THIRTY-ONE
THE NEXT time Dr. Fletcher came in, I was more coherent. She picked up the console and studied it. Did all hospital personnel do that automatically?
"How am I?" I asked.
"You're fine," she said. "And I can say that with authority, because I am your personal physician. Only the president and movie stars get better treatment."
She sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand on mine. "The truth is, all medical personnel in the science section were moved over to help with the emergency. But, even if that weren't the case, you'd still be under my care. You are not so much a medical case as a scientific one."
"Because I had the worst exposure to the dust?"
"You were one of the first," she said. "So if any weird effects were going to show up, we'd expect to see them in you first."
"And ... ?"
"And I am disappointed to tell you that the dust is about as benign as a Chtorran life-form can be. The death toll is expected to remain below three thousand."
"Disappointed?"
"Mm hm. I was hoping you'd be an interesting case. Too bad. I guess I'm just going to have to go back to my worms."
"Worms? Plural?"
"Uh huh. We've got two more live ones." "Dr. Fletcher?"
"Yes?"
"Have you ever put any of them together?"
"They're in the same tank, why?"
"Do they -I don't know how to phrase this-do they roll around together like they're making love?"
She looked surprised. "How do you know about that? We've only had them together for a few days. The whole thing is still very secret."
"You haven't seen the videos we brought-?"
She raised an eyebrow at me. "In all my spare time? In case you hadn't noticed-"
"Right. Sorry. Well, we saw the wrestling behavior when the blimp arrived. The worms got frantic. At first I thought they were attacking each other, but they weren't. They came back. They looked ... confused-but I wouldn't even begin to guess what was going on."
"Mm," she said. She looked like she was considering something.
"I want to see your worms," I said.
She nodded. "I want to see your videos. As soon as you're ambulatory again, okay? I'll set it up." She stood up to go. "There's a wheelchair in the closet if you want to get out of bed. Please ask a nurse to assist you. Don't be proud."
"Thanks. What room is Colonel Tirelli in?"
"She checked out three days ago. But Captain Anderson is upstairs and you can visit him any time." She remembered something. "Oh-you have messages, quite a stack of them. Please read the priority ones first. And I think your mother wants to visit you. Handle that, all right?" And then she was out the door.
After a while, I buzzed for assistance and got myself bathed, shaved and transferred to a wheelchair. I found my way up to the twelfth floor without too much trouble.
Duke was still in an oxygen tent.
He looked dreadful. He looked like the guest of honor at a Texas barbecue. I couldn't look and I couldn't look away. His face was swollen. His eyes were blistered shut. His skin was blackened and peeling. His arms looked wet and putrefying. And he smelled bad.
I almost fled in horror. Human beings should not look like this.
Human beings should not smell like this. But I didn't know how to put the wheelchair in reverse, and the little voice in my head was already bawling me out for being a coward. I steeled myself and stayed.
I rolled around to the foot of his bed and picked up the mediconsole.
Duke was on maintenance. He was beyond consciousness. For that I was grateful. There was not a lot to say. And I wasn't sure I could talk to him yet. Not with him looking like something out of a horror show. This wasn't Duke. I couldn't rectify this monstrous piece of meat with the man I had spent so much time with.
I didn't see how he could ever be human again. He might live. But his life was over. I don't know how I knew. I just knew it. My mind brought up memories. Duke had taught me almost everything I knew about how to be a military man. He'd made it very simple, he'd boiled it down to two words.
Be certain.
"Here's how to know if you're certain," he'd said. "Can I rip your arm off if you're wrong? If you can't give me an unqualified yes, then you're still not certain.
"That thing that you ignore-that thing that you let yourself be unaware of, or unconscious of, or uncertain about-that's the thing that's going to kill you. So your job, whatever it looks like, is really this: you have to know everything about everything that you have to deal with.
"There are no accidents, Jim. If you get killed, the game is over. You lost."
Simple.
Except... what would you call lying in a hospital bed looking like a bride's first roast?
Duke had screwed up somewhere. He'd trusted me. It didn't matter what Colonels Tirelli and Anderson said. This was my fault. I wished I could wake him up long enough to ask him to forgive me.
Except I knew he wouldn't.
THIRTY-TWO
TWO DAYS later, my chest scan came up clean and they checked me out of the hospital. They needed the bed space. "Go visit your mother," they told me. "She's been bugging us three times a day."
My mom was in Santa Cruz, doing something with maps-I wasn't sure what. She said she'd explain when I got there. I checked out a jeep from the motor pool and headed south on I-117.
It was over an hour's drive, but I barely noticed. The whole way there, all I could hear was the argument inside my head.
I was considering resigning my commission.
It was something that Dr. Fletcher had said; it still rankled. "You and I have two different jobs. Your job is to kill worms. My job is to study them." I was looking at myself in a mirror and wondering how the hell I'd gotten here. This wasn't where I'd wanted to be.
What I really wanted to do was what Dr. Fletcher was doing-study the worms. But how could I do that with stripes on my sleeves? They kept putting weapons into my hands and that guaranteed that all I could do was kill worms. That was the thing about being in the army-there weren't a whole lot of options.
But killing the worms-at least the way we were doing it now-was not working.
The Chtorran ecology was eating us alive.
Its microorganisms alone had killed billions of people. Those of us who survived the plagues still had to deal with the sea sludge, the stingflies, the bladderbugs, the red kudzu, the oilworms, the "grabgrass," the binnies, the libbits, the meeps-and of course, always and inevitably, the worms.
Our ancestors had killed the dinosaurs. We'd sucked their eggs and eaten their children. We still ate their descendants today: chickens, ducks, and turkeys. If tyrannosaur and hadrosaur and deinonychus still walked the Earth, we'd find a way to eat them too. The Chtorrans would do the same to us. They couldn't see us as anything more than food. Do you talk with your sandwich?
And if this was only the first wave of the invasion-as Dr. Zymph kept saying-what horrors were still waiting to manifest themselves?
How long did it take to Chtorra-form a planet? How many waves of infestation?
There had to be an intelligence behind this madness-but it might not show up for centuries, perhaps not until long after the last human being was... what? In a zoo? In a museum? Did we figure at all in the equation?
I didn't think so.
But-
-if I really felt that way, then why did I bother to keep on fighting? If the situation was that hopeless, why not just lay down and die?
Because-I had to smile at myself-I still didn't really believe it. I knew it, but I didn't believe it.
But none of this had anything to do with the army anyway. The army was irrelevant. We were holding back the worms by sheer brute force because we couldn't think of anything else to do.