The Space Merchants Page 11

  "Shut up," he said to me. He shifted a couple of the needles that pincushioned my abdomen, watching the readings on the telltales. "Um," he muttered.

  "I'm glad you think so," I said.

  He disregarded my remark. Dr. Morius doesn't like humorous conversation unless it comes from him. He pursed his lips and pulled out a couple of the needles. "Well, let's see, Walthers. We've taken out the spleno -venal shunt. Your new liver is functioning well—no sign of rejection —but you're not flushing wastes through as fast as you ought to. You'll have to work on that. We've got your ion levels back up to something like a human being, and most of your tissues have a little moisture in them again. Altogether," he said, scratching his head in thought, "yes, in general, I would say you're alive. So I think probably the operation was a success."

  "That's very witty," I said.

  "You've got some people waiting for you," he went on. "Vastra's Third and your lady friend. They brought you some clothes."

  That interested me. "Does that mean I'm getting out?" I asked,

  "Like right now," he told me. "They'll have to keep you in bed awhile, but your rent's run out. We need the space for paying customers."

  Now, one of the advantages of having clean blood in my brains instead of the poisonous soup it had been living on was that I could begin to think reasonably clearly. So I knew right away that good old comical Dr. Morius was making another of his little jokes. "Paying customers." I wouldn't have been there if I hadn't been a paying patient. Though I couldn't imagine what my bills were being paid with, I was willing to keep my curiosity in check until I was outside the Quackery.

  That didn't take long. The quacks packed me in wet-sheets, and Dorrie and the Third of Vastra's House rolled me through the Spindle to Sub Vastra's place. Dorrie was pale and tired still—the last couple of weeks hadn't been much of a vacation for either of us—but needing nothing more than a little rest, she said. Sub's First had kicked some of the kids out of a cubicle and cleared it out for us, and his Third fussed over both of us, feeding us up on lamb broth and that flat hard bread they like, before tucking us in for a good long rest. There was only the one bed, but Dorrie didn't seem to mind. Anyway, at that point the question was academic. Later on, not so academic. After a couple of days of that I was on my feet and as good as I ever was.

  By then I found out who had paid my bill at the Quackery.

  For about a minute I had hoped it was me—quickly filthy rich from the priceless spoils of our tunnel—but I knew that was an illusion. The tunnel had been right on the military reservation. Nobody was ever going to own anything in it but the military.

  If we'd been hale and hearty we could have gotten around that, with a little inventive lying. We could have carted some of the things off to another tunnel and declared them, and almost certainly we would have gotten away with it . . . but not the way we were. We'd been a lot too near dead to conceal anything.

  So the military had taken it all.

  Still, they'd showed something I never had suspected. They did have a kind of a heart. Atrophied and flinty, yes, but a heart. They'd gone into the dig while I was still getting glucose enemas in my sleep, and they'd been pleased with what they'd found. They decided to pay me a kind of finder's fee. Not much, to be sure. But enough to save my life. Enough to meet the Quackery's bill for all their carpentry on me, and even enough left over to put some in the bank and pay the back rent on my own place, so Dorrie and I could move in when Vastra's House decided we were well enough to be on our own.

  Of course, they hadn't had to pay for the transplant liver itself. That hadn't cost anything at all.

  For a while it bothered me that the military wouldn't say what they'd found. I did my best to find out. I even tried to get Sergeant Littleknees drunk so I could worm it out of her, when she came to the Spindle on furlough. That didn't work. Dorrie was right there, and how drunk can you get one girl when another girl is right there watching you? Probably Amanda Littleknees didn't know, anyhow. Probably nobody did except a few specialists.

  But it had to be something big, because of the cash award, and most of all because they didn't prosecute us for trespassing on the military reservation. And so we get along all right, the two of us. Or the three of us.

  Dorrie turned out to be really good at selling imitation prayer fans and fire-pearls to the Terry tourists, especially when her pregnancy began to show. We were both kind of celebrities, of course. She kept us in eating money until the high season started, and by then I had found out that my status as a famous tunnel discoverer was worth something, so I parlayed it into a cash loan and a new airbody. We're doing pretty well, for tunnel-rats. I've promised I'll marry her if our kid turns out to be a boy, but as a matter of fact I'm going to do it anyway. She was a great help at the dig.

  Especially with my own private project.

  Dorrie couldn't have known just what I wanted to bring Cochenour's body back for. She didn't argue, though. Sick and wretched as she was, she helped me get the cadaver into the airbody lock for the return to the Spindle.

  Actually, I wanted that body very much—one piece of it, anyway.

  It's not really a new liver, of course. Probably it's not even secondhand. Heaven knows where Cochenour bought it, but I'm sure it wasn't his original equipment.

  But it works.

  And, bastard though he was, I kind of liked him in a way, and I don't mind at all the fact that I've got a part of him with me always.

  Table of Contents

  Contents

  The Merchants of Venus

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  Jack Gaughan World of If artwork