Cranston flashed him a guilty glance, then turned his attention to the cooker. “Uh…I tried calling you on the radio… no answer. I didn’t know what was happening. Then… uh, the tent… it looked like it was going to collapse—”
“It did,” Dan said wearily. “You did the best thing.”
“Oh… okay…” He smiled, still looking slightly guilty.
Dr. Hsai’s quarters looked like pictures of Japanese homes that Valery had seen on the education tapes.
The compartment was no bigger than any other single man’s quarters. But it looked different. There were living green vines climbing along one wall, reaching upward to the ceiling light panels. A painting filled part of the same wall, showing soft green hills and a river with a delicate bridge arching over it. The vines seemed to blend into the picture, the two merged and became a single experience. The bunk was austere, hard-looking, but a beautiful red drape hung beside it. There was no other furniture visible, except two little pillows on the floor and a low-slung black lacquered table.
Dr. Hsai himself was dressed in a loose-fitting robe of black and white, with just a hint of gold thread at the collar.
“What a beautiful robe!” Valery said, despite herself, as Dr. Hsai ushered her into his quarters.
“Thank you very much.” The psychotech smiled pleasantly. “It belonged to my great-grandfather and has been handed down through four generations.”
“It’s very lovely.”
He smiled again and bowed ever so slightly. “I am afraid,” he said, “that I have no western furniture for you to sit upon. I usually receive visitors in the office of the infirmary. But you seemed so insistent—”
“I can sit on the floor,” Val said. She curled up next to the bunk.
Dr. Hsai offered her one of the pillows, and Val put it behind the small of her back, then leaned against the edge of the bunk.
“You wish to ask me a medical question?” Dr. Hsai inquired, sitting in the middle of the tiny room.
“A psychological question,” Val replied.
He nodded. “I might have guessed. Unfortunately, my knowledge of psychiatry is far from expert, although I have been studying the available tapes on the subject very carefully these past few weeks.”
“Why?” Val asked. “Do you think there’s a killer aboard the ship, too?”
Hsai smiled patiently. “Not at all. At least, I hope not. But certain individuals believe that there might be a killer among us, and I am trying to pin down the origins of these fears.”
“There have been these… accidents.”
“Yes.”
“Including my father.”
“Yes.”
Valery was starting to feel uncomfortable. What she wanted to ask suddenly began to sound silly in her own mind. Worse still, she felt that Dr. Hsai knew what she wanted, but was being too polite to bring up the subject himself.
“Dan Christopher has been under great emotional stress,” the psychotech said, mainly to keep the conversation from faltering. “He is a very troubled young man. Perhaps it would have been wise to revive one or more of our sleeping psychiatrists, to examine him thoroughly.”
“Yes, I was wondering why you didn’t do that,” Val said.
“Larry Belsen said it wouldn’t be necessary. As Chairman, he has the responsibility to pass on all requests for revival.”
“Larry disapproved?”
“Yes. I asked him specifically if he wanted us to revive a psychiatrist… It was when Dan Christopher was in the infirmary for observation, and I could find nothing psychologically wrong with him “
“And Larry said he didn’t want a psychiatrist revived?”
Dr. Hsai almost frowned “Not in those words, but he told me he thought it would be unnecessary. You know, of course, the difficulties involved in reviving a person, and the limited resources we have. It cannot be done lightly. And we cannot ask the person, once revived, to return to sleep a few days or weeks later It is not medically wise, for one thing.”
“I know.” Valery suddenly realized that she was gnawing on her lip. A nervous habit. She looked back at Dr. Hsai. “About the question I wanted to ask you…”
“So?”
Somehow it didn’t feel so silly now “Could, could a person do things—violent things—and not know it?”
Hsai looked puzzled.
“I mean, could somebody commit a murder and then not remember he did it? You know, his conscious mind doesn’t even know what he’s really doing “
Hsai gave the faintest of shrugs. “I have heard of such cases in my education, of course, but… of course, I have never dealt with such a situation myself.”
Before she could think about it, Valery spilled out, “Do you think that the reason Larry didn’t want a psychiatrist revived is that he was afraid the psychiatrist might find out something about him—about Larry himself.”
For an instant, Hsai looked shocked. Then he dropped a mask of oriental and professional calm over his face “You believe that Larry Belsen might be unbalanced?”
“My father’s injury was no accident,” Val said, feeling miserable “Somebody did it. Either Dan or Larry or somebody else “
For several moments Dr. Hsai sat there silently, his eyes closed. Then he looked up and said, “I will immediately take steps to revive the ship’s best psychiatrists. If your suspicions are even remotely close to the truth, this is an emergency situation There is no need to wait for the Chairman’s approval under these circumstances “
“The only trouble is,” Val said, “that Dan might already be dead “
13
Dan knew it was a nightmare, yet it still had him terrified.
He was running, or trying to. He seemed to be caught in some thick syrupy liquid that made all his motions languidly slow. Something was roaring behind him, getting louder, catching up to him. When he tried to look over his shoulder, all he could see was a giant pair of hands reaching for him.
He tried to run faster, but couldn’t. The roaring became ear-shattering. Lightning crashed and the hands grabbed at him, caught him, bore him down, pushed him under, beat at him, pummeled him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even scream—
He woke up, wide-eyed and drenched with sweat, trembling. Half a meter above his face was the curving ceiling of the underground shelter. In the bunk below him he could hear Cranston snoring lightly. The hum of electrical machinery was the only other sound, beside his own throbbing pulsebeat.
The wind had died!
Dan pushed himself up to a sitting position, and his back muscles screamed agony. For a moment he was dizzy. Forcing both the pain and faintness down, he swung his legs slowly over the edge of the bunk and slid down to the plastic flooring. The jolt when his feet hit the floor sent a fresh spark of pain shooting through him.
He shook Cranston awake.
“Huh … whuzzit…”
“I think the storm’s over,” Dan said. “You try the radio while I get suited up.”
Cranston swung out of the bunk slowly. For a long moment he sat on its edge, head drooping tiredly.
“What… how… what time’s it?”
Dan glanced at his wristwatch. It was set on ship time. “We must’ve slept more than twelve hours. Come on, try the radio.”
“How d’you feel?” Cranston asked as he pulled himself to his feet.
“Black and blue all over. Otherwise okay.”
“It’s this damned gravity.”
Cranston shuffled over to the little desk that bore the communications transceiver, minus viewscreen. As he flicked it on and started talking into the speaker, Dan pulled on the one usable pressure suit they had left.
By the time Dan was checking the seal of his helmet, he could hear Cranston saying, “No use. Can’t get through to them. No answer.”