Steppins swiveled back to face the Edmund again, as if afraid that Carl’s intent was only to distract her while Jeffers and the Hawaiians spirited the entire torch ship away.
—You Percells don’t fear the Halley diseases as much as we human beings do. We won’t go into why, since you keep denying all responsibility for the sicknesses. But it is sufficient to know that we will not let the hydro be polluted! Both the big and small hydroponics modules stay attached until the new dome is completely checked out…and by an Ortho specialist!—
Carl fumed. He knew what his alternatives were. He could give Jeffers the go-ahead anyway… and maybe spark a miniwar among the factions.
Or he could run below and complain to the spineless Mauritanian in command.
Or he could go down and lend a hand.
“Use a purple during your next erotic rest break,” he suggested, and kicked off toward the workers before she could reply.
“Hey, Lani!” he called. “Let me help you with that thing.”
SAUL
“I’m getting so I don’t even care about the danger of dying anymore, Saul. It’s the itch I can’t stand. All day, all night, in spite of the topicals Akio Matsudo gives me. I swear, if this keeps up I’m going to ask ’Kio if I can borrow his great-grandfather’s seppuku knife and really scratch!”
Marguerite von Zoon lay facedown on the taut webbing, trying to keep still as the masked and gowned treatment-room techs picked away at her skin with tweezers and little glassine vials, sampling the fungoids that were turning her body into a battlefield.
A quarter of her skin was broken and cracked. Pink, half-open wounds and dark-domed blisters erupted in ugly patches. Here and there, the flesh had split open in nasty ulcerated sores, glistening with sickening dampness.
Saul worked his team as quickly as possible, knowing how hard this must be for her. Marguerite was an intensely private person—a true exile who had left Earth only in order to save her family from punishment for political crimes. Whatever it stated on some piece of paper, only a bureaucrat would try to say that she had “volunteered” to come out here to become food for gnawing alien cells.
And yet Marguerite’s cheerfulness was legendary. The discomfort had to be severe for her to be complaining at all.
Saul stepped up beside her as soon as the techs had finished. “Marguerite, I’m going to bring up the new beamer and try that experimental subdermal scrub now. Try not to move unnecessarily.”
She nodded curtly. Only a damp sheen on her forehead and her flexing palms betrayed her nervousness. Saul guided a wheeled hospital mech into position, canting the broad plate of a synthetic aperture microwave array over her prone form.
I’ve been privileged to know many fine human beings, Saulthought. But none braver than this good woman.
She had volunteered to be the first to try this untested treatment. When offered a chance to escape into the slots instead, she had rejected the idea outright. “I’ll not leave you and Akio as the only physicians awake during this crisis,” she had told him flatly.
Days had passed while the technicians built and rebuilt the new beamer to Saul’s specifications… always scratching for priorities against the hall crews and those overhauling the Edmund Halley. By now, there was little choice left. If this treatment didn’t work, Marguerite would have to go on ice.
Secretly, Saul feared it was already too late even for that. There was no guarantee that cooling down to a degree above freezing would stop these vicious, multicolored, funguslike growths, once they were this deeply established.
A third of the awake crew—and even a few of the slotted corpsicles—have these creeping skin disorders. They worry Akio worse than the Crump Mumps or even the Red Clap. They’re the biggest reason why I may not be able to go out with the Edmund after all. Osborn and the others may have to take their chances without a doctor.
And there was one more cause for his hurry to make the new treatments work.
Yesterday, while they were making love, he had fund a fine lacelike webbing of green strands spreading under Virginia’s shoulder blades and issuing across her back. He hadn’t said anything to her, yet. But his motive was stronger than ever to find a cure.
The machines had finished moving into place. “All right, Marguerite,” he told his patient. “Now remember, hold still.”
“Yes, Saul.”
Her hands clenched the table’s rails. Saul turned to the hulking, spiderlike medical-mech. “Access five—” he began. But he had to stop as a sudden wave of dizziness swept over him. He managed to lift the collar of his gown just in time to contain a violent sneeze.
Saul’s head rang. The dull body aches that he had managed to put out of his mind for half an hour or so returned in force now. It was a long moment before he could look up, blinking through drifting blue spots, and address the machine again.
“Access… five-two-seven Jonah.”
A receptivity light winked across the mech’s plastic panel. He continued, “Play sixty milliwatts in preprogrammed fungoid RNA resonant spectrum A dash two-nine-four, focused on foreign subdermal growth, patient’s right inner rear thigh, five hundred seconds, safety factor beta.”
They had adapted a unit designed for magnetic resonance and ultrasound inspection of internal injuries. The sophisticated mech would be able to aim and evaluate the focused radar far quicker than any human operator.
“Preparing to project,” the machine announced flatly.
Saul’s best assistant, Keoki Anuenue, was watching a data tank, supervising the procedure. Not only was Keoki a skilled laboratory technician, he was also one of the strongest men Saul had ever known. Three days ago, he had had a chance to see the big Hawaiian in action, when there had been a cave-in up on Level B.
A particularly nasty variety of vermin had lodged a beachhead in the utilities shaft leading to Airlock 1, their main lifeline to the Edmund Halley. The major cooling vent—essential for keeping the ice around them from melting—was nearly chocked off with an ocher variant of worm bigger than the purple horrors.
Saul and Keoki had arrived on B Level just as the halls erupted in loud screams and alarm Klaxons. Most terrifying of all was the grinding groan and squeal of collapsing ice. The cable Saul had been climbing broke loose and whipped from the wall like a tortured snake, flinging him away just as a block of dark, mottled crystal pierced through the fibersheath lining and smashed the side of the shaft.
Keoki Anuenue caught Saul and planted him into a safe niche, then turned and leaped up toward the glittering stone boulder that had seven men and women trapped in the utility tunnel. They had minutes, at best. Keoki went at saving them the only way possible.
He braced his back against the tattered plastisheath, planted his feet on the iceblock, and heaved. It must have massed a hundred tons not counting the rubble lying atop it. “Kei make nei mai…” Keoki had grunted as the boulder, unbelievably, grumbled and started to move.
A blast of fetid dankness flowed through the gap. The Hawaiian’s face was a beaded torrent in the humid air, his neck tendons bunched like knotted ropes. Saul had no time to stop and think. He dove into the narrow opening.
Along with a dozen other odors, the air was filled with the scent of almonds. If any of their suits had been punctured, even the blood cyanutes wouldn’t have protected the trapped crewmen much longer from the rich vein of cyanide that had been broken open by the falling rock.