by Damon Knight
The man turned. “Yes?”
“Security. Will you show me your ID, please?”
McNulty and the Woodruffs were walking past. “Keep on going,” McNulty muttered.
The man reached into his pocket. “What’s this about?”
McNulty turned, got the hypo, slipped off the cap, stuck the needle into the back of the man’s neck and pressed the plunger. He yanked the hypo out again barely in time to catch the body as it fell.
Janice was waiting for them in the room at the end of the isolation corridor. They laid the man out on the bed, loosened his necktie. McNulty took the opportunity to glance into his wallet: the man’s name was Roger Cooke, and he had a driver’s license from Maine. He glanced up at the TV camera mounted at the corner of the ceiling. “Is that thing working?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“I must say it seems to have worked,” Bliss said. “How is he taking it?”
“He doesn’t like it, but he’s pretty calm. He says he’s going to sue us. We’re giving him priority on room service; he can get anything he wants.”
“Well, that’s a relief. My hat is off to you, Doctor. Have you had any thoughts about what to do with him when we get to Guam?”
“I’ve talked to the health commissioner there. We’re trying to work something out—a coast-guard ship anchored offshore maybe. It would be better to get him to Manila. There’s a lot of red tape, but I think we can put it all together. What the hell they’ll do with him I don’t know, but at least it’ll be out of our hands.”
“Thank God.”
After three days Sea Venture was almost back to normal; the restaurants were full, the corridors crowded and cheerful. On the fourth day, early in the morning, McNulty got a call from the security guard who was watching Cooke’s room on television. Cooke appeared to be in convulsions.
With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, McNulty went there with a nurse and opened the room. The nurse was the first one to reach the patient. McNulty knelt beside her, got the man’s jaw open to make sure he wasn’t biting his tongue. When he looked up, the nurse was on her feet, swaying a little. She took two steps toward the door, then fell like a tree. Before he could call out, McNulty heard another body fall in the corridor.
Cooke was dead; there was a line of victims in the hall. The horror had escaped.
31
McNulty finished out his workday, went home, took a couple of Nembutals and went to sleep. He woke up in the morning with the clear recollection of what had happened and the knowledge that he could no longer call himself fit to practice medicine. He had broken the oldest rule in the book: “The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of my patients according to my ability and judgment, and not for their hurt or any wrong.”
He discovered that the knowledge of his guilt was only what he had always suspected. If this had been Santa Barbara, he could have walked out the door, but it wasn’t. For better or worse, McNulty was the only medical doctor on Sea Venture, and there were still things he had to do. He made up his mind that he would do them to the best of his ability—brilliantly, if possible—and then he would try to figure out what, if anything, was left of his life.
Cooke’s body was on ice down in a corner of the freezer section. His family had been notified. They had been offered the option of a burial at sea, if they so desired, but they wanted the body shipped home. By rights there would be an inquiry. He was guilty of malpractice, or of murder if you looked at it that way, but the worst thing he was guilty of, the thing he could not forgive himself, was stupidity.
On the following day he began a systematic effort to locate and interview all the recovered patients. Jamal A. Marashi, the man who had struck his wife, was a Malaysian living in the United States. He seemed to McNulty an entirely selfish person; his grievances against his wife took up most of the conversation. McNulty put him down as inconclusive; for all he knew, Marashi had been exactly the same before his illness.
Luis Padilla, the steward, was another matter. At first he seemed very much at ease; he denied that he had taken any jewelry from Mr. and Mrs. Emerton, and pointed out that his record was unblemished.
“Mr. Padilla,” McNulty said, “I’m a medical man, not a policeman. I don’t care whether you took that stuff or not. What I’m trying to find out is, what does this disease do to people? Could you just tell me, did you feel any different after you got well? We won’t talk about the jewels at all.”
Padilla shifted uneasily. “Different? Well, maybe a little different.”
“Could you tell me how?”
“Well, you know, how I think about things.”
“Yes?”
Padilla seemed to make up his mind. “Doctor, you know, I am a Filipino. Our country was conquered by your country a hundred years ago. First your country says after they drive the Spaniards away, they will give us our independence. Then they change their minds, no, the Philippines is our country now. Our national hero, Aguinaldo, you have heard of him?”
“No,” said McNulty. “I’m sorry.”
Padilla smiled. “He was the leader of the independence movement. He fought many battles. The U.S. government defeated him only by treachery.”
“I see,” McNulty said. “So you feel differently now about Americans?”
“Not about you, Doctor,” said Padilla politely. “I think you are a good man. But I know what Americans did to my country, and I think it is important for us to have pride.”
“And you started thinking this way after you got well?”
“Yes.” Padilla shrugged and smiled. “You want to know, why not before? I don’t know why. I think maybe I listened too long to people who say, keep in your place. Remember the Americans are the boss. I don’t know, but I believe the way I think now is better.”
