by Damon Knight
Bliss introduced McNulty and said, “Before we do our usual Tuesday drill, I’d like to discuss the problems we’re having as a result of the epidemic, if I can call it that. Mr. Skolnik, will you begin? You must be getting most of the complaints.”
Skolnik smiled faintly. “When they can’t get us, they dump on Arline. We’re running about three hours behind on room service, and it’s getting worse. I’d say probably about seventy percent of the passengers are taking all their meals in their rooms. We’re doing our best, but we were never set up for that.”
“Mr. Schaffer, does that figure conform to your experience?”
“Our restaurant attendance is down almost eighty percent. Most of my people are working for Skolnik now.”
“Ms. Truman?”
“Charles is right, we’re spending most of our time trying to calm down people who can’t get room service on the phone. It’s a very unpleasant situation.”
“Some of these people are practically barricading themselves in their rooms,” Skolnik said. “When the steward knocks on their door, they holler to leave the cart and go away. It’s a morale problem for us, because we have to bill them for those meals, and the stewards don’t get their tips.”
“Any suggestions?” Bliss asked.
“I think we ought to consider a bonus to the stewards, to come out of general funds. Say fifteen percent of their pay.”
“I agree,” said Truman. “The stewards are carrying the whole load—if they get really unhappy, we’re all in trouble.”
“Fifteen percent is too much,” said Seaver.
“No, it really isn’t,” Skolnik answered. “In fact, it’s on the low side, because we’re talking about fifteen percent of their base salary, which is only about a third of their income. If they were delivering meals the usual way, they’d be getting fifteen percent and more on the charge for the food. I’d say definitely it ought to be at least fifteen, and I’d appreciate it if you’d come down and make the announcement yourself, Mr. Bliss, and, you know, thank them for what they’re doing under these trying circumstances and so on.”
“Mr. Seaver, is that agreeable to you?”
Seaver shrugged. “Okay.”
“All right, then.” Bliss made a note. “Now about passenger morale—I think that’s the major problem, isn’t it? Any ideas?”
“If we could tell them something reassuring about the epidemic—” said Truman.
“Any prospect of that, Dr. McNulty?”
“None that I can see. We’re still getting five or six cases a day.”
“Even though people are hiding in their rooms?” Truman asked.
“Yes.”
“Could we do something to convince them that they’re just as safe if they come out?”
“No, because it wouldn’t be true. Some people are being infected in their rooms—from stewards usually—but most of them are getting it in public places.”
“Dr. McNulty, that brings up the issue of asking people to report to you if they feel faint. Shouldn’t we be doing that with the stewards, at least?”
“All I can say is it didn’t work before. Five or six a day is bad enough, but we were getting nine and ten.”
“I just don’t understand that,” said Truman. “How could something like that make the disease spread faster?”
McNulty hesitated. “Let me tell you, I don’t understand it either. Ordinarily, if you’ve got a communicable disease, either it spreads broadcast, through the air, or drinking water, or some vector like an insect, or else it spreads by contact. Either way, you get a rising curve of infection until it levels off somewhere. This isn’t like that. What we’re seeing is one case at a time. The only way it makes sense is if there is a vector, like a bug, say, but just one single bug. Think of some little insect that’s a carrier of the disease—it gets on you, you get sick, then it jumps off and gets on me, I get sick, and so on.”
“Have you found anything like that on the patients?”
“No. But remember, there’s a latent period after the infection is passed on. By the time we see the patient, they’ve already infected somebody else.”
“So if we could examine somebody while they’re latent—?”
“That was the idea, but we never could do it.”
Skolnik said, “Dr. McNulty, does it sound to you like this is a smart bug?”
McNulty did not smite. “That’s a thought that’s crossed my mind.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t know if I am or not.”
“Well, if you don’t know, who does?”
Bliss rapped gently on the table. “Gentlemen, and Ms. Truman, we’re all under a strain. Dr. McNulty is doing his best, and I know we’re all grateful to him.”
“Let’s talk about this a little more,” said Truman after a moment. “Doctor, is it conceivable that this isn’t an epidemic at all? Could somebody be going around squirting people with something, or injecting them with some poison?”
There was a stir around the table. “My God, what a horrible idea,” somebody said.
“I don’t see how it’s possible,” McNulty answered. “It can’t be one person, because there’s no one person that’s always there. Often there’s nobody around but the two people—the one that’s infected, and the one they pass it on to.”
“Could it be on something that they hand each other—a coin, for instance?”
“No. Usually there’s no contact.”
Bliss sighed. “Now, Doctor, is it the fact that nobody you’ve consulted has been able to throw any light?”
“Yes.”
“And we can’t say when, if ever, we’ll be able to stop this thing?”
“True.”
Arline Truman leaned forward. “You said that sometimes there are only two people in a room when it happens. Wouldn’t that be our best chance? This may sound heartless, but suppose instead of sending somebody to pick up the person who’s ill, we send a nurse in there to take care of them and just keep the room locked?”
