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Title: The Little Black Bag
Author: Kornbluth, Cyril M. (1924-1958)
Date of first publication: 1950
   (Astounding Science Fiction, July issue)
Date first posted: 12 October 2009
Date last updated: 12 October 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #401

This ebook was produced by: Dr. Mark Bear Akrigg





THE LITTLE BLACK BAG




Old Dr. Full felt the winter in his bones as he limped down
the alley. It was the alley and the back door he had chosen
rather than the sidewalk and the front door because of the
brown paper bag under his arm. He knew perfectly well that
the flat-faced, stringy-haired women of his street and their
gap-toothed, sour-smelling husbands did not notice if he
brought a bottle of cheap wine to his room. They all but
lived on the stuff themselves, varied with whiskey when pay
checks were boosted by overtime. But Dr. Full, unlike them,
was ashamed. A complicated disaster occurred as he limped
down the littered alley. One of the neighborhood dogs--a
mean little black one he knew and hated, with its teeth
always bared and always snarling with menace--hurled at his
legs through a hole in the board fence that lined his path.
Dr. Full flinched, then swung his leg in what was to have
been a satisfying kick to the animal's gaunt ribs. But the
winter in his bones weighed down the leg. His foot failed to
clear a half-buried brick, and he sat down abruptly,
cursing. When he smelled unbottled wine and realized his
brown paper package had slipped from under his arm and
smashed, his curses died on his lips. The snarling black dog
was circling him at a yard's distance, tensely stalking, but
he ignored it in the greater disaster.

With stiff fingers as he sat on the filth of the alley, Dr.
Full unfolded the brown paper bag's top, which had been
crimped over, grocer-wise. The early autumnal dusk had come;
he could not see plainly what was left. He lifted out the
jug-handled top of his half gallon, and some fragments, and
then the bottom of the bottle. Dr. Full was far too occupied
to exult as he noted that there was a good pint left. He had
a problem, and emotions could be deferred until the fitting
time.

The dog closed in, its snarl rising in pitch. He set down
the bottom of the bottle and pelted the dog with the curved
triangular glass fragments of its top. One of them
connected, and the dog ducked back through the fence,
howling. Dr. Full then placed a razor-like edge of the
half-gallon bottle's foundation to his lips and drank from
it as though it were a giant's cup. Twice he had to put it
down to rest his arms, but in one minute he had swallowed
the pint of wine.

He thought of rising to his feet and walking through the
alley to his room, but a flood of well-being drowned the
notion. It was, after all, inexpressibly pleasant to sit
there and feel the frost-hardened mud of the alley turn
soft, or seem to, and to feel the winter evaporating from
his bones under a warmth which spread from his stomach
through his limbs.

A three-year-old girl in a cut-down winter coat squeezed
through the same hole in the board fence from which the
black dog had sprung its ambush. Gravely she toddled up to
Dr. Full and inspected him with her dirty forefinger in her
mouth. Dr. Full's happiness had been providentially made
complete; he had been supplied with an audience.

"Ah, my dear," he said hoarsely. And then: "Preposserous
accusation. 'If that's what you call evidence,' I should
have told them, 'you better stick to your doctoring.' I
should have told them: 'I was here before your County
Medical Society. And the License Commissioner never proved a
thing on me. So, gennulmen, doesn't it stand to reason? I
appeal to you as fellow memmers of a great profession--"'

The little girl, bored, moved away, picking up one of the
triangular pieces of glass to play with as she left. Dr.
Full forgot her immediately, and continued to himself
earnestly: "But so help me, they _couldn't_ prove a thing.
Hasn't a man got any _rights?_" He brooded over the
question, of whose answer he was so sure, but on which the
Committee on Ethics of the County Medical Society had been
equally certain. The winter was creeping into his bones
again, and he had no money and no more wine.

Dr. Full pretended to himself that there was a bottle of
whiskey somewhere in the fearful litter of his room. It was
an old and cruel trick he played on himself when he simply
had to be galvanized into getting up and going home. He
might freeze there in the alley. In his room he would be
bitten by bugs and would cough at the moldy reek from his
sink, but he would not freeze and be cheated of the hundreds
of bottles of wine that he still might drink, the thousands
of hours of glowing content he still might feel. He thought
about that bottle of whiskey--was it back of a mounded heap
of medical journals? No; he had looked there last time. Was
it under the sink, shoved well to the rear, behind the rusty
drain? The cruel trick began to play itself out again. Yes,
he told himself with mounting excitement, yes, it might be!
Your memory isn't so good nowadays, he told himself with
rueful good-fellowship. You know perfectly well you might
have bought a bottle of whiskey and shoved it behind the
sink drain for a moment just like this.

The amber bottle, the crisp snap of the sealing as he cut
it, the pleasurable exertion of starting the screw cap on
its threads, and then the refreshing tangs in his throat,
the warmth in his stomach, the dark, dull happy oblivion of
drunkenness--they became real to him. You _could_ have, you
know! You _could_ have! he told himself. With the blessed
conviction growing in his mind--It _could_ have happened,
you know! It _could_ have!--he struggled to his right knee.
As he did, he heard a yelp behind him, and curiously craned
his neck around while resting. It was the little girl, who
had cut her hand quite badly on her toy, the piece of glass.
Dr. Full could see the rilling bright blood down her coat,
pooling at her feet.

He almost felt inclined to defer the image of the amber
bottle for her, but not seriously. He knew that it was
there, shoved well to the rear under the sink, behind the
rusty drain where he had hidden it. He would have a drink
and then magnanimously return to help the child. Dr. Full
got to his other knee and then his feet, and proceeded at a
rapid totter down the littered alley toward his room, where
he would hunt with calm optimism at first for the bottle
that was not there, then with anxiety, and then with frantic
violence. He would hurl books and dishes about before he was
done looking for the amber bottle of whiskey, and finally
would beat his swollen knuckles against the brick wall until
old scars on them opened and his thick old blood oozed over
his hands. Last of all, he would sit down somewhere on the
floor, whimpering, and would plunge into the abyss of
purgative nightmare that was his sleep.

     *     *     *     *     *

After twenty generations of shilly-shallying and "we'll
cross that bridge when we come to it," genus homo had bred
himself into an impasse. Dogged biometricians had pointed
out with irrefutable logic that mental subnormals were
outbreeding mental normals and supernormals, and that the
process was occurring on an exponential curve. Every fact
that could be mustered in the argument proved the
biometricians' case, and led inevitably to the conclusion
that genus homo was going to wind up in a preposterous jam
quite soon. If you think that had any effect on breeding
practices, you do not know genus homo.

There was, of course, a sort of masking effect produced by
that other exponential function, the accumulation of
technological devices. A moron trained to punch an adding
machine seems to be a more skillful computer than a medieval
mathematician trained to count on his fingers. A moron
trained to operate the twenty-first century equivalent of a
linotype seems to be a better typographer than a Renaissance
printer limited to a few fonts of movable type. This is also
true of medical practice.

