“I am not a doctor! The blood—that is merely chemistry. Engineering and chemistry I understand. But not medicine.”
“It must be those things you added to my blood that have made my arthritis worse.”
“What is this arthritis?” Joe asked.
Cramer explained, exhibiting his swollen hands. “Maybe the new medicine will help,” he said.
Joe was preparing for his departure. He had been on this world for a long time, he told Cramer. For many years, the way Cramer measured time. His studies were completed, and his collecting, also, except for some suitable specimens of larger animals. He asked Cramer’s help, and Cramer talked with Ed Morton and gave him a wild tale about starting a new business. He began buying cattle, horses, sheep, hogs, goats, even a few stray dogs and cats. Joe furnished whatever money was needed. Cramer wondered where he’d gotten it, but thought it impolite to ask.
Joe put up a small corral for the animals, and he would take them, one or two at a time, away down the forest path. After Cramer watched the twentieth cow disappear in that direction, he remarked, “You must have a large ship.”
“Not very large,” the complacent Joe replied.
“Then how do you get them all into it?”
“That is only a small problem in packing,” Joe said. And left with the first of an entire flock of sheep.
The new pills did not help. The arthritis became an incessant torment that intensified daily. Cramer kept to his bed, moving his pain-wracked body as little as possible. Joe looked in frequently. His placid expression never changed, but his actions, his questions, betrayed a fumbling concern.
He opened cans and prepared Cramer’s meals, and as the arthritis became worse he also helped him to eat. While he worked about the corner of the cabin Cramer called his kitchen, they talked.
“This arthritis,” Joe said. “Such a thing does not occur among my people. I find no mention of it in my books.”
Cramer nodded dully, and concealed his disappointment. Somehow he had hoped—he had confidently expected— that Joe could do something for him. A man who could casually supply a substitute heart and change the chemical makeup of one’s blood should be able to handle a little thing like arthritis.
“I am sorry the things I added to your blood have done this to you,” Joe said. “But I cannot help. I just do not understand it.”
“Will it keep getting worse?”
“I do not know.”
Cramer nodded again. “With this new pump, and the new chemicals in my blood, how long can I expect to live?”
“Who can say? Life is a fragile flame that flickers in the winds of chance. My own life would have ended in your river had you not generously saved me.”
“Yes, yes,” Cramer said impatiently. “But without accidents, how long will I live?”
“But without accidents, you will not die! You will not die at all. This pump does not wear out or stop.”
Cramer lay staring silently at the ceiling contemplating eternal life with eternal pain.
“Could you remove those chemicals from my blood?” he asked.
“Perhaps. It would be difficult. And soon the new pump would not work. It would—”
“Clog up?” Cramer suggested.
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose you could give me back my old heart.”
“But that one would not work at all!”
Cramer lifted a hand, now puffed to twice its normal size. “Soon,” he said, “perhaps as soon as tomorrow, and certainly within a week, the pain will be so bad that I won’t be able to move. I won’t be able to do a thing for myself. Perhaps I won’t even be able to sit up. I’ll have to go into a nursing home, and be waited on as long as I live. I haven’t enough money for that.”
“This money—I can give you as much money as you wish to have.”
“Even with enough money, can you imagine what kind of life that would be? Flat on my back, and in agony every time I move a finger. And it would go on, and on, and on. Very few accidents happen in nursing homes. But it seems that I have no choice.”
Joe said nothing.
“Only I do have a choice,” Cramer went on. “I can have you put my old heart back, so an autopsy wouldn’t stir up a fuss—they could think what they liked about the incision—and end things immediately, as should have happened that night on the river. Or I can take as much money as you can give me, and go into a nursing home where I would live indefinitely but helplessly in fairly comfortable torment. It isn’t much of a choice, but it is a choice.”
Joe still said nothing.
“And,” Cramer said, “I’ll have to decide before you leave. When will that be?”
“I had thought—tomorrow. Tomorrow night. But since you have such a difficult choice to make, I could wait another day. Or two.”
“If I can’t decide by tomorrow,” Cramer said dryly, “I won’t be able to decide at all.”
In the morning Joe carried him outside, and he sat cushioned by pillows and blankets and looked out at the river. Soon it would be summer, with the grating song of frogs at night, and leaping fish, and the sullen old turtle that always sunned itself on the big log a few yards upstream. He loved it all, and now, whatever he decided, it was lost to him.
But perhaps, if he entered a nursing home, medical science would eventually be able to do something for this synthetically intensified arthritis—or perhaps not. That would be a frightening gamble, because he would be doomed to endless pain if he lost. Lying helpless, closely watched in a nursing home, he would not even have the choice of taking his own life. And the first time he was examined there would be embarrassing questions about his heart. He would be a medical freak.
Even so, sitting there looking at the sun on the rippling water, life seemed good to him—until he attempted to move.
Joe came to prepare his lunch, maintaining a sympathetic silence. He came again at dusk for the final time. A last meal, and then he would deliver Cramer to the Mortons, with enough money to last him an eternity of lifetimes; or he would replace his new heart with the worn-out one and leave his body in the cabin, to be found as chance might decide. Joe fed him—a simple meal, for a last meal— canned beans, canned hash, canned fruit, plenty of hot coffee. Cramer ate slowly savoring each mouthful.
“Well, friend Cramer?” Joe asked, when he had finished.
“If I could use my hands,” Cramer said, “I could flip a coin.”
“I admire your courage, friend Cramer.”
“I have no courage, Joe. Flipping a coin may be the only answer, because I haven’t decided.”
“If you’d like to wait another day—”
“That wouldn’t help. If it were a question of doing something, then I could decide, I think. I had no trouble deciding that night on the river. But to sit here calmly in a chair and make a choice between living, even though in agony, and dying, is something I cannot do. So I’m going to leave the choice to you.”
“To me?”
Cramer nodded.
For the first time Joe’s round face registered a discernible emotion. He was shocked. More than that—he was staggered. “Friend Cramer ... I cannot make that kind of decision for you! You have no right to ask.”
“Every right,” Cramer said calmly. “The whole business is your fault. If I hadn’t saved your life, and then if you hadn’t saved mine, there wouldn’t be a problem. So it’s up to you to decide. If you want to flip a coin, I won’t mind.”
Joe gazed down at him helplessly. A many-fingered gesture underscored his consternation. He attempted to speak, and sputtered inanely.
“I’m waiting,” Cramer said.