Star Crossed

by C. Gockel

  Wing was happy and busy. Joe felt a pall of corrosive boredom on his soul. They could have provided him with a telcon—a link to the Ship, to its Intelligence, and his laboratory up there. He could have worked here with a telcon. But none had been forthcoming. Catharin claimed that the Base had a limited number of those, all tied up. Joe had long since exhausted what he could do with his notebook.

  Joe expected the doctor to check in on them right after sunset. A creature of habit, she arrived on time. She wore a disposable pair of gloves and a lab coat, but did not mind breathing their air: viruses that could be transmitted pneumatically had already been looked for and ruled out. Wing rolled up a sleeve for the doctor to take a blood sample.

  When his turn came, Joe crossed his arms. “Still?”

  “Take it easy, Joe. You earned a vacation.”

  “I was right. When do I get out?”

  She gestured toward the outside door.

  “No good.”

  With surprisingly strong fingers, she probed Joe’s left shoulder. He grunted when she found a residue of pain deep inside. She asked, “You’ve crossed the stars to a strange world, then you don’t care to wander around outside?”

  She sounded casual. But her agenda wasn’t casual at all. She sometimes probed his mind with words, in case an infection manifested itself by addling his brains. “Never been a nature lover.”

  “Try it sometime.” To Wing, she said, “Find anything interesting today?”

  Wing waved at his colorful pebbles. “Amber!”

  “Isn’t amber yellow?”

  “On Earth, amber was the fossilized resin of coniferous trees, not always yellow,” Wing explained. “These stones seem to be this world’s amber, in even more colors than Earth’s.”

  “Amber that’s blue and violet and rose and green? How marvelous!” Real interest came across in her voice and expression. She had dropped the professional mask.

  With reluctance Joe rolled up his sleeve for the bloodletting. “You damn well know you won’t find any alien bugs. If my blood had chlorophyll instead of hemoglobin, then maybe.”

  “That would be an extraordinary human modification,” she said pleasantly as his blood spurted into the vial. A greeneyed blonde, striking rather than pretty, she was tall and rangy and, in tan coveralls under the white coat, not quite flatchested. She had her hair woven into braids and pinned up in a complicated, sculpted way—the professional woman’s look on Earth in the late twentyfirst century. And therefore, a millennium out of date. “Any pains, fever, flulike symptoms?” she asked.

  “I got over stasis fever weeks ago.”

  “I’m aware of that. But there’s a bug making the rounds.”

  “Bug?”

  “Well, viral symptoms and epidemiology. We haven’t pinned the virus down. It’s mild, probably a variant of a virus we inadvertently brought with us. Your staff up on the Ship have been very helpful.” With that, she slapped a small bandage on his arm.

  “Damn it, I’m needed up there!”

  Not his height but close to it, she stood in front of him with her hands on her hips. “Look, Joe, we’re going to need you, all right. Not this minute and not for something this trivial. But fully recuperated. Which you are not.”

  “I’ll decide when I’m ready to go back to work!”

  “No. I will.” She left, shutting the inner door. It locked with a snick.

  Suddenly it occurred to Joe that Catharin was testing how he handled frustration. Keeping him away from a telcon to see how he reacted. And keeping him out of Unity Base to see how he held up in relative isolation. The idea infuriated him. “I’m taking a walk,” he muttered. Putting on a jacket, Joe left the quarantine hut, walking away from the dome, between a purple dusk sky overhead and rough red dirt underfoot. And between two chalk lines drawn on the dirt. The lines marked out a slim wedge of the mountaintop as observation zone—off limits to everybody but Joe and Wing, while the rest of the mountaintop was off limits to the two of them. Within the lines, Joe could freely cross the dome’s clearing and venture into the stand of conifers, as Wing had done today. But he could not step over the chalk lines. That would break the observation rules and give Catharin grounds to question his mental stability.

  A volleyball game was in progress on the level dirt beside the dome. Since the crash and subsequent survival of Joe and Wing, the Base personnel had begun to make themselves at home outdoors—by way of team activities, exploring parties, and volleyball games. Team players. That was the Vanguard all over. Teamplay, teamtalk, teamthink.

