The Men Inside

Book 99: Gateway Essentials

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Earth's Elite - or its outcasts? For a selected, genetically-fitted few among the teeming millions of the twenty-first century, to become a Messenger for the Hulm Institute is to escape the prison that is life, that is earth. A Messenger is Noble! A Messenger is One of the Chosen. A Messenger is a Forerunner of a Time in which Fear and Disease will Disappear Forever. And inside a Messenger's head is murder, impotence and despair.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 151

Sample

In medias res, folks, here comes Blount. He is on the run and full of fun, looking for a follicle of cancer. Consider him if you will, if
you must: his indignity, his power; he is twenty-two years old at this time, still and always-to-be virginal, sliding through
corpuscles and strips of intestine like a beetle, scuttling through all of the fields of darkness. At the ready is his little
lance, in his helmet is his tiny light, both ready to aim and cut. Think of Blount if you will: he is a man of some potential,
education and background. Does he really deserve to be in a position like this? Mote in the crazed and sleeping Yancey, eighty-three
years old and there he lies in the Institute at some enormous expenditure to be cured of his diagnosis. The figure for treatment
bedazzles Blount; he continues on his way.


Deep in the bowels of Yancey, ladies and germs, tweezers held against his tiny eyes like a periscope, Blount now looks keenly
for the cancer which he will eviscerate, drop into the pouch at his side and wing from the corpus of the patient. Nothing
to this at all for Blount the friendly, local saint. In two hours Yancey will put tentacles on consciousness again, in two
days he will recover mobility, in two weeks he will be released from the Institute, fifty thousand dollars lighter in assets
but ready to resume that which he calls his life. Blessings for the disturbed Blount! he will do this for Yancey through his
own effort, aided by the mechanism of the wonderful Hulm Projector the contemplation of which has given him so many happy
hours. But Blount has problems. This man has difficulties. Let us attend a shade more closely. He cannot find the site.


CanNOT find the site! disgraceful. The charts have located it precisely in the upper recesses of the colon, radiology and
the fluoroscopes have pinned it within a millimeter of possibility but nevertheless Blount scrambles to a halt somewhere in
that area and with the aspect of a man who has misread a timetable looks first one way then the other, his wee jaw dropping
with astonishment. Into each life, even the happy life of a Messenger, some rain or blood must fall it would seem. Bad luck
indeed for Blount: he cannot find what he seeks.


“Son of a bitch,” our friend murmurs, talking to himself as Messengers are apt to do on and off the job, “I don’t believe
this. It isn’t fair, how can they do this to me, where is that cancer?” Momentarily, staring at a kidney, he constructs a
massive if rather schizoid explanation: there is no cancer. Or the charts have deliberately mislocated it. He is still in
training, this is yet another test and supervisors are standing by the bed of the immobilized Yancey, following Blount’s journey
with micrometers and watching the bulging of the stomach. They are at this moment solemnly discussing Blount’s control under
stress and they are not pleased.


But Blount casts this aside as he has cast so much from him (not five years ago this courageous little fellow lived in Downside
with a father who followed horses; if he can move beyond that then he can move beyond anything). The time of testing is over.
He is a full-fledged Messenger now, Blount is. Two months duty in the Institute accomplished, diploma on the wall of his furnished
quarters and Yancey is not his first case but his sixteenth. Fifteen successful eviscerations later the Institute would surely
not be re-evaluating him; they have calculated their overhead down carefully the cheap sons of bitches, they would not waste
the money observing a perfectly faithful Messenger. Nevertheless, where is that cancer? Has radiology failed? Has this fool Yancey healed himself in the night? Was there never a cancer at all but merely an hysterical
profusion of cells which Yancey, that religious fanatic, has shaken into quiescence? “Oh, this is too much,” Blount reminds
himself, articulate as always, master of the various mysteries of tongues. “Too much for me. I’ve got to find this obscenity
thing. I can’t stand it any more.” He looks over the terrain again. He cannot find the obscenity thing.


