course.” I smiled, just faintly, frightened, and took another step back. I couldn’t shake the urge to spread tartar sauce on him. “Can you tell me the symptoms?”
“Well,” he said, touching the tips of his tentacles, looking away, “for no apparent reason, and without the slightest warning, I experience feelings of first a tightness in the cerebral area, a tremor or unpleasant quiver, then a shock of dislocation, cold sweat, followed by vomiting, vertigo — the sense of falling, the inability to ascertain precisely what things mean, and the peculiar sense that I am somehow dependent upon everything in my perceptual field: xlanthia, hbeds, or sploks, which have a curious opacity, a marvelous beauty”—here he burst into tears—“yet threaten to absorb me, engulf me, annihilate me completely, because I am, in a word, deeply and inexorably different from them.” His anguish exploded in my mind. “It’s nauseating, do you see?”
“Steady there.” I reached to pat his shoulder or knee — it was hard to tell which. “You don’t have to go on.” The effort to explain had greatly excited him — he was smoking. He stared, blankly, like a shock victim. Gambling, I gave him Trional. “Just tell me how to get out and I’ll bring help—”
“So,” he said, cutting me off, five tentacles slithering over what might have been a wet forehead, “so I feel a horrified fascination for the sploks and so desire (and yet dread) them that I yearn for their recognition, shift from melancholy to euphoria, and think of nothing else, which”—his voice quavered—“has led other Plague victims to irascibility, violence, moodiness, a morbid fascination with Time, boredom, the loss of memory, and, worst of all, thermogenesis.”
“Beg pardon?” I asked. “Thermogenesis?”
“It’s what you call internal combustion. The Plague affects us that way, physically. The final stage is extinction. We explode.”
“When you say explode, do you mean explode?”
“Like Chinese fireworks,” he said. “Like an MTV music-video.”
“Horrible!” I swallowed. Then: “Did I come in through that corridor or—”
“You haven’t heard the worst.” His voice was frail. “I can thermogenerate at any moment.”
I gave the Creature a dose of diphenylhydantoin.
It’s not every day a Negro doctor is delivered a new medical anomaly with, as it were, a red ribbon around it. It was, accordingly, as you see, an awful affliction. Awful! He now stood only as high as my chest. The room was full of smoke. Psychosomatic, I’d have to say, and how it might be cured was more than I could have told you, but a man who has survived Carbondale for thirty years is an eternal optimist. We had but to isolate the cause of the Plague to name it, but name it to know its nature. The Nobel Prize would be a gift to whoever diagnosed, then cured this uncanny disease. It was front-page stuff. Medical history, I hoped, might even rename it after me. Realizing I would need help for a real examination, I fumbled into my coat, and hurried to the Telecipher for my bag. It was then that, looking up, I saw — or thought I saw — a man with a crowbar crack the lock to a farmhouse full of cats, enter, which startled an old woman inside, then smash her head like a melon. Was this Anna? As he tore at her dress, there was a break in the film, some markings, then I saw another woman, younger, and quietly eagle-rocking her hips under a boy on a high bed with a carved oak headboard. She wore a pink slip like the one I had bought last year at Penney’s for Mildred. Peering at the screen, I saw…
“That’s my wife!” I croaked. “Can you turn this thing up?”
The Creature increased the volume. “Would you like the odors, too? This device, as far as I understand it…”
I missed whatever he said next, for now I heard the suction of sweating bodies, whiffed the venereal, fishlike bouquet of love. My old woman sighed, “Oh, Doctor…” I leaned forward, sweating from the soles of my feet upward, fingers in my beard; then, in disbelief, I saw Gary Freeman, his back glistening with perspiration, pull on a pair of Danger High Voltage slacks, and dry Mildred with one of my best Hawaiian shirts. Chuckling, he held it up to his face. “Does Henry really wear this shit?” My stomach tightened. My throat squeezed as if in a fist. On Mildred’s walnut bureau, a crumpled Trojan lay atop a copy of The Joy of Classical Piano. I closed my eyes, counted twenty, turned my face from the screen, then opened my lids quickly. They fell to it again. They shook my picture off the wall.
“You’re the only medicine I need,” groaned Mildred.
I had cardiac arrest for the rest of my life. Too weak to stand, I sat heavily on the platform, opened my bag, took out the sphygmometer, and checked my blood pressure: 140 over 110.
The Creature gently placed a tentacle on my shoulder. “Come away, Henry.” He adjusted the Telecipher—“It seems we are both strangers here, no?”—which responded by flashing from my bedroom to images of his Lifeworld — a low-gravity planet in the Alpha Centauri-A galaxy, a star system much like our own — but I was too shaken to pay attention. I pulled loose my collar. How in heaven’s name could she do this to me? Trembling, I gave myself a shot of Dilantin and closed my eyes. They were right, Gary and Mildred; I was wrong. You couldn’t really fault Mildred or the boy if, as the new morality said, a man like me, an antique Negro with my close-cropped haircut, heavy glasses that diffused my pupils, Murray’s hair pomade, and funny Old Testament ways, was a relic — the product of ideas obsolete before I was born. By the way the world reckoned things, I was, at fifty-eight, Victorian, out of fuel now and running on the fumes. Old and crapped out. A pain corkscrewed through my chest. Should I weep? Should I call my attorney? Should I return to the only thing in this world that gave my life ballast: my work? I wheeled away, still flushed with confusion, from the Telecipher with this in mind, only to discover that the Creature had in my moment of confusion gone critical and was now so sensitive and overwrought that the slightest contact with objects in the saucer made him wince. “I want to say God bless you, Henry, and thank you for trying.” He smiled sickly at me. He was no taller than my knee. His mouth slipped sideways, then he fell, his figure forming an X that seemed to obliterate everything. “The idea has just occurred to me that all phenomena are products of my ego.”
Poor creature, he was past helping.
“You have to tell me how to get out.” I lifted his head; it fell back, heavy and soft, like a bag. “Do you know how the door opens?”
Evidently, he did not know.
“I’m not Schweitzer!” I said. “Where’s the key?”
In the terror of seeing him die instantly, the explosion going through me like a shock, and in the terror of being certain that without the Creature I was trapped, I backed away, then toward him, my terror greatest of all when I found no Creature there, merely vapor spiraling from a pool of black serum.