Darzek had picked out with his light.
"It does that every time you speak," Darzek said. "Nonsense! What could it hear with?"
The light swelled softly and was gone.
"We don't know," Darzek said. "That isn't the question. Do you realize that this unmentionable lump of undefined tissue is in love with you?"
"Ridiculous!"
Again the light swelled and faded.
"The kloatraz," Darzek said, "is almost as old as the hills, and in that long lifetime it has met millions or maybe billions of intelligent life forms, and every individual among them wanted something from it - information, assistance in some project that benefited everyone but the kloatraz, and so on. Suddenly it has encountered an intelligent being wholly dedicated to its own welfare. Every question you ask it is about itself. How do you feel? Does this hurt? Is the itch any better today? Which salve do you like best? Can you wiggle your boils?"
"They aren't boils!" Malina said indignantly.
"All of your waking hours are devoted to nothing but this monstrosity's health," Darzek went on. "Or the lack of it. You ask nothing at all for yourself. You've turned the thing's mind inward. A life form that's mainly brain is hardly aware of its physical existence, but you've made it aware. Now it's thinking of itself to the exclusion of everything else except you, because everything you do makes it more aware of itself."
"What do you want me to do?" she demanded. "Quit?"
He looked at her levelly. "That's a good idea. Let's try that."
She thought for a moment. The notion that the kloatraz was in love with her seemed like a typical masculine fantasy, but she could not deny the possibility that the kloatraz's illness was psychogenic. As with a human patient, if illness brought about a desired result, the patient would remain ill and very likely become worse.
"All right," she told Darzek. "But strictly as a medical experiment."
She moved to the most remote compartment available, and one of Darzek's assistants took over her nursing chores. Once a day - and once only - he applied her selections of medications to the areas she indicated on her map. Otherwise, the kloatraz's problems, physical or mental, were left strictly alone.
The kloatraz showed no improvement on any level. Its physical condition became worse; the Udef identification system remained incomplete. Finally Darzek gave up and told Malina to do what she liked with her patient. She returned to the cargo control room and saw the kloatraz for the first time in more than a week.
Its spots had multiplied; the sloughing had increased. The entire lower one third of that vast, looming form was fast becoming a composite mass of enormous, oozing, fetid lesions.
Again she tried the heated buffer solution that had been briefly successful. She began to achieve positive results almost at once. Crusts formed on the worst lesions, but this time they seemed to have an alarming life of their own. They grew and merged and became massive lumps of hardened matter; and then, to her amazement, they began to be absorbed. When they had completely disappeared, the formerly smooth surface had pronounced irregularities, with a visible nodule at every healed ulcer.
But an epithelized nodule was a definite improvement over ~1 oozing lesion. She was pleased with her progress. She wanted Darzek to see for himself this refutation of his feckless fantasy, and she sent Arluklo for him; but he was busy and unavailable. Perhaps he preferred his fantasy.
Later she sent Arluklo again, and Arluklo returned with the information that Gul Darr was on another ship. At first she could not comprehend. Theirs had been a self-contained universe for so long, and she had been so intensely preoccupied, that she had forgotten where they were going and why.
"What do you mean - another ship?" she asked.
"We have reached the fleet, and Gul Darr is giving the captains of the other ships their instructions."
"I see," Malina said.
It meant that whatever instruments the kloatraz had completed were being distributed to the fleet, and soon they would go chasing about trying to corner the Udef and make it perform for the new instruments. It seemed like a tiresome waste of time and energy.
And, she reflected, when a doctor had a patient to care for, it could be an intrusion and a damned nuisance.
22
The relapse came with startling suddenness.
Malina had been treating the entire base with a daily application of a heated solution. The healed area had enlarged, and all of the ulcers seemed to be encrusting nicely. Abruptly new spots began to appear; the ulcers developed a creamy discharge, teeming with bacteria, that resembled pus; and even the area that had seemed completely healed began to slough again. The base of the kloatraz quickly reverted to a suppurating mass.
Malina, glumly meditating this worsening condition, realized with a start that she'd forgotten her children, just as she'd forgotten the Udef.
She said aloud, "Brian. Maia."
Light flickered in the area Darzek had pointed out to her. It seemed much brighter now, but that could have been because the massive form remained almost completely dark. The brain was becoming dormant, and it no longer sparkled with visual flashes of thought.
She feared that her patient was dying.
She had noticed another area of the surface that lighted dimly when she entered the cargo hold and then faded when she left. Both areas lighted whether or not Arluklo was present as the kloatraz's eyes and ears. Was the kloatraz able to see as well as hear, or did it perceive her presence and her voice in some other way?
