The doctors went back to their drugs and tried ancient, simple remedies - morphine and caffeine to counteract each other, and a rough massage to make him dream again, so that the telepath could pick it up.
There was no further result that day, or the next.
Meanwhile the Earth authorities were getting restless. They thought, quite rightly, that the hospital had done a good job of proving that the patient had not been on Earth until a few moments before the robots found him on the grass. How had he gotten on the grass?
The airspace of Earth reported no intrusion at all, no vehicle marking a blazing arc of air incandescing against metal, no whisper of the great forces which drove a planoform ship through space2.
(Crudelta, using faster-than-light ships, was creeping slow as a snail back toward Earth, racing his best to see if Rambo had gotten there first.)
On the fifth day, there was the beginning of a breakthrough.
Elizabeth had passed.
This was found out only much later, by a careful check of the hospital records.
The doctors only knew this much: Patients had been moved down the corridor, sheet-covered figures immobile on wheeled beds.
Suddenly the beds stopped rolling.
A nurse screamed.
The heavy steel-and-plastic wall was bending inward. Some slow, silent force was pushing the wall into the corridor itself.
The wall ripped.
A human hand emerged.
One of the quick-witted nurses screamed, “Push those beds! Push them out of the way.”
The nurses and robots obeyed.
The beds rocked like a group of boats crossing a wave when they came to the place where the floor, bonded to the wall, had bent upward to meet the wall as it tore inward. The peace-colored glow of the lights flicked. Robots appeared.
A second human hand came through the wall. Pushing in opposite directions, the hands tore the wall as though it had been wet paper.
The patient from the grass put his head through.
He looked blindly up and down the corridor, his eyes not quite focusing, his skin glowing a strange red-brown from the burns of open space.
“No,” he said. Just that one word.
But that “No” was heard. Though the volume was not loud, it carried throughout the hospital. The internal telecommunications system relayed it. Every switch in the place went negative. Frantic nurses and robots, with even the doctors helping them, rushed to turn all the machines back on - the pumps, the ventilators, the artificial kidneys, the brain re-recorders, even the simple air engines which kept the atmosphere clean.
Far overhead an aircraft spun giddily. Its “off” switch, surrounded by triple safeguards, had suddenly been thrown into the negative position. Fortunately the robot-pilot got it going again before crashing into Earth.
The patient did not seem to know that his word had this effect.
(Later the world knew that this was part of the “drunkboat effect.” The man himself had developed the capacity for using his neurophysical system as a machine control.)
In the corridor, the machine robot who served as policeman arrived. He wore sterile, padded velvet gloves with a grip of sixty metric tons inside his hands. He approached the patient. The robot had been carefully trained to recognize all kinds of danger from delirious or psychotic humans; later he reported that he had an input of “danger, extreme” on every band of sensation. He had been expecting to seize the prisoner with irreversible firmness and to return him to his bed, but with this kind of danger sizzling in the air, the robot took no chances. His wrist itself contained a hypodermic pistol which operated on compressed argon.
He reached out toward the unknown, naked man who stood in the big torn gap of the wall. The wrist-weapon hissed and a sizeable injection of eondamine, the most powerful narcotic in the known universe, spat its wav through the skin of Rambo’s neck. The patient collapsed.
The robot picked him up gently and tenderly, lifted him through the torn wall, pushed the door open with a kick which broke the lock and put the patient back on his bed. The robot could hear doctors coming, so he used his enormous hands to pat the steel wall back into its proper shape. Work-robots or underpeople could finish the job later, but meanwhile it looked better to have that part of the building set at right angles again.
Doctor Vomact arrived, followed closely by Grosbeck.
“What happened?” he veiled, shaken out of a lifelong calm. The robot pointed at the ripped wall.
“He tore it open. I put it back,” said the robot.
The doctors turned to look at the patient. He had crawled off his bed again and was on the floor, but his breathing was light and natural.
“What did you give him?” cried Vomact to the robot.
“Condamine,” said the robot, “according to rule 47-B. The drug is not to be mentioned outside the hospital.”
“I know that,” said Vomact absentmindedly and a little crossly. “You can go along now. Thank you.”
“It is not usual to thank robots,” said the robot, “but you can read a commendation into my record if you want to.”
“Get the blazes out of here!” shouted Vomact at the officious robot.
The robot blinked. “There are no blazes but I have the impression you mean me. I shall leave, with your permission.” He jumped with odd gracefulness around the two doctors, fingered the broken doorlock absentmindedly, as though he might have wished to repair it; and then, seeing Vomact glare at him, left the room completely.
A moment later soft muted thuds began. Both doctors listened a moment and then gave up. The robot was out in the corridor, gently patting the steel floor back into shape. He was a tidy robot, probably animated by an amplified chicken-brain, and when he got tidy he became obstinate.
“Two questions, Grosbeck,” said the sir and doctor Vomact.
“Your service, sir!”
“Where was the patient standing when he pushed the wall into the corridor, and how did he get the leverage to do it?”
Grosbeck narrowed his eyes in puzzlement. “Now that you mention it, I have no idea of how he did it. In fact, he could not have done it. But he has. And the other question?”
“What do you think of condamine?”
“Dangerous, of course, as always. Addiction can - ”
“Can you have addiction with no cortical activity?” interrupted Vomact.
“Of course,” said Grosbeck promptly. “Tissue addiction.”
“Look for it, then,” said Vomact.
Grosbeck knelt beside the patient and felt with his fingertips for the muscle endings. He felt where they knotted themselves into the base of the skull, the tips of the shoulders, the striped area of the back.
When he stood up there was a look of puzzlement on his face. “I never felt a human body like this one before. I am not even sure that it is human any longer.”
Vomact said nothing. The two doctors confronted one another. Grosbeck fidgeted under the calm stare of the senior man. Finally he blurted out,