“Philly who?”
“Philadelphia. It’s where I live with my folks.”
“You don’t have to call. The pneumo’ll shoot you there in twenty minutes.”
“I know that. I have to tell them I’m not coming home tonight.”
Which was all I needed. “The phone’s out of order,” I said.
“Don’t guff,” she said. “What kind of rip do you think I am? I wouldn’t lay a call on you.”
“You really should go home, Miz—” I still didn’t know her name.
“I’m staying. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. This is first Opsday, and I’m going to start your Ops Week for you, touch earth.”
“The phone’s in the bedroom.”
“I know, and it works. I tried it. I’ll call from the public CB down in the lobby. I don’t want to take anything off you, dude, except your clothes. Maybe you don’t know there are girls like me. Maybe you’ll find out, touch earth.”
She left. I sat at the fire, trying to figure out how I’d gotten into this tsimmis and how in hell I was going to get out of it without hurting feelings. No attack-escape; I just prayed. There was a knock on the door.
“It’s open,” I called.
The door opened. It was Ind’dni. My prayers were answered. There is a God.
“Bless you, Subadar,” I said.
“Alas, I have no pleasant greeting for you, Dr. Shima.”
“Is it a bust, I hope?”
“Please to come downstairs, doctor.”
“I’ll go quietly, but I—”
“Come, please.”
So I come please. Ind’dni was silent and despairing. I was completely bewildered. In the lobby, the hommy squad stood around the glass CB booth. There were spectators staring; some vomiting. The glass door was shut tight. A body’d been jammed into the booth, head down, the veins torn open, and she’d drowned in her own blood to begin my carnival for me.
16
They were out at sea aboard the nuclear trawler, Drogh III, far beyond the sight of land and the stench of the Corridor. The derrick boom was swung to starboard, and the winch was slowly releasing the heavy multi-cable as the bathysphere containing Gretchen Nunn descended. Inside, she was entwined and embroidered with electrode contacts.
Doctors Blaise (Shim) Shima and Friedrich Humboldt (Lucy) Leuz were in the control cabin which resembled the flight deck of a spacecraft; four walls of illuminated readout panels, dials, and projection screens.
Lucy Leuz was power gone to fat. Not tall, enormously bulky, with arms and legs as big around as a girl’s waist. A bathtub could barely contain him plus five gallons of water. Oddly enough, his voice was completely out of character with the menace of his bulk; soft and sweet, the vowels curiously inflected with umlauts. “True” was “Trew.” “Moon” was “Mewn.”
“She deep enough, Lucy?” Shima asked.
Leuz was concentrating on the depth dial. “Almost. Patience, Shim baby. Patience. Got your sensory program set?”
“Uh-huh. All five ready and counting.”
“Five? Five senses? I thought you said that Subadar Ind’dni told you—”
“To hell with what he said. I’m testing everything; sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. They learned us to take nothing for granted at Tech. Remember?”
“Painfully. Are her electrode contacts secure, but I mean really?”
“She’ll never shake ‘em off.”
“And she knows the scam? She won’t panic when you jolt her?”
“She’s been briefed. She knows. Don’t worry… Gretchen’s got a cool that could start another ice age.”
“R.” Leuz pressed a stud. “We stop the descent here. Two hundred fathoms.”
“Thank heaven it’s a calm sea.”
“Down two hundred fathoms your girl wouldn’t know if a typhoon was blowing upstairs.”
“The fun you DODO dudes have.”
“You want to signal her that you’re starting, Shim?”
“No, that’s not in the program. She’s on her own, down in the deep blue yonder.”
“It’s the deep black yonder, where she is. The girl is about as insulated as she’ll ever be.”
Shima nodded, threw a switch, and Gretchen’s total State of the Body flashed onto a projection screen.
“Whatever in the cockeyed world is that, Shim?”
“Metabolic readout, Lucy. Pulse. Temperature. Respiration. Tension. Tone. Etcetera. Etcetera.”
“In decimal? Decimal! Talk about old-fashioned!”
“Yeah. It’s an antique program I pulled out of the software library at CCC. It was the easiest and quickest to convert to these tests. Any self-respecting computer will translate the decimal into modern binary, if I need it.”
“Was the old original a sensory test program? Like how and why customers smell CCC perfumes?”
“Hell, no! It was probabilities for n-tuplets worked out for Sales. But you write a classy program, Lucy, and its algorithms can be adapted to anything. You know that. Snips and snails and puppydog tails, and such are computers made of.”
“The fun you science mavins have.”
“Oh, a science, am I? And what are you, pray, Doctor Friedrich Humboldt Leuz?”
“I, sir, whatever your name is, am an Untersee Forschungsreisende… And what’s more, I can spell it.”
“And a hearty Sieg Heil to you. I’m going to hit her with sound now. Got to find out if her hearing is secondhand, too. Ind’dni said that might be important. He didn’t say why…”
Shima examined the readout of Gretchen’s sound-responses with perplexity. At last Leuz inquired, “Got a problem?”
“It’s the damnedest thing,” Shima said slowly. “She can hear all right, but she has a very low quantity threshold. In other words, she can hear, say, distant thunder, but not thunder cracking overhead. She can hear a canary whisper, but not a bull sea-lion roar. That’s a complete switch on your run-of-the-mill deafness.”
“Fascinating. You know, Shim, Miz Nunn might be a new evolutionary quantum jump.”
“Oh?”
“The crux of survival for a species is adaptability. What knocked off the extincts? Inability to roll with the punches of change.”
“No argument.”
“Our environment has been changing drastically,” Leuz continued. “One of them is the battering of our senses by sights and sounds beyond endurance, which is why we have so many crazies in Bedlam-Rx. Thousands and thousands who’ve rejected an impossible reality.” Leuz meditated. “Maybe they’re the sanes and we’re the crazies to put up with it.”
“And Gretchen? Is she rejecting?”
“No, she’s adapting. Mother Nature is always pushing species toward the primal pinnacle, and that includes Man. Regrettably, you and I are far below that pinnacle.”
“Careful with your slander, Lucy. I’m taping everything that goes on here.”
“Mother Nature, with her glorious improvisation, is trying to generate an advanced species of Man through a freaky adaptation to our changing environment. Another push toward the primal pinnacle… and that’s your girl, Gretchen Nunn. She’s rolling with the punches of degenerating sights and sounds.”
“Hmmm… The primal pinnacle… You may be right, Lucy. Certainly you’re right about my being nowhere near it. But Gretchen? I don’t know. I do know that, near or far, she’s unique.”
“All of that. The only question is whether it’s a genuine mutation and inheritable. Are you doing anything to investigate that?”
“The pill is her option,” Shima smiled. “R. No more rapping; we mustn’t keep the lady waiting. I’ll check taste and smell now.”
“Man! What a peak! Ind’dni was right. The little lady sure can smell and taste.”
“What’d you hit her with, Shim?”
“H2S. Hydrogen sulphide.”
“What? Rotten eggs?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That, sir, is cruel and unusual punishment, expressly forbidden by the Constitution of the United States.”
“She was programmed to expect the worst.”