There was another silence, underlined by the rumbling of the crowd at the spaceport, now sounding somehow ominous. By unspoken assent, they turned their chairs to watch the tank.

  Juli found herself calm, resigned, washed out. She was even interested in seeing the takeoff, though such things had never interested her before; and not entirely because her “things” were on board. Goldfarb Z ordered another round of drinks.

  A moment later, the floor twitched under them, like the hide of a horse trying to dislodge persistent flies. Bottles fell from the bar. The 3V image flickered, and the crowd roar from it swelled suddenly. Most of the customers at the bar made for the door, at speed, and almost everyone around the table sprang up. Chairs fell over.

  Fan shot out one hand and grabbed Gradus by a wrist. “Sit down,” he said. “Where are you running to?”

  “That was an earthquake,” she said glacially, “in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  From the 3V the roar grew louder. Juli saw that the crowd was rushing the ship. Evidently, the secret was finally out. Then there was a dull sound of sneeze-gas grenades going off.

  “Really, Fan,” Goldfarb Y said, “it’s better to be out of doors in an earthquake. Everybody knows that.”

  “If that was ever true,” Fan said, “it doesn’t apply any more.”

  There was a second shock, and the 3V gave up entirely.

  “Damn,” Fan said. “I wanted to watch that. Alex, how tall is this building?”

  “Seventeen stories, but the elevators only go up to the fifteenth. If they’re still running at all.”

  “The lights are still on.”

  “But supposing the elevators quit on us while we’re up there?” Girlie said.

  “Suppose they do?” Fan said. There was silence. He went on:

  “Girlie, do you really care what floor you die on? Wouldn’t you rather see the first survival ship leave—or whether or not the quakes and the mob even let it leave—than run around in the street like a mouse? Let’s be human beings to the end, goddam it. I’m going up. The rest of you can suit yourselves.”

  “Me too,” Juli said. But she shook Alex’s hand with great determination.

  And there below them was the Earth, and its wide sky of islands; and the towers of the city to the south. It was a bright day; they could see the fugitive highlights of the sun glancing off the canals of lower Manhattan. It was all quite beautiful. Juli thought her heart ought to be breaking, but in fact she felt only a vast, free exhilaration. Soon it would all be gone; but she had never expected to outlive it. What filled her heart, instead, was something oddly like gratitude.

  “There she goes!” Fan cried out suddenly, almost with joy. She felt his hand on her shoulder, turning her around to face toward the northwest. A thin, towering plume of pure white steam was rising slowly on the western horizon, rising, rising.... For an instant, just above its tip, there was a splintery flash of metal. Then the plume began to twist and drift.

  There was a strange sound from the little party on the roof, a little like a sob, a little like a cheer.

  “They made it,” Goldfarb Y said, like a prayer.

  Then the building jerked like a whip under their feet, and the sound turned to screams and hoarse yells. Asphalt and gravel ripped into Juli’s knees and palms. A roar floated up from the city, laced with still fainter screams, like the glints of sunlight on the water.

  “My God,” the nameless engineer was saying mechanically. “My God. My God.”

  Alex’s hands grasped her, helped her to her feet, steadied her. The building was still swaying a little. Once more, they were all looking south.

  Not far away—perhaps ten or fifteen blocks—a few small, old buildings were toppling and sliding down into rubble and dust, unheard in a general uproar. Juli scarcely noticed them, nor did the others seem to be watching that. Much farther downtown, perhaps in what had once been the financial district, or else from the waters of Red Hook or Park Slope, a thick, dense column of black fumes was rising toward the risen half-Moon, like a Satanic mockery of the trail of the vanished ship. It made a sound like the full diapason of some gigantic organ.

  “Fissure,” Fan shouted, in an otherwise perfectly neutral voice. “I do hate to see my predictions jump the gun like that. It might make people think I lack influence in the proper quarters.”

  “Your predictions, Fan?” Alex said ironically.

  “Certainly. That break’s in Brooklyn Heights or thereabouts. That’s where I said it would open if the injection wells were responsible. So you see the Secretary and I were both right.”

