The Voices of Heaven by Frederik Pohl Read Free Book Online Page A

way, what doctors used to do when they first figured out how the body chemistry could mess the mind up, was to deal with the symptoms. When the patient was depressed they'd give him pep-up pills, when he was hyper they'd give him tranquilizers.
    Then, when they began to think about cures, they tried other kinds of treatments. Then they'd inject the protein or other missing chemical into the bloodstream, so that the symptoms wouldn't occur at all. The first disease they did that with, I think, wasn't a mental problem, it was something called diabetes. That kind of treatment was what they called "the needle way," and it worked. The diabetics that stuck themselves with insulin every day lived perfectly normal lives—unless they ran out of insulin.
    So then the doctors began to figure out how to trick the body into making its own insulin, or whatever, as a healthy body was supposed to do in the first place. The theory was that if they could use some carrier to deliver genetically active material to the patient's system they could get the process going. Then, if the stuff they put in was tolerated by the body's system (that is, if it was not inactivated by the body's immune defenses, and if it wasn't causing anything nasty like tumors), the added genetic material would settle down and release the desired recombinant protein (or whatever) at a controllable rate indefinitely. When that happened the patient was "cured." He could forget he'd ever been sick, no needles, no worries, no nothing.
    That was the right way to do it, but it didn't work for me. They couldn't find a carrier that would survive in my body.
    They tried everything they could think of. For instance, one thing they could do would be simply to flood the patient's system with carriers that would just float around in the bloodstream, like bacteria or leucocytes, and do their job. When they tried it on me, though, mine didn't. The carriers were rejected, or they just stopped working. (And all through these trials, you understand, I was going loopy about half the time, depressed to the point of catatonia the rest. There's a special name for that horrid catatonic state; they call it "depressive stupor," and I never want to live through it again. So I lost patience pretty fast. I wanted to get this business finished—at least, I wanted that at such times as I was sane enough to be able to figure out what I did want.)
    Then they tried carriers that would actually bond with working parts of my body, instead of just floating around unattached. They tried immature muscle cells, called myoblasts; they tried immature bone cells; they tried white blood cells, keratinocytes, fibroblasts, liver cells—they tried everything they could think of, and those wonderful strong immune defenses in my body just chewed them all up and spat them right out again. There was more they could do, they told me—when I was in one of my brief lucid periods—like try to turn down my immune defenses enough to tolerate the genes. That had some drawbacks, they admitted. For instance, I'd probably keep on catching a lot of little illnesses, everything from warts to pneumonia, but those could be treated. . . .
    I said no. I said no more experimenting, please. I said I was tired of those terrible, wild mood swings, and I wanted out of the clinic.
    So they sighed and went back to the quick and dirty. The needles.
    They made it as easy on me as they could, with time-release material so that I only needed a shot about once every three or four months . . . but I would, they said, always need the shots. Unless I wanted to alternate between zombie and lunatic for the rest of my life.
     
    "You better have some blood work," Helge decided when she was through poking me. She sent me off to the medtech, who greeted me like an old friend. I didn't have to be told what to do. I had my arm stretched out for the needles before the nurses said a word. When the machine had taken its blood and finished its workup Helge