It was a complicated affair of many factors. The
supernormals "improved the product" at greater speed than
the subnormals degraded it, but in smaller quantity because
elaborate training of their children was practiced on a
custom-made basis. The fetish of higher education had some
weird avatars by the twentieth generation: "colleges" where
not a member of the student body could read words of three
syllables; "universities" where such degrees as "Bachelor of
Typewriting," "Master of Shorthand" and "Doctor of
Philosophy (Card Filing)" were conferred with the
traditional pomp. The handful of supernormals used such
devices in order that the vast majority might keep some
semblance of a social order going.

Some day the supernormals would mercilessly cross the
bridge; at the twentieth generation they were standing
irresolutely at its approaches wondering what had hit them.
And the ghosts of twenty generations of biometricians
chuckled malignantly.

It is a certain Doctor of Medicine of this twentieth
generation that we are concerned with. His name was
Hemingway--John Hemingway, B.Sc., M.D. He was a general
practitioner, and did not hold with running to specialists
with every trifling ailment. He often said as much, in
approximately these words: "Now, uh, what I mean is you got
a good old G.P. See what I mean? Well, uh, now a good old
G.P. don't claim he knows all about lungs and glands and
them things, get me? But you got a G.P., you got, uh, you
got a, well, you got a ... _all-around man!_ That's what
you got when you got a G.P--you got a all-around man."

But from this, do not imagine that Dr. Hemingway was a poor
doctor. He could remove tonsils or appendixes, assist at
practically any confinement and deliver a living, uninjured
infant, correctly diagnose hundreds of ailments, and
prescribe and administer the correct medication or treatment
for each. There was, in fact, only one thing he could not do
in the medical line, and that was, violate the ancient
canons of medical ethics. And Dr. Hemingway knew better than
to try.

Dr. Hemingway and a few friends were chatting one evening
when the event occurred that precipitates him into our
story. He had been through a hard day at the clinic, and he
wished his physicist friend Walter Gillis, B.Sc., M.Sc.,
Ph.D., would shut up so he could tell everybody about it.
But Gillis kept rambling on, in his stilted fashion: "You
got to hand it to old Mike; he don't have what we call the
scientific method, but you got to hand it to him. There this
poor little dope is, puttering around with some glassware
and I come up and I ask him, kidding of course, 'How's about
a time-travel machine, Mike?"'

Dr. Gillis was not aware of it, but "Mike" had an I.Q. six
times his own, and was--to be blunt--his keeper. "Mike" rode
herd on the pseudo-physicists in the pseudo-laboratory, in
the guise of a bottle-washer. It was a social waste--but as
has been mentioned before, the supernormals were still
standing at the approaches to a bridge. Their irresolution
led to many such preposterous situations. And it happens
that "Mike," having grown frantically bored with his task,
was malevolent enough to--but let Dr. Gillis tell it:

"So he gives me these here tube numbers and says, 'Series
circuit. Now stop bothering me. Build your time machine, sit
down at it and turn on the switch. That's all I ask, Dr.
Gillis--that's all I ask."'

"Say," marveled a brittle and lovely blonde guest, "you
remember real good, don't you, doc?" She gave him a melting
smile.

"Heck," said Gillis modestly, "I always remember good. It's
what you call an inherent facility. And besides I told it
quick to my secretary, so she wrote it down. I don't read so
good, but I sure remember good, all right. Now, where was
I?"

Everybody thought hard, and there were various suggestions:

"Something about bottles, doc?"

"You was starting a fight. You said 'time somebody was
traveling."'

"Yeah--you called somebody a swish. Who did you call a
swish?"

"Not swish--_switch_."

Dr. Gillis's noble brow grooved with thought, and he
declared: "Switch is right. It was about time travel. What
we call travel through time. So I took the tube numbers he
gave me and I put them into the circuit-builder; I set it
for 'series' and there it is--my time-traveling machine. It
travels things through time real good." He displayed a box.

"What's in the box?" asked the lovely blonde.

Dr. Hemingway told her: "Time travel. It travels things
through time."

"Look," said Gillis, the physicist. He took Dr. Hemingway's
little black bag and put it on the box. He turned on the
switch and the little black bag vanished.

"Say," said Dr. Hemingway, "that was, uh, swell. Now bring
it back."

"Huh?"

"Bring back my little black bag."

"Well," said Dr. Gillis, "they don't come back. I tried it
backwards and they don't come back. I guess maybe that dummy
Mike give me a bum steer."

There was wholesale condemnation of "Mike" but Dr. Hemingway
took no part in it. He was nagged by a vague feeling that
there was something he would have to do. He reasoned: "I am
a doctor and a doctor has got to have a little black bag. I
ain't got a little black bag--so ain't I a doctor no more?"
He decided that this was absurd. He _knew_ he was a doctor.
So it must be the bag's fault for not being there. It was no
good, and he would get another one tomorrow from that dummy
Al, at the clinic. Al could find things good, but he was a
dummy--never liked to talk sociable to you.

So the next day Dr. Hemingway remembered to get another
little black bag from his keeper--another little black bag
with which he could perform tonsillectomies, appendectomies
and the most difficult confinements, and with which he could
diagnose and cure his kind until the day when the
supernormals could bring themselves to cross that bridge. Al
was kinda nasty about the missing little black bag, but Dr.
Hemingway didn't exactly remember what had happened, so no
tracer was sent out, so--

     *     *     *     *     *

Old Dr. Full awoke from the horrors of the night to the
horrors of the day. His gummy eyelashes pulled apart
convulsively. He was propped against a corner of his room,
and something was making a little drumming noise. He felt
very cold and cramped. As his eyes focused on his lower
body, he croaked out a laugh. The drumming noise was being
made by his left heel, agitated by fine tremors against the
bare floor. It was going to be the D.T.'s again, he decided
dispassionately. He wiped his mouth with his bloody
knuckles, and the fine tremor coarsened; the snare-drum beat
became louder and slower. He was getting a break this fine
morning, he decided sardonically. You didn't get the horrors
until you had been tightened like a violin string, just to
the breaking point. He had a reprieve, if a reprieve into
his old body with the blazing, endless headache just back of
the eyes and the screaming stiffness in the joints were
anything to be thankful for.

There was something or other about a kid, he thought
vaguely. He was going to doctor some kid. His eyes rested on
a little black bag in the center of the room, and he forgot
about the kid. "I could have sworn," said Dr. Full, "I
hocked that two years ago!" He hitched over and reached the
bag, and then realized it was some stranger's kit, arriving
here he did not know how. He tentatively touched the lock
and it snapped open and lay flat, rows and rows of
instruments and medications tucked into loops in its four
walls. It seemed vastly larger open than closed. He didn't
see how it could possibly fold up into that compact size
again, but decided it was some stunt of the instrument
makers. Since his time--that made it worth more at the hock
shop, he thought with satisfaction.

Just for old times' sake, he let his eyes and fingers rove
over the instruments before he snapped the bag shut and
headed for Uncle's. More than a few were a little hard to
recognize--exactly, that is. You could see the things with
blades for cutting, the forceps for holding and pulling, the
retractors for holding fast, the needles and gut for
suturing, the hypos--a fleeting thought crossed his mind
that he could peddle the hypos separately to drug addicts.

Let's go, he decided, and tried to fold up the case. It
didn't fold until he happened to touch the lock, and then it
folded all at once into a little black bag. Sure have forged
ahead, he thought, almost able to forget that what he was
primarily interested in was its pawn value.

