“My wife,” he husked. “My wife? Jameela?” Saying her name was like shovelling dirt upon her coffin. “Jameela? My wife!” He couldn’t bring himself to ask if she were dead.
The nurse was silent. Then: “Your clothes are wet and bloody. I’ve brought you a dry shirt and a pair of pants from your wardrobe back there.”
“My wife, God damn it!”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t told.” She was lying. He knew now for certain.
Only one of the big helicopters still crouched in front of the charred shell that had housed the communications center. Lessing’s bearers lugged him up a clanging, oil-stinking metal ramp into a cargo-bay crammed with web-tied crates and lit by a couple of bluish glow-lamps. He was dumped, stretcher and all, between two other stretchers. A stocky commando sat down facing Lessing, rifle between his knees.
He strained to see who his neighbors were. To his left, Abu Talib’s aquiline features were visible amidst a swirl of blankets. The Arab did not move, and his eyes were closed. He was still alive: the rise and fall of his chest showed that. The Izzies had probably drugged him, either for medical reasons or to keep him quiet
The man on Lessing’s right was Richmond.
He was dead.
The Izzieshad covered his face with a blanket, but it had partially slipped off. His long, pallid features looked slightly less lugubrious in death than in life. Lessing could see no wounds because of the blanket, but sea water and blood stained the grimy, metal deck beneath his stretcher.
The nurse returned and unbuckled the straps holding Lessing to the stretcher. “Sit up. I don’t have the key to the cuffs, but I can get you out of your wet clothes and into something dry. Here, these are yours, aren’t they?”
Who cared about dry clothes? They were irrelevant. Jameela was gone.
“Don’t worry,” the woman said. “I’m a nurse. I’ve seen naked men before.” She sounded as though that were some kind of major personal sacrifice.
Her old-fashioned prudery gave Lessing a glimmer of amusement. She seemed so flustered, so tired, and so sincere. He let her have her way…
The pants were his light grey dungarees. Jameela had ironed them the day before yesterday, back when the world was different. He didn’t recognize the white shirt at first, then realized it was the one he had worn to visit the Black Muslim leader, the Khalifa, in Los Angeles. He hadn’t put it on since.
The nurse got his trousers changed, clucking at the barnacle scratches and abrasions. The handcuffs prevented her from changing his shirt, and she had to be satisfied with draping the dry one over his shoulders. He huddled back down upon the hard stretcher. The feel of the cloth reminded him of Morgan, the Khalifa — and Jameela.
Suddenly he wondered whether the Khalifa’s little zombie pill — what was its name? tetrodotoxin? — was still in the breast pocket of the shirt? He had never removed it. If it were there, he had a way to avoid torture, perhaps to escape! He rolled over so that neither the nurse nor the stolid guard could see, and let his fingers wander over the fabric.
He felt a tiny lump deep within the pocket seam. A bit of tissue… A theater ticket stub? A forgotten aspirin?
It was the zombie pill.
Excitement swept over him. Where could he hide it? The Izzies would certainly strip him, search him head to foot, and issue him their favorite prison garb, a blue jogging suit. They’d find the pill! He thought as hard as the ache in his head would let him. Of course! His head! He raised his hands to the bandage on his temple, groaned, and slumped down. A comer of the cotton pad came free in his fingers, and he poked the little pill into a fold in the cleanest and driest part of it. That would have to do for now. He’d do better once they got him where he was going.
He was minded of Copley’s story about a captured mere who melted a plastic spoon on the light bulb in his cell and used the goo to coat a smuggled cyanide pill so that it was watertight and wouldn’t dissolve. This he swallowed, waited until it reappeared in his stool, cleaned it off, and swallowed it again — and again, and again, over and over, for months. At last, when he could endure no more of his captors’ “discipline,” the mere cracked the plastic coating with his teeth and became history. The funny part, according to Copley, was the guards’ dismay at their captive’s unexpected exit: in that country — Lessing couldn’t recall which it was — whenever a prisoner escaped or succeeded in suicide, his guards were made to draw lots, and the loser faced a firing squad. Hilarious!
The helicopter groaned, shuddered, and lurched up into the pre-dawn sky. The flight did not take long; the Izzies’ ship lay just offshore. It was one of their newer, nuclear-powered destroyers. They had built up quite an impressive navy during their past two decades of conquest in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.
Lessing was hustled out onto the gently pitching deck. The cool, damp, salt-smelling air felt good. He looked around to sec black-clad commandos forming up, sailors in tan uniforms hurrying to and fro, and technicians swarming over the locust-like giant helicopters. They were about to get underway. He thought he glimpsed a group of fellow prisoners huddled together against a bulkhead, but a forklift carrying a stack of boxes rumbled in front of them, and when it had passed they were gone. Had that flash of silver been Mrs. Delacroix’ white hair? Farther away he spotted five or six stretchers laid out on the deck surrounded by medics and orderlies. Were the occupants Izzie casualties or his own comrades? He had no way to tell.
All would become clear later. He would probably find that clarification very painful.
Lessing watched as two sailors carried Abu Talib’s stretcher past him. Two more wrestled Richmond’s stiffening corpse into a brown plastic body-bag and zipped it shut. As they did so, Lessing noticed something on the damp, dark-stained cloth of the stretcher where the kikibird had lain. Lessing looked. A bit of glass? A sliver of mirror? Something glittered there in the misty morning light.
He knew what it was.
A shard of Pacov-1’s silvery globe.
The open flap of Lessing’s glassine envelope had been sticking out of Richmond’s pocket when the sailors lifted his body.
Sea water. Richmond’s swim in Madolenihmw Bay must have done it!
The containers were half a century old, fragile, and probably designed to be water soluble. What better way to deliver their contents? They must have started to decompose the moment they got wet.
What of the black cylinder — Pacov-2? That wasn’t likely to be in any better condition.
Everybody here, Lessing included, was certainly infected with Pacov-1. If Pacov-2 were free as well, it was over for everybody on this ship — possibly on Ponape itself.
Only Captain Levi, the man Lessing had killed, knew what Richmond’s mission was. The other Izzies had no reason to search the kikibird’s body. They wouldn’t have recognized Pacov even if they had found it!
What to do?
The Khalifa’s pill might save him, of course. It wasn’t likely, but it might. But when to swallow it? Too soon, and his captors would toss his “dead” body into the sea! Worse, they might wail until they reached home and then bury him alive; waking up in a coffin held no appeal! Too late, and Lessing would die from Pacov! He racked his brain but could only recall Mulder saying something about waiting a couple of weeks— or was it months? — after Pacov-1 before sending in Pacov-2. As imprecise as you could get. Would it make any difference if both viruses were introduced at once?
With a shudder he realized he was being himself as usuaclass="underline" abstract and objective. What of Alan Lessing? It was his death, too!
He could tell the Izzies. They might believe him, in which case they would probably shoot him anyway. Furthermore, he could tell them about the Khalifa’s pill; they’d take it away for testing, but they could never manufacture the stuff in time to save the people on this destroyer.