My last sight as I left was of Vi’s big Buddha face with its mask of mixed malice and pity.
3
I thought Nick would take it badly when I reported the bite to him that afternoon. Perhaps he did, but his response was practical. ‘The girl says she doesn’t get the toxic chewey?’
‘That’s right, but she sleeps with her pimp who’s sick with it right now. She may be a carrier.’
‘Sure to be.’
Through my welter of assorted feelings, I said, ‘I want to get married.’
‘To Carol. I know.’
Knew everything, didn’t he? His existence was what love/hate meant to me. ‘But if I go to Med they’ll want to know how I got it and that will land you in the shit. Both of us. We’ll be finished in PI.’
‘No, we won’t, lad. Med will keep its mouth shut. The moment we agreed to do the job Med lost its power to harm us. Connivance. We’ll work through Arry since he has the contacts.’
Locating Arry by trivline was not easy. Stabs at possible venues found him either just gone or due there later. Nick persisted, outwardly unmoved, while I tried to keep the calm his example demanded and my mind sweated. The thought of Carol and an impotent future scared tears to my eyes, which Nick pretended not to notice.
It took him fifty minutes to run Arry to earth in, of all places, a cross-disciplinary seminar, the secretary agreed only after threats to call him out of session. Nor was Arry pleased; he had to be argued with.
‘No, Arry, I can’t, not on a public line . . . for Christ’s sake, it’s urgent. Teddy’s in trouble . . . no, not even an hour, too much time lost already . . . I can’t tell you . . . doesn’t that give you a clue? Yes, that bad!’
He switched off stared somberly at me and said, ‘He’ll be here.’
He was, in twenty minutes, when he wasted ten seconds in panic over me and turned at once to consideration of the meds. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘that they may never have seen a case so soon after infection. They’ll jump at the chance to examine him.’
I snapped that I wanted to be cured, not researched. He had the grace to be discomfited. ‘With all the secrecy, we don’t know how they are progressing toward a cure. My contacts don’t know – or say they don’t. So, catching it so early . . . Come on, we’re wasting time.’
Nick called after us, ‘Good luck.’ His tone was concerned but how much concern could he spare? By definition the PI job must sometimes be dangerous.
We went directly to Med Section on the edge of the city, well out of Center, in a sprawling hospital complex hung over from the last century. Arry made his contact by intercom from the ground floor and, after what turned out to be an agitated session when he gave his name, we were referred to Room 717.
We shot up to the seventh floor by express lift. Seven-seventeen was a waiting room with deep chairs, a table and a girl in nursing overall. She greeted Arry with a secretive half-smile that suggested her as the one who had trapped him in his sexual game, and said with detectable patronage, ‘A result so soon?’ and looked me over with a satisfied air. ‘He’s young for a copper, isn’t he?’
Arry said, ‘No result yet.’
‘Sent a boy on a man’s errand, did you?’ She was laughing. ‘So what do you want? You shouldn’t be seen here.’
‘He’s infected.’
She took a step away from me. It may have been merely Arry’s unexpectedness or it could have been a fear reaction. Arry handed back a little of her needling. ‘You know it doesn’t travel by air. I should have let him rub a sweaty hand over you.’
Her insolence evaporated. ‘When did it happen?’
‘About four hours ago. I want something done about it.’
‘The treatment . . . they don’t really know.’ An uncertain hand crept up her cheek to twist a lock of blonde hair.
Arry snarled, ‘Get Arnold!’
She went quickly, looking worried, and in a few minutes came back to lead us into a surgery. The man at the desk shooed her out with a jerk of the head. Arnold, I presumed. He stared at me so steadily that I knew he was unsure of himself, trying to get on top of a meeting that disturbed him badly. He barely nodded to Arry but addressed me with what he may have thought was a ring of authority, ‘Tell me what happened.’
I did, naming no names and giving no tower number or district. He snapped irritably, ‘So we’re no further forward. We know about the soldiers. The question is, where do they get it?’
‘We’ll find that out – after I’ve been treated.’
