Richard looked back over his shoulder and saw Yves beginning to stir. ‘Wally!’ he yelled. ‘Get up here now!’
The cadet was slim and quick; he was out of his seat far more quickly than the French scientist and rushed unsteadily up the length of the fuselage.
‘Steady!’ called Richard, and he caught the boy’s hand as he came up to the back of the pilot’s seat. He guided the cadet’s grip to the curve of plastic-covered metal, giving the boy a chance to hold on and steady himself. As he did so, something caught his eye and he took a closer look at the hand he was holding.
The back of Wally Gough’s right hand was a mass of small white blisters where the skin was beginning to fall away.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The boy would not stop shaking. He sat at the examination table clad in a hospital gown, still blushing with the thought of having been seen naked by Dr Higgins, and trembled like a leaf in Richard’s gentle grip. His arms shook, making his hands almost impossible for Asha to examine. His shoulders shook and his torso jumped. He could not keep his legs still and the sound of his slippers drumming on the lino of the deck almost drowned out the low grumbling of Lamia Lykiardropolous and the rest in the isolation rooms next door. Just as he seemed incapable of keeping his body still, so he seemed incapable of controlling his tongue.
‘Is it serious, Doctor?’
‘Let’s just see, shall we?’
‘I don’t know how long it’s been there. It doesn’t hurt. Does that matter? I’ve heard your hands and feet go numb with some diseases. Like leprosy. It isn’t leprosy, is it, Doctor? I mean…’ He stopped. He could not remember what he meant.
‘It’s all right,’ Richard said quietly, imagining his son William sixteen years older. He held the terrified boy more tightly. Wally was doing all right.
‘I mean I can feel my fingers and everything. Know what I mean? I can feel the top of the table here and everything, I just can’t feel the blisters. Is that important? Does it mean anything? I mean, I haven’t got leprosy, have I?’
‘No, of course you haven’t. Don’t you worry.’ It was Richard who spoke. Asha was busy.
Then, ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.
‘I’ve been in the helicopter,’ he answered, literally, childlike with shock.
‘During the last week or so,’ she prompted gently.
‘On deck, mostly,’ he answered ruefully. ‘During the day at least. I’ve been in charge of one work party after another. Ding-dong likes a clean ship.’
‘ “Ding-dong”?’ asked Richard, though he suspected what the answer would be.
‘First Officer Bell.’ Wally paused, then fired up in his own defence. ‘I don’t call her that! Well, not usually. And anyway…’
‘Anyway?’ prompted Richard.
‘Anyway, Ding-dong is nothing. Some of them… the engineers, I think… well, they call her Hells.’
Richard’s eyes met Asha’s. The corners of each pair crinkled. Hells Bells. She was tall, she was blonde, she was in charge of the sexist so-and-sos. What could you expect?
‘In my day,’ said Richard, ‘they would have called her “Is-a”. Times change.’
‘And not for the better,’ supplied Asha. ‘Can you feel that?’ She pushed a sterile needle into the tip of the most heavily blistered finger.
‘OUCH! Yes, I can.’
‘And this?’
‘OUCH!’
‘It’s probably not leprosy, then,’ she informed him, bracingly.
‘So what is it?’
‘The same as the others have got, as far as I can tell. Whatever that is. Now, where have you been?’
‘On deck during the day, getting that sand cleared away. With First Officer Bell in the evening, learning navigation.’
‘Lucky you,’ teased Richard, trying to lighten the situation a little.
Wally looked at him, eyes wide with shock. ‘Captain!’ he breathed. ‘She’s an officer!’
‘And a very good one too,’ interjected Asha severely, frowning. ‘Is that all? I mean, you haven’t been upon the ice?’
‘No, Doctor.’
‘Or in the outwash from the glacier?’
‘No. It doesn’t come out as far as Titan. And—’
‘And you haven’t been swimming in the sea?’
‘Doctor! I mean, there are sharks …’
‘Right. ‘Nuff said. Now, I’m going to spread this ointment onto your hands and bandage them lightly. Then you’ll have to stay here for a while, but I don’t think it’s serious and I don’t think you have anything to worry about. OK?’
‘Yes …’
‘Good. Anything you want?’
His wide, defenceless eyes looked up at Richard. ‘All my stuff. My book on navigation. The first officer’s going to give me a test on it tomorrow…’
Richard smiled. ‘We’ll bring your stuff across. Just write a list, OK? If you can hold a pen with that stuff on your hands. And I promise you, First Officer Bell will definitely not give you a test tomorrow. You just get some rest, and try not to worry. That’s an order. All right?’
‘Yes, Captain. Thank you, Captain.’
In the corridor outside he said at once, ‘Well?’
‘Impossible to say. He’s got the same thing as the others, but he hasn’t been in any of the same places. They’ve all been at least wetted by water from Manhattan, but he hasn’t been anywhere near it. They’re all convinced that it’s to do with the ice or something in it.’
‘Something radioactive.’
‘Precisely. But Wally’s had nothing to do with any of that. And anyway…’
‘Yes?’
‘No doctor worth her salt listens to the opinions of a patient. You have to make up your own mind; you’re die doctor, after all.’
‘Quite. I see.’
‘So, we take with a pinch of salt the suggestion that this is in fact anything to do with the iceberg, and we keep looking for an alternative which also fits the facts as we know them.’
‘When you have eliminated all the probabilities, the alternative, no matter how improbable, must be true.’
‘That sounds like a quote.’
‘Sherlock Holmes, I believe. Or Hercule Poirot, perhaps …’
‘True, nevertheless.’
‘As long as you are clear about what the one remaining alternative actually turns out to be.’
‘I take your point. But I cannot see, if there is an infection and the iceberg is the source of it, how the cadet caught it if he never went anywhere near the iceberg in the first place.’
‘Unless,’ said Richard without thinking, ‘unless it is contagious.’
‘Don’t,’ begged Asha. ‘I’ve had nightmares about that for a week and I don’t want to think about it any more, thank you very much.’
Richard had had no choice but to bring Wally to the ship’s hospital but he knew it was doing no good at all to add one more infected soul to the already frightened crew of Psyche. Peter Walcott made no secret of the fact that he was finding the situation difficult to control.
As he walked up towards the navigation bridge deep in conversation with Asha, Richard could not help but recall the power of the moment he had pulled the juju doll out of the dead Russian woman’s body bag and the unexpectedly fierce reaction from the apparently cool Major Tom Snell. There was an atmosphere aboard this ship which would have graced the supernatural opening of Macbeth. He was well aware that the crew was muttering with superstitious discontent; now it was as though the very shadows were whispering. He realised that he had been a little too dismissive of the Guyanese captain’s worries. Well, not dismissive exactly; perhaps he had just been preoccupied. But there was no doubting the power of the atmosphere now that he was aboard.