Title: To Pay the Piper
Author: Blish, James
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "To Pay the Piper" ***


                           TO PAY THE PIPER

                            BY JAMES BLISH

              _Clearly, re-educating Man's brain wouldn't
               fit him for survival on the plague-ridden
            surface. Re-educating his body was the answer;
                 but the process was so very long...._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
             Worlds of If Science Fiction, February 1956.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


The man in the white jacket stopped at the door marked "Re-Education
Project--Col. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding Officer" and waited while the
scanner looked him over. He had been through that door a thousand
times, but the scanner made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never
seen him before.

It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it _had_
never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings to whom it
reported might think. It went over him from grey, crew-cut poll to
reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry body and lean profile
against its stored silhouettes, tasting and smelling him as dubiously
as if he were an orange held in storage two days too long.

"Name?" it said at last.

"Carson, Samuel, 32-454-0698."

"Business?"

"Medical director, Re-Ed One."

While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came rolling down
upon him through the mile of solid granite above his head. At the same
moment, the letters on the door--and everything else inside his cone
of vision--blurred distressingly, and a stab of pure pain went lancing
through his head. It was the supersonic component of the explosion, and
it was harmless--except that it always both hurt and scared him.

The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing yellow up to
now, flicked back to red again and the machine began the whole routine
all over; the sound-bomb had reset it. Carson patiently endured its
inspection, gave his name, serial number and mission once more, and
this time got the green. He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy
square of cheap paper he had been carrying all along.

Mudgett looked up from his desk and said at once: "What now?"

The physician tossed the square of paper down under Mudgett's eyes.
"Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's speech last night," he
said. "The total effect is going against us, Colonel. Unless we can
change Hamelin's mind, this outcry to re-educate civilians ahead of
soldiers is going to lose the war for us. The urge to live on the
surface again has been mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to
focus on. Us."

Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary; a blocky, bulky
man, as short as Carson and with hair as grey and close-cropped. A
year ago, Carson would have told him that nobody in Re-Ed could afford
to put stray objects in his mouth even once, let alone as a habit;
now Carson just waited. There wasn't a man--or a woman or a child--of
America's surviving thirty-five million "sane" people who didn't have
some such tic. Not now, not after twenty-five years of underground life.

"He knows it's impossible, doesn't he?" Mudgett demanded abruptly.

"Of course he doesn't," Carson said impatiently. "He doesn't know any
more about the real nature of the project than the people do. He thinks
the 'educating' we do is in some sort of survival technique--That's
what the papers think, too, as you can plainly see by the way they
loaded that editorial."

"Um. If we'd taken direct control of the papers in the first place--"

Carson said nothing. Military control of every facet of civilian life
was a fact, and Mudgett knew it. He also knew that an appearance
of freedom to think is a necessity for the human mind--and that
the appearance could not be maintained without a few shreds of the
actuality.

"Suppose we do this," Mudgett said at last. "Hamelin's position in
the State Department makes it impossible for us to muzzle him. But it
ought to be possible to explain to him that no unprotected human being
can live on the surface, no matter how many Merit Badges he has for
woodcraft and first aid. Maybe we could even take him on a little trip
topside; I'll wager he's never seen it."

"And what if he dies up there?" Carson said stonily. "We lose
three-fifths of every topside party as it is--and Hamelin's an
inexperienced--"

"Might be the best thing, mightn't it?"

"_No_," Carson said. "It would look like we'd planned it that way. The
papers would have the populace boiling by the next morning."

Mudgett groaned and nibbled another double row of indentations around
the barrel of the pencil. "There must be something," he said.

"There is."

"Well?"

"Bring the man here and show him just what we _are_ doing. Re-educate
_him_, if necessary. Once we told the newspapers that he'd taken the
course ... well, who knows, they just might resent it. Abusing his
clearance privileges and so on."

"We'd be violating our basic policy," Mudgett said slowly. "'Give
the Earth back to the men who fight for it.' Still, the idea has some
merits...."

