The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

THE RED EGG José Maria Gironella

The malignant tumor, cancer, flew over the rooftops of the city. It had the shape of an egg. Its flight was slow and solemn. The birds noticed something strange in its proximity and moved away from it, coasting in silence. It was a young cancer, red in color, with bluish bands. It was three years old. It had been born in an experimental laboratory, in the skin of a mouse, near a pit-coal mine. Its destiny—to die with the mouse—had seemed a small glory and it had decided to escape. This it did, breaking away and flying off through a window. Scarcely free, it soaked up the mine’s atmosphere and then allowed itself to be touched by the ultraviolet rays of sunlight. It noticed itself becoming more robust, thriving. It went on molding itself with art, changing position in relation to those rays, until it attained an oval form. Its highest aspiration was to be like an egg, since this would guarantee its fecundity. Once it reached its objective, it gave itself over to the whims of the wind, up and down, seeing landscapes it would never have known in the laboratory. Until it came upon the industrial city.

The Red Egg, three years old, gifted with one large and sensitive eye, understood that the city held in its breast all that appealed to him—paraffin, smoke, etc.—and he breathed with satisfaction. At each inhalation, a band of quills or antennae erupted around his belly, which then contracted when he exhaled. He looked at the cathedral clock: two minutes before noon. Vaguely he remembered that, in the laboratory where he was captive, every morning on the stroke of twelve a bell rang, and first a nurse entered, bringing them food, and immediately afterward came men dressed in white, protected by lead aprons.

Midday in the city was even more spectacular. The sirens of all the factories shrilled, and instantly the streets were crowded. Men and women headed for their respective homes, where there were quick kisses all around and where the babies were lifted into the air like flags. The Red Egg smiled. In the laboratory he’d fled from, he had never heard speak of love.

The passing parade of the city’s inhabitants permitted the cancer to take a look at the bodies, especially those that had passed the age of thirty-five. He immediately observed that his brothers, the tumors, had carried out an intensive labor. In fact, there were already a considerable number of people who carried cancer incrusted in some part of their organism, in the stomach, in the bladder, in the larynx, etc. Some of these people already moved without vigor, coughed repeatedly and had sharpened noses. Others were completely ignorant of the presence of the intruder and seated themselves at the table, unfolding their napkins with good humor. The magnitude of this labor, which had even reached children, and in one case a fetus!, did not surprise the Red Egg, since it was evident that in that city there were abundant accomplices, gestators or transmitters of cancer, such as tobacco tars, anthracite. . . . The Red Egg recognized accomplices of its malignancy even in the jars of beauty products and in the analines that colored certain foods.

The Red Egg, three years old, understood that that city combined in its breast all that was appetizing to him. He could nourish himself indefinitely with the gas tank alone and he could add to that the extreme temperatures of the iron works, alcohol and neon tubes.

Unhurriedly, he roved over the rooftops, asking himself, “Whom shall I attack?” Oh, yes, he must select a victim! The situation was a routine one for his race, but not for him. He breathed voluptuously. Which organism, he asked, would he choose from among so many thousands? Of course, it had to be a human organism, a man or a woman. He could not understand why many of his brothers preferred to adhere to trees, to mushrooms, to fish or to butterflies. And which part would he abide in? The skin and mouth were imprudent. With radio therapy or with a scalpel they could attack him in any surgery. The lungs offered more security and so did the digestive apparatus, whose remote cloisters, yet unknown, constituted a guarantee of impunity. And he must not forget the brain! The Red Egg philosophized in his fashion on the subject. Curious, yes, curious and flattering to be gnawing at the mind, at the faculty to speak and coordinate, to be eating metaphysics, to assassinate the noble potentialities of the being, little by little.

Unexpectedly—the municipal clock pointed to one— something occurred that stunned the Red Egg: as though obedient to an imaginary baton, all the bells of the city began to ring, undoubtedly announcing a forthcoming festivity. The impact of the sound waves hit the cancer point blank, especially those of the cathedral bells that rolled at his side. The fact that these waves were gay and basically contrary to death gave him indescribable anguish. The circle of quills and antennae sprang out round his belly with fulminating aggressiveness but it did not cure him of the nausea he felt. Irritated, he leapt away with decision, toward the west, where it was clear, where there were no steeples. There he recovered. He saw two women hanging out clothes on a roof top. One of them had a carcinoma on one knee! In spite of which she laughed and gestured as though she were eternal. Suddenly, on the outskirts of the city, beyond the ball field, an immense sea of crosses and tombs surged before his green eye. This sight brought back his self-confidence, confidence in his power. A cemetery! It was the first time he had had direct contact with one. In his three years of life he had only seen two cadavers, both of them white mice. It was obvious that many drops in that sea of crosses were due to the action of his brothers. The graveyard constituted, then, a victorious summary, a living testimony of the power and inheritance of his stock.

