A car door slammed outside. I wanted to run, but there was one more question which had to be asked. “I was in the old house. I saw the tank and … something … which looked like a boy. Does that mean Sammy’s dying? That you were going to replace him?”
“Sammy’s going to be all right, George … though at first I wasn’t hopeful … I haven’t known you and May as long as Dr. Pitman did, but I’m very fond of … I knew May couldn’t take the loss, so I arranged a substitution … tentatively, you understand, kleyl nurr … not needed now … Sammy will be fine …’ He tried to smile at me and blood welled up between his lips just as the doorbell rang with callous stridency.
I stared down at the tired, broken old man with—in spite of everything—a curious sense of regret. What kind of hell had he been born into originally? What conditions would prompt anybody to make the journey he had made for such meagre rewards? The bell rang again and I opened the door.
“Call for an ambulance,” I said to the stranger on the steps. “Dr. Pitman seems to have fallen down the stairs—I think he’s dying.”
It was quite late when the police cruiser finally dropped me outside my home, but the house was ablaze with light. I thanked the sergeant who had driven me from the mortuary where they had taken the body of Dr. Pitman (I couldn’t think of him by any other name) and hurried along the white concrete of the path to the door. The lights seemed to signal a change in May’s mood but I was afraid to begin hoping, in case …
“George!” May met me at the door, dressed to go out, face pale but jubilant. “Where’ve you been? I tried everywhere. The clinic called me half an hour ago. You’ve been out for hours. Sammy’s feeling better and he’s asking to see us. I brought the car out for you. Should I drive? We’re allowed in to see him, and I …’
“Slow down, May. Slow down.” I put my arms around her, feeling the taut gratification in her slim body, and made her go over the story again. She spilled it out eagerly.
Sammy’s response to drug treatment had been dramatic and now he was fully conscious and asking for his parents. The senior doctor had decided to bend regulations a little and let us in to talk with the boy for a few minutes. A starshell of happiness burst behind my eyes as May spoke, and a minute later we were on our way to the clinic. A big moon, the exact colour of a candle flame, was rising behind the rooftops, trees were stirring gently in their sleep, and the red glow from the direction of the Guthrie house had vanished. May was at the wheel, driving with zestful competence, and for the first time in hours the pressure was off me.
I relaxed into the seat and discovered I had forgotten to rid myself of the pistol which had nudged my ribs constantly the whole time I was talking to the police. It was on the side next to May so there was little chance of slipping it into the glove compartment unnoticed. Shame at having carried the weapon, plus a desire not to alarm May in any way after what she had been through, made me decide to keep it out of sight a little longer. Suddenly very tired, I closed my eyes and allowed the mental backwash of the night’s events to carry me away.
The disjointed fragments from Dr. Pitman made an unbelievable story when pieced together, yet I had seen the ghastly proof. There was something macabre about the idea of the group of alien beings, duplicates of dead people, cooped up in a dingy room in a disused house, patiently waiting to die. The memory of seeing Granny Cummins’ face again, two weeks after her funeral, was going to take a long time to fade. She, the duplicate, had recognised me, which meant that the copying technique used by the aliens was incredibly detailed, extending right down to the arrangement of the brain cells. Presumably, the only physical changes they would introduce would be improvements—if a person was dying of cancer the duplicate would be cancer-free. Ageing muscles might be strengthened—Dr. Pitman and those who had been in the house all moved with exceptional ease. But would they have been able to escape the fire? Perhaps some code of their own would not allow them to leave the house, even under peril of death, unless a place had been prepared to enable them to enter our society without raising any alarms ….
The aliens may have a code of ethics, I thought, but could I permit them to come among us unhindered? For that matter, had I any idea how far their infiltration had proceeded? I’d been told that Dr. Pitman was the first subject in this town—did that mean the invasion covered the entire state? The country? The world? There was also the question of its intensity. The dying man had said the substitution technique failed when a person’s death occurred suddenly at home, which implied the clinic was well infiltrated—but how thoroughly? Would there come a day when every old person in the world, and a proportion of younger people as well, would be substitutes?
Street lights flicking past the car pulsed redly through my closed eyelids, and fresh questions pounded in my mind to the same rhythm. Could I believe anything “Dr. Pitman’ had said about the aliens’ objectives? True, he had appeared kind, genuinely concerned about Sammy and May—but how did one interpret fecial expressions controlled by a being who may once have possessed an entirely different form? Another question came looming—and something in my subconscious cowered away from it—why, if secrecy was so vital to the aliens’ scheme, had “Dr. Pitman’ told me the whole fantastic story? Had he been manipulating me in some way I had not yet begun to understand? Once again I saw my son’s face blindly lolling as he was carried down the stairs, and a fear greater than any I had known before began to unfold its black petals.
I jerked my eyes open, unwilling to think any further.
“Poor thing—you’re tired,” May said. “You keep everything bottled up, and it takes far more out of you that way.”
I nodded. She’s mothering me, I thought. She’s happy, serene’ confident again—and it’s because our boy is getting better, Sammy’s life is her life,
May slowed the car down. “Here we are. We mustn’t stay too long—it’s very good of Dr. Milligan even to let us in at this time.”
I remembered Dr. Milligan—tall, stooped and old. Another Dr. Pitman? It came to me suddenly that I had told May nothing at all about the events of the evening, but before I could work out a suitably edited version we were getting out of the car. I decided to leave it till later. In contrast to the boisterous leaf-scented air outside the atmosphere in the clinic seemed inert, dead. The reception office was empty but a blond young doctor with an in-twisted foot limped up to us, then beckoned to a staffnurse when we gave our names. The nurse, a tall woman with mottled red forearms, ushered us into the elevator and pressed the button for the third floor.
“Samuel is making exceptional progress,” she said to May, “He’s a very strong little boy.”
“Thank you.” May nodded gratefully. “Thank you.”
I wanted to change the subject, because Sammy had never appeared particularly strong to my eyes, and the loathsome blossom of fear was fleshing its leaves within me. “How’s business been tonight?”
“Quiet, for once. Very quiet.”
“Oh. I heard there was a fire.”
“It hasn’t affected us.”
“That’s fine,” I said vaguely. If the aliens were constructed with precisely the same biological building blocks as humans their remains would appear like those of normal fire victims. There’ll be hell to pay, I told myself and desperately tried to adhere to that line of thought, but the black flower was getting bigger now, unmanageable, reaching out to swallow me. Biological building blocks—where did they come from? The dark soupy liquid in the tank—was it of synthetic or natural origin? The thing I’d seen floating in there—was it a body being constructed?