No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories Read online

  “Where do you find this stuff?” I asked.

  Eli wagged a shaky finger.

  “Secret,” he whispered, huskily.

  His eyes, I saw, were blearier than ever. He wobbled even as he sat. But his hand snaked out with what amounted to instinct to cuddle the bottle.

  “Good drinkin’ likker,” he mumbled. “Good for the stomach—”

  His head drooped and rested on the table. The bottle tipped and the little remaining liquor splashed onto the floor.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said to the man behind the bar.

  “Soon as he sobers up,” the man told me, “he’ll light out for Sunward. Been going there for years. Queer old duck. Figure there’s anything to him claiming he’s a couple hundred years old?”

  “Not a chance,” I told him.

  He held a glass up to the light, blew on it, polished it with a cloth until it shone.

  “A bunch of the boys had him yarning good just before you came in. Marty Berg was setting them up.”

  “About this time Marty always sets them up,” I told him. “Election day is getting close.”

  I started to go and then turned back and laid a coin on the bar.

  “When he wakes up give him a drink on me,” I said. “He’ll need one then. I’ll try to catch him again before he hits for Sunward.”

  But I didn’t catch him again.

  Twenty-four hours later they found old Eli’s body in the badlands just west of the city’s port. He had been killed by three vicious knife thrusts. The police said he had been dead twelve or eighteen hours.

  Marty Berg was one of those men who can’t go back to Earth. Just what the trouble was no one knew and no one cared to ask. It might have been any number of things, for Marty’s talents are varied.

  As a ward heeler in the North Wall precinct, he always delivered the vote. The methods he used were never questioned. What he got out of it no one really cared, for New Chicago had not as yet developed civic consciousness.

  When he came into my office I gave him the glad hand, for he was a news source. More than once he’d tipped me off on political shenanigans.

  “What’s the news on Eli?” he asked.

  “None at all,” I told him. “The police are baffled.”

  Marty wagged his head. “Too bad. I hope they catch the guy.”

  “What can I do for you, Marty?”

  “Just a little favor,” said Marty. “I hear you’re going to Earth for a bit of vacation—”

  “In a day or two,” I said. “It’ll be good to see Earth again. A man sort of misses—”

  And there I stopped, remembering about Marty not being able to go back.

  But he didn’t seem to notice.

  “You remember Chesty Lewis? The bird they hooked for forgery?”

  “Sure, I met him a couple of times. The cops back in New York used to run him in every now and then.”

  “He’s out again,” said Marty, “and I’d like to send him a little gift. Just a remembrance from an old pal. I thought maybe you’d take it along and hand it to him. I’d mail it but the mail rates—”

  I could understand that. The mail rates were high.

  Marty hauled a package from his pocket and set it on the desk.

  I picked it up and shook it. “Listen, Marty, you wouldn’t be getting me into trouble, would you?”

  He spread his hands. “Why should I be getting a friend of mine into any trouble? It’s just to save the mailing costs I’m doing this. I’ll tell you what it is. Just one of those sand flasks with different colored sands made into a pretty picture. A picture of a spaceship, this one is. A white ship out in space, with red sand like blasts shooting from the rockets—”

  “Forget it, Marty,” I said. “I just wondered. Sure, I’ll take it.”

  “Chesty will be nuts about it,” said Marty. “He always did like pretty things.”

  Floyd Duncan, veteran chief of the New Chicago office of the Solar Bureau of Investigation, was the first to find the clue in old Eli’s murder and when he found it he didn’t believe it.

  He growled at me when I came into his hangout, but I kidded him along and pretty soon he softened up.

  “This case has got me down,” he growled.

  “No clues?” I asked.

  “Hell, yes,” he said. “I got a clue but it’s worse than not having one because it can’t be right.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “About one hundred years,” he said, rustling papers on his desk and trying to act ferocious.

  “You’re all haywire,” I said. “Years haven’t anything to do with clues.”

  “You ever heard of Dr. Jennings Anderson?” he asked me.

  “The chap who built the sanitarium out on Sunward?”

  “That’s the fellow. Built it one hundred fifty years ago. Doc was all of fifty then, himself. Put every dime he had in it. Thought he could cure the space dopes. For that matter the sanitarium is still trying to cure them, but not getting very far.”

  I nodded, remembering Anderson’s story. The sanitarium out on the Sunward side still stood as a monument to his hopes and humanitarianism. Recognizing the space disease, which regularly struck down the men who roamed the trails between the planets, as a challenge to his knowledge and his love of humankind, he had constructed the sanitarium, had tried to cure the stricken spacemen by use of the radiations which slashed out from the Sun.

  Duncan rattled some more papers and then went on. “Anderson died over one hundred years ago. He’s buried out there at the sanitarium. Folks back on Earth subscribed a pile of money to put up the shaft over his grave. Had to use zero metal. Only thing that will stand up in the radiations.”

  I watched Duncan narrowly, wondering what he was getting at. He was right about Doc Anderson being dead, for I had seen the shaft myself, with his name inscribed on it.

