CV

by Damon Knight

  The lottery was Skolnik’s idea, improved on and elaborated by Jim Islip, the entertainment director. “It isn’t enough to appeal to their civic duty,” he said. “Don’t misunderstand me, there are a lot of good people here, and they’ll volunteer. But that’s grim, and we don’t want to be grim. Let’s do it this way—we’ll hold a drawing every afternoon in the forward Main Deck lobby, televised all over the vessel, with cash prizes for the winners. They’ll get baskets of fruit and flowers delivered to their staterooms, and we’ll post their names and photographs, and publish them in the Journal, and believe me, we’ll get more people signing up that way than we would by telling them it’s their duty.”

  “How much cash?” Erik Seaver wanted to know.

  “For these people, it’ll have to be substantial or it won’t mean anything. I’d say two thousand dollars for the first name drawn, fifteen hundred for the second, a thousand for the third, then five hundred apiece for all the rest.”

  “You’re talking about seven thousand a day,” Seaver said.

  “I know it, but this isn’t a time to count pennies. The lottery has to work, and more than that, we’ve got to improve morale—make people see this as a kind of fun thing. If we don’t, we’re going to lose more than seven thousand a day just in vandalism.”

  Then there was a discussion about the recovered patients. “I see a problem here,” McNulty said. “So far, nobody has ever been infected twice. Now, I don’t know what that means. It could mean just that the parasite has so many people to choose from, there’s no reason for it to take the same host a second time. But it could mean that it can’t take a person twice, because of acquired immunity, or for some other reason that we don’t know.”

  “What’s the difference?” Bernstein asked.

  “Well, it could happen that we’ll wind up with recovered patients on the lifeboat, and they’ll be stuck there. We can’t take them off, because we still don’t know if the parasite can reinfect them or not, and if they can’t get off by getting infected, how do they get off?”

  “What about just excusing them from the drill in the first place?”

  “I’d be afraid to risk it. If we leave them on board, and it turns out that the parasite is in one of them, we’d have to start all over.”

  “We’ve got the same problem, only more so,” said Schaffer, “with the rest of the people we leave on board. My kitchen people, security, et cetera, including all of us here.”

  “Let’s take one problem at a time,” Bliss said. “About the recovered patients, Doctor, I think I see a solution. After we find out which lifeboat the parasite is aboard, we clear out all the rest. The lifeboats are in pairs, two opening from each bay. We can seal off that bay satisfactorily, I think, and then transfer any recovered patients into the next boat. As soon as the next person collapses, we’ll know where we are, and then we can let the recovered patients go. Mr. Young?”

  “I can run you up a good sturdy barrier,” said the carpentry chief. “Put a door in it, and a lock on the door. No problem there.”

  “Good. Any problem with security; then, Mr. Lundgren?”

  “No, with a barrier there’s no reason we can’t handle it.”

  “All right, now about the rest of us, I think that’s a bit simpler. Let’s agree that we’ll go on drill alert at fifteen hundred hours in two days’ time, but the drill won’t be announced until you tell me, Doctor, that you’ve just had a fresh victim. If, by any bad luck, anyone on the reserve list happened to be in the same corridor or lobby as the victim, we’ll make a last-minute substitution. Does that seem satisfactory to all of you? Good; then will you all please make up reserve lists, with standbys noted, and have them on my desk by oh nine hundred tomorrow?”

  Really, Bliss thought afterward, he had handled that rather well. It was just possible that he was going to get through this without disgracing himself.

  37

  When Norman Yeager got up the next afternoon, he found a flimsy in his tray about a new lifeboat assignment. He knew from the number that it was a passenger lifeboat; now why was that?

  He sat down at his terminal, accessed the main computer, and looked over the lifeboat lists; then he called Bliss’s secretary.

  “Bunny, it’s Norm Yeager. Why are you fooling around with the lifeboat assignments all of a sudden, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “There’s going to be a special drill,” said Bunny. “Something to do with the parasite. Keep it under your hat.”

  “Oh. All right.” Idly he called up the lifeboat lists again and looked at the people he was going to be with: nobody special, and nobody he knew. Next he searched for Claiborne, Mr. and Mrs. Malcolm. They were in Lifeboat Thirty-one. Back to the lists, and he plucked out a name at random, M. Shanigar, and substituted his own. Then, to tidy up, he put M. Shanigar in the other lifeboat, the one where he was supposed to be. It would make a little confusion when Mr. S. got to Lifeboat Thirty-one, but never mind. At least he would get to see Mrs. Claiborne again, perhaps even to say a few words.

  He really wanted no more than that, just the chance to sit down and have a talk with her, the good talk they had missed having in his room because she was so tired. He couldn’t even claim that he knew her, and yet he felt that he really did: he knew the sweetness and gentleness in her, the deep enduring qualities her husband had never seen. He had watched the two of them together, after she got out of the hospital. Her husband was a gross physical presence, heavy and thick and stinking of tobacco: how could she stay with him? Sometimes he imagined her saying, “Only you can save me.” And he knew that he would; he would carry her off to a mountaintop and they would live there highly and nobly, with his sword between them when they lay down at night.

