Mercer looked doubtful. If the cap had brought him happiness on the ferry, it would take at least electrical stimulation of the brain to undo whatever torments the surface of Shayol had to offer.
B’dikkat’s laughter filled the room like a bursting pillow.
“Have you ever heard of condamine?”
“No,” said Mercer.
“It’s a narcotic so powerful that the pharmacopoeias are not allowed to mention it.”
“You have that?” said Mercer hopefully.
“Something better. I have super-condamine. It’s named after the New French town where they developed it. The chemists hooked in one more hydrogen molecule. That gave it a real jolt. If you took it in your present shape, you’d be dead in three minutes, but those three minutes would seem like ten thousand years of happiness to the inside of your mind.” B’dikkat rolled his brown cow eyes expressively and smacked his rich red lips with a tongue of enormous extent.
“What’s the use of it, then?”
“You can take it,” said B’dikkat. “You can take it after you have been exposed to the dromozoa outside this cabin. You get all the good effects and none of the bad. You want to see something?”
What answer is there except yes, thought Mercer grimly; does he think I have an urgent invitation to a tea party?
“Look out the window,” said B’dikkat, “and tell me what you see.”
The atmosphere was clear. The surface was like a desert, ginger-yellow with streaks of green where lichen and low shrubs grew, obviously stunted and tormented by high, dry winds. The landscape was monotonous. Two or three hundred yards away there was a herd of bright pink objects which seemed alive, but Mercer could not see them well enough to describe them clearly. Further away, on the extreme right of his frame of vision, there was the statue of an enormous human foot, the height of a six-story building. Mercer could not see what the foot was connected to. “I see a big foot,” said he, “but—”
“But what?” said B’dikkat, like an enormous child hiding the denouement of a hugely private joke. Large as he was, he could have been dwarfed by any one of the toes on that tremendous foot.
“But it can’t be a real foot,” said Mercer.
“It is,” said B’dikkat. “That’s Go-Captain Alvarez, the man who found this planet. After six hundred years he’s still in fine shape. Of course, he’s mostly dromozootic by now, but I think there is some human consciousness inside him. You know what I do?”
“What?” said Mercer.
“I give him six cubic centimeters of super-condamine and he snorts for me. Real happy little snorts. A stranger might think it was a volcano. That’s what super-condamine can do. And you’re going to get plenty of it. You’re a lucky, lucky man, Mercer. You have me for a friend, and you have my needle for a treat. I do all the work and you get all the fun. Isn’t that a nice surprise?”
Mercer thought, You’re lying! Lying! Where do the screams come from that we have all heard broadcast as a warning on Punishment Day? Why did the doctor offer to cancel my brain or to take out my eyes?
The cow-man watched him sadly, a hurt expression on his face. “You don’t believe me,” he said, very sadly.
“It’s not quite that,” said Mercer, with an attempt at heartiness, “but I think you’re leaving something out.”
“Nothing much,” said B’dikkat. “You jump when the dromozoa hit you. You’ll be upset when you start growing new parts — heads, kidneys, hands. I had one fellow in here who grew thirty-eight hands in a single session outside. I took them all off, froze them and sent them upstairs. I take good care of everybody. You’ll probably yell for a while. But remember, just call me Friend, and I have the nicest treat in the universe waiting for you. Now, would you like some fried eggs? I don’t eat eggs myself, but most true men like them.”
“Eggs?” said Mercer. “What have eggs got to do with it?”
“Nothing much. It’s just a treat for you people. Get something in your stomach before you go outside. You’ll get through the first day better.”
Mercer, unbelieving, watched as the big man took two precious eggs from a cold chest, expertly broke them into a little pan and put the pan in the heat-field at the center of the table Mercer had awakened on.
“Friend, eh?” B’dikkat grinned. “You’ll see I’m a good friend. When you go outside, remember that.”
An hour later, Mercer did go outside.
Strangely at peace with himself, he stood at the door. B’dikkat pushed him in a brotherly way, giving him a shove which was gentle enough to be an encouragement.
“Don’t make me put on my lead suit, fellow.” Mercer had seen a suit, fully the size of an ordinary space-ship cabin, hanging on the wall of an adjacent room. ‘When I close this door, the outer one will open. Just walk on out.”
“But what will happen?” said Mercer, the fear turning around in his stomach and making little grabs at his throat from the inside.
“Don’t start that again,” said B’dikkat. For an hour he had fended off Mercer’s questions about the outside. A map? B’dikkat had laughed at the thought. Food? He said not to worry. Other people? They’d be there. Weapons? What for, B’dikkat had replied. Over and over again, B’dikkat had insisted that he was Mercer’s friend. What would happen to Mercer? The same that happened to everybody else.
Mercer stepped out.
Nothing happened. The day was cool. The wind moved gently against his toughened skin.
Mercer looked around apprehensively.
The mountainous body of Captain Alvarez occupied a good part of the landscape to the right. Mercer had no wish to get mixed up with that. He glanced back at the cabin. B’dikkat was not looking out the window.
Mercer walked slowly, straight ahead.
There was a flash on the ground, no brighter than the glitter of sunlight on a fragment of glass. Mercer felt a sting in the thigh, as though a sharp instrument had touched him lightly. He brushed the place with his hand.
It was as though the sky fell in.
A pain — it was more than a pain; it was a living throb — ran from his hip to his foot on the right side. The throb reached up to his chest, robbing him of breath. He fell, and the ground hurt him. Nothing in the hospital-satellite had been like this. He lay in the open air, trying not to breathe, but he did breathe anyhow. Each time he breathed, the throb moved with his thorax. He lay on his back, looking at the sun. At last he noticed that the sun was violet-white.
It was no use even thinking of calling. He had no voice. Tendrils of discomfort twisted within him. Since he could not stop breathing, he concentrated on taking air in the way that hurt him least. Gasps were too much work. Little tiny sips of air hurt him least.
The desert around him was empty. He could not turn his head to look at the cabin. Is this it? he thought. Is an eternity of this the punishment of Shayol?
There were voices near him.
Two faces, grotesquely pink, looked down at him. They might have been human. The man looked normal enough, except for having two noses side by side. The woman was a caricature beyond belief. She had grown a breast on each cheek and a cluster of naked baby-like fingers hung limp from her forehead.
“It’s a beauty,” said the woman, “a new one.”
“Come along,” said the man.
They lifted him to his feet. He did not have strength enough to resist. When he tried to speak to them a harsh cawing sound, like the cry of an ugly bird, came from his mouth.
They moved with him efficiently. He saw that he was being dragged to the herd of pink things.
As they approached, he saw that they were people. Better, he saw that they had once been people. A man with the beak of a flamingo was picking at his own body. A woman lay on the ground; she had a single head, but beside what seemed to be her original body, she had a boy’s naked body growing sidewise from her neck. The boy-body, clean, new, paralytically helpless, made no movement other than shallow breathing. Mercer looked around. The only one of the group who was wearing clothing was a man with his overcoat on sidewise. Mercer stared at him, finally realizing that the man had two — or was it three? — stomachs growing on the outside of his abdomen. The coat held them in place. The transparent peritoneal wall looked fragile.