39
Hendricks woke up in a strange place, some sort of
medical facility. The last thing he could remember was
being on the bathyscaphe. He and Altman were going
down, and then his head had started to hurt so much, he
could hardly stand it. After that, it all felt like a dream. There
had been some kind of problem. He remembered Altman
speaking calmly to him, remembered taking readings, but
also remembered the feel of the floor. He must have fallen.
Maybe they hit something.
He felt groggy. Parts of his body were numb, and parts of
his brain felt like they had been torn out. There was a tube
running into his forearm. Maybe they were experimenting
on him.
He looked around. He was the only one there.
He moved furtively out of bed, peeling the tape off the
tube in his arm and pulling it out. It burned coming out. He
dropped it, left it dripping beside the bed, and stumbled to
the door.
It was locked.
He stayed there, staring at the handle.
After a while he heard the sound of footsteps in the hall
outside. He rushed back into his bed and half closed his
eyes.
Through his eyelashes he watched the door open. A
woman came in, dressed in white, carrying a holoboard.
She walked straight to his bed. His mind pictured him
running out the door at the far end of the room, but in the
end his body did not move.
“Hello,” said the woman. “How are we today?”
He didn’t say anything, still pretending to be asleep.
“Oh, dear. You’ve torn your IV out again,” she said. “We
can’t have that, can we?”
She bent down for the end of the tube. It was at that
moment that his body decided to reach up and grab her
wrist. True, he was in his body, was watching through his
eyes, but it was doing things he wasn’t telling it to do. He
wasn’t the one controlling it, which meant there must be
someone else in there with him.
As soon as he thought that, it felt like everything was
happening at a little distance, like he’d sunk deeper into his
body, like he’d never be in control of the body again. And
yet he could still feel everything. He watched the hand
holding the nurse’s arm pull her on top of him like she was a
doll. He felt the jaw opening and the teeth closing around
the nurse’s neck, and then a series of wet sounds as the
neck burst open and warm blood spilled down across his
chin and his own neck. Her wrist, the one he was holding,
he saw, was broken, crushed, and the arm attached to it
was no longer sitting in the socket right. She was trying to
gasp for breath, but there was a hole in her windpipe now
and all that came out was a hissing and a mist of blood.
Her face was there just above him, her eyes terrified for a
moment but almost immediately becoming loose in their
orbits as she lost consciousness.
A few seconds later, after his body had done a few more
things to her, he was certain she was dead. If he’d been
asked to describe how exactly it had happened, he
wouldn’t have been able to say, though he was fairly certain
he had something to do with it. Or not him, exactly: his
body. One moment she was still alive, even if just barely,
and then there was an awful blur of things happening. When
they stopped, she was dead.
He padded softly to the door and tried it. It was still locked.
How was that possible? She’d come through it, hadn’t she?
She must have had a key. He shambled back to her
corpse in search of her pockets. But he couldn’t find any
pockets. She was too much of a mess. Pushing his bloody
hands through the sopping remains of clothing and flesh, he
finally found something hard that wasn’t a bone.
He had just straightened up, bloody key in hand, when he
realized that he wasn’t alone in the room after all. There
was a shape there, in the shadows of the last bed.
“Who is it?” he said.
Don’t you recognize me? a voice said.
He went a little closer, then closer still. It was as if the
person was both there and not there at the same time. And
then, suddenly, he felt a piercing pain in his head. He
staggered. When he looked back up, he knew who it was.
“Dad,” he said.
Good to see you, Jason, he said. Come sit down. I want
to have a serious talk with you.
“What about, Dad?”
But his dad wasn’t where he thought he was. He turned
around and found him in another bed.
We’re failing, Jason, his dad said. You should leave
that thing down where you found it. Convergence is not the
only thing that matters.
“Convergence?” asked Hendricks, then had to search
frantically for his father, who somehow had moved again.
They want us all to become one, son. He gave a
mournful smile, shaking his head. Can you imagine? he
said.
“Who’s they, Dad?”
We have to be very careful or there will be nothing left of
us. Then his dad smiled. It was a beautiful smile, like he
used to give Jason back when he was very young, just a
few years old. Jason had forgotten that smile, but now it all
came flooding back.
Tell them, Jason, he said. Tell everyone.
“I will, Dad,” he whispered. “I will.”
There was some noise behind him, but he didn’t want to
look away from his father’s face. If he did, he feared he’d
never find it again. Then there was shouting. He ignored it
as long as he could, but it was too powerful. He turned
around and moved toward it.
There was a roar and a flash and he was suddenly on the
ground, staring straight up at the ceiling. I should get up
and tell them, he thought, but when he tried, he couldn’t
move. I’ll just lie here, he thought. “Dad?” he whispered, but
there was no answer.
40
“Can I have a copy of this?” asked the icthyologist,
watching the vid.
Altman shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” he said. “Those
strange hornlike projections, I don’t have a precedent for
those. You may have discovered a new species. Or it may
be the result of a mutation of some kind. I can ask around,
see if anybody’s seen anything like it, but I never have.”
“So, it’s unusual.”
“Very unusual.”
“Well?” Altman asked. He was in Skud’s lab, the water
bottle with him. The pinkish swath had been extracted from
it and placed into a specimen tube. From this, Skud had
taken a tiny sample, running a genetic test.
“It’s strange,” said Skud. “It’s tissue.”
“What sort of tissue?”
“Living tissue,” said Skud. “Like flesh. It was once alive.
But it has a very unusual genetic profile.”
“So, it is skin that has been torn off something?”
