The Kindly Isle

IV

My remaining business with Dick Kavilan didn't take long. By the time Edna's tour group was scheduled to go home, I was ready, too.

The two of us decided not to wait for the bus to the airport. We went early, by taxi, beating the tours to the check-in desk. By the time the first of them arrived we were already sitting at the tiny bar, sipping farewell piña coladas. Only it was not going to be a farewell, not when I had discovered she lived only a few miles from the house I had kept all these years as home base.

When the tour buses began to arrive I could not resist preening my forethought a little. "That's going to be a really ugly scene, trying to check in all at once," I said wisely.

But really it wasn't. There were all the ingredients for a bad time, more than three hundred tired tourists trying to get seat assignments from a single airline clerk. But they didn't jostle. They didn't snarl, at her or each other. The tiny terminal was steamy with human bodies, but it almost seemed they didn't even sweat. They were singing and smiling—even Edna's sister and brother-in-law. They waved up at us, and it looked like their marriage had a good shot at lasting a while longer, after all.

A sudden gabble from the line of passengers told us what the little callboard confirmed a moment later. Our airplane had arrived from the States. Edna started to collect her bag, her sack of duty-free rum, her boots and fur-collared coat for the landing at Dulles, her little carry-on with the cigarettes and the book to read on the flight, her last-minute souvenir T-shirt…"Hold on," I said. "We've got an hour yet. They've got to disembark the arrivals and muck out the plane—you didn't think we'd leave on time, did you?"

So there was time for another piña colada, and while we were drinking them the newcomers began to straggle off the DC-10. The noise level in the terminal jumped fifteen decibels, and most of it was meal complaints, family arguments and clamor over lost luggage. The departing crowd gazed at their fretful replacements good-humoredly.

And all of a sudden that other unpleasant train of thought bit down hard. There was a healing magic on the island, and the thought of Val Michaelis doing the sort of thing he was trained to do here was more than I could bear. I hadn't turned Michaelis in, because I thought he was a decent man. But damaging these kind, gentle people was indecent.

I put down my half-finished drink, stood up and dropped a bill on the table. "Edna," I said, "I just realize there's something I have to do. I'm afraid I'm going to miss this flight. I'll call you in Maryland when I get back—I'm sorry."

And I really was. Very. But that did not stop me from heading for the phone.

The men from the NSA were there the next morning. Evidently they hadn't waited for a straight-through flight. Maybe they'd chartered one, or caught a light flight to a nearby island.

But they hadn't wasted any time.

They could have thanked me for calling them, I thought. They didn't. They invited me out to their car for privacy—it was about as much of an "invitation" as a draft notice is, and as difficult to decline—while I answered their questions. Then they pulled out of the hotel lot and drove those thirty-mile-an-hour island roads at sixty. We managed not to hit any of the cows and people along the way. We did, I think, score one hen. The driver didn't even slow down to look.

I was not in the least surprised. I didn't know the driver, but the other man was Joe Mooney. Now he was a full field investigator, but he had been a junior security officer at the labs when Michaelis walked away. He was a mean little man with a high opinion of himself; he had always thought that the rules he enforced on the people he surveilled didn't have to apply to him. He proved it. He turned around in the front seat, arm across the back, so he could look at me while ostensibly talking to his partner at the wheel: "You know what Michaelis was working on? Some kind of a bug to drive the Russians nuts."

"Mooney, watch it!" his partner snapped.

"Oh, it's all right. Old Jerry knows all about it, and he's cleared—or used to be."

"It wasn't a bug," I said. "It was a virus. It wouldn't drive them crazy. It would work on the brain to make them irritable and nasty—a kind of personality change, like some people get after a stroke. And he didn't just try. He succeeded."

"And then he ran."

"And then he ran, yes."

"Only it didn't work," grinned Mooney, "because they couldn't find a way to spread it. And now what we have to worry about, we have to worry that while he was down here he figured out how to make it work and's looking for a buyer. Like a Russian buyer."

Well, I could have argued all of that. But the only part I answered, as we stopped to unlock the chain-link gate, was the last part. And all I said was, "I don't think so."

