The whole thing was impossible. It wouldn’t work. They needed two tanks—
Abruptly Sandy roared with surprised satisfaction, making the unconscious woman stir and moan. They had two tanks! The only problem was that one of them was empty.
By the time he had figured out how to bleed some of the contents of the full tank into the other Marguery’s moaning had stopped. She seemed to be asleep. She simply did not rouse from that sleep, even when he shook her.
Sandy hooked her into her gear, slipped his own mask on, and began the long climb down into the water and under it, pulling himself hand over hand along the rail of the spiral staircase, retracing their steps. Finally, once they were down, he could see the glow of sunlight outside.
Three minutes later he was at the surface, bawling frantically for help to the people who were staring at him from a passing work boat.
Chapter 19
Because the Earth human body is constantly exposed to attack by organic things of all kinds from its environment, most of which would do it harm if they could, it has a complicated and very effective system of defenses. Antibodies form. Glands flood the system with prophylactic agents. The body mobilizes to defeat the attacker. The system works very well—that is why life has survived on Earth for four billion years—but sometimes the very mobilization of defense systems by itself causes fever, itching, sneezing, the formation of pimples or blisters or blotches—even syncope; even, sometimes, death. