Whittaker removed the probe slowly from the young man's left temple and sighed over a job well done. He tossed the long needle onto the waiting instrument trolley with a clatter and wiped his hands on an available towel.
"Alright," he said, in an exasperated tone, "You can take him now. He's got about another twenty-five minutes before he comes around."
The uniformed guard by the door saluted formally and proceeded to wheel the young man out of the operating theatre, still strapped to the table. Whittaker let out a second sigh, this one reeking even more of fatigue than the first, and slumped back into his comfy leather chair. As he felt himself begin to drift off, it struck him how out of place the chair was in the sterile environment of the operating theatre. The room's walls were a hospital off-white, lined with cabinets and interesting looking pieces of equipment, half of which were never used. The instrument trolley stood a few feet away, each instrument slightly bloodstained, but otherwise gleaming in pristine titanium sterility. Not a trace of corrosion.
Indeed, the large, leather armchair would have been more at home in some lawyer's office, had there been any lawyers left, as would the small ornate mahogany table, with its burden of a half-empty whiskey bottle and single glass. The contemplation of such trivialities was not enough to remedy a day's stressful work, and Whittaker was almost asleep when Steen entered the room.
"Rise and shine, Dr. Whittaker," grinned Barry Steen in the cheery, fresh tone that always aggravated Whittaker, "There are still two more to be done before you knock off tonight."
The half-sleep Whittaker had been in had all the disadvantages of a short nap, but none of the benefits. He felt as lethargic as any waking sleeper, but the fatigue did not have the edge of refreshment that sleep would have provided. "Two more, Steen? Where are they all coming from?"
"The volunteer rate has risen by five per cent since New Prague fell, and the new bill means that a lot more crimes are punishable by forcible programming."
Whittaker wiped a lazy hand across his brow. He didn't like the idea of forcible programming. Mentally altering healthy young men to fight on the front lines like veritable Gods of War was one thing, when they were volunteers, and it sort of made sense to put serial killers to good use, but the new Bill meant that just about any criminal offence could propel you into conflict. Whittaker himself had been known to skip paying for gum at the store. Could he be the next one out there, rifle in hand?
The principle was simple. The recalibration of neurochemical reaction rates in the brain gave the soldiers increased pain thresholds, additional determination, and other mental advantages. To augment this, engramic programming was used to confuse the subject into believing the conflict he was in was one to which he was truly dedicated. In a number or cases engramic programming had no effect. When alien invaders from another world were overrunning cities like they were kindergartens, it was clear than there were fewer causes more worthy than the protection of humanity. The programs were not tailored to the subjects. The program was always the same and drew from the psyche of the soldier to create its delusions. It sometimes shocked Whittaker to think that some of the bravest of battlefield heroes, in their minds, were probably slaughtering small children.
Whittaker rationalised it away. They were fighting for Earth, just like the others, the only difference was they didn't know they were doing it.
"Listen," said Steen in a lower voice, "You've got five minutes to sterilise your equipment and have a good stiff drink."
Whittaker hauled himself out of his chair and over to the trolley. A drink was not a good idea. He'd have one once the job was finished, not before.
"I'm ready to operate whenever you please." Whittaker's chest began to itch.
Two hours of work and a fifteen minute ride on the metro later, Whittaker found only two flights of stairs separating him from his apartment. He took the lift.
His key turned easily in the lock, and finally, back in his sanctum, Whittaker felt he could relax. He shrugged his trenchcoat into a nearby chair, and moved to the refrigerator, from which he removed a cold beer. Slowly but purposefully he drained it. He tossed his keys on to the breakfast bar, and fell into the chair on top of his coat. He crushed the beer can in his hand. The temptation was so great! He would only have to walk two blocks to be at the nearest recruiting office. He wanted to help the war effort, but he knew one simple fact; he was a coward. The programming would erase that, but Whittaker was scared of dying. He'd have to make it as far as the operating table before the programming gave him courage, and whilst the office was just two blocks away, those were two blocks he knew he'd never walk. As a child, he'd always dreamed of saving the world from marauding, inhuman invaders, not unlike those threatening his world now. Still, at least he was doing his part.
Why did his chest itch? It didn't matter. He needed a shower anyway. Whittaker moved through to the bathroom and began to peel off his clothes. Climbing into the shower, he set the water to a nice, refreshing cold. He reached for the soap and began rub it over his itching chest. Almost immediately he was struck by a stinging pain. In shock, and for the first time, he looked down at his chest. Scratches? There were scratch marks, shallow but livid, criss-crossing his torso, almost like the claw marks of a wild animal. How could they have got there? Whittaker put a tentative finger to one of the fresh scars, and immediately withdrew it in pain. Not a good idea, but it explained the itching.
