CV

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 Obregon, 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. Trapping 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.