"You. That's what I said, man! You're on orders today. Come on to the tissue bank!"
11
• The group of scrapped men waited for the elevator.
The man next to Ryeland was whispering feverishly under his breath, his eyes fixed on the elevator door as though it were the gate to hell. He caught Ryeland looking at him and threw him a wild smile. "First time for you? Me, too. But I figure it won't be much, you know."
"All right, all right." The guards began to herd them into the opening elevator door. "Move along, now!"
The elevator dropped swiftly and let them out in an underground hall. Blue asepsis lamps winked on the walls, a hum from the air ducts told of purifiers at work. The guards ordered them to sit down. There were a dozen long, wooden benches. The waiting room was not at all crowded, though there were twenty or more walking cadavers in it. Ryeland looked around at them. Some seemed to have all their faculties and parts; if there was anything missing, it was not such as would appear on the surface. Many showed signs of being nibbled away—a leg missing, an ear, a finger or two. And some were so much prosthesis, so little flesh and blood, that it was a wonder that the surgeons could find anything left to take from them.
The nervous man switched seats to join Ryeland and hissed in his ear: "See, the way I see it, they're not going to take much the first time. Why should they? For instance, your body might not transplant right. They can't tell. They'll have to do a couple little jobs first and see how they take, before they try anything big. I'm positive of that, friend. . ." He stopped as the door opened, his eyes like a tortured kitten's. But it was only a nurse walking through, and she paid no attention to them.
Ryeland took time from his own worries to comfort the man. "That's right," he said. "That figures." It didn't, of course; the Plan knew all it had to know about them already. But the nervous man seized at the reassurance.
He babbled: "Now, all we have to worry about is something little.
Maybe some clumsy oaf lost a couple of fingers somewhere. Well, they'll take a finger. Or a couple of fingers. . He glanced wonderingly at his hand. "A couple of fingers. They'll take—But what's that? You can spare them. Or a foot, maybe. But they aren't going to take anything big the first time, because—"
The door opened.
A young, slim guard walked in. He was bored, and the look he gave the waiting cadavers was not intended for anything human. "Eckroth?" he called, reading from a list. The man next to Ryeland jumped. "Come on!"
The nervous man stared frantically at Ryeland, swallowed, stood up and left, into a door that closed, silent and final, behind him.
Ryeland sat and waited.
One by one the cadavers were summoned to their operating rooms to give to the Plan what the Plan demanded of them. Ryeland watched them, because it was better to think of them than to think about himself: the oldster with the fire-blue eyes, weeping into the maze of tubes that had replaced his breathing apparatus; the young girl with the curiously flat dressings along one side of her body; the men and women of all sizes and descriptions. Ryeland was almost the last of them all to be called.
But at last it was his turn. A nurse beckoned to him. He stood up, feeling strangely empty. A queer premonitory tingling raced all over his peripheral nervous system, like a pain looking for its proper place to settle down and begin aching.
What would it be? A foot, an arm, a set of teeth, some internal organs?
"Oh, come on" said the nurse, looking ruffled. She was a pretty girl with red hair. She even wore a ring on her finger. Ryeland marveled. This girl was engaged! Somewhere there was a Plan-fearing man who looked at her with affection and warmth. And, here, she was the embodiment of something that was going to deprive Steve Ryeland of a part of his body.
He walked stiffly after her. There was a roar in his ears: the drumming of his blood. It was very loud; he felt his heart thumping, very strong. Colors were bright, an antiseptic odor in the room was very sharp. His senses missed nothing. He felt the stiffness of his worn red uniform. The blue glare of the sterilamps was painfully bright.
He was in a small room, dominated by a neat, high operating table, stainlessly white.
Ryeland looked at the table and licked his lips.
Unexpectedly the nurse giggled. "Oh, I swear. You cadavers take everything so hard. Don't you know why you're here?"
Ryeland nodded stiffly. He knew very well. Still, it was odd that he didn't see the bright metal gleam of instruments.
She said, humorously exasperated: "I don't think you do. Your blood, friend. That's all I'm going to take from you today. Maybe next time it will be different, of course. But right now we only need half a liter of your good red blood."
Rat on his back, with his arm strapped to the table and a crisp, cool sheet covering his legs, Ryeland lay. He was watching his blood slowly fill a liter beaker up to a measured mark. His blood was wine-purple colored, and it seemed to flow very slowly.
There was nothing at all painful about the process. Of course, it wasn't exactly pure pleasure. There was a queer jumpy sensation in his skin, a sort of warning of something that might hurt—as though the nerve-ends, evolved to cope with grosser wounds and warn of in-stanter dangers, did not know quite what to tell the brain, and could only express a sort of worry. The tube made a faint vulgar sound from time to time, like a siphon sucking air, but there was no other noise. The nurse had left him. It was amazing how still the world was. . .
And it was amazing how clearly Ryeland could think.
He was tranquil.
More than that, he knew he was tranquil.
More still, he was beginning to realize that he had been tranquil— stupidly, crazily tranquil—ever since he had arrived in the Body Bank! And so was everyone else! It accounted for the cheerful amputees and his heedless roommates at the Dixie Presidents. Tranquil! But it was not natural, and so it was due to drugs.
Ryeland lay lazily watching the thick froth at the top of the beaker of his blood and marveled that he had not seen it before. Even the man who wrote the diary had never seen it, though he had come so close. Drugs!
The Plan of Man understood that there were circuits in the human brain not subject to reason. Self-preservation was one of them. The Machine would not risk a sudden flare-up of that instinct. The Machine must have known that, whatever the mood of the Body Bank's raw materials as they went in, however carefully conditioned to their duties under the Plan of Man, the threat of dismemberment and death could upset all conditioning.
Therefore the Machine had taken steps. The obvious step—how was it that no one had seen it?—was to flood the cadavers with tranquilizing drugs.
The nurse came in. She tapped the beaker lightly with a finger, fussed with the tubes, and in a moment deftly removed the needle from Ryeland's arm. She was humming to herself. She pressed an alcohol pad over the little puncture in his arm and ordered: "Hold it that way to keep the pad in place."
Ryeland was hardly listening. Tranquilizing drugs, he thought, like an echo; it explained everything. It explained why D.W.H.'s careful plans had come to nothing; before they could mature, the drive that would make them reality had been sapped. It explained why Ryeland himself had loafed for irretrievable days. The only astonishing thing was that he had found out.
The nurse straightened his arm, plucked off the pad and pointed. "Out that way."
Ryeland started obediently out the door, then stopped, shocked to alertness at last.
An orderly was guiding an electric stretcher down the hall. On it, his eyes closed, lay the nervous man from Ryeland's group of donors. He looked to be asleep. Surely he had lost something—but what? Arms were there, legs showed under the sheet, there was no mark on the motionless face.