Mrs. Morton Tring turned up with the friend, Alice Gortmacher, with whom she had been staying since she left her husband. Mrs. Tring was a handsome woman in her early fifties; Ms. Gortmacher was smaller, darker and more intense. “If you think,” she said, “you’re going to get Susan to go back to that man, you’re very much mistaken.”
“No, no,” said McNulty, “that isn’t it at all. Believe me, Mrs. Tring—”
“Ms. Coleman,” she said; “I’m taking my maiden name back.”
“Ms. Coleman, then. I’m just interested to know if you experienced any change of feelings after you were ill. Did your outlook change, the way you look at things?”
“It certainly did,” put in Ms. Gortmacher. “She saw for the first time what a monster she was married to.”
“Is that right, Ms. Coleman?”
“Yes, well— It’s not exactly that, Alice. I mean, I knew what Mort was like, but suddenly it just seemed to me that I was staying with him for all the wrong reasons.”
“What sort of reasons?” McNulty asked.
“Well, you know, the usual things. The children. Mort’s career. What would people say, et cetera. And then, I suppose, I was afraid, too. What would happen if I divorced Mort and went off on my own? I still don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” said Ms. Gortmacher, patting her hand. “Yes, you do.”
Ms. Coleman put her hand on her friend’s. “Alice is going to take me into her business,” she said. “She’s the dearest friend I ever had, and I don’t know what I’d do without her. But even if I didn’t have Alice, I’d do the same thing—I’d leave Mort.”
“Can you tell me what it was that changed your mind about that?”
She hesitated. “Well, this may sound silly, but I woke up one morning, a few days after I got well, and Mort was snoring, and I just asked myself, what am I doing here? And I looked at all the reasons, and they weren’t good enough. So I got up and got dressed, and called Alice, and just went.”
“Ms. Coleman,” said McNulty, “how many married women do you suppose there are who would feel the way you do, if they just thought it over?”
She
glanced away for a moment. “Four out of five,” she said.
“More,” said Ms. Gortmacher firmly.
And, McNulty thought, she might well be right. He sympathized entirely, but what would happen to the world if the divorce rate climbed to ninety percent? If only couples who liked being together stayed together? Or if only those who knew themselves to be fitted for the practice of medicine ever became doctors?
32
Randall Geller and Yvonne Barlow, wearing dark glasses and sipping tall drinks, were lying side by side in lounge chairs near the pool, looking out across the bright ocean. Their bathing suits were almost dry. “What do you want to do next?” Barlow asked.
“Dunno. Go watch the geriatrics play shuffleboard?”
“Or sit here all day?”
“I can do with a lot of sitting here.” Geller hoisted his tall glass and drank.
“Not worried about boredom?”
“Hell, no. You know what I dreamed about last night?”
“No.”
“I dreamed I had the solution to the problem of sexuality.”
“That sounds boring.”
“It was very exciting. You know, why did bisexuality ever arise? You’ve got the Best Man theory, the Red Queen theory, the Tangled Banks theory, and none of them work. I had it all figured out, but I forgot it.”
“Maybe it was just for fun,” Barlow said lazily.
“Well, why not? Pleasure is a survival factor—if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have it.”
“There’s a circular argument if I ever heard one. Do you think a spider gets a kick from building a web?”
“No opinion,” said Geller.
“Well, if you were going to design a machine to build webs, would you put pleasure into the circuit or not?”
“Oh, God.”
“No, you wouldn’t, because number one it wouldn’t be necessary, and number two you wouldn’t know how to do it, and number three if you did do it, it would be counterproductive. A spider that built webs for kicks might get bored and quit. Spiders just go ahead and build them.”
“Uh-huh. You remember the elevator operator in Brave New World?” Geller mimicked a voice trembling with ecstasy: “ ‘Up, up!’” Then misery and despair. “ ‘Down—down!’”
“So when was the last time you saw an elevator operator?”
“Um.”
They sat in peaceful silence; then Barlow said, “You ever know anybody who was rich?”
“No.”
“I did—a girl I went to school with. Her parents left her umpty million dollars.”
“What’s her address?”
“She wouldn’t look at you twice,” Barlow said. “Anyway, okay, she’s been married three times, she doesn’t have to do a thing she doesn’t want to do, and she’s really a failed human being. Can you imagine life as one long birthday party? She knows she blew it, and she doesn’t know what to do about that, and she’s very unhappy.”
“Tough,” said Geller. “That’s very tough.”
“Sure it is. Suppose you didn’t want to do anything except watch television and go to football games?”
“Paradise,” said Geller.
There was a buzz from Barlow’s beach bag. She reached over, extracted the phone. “Hello, Doctor.”
The phone quacked at her.
“Who else would be calling us?… We could, but we probably won’t… If you want to talk, why don’t you come up here? We’re at the Sports Deck pool… Come up if you want to.” She put the phone away.
“Now why did you do that?” said Geller.
“Why not? Good for your boredom.”
McNulty showed up a few minutes later, interrupting a spirited argument. “Good old Doc,” said Geller. “Sit down, have a drink.”
