If the journey was bad, the arrival at Mount Ararat was worse. Wilsa wanted solitude; but when Jon halted the ground car, it seemed that the whole population of Europa had come to mourn.
There was Tristan, returned from orbit and staring at Wilsa with an awful kick-me expression that was totally out of place on his cheerful face. There was Nell Cotter, regarding Wilsa and Jon with a cold, speculative eye. And worst of all, there was a towering stranger, David Lammerman, whose face lit up with joy when he saw the size of the bulky figure being carried from the car. But when Camille Hamilton's helmet was opened and her frozen, lifeless face was revealed, he gasped and stood motionless while tears ran down his cheeks.
"Can you identify her?" asked Hilda Brandt.
Lammerman nodded numbly.
"Very well." The older woman took charge. She had seemed on their arrival as upset as anyone, but after her first close inspection of Camille's face she became calm and businesslike. "We can't let her stay here. Let's go to my rooms, where it's warmer. We all need warmth. Four of you, give a hand with the stretcher."
"It's all right. I'll take her." Lammerman lifted the body alone, cradling it tenderly in his arms, and moved off after Hilda Brandt. The others followed, heading for Brandt's private quarters. Jon Perry fell into step with Nell Cotter and began talking to her, while Tristan lagged behind with Wilsa, last in the group.
"I didn't expect to see you here." Wilsa knew how stilted and awkward her words sounded. "I thought it was really difficult to get permission to visit Europa. So when I got the chance to come—a chance I thought I'd never have again . . ."
It wasn't an apology. Not quite. But Tristan seized it gratefully. "It's almost impossible to get here usually, because Hilda Brandt likes to keep the wrong people out. But when she learned that Camille Hamilton was lost out on the surface, she threw all the rules overboard. She let Lammerman in. And Cyrus Mobarak provided the ships for the high-resolution search. Otherwise . . ."
He stopped abruptly and closed his eyes.
Otherwise? Otherwise, Tristan had been about to say, we would have been too late. (And I thought at first that it was you.)
But we were too late. Wilsa reached out and squeezed Tristan's hand. He clung to it desperately, like a lifeline, and did not let go even when they entered Hilda Brandt's suite.
Everyone was present except David Lammerman. He must have taken Camille's body somewhere else. To a morgue? wondered Wilsa. She took a seat near the door. A morgue, on Europa. But the whole world was a morgue. Its frigid, kilometers-deep crust was a natural tomb, a sarcophagus big enough to hold everyone in the solar system, past or present.
At that thought, Wilsa's traitorous mind created a roll of muffled drums, followed by a mournful sordino phrase deep in the cellos and basses.
A requiem mass for Camille Hamilton, whom she had never met in life? There were stranger things. Wilsa allowed Tristan to hold her hand while she retreated into the one place that she knew sorrows could not reach. She realized that the others in the room were talking, gesturing, arguing, but she could not hear them. Normal speech did not get through when composition seized her.
Disturbance, when it came, was physical.
And urgent.
A great hand gripped her arm. She looked up to find a big, wild-eyed face staring into hers. It was David Lammerman, dragging her to her feet. He seemed as unable to speak as she had been unable to listen. He hustled her outside, with Tristan following. Nell Cotter, obeying her natural instinct, quietly rose, turned on her camera, and went after them.
Lammerman had placed the body of Camille Hamilton on a long trestle table in the next room. Her suit helmet was off, and the double suit that she was wearing was peeled away from her arms and torso. Wilsa saw a bloated, neckless head and pale, swollen limbs, each as thick as her own thighs. The skin of the upper arms was translucent and tight-stretched, like milky latex film.
Lammerman drew Wilsa closer to the table. She stared down at Camille Hamilton and realized that the stony rigidity of the corpse was disappearing in the warm air. The bulging forearms were sagging, their stretched skin dimpling as body liquids pooled under Europa's gende gravity.
"Look!" David Lammerman's grip on Wilsa's arm was strong enough to bruise. She gazed down, saw nothing, and tried to pull away. Then the mouth of the corpse moved in a tiny, near-invisible spasm.
Escaping body gases? But the sodden eyelashes were quivering.
