The Pyramid In The Desert
KATHERINE MacLEAN

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls

Of mastodons are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

 

The grizzly bear whose potent hug

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

 

Great Caesar’s bust is on the shelf

And I don’t feel so well myself!

Arthur Guiterman

IT WAS AFTERNOON. The walls of the room glared back the white sunlight, their smooth plaster coating concealing the rickety bones of the building. Through the barred window drifted miasmic vapors, laden with microscopic living things that could turn food to poison while one ate, bacteria that could find root in lungs or skin, and multiply, swarming through the blood.

And yet it seemed to be a nice day. A smoky hint of burning leaves blurred the other odors into a pleasant autumn tang, and sunlight streaming in the windows reflected brightly from the white walls. The surface appearance of things was harmless enough. The knack of staying calm was to think only of the surface, never of the meaning, to try to ignore what could not be helped. After all, one cannot refuse to eat, one cannot refuse to breathe. There was nothing to be done.

One of her feet had gone to sleep. She shifted her elbow to the other knee and leaned her chin in her hand again, feeling the blood prickling back into her toes. It was not good to sit on the edge of the bed too long without moving. It was not good to think too long. Thinking opened the gates to fear. She looked at her fingernails. They were pale, cyanotic. She had been breathing reluctantly, almost holding her breath. Fear is impractical. One cannot refuse to breathe.

And yet to solve the problems of safety it was necessary to think, it was necessary to look at the danger clearly, to weigh it, to sum it up and consider it as a whole. But each time she tried to face it her imagination would flinch away. Always her thinking trailed off in a blind impulse to turn to Alec for rescue.

When someone tapped her shoulder she made sure that her face was calm and blank before raising it from her hands. A man in a white coat stood before her, proffering a pill and a cup of water. He spoke tonelessly.

“Swallow.”

There was no use fighting back. There was no use provoking them to force. Putting aside the frantic futile images of escape she took the pill, her hands almost steady.

She scarcely felt the prick of the needle.

 

It was afternoon.

Alexander Berent stood in the middle of the laboratory kitchen, looking around vaguely. He had no hope of seeing her.

His wife was missing.

She was not singing in the living room, or cooking at the stove, or washing dishes at the sink. Helen was not in the apartment.

She was not visiting any of her friends’ houses. The hospitals had no one of her description in their accident wards. The police had mot found her body on any slab of the city morgue.

Helen Berent was missing.

In the corner cages the guinea pigs whistled and chirred for food, and the rabbits snuffled and tried to shove their pink noses through the grill. They looked gaunt. He fed them and refilled their water bottles automatically.

There was something different about the laboratory. It was not the way he had left it. Naturally after five months of the stupendous deserts and mountains of Tibet any room seemed small and cramped and artificial, but there were other changes. The cot had been dragged away from the wall, towards the icebox. Beside the cot was a wastebasket and a small table that used to be in the living room. On top of the table were the telephone and the dictation recorder surrounded by hypodermics, small bottles cryptically labeled with a red pencil scrawl, and an alcohol jar with its swab of cotton still in it. Alec touched the cotton. It was dusty to his fingers, and completely dry.

The dictation recorder and the telephone had been oddly linked into one circuit with a timer clock, but the connections were open, and when he picked up the receiver the telephone buzzed as it should.

Alec replaced the receiver and somberly considered the number of things that could be reached by a woman lying down. She could easily spend days there. Even the lower drawers of the filing cabinet were within reach.

He found what he was looking for in the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet, filed under “A,” a special folder marked “ALEC.” In it were a letter and two voice records dated and filed in order.

The letter was dated the day he had left, four months ago. He held it in his hand a minute before beginning to read.

Dear Alec,

You never guessed how silly I felt with my foot in that idiotic bandage. You were so considerate I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. After you got on board I heard the plane officials paging a tardy passenger. I knew his place was empty, and it took all my will power to keep from running up the walk into the plane. If I had yielded to the temptation, I would be on the plane with you now, sitting in that vacant seat, looking down at the cool blue Atlantic, and in a month hiking across those windy horizons to the diggings.

But I can’t give up all my lovely plans, so I sublimated the impulse to confess by promising myself to write this letter, and then made myself watch the plane take off with the proper attitude of sad resignation, like a dutiful wife with a hurt foot.

This is the confession. The bandage was a fake. My foot is all right. I just pretended to be too lame to hike to have an excuse to stay home this summer. Nothing else would have made you leave without me.