  Skewed off perfect vertical, two poles held the volleyball net against a garnetcolored sunset sky. Joe swung his arms as he walked just inside one of the chalk lines of Catharin’s particular little game. She had found pain in the shoulder, but now he felt none. Wing came out into the evening too, and strolled behind him.

  Joe glanced back at the domed frame of Unity Base. It exuded a yellow glow of confidence: internal lighting that showed through the thin skin. Portal doors punctuated the dome at exact intervals. Each door corresponded to a numbered and designated wedge of the dome, the nearest being Medical, Catharin’s territory.

  To the east, the mountain sloped down precipitously, tumbled into lowlands of dark blue-green forest. The lowlands rolled toward a distant ocean that bowed with the horizon.

  Out of the oceanic horizon rose Planet Blue. The sounds of volleyball continued, players managing to ignore the spectacle of the moonlighted, incalescent bow of sea erupting, splitting off the equally vivid blue orb of moon. The two shapes parted, smooth and shimmering as icy blue superfluid. Joe let out the breath that he had been holding.

  “‘Once in a blue moon’ means rarity,” said Wing. “But here the moon is always blue.”

  “Puts me in mind of our first night down here.”

  “Yes. Blue was full then too.”

  Memory still shied away from the crash. But Joe vividly remembered the moonlit walk up the mountainside, odd plants and weird smells all in a bath of blue light the likes of which the human brain had never known in its evolutionary experience.

  The yellow dome was a normal human environment, surrounded by simple dirt. But the dome amounted to one tiny blister on the skin of a strange planet, with a wilder world in the sky above. It struck Joe as absurd that Earth people should make themselves at home even here, on the tamer half of the double planet. No biological hazards, but it was a hell of a strange place. Joe picked up some stones, hurled them back into the red dirt.

  “Listen!” Wing cocked his head toward the dome, from which Joe heard the muffled but unmistakable sounds of an argument with raised voices. Then came a crash and a yelp of pain.

  The Medical portal flew open. A man bolted out and ran away from the dome, pounding across the open ground.

  Catharin appeared in the portal. Catching sight of Joe and Wing, she yelled, “Stop him! He’s gone crazy!”

  Spring-loaded with the adrenaline of intense frustration, Joe sprinted to intercept the fugitive. The man did not see Joe in the dusk until Joe blocked his way. And then the man shied away from Joe, wild-eyed, as if the devil himself had stepped in front of him.

  He was big and brawny but wide open. Joe poured all of his pentup frustration into one blow to the jaw that spun the big man backwards. The man fell flat onto the dirt, out cold.

  Joe’s hand hurt, bone-bruised. But the adrenaline in his system sang victory.

  “Good heavens,” Wing said, bending over the unconscious man, who had close-cropped, sandy hair. “It’s Fredrik Hoffmann.”

  Dashing up, Catharin crouched beside Hoffmann. “I didn’t mean knock the daylights out of him!” she said sharply.

  “So what did you mean?”

  A stain that looked like wine in the twilight blotched the front of her coat. “That’s blood!” Wing gasped. “Are you wounded?”

  She shook her head. “It’s yours and Joe’s.”

  The volleyball game broke up and ran over, people animated by c
uriosity and consternation. A brown-haired young man emerged from the Med portal, carrying a stretcher. Hoffmann groaned.

  “Some of you help me take him inside,” Catharin said. “He’s not badly hurt, but he’s out of his mind.”

  A gasp ran through the crowd.

  “And violent,” added the brown-haired young man, and told Joe with frank admiration, “I’m glad you flattened him.”

  Joe’s adrenaline hummed satisfaction.

  Somebody asked. “Is it the new fever?”

  Tight-lipped, Catharin shook her head. “No—Fredrik’s got a problem of his own.”

  Hoffmann was rolled onto the stretcher. Two of the heftier volleyball players started toward the dome with the unconscious load. A breeze stirred across the mountaintop like a cold blue draft of misgiving. Catharin said, “Joe, I must ask you to cut your recuperation short. I need your help on this.”

