Miss Lamb,” Diane announced. “Dr. Sofia Lamb…” There was a certain coolness in her voice as she said it, Andrew Ryan noted. Had she already taken a dislike to the woman? Dr. Lamb had been a kind of missionary, both physician and psychiatrist, working in Hiroshima before and after the bomb—maybe Diane was intimidated. Diane was sensitive about her working-class background.
“Escort her in. Have the guards wait outside.”
Diane sniffed but went back into the outer room and held the door for Sofia Lamb.
“He’ll see you now, Dr. Lamb,” Diane said, as if wondering why he was seeing her.
“Splendid. It’s been a long journey … I’m curious to find the final chamber of this great nautilus shell of a city…”
Ryan stood politely as she strode in. Dr. Lamb carried herself like the educated, well-heeled elite professional she was. He knew protocol would matter with her.
She was tall, almost cruelly slim, her blond hair coifed into large curls atop her head. She had a long neck, a narrow face with stark bone structure, icy blue eyes behind stylish horn-rimmed glasses, lips darkly rouged. She wore a navy-blue dress suit with sharp white collars and dark blue pumps.
“Welcome to Rapture, Miss Lamb. Won’t you have a seat? I hope your journey wasn’t too exhausting. It’s a pleasure to have you join us in our brave new world.”
She sat in the chair across from him, crossing her long pale legs. “Brave new world—a reader of Shakespeare! The Tempest, was it not?” Her long slender fingers expertly extracted a platinum cigarette case from her small handbag as she went on, looking blandly at him, “O brave new world that has such creatures in it…”
“Are you surprised, Miss Lamb, that I’m familiar with Shakespeare?” Ryan asked, coming around the desk to light her cigarette with a gold lighter.
She blew smoke at the ceiling and shrugged. “No. You’re—a wealthy man. You can afford to educate yourself.”
It was not an obvious criticism—yet somehow, it was condescending. But she smiled—and he saw a glint of charisma. “I must say,” she went on, glancing around, “this place is remarkable. Quite astonishing. And yet no one seems to know about it.”
“As few as we can manage. We work hard at keeping it secret. And we shall require you to keep it secret too, Miss Lamb. Or should I call you Doctor Lamb…?”
He waited for her to say, Oh, call me Sofia. But she didn’t. She merely nodded, just faintly.
Ryan cleared his throat. “You are well aware of the driving forces behind Rapture—its philosophy, its plan. The Great Chain…”
“Yes, but I can’t claim to completely understand your … operative philosophy. I am of course attracted by the possibilities of a new society that has no … no interference from the outside world. A self-sustaining colony that might rediscover human possibilities—the possibility of a society free from the warmongering of the upper world…”
“I understand you were in Hiroshima when…”
“I was in a sheltered, outlying place. But yes. People I sometimes worked with were burnt to shadows on the walls of their homes.” Her eyes held a flat horror at the memory. “If the modern world were a patient in my care…” She shook her head. “I would diagnose it suicidal.”
“Yes. Hiroshima, Nagasaki—they were a large part of the reason we built Rapture. I suspected you might understand our imperative, after seeing what happened there, firsthand. I’m certain the surface world will commit nuclear suicide in time, Dr. Lamb. One generation, two, three—it will happen—and when it does, Rapture will be safe, here below. Self-sufficient and thriving. Rapture is deliverance.”
She tapped her cigarette ash into the brass floor ashtray beside her chair, nodding eagerly now. “That is the great appeal for me. Deliverance. A new chance to … to remake society into something innately good! Everyone has a duty to the world, Mr. Ryan—and we’ve lost all that, up above, in all the grubbing chaos of that perverse civilization…”
Ryan frowned, not exactly understanding her. But before he could ask her to elucidate, she went on:
“And I was gratified to hear that everyone has equal opportunity here! Including women, presumably?” She glanced at him questioningly. “In ordinary society the male hierarchy crushes our dreams. They see a woman with a spark”—she crushed her cigarette out angrily in the ashtray—“and they crush it out! ‘Lady doctors,’ as they call them, are sometimes tolerated. But … real advancement for a woman in the field? No.”
