CV

by Damon Knight

“Yes,” said Bliss gloomily.

  He played a game with Hartman and went to bed, but did not sleep; he lay and watched the illuminated inertial guidance repeater opposite his bed. After an hour and a half the motion of the vessel was much worse. He picked up the phone.

  “Control Center.”

  “Womack, take her down to seventy feet.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Presently the motion moderated again. For there to be any at all at this depth, the waves at the surface must be a hundred feet tall. Bliss wondered where the carrier was and if it had managed to get out of the storm path.

  Down here, they were blind and deaf; the inertial guidance was all they had. Up there, it was a nightmare of wind and wave.

  Bliss was aware that he had done all that a man could, and more than he had expected of himself. And it was all for nothing, because he couldn’t isolate the parasite and he couldn’t kill it. For a long time he had clung to the unreasonable hope that Dr. McNulty would think of something when he recovered. Now he could not deceive himself any longer. In another twenty hours his supply of chemicals would run out and he would be unable to submerge; then the helicopter would land and take the passengers off: mate in one.

  At oh-five-hundred he got up, shaved and dressed, and went to the Control Center. He spoke to the security guards at the door, crossed the anteroom and went in.

  “That’s all right, Davis, you’re relieved. Go and get some sleep, or whatever you like.”

  “Sir?”

  “I said you’re relieved. Go home; that’s an order.”

  The young man stood up slowly and left the room. Bliss went and tapped the communications man on the shoulder; he looked up, raising the earphones. “You’re relieved,” Bliss said. “Go on, get out.”

  When they were both gone, Bliss locked the door and sat down for the last time in the command chair.

  Never in his professional career had he had to make a decision like this. It was not his style at all; he was an administrator, not one of your Yankee skippers quelling mutinies with a marlinspike or bringing his ship through a gale around Cape Horn. But he was squarely against it now: there were no longer two choices, only one.

  He looked at the inertial guidance display on the console. Their position was a little more than three miles due east of Rota. He waited and watched the chronometer, then pressed the buttons to bring Sea Venture to the surface.

  Great tub that she was, she would break up like a house of cards if he ran her ashore in this weather. He had a glimpse of bulkheads collapsing, water rushing down the corridors like a gray fist.

  As he waited, he felt a vague dissatisfaction, a feeling of something unfinished. It was too bad about the radio; he would have liked to try to get a call through to his wife, just to say good-bye.

  53

  As the great vessel rose, waves fell over her like mountains. She dipped and shuddered, and her massive fabric groaned. Cups fell off tables, then vases from stands. Throughout Sea Venture, people sat up in bed, gasped questions at each other. The motion of the vessel around them was like a betrayal, like an earthquake. The sounds were like nothing they had ever heard. Then the loudspeakers in the corridors came to life.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chief Bliss. We are experiencing some turbulence as a result of surfacing to avoid a submerged obstacle. We will be descending to a safe depth shortly. There is no cause for alarm, and the lifeboats will not be used. I repeat, the lifeboats will not be used. Thank you and good night.”

  Malcolm got up and began to dress.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “If I have to drown, I don’t want to do it in bed.”

  After a moment she laughed. “Come here a minute first,” she said. “You know, I never realized before how much I love you.”

  Emily and Jim sat looking at each other. Jim’s face was pale; there were beads of sweat on his forehead. “Em,” he said, “I’m sorry, you know—for everything.”

  “You don’t have to be sorry,” she said. “Maybe—”

  “What?”

  “Maybe this is a good time to forgive each other.”

  McNulty woke up with a feeling of panic. At first he did not know where he was. The room was dark except for a night-light; the bed was lurching under him, and a deep tortured sound came from the walls.

  He got up, stumbled to the light switch, and found his pants in the closet. In the corridor he met Hal Winter, his head still bandaged. “Dr. McNulty, what’s happening?”

  “Don’t know,” said McNulty. “Get me a chair, will you—I’m not sure I can walk.”

  Winter brought a powered wheelchair and helped him into it. “Where are you going?”

  “Control.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  In the anteroom they found two deputies, Ferguson and Davis, Walter Taggart, the head of engineering, several security guards, and a swarm of other people. Ben Higpen, Yetta Bernstein, and Captain Hartman entered a few moments later.

  Ferguson was talking on a telephone. After a moment he put it down and turned to McNulty. “He won’t listen,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The Chief. He’s in there with the door locked.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Ferguson got up and moved his chair to make room. “Just press the button—I’ve got the speaker on.”

  McNulty rolled his wheelchair up. “Chief, this is McNulty. Mind telling me what you’re up to?”

  “I’m sorry about this, Doctor,” said a voice, “but there’s no other way to do it. If we keep on, they’ll float us, or disable us, and take the passengers off. We haven’t a prayer of getting rid of that thing: you know it and I know it. The only way is to take it to the bottom with us. I’m really sorry. Please tell the others not to try to break in; I’m armed, and I’ll shoot if they do.”

  At Ferguson’s gesture, McNulty turned off the phone. The deputy said, “Mr. Taggart, can you get down into the controls and cut them?”