  And he knew at the same time that these were only imaginings, that she was a married woman with responsibilities somewhere, maybe even children; a house, friends he had never met, an occupation, the thousand details of a life. And even knowing all this, he longed for just the chance to speak to her, to hear her say, “You can help me.” Because it was possible that she really wanted to get away from that man—how could she not?—and even if she only said, “Hide me,” or “Please lend me some money,” or anything, it would be a joy to him, yes, even if he knew he would never see her again.

  The boat drill took place at three-thirty. A few people were drunk in their staterooms, or elsewhere, and did not attend. There were other problems, too: the manager of the Promenade Theater had not received word, or had forgotten, and had failed to turn off his screen. Thirty people had to be rounded up from the theater, but by that time it didn’t matter: the parasite had been found.

  From his seat in the middle of Lifeboat Thirty-one, the fat man watched with interest as the steward called the roll. He remembered being in a lifeboat before, but he had not been paying much attention then. The lifeboat, evidently, was a small vessel which could be released from the bigger one in an emergency. Was there any possibility that an emergency would occur while he was aboard it?

  “Mr. Eller?”

  “Here,” he answered.

  The passengers opposite him were mostly prosperous-looking middle-aged Americans. There was one younger couple, holding hands, and farther down in the row there was a still younger man, unusually dressed.

  The steward was explaining the features of the lifeboat and what would happen in the event of an emergency. The fat man was not looking in that direction, and could not see the control panel; hoping for a better view, he slipped out, across the fuzzy space, and in again so deftly now that she felt almost no disorientation as the fat man’s weight slumped against her and then rolled to the floor.

  People were standing up to look. The steward, aided by a man with a white armband, rolled the fat man over and loosened his collar. Then the steward returned to the front of the boat. “Please take your seats, ladies and gentlemen!” he called.

  The lifeboat door opened and a rope flew through the opening. The steward picked it up, pulled
on it; a bed on wheels came rolling in. “May I have some assistance?” he asked. Two men came forward; with the steward and the security guard, they lifted the man’s body and got it onto the bed. They wheeled the bed up to the front. The steward spoke on the phone again; the door opened, the steward threw out the rope. Presently the wheeled bed, with the fat man on it, rolled through the doorway and disappeared.

  The steward turned. “Ladies and gentlemen, I can now inform you that this boat drill has been held for a special purpose. The purpose is to isolate the carrier of the epidemic, in order to allow the other passengers to resume their normal activities. As you know, the disease is quite harmless—”

  “Wait a minute,” called a white-haired woman. “Are you saying that we’re all quarantined on this boat?”

  “That is unfortunately the case. However, this merely means that each of us, including myself, will be here until they become ill, and then we will spend ten days in the hospital receiving the best of care.”

  There were other voices, but she hardly heard them. It was clear now that she had made an unforgivable mistake: she had underestimated her opponents.

  Was it possible that they were now prepared to let one of their number die in order to be rid of her? If so, her destiny had turned, all in that single unsuspecting moment when she had walked into the lifeboat; the game was lost, her death certain, her children unborn.

  38

  The steward spoke on the phone again, then turned and faced the passengers.

  “Mrs. Claiborne?”

  “Here,” said the young woman opposite.

  The steward came and bent over her. “May I see your ID, please?” He took the cards she handed him, examined them carefully. “Will you please come with me?”

  “I’m sorry, what is this for?”

  “You are being released, because you have already had the disease. You will be taken to quarantine in another lifeboat, and then when we are sure that the disease carrier is still here, you will be free to go.”

  She looked at her husband. “Malcolm, I don’t want to leave you here alone.”

  “No, you must go,” he said, pressing her hand. “There’s no point in both of us being cooped up; don’t turn martyr on me again, will you?”

  She smiled. “All right, I’ll try not to. See you soon.”

  The steward led her to the front of the boat. The door opened and a gray-haired man walked in. At the steward’s nod, Mrs. Claiborne walked out. The door closed.

  “Steward, may I ask what is happening?” an old woman demanded.

  “Yes, madam. Mrs. Claiborne has been released because she has already had the disease. This gentleman is a volunteer, to replace the gentleman who became ill. Each of us who becomes ill will be replaced in this way, and so you see, we will all be able to leave the lifeboat very shortly.”

  Now their strategy was clear, and she admired it for the ingenious way it circumvented their taboo against killing. It was evident, moreover, from the lengths they had gone to, that they were not willing to sacrifice one of their number. Therefore her response must be to show that their strategy could not succeed. When they realized that, they would have to release her along with the rest of the passengers. But what if they did not?

  The steward was passing, and she slipped out and across and in, so smoothly that he did not notice until he heard the woman’s body fall to the floor. He knelt and straightened her out, pulled down her skirt. Her pulse was steady and slow. It was interesting, the steward thought, how stupid and ugly people invariably looked when they were unconscious.