"Hamelin is out in the antechamber right now," Carson said. "Shall I
bring him in?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The radioactivity never did rise much beyond a mildly hazardous level,
and that was only transient, during the second week of the war--the
week called the Death of Cities. The small shards of sanity retained
by the high commands on both sides dictated avoiding weapons with
a built-in backfire: no cobalt bombs were dropped, no territories
permanently poisoned. Generals still remembered that unoccupied
territory, no matter how devastated, is still unconquered territory.

But no such considerations stood in the way of biological warfare. It
was controllable: you never released against the enemy any disease you
didn't yourself know how to control. There would be some slips, of
course, but the margin for error--

There were some slips. But for the most part, biological warfare worked
fine. The great fevers washed like tides around and around the globe,
one after another. In such cities as had escaped the bombings, the
rumble of truck convoys carrying the puffed heaped corpses to the mass
graves became the only sound except for sporadic small-arms fire; and
then that too ceased, and the trucks stood rusting in rows.

Nor were human beings the sole victims. Cattle fevers were sent
out. Wheat rusts, rice molds, corn blights, hog choleras, poultry
enteritises fountained into the indifferent air from the hidden
laboratories, or were loosed far aloft, in the jet-stream, by
rocketing fleets. Gelatin capsules pullulating with gill-rots fell
like hail into the great fishing grounds of Newfoundland, Oregon,
Japan, Sweden, Portugal. Hundreds of species of animals were drafted
as secondary hosts for human diseases, were injected and released to
carry the blessings of the laboratories to their mates and litters.
It was discovered that minute amounts of the tetracycline series of
antibiotics, which had long been used as feed supplements to bring farm
animals to full market weight early, could also be used to raise the
most whopping Anopheles and Aëdes mosquitoes anybody ever saw, capable
of flying long distances against the wind and of carrying a peculiarly
interesting new strains of the malarial parasite and the yellow fever
virus....

By the time it had ended, everyone who remained alive was a mile under
ground.

For good.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I still fail to understand why," Hamelin said, "if, as you claim, you
have methods of re-educating soldiers for surface life, you can't do so
for civilians as well. Or instead."

The under-secretary, a tall, spare man, bald on top, and with a heavily
creased forehead, spoke with the odd neutral accent--untinged by
regionalism--of the trained diplomat, despite the fact that there had
been no such thing as a foreign service for nearly half a century.

"We're going to try to explain that to you," Carson said. "But we
thought that, first of all, we'd try to explain once more why we think
it would be bad policy--as well as physically out of the question.

"Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it's possible. Even
people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors hope
for something better for their children--a glimpse of sunlight, a
little rain, the fall of a leaf. That's more important now to all of us
than the war, which we don't believe in any longer. That doesn't even
make any military sense, since we haven't the numerical strength to
occupy the enemy's territory any more, and they haven't the strength to
occupy ours. We understand all that. But we also know that the enemy is
intent on prosecuting the war to the end. Extermination is what they
say they want, on their propaganda broadcasts, and your own Department
reports that they seem to mean what they say. So we can't give up
fighting them; that would be simple suicide. Are you still with me?"

"Yes, but I don't see--"

"Give me a moment more. If we have to continue to fight, we know
this much: that the first of the two sides to get men on the surface
again--so as to be able to _attack_ important targets, not just keep
them isolated in seas of plagues--will be the side that will bring this
war to an end. They know that, too. We have good reason to believe
that they have a re-education project, and that it's about as far
advanced as ours is."

"Look at it this way," Col. Mudgett burst in unexpectedly. "What we
have now is a stalemate. A saboteur occasionally locates one of the
underground cities and lets the pestilences into it. Sometimes on our
side, sometimes on theirs. But that only happens sporadically, and
it's just more of this mutual extermination business--to which we're
committed, willy-nilly, for as long as they are. If we can get troops
onto the surface first, we'll be able to scout out their important
installations in short order, and issue them a surrender ultimatum with
teeth in it. They'll take it. The only other course is the sort of
slow, mutual suicide we've got now."

