If All Else Fails (23 page)

"The child felt the
poison and changed it into water in his belly. He felt great sadness in his heart and an anger
be­cause they did not want him to live. They did not want him born into a world they had grown
sick of. It was not their right to choose for him because his power was greater than theirs. He
did not change the poison flowing through them to water. His hatred was at them, for they had let
the world beat them. They began the agony of poison dying but they could not die.

"I sat with them
through this time. I sat with my brother and sister-by-law and they told me these things through
their agony. They screamed to die but the child was punish­ing them for letting the world beat
them. I, Nahtari, did not want to see the child born into this world. I feared his com­ing. There
was nothing I could do. He came to birth.

"It was not a child
like expected. He bled. His chest was bleeding. I had expected hot roaring fires. I had expected
a child of frightful appearance. It was but a small baby that bled and could not talk.

"The father pulled
the baby up and beat him into breath­ing. He laid the baby on the bed and went outside the house.
After a little while, my sister-by-law got to her feet, swaying on dizzy legs, and she staggered
out after him. I tried to stop the bleeding of the baby chest but I was too scared about my
brother and sister-by-law. I ran outside. They laid side by side in the black dirt of the garden.
They were dead and five days decayed.

"I took the little
one into my home but the bleeding sickened my old woman and she died. So I took the bleed­ing one
to the traveling show. The white people there did not sicken and die at the sight of his
bleeding.

"In lines all round
the tent they would stand to pay good
money to see the bleeding one. They all wanted to see him bleeding and they were not
sickened by it and they did not die. But the government people came and took the bleeding one
from me and made me sign little pieces of paper and gave me money so they could do what they do.
I turned him over to the government ones and that is all there is to the story and it is the
truth.

"Now I come every
week to talk to him. I know he is too powerful to have a name. I am waiting for him. I am telling
all this so I will not have to tell it again and so that this warning is given to all who would
have dealings with him. He is not ready to do what he will one day do. Do not walk in his shadow.
Leave him alone, for he is not you. For twenty-three years he has been gathering power. That is
all I have to say."

He switched off the
tape machine, smiling to himself be­cause there was no one to hear it. He closed the door
care­fully behind him and went looking for Dr. Santell and his twelve dollars.

Miss Dow pushed
open the door cautiously. She was not sure if she had the stomach for what she was doing. But
making up her mind, she stepped into the room. She kept telling herself that he was perfectly
harmless.

The drain in the
center of the floor was stopped up with clotted blood. He stood in a shallow pool of his own
blood. His body was motionless, his breathing just barely percep­tible by a slight rising and
falling of his chest The blood flowed steadily to the floor.

"Can you hear me?"
she asked nervously. She shut the door behind her. She kept her eyes on his face. He stared at
her but gave no sign that he had heard her. He seemed to be in no pain, despite the stream of
blood flowing down his

chest. "I'm not
going to hurt you." She approached him slowly
with a small glass lab beaker. Averting her eyes slightly she placed the glass container
below the wound.

She felt a little
foolish for having spoken to him. It was obvious to her now that he was little better than a
cretin and that he could not understand a word she said.

She stood there
awkwardly, the glass beaker filling with his blood. The naked man seemed unaware of her presence,
yet still she felt an unreasonable fear. There was something frightening about the still figure.
Something threatening, otherworldly, in the steady flow of blood down his chest. He did not seem
vulnerable. Rather it was as if the world were too insignificant for him to notice it

She backed away
from him with a full glass of his blood. She felt better with each step she took. He stared at
her, no expression on his face, his eyes unusually bright. She had felt very uncomfortable under
his stare.

Miss Dow had turned
and started out the door, watching him all the while. Suddenly he moved. She turned quickly. Fear
rose in her like a tide. The bleeding man cupped a hand beneath the wound in his
chest.

Slowly, he brought
his hands to his lips and drank of his own blood. Miss Dow fainted.

Dr. Santell found
her in the doorway. A tiny, red pool of fresh blood was beginning to blacken on the floor beside
her head. The glass beaker she had brought into the room was gone.

"What happened?"
asked Dr. Santell, bending over the couch, his voice oddly gentle despite its gruffness.
"Here-take a sip of this," he said, offering her a small glass of whis­key. "It'll steady your
nerves."

She was too weak to
refuse. The whiskey burned her throat and made her cough. He made her take another sip. It almost
made her gag but it seemed to help. A touch of color reappeared in her face.

"He—he—he drank his
own bloodl" she whispered, totter­ing on the edge of hysteria.

Dr. Santell leaned
forward eagerly. His features sharp­ened, his manner became intent and forceful. "Are you sure?"
he demanded.

"Yes, I'm sure,"
she said with a trace of her normal

sharpness.

"Are you
sure—absolutely sure—he drank his own blood?" he asked again, impatiently. The answer seemed
unusually important to him.

"Of course, I'm
sure, damn it! It was absolutely disgust­ing!" She wrinkled up her nose. "That revolting animal
did it on purpose. Just because I collected a beaker of his—"

Dr. Santell
suddenly became greatly agitated. "You col­lected a glass beaker of his blood?"

She nodded,
bewildered by his strange behavior.

"God! It's happened
again," he muttered. "It's happened again!" A look of dread passed over his face.

"What the devil are
you talking about?" demanded Miss

Dow.

"When I heard you
scream, I started running. I was the first one to reach you. You were sprawled in the doorway.
There was a big bloodstain beside your head on the floor. There was no glass on the floor of the
room and it wasn't in the hallway."