"Oh, my God. She's alive!" Wilsa touched the swollen cheek. The skin was clammy, but it had warmed to more than room temperature. She turned to Tristan. "She is. We need a doctor."
He hesitated for a second, fighting the urge to stay and watch. Then he nodded and was gone. Nell Cotter moved forward, bending low over the body.
"She's breathing now. Lift her head."
But the words were unnecessary. Blue eyes flickered open for a split second, while the puffed hands began to scrabble at the tabletop. There was a faint grunt of discomfort and effort.
"Help her," said Wilsa. "She's trying to sit up."
The two women raised the body carefully to a sitting position. David Lammerman leaned close. "Camille. Can you hear me?"
The eyes remained closed, but a whimper came from the parted lips.
"She's hurting," he said. "Camille, how can we help you?"
There was a silence. "She can't hear you," said Nell. But Camille's eyes were opening again, to wander vaguely around the room and to at last return to focus on Wilsa and Nell. The swollen cheeks puffed in and out. And the slack mouth spoke. "Bathroom. Need . . . go bathroom."
Wilsa and Nell stared at each other in confusion. But the gross body was trying to stand up.
"Take one arm." Nell gripped and lifted. Wilsa grabbed hold, and in a moment Camille Hamilton stood teetering between the two women. She was huge, twice as wide as either of them.
"Bathroom," she said again. "Donkey-headed and . . . impulsive. Gotta pee."
"She knows what she wants," said Nell. "Better do it."
"It's this way," said Wilsa. Between them they guided Camille slowly along the corridor, with David Lammerman drifting helplessly behind. Before they reached the bathroom, everyone else came hurrying out of Hilda Brandt's rooms.
"Stay clear," said Nell firmly. What she and Wilsa were doing was tricky enough without half a dozen others crowding around. "She's alive. We're going in here."
"Gotta pee," said Camille urgently.
They eased the rest of the double suit off her. The body revealed was lumpy and grotesque, hard islands of flesh sitting amid distended bulges of liquid flab, and all within that pale skin stretched to breaking. As soon as she was free of the suit, Camille staggered single-mindedly into a stall.
"What's happening?" David Lammerman poked his head in. "Gabriel Shumi is here—the Europan chief medical officer."
"She's going to the bathroom," said Nell. "Get the hell away, and tell the others to stay out, too. The doctor can look at her as soon as she's done." Then to Wilsa, when he had vanished, "If she's ever done. This is ridiculous. It's been minutes. How long can she keep it up?"
Wilsa surveyed the still-swollen body, and listened to the steady and apparently endless expulsion of liquid. "Quite a while. She probably masses fifty kilos normally. I'd guess that she's over a hundred and fifty at the moment. I think it's all just extra water. When she was out on the ice, she must have drunk twenty gallons of it."
"Why, for God's sake?"
But Camille was trying to stand up. "Think I'm done," she said in a slurred voice. "For the moment. Have to stay near here, though. More where that came from."
They helped her into her suit. Once dressed and on her feet, she was able to move unaided into the corridor. A gurney was waiting, and the physician standing next to it did not give Camille the option of walking. He had her on it and ready to be wheeled away within seconds.
Dr. Shumi waved aside the others when they tried to follow. He was a tall, elegant man, with a great air of a
uthority. Be a big hit, thought Nell, among the Inner Circle back on Earth. But she sensed a deep-seated unease behind that professional poise, and she could make a guess at the cause. Any physician who chose to practice on a small research station like Mount Ararat must be avoiding medical problems, not seeking them out. Minor ailments were cured on site, major ones shipped at once to Ganymede's superior facilities. Gabriel Shumi had it easy. He must be profoundly uncomfortable with an anomaly like Camille Hamilton suddenly dropped in his lap.
"I promise to return and give you a report as soon as I can," the doctor was saying. "But I cannot allow spectators."
"Will she be all right?" asked David Lammerman.
"Well, it's too soon for me to give you an opinion on that."
His halfhearted tone confirmed Nell's impression. Gabriel Shumi was out of his depth, and he didn't like it. Dead people who came back to life were not in his casebook.