New York seems twice as hot and sticky now that the plane has taken you away. Honestly, I love you and my vacations too much to abandon the expedition to the unsanitary horrors of native cooking for just laziness. Remember, Alec, once when I was swearing at the gnats along the Whangpo, you quoth, “I could not love you so my dear, loved I not science more.” I put salt in your coffee for that, but you were right. I am the wife of an archeologist. Whither thou goest I must go, your worries are my worries, your job, my job.

What you forget is that besides being your wife, I am an endocrinologist, and an expert. If you can cheerfully expose me to cliffs, swamps, man-eating tigers and malarial mosquitoes, all in the name of Archeology, I have an even better right to stick hypodermics in myself in the name of Endocrinology.

You know my experiments in cell metabolism. Well naturally the next step in the investigation is to try something on myself to see how it works. But for ten years, ever since you caught me with that hypodermic and threw such a fit, I have given up the personal guinea pig habit so as to save you worry. Mosquitoes can beat hypos any day, but there is no use trying to argue with a husband.

So I pretended to have broken one of the small phalanges of my foot instead. Much simpler.

I am writing this letter in the upstairs lobby of the Paramount, whither I escaped from the heat. I will write other letters every so often to help you keep up with the experiment, but right now I am going in to see this movie and have a fine time weeping over Joan Crawford’s phony troubles, then home and to work.

G’by darling. Remember your airsick tablets, and don’t fall out.

Yours always,

Helen

P.S. Don’t eat anything the cook doesn’t eat first. And have a good time.

After the letter there were just two voice records in envelopes. The oldest was dated July 24th. Alec put it on the turntable and switched on the play-back arm. For a moment the machine made no sound but the faint scratching of the needle, and then Helen spoke, sounding close to the microphone, her voice warm and lazy.

“Hello, Alec. The day after writing that first letter, while I was looking for a stamp, I suddenly decided not to mail it. There is no use worrying you with my experiment until it is finished. I resolved to write daily letters and save them for you to read all together when you get home.

“Of course, after making that good resolution I didn’t write anything for a month but the bare clinical record of symptoms, injections and reactions.

“I concede you that any report has to include the human detail to be readable, but honestly, the minute I stray off the straight and narrow track of formulas, my reports get so chatty they read like a gossip column. It’s hopeless.

“When you get back you can write in the explanatory material yourself, from what I tell you on this disk. You write better anyhow. Here goes:

“It’s hard to organize my words, I’m not used to talking at a faceless dictaphone. A typewriter is more my style, but I can’t type lying down, and every time I try writing with a pen, I guess I get excited, and clutch too hard, and my finger bones start bending, and I have to stop and straighten them out. Bending one’s finger bones is no fun. The rubbery feel of them bothers me, and if I get scared enough, the adrenalin will upset my whole endocrine balance and set me back a week’s work.

“Let’s see: Introduction. Official purpose of experiment—to investigate the condition of old age. Aging is a progressive failure of anabolism. Old age is a disease. No one has ever liked growing old, so when you write this into beautiful prose you can call it—‘The Age-Old Old-Age problem’.”

“Nowdays there is no evolutionary reason why we should be built to get old. Since we are learning animals, longevity is a survival factor. It should be an easy conquest, considering that each cell is equipped to duplicate itself and leave a couple of young successor cells to carry on the good work. The trouble is, some of them just don’t. Some tissues brace themselves to hang on fifty years, and you have to get along with the same deteriorating cells until death do you part.

“From Nature’s point of view that is reasonable. The human race evolved in an environment consisting mainly of plagues, famines, blizzards, and saber-toothed tigers. Any man’s chances of staying unkilled for fifty years were pretty thin. Longevity was not worth much those days. What good is longevity to a corpse?

“We have eliminated plagues, famines, and saber-toothed tigers, but old age is still with us. One was meant to go with the other, but evolution hasn’t had time to adjust us to the change.

“That Russian scientist started me on this idea. Boglametz. He gave oldsters a little of their lost elasticity by injections of an antibody that attacked and dissolved some of their old connective tissue and forced a partial replacement.

“I just want to go him one better, and see if I can coax a replacement for every creaking cell in the body.

“You can see how it would be a drastic process—halfway between being born again and being run through a washing machine. There is nobody I dare try it on except myself, for I’ll have to feel my way, working out each step from the reactions to the last step, like making up a new recipe by adding and tasting.

 

“Item: The best way to test your theories is to try them on yourself. Emergency is the mother of exertion.

“Thirty-eight is just old enough to make me a good guinea pig. I am not so old and fragile that I would break down under the first strain, but I am not so young that a little added youth won’t show.

