Or the laughter he'd gotten from the set of 'brawn jokes' Jon had sent when Tia picked Alex as her partner.
Well, Doctor Kenny, Anna, and Lars were my friends, and still are. Sometimes age doesn't make much of a difference.
"Hey, Alex?" she called. He was waiting for another of the timid Zombies to give in to hunger. The clock was running.
"What?"
"What do you call a brawn who can count past ten?"
"I don't know," he said good-naturedly. "What?"
"Barefoot'"
He made a rude noise, then sighted and pulled the trigger. One down, how many more to go?
They had fifty-two Zombies packed in the hold, and one casualty. One of the Zombies had not survived the darting; Alex had gone into acute depression over that death, and it had taken Tia more than an hour to talk him out of it. She didn't dare tell him then what those contact-buttons revealed; some of their passengers weren't thriving well. The heart rates were up, probably with fear, and she heard whimpering and wailing in the hold whenever there was no one else in it but the Zombies. The moment any of the servos or Alex entered the hold, the captives went utterly silent. Out of fear, Tia suspected.
The last Zombie was in the hold; the hold was sealed, and Tia had brought the temperature up to skin-heat. The ventilators were at full-strength. Alex had just entered the main cabin.
And he was reaching for his helmet-release.
"Don't crack your suit," she snapped. How could she have forgotten to tell him? Had she? Or had she told him, and he had forgotten?
"What?" he said. Then, "Oh, decom it. I forgot!"
She restrained herself from saying what she wanted to. "Doctor Kenny said you have to stay in the suit. Remember? He thinks that the chance we might have missed something in decontamination is too much to discount. He doesn't want you to crack your suit until you're at the base. All right?"
"What if something goes wrong for the Zombies?" he asked, quietly. "Tia, there isn't enough room in that hold for me to climb around in the suit."
"We'll worry about that if it happens," she replied firmly. "Right now, the important thing is for you to get strapped down, because their best chance is to get to Base as quickly as possible, and I'm going to leave scorch-marks on the ozone layer getting there."
He took the unsubtle hint and strapped himself in; Tia was better than her word, making a tail-standing takeoff and squirting out of the atmosphere with a blithe disregard for fuel consumption. The Zombies were going to have to deal with the constant acceleration to hyper as best they could. At least she knew that they were all sitting or lying down, because the crates simply weren't big enough for them to stand.
She had been relaying symptoms, observed and recorded, back to Doctor Kenny and the med staff at Kleinman Base all along. She had known that they weren't going to get a lot of answers, but every bit of data was valuable, and getting it there ahead of the victims was a plus.
But now that they were on the way, they were on their own, without the resources of the abandoned dig or the base they were en route to. The med staff might have answers, but they likely would not have the equipment to implement them.
Alex couldn't move while she was accelerating, but once they made the jump to FTL, he unsnapped his restraints and headed for the stairs.
"Where are you going?" she asked, nervously.
"The hold. I'm in my suit. There's nothing down there that can get me through the suit."
Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there. "You can't do anything for them in the crates," she said. "You know that."
He turned toward her column. "What are you hiding from me?"
"N-nothing," she said. But she didn't say it firmly enough.
He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.
"Tia, what's going on down there?" he demanded. "They weren't like this before we took off, were they?"
"I think..." She hesitated. "Alex, I'm not a doctor!"
"You've got a medical library. You've been talking to the doctors. What do you think?"
"I think, they aren't taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that some kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for, for things that you know should be there, but aren't. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it, identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that's out of commission," She felt horribly helpless. "I think for them it's like being in Singularity."
"For four days?" he shouted, hurting her sensors. "I'm going down there."
"And do what?" she snapped back. "What are you going to do for them? They're afraid of you in that suit!"
"Then I'll,"
"You do, and I'll gas the ship," she said instantly. "I mean that, Alex! You put one finger on a release and I'll gas the whole ship!"
He sat back down, collapsing into his chair. "What can we do?" he said weakly. "There has to be something."
"We've got some medical supplies," she pointed out "A couple of them can be adapted to add to the air supply down there. Help me, Alex. Help me find something we can do for them. Without you cracking your suit."
I'll try," he said, unhappily. But his fingers were already on the keyboard, typing in commands to the med library, and not sneaking towards his suit-releases. She blanked for a microsecond with relief.
Then went to work.
Three more times there were signs of crisis in the hold. Three more times she had to threaten him to keep him from diving in and trying to save one of the Zombies by risking his own life. They lost one more, to a combination of anti-viral agent and watered-down sleepygas that they hoped would act as a tranquilizer rather than an anesthetic. Zombie number twenty seven might have been allergic to one or the other, although there was no such indication in his med records; his contact-button gave all the symptoms of allergic shock before he died.
Alex stopped talking to her for four hours after that. Twenty-seven had been in the bottom rank, and a shot of adrenaline would have brought him out, if it had been allergic shock. But his crate was also buried deep in the stacks, and Alex would have had to peel the whole suit off to get to him. Which Tia wouldn't permit. They had no way of knowing if this was really an allergic reaction, or if it was another development of the Zombie Bug. Twenty-seven had been an older man, showing some of the worst symptoms.
Although Alex wasn't talking to her, Tia kept talking, at him, until he finally gave in. Just as well. His silence had her convinced that he was going to ask for a transfer, and that he hated her, if a shell-person could be in tears, she was near that state when he finally answered.