She transmitted to the ship's control room to tell Jan Darzek about her rapidly failing patient. The captain, an extremely tall life form with arms and legs that tripled at the elbow and knee, gravely informed her that Gul Darr again was in conference on another ship.
As she turned away, he remarked, "You can join him these if it's important." He gestured at a transmitting frame.
Was it important? Darzek had considered the kloatraz their one hope against the Udef. On that premise he had brought it, and her, on this interminable journey across the light-years. Now the poor creature was too sick to work for him, and he had lost interest. He seemed not to realize that if it recovered it might be able to work again.
She thanked the captain and stepped through the transmitter.
She was in the control room of another ship. There was moisture on the floor, and she slipped and nearly fell. Regaining her balance, she tripped over a corpse. One of Darzek's scientists caught her as she went headlong. Politely he set her upright and helped her to a corner where the floor was dry. Then he returned to the corpse he had been examining. '
The bodies of six different life forms - in her benumbed state of shock she absently counted them - were sprawled about the room, their variously colored body fluids running stickily together. In the corridor beyond, other corpses lay.
"The Udef?" she asked.
The scientist answered noncommittally. "Yes. Udef."
The ship had been in remote orbit, he explained, waiting to perform tests if the Udef struck that planet; and the orbit had not been remote enough, or the ship had the bad luck to be squarely in the Udef's path on its approach. Either possibility had an identical, inevitable result: one crew lost; one ship that needed extensive cleaning.
When Malina had insisted on accompanying the kloatraz, Darzek had told her that there were three or four chances in a hundred that the Udef would strike the ship she was on. She'd answered brightly that her chances of dying accidentally on Earth were only slightly better than that. Ever since, she had seen her outlook for survival as a mathematical ratio. Now she saw it in terms of blood-spattered ships crewed by corpses.
She watched the scientist for a few minutes. He had a cluster of tentacles at each shoulder, and each tentacle terminated in a cluster of fingers - equipment any human pathologist would have regarded with envy.
“Where is Gul Darr?” she asked finally. "Down," the scientist said.
"Down?" she e
choed blankly.
The scientist pointed to a viewing screen she had not noticed. A group of Darzek's scientists in bulky protective clothing were cautiously picking their way through a nightmarish scenario of which the scene surrounding Malina was only a minor echo. Corpses lay everywhere in grotesque clusters and heaps.
"If it's urgent, you can go down," the scientist said. "There are extra suits in the lockers."
It hadn't been urgent to start with, and it was seeming less so with each passing minute. She was about to return to the other ship when Darzek's assistant, URSGworl, entered.
The scientist said, "She's looking for Gul Darr."
URSGworl nodded and motioned her to follow him. The protest was on her lips; her curiosity was more compelling. If she was laboring to save the universe, perhaps she should see first hand what she was saving it from. URSGworl measured her with a glance and handed her a suit of baggy clothing. She donned it thinking of the Monturan natives. On the third try they found a helmet that fitted her. URSGworl swiftly outfitted himself, gestured, stepped through a transmitter frame. She followed him.
Instantly she wished she hadn't. One body could be a study; ten, a tragedy; a hundred, a disaster. But a million corpses were merely ten thousand disasters lumped together in gross redundancy. It· was impossible to feel ten thousand times as stunned and indignant over a million corpses as she would have over a hundred. She wished she were back in the peaceful dimness of the cargo hold worrying about the kloatraz.
And the carnage she was viewing represented the fate of only one city of one world. She remembered Jan Darzek's answer when Miss Schlupe asked him if he really was going to save the universe:
"Someone had better do it." She breathed a fervent "Amen!"
Gingerly she stepped over and around the clusters of dead, hurrying after URSGworl, and eventually they overtook Darzek and his scientists. At this late date there was little that another pile of corpses could tell them about the Udef, so their work was almost finished. Darzek did not recognize her in the protective clothing, and she was content to follow after him anonymously. He walked along quietly, listening to his scientists; and their remarks, turned to thunder by an amplifier in Malina's helmet that she didn't know how to adjust, sounded like cryptanalysis in a strange language.
Finally they marched in single file to the transmitter frame, and through it to a decontamination chamber, and through that to the room where Malina had donned her suit.
As she removed her helmet, Darzek suddenly became aware of her presence. For a long moment he seemed to have difficulty remembering who she was.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded.
"Sightseeing," she answered coolly.
With him glaring at her reproachfully, she wiggled out of her protective clothing, returned it to a locker, and left. She refused to try to explain her unimportant important mission. He carried the staggering burden of trying to save the universe; she was only trying to save a dying kloatraz that he'd forgotten about.