“One question is—just how many tissues of any kind dare I destroy at once. The more I clear away at once, the more complete the replacement, but it is rather like replacing parts in a running motor. You wonder just how many bolts you can take out before the flywheel comes off its shaft and flies away. Speed should help. A quick regrowth can replace dissolved tissue before the gap is felt. The human machine is tough and elastic. It can run along on its own momentum when it should be stopped.

“This winter I bred a special strain of mold from some hints I had found in the wartime research reports on the penicillia. The mold makes an art of carrying on most of the processes of life outside of itself. Digestion and even most of the resynthesis of assimilation is finished before the food touches the plant. Its roots secrete enzymes that attack protein, dismantle it neatly down to small soluble molecules, and leave them linked to catalytic hooks, ready to be reassembled like the parts of a prefabricated house.

“The food below the mold becomes a pool. The mold plants draw the liquid up through their roots, give it the last touch that converts it to protoplasm, provide it with nucleus and throw it up in a high waving fur of sporangia.

“But that liquid is magic. It could become the protoplasm of any creature with the same ease and speed. It could be put into the bloodstream and be as harmless as the normal rough aminos, and yet provide for an almost instantaneous regrowth of missing flesh, a regrowth complete enough, I hope, to allow the drastic destruction and replacement I need.

“That may provide the necessary regeneration, but to have the old cells missing at the proper time and place, in the proper controlled amounts, is another problem entirely. The Russians used the antibody technique on horses to get a selectively destructive serum. That is all right for them, but it sounds too slow and troublesome for me. The idea of innoculating a horse with some of my connective tissue doesn’t appeal to me somehow. How am I supposed to get this connective tissue? Besides, I don’t have a horse. The serum farms charge high.

“After watching a particularly healthy colony of mold melting down a tough piece of raw beef I decided that there are other destructives than antibodies.

“I forced alternate generations of the mold to live on the toughest fresh meat I could find, and then on the dead mold mats of its own species. To feed without suicide it had to learn a fine selectivity, attacking only flesh that had passed the thin line between death and life. Twice, variants went past the line and dissolved themselves back to puddles, but the other strains learned to produce what was needed.

“Then I took some of the enzyme juice from under a mat, and shot the deadly stuff into a rabbit—the brown bunny with the spot. Nothing happened to Bunny, she just grew very hungry and gained an ounce. I cut myself, and swabbed the juice on the cut. It skinned the callus from my fingertips, but nothing happened to the cut. So then I sent a sample over to the hospital for a test, with a note to Williams that this was a trial sample of a fine selective between dead and live tissue, to be used cautiously in cleaning out ragged infected wounds and small local gangrene.

 

“Williams is the same irresponsible old goat he always was. There was an ancient patient dying of everything in the book, including a gangrenous leg. Williams shot the whole tube of juice into the leg at once, just to see what would happen. Of course it made a sloppy mess that he had to clean up himself. It served him right. He said that the surprise simply turned his stomach, but the stuff fixed the gangrene all right, just as I said it would. It was as close and clean as a surgical amputation. Nevertheless he came back with what was left of the sample and was glad to be rid of it. He guessed it to be a super catalyst somehow trained to be selective, and he wanted to get rid of it before it forgot its training.

“When I asked about the old patient later, they said that he woke up very hungry, and demanded a steak, so they satisfied him with intravenous amino acids, and he lived five days longer than expected.

“That was not a conclusive check, but it was enough. I labeled the juice ‘H’ for the acid ion. ‘H’ seemed a good name somehow.

“The first treatment on schedule was bone replacement. Middle age brings a sort of acromegaly. People ossify, their bones thicken, their gristle turns to bone and their arteries cake and stiffen. My framework needs a polishing down.

“For weeks I had cut my calcium intake down to almost nothing. Now I brought the calcium level in my blood down below the safe limit. The blood tried to stay normal by dissolving the treated bone. For safety, I had to play with parathyroid shots, depressants, and even a little calcium lactate on an hour-to-hour observation basis, to keep from crossing the spasm level of muscle irritability.

“But the hullabaloo must have upset my own endocrines, for they started behaving erratically, and yesterday suddenly they threw me into a fit before I could reach the depressant. I didn’t break any bones but I came out of the fit with one of my ulna uncomfortably bent. The sight of it almost gave me another fit.

“When one’s bones start bending it is time to stop. I must have overdone the treatment a bit. There seems to be almost no mineral left in the smaller bones, just stiff healthy gristle. I am now lying flat on the cot drinking milk, eggnogs, and cod liver oil. I dreamed of chop suey last night, but until I ossify properly, I refuse to get up and go out for a meal. The icebox is within easy reach. Maybe my large bones are still hard, and maybe not, but I’ll take no chances on bow legs and flat feet just for an oriental dinner.

