Host Age by John Brunner

Author:John Brunner [Brunner, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi Short Story
Publisher: Nnew Worlds Science Fiction
Published: 1956-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

V

He was thinking over that dialogue while he ate his lunch, snatched hastily in the house surgeon’s room at the hospital. There had been thirty-six new admissions in the course of the morning—thirty-five of them Plague and one appendicitis. The Plague situation was rapidly approaching saturation point. If W.H.O. didn’t move in some troubleshooters, there just wouldn’t be enough doctors in Britain to cope with the rush.

But he found himself less worried by that, which would affect himself, than by the problem he knew Kent was having to face—how a man had got into the burglar-proof premises of his firm. He remembered suddenly that the reason for it was the conversation he had had with Buehl the day before. He would have been reminded earlier if they hadn’t shifted him out of the main ward into the convalescent section.

A matter transmitter, that was it. It seemed like the only possible explanation of Borghum’s entry. Nonetheless it was fantastic. Matter transmitters belonged to the future, not to an age in which spaceships still relied on fallible rockets and long periods of coasting to drift them to Mars or the Moon.

Or did they ?

He pushed aside his paper plate, still half full of the tasteless stew which was the best they had been able to provide for lunch—apparently about half the staff of the meat distribution centre at Smithfield had gone down with Plague, and the health officers had banned delivery of what might be infected food.

“ Sister !” he called out, and she answered him from the room next door. “ Where did they put that man Buehl ? The one I said could be moved last night ?”

“ Ward 29,1 think,” she called back. “ Did you want to see him ?”

“ I’m just going down to see how he is.”

He left the office and walked briskly down the passage. Buehl had said that he was going to check the math of this fellow Wiseman. He wondered if they had managed to find him the computer he had asked for.

Apparently they had, for when he entered Ward 29, he found the spaceman figuring busily on an already closely written scratchpad, and punching equations by touch on the keyboard of a small wheeled calculator beside his bed. He looked up on hearing Clifford approach, and broke into a grin.

“ Hullo, doc !” he said. “ Come to make sure I won’t trouble you again ?”

Clifford forced a smile at the rather morbid joke. He shook his head. “ I’m afraid not,” he replied. “ Do you remember telling me about this matter transmitter of Wiseman’s yesterday ? You said you were going to check the math.”

“ That’s right. I am. I had a hard job getting to sleep last night. The nurse wouldn’t let me stay up to finish the equation I was working on, so I had to rim it in my head, and believe me my grey cells are no match for a machine.” He hunted for a sheet of paper somewhere among the pile on the blankets.

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