  “We found a brand-new dollar bill on old Eli,” said Duncan. “We checked for fingerprints. Found a lot of them. Money picks prints up fast, you know. We checked all the prints and they all check out to nothing—all except one.”

  He ran blunt fingers through his iron-gray hair.

  “That one print,” he told me, “Is that of old Doc Anderson!”

  “But, look,” I blurted, “that can’t be right!”

  “Of course it can’t be right,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”

  Back in my apartment I opened up the package Marty had given me and got the surprise of my life. For once, Marty had told the truth. The thing in the package really was a sand flask, one of those things the gift shops sell to tourists. Made of brilliant Mercutian sands, some of them are really bits of art.

  The one I took out of the package wasn’t any piece of art, but it was a fair enough piece of work. I put it on a table and looked at it, wondering why Marty would be sending something like that to an egg like Chesty.

  And the more I looked at it, the stronger grew the hunch that there was something wrong. Somewhere something didn’t tie together. This business of sending a sand flask to Chesty Lewis somehow didn’t click.

  So I wrapped it up again and hid it in my dresser drawer. Then I went out and hunted through the shops until I found one just like it. I bought that one and wrapped it up and put it in the mails, addressing it to Chesty in care of a boardinghouse that I knew could get in touch with him.

  Why I did a thing like that I can’t explain, even to this day. It was just a hunch, one of those unaccountable sixth senses that newsmen sometimes acquire. The whole deal had a phony ring, had put me on my guard.

  Back in the apartment once again, I closed the blinds, turned off the lights and tried to go to sleep.

  I was dog-tired, but I had a lot of trouble dropping off. My mind kept buzzing round.

  I thought about old Eli and the
new dollar bill with the one-hundred-year-old fingerprints upon it. I thought about Marty Berg sending a sand flask to Chesty Lewis and wondered if what I had just done would make any difference. I wondered about Doc Anderson, dead these hundred years or more, resting under the stele of zero metal.

  Finally I did go to sleep, only to be wakened a short time later with severe stomach pains. Groping blindly on the bedside table I found a couple of capsules, swallowed them and waited for the pain to ease.

  It was hours later when I finally awoke.

  All sign of stomach distress was gone. I felt a good ten years younger, I told myself, lying there, reluctant to get up. It’s wonderful what a good long sleep will do.

  Squaring off in front of the mirror after plugging in my razor, I noticed something funny about the face that stared back at me.

  I leaned closer to the glass, trying to figure out what could be wrong. The image that stared back at me was me all right, but it had a different look. There weren’t nearly so many wrinkles and the baggy cheeks had filled up a little bit, and there was a slight flush of color in them.

  But that wasn’t all.

  The streak of gray on the left side of my head was gone! The hair was coal-black!

  Alarmed, I rumpled my hair, searching for gray ones. There weren’t any.

  It wasn’t until then I remembered the capsules.

  A frantic search of the vest pocket where I had placed the ones filled with old Eli’s salts failed to locate them.

  There was just one explanation. Absent-mindedly I had fished them out of the pocket, put them with the others on the bedside table.

  Could it be that I had taken one of them when I had awakened? And if I had, would that account for the filled out cheeks, the disappearance of the gray streak?

  I sat down, flabbergasted.

  I remembered old Eli had told me he sold those salts to Dr. Vincent out at the Sunward sanitarium.

  Back at my shaving once again, I knew there was just one thing to do. I had to see Dr. Vincent right away.

  And when I went to see him I would carry a short steel bar. One that would fit my coat pocket. There would be a use for it.

  Seeing Dr. Vincent was easier said than done. Few people saw him. Both he and his predecessor, Dr. Brown, were noted for their reluctance to appear in public. Too engrossed in their work, they had always said.

  Anderson, Brown and Vincent, three strange men. Anderson under the stele that rose before the sanitarium entrance. Brown, undoubtedly dead, but with his later life, after he had left the sanitarium, shrouded in mystery. Vincent, present head of the institution, practically unknown to the medical profession except by reputation.

  Three men who had dedicated their lives to finding a cure for the space sickness. Men who, so far, had failed. To them, from all the far corners of the Solar System came the space dopes, the men stricken by the dread disease which even now spelled the swift doom of all on whom it fastened. Not so swiftly now, perhaps, but nevertheless certain.

  For the sanitarium had made some progress. By its treatment with radiations it could ease the pain, could slow up the ravages, give each victim a few more months to live, an easier death. But that was all. The space sickness still was fatal. There was no cure.

  I had visited the sanitarium only once before—when I first had come to New Chicago. The New York office had wanted a feature story about the place and I had gotten it, but not from Dr. Vincent. I had not, in fact, seen Dr. Vincent. The soft-voiced robot secretary had told me he was very busy. An equally soft-voiced robot attendant had taken me in tow, had shown me the building, explained its workings, discussed learnedly the work of Dr. Vincent. It was a good story.

  Practically all the attendants, I knew, were robots.

  “We do not make mistakes,” the soft-voiced metal-man had told me. “Here, where mistakes are fatal, we are better than a human being.”

