by Damon Knight
Through McNulty, also, he had gained insight into the characters of the other rulers of Sea Venture, particularly Bliss and Bernstein. Bliss was a conscientious and unimaginative man, an administrator. Bernstein, by far the strongest personality in the ruling circle, had nearly been the death of him. He had considered taking them both if he could, but he had concluded that it would be foolish to put them out of action, since they would be replaced by others about whom he knew nothing. Furthermore, the engineer Jacobs represented a possible threat which must be investigated.
As they got up to leave, he saw his opportunity and slipped out, across to the man waiting his turn at the doorway and in again, and the startlement and confusion crashed in around him as the body fell to the floor and someone else tripped over it.
“My God, it’s Dr. McNulty!” said Bliss’s voice. “Mr. Skolnik too?”
“No, I’m all right,” said Skolnik, getting to his feet. “But I think he’s got it.”
“How is that possible?” said somebody.
“Mr. Seaver, call the hospital, please, get a litter up here.”
“Do you want me, Chief?” said Jacobs.
“No, that’s all right.” Jacobs and one or two others walked out.
“Do you realize,” Arline Truman was saying, “that this means the parasite was in Dr. McNulty all the time we were talking? It knows every single thing we said.”
A horrid thought came into Bliss’s mind. He said loudly, “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please all move away from one another? Get out of the doorway, if you will, back into the room… that’s right, thank you. I’d like you to keep at least five feet away from each other. When you leave, please do so one at a time, keeping your distance.” He looked around. “Who’s missing? Taggart, Williams and Jacobs. Mr. Seaver, will you please try to get them on the phone and tell them the same thing? Tell them to stay at least five feet away from everyone.”
“What’s this for?” Skolnik asked.
“The parasite is probably in one of us at this moment. We have reason to think that it can’t travel more than four feet or so from one person to another. If the thing went from one to another of us, it could put the whole operating staff in hospital.”
Higpen said quietly to Yetta Bernstein, “We can’t go back to perm.”
“You’re right.”
“What about elevators?” Erik Seaver asked. “And restaurants? You can’t even get from one place to another in Sea Venture without coming closer than five feet to somebody.”
“In that case, don’t go out. We’ll do our conferences by phone if necessary. Do your work the same way as much as you possibly can. Have your meals in your rooms, and be sure the stewards don’t come near you.”
Higpen attracted Truman’s attention. “Arline, Yetta and I think we’d better stay somewhere until this is cleared up. Can you get us a couple of rooms?”
“Yes.” She put her hand to her forehead. “Let me think. I’m not even sure I can get back to my office. All right. I’ll call them from here, get the numbers of the rooms, and I’ll have somebody open them and leave the keys inside.”
“Thank you.”
“All right, then,” said Bliss, “if there are no more questions, will you please leave one at a time? As soon as we know where we are, I’ll notify all of you.”
Jacobs went into his office, feeling shaken up. The thing had never attacked a staff member before, and he had unconsciously assumed that it wouldn’t. He sat down, put his feet up on his desk, and began to think about Bliss’s idea for a Buck Rogers gun. Electrical fields, radio hash, no problem, just an unshielded motor—a drill would do, and he could use the grip and trigger for the rest of the stuff. Diagrams went through his head. Ultrasonics, maybe not—they had an ultrasound generator in the fishery, but it was too big. Ultraviolet, though…
And as the observer absorbed his knowledge, he saw that none of the things Jacobs was planning could harm him. He had thought as much, but it was important to be sure. When the steward came in with the lunch cart, he slipped out again and watched as Jacobs toppled silently to the floor.
40
After Jacobs, no more of the staff were attacked. Bliss kept up the five-foot rule just the same; it was a nuisance, almost unenforceable, but he could not see what else to do. Patients were still coming in to the hospital annex, five or six a day. About half of them were stewards, and the problem there was serious. Some of the remaining stewards were flatly refusing to work, and Skolnik had been forced to offer them stupendous bonuses.
The horrifying thing was that the parasite had got off the lifeboat in spite of all their precautions. If it could do that, then perhaps everything they thought they knew about it was false. Bliss realized for the first time how much they had all depended on McNulty. Now there was nobody to take the strain but Bliss himself, and he alone knew how inadequate he was.
He saw very clearly that his failure might mean the collapse of civilization. It was all very well to say that bad behavior was due to irrational instincts, but if it weren’t for instincts nobody would do anything at all. Nations would break down, the family would break down— Who would get married and have children, for instance, if they were guided only by reason?
So he had to find the way to eliminate the parasite. He knew there must be a way, but although he squeezed his brain like a damp sponge, for the life of him he couldn’t see what it was.
After Emily got out of the hospital, the world began to seem very strange. Things around her were less frightening and at the same time, in some indefinable way, less interesting. The lifeboats, for example, were merely lifeboats and not wells of terror. She saw now why Jim had been so impatient with her; he could not understand why she was frightened of so many things, and now she could not understand it herself. She was not frightened of Jim, either, and that was a hard thing for both of them to get used to. He looked at her in bafflement sometimes, as if she were a stranger. They were extraordinarily polite to each other. She saw that in a way he missed the old Emily, because that Emily had needed him.
No matter where they went, she never heard the sound of the grocery cart now, and she knew it was gone forever. It was as if a kind of vacuum cleaner had taken the fuzz out of her brain. And she was grateful for that, but she saw now that her fears and delusions had been all she had. Sometimes lying awake at night she tried to summon one of them up again like a familiar old ache. But they were gone, and she didn’t know who she was.
Phil and Rodney Thurston were twins, eighteen years old, red-haired and green-eyed. Phil was the taller one; Rodney was a little heavier and rounder-faced. They were traveling with their father; their mother was dead. The trip, their father said, was a reward for their having graduated from the Stowe School without disgrace and having successfully crammed for Harvard. Phil and Rodney would have preferred a month in Paris, or even Denver. Half the time they walked around with SeeMan headgear on, watching the frantic images on the screen and listening to the earphones. They went to plays and concerts with their father when they had to—the old man was a bear on culture—and commented politely, because if they didn’t he would go into his berserk mode. To each other, in moments of privacy, they said, “Bor-ing.”
When their father collapsed in the Sports Deck Lounge and was carried away to hospital, things began to look up. The new atmosphere of Sea Venture was exciting, and it was wonderful to be absolutely free. At first they only stayed up all night and got drunk on whisky. Later they tried other things.
A branch whipped at his eyes as he stood up, and he jerked away with a feeling of anger and resentment, as if it was somebody’s fault that he hadn’t seen the branch, or had misjudged the distance. It was the kind of feeling that made you go down to City Hall and complain. What was he sore about, that his eyes wouldn’t focus that close? And where was that anyway, in the woods behind his parents’ house, or where?—and when had it happened? It was gone, just that little bit complete in itself but with nothing before or after.
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“Put it down over there,” her voice said. “It” was a stoneware jug, sweating cold, and “there” was an enamel-topped table in the potting shed. That was all, a crisp little bit of memory or desire—it could have happened, they had spent a lot of time in that potting shed, but he did not recognize it, had never thought it important enough to save, and he had no idea what came on either side of it. He spoke her name, trying to bring her back, to turn around so he could see her, and at the same time he knew that was all there was: just the coolness of the white jug in his hands, and the voice, unemphatic, not laden with any message—just “Put it down over there.”
He remembered how he had thought he was prepared for Nita’s death, and more than prepared—impatient for it, as an end to her pain and his. When she died, he was unready for the depth of his grief. Grief wasn’t even the word; he did not perceive himself as grieving, or mourning: it was more as if he were trying to come to terms with some inarguable fact that made everything else meaningless.
It was only his work that had pulled him through it, and for months, even after he thought he was over it and was fooling everybody, there would be absolutely unexpected tidal waves of sorrow.
And he had been a better physician for it, after a while, and it had even occurred to him that every doctor who had to deal with people’s pain ought to have to undergo something like this himself, maybe as part of the internship. You couldn’t kill off the intern’s wife, and if he was as poor as most of them he didn’t have one anyway, but you could give him something he greatly desired and let him get used to it and then take it away. That would do something, maybe, for the habit of reducing patients to parts of the body—“this liver,” or “this melanoma,” the way so many doctors did.
He dimly knew that he was a patient himself right now, must be, this sense of floating around not quite bodiless but almost, and it had the comforting feel of being too sick to go to school when he was a kid, bundled up safe and warm in bed in the little room behind the kitchen, with his mother somewhere out there ready to bring him aspirins and tea. It was that kind of feeling of not having any problems or responsibilities, just having to be sick, which was easy and pleasant to do. And drift from one place to another.
Here now was one of those places in Disneyland or wherever it was, with green stick-people climbing around in their network of spikes the color of mole fur. Their faces weren’t human, but that didn’t bother him the way it had before, it was just interesting, and he knew it would be easier to understand them later on—“when we are all brothers and sisters.”
41
Hartman was more deeply disturbed than ever by what was happening in Sea Venture. He had seen violence before, during the London riots in the eighties, and after the Lisbon earthquake; when civil order broke down, people who were normally restrained took advantage of the opportunity to loot and break things; that was understandable. But wasn’t this something different?
Boys walking up to an elderly woman, taking her cane away and using it to break her bones. Assaults with broken Coke bottles, rapes, knifings. It was senseless, purposeless violence, as if, Hartman thought, there were some dark half-aware force in human minds that saw itself threatened, and was striking out like a wounded animal.
When the call for security volunteers went out, Hartman offered his services and was given a supervisory post on the night shift. A little before midnight of his third day, he was sitting at his desk in the corridor when he saw Hal Winter coming toward him.
“Well, we meet again,” said Hartman. He looked at the white armband on Winter’s sleeve and the nightstick in his hand.
“You, too?”
