Her features went slick with surprise. "I didn't."
"It's all right. I'm not angry."
"You're not?" Her lipsticked mouth looked petulant again.
"Why should I be?" Carl smacked the lance against his palm like a nightstick. "I'm leaving this rock as soon as the lynk can carry me, and nobody can stop me. I want you to tell them that. Make them understand=-so no one tries to stop me."
"There's still time." Her face was moony with love in a halo of static-frizzed hair. "Stay with me. And talk with them. yourself. Let them hear what they can before you go." , "No, Sheelagh. I came back to see you, not them. I have to explain why I behaved so wildly with you the other night."
"Sit down and tell me." She put her hands on him to guide him toward a Morris chair, and two blue sparks snapped from her fingertips.
Carl's eyes went fish-round. He looked again at her hair and the wrinkled blouse clinging to her pale flesh.
"I wasn't thinking clearly," he said in a voice crispy with apprehension. "The zotl had me freaked. And I just felt I had to be with you. I needed sympathy"
"Tell me about it." She steered him to the upholstered chair, and the smell of her was fresh as the browse of a summer shower.
"Here, sit down."
"I got selfish," he continued through the static of his nervousness. "And, well, to get to the point -I think I exposed you to the same spore that first turned me into light. The spore's in my blood, and-"
"You what?" Her romantic mask curdled to a scowl.
""The euphoria you're feeling-the sparks..." His hands opened futilely before him. "They're all symptoms, Sheelagh! But you don't have to be afraid-"
"You infected me?" Anger and fear pulsed in her eyes. "I'm going to be taken to that other world?" Her breath spit with her shock. In a gesture made strong with her sudden loathing, she shoved Carl, and he dropped backward into the plump chair.
The springloaded hypodermic hidden in the cushion punched him squarely in the upper right quadrant of his buttocks, and his face buckled with shock. Zeke felt Carl's outrage as he realized he had been duped. He raised the lance at Sheelagh, and she gasped, the angry flush of her face draining to the color of metal. But the drug was a nervelock, and one second later, Carl was paralyzed.
Another second, and he was unconscious.
Time collaged, and Zeke witnessed the arrival of the police and the siren-whirling transport of Carl's body to a surgery room in Sloan Kettering. The images shrank and went colorless, wrinkling up like a mushroom, collapsing into the dark duff of sleep.
Carl woke to a searing headache. His brain felt sunburned.
When he opened his eyes, the blisters inside his skull winced with the weight of the light. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were so much cooked squid. The brash light sat on his-chest, and his eyes adjusted enough for him to see that he was in a white-tiled observation chamber. An overhead camera silently watched him. His hands fluttered over his body, and he felt wires taped to his nakedness.
"Carl Schirmer," a woman's voice spoke. "I am Commander Leonard. You are in my charge now, and I've placed you under maximum security watch-for obvious reasons. Are you willing to cooperate with me?"
Carl squinted up at a whitehaired old lady with cheeks brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Her iguana eyes regarded him dispassionately.
"What've you done to me?" Carl groaned. He was hollowed out, and the gonging emptiness terrified him.
- "Your weapons have been removed, Carl." The clack of a lock resounded in the chamber, and a hatch opened at the far end. A muscular fellow in a scarlet jumpsuit waited there.
"Can you sit up?" Commander Leonard asked.
"I don't think so."
"Let's try". She lifted his head and put an arm under his shoulders. With an unexpected strength, she sat him up, and his head pounded like a diesel. His within life was vaporous. The hymn-presence of the armor was gone. Only the sinuosities of his body, shivering with alarm, were real.
"Now I want you to stand up," she informed him.
He looked at her as though she had asked him to kill himself.
She pulled off the wires taped to his body, and he leaned his face into the shoulder of her white jacket. The purple odor there reminded him of the kindly
matrons that came to St. Tim's on holidays to play with the children.
"We've taken the armoring chip out of your skull," she said, helping him to stand. "We couldn't take the chance of leaving it in.
And even with it out, we've kept you unconscious just to be sure.
You've been out for three days now, and in that time we've examined you and your artifacts thoroughly."
Carl wobbled, and the scarlet-suited bouncer who had stepped into the chamber steadied him. Commander Leonard unfolded a green hospital gown. While she dressed him, she spoke: "You have the chromosomes of a newborn--no chipping on any of the alleles, and the supercoiling of your genomes is tight as it gets. You're genetically perfect. And that means you're somehow artificial.
You're not really human."
The pain in his head was dimming, and psychic space rippled like wind-bright curtains.
"The painkiller should be coming on about now," Commander Leonard said, fastening the gown's ties behind his back. "I think you can walk. Please, try."
He swayed forward, and the guard guided him. At the hatch, his escort put a hand on his head to keep him from braining himself as he went through. The outside of the chamber was darker and cooler. The guard led him down a melon-pale corridor past doorless ofce stalls. To one side was a burnedout cavity that had once been an office. The black, tar-droopy shapes of a desk and chairs were discernible in the ash-slush.
"That's where Sheelagh caught light," Commander Leonard's grandmotherly voice said. "No one really believed her story until that happened. Fortunately, the agent interviewing her fled when he saw green fire crawling over her."
"Sheelagh-" Carl's voice cracked. "I infected her."
"Yes, and two others in the apartment building you bought her have also caught light in the last two days."
Carl wanted to speak, to explain himself, but his mind was tenanted with grief. "I didn't want this to happen-" he managed lamely. The guard nudged him beyond the cindered room, and anguish turned in Carl like a sense. "I'm sorry-believe me."
"We believe everything now," the commander said. "'Mat's why we've gotten you up."
They came to an open elevator. It closed behind them and with a barely perceptible hug silently carried them up. "Your actions have threatened all life on earth," Leonard spoke. "You're a selfish, thoughtless man, Carl, and you should be punished for what you've done. But for now, we need you. And maybe bur need is punishment enough."
Terror bristled in him. "The zotl."
The commander's lizard eyes nodded. "The lance has been calling for you. It started at midnight. Listen."
Carl heard it: a rumbling, inchoate as thunder.
The elevator stopped, the doors parted, and the thunder became a bellowing that forced hands over ears. The guard pushed Carl into the withering roar. The cacophony stopped instantly.
Carl looked around. He was in an amphitheater ringed with computer panels and viewscreens. The floor of the chamber was a maze of consoles. People in uniforms and lab suits were coming out of the soundproofed siderooms where they had been waiting. At the center of the electronic labyrinth was a gray velvet pedestal on which lay the gold lance and the electricitycolored armoring chip. A technician .in a green smock picked them up in surgery-gloved hands and began working his way through the maze to them.
The viewscreens came on, revealing a milky dawn
sky. Pins of cold light flashed on the monitor screen with the glinting swiftness of rapiers.
"Needlecraft," Carl clattered more than said.
"If you can't stop them," Commander Leonard said stiffly, "the spore you infected us with won't have its chance to kidnap us."