With a definite objective, it was not too hard for him to
get to his feet. He decided to go down the front steps, out
the front door and down the sidewalk. But first--

He snapped the bag open again on his kitchen table, and
pored through the medication tubes. "Anything to sock the
autonomic nervous system good and hard," he mumbled. The
tubes were numbered, and there was a plastic card which
seemed to list them. The left margin of the card was a
run-down of the systems--vascular, muscular, nervous. He
followed the last entry across to the right. There were
columns for "stimulant," "depressant," and so on. Under
"nervous system" and "depressant" he found the number 17,
and shakily located the little glass tube which bore it. It
was full of pretty blue pills and he took one.

It was like being struck by a thunderbolt.

Dr. Full had so long lacked any sense of well-being except
the brief glow of alcohol that he had forgotten its very
nature. He was panic-stricken for a long moment at the
sensation that spread through him slowly, finally tingling
in his fingertips. He straightened up, his pains gone and
his leg tremor stilled.

That was great, he thought. He'd be able to _run_ to the
hock shop, pawn the little black bag and get some booze. He
started down the stairs. Not even the street, bright with
mid-morning sun, into which he emerged made him quail. The
little black bag in his left hand had a satisfying,
authoritative weight. He was walking erect, he noted, and
not in the somewhat furtive crouch that had grown on him in
recent years. A little self-respect, he told himself, that's
what I need. Just because a man's down doesn't mean--

"Docta, please-a come wit'!" somebody yelled at him, tugging
his arm. "Da litt-la girl, she's-a burn' up!" It was one of
the slum's innumerable flat-faced, stringy-haired women, in
a slovenly wrapper.

"Ah, I happen to be retired from practice--" he began
hoarsely, but she would not be put off.

"In by here, Docta!" she urged, tugging him to a doorway.
"You come look-a da litt-la girl. I got two dolla, you come
look!" That put a different complexion on the matter. He
allowed himself to be towed through the doorway into a
mussy, cabbage-smelling flat. He knew the woman now, or
rather knew who she must be--a new arrival who had moved in
the other night. These people moved at night, in motorcades
of battered cars supplied by friends and relations, with
furniture lashed to the tops, swearing and drinking until
the small hours. It explained why she had stopped him: she
did not yet know he was old Dr. Full, a drunken reprobate
whom nobody would trust. The little black bag had been his
guarantee, outweighing his whiskery face and stained black
suit.

He was looking down on a three-year-old girl who had, he
rather suspected, just been placed in the mathematical
center of a freshly changed double bed. God knew what sour
and dirty mattress she usually slept on. He seemed to
recognize her as he noted a crusted bandage on her right
hand. Two dollars, he thought-- An ugly flush had spread up
her pipe-stem arm. He poked a finger into the socket of her
elbow, and felt little spheres like marbles under the skin
and ligaments roll apart. The child began to squall thinly;
beside him, the woman gasped and began to weep herself.

"Out," he gestured briskly at her, and she thudded away,
still sobbing.

Two dollars, he thought-- Give her some mumbo jumbo, take the
money and tell her to go to a clinic. Strep, I guess, from
that stinking alley. It's a wonder any of them grow up. He
put down the little black bag and forgetfully fumbled for
his key, then remembered and touched the lock. It flew open,
and he selected a bandage shears, with a blunt wafer for the
lower jaw. He fitted the lower jaw under the bandage, trying
not to hurt the kid by its pressure on the infection, and
began to cut. It was amazing how easily and swiftly the
shining shears snipped through the crusty rag around the
wound. He hardly seemed to be driving the shears with
fingers at all. It almost seemed as though the shears were
driving his fingers instead as they scissored a clean, light
line through the bandage.

Certainly have forged ahead since my time, he
thought--sharper than a microtome knife. He replaced the
shears in their loop on the extraordinarily big board that
the little black bag turned into when it unfolded, and
leaned over the wound. He whistled at the ugly gash, and the
violent infection which had taken immediate root in the
sickly child's thin body. Now what can you do with a thing
like that? He pawed over the contents of the little black
bag, nervously. If he lanced it and let some of the pus out,
the old woman would think he'd done something for her and
he'd get the two dollars. But at the clinic they'd want to
know who did it and if they got sore enough they might send
a cop around. Maybe there was something in the kit--

He ran down the left edge of the card to "lymphatic" and
read across to the column under "infection." It didn't sound
right at all to him; he checked again, but it still said
that. In the square to which the line and column led were
the symbols: "IV-g-3cc." He couldn't find any bottles marked
with Roman numerals, and then noticed that that was how the
hypodermic needles were designated. He lifted number IV from
its loop, noting that it was fitted with a needle already
and even seemed to be charged. What a way to carry those
things around! So--three cc. of whatever was in hypo number
IV ought to do something or other about infections settled
in the lymphatic system--which, God knows, this one was.
What did the lower-case "g" mean, though? He studied the
glass hypo and saw letters engraved on what looked like a
rotating disk at the top of the barrel. They ran from "a" to
"i," and there was an index line engraved on the barrel on
the opposite side from the calibrations.

Shrugging, old Dr. Full turned the disk until "g" coincided
with the index line, and lifted the hypo to eye level. As he
pressed in the plunger he did not see the tiny thread of
fluid squirt from the tip of the needle. There was a sort of
dark mist for a moment about the tip. A closer inspection
showed that the needle was not even pierced at the tip. It
had the usual slanting cut across the bias of the shaft, but
the cut did not expose an oval hole. Baffled, he tried
pressing the plunger again. Again _something_ appeared
around the tip and vanished. "We'll settle this," said the
doctor. He slipped the needle into the skin of his forearm.
He thought at first that he had missed--that the point had
glided over the top of his skin instead of catching and
slipping under it. But he saw a tiny blood-spot and realized
that somehow he just hadn't felt the puncture. Whatever was
in the barrel, he decided, couldn't do him any harm if it
lived up to its billing--and if it could come out through a
needle that had no hole. He gave himself three cc. and
twitched the needle out. There was the swelling--painless,
but otherwise typical.

Dr. Full decided it was his eyes or something, and gave
three cc. of "g" from hypodermic IV to the feverish child.
There was no interruption to her wailing as the needle went
in and the swelling rose. But a long instant later, she gave
a final gasp and was silent.

Well, he told himself, cold with horror, you did it that
time. You killed her with that stuff.

Then the child sat up and said: "Where's my mommy?"

Incredulously, the doctor seized her arm and palpated the
elbow. The gland infection was zero, and the temperature
seemed normal. The blood-congested tissues surrounding the
wound were subsiding as he watched. The child's pulse was
stronger and no faster than a child's should be. In the
sudden silence of the room he could hear the little girl's
mother sobbing in her kitchen, outside. And he also heard a
girl's insinuating voice:

"She gonna be O.K., doc?"

He turned and saw a gaunt-faced, dirty-blonde sloven of
perhaps eighteen leaning in the doorway and eyeing him with
amused contempt. She continued: "I heard about you,
_Doc-tor_ Full. So don't go try and put the bite on the old
lady. You couldn't doctor up a sick cat."

