The Crack In Space Read Online Free PDF Page B

transplant operations within last year. Statistically, it’s unlikely that the UN Vital Organ Fund Reserve would have had that many organs available in so limited a time, but it is possible. In other words, we’ve got nothing.’
    Mrs Myra Sands smoothed her skirt thoughtfully, then lit a cigarette. ‘We’ll select at random from among the forty; I want you to follow at least five or six up. How long will it take for you to do that?’
    Tito calculated silently. ‘Say two days. If I have to go there and see people. Of course, if I can do some of it on the phone—’ He liked to work through the Vid-phone Corporation of America’s product; it meant he could stick near the Altac 3-60. And, when anything came up, he could feed the data on the spot, get an opinion without delay. He respected the 3-60; it had set him back a great deal, a year ago when he had purchased it. And he did not intend to permit it to lie idle, not if he could help it. But sometimes—
    This was a difficult situation. Myra Sands was not the sort who could endure uncertainty; for her things had to be either this or that, either A or not-A—Myra made use of Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle like no one else he knew. He admired her. Myra was a handsome, extremely well-educated woman, light-haired, in her middle forties; across from him she sat erect and trim in her yellow Lunar squeak-frog suit, her legs long and without defect. Her sharp chin alone let on—to Tito at least—the grimness, the no-nonsense aspect, of her personality. Myra was a business-woman first, before anything else; as one of the nation’s foremost authorities in the field of therapeutic abortions, she was highly paid and highly honored  . . . and she was well aware of this. After all, she had been at it for years. And Tito respected anyone who lived as an independent business person; after all, he, too, was his own boss, beholden to no one, to no subsidizing organization or economic entity. He and Myra had something in common. Although, of course, Myra would have denied it, Myra Sands was a terrible goddam snob; to her, Tito Cravelli was an employee whom she had hired to find out—or rather to establish as fact—certain information about her husband.
    He could not imagine why Lurton Sands had married her. Surely it had been conflict—psychological, social, sexual, professional—from the start.
    However, there was no explaining the chemistry which joined men and women, locked them in embraces of hate and mutual suffering sometimes for ninety years on end. In his line, Tito had seen plenty of it, enough to last him even a jerry lifetime.
    ‘Call Lattimore Hospital in San Francisco,’ Myra instructed in her crisp, vigilantly authoritative voice. ‘In August, Lurton transplanted a spleen for an army major, there; I think his name was Walleck or some such quiddity as that. I recall, at the time  . . . Lurton had had, what shall I say? A little too much to drink. It was evening and we were having dinner. Lurton blurted out some darn thing or other. About "paying heavily" for the spleen. You know, Tito, that VOFR prices are rigidly set by the UN and they’re not high; in fact they’re too low  . . . that’s the cardinal reason the fund runs out of certain vital organs so often. Not from a lack of supply so much as the existence of too darn many takers.’
    ‘Hmm,’ Tito said, jotting notes.
    ‘Lurton always said that if the VOFR only were to raise its rates  . . .’
    ‘You’re positive it was a spleen?’ Tito broke in.
    ‘Yes.’ Myra nodded curtly, exhaling streamers of gray smoke that swirled toward the lamp behind her, a cloud that drifted in the artificial light of the office. It was dark outside, now; the time was seven-thirty.
    ‘A spleen,’ Tito recapitulated. ‘In August of this year. At Lattimore General Hospital in San Francisco. An army major named—’
    ‘Now I’m beginning to think it was Wozzeck,’ Myra put in. ‘Or is that an opera