  Yeager had to get out, and he thought he knew a way to do it. If he fell over, seemed to collapse, and if he didn’t move, not for anything, they would take him out on a litter. Then he could “recover” when he got to the infirmary, and once he was out, there would be no reason to put him back in again. And he would find her sitting in a restaurant, or in a deck chair by the pool, and he would say, smiling, “May I join you?”

  He closed his eyes, let his body go limp. He was careful to twist a little as he went down, so that he struck the floor on his shoulder and rolled over onto his back. He lay there, schooling himself to breathe slowly, and listened to the voices around him.

  The steward hurried back down the aisle. His curiosity was aroused: there was something odd about the appearance of the young man on the floor—he did not look ill, or even unconscious; he looked like someone pretending to be asleep. In the act of kneeling, he slipped out once more and in again, and when he heard the body fall beside him, he was so startled that he almost opened his eyes.

  After a long time he felt himself lifted and placed on a litter. He was being rolled up the aisle; then there was a wait. The door opened. “Two of them this time,” said a voice a little distance away.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it’s going faster, anyhow.”

  The litter moved again, swung around, halted. He heard another door opening. He concentrated on being limp, not giving in to the temptation to look through his eyelashes. Now they were going into an elevator; the door closed, the elevator was moving. Now he was being wheeled down a long hall. Another door. “Two this time!” said a female voice. “Oh, Dr. McNulty!”

  Another presence was bending over him. “Get the tube into that one, will you, Terri?” said the voice. “Something funny about this one—”

  And he slipped out through the fuzzy space and in again, and as he bent over the patient he could see that he had been mistaken; the young man was in a typical stupor, eyes half-closed, breathing almost imperceptibly. He must be cracking up, thought Dr. McNulty.

  39

  Nothing more happened on the lifeboat for the rest of the day. At the staff meeting in the morning, McNulty said, “There’s no use speculating, but what bothers me is that the thing may be deliberately holding back. Staying in one host until the victim dies.”

  “Can it do that?” asked Higpen.

  “It did once before.”

  “I don’t see what it would gain,” said Arline Truman. There were faint brown semicircles under her eyes.

  “Well, if it killed another person, we’d have to take the rest of them out of there.”

  “But what if we didn’t? Then it would be stuck on the lifeboat.”

  “We’d have to,” said McNulty. His face was grim.

  “All right, but it doesn’t know that. Maybe it’s trying to bluff us.”

  “As you say, Doctor, there’s not much use in speculating,” said Bliss. “It may be a war of nerves. When it sees that we don’t flinch, it will change hosts again and then we’ll go on with the volunteers as we planned.”

  “Yes, and then what?” Bernstein wanted to know. “Mr. Bliss, I didn’t get much sleep last night. I was thinking, what if this plan works—what then?”

  “It gives us a breathing space.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “I know it isn’t. Doctor, have you had any luck with the drug idea?”

  “No.”

  “What drug idea is that?” Bernstein demanded.

  “Oh, just a thought. We wondered if there might be some common drug that would keep the parasite from invading anyone.”

  “The sample is too small,” McNulty said. “So far I haven’t found anybody who was under the influence of marijuana or barbiturates, or half a dozen other things, but that doesn’t prove anything.”

  “What about dosing the volunteers before they go in?” Truman asked.

  “Worth trying, maybe. There are thousands of drugs.”

  Bernstein said, “I want you to look at this. What if the drugs don’t work, what if nothing works? Then there’s only one way we’re going to kill that parasite, and that’s to kill the person it’s in.”

  McNulty was shaking his head.

  “Throw him overboard,” said Bernstein. “Right down to the bottom of the sea.”

  “We can’t do that,” said McNulty almost inaudibly.

  “Maybe we can’t do anythin
g else,” said Bernstein. “We’re going to have to face this sooner or later, and it might as well be now.”

  “Mrs. Bernstein, let’s not exaggerate. Doctor, I had another thought—what about the period when the parasite is between hosts? Something like a crab out of its shell. Do you suppose it might be vulnerable then?”

  McNulty stroked his chin. “Vulnerable to what?” he said. “Electrical fields, maybe?”

  “Yes, something like that. Mr. Jacobs, could you rig up some sort of gadget?”

  “Sure, if I know what you want.”

  “Well, more or less a little of everything. Electrical fields, ultrasound, radio frequencies, anything you can think of.”

  “It will look like some kind of Buck Rogers gun,” said Jacobs, grinning.

  “All right, but if it turns the trick, we won’t mind. Is there anything else? Any other suggestions? Until tomorrow, then.”

  The observer was delighted with this unique opportunity to observe McNulty, the man who was charged with caring for his former hosts, and he was interested by the dim, distorted image of himself as McNulty imagined him. He admired the doctor for his humility, his lack of self-deception, and his deep anguish at having caused the death of a patient; these qualities gave his personality a flavor which the observing mind found deeply satisfying.