  “Not in time to do any good. I’d say force the door and take our chances. He may be bluffing about the gun.”

  “What if he isn’t? Suppose he fires a couple of shots into the control panel?” Ferguson turned on the phone again. “Chief, we’d appreciate a chance to talk about this. Will you open the door, please?”

  “Not likely. You know I’m right, all of you.”

  McNulty put his head in his hands. “He is right,” he muttered. Watery images were going through his head: the cold, and the fish lips nuzzling against his dead face…

  Suddenly he sat up. “Oh, God,” he said. “The fish!”

  “Take it easy, Doctor,” said Ferguson, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “No, no, you don’t understand— Let me talk to him.” He grabbed the phone and said, “Mr. Bliss, there’s something you don’t know.”

  “There’s a great deal I don’t know, but I expect I’ll find out shortly.”

  McNulty kept talking. “You remember, after Randy Geller collapsed, there was a three-hour period before the next person felt faint?”

  There was a pause. “No, I don’t recall. What about it?”

  “He was found beside an aquarium in the marine lab. The fish, don’t you understand—the fish!”

  There was a silence. “Are you suggesting—?”

  “That’s where it spent those three hours, it’s got to be. It doesn’t have to live in human beings. If you sink us, you won’t be killing the thing, you’ll be letting it loose.”

  After a long pause Bliss’s voice said, “Descending to one hundred feet.”

  Slowly the motion of the vessel steadied; the groaning died away. The door opened and Bliss emerged. His face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed. “Mr. Ferguson, take over,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.” Ferguson passed him with a sympathetic look, as if he wanted to say more but could not find the words. The comm person followed him in.

  Bliss sat down heavily and put his hands between his k
nees. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve made a mess of it. I knew I would.” He looked at McNulty. “We’re done for, aren’t we? There’s no way to get rid of the thing.”

  McNulty felt that it was an intolerable effort to speak. “This man needs to lie down awhile, and so do I,” he said. He turned to the nearest face. “Will you call the annex and get somebody to give him a Dalmane?”

  After that someone trundled him into the elevator and back down to the hospital bed, and in no time at all he was awake again. Janice was saying, “Doctor, how about a little breakfast?” The idea disgusted him, but he drank the orange juice, managed to get down a few spoonsful of oatmeal. Janice started to help him to the bathroom, but “I can walk,” he said gruffly, and he could.

  “Any more patients?” he asked when he got back.

  “Two last night, a broken leg and a heart attack.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Down the hall, but you’re not going there. The heart patient is recovering, I set the leg and it’s okay. You’re a patient, Doctor, and everything is under control.”

  McNulty wished it were true. “How is Bliss?” he asked.

  “All right. He called this morning to see how you were.” She went away. A few minutes later she was back, followed by Higpen and Bernstein. “Ten minutes,” she said firmly, and disappeared again.

  Higpen looked as if he had not slept, and so did Bernstein. “Doctor,” she said, “we want to talk to you about an idea, if you’re feeling strong enough.”

  “Sure,” said McNulty.

  “Maybe you remember I said this before. There is a way to get rid of this thing, if one of us is willing to die.”

  McNulty started to shake his head.

  “I’m not talking about murder, I’m talking about somebody to be a sacrifice, a scapegoat. Suppose we get a few people to agree. There wouldn’t have to be many. We’d go wherever the last victim collapsed and stay there until the parasite takes one of us.”

  “And then what?” McNulty asked.

  “Get a crate ready. A metal crate, ten feet on a side. The person, whoever it is, gets into the crate and you give them an injection.”

  “I won’t—” McNulty started to say.

  “Wait a minute, let me finish. We put some kind of a framework inside the crate to hold the person in the middle. And then we lower the crate to the bottom of the ocean. The person dies painlessly; the parasite can’t get out, and the fish can’t get in. Now tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  “It won’t work,” said McNulty wearily. “If these folks know what they’re going to do, the parasite will know too, and it’ll get away like it did before.”

  “Could you hypnotize them, so they wouldn’t know?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  Bernstein took a deep breath. Her eyes filled suddenly, and tears began to trickle down her cheeks. “Well, if we have to kill somebody who isn’t a volunteer—” she said in a tight, high voice.

  “Scapegoat,” said Higpen suddenly. “Yetta, remember the goat in the King Neptune ceremony?”

  “Sure I do. What about it?”

  “Dressed in a suit, riding in a cart? What if we could get the thing to go into a goat?”

  They looked at each other, then at McNulty. “Might work,” he said, and felt a trickle of excitement. “The thing has never seen a goat, is that right?”

  “Yes, because we kept it out of perm. Do you think, if we dressed it up in a suit again—?”

  “My gosh, I just remembered something.” McNulty sat up straight. “When this thing first started, we were getting a run of patients that looked unusual some way—dress, or skin color. That might have been just because the thing noticed the difference, and was curious.”

  After a moment Bernstein said, “Come on.” Her jaw was set. Higpen followed her out the door.

  They went to look at the goats, then talked to Miriam Schofelt, who had been the chairperson of the King Neptune Committee this year. She still had the suit they had used, a paper one made by Mrs. Omura, jacket, collar and tie all in one piece. They called Dan Taggart in engineering and explained what they wanted.