Hamelin put the tips of his fingers together. "You gentlemen lecture
me about policy as if I had never heard the word before. I'm familiar
with your arguments for sending soldiers first. You assume that you're
familiar with all of mine for starting with civilians, but you're
wrong, because some of them haven't been brought up at all outside the
Department. I'm going to tell you some of them, and I think they'll
merit your close attention."

Carson shrugged. "I'd like nothing better than to be convinced, Mr.
Secretary. Go ahead."

"You of all people should know, Dr. Carson, how close our underground
society is to a psychotic break. To take a single instance, the number
of juvenile gangs roaming these corridors of ours has increased 400%
since the rumors about the Re-Education Project began to spread.
Or another: the number of individual crimes without motive--crimes
committed, just to distract the committer from the grinding monotony of
the life we all lead--has now passed the total of all other crimes put
together.

"And as for actual insanity--of our thirty-five million people still
unhospitalized, there are four million cases _of which we know_,
each one of which should be committed right now for early paranoid
schizophrenia--except that were we to commit them, our essential
industries would suffer a manpower loss more devastating than anything
the enemy has inflicted upon us. Every one of those four million
persons is a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but how
can we do without them? And what can we do about the unrecognized,
sub-clinical cases, which probably total twice as many? How long can we
continue operating without a collapse under such conditions?"

Carson mopped his brow. "I didn't suspect that it had gone that far."

"It has gone that far," Hamelin said icily, "and it is accelerating.
Your own project has helped to accelerate it. Col. Mudgett here
mentioned the opening of isolated cities to the pestilences. Shall I
tell you how Louisville fell?"

"A spy again, I suppose," Mudgett said.

"No, Colonel. Not a spy. A band of--of vigilantes, of mutineers. I'm
familiar with your slogan, 'The Earth to those who fight for it.' Do
you know the counter-slogan that's circulating among the people?"

They waited. Hamelin smiled and said: "'Let's die on the surface.'

"They overwhelmed the military detachment there, put the city
administration to death, and blew open the shaft to the surface. About
a thousand people actually made it to the top. Within twenty-four hours
the city was dead--as the ringleaders had been warned would be the
outcome. The warning didn't deter them. Nor did it protect the prudent
citizens who had no part in the affair."

Hamelin leaned forward suddenly. "People won't wait to be told when
it's their turn to be re-educated. They'll be tired of waiting, tired
to the point of insanity of living at the bottom of a hole. They'll
just go.

"And that, gentlemen, will leave the world to the enemy ... or, more
likely, the rats. They alone are immune to everything by now."

There was a long silence. At last Carson said mildly: "Why aren't _we_
immune to everything by now?"

"Eh? Why--the new generations. They've never been exposed."

"We still have a reservoir of older people who lived through the war:
people who had one or several of the new diseases that swept the
world, some as many as five, and yet recovered. They still have their
immunities; we know; we've tested them. We know from sampling that no
new disease has been introduced by either side in over ten years now.
Against all the known ones, we have immunization techniques, anti-sera,
antibiotics, and so on. I suppose you get your shots every six months
like all the rest of us; we should all be very hard to infect now, and
such infections as do take should run mild courses." Carson held the
under-secretary's eyes grimly. "Now, answer me this question: why is it
that, despite all these protections, _every single person_ in an opened
city dies?"

"I don't know," Hamelin said, staring at each of them in turn. "By your
showing, some of them should recover."

"They should," Carson said. "But nobody does. Why? Because the very
nature of disease has changed since we all went underground. There are
now abroad in the world a number of mutated bacterial strains which can
bypass the immunity mechanisms of the human body altogether. What this
means in simple terms is that, should such a germ get into your body,
your body wouldn't recognize it as an invader. It would manufacture
no antibodies against the germ. Consequently, the germ could multiply
without any check, and--you would die. So would we all."

