"Paingod and Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Chapter three

“Honest to God, I tell you, Murray, I can’t take it much longer!”

Bergman was still shaking from the examination in Calkins’s offices. His hands were prominent with blue veins, and they trembled ever so slightly across the formatop of the table. The dim sounds of the Medical Center filtered to them in the bush — booth. Bergman ran a hand through his hair. “Every time I see one of those …” he paused, hesitated, then did not use the word. Murray Thomas knew the word, had it come forth, would have been monsters . Bergman went on, a blank space in his sentence, “Every time I see one of them picking around inside one of my patients, with those metal tips, I — I get sick to my stomach! It’s all I can do to keep from ripping out its goddamned wiring!” His face was deathly pale, yet somehow unnaturally flushed.

He quivered as he spoke. And quivered again.

Dr. Murray Thomas put out a hand placatingly. “Now take it easy, Stu. You keep getting yourself all hot over this thing and if it doesn’t break you — which it damned well easily could — they’ll revoke your license, bar you from practicing.” He looked across at Bergman, and blinked assuringly, as if to keynote his warning.

Bergman muttered with surliness, “Fine lot of practicing I do now. Or you, for that matter.”

Thomas tapped a finger on the table. It caused the multicolored bits of plastic beneath the formatop, to jiggle, casting pinpoints of light across Bergman’s strained features. “And besides, Stu, you have no logical , scientific reason for hating the phymechs.”

Bergman stared back angrily. “Science doesn’t come into it, and you know it. This is from the gut, Murray, not the brain!”

“Look, Stu, they’re infallible; they’re safer and they can do a job quicker with less mess than even a — a Kohlbenschlagg. Right?”

Bergman nodded reluctantly, but there was a dangerous edge to his expression. “But at least Kohlbenschlagg, even with those thick-lensed glasses, was human. It wasn’t like having a piece of — of — well, a piece of stovepipe rummaging around in a patient’s stomach.”

He shook his head sadly in remembrance. “Old Fritz couldn’t take it. That’s what killed him. Those damned machines. Playing intern to a phymech was too much for him — Oh hell! You know what a grand heart that old man had, Murray. Fifty years in medicine and then to be barely allowed to hold sponge for a lousy tick-tock … and what was worse, knowing the tick-tock could hold the sponge more firmly with one of its pincers. That’s what killed old Fritz.”

Bergman added softly, staring at his shaking hands, “And at that … he’s the lucky one.”

And then. “We’re the damned of our culture, Murray; the kept men of medicine.”

Thomas looked up startled, then annoyed. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Stuart, stop being melodramatic. Nothing of the sort. If a better scalpel comes along, do you refuse to discard the old issue because you’ve used it so long? Don’t be an ass.”

“But we’re not scalpels. We’re men! We’re doctors! ” He was on his feet suddenly, as though the conversation had been physically building in him, forcing an explosion. The two whiskey glasses slipped and dumped as his thighs banged the table in rising. Bergman’s voice was raised, and his temples throbbed, yet he was not screaming; even so, the words came out louder than any scream.

“For God’s sake, Stu, sit down! ” Thomas looked apprehensively around the Medical Center Lounge. “If the head resident should walk in, we’d both get our throats cut. Sit down , will you already!”

Bergman slumped slowly back onto the form seat. It depressed and flowed around him caressingly, and he squirmed in agony, as though it were strangling him. Even after he was fully seated, his shoulders continued rounding; his eyes were wild. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, his upper lip.

Thomas leaned forward, a frown creasing his mouth. “Take hold, Stu. Don’t let a thing like this ruin you. Better men than us have felt this way about it, but you can’t stop progress. And losing your head, doing something crazy like that exhibition at the operation yesterday, won’t do any of us any good. It’s all we can do to maintain what rights we have left. It’s a bad break for us, Stu, but it’s good for the whole rest of the human race, and dammit, man, they come before us. It’s as simple as that.”

He drew a handkerchief from his breast pouch and mopped at the spreading twin pools of liquor, covertly watching Bergman from behind lowered lashes.

The sudden blare of a juke brought Bergman’s head up, his nostrils flaring. When he realized what it was, he subsided, the lights vanishing from his eyes.

