Читать книгу Imaginings of a Dark Mind - James C Glass - Страница 9

BACON ’N’ EGGS

There were rats in the soufflé again.

At least that’s what we told our cook when black speckles appeared on the eggs he served up. Now John Redcloud is the best chef you’ll find on any probe between here and Sol, and he knows it, but it still pissed him off when his scrambled eggs were criticized. “You don’t like it, there’s toast and oatmeal,” he said, and everyone groaned. We’d been eatin’ that stuff for four-hundred and fifty days on Roosevelt’s run to Procyon C and its trio of steamy planets. Even the sight of freeze-dried eggs and bacon bits was heaven to most of the crew. Me, I don’t eat breakfast. Anyway, the crew laughed, picked out the little black things hiding among the bacon bits and snarfed it all down, leaving little for John to put back in the oven for warming.

I’d been operations chief for ten years, and it was my second planet fall. A probe crew spends most of a lifetime just traveling, and two drops was already pretty good for a career. We were all grateful for that, and there were worse places to explore. We’d picked Emerald because the other two planets were just hot rock and old lava flows, and here we were surrounded by plant life so thick we’d had a hard time finding a place to put down. It was botanical heaven: ferns and gnarled trees like arthritic hands draped in thick mosses in yellows and emerald green, red and purple flowers big as a dinner plate all over the place. Harry Burns and his botany team were spending as much outside time as their refrigeration units would allow, collecting plants somehow thriving at a temperature of a hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

Our third day on Emerald I was just finishing morning coffee when the intercom squealed, “Carl Doser down there?”

Harry’s voice. I jumped up and answered quick because he wasn’t due back in for five hours. “Yeah, Harry, what’s up?”

“Meet me in lock three, Chief. I’ve got a problem here.”

“On my way,” I said, and moved quick as I always do when I hear concern in a man’s voice.

Lock three was aft; two flights up so it took a minute. When I got there two people were stripping E suits and the UV was on behind the port so someone was still decontaminating. The door snapped open and there was Harry, red-faced, bending over a suited figure huddled on the floor. The others were busy stripping so I rushed straight to him. “What’s up?” I asked, out of breath from the short sprint in 1.2 gee. I wasn’t getting any younger, either. But I am a survivor.

“It’s Sally,” he said, fumbling at the helmet of the huddled figure at his feet. “We were coming back with moss samples and she started groaning, and then she doubled up and went down like a rock. Cramps, she says, and it seems severe. Help me with this, Chief.”

We got the helmet off and Sally Dieter looked awful, face pinched up in pain and her skin sweaty and grey. Scared us both right away. When we unzipped her suit she screamed and writhed around like a crazy person, and that really scared us. We carried Sally in her suit, groaning and in a fetal position, all the way to sick bay where Doc Joan hustled us outside before she even made an examination. We went back to the lock to talk to the rest of the botany team, but they only scratched their heads. One minute Sally was fine, the next she was down on the ground yelling about pain in her stomach.

Joan came up two hours later to ask a bunch of questions and tell us Sally was seriously ill and she was doing some blood work on her. Whatever was wrong, she said, it was rough stuff.

The following day, it started happening to other members of the crew.

* * * *

It was just me, Harry and Doc Joan having coffee in the mess room the morning of day eight on Emerald. John Redcloud poured the thick, black stuff for us and munched down his usual breakfast of dry toast. “Anyone for eggs?” he asked hopefully.

“Sure,” said Harry, and John served him up a plate.

“We’ve got to radio Roosevelt and get a pickup,” said Joan, rubbing her eyes. “I’ve got them stacked up in there like cordwood and I need lab help. I don’t even have a decent microscope, and nothing is visible on the plates.”

“You’re sure it’s some kind of bug?” asked Harry, brushing mini-rat turds off his eggs before eating a forkful of them. John frowned at him.

“Has to be,” said Joan. “Probably viral, the way they keep spiking fevers, and the penicillin isn’t doing a thing.

“Sally went up to a hundred-five and was crazy with pain until I got her in the cold tub and then in a few minutes she was coherent again, asking about the others and wanting to know if her plant samples were stowed. Fifteen minutes out of the bath she was raving again and I had to restrain her. It doesn’t make any sense. I can’t keep shuttling six people to and from the cold bath. I haven’t had any sleep in two days and I’m out of ideas.”

“Even if we call now,” I put in, “we can’t get Roosevelt back for maybe a week. They’ve followed those inner planets half way around Procyon by now.”

“Terrific,” said Joan. “Another day of no sleep, making ice as fast as I can.” And then she seemed to brighten. “Maybe if the sick bay were cooler they’d at least get some rest. Cold seems to help.”