"I see," Hamelin said. He seemed to have recovered his composure
extraordinarily rapidly. "I am no scientist, gentlemen, but what you
tell me makes our position sound perfectly hopeless. Yet obviously you
have some answer."

Carson nodded. "We do. But it's important for you to understand the
situation, otherwise the answer will mean nothing to you. So: is it
perfectly clear to you now, from what we've said so far, that no amount
of re-educating a man's brain, be he soldier _or_ civilian, will allow
him to survive on the surface?"

"Quite clear," Hamelin said, apparently ungrudgingly. Carson's hopes
rose by a fraction of a millimeter. "But if you don't re-educate his
brain, what can you re-educate? His reflexes, perhaps?"

"No," Carson said. "His lymph nodes, and his spleen."

A scornful grin began to appear on Hamelin's thin lips. "You need
better public relations counsel than you've been getting," he said.
"If what you say is true--as of course I assume it is--then the term
're-educate' is not only inappropriate, it's downright misleading.
If you had chosen a less suggestive and more accurate label in the
beginning, I wouldn't have been able to cause you half the trouble I
have."

"I agree that we were badly advised there," Carson said. "But not
entirely for those reasons. Of course the name is misleading; that's
both a characteristic and a function of the names of top secret
projects. But in this instance, the name 'Re-Education', bad as it now
appears, subjected the men who chose it to a fatal temptation. You see,
though it is misleading, it is also entirely accurate."

"Word-games," Hamelin said.

"Not at all," Mudgett interposed. "We were going to spare you the
theoretical reasoning behind our project, Mr. Secretary, but now
you'll just have to sit still for it. The fact is that the body's
ability to distinguish between its own cells and those of some foreign
tissue--a skin graft, say, or a bacterial invasion of the blood--isn't
an inherited ability. It's a learned reaction. Furthermore, if you'll
think about it a moment, you'll see that it has to be. Body cells die,
too, and have to be disposed of; what would happen if removing those
dead cells provoked an antibody reaction, as the destruction of foreign
cells does? We'd die of anaphylactic shock while we were still infants.

"For that reason, the body has to learn how to scavenge selectively.
In human beings, that lesson isn't learned completely until about a
month after birth. During the intervening time, the newborn infant is
protected by antibodies that it gets from the colestrum, the 'first
milk' it gets from the breast during the three or four days immediately
after birth. It can't generate its own; it isn't allowed to, so to
speak, until it's learned the trick of cleaning up body residues
_without_ triggering the antibody mechanisms. Any dead cells marked
'personal' have to be dealt with some other way."

"That seems clear enough," Hamelin said. "But I don't see its
relevance."

"Well, we're in a position now where that differentiation between the
self and everything outside the body doesn't do us any good any more.
These mutated bacteria have been 'selfed' by the mutation. In other
words, some of their protein molecules, probably desoxyribonucleic acid
molecules, carry configurations or 'recognition-units' identical with
those of our body cells, so that the body can't tell one from another."

"But what has all this to do with re-education?"

"Just this," Carson said. "What we do here is to impose upon the cells
of the body--all of them--a new set of recognition-units for the
guidance of the lymph nodes and the spleen, which are the organs that
produce antibodies. The new units are highly complex, and the chances
of their being duplicated by bacterial evolution, even under forced
draught, are too small to worry about. That's what Re-Education is. In
a few moments, if you like, we'll show you just how it's done."

Hamelin ground out his fifth cigarette in Mudgett's ashtray and placed
the tips of his fingers together thoughtfully. Carson wondered just
how much of the concept of recognition-marking the under-secretary had
absorbed. It had to be admitted that he was astonishingly quick to
take hold of abstract ideas, but the self-marker theory of immunity
was--like everything else in immunology--almost impossible to explain
to laymen, no matter how intelligent.

"This process," Hamelin said hesitantly. "It takes a long time?"

"About six hours per subject, and we can handle only one man at a time.
That means that we can count on putting no more than seven thousand
troops into the field by the turn of the century. Every one will have
to be a highly trained specialist, if we're to bring the war to a quick
conclusion."