Mooney laughed out loud. "You always were a googoo," he said. "You sure Michaelis didn't stick you with some of that stuff in reverse?"

I hadn't been able to find the entrance of the wine cellar, but that pair of NSA men had no trouble at all. They realized at once that there had to be a delivery system to the main dining room—I hadn't thought of that. So that's where they went, and found a small elevator shaft that went two stories down. There wasn't any elevator, but there were ropes and Mooney's partner climbed down while Mooney and I went back to the shopping floor. About two minutes after we got there a painters' scaffold at the end of the hall went over with a crash, and the NSA man pushed his way out of the door it had concealed. Mooney gave me a contemptuous look. "Fire stairs," he explained. "They had to be there. There has to be another entrance, too—outside—so they can deliver the wine by truck."

He was right again. From the inside it was easy to spot, even though we had only flashlights to see what we were doing. When Mooney pushed it open we got a flood of tropical light coming in, and a terrible smell to go with it. For a moment I wondered if the graveyard wind had shifted again, but it was only a pile of garbage—rotted garbage—long-gone lobster shells and sweepings from the mall and trash of all kinds. It wasn't surprising no one had found the entrance from outside; the stink was discouraging.

No matter what else I was, I was still a man paid to do a job by his company. So while the NSA team were prodding and peering and taking flash pictures, I was looking at the cellar. It was large enough to handle all the wines a first-class sommelier might want to store; the walls were solid, and the temperature good. With that outside door kept closed, it would be no problem to keep any vintage safely resting here. The Dutchman shouldn't have given up so easily, just because he was faced with a lot of lawsuits—but maybe, as Dick Kavilan had said, people were meaner then.

I blinked when Joe Mooney poked his flashlight in my face. "What are you daydreaming about?" he demanded.

I pushed his hand away. "Have you seen everything you need?" I asked.

He looked around. There wasn't a whole lot to see, really. Along one wall there were large glass tanks—empty, except for a scummy inch or two of liquid at the bottom of some of them, fishy smelling and unappetizing. There were smaller tanks on the floor, and marks on the rubber tile to show where other things had been that now were gone. "He took everything that matters out," he grumbled. "Son of a bitch! He got clean away."

"We'll find him," his partner said.

"Damn right, but what was he doing here? Trying out his stuff on the natives?" Mooney looked at me searchingly. "What do you think, Wenwright? Have you heard of any cases of epidemic craziness on the island?"

I shrugged. "I did my part when I called you," I said. "Now all I want is to go home."

But it wasn't quite true. There was something else I wanted, and that was to know if there was any chance at all that what I was beginning to suspect might be true.

The next day I was on the home-bound jet, taking a drink from the stew in the first-class section and still trying to convince myself that what I believed was possible. The people were meaner then. It wasn't just an offhand remark of Kavilan's; the hotel manager told me as I was checking out that it was true, yes, a few years ago he had a lot of trouble with help, but lately everybody seemed a lot friendlier. Val Michaelis was a decent man. I'd always believed that, in the face of the indecencies of his work at the labs…having left, would he go on performing indecencies?

Could it be that Michaelis had in fact found a different kind of virus? One that worked on different parts of the brain, for different purposes? That made people happier and more gentle, instead of suspicious, paranoid, and dangerous?

I was neither biologist nor brain anatomist to guess if that could be true. But I had the evidence of my eyes. Something had changed the isle from mean, litiginous, grasping—from the normal state of the rest of the world—to what I had seen around me. It had even worked on me. It was not just Edna Buckner's sweet self, sweet though she was, that had let me discharge eight years of guilt and horror in one night. And right here on this plane, the grinning tour groups in the back and even the older, more sedate first-class passengers around me testified that something had happened to them…

Not all the first-class passengers.

Just across the aisle from me one couple was busy berating the stewardess. They didn't like their appetizer.

"Langouste salad, you call it?" snapped the man. "I call it poison. Didn't you ever hear of allergy? Jesus, we've been spending the whole week trying to keep them from pushing those damned lobsters on us everywhere we went…"

Lobsters.

Lobsters were neither mammals nor insects. And the particular strains of Retroviridae that wouldn't reproduce in either, I remember, had done just fine in crustaceans.

Like lobsters.