"I've never in my life seen so much edema," he went on. "Fluid retention and swelling. Her body seems to be taking care of that problem in the . . . er, the natural way. As far as I can tell, she's doing well. But I need to do a thorough examination."
He waved off further questions and hustled the gurney away along the corridor. With the removal of Camille's presence, the group spun away into small clusters to talk about what they had seen; and then, when that phenomenon did not yield to analysis, to discuss other things. Tristan and Wilsa locked themselves into an intense personal conversation. David Lammerman listened in silence to Buzz Sandstrom, who was denying that he had forced Camille out onto the ice. But David heard hardly a word. His face glowed with joy, not with accusation. He did not understand how Camille had survived. He did not care. She was alive!
Nell stood alone. She had not merely seen, she had recorded. Every element of the resurrection was on video, even Camille's amazing bladder action, but Nell wasn't sure of what to do with the film. There was surely a place in Earth's junk-sport programs for a clip of the solar system's longest continuous pee, but that was a branch of the business that Nell was happy to avoid. What did it all mean? Until she knew that, her footage was a mere curiosity.
She scanned the group. When she came to Hilda Brandt, the research director met her eye and jerked her head for Nell to come over to her. She went reluctantly.
"Isn't it nice to have a happy ending for a change?" Brandt was apparently as pleasant and unassuming as ever. "But I think this particular party is over. I know that you, at least, are wondering what comes next. I'm afraid that it has to be an anticlimax. Jon Perry stays here and does the job for which he came to Europa. But everyone else must leave. This is a protected environment. Although I must say, it hasn't looked anything like that for the past twenty-four hours."
Her eyes, bright and innocent, gazed into Nell's. "I need help. Will you give a hand getting everyone out of here without a fuss? If you do, I give my word that you'll be in the front row when Jon Perry comes back next time from the Europan seabed."
Hilda Brandt was behaving as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Her casual manner reduced Camille's revival from the impossible to the commonplace. Nell nodded, even as she subvocalized: What does she really think of all this? And why me? Why has Hilda Brandt singled me out to help her?
She could think of only one answer. Brandt understood, like no one else in the group, the advantage of a friendly press. Comparing that understanding with the adolescent naivete of Outward Bound, Nell again sensed an incongruity. Outward Bound members and sophistication lived in different universes. But somehow Hilda Brandt inhabited both.
Nell tried to shepherd people along the corridor. They would not budge. It would take physical violence to move them until they received another report from Dr. Shumi on Camille's condition. She caught Hilda Brandt's eye and shrugged. The older woman smiled sympathetically, as though she had expected Nell to be unsuccessful. She did not seem upset by the failure.
Nell's mind continued to spin with puzzling questions. So why did she ask me, if she knew it wouldn't work? And an answer, a flash of inspiration: She wanted to give me a job that would isolate me from talking to the others. But why? And finally, a warning to herself: Be careful. Pawns never get to see much of the board. There is more to the Outer System, Nell Cotter, than is dreamed of in your philosophy. If you want to get to the bottom of all this, you'd better not forget it. And if you want to stay out of trouble, you'd better not confuse Hilda Brandt's statements with her motives.
18
Deep Discovery
Jon Perry was thoroughly miserable. He had never been good at understanding emotions, his own or anybody else's. He had watched Nell Cotter as she wandered through the group urging everyone back toward Hilda Brandt's quarters, and he had tried without success to read her facial expression. Finally he went over to her. She greeted him with a small, distant nod. She accepted his offer of assistance, and she even talked to him freely enough; but it was the bright, impersonal chatter of a stranger in an elevator.
Until, without warning, she turned and whispered in a low, savage voice: "Why did you do it? And don't say, 'Do what?' "
Jon had wondered the same thing himself. He liked Wilsa, and he felt totally at ease with her. But that was not the reason he had headed for Europa with her after as good as promising that he would take Nell with him. And he had wanted to go with Nell.
He shook his head. "I don't know. I'm sorry, but I really don't. I don't know why I did it."
She stared at him for two seconds, standing motionless in her characteristic cocked-head stance. "You just saved your face, Jon Perry. Not to mention some other bits. You gave me the only answer I can believe. All right, then."