"Indeed?" he rumbled. This young person was going to get a
lesson she richly deserved. "Perhaps you would care to look
at my patient?"

"Where's my mommy?" insisted the little girl, and the
blonde's jaw fell. She went to the bed and cautiously asked:
"You O.K. now, Teresa? You all fixed up?"

"Where's my mommy?" demanded Teresa. Then, accusingly, she
gestured with her wounded hand at the doctor. "You _poke_
me!" she complained, and giggled pointlessly.

"Well--" said the blonde girl, "I guess I got to hand it to
you, doc. These loud-mouth women around here said you didn't
know your ... I mean, didn't know how to cure people. They
said you ain't a real doctor."

"I _have_ retired from practice," he said. "But I happened
to be taking this case to a colleague as a favor, your good
mother noticed me, and--" a deprecating smile. He touched
the lock of the case and it folded up into the little black
bag again.

"You stole it," the girl said flatly.

He sputtered.

"Nobody'd trust you with a thing like that. It must be worth
plenty. You stole that case. I was going to stop you when I
come in and saw you working over Teresa, but it looked like
you wasn't doing her any harm. But when you give me that
line about taking that case to a colleague I know you stole
it. You gimme a cut or I go to the cops. A thing like that
must be worth twenty--thirty dollars."

The mother came timidly in, her eyes red. But she let out a
whoop of joy when she saw the little girl sitting up and
babbling to herself, embraced her madly, fell on her knees
for a quick prayer, hopped up to kiss the doctor's hand, and
then dragged him into the kitchen, all the while rattling in
her native language while the blonde girl let her eyes go
cold with disgust. Dr. Full allowed himself to be towed into
the kitchen, but flatly declined a cup of coffee and a plate
of anise cakes and St. John's Bread.

"Try him on some wine, ma," said the girl sardonically.

"Hyass! Hyass!" breathed the woman delightedly. "You like-a
wine, docta?" She had a carafe of purplish liquid before him
in an instant, and the blonde girl snickered as the doctor's
hand twitched out at it. He drew his hand back, while there
grew in his head the old image of how it would smell and
then taste and then warm his stomach and limbs. He made the
kind of calculation at which he was practiced; the delighted
woman would not notice as he downed two tumblers, and he
could overawe her through two tumblers more with his tale of
Teresa's narrow brush with the Destroying Angel, and
then--why, then it would not matter. He would be drunk.

But for the first time in years, there was a sort of
counter-image: a blend of the rage he felt at the blonde
girl to whom he was so transparent, and of pride at the cure
he had just effected. Much to his own surprise, he drew back
his hand from the carafe and said, luxuriating in the words:
"No, thank you. I don't believe I'd care for any so early in
the day." He covertly watched the blonde girl's face, and
was gratified at her surprise. Then the mother was shyly
handing him two bills and saying: "Is no much-a money,
docta--but you come again, see Teresa?"

"I shall be glad to follow the case through," he said. "But
now excuse me--I really must be running along." He grasped
the little black bag firmly and got up; he wanted very much
to get away from the wine and the older girl.

"Wait up, doc," said she. "I'm going your way." She followed
him out and down the street. He ignored her until he felt
her hand on the black bag. Then old Dr. Full stopped and
tried to reason with her:

"Look, my dear. Perhaps you're right. I might have stolen
it. To be perfectly frank, I don't remember how I got it.
But you're young and you can earn your own money--

"Fifty-fifty," she said, "or I go to the cops. And if I get
another word outta you, it's sixty-forty. And you know who
gets the short end, don't you, doc?"

Defeated, he marched to the pawnshop, her impudent hand
still on the handle with his, and her heels beating out a
tattoo against his stately tread.

In the pawnshop, they both got a shock.

"It ain't stendard," said Uncle, unimpressed by the
ingenious lock. "I ain't nevva seen one like it. Some cheap
Jap stuff, maybe? Try down the street. This I nevva could
sell."

Down the street they got an offer of one dollar. The same
complaint was made: "I ain't a collecta, mista--I buy stuff
that got resale value. Who could I sell this to, a Chinaman
who don't know medical instruments? Every one of them looks
funny. You sure you didn't make these yourself?" They didn't
take the one-dollar offer.

The girl was baffled and angry; the doctor was baffled too,
but triumphant. He had two dollars, and the girl had a
half-interest in something nobody wanted. But, he suddenly
marveled, the thing had been all right to cure the kid,
hadn't it?

"Well," he asked her, "do you give up? As you see, the kit
is practically valueless."

She was thinking hard. "Don't fly off the handle, doc. I
don't get this but something's going on all right ... would
those guys know good stuff if they saw it?"

"They would. They make a living from it. Wherever this kit
came from--"

She seized on that, with a devilish faculty she seemed to
have of eliciting answers without asking questions. "I
thought so. You don't know either, huh? Well, maybe I can
find out for you. C'mon in here. I ain't letting go of that
thing. There's money in it--some way, I don't know how,
there's money in it." He followed her into a cafeteria and
to an almost-empty corner. She was oblivious to stares and
snickers from the other customers as she opened the little
black bag--it almost covered a cafeteria table--and ferreted
through it. She picked out a retractor from a loop,
scrutinized it, contemptuously threw it down, picked out a
speculum, threw it down, picked out the lower half of an
O.B. forceps, turned it over, close to her sharp young
eyes--and saw what the doctor's dim old ones could not have
seen.

All old Dr. Full knew was that she was peering at the neck
of the forceps and then turned white. Very carefully, she
placed the half of the forceps back in its loop of cloth and
then replaced the retractor and the speculum. "Well?" he
asked. "What did you see?"

"'Made in U.S.A.'" she quoted hoarsely. "'Patent Applied for
July 2450.'"

He wanted to tell her she must have misread the inscription,
that it must be a practical joke, that--

But he knew she had read correctly. Those bandage shears:
they _had_ driven his fingers, rather than his fingers
driving them. The hypo needle that had no hole. The pretty
blue pill that had struck him like a thunderbolt.

"You know what I'm going to do?" asked the girl, with sudden
animation. "I'm going to go to charm school. You'll like
that, won't ya, doc? Because we're sure going to be seeing a
lot of each other."

Old Dr. Full didn't answer. His hands had been playing idly
with that plastic card from the kit on which had been
printed the rows and columns that had guided him twice
before. The card had a slight convexity; you could snap the
convexity back and forth from one side to the other. He
noted, in a daze, that with each snap a different text
appeared on the cards. _Snap_. "The knife with the blue dot
in the handle is for tumors only. Diagnose tumors with your
Instrument Seven, the Swelling Tester. Place the Swelling
Tester--" _Snap_. "An overdose of the pink pills in Bottle
3 can be fixed with one white pill from Bottle--" _Snap_.
"Hold the suture needle by the end without the hole in it.
Touch it to one end of the wound you want to close and let
go. After it has made the knot, touch it--" _Snap_. "Place
the top half of the O.B. Forceps near the opening. Let go.
After it has entered and conformed to the shape of--"
_Snap_.

     *     *     *     *     *

The slot man saw "FLANNERY 1--MEDICAL" in the upper left
corner of the hunk of copy. He automatically scribbled "trim
to .75" on it and skimmed it across the horseshoe-shaped
copy desk to Piper, who had been handling Edna Flannery's
quack-expos series. She was a nice youngster, he thought,
but like all youngsters she over-wrote. Hence, the "trim."