  A ramp circled up to the apex of the dome, the conference room. Ironically aware that he had finally reached the destination of his flight down from the Ship, Joe noted the room’s large oval table with a dozen chairs and half a dozen seated people. A telecommunications console—a compact one, only two feet across, with four windows smaller than dinner plates—sat on the table. Above the table, a skylight showed an octagon of purple sky, with a cirrus cloud like the tail of an iceblue mare.

  The chief expedition scientist gravely shook Joe’s hand. A bony, middle-aged man named Aaron Manhattan, his long face was crowned with black hair going gray. Catharin showed Joe to a chair and selected one for herself, not adjacent to Joe’s. The Captain attended in a telcon window, his image transmitted from the Ship. One final arrival took the form of a disembodied voice from the telcon. The voice belonged to Samantha Berry, the leader of a survey team out exploring the wilderness. The team had a two-way communicator, but its visual channels were tied up with images of native plants and visualizations of cellular analysis.

  “I hear somebody cracked up!” the transmitted voice of Samantha Berry blared.

  Manhattan adjusted the volume down. “What happened?” he asked Catharin.

  The Captain said, “This is going in the official log.”

  Catharin nodded. “Fredrik Hoffmann was in the infirmary to have his temperature taken. I had just returned from the Pent—the observation facility, with blood samples from Carlton Wing and Joe Toronto, which I had placed in a rack on the infirmary counter. Out of the blue, Fredrik accused me of planning to infect him with a virus from outside—of intending to inject Joe’s blood or Carlton’s into him to make him sick.”

  Manhattan’s jaw dropped.

  “Fredrik became very belligerent.” Catharin’s lips twisted in distaste—a crack in her cool mask of professionalism. “He snatched the blood sample vials from the counter, unstoppered them, and threw the blood at me. Eddy tried to intervene, but he shoved Eddy into a supply cabinet. Then he ran outside. Fortunately, Joe Toronto was able to stop him.”

  The woman to Joe’s left, a small redhead, had crossed her arms as Catharin spoke, scowling. She said to Joe, “Thanks. He deserved it.”

  The pre-existing worry lines in Manhattan’s face deepened. “Hoffmann’s actions and his accusations make no sense.”

  “Not a lick,” commented Berry’s voice. “Has a nasty ring to it, though.”

  “You mean the blood?”

  “From two birds in quarantine. What if they had an evil virus in their blood?”

  “They don’t. They aren’t sick,” Manhattan protested.

  “That’s true,” said Catharin. “But Samantha’s right. That was a gesture with very negative symbolism. On the part of a sick man,” she added, voice level, face pale.

  “Sick how?” asked the little redhead next to Joe. “Better unpack it.” Joe placed her voice, from his hours of listening to the Base communications while he convalesced in the Penthouse: she was Fisher, the pilot of the plane that had been mapping the land around Unity Base. She’d seemed talkative but interesting.

  Catharin said, “Fredrik Hoffmann is hypochondriac, to start with. He’s demanded that we check him for fever or infection almost every day for a week, when in fact he’s not had a trace of either. Others did. We have a mild flulike sickness going around. But Hoffmann has yet to come down with it.”

  In the window of the telcon, the Captain looked gravely attentive.

  “We came as clean as possible, but some everyday viruses stowed away with us. They mutate readily, and this one seems to be the result of such a random change. We can deal with it. As I said, it’s no worse than flu.”

  “Where does the mental breakdown fit in?” asked the Captain.

  “There are two separate problems,” Catharin countered. “The viral illness that’s going around, and a problem peculiar to Fredrik. He passed the psychological screening tests to come in the Ship. Still, apparently mentally healthy people can break down.”

  Fisher said, “He’s been hypochondriac to the point of paranoid. He vehemently objected to sending out a search party to look for you after the crash. He was full of scare talk—insisted that even if we found you,” she informed Joe, “it would be too dangerous to bring you back to the dome. Alive or not, you might be infected with something and infect the whole expedition team, and we would all die a horrible death.”

  Joe rubbed his bruised hand with satisfaction. He had owed Hoffmann that knockout punch.

  Catharin said, “He has a private psychiatric problem. There’s been no mental disturbance on the part of anybody else.”

  Berry’s voice crackled in again. “How about gross negligence? Happened earlier today. Haven’t even told Manhattan about it. One of my team members out here wandered away.”