He followed her eyes as she surveyed the others. They were moving, slowly but steadily, toward Hilda Brandt's suite of rooms.
"They can go the rest of the way without us." Nell linked her arm in his. "We'll stay outside. I have to talk to you."
"I've been wanting to talk to you for days."
"So you get your chance. But first, you listen. Hilda Brandt wants me and the rest of us off Europa within the next few hours. Everybody except you. But Wilsa says that she's been invited to come back after her next set of concerts. Did you arrange that?"
"No. Honest. Nell, I didn't even know about it. I don't feel that way about Wilsa."
"Then how do you feel about her? Oh, hell, I'm not going to start that again. But I'm damned if I'll go back to Ganymede to stew over you without knowing where I stand. Make up your mind, Jon Perry. Are you and I going to be an item, or aren't we?"
"Well . . ."
"No stalling." She reached up to grab him by the ears, hard enough to hurt. "Yes or no?"
"Yes. Definitely yes. I wasn't stalling. I want you, want to be with you. It's what I've thought about ever since we got to Arenas. You're so-m-mm—"
The rest of his sentence was smothered by an urgent kiss on the lips from Nell. "Tell me the good stuff some other time," she said as she released him. "We'll have to postpone everything else, because they're coming. Don't think I'm a patient woman, though."
Jon glanced toward Hilda Brandt's suite, then realized that Nell was not looking in that direction. He turned to scan the main corridor. Dr. Gabriel Shumi approached—and with him, barely recognizable, was a plump, fair-haired woman. The corpse from the ice tomb. Her face was patchy with broken veins and blotches of pink, and the doctor had his hand ready at her arm; but as they entered Brandt's suite, she was walking steadily and without assistance.
"Camille Hamilton," said Nell. "Come on. I have to cover this."
She and Jon hurried into the room just as Shumi was beginning to talk. Camille, a little bewildered-looking to Jon now that he could see her eyes, sat on a broad, cloth-covered armchair in the middle of the chamber.
"I promised a report for Dr. Brandt as soon as possible, otherwise I'd not be here now." The physician's fine-featured face wore an unhappy expression. His own words were repugnant to him. "And if I hadn't been
assured by everyone in this room that Camille Hamilton was frozen solid and apparently dead an hour ago, I'd ask you to stop playing games and wasting the time of overworked doctors. Miss Hamilton, please stand up. And turn around."
Camille did so, wobble-legged and bowing her head in embarrassment. "I feel like the prize exhibit in an old-fashioned animal show. A turkey, maybe." She glanced at everyone in turn. "Where are Jon Perry and Wilsa Sheer? I want to thank them for saving my life."
"As you can see," went on Shumi, "she appears to be recovering, and she's functioning almost normally. But please don't ask me, or anyone else in the medical facility, how. There are two or three ways of taking a human being's body temperature all the way down below freezing point and back up, safely, and we do it often enough in tricky operations. But it doesn't just happen because someone is exposed to extreme cold."
"People who fall through ice," volunteered Tristan, "into freezing water . . ."
"All of their systems switch off and their body temperature drops in a few seconds. The brain's oxygen requirement drops, too. That's how they can survive." Gabriel Shumi gestured to Camille to sit down again. "But that's not what happened here, according to everything that was told to me. The temperature in her car would have gone down slowly, over a period of time. That's a killer. And stranger than that, you have the retained water . . . and the ice."
"Ice?" Hilda Brandt had been smiling at Camille with a proprietary air.
"Solid ice, Dr. Brandt. When we got Miss Hamilton to the X-ray department, there were lumps of water-ice scattered over her body, close to the skin. Anything from a few grams to a couple of kilos. As they melted she got rid of the excess water in the natural way—sixty kilograms from the time she stepped into my lab to the time she stepped out of it. A wonderful flushing job for the kidneys, you might say. I estimate that there are still about fifteen to twenty kilos to go before she reaches her usual body weight. But it's all liquid."
"No hurry now," said Camille. She smiled. "You're all quite safe, I won't disgrace myself."
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