“Oh yes, I see…” Ryan thoughtfully stroked his mustache with the ball of his thumb. Theoretically everyone in Rapture started on an equal footing—and anyone could rise to the top with hard work, enterprise, talent, ruthless dedication to the simple, liberating power of free enterprise. Even women.
He’d invited Sofia Lamb to Rapture because she’d graduated at the top of her class. She was said to have written brilliant theses—which Ryan hadn’t had time to read—and to have shown a fearlessness in psychiatric experimentation. Scientific fearlessness was axiomatic to Rapture.
“You can compete with the rest of us here,” Ryan said firmly, as much to convince himself as her. “But of course your initial work would be to evaluate Rapture, help us develop a means of preparing the public for the future. More pressingly, some residents may be developing psychological problems—little, ah, personal difficulties that bubble up from isolation down here. Your first task will be to diagnose those problems and suggest a solution.”
“Oh, of course, that is quite understood. But later—if I want to develop my own … institute, here in Rapture?”
“Ah yes. That would be splendid. Why shouldn’t people have a psychiatric doctor to consult with? A whole institute for self-exploration.”
“Or perhaps for redefining the self,” she murmured. She stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to be shown my quarters. The trip here has been—a lot to absorb. I need to change, rest a bit—and I’ll need a full tour of Rapture. I’ll start my diagnosis right away—this evening.”
“Good! I’ll have Chief Sullivan send over his files about … problem people. The little malcontents cropping up—the complainers, and so on. You can start with those.”
Neptune’s Bounty, Rapture
1950
Brigid Tenenbaum was walking down the chilly dock toward the water, thinking that perhaps she might get some fresh fish for dissection. If they were iced, she could extract their genetic material with some hope it might be intact. She didn’t have a definite contract with Sinclair Solutions anymore, but she could still use their lab after-hours, since she had the door combination. The tale of her attempt to extract semen from one of the submariners with a large syringe had gotten her dropped, unreasonably she felt, from Sinclair’s research labs. Certainly, she’d used bad judgment in implying she wanted something else from the man’s evil-smelling genitals. Perhaps she’d thrust the needle into his gonad rather too vigorously. But for him to run screaming from the lab, naked from the waist down, with a syringe dangling from his groin, trailing blood and shrieking, “The crazy bitch put a spike in my goddamn nuts!” seemed like an overreaction.
Since then she’d scarcely seen Rapture’s founder. Nor had she been able to get an appointment with the man. There was always an excuse from that snippy Diane McClintock.
Sometimes she wished she were back in the camp, working with her mentor. At least they had real creative freedom.
Brigid sighed and tugged her coat closer around her shoulders. It was always nippy down here, in the strange, underwater docks. A kind of artificial cavern, really, within Rapture, filled with water, where the delivery boats pulled up, loaded with fish and other approved goods brought from the submarine bays. The docks were wooden, the walls and ceiling were metal—the water lapped at the pylons with a strange hollow, echoing whisper.
A constable and a black man who seemed to be a deputy were walking past, both of them looking at her curiously.
She saw a couple of dockworkers in heavy pea jackets, standing on the pier below her, waiting for a small tugboatlike vessel to pull up so they could offload it. They were amusing themselves as they waited, tossing a ball back and forth. She recognized both of the men—she’d seen them under Dr. Suchong’s hands. He’d tried to cure one of them, Stiffy, of a partial paralysis—and the other one …
The other one saw her first. He was a stubby-nosed man with a windburned face—but his red face went white when he saw Tenenbaum. He dropped the ball and clapped both hands to his genitals. “No you don’t, lady, you ain’t getting near ’em!”
He backed away from her, shaking his head. “Uh uh, lady!”
“Don’t be such a fool!” she called out wearily, searching for the right English words. “I am not here for you. I want fresh fish.
You’re calling them fish now, are you?” the man demanded, backing away—and falling off the dock into the water. He got up, sputtering, spitting water—it was only four feet deep here.
