“Hah, yes,” the doctor said. “Interesting. Would you turn your head, please? Good…good…fine, now blink.”
Pareti did as he was told. Ball jotted down notes, turned on the recording cameras, and hummed to himself as he arranged a tray of shining instruments.
“You’ve caught it, of course,” Ball said, almost as an afterthought.
“Caught what?” Pareti demanded, hoping he’d get some other answer.
“Ashton’s Disease. Goo infection, if you like, but we call it Ashton’s, after the first case.” Then he chuckled to himself: “I don’t suppose you thought it was dermatitis?”
Pareti thought he heard eerie music, an organ, a harpsichord.
Ball went on. “Your case is atypical, just like all the others, so, really, that makes it typical. It has a rather ugly Latin name, as well, but Ashton’s will do.”
“Stuff all that,” Pareti said angrily. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“Why do you think you get high-hazard, why do you think they keep me on board? I’m no G.P., I’m a specialist. Of course I’m absolutely sure. You’re only the sixth recorded case. Lancet and the AMA Journal will be interested. In fact, with the proper presentation Scientific American might care to publish an article.”
“What can you do for me?” Pareti snapped.
“I can offer you a drink of excellent pre-War Bourbon,” Dr. Ball said. “Not a specific for your ailment, but good for the whole man, so to speak.”
“Stop screwing around with me. I don’t think it’s a haha. Isn’t there anything else? You’re a specialist!”
Ball seemed to realize for the first time that his black humor was not being received with wild enthusiasm. “Mr. Pareti, medical science admits of no impossibility, not even the reversal of biological death. But that is a statement of theory. There are many things we could try. We could hospitalize you, stuff you with drugs, irradiate your skin, smear you with calamine lotion, even conduct experiments in homeopathy and acupuncture and moxibustion. But this would have no practical effect, except to make you very uncomfortable. In the present state of our knowledge, Ashton’s is irreversible and, uh, terminal.”
Pareti swallowed hard at the last word.
Oddly, Ball smiled and added, “You might as well relax and enjoy it.”
Pareti moved a step toward him, angrily. “You’re a morbid son of a bitch!”
“Please excuse my levity,” the doctor said quickly. “I know I have a dumb sense of humor. I don’t rejoice in your fate…really, I don’t…I’m bored on this desolate Tower…I’m happy to have some real work. But I can see you don’t know much about Ashton’s…the disease may not be too difficult to live with.”
“I thought you said it was terminal?”
“So I did. But then, everything is terminal, even health, even life itself. The question is how long, and in what manner.”
Pareti slumped down into a Swedish-designed relaxer chair that converted—when the stirrups were elevated—into a dilation-and-curettage brace-framework for abortions. “I have a feeling you’re going to lecture me,” he said, with sudden exhaustion.
“Forgive me. It’s so dull for me here.”
“Go on, go on, for Christ’s sake.” Pareti wobbled his hand wearily.
“Well, the answer is ambiguous, but not unpromising,” Ball said, settling with enthusiasm into his recitation. “I told you, I believe, that the most typical thing about the disease is it atypicality. Let us consider your illustrious predecessors.
“Case One died within a week of contracting the disease, apparently of a pneumonic complication…”
Pareti looked sick. “Swell,” he said.
“Ah! But Case Two,” Ball caroled, “Case Two was Ashton, after whom the Disease was named. He became voluble, almost echolalic. One day, before a considerable crowd, he levitated to a height of eighteen feet. He hung there without visible support, haranguing the crowd in a hermetic language of his own devising. Then he vanished, into thin air (but not too thin for him) and was never heard from again. Hence, Ashton’s Disease. Case Three…”
“What happened to Ashton?” Pareti asked, a vapor of hysteria in his voice.
Ball spread his hands, without an answer. Pareti looked away.
“Case Three found that he could live underwater, though not in the air. He spent two happy years in the coral reefs off Marathon, Florida.”
“What happened to him?” Pareti asked.
“A pack of dolphins did him in. It was the first recorded instance of a dolphin attacking a man. We have often wondered what he said to them.”
“And the others?”
“Case Four is currently living in the Ausable Chasm community. He operates a mushroom farm. He’s become quite rich. We can’t detect any effect of the disease beyond loss of hair and dead skin (in that way, your cases are similar, but it may be just coincidence). He has a unique way with mushrooms, of course.”
“That sounds good,” Pareti brightened.
“Perhaps. But Case Five is unfortunate. A really amazing degeneration of the organs, accompanied by a simultaneous external growth of same. This left him with a definitely surrealistic look: heart hanging below his left armpit, intestines wrapped around his waist, that sort of thing. Then he began to develop a chitinous exo-skeleton, antennae, scales, feathers—his body couldn’t seem to decide what it was evolving into. It opted at last for earth. Wormdom—an anaerobic species, quite unusual. He was last seen burrowing into sandy loam near Point Judith. Sonar followed him for several months, all the way to central Pennsylvania.”
Pareti shuddered. “Did he die then?” Again, Ball spread his hands, no answer. “We don’t know. He may be in a burrow, quiescent, parthenogenetic, hatching the eggs of an inconceivable new species. Or he may have evolved into the ultimate skeletal form…unliving, indestructible rock.”
Pareti clasped his hairless hands, and shivered like a child. “Jesus,” he murmured, “what a beautiful prospect. Something I can really look forward to.”
“The form of your particular case might be pleasant,” Ball ventured.
Pareti looked up at him with open malice. “Aren’t you the smooth bastard, though? Sit out here in the water and laugh your ass off while the goo nibbles on some guy you never met before. What the hell do you do for amusement, roast cockroaches and listen to them scream?”
“Don’t blame me, Mr. Pareti,” the doctor said evenly. “You chose your line of work, not I. You were advised of the risks—”
“They said hardly anybody caught the goo disease, it was all in the small type on the contract,” Pareti burst in.
“—but you were advised of the risks,” Ball pressed on, “and you received hazard-bonus accordingly. You never complained during the three years that money was being poured into your account, you shouldn’t bellyache now. It’s rather unseemly. After all, you make approximately eight times my salary. That should buy you a lot of balm.”
“Yeah, I made the bonuses,” Pareti snarled, “and now I’m really earning it! The Company—”
‘The Company,” Ball said, with great care, “is absolutely free of responsibility. You should indeed have read all that tiny type. But you’re correct: you are earning the bonuses now. In effect you were paid to expose yourself to a rare disease. You were gambling with the Company’s money that you wouldn’t contract Ashton’s. You gambled, and unfortunately, seem to have lost.”
“Not that I’m getting any,” Pareti said archly, “but I’m not asking for your sympathy. I’m only asking for your professional advice, which you are paid—overpaid, in my estimation—to give. I want to know what I should do… and what I ought to expect.”
Ball shrugged. “Expect the unexpected, of course. You’re only the sixth, you know. There’s been no clear-cut pattern established. The disease is as unstable as its progenitor…the goo. The only pattern—and I would hesitate even to suggest that it was a pattern—”
“Stop waltzing with me, damn it! Spit it out!”
Ball pursed his lips. He might have pressed Pareti as far as he cared to press him. “The pattern, then, would appear to be this: a radical change of relationship occurs between the victim and the external world. These can be animate transformations, like the growth of external organs and functional gills; or inanimate transformations, like the victim who levitated.”
“What about the fourth case, the one who’s still alive and normal?”