Harry swallowed the last of his eggs. “The four of us are okay and we’ve been in close proximity to the others. Whatever it is can’t be airborne and if we brought it in with us the UV had no effect. There has to be a common denominator, and we’re not seeing it.”

“You, Sally, Hadley, Estevez and Ono have been outside,” I said, “and the rest of us have been in here the whole time. It’s either airborne or contact, and I’ve handled the suits, too.”

“Whatever,” said Joan, and she ran off to turn down the thermostat in sick bay while Harry, John and I sat drinking coffee and puzzling at the table.

An hour later, Sally sat up in bed, screamed once very loud—and died.

The next morning, Harry was sick and out of his head like the rest of Joan’s patients.

* * * *

We were too scared to go outside so we put Sally in the aft lock and purged it good with nitrogen. The first good thing to happen in days was when I got Roosevelt on the horn and told them our troubles. The bad news was it’d be six days before we got a pickup. Hang on, they said, and that’s when I discovered pretty Doc Joan could swear for five minutes without repeating herself. After she’d calmed down she tried to encourage John and me. “The rest of them are doing better, but I’ve got sick bay down to fifty degrees. All we need now is pneumonia, but this bug doesn’t seem to like low temperature. It’s evolved with the hundred-fifty degrees outside. I still can’t get a culture. Come on, guys, there’s three of us left here. What’s the common link in all this? Think!”

So I thought. Five had been outside and five had not, and Harry had taken sick days after the others. We’d all been breathing the same air, and John usually washed our dishes and utensils in cold water. When someone got a cold we all got it, but not this time. John and I sat there staring at each other while Joan went back to start her patients on some kind of antibiotic, but she was back in a flash. “Well? Any ideas?”

“Not a clue,” I said, and Joan sighed, looked real tired, her eyes kind of puffy. John leaned back against the stove and folded his arms across his chest, the look on his face unreadable as usual.

“Eggs,” said John Redcloud.

“What?” said Joan tiredly.

“They all been eatin’ eggs—except us three. Harry had ’em just yesterday and now he’s sick too.”

Joan looked startled, and me I was thinking fast and he was right. The entire botany team had fueled up on eggs the morning after planet fall, cleaning out the whole pan so there was nothing left for anyone else, but John had been making enough for the whole crew and more since then. John’s a vegetarian and Joan is like me; breakfast is coffee and maybe some toast. And at that instant, something clicked in my head.

“What are the black specks on the eggs, John? Pepper?”

“Don’t use pepper, just a little salt. People’re picky about eggs.”

“You know what I mean. The crew’s been kidding you about it. Rat turds? Look like little peppercorns, they do.”

“Nothin’ I put in,” said John, looking offended. “Maybe some burn from the oven.”

Now Doc Joan was suddenly interested. “You cook the eggs in the oven?”

“Naw. I got only one skillet, not enough for everyone. I scramble eggs in relay and warm ’em in the oven.”

Now Joan seemed real interested. “Show me the oven, John.”

“Right here,” he said, and opened it. I took one look and decided it needed cleaning, but Joan pushed me aside and got down on her knees to look all around inside the thing. Those black specks were scattered around on the bottom of the oven, but it was when Joan looked up at where the heating coils were that she gasped. “Oh, my God. Carl, get me a bowl or a cup—and a spoon, quick. I think I’ve found our bugs.”

I was quick about it and in a second she was holding a cup up inside the oven, scraping away with the spoon while John and I exchanged curious looks. She put the cup on the table and we looked inside.

Rat turds. Half a cup-full.

“They’re thick on the oven ceiling, clusters following the shape of the coil, and they’re growing there. One of them popped open while I was inside. Close the oven door, John!” It was more than curiosity in Joan’s voice, now. It was fear, and I remember thinking that the stuff in that cup was nothing to be fooled with. I stepped back a little from the table.

“I’ve got to do it here. Sick bay’s too cold,” she said. “Get some towels to cover the table, but don’t touch the cup or the spoon. I’ll be right back.” She rushed off towards the sick bay.

John and I laid out some towels at one end of the table, and didn’t go near that cup, and when Doc Joan returned we backed clear up against a wall to watch her.

She had a mask on, and surgical gloves, and carried a stack of those little dishes I’d seen her use for growing bug colonies on Roosevelt. She sat down at the table, put everything on towels, then poured some black stuff on a cup saucer and started worrying it with the spoon. Little peppercorns, like I said, but kind of squishy. “Like skin,” she said. “I bet it’s protein of some kind.” But then she hit a hard one and it popped open, and even from six feet away I could see something yellow ooze out. It made my stomach crawl.