"Don't be
ridiculous! I had it with me. Isn't this an aw­fully big fuss to be making over a—"

Dr. Santell turned
his back on her and dialed security.

"Hobeman? This is
Santell. Have room 473 searched for a glass beaker. Delay his feeding time if you have to, but
find that beaker!" He shut off the viewscreen.

He looked at Miss
Dow. Her face was blank with bewil­derment. Before she could ask a question he began, "Some­thing
strange has developed in the last few weeks. Our monitors have been picking up unusual activity
levels. They
aren't sophisticated
enough to tell us exactly what's happen­ing but his heartbeat and galvanic skin responses have
been fluctuating wildly."

"But what does that
have to do with the glass?" asked Miss Dow.

"I'm coming to
that. A week ago, during one of his strange activity levels, the observation port on the wall of
his room disappeared."

Miss Dow's face
registered shock. "Disappeared? How is that possible?"

Dr. Santell was
grim. "I have no idea whatsoever. We found traces of melted glass on the floor of the room. But
what disturbs me the most is that we could detect no coronary activity at the time of the
disappearance. For two hours his blood was circulating but bis heart wasn't
func­tioning."

"He's not human, is
he?" said Miss Dow.

"I don't know,"
said Dr. Santell, staring off into space. "I just don't know."

He pushed the carts
through the door. The bleeding man stared at him as he had stared for the seven years he had been
there.

"Soup's on, Joe,"
said the man with the feeding carts.

Two men hidden from
view by the door were examining two streaks of melted glass on the floor.

"Hey, hold up
there," said one of the men. "He's not to be fed until we've finished our search."

"I won't get in the
way. What's disappeared this time?"

"Nothing
important," grumbled one of the men. "Just a glass jar from the lab."

"Shame on you,
Joe," said the cartman, waving a finger at the motionless figure in the center of the room. "You
oughten to be stealing stuff like that." He opened the top of his cart and took out a pair of
gloves.

"It won't hurt if I
feed him, will it? I don't have to hose him down until you guys have finished," he said, pulling
the gloves over his hands.

"Go ahead. We
aren't going to find anything anyway."

The cartman opened
a panel on the side of the cart and

brought out a bowl
of raw meat. He sat it on the floor in

front of the
bleeding man. From the other cart he got a

large bowl of
uncooked vegetables and a large wooden

ladle.

He detached a water
hose from the wall and started back­ing toward the bleeding man, uncoiling the hose as he walked.
When he got to the end of the hose, he turned

around.

The bleeding man
had overturned the feeding bowls with his feet. He was drinking his own blood from cupped
hands.

"This is what you
are looking for," said Dr. Santell, hand­ing Miss Dow a clipboard. "His blood type is O lateral.
We've run hundreds of tests on it and it seems to be per­fectly normal blood, a little more
resistant to some diseases than ordinary blood but otherwise normal. It's too bad the government
won't let us use his blood. He's a universal donor and, at the rate he produces blood, I'll bet
he could supply Intercity all by himself."

"But that's just
the point. We are going to use his blood," said Miss Dow. "We are going to use his blood," said
Miss Dow, "and a lot more besides. That's why I was sent here to take charge of this
case."

"The government's
changed its policy, then?" asked Dr. Santell. "Why?"

"We've given
transfusions of his blood to prisoners and it seems to have no bad effects. Tell me, you've
studied him for seven years, do you have any idea how something like him is possible?"

Dr. Santell lit a
synthetic cigarette slowly. He gave her a curious look.

"Did you listen to
Nahtari's explanation?"

"That lunacy,"
sniffed Miss Dow. "I think we should pay a little more attention to a chromosomal-mutation theory
than some wild story from some unwashed primitive like Nahtari."

Dr. Santell
shrugged. "It doesn't really matter what caused it. I couldn't even make an educated guess. His
ver­sion is the only evidence we have."

"Confine yourself
to specifics, please," said Miss Dow. "What biological evidence do we have?"

"There is
biological evidence pointing to chromosomal differentiation. He has sixty-four paired
chromosomes. I have been unable so far to determine their exact structure. He seems to have all
the normal ones. Technically, that makes him a member of our species, I suppose. But it's those
extra chromosome pairs that are so unusual. They seem to be entirely new structures unlike
anything we are familiar with. It must be something outside our experience. I think I pointed
this out in more detail in my report."

"But technically,
he is human?" asked Miss Dow.

"I would say he
is," said Dr. Santell.

"Very well. Then I
am going to give the final go-ahead on this project," said Miss Dow.

"And what project
is that?"

"We're going to
transfer him to the military dome at In­tercity, where he will be dissected for tissue
regeneration. Hopefully, his cellular matrix will produce like-functioning biological
constructs."

"What!" Dr. Santell
jumped to his feet. "You're not seri­ous! That would be murder! Matrix reconstruction from
tis­sue cultures has never advanced beyond the experimental stage! We don't have the technology
yet to stimulate the
reproduction of
brain and nerve tissue! Good lord, woman, you can't seriously—"

"I am quite aware
of our shortcomings in the field of tis­sue regeneration," said Miss Dow coldly. "For years, our
work in this area has been little better than a waste of time and materials. We have yet to
produce a successful unit with a well-developed nervous system. Nor have we been able to
successfully clone an individual. These matters, how­ever, are not relevant to this particular
case."

"Not relevant!
You'll kill him! And to what purpose? A line of research that you yourself admitted has been a
waste of time!" stormed Dr. Santell, his face flushed with anger.