He rested his head in his hand, rubbing slowly up and down the length of his nose. “How did it all start, Murray? I mean, all this?” He looked at the roaring juke that nearly drowned out conversation despite the hush booth … the bar with its mechanical drink interpolater — remarkable mnemonic circuits capable of mixing ten thousand different liquors flawlessly — and intoxication estimater … the fully mechanized hospital rearing huge outside the plasteel-fronted bar … robot physicians glimpsed occasionally passing before a lighted window.

Windows showing light only because the human patients and fallible doctors needed it. The robots needed no light; they needed no fame, and no desire to help mankind. All they needed was their power pack and an occasional oiling. In return for which they saved mankind.

Bergman’s mind tossed the bitter irony about like a dog with a foul rag in its mouth.

Murray Thomas sighed softly, considered Bergman’s question. He shook his head. “I don’t know, Stu.” The words paced themselves, emerging slowly, reluctantly. “Perhaps it was the automatic pilot, or the tactical computers they used in the Third War, or maybe even farther back than that; maybe it was as far back as electric sewing machines, and hydramatic shift cars and self-serve elevators. It was machines, and they worked better than humans. That was it, pure and simple. A hunk of metal is nine times out of ten better than a fallible man.”

Thomas considered what he had said, added definitely, “I’ll take that back: ten times out of ten. There’s nothing a cybernetics man can’t build into one of those things now. It was inevitable they’d get around to taking human lives out of the hands of mere men.” He looked embarrassed for an instant at the length and tone of his reply, then sighed again and downed the last traces of his drink, running his tongue absently around the lip of the glass, tasting the dried liquid there.

Bergman’s intensity seemed to pulse, grow stronger. He was obviously trying to find an answer to the problem of himself, within himself. He hunched further over, looking into his friend’s face earnestly, almost boyishly, “But — but it doesn’t seem right , somehow. We’ve always depended on doctors — human doctors — to care for the sick and dying. It was a constant, Murray. A something you could depend on. In time of war a doctor was inviolate.”

“In times of need — I know it sounds maudlin, Murray — for God’s sake, in times of need a doctor was priest and father and teacher and patriot, and … and …”

He made futile motions with his hands, as though pleading the words to appear from the air. Then he continued in a stronger voice, from a memory ground into his mind:

“ ‘I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. In whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm. And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.’ ”

Thomas’s eyebrows rose slightly as his lips quirked in an unconscious smile. He had known Bergman would resort to the Oath eventually. Dedicated wasn’t enough of a word to describe Stuart Bergman, it seemed. He was right, it was maudlin, and still …

Bergman continued. “What good is it all now? They’ve only had the phymechs a few years now, only a few, and they have them in solidly … even though there are things about them they aren’t sure about. So what good were all the years in school, in study, in tradition? We can’t even go into the homes any more.”

His face seemed to grow more haggard under the indirect gleam of the glaze lights in the lounge; his hair seemed grayer than a moment before; the lines of his face were deeper. He swallowed nervously, ran a finger through the faint coating of wet left by the spilled drinks. “What kind of a practice is that? To carry slop buckets? To be allowed to watch as the robots cut and sew our patients? To be kept behind glass at the big operations?”

“To see the red lights flash on the hot board and know a mobilized monster is rolling faster than an ambulance to the scene? Is that what you’re telling me I have to adjust to? Are you, Murray? Don’t expect me to be as calm about it as you!”

“And most degrading of all,” he added, as if to solidify his arguments, “to have them throw us a miserable appendectomy or stomach-pump job once a week. Like scraps from the table … and watch us while we do it! What are we, dogs? To be treated like pets? I tell you, I’m going crazy, Murray! I go home at night and find myself even cutting my steak as though it were heart tissue. Anything, anything at all, just to remind myself that I was trained for surgery. My God! When I think of all the years, all the sweat, all the gutting and starving, just to come to this! Murray, where’s it going to end?”

He was on the verge of another scene like the one in the operating room observation bubble.

Whatever had happened when the Head Resident had examined Bergman — and it seemed to have been cleared up, for Bergman was still scheduled on the boards as phymech assistant, though his weekly operation had been set ahead three days — it wouldn’t do to let it flare up again.

