Part 2

"Thank you, John," he said. "I often wonder, though, whether the Nuremberg Principles really gave us the right to build and populate this germless microcosm. We told your mothers when they volunteered that the results of raising humans gnotobiotically would be important. They have indeed. Thousands of lives have been saved by what we've learned here. We saw to it, as we'd also promised your mothers, that your health hasn't suffered by reason of experiments, that you've been given the education you need to earn a good living, and especially that your dignity as human beings has always been respected. The core question is, did we have the right to involve fellow humans, not yet born, in a process the end of which we couldn't entirely predict? Enough of this, though. My conscience is my own problem. For your immediate relief I can offer only: keep busy."

"Work is dandy, but liquor's quicker," I said. "A wound of the heart calls for a therapeutic drunk."

"I'll honor your prescription, Doctor," the Chief said. "The moment I get outside, I'll Seitz you some of my own Scotch." He stood up and caught hold of his air-hose. "Forgive me for behaving so like Pollyanna, John," he said. "I wish I could offer you relief more potent than Scotch and sympathy."

"Such spiritual Band-aids are all the help there is, Chief. Thank you for them."

He slapped me on the shoulder with his gloved right hand, then walked through the shower-room, trailing his black air-hose, and dropped down the manhole into the formaldehyde sump on his way back out into the world.

I sat on my bench in my artificial garden in the middle of the great steel womb I'd been delivered into, and I thought about my Anne.

* * * * *

"If I had a chisel and about four tons of Carrara marble," the girl standing behind me said, "I'd hack me out a statue on your model, and call it _The Thinker_." Dorothy--the Firebird--Damien plumped her little backside onto the bench beside me and scintillated eagerness to converse.

I didn't want to talk to anyone at the moment, certainly not to the Firebird. To employ a metaphor from an appetite less exalted than love, seeing the Firebird after losing Anne was too much like being offered hamburger after having had a filet mignon snatched from under nose.

Still, as my peripheral vision took in the Firebird's brilliantly distributed five-foot-three, I realized that my metaphor was false. That flame-colored hair and impish, freckled face; that halter taut as a double-barreled ballista cocked to fire twin rounds; I turned my attention to the girlscape beside me, quite innocent of covetousness, my interest purely aesthetic. No hamburger, this. Firebird Damien was filet mignon.

But she wasn't Anne.

Suddenly I was contrite toward my fellow captive. "You're looking splendid, Miss Damien," I said.

"And you got a face peeled off the iodine bottle. Tell mamma where it hurts."

"Don't delve, doll."

"Woman-trouble?" she asked.

"The term is tautological," I said. "_Woman_ and _trouble_ are synonyms. If the language had any logic the words would rhyme."

The Firebird put a freckled arm across my shoulder and squeezed my deltoid with her resting hand. I shrugged. "Don't try to shake me loose, Johnny," she said. "I'm trying to find out what sort of people you are. Whether you're a Shrinker or a Flesh-Presser."

"Obviously, you're of the Shrinker persuasion," I said.

"Hoo-hah! Shrinkers are the other race from me," the Firebird said. "They're the people who quail at shaking hands, who never slap a back nor playfully pinch. They hate to be crowded, don't like to be touched. My sort of people, though, tend to cuddle like puppies, or like cattle in a thunderstorm; we take comfort in the closeness of other humans. We're not erotic about this, Johnny. Not necessarily erotic, I mean. We have our moments, too, or the Shrinkers would long since have taken over the world in spite of their dreadful handicap. We're the people who make brilliant barbers. The kind who say hello to you with a Roman handshake and a clasp on the shoulder. We're the doctors with the healing touch, the most tender nurses. We're the Flesh-Pressers." She gently squeezed my shoulder-muscle again to demonstrate. "Tell me what's the matter, Johnny. Maybe I can help."

* * * * *

"No magic touch will cure my trouble," I said. "Anne and I are through. It was hopeless. I was like the goldfish in love with the cat. So I called our romance to a halt today and drove home in my little green sports-car, feeling a little green and hardly sporty at all. Please don't mention this again, Firebird; not till I'm old and bald and my wound has healed to a thin white scar."

"Can I say one thing?"

"You will, so do."

"I'm really sorry, Johnny."