‘Reverse blackmail, copper?’
‘We’re in each other’s hands.’
‘True.’ He cocked his head at Arry. ‘You ought to bow out before it’s too late.’
‘Can’t. Teddy’s the mate. I’ll see it through.’
I told him, ‘No need. Get out while you can.’
‘I buggered it up in the first place, so I’ll stick around in case I’m needed.’
Hearing determination from that skinny frame was an uplift for my growing picture of a sturdy, bedrock Swill stratum. He would have been wiser to withdraw, but the thought faded in the warmth of having a friend at hand when I was alone in my danger and afraid of the thing inside me.
Arnold said to me, ‘You may not be infected.’
‘Is there a test?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, then.’
He got up from the desk, said, ‘Roll up your sleeve,’ opened the wall cabinet and prepared to take a blood sample. Digging at a vein, he asked, ‘What’s your name, Officer?’
‘Have I asked yours? I know “Arnold.” That’s enough.’
He did not answer but filled the syringe with blood and took it away through an inner door. In fifteen minutes he came back with the pale face of a man who has been bawled out with no chance of answering back. I guessed that he had had to cover himself by reporting to someone higher up, someone who was furious at the risk of exposure that I represented. He said tightly, ‘You’re infected.’
‘So what now?’
‘I suppose we’ll have to do something for you.’
‘You suppose?’
He threw up his arms in real distress. ‘Yes – I suppose! It isn’t certain but we’ll try.’
I said, strung up with hope and fear and overplaying my hand, ‘It’d bloody well better be certain. Let me down and I’ll talk to whoever will listen. Including the Swill.’
‘Come with me and don’t talk like a fool.’ He glowered at Arry. ‘You can come and see fair play if you think that’s your role.’
That was when I realized that these people could kill me as a nuisance and most likely get away with it.
Arnold informed me with angry gravity, ‘I don’t intend to open you up or slice anything off.’ I suppose I smiled because he smiled sourly back. ‘I intend to cook you.’
I said nothing to that. Best to let him have his fun and hope it was only fun. He led us into an operating theater. ‘There will be no theater staff. The fewer people who know about this, the better. First I need to know if you are fit for cooking. Strip off.’ I removed shirt, shoes and trousers. ‘Underwear, the lot. You look healthy enough.’
He put me through a routine examination, including cardiograph. ‘I’d hate you to collapse in the oven. Hard to explain away an unauthorized copper.’
Arry decided that was funny and giggled madly; he was a sucker for sick jokes. I stuck to sullen silence, which puts jokers off balance.
‘It’s no jest,’ Arnold said. ‘There’s the oven.’
It was a steel cylinder large enough to contain a man, with a window at what I took to be the ‘head’ end, a snake’s nest of cables plugged in along its length and a not-too-complex control board.
Arry asked through his spluttering, ‘Gas or coal burner?’
‘More like a microwave. In many ways, quite like.’ He came at me with a syringe and I lifted my arm. Selecting a fresh vein, he asked, ‘Don’t you care what I do to you?’
‘I care.�
�
‘Should I tell you?’
‘Keep it simple.’
Whatever was in the syringe emptied itself into my bloodstream. ‘The trouble with viruses is that they hide in crannies. They invade the joints, the brain, the lymph glands, the liver, and we have to flush them out of hiding. That is what the injection is for. It disturbs the organs that harbour them and they don’t like it. They pop back into the veins and arteries from which the body can flush them in the normal fashion – after they’re dead. Follow?’
I nodded. ‘So the game is to kill them where the elimination systems can get at them. Now, you know that this virus can change its structure to deal with drugs – but it can’t stand a long, hot summer. So we will create an environment some 5 degrees above normal for several minutes. About eight. That is very hot for a body to be and it is the viral equivalent of a long, hot summer. Humans can die of it if their hearts are not strong enough and your minutes will be spent on the edge of risk. I don’t think it will harm a healthy youngster like you, but it could. It could even kill you. Acceptable risk?’
