“Very bad,” Joe said again.
“You mean . . . my heart—”
“Yours. Certainly.”
Cramer started to laugh. This Joe, he thought, was all the character he looked to be. “What’s keeping me alive?” he asked, wiping his eyes. He pressed his hand to his chest, felt for his wrist, and stopped laughing. He had no heartbeat, no pulse.
Joe said seriously, “But I gave you another.”
“You said you weren’t a doctor,” Cramer said.
“But the heart is no problem for a doctor! It is more... I think you would call it an engineering problem.”
“I suppose,” Cramer said. “It’s just a pump.”
“That is correct. So I have given you another pump.”
“A better one, I hope,” Cramer said, feeling again for his pulse. He could not find it.
“Much better. This one does not wear out.”
“All right. Whatever you did, I thank you. If this is a gag, as it has to be, I still thank you. Out there on the water I didn’t much care if I lived or not, but sitting here with the sun shining I’d just as soon stick around for a while. So I thank you.”
“And I, friend Cramer, thank you. There is a bond between us, because we have saved each other’s lives. But I think my debt greater than yours. I’ll come again this evening.”
He rocked away, carrying the flask.
Cramer’s strength returned slowly. He knew that exercise would have helped him, but his arthritis seemed worse each day, and the few hobbling steps he took about his cabin were searing torment.
Joe appeared punctually in the fading light of evening, songfully inquired as to his health, and soberly examined his chest, where the incision was healing in a neat scar line.
“I’ll have to get into town,” Cramer told him one evening.
“But why not?” Joe sang. “You are almost well.”
Cramer lifted a swollen foot. “I can hardly walk. If I don’t get some medicine quickly, I won’t be able to walk at all.”
“Myself, I do not go into this town. But if I can help—”
“If you can get me as far as the Mortons’ farm, Ed or Ruth will take me into town.”
“Do you wish to go now?”
“Tomorrow,” Cramer said. “Tomorrow afternoon. The doctor isn’t in his office in the morning.”
“Tomorrow,” Joe agreed.
He carried Cramer in his arms, as easily as he might have carried a child, and deposited him on the Mortons’ front porch. Before Cramer had finished knocking he had disappeared. Ruth Morton drove Cramer to town, and helped him hobble up the steps to the doctor’s office.
Old Doc Franklin, who was some ten years younger than Cramer, looked at the swollen feet and ankles and scowled. “I thought we had this controlled.”
“So did I,” Cramer said:
“But you insist on living out there in that damp hole.”
“I ran out of pills,” Cramer said.
“Let’s see your hands. Is it bothering anywhere else?”
“My knees. My wrists, a little-, and—”
“Elbows and shoulders,” Dr. Franklin said. “In short, in just about every joint in your body. Going without your pills for a few days wouldn’t make it spread that quickly. Let’s see those knees.”
He took one look and tilted back to stare morosely at the ceiling. “I’ll give you something different,” he said. “We’ll see what happens. I’d just as soon leave the shots as a last resort, but the way this thing is progressing that last resort isn’t very far off. Now—will you move into town where someone can look after you?”
Cramer shook his head. “Not now. Later—”
“If you wait much longer, you’ll be totally disabled, and you’ll have a choice between being moved or starving to death. If you don’t starve first, before anyone notices. For a supposedly intelligent man, and a retired college professor, you are the most pig-headed—”
Cramer listened with a grin. He’d heard this little sermon before—he heard it, in fact, every time he saw Doc.
“Stop smirking,” the doctor said. “So you love fussing around the water. How much fussing will you do when you can’t get out of bed?”
“I can still look at it.”
The doctor snorted.
On an impulse, Cramer said, “How about cheeking my heart?”
The doctor turned quickly. “Heart acting up, too? Darned if you aren’t just a walking corpse.”
He reached for his stethoscope.
“Never mind,” Cramer said hastily, pushing himself to his feet. “There’s nothing wrong with my heart.”
“There’s plenty wrong with your heart. Unbutton your shirt.”
“No. I never felt better in my life—except for this.” Cramer waved a swollen hand.
“Eighty per cent of the coronary victims say the same thing, just before they keel over. Unbutton your shirt.”
Cramer picked up the prescription form, and took two painful steps toward the door. “I’ll give these pills a try.”
“You,” Dr. Franklin said, “are stubborner than any jackass I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. Talk about spoiled children! Sadie Brian is bringing that brat of hers in this afternoon for a polio shot, and after seeing you I can look forward to it. You don’t need pills, you need a good kick in the pants, and I have half a notion—”
Cramer closed the office door behind him and leaned against it, breathing heavily, shaken by the narrowness of his escape. A few more seconds in Doc’s chair, and he’d have found himself attempting to explain a scar on his chest that assuredly had not been there the last time Doc examined him—and a heart that did not beat
“Ready to go?” Ruth Morton asked.
“I certainly am,” Cramer said.
Ruth left him on a bench in the sunshine while she got his prescription filled and did his shopping for him. They drove back to the Morton farm, and Ed took charge of getting Cramer and his supplies down to his cabin.
It was evening, by then. Dusk pointed long-fingered shadows out across the water. Cramer sat tilted back in his chair by the dock, waiting for Joe.
He came swinging out of the forest, his large face white, almost luminous in the growing darkness, his voice songful as always.
“So you have returned, friend Cramer. I was concerned for you.”
Cramer nodded, wondering how to say what he had to say. He pointed at the sky, where one star winked timidly through the overcast. “You come from there, don’t you?”
Joe hesitated. “Not there,” he said finally, and pointed at the horizon. “That way. How did you know?”
“Lots of things. Your giving me a new heart. The fact that you have too many fingers, which I noticed several days ago, but didn’t want to believe. And then—”
Joe held up a seven-fingered hand. “I would have said that you have too few fingers!”
“Why are you here?”
“To study, to collect specimens—”
“To prepare for an invasion?”
“Friend Cramer! Why would my people want your distant world? There are so many closer worlds, unoccupied worlds. No, I come only to study and to collect, and when I leave it may be that none of my people will ever come here again.”
“I see. When you fixed my heart, did you do anything else?”
“But I did not fix it! It could not be fixed. I had to give you a new one, and other than that I added only a few things to your blood so the new pump could operate. Your blood was much too susceptible to what you call clotting. Now that will not happen.”
“But if my blood won’t clot, one small cut—”
“It will clot when that is necessary. It will do it better than before. But in the veins and arteries, and in the pump, it will not clot. Do you understand?”
“I hope so. You know so much, and yet you say you aren’t a doctor.”