Certain people in the city discovered that strange presence over their roofs. So strange was it that “a slow oval object” should be seen floating on its own between the steeples, that terror overtook each of these observers, although for the moment none of them dared communicate the news to anyone else. They tried to ascertain if the phenomenon was real, provable. The binoculars sealed their doubts! A red and oval object, gliding smoothly, like certain birds. Occasionally turning upon itself.

The first warning came from the Air Base. Nothing registered on the radar, but the observer on watch, a veteran of the war, discovered the Red Egg. At the same instant that he was focusing his fieldglasses to make sure it was not an hallucination, an old paralytic at the other end of the city, who spent his semi-death close to a balcony, looked up on high and exclaimed to himself, “What’s that?” Whereupon he insisted on binoculars, and a granddaughter obtained them from a nearby store. “A red and oval egg, with something in the middle, resembling an eye!” The paralytic alerted his kin. A group was formed that would go on growing. And the same occurred with the watchman of a factory, installed in his high wooden sentry-box. And with a talkative storyteller, who went up to the roof to feed his pigeons, as usual.

The band of musicians that was to gather in the square to announce with clash and clatter the following day’s festivities, disintegrated. Within an hour the news had run from mouth to mouth. Like a lever, it made heads lean back to scan the skies. And there was a diversity of opinions, There were many who attempted, without success, to spot the cancer. “It must have been a piece of paper!” they exclaimed, incredulous. “It must have been a witch!” But, suddenly, someone would shout, “There it is!” And many forefingers became arrows. There was the greatest number of eyewitnesses at a few minutes past one, that is, when the cancer became dizzy and went off through space toward the west, crossing through various clean and clear areas.

At two o’clock sharp, all the observation posts were taken, and the diagnosis was positive and unanimous. The Red Egg, the mysterious presence, was a fact. When a photographer appeared with a plate on which the silhouette of the tumor could be seen clearly contrasted over the gas tank, the news was considered official, and a superstitious panic completely took hold of the populace.

The authorities met in the hurry of hysteria, but they could not prevent the tumultuous mobilization of the population’s reflexes, they could not prevent the men who used blowers at their work from looking at these instruments with the same fearful and impatient perplexity with which firemen look at their long metal stepladders. All the conjectures agreed on one point: there was something about the Red Egg, in its appearance, that was repugnant to the depths of a human being, and it was evident that, in spite of its smallness and its being called “a ball” or “a top” by the children, it represented a threat of unpredictable magnitude. Of course, no one thought of an object from another planet, and only a pair of cloistered nuns alluded to the devil; it was generally believed to be a complex robot, with electric and fulminating bowels, or a beast. An unknown animal, freed from some remote sleep. The bad thing was that its manner of moving about was reminiscent of beings endowed with free will.

The tumor soon noticed that the city had spotted him. But he didn’t care. Man was so limited, the sun had only to hide to blind him. And since the bells had been silenced, what stillness their muteness created! Almost insolently, he turned several cartwheels in the air, coming to rest at last by the lightning rod of an official building.

At that moment, two chemists in a canning factory who had been examining some photographic plates, insinuated a diagnosis: there was a possibility that the Red Egg was fleshy, that it contained flesh mitter. Upon hearing this suggestion, made with great timidity, an illustrious neighbor of the city, the gravedigger, had a sudden illumination. While the authorities continued their meeting without daring to take any measures, the gravedigger looked up and clenching his fists shouted, “It’s a cancer!” With the help of binoculars he looked up again and repeated, more firmly this time, “It’s a cancer!”

The impressive word ran through the streets and crossed bridges with as many feet as it had letters, or like an escaping stream of blood. “It’s a cancer!” Ah, no one knew those “quills” or “antennae” like the gravedigger! His own wife had been a victim of those quills and now lay in the cemetery, converted into one of those drops in that sea of crosses, fifty yards away from where her bedroom had once been. “The doctors!” demanded the gravedigger. “The doctors should act!”

The first reaction was a collective paralysis. Immobility. After that, fantastic ideas crossed men’s minds: to bury oneself in stone and mortar or, even better, to flee. But a cancer must run faster than an idea and must filter through walls without effort. And guns? And airplanes? And fumigating machines?

