Anti-Man

"I can resign from society without giving up my degree and skills. Don't pride yourself that I would cancel out all my medical interests, hopes and dreams just for you, boy. Now get that coat and shirt off!" It felt good to be forceful after letting Him derail me so many times before. Funny that I should be considered the terror of interns for eight years, the scowling, black-eyed dragon who ate young doctors whole if they so much as appeared with wrinkled whites for duty, and yet allow myself to be put off by this non-man so easily. Wasn't I the same doctor whose nurse, working the same floor and duty shift with him, arrived half an hour early and left half an hour late rather than forget to prepare or finish something? Yet I must wrangle with this Adam for the simple purpose of perhaps saving His arm from gangrene. Perhaps, I told myself, it was because we were running, because I was a criminal and afraid. I had set up a new life style for myself, and the whorls of its pattern had rocked my self-confidence. That would have to change. What was I without my bluster? My towering rage? I scowled the intern-paralyzing scowl. "Hurry up!"

When it was put that bluntly, a severe command, He obeyed. He always obeyed commands. He was almost the perfect android. There had just been one incident when He had refused to obey a command, and that had been the same incident that had revealed the fact that He was developing abilities far beyond any we had anticipated. Considering the fact that World Authority research administrators anticipate everything (or so they proudly proclaim at every opportunity), the discovery shook up quite a few people. Quite a few of the wrong people.

I had been with Him that day on the ground floor of the testing lab, working on analysis of His reflex pattern (which had just then begun to show an extraordinary rapidity, especially in the areas of heat and light tropism) when the explosion had rocked the research complex. The floor trembled, windows rattled, plaster dust sifted down onto us. I didn't think about Him or leaving Him alone, but I grabbed my bag and ran, following the intercom directions to the sector of the disaster.

I worked for two hours in the smoking ruins, trying to do preliminary patchwork on the dying bodies-trying to convince myself that they still had a chance-while we waited for the base and the town ambulances to return from their agonizingly slow trips to the local hospital. When I had seen the animated form of a man I had earlier left for dead-damn dead! — under a crushing pile of debris, I thought I had finally flipped out of rational thought ways. Then I began to see others, six in all, men certainly dead only a short time before. He was doing it. He. I became aware of the military standing around, almost every important officer on the base and enough MPs to make a war movie. They were ordering Him to stop reviving people. It should have been that simple. Command and obedience. Instead, He wouldn't listen to them. He repeatedly disobeyed. Finally, they shot Him with narcodarts and put Him on ice until they could decide what was to be done.

Under the current social mores, it was perfectly correct and noble to keep someone from suffering or dying prematurely. The operative word there is "prematurely." In a world of nine billion, it was taboo — and suicidal — to bring anyone back from the dead. The ranks of the living, God knew, were almost more than the planet could bear. The government had successfully discredited the Crionics Association, had squashed all possibilities of producing Mercer Serum to regress the effects of aging. Here was a new threat every bit as frightening and impossible as anything they had faced before.