"Thank you, Firebird," I said. "The Chief promised to send some therapeutic juices through the Seitz filter. If you've a mind to sample a little sterile White Horse, perhaps tie one on with me this evening, you'd be most welcome."

"I'll be proud and happy," the Firebird said. She scooted even closer.

I found her propinquity not at all unpleasant. Was I perhaps of the Flesh-Presser clan myself? The girl smelled good, the faint wholesome feminine odor of my Lapin foster-sisters--a perfume an outside wench, host to a universe of bacteria, could approximate only with Pepsodent and the most meticulous attention to her underarms, I gather from TV.

"How am I to entertain you, sir?" the Firebird asked me. "I have current gossip, vintage scandal, clever anecdotes lifted from the steaming pages of my autoclaved _Reader's Digest_, imitations of bird-songs--heavy on the mating-calls, these--and sheer adoration." She paused. "Scratch that last offering, Johnny," she said. "It's un-hygienic for a girl to wear her heart on her sleeve, even here."

"I've lost touch with the Big Tank social whirl these last few weeks," I said. "I've been spending all my alive-time in the greater world of Valparaiso, Indiana. Bring me abreast of the local gossip, Firebird, if you please."

"Gladly. First there's the case of Mary deWitte. She's still on the trail of her basketball star--a fellow named Lofting--confident that somehow they'll manage to compromise her hateful purity.... Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Mary," she said, seeing that I was frowning.

"I was just thinking," I said. "Miss deWitte and I might get together to establish an Amour Anonymous group in the Big Tank."

"If you do, Johnny," the Firebird said softly, "write me up a card as a charter member."

"The Chief was talking about Mary deWitte only a few minutes ago," I said. "Hasn't she accepted the fact that we Lapins can't hope to breed with those jungle weeds outdoors?"

"Have you accepted that fact, Johnny?" the Firebird asked.

"Apt question," I admitted. "Sure. I've decided that Anne is as unavailable to me as Mars is. I don't know which makes me more bitter, Firebird; losing Anne or being denied the chance at the stars. Now that the solar system is getting man's footprints all over it, now that the Orion ships are slamming out to Mars and back on a busline's schedule, and the biggest ship of all is being fitted for deep space at the back of the moon, the constellations don't seem much further off than Chicago. But not for me."

"You think you're bitter, bud, you should hear me with my hair down," the Firebird said. "But we've had dirges enough for one evening. Your whiskey should be filtered through by now. Let's go wet our Scotch apéritif, and have dinner."

"I'm not hungry," I said. "I just ate a turnip."

"Will turnips make you big and strong? You need solider food, like Scotch. That's my professional opinion, Doctor." She got up and tugged at my hand. "Come on, Johnny. I'm not about to let you sit here all evening and brood."

"Is this your prescription, sweet Firebird?" I asked. "That I'm to go back to the madding crowd, mingle with my twenty-eight fellows in aseptic togetherness? Well, you're probably right." I got up from my park-bench to walk with her, hand-in-hand, to the dining room, stopping en route at my room for a shirt. Dinner was a formal affair in the Big Tank, shirts for the gentlemen and shoes for all.

* * * * *

The other Lapins were already eating. They greeted me and especially the Firebird with jokes and fellowshippy sounds.

I felt very much at home with them. There was Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astrophysicist, his magnificent u.v.-blackened body a study in the surface musculature of the human male. At his table was Karl Fyrmeister, who has a practically complete collection of the airmail stamps of the world to console him on long winter evenings. All the stamps are quite sterile. Karl was talking with Gloria Moss, whose academic specialty was group dynamics. She demonstrated muscular dynamics so attractively that when she walked about the campus in her chastity-suit she drew whistles, a truly remarkable accolade when you consider that the c-suit is somewhat less faithful to the wearer's form than a poncho. Keto Hannamuri sat the four-place table with Bud and Karl and Gloria. He was my fellow-medic among McQueen's Beasts, a pediatrician. Kids loved him. Wearing his sterility-suit as he made his Ped Ward rounds, that Oriental smile showing through the face-plate of his mask, Keto seemed to the television-nurtured youngsters the very model of the friendly extra-solar alien, complete with space-suit. Besides his flair for showmanship, Keto was a remarkably fine doctor. As we passed his table, he slapped the Firebird's short-shorted callipygia in a kin-ship-gesture of the Flesh-Presser clan.