"Which means no civilians," Hamelin said. "I see. I'm not entirely
convinced, but--by all means let's see how it's done."

       *       *       *       *       *

Once inside, the under-secretary tried his best to look everywhere at
once. The room cut into the rock was roughly two hundred feet high.
Most of it was occupied by the bulk of the Re-Education Monitor, a
mechanism as tall as a fifteen-storey building, and about a city block
square. Guards watched it on all sides, and the face of the machine
swarmed with technicians.

"Incredible," Hamelin murmured. "That enormous object can process only
one man at a time?"

"That's right," Mudgett said. "Luckily it doesn't have to treat all the
body cells directly. It works through the blood, re-selfing the cells
by means of small changes in the serum chemistry."

"What kind of changes?"

"Well," Carson said, choosing each word carefully, "that's more or
less a graveyard secret, Mr. Secretary. We can tell you this much: the
machine uses a vast array of crystalline, complex sugars which _behave_
rather like the blood group-and-type proteins. They're fed into the
serum in minute amounts, under feedback control of second-by-second
analysis of the blood. The computations involved in deciding upon the
amount and the precise nature of each introduced chemical are highly
complex. Hence the size of the machine. It is, in its major effect, an
artificial kidney."

"I've seen artificial kidneys in the hospitals," Hamelin said,
frowning. "They're rather compact affairs."

"Because all they do is remove waste products from the patient's
blood, and restore the fluid and electrolyte balance. Those are very
minor renal functions in the higher mammals. The organ's main duty is
chemical control of immunity. If Burnet and Fenner had known that back
in 1949, when the selfing theory was being formulated, we'd have had
Re-Education long before now."

"Most of the machine's size is due to the computation section," Mudgett
emphasized. "In the body, the brain-stem does those computations, as
part of maintaining homeostasis. But we can't reach the brain-stem from
outside; it's not under conscious control. Once the body is re-selfed,
it will re-train the thalamus where we can't." Suddenly, two swinging
doors at the base of the machine were pushed apart and a mobile
operating table came through, guided by two attendants. There was a
form on it, covered to the chin with a sheet. The face above the sheet
was immobile and almost as white.

Hamelin watched the table go out of the huge cavern with visibly mixed
emotions. He said: "This process--it's painful?"

"No, not exactly," Carson said. The motive behind the question
interested him hugely, but he didn't dare show it. "But any fooling
around with the immunity mechanisms can give rise to symptoms--fever,
general malaise, and so on. We try to protect our subjects by giving
them a light shock anesthesia first."

"Shock?" Hamelin repeated. "You mean electroshock? I don't see how--"

"Call it stress anesthesia instead. We give the man a steroid drug that
counterfeits the anesthesia the body itself produces in moments of
great stress--on the battlefield, say, or just after a serious injury.
It's fast, and free of after-effects. There's no secret about that,
by the way; the drug involved is 21-hydroxypregnane-3,20 dione sodium
succinate, and it dates all the way back to 1955."

"Oh," the under-secretary said. The ringing sound of the chemical name
had had, as Carson had hoped, a ritually soothing effect.

"Gentlemen," Hamelin said hesitantly. "Gentlemen, I have a--a rather
unusual request. And, I am afraid, a rather selfish one." A brief,
nervous laugh. "Selfish in both senses, if you will pardon me the pun.
You need feel no hesitation in refusing me, but...."

Abruptly he appeared to find it impossible to go on. Carson mentally
crossed his fingers and plunged in.

"You would like to undergo the process yourself?" he said.

"Well, yes. Yes, that's exactly it. Does that seem inconsistent? I
should know, should I not, what it is that I'm advocating for my
following? Know it intimately, from personal experience, not just
theory? Of course I realize that it would conflict with your policy,
but I assure you I wouldn't turn it to any political advantage--none
whatsoever. And perhaps it wouldn't be too great a lapse of policy to
process just one civilian among your seven thousand soldiers."

