Diana was shaking her head. “Get ready to crack him,” she said to Jarvil. “Get Doris down here.” The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.
She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.
There was a small red mark between the two electrode bums. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard’s neck.
“Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.” Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to where I’d been sitting. With the corner of my eye I saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.
Charlie looked the way. I felt. He called out weakly, “Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.” She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.
He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the blood off her arms and said, “Got to change. Back in a minute.”
I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know. I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.
“What — oh, you want something for your hand.” She was half-dressed, unselfconscious. “Ask Jarvil.”
“No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?”
“Oh. Well,” she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. “It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.”
“And he tried to hang himself.”
“That’s right.” She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. “I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.”
“But, Diana … there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.”
She shrugged. “The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.”
“Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.”
She looked at me curiously. “I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.”
You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t leave a mark. “He was dead when you gave him the shot?”
“That would be my professional opinion.” Deadpan. “No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.”
“Yeah. I see.”
“Is something … what’s the matter, William?”
Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. “Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.” I opened the door. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”
She looked straight into my eyes. “That’s true.”
Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him — since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome court-martial.
The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military “Justice,” Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All I had to do was say “You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.” And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.
My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.
So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.
The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.
The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the “the buck stops here” type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.
I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me — whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficult because my language was an archaic dialect that they had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master “modern” English.
For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening — I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me — so I stopped short. Then I tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.
And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times seemed scarcely less alien than the enemy; even the near-certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause — if only I could have had Marygay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.
He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference — all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a cliché in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told! Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.
In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.
I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge he was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance. He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.