“Well,” said Barlow thoughtfully, “you know, we can. That’s not the problem. Look, we’re assuming the thing is intelligent and it understands what we say. So we can talk to it all we want to; the only thing is, it can’t talk to us, or won’t.”
“Which is it?” McNulty asked. “Randy?”
Geller shifted restlessly in his chair. “How the hell do I know?”
“While you were infected—”
“Infested,” Geller muttered.
“—did you ever feel that your actions were being controlled in any way?”
“Are you kidding?” Geller got up, his face set.
“Randy,” said Barlow.
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“Do it for me. This is interesting. Come on.”
Geller sat down sulkily. “It’s all bullshit.”
“What he means is, the answer is no.”
“I can tell him what I mean, Yvonne.”
“So tell him.”
“The answer is no,” said Geller. “Not just maybe or perhaps or a little bit. I know that for sure, because while I had the parasite, I did just what I would have done anyway. Look, use your brain. Here you are, you’re a thing from another planet or God knows where, and you’ve never seen people before, or walls, or toothpicks, or coffee cups. If you could control the person you’re in, what would you do? You’d walk it around and look at everything. If you could make a person talk, you’d ask questions. Then you’d have your wish.”
“He means you could have a conversation with it,” Bar-low said. “And he’s right. As far as I can tell, I didn’t do or say a thing that I wouldn’t have said on an ordinary day. So I think we’re justified in assuming, the way we have before, that if the thing doesn’t do something, it’s because it can’t.”
“Would you both agree,” McNulty asked delicately, “that your attitudes changed after the parasite left you?”
“Sure.”
“Yvonne, you too?”
“Of course. I suddenly saw I wasn’t doing what I wanted to do with my life, so I quit.”
“What do you want to do with your life?”
“I want to have some fun, and find out things, and do something that makes sense.”
“Okay. But you know it must have been the parasite that changed your mind.”
“True.”
“And you like that.”
“Sure, I like it."
“Don’t you have to ask youself—being objective, now—if you would have liked the idea of having your mind changed, if you’d known it was going to happen?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Geller broke in. “Come on, you know you can’t argue that one way or the other. Either we’re crazy now or we were dumb before. I say we were dumb before.”
“So you think the thing did you a favor?”
“A favor?” said Geller. “Maybe.” He gnawed a fingernail. “Interesting question. Might be just a by-product of the parasite-host relationship. Or maybe it’s a symbiote, not a parasite—it gives you something for what it gets, like the bacteria in your gut.”
Barlow was nodding. “I think that’s right.”
“So you’d definitely say it doesn't intend us harm, basically?”
“Right.”
“Even though it makes everything fall apart?”
“What do you mean by everything?”
“Well, the marine lab, for instance. You both walked off your jobs. What would happen if everybody walked off their jobs?”
“I don’t give a damn about their stupid jobs. Look, McNulty, I know you think I’m a brainwashed idiot, but that’s your problem. Take a good look at the things people do for a living and ask yourself how many of them are worth doing. How many people go through their whole goddamn lives screwing part A onto part B?”
“So you think the best thing to do would be to spread this around? Let the parasite get onto the mainland?”
“No.”
McNulty glanced at Barlow, then leaned back and folded his hands. “Now, isn’t there a little bit of contradiction there?”
“Think, McNulty. The system works because most people are dumb. That doesn’t mean I have to be dumb.”
“I see. And you don’t feel any obligation to help make the system work? Even though you’re in trouble if it doesn't?”
“No. The system will probably collapse. We’ll get a new system. It might be a better one.”
Next morning Emily Woodruff was wheeled into the hospital annex; she had collapsed in the Quarter Deck Breakfast Shop. McNulty looked at her and wondered if that was coincidence. Had the parasite deliberately sought her out, so they couldn’t play that trick again?
33
In the name of the emergency, and with a sense of profound relief, Bliss had canceled all his formal entertainments, but the curious result was that time hung heavy on his hands in the evenings. In the ample space of his living room, intended for jolly cocktail parties of thirty or more, he felt himself isolated, almost imprisoned. He could not invite any of the VIP passengers without having to listen to their complaints all over again, and as for the staff, he saw all he wanted of them during the day. The only ones he could talk to were Dr. McNulty, who as a professional man did not exactly come under the heading of staff, and Captain Hartman, who was neither staff nor passenger.
After dinner that night in Bliss’s suite, McNulty told them about his interviews with the recovered patients, particularly Geller and Barlow. “As far as I can make out,” he said, “the only principle they recognize is what you might call more or less enlightened self-interest. They’re intelligent young people, and they’re not exactly antisocial, but they just don’t see the point of supporting a system they think is cockeyed.”
“And that makes you uneasy?”
“Yes, it does. Maybe the system is cockeyed, but it seems to work. I’ve been thinking about that lately. Lots of the things we do aren’t rational. Love isn’t. Having babies isn't. ‘Irrational’ is a dirty word, but maybe it shouldn’t be. This thing, this parasite, maybe it’s a completely rational being, and it just doesn’t understand that human beings don’t work that way. You know what they say about the road to hell?”
“No, what do they say?”
“It’s paved with good intentions.”
After McNulty went home, Bliss brought out the chessboard. It was his turn to play white; he used a conventional Ruy Lopez opening. Hartman played for position, as usual, but Bliss developed an unorthodox queen’s-side position which turned into an ingenious combination twenty moves later. Hartman smiled when he saw it. “Well done,” he said, and tipped over his king.
Afterward he accepted a whisky and said, “You know, I think the doctor is right to be worried. The other day I had a talk in a bar with two gentlemen, both recovered patients and both veterans of the Nicaraguan War. They both say quite emphatically they wouldn’t do it again.”
“Did you ask them,” said Bliss, “what if the U.S. were invaded?”
“I did, and they said they’d fight then if they had to, because they could see some point in it. By the way, I also talked to a recovered patient who’d spent twenty years in some giant corporation or other. He said if he had it to do over, he wouldn’t do that again. After he retired, he took up making stained glass, and now he says he’s happy for the first time in his life."
"That’s worrisome," Bliss said after a moment. “There are a good many things in life one doesn’t particularly like to do; still, they've got to be done. Where would we be if everyone did just what they liked?"
"Wouldn’t be any war, perhaps.” Hartman said. “Nobody would go and fight for democracy, or Bolshevism, or the Holy Roman Empire."
"You have to fight sometimes.”