“Darling, I’m having a wonderful time, and I wish you were here to look over my shoulder and make sarcastic remarks. Every step is a guess based on the wildest deductions, and almost every guess checks and has to be written down as right. At this rate, when I get through I’ll be way ahead of the field. I’ll be one of the best cockeyed endocrinologists practicing.

“I hope you are having a good time too, and finding hundreds of broken vases and old teeth.

“I’ve got to switch back to the notes and hours record now and take down my pulse rate, irritability level, PH and so on. The time is now seven ten, I’ll give you another record soon.

“G’by Hon—”

Her voice stopped and the needle ran onto the label and scratched with a heavy tearing noise. Alec turned the record over. The label on the other side was dated one week later.

Helen said cheerfully:

“Hello, Alec. This is a week later. I took a chance today and walked. Flat on my back again now, just a bit winded, but unbowed.

“Remember the time the obelisk fell on me? They set my arm badly, and it healed crooked with a big bump in the bones where the broken ends knitted. That bump made a good test to check the amount of chromosome control in this replacement business. If it approaches true regeneration, the bump should be noticeably reduced, and the knitting truer, to conform better to the gene blueprint of how an arm should be.

“The minute I thought of that test I had to try it. Risking flattened arches I got up and took the elevator down to the second floor office of Dr. Stanton, and walked right through an anteroom of waiting patients to the consulting room, where I promptly lay down on his examination table.

“He was inspecting a little boy’s tonsils and said irritably: “ ‘I really must ask you to wait your turn— Oh, it’s Dr. Berent. Really Dr. Berent, you shouldn’t take advantage of your professional position to— Do you feel faint?’

“ ‘Oh I feel fine,’ I told him charmingly, ‘I just want to borrow your fluoroscope a minute to look at an old break in the right humerus.’

“ ‘Oh yes, I understand,’ he says blinking. ‘But why are you lying down?’

“Well, Alec, you remember how that young man is—rather innocent, and trying to be dignified and stuffy to make up for it. The last time we spoke to him, and you made those wonderful cracks, I could see him thinking that we were somewhat odd, if not completely off our rockers. If I tried to tell him now that I was afraid my legs would bend, he would have called for a padded wagon to come and take me away.

“I said, ‘I am afraid that I have upset my parathyroids. They are on a rampage. Just a momentary condition, but I have to stay relaxed for a while. You should see my irritability index! A little higher and… ah… I feel rather twitchy. Do you happen to have any curare around?’

“He looked at me as if I had just stabbed him with a hatpin, and then pulled out the fluoroscope so fast it almost ran over him, screened my arm bones and hustled me out of there before I could even say aha. Apparently the idea of my throwing a fit right there didn’t arouse his professional ardor one bit.

“Alec, when I saw those bone shadows it was as much as I could do to keep from frightening the poor boy with war whoops. I put both arms under together, and I couldn’t see any bumps at all. They were exactly the same.

“This means that cells retain wider gene blueprints than they need. And they just need a little encouragement to rebuild injuries according to specifications. Regeneration must be an unused potential of the body. I don’t see why. We can’t evolve unused abilities. Natural selection only works in life and death trials—probably evolution had no part in this. It is just a lucky break from being fetal apes, a hang-over bit of arrested development.

“I wonder how wide a blueprint each cell retains. Can a hand sprout new fingers, a wrist a new hand, a shoulder a new arm? Where does the control stop?

“The problem is a natural for the data I am getting now. Next winter when I am through with this silly rejuvenation business I’ll get down to some solid work on regeneration, and try sprouting new arms on amputees. Maybe we can pry a grant from the Government, through that military bureau for he design of artificial limbs. After all, new legs would be the artificial limb to end all artificial limbs.

“But that is all for next year. Right now all I can use it for is to speed up replacement. If I can kid my cells into moving up onto embryo level activity—they would regrow fast enough to keep the inside works ticking after a really stiff jolt of the bottled dissolution. I’d have to follow it fast with the liquid protein— No, if they regrew that fast they would be using the material from the dissolved old cells. I could telescope treatment down to a few hours. And the nucleus control so active that it rebuilds according to its ideal.

“Demolition and Reconstruction going on simultaneously. Business as Usual.