“I don’t think this is so,” said Skud. “I think it was alive not
so long ago. It was alive when you found it. Maybe even
alive until you bottled it.”
“That can’t be,” said Altman. “When I found it, it was just
like this, but in big sheets. It couldn’t have been alive.”
“Yes,” said Skud. “It is a very simple organism. I do not
know what it is. It has no brain and no limbs and was made
of almost nothing at all. But it was, technically, alive.”
Altman shook his head.
“You are a doubter, I see,” said Skud. “I can prove it with
a simple experiment.” He upturned the sample vial, leaving
the pink swath lying curled on the table. He took a battery
with a pair of wires connected to it, sparked them against
each other, then touched them to one another. Immediately
the swath jolted, moved.
“You see,” said Skud proudly. “Alive.”
“Don’t,” said Ada. “It’s morbid.”
“It’s not morbid,” said Altman. “I’m just stating the facts.
This is just anecdotal, mind you, but it still must mean
something.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Just listen,” said Altman. “Just listen and give me a
hand.” He held up one finger. “You were the one who
started this back in the town. I’m just going to give you the
same talk you gave me, more or less. Nearly everybody I’ve
talked to on the ship has a headache. Even if I haven’t
heard them say it aloud, I’ve seen them clutching their
heads. That’s not normal.”
“It’s just anecdotal,” said Ada. “It’s not scientific.”
“I said that already,” said Altman.
“It could be a gas leak,” said Ada, “or a problem with the
ventilation system.”
“It could be,” said Altman, but most of those people have
been having headaches long before that. They’ve been
having them ever since the first signal broadcast.”
He held up a second finger. “Insomnia,” he said. “I’ve
asked around about this. Showalter has it. I have it off and
on. That German scientist has it. I heard the two guards
outside of the command center complaining about it and
then later another three in the main dome. Have you had
it?”
“No,” said Ada. “But I’ve been having weird dreams.”
“That’s the other thing people are talking about,” said
Altman, raising another finger. “Strange, vivid dreams. I’ve
had them, too, lots of people have. And then we get to the
more extreme cases.” He held up two more fingers.
“Attacks,” he said, wiggling one, “and suicides,” he said,
wiggling the other. “Not scientific, I admit,” he said. “But
we’ve only been talking a few minutes and I’ve already run
out of fingers. I’ve never been around a place where I’ve
seen so many of either.”
“I heard that Wenbo went crazy,” said Ada. “Tried to
strangle one of Markoff’s men.”
“I heard the same thing,” said Altman. “Similar thing
happened with Claerbout and Dawson. And Lumley
stabbed Ewing and then painted a set of weird symbols on
the walls of his own room with his own shit. And who knows
what we’re not hearing about, what they’re covering up.”
Ada shuddered. “And poor Trostle,” she said. “He always
seemed so stable.”
“Suicides and attempted suicides. Don’t forget Press.”
“Frank Press? Did he attempt suicide?”
“Not only did he attempt it, he succeeded. There must be
at least three or four more on that list, too. Doesn’t that
seem abnormal? I mean there are only two or three
hundred on board. That’d put the suicide rate up over two
percent. That can’t be normal, can it?”
Ada shook her head.
“It’s not scientific,” said Altman, waving his fingers
around. “But I still don’t like what it’s telling me. Ask around.
See if I’m wrong. I hope to God I am.”
A few hours later, Markoff appeared at his door. He was
carrying a tranquilizer gun in his hand. It looked like an
ordinary pistol but with a longer and thicker barrel, a square
cartridge near the barrel’s end.
“Ever worked one of these?” he asked.
Altman shook his head.
He opened the cartridge. “Darts go here,” he said.
“Cartridge snaps in and out. There are CO2 cartridges in
the grip, but you don’t need to worry about changing those;
we’ll handle it. You pull this bolt back,” he said, drawing
back a lever on the gun’s side, “and set the safety like this.
It’s easy to thumb off. As long as the bolt’s back, it’ll shoot.
Aim for flesh.”
“It won’t go through clothing?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Markoff. “It’ll go through clothing,
but clothing means more chances of something going
wrong. Aim for flesh. Or, if you’re not much of a shooter, just
try to push it up against the person’s chest before you fire.”
He handed the tranquilizer over to Altman, who held it
awkwardly.
“The dart contains a strong sedative. It’ll take a few
seconds to take effect,” Markoff said. “It’ll hurt going in but
probably not enough to slow a maniac down much. You
sure you don’t want a real gun?”
Altman shook his head.
“You leave in fifteen minutes,” Markoff said.
Hurriedly he tracked down Ada and told her what was
happening.
“I don’t want you to go down there again,” she said.
“It doesn’t affect me.” He kissed her again. “Besides, I
have no choice.”
“But after what happened to Hendricks . . .”
“I handled that all right, didn’t I? We’re still both in one
piece, aren’t we?”
She covered her mouth with one hand. “You haven’t
heard?” she said.
“Haven’t heard what?”
“Hendricks is dead. He killed a nurse, tore her apart.
They had to shoot him.”
Stunned, he collapsed onto the bed. He didn’t trust
himself to speak. Even more so than Moresby, this had
been his fault. Maybe if he’d turned back when Hendricks
had first wanted, it wouldn’t have happened. How many
deaths would be on his conscience before it was all over?
Ada was lying beside him, stroking his forehead. “I’m
sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” And then, “Michael, don’t go.”
He shook his head. “I have to go,” he replied. “I have no
choice.” Turning away from her, he climbed out of the bed
and made his way heavily down to the submarine bay.
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