Piper dealt back a city hall story to the slot, pinned down
Flannery's feature with one hand and began to tap his pencil
across it, one tap to a word, at the same steady beat as a
teletype carriage traveling across the roller. He wasn't
exactly reading it this first time. He was just looking at
the letters and words to find out whether, as letters and
words, they conformed to _Herald_ style. The steady tap of
his pencil ceased at intervals as it drew a black line
ending with a stylized letter "d" through the word "breast"
and scribbled in "chest" instead, or knocked down the
capital "E" in "East" to lower case with a diagonal, or
closed up a split word--in whose middle Flannery had bumped
the space bar of her typewriter--with two curved lines like
parentheses rotated through ninety degrees. The thick black
pencil zipped a ring around the "30" which, like all
youngsters, she put at the end of her stories. He turned
back to the first page for the second reading. This time the
pencil drew lines with the stylized "d's" at the end of them
through adjectives and whole phrases, printed big "L's" to
mark paragraphs, hooked some of Flannery's own paragraphs
together with swooping recurved lines.

At the bottom of "FLANNERY ADD 2--MEDICAL" the pencil slowed
down and stopped. The slot man, sensitive to the rhythm of
his beloved copy desk, looked up almost at once. He saw
Piper squinting at the story, at a loss. Without wasting
words, the copy reader skimmed it back across the Masonite
horseshoe to the chief, caught a police story in return and
buckled down, his pencil tapping. The slot man read as far
as the fourth add, barked at Howard, on the rim: "Sit in for
me," and stumped through the clattering city room toward the
alcove where the managing editor presided over his own
bedlam.

The copy chief waited his turn while the make-up editor, the
pressroom foreman and the chief photographer had words with
the M.E. When his turn came, he dropped Flannery's copy on
his desk and said: "She says this one isn't a quack."

The M.E. read:

"FLANNERY 1--MEDICAL, by Edna Flannery, _Herald_ Staff
Writer.

"The sordid tale of medical quackery which the _Herald_ has
exposed in this series of articles undergoes a change of
pace today which the reporter found a welcome surprise. Her
quest for the facts in the case of today's subject started
just the same way that her exposure of one dozen shyster
M.D.'s and faith-healing phonies did. But she can report for
a change that Dr. Bayard Full is, despite unorthodox
practices which have drawn the suspicion of the rightly
hypersensitive medical associations, a true healer living up
to the highest ideals of his profession.

"Dr. Full's name was given to the _Herald_'s reporter by
the ethical committee of a county medical association, which
reported that he had been expelled from the association on
July 18, 1941 for allegedly 'milking' several patients
suffering from trivial complaints. According to sworn
statements in the committee's files, Dr. Full had told them
they suffered from cancer, and that he had a treatment which
would prolong their lives. After his expulsion from the
association, Dr. Full dropped out of their sight--until he
opened a midtown 'sanitarium' in a brownstone front which
had for years served as a rooming house.

"The _Herald_'s reporter went to that sanitarium, on East
89th Street, with the full expectation of having numerous
imaginary ailments diagnosed and of being promised a sure
cure for a flat sum of money. She expected to find unkempt
quarters, dirty instruments and the mumbo-jumbo
paraphernalia of the shyster M.D. which she had seen a dozen
times before.

"She was wrong.

"Dr. Full's sanitarium is spotlessly clean, from its
tastefully furnished entrance hall to its shining, white
treatment rooms. The attractive, blonde receptionist who
greeted the reporter was soft-spoken and correct, asking
only the reporter's name, address and the general nature of
her complaint. This was given, as usual, as 'nagging
backache.' The receptionist asked the _Herald_'s reporter
to be seated, and a short while later conducted her to a
second-floor treatment room and introduced her to Dr. Full.

"Dr. Full's alleged past, as described by the medical
society spokesman, is hard to reconcile with his present
appearance. He is a clear-eyed, white-haired man in his
sixties, to judge by his appearance--a little above middle
height and apparently in good physical condition. His voice
was firm and friendly, untainted by the ingratiating whine
of the shyster M.D. which the reporter has come to know too
well.

"The receptionist did not leave the room as he began his
examination after a few questions as to the nature and
location of the pain. As the reporter lay face down on a
treatment table the doctor pressed some instrument to the
small of her back. In about one minute he made this
astounding statement: 'Young woman, there is no reason for
you to have any pain where you say you do. I understand
they're saying nowadays that emotional upsets cause pains
like that. You'd better go to a psychologist or psychiatrist
if the pain keeps up. There is no physical cause for it, so
I can do nothing for you.'

"His frankness took the reporter's breath away. Had he
guessed she was, so to speak, a spy in his camp? She tried
again: 'Well, doctor, perhaps you'd give me a physical
checkup. I feel run-down all the time, besides the pains.
Maybe I need a tonic.' This is never-failing bait to shyster
M.D.'s--an invitation for them to find all sorts of
mysterious conditions wrong with a patient, each of which
'requires' an expensive treatment. As explained in the first
article of this series, of course, the reporter underwent a
thorough physical checkup before she embarked on her
quack-hunt, and was found to be in one hundred percent
perfect condition, with the exception of a 'scarred' area at
the bottom tip of her left lung resulting from a childhood
attack of tuberculosis and a tendency toward
'hyperthyroidism'--overactivity of the thyroid gland which
makes it difficult to put on weight and sometimes causes a
slight shortness of breath.

"Dr. Full consented to perform the examination, and took a
number of shining, spotlessly clean instruments from loops
in a large board literally covered with instruments--most of
them unfamiliar to the reporter. The instrument with which
he approached first was a tube with a curved dial in its
surface and two wires that ended on flat disks growing from
its ends. He placed one of the disks on the back of the
reporter's right hand and the other on the back of her left.
'Reading the meter,' he called out some number which the
attentive receptionist took down on a ruled form. The same
procedure was repeated several times, thoroughly covering
the reporter's anatomy and thoroughly convincing her that
the doctor was a complete quack. The reporter had never seen
any such diagnostic procedure practiced during the weeks she
put in preparing for this series.

"The doctor then took the ruled sheet from the receptionist,
conferred with her in low tones and said: 'You have a
slightly overactive thyroid, young woman. And there's
something wrong with your left lung--not seriously, but I'd
like to take a closer look.'

"He selected an instrument from the board which, the
reporter knew, is called a 'speculum'--a scissorlike device
which spreads apart body openings such as the orifice of the
ear, the nostril and so on, so that a doctor can look in
during an examination. The instrument was, however, too
large to be an aural or nasal speculum but too small to be
anything else. As the _Herald_'s reporter was about to ask
further questions, the attending receptionist told her:
'It's customary for us to blindfold our patients during lung
examinations--do you mind?' The reporter, bewildered,
allowed her to tie a spotlessly clean bandage over her eyes,
and waited nervously for what would come next.