And Murray Thomas knew things were boiling inside his ex-schoolmate; he had no idea how long it would be before the lid blew off, ruining Bergman permanently.

“Calm down, Stuart,” he said. “Let me dial you another drink …”

“Don’t touch that goddam mechanical thing! ” he roared, striking Thomas’s hand from the interpolater dial.

He gasped raggedly. “There are some things a machine can’t do. Machines brush my teeth in the morning, and they cook my food, and they lull me to sleep, but there must be something they can’t do better than a human … otherwise why did God create humans? To be waited on by tin cans? I don’t know what they are, but I swear there must be some abilities a human possesses that a robot doesn’t. There must be something that makes a man more valuable than a whirring, clanking chunk of tin!” He stopped, out of breath. It was then that Calkins, the head resident, stepped around the panel separating the booths from the bar.

The head resident stood there silently, watching for a moment, like a hound on point. He fingered the lapel on his sport jumper absently. “Getting a bit noisy, aren’t you, Dr. Bergman?”

Stuart Bergman’s face was alive with fear. His eyes lowered to his hands; entwined like serpents, seeking sanctuary in each other, white with the pressure of his clasping, his fingers writhed. “I — I was just, just, airing a few views … that’s all, Dr. Calkins.”

“Rather nasty views, I must say, Dr. Bergman. Might be construed as dissatisfaction with the way I’m handling things at Memorial. You wouldn’t want anyone to think that, would you, Dr. Bergman?” His words had taken on the tone of command, of steel imbedded in rock.

Bergman shook his head quickly, slightly, nervously. “No. No, I didn’t mean that at all, Dr. Calkins. I was just — well, you know. I thought perhaps if we physicians had a few more operations, a few more difficult …”

“Don’t you think the phymechs are quite capable of handling any such, Dr. Bergman?”

There was an air of expectancy in his voice … waiting for Bergman to say the wrong thing. That’s what you’d like, wouldn’t you, Calkins? That’s what you want! His thoughts spun sidewise, madly.

“I suppose so … yes, I know they are. It was, well, it’s difficult to remember I’m a doctor, not doing any work for so long and all, and …”

“That’s about enough, Bergman!” snapped Calkins. “The government subsidized the phymechs, and they use taxpayers’ money to keep them serviced and saving lives. They have a finer record than any human …”

Bergman broke in sharply. “But they haven’t been fully tested or …”

Calkins stared him into silence, replied, “If you want to remain on the payroll, remain in the hospital, Dr. Bergman, even as an assistant, you’d better tone down and watch yourself, Bergman. We have our eyes on you.”

“But I …”

“I said that’s enough, Bergman!” Turning to Murray Thomas he added violently, “And I’d watch who I keep company with, Thomas, if I were you. That’s all. Good evening.” He strode off lightly, almost jauntily, arrogance in each step, leaving Bergman huddled in a corner of the booth, staring wild-eyed at his hands.

“Rotten lousy appointee!” snarled Thomas softly. “If it weren’t for his connections with the secretary of medicine, he’d be in the same boat with us. The lousy bastard.”

“I — I guess I’d better be getting home,” mumbled Bergman, sliding out of the booth. A sudden blast from the juke shivered him, and he regained his focus on Thomas with difficulty. “Thelma’s probably waiting dinner for me.”

“Thanks … thanks for having a drink with me, Murray. I’ll see you at washup tomorrow.” He ran a finger down the front of his jumper, sealing the suit; he pulled up his collar, sealing the suit to the neck.

A fine spray of rain — scheduled for this time by Weatherex — was dotting the huge transparent front of the lounge, and Bergman stared at it, engrossed for an instant, as though seeing something deeper in the rain.

He drew a handful of octagonal plastic chits from his pouch, dropped them into the pay slot on his side of the table, and started away. The machine registered an overpayment, but he did not bother to collect the surplus coins.

He paused, turned for a moment. Then, “Thanks … Murray …” and he was gone into the rain.

Poor slob , thought Dr. Murray Thomas, an ache beginning to build within him for things he could not name. Just can’t adjust. He knew he couldn’t hold it, but he dialed another drink. He regretted it while doing it, but that ache had to be avoided at all costs. The drink was a double.