“Not during working hours, thanks,” said McNulty, pulling over a web chair. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it? I can’t remember the last time— Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you, I’ve been interviewing some of the other recovered patients, and there’s a pattern, all right. Marriages breaking up. People leaving their jobs. I keep thinking, maybe the parasite doesn’t know what it’s doing to us. If only we could talk to it.”
“Well,” said Barlow thoughtfully, “you know, we can. That’s not the problem. Look, we’re assuming the thing is intelligent and it understands what we say. So we can talk to it all we want to; the only thing is, it can’t talk to us, or won’t.”
“Which is it?” McNulty asked. “Randy?”
Geller shifted restlessly in his chair. “How the hell do I know?”
“While you were infected—”
“Infested,” Geller muttered.
“—did you ever feel that your actions were being controlled in any way?”
“Are you kidding?” Geller got up, his face set.
“Randy,” said Barlow.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Do it for me. This is interesting. Come on.”
Geller sat down sulkily. “It’s all bullshit.”
“What he means is, the answer is no.”
“I can tell him what I mean, Yvonne.”
“So tell him.”
“The answer is no,” said Geller. “Not just maybe or perhaps or a little bit. I know that for sure, because while I had the parasite, I did just what I would have done anyway. Look, use your brain. Here you are, you’re a thing from another planet or God knows where, and you’ve never seen people before, or walls, or toothpicks, or coffee cups. If you could control the person you’re in, what would you do? You’d walk it around and look at everything. If you could make a person talk, you’d ask questions. Then you’d have your wish.”
“He means you could have a conversation with it,” Barlow said. “And he’s right. As far as I can tell, I didn’t do or say a thing that I wouldn’t have said on an ordinary day. So I think we’re justified in assuming, the way we have before, that if the thing doesn’t do something, it’s because it can’t.”
“Would you both agree,” McNulty asked delicately, “that your attitudes changed after the parasite left you?”
“Sure.”
“Yvonne, you too?”
“Of course. I suddenly saw I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do with my life, so I quit.”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
“I want to have some fun, and find out things, and do something that makes sense.”
“Okay. But you know it must have been the parasite that changed your mind.”
“True.”
“And you like that.”
“Sure, I like it.”
“Don’t you have to ask youself—being objective, now—if you would have liked the idea of having your mind changed, if you’d known it was going to happen?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Geller broke in. “Come on, you know you can’t argue that one way or the other. Either we’re crazy now or we were dumb before. I say we were dumb before.”
“So you think the thing did you a favor?”
“A favor?” said Geller. “Maybe.” He gnawed a fingernail. “Interesting question. Might be just a by-product of the parasite-host relationship. Or maybe it’s a symbiote, not a parasite—it gives you something for what it gets, like the bacteria in your gut.”
Barlow was nodding. “I think that’s right.”
“So you’d definitely say it doesn’t intend us harm, basically?”
“Right.”
“Even though it makes everything fall apart?”
“What do you mean by everything?”
“Well, the marine lab, for instance. You both walked off your jobs. What would happen if everybody walked off their jobs?”
“I don’t give a damn about their stupid jobs. Look, McNulty, I know you think I’m a brainwashed idiot, but that’s your problem. Take a good look at the things people do for a living and ask yourself how many of them are worth doing. How many people go through their whole goddamn lives screwing part A onto part B?”
&n
bsp; “So you think the best thing to do would be to spread this around? Let the parasite get onto the mainland?”
“No.”
McNulty glanced at Barlow, then leaned back and folded his hands. “Now, isn’t there a little bit of contradiction there?”
“Think, McNulty. The system works because most people are dumb. That doesn’t mean I have to be dumb.”
“I see. And you don’t feel any obligation to help make the system work? Even though you’re in trouble if it doesn’t?” “No. The system will probably collapse. We’ll get a new system. It might be a better one.”
Next morning Emily Woodruff was wheeled into the hospital annex; she had collapsed in the Quarter Deck Breakfast Shop. McNulty looked at her and wondered if that was coincidence. Had the parasite deliberately sought her out, so they couldn’t play that trick again?
33
In the name of the emergency, and with a sense of profound relief, Bliss had canceled all his formal entertainments, but the curious result was that time hung heavy on his hands in the evenings. In the ample space of his living room, intended for jolly cocktail parties of thirty or more, he felt himself isolated, almost imprisoned. He could not invite any of the VIP passengers without having to listen to their complaints all over again, and as for the staff, he saw all he wanted of them during the day. The only ones he could talk to were Dr. McNulty, who as a professional man did not exactly come under the heading of staff, and Captain Hartman, who was neither staff nor passenger.
After dinner that night in Bliss’s suite, McNulty told them about his interviews with the recovered patients, particularly Geller and Barlow. “As far as I can make out,” he said, “the only principle they recognize is what you might call more or less enlightened self-interest. They’re intelligent young people, and they’re not exactly antisocial, but they just don’t see the point of supporting a system they think is cockeyed.”