Blount believes in the charts. He has learned to trust them, the little geometry of spaces which plot out his job and leave
him with little other than the manual labor. The charts canNOT fail him now, any more than could the projector. (But if it
did, Blount’s present difficulties would go atwinkling; no, he will not even think of a failure of the projector.) In the
Institute our dwarfish friend has learned faith; in the viscera of his clients he has learned application: surely, surely
these excellent qualities acquired with such difficulty cannot fail me now. “Oh do not fail me now you sons of bitches,” murmurs
Blount, highly articulate even in this difficult pass and swings his gaze in increasingly wider arcs like the buttocks of
a man fucking (what a scatological intelligence impotent little Blount has!) looking for a bump in the colon. Pity this man
if you will: he is in deep trouble but he plods on, unaware of the calamities that await him, unaware of the fact that his
troubles, in the truest sense, are just beginning.


Pinned in the colon, confused and irreligious little elf (otherwise he would attempt an uncomprehending prayer) Blount sees
healthy tissue, hanging and pulsating, all of this meat in the cavity. No hint of metasteses anywhere. Well, then, they have
mislead him. Or Yancey has mislead himself. This is a healthy patient. The fluoroscopy has picked up phantoms, a false sign,
rare but possible. This can be the only explanation. Blount inhales several gusts of foul body air through his five-eightieths of an inch frame, the air much like that in the kitchens of the Institute, feeling himself enlarge with pride.
They will write him up in their journals after all. Five thousand Messengers in Institutes from Lisbon to the Dakotas perform
their wondrous tasks in obscurity and only Blount to have dealings with a phantom-cancer. Extraordinary! Only twenty-two,
he may be small but he is powerful. And now immortal.


He prepares to leave. It is really best that he do this because in fifteen minutes or maybe a little less than that the effects
of the Projector are going to release and Blount, in or out of the cavity, is going to swell like a blowfish. He will grow
from five-eightieths of an inch to his full and vigorous five-feet-one in the space of two-point-eight seconds whoosh! and if this process should happen to occur while he is still idly seeking disorder within Yancey’s colon there will indeed
be repercussions. Yancey will spatter; bits and pieces of the old millionaire will be all over the wall and hospital bed,
a disgusting sight, bad for public relations and the laundry room to say nothing of Blount’s future as a Messenger and nothing
to be done about it no matter how demurely Blount would confront the Supervisors to point out that it could not possibly be
his fault. It is definitely the time to get out of here; time is a-wasting as his father used to put it and so, another tired
union worker who has not quite made shape-up, Blount tosses the little lance over his shoulder, adjusts the beam on the helmet
to fullest intensity, and turns to trudge back wearily through the anal cavity to drop at last in a little gelid huddle on
the sheets.


Disappointing, but Blount has the journals to bemuse him, along with a generalized feeling of relief. He has been spared a
job after all and since he hates his job, a dirty, sweaty and disgusting detail performed upon patients most of whom he loathes, this is not to be
derogated, not by the likes of this twenty-two-year old Messenger who is still working on the fourth month of the first year of his five-year indemnity.


“A job spared is still a piece of good time,” he reminds himself, making up another of his spectacular aphorisms on the very
spot of implication and then, as he gives one last checking glance, well—


—well, he sees the cancer after all, dead-center on the spot where it is supposed to be.

There it is! how could he have missed it? it is on the anterior wall in accordance with the maps, exactly where it must have
been all the time that Blount was scurrying through his search. Did someone perhaps steal it and then replace it, smirking
at Blount’s discomfiture? Did it become reconstituted after a remission? Or did Blount miss the target because—leave it be
said—he did not want to do the job and worked out a selective blindness? The possibility cannot be ignored. Blount is an honest
man although limited in so many ways and if it is true that he would deliberately miss a site because he hated the patient
or the job too much to function … well, then, he will have to discuss this with the Supervisors. In the meantime and absolutely
no getting away from this now, he has to get the damned thing out.


Time’s a-wasting: twelve minutes left on the Blount timer, glowing for miniaturized accuracy, now throbbing on his wrist.
Twelve minutes in which to dig. There it is now, the bastard, dead before him, hanging as if suspended on a hook, faintly
greenish against the red and black of the surrounding sections of the colon. It palpitates slightly like a fis in its element,
frail little holes pinched into the sides further extending that piscine aspect, a haze coming off the surfaces like a religious
aura and Blount, his lance already down into port arms position, approaches the cancer like a penitent. He falls before it
to do his deeds. He falls to attack the altar of the cancer with the lance of the righteous and the reduced.