I felt a sudden overwhelming love for all these people, my brothers-and-sister-in-exile. I took my tray to sit down quick with the Firebird before my reserve, depleted by the emotional beating I'd taken at noon, gave way.

The menu featured radared steak. The meat was germ-free and somewhat tenderized by the high-energy beams. (A purist in culinary proteins might go so far as to say denatured.) The nearest any Lapin came to ingesting a bacterium was here at the table, where we ate billions of bacterial corpses. The bugs achieved a post-mortem revenge by triggering the production of faint bacterial antibodies in our blood.

Besides the steaks and the myriads of murdered microbes, we had an aseptic salad prepared from Tank-grown hydroponic vegetation, dressed with Roquefort, the cheese that vies with penicillin in my private hall of fame as the noblest product ever a mold gave man. The Scotch that Dr. McQueen had promised to send was on hand, Seitz-filtered into a sterile White Horse bottle. Not really caring to dilute my poignancies with alcohol, I passed the whiskey among the tables nearby.

* * * * *

The Firebird was managing to stay quite close to me, though technically remaining on her own side of the table, eating and talking and now and then flashing me such a glance of yearning that I was pierced by the sight of her and by a remembered line of e. e. cummings's: "... your slightest look easily will unclose me though I have closed myself as fingers...." Just as suddenly, I realized that mine was a highly pathological state of mind, the rinse-phase of the brain-wash. Autism can be produced as surely by loneliness or unrequitable love as by injections of LSD-25.

So I turned my attention to my environment, consciously flexing my muscles of mental health. I answered the Firebird's sallies with automatic flippancy. I ate my steak, savoring its flavor. And I looked about the dining-room, examining it as though I'd never eaten there before.

The Lapins' dining-room in the Big Tank is about the size of a railroad restaurant car. (Not that I've ever been aboard a train to make the comparison. The stringencies of the sterility-suit tie such of us to the Big Tank on a short leash: the most sanitary of outside washrooms would prove a pesthole to a Lapin.) The kitchen, which was under the supervision of the Firebird, our dietitian, could have been squeezed into a telephone booth. It served chiefly as receiving-station for the autoclave and the radar-room, through which all our food came. With its ten little four-place tables, each covered with a gypsy red-checkerboard cloth, set with a green glass vase of Tank-grown daisies, our dining-room was friendly enough. The Tank-ness of it, though, was emphasized by a mural along one wall, a fantasy of stars and men and microbes that half a dozen of us had planned and painted one week. Where the mural was now had once been a picture window, overlooking a green stretch of Central campus, a source of comfort to us all. An Air Force jet, though, pulling out of a dive invisibly above us, had sonic-boomed a crack in both panes of the double glass of the window, causing a general alert as we realized that some airborne _Proteus_ or fortunate _Staphylococcus_ or lonely _Aspergillis_ might have invaded our fortress through this almost microscopic breach in our walls.

Careful decontamination had saved our sterility, but now the Big Tank had no window.

"I was saying...." the Firebird said, in a firm voice.

"Sorry, doll. You were saying?"

"That Mary deWitte isn't here. Do you suppose she's still outside? She checked out her sterility-suit about the same time you did."

"That's a good nine hours ago," I said, glancing at the clock set over Saturn on our mural. "Either Mary has been on a restricted-fluids diet, or True Love has made her careless of visceral discomfort."

"Don't be coarse, Johnny."

"The demands of the kidney are as exigent as those of the heart, Firebird," I said. "I think I'd better call Dr. McQueen."

"You'll only cause trouble for her and Lofting," Firebird said.

"I've decided that it's better to be lovesick than dead," I explained, getting up from the table.

* * * * *

I went to the phone in the corner of the dining-room and dialed Dr. McQueen's home. "Chief? John Bogardus. Mary deWitte still hasn't come home to roost. I think we'd better find her before she does something splendid and foolish."