The authorities, in fact, did appeal to the doctors. Various internes advised keeping calm, realizing that the action of cancer in the organism is slow. On the other hand, others opined that the cellular degeneration was produced instantaneously, so that it was imperative to prevent the tumor from diving and penetrating a body. As for the specialists, they surprised everyone. They wanted to apprehend the tumor alive, not to destroy it. “This would at last enable us to discover its secret.”

The doctors reviewed the means at their disposal for attacking the growth. The Red Egg sharpened his antennae and smiled to hear them speak of washings of blood, of mustard gas, of mistletoe, celandine, hydrastis, creosote.... Actually, he feared only radio therapy and the surgeon’s knife, and neither of these two could hurt him at a distance. “Therefore, I’ll wait in peace....”

“I’ll wait. . . .” From his lightning rod, the cancer had returned to his philosophizing, now master of himself and without nausea. The fear imprinted in the eyes of the populace produced an excited euphoria in him. The city was already familiar to him, he knew its shadows and its most hidden corners. He observed that the human traffic seemed to increase around the churches, around the hospitals and the Air Base. The pious against him? The army against him? Pooh!

The cancer decided to wait until nightfall to throw himself into the attack, by sliding down any chimney hole. In the meantime, he would choose his victim. Who? Ah, this was his limitation: he could attack but one single creature.

He thought first of the old paralytic, the one in semi-death, who informed on his presence. He had degenerated intestinal flora and the task would be easy. Then he thought of the photographer who had taken the most revealing plate; there was a syphilitic inheritance in him, and the task would be even simpler. Then he thought of the priests, who spend their lives speaking of death, of the mayor, of the gravedigger! A pretty combination!

None of these victims was to his liking. The Red Egg pondered, while the sky clouded, permitting him to go undetected.

In midafternoon, the Red Egg felt hungry. He looked about him and saw nothing that would do. The factories had not reopened, and in consequence were not expelling smoke. The gas tank was out of the way, as were the gasoline stations: Finally he discovered that the weather vane on which he’d settled was covered with rust and mold, and by rubbing against it he absorbed it, immediately swelling out like a great beer drinker.

Sundown increased the general nervousness. Normally healthy people who had spent these hours saying the rosary began to notice alarming symptoms and even had fits of coughing and vomiting. “I have pains here!” “I feel this or that!” They feared that they had been attacked by the tumor. Their eyes interrogated each other and they avoided mirrors.

At seven sharp the hopeless ones, the people already afflicted by cancer, showed their faces. They went to the authorities, saying, “Tell us if we can help!”

The example of these sick was decisive. Decisive thanks, once again, to the gravedigger. The gravedigger thought of his dead wife and he flew out into the street ready to face up to the cancer. He was counting on the firemen’s ladders and on helicopters, but even more on his own instinct. He defied the Red Egg and his outcry caught on. Men who had lost their wives and women who had lost their husbands began opening their doors and coming out into the street. At the start, it was a timid gathering. But there were so many cancer-mutilated families! A throng grew in the main square. Heads looked up from various vantage points. Someone spat upward. A boy screamed out, “Try to come down! We’re waiting for you!” The cancer victims who had been operated on successfully were outstanding: with their crippled bodies, their withered lungs, their plastic Tectums. Those whose larynxes had been affected emitted grunts through a hole opened in their chests. They could not shout, “Try to come down! We’re waiting for you!” They could only think it. They could grunt it. And they did. And there were those who breathed asthmatically through rubber tubes.

The tumor did not appear. Concealed among the clouds, he was a spectator to that unfolding of events. Men suffered! Their aspect was similar to the mice in the laboratory and also to the young tumors attacked by the Cyclotron.

Then, a modest figure came forward, asserting that she had seen the cancer cry. It was a school teacher, from a school in the suburbs. In the school there was a small telescope, and with this apparatus she had seen the cancer weeping. “It’s true,” confirmed a bell ringer. “I too have seen him cry.” The gravedigger became angry, but the doctors admitted it was possible. “All living organisms can weep.”

The teacher was a disheveled young woman who believed in invisible things. She proposed they gather together all the children of the city so that the cancer should feel compassion. “After all, we’re here to defend the children, aren’t we?”

The teacher tossed her hair a little more until she won out with her idea. Several hundred children were brought together in the cathedral square, in correct formation, looking upwards. “Why are we doing this?” The children still thought that the Red Egg was a “little ball” or “a top.” Until the schoolteacher told them they were mistaken, and that it was death.