“Then you’ve got three people in there,” McNulty said wearily. “What do you do when all three of them get sick? Send in a fourth one—who has to be a nurse? Before the day was out, you’d have the room packed with nurses, all sick but one. The infection rate wouldn’t go down, the only difference would be that we’d be losing nurses, and we can’t spare them.”
“Are there other suggestions?” asked Bliss. He waited. “I hope we’ll all be thinking about this before we meet again. Meanwhile, let’s get on to other matters and let Dr. McNulty go back to his patients.”
Early on the tenth day, about nine o’clock, one of the volunteer nurses came running in. “Dr. McNulty, one of my patients looks better. I think he tried to say something.”
The patient was Randall Geller. He looked disoriented, but his eyes were focusing. His lips moved when McNulty bent over. “Wha’ happened?”
“You’ve been very ill, Mr. Geller, but you’re better now.” McNulty took Geller’s pulse; it was a little stronger.
Late that afternoon Yvonne Barlow regained consciousness. By that time Geller was feeling strong enough to be helped to the bathroom. McNulty called Bliss and said, “I think we’re out of the woods.”
It was a wonderful feeling, but it was premature.
22
By Monday Randall Geller was sitting up, looking feeble but alert. McNulty asked him, “What do you remember about getting sick?”
“Not a thing. The last I remember, I was talking to Yvonne.”
“What were you talking about?”
“I don’t know, nothing much. Just talking.”
“What about before then? Do you remember any momentary faintness, for instance?”
Geller looked thoughtful. “Well, yeah. The day before. Just for a second, I felt like I was going to fall down.”
“What were you doing at the time?”
“I was talking to that visiting fireman. What’s his name, Newland.”
“What about?”
“Well, I was showing him some manganese nodules we dredged up. There was an australite in one of them—a kind of glass meteorite. Pretty unusual.”
“A glass meteorite,” said McNulty, scribbling a note. “Never heard of that one. What do they look like?”
“This one was hollow, about a centimeter across.”
“Don’t suppose anything could have got out of it to make you sick,” said McNulty, attempting a joke.
“Well, it could. I cracked it open.”
McNulty stared at him. “Where is it now?”
“I gave it to Yvonne. I guess she put it away somewhere.”
McNulty went and talked to Ms. Barlow. She was recovering a little faster than Geller had; there were deep semicircles under her eyes, but her color was good.
“Ms. Barlow, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you remember anything about when you collapsed?”
“No. I was in the dredge room, and somebody called in that the lunch cart was here. And that’s the last I remember until I woke up in the hospital.”
McNulty made a note. “Mr. Geller was telling me about this thing he found in a manganese nodule—some kind of meteorite?”
“Yes, an australite.”
“What did you do with it, do you remember?”
“I labeled it and put it in a cabinet in my office.”
“If I call somebody down there, could you tell them where it is and get them to bring it up?”
“Sure. Call Tim Vincent. What do you want it for?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
McNulty got Vincent on the phone and handed it to her.
“Tim, in the right-hand cabinet on the wall across from my desk, on the second shelf there’s a labeled australite—the one Randy found in the nodule. Could you find it and bring it up to Dr. McNulty?” She handed back the phone. “He’ll be up in a few minutes.”
Vincent was a narrow-faced young man with an uneasy smile. “This what you wanted?” he asked.
McNulty took the cracked sphere and turned it over in his fingers. “Guess so. Is this the way they usually look?”
“They come in all kinds of shapes. Some are like little flat buttons. Some are lumps.”
McNulty sniffed at it. “Could you analyze the inside of this to see if anything was in it?”
“What would I be testing for?”
“Damn if I know. Some kind of gas, maybe.”
“Well, that’s a big order. If it was a gas, there wouldn’t be anything left in there, anyway.”
“Volatile oil, then? See what you can do, will you? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Okay,” said Vincent without visible enthusiasm, and went away.
The next day he found Geller sitting up and eating poached eggs and toast with apparent appetite. “Feeling pretty good?” he asked.
“Sure. Raring to go.”
McNulty sat down and looked at his chart. In fact, Geller seemed to be making a remarkable recovery.
“We were talking before about your dizzy spell when you opened the australite. Do you think there could be some connection between that and your getting sick?”
“That’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Geller said with his mouth full.
“I’m sorry?”
Geller swallowed. “After which, therefore because of which. A common logical fallacy. Before you can show a causal connection, you have to exclude sources of error. In other words, did anything else happen besides opening the australite that could have started the epidemic?”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know. It’s all bullshit, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” McNulty asked. There was a funny expression on Geller’s face.
“Ah, hell. That’s just the conventional crap I was feeding you. I don’t even know why I said it. Sure, I think something came out of that australite. I’ll tell you something else, I think it’s intelligent.”
“But you say you didn’t see anything when you cracked the thing open?”