"Like perhaps marrying her contaminated basketball-player and setting out on a suicidal honeymoon?" Dr. McQueen suggested. "You're right, John; we should prevent that sort of thing. The rub is, we're too late. I got a phone-call from Mary a few minutes after I got home this evening. She abandoned her sterility-suit in a downtown Chicago hotel room at noon today, and married her fledgling lawyer in a civil ceremony at one o'clock. I tried to find out from her where she was, but she just said she was very happy and hung up."

"Hell! What are we going to do?"

"I'm flying to Chicago, where I'll ask the help of the police in finding Mary," the Chief said. "Once I've run down the happy couple, though, damned if I know what I'll do next. Shall I stand outside the bridal chamber with a syringeful of broad-spectrum antibiotics, waiting for Mary to sneeze?"

"They'll have a short marriage," I said.

"Mary knows how likely it is that she'll never grow old," Dr. McQueen said. "But I suspect that she hasn't said a word to her husband. I'd better go now, John. My plane leaves in twenty minutes."

"Don't let this prey on you too much, Chief," I said. "We Lapins have free will, too. We're old enough to bear the responsibilities for our own actions."

"Thank you, Johnny." Dr. McQueen hung up.

I returned to the table with no enthusiasm for the remaining half of my steak. "What's up, Johnny?" the Firebird asked me.

"Now we are twenty-eight," I said. "They were married in Chicago at one o'clock."

"How wonderful!" the Firebird exulted.

She stood and pounded our table-top with the vase, scattering damp daisies on the cloth. "Quiet, everybody! I've got an announcement." The chatter over dessert simmered down. "Mary deWitte got married today--here's to the bride!" Firebird slopped two ounces of White Horse into her glass and downed them at a heroic gulp. She sat, sputtering. The chatter at the other tables crescendoed as our colleagues reminded one another of the significance of the Firebird's news.

"Will you also propose the toast at Mary's wake?" I asked.

* * * * *

"What a hideous thing to say!"

"It was, Firebird," I said. "Forgive me, please. This thing has left me in a wounding mood."

"Is Mary really in such danger?" Firebird asked.

"She may last a week, not much more. Today she'll meet _Klebsiella_, probably; perhaps _E. coli_ and _Shigella_. Pretty soon she'll start to sniffle with the first common cold she's ever experienced. Polio virus and the ECHO group may get to her first, and establish themselves before there is sufficient growth of bacterial flora to give them competition. Her intestinal walls are thin and weak, so she may suffer megacolon as a result of gas-producing fermentation. From a pathologist's point of view, I'll find it most instructive to learn the manner of Mary Lofting's death. From the standpoint of a friend and fellow Lapin, though, I'll think her death a damned shame."

"I'm getting a little drunk, Johnny," the Firebird said, "and a little maudlin. So, say you're right. After all, you're the doctor and I'm just a dumb dietitian. But don't you think maybe it's worth while, what Mary's done? Condemning herself to die, I mean, because she's really in love, and death is what she's got to pay for a few days' happiness. Don't you think the price is fair, Johnny?"

"If I did, I'd be paying it," I said.... "No, Firebird. Seizing a little love and poetry before the sacrifice is great stuff for epics, but it doesn't make much sense to me. When I'm married I'll want to see my children all the way through Spock and Gesell. I'll want to grow old with my wife, if you'll excuse the corn."

"We Flesh-Pressers have a natural reverence for corn," the Firebird said. "It's part of the syndrome. Johnny, if you really want what you just said, want those things badly enough to set up a marriage on half a love, give me a call. Anytime. Even though I don't set your blood aflame." She stood up, a little unsteady, and rubbed her hand across her eyes in a tardy effort to hide tears. "Save the brushoff till tomorrow, Johnny," she said. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight, sweet Firebird," I said. She turned and walked quickly from the dining-room.

Bud Dorsey, our weight-lifting astronomer, left his three companions to bring his coffee over and sit with me. Bud was the Lapin who'd have been a Central U. fullback as an undergraduate, if only Dr. McQueen had let him play the game in a chastity-suit. "What will happen to Mary deWitte, John?" he asked.

"She'll die," I said.

"One flight in the sunlight, then her wings fall off. We Lapins are a fragile race. May I?" I nodded. Dorsey poured some of the Scotch into Firebird's empty water-glass and sipped it.