“Here it is,” she said. “We’ve found it!”

Well you can have it, I thought, but she sure was excited. She popped some more, then smeared a bunch of stuff on those little dishes, some with black, some with the yellow gunk. It was past lunchtime, but I didn’t have any appetite at all. “Got to keep these things warm,” she said. “They’ve evolved at high T. John, turn the oven on again, right where you warm the eggs.”

“Ain’t going near that thing,” said John.

“Just set the temperature for me!” said Joan angrily. “I’ll open it up.”

John did as he was told and I stayed where I was, feeling a little wimpy, but then Joan had the mask on and I didn’t, and my mama did not raise a fool. So Doc put the dishes, cup and spoon in the oven and closed the door, looking tired but pleased with herself. “If I get a culture, I’ve got a good chance of finding something that’ll kill it quick. I’ve already eliminated penicillin and half a dozen antibiotics. Now we just have to wait.”

That didn’t mean sitting. I was a one-man maintenance crew now and the environmental system was overloaded from that air-conditioner blasting away in sick bay. I spent the next twenty four hours resetting relays, sending status reports to Roosevelt and scraping frost from coils, buckets of it. The ice machine stopped twice and we were pouring frost into the cold tub while Joan fought with two more members of the botany team out of their heads with fever again. And it was damn cold in that room. All the while Doc Joan was looking more and more haggard, big purple swellings of flesh now under her eyes, and Roosevelt was starting to talk quarantine to us. Couldn’t blame them; the whole probe had become a bug farm. I remember how thick and rancid the air seemed, and wondering if we were all breathing in yellow guck. I remember noticing stuffiness in my nose, and little pains in my stomach. It didn’t occur to me it was because I hadn’t eaten anything for twenty-four hours.

The next morning we rushed to the mess room, Joan walking jerky and looking ashen-faced. She opened the oven and placed its contents on the towel-draped table, took one look and dropped hard into a chair. “Damn,” she said. “Damn, damn,” and put her head in her hands.

I looked carefully over her shoulder. The volume of black stuff in the cup had grown considerable. But there was nothing in those bug dishes. Nothing.

And then Doc Joan groaned, tilted her head back towards me. Her eyelids fluttered, her eyes rolled back up in her head and she fell forward hard onto the table.

* * * *

There were two of us left standing. At first we’d thought Joan had the bug, too, but the symptoms weren’t there and we decided it was plain old exhaustion. We laid her out on a cot in the mess room and she slept like a dead person for fifteen hours before she started tossing and turning and mumbling. John and I cat-napped and nibbled some toast and Roosevelt called to say pick up would be in four days with a med team joining us in quarantine.

Bad turned to worse when we lost our second crew member. Harry was thrashing around and yelling again and we had to do another cold dip on him, but when we went to get him we found his neighbor patient Ono lying peacefully dead and covered with a horrible black mass he’d vomited up. So we dipped Harry until he was quiet and put Ono in the lock with Sally. We went back to check on Joan and found her sitting up on the cot. We told her about Ono and she bit her lip so hard it bled a little. Frustrated. Angry. After a while, though, she was thinking again.

“Eggs,” she said. John and I looked at each other.

“Don’t you see? They grow in eggs. Protein eaters! I’m doing the wrong culture. Help me up.”

She stood there wobbly while we told her about the last fifteen hours. “Okay, so this is beyond serious, now. The whole crew can be dead in four days if I don’t do something right. Carl, put some gloves on and get a sputum sample from Ono. John, you help me to the botany lab. I still can’t find my feet. Carl, you meet us there.”

We did that. I found her in the botany lab working with the bug dishes. “Protein eaters,” she said again. “They’re eating our crew up from the inside. So I’m using albumin for the culture plates. John, set that oven to one hundred-fifty exactly. This is our last chance.”

John fled. I watched while Joan smeared ground peppercorns, yellow guck and Ono’s horrible spit on the bug dishes. I helped carry them to the oven. Her excitement was there again and a little color had returned to her face. Quite a lady. The bugs were cooking and Joan was thinking aloud; “Got to get it right the first time. Penicillin and standard antibiotics are no good. There’s a different pathway in these things. Maybe combinations. God, I don’t even know the pathology! Could be an inhibitor. Shut these suckers down. How much for a hundred kilo male?” She suddenly became aware of John and I staring at her blankly. “Okay, you watch after my patients a while. I’m going to do some inventory in the botany lab.” And she left the room.