“Next stop is the replacement of various soft tissues. If I were not in such a hurry, I would do it in two long slow smple Ghandi-like fasts, with practically no scientific mumbo jumbo. The way a sea squirt does it, I mean—though I’d like to see someone starve himself down to a foot high.

“I have to start working now. The record is running out anyhow, so good-by until the next record, whenever that is.

“Having wonderful time.

“Wish you were here.”

 

He took the record off hurriedly and put on the next one. It was recorded on only one face, and dated September 17th, about fifty days later, seven weeks.

Helen started speaking without any introduction, her voice clearer and more distant as if she were speaking a few feet from the microphone.

 

“I’m rather upset Alec. Something rather astonishing has happened. Have to get you up to date first.

“The fasting treatment went fine. Of course I had to stay indoors and keep out of sight until I was fit to be seen. I’m almost back to normal now, gaining about a pound a day. The embryo status treatment stimulated my cells to really get to work. They seem to be rebuilding from an adult blueprint and not a fetal one, so I am getting flesh again in proper proportion and not like an overgrown baby.

“If I am talking disjointedly it is because I am trying hard not to get to the point. The point is too big to be said easily. Of course you know that I started this experimenting just to check my theoretical understanding of cell metabolism. Even the best available theory is sketchy, and my own guesses are doubtful and tentative. I never could be sure whether a patient recovered because of my treatment, in spite of my treatment—or just reacted psychosomatically to the size of my consultant fee.

“The best way to correct faulty theory is to carry it to its logical absurdity, and then to use the silliness as a clue to the initial fault.

“Recipe: to test theories of some process take one neutral subject—that’s me—and try to induce a specific stage of that process by artificial means dictated by the theories. The point of failure will be the clue to the revision of the theories.

“I expected to spend the second half of my vacation in the hospital, checking over records of the experiment, and happily writing an article on the meaning of its failure.

“To be ready for the emergency I had hitched one of the electric timer clocks to the dictaphone and telephone. If I didn’t punch it at five-hour intervals, the alarm would knock off the telephone receiver, and the dictaphone would yell for an ambulance.

“Pinned to a big sign just inside the door was an explanation and full instructions for the proper emergency treatment. At every step in the experiment I would rewrite the instructions to match. ‘Be Prepared’ was the motto. ‘Plan for every contingency.’ No matter when the experiment decided to blow up in my face I would be ready for it.

“There was only one contingency I did not plan for.

“Alec, I was just looking in the mirror. The only mirror that is any good is the big one in the front bedroom, but I had put off looking into it. For a week I lounged around reading and sleeping on the lab cot and the chair beside the window. I suppose I was still waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing did, and the skin of my hands was obviously different —no scars, no calluses, no tan, just smooth pink translucent skin—so I finally went and looked.

“Then I checked it with a medical exam. You’ll find that data in with the other notes. Alec, I’m eighteen years old. That is as young as an adult can get.

“I wonder how Aladdin felt after rubbing a rusty lamp just to polish it up a bit.

“Surprised I suppose. The most noticeable feature of this new face so far is its surprised expression. It looks surprised from every angle, and sometimes it looks pale, and alarmed.

“Alarmed. Einstein was not alarmed when he discovered relativity, but they made a bomb out of it anyhow. I don’t see how they could make a bomb out of this, but people are a wild, unpredictable lot. How will they react to being ageless? I can’t guess, but I’m not reckless enough to hand out another Pandora’s box to the world. The only safe way is to keep the secret until you get back, and then call a quiet council of experts for advice.

“But meanwhile, what if one of our friends happens to see me on the street looking like eighteen years old? What am I supposed to say?

“It is hard to be practical, darling. My imagination keeps galloping off in all directions. Did you know your hair is getting thin in back? Another two years with that crew cut and you would have begun to look like a monk.

“I know, I know, you’ll tell me it is not fair for you to be a juvenile when every one else is gray, but what is fair? To be fair at all everyone will have to have the treatment available free, for nothing. And I mean everyone. We can leave it to an economist to worry out how. Meanwhile we will have to change our names and move to California. You don’t want people to recognize you, and wonder who I am, do you? You don’t want to go around looking twice as old as your wife and have people calling you a cradle snatcher, now do you?

“Wheedling aside, it is fair enough. The process is still dangerous. You can call yourself Guinea Pig Number Two. That’s fair. We can sign hotel registers G. Igpay and wife. Pardon me, Alec, I digress. It is hard to be practical, darling.

“If the treatment gets safely out of the lab and into circulation—rejuvenation worked down to a sort of official vaccination against old age—it would be good for the race I think. It may even help evolution. Regeneration would remove environmental handicaps, old scars of bad raising, and give every man a body as good as his genes. A world full of the age proof would be a sort of sound-mind, sound-body health marathon, with the longest breeding period won by the people with the best chromosomes and the healthiest family tradition.