  “I don’t know about a metal crate,” Taggart said. “Even aluminum, that’ll corrode away after a while. I’d say the best thing would be to use a wooden crate and fill it with concrete, if we had any.”

  “I’ve got about a hundred bags of mix in the store,” Higpen said. “Is that enough?”

  “Guess so. What mix?”

  “Some of it’s one-two-four, some one-one-two.”

  “Sounds good to me. How big a crate, did you say?”

  54

  Down at the end of the lobby, people were gathering around someone who had just come in. Curious, she went that way. The watcher inside her was intrigued to notice that the center of the crowd was a black-and-white goat, dressed in a gray suit and tie, sitting in a cart. It was clear from her host’s reactions that this was an amusing sight, but she was not quite sure why. The relationship between human beings and the other species on their planet was something she had never clearly understood. The goat was considered an inferior animal, but if this one was dressed like a human, did that imply that some goats had a higher status?

  As soon as she was near enough, she slipped out, across the fuzzy void and in again, feeling the alien body slump as she entered. She had just time to realize that the goat was indeed a lower animal, without speech or reasoning, before the needle entered her neck.

  They carried the limp body into the fishery section, where the crate was ready. The crate was partly filled with concrete; they lowered the goat into it and then poured more concrete and bolted on the top. The hoist took it out over the surging green water, lowered and released it. The crate sank and was gone, on its way to the bottom. The horror went with it.

  Both windstacks had been carried away in the storm, and there was other damage above decks; the radar dishes and antennas were gone, screens and railings broken. Sea Venture could not signal, but she floated, and at last the helicopter touched down on the landing area. Bliss was there to meet the Marines when they emerged with drawn pistols.

  “That won’t be necessary, gentlemen,” he said. “Our resistance is over; you’re free to come aboard.”

  “Who are you?” the Marine officer demanded.

  “I’m Stanley Bliss, Chief of Operations.”

  “My orders are to place you under arrest until the vessel is secured, Mr. Bliss. Will you go ahead of us, please?”

  “Certainly.”

  McNulty had been watching himself with clinical attention, waiting for alterations in his outlook, and he thought he had found some. It was a little as if all the things that were important to him were weighted parts in a Rube Goldberg machine, and the weights had shifted silently and smoothly to new positions. They were all still there, but their relationships were different. His view of the universe seemed perfectly coherent, and he was comfortable with it; in fact, it seemed to him that he was viewing things more sensibly and rationally than he had before. It was funny to be seeing the situation from the inside, and even funnier that it didn’t seem to make any difference that he had been expecting it.

  To begin with, he was not sorry that he was a doctor, and he meant to continue in the practice of his profession if he could get away with it, but he didn’t feel the same way about the rules and conventions. He had a feeling that he had been doing a lot of things just to touch base or protect himself against malpractice suits, not especially for the benefit of the patient, and not doing some other things that might have been helpful. He was discovering in himself a sudden curiosity about herbal cures, for example, and psychosomatic stuff that he had dismissed as pseudoscience. Maybe it was pseudoscience, but did that matter, if it worked?

  After consultation with the carrier, it was decided that two hundred passengers would be taken off now, the rest later when Bluefields was joined by two more carriers. Sea Venture, now far off her course, would be assisted by tugs to re
ach Manila. After that Bliss was not sure what would happen. Probably they would try to fit new windstacks there in order to get the vessel back to her home port in San Francisco. It was doubtful that Sea Venture would ever cruise again; the best thing might be to break her up for scrap.

  As for himself, he was more or less scrap too. He might have to face criminal charges in the States, and there would certainly be civil suits as well. If he got through all that, it was still doubtful that Cunard would take him back. He could perhaps get a job managing a hotel inland somewhere. That would suit him very well.

  On their last night together, Bliss, Bernstein, Higpen, Hartman, Winter, and McNulty had a late dinner. “I must say I’m proud of the lot of you,” said Hartman. “If there’s any justice, you’ll all go down in the history books. Even if not, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve met and defeated the greatest threat humanity has faced in a hundred thousand years.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to you. May you live and prosper.”

  “Now I suppose we’ll never know what might have happened, if it had gone the other way,” said Winter. “It’s a shame we didn’t find out more when we had the opportunity.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, well, for instance—how does the thing reproduce?”

  McNulty looked startled. “Good question. Maybe it’s just as well none of the passengers were pregnant.”

  About twelve hundred of the passengers were taken off by helicopter, over a three-day period, and transported after further delays to Guam; the rest elected to stay with Sea Venture to Manila. The vessel seemed emptier and older than she was; there was a curious sense of decayed majesty in her lobbies and corridors, as if she were an ancient hotel about to be torn down. Some of the passengers became quite sentimental in their loyalty, and spoke with scorn of those who had “left the sinking ship.”

  Tugs warped the battered hull into Manila Harbor on a May afternoon. The sky was cloudless, the air hot and moist. Jim and Emily Woodruff went down the ramp together, her hand tucked into his arm. “It’ll be good to get home,” Jim said.