‘Quite,’ I said, very bluff and tough and shrinking inside.
He pressed a cutaneal spray against my arm and triggered it. ‘A soporific.’
I said, before it should take effect, ‘Arry, call the boss and tell him what’s going on,’ and asked Arnold, ‘How long will this take?’
‘If you leave at all it will be within the hour.’
‘Say I’ll see him tonight, Arry.’
Arnold asked idly, ‘Who is your boss?’
Amateur! ‘Who’s yours?’
He pursed his lips. ‘You will meet him before you leave.’
I couldn’t let that chance pass. ‘Pray to God you don’t meet mine if this goes wrong.’
He said to Arry, ‘Call the damned man. Let’s not start a schoolyard feud.’
Pretty cheeky for the one who was making the bitching pace. As Arry went out I felt the relaxation begin.
‘Tiring?’
‘Yes.’
‘Up on here.’ He helped me on to a narrow trolley which I saw mistily would fit slots in the end of the oven, and rolled me toward it. He leaned over me to offer a last comfort. ‘We have tried this on three kinds of monkeys and a resentful gorilla, so we know it works. On monkeys and gorillas. You can never be sure that the human organism will react in quite the same way – 99 percent sure is never enough. Any last wishes? Just in case?’
Arnold must have taken a thorough going-over from higher up, but only a monster would have carried on like that unless he was sure of a successful outcome. I slipped calmly into sleep.
I woke under blankets with a headache and that striking coolness of flesh that comes after heavy sweating, and a general feeling of wanting to sleep forever. The prick of the syringe must have wakened me – Arnold drawing more blood.
Arry came alongside with an unexpected cup of tea and I struggled to sit up. Tiredness hit like a club but I hoped it would pass. It was the cheap tea used in canteen urns, sour by comparison with our home contraband. He asked, ‘All right?’
I nodded.
‘I told the boss.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Tell him to hope his troubles will be little ones after all.’
Yes, he would, but a joke beats tears any day.
Arnold, fiddling with test tubes at a wall bench, said without looking around, ‘Drink your tea and take a shower in the recess outside the door. You stink like Swill.’
‘How would you know?’
I should have expected the answer: ‘I was born Swill.’
Oh, the pride in origins transcended! The pride of Extrahood. Now that he had told me, I could detect it faintly in his voice. Some of the most capable men I now knew had been Swillborn. It should mean something. To be thought over later.
‘When you have dressed,’ he said, ‘there is someone waiting to see you.’
‘Your nameless boss?’
‘Somebody.’ He stacked test tubes in a rack, each with a fingernail of fluid of a different colour, shading from veinous scarlet to bluish to clear.
I asked, ‘Is the guinea pig clean?’
‘There still has to be microscopic examination and a count.’
‘At least I’m alive.’
‘Yes,’ sounding as though it hurt him. ‘Take your shower.’
The water cleansed me but I still felt like the wrath of an avenging God. Arnold seemed to think that I looked like it, too, because he gave me a sharp-tasting draft of some kind and had me sit down for five minutes. Whatever it was helped.
‘Temporary only,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a grilling, if that’s the phrase, but you’ll pick up quickly.’ He instructed Arry, ‘Don’t leave him until you’ve delivered him home.’
Said Arry, ‘Bet on it, mister. I wouldn’t miss a bar of this.’
So at least one of us was enjoying himself.
An intercom buzzed and Arnold answered it. ‘The gentleman is ready for you.’ To Arry, who stood with me, ‘Not you. You wait here. This way, cloak-and-dagger boy.’
He left me in an interrogation cubicle, actually a Diagnostic Interview Room, little different from a PI setup with recording equipment and cameras.
The man behind the desk was in his fifties, sallow-faced, square-faced and blank-faced in the way of inquisitors who would have you think them disinterested. I did not recognize him; there was no reason why I should recognize one of hundreds of civil servants but I filed him, item by item, for identification – grey-green eyes, mouth generously wide but ungenerously thin in the lips, hair basin-cropped in the Sweet fashion of the moment, ears flat to the skull, chin unexpectedly loose and deep lines – not laughter lines – beside the mouth.