"She still cannot say exactly what happened while she was
blindfolded--but X rays confirm her suspicions. She felt a
cold sensation at her ribs on the left side--a cold that
seemed to enter inside her body. Then there was a snapping
feeling, and the cold sensation was gone. She heard Dr. Full
say in a matter-of-fact voice: 'You have an old tubercular
scar down there. It isn't doing any particular harm, but an
active person like you needs all the oxygen she can get. Lie
still and I'll fix it for you.'

"Then there was a repetition of the cold sensation, lasting
for a longer time. 'Another batch of alveoli and some more
vascular glue,' the _Herald_'s reporter heard Dr. Full say,
and the receptionist's crisp response to the order. Then the
strange sensation departed and the eye-bandage was removed.
The reporter saw no scar on her ribs, and yet the doctor
assured her: 'That did it. We took out the fibrosis--and a
good fibrosis it was, too; it walled off the infection so
you're still alive to tell the tale. Then we planted a few
clumps of alveoli--they're the little gadgets that get the
oxygen from the air you breathe into your blood. I won't
monkey with your thyroxin supply. You've got used to being
the kind of person you are, and if you suddenly found
yourself easygoing and all the rest of it, chances are you'd
only be upset. About the backache: just check with the
county medical society for the name of a good psychologist
or psychiatrist. And look out for quacks; the woods are full
of them.'

"The doctor's self-assurance took the reporter's breath
away. She asked what the charge would be, and was told to
pay the receptionist fifty dollars. As usual, the reporter
delayed paying until she got a receipt signed by the doctor
himself, detailing the services for which it paid. Unlike
most, the doctor cheerfully wrote: 'For removal of fibrosis
from left lung and restoration of alveoli,' and signed it.

"The reporter's first move when she left the sanitarium was
to head for the chest specialist who had examined her in
preparation for this series. A comparison of X rays taken on
the day of the 'operation' and those taken previously would,
the _Herald_'s reporter then thought, expose Dr. Full as a
prince of shyster M.D.'s and quacks.

"The chest specialist made time on his crowded schedule for
the reporter, in whose series he has shown a lively interest
from the planning stage on. He laughed uproariously in his
staid Park Avenue examining room as she described the weird
procedure to which she had been subjected. But he did not
laugh when he took a chest X ray of the reporter, developed
it, dried it, and compared it with the ones he had taken
earlier. The chest specialist took six more X rays that
afternoon, but finally admitted that they all told the same
story. The _Herald_'s reporter has it on his authority that
the scar she had eighteen days ago from her tuberculosis is
now gone and has been replaced by healthy lung-tissue. He
declares that this is a happening unparalleled in medical
history. He does not go along with the reporter in her firm
conviction that Dr. Full is responsible for the change.

"The _Herald_'s reporter, however, sees no two ways about
it. She concludes that Dr. Bayard Full--whatever his alleged
past may have been--is now an unorthodox but highly
successful practitioner of medicine, to whose hands the
reporter would trust herself in any emergency.

"Not so is the case of 'Rev.' Annie Dimsworth--a female
harpy who, under the guise of 'faith' preys on the ignorant
and suffering who come to her sordid 'healing parlor' for
help and remain to feed 'Rev.' Annie's bank account, which
now totals up to $53,238.64. Tomorrow's article will show,
with photostats of bank statements and sworn testimony
that--"

The managing editor turned down "FLANNERY LAST ADD--MEDICAL"
and tapped his front teeth with a pencil, trying to think
straight. He finally told the copy chief: "Kill the story.
Run the teaser as a box." He tore off the last
paragraph--the "teaser" about "Rev." Annie--and handed it to
the desk man, who stumped back to his Masonite horseshoe.

The make-up editor was back, dancing with impatience as he
tried to catch the M.E.'s eye. The interphone buzzed with
the red light which indicated that the editor and publisher
wanted to talk to him. The M.E. thought briefly of a
special series on this Dr. Full, decided nobody would
believe it and that he probably was a phony anyway. He
spiked the story on the "dead" hook and answered his
interphone.

     *     *     *     *     *

Dr. Full had become almost fond of Angie. As his practice
had grown to engross the neighborhood illnesses, and then to
a corner suite in an uptown taxpayer building, and finally
to the sanitarium, she seemed to have grown with it. Oh, he
thought, we have our little disputes--

The girl, for instance, was too much interested in money.
She had wanted to specialize in cosmetic surgery--removing
wrinkles from wealthy old women and whatnot. She didn't
realize, at first, that a thing like this was in their
trust, that they were the stewards and not the owners of the
little black bag and its fabulous contents.

He had tried, ever so cautiously, to analyze them, but
without success. All the instruments were slightly
radioactive, for instance, but not quite so. They would make
a Geiger-Mller counter indicate, but they would not
collapse the leaves of an electroscope. He didn't pretend to
be up on the latest developments, but as he understood it,
that was just plain _wrong_. Under the highest
magnification there were lines on the instruments'
superfinished surfaces: incredibly fine lines, engraved in
random hatchments which made no particular sense. Their
magnetic properties were preposterous. Sometimes the
instruments were strongly attracted to magnets, sometimes
less so, and sometimes not at all.

Dr. Full had taken X rays in fear and trembling lest he
disrupt whatever delicate machinery worked in them. He was
_sure_ they were not solid, that the handles and perhaps
the blades must be mere shells filled with busy little
watchworks--but the X rays showed nothing of the sort. Oh,
yes--and they were always sterile, and they wouldn't rust.
Dust _fell_ off them if you shook them: now, that was
something he understood. They ionized the dust, or were
ionized themselves, or something of the sort. At any rate,
he had read of something similar that had to do with
phonograph records.

_She_ wouldn't know about that, he proudly thought. She
kept the books well enough, and perhaps she gave him a
useful prod now and then when he was inclined to settle
down. The move from the neighborhood slum to the uptown
quarters had been her idea, and so had the sanitarium. Good,
good, it enlarged his sphere of usefulness. Let the child
have her mink coats and her convertible, as they seemed to
be calling roadsters nowadays. He himself was too busy and
too old. He had so much to make up for.

Dr. Full thought happily of his Master Plan. She would not
like it much, but she would have to see the logic of it.
This marvelous thing that had happened to them must be
handed on. She was herself no doctor; even though the
instruments practically ran themselves, there was more to
doctoring than skill. There were the ancient canons of the
healing art. And so, having seen the logic of it, Angie
would yield; she would assent to his turning over the little
black bag to all humanity.

He would probably present it to the College of Surgeons,
with as little fuss as possible--well, perhaps a _small_
ceremony, and he would like a souvenir of the occasion, a
cup or a framed testimonial. It would be a relief to have
the thing out of his hands, in a way; let the giants of the
healing art decide who was to have its benefits. No, Angie
would understand. She was a goodhearted girl.

It was nice that she had been showing so much interest in
the surgical side lately--asking about the instruments,
reading the instruction card for hours, even practicing on
guinea pigs. If something of his love for humanity had been
communicated to her, old Dr. Full sentimentally thought, his
life would not have been in vain. Surely she would realize
that a greater good would be served by surrendering the
instruments to wiser hands than theirs, and by throwing
aside the cloak of secrecy necessary to work on their small
scale.