Just in time. Now Harry was sitting up, eyes open—babbling. When we touched him he screamed and clawed at my face. I gave him a bear hug, told him everything was okay. Everything was under control. Yeah. He calmed down, went back to sleep, his forehead hot in the terrible cold of that room. John checked the ice machine when we noticed the silence. It was down again, a handful of ice cubes left. I reset the relay, scraped off two buckets of frost and set them at the ready.

Joan was in the mess room, smearing more guck on more bug dishes, a jar of white powder in front of her. “They like eggs, I’ll give ’em eggs,” she said. “If they don’t culture out in Albumin, we’re done for.”

“You have eggs in there?” I squinted at the dishes.

“Albumin. Like egg white. Thank God for the botany lab.” She added four more dishes to the stuff already cooking in the oven. “How’re my patients? You guys doing alright?”

John and I nodded, but were concerned. She was ashen-faced again. “Why don’t you lie down a while longer?” I said. “Maybe eat something?” She took my hand, squeezed it. “Thanks, Chief. I’d like that.”

We fed Joan some toast with honey on it, a glass of water, and eased her back onto the cot. “We’ll take care of everything,” I said. She smiled, eyes fluttering, and was out like a light in seconds.

Four hours later we nearly lost Harry, tackled him at the door of sick bay as he was staggering out. We used up the last of the ice and frost to cool him down. He opened his eyes, grabbed my shoulder. “Water,” he said. “I’m burning up inside, Chief.” I looked around again, but the ice was gone. What the hell, I thought, and dipped a cup of water out of the cold tub. Harry gulped it down and I got another. He drank three cups, and went to sleep like a baby.

I’m no doctor, but Harry going to sleep like that gave me an idea. We fed cold water to the others by the cupful. They seemed to crave it, and one cup of the stuff gave me a cramp. But they all slept peacefully the entire night. So much for modern medicine.

John and I even slept some, and in the morning we got to the mess room just as Doc Joan was shuffling towards the oven. She put her hand on the door handle and turned towards us, face grey. “This is it, guys,” she said solemnly. “Hold your breath.”

She opened the oven, took a close look, and screamed, “Yes!”

She took the little dishes out of the oven one-by-one and put them on the table. The dishes with pieces of peppercorns on them were blank, but the four others were streaked with narrow rows of lemon-yellow fuzz topped with bulbous swellings. I thought of mushrooms in the hydroponic tanks on Roosevelt. “Pretty small for killers, aren’t they?” said Joan, and then she turned around and kissed me right on the mouth. Nice. When she turned to John, he backed away from her quick up against the stove. “We did it! We found them! Now let’s see if we can kill ’em.”

Very excited, she was, and I was still feeling that kiss. She sent John and me for more dishes while she rummaged in her pharmacy, pulling out vials of stuff, rushing back to the botany lab and staying in there the rest of the morning while John and I ate cereal, drank coffee, scraped frost and looked in on the rest of the crew. Some of them were getting restless again. Harry moaned, opened his eyes. He looked like a man near-starved to death. “We aren’t going to make it, are we Chief? We’re all going to die here.” A little tear leaked from one eye.

“We found the bugs,” I said, patting him on a bony shoulder. “Doc is testing now to see what’ll kill them. Hang on just a little longer, Harry. We’ll get ’em. Besides, you’ve got to fly this probe for us.”

“They’re eating me up inside,” said Harry, and moaned again. I have never felt as helpless in my life as I did at that moment, and now the others were moaning, twisting and pulling against the straps we’d used to keep them on their cots. Things were heating up again, next to no ice in the machine and one bucket of frost to work with. I tested the tub water with a finger. In that terrible cold room it felt warm.

Joan appeared in the doorway. “We’re cooking again. The rate that first batch grew we should know something by early tomorrow. How’re you doing?”

“Fevers coming again and the dip is warm. The ice machine can’t keep up with what we need, and I think we’ll need plenty before tonight is over.”

“Hold the fort,” said Joan. “I’ve got one more plate to make with a protease inhibitor I found in the lab. When I do that I’ve tried everything I could find. Okay?”

We nodded grimly, and Joan disappeared.

All the action started an hour later.

Alonzo, our electrician, sat up on his cot with a shout and pulled at his restraints hard enough to bend the one inch tubing of the frame beneath him. Black stuff was oozing from his mouth and he was making bluh-bluh sounds while his body jerked and shook. I grabbed him from behind while John ran for the frost bucket and headed for the tub and I screamed, “No! Bring it over here! We’ll never get the tub cooled down!”

John, bless him, did as he was told. “Now get me a spoon and crush up what ice we have left in the machine. All of it.”