  Which sounded like a good explanation, but left one sort of hanging in the air.

  This time, as the time before, I had no trouble getting to the secretary who guarded Vincent’s office. And this time, as the time before, I got the same answer.

  “Dr. Vincent is very busy. What is it you want?”

  I leaned closer, across the desk, cutting off access to the row of call buttons.

  “It’s a matter of life and death,” I said and even as I spoke I yanked the short steel bar out of my pocket and struck.

  I put everything I had into that blow and I knew just where to hit, right between the robot’s gleaming eyes.

  The one blow was enough. It dented in the heavy metal, smashed the delicate mechanism. The robot slid off the chair, clanged onto the floor.

  For long seconds I stood there, hoping against that the walls were soundproofed. They must have been, for there was no scurry of feet outside, no sound from Vincent’s inner office.

  Walking softly, thanking my stars the doors did not boast newfangled locks but the simple latches of the day when the sanitarium had been built, I locked the outer door, then strode across the room and twisted the knob to Vincent’s office. It turned in my hand and I stepped inside.

  A man sat at a desk directly opposite the door. A man well past middle age, with snow-white hair. He was busy and did not look up when I came in. If he had heard me at all, he probably thought I was the secretary.

  “Dr. Anderson?” I asked.

  “Why, yes. What can I—”

  And then he jerked his head up and stared at me.

  I laughed at him softly.

  “I thought so,” I said.

  Muscles jerked around his jaws, as if he were trying to keep his teeth from chattering.

  “Who are you?” he asked hoarsely.

  “A friend of old Eli’s,” I told him.

  “He sent you?”

  “No, he didn’t send me. Eli is dead.”

  He started out of his chair at that. “What’s that you say? Old Eli is dead? Are you certain?”

  “The news,” I told him, “has been in the papers. The radio carried it.”

  “I get no papers,” he said. “I have no time to read them. The radio over there,” he jerked his head toward an old set in the corner, “hasn’t been turned on for months.”

  “It is the truth,” I said. “Murdered. And the salts were stolen.”

  The man behind the desk went pale.

  “The salts stolen!”

  “Someone,” I said, “who guessed what they were.”

  He sat down slowly, as if every ounce of strength had drained from his body. Huddled behind his desk he looked an old, old man.

  “You’ve been afraid of this for years,” I said.

  He nodded dumbly.

  Silence hung between us, a long and empty silence and looking at the man, I felt sorry for him.

  “Afraid of it,” he said, “for two reasons. But I guess it doesn’t matter any more. I’ve failed. There is no cure. There was just one hope left and that has failed—”

  I paced swiftly across the room.

  “Look,” I shot at him, “are you actually admitting that you are Dr. Anderson?”

  He looked at me. “Why not?”

  I stammered a little. “I thought you would put up a fight.”

  “There’s no use of fighting any more,” he said. “Two hundred years is too long for any man to live. Especially when he fails year after year at the goal he had set himself.”

  “Dr. Anderson,” I said, half speaking to myself, half to him. “Dr. Brown and now Dr. Vincent.”

  He smiled faintly. “All three of them. It was easily arranged. I built the sanitarium, I owned it. I was accountable to no one. I named my successor and my successor named his successor. Why should the world wonder? The men who were named were men from the laboratory in this place. Obscure men, of course, but men familiar with
the work.”

  He smiled wanly at me. “Clever?”

  “But the staff?” I asked.

  “Except at first, there has been none. Just myself and the patients and the robots. The robots don’t talk, the patients die.”

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. “And who are you?”

  I took a long breath. “Sherm Marshall of the Solar Press.”

  “And you want a story?”

  I nodded, fearful of what would happen next.

  And the thing that happened was the last thing I expected.

  “Sit down,” he said. “Since you are here, you may as well know what has been going on.”

  “That’s swell of you, Doctor,” I said, waiting for the lightning to strike.

  No lightning struck.

  “Have you ever kept a thing bottled up inside yourself so long you wanted to shriek?” he asked. “Have you ever ached to tell something that you knew and still you couldn’t tell it?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s me,” said Dr. Anderson.

  He sat silent so long I thought he had forgotten me, but finally he went on.

  “I came here with a theory that the radiations thrown out by the Sun, properly screened for selectivity, would have a curative effect upon the victims of space sickness. It worked, to an extent. It alleviated the malady, but it was not a cure. It didn’t go far enough. It gave a few added months, in some cases a few added years, of life, but that was all. I knew that I had failed.

  “It was about the time I came to this realization that old Eli stumbled in. His car had broken down, his spacesuit was down to the last half-hour of oxygen. With him he had some peculiar salts—a queer earth such as he had never seen before. He had only a sample. I offered to analyze it for him and he left it. Quite by accident I discovered its properties.

  “At about the time a very close friend of mine was brought here with the sickness. It was then that the full force of my failure was brought home to me. I knew my friend would die despite all that I could do. But he had hopes that I could save him—and that only made it worse.”

  He stopped and stared at something on the opposite wall, but there was nothing there.

  So I reminded him: “These salts of Eli’s? They prolonged life?”