Contact with another human. Herb Asher shrank involun- tarily. Oh Christ, he thought. He trembled. No, he thought.
Please no.
The Divine Invasion
CHAPTER 2
You can tell they're after you, Herb Asher said to himself, when they bore through the ceiling. The foodman, the most important of the several supplymen, had unscrewed the roof lock of the dome and was descending the ladder.
"Food ration comtrix," the audio transducer of his radio announced. "Start rebolting procedure."
"Rebolting underway," Asher said.
The speaker said, "Put helmet on."
"Not necessary," Asher said. He made no move to pick up his helmet; his atmosphere flow rate would compensate for the loss during the foodman's entry: he had redesigned it.
An alarm bell in the dome's autonomic wiring sounded.
"Put your helmet on!" the foodman said angrily.
The alarm bell ceased complaining; the pressure had restabilized. At that, the foodman grimaced. He popped his helmet and then began to unload cartons from his comtrix.
"We are a hardy race," Asher said, helping him.
"You have amped up everything," the foodman said; like all the rovers who serviced the domes he was sturdily built and he moved rapidly. It was not a safe job operating a comtrix shuttle between mother ships and the domes of CY3O II. He knew it and Asher knew it. Anybody could sit in a dome; few people could function outside.
"Can I sit down for a while?" the foodman said, when his work had ended.
"All I have is a cupee of Kaff," Asher said.
"That'll do. I haven't drunk real coffee since I got here. And that was long before you got here." The foodman seated himself at the dining module service area.
The two men sat facing each other across the table, both of them drinking Kaff. Outside the dome the methane messed around but here neither man felt it. The foodman perspired; he apparently found Asher's temperature level too high.
"You know, Asher," the foodman said, "you just lie around on your bunk with all your rigs on auto. Right?"
"I keep busy."
"Sometimes I think you domers-" The foodman paused. "Asher, you know the woman in the next dome?"
"Somewhat," Asher said. "My gear transfers data to her input circuitry every three or four weeks. She stores it, boosts it and transmits it. I suppose. Or for all I know-"
"She's sick," the foodman said.
Startled, Asher said, "She looked all right the last time I talked to her. We used video. She did say something about having trouble reading her terminal's displays."
"She's dying," the foodman said, and sipped his Kaff.
The word scared Asher. He felt a chill. In his mind he tried to picture the woman, but strange scenes assailed him, mixed with soupy music. Strange concoction, he thought; video and aud fragments, like old cloth remnants of the dead. Small and dark, the woman was. And what was her name? "I can't think," he said, and put the palms of his hands against the sides of his face. As if to reassure himself. Then, rising and going to his main board, he punched a couple of keys; it showed her name on its display, retrieved by the code they used. Rybys Rommey. "Dying of what?" he said. "What the hell do you mean?"
"Multiple sclerosis."
"You can't die of that. Not these days."
"Out here you can."
"How-shit." He reseated himself; his hands shook. I'll be god damned, he thought. "How far advanced is it?"
"Not far at all," the foodman said. "What's the matter?" He eyed Asher acutely.
"I don't know. Nerves. From the Kaff."
"A couple of months ago she told me that when she was in her late teens she suffered an-what is it called? Aneurysm. In her left eye, which wiped out her central vision in that eye. They suspected at the time that it might be the onset of multiple sclerosis. And then today when I talked to her she said she's been experiencing optic neuritis, which-"
Asher said, "Both symptoms were fed to M.E.D.?"
"A correlation of an aneurysm and then a period of remission and then double vision, blurring ... You're all rattled up."
"I had the strangest, most weird sensation for just a second, there," Asher said. "It's gone now. As if this had all happened once before."
The foodman said, "You ought to call her up and talk to her. It'd be good for you as well. Get you out of your bunk."
"Don't mastermind my life," Asher said. "That's why I moved out here from the Sol System. Did I ever tell you what my second wife used to get me to do every morning? I had to fix her breakfast, in bed; I had to-"
"When I was delivering to her she was crying."
Turning to his keyboard, Asher punched out and punched out and then read the display. "There's a thirty to forty percent cure rate for multiple sclerosis."
Patiently, the foodman said, "Not out here. M.E.D. can't get to her out here. I told her to demand a transfer back home. That's what I'd sure as hell do. She won't do it."
"She's crazy," Asher said.
"You're right. She's rattled up crazy. Everybody out here is crazy."
"I just got told that once today already."
"You want proof of it? She's proof of it. Wouldn't you go back home if you knew you were very sick?"
"We're never supposed to surrender our domes. Anyhow it's against the law to emigrate back. No, it's not," he corrected himself. "Not if you're sick. But our job here-"
"Oh yeah; that's right-what you monitor here is so important. Like Linda Fox. Who told you that once today?"
"A Clem," Asher said. "A Clem walked in here and told me I'm crazy. And now you climb down my ladder and tell me the same thing. I'm being diagnosed by Clems and foodmen. Do you hear that sappy string music or don't you? It's all over my dome: I can't locate the source and I'm sick of it. Okay, I'm sick and I'm crazy; how could I benefit Ms. Rommey? You said it your- self. I'm in here totally rattled up; I'm no good to anyone.
The foodman set down his cup. "I have to go.
"Fine," Asher said. "I'm sorry; you upset me by telling me about Ms. Rommey."
"Call her and talk to her. She needs someone to talk to and you're the closest dome. I'm surprised she didn't tell you."
Herb Asher thought, I didn't ask.
"It is the law, you know," the foodman said.
"What law?"
'If a domer is in distress the nearest neighbor-"
"Oh." He nodded. "Well, it's never come up before in my case. I mean-yeah, it is the law. I forgot. Did she tell you to remind me of the law?"
"No," the foodman said.
After the foodman had departed, Herb Asher got the code for Rybys Rommey's dome, started to run it into his transmitter and then hesitated. His wall clock showed 18:30 hours. At this point in his forty-two-hour cycle he was supposed to accept a sequence of high-speed entertainment, audio- and video-taped signals emanating from a slave satellite at CY3O III; upon storing them he was to run them back at normal and select the material suitable for the overall dome system on his own planet.
He took a look at the log. Fox was doing a concert that ran two hours. Linda Fox, he thought. You and your synthesis of old-time rock, modern-day streng and the lute music of John Dowland. Jesus, he thought; if I don't transcribe the relay of your live concert every domer on the planet will come storming in here and kill me. Outside of emergencies-which really didn't occur -this is what I'm paid to handle: information traffic between planets, information that connects us with home and keeps us human. The tape drums have to turn.
He started the tape transport at its high-speed mode, set the module's controls for receive, locked it in at the satellite's operating frequency, checked the wave form on the visual scope to be sure that the carrier was coming in undistorted and then patched into an audio transduction of what he was getting.
The voice of Linda Fox emerged from the strip of drivers mounted above him. As the scope showed, there was no distortion. No noise. No clipping. All channels, in fact, were balanced; his meters indicated that.