by Damon Knight
“Please.” She moved away slightly. “I just want the answer. If it’s yes, that’s all right, and if it’s no, that’s all right too.”
Stevens studied her curiously. There was a change in her; she was less vulnerable and somehow more interesting. He had not stopped to consider whether he really wanted her; now he discovered that he did. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Let’s go to my room.”
Afterward she said, “It isn’t the same, is it?”
“No.”
“I don’t love you, you know. It’s better with love.”
“And when did you realize that?”
“After I was sick. I didn’t love you before, but I thought I did. What were you after, my parents’ money? They haven’t got much.”
Stevens got a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. “Julie, I am not a fortune hunter.”
“You’re not a member of Gallard Frères in New York, either. I called a friend of Dad’s.”
“Did you say Gallard? It’s Ballard, dear, with a B.”
“Don’t lie,” she said. “What’s the point of lying?”
And indeed, he could see that it was only a habit, a part of the game he had been playing so long that he had forgotten there was any other way to live.
“You know,” he said, “I really wish I could tell you all the truth about myself.”
She looked at him. “Do you know it all?”
“Does anyone?” He turned and put his hand on her shoulder. “Do you want us to go on meeting?”
She smiled faintly. “Yes. Why not?”
After she got well, Malcolm insisted on their leading as normal a life as possible; he could not bear the thought, he said, of keeping her cooped up in a stateroom after what she had already been through. “It’s foolish to take the chance,” she said. “I’ve had the disease, but you haven’t.”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Malcolm.
He had been frantic with worry, especially after she was found in another man’s stateroom. When she explained why she had done it, he wept warm tears on her cheek. Never, he said, had any man had such a companion.
They ate in the restaurants that were still open, walked on the Promenade Deck, lounged beside the open-air pool. He was tender and solicitous, because, he said, she still hadn’t got her strength back; but that was not the reason.
One day at lunch Norman Yeager came up to their table, smiling, diffident, in his worn blue jeans and his funny little hat. When she introduced them, she could tell that Malcolm, in an excess of magnanimity, was about to invite him to sit down. She warned him under the table, and after a few moments of shifting from foot to foot, Yeager went away.
“He seems perfectly harmless,” Malcolm said afterward. “We could have been a little more cordial, don’t you think? After all, he did you a tremendous favor. And he’s probably smitten with you—why not?”
“All the more reason,” she said. “Honestly, Malcolm, did you ever really think—?”
He smiled and took her hand across the table. “Only because I was out of my mind,” he said.
They had met at a party in the Village. After a few words, Malcolm had gone away and come back with a bunch of grapes, which he handed to her. “I wish they were emeralds,” he said.
She smiled. “That’s Charles MacArthur’s line.”
“I know, but I mean it as much as he did. More.”
Then it had all been so quick, so natural and easy. Malcolm was a lawyer, not a Perry Mason type but a sweet, gentle man. Others had told her how pretty she was, but he was the first who made her believe it. She had loved him with a pure devotion, loved him more than her life. She remembered, as if it had happened to someone else, how she had left him the moment she knew she was infected. That was reasonable, because she believed she was going to die anyway, but she had not done it because it was reasonable. If she had been able to choose between her death and his, she would have chosen unhesitatingly. That was what seemed so extraordinary to her. She still loved him, because he was dear and familiar, and loved her, but would she give up her life for his? Probably not.
That was what she had to conceal from him, the change in her, and it was more and more difficult because he knew something was wrong and would not ask.
28
On days when he had business in the passenger section, Higpen usually managed to drop in on Newland for an hour or so. Once or twice they had lunch or dinner together. Hal Winter was always present on these occasions, and sometimes a young couple, Julie Prescott and John Stevens, who had been in the hospital at the same time as Newland.
At first Higpen made allowances for their recent illness, but as time went by he grew more and more uneasy. There was something odd about all three of them; he was sure that Winter scented it too.
He told himself that part of the problem was that he simply did not care for John Stevens: he was too perfectly polite, too charming, and at the same time too ironic—the sort of young man Higpen instinctively mistrusted. He felt more sympathetic toward Julie Prescott, who seemed to be making an effort to be more cheerful than she felt. But it was the change in Newland himself that disturbed him most. Newland was as gracious as ever, his conversation as fascinating, but Higpen had the eerie impression many times that he was playing a role. Furthermore, among the three of them there seemed to be some unspoken understanding, some secret agreement that excluded both him and Hal Winter.
Once, when they were alone together for a moment, he said, “Paul, how are you feeling?”
“Very well. I’m all right.”
“No aftereffects?”
“No. Not physical ones, at any rate. A philosophical fallout, maybe.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s hard to explain. The other day I woke up thinking about an exchange I had with a young woman in the audience at one of my lectures. That was, oh, four or five years ago, in San Diego. I don’t know why I suddenly remembered it. She stood up and asked me why I thought it was important to build cities in space, or for that matter in the ocean. We already had cities on land, she said; why not spend the money to make them better?”
