A Man Obsessed

by Alan Edward Nourse

"I'm glad to hear that," said Jeff sourly. "It makes me feel better."

"I'm not trying to be facetious. I mean it. We're not ghouls. We don't have any less regard for human life than anyone else, just because we're responsible for some human death in the work we're doing. For one thing, we study every human being we use, try to dig out his strengths and weaknesses, physical and mental. We want to know how he reacts to what, how fast he recuperates, how much physical punishment his body can take, how far his mental resiliency will extend. Then when we know these things, we can fit him into the program of research which will give him the very best chance of coming out in one piece. At the same time, he will fill a spot that we need filled. No, there's no delight here in taking human life or jeopardizing human safety."

They turned abruptly off the corridor and entered a small office. Schiml motioned Jeff to a chair, sat himself down behind a small desk and began sorting through several stacks of forms. The room was silent for a moment. Then the doctor punched a button on the telephone panel.

When the light blinked an answer to him, he said: "Gabe? He's here. Better come on up."

Then he flipped down the switch and leaned back, lighting a long, slender cigar and undoing the green robe around his neck.

Jeff watched him, still puzzling over what he had just said. The doctor seemed so matter-of-fact. What he had said made sense, but somewhere in the picture there seemed to be a gaping hole. "This sounds like it's a great setup—for you doctors and researchers," he said finally. "But what's it leading to? What good is it doing? Oh, I know, it increases your knowledge of men's minds, but how does it help the man in the street? How does it actually help anyone, in the long run? How do you ever get the government to back it with the financial mess they're facing in Washington?"

Schiml threw back his head and laughed aloud. "You've got the cart before the horse," he said, when he got control of his voice. "Support? Listen, my lad, the government is running itself bankrupt just to keep our research going. Did you realize that? Bankrupting itself! And why? Because unless our work pays off—and soon—there isn't going to be any government left. That's why. Because we're fighting something that's eating away at the very roots of our civilization, something that's creeping and growing and destroying."

He stared at Jeff, his eyes wide. "Oh, the government knows that the situation is grave. We had to prove it to them, show it to them time and again, until they couldn't miss it any longer. But they saw it finally. They've seen it growing for a century or more, ever since the end of the Second War. They've seen the business instability, the bank runs and the stock market dives. They've seen the mental and moral decay in the cities. They could see it, but it took statistics to prove that there was a pattern to it, a pattern of decay and rot and putrefaction that's been crumbling away the clay feet of this colossal civilization of ours."

The doctor stood up, paced back and forth across the room and sent blue smoke into the air from the cigar as he walked. "Oh, they support us all right. We don't know for sure what we're fighting, but we do know the answer is in the functioning of the minds and brains of man. We're working against a disease—a creeping disease of men's minds—and we are forced to use men to search those minds, to study them, to try to weed out the poison of the disease. And so we have the Mercy Men to help us fight."

The doctor's lips twisted in a bitter sneer as he sat heavily down on the chair again, crunched the cigar out viciously in the tray. "Mercy Men who have no mercy in their souls, who have no interest nor concern with what they're doing, or what it may be accomplishing. They are interested in one thing only: the amount of money they'll be paid for having their brains jogged loose."