“I am not for one second implying that nuclear charges in the atom are the same thing as static electricity. They’re in a different league altogether. But the analogy holds. I could use another analogy. I could liken the charge in the wild cells to accumulations of fat. And this gunk of mine to a detergent that would break it up and spread it so far it couldn’t be detected any more. But I’m led to the static analogy by an odd side effect organisms injected with this stuff do build up one hell of a static charge. It’s a byproduct and, for reasons I can only theorize about at the moment, it seems to be keyed to the audio spectrum. Tuning forks and the like. That’s what I was playing with when I met you. That tree is drenched with this stuff. It used to have a whorl of wild-cell growth. It hasn’t any more.”
He gave her the quick, surprising ‘smile and let it flicker away as he held the needle point upward and squirted it. With his other hand wrapped around her left bicep he squeezed gently and firmly. The needle was lowered and placed and slid into the big vein so deftly that she gasped not because it hurt but because it did not. Attentively he watched the bit of glass barrel pro-truding from the black housing as he withdrew the plunger a fraction and saw the puff of red into the color-less fluid inside.
Then he bore steadily on the plunger again.
“Please don’t move. I’m sorry, this will take a little time. I have to get quite a lot of this into you. Which is fine, you know,” he said, resuming the tone of his previous remarks about audio spectra, “because side effect or no, it’s consistent. Healthy bio systems develop a strong electrostatic field, unhealthy ones a weak one or none at all. With an instrument as primitive and simple as that little electroscope you can tell if any part of the organism has a community of wild cells and if so, where it is and how big and how wild.” Deftly he shifted his grip on .the encased hypodermic without moving the point or varying the plunger pressure. It was beginning to be uncomfortable an ache turning into a bruise. “And if you’re wondering why this mosquito has a housing on it with a wire attached (although I’ll bet you’re not and that you know as well as I do that I’m doing all this talking just to keep your mind occupied) I’ll tell you.
It’s nothing but a coil carrying a high-frequency alternating current. The alternating field sees to it that the fluid is magnetically and electrostatically neutral right from the start.”
He withdrew the needle suddenly and smoothly, bent an arm and trapped in the inside of her elbow a cotton swab.
“Nobody ever told me that after a treatment,” she said.
“What?”
“No charge,” she said.
Again that wave of approval, this time with words: “I like your style. How do you feel?”
She cast about for accurate phrases.
“Like .the owner of a large sleeping hysteria begging someone not to wake it up.”
He laughed.
“In a little while you are going to feel so weird you won’t have ‘time for hysteria.”
He got up and returned ‘the needle to -the bench, looping up the cable as he went. He turned off the AC
field and returned with a large glass bowl and a square of plywood. He inverted the bowl on the floor near her and placed the wood on its broad base.
“I remember something like that,” she said. “When I was in junior high school. They were generating artificial lightning with a—let me see—well, it had a long, endless belt running over pulleys and some little wires scraping on it and a big copper ball on top.”
“Van de Graaf generator.”
“Right. And they did all sorts of things with it. But what I specially remember is standing on a piece of wood on a bowl like that and they charged me up with the generator. I didn’t feel much of anything except all my hail stood out from my head. Everyone laughed. I looked like a golliwog. They said I was carrying forty thousand volts.”
“Good. I’m glad you remember that. This’ll be a little different, though. By roughly another forty thousand.”
“Oh!”
“Don’t worry. As long as you’re insulated and as long as grounded or comparatively grounded objects—me, for example—stay well away from you, there won’t be any fireworks.”
“Are you going to use a generator like that?”
“Not like that—and I already did. You’re the genera-
*N
ror.
“I’m—oh!” She had raised her hand from the uphol-stered chair arm and there was a crackle of sparks and the faint smell of ozone.
“You sure are and more than I bought—and quicker.
Get up.”
She started up slowly. She finished the maneuver with speed. As her body separated from the chair she was, for a fractional second, seated in a tangle of spitting blue-white threads. They, or she, propelled her a yard and a half away, standing. Literally shocked half out of her wits, she almost fell.
“Stay on your feet,” he snapped and she recovered, gasping. He stepped back a pace. “Get up on the board.
Quickly now.”
She did as she was told, leaving, for the two paces she traveled, two brief footprints of fire. She teetered on the board. Visibly, her hair began to stir.
“What’s happening to me?” she cried.
“You’re getting charged after all,” he said jovially but at this point she failed to appreciate the extension of even her own witticism.
She cried again, “What’s happening to me?”
“It’s all right,” he said consolingly.
He went to the bench and turned on a tone generator.
It moaned deep in the one to three hundred cycle range.
He increased the volume and turned the pitch control.
It howled upward and, as it did so, her red-gold hair shivered and swept up and out, each hair attempting frantically to gat away from all the others. He ran the tone up above ten thousand cycles and all the way back to a belly-bumping inaudible eleven. At the extremes her hair slumped but at around eleven hundred it stood out in, as she had described it, golliwog style. She could feel it.
He turned down the gain to a more or less bearable level and picked up the electroscope. He came toward her, smiling.
“You are an electroscope, you know that? And a living Van de Graaf generator as well. And a golliwog.”
“Let me down,” was all she could say.
“Not yet. Please hang tight. The differential between you and everything else here is so high that if you got near any of it you’d discharge into it. It wouldn’t harm you—it isn’t current electricity—but you might get a burn and a nervous shock out of it.” He held out the electroscope. Even at that distance—and in her distress—she could see the gold leaves writhe apart. He circled her, watching the leaves attentively, moving the instrument forward and back and from side to side. Once he went to the tone generator and turned it down some more.
“You’re sending such a strong field I can’t pick up the variations,” he explained and returned to her, coming closer now.
“I can’tmuch more1 can’t,” she murmured.
He did not hear or he did not care. He ‘moved the electroscope near her abdomen, up and from side to side.
“Yup. There you are,” he said cheerfully, moving the instrument close to her right breast.
“What?” she whimpered.
“Your cancer. Right breast, low, around toward the armpit.” He whistled. “A mean one, too. Malignant as hell.”
She swayed and then collapsed forward and down. A sick blackness swept down on her, receded explosively in a glare of agonizing blue-white and then crashed down on her like a mountain falling.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Another wall, another ceiling. Hadn’t seen it before. Didn’t matter. Don’t care.
Sleep.
Place where wall meets ceiling. Something in the way.
His face, close, drawn, tired—eyes awake, though, and penetrating. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care.