Disturbed by the entire affair, he switched off the water and climbed out of the shower, casually wrapping a towel around himself. Carefully he examined the lacerations in the mirror overhanging the washbasin.
"What's the diagnosis, Dr. Bates?"
The woman, younger than Whittaker, her blonde hair several shades lighter than his, took a few steps back and began to tap her front teeth with the end of her biro. She looked in deep thought.
"On preliminary examination," she began, "I'd say… you have several scratches across your chest. What more do you want me to say? There's nothing altogether odd about them. I could refer you to a specialist, who would, for a fee, be able to tell you whether they came from a mad dog or an overzealous lover, but all that would accomplish would be to recommend if tetanus shots would be a good idea. Then again, with your taste in women…
Her voice trailed off but soon found its volume again. "The real mystery here is why you came to me with this, and not someone else."
Whittaker sighed at his sister's domineering nature. "I wanted the best, Kelly."
Kelly raised an eyebrow. "And I supposed he was booked?"
"Indeed I was." Whittaker replied with a grin, "But you're wrong.
"The real question is not why I came here. The only question in my mind is how the damn things got there in the first place, and, before you bring it up again, I have had all my injections, everything from tetanus to ebola, so I'm okay on that front. They're given out as standard to all employees at the clinic." Whittaker hopped down from the examination table in the small local surgery, and shrugged his shirt back onto his shoulders. He went about the task of rebuttoning it. "Speaking of the clinic, is there any chance of seeing you there soon?"
Kelly's eyes turned quickly back towards her brother. They were filled with pure venom. "The only way you're going to get me in that damn place," she spat, " Is if they introduce conscription as punishment for tax dodging. It's wrong Brian, and you know it."
"Yeah, I know it," muttered Whittaker, "But what else can I do? If we don't get troops out there, and quickly, then the Earth will soon be overrun with those damn things. You've seen the TV broadcasts. Only reprogrammed marines stand a chance. That's wrong too. Refusing to help; that's a crime, in my book. It's treason, and as soon as the government realise that, you and all your colleagues are gonna' end up on my slab."
"I've offered to work at the triage hospitals at the front. I'm on the waiting list, but they've got as many as they need right now."
"Oh, of course they've got as many triage doctors as they need!" Whittaker was almost yelling now. "No one wants to have to work at the clinics, but we do, because we know we're doing what has to be done. We're not proud of ourselves for what we're doing, we're proud because we know we've got more guts than those who refuse!"
"I'm still not coming." Kelly Bates was almost crying.
"What good are you doing here? Patching up the drunks and the nulls in a low income area? You know that as soon as they leave you, half of them mug some poor guy, get caught and end up on the front lines, don't you? Essentially you're just prepping them for surgery! Come and join us. You might meet some old friends!"
That was the final straw. Kelly leapt to her feet, her eyes ablaze this time rather than venomous, swollen with withheld tears and mental anguish. She managed to meet her brother's gaze despite her smaller stature.
"I think you'd better leave now."
Whittaker grabbed his coat and stalked over to the door, swung it open, and strode out, red with anger, through a waiting room full of shocked patients. "Give my regards to your good husband," was his parting shot.
Despite his volatile temper, Whittaker was rational above all else in a crisis, even as he stormed from his sister's office in a crimson rage, the other half of his mind was taking her advice; he was thinking which of his friends in the medical profession might be most qualified to identify the marks.
So it was with a portion of his mind trying to forget that he was there on the advice of someone with whom he was angry, that he found himself in the office of Dr. Otto Stromm.
Stromm instructed Whittaker to remove his shirt, and he did so with reluctance, figuring that he had spent plenty of time with his shirt off that day. Stromm went to work quickly, running his fingers along each scratch in turn. After each he would hum to himself, mutter, or find some other way to voice his displeasure. He obviously wasn't happy about something.
The German man leaned back in his seat and removed his horn-rimmed spectacles. They were purely for show anyway. Stromm had had his eyes surgically correctly years beforehand, and simply wore the eyeglasses as he thought it lent him, along with his perfectly bald head, a modicum of the look of an educated man.
"I can't be too precise," apologised Stromm, "But the scratches are certainly natural in origin."
"What do you mean?", asked Whittaker.
