Bergman was becoming panicky. If a robocop should see the old woman talking to him, it might register his name, and that would be his end at Memorial. They’d have him tagged for home-practitioning, even if it wasn’t true. How could he possibly attend this woman’s man? It would be the end of his stunted career. The regulations swam before his eyes, and he knew what they meant. He’d be finished. And what if this was a trap?
But tetanus!
(The terrifying picture of a man in the last stages of lockjaw came to him. The contorted body, wound up on itself as though the limbs were made of rubber; the horrible face, mouth muscles drawn back and down in the characteristic death-grin called risus sardonicus; every inch of the nervous system affected. A slamming door, a touch, a cough, was enough to send the stricken man into ghastly gyrations and convulsions. Till finally the affliction attacked the chest muscles, and he strangled horribly. Dead … wound up like a snake, frothing … dead.)
But to be thrown out of the hospital. He couldn’t take the chance. Almost without realizing it, the words came out: “Get away from me, woman; if the robocops see you, they’ll arrest us both. Get away … and don’t try approaching a doctor like this again! Or I’ll see that you’re run in myself. Now get away. If you need medical aid, go to the phymechs at the hospital. They’re free and better than any human!” The words sounded tinny in his ears.
The old woman fell back, light from the illumepost casting faint, weird shadows across the lined planes of her face. Her lips drew back from her teeth, many of them rotting or missing.
She snorted, “We’d rather die than go to them creations of the devil! We don’t have no truck with them things … we thought you was still doctors to help the poor … but you ain’t!” She turned and started to slip away into the darkness.
Faintly, before the rustle of her footsteps were gone, Stuart Bergman heard the sob that escaped her. It was filled with a wild desperation and the horror of seeing death in the mist, waiting for her and the man she loved.
Then, ever more faintly …
“Damn you forever!”
Abruptly, the tension of the past months, the inner horror at what he had almost done to the blue-eyed girl earlier, the fight and sorrow within him, mounted to a peak. He felt drained, and knew if he was to be deprived of his heritage, he would lose it the right way. He was a doctor, and a man needed attention.
He took a step after her dim shape in the rain.
“Wait, I …”
And knowing he was sealing his own doom, he let her stop, watched the hope that swam up in her eyes, and said, “I — I’m sorry. I’m very tired. But take me to your man. I’ll be able to help him.”
She didn’t say thank you. But he knew it was there if he wanted it. They moved off together, and the watcher followed on silent treads.
Chapter six
The forever stink of Slobtown assaulted Bergman the moment they passed the invisible boundary. There was no “other side of the tracks” that separated Slobtown’s squalor from the lower middle-class huts of the city, but somehow there was no mistaking the transition.
They passed from cleanliness into the Inferno, with one step.
Shadows deepened, sounds muffled, and the flickering neon of outdated saloon signs glared at them from the darkness. Bergman followed stolidly, and the woman led with resignation. She had a feeling the trip would be in vain. Charlie had been close to the edge when she had left, and this doctor’s coming was an unexpected miracle. But still, Charlie had been so close, so close …
They threaded close to buildings, stepping wide around blacker alley mouths and empty lots. From time to time they heard the footpad of muggers and wineheads keeping pace with them, but when the noises became too apparent, the woman hissed into the darkness, “Geddaway from here! I’m Charlie Kickback’s woman, an’ I got a croaker fer Charlie!” Then the sounds would fall behind.
All but the metal follower, whom no one saw.
The raw sounds of filthy music spurted out of the swing doors of a saloon, as they passed, and were followed almost immediately by a body. The man was thrown past the building, and landed in a twisted heap in the dirty gutter. He lay twitching, and for an instant Bergman considered tending to him; but two things stopped him.
The woman dragged him by his sleeve, and the gutter-resident flopped over onto his back, bubbling, and began mouthing an incomprehensible melody with indecipherable words.
They moved past. A block further along, Bergman saw the battered remains of a robocop, lying up against a tenement. He nodded toward it, and in the dusk Charlie Kickback’s woman shrugged. “Every stiff comes in here takes his chances, even them devil’s tinkertoys.”
They kept moving, and Bergman realized he had much more to fear than merely being deprived of his license. He could be attacked and killed down here. He had a wallet with nearly three hundred credits in it, and they’d mugged men down here for much less than that, he was sure.
But somehow, the futility of the day, the horror of the night, were too insurmountable. He worried more about the fate of his profession than the contents of the wallet.
Finally they came to a brightly lit building, with tri-V photoblox outside, ten feet high. The blox showed monstrously mammaried women doing a slow tri-V shimmy, their appendages swaying behind the thinnest of veils, which often parted. The crude neon signs about the building read:
THE HOUSE OF SEX SEX SEX SEX!!!
AFTER SHOWS THE GIRLS’ TIME IS THEIR OWN AND NO
HOLDS BARRED!
MORE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE FOR A CREDIT!!!
LADY MEMPHIS AND HER EDUCATED BALOO — TRIX
DIAMOND — MLLE. HOT!
COME NOW, JACK, COME NOW!!
Bergman inclined his head at the poster blox, at the signs, and asked, “Is he here?” Charlie Kickback’s woman’s face greyed down and her lips thinned. She nodded, mumbled something, and led Bergman past the ticket window with its bulletproof glass and steel-suited ticket taker. The woman snapped a finger at the taker, and a heavy plasteel door slid back for them. The moment it opened, tinny music, fraught with the bump and g rrrr ind of the burlesque since time immemorial, swept over them, and Bergman had to strain to hear Charlie Kickback’s woman.
He tensed, and caught her voice. “This way … through the side door …”
They passed the open back of the theater, and Bergman’s eyes caught the idle twist of flesh, and the sensuous beat of naked feet on a stage. The sounds of warwhoop laughter and applause sifted up through the blaring music. They passed through the side door.
The woman led him down a hall, and past several dim grey doors with peeling paint. She stopped before a door with a faded star on it, and said, “He-he’s in h-here …” And she palmed the door open quietly.
She had not needed the silence.
Charlie Kickback would never writhe at a sound again.
He was quite dead.
Twisted in on himself, wound up like some loathsome pretzel, he lay on the floor beneath the dirty sink, one leg twisted under himself so painfully, it had broken before death. He had strangled to death.
The old woman rushed to the body, and fell to her knees, burying her face in his clothing, crying, namelessly seeking after him. She cried solidly for a few minutes, while Bergman stood watching, his heart filled with pity and sorrow and unhappiness and frustration.
This never would have happened, if …
The woman looked up, and her face darkened. “You! You’re the ones brought in them robots. We can’t stay alive even no more, cause of them! It’s you … and them …”