“Ha, ha, Archie!” the other fisherman called gleefully to him, going to pick up the ball. “You finally got that bath you been avoidin’!”
“Screw you, Stiffy!” Archie called, splashing off toward the approaching boat. “Ahoy there, give me a hand; I’m comin’ aboard!”
“Ah, whatya scared of a skinny little dame for!” Stiffy yelled, laughing.
She approached Stiffy, putting on a professorial, officious manner so that he wouldn’t try to become too familiar.
“You throw the ball—it is very … unusual for you, no?” she asked, staring at his hands. She’d stood by and observed when Suchong had examined him. “Your hands—one paralyzed, the other only half working, this I remember. You carry some things on shoulders, not do so much work with hands.”
“Sure—that’s why they called me Stiffy. I got another kinda Stiffy, lady, if you—”
She gave him her severest frown. “Do not trifle with me! I wish only to know—how you can catch ball now. With fingers that were paralyzed. Dr. Suchong repaired your hands, yes?”
“Suchong? Hell no! Made a lotta excuses. Funniest thing. We had a net fulla fish, see. I was scoopin’ ’em out of the net, sortin’ ’em out—that much I could do, anyhow—and there was some kinda sea slug mixed in with ’em, floppin’ around. Weirdest lookin’ little slug you ever saw! Little bastard bit me on the hand!” Stiffy chortled. He didn’t seem angry about it at all. “I didn’t even know they could bite! Well, my hands got kinda swole—but when the swelling went down”—he looked at his hands in renewed wonder—“they started to come to life!” He tossed the ball in the air and deftly caught it. “You see that? Before the little bastard bit me, I couldn’t do that, no way, no how!”
“You think it was sea slug that release paralysis?”
“Something in that bite—I could feel it spreading out, like, in my hand!”
“Ach! Indeed!” She peered at his hands. Saw the curious bite marks. “If only I had this creature … You can find another such sea slug?”
“I still got the same one! Chucked it in a bucket of seawater! It was such a crazy-lookin’ little thing I actually thought I could maybe sell it to one of you scientist types. You wanta buy it?”
“Well—perhaps I do.”
Sofia Lamb’s Office
1950
“I guess … I guess I shouldn’t have brought my kids to Rapture. But they told me we had to come together, the whole family, or nothin’ … They said they needed skills with a boiler, I’d be taken care of and make a pile of dough…”
Dr. Sofia Lamb was watching the middle-aged man in the workman’s overalls pacing back and forth in her office, wringing his hands. “Wouldn’t you like to relax on the couch as we work on this, Mr. Glidden?”
“No, no I can’t, Doc,” Glidden muttered. He sniffled, as if trying not to cry. His eyes were bruised looking from fatigue; his thin lips quivered. His big hands were reddened from his work in the geothermal plant. “I need to get back home. Ya see, my wife, my kids, they’re alone in the new apartment … if you can call it an apartment. A dump is what it is. Lotta shifty characters around there. I feel like the kids ain’t safe in that place … We’re havin’ to share it with another family—there ain’t enough housing in this crazy town. Nothing I can afford, I mean. They said there’d be more housing here … and better pay. I thought it was a road-to-riches thing, like the Comstock Mine … They talked like…” He bit his lip.
She nodded, shifted in her chair, and made a note. She’d heard a similar story from a number of workers she’d interviewed as part of her project for Ryan. “You feel you were … misled about what would happen here?”
“Yeah, I—” Glidden broke off, stopping in the center of the room, staring at her suspiciously. “You … you work for Ryan, right?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking—”
“So no, no I wasn’t, what’d you say, misled.” He licked his lips. “They were straight with me.”
“It’s all right; you can say what you really think,” Sofia said reassuringly. “It’s true that these therapeutic sessions will be summed up in a report—but I’m not naming specific people in my report. It’ll be about the trends…”
“Yeah? How come this ‘therapy’ thing here is free? I wouldn’t-a come except my wife says I’m all tense and like that … but … free? Nothing’s free in Rapture!
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