"Like I said, I can't be too certain, but they were not caused with an edged weapon. They were inflicted by beast, not man. I don't know what kind of beast could inflict these kinds of wounds, exactly, but it would be large. The marks are superficial, yes, but the cleanness of the cuts makes it look as if the creature that attacked you had far more power and size, and you just got its claw-tips.
"If so, you are very lucky. The only terrestrial animals I can think off that these could match are bears, or perhaps some large cats."
"You say terrestrial animals?"
Stromm's frown increased in intensity and his voice lowered. "We've only ever met one extra-terrestrial race, Dr. Whittaker, and it has not yet been decided which of the two of us will prove the survivor. It may seem ludicrous, but I can't lie to you. I've spent my time at the front line hospitals, but if I didn't know better, I'd say those marks were a nick from a Chiropetan."
The mere mention of the race's name sent a slight chill down Whittaker's spine. Eight feet tall, six legs, clad in obsidian carapace and immune to every known toxin. The stuff of his nightmares.
"It's madness, of course," continued Stromm, "I must be mistaken. I could only have said for certain if I'd had a look before you'd used the dermal regenerator."
Stromm's words shook Whittaker back from his consideration of the alien creatures. What had Stromm said?
"Dermal regenerator?"
"Yes," said Stromm slowly, as if talking to child, "It's a device we doctors use for treating flesh wounds…"
"I know what a dermal regenerator is man," snapped Whittaker impatiently, "But I haven't touched one since my last operation. I certainly haven't used one on myself."
"Well that didn't happen on its own", replied the other man, tapping Whittaker's bare chest.
Whittaker looked down at his torso. Otto was right. Little remained of the abrasions he'd had before other than indistinct pink marks. It looked for all the world as if someone had used a dermal regenerator on him. They were certainly a far cry from the livid scars that they had been… when? Had they been like that when he'd entered Stromm's office? He didn't know. They were certainly intact when Kelly had examined him. What had happened?
Whittaker raised his bowed head so that he could look his colleague in the face. "Stromm," he said, slowly, deliberately, "I swear, I have not used a dermal regenerator on these wounds. I've not even so much as rubbed antiseptic into them."
"Then it looks like we have three mysteries on our hands. First, how did they get there, as you've no more been near a grizzly bear than you have a Chiropetan, and secondly, how in the name of hell did they heal so fast?"
"That's two. What's the third?"
"The pain. They're superficial wounds alright, but you know as well as I do that if that happened in your sleep, you'd wake up."
Whittaker was as vexed by this as he was by the rest of the affair. He buttoned his shirt, thanked Otto distractedly, donned his coat and made for the door.
"Sorry I couldn't help more," the doctor apologised, "It seems you came to me for answers but all I've given you is more questions. Oh, and one more thing!"
Whittaker turned back to face him.
"A fourth question. You're a doctor. A good one."
Whittaker nodded.
"Why didn't you at least put some antiseptic on those scars?", smirked Stromm, "They could have turned nasty!" Stromm grinned for the first time since Whittaker had entered the office.
Whittaker smiled back weakly. He didn't find it amusing in the least.
Brian Whittaker visited more people as the afternoon grew into the evening. He didn't want to return to his apartment as he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep. He went to see a priest (his father had been a devout Catholic), who informed him that it was not a sin to be wounded, and, no, stigmata had never, historically speaking, taken the form of scratches across the chest. Whittaker left the chapel feeling it had been a waste of time.
After this, for balance, he'd been to see a Rabbi (his mother had been an Orthodox Jew - with hindsight you could see why they'd never got on, though how they managed to raise three atheist children was anyone's guess). The Rabbi had, for once, the same stance as the priest on the subjects of sin and stigmata, and Whittaker felt the visit to the synagogue had been an even bigger waste of time.
Visiting Lazy Joe did not turn out to be a waste of time. Lazy Joe was never a waste of time. On the corner of fifth avenue and seventeenth street, Lazy Joe's tavern always provided liquid solace for the lost of the city. And Whittaker felt lost.
What's more, the staff at Lazy Joe's were willing to lend a kind ear, whatever your problem, your wallet size and your intelligibility level. They weren't much for advice, beyond 'Have another drink. The whiskey's cheap', but they couldn't be much worse than the priest and the Rabbi. Whittaker could vaguely remember postulating, with great eloquence, to the barman that he should find a nun and 'finish the set', because all jokes seemed to feature a priest, a Rabbi and a nun.