Subverted, by God! Carson looked at Mudgett with a firmly straight
face. It wouldn't do to accept too quickly.

But Hamelin was rushing on, almost chattering now. "I can understand
your hesitation. You must feel that I'm trying to gain some advantage,
or even to get to the surface ahead of my fellow-men. If it will set
your minds at rest, I would be glad to enlist in your advance army.
Before five years are up, I could surely learn some technical skill
which would make me useful to the expedition. If you would prepare
papers to that effect, I'd be happy to sign them."

"That's hardly necessary," Mudgett said. "After you're Re-Educated, we
can simply announce the fact, and say that you've agreed to join the
advance party when the time comes."

"Ah," Hamelin said. "I see the difficulty. No, that would make my
position quite impossible. If there is no other way--"

"Excuse us a moment," Carson said. Hamelin bowed, and the doctor pulled
Mudgett off out of ear-shot.

"Don't overplay it," he murmured. "You're tipping our hand with that
talk about a press release, Colonel. He's offering us a bribe--but he's
plenty smart enough to see that the price you're suggesting is that of
his whole political career. He won't pay that much."

"What then?" Mudgett whispered hoarsely.

"Get somebody to prepare the kind of informal contract he suggested.
Offer to put it under security seal so we won't be able to show it
to the press at all. He'll know well enough that such a seal can be
broken if our policy ever comes before a presidential review--and that
will restrain him from forcing such a review. Let's not demand too
much. Once he's been re-educated, he'll have to live the rest of the
five years with the knowledge that he _can_ live topside any time he
wants to try it--and he hasn't had the discipline our men have had.
It's my bet that he'll goof off before the five years are up--and good
riddance."

They went back to Hamelin, who was watching the machine and humming in
a painfully abstracted manner.

"I've convinced the Colonel," Carson said, "that your services in the
army might well be very valuable when the time comes, Mr. Secretary. If
you'll sign up, we'll put the papers under security seal for your own
protection, and then I think we can fit you into our treatment program
today."

"I'm grateful to you, Dr. Carson," Hamelin said. "Very grateful,
indeed."

       *       *       *       *       *

Five minutes after his injection, Hamelin was as peaceful as a flounder
and was rolled through the swinging doors. An hour's discussion of the
probable outcome, carried on in the privacy of Mudgett's office, bore
very little additional fruit, however.

"It's our only course," Carson said. "It's what we hoped to gain from
his visit, duly modified by circumstances. It all comes down to this:
Hamelin's compromised himself, and he knows it."

"But," Mudgett said, "suppose he was right? What about all that talk of
his about mass insanity?"

"I'm sure it's true," Carson said, his voice trembling slightly despite
his best efforts at control. "It's going to be rougher than ever down
here for the next five years, Colonel. Our only consolation is that the
enemy must have exactly the same problem; and if we can beat them to
the surface--"

"_Hsst!_" Mudgett said. Carson had already broken off his sentence. He
wondered why the scanner gave a man such a hard time outside that door,
and then admitted him without any warning to the people on the other
side. Couldn't the damned thing be trained to knock?

The newcomer was a page from the haemotology section. "Here's the
preliminary rundown on your 'Student X', Dr. Carson," he said.

The page saluted Mudgett and went out. Carson began to read. After a
moment, he also began to sweat.

"Colonel, look at this. I was wrong after all. Disastrously wrong. I
haven't seen a blood-type distribution pattern like Hamelin's since I
was a medical student, and even back then it was only a demonstration,
not a real live patient. Look at it from the genetic point of view--the
migration factors."

He passed the protocol across the desk. Mudgett was not by background
a scientist, but he was an enormously able administrator, of the breed
that makes it its business to know the technicalities on which any
project ultimately rests. He was not much more than half-way through
the tally before his eyebrows were gaining altitude like shock-waves.

"Carson, we can't let that man into the machine! He's--"

"He's already in it, Colonel, you know that. And if we interrupt the
process before it runs to term, we'll kill him."

