The men inside, p.1
The Men Inside, page 1
20-09-2023
THE MEN INSIDE
Blount reminds himself that he is not to enjoy what he is doing. Murdering the rounder is a serious business; it must he taken on that level. He is taking it on that level. The old man’s breath is sealed off like placing a cork in a bottle; Hulm begins to inflate him with his own gases. Closer and closer. There cannot be much strength left in a ninety-four-year-old body. Blount applies himself to the task, the emotional edges retracting further. Harder and harder. In and out. Hulm flops on the bed. His body dilates. His eyes open and look into Blount’s. In those eyes Blount sees his own face. He feels ’ no horror. He looks no different than he has in years. Murder is not changing his features nor deforming them with complexity. It is now, it is always to be, it has always been the same old Blount.
Also in Arrow by Barry N. Malzberg
The Falling Astronauts
Barry N. Malzberg
THE MEN INSIDE
ARROW BOOKS
Arrow Books Ltd
3 Fitzroy Square, London W1.
An imprint of the Hutchinson Publishing Group
London Melbourne Sydney Auckland
Wellington Johannesburg and agencies throughout the world
First published in Great Britain by Arrow Books Ltd 1976
© Barry N. Malzberg 1973
CONDITIONS OF SALE
This book shall not. by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser. This book
is published at a net price and is supplied subject
to the Publishers Association Standard Conditions
of Sale registered under the Restrictive Trade
Practices Act, 1956
Made and printed in Great Britain
by The Anchor Press Ltd
Tiptree. Essex
isbn o 09 912820 9
This novel is for:
Harry Harrison, Robert Hoskins and Robert Silverberg… and for my parents.
“I will go into the core and, striking, take the sickness
out. I will do this with humility because I am merely
a Messenger. My enemy is metastases, my cause their
expulsion, my sin the vanity of pride, my future the
casting of burdens for I am a Messenger…”
Oath of the Institute, 1996
“It’s all a bunch of crap and don’t you forget it.”
Leslie Blount, 2022
1
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 die 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 atwinlding; 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 incomprehending prayer) Blount sees healthy tissue, hanging and pulsating, all of this meat in the cavity. No hint of metastases 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 hat
“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 isl 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 personna 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 farseeing 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 infallable 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 die 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, Blount 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 metastases piece by piece where it clings like a ghost to the nerve fibers. Yancey’s blood is quickening with the thrill of relief, his respiration and gross motor functions accelerate. Blount sways gently in a bobbing breeze and holds on for support as he continues. He does indeed continue. Efficient and dedicated, this Leslie Blount. He is doing his work. One might even say that he loves it.
The spot has been localized. In range now with bare hands poised to grasp, Blount can see the gentle color of the dyes implanted. They glow orange in this deep cavity, sending forth a small corona or aureole which he much admires as he comes toward the center of his tasks. How could he have missed this cancer? What was wrong with him? Oh, it is a lovely one, beautiful large and symmetrical, only slightly ellipsoid, almost circular, one of the nicest he has ever seen and one of the cleanest as well. It has spread but to no depth, Blount does not have to resort to surgical gestures in order to take all of it out. To the contrary, the cancer literally jumps into his hands, collaborating with him then in this act of extinction, surging from the fibers attaching with such ease that it seems to be doing a good portion of the work on its own. What a cooperative little tumor it is! Yancey for all of his age and decrepitude is of good stock and his overall condition is good. His body expels the cancer (with Blount’s tricky assistance) as easily as the old man must have ex-polled the fifty thousand for treatment, right into the palm of the Institute.