“Thank heavens I can strike a blow for evolution at last. Usually I find myself on the opposite side, fighting to preserve the life of some case whose descendants will give doctors a headache.

“And look at cultural evolution! For the first time we humans will be able to use our one talent, learning, the way it should be used, the way it was meant to be used from the beginning, an unstoppable growth of skill and humor and understanding, experience adding layer on layer like the bark of a California Redwood.

“And we need thinkers with time to boil the huge accumulation of science down to some reasonable size. It is an emergency job—and not just for geniuses, the rest of us will have to help look for common denominators, too. Even ordinary specialists will have time to learn more, do some integrating of their own, join hands with specialists of related fields.

“Take us, a good sample of disjointed specialties. You could learn neurology, and I could learn anthropology and psychology, and then we could talk the same language and still be like Jack Spratt and his wife, covering the field of human behavior between us. We would be close enough to collaborate—without many gaps of absolute ignorance—to write the most wonderful books. We could even… ah—We can even—”

(There was a silence, and then a.shaky laugh.)

“I forgot. I said, ‘Take us for example,’ as if we weren’t examples already. Research is supposed to be for other people. This is for us. It is a shock. Funny—funny how it keeps taking me by surprise.

“It shouldn’t make that much difference. After all, one lifetime is like another. We’ll be the same people on the same job—with more time. Time enough to see the sequoias grow, and watch the ripening of the race. A long time.

“But the outside of the condemned cell is not very different from the inside. It is the same world, full of the same harebrained human beings. And yet here I am, as shaky as if I’ve just missed being run over by a truck.”

(There was another uncertain laugh.)

“I can’t talk just now, Alec. I have to think.”

 

For some minutes after the record stopped Alec stared out of the window, his hands locked behind his back, the knuckles working and whitening with tension. It was the last record, the only clue he had. The quaver in her voice, her choice of words, had emphatically filled his mind with the nameless emotion that had held her. It was almost a thought, a concept half felt, half seen lying on the borderline of logic.

Before his eyes persistently there grew a vision of the great pyramid of Cheops, half completed, with slaves toiling and dying on its slopes. He stared blindly out over the rooftops of the city, waiting, not daring to force the explanation. Presently the vision began to slip away, and his mind wandered to other thoughts. Somewhere down in that maze of buildings was Helen. Where?

It was no use. Unclenching his stiffening fingers Alec jotted down a small triangle on the envelope of the record, to remind himself that a pyramid held some sort of clue. As he did it, suddenly he remembered that Helen, when she was puzzled, liked to jot the problem down on paper as she thought.

On the bedroom vanity table there was a tablet of white paper, and beside it an ashtray holding a few cigarette stubs. The tablet was blank, but he found two crumpled sheets of paper in the wastebasket and smoothed them carefully out on the table.

It began “Dear Alec” and then there were words crossed and blotted out. “Dear Alec” was written again halfway down the sheet, and the letters absently embroidered into elaborate script. Under it were a few doodles, and then a clear surrealistic sketch of a wisdom tooth marked with neat dental work, lying on its side in the foreground of a desert. Subscribed was the title “TIME”, and beside it was written critically, “Derivative: The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Doodles and vague figures and faces covered the bottom of the page and extended over the next page. In the midst of them was written the single stark thought, “There is something wrong.”

That was all. Numbly Alec folded the two sheets and put them into the envelope of the record. A tooth and a triangle. It should have been funny, but he could not laugh. He took the record out and considered it. There was another concentric ribbon of sound on the face of the disk. Helen had used it again, but the needle had balked at a narrow blank line where she had restarted the recorder and placed the stylus a little too far in.

He put the record back on the turntable and placed the needle by hand.

 

“Alec darling, I wish you were here. You aren’t as good a parlor psychologist as any woman, but you do know human nature in a broad way, and can always explain its odder tricks. I thought I was clever at interpreting other people’s behavior, but tonight I can’t even interpret my own. Nothing startling has happened. It is just that I have been acting unlike myself all day and I feel that it is a symptom of something unpleasant.

“I walked downtown to stretch my legs and see the crowds and bright lights again. I was looking at the movie stills in a theater front when I saw Lucy Hughes hurrying by with a package under one arm. I didn’t turn around, but she recognized me and hurried over.

“ ‘Why Helen Berent! I thought you were in Tibet.’