John ran as I relaxed my grip on Alonzo, getting in front of him to wipe that horrible spittle from his mouth. “I’m here, I’m here,” I said, near panic myself when I looked into his fear-filled eyes. “Oh, oh, oh,” he said, over and over again.

John came back with Joan right behind him, handed me the spoon and I started shoveling frost into Alonzo’s mouth and he was swallowing it fast.

“What are you doing?” screamed Joan.

I told her about my ice-water treatment, how it had calmed everyone right down. “I think the bugs are in his belly, and they can’t work in cold. Ice or cold water in the stomach shocks them. That’s what I think. It works, Doc. I’ve seen it.”

Joan had reached for the spoon, but now she stepped back and sighed. “What the hell, try it. We’ve run out of options anyway.”

So I shoveled and Alonzo swallowed and, sure enough, in a few minutes he calmed down and licked his lips. “Better,” he said. “Thanks, Chief.” I eased him back on the cot and turned towards Joan, who was looking broodingly at me.

“Okay, we’ll do it your way,” she said.

And we did. Five more times that night.

* * * *

It was two in the morning. Everyone was resting quietly, but there was no more ice or frost. Joan looked at me, eyes sunken and dark-rimmed with fatigue. “It’s now or never, Carl. If we don’t start a treatment soon we’ll lose all of them and maybe even ourselves. Let’s check those cultures.”

I followed her to the mess room where John was making coffee. She went straight to the oven, took out the little dishes one by one and put them on the table, an expression of gloomy despair growing with each trip. She sat down at the table and rested her chin in her hands. “Well, I tried,” she said softly. “I did the best I could.”

I leaned over her shoulder. The dishes were covered with neat rows of yellow fuzz like ripe grain fields seen from a kilometer above. Healthy, they were, and growing. I put a hand on her shoulder. “Sorry,” I said. “You just didn’t have enough to work with on something new like this. I’d better call Roosevelt and let them know.” I looked at John, but he shifted his gaze to the floor in front of him.

“If only I’d—,” she said, then jerked upright so fast my hand dropped away from her shoulder. “Wait a minute!” She pointed a finger, counting dishes, and then squinting closely at them, reading the little labels telling her which drug she had tried. She counted again. “There’s a dish missing here. I had—oh shit!” She jumped up from the table.

“What?”

“The culture with the actinylprotease, I left it in the botany lab when you had trouble with Alonzo last night. It’s been at room temperature all this time.” She rushed out of the room and I was right behind her all the way to the lab. The dish was where she’d left it, a swivel lamp still burning close over the working area. Joan practically leaped at it, eyes inches from the dish. “I think—yes, look!”

I looked. Same thing, like rows of wheat, only fainter, and something was wrong with two of those rows, like locusts had been at them, eating them to the ground. There were jagged, bare lines in a field of yellow fuzz. There was no life there.

“Killed them!” shouted Joan right into my ear. “There’s no time for a better test, Carl. I have to go with it, and now.” She was making calculations on a piece of paper. “There’s no telling what else it’ll kill in a human. As far as I know it’s only been used on small animals before now. This is a monstrous chance I’m taking here. I want you to understand that before I ask you to help me. Do you?”

“They’re going to die for sure if we don’t do something,” I said solemnly. “What can I do?”

“Oh, Carl,” said Joan, and she kissed me again, only this time I kissed back and managed to hold it for half a second until she pulled away and smiled at me. “Syringes in that left drawer. Help me fill them.” She mixed and measured, her face flushed again with excitement. I helped her fill five syringes with the stuff she brewed, and handed them to her in sick bay when she shot it into her five patients. She sat down, and sighed. “I can see my whole career going down the drain for this. I just might have murdered five people.”

* * * *

But it didn’t work out that way.

Harry was the first to feel better, I guess because the bugs hadn’t been in him quite as long as for the others. Joan shot them up four times a day until Roosevelt arrived and it was another fourteen days before we were out of quarantine. The stuff in those syringes looked like swamp water, but in five days everyone was screaming for food and Joan started them on a liquid protein diet. None of us found it amusing when Harry asked for eggs.

We all felt bad about Sally and Ono. Another probe took them out for a deep space burial with a trajectory taking them into the furnace of Procyon C. It was a good way for a spacer to end it. There was relief when we discovered the bugs hadn’t come in with anyone. There were clusters of peppercorns around the stove’s vent to the outside, and the flue was full of them. That meant redesign before another probe landed on Emerald three years later.

When we climbed aboard Roosevelt, Joan and I were both sneezing from colds, giving each other sly looks and glad that nobody asked why we had the sniffles and the others didn’t. We’d already decided we’d ship out together again if even the smallest opportunity arose.

And it did.