"Poorly, that's the only word for it. Off my feed, can't sleep. When I do I wake up with the cold sweats. And the bowels! Let me tell you about the bowels. Hey!"
Livermore slapped the cold pickup of the stethoscope against the bare skin of Grazer's chest. Patients liked Dr. Livermore but hated his stethoscope, swearing that he must keep it specially chilled for them. They were right. There was a thermoelectric cooling plate in the case. Livermore felt that it gave them something to think about. "Hmmrr…" he said, frowning, the earpieces in his ears, hearing nothing. He had plugged the stethoscope with wax a year earlier. The systolic, diastolic murmurs disturbed his concentration; he heard enough of that from his own chest. Everything was in the records in any case, since the analysis machines did a far better job than he could ever do. He flipped through the sheets and graphs.
"Button your shirt, sit down, take two of these right now. Just the thing for this condition."
He shook the large red sugar pills from the jar in his desk drawer and pointed to the plastic cup and water carafe. Grazer reached for them eagerly: this was real medicine. Livermore found the most recent X rays and snapped them into the viewer. Lovely. The new kidney was growing, as sweetly formed as a little bean. Still tiny now beside its elderly brother, but in a year's time they would be identical.
Science conquereth all, or at least almost all; he slammed the file on the table. It had been a difficult morning, and even this afternoon surgery was not as relaxing as it usually was. The old folks, the AKs, his peer group, they appreciated one another. Very early in his career he had taken his M.D.; that was all that they knew about him. A doctor, their age. He sometimes wondered if they connected him at all with the Dr. Rex Livermore in charge of the ectogenetic program. That is, if they had ever heard of the program.
"I'm sure glad for the pills, Doc. I don't like those shots no more. But my bowels—"
"Goddamn and blast your bowels. They're as old as my bowels and in just as good shape. You're just bored, that's your trouble."
Grazer nodded approvingly at the insults — a touch of interest in an otherwise sterile existence. "Bored is the very word, Doc. The hours I spend on the pot—"
"What did you do before you retired?"
"That was a real long time ago."
"Not so long that you can't remember. And if you can't, why then you're just too old to waste food and space on. We'll just have to hook that old brain out of your skull and put it in a bottle with a label saying senile brain on it."
Grazer chuckled; he might have cried if someone younger had talked to him this way. "Said it was a long time ago, didn't say I forgot. Painter. Housepainter, not the artist kind, worked at it eighty years before the union threw me out and made me retire."
"Pretty good at it?"
"The best. They don't have my kind of painter around anymore."
"I can't believe that. I'm getting damn tired of the eggshell off-white superplastic eternal finish on the walls of this office. Think you could repaint it for me?"
"Paint won't stick to that stuff."
"If I find one that will?"
"I'm your man, Doc."
"It'll take time. Sure you won't mind missing all the basket-weaving, social teas, and television?"
Grazer snorted in answer, and he almost smiled.
"All right, I'll get in touch with you. Come back in a month in any case so I can look at that kidney. As for the rest, you're in perfect shape after your geriatric treatments. You're just bored with television and the damned baskets."
"You can say that again. Don't forget about that paint, hear?"
A distant silver bell chimed, and Livermore pointed to the door, picking up the phone as soon as the old man had gone. Leatha Crabb's tiny and distraught image looked up at him from the screen.
"Oh, Dr. Livermore, another bottle failure."
"I know. I was in the lab this morning. I'll be down there at fifteen hundred and we can talk about it then." He hung up and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes until the meeting— he still had time to see another patient or two. Geriatrics was not his field, and he really had very little interest in it. It was the people who interested him. He sometimes wondered if they knew how little they needed him, now that they were on constant monitoring and automated medical attention. Perhaps they just enjoyed seeing and talking to him as he did to them. No harm done in any case.