  “How nice for you both,” Gradus said, but for once there was no malice in her voice. Of course she was all ready to die naked, having been dressing the part for many years; but no one else seemed at all alarmed any more. Irene and Evadne were weeping silently, but without even seeming to notice it.

  The black fumes rose in the bright sky. Gradually, they parted at the top, and began to spread gently, parallel to the horizon, as if along some low air stratum. The striations fanned out a little to the west as they drifted; the hinge of that fan did seem to be focused somewhere over the near shore of Brooklyn.

  “Temperature inversion,” Fan said. “New York’s last smog attack.”

  “Omniscient to the last,” Gradus said.

  “It’s funny,” Juli said. “I mean, it’s odd. I never thought of it before.”

  “Of what?” Alex said, taking her hand.

  “That everything means something special, no matter what it is, if you know it’ll never happen again. Even smog.”

  The dark striations floated toward them, their shadows making broader stripes over the groaning city in the brilliant sunshine. Were they just parts of widening circles? Or had the prevailing winds also changed? Or—

  The roof lurched again. Evadne, who had been standing closest to the parapet, would have gone over it had the unnamed engineer not grabbed her. A cornice fell off and went smashing down the setbacks toward the street.

  “There won’t be,” Fan said gently, “any flight tomorrow. Good-bye, all.”

  The cats!

  With a cry, Juli raced for the stairwell. Alex called after her, something about the danger and the power being off, but she did not care.

  She was almost fainting with exhaustion by the time she reached the dust-choking, bombarded street, and another temblor threw her to her knees just in front of the smashed glass display windows of the expensive supermarket. Shaking her dirty hair out of her face, she got up again and staggered inside.

  “Hausmaus! Splat!”

  There was a dim cry. Inside, the cement and plaster dust was almost impenetrable, but she could see vaguely that the place had been looted before the last panic had struck. Not only were there cans, bottles, and packages lying where the shocks had thrown them, but there were also a number of half-filled string bags and two-wheeled pushcarts abandoned near the door.

  “Here, kitty! Kitty, kitty!”

  Three or four meows responded. Through her watering, gritty, gas-inflamed eyes she seemed to be seeing thousands of cats. And indeed there were a great many. The carrier was where she had left it, half buried under a pile of loose cornflakes, diet cookies, and other things that had burst out of fallen pasteboard packages; but the door had fallen open and it was empty.

  Through the haze and the tears, she was able finally to make out that all those thousands of cats were actually only a store cat and four squealing, barely ambulatory kittens. Then she saw Splat!, who somehow had managed to scramble to the top tier of a display rack which still held a few canned goods. He was too fat to get back down by himself, or at least that seemed to be his theory, and Juli decided to leave him there for the moment. He would be no safer anywhere else, and as long as he was treed like that, she would at least know where to find him.

  “Hausmaus? Hausmaus?”

  There was another violent earth shock. The entire front of the store crunched down to about half its previous height, and masonry roared into the street in front of it. Overhead, parallel to the street, a beam burst through the plaster of the ceiling, one end hanging free. Instantly changing her mind, Juli grabbed Splat! and stuffed him back in the carrier, followed by a kitten who happened to be in reach, and latched the door.

  Was there another way out of the store? Yes, a door that evidently gave into the lobby of the building. It was wooden and had split at the top; its frame was twisted.

  “Hausmaus! Here, puss!”

  Another shock.

  “Juli!”

  It was Alex. He was pounding on the door, which evidently was locked, jammed, or both. “Juli, Juli, where are you?”

  There was the sound of a heavier blow, as if he had kicked the door. Juli tugged frantically at the knob. It would not give.

  He kicked the door again, and almost at the same time, there was another tremor. Part of the bottom panel fell out of the door. Juli dropped to her hands and knees, and found Alex facing her on the other side in the same position. He could not see her, however, for blood was streaming into his eyes from a slash which ran diagonally across his forehead and up over his scalp.

  “Alex, here I am!”