It must have been about that time that he'd passed out because he couldn't remember anything after that. Still, the bar staff had chosen a particularly nice dumpster to toss him in at closing time. Always friendly, the staff at Lazy Joe's.
Whittaker lay in the dumpster and stared at the stars. Or at least he tried to. You couldn't see the stars above a city of this size, the light pollution was just too much. He fancied he could make out the Plough, but that was probably just the drink, he decided. He'd woken up upon his impact into the pile of trash, and was now entering a phase where he was acutely aware of his own inebriation, and quite enjoying it. He was just beginning to wonder what the effects might be if he tried to perform an appendectomy on a patient in this state, when he was struck by a crippling pain to his abdomen. On adrenaline alone he managed to hurl himself out of the dumpster onto the pavement below. The pain of the impact was blunted a little by the alcohol, and significantly by the sight of his own intestines spilling onto the floor in front of him. He stared dumbly at his own digestive track for a few seconds, and then turned around to try and glimpse his assailant. Almost immediately he was struck in the jaw by what felt like a huge needle. The needle withdrew and Whittaker felt half his face trying to fall away, releasing blood with vigour only matched by his guts. By far the most frightening aspect, however, was that Whittaker could still not see his attacker. Whatever it was that was victimising him was invisible to the naked eye.
Whittaker pulled himself into the foetal position and waited to die. The world had gone mad, and he had gone drunk. He was losing blood rapidly, this he knew, and quickly the world became fuzzy and dark for the second time that evening, under far less preferable circumstances.
Beep.
Beep.
The first sense to return was his hearing. He could hear his life support machine. Whittaker somehow knew that he had only to open his eyes if he wished to see, but that was a big 'if'. Eventually he plucked up the courage to withdraw his lids.
The faces that met him were his sister, Otto Stromm and a third doctor who was familiar to Whittaker, but whose name he couldn't place. The headache didn't help.
They all looked generally pleased to see him.
"You're awake!". Kelly breathed a sigh of relief. "I didn't think you'd stay out for long!"
Whittaker moved his cracked lips. "What happened to me?" The voice must have been his own, but it sounded more raspy than he remembered.
Otto took a questioning glance at the third doctor, who nodded, calmly.
"No one's sure yet," said Otto carefully, "Brian, the doctors here want you to attend some special mental therapy sessions, when you're well enough."
"Therapy sessions?", asked Whittaker.
"That's right," soothed Kelly, "Therapy sessions."
She explained at greater length, but Whittaker was too tired to listen, and far too tired to argue.
A year later Whittaker was back working at the clinic. Africa had fallen and they had diversified his duties to include cloning work, though he still maintained the reprogramming work and other, more standard, medical procedures. He remembered little of the most traumatic day of his life, and didn't want to remember either. He'd been very ill then. He knew this now. Something about scratches. Self inflicted wounds. Still, he was helping to fight the aliens now, and that was all that mattered.
Ericsson and Spender walked up the steel corridor together. They stopped outside on particular window and gazed in at the glass-eyed young man operating on his patient.
Spender turned to Ericsson.
"I understand we almost lost this one in the raids last year."
"Yes. It would have been a shame. He's one of the best. We lost his service for several months while his body healed."
"How did it happen?"
"The Chiropetans attacked us, but we had prior warning. He, and all the others, were shot full of painkillers. Unfortunately, they followed up with a second strike, and he was attacked a further time. He would have felt that one, and, like I said, it was bad. He almost died."
"The wounds would have showed up in his delusions, right?"
"Sure! We had to intervene after the second attack. Alter his program, to include a psychiatrist, who convinced him the entire episode had been self-caused psychosis brought on by stress. Pioneering stuff, considering that we usually just leave the delusions up to the deluded to create."
Spender looked thoughtful for a second.
"Out of interest…"
"Yes?"
"What is the nature of his delusion?"
"An interesting one. He believes he is performing vital operations that will help defend the Earth from a maundering race called the Chiropetans."
Spender raised both eyebrows.
"But… he is!"
Ericsson nodded. "Freaky, isn't it? He always wanted to fight off aliens."
Spender shook his head. " I've never liked the idea of using criminals with medical backgrounds to augment our supply of doctors. It's like lying to them."
Ericsson sighed, "They're fighting for Earth, just like us. They just don't know they're doing it."
And with that, Ericsson continued up the corridor.
Spender had to take one last look at the criminal physician, as he dumbly performed his medical routines. His reality was an illusion of the truth.
"He's different," muttered Spender, "He knows he's doing it." With that, he turned away and followed Ericsson, never quite catching up.
