She had to be gotten out of there!
There wasn’t any question about it. What she needed was medical help, and Sandy couldn’t supply it himself.
With only one air tank, what could he do? Not to mention the fact that he couldn’t swim.
It was impossible; but it was also absolutely necessary, and so, grimly, Sandy fitted the mask over the unconscious, groaning woman and clumsily attached the one filled air tank. He closed his eyes, visualizing the path they had traced on entering. Down the spiral staircase. Across the bank floor. Out into the open water, then up to the surface.
It had, he thought, taken no more than five or ten minutes for them to enter in the first place. That was with Marguery in command, and Marguery knew what she was doing; so call it fifteen for him to make it out. Well, then. He could hold his breath for, probably, three minutes—call it two and a half to be safe. That meant he needed to empty his lungs and fill them again half a dozen times.
Was that possible?
The only way to find out was to try. Holding his breath, he slipped his hand under the mask on Marguery’s unconscious face and pulled the mask away. His great hand covered her mouth and nose easily as he exhaled all the air his lungs would surrender. His other hand put the mask over his own face long enough to refill his lungs, and then he replaced the mask.
Then he squatted on his heels in dismay. He was not at all sure that he would be able to keep water from entering Marguery’s lungs, but that wasn’t the worst thing. Still worse was the fact that the process took far too much time. He couldn’t go on breathing only once every two minutes for very long. There was another consideration, too: He didn’t have enough hands to go around. He needed one to keep the water out of Marguery’s nose and mouth, one to hold the mask to his own, and a third one to hold onto whatever rail or article of furniture was mooring them at the moment, and still a fourth hand to hold Marguery.
The whole thing was impossible. It wouldn’t work. They needed two tanks—
Abruptly Sandy roared with surprised satisfaction, making the unconscious woman stir and moan. They had two tanks! The only problem was that one of them was empty.
By the time he had figured out how to bleed some of the contents of the full tank into the other Marguery’s moaning had stopped. She seemed to be asleep. She simply did not rouse from that sleep, even when he shook her.
Sandy hooked her into her gear, slipped his own mask on, and began the long climb down into the water and under it, pulling himself hand over hand along the rail of the spiral staircase, retracing their steps. Finally, once they were down, he could see the glow of sunlight outside.
Three minutes later he was at the surface, bawling frantically for help to the people who were staring at him from a passing work boat.
Chapter 19
Because the Earth human body is constantly exposed to attack by organic things of all kinds from its environment, most of which would do it harm if they could, it has a complicated and very effective system of defenses. Antibodies form. Glands flood the system with prophylactic agents. The body mobilizes to defeat the attacker. The system works very well—that is why life has survived on Earth for four billion years—but sometimes the very mobilization of defense systems by itself causes fever, itching, sneezing, the formation of pimples or blisters or blotches—even syncope; even, sometimes, death. Then the syndrome is called “an allergic reaction,” and it can be more serious than the original attack.
When one of the air-evac medics took time to explain that to Sandy, he understood—more or less. What he understood best was that it was serious. It kept the medics busy. By the time the helicopter had made the ten-minute flight to Hudson City and was swooping down on the roof marked with a squared-off red cross, Marguery was shrouded in blankets, with a tube in her nose and another tube taped to a needle that entered a vein in her arm and her face mostly hidden under a mask.
She wasn’t talking, even incoherently. She was unconscious. After those first quick words of explanation, the medics weren’t talking, either, or at least not to Lysander Washington. No one paid any attention to him at all, at least not until they had pushed the wheeled stretcher Marguery was on into one elevator and hurried Lysander himself into another, with instructions to sit in the emergency waiting room—and the only attention he got then was from the other people sitting around, some with crutches, some with babies in their arms, some half asleep, some nervously pacing back and forth as they waited to hear the prognosis on their friends or relatives within.
The seats were flimsy aluminum-tubing things with canvas backs. Sandy did not want to trust his weight to them. He was more inclined to join the pacers, anyway, because the whole thing was a terrible mystery to him, and he couldn’t help feeling that in some way—what way it could possibly be he couldn’t imagine—the whole thing was his fault.
And no one would tell him anything.
A little girl in shorts and tennis shoes was staring at him, diverted from the situation comedy on the waiting-room TV screen. She had a carton of popcorn from a vending machine in her hand, but she wasn’t eating the popcorn because her thumb was in her mouth. She pulled it out long enough to ask, “Mister, are you the spaceman?”
He scowled at her. He was not in a talkative mood. “No,” he lied. Why should he be truthful when all about him deceived? “I’m, uh, just a normal Earth human waiting for my wife to have a baby.”
“I don’t think that’s so,” the child said critically, “because we go to the other side of the hospital when we come here for babies. My brother’s getting a marble out of his nose; he’s dumb. Do you want some popcorn?”
He shook his head and got up to visit the drinking fountain. He peered down the forbidden corridors of the hospital, pale green and white, with carts that bore unplugged machines and stacks of linen, and people in pale green smocks hurrying back and forth. Ignoring the girl, he went to the reception desk again. “Can you tell me anything about Marguery Darp?” he begged.
“The doctor will be with you when she can,” the receptionist said, eyeing him curiously. “There’s a film room down the hall if you’d like to watch some other kind of television while you wait.”
“Do they have decent chairs?” he asked ungraciously.
The receptionist studied his build. “They have couches, anyway. I think they’re pretty strong,” she offered.
“Then maybe I will,” Sandy growled, but what he decided to do first was to visit the men’s room. He was brooding. This world was entirely too full of unexpected crises! He was tired of being taken by surprise. It wasn’t the way he had been brought up; on the big interstellar ship you at least always knew where you stood, and if there was ever any doubt about what to do next the Major Seniors would tell you.
He did not want to face the curiosity of the people in the lounge again. When he found the film room the couch did, at least, look sturdy enough to bear him. But as soon as he sat and gazed at the screen, he was taken aback to see a familiar face. It was his old cohort-mate, Bottom! He was on a platform, just as Polly had been, and he, too was lecturing an invisible audience. Not on astronomy, of course. His topic was biological control of radioactive and toxic wastes, and he was showing microscope pictures of tiny organisms that, he said, would concentrate all the undesirables into their own bodies, simply by feeding on them, and then the little things could be harvested and disposed of. Result: clean water and soil.