“Well, here’s Ella Murdoch Smith’s number. Classmate at East Feliciana High, diehard segregationist in the old days, yet intelligent, Ayn Rand type, left town when schools were integrated so her children wouldn’t be ruined, went to Outer Banks of Carolina, lived in a shack, taught school, educated her children, wrote poetry about spindrift and the winter beach. Returned last year, rages and Ayn Rand ideology gone, got menial cleaning job right here at Mitsy, came to me complaining of plots of fellow employees against her, particularly one Fat Alice. My impression: paranoia, until I talked to her supervisor and found out Fat Alice was a robot. My impression: though Fat Alice was programmed to ‘speak,’ Ella couldn’t tell that she was not human. She was responding to Fat Alice’s speech like another robot. No more poems about spindrift.”
Ella rolls out like a rug on the screen: Na-24—21, C-137—121.
“Are you writing these down?” I ask her.
“Honey, I’m doing better than that. I got them taped right here. If we get enough, we can run them through and see if we can come up with a vector, a commonality.”
“How many do we need?”
“The more the better. I’ll tell you what.” She grabs me and gives me a jerk.
“What?”
“Give me a few more, then I’ve got an idea. Tom, we’re missing something. It’s under our noses and we’re missing it!”
“Yeah.”
“Well, let’s see.” I’m looking at my list. “Well, there’s Kev and Debbie. Father Kev Kevin, ex-Jesuit, and Sister Thérèse, ex-Maryknoller, now Debbie Boudreaux. Both radicalized, joined Guatemalan guerrillas, Debbie radical feminist, used to talk about dialoguing, then began to talk tough, about having balls, cojones — now both retired to a sort of commune retreat house in pine trees, marital problems: Kev accusing Debbie of being into Wicca and having out-of-body experiences with a local guru which are not exactly out of body, Debbie accusing Kev of becoming overly active as participant therapist in a gay encounter group—”
“That’s enough. How do we get a handle on them?”
“Try American Society of Psychotherapists.”
“Got you. Give me the numbers. Okay. Okay. Got them.”
Kev: zero. Normal!
Debbie: zero. Normal!
Lucy: “I’m confused. Talk about flakes. What do you make of them?”
“One of three things. One, they’re acting like normal married couples. Two, they’re pathological, but the pathogen is not heavy sodium.”
“Three?”
“Father Smith would say the pathogen is demonic.”
“Demonic. I see. What do you say?”
“I say let’s run some more.”
We run a dozen more. We’ve got three negatives, the rest positive.
Lucy turns off all machines. Lights stop blinking. There are no sounds but the hum of lights. A screech owl’s whimpers. It is three o’clock.
“I’m going to bed,” I say. “Let’s sleep on it.”
“Wait wait wait.”
“All right.”
“I’ve got an idea.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know where these people live?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’m going to give you a graphic, a map. Let’s see how many we can locate. Maybe we can get a pattern.”
“Let’s do it tomorrow.”
“It’ll only take a second. Watch this.”
She pops in a cassette and there’s old Louisiana herself, a satellite view, color-coded, with blue lakes and bayous, silver towns and cities, rust-red for plowed fields, greens for trees — and the great coiling snake of the Mississippi.
“Now watch this.”
The satellite zooms down. Here’s Feliciana, from the Mississippi to the Pearl, from the thirty-first parallel to the Crayola blue of Lake Pontchartrain. I can even see the Bogue Falaya and Bayou Pontchatolawa, where I fished yesterday — was it yesterday? — with John Van Dorn.
“Here’s your wand. Locate as many patients as you can.”
Like Tinker Bell, I can touch the screen and make a star. I make a constellation. We gaze at it. It has no shape. It is a skimpy, ill-formed star cluster.
“How many questions will this thing answer?” I ask finally, hoping to stump it so I can go to bed.
“Almost any. It is a matter of framing the question.”
“I can frame the question.”
“Well?”
“It is a preposterous question.”
“Ask it.”
“There is no way it can be answered.”
“Ask Hal. He’s good.”
“I want the computer to locate on this graphic every person in Feliciana Parish and adjoining parishes who has an elevated plasma level of heavy sodium — which is to say, any level of heavy sodium.”
“Good Lord,” says Lucy. She gazes at me. I seem to hear her own circuits firing away like Hal thinking things over. She taps her teeth with a pencil. She tugs absently at my Bean collar, brushes me off. She slaps the desk. “Well, why the hell not? It’s a challenge. There are data banks which have the information. It’s just a matter of latching on to it, right?”
“Right,” I say wearily. Why did I ask?
“As a matter of fact,” she muses, plucking a grain of tobacco from her tongue and taking my arm again, “there just might be a chance.”
“There might be?”
“Sure. We got a five-thousand-baud system here.”
“That ought to do it. What is a baud?”
“Never mind. There just might be a chance.”
“Good.”
“You know why?” She pulls close.
“Why?”
“Because. I seem to recall that when the Grand Mer unit was finished, it was after T.M.I. Then after Chernobyl NIH called for an EIS to placate the anti-nukes.”
“What’s an EIS?”
“Environmental Impact Study.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning a parish-wide sampling was done for radioactivity.”
“You mean people were tested?”
“Sure. Urinalyses almost certainly. And it’s just possible that they could have—” She jerks me. “Sodium would show up in the urine, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure.”
“It is just possible—” She searches my right eye, then my left. “Tell you what?”
“What?”
“Let’s hit the mainframe in Baton Rouge and ask it to do the work. By God, there is just a chance.”
“Let’s do that.”
She gazes, taps her teeth, plucks at her tongue. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll do some networking. We’ll use State Public Health and if necessary the Census Bureau and if necessary NIH in D.C. And we’ll ask the mainframe in Baton Rouge to do the asking. I’ve got the authority.”
“Okay.”
“Now understand this. It won’t be entirely accurate, because if there’s a John Hebert who’s positive, the census will give us half a dozen John Heberts right here in Feliciana. You understand?”
“I understand.”
“But we’ll get some sort of distribution.”
“Great.”
Another half hour of phone work, little-black-box work, page flipping, key hitting, user names, user codes, access codes, logging in, PIVs, Hal’s initial outrage, user authorization denied, SNERROR, QUERY QUERY QUERY, NIX — Hal relenting, until finally there is a single meek little green-for-go o?.
“Okay what?” I ask.
“Cross your fingers.”
“Okay.”
She takes a breath. “Here we go.”
“Well?”
“I’m afraid to hit the key,” says Lucy, grabbing me, eyes round.
“Show me the key and I’ll hit it.”
She shows me the key, turns her face. I hit the key. Something is wrong.
It looks like a weather map. It looks like what happens when the TV weatherman switches to his satellite map of Louisiana streaked with cold fronts, upper level clouds, clear black sunshine.