He smiled at Higpen. “Well, I put her down with two or three well-chosen phrases. I said that we hadn’t got where we are by settling for what we had. We’ve always been an exploring animal; we’ve gone everywhere it was possible for us to go, and done everything it was possible for us to do. That’s what made us great, I said.”
“Good.”
“Yes, and she sat down, but the other morning I seemed to hear her voice saying, ‘Why do we have to be great?’ And I couldn’t think of the answer.”
“Well,” said Higpen uncomfortably.
“You see, you can’t think of it either.”
Hal Winter came back into the room and sat down. “Hal, maybe you can tell us—why do we have to be great?”
Hal looked wary. “Great in what way?”
“You know, building pyramids, climbing Everest, going into space.”
Hal crossed his legs. “Lots of people don’t.”
“No, that’s true, but think where we were a hundred thousand years ago and where we are now.” He turned to Higpen. “Do you remember the Tasaday?”
“In the Philippines? Yes.”
“A little tribe, what was it, about twenty people, absolutely isolated in the jungle. They were still living in the Stone Age. They didn’t know there were any other people in the world.”
“I remember.”
“And you know what? They were happy.”
“They didn’t know any better.”
“No. They didn’t. Something else I remember—it’s funny how these things come back. An anthropologist once figured out that the Australian aborigines, before the white people came, had to work about ten hours a week, hunting and gathering. The rest of the time they could sit around and tell stories.”
“So? They were naked savages.”
“Yes, that’s right. And they were happy. I used to know a man who h
ad lived with the Eskimos in Alaska, and he said that in the villages where they hadn’t had much contact with the white people yet, they were the happiest people he had ever known.”
“Paul, I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“I don’t know myself, but I just began to wonder, the other morning, what’s wrong with being happy?”
29
On the eighteenth day, the number of patients in the hospital annex was still rising, but more slowly, and McNulty calculated that if admissions and discharges kept up at this rate, the number would level off at about thirty. He was thankful for the recoveries, but he knew no more about the illness now than he had to begin with.
There was something else: he was increasingly disturbed by the signs of personality changes he saw in the recovered patients. Geller was the first example. Anybody listening to him talk would say he was alert, intelligent, perfectly rational, and yet he had walked out of his job without any explanation and had taken a poke at a co-worker who asked him for one. That could have been just nervous fatigue, but the next day Yvonne Barlow had walked off the job too, and McNulty gathered that the marine lab was in disarray. After them on the list came two stewards. One of them, Manuel Obregón, had been in some kind of trouble with his supervisor; there were charges and countercharges before the union committee. The other one, Luis Padilla, had been accused of stealing by a passenger. After Padilla there was a little string of people with exotic names, Boon Hee Koh, Jamal A. Marashi, Setsuko Nakamura, and they were sprinkled in after that, more than you would expect—as if the thing were attracted to people of unusual dress or appearance. Marashi had struck his wife during a quarrel and McNulty had to put five stitches in her lip. A Mrs. Morton Tring had left her husband of twenty years and moved in with a woman friend on the Quarter Deck. Another one had left her husband without explanation and had been found the next morning in Norman Yeager’s room. There were fistfights involving recovered patients almost every day, and larger disturbances now and then. Four men, drunk and belligerent in the Quarter Deck Bar late at night, had been asked to leave by the manager; they had knocked him down, broken a bottle over his head, turned over tables, and had to be subdued by half a dozen security people. A waiter in the Madison Restaurant, asked for the second time when a customer’s French toast would be ready, had said, “Get it yourself if you’re in a hurry,” thrown a tray at the customer, walked out and had not returned.
Geller had gone back to the marine lab once since he had left, but was not there now; he did not answer his room phone or his personal phone, and it was the same with Barlow. McNulty had had them paged repeatedly; it was late afternoon before he got a call.
“This is Geller. What the fuck do you want?”
“Just want to talk to you. Do you know where Ms. Barlow is?”
“She’s here. What do you want to talk about?”
“The australite, for one thing. Vincent says he doesn’t know where it is—thinks you have it.”
“Vincent’s an idiot. Yeah, I did a little work on it with Yvonne. It isn’t glass.”
“No?”
“No, it’s silica in microscopic cells, kind of like a blastula.”
“Organic?”
“Sure, organic.”
“Well, hell, then that means— Will you bring it up and let me look at it?”
“Maybe.”
“I’d like to get your ideas about this thing—yours and Ms. Barlow’s.”
“I’ll see if she wants to.” Geller hung up.
Geller and Barlow wandered in about five o’clock. Both of them looked cool, relaxed and calm; there was something about the way they sat together that made McNulty think their relationship had turned personal.
“Here’s the dingus,” Geller said, handing over the cracked transparent sphere. “It’s not an australite. Yvonne thinks it’s an artifact.”
“Even though it’s organic?”
“It’s the shape,” Barlow said. “The inside of it is a perfect sphere within the limits of measurement.” She handed him a record crystal; McNulty put it into the player and watched in fascination while an iridescent surface bloomed on the screen—a vast pale globe in which the lenticular cells could be made out, like some alien geodesic sphere.