The interview was bewilderingly short.
He said, with no apparent bias for or against, ‘You’re lucky to be alive. You have served as test subject for a highly debatable experimental treatment and survived.’ His voice was cool, his speech precise, his expression null. ‘I permitted the test because it wouldn’t have mattered if it had killed you.’
Cadet training is a time of shaming put-downs and impersonal diminishments but nothing in those years matched the impact of the equable, incontrovertible statement that I did not matter, that my life was of no moment to anyone but myself. We accept that only one person in a million has real importance to the race but each of us remains the center of his universe, the pivot of energy and mind. That man told me in a single sentence that the world would not flicker if I ceased to exist, that it would have affected nothing if I had never existed and that my continued existence would affect nothing in the stream of time.
It was with the piping hate of a midget that I assumed defiance to save myself from tears. ‘Using disposable oddments saves qualms of conscience.’
‘Yes.’ Just that, Yes.
‘And since I have survived?’
‘You can save me time. Who is your immediate superior?’
‘Find out. Who are you?’ Schoolboy stuff perhaps, but it’s a style of defiance that rankles.
He peered, not owlishly but as one recognising a familiar brand of intransigence. ‘Of course I will find out – faster than you will identify me.’
So he would, with my face already videoed from every angle and my voice recorded for prints, but that would not lead him to Nick because junior PI have no group allocation but form a training pool to be called on by senior officers as required. He had not bothered to ask my name; perhaps he knew it, perhaps he did not care. He stabbed at his desk panel and my voice spoke clearly out of the air, threatening Arnold that I would spread what I knew among the Swill.
He cut it off. ‘Gutter stirring! Would you do it?’
At that moment I did not know what I might do but played it safe. ‘I don’t think so. If the sufferers are treated by the meds and the supply of doctored chewey dries up there will be no need to tell anyone.’
Nonsense, of course, and he knew it. ‘To that, two thing
s. One, the immediate origin of the doctored narcotic is known and drying up of the supply is in progress. For your interest, it is brought in from over the border. The Indons also are infected and the ultimate source is uncertain.’
‘But they push it to us?’
‘Not wittingly. There is some fraternization between border patrols which is very difficult to prevent.’
That explained the soldiers. Or did it? To question it would only reveal that I knew more than he guessed. I asked, ‘And the other thing?’
‘New therapies must be designed. Quickly, I hope. The virus is vulnerable, but though nobody dies of the infection, many might succumb to the heat cure.’
That rang true, but why tell me? So that I would carry it back and render further investigation unnecessary? To let PI know that international relations were involved and that Med Section had the game in control?
He said, as if I bored him, ‘You can go now.’ There is no smallness like that of a nonentity.
In the theater Arnold told me my tests were negative. ‘You’ll live with your balls working.’ His spite was worth getting away from.
Going down in the lift, I asked what Arnold Whatever could have against me. Arry sighed and explained to the class dummy, ‘The fact that you copped a dose of virus and had to come to Med making threats, that’s what. It was a complication he couldn’t see the end of, so he reported it to cover himself and in about two minutes flat all the wrong people knew that some Med Section juniors had been trying a little undercover work where silence is golden. Now a lot of meds will be disciplined with loss of seniority and all that, Arnold among them. Also the nurse you saw first up. You’re as popular as the disease.’
He was happy about it. Humiliation by his bit of failed nursing sex would have had something to do with that.
‘I should have thought of all that.’
‘Your mind was otherwise engaged. Now you can lift it above your crotch and let it operate.’
That sounded more like asperity than good humour.
We took a hovertram back to City Center and the journey gave my mind time to grind into gear. Whatever the boss man had wanted of that interview and had not obtained (or had he?) I was sure that he would be seeking the name of the PI officer who had run an illicit Swill expedition. So I would be tailed in some fashion until I reported. So immediate reporting was out.
The Sea and Summer Page 30