She returned to the hold; she spoke. The appropriate areas lighted dimly. With Arluklo trailing after her, she circled the kloatraz despondently. The condition of the festered base now was so completely beyond her control that she lacked the courage and patience to try further medication.
"Poor old kloatraz," she murmured. "While you were the universe's one hope, everyone gathered around to see how you were doing. Now there's no hope at all, and the universe is in as bad a shape as you are. And here are the three of us - alone."
Again she wondered to what extent - if any - the illness was psychogenic. Darzek's scientists had discarded the kloatraz the moment it could make no more progress with its instruments. The brain that had handled dozens or hundreds of trading operations simultaneously was left without mental stimulation. Was the sudden physical decline an inevitable result of that?
She turned to Arluklo. "When is the kloatraz going to finish the instruments it was designing for Gul Darr?” she asked.
Arluklo answered promptly, "It did finish them."
"But it didn't," Malina protested. "It was advancing the complexity of the designs by steps and suddenly it stopped. Why didn't it finish them?"
"It did finish them," Arluklo said.
She could think of nothing more to ask. Perhaps Darzek could have given her enough information so she could pursue the subject, but the possibility of achieving anything was so obviously dubious that she decided not to mention it.
She felt the throb of transmission. The ship was under way again, off to investigate another dead ship or dead world. Her brief excursion - the effort of getting about in the awkward clothing and the physical and emotional strain of avoiding corpses and their ooze all of that had exhausted her. She went to bed and fell asleep at once.
It was the heat that awakened her. The living quarters suddenly seemed stifling. At the same moment a strange dizziness seized her. She lurched to her feet and staggered into the cargo control room.
Shielding her eyes against a blinding light, she attempted to look through the transparent wall into the cargo hold.
The kloatraz was ablaze with heat and light. Crowds had gathered at the transparent walls she could see on the opposite side of the hold. She hoped desperately that Jan Darzek was among them someone had to do something and quickly - but because of the intense light she could not make out who was there. While she was peering across at them, one of them dropped to the floor, and then another. Her own dizziness was increasing, and she had difficulty in standing.
Then she realized what was happening. The Udef had found them and was attacking the kloatraz, and the heat of that battle filled the cargo hold.
Desperately she looked again at the transparent walls opposite.
Now she could see no one there. All of them had fallen. Even while occupied with the kloatraz, the Udef had enough force left to kill them. "Brian!" she cried. "Maia." She wanted to run, to escape the thing within her that tore at her brain. She put a hand forward to steady herself and felt the transparent wall yield at her touch. It was almost at melting temperature.
The pain from her burned fingers momentarily aroused her. She staggered to the control panel, unused since the cargo master had emptied the holds at Montura. How had he done it? A twist of the dial - she twisted it all the way. Position the hold indicator - she positioned both of them. A pull of the lever - but the lever would not move. Sobbing, she applied all of her strength. Then she remembered the safety catch. She released it and hauled at the lever. She was barely able to move it. Another tug, another -
A sudden, shrieking whoosh, and the kloatraz was gone. The hold opening closed automatically. The normal light that remained seemed the edge of darkness. Malina forced the lever back and even conscientiously locked it into place with the safety catch before she fainted.
She came to with an awareness that the floor was uncomfortably warm to lie on. She struggled uncertainly to her feet and looked about her.
The hold was empty. The transparent wall bulged with the impressions of her fingers. Arluklo sat against the wall waiting for her voice to activate him. She spoke his name and repeated it twice, but he did not respond. Had he suffered another internal malfunction?
"He's lost his brain," she sobbed.
She stepped through the transmitter to the ship's control room.
There were several bodies on the floor, but those in the room who were still standing - Darzek among them - were paying no attention. They were watching the ship's viewing screen.
On the screen, the kloatraz was drifting against the deep black of space with a fierce, blinding light that rivaled a sun.
"I just got here," Darzek said. "What happened?"
She did not answer. There was a dazzling flash, the kIoatraz's light momentarily filled the screen and then faded, and the screen was empty.
"So it lost," Malina said bitterly. The irresistible force had met the immovable object, Udef crashing headlong into kloatraz
, and the kloatraz had been vanquished.
"I wonder if maybe we gave up on it too soon," Darzek mused.
"Even if it lost, that was quite a struggle."
A heroic struggle, Malina thought. A struggle to the death by a lonely, sick creature. Even now she could manifest no affection for the brain-bound monster, but she could pity it, and she had and did.
"Was it you who ejected it?" Darzek asked. She nodded.
"How'd you happen to know how?"
"I watched the cargo master. Back at Montura."
"Incredible. You're probably the only one on board who knew how. We never figured on it leaving the ship except by transmitter. You saved everyone aboard, including yourself."
[Jan Darzek 03] - This Darkening Universe Page 25