  She heard Splat!’s hoarse Siamese cry behind her, and then he was clambering clumsily over her calves. Evidently the door to the carrier had come open again.

  “Juli—”

  She reached out for Alex. As her hand touched his cheek, there was still another shock, and the free end of the ceiling began to fall, slowly at first. Juli felt the soft, familiar thump of Hausmaus landing on his frequent perch between her shoulder blades, and

  CARCINOMA ANGELS

  Norman Spinrad

  A funny story about cancer? Why not? If any phrase sums up the career of Norman Spinrad to date, it’s “Why not?”—for this gifted, irreverent young author has made a specialty of tackling the unlikely and the implausible. His controversial novel, Bug Jack Barron, earned him the honor of being the first science-fiction writer ever to be denounced in Parliament as a “nameless degenerate”; his vigorous essays in the Los Angeles Free Press and other underground journals have won him a strong following in the counterculture; his short stories, collected in a volume called The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde, demonstrate versatility, energy, and fertility of invention. The story that follows first appeared in Harlen Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions—and more than amply fulfilled the theme implicit in that celebrated collection’s title.

  At the age of nine Harrison Wintergreen first discovered that the world was his oyster when he looked at it sidewise. That was the year when baseball cards were in. The kid with the biggest collection of baseball cards was it. Harry Wintergreen decided to become it.

  Harry saved up a dollar and bought one hundred random baseball cards. He was in luck—one of them was the very rare Yogi Berra. In three separate transactions, he traded his other ninety-nine cards for the only other three Yogi Berras in the neighborhood. Harry had reduced his holdings to four cards, but he had cornered the market in Yogi Berra. He forced the price of Yogi Berra up to an exorbitant eighty cards. With the slush fund thus accumulated, he successively cornered the market in Mickey Mantle, Willy Mays and Pee Wee Reese and became the J. P. Morgan of baseball cards.

  Harry breezed through high school by the simple expedient of mastering only one subject—the art of taking tests. By his senior year, he could outthink any test writer with his gypsheet tied behind his back and won seven scholarships with foolish ease.

  In college Harry discovered girls. Being reasonably good-looking and reasonably facile, he no doubt would’ve garnered his fair share of conquests in the normal course of events. But this was not the way the mind of Harrison Wintergreen worked.

  Harry carefully cultivated a stutter, which he could turn on or off at will. Few girls could resist the lure of a good-looking, well-adjusted guy with a slick line who nevertheless carried with him some secret inner hurt that made him stutter. Many were the girls who tried to delve Harry’s secret, while Harry delved them.

  In his sophomore year Harry grew bored with college and reasoned that the thing to do was to become Filthy Rich. He assiduously studied sex novels for one month, wrote three of them in the next two which he immediately sold at $1000 a throw.

  With the $3000 thus garnered, he bought a shiny new convertible. He drove the new car to the Mexican border and across into a notorious border town. He immediately contacted a disreputable shoeshine boy and bought a pound of marijuana. The shoeshine boy of course tipped off the border guards, and when Harry attempted to walk across the bridge to the States they stripped him naked. They found nothing and Harry crossed the border. He had smuggled nothing out of Mexico, and in fact had thrown the marijuana away as soon as he bought it.

  However, he had taken advantage of the Mexican embargo on American cars and illegally sold the convertible in Mexico for $15,000.

  Harry took his $15,000 to Las Vegas and spent the next six weeks buying people drinks, lending broke gamblers money, acting in general like a fuzzy-cheeked Santa Claus, gaining the confidence of the right drunks and blowing $5000.

  At the end of six weeks he had three hot market tips which turned his remaining $10,000 into $40,000 in the next two months.

  Harry bought four hundred crated government surplus jeeps in four one-hundred-jeep lots of $10,000 a lot and immediately sold them to a highly disreputable Central American government for $100,000.