Dr. Full was in the treatment room that had been the
brownstone's front parlor; through the window he saw Angle's
yellow convertible roll to a stop before the stoop. He liked
the way she looked as she climbed the stairs; neat, not
flashy, he thought. A sensible girl like her, she'd
understand. There was somebody with her--a fat woman,
puffing up the steps, overdressed and petulant. Now, what
could she want?

Angie let herself in and went into the treatment room,
followed by the fat woman. "Doctor," said the blonde girl
gravely, "may I present Mrs. Coleman?" Charm school had not
taught her everything, but Mrs. Coleman, evidently _nouveau
riche_, thought the doctor, did not notice the blunder.

"Miss Aquella told me _so_ much about you, doctor, and your
remarkable system!" she gushed.

Before he could answer, Angie smoothly interposed: "Would
you excuse us for just a moment, Mrs. Coleman?"

She took the doctor's arm and led him into the reception
hall. "Listen," she said swiftly, "I know this goes against
your grain, but I couldn't pass it up. I met this old thing
in the exercise class at Elizabeth Barton's. Nobody else'll
talk to her there. She's a widow. I guess her husband was a
black marketeer or something, and she has a pile of dough. I
gave her a line about how you had a system of massaging
wrinkles out. My idea is, you blindfold her, cut her neck
open with the Cutaneous Series knife, shoot some Firmol into
the muscles, spoon out some of that blubber with an Adipose
Series curette and spray it all with Skintite. When you take
the blindfold off she's got rid of a wrinkle and doesn't
know what happened. She'll pay five hundred dollars. Now,
don't say 'no,' doc. Just this once, let's do it my way,
can't you? I've been working on this deal all along too,
haven't I?"

"Oh," said the doctor, "very well." He was going to have to
tell her about the Master Plan before long anyway. He would
let her have it her way this time.

Back in the treatment room, Mrs. Coleman had been thinking
things over. She told the doctor sternly as he entered: "Of
course, your system is permanent, isn't it?"

"It is, madam," he said shortly. "Would you please lie down
there? Miss Aquella, get a sterile three-inch bandage for
Mrs. Coleman's eyes." He turned his back on the fat woman to
avoid conversation, and pretended to be adjusting the
lights. Angie blindfolded the woman, and the doctor selected
the instruments he would need. He handed the blonde girl a
pair of retractors, and told her: "Just slip the corners of
the blades in as I cut--" She gave him an alarmed look, and
gestured at the reclining woman. He lowered his voice: "Very
well. Slip in the corners and rock them along the incision.
I'll tell you when to pull them out."

Dr. Full held the Cutaneous Series knife to his eyes as he
adjusted the little slide for three centimeters depth. He
sighed a little as he recalled that its last use had been in
the extirpation of an "inoperable" tumor of the throat.

"Very well," he said, bending over the woman. He tried a
tentative pass through her tissues. The blade dipped in and
flowed through them, like a finger through quicksilver, with
no wound left in the wake. Only the retractors could hold
the edges of the incision apart.

Mrs. Coleman stirred and jabbered: "Doctor, that felt so
peculiar! Are you sure you're rubbing the right way?"

"Quite sure, madam," said the doctor wearily. "Would you
please try not to talk during the massage?"

He nodded at Angie, who stood ready with the retractors. The
blade sank in to its three centimeters, miraculously cutting
only the dead horny tissues of the epidermis and the live
tissue of the dermis, pushing aside mysteriously all major
and minor blood vessels and muscular tissue, declining to
affect any system or organ except the one it was--tuned to,
could you say? The doctor didn't know the answer, but he
felt tired and bitter at this prostitution. Angie slipped in
the retractor blades and rocked them as he withdrew the
knife, then pulled to separate the lips of the incision. It
bloodlessly exposed an unhealthy string of muscle, sagging
in a dead-looking loop from blue-grey ligaments. The doctor
took a hypo, number IX, pre-set to "g" and raised it to his
eye level. The mist came and went. There probably was no
possibility of an embolus with one of these gadgets, but why
take chances? He shot one cc. of "g"--identified as "Firmol"
by the card--into the muscle. He and Angie watched as it
tightened up against the pharynx.

He took the Adipose Series curette, a small one, and spooned
out yellowish tissue, dropping it into the incinerator box,
and then nodded to Angie. She eased out the retractors and
the gaping incision slipped together into unbroken skin,
sagging now. The doctor had the atomizer--dialed to
"Skintite"--ready. He sprayed, and the skin shrank up into
the new firm throat line.

As he replaced the instruments, Angie removed Mrs. Coleman's
bandage and gayly announced: "We're finished! And there's a
mirror in the reception hall--"

Mrs. Coleman didn't need to be invited twice. With
incredulous fingers she felt her chin, and then dashed for
the hall. The doctor grimaced as he heard her yelp of
delight, and Angie turned to him with a tight smile. "I'll
get the money and get her out," she said. "You won't have to
be bothered with her any more."

He was grateful for that much.

She followed Mrs. Coleman into the reception hall, and the
doctor dreamed over the case of instruments. A ceremony,
certainly--he was _entitled_ to one. Not everybody, he
thought, would turn such a sure source of money over to the
good of humanity. But you reached an age when money mattered
less, and when you thought of these things you had done that
_might_ be open to misunderstanding if, just if, there
chanced to be any of that, well, that judgment business. The
doctor wasn't a religious man, but you certainly found
yourself thinking hard about some things when your time drew
near--

Angie was back, with a bit of paper in her hands. "Five
hundred dollars," she said matter-of-factly. "And you
realize, don't you, that we could go over her an inch at a
time--at five hundred dollars an inch?"

"I've been meaning to talk to you about that," he said.

There was bright fear in her eyes, he thought--but why?

"Angie, you've been a good girl and an understanding girl,
but we can't keep this up forever, you know."

"Let's talk about it some other time," she said flatly. "I'm
tired now."

"No--I really feel we've gone far enough on our own. The
instruments--"

"Don't say it, doc!" she hissed. "Don't say it, or you'll be
sorry!" In her face there was a look that reminded him of
the hollow-eyed, gaunt-faced, dirty-blonde creature she had
been. From under the charm-school finish there burned the
guttersnipe whose infancy had been spent on a sour and
filthy mattress, whose childhood had been play in the
littered alley and whose adolescence had been the sweatshops
and the aimless gatherings at night under the glaring street
lamps.

He shook his head to dispel the puzzling notion. "It's this
way," he patiently began. "I told you about the family that
invented the O.B. forceps and kept them a secret for so many
generations, how they could have given them to the world but
didn't?"

"They knew what they were doing," said the guttersnipe
flatly.

"Well, that's neither here nor there," said the doctor,
irritated. "My mind is made up about it. I'm going to turn
the instruments over to the College of Surgeons. We have
enough money to be comfortable. You can even have the house.
I've been thinking of going to a warmer climate, myself." He
felt peeved with her for making the unpleasant scene. He was
unprepared for what happened next.

Angie snatched the little black bag and dashed for the door,
with panic in her eyes. He scrambled after her, catching her
arm, twisting it in a sudden rage. She clawed at his face
with her free hand, babbling curses. Somehow, somebody's
finger touched the little black bag, and it opened
grotesquely into the enormous board, covered with shining
instruments, large and small. Half a dozen of them joggled
loose and fell to the floor.

