“Hold it, buddy. Not yet. You've gotta be processed, so keep it on until we get out of here.”
Now what the devil did he mean by that? Gary watched them, the nervous knot again forming in his stomach. They slid out of their suits and left the building, slamming the door behind them to leave him standing there alone. Again he raised a hand and commenced undressing, noticing for the first time that his uniform didn't quite fit him, that he had a stubble of beard. Abruptly the steel door opened and a medical corpsman appeared there.
He stared at Gary professionally. “I oughtta get a medal for this,” the man announced briskly. “Maybe you got the plague.”
“And maybe I haven't!” Gary retorted. “Come on, get it over with. I want to get outside — this place gives me the willies.”
“You don't go outside, brother — not until your tests come out. Gimme your arm.”
“The hell I don't! What for?”
“The hell you don't.” The soldier reached for his arm. “Blood tests, see? You might be carrying something. We gotta be damned careful.” He plunged the needle into Gary's arm and drew forth a sample. “What type blood?”
“How do I know?” Gary said with angry impatience.
“By looking at your tag, stupid.” He reached out a swift hand to lift the chain hanging from Gary's neck, to read the inscription on the metal tag. “AB. Kinda rare, ain't you?”
“What do you mean by that crack?”
“AB ain't common around here chum, like in the Egyptians or the Chinese maybe.” He glanced at the tag again. “You're Moskowitz, huh? Well, I've seen funnier — maybe you're an Egyptian Moskowitz.”
“Get the hell out of here!” Gary was fast losing his temper, aided by a growing fear. “And bring me something to eat — I'm damned tired of C-rations.”
“Okay, okay.” The corpsman completed his work and left.
Gary sat down on the floor to wait and to brood. He waited a full half hour, worrying about the dog tag on his neck. The stolen Moskowitz tag — and the Moskowitz blood type. He hadn't thought about that. It occurred to him suddenly that he hadn't thought about many things, little things really that seemed unimportant until they reached out to push him before a firing squad. What were they doing with the lieutenant's body? He had strangled the man and later encased the body in a radiation suit, but there were no bullet holes in the suit. What did that do to his carefully prepared story of ambush, with himself the only survivor?
The personnel from Knox were not supposed to remove their suits on the journey, but they had done so, believing themselves safe from contamination so long as they did not fraternize with “enemy agents.” If then he admitted that the lieutenant had removed his suit en route and had been strangled by an enemy, it followed that Gary must have replaced the suit after the officer was dead. It also followed that both the officer and Gary had exposed themselves to the plague. That would be the certain end of him. On the other hand it was difficult to believe that the lieutenant could be strangled while wearing his suit — and there was the manufactured evidence of a bullet-scarred truck to show that the ambushers had used guns, not fingers to kill.
Bitterly, he realized he should have left the rotting officer behind. Rotting… the thought took form, shaped itself into a faint hope. It might be that they would not remove the suit from the lieutenant's body.
There were other things — he didn't know the names of people of Knox, he didn't know the history or background of Moskowitz… didn't so much as know the man's enlistment date. The serial numbers on the dog tag would give some clue to that, but he couldn't guess the accurate answer from the numbers. His only chance of escaping detection there lay in the fact that serial records may have been destroyed in a ravaged Washington.
The door opened and the corpsmen entered, carrying a tray.
“Another medal — you phony Egyptian!”
“I ain't no Egyptian,” Gary flared, half frightened.
“I'll say you ain't. AB hell! You ain't no more AB than I am. In case anybody asks, you're a big fat round O. Better remember that — you might need it sometime.”
“But the tag says—”
“The tag lies like a rug, chum, but don't let it throw you. You're an early bird, ain't you?” He put down the tray. “It happened all the time, back at the beginning; they rushed them through fast and made some mistakes. I'll bet one guy out of every twenty is walking around with the wrong type on his tag — or pushing up flowers. Sloppy work, but you can't help it. Only trouble is, if you ever need a transfusion in a hurry and they pump the wrong kind into you — bingo.”
“Maybe it changed,” Gary suggested. “It was a long time ago.”
“Nope.” The soldier shook his head and grinned at Gary's ignorance. “It never changes, no more than fingerprints. You was born with O and you'll die with O. Now eat up. I'll bring in water and a can pretty soon; you're stuck here until the tests prove out. Two or three days maybe.”
“What for?” he asked again. “Why the tests?”
“To see if you picked up anything, stupid. If you're carrying any plague germs around, we'll soon know it.” He backed away. “And I'll earn that damned medal.”
“That's a hell of a note. Listen — do me a favor. Put in for a pass for me. I've been out of circulation too long.”
“A pass he wants yet!”
Gary didn't get the pass — he never waited for it, never waited out the three days. He knew with certainty what those tests would reveal, knew beyond doubt that the test tubes or whatever things they used would point to his two years of wandering around the quarantined land, would shout what must be in his blood. Freedom was too near to wait three days.
He did nothing the first night, other than lie in the decontamination chamber and wait quietly. He called for and received repeated trays of food, a great quantity of water, the needed things a half-starved man would demand. And he noted with each opening and closing of the door that it was not locked from without. A single sentry stood outside, seldom at attention. They did not consider him a dangerous risk. Twice during the first night he sent out for water and once asked for more cigarettes. The sentry brought them, laid them in the doorway and retreated a few paces. Gary opened the door and hauled the things inside.
On the second day the medical corpsman brought paper and pencil and commenced questioning; he began in the routine way with Gary — or Moskowitz's immediate and current history, but quickly moved on to the journey made by the three truckloads of gold, and what happened to them. Gary hid his relief and spun an acceptable story. He included a vivid description of the country through which he had supposedly passed, and for spite threw in mention of the thousands of people they had seen, people hospitable and otherwise.
The questioner's head jerked up in disbelief. “Huh?”
“Huh, what?” It seemed that Gary had him hooked.
“Thousands of enemy agents?”
“I don't know if they were enemy agents or not,” Gary said casually, “but there were thousands of them all right. I don't mean in the cities — all the cities are dead and bombed out, we avoided those, but the little towns are full of people. Every time we passed through a whistle stop the whole damned population rushed out to greet us — just like those towns in France I went through.”
“But there can't be people over there, our people. They're all dead.”
Gary stared at him. “Why should I lie about it?”
“Well— I dunno.”
“All right. The burgs are full, believe me. Farmers in the field — a lot of the horses are dead, I guess, because I saw men pulling plows.” He hid a grin, watching the corpsman write down what he had said. The corpsman would do more than that — he would spread it around the camp. He went on with his story, bringing it up to the point where the ambush had wiped out everyone but him and the lieutenant — and the lieutenant had died a few hours later. And say — did the lieutenant get a military funeral?