World in a Bottle

by Allen Kim Lang

We made it while I was still breathing. I braked in front of the BICUSPID entrance and walked as fast as I dared, dizzy and panting with the concentration of CO₂ bottled up with me in my chastity-suit. Outside the door to the contaminated labs, I shook Bjornson's hand and told him that I considered the expense of my Gross Income Tax justified by his employment. I went inside then, climbed the steel steps to the glass-walled shower. I cut in my suit-radio and announced my arrival. "Bogardus here. I'm nearly out of wind; my filter's soaked. I'm cutting in reserve-air. Anybody around to see that I scrub behind my ears?"

Dr. Roy McQueen, Director of BICUSPID, came out of his office, where he'd monitored my announcement from the loudspeaker set above his desk, and faced the glass door of the shower room. He waved to me and cut on his microphone. "Okay, Johnny," he said.

I sealed off my air-filter and cut in the reserve-air. That canned wind felt to my lungs like cold beer to the throat on a July day. I felt the oxygen percolating through me to my toes and finger-tips, tingling them back to life. Turning on the detergent shower, I sloshed around beneath it, washing the outside dust off my chastity-suit.

"You're dry by the tank," Dr. McQueen said into his hand microphone.

I picked up the long-handled shower brush and scrubbed back there. I showered the suit's armpits, the folds behind the knees, the soles of the suit's boots, scrubbing hard with the brush. "You're all wet, Johnny," the Chief said. "Got enough air for half an hour in the bathtub?"

"Yes, sir," I said, checking the gage of my reserve-air tank. Having scrubbed off most of the flora I'd picked up in the great wild world of Indiana, I climbed down through the manhole into the bathtub, a sump of formaldehyde solution eight feet deep. I sat on the iron bench at the bottom to soak. "How about switching on some music, Chief? I didn't think to bring anything waterproof to read."

"You'll hear music from me," Dr. McQueen said. "This is a big day for BICUSPID, Johnny. It's the first time one of you kids ever came home from a date with a police escort. What happened? Anne's old man decide he didn't want a plastic-wrapped son-in-law? He call the law to throw you off his front porch?"

"My air-filter got bolixed," I explained into the microphone, "so I leaned on the gas pedal pretty heavy on the way home. A friendly gendarme named Bjornson turned up."

"You should be more careful, Johnny. I'd hate to have to post you." Like the rest of us, Dr. McQueen did post-mortems on the germ-free animals who died of old age or stir-fever in the Big Tank, or had to be sacrificed as routine sterility controls. Last winter, for the first time, the Chief had had to autopsy one of us Lapins.

Poor Mike Bohrman had gone off his rocker and stripped off his sterility-suit in the snow. All we wear underneath is a pair of shorts. That's the way Mike had run around, almost naked in a northern Indiana February. It was hours before he'd been missed.