“So what is it, a container, a—a kind of transportation device?”
“Looks like it. We break the capsule, something comes out, Randy gets sick.”
“What kind of something?” McNulty asked.
“We’ve talked about that. Neither one of us believes in a microscopic intelligence, or an intelligent gas. Maybe it’s an energy system, and that’s why we can’t see it. Randy thinks we ought to hunt for it with an electroscope.” She grinned.
“Joke,” said Geller, but he smiled too.
“Listen, something else is bothering me,” said McNulty, and he told them about Emily Woodruff, the woman who thought she heard the sound of the creaking grocery cart.
He had gone to talk to Mrs. Woodruff, and had found her reasonably well-oriented; she knew the date, and who was President, and so on. She was a little loony, maybe, but no more so than a lot of his patients who were walking around, and he could not see any point in confining her; he certainly was not qualified or equipped to do any psychiatric stuff.
“Here’s what I can’t get out of my head,” he told them. “According to her husband, Emily Woodruff followed a man who seemed to be making this grocery-cart noise into a restaurant, and then the man collapsed—that was Brian Eisenstein, one of my patients. Then she heard it again when a woman sitting nearby got up and left. And that was Mrs. Rebecca Kramer, who collapsed later that afternoon. So there you have it twice: either she can identify a person who’s about to come down with the disease or else it’s coincidence.”
“There’s a saying in the army—‘Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.’ I don’t even think you ought to call it a disease. Call it a parasite.”
“Maybe Mrs. Woodruff is your electroscope,” said Barlow.
“She’s getting some kind of information the rest of us aren’t, and interpreting it her own way.”
“What would you do if you were me?”
They looked at each other. “You first,” said Geller.
“Okay,” Barlow said. “The trouble is, this thing is too smart for you. If you try to grab somebody who’s carrying it, it jumps to somebody else. Now suppose you could identify the host, not just when the parasite enters it but any time.”
“And then what?”
“Hit him over the head with a hammer,” said Geller, “cart him off to solitary. Then you’ve got the parasite confined to one host, and the epidemic stops.”
“He’s joking,” said Barlow. “Not a hammer, but what about sticking him with a hypodermic? Is there something that would knock him out fast enough without killing him?”
“Sure, couple of things, but you realize what you’re asking me to do?”
“Do what you want,” said Geller. He belched and started to get up.
“No, wait a minute, Randy, don’t be so goddamned impatient. Look, Doctor, do you want to solve your problem or not? Find the host, stick him with a hypo. Then he’s unconscious and the parasite can’t get out. Take him into a stateroom and leave him there, locked up, with plenty of food. When he comes to, the parasite still can’t get out, because there’s nobody close enough. Then you can explain over the phone.”
“Would you buy that explanation, Yvonne?” Geller asked.
“I’d be madder than hell, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Sounds familiar. Isn’t that what Himmler used to say?”
“Come on, Randy. Have you got a better idea?”
“No. How about you, Doctor?”
When they had gone, McNulty thought about them a long time. They were bright, cheerful young people, smart as whips both of them, but there was something wrong with their heads. They just didn’t seem to give much of a damn. Trap
ping the parasite was like a game to them, and they really didn’t care whether it worked or not. They hadn’t even bothered to tell him their discoveries about the australite until he tracked them down. Sociopaths, he thought, but that wasn’t it either. There was just something missing, something important, and they didn’t even know it was gone.
But they were right: he couldn’t think of any other answer.
30
Bliss, after waffling for two days, finally gave his permission on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, when the first patient came in, McNulty found out where she had been stricken—it was a coffee shop down on E Deck. As soon as the patient was in bed and the tube down her nose, he called the Woodruffs and asked them to meet him in the forward lobby in E. He put on a jacket in place of his white coat, took the hypo out of the refrigerator and slipped it into his pocket. He felt like an ax murderer.
“Let’s go, Lori,” he said to the security woman who was waiting in the outer office with a wheelchair. “Remember, you stay behind us, and don’t come up till I call you.”
Emily and Jim Woodruff were sitting on a banquette in the lobby. Jim got up when he saw McNulty approaching. “I had a hard time keeping her here. She wants to go looking, she thinks it’s somewhere close.”
“Good,” said McNulty. “Emily, are you all set?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, let’s just stroll around. If you hear that noise, you tell me right away.”
“I’m sure he’s here,” she said. “Jim wouldn’t let me look before.”
“That’s right, because we had to get everything ready.”
A few people were in the lobby, looking hostile and suspicious. They glanced into the coffee shop, which was empty except for the waitress and counterman. Lori Applewhite, the security woman, was following them a few paces behind. As they reached the far side of the lobby, a man came out of the restroom. Emily’s face took on a rapt expression. “There he is,” she whispered.
“Him, right there?”
McNulty signaled to Applewhite, who nodded and wheeled her chair past them. The man, gray-haired and slender, was walking rapidly away. “Sir,” she called.