"_Now_ see what you've done!" roared the doctor,
unreasonably. Her hand was still viselike on the handle, but
she was standing still, trembling with choked-up rage. The
doctor bent stiffly to pick up the fallen instruments.
Unreasonable girl! he thought bitterly. Making a scene--

Pain drove in between his shoulderblades and he fell
face-down. The light ebbed. "Unreasonable girl!" he tried to
croak. And then: "They'll know I tried, anyway--

Angie looked down on his prone body, with the handle of the
Number Six Cautery Series knife protruding from it. "--will
cut through all tissues. Use for amputations before you
spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme caution should be used in the
vicinity of vital organs and major blood vessels or nerve
trunks--"

"I didn't mean to do that," said Angie, dully, cold with
horror. Now the detective would come, the implacable
detective who would reconstruct the crime from the dust in
the room. She would run and turn and twist, but the
detective would find her out and she would be tried in a
courtroom before a judge and jury; the lawyer would make
speeches, but the jury would convict her anyway, and the
headlines would scream: "BLONDE KILLER GUILTY!" and she'd
maybe get the chair, walking down a plain corridor where a
beam of sunlight struck through the dusty air, with an iron
door at the end of it. Her mink, her convertible, her
dresses, the handsome man she was going to meet and marry--

The mist of cinematic clichs cleared, and she knew what she
would do next. Quite steadily, she picked the incinerator
box from its loop in the board--a metal cube with a
different-textured spot on one side. "--to dispose of
fibroses or other unwanted matter, simply touch the disk--"
You dropped something in and touched the disk. There was a
sort of soundless whistle, very powerful and unpleasant if
you were too close, and a sort of lightless flash. When you
opened the box again, the contents were gone. Angie took
another of the Cautery Series knives and went grimly to
work. Good thing there wasn't any blood to speak of-- She
finished the awful task in three hours.

She slept heavily that night, totally exhausted by the
wringing emotional demands of the slaying and the subsequent
horror. But in the morning, it was as though the doctor had
never been there. She ate breakfast, dressed with unusual
care--and then undid the unusual care. Nothing out of the
ordinary, she told herself. Don't do one thing different
from the way you would have done it before. After a day or
two, you can phone the cops. Say he walked out spoiling for
a drunk, and you're worried. But don't rush it, baby--_don't
rush it_.

Mrs. Coleman was due at 10:00 A.M. Angie had counted on
being able to talk the doctor into at least one more
five-hundred-dollar session. She'd have to do it herself
now--but she'd have to start sooner or later.

The woman arrived early. Angie explained smoothly: "The
doctor asked me to take care of the massage today. Now that
he has the tissue-firming process beginning, it only
requires somebody trained in his methods--" As she spoke,
her eyes swiveled to the instrument case--open! She cursed
herself for the single flaw as the woman followed her gaze
and recoiled.

"What are those things!" she demanded. "Are you going to cut
me with them? I _thought_ there was something fishy--"

"Please, Mrs. Coleman," said Angie, "please, _dear_ Mrs.
Coleman--you don't understand about the ... the massage
instruments!"

"Massage instruments, my foot!" squabbled the woman shrilly.
"That doctor _operated_ on me. Why, he might have killed
me!"

Angie wordlessly took one of the smaller Cutaneous Series
knives and passed it through her forearm. The blade flowed
like a finger through quicksilver, leaving no wound in its
wake. _That_ should convince the old cow!

It didn't convince her, but it did startle her. "What did
you do with it? The blade folds up into the handle--that's
it!"

"Now look closely, Mrs. Coleman," said Angie, thinking
desperately of the five hundred dollars. "Look very closely
and you'll see that the, uh, the sub-skin massager simply
slips beneath the tissues without doing any harm, tightening
and firming the muscles themselves instead of having to work
through layers of skin and adipose tissue. It's the secret
of the doctor's method. Now, how can outside massage have
the effect that we got last night?"

Mrs. Coleman was beginning to calm down. "It _did_ work,
all right," she admitted, stroking the new line of her neck.
"But your arm's one thing and my neck's another! Let me see
you do that with your neck!"

Angie smiled--

     *     *     *     *     *

Al returned to the clinic after an excellent lunch that had
almost reconciled him to three more months he would have to
spend on duty. And then, he thought, and then a blessed year
at the blessedly super-normal South Pole working on his
specialty--which happened to be telekinesis exercises for
ages three to six. Meanwhile, of course, the world had to go
on and of course he had to shoulder his share in the running
of it.

Before settling down to desk work he gave a routine glance
at the bag board. What he saw made him stiffen with shocked
surprise. A red light was on next to one of the numbers--the
first since he couldn't think when. He read off the number
and murmured "O.K., 674,101. That fixes _you_." He put the
number on a card sorter and in a moment the record was in
his hand. Oh, yes--Hemingway's bag. The big dummy didn't
remember how or where he had lost it; none of them ever did.
There were hundreds of them floating around.

Al's policy in such cases was to leave the bag turned on.
The things practically ran themselves, it was practically
impossible to do harm with them, so whoever found a lost one
might as well be allowed to use it. You turn it off, you
have a social loss--you leave it on, it may do some good. As
he understood it, and not very well at that, the stuff
wasn't "used up." A temporalist had tried to explain it to
him with little success that the prototypes in the
transmitter had been transducted through a series of
point-events of transfinite cardinality. Al had innocently
asked whether that meant prototypes had been stretched, so
to speak, through all time, and the temporalist had thought
he was joking and left in a huff.

"Like to see him do this," thought Al darkly, as he
telekinized himself to the combox, after a cautious look to
see that there were no medics around. To the box he said:
"Police chief," and then to the police chief: "There's been
a homicide committed with Medical Instrument Kit 674,101. It
was lost some months ago by one of my people, Dr. John
Hemingway. He didn't have a clear account of the
circumstances."

The police chief groaned and said: "I'll call him in and
question him." He was to be astonished by the answers, and
was to learn that the homicide was well out of his
jurisdiction.

Al stood for a moment at the bag board by the glowing red
light that had been sparked into life by a departing vital
force giving, as its last act, the warning that Kit 674,101
was in homicidal hands. With a sigh, Al pulled the plug and
the light went out.

     *     *     *     *     *

"Yah," jeered the woman. "You'd fool around with my neck,
but you wouldn't risk your own with that thing!"

Angie smiled with serene confidence a smile that was to
shock hardened morgue attendants. She set the Cutaneous
Series knife to three centimeters before drawing it across
her neck. Smiling, knowing the blade would cut only the dead
horny tissue of the epidermis and the live tissue of the
dermis, mysteriously push aside all major and minor blood
vessels and muscular tissue--

Smiling, the knife plunging in and its microtomesharp metal
shearing through major and minor blood vessels and muscular
tissue and pharynx, Angie cut her throat.

In the few minutes it took the police, summoned by the
shrieking Mrs. Coleman, to arrive, the instruments had
become crusted with rust, and the flasks which had held
vascular glue and clumps of pink, rubbery alveoli and spare
grey cells and coils of receptor nerves held only black
slime, and from them when opened gushed the foul gases of
decomposition.




[End of _The Little Black Bag_ by C. M. Kornbluth]