"Let's kill him, then," Mudgett said harshly. "Say he died while being
processed. Do the country a favor."

"That would produce a hell of a stink. Besides, we have no proof."

Mudgett flourished the protocol excitedly.

"That's not proof to anyone but a haemotologist."

"But Carson, the man's a saboteur!" Mudgett shouted. "Nobody but an
Asiatic could have a typing pattern like this! And he's no melting-pot
product, either--he's a classical mixture, very probably a Georgian.
And every move he's made since we first heard of him has been aimed
directly at us--aimed directly at tricking us into getting him into the
machine!"

"I think so too," Carson said grimly. "I just hope the enemy hasn't
many more agents as brilliant."

"One's enough," Mudgett said. "He's sure to be loaded to the last cc of
his blood with catalyst poisons. Once the machine starts processing
his serum, we're done for--it'll take us years to re-program the
computer, if it can be done at all. It's _got_ to be stopped!"

"Stopped?" Carson said, astonished. "But it's already stopped. That's
not what worries me. The machine stopped it fifty minutes ago."

"It can't have! How could it? It has no relevant data!"

"Sure it has." Carson leaned forward, took the cruelly chewed pencil
away from Mudgett, and made a neat check beside one of the entries on
the protocol. Mudgett stared at the checked item.

"Platelets Rh VI?" he mumbled. "But what's that got to do with.... Oh.
Oh, I see. That platelet type doesn't exist at all in our population
now, does it? Never seen it before myself, at least."

"No," Carson said, grinning wolfishly. "It never was common in the
West, and the pogrom of 1981 wiped it out. That's something the enemy
couldn't know. But the machine knows it. As soon as it gives him the
standard anti-IV desensitization shot, his platelets will begin to
dissolve--and he'll be rejected for incipient thrombocytopenia." He
laughed. "For his own protection! But--"

"But he's getting nitrous oxide in the machine, and he'll be held six
hours under anesthesia anyhow--also for his own protection," Mudgett
broke in. He was grinning back at Carson like an idiot. "When he comes
out from under, he'll assume that he's been re-educated, and he'll beat
it back to the enemy to report that he's poisoned our machine, so
that they can be sure they'll beat us to the surface. And he'll go the
fastest way: _overland_."

"He will," Carson agreed. "Of course he'll go overland, and of course
he'll die. But where does that leave us? We won't be able to conceal
that he was treated here, if there's any sort of an inquiry at all. And
his death will make everything we do here look like a fraud. Instead
of paying our Pied Piper--and great jumping Jehosophat, look at his
name! They were rubbing our noses in it all the time! Nevertheless, we
didn't pay the piper; we killed him. And 'platelets Rh VI' won't be an
adequate excuse for the press, or for Hamelin's following."

"It doesn't worry me," Mudgett rumbled. "Who'll know? He won't die in
our labs. He'll leave here hale and hearty. He won't die until he makes
a break for the surface. After that we can compose a fine obituary
for the press. Heroic government official, on the highest policy
level--couldn't wait to lead his followers to the surface--died of
being too much in a hurry--Re-Ed Project sorrowfully reminds everyone
that no technique is fool-proof--"

Mudgett paused long enough to light a cigarette, which was a most
singular action for a man who never smoked. "As a matter of fact,
Carson," he said, "it's a natural."

Carson considered it. It seemed to hold up. And 'Hamelin' would have a
death certificate as complex as he deserved--not officially, of course,
but in the minds of everyone who knew the facts. His death, when it
came, would be due directly to the thrombocytopenia which had caused
the Re-Ed machine to reject him--and thrombocytopenia is a disease of
infants. _Unless ye become as little children...._

That was a fitting reason for rejection from the new kingdom of Earth:
anemia of the newborn.

His pent breath went out of him in a long sigh. He hadn't been aware
that he'd been holding it. "It's true," he said softly. "That's the
time to pay the piper."

"When?" Mudgett said.

"When?" Carson said, surprised. "Why, _before_ he takes the children
away."





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "To Pay the Piper" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.