Blount is a religious fanatic, mildly-compensated: do not think ill of him. Anyone in his position must be so; do not think
uncharitably of this man. He is only twenty-three years old but most of the apostles were younger men. If he, if they, did
not take the quest and persona at some level of symbolic inference, having, rather, to confront it strictly on what they
call the reality level, Blount would be mad. He does not want to be mad; he cherishes his sanity, one of the last factors
in his possession which connects him to the men outside.


There it is: eleven minutes left. Blount sets to work with a will, performs his horrid little tasks. As he works he sings
to himself for comfort, anything for distraction at this time: he sings a popular song of the 1990’s, the decade of his miraculous
if hardly immaculate birth as he performs the necessary at a point of high remove. PATER NOSTER/COME FROM GLOUCESTER/COME
TO TAKE YOU AWAY?/GLORYA EXCELSIS/IS WHAT THEY TELL US/SO WHAT YOU GONNA SAY? Blount sings cleaving, cleaving. BE GAY, BE
GAY, BE GAY, COME WHAT MAY YOU MUST ALWAYS BE GAY.


Blount loves the old songs; they give him an apprehension of an era he but dimly grasps but suspects he would have been successful
within, rather than the gray survival of his present maturity. If he had been full-grown in the 1900’s, Blount likes to think,
(how misguided he is) he might have invented the process himself, been like old Hulm; at the very least he would have gotten
in early, near the beginning, might well be a director of the Institute now, sitting at a distance from the actual tasks,
honored. Surely Blount would have been far-seeing enough to have backed old Hulm throughout the famous and early days of difficulty.


BE GAY, BE GAY. Gloucester Retrieval: top of the list in 1995 or was it 1996? either way before Blount’s time, a good distance before. 1995 would have been near
the heyday of his father who then forty-five would have been struggling with the first analyses of his maiden colts & geldings
system, that system which was, no less, going to free the old bugger from Downside forever and bring him to the most perfect
realization of all his purposes. Gloucester Retrieval; that was a simpler time all right, just as maiden colts & geldings was a simpler system. Following its first perfection came
the second, third and fourth revivals during which this system was adjusted and readjusted by the aging Blount senior in accordance
with the maneuverings of certain manipulative jockeys, trainers, officials & etc. which elements could not bear to allow the
struggling Blount Senior, then going on forty-six, to construct a neat and infallible method of dealing with those factors
which were crushing him out of existence.


Somewhat later on Blount’s father got married, sired Blount, took Blount, abandoned his wife, not necessarily in that order
and entered upon a Green and Blue Period during which all of the systems to which he was so dedicated were tossed into the
waste pile and a newer approach was evolved, one of pure intuition: the naming of names, the coloring of colors. This system
worked no better, really, than the Maiden Colts & Geldings method but it can be said again that Blount Senior found it easier
to analyze horses this way and therefore the Green and Blue Period is not to be derogated. Do not discard it or anything else
anent Blount Senior. Think of this distinguished sire as we see his tiny son, now twenty-three, bent over the task in a fury:
like a man studying a racing form Blount’s lips move and mumble as he applies himself to his work. WENT DOWN TO GLOUCESTER
IN A FEVER OF NEED/LOOKING FOR THE SAVIOUR OH YES INDEED.


Blount is working on his sixteenth case now. He is still profoundly absorbed by the details of his work; it is only its politics
which he is beginning to despise. Later, Blount will become wholly cynical. His small, delicate frame will fill with dread and revulsion, he will decide that the actual
act of the Messenger is as repellent as everything which leads on to the Becoming … but this is a bit in the future, one or
two large days perhaps, even a week or so. For now, we can enjoy Blount just as he enjoys his work. Humming and slicing, Blout
devotes himself to the mysterious cancer of Yancey, moving first with the chisel for crude cutting and shaping, then when
the lump has been removed and secreted, coming in closer now, hand to hand, to do the fine work of taking out the metasteses
piece by piece where it. . .