“Right. So it’s invisible, or it’s a gas, or too small to be seen, or some kind of coherent packet of energy, or who knows what. One thing we can be pretty sure of, it’s not from here. It fell out of space, maybe millions of years ago. So there’s no reason to expect it to look like anything we’re familiar with.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing, but I thought I was crazy. The damn thing knows what we’re doing. When I asked people to come in if they felt faint, it jumped from one to another every time they started to do it. All right, suppose all this is true. What can we do about it? Give me some ideas—I’m fresh out.”
Geller leaned back and wiped his lips, looking pleased. “Well, what do we know so far? First of all, we know that the collapse comes when the thing leaves. When it goes into somebody, they feel faint for a minute. Second, we know, or at least I know, that it doesn’t make you feel any different while it’s in you.”
“What about afterward?” McNulty asked delicately. “Do you feel different now?”
Geller scowled at him. “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s your post hoc, ergo propter hoc again. If I do feel different, we still don’t know if it’s because I had the parasite.”
“Could you tell me what the difference is?”
“In how I feel?” Geller hesitated. “To tell you the truth, I’m just not buying a lot of the stuff I used to swallow.”
“That could happen to anybody,” McNulty said sympathetically.
“Sure. So let’s skip it and get back to the parasite. One thing we know, it couldn’t get out of that glass ball until it was broken. So whatever it is, it probably can’t pass through a solid object. So the problem is to get the jinni back in the bottle.”
McNulty had his notepad out and was doodling. “If we put somebody in a glass case?” he said tentatively.
“It’s too smart for that. Unless we could get them when they’re asleep.”
McNulty shook his head. “Glass case,” he said. “Like an aquarium? What would you do about the seams? There’d have to be an air supply. Might get out through the hoses. Got to be something better.”
“Well, what are its limitations? First of all, it never has gone through a wall or anything, as far as we know—is that right?”
McNulty nodded.
“Okay, that’s something. Next thing, how far away have the patients been from each other?”
McNulty looked startled. “Never thought of that. They’ve all been close.”
“What’s the farthest?”
“I’d have to ask. Probably three, four feet.”
“Okay, if it never has gone farther than that, it may be because it can’t. Anything else?”
McNulty stared at the wall. “Sleep,” he said. “You talked about sleep. I’d have to go through the interviews, but I bet I’m right—it never has left a person when they were asleep.” “Good. All right, let’s see what we’ve got. It can’t go through walls, it can’t travel more than three or four feet between people, and it can’t leave a sleeping person. What does that add up to?”
McNulty looked at the desk awhile. “What it adds up to,” he said, “is who’s going to bell the cat?”
23
Three or four people popped out of their offices to greet him as he walked down the hall. “Glad to see you back,” they said, with embarrassed smiles. “You okay now? That’s great.”
“Listen, I’m really glad to see you back,” said Tim Vincent. The cigarette in his mouth was trembling. “We’ve been terrifically shorthanded here since you and Yvonne got sick. If you can start doing the temp and salinity again, and all that stuff, it’ll really make a difference.”
“Sure,” said Geller.
“Well—it’s about time for the ten o’clock. Can you take over now? Is it okay?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“All right. Sorry. See you later.” Vincent disappeared into his lab.
Geller
looked at the familiar instruments; it was amazing that he had never noticed how ugly they were. He picked up the log, looked over the last few entries in Vincent’s crummy handwriting. Feeling an unreasonable irritation, he checked the recording salinometer and thermometer, put them back through the hatch and started them down on the cable. It was time for the dredge too; he noticed in the log that Vincent had skipped that a few times. Too busy dissecting his fish. He started the dredge cable, noted the time in the log, and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Water samples were lined up in a rack, about a week’s worth, labeled with date, time and depth, but the analyses had not been done. It would take him at least a week to catch up, working a couple of hours overtime every day.
He picked up the first one, took a measured sample, added reagents. PCB, twenty-one parts per million. He noted it on a fresh page in the log. What was he doing this for?
He sat down and tried to remember how he had felt about his work before he got sick. It had never been any more fun than it was now, as far as he could recall, but he had done it anyway, one day after the next: why was that? Gathering data—grim little numbers in a book. He remembered something he had told Newland—“I’m not that crazy about theories. What we need is data.” Balls. The data went into computers, and the computers drew charts and graphs, piling up ugly stacks of paper, and eventually somebody would analyze them and come up with some new revision of a revision of the model of deep-water distribution.
With startling clarity, he suddenly remembered the experience that had made him go into marine science in the first place. He was sixteen, a high-school kid in Skokie, Illinois. It was a warm May day, and the windows were open in the biology room, the fresh air blowing in to mingle with the stinks. Some visiting scientist was there, a skinny guy with receding ginger-colored hair. Geller couldn’t even remember his name. He wasn’t paying much attention until the guy showed them a little bottle with a cork in it and a yellowed slip of paper inside. He handed it around for them to look at, and when it came to Geller, he read the violet writing on the paper through the bluish glass, spidery, faded, almost invisible: San Francisco, July 17, 1893. And he heard the ginger-haired man saying, “That bottle was picked up by a Japanese fisherman off Hokkaido in January, nineteen sixty-three.”