“You’re worried that too many people have to be in on it,” Stoner said.
“Yes,” Markov agreed, eyes still closed. “A faked message from our visitor would require the three of us, Thompson and at least two or three of the radio telescope technicians. Besides, don’t you think that men such as Zworkin and Cavendish are clever enough to recognize a faked message after a bit of study?”
“That’s where you come in, old friend,” said Stoner. “Your job is to create a message that’ll keep them puzzled long enough for us to get the rendezvous mission going.”
Markov opened his eyes and smiled sadly at them. “I see. It all depends on me.”
“A lot of it does.”
“Will you try?” Jo asked him.
The Russian pursed his lips, then smiled at her. “For you, beautiful one, I would dare anything. Why not? It will be a challenge. And if we are truly revolutionaries, we must take some risks, mustn’t we?”
Despite his own headache, Stoner saw that Markov was humoring them both. The Russian had no faith in the desperate scheme. But he raised his coffee cup to Markov.
“To our revolution,” Stoner toasted.
Markov clicked his cup against Stoner’s. Jo added hers, saying, “To us.”
Through a red wash of agony, Cavendish saw them bring Reynaud into the infirmary: two husky young sailors carried the stretcher with the fat little priest resting on it like a small beached whale in a black suit. Cavendish’s own pain made his vision blur; he couldn’t tell if Reynaud was conscious or not.
“What…happened to him?” Cavendish’s voice was weak, hollow.
The efficient middle-aged nurse who had been watching over him clucked her tongue. “Never you mind him. You just lay back there and rest.”
Cavendish felt too weak to do anything else. But the pain was getting worse, not better. It had been a mistake to come to the hospital when the pain had started. Now he was trapped in here, and the waves of torture were racking his whole body, despite the analgesics the doctors had pumped into him.
He knew where he had to be, what he had to do. He was being disobedient, and they were punishing him for it. As they should. He had been a fool to disobey. But now this American nurse was hovering over his narrow infirmary bed and he was too weak to fight his way past her.
If she would just go away for a minute or two, Cavendish thought. Just long enough to let me slip away.
The young doctor who had given him the injection stepped into the little curtained alcove.
“How’s he doing?” he asked the nurse.
“Restless.”
Turning to Cavendish, the doctor put on a professional smile. “Still feeling some discomfort?”
Discomfort? Cavendish thought. Why can’t they say the word pain?
“I’m…I feel somewhat better,” he lied, knowing that the doctor expected such an answer.
“Good. You just try to relax. Migraines don’t last forever.”
“The…man they just brought in,” Cavendish managed to gasp out. “Was that…Dr. Reynaud?”
The doctor nodded. “Yes. Fell down and broke his arm.”
“It’s busy tonight,” the nurse said. “Some nights you just sit here, bored to death. But tonight’s busy.”
“And it’s not even payday,” the doctor said.
Cavendish let his head sink back onto the pillow and ground his teeth together to keep from crying out with the pain. The doctor left, but the nurse went no further than the end of the curtains framing Cavendish’s bed.
A terrific clatter and roar of shouting voices suddenly erupted from somewhere beyond the curtains.
“For Chrissake, hold him down!”
“Gimme a hand!”
“Orderly! Nurse! Come on, quick…”
And over it all, the screaming, screeching voice of a…what? Cavendish couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Or a beast.
The nurse disappeared. Cavendish could make out the sounds of struggle, fighting. Bodies flailing and thumping against walls and floor. A pair of burly orderlies raced past his curtained bed. Then the same doctor who had treated him.
“Hold him, hold him!”
Every muscle in his body fluttering from the effort, Cavendish slowly, excruciatingly, pulled himself up to a sitting position. They hadn’t taken his clothes off, just his shoes. Getting to his feet nearly made him faint. Reaching down to pick up his shoes was an agony of effort.
And through it all, the melee out in the hallway continued.
In his stocking feet, Cavendish stepped to the edge of the curtains and peered out into the hall. A tangle of bodies thrashed on the floor by the hospital’s main entrance, orderlies and nurses struggling to hold down a single young blond man who battled them all with rabid, insane ferocity.
One doctor, armed with a hypodermic, was trying to plant his knees on the young man’s chest. Another—the doctor who had treated Cavendish—was attempting to stick a needle into one of his thrashing legs.
Good Lord, Cavendish thought with a shock of sudden recognition, that must be young Schmidt! But it was hard to tell; the man’s face was contorted into that of a wild animal.
Cavendish gaped, almost forgetting his own pain, for several moments. Then he slipped away down the hall, heading for the hospital’s rear entrance, carrying his shoes in one hand like a husband sneaking home to his angry wife after staying away too long.
Jo was holding his arm as Stoner came out of the Officers’ Club. Markov stood on his other side, beneath the naked light bulbs that illuminated the club’s sign. Thousands of insects buzzed and hovered around the lights, trying in their mindless, instinctual way to understand its mystery.
The lights went out abruptly.
“I had no idea it was so late,” Stoner said. “We closed the joint.”
“It’s midnight,” Jo said. “They close at midnight.”
Stoner took a deep breath of sea air. It was cool and seemed to cut through the fog in his head.
“Well, my fellow revolutionaries,” he heard himself say, “what do you think our chances are?”
“We can do it,” Jo answered immediately.
Markov’s reply was slower, “I will need a few days to create a suitably confusing set of signals.”
“But what chances of success do we have?”
The Russian tugged at his beard. “Practically zero,” he admitted. Then, with a boyish grin, “But the difference between zero and practically zero is the margin of all successful revolutions.”
“We’re all crazy, you know,” Stoner said.
“Not crazy. Drunk, certainly. But not crazy.”
“We can do it,” Jo repeated, grasping Stoner’s arm more tightly. “Big Mac isn’t that smart; he’ll fall for it. He’ll probably have a heart attack but he’ll fall for it.”
“That’s a fringe benefit I hadn’t thought about,” Stoner said grimly.
“I’ll talk to Dr. Thompson about it first thing tomorrow morning,” Jo said.
“Thompson,” Stoner echoed.
Nodding, she said, “He’s the key to this whole plan. We’ve got to get him to go along with us.”
“He won’t do it,” Stoner said.
Jo answered, “I think I can talk him into it.”
He looked at her for a long moment, then walked down the three wooden steps from the club’s doorway to the coral-cement paving of the sidewalk.
“Skip it,” he said.
“What?”
Turning back to face Jo and Markov, Stoner said, “Forget the whole idea. I’m not going through with it.”
Markov’s face fell. “But it was your idea!”
“I know. But it’s no good. Forget about it,” he said.
Stepping down to his side, Jo said, “Keith, if you’re worried about Jeff and me…”