“I turned around and looked at her. Lucy, with her baby ways and feminine intuition. It would be easy to confide in her but she was not the kind to keep a secret. I didn’t say anything. I suppose I just looked at her with that blank expression you say I wear when I am thinking.

“She looked back, and her eyes widened slowly.

“ ‘Why you’re too young. You’re not—Heavens! I’m awfully sorry. I thought you were someone else. Silly of me, but you look just like a friend of mine—when she was younger I mean. It’s almost uncanny!

“I put on a slight western drawl, and answered politely, as a stranger should, and she went away shaking her head. Poor Lucy!

“I went in to see the movie. Alec, what happened next worries me. I stayed in that movie eight hours. It was an obnoxious movie, a hard-boiled detective story full of blood and violence and slaughter. I saw it three and a half times. You used to make critical remarks on the mental state of a public that battens on that sort of thud and blunder—something about Roman circuses. I wish I could remember how you explained it, because I need that explanation. When the movie house closed for the night I went home in a taxi. It drove too fast but I got home all right. There was some meat stew contaminated with botulus in the icebox, but I tasted the difference and threw it out. I have to be very careful. People are too careless. I never realized it before, but they are.

“I had better go to bed now and see if I can get some sleep.”

 

Automatically Alec took the record off and slid it back into its envelope. The penciled triangle caught his eye, and his hands slowed and stopped. For a long time he looked at it without moving—the pyramids, the tombs of kings. An ancient religion that taught that one of man’s souls lived on in his mummy, a ghostly spark that vanished if the human form was lost. A whisper of immortality on earth. Cheops, spending the piled treasures of his kingdom and the helpless lives of slaves merely for a tomb to shield his corpse, building a pitiful mountain of rock to mock his name down the centuries. Hope—and fear. Hope brings terror.

There are wells of madness in us never tapped.

Alec put away the record and stepped to the window. The brown towers of Columbia Medical Center showed in the distance. Cornell Medical was downtown, Bellevue—“Hope,” said Alec. “When there is life there is hope,” said Alec, and laughed harshly at the pun. He knew now what he had to do. He turned away from the window, and picking up a classified telephone directory, turned to “Hospitals”.

 

It was evening. The psychiatric resident doctor escorted him down the hall talking companionably.

“She wouldn’t give her name. Part of the complex. A symptom for us, but pretty hard on you. It would have helped you to find her if she had some identifying marks I suppose, like scars I mean. It is unusual to find anyone without any—”

“What’s her trouble?” asked Alec. “Anxiety? Afraid of things, germs, falls—?”

“She’s afraid all right. Even afraid of me! Says I have germs. Says I’m incompetent. It’s all a symptom of some other fear of course. These things are not what she is really afraid of. Once we find the single repressed fear and explain it to her—” He checked Alec’s objection. “It’s not rational to be afraid of little things. Those little dangers are not what she is really afraid of anyhow. Now suppression—”

Alec interrupted with a slight edge to his voice.

“Are you afraid of death?”

“Not much. There is nothing you can do about it, after all, so normal people must manage to get used to the idea. Now she—”

“You have a religion?”

“Vedanta. What of it? Now her attitude in this case is—”

“Even a mouse can have a nervous breakdown!” Alec snapped. “Where is the repression there? Vedanta you said? Trouble is, Helen is just too rational!” They had stopped. “Is this the room?”

“Yeah,” said the doctor sullenly, making no move to open the door. “She is probably still asleep.” He looked at his watch. “No, she would be coming out of it now.”

“Drugs,” said Alec coldly. “I suppose you have been psychoanalyzing her, trying to trace her trouble back to some time when her mother slapped her with a lollypop, eh? Or shock treatment perhaps, burning out the powers of imagination, eh?”

The young psychiatrist let his annoyance show. “We know our jobs, mister. Sedatives and analysis, without them she would be screaming the roof off. She’s too suspicious to consciously confide her warp to us, but under scopolamine she seems to think she is a middle-aged woman. How rational is that?” With an effort he regained his professional blandness.

“She has not said much so far, but we expect to learn more after the next treatment. Of course being told her family history will help us immeasurably. We would like to meet her father and mother.”

“I’ll do everything in my power to help,” Alec replied. “Where there is life there is hope.” He laughed harshly, on a note that drew a keen professional glance from the doctor. The young man put his hand to the knob, his face bland.

“You may go in and identify her now. Remember, be very careful not to frighten her.” He opened the door and stood aside, then followed Alec in.

Helen lay on the bed asleep, her dark hair lying across one cheek. She looked like a tired kid of nineteen, but to Alec there seemed to be no change. She had always looked this way. It was Helen.