“Oh, yes. They think I’m too feeble to patrol, but they let me supervise. They’ve even given me a title, the same one I had before; that’s very nice in a way. Well, let me tell you the drill. Your section is the port side of this deck, midships forward, from Corridor A to E. Your partner should be here in a few minutes and he’ll show you the ropes. Here’s my number; you call that if there’s any trouble. Do that first. Every hour you’re allowed a ten-minute rest period here—you see I’ve got coffee, doughnuts, all the comforts of home. They’ve told you, I expect, about excessive force?”
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t take it too seriously. If there is any trouble, talk your way out of it if you can, but if you can’t, use the baton—that’s what it’s for. Had any training with the stick?”
“No.”
“Let me show you one or two things. If it’s a man with a weapon, go for the wrist, shoulder, elbow—anything to make him drop it. Or if he’s too active for that, thrust straight for the gut. The baton gives you sixteen inches reach, probably more than anything he’ll be carrying. If you hit him hard enough, you’ll paralyze his solar plexus, and he’ll be in enough pain that you shouldn’t have any trouble getting him to come along peacefully. The detention rooms are right here, down the corridor. Now say it’s a man attacking a woman. In that case I wouldn’t advise the talk method. Tap him behind the ear, like this, or on the temple, about hard enough to crush a grapefruit. Don’t be too dainty. The idea is to stun him, or knock him out, but if you happen to give him a concussion, don’t worry—better him than you. Is that all clear?”
“Yes, I hope so.” Winter smiled.
“You’re a big, strong lad; you shouldn’t have any problems. Good luck to you.”
The first time was when they were coming back from a late movie, cutting across the residential corridors to get to the elevators on the starboard side. Ahead of them was an old woman hobbling along with a cane. “Ten points,” said Rodney.
They looked at each other. Phil said, “Dare you.”
Rodney said nothing, but there was a glint in his eye. He started to walk faster. Phil hurried to keep up, suddenly excited, wondering if he would really do it.
They came up behind the old woman. As they were about to pass, Rodney reached out, grabbed the cane and pulled. “Oh!” said the old woman as she fell. Her eyes were like oysters; she was still holding onto the cane. Rodney yanked it away from her. His face was flushed, his lips bright. He raised the cane and brought it down across her knees. Then they ran, with her screams behind them.
They hid the cane behind a grandfather clock in the lounge. The next night they got another one, and then every night when they went prowling, they both had their canes.
For a while they specialized in old people, but that got boring, and one night they caught a young woman alone. They backed her into a doorway and Rodney held his cane across her throat while Phil pulled her panties down. Afterward they didn’t look at each other or speak; but three nights later they did it again.
Although the corridors of Sea Venture were strewn with paper and trash, ceiling lights broken, some TV screens blank, a curious semblance of normal life went on; the casino was closed, but the restaurants and bars were open; the only difference, aside from the litter, was that you met fewer people, and some of them were a little strange. Barlow and Geller, picking their times and places with some care, had never had any trouble; Geller looked just sufficiently large and bad-tempered to discourage interference, and Barlow carried a dissecting knife in her purse.
They were sitting in the Quarter Deck Bar one afternoon, drinking margaritas. “There’s one,” said Barlow, looking across the room. “No, both of them are.”
Geller followed the direction of her gaze. “Yeah.”
“They’re looking at us.”
“Well, why not?” Geller raised his glass and smiled.
The man was saying something to the woman. After a moment they rose and came across the lounge, carrying their drinks. “May we introduce ourselves?” said the man. “My name is John Stevens. Allow me to present Julie Prescott.”
“Sit down,” Geller said. “Randy Geller, Yvonne Barlow.” They slid over to make room.
“You are both recovered patients of the epidemic, isn’t that so?” asked Stevens.
“Number one an
d number two. The question is, how did you know?”
“I think it’s something about your faces,” Julie Prescott said. “But I really don’t know how I know—I just do.”
“Which of you was number one?” Stevens asked politely.
“I was. Down in the marine lab. McNulty thinks it was something that came out of an australite we dredged up. He also thinks it isn’t a disease, it’s an intelligent parasite.”
“And you don’t believe this?”
“Oh, yeah, I believe it too.”
“Do you work in the marine laboratory also, Ms. Barlow?”
“Yvonne. I did—we both did—but we quit.”
“I see. Because it didn’t make sense anymore?”
“That’s right.”
They looked at each other. Barlow had a curious feeling that the words themselves were unimportant.
“Do you think that is the recognition factor, then? We recognize those to whom life no longer makes sense?”
“Not life,” said Barlow. “The way we used to live.” “And how will you live now?”
Geller said, “Yvonne and I are going to set up a little private lab on the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. We can do enough commercial work to get by, and still do some real science.”
“That will not be marine science, will it, in Michigan?”
“No, but biology is biology. Yvonne is interested in schistosome dermatitis. Swimmer’s itch. It’s a parasite, maybe that’s why she likes it. What about you?”
“I’m not sure yet. I think my problem is with life in general.”
Julie said, “I’m going to paint, I think. For a year or two, anyhow, long enough to find out if I’m any good.”
“Always assuming we get off Sea Venture,” said Geller.
Stevens smiled. “Oh, we’ll get off. One way or another.”