She was a fifty-footer, a slender craft with a weighted fin-keel that would cut too deep for bay navigation. Paul guessed that the colony wanted only a flat-bottomed vessel for hauling passengers and cargo across from the mainland. They would have little use for the trim seaster with the lines of a baby destroyer. Upon closer examination, he guessed that it had been a police boat, or Coast Guard craft. There was a gun-mounting on the forward deck, minus the gun. She was built for speed, and powered by diesels, and she could be provisioned for a nice long cruise.
Paul went to scrounge among the warehouses and locate a stock of supplies. He met an occasional monk or nun, but the gray-skinned monastics seemed only desirous of avoiding him. The dermie desire was keyed principally by smell, and the deodorant oil helped preserve him from their affections. Once he was approached by a wild-eyed layman who startled him amidst a heap of warehouse crates. The dermie was almost upon him before Paul heard the footfall. Caught without an escape route, and assailed by startled terror, he shattered the man’s arm with a shotgun blast, then fled from the warehouse to escape the dermie’s screams.
Choking with shame, he found a dermie monk and sent him to care for the wounded creature. Paul had shot at other plague victims when there was no escape, but never with intent to kill. The man’s life had been spared only by hasty aim.
“It was self-defense,” he reminded himself.
But defense against what? Against the inevitable?
He hurried back to the hospital and found Mendelhaus outside the small chapel. “I better not wait for your boat,” he told the priest. “I just shot one of your people. I better leave before it happens again.”
Mendelhaus’ thin lips tightened. “You shot—”
“Didn’t kill him,” Paul explained hastily. “Broke his arm. One of the brothers is bringing him over. I’m sorry, Father, but he jumped me.”
The priest glanced aside silently, apparently wrestling against anger. “I’m glad you told me,” he said quietly. “I suppose you couldn’t help it. But why did you leave the hospital? You’re safe here. The yacht will be provisioned for you. I suggest you remain in your room until it’s ready. I won’t vouch for your safety any farther than the building.” There was a tone of command in his voice, and Paul nodded slowly. He started away.
“The young lady’s been asking for you,” the priest called after him.
Paul stopped. “How is she?”
“Over the crisis, I think. Infection’s down. Nervous condition not so good. Deep depression. Sometimes she goes a little hysterical.” He paused, then lowered his voice. “You’re at the focus of it, young man. Sometimes she gets the idea that she touched you, and then sometimes she raves about how she wouldn’t do it.”
Paul whirled angrily, forming a protest, but the priest continued: “Seevers talked to her, and then a psychologist—one of our sisters. It seemed to help some. She’s asleep now. I don’t know how much of Seevers’ talk she understood, however. She’s dazed—combined effects of pain, shock, infection, guilt feelings, fright, hysteria—and some other things, Morphine doesn’t make her mind any clearer. Neither does the fact that she thinks you’re avoiding her.”
“It’s the plague I’m avoiding!” Paul snapped. “Not her.”
Mendelhaus chuckled mirthlessly. “You’re talking to me, aren’t you?” He turned and entered the chapel through a swinging door. As the door fanned back and forth, Paul caught a glimpse of a candlelit altar and a stark wooden crucifix, and a sea of monk-robes flawing over the pews, waiting for the celebrant priest to enter the sanctuary and begin the Sacrifice of the Mass. He realized vaguely that it was Sunday.
Paul wandered back to the main corridor and found himself drifting toward Willie’s room. The door was ajar, and he stopped short lest she see him. But after a moment he inched forward until he caught a glimpse of her dark mass of hair unfurled across the pillow. One of the sisters had combed it for her, and it spread in dark waves, gleaming in the candlelight. She was still asleep. The candle startled him for an instant—suggesting a deathbed and the sacrament of the dying. But a dog-eared magazine lay beneath it; someone had been reading to her.
He stood in the doorway, watching the slow rise of her breathing. Fresh, young, shapely—even in the crude cotton gown they had given her, even beneath the blue-white pallor of her skin—soon to become gray as a cloudy sky in a wintery twilight. Her lips moved slightly, and he backed a step away. They paused, parted moistly, showing thin white teeth. Her delicately carved face was thrown back slightly on the pillow. There was a sudden tightening of her jaw.
A weirdly pitched voice floated unexpectedly from down the hall, echoing the semisinging of Gregorian chant: “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor…” The priest was beginning Mass.
As the sound came, the girl’s hands clenched into rigid fists beneath the sheet. Her eyes flared open to stare wildly at the ceiling. Clutching the bedclothes, she pressed the fists up against her face and cried out: “No! NOOOO! God, I won’t!”
Paul backed out of sight and pressed himself against the wall. A knot of desolation tightened in his stomach. He looked around nervously. A nun, hearing the outcry, came scurrying down the hall, murmuring anxiously to herself. A plump mother hen in a dozen yards of starched white cloth. She gave him a quick challenging glance and waddled inside.
“Child, my child, what’s wrong! Nightmares again?”
He heard Willie breathe a nervous moan of relief. Then her voice, weakly— “They… they made me… touch… Ooo, God! I want to cut off my hands!”
Paul fled, leaving the nun’s sympathetic reassurance to fade into a murmur behind him.
He spent the rest of the day and the night in his room. On the following day, Mendelhaus came with word that the boat was not yet ready. They needed to finish caulking and stock it with provisions. But the priest assured him that it should be afloat within twenty-four hours. Paul could not bring himself to ask about the girl.
A monk brought his food—unopened cans, still steaming from the sterilizer, and on a covered tray. The monk wore gloves and mask, and he had oiled his own skin. There were moments when Paul felt as if he were the diseased and contagious patient from whom the others protected themselves. Like Omar, he thought, wondering—“which is the Potter, pray, and which the Pot?”
Was Man, as Seevers implied, a terrorized ape-tribe fleeing illogically from the gray hands that only wanted to offer a blessing? How narrow was the line dividing blessing from curse, god from demon! The parasites came in a devil’s mask, the mask of disease. “Diseases have often killed me,” said Man. “All disease is therefore evil.” But was that necessarily true? Fire had often killed Man’s club-bearing ancestors, but later came to serve him. Even diseases had been used to good advantage—artificially induced typhoid and malaria to fight venereal infections.
But the gray skin… taste buds in the fingertips… alien microorganisms tampering with the nerves and the brain. Such concepts caused his scalp to bristle. Man—made over to suit the tastes of a bunch of supposedly beneficent parasites—was he still Man, or something else? Little bacteriological farmers imbedded in the skin, raising a crop of nerve cells—eat one, plant two, sow an old actor in a new field, reshuffle the feeder-fibers to the brain.