  He took the $100,000 and bought a tiny island in the Pacific, so worthless that no government had ever bothered to claim it. He set himself up as an independent government with no taxes and sold twenty one-acre plots to twenty millionaires seeking a tax haven at $100,000 a plot. He unloaded the last plot three weeks before the United States, with UN backing, claimed the island and brought it under the sway of the Internal Revenue Department.

  Harry invested a small part of his $2,000,000 and rented a large computer for twelve hours. The computer constructed a betting scheme by which Harry parlayed his $2,000,000 into $20,000,000 by taking various British soccer pools to the tune of $18,000,000.

  For $5,000,000 he bought a monstrous chunk of useless desert from an impoverished Arabian sultanate. With another $2,000,000 he created a huge rumor campaign to the effect that this patch of desert was literally floating on oil. With another $3,000,000 he set up a dummy corporation which made like a big oil company and publicly offered to buy this desert for $75,000,000. After some spirited bargaining, a large American oil company was allowed to outbid the dummy and bought a thousand square miles of sand for $100,000,000.

  Harrison Wintergreen was, at the age of twenty-five, Filthy Rich by his own standards. He lost his interest in money.

  He now decided that he wanted to Do Good. He Did Good. He toppled seven unpleasant Latin American governments and replaced them with six Social Democracies and a Benevolent Dictatorship. He converted a tribe of Borneo headhunters to Rosicrucianism. He set up twelve rest homes for overage whores and organized a birth control program which sterilized twelve million fecund Indian women. He contrived to make another $100,000,000 on the above enterprises.

  At the age of thirty Harrison Wintergreen had had it with Do-Gooding. He decided to Leave His Footprints in the Sands of Time. He Left His Footprints in the Sands of Time. He wrote an internationally acclaimed novel about King Farouk. He invented the Wintergreen Filter, a membrane through which fresh water passed freely, but which barred salts. Once set up, a Wintergreen Desalinization Plant could desalinate an unlimited supply of water at a per-gallon cost approaching absolute zero. He painted one painting and was instantly offered $200,000 for it. He donated it to the Museum of Modern Art, gratis. He developed a mutated virus which destroyed syphilis bacteria. Like syphilis, it spread by sexual contact. It was a mild aphrodisiac. Syphilis was wiped out in eighteen months. He bought an island off the coast of California, a five-hundred-foot crag jutting out of the Pacific. He caused it to be carved into a five-hundred-foot statue of Harrison Wintergreen.

  At the age of thirty-eight Harrison Wintergreen had Left sufficient Footprints in the Sands of Time. He was bored. He looked around greedily for new worlds to conquer.

  This, then, was the man who, at the age of forty, was informed that he had an advanced, well-spread and incurable case of cancer and that he had one year to live.

  Wintergreen spent the first month of his last year searching for an existing cure for terminal cancer. He visited laboratories, medical schools, hospitals, clinics, Great Doctors, quacks, people who had miraculously recovered from cancer, faith healers and Little Old Ladies in Tennis Shoes. There was no known cure for terminal cancer, reputable or otherwise. It was as he suspected, as he more or less even hoped. He would have to do it himself.

  He proceeded to spend the next month setting things up to do it himself. He caused to be erected in the middle of the Arizona desert an air-conditioned walled villa. The villa had a completely automatic kitchen and enough food for a year. It had a $5,000,000 biological and biochemical laboratory. It had a $3,000,000 microfilmed library which contained every word ever written on the subject of cancer. It had the pharmacy to end all pharmacies: a liberal supply of quite literally every drug that existed—poisons, painkillers, hallucinogens, dandricides, antiseptics, antibiotics, vericides, headache remedies, heroin, quinine, curare, snake oil—everything. The pharmacy cost $20,000,000.

  The villa also contained a one-way radiotelephone, a large stock of basic chemicals, including radioactives, copies of the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, the Book of the Dead, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the I Ching and the complete works of Wilhelm Reich and Aldous Huxley. It also contained a very large and ultra-expensive computer. By the time the villa was ready, Wintergreen’s petty cash fund was nearly exhausted.

  With ten months to do that which the medical world considered impossible, Harrison Wintergreen entered his citadel.