  “Wandered away?” Manhattan repeated.

  “Over hill and dale, ridge and vale. Misplaced his two-way, so we couldn’t use it to pinpoint his location. We lost half a day searching, and I gained gray hairs, I tell you.”

  “Weird,” Fisher commented to Joe.

  “Then there was the shuttle pilot.” Manhattan frowned.

  Maybe the shuttle pilot had been grossly negligent. Or suddenly slightly crazy. No one would know now. Joe remembered the sickening tilt of the shuttle plane, the crunch of metal and the crack of his bone. He shuddered. Fisher picked up on it and murmured, “Crashes take a while to get over even if you walk away.”

  The Captain said, “We haven’t had any bad accidents or disturbing incidents on the Ship.”

  “Up there, nobody’s ass is hanging out over strange terrain,” Berry pointed out.

  Evidently not offended, the Captain nodded. Under his visage the telcon clock read 1400 p.m. in angular red digits. 1400 p.m.? That made no sense, Joe thought. With a twenty-four-hour clock you don’t need a.m. and p.m. The Captain said, “I don’t like the timing of all this. It’s inside the quarantine period. Granted, neither virus nor mental imbalance cropped up where you expected—in the people who got dragged through the ecosystem. Still, I’m extending the quarantine indefinitely pending complete understanding of what’s happened.”

  A middle-aged man at Manhattan’s right spoke up. Joe knew that one’s voice too: he was Wimm Tucker, the Base quartermaster, cook, and resident chess master. “We need supplies. All the greenhouse has produced is a few pecks of tomatoes and eggplants, and I’ve got twenty-one mouths to feed.”

  “Transmit a grocery list. We’ll drop ‘em to you from the Ship,” the Captain assured him. “Aaron, you better bring in the survey team, at least until you know where your problems are coming from. Loss of signal coming. Captain out.”

  “Damn it all!” Berry exploded.

  “He’s right, Sam,” Manhattan said. “I’ll send the copter out for you first thing in the Green-morning.”

  Fisher asked, “Should I curtail my mapping flights, too?”

  Manhattan handed the question off to Catharin.

  “I don’t think that’s necessary,” said Catharin. “But watch yourself, Becca.” Catharin’s professional m
ask was down. With warm concern, she told the other woman, “Disorientation, insomnia—be alert for any anomaly in yourself.”

  Fisher nodded. “Will do.”

  The Medical section of Unity Base was a far cry from a world-class research laboratory—Joe’s natural habitat on Earth and approximately what he had worked with up in the Ship. This place looked exactly like what it was—an abbreviated combination of infirmary and field laboratory.

  Catharin replied to his tacit dismay. “Quarantine is making my work harder. The hospital’s up there not here, and so is my research staff. To say nothing of yours.”

  “Telcons?”

  “We have exactly one in here. You and I will have to share it. And there’s loss of signal half the time, when the ship’s on the other side of its orbit. A communications satellite is scheduled to be deployed to remedy that.”

  The brown-haired young man who had brought the stretcher out for Hoffmann approached them. “Doctor, I disinfected the floor and your coat. Shall I make coffee?”

  “Please. Joe, this is Eddy Pazmino, my nurse, lab tech, and office assistant all in one.”

  “You’re the guy who got shoved into a cabinet?” Joe asked.

  Eddy grinned. “I’m sure my backside hurts less than Fred’s jaw.”

  Catharin handed a flash wand to Joe. “Here are the results of the fever study so far. See what you think.”

  Joe touched the wand to his notebook and scanned it. Offhand he would not have known a respiratory virus from tobacco mosaic. His specialty was retroviruses. But back in graduate school he’d chosen Epstein-Barr virus for a topic outside his own area for his qualifying exam, and recalled several single-base mutations involved in its virulence. “It’s a variant of EpsteinBarr, less virulent than the original.”

  She gave him a surprised look. “That’s what one of the researchers on the Ship thought. After studying it for hours.”

  “So name it after him. It’s a nice little bug, nothing evil. Which is what you tried to tell the Captain. You didn’t try too hard, though.”

  “The identification isn’t conclusive.”