The children, upon hearing this word, burst out crying: they were living organisms. They huddled inside their coats. Some tried to run away. The lyrical project of the teacher, which consisted of loosening childish comets and multicolored balloons inscribed with “PITY” in the direction of the cancer, came tumbling down. No one shared her sensibility, and there was a general disbanding of children.

Shadows began sniffing here and there, touching buildings and faces with the evening mystery. The cancer prepared for action. He was nervous because of the cats, camping on the roofs and the walls. He was nervous because he had been born in a mouse. Besides, he discovered a soldier hidden under an eave, with his rifle poised to shoot. There were the firemen, with the ladders ready, the rumble of the helicopters could be heard nearby, and from the Air Base beams of light scanning the sky. No, he could not underestimate the inhabitants’ will to defend themselves.

The Red Egg felt besieged. There was a certain disproportion between his size and the scandalous forces organized to combat him. But his size was precisely his guarantee of immunity. At this, he pulled himself together. He again absorbed a dose of rust and mold, he nourished himself by inhaling emanations from the gas tank, and he mobilized his self-esteem with a glance at the cemetery, which was his guarantee of effectiveness.

At nine sharp, at the instant in which the Red Egg definitely selected his victim, a scream echoed in the cathedral square, piercing the belly of the tumor. “All right, then—kill me!” a man about forty years old, a chimney sweep by trade, had flung out. He was alone in the world and he understood that his work put him in constant mourning. “Why such hesitation?” repeated the man, looking upward. “Kill me!” He loosened the front of his shirt. Powerful hands covered his mouth and made him shut up. It was necessary that suicides should not disrupt the sequence of events.

The cancer was not to be deflected. He went bounding up the chimney which, as a matter of fact, crowned the hospital building. Once there, he stood at the opening and bid farewell to the moon, to the cats and to the rooftops, “Au revoir,” he said. And he leaned into the chimney with his belly of quills.

He started down the blackened tube which on several occasions had been cleaned by the chimney sweep. Once down, he dragged himself through an aseptic corridor, with white doors on either side. He knew the plan of the building from memory. But his presence there was provocative. At the moment, no one passed by; but he would have to choose between the shadowed halls or the risk of being discovered and dying.

On either side there were cancer patients. He greeted their tumors; the sick experienced an unusual twitch. In a large ward he discovered a man immunized against the tumor. He was a cultivator of bees. Each time they stung him, the bees injected formic acid, which apparently acted its a neutralizes

Finally he arrived without incident at the recently inaugurated Surgery Number Three. The victim was inside! It was the surgeon. The most distinguished man in the city, and the most vigorous. Everyone called him “the Doctor.” His scalpel was the most competent in the land. His fingers were long, agile, elegant. Expert fingers. So much so that according to the data in the hospital file, they were directly responsible for the death of almost a thousand tumors in one year, two years, three. ... He was the most anxious and determined enemy of cancer. Neither the internes nor the radio therapists could compare with him. The internes felt impotent and the radio therapists often injured healthy tissues or induced sterility.

The Doctor was there, while at home his wife and children waited, oppressed. With hands gloved, raised, he prepared to intervene. His assistants, encased in green robes, trembled and would have preferred to watch the door rather than the table where the patient lay. The patient, stretched out on the table, anesthetized, had a cancer, an umbilical cancer. The Red Egg immediately recognized the malignancy, but he could do nothing to prevent its uprooting. He had not been given the power to strike like lightning or with the speed of a heart attack.

The Doctor ordered, “Scissors!” In that moment the Red Egg, sliding surreptitiously, reached the Doctor’s right shoe and rubbed himself in its wax, which also nourished him. He remained there for a few minutes, while the Doctor tore up the sublingual tumor by the roots, completely, assassinating it, frustrating its intent to found a small deadly colony in the patient’s throat.

The Doctor made a gesture of victory and turned. In that instant, the Red Egg climbed up the conic hole of his trouser. He penetrated the body in the region of the liver and murmured, “There! Let’s see you operate on yourself, now!”

The Doctor noticed only a slight tremor. As for the cancer, he adhered rigorously to the tissues and settled himself to rest a full twenty-four hours. It had been a hard day. Now there was nothing to do but wait, since neither the Roentgen rays, nor the cyclotron could reach him there. Now there was nothing else to do but grow, to grow little by little until the Doctor, the superman, the only one in the city who had not interrupted his daily work, became pale, felt himself failing, until he would hear, from the mouth of a colleague the irrevocable verdict.