“Damn!” Pitt agonized, gritting his teeth.
“She says she’s already experiencing the first symptoms of the flu,” Jonathan continued. “She wants to wish us good luck.”
“Contact her!” Pitt shouted. “Now, live, before she signs off.”
“Pitt, it’s no use,” Sheila said. “It will just make it more difficult. She’s infected!”
“She might be infected, but obviously she’s still Cassy,” Pitt said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t be wishing us good luck.” He forcibly nudged Jonathan aside and started typing furiously.
Jonathan looked up at Sheila. Sheila shook her head. Although she knew it was wrong, she didn’t have the heart to stop him.
For Cassy the image on the monitor was intermittently blurry. As she’d typed the tears had come. Closing her eyes for a moment and wiping them with the back of her hand, she tried to get herself under control. She wanted to leave one last message for Pitt. She wanted to tell him that she loved him.
Opening her eyes and returning her hands to the keyboard, Cassy was about to type her last sentence when a live message popped onto her screen. She gazed at it in astonishment. It said: “Cassy, it’s me, Pitt. Where are you?”
It was the longest few seconds of Pitt’s life. He goggled at the monitor and willed it to respond. Then as if answering a prayer, the black characters began popping out of the luminous background.
“Yes!” Pitt shouted while punching the air with a fist. “I caught her. She knows I’m here.”
“What is she saying?” Sheila ventured. She was afraid to ask because she was sure this contact was going to lead to heartache and trouble.
“She’s saying she’s not too far from here,” Pitt said. “I’m going to tell her to meet me.”
“Pitt, no!” Sheila shouted. “Even if she’s not one of them now, she will be shortly. You can’t take the chance. You certainly can’t expose this lab.”
Pitt looked over at Sheila. His emotional pain was palpable. His breaths were coming in short gasps. “I can’t abandon her,” he said. “I just can’t.”
“You must,” Sheila said. “You saw what happened to Beau.”
Pitt’s fingers were poised above the keyboard. He’d never felt such heart-wrenching indecision.
“Wait,” Harlan said suddenly. “Ask her how long it has been since she was stung.”
“What difference does that make?” Sheila said angrily. She felt irritated that Harlan would interfere at such a moment.
“Just do it,” Harlan said. He walked over to stand behind Pitt.
Pitt typed the question. The answer came back instantly: about four hours. Harlan looked at his watch and bit the inside of his cheek while thinking.
“What is going on inside your head?” Sheila demanded, looking Harlan in the eye.
“I have a little confession to make,” Harlan said. “I wasn’t telling the whole truth about those black discs. One of them did sting me when I was out collecting the last batch.”
“Then you are one of them!” Sheila said with horror.
“No, at least I don’t think so,” Harlan said. “I tied my weak monoclonal antibody to the enabling protein, and I’ve been giving myself shots ever since. I’ve had the sniffles but no flu.”
“That’s fantastic,” Pitt said. “Let me tell Cassy.”
“Wait!” Sheila commanded. “How long after you were stung did you give yourself the antibody?”
“That’s my only concern,” Harlan said. “There was a three-hour interval. I was in Paswell at the time it happened. It took me three hours to get back here.”
“Cassy has already been four,” Sheila said. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s worth a try,” Harlan said. “We can put her in one of the containment rooms and see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, there’s no way she can get out of there. They’re like dungeons.”
Pitt didn’t need any more encouragement. Without another word he began telling Cassy they had an antibody to the protein and giving her directions to the deserted gas station.
“Why didn’t you tell us you’d been stung?” Sheila questioned. She didn’t know whether to be angry or encouraged by this new development.
“To be honest,” Harlan said, “I was afraid you wouldn’t trust me that I was okay. I was going to tell you sooner or later. Actually the fact that it has seemingly worked makes me feel a bit optimistic.”
“Well, I should say so!” Sheila said. “It’s the first positive piece of information so far.”
Pitt finished his communication with Cassy and came over to Sheila and Harlan.
“I hope you were as discreet as possible with the directions,” Harlan said. “We certainly don’t want a truckload of infected people to be there at the station waiting for you when you arrive.”
“I tried to be,” Pitt said. “But at the same time I wanted to make sure Cassy found the place. It is so isolated.”
“Actually the risk is probably pretty small,” Harlan said. “My feeling is that the infected people aren’t using the Net. They don’t seem to need it since they appear to know what each other are thinking.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?” Pitt asked Harlan.
“I don’t think I’d better,” Harlan said. “There’s only a partial dose of my antibody left. I’ll have to get busy extracting more so that it’s available when your friend gets here. That means you’ll have to find your own way. Think you can do it?”
“Sounds like I don’t have much choice,” Pitt said.
Harlan handed Pitt the vial of what antibody he had along with a syringe. “I hope you know how to give an injection,” he said.
Pitt commented that he thought he could do it because he’d been clerking in the hospital for three years.
“You’d better give it IV,” Harlan said. “But be prepared for some mouth to mouth if she has an anaphylatic reaction.”
Pitt visibly gulped, but he nodded.
“And you might as well take this,” Harlan said, unbuckling his holstered Colt.45. “My advice is to use it if you have to. Remember, the infected people feel very strongly about you being infected if they sense you aren’t.”
“What about me?” Jonathan asked. “I’ll go with Pitt. He might have trouble finding his way back here, and four eyes will be better than two.”
“I think you’d better stay here,” Sheila said. “We can find plenty for you to do.” She rolled up her sleeves. “And we are going to be very busy.”
Once Cassy had been located, brought to the institute, and subsequently infected, progress on the Gateway speeded up. Although the thousands of workers didn’t have to be individually told what to do, ultimately their instructions came from Beau. Consequently it was necessary for Beau to spend a good deal of time in the vicinity of the construction and for his mind to be clear of extraneous thoughts. With Cassy upstairs and soon to be one of the infected, Beau found it easy to fulfill his responsibilities.
Progress had even reached a point where it was possible to energize briefly a portion of the electrical grids. The test was a success although it did indicate that portions of the system needed further shielding. With those instructions communicated, Beau took a break.
He climbed the main stairs in a normal bipedal fashion, although he was conscious of the fact that it would probably be easier for him now to hop up, taking six or eight steps at a time. There had been considerable augmentation of his quadriceps.
Reaching the upper hall he sensed something was wrong. He hadn’t felt it downstairs because the level of unspoken communication about the Gateway was so intense. But now that he was alone, it was different. By this time he should have been getting stirrings of Cassy’s developing collective consciousness. Since there was none at all he feared she’d died.