The doctor called gently. “Miss… ah… Berent. Miss Berent.”

Helen’s body stiffened, but she did not open her eyes. “Go away,” she said in a small, flat voice. “Please!”

“It is just Dr. Marro,” the young man said soothingly.

“How do I know you are a doctor?” she said without stirring. “You’d say that anyway. Maybe you escaped and disguised yourself as a doctor. Maybe you are a paranoiac.”

“I’m just myself,” said the resident, shrugging. “Just Dr. Marro. How can I prove it to you if you don’t look at me?”

The small voice sounded like a child reciting. It said: “If you are a doctor, you will see that having you here upsets me. You won’t want to upset me, so you will go away.” She smiled secretly at the wall. “Go away please.”

Then, abruptly terrified, she was sitting up, staring. “You called me Miss Berent. Oh, Alec!” Her eyes dilated like dark pools in a chalk face, and then Helen crumpled up and rolled to face the wall, gasping in dry sobs. “Please, please—”

“You are exciting her, Mr. Berent,” said the resident. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to leave.”

It had to be done. Alec swallowed with a dry mouth, and then said in a loud clear voice, enunciating every syllable: “Helen, honey, you are dying.”

For a moment there was a strange silence. The doctor was looking at him with a shocked white face; then he moved, fumbling for an arm lock, fumbling with his voice for the proper cheerful tone. “Come, Mr. Berent, you… we must be going now.”

Alec swung his clenched fist into the babbling white face. The jolt on his knuckles felt right. He did not bother to watch the doctor fall. It only meant that he would have a short time without interruption. Helen was cowering in the far corner of the bed, muttering “No—no—no—no—” in a meaningless voice. The limp weight of the psychiatrist leaned against his leg and then slipped down and pressed across the toes of his shoes.

“Helen,” Alec called clearly, “Helen, you are dying. You have cancer.”

She answered only with a wordless animal whimper. Alec looked away. The gleaming white walls began to lean at crazy angles. He shut his eyes and thought of darkness and silence. Presently the whimpering stopped. A voice faltered: “No, I am never going to d— No, I am not.”

“Yes,” he said firmly, “you are.” The darkness ebbed. Alec opened his eyes. Helen had turned around and was watching him, a line of puzzlement on her forehead. “Really?” she asked childishly.

His face was damp, but he did not move to wipe it. “Yes,” he stated, “absolutely certain. Cancer, incurable cancer.”

“Cancer,” she murmured wonderingly. “Where?”

He had that answer ready. He bad picked it from an atlas of anatomy as an inaccessible spot, hard to confirm or deny, impossible to operate for. He told her.

She considered for a second, a vague puzzlement wrinkling her face. “Then… I can’t do anything about it. It would happen just the same. It’s there now.” She looked up absently, rubbing a hand across her forehead. “The deadline?”

“It’s very small and encysted.” Casually he waved a hand. “Maybe even ten—twenty years.”

Thinking, she got out of bed and stood looking out the window, her lips pursed as if she were whistling.

Alec turned to watch her, a polite smile fixed on his lips. He could feel the doctor’s weight shifting as his head cleared. “Cells,” Helen murmured, once, then exclaimed suddenly to herself. “Of course not!” She chuckled, and chuckling spoke in her own warm voice, the thin note of fear gone. “Alec, you’ll never guess what I have been doing. Wait until you hear the records!” She laughed delightedly. “A wild goose chase! I’m ashamed to face you. And I didn’t see it until this minute.”

“Didn’t see what, honey?”

The doctor got to his knees and softly crawled away.

Helen swung around gayly. “Didn’t see that all cells are mutable, not just germ cells but all cells. If they keep on multiplying—each cell with the same probability of mutation —and some viable mutations would be cancerous, then everybody— Work it out on a slide rule for me, Hon. I didn’t discover immortality. Everybody who lives long enough will die of something with so many million cells in the body, with—”

She had been looking past him at the new idea, but now her gaze focused and softened. “Alec, you look so tired. You shouldn’t be pale after all your tramping around in—” The mists of thought cleared. She saw him. “Alec, you’re back.”

And now there was no space or time separating them and she was warm and alive in his arms, nuzzling his cheek, whispering a chuckle in his ear. “And I was standing there lecturing you about cells! I must have been crazy.”

He could hear the doctor padding up the hall with a squad of husky attendants, but he didn’t care. Helen was back.

From too much love of living

From hope and fear set free

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no life lives for ever;

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.

Swinburne