* * * * *

"The men who devised the Nuremberg Principles failed us when they forgot to underwrite the romantic aspirations of human guinea-pigs," I said. "As a result of their oversight, it seems that McQueen's Beasts have made a bigger contribution to sociology than to bacteriology. We've demonstrated that familiarity doesn't breed. Here we are, now, fourteen pairs of healthy Americans in their middle twenties, and neither a marriage nor a pregnancy amongst us. Why?"

"Tell me, John," Dorsey said.

"I'll tell you why," I said. "It's because we're fond of our foster-sisters, but we're also a little bored with them. And they with us. We men know every canned peach's flirtations and frailties and conversational gambits so thoroughly that one of us could no more marry one of them than the average outsider could marry his kid sister."

"Even that's been done, John, just for principle's sake," Dorsey said. "The Pharaohs wed their sisters because no one else was exalted enough for the honor. Our predicament is not dissimilar. The primal urge, John, will in time overwhelm the curse of contiguity."

"Could be," I said. "But it's not just sex that's agonizing me, Bud. Prison has whole constellations of frustration. However warm and understanding our guards may be, this is still a prison, and half of us are stir-crazy. Why did Mike Bohrman take off his chastity-suit last winter, to walk barefoot through the snow with only his suit-shorts on, till he collapsed from the cold? It was a prison-break, Bud. So was Mary deWitte's witless marriage. They were both suicide, the lifer's one way over the wall."

"Stir-crazy?" Dorsey asked. "You're exaggerating, John."

"Open your eyes, Bud," I said. "Look at Karl Fyrmeister's hands, for example. I'm violating no medical confidence to tell you that Karl got his dermatitis as the result of compulsive hand-washing. There's a fine neurotic symptom for a germ-free Lapin! If I'm exaggerating our collective un-sanity, Bud, tell me why Lucy Cashdollar has become an apprentice alcoholic. Why does Fizz Ewell, with an I.Q. that must range in the 150's and the most brilliant record the Nuclear Engineering Department has ever seen, spend six hours a day working crossword puzzles? Why do you have that tic of your left orbicularis oculi? Why am I an insomniac, with a nasty barbiturate habit? Look around, Bud. You'll see that our little home has turned into something of a snakepit. Our neuroses are only garter snakes so far; but they'll grow into cobras, given time and further frustration to feed on."

* * * * *

Dorsey's left eye twitched as though my mentioning his tic had triggered it. He self-consciously raised his fingers to the vellicating muscle, more to hide than to soothe it.

"While our keepers were sending Lapins through every major discipline offered on the campus," he said, "it seems they'd have done well to have trained one of us in psychiatry."

"For what?" I demanded. "So we could have someone right here in the Tank to spoon out our soothing-syrups? Man, we've got a right to be stir-crazy. We're life prisoners and we've committed no crime." I stopped to get my calm back. "Bud," I asked, "do you know what I want more than anything else, next to Anne?"

"Of course I do," Dorsey said. "Like you've pointed out, John, we've got no secrets from each other. Your big itch is to step aboard one of the Orion ships. You want to join up for the chase after interplanetary white whales."

"It's only natural," I said. "When we were kids, Bud, we saw the same TV programs, the same space-adventure movies, as the kids who are now the men in space. Every boy in America was conditioned to long for a space-suit. I'm one of the ones who could have made it, Bud. I love medicine, and I think I'm going to be a damned fine pathologist; but I'd turn in my M.D. for an Ordinary Spaceman's ticket without a second's hesitation. When I read, two years ago, that Immermann had discovered that human skull in the oxide rubble below Roosevelt Ridge in Syrtis Major, I cried for the first time since I was six years old. Twenty thousand years ago there was man on Mars. And I'm confined to Earth for life."

"How much do you know about the Immermann skull, John?" Dorsey asked me.

"What I've said. Is there more?"

"One point," Dorsey said. "My field, radio astronomy, is a deep-space sort of specialty; but I do from time to time condescend to read the _Journal of Aerology_ and the other parochial, solar-system publications. Somewhere I read that there's something odd about that skull Colonel Immermann dug up."

"If you're suggesting that it was a second Piltdown hoax, planted in that Martian talus to jar larger Air Force appropriations from Congress, keep it from me," I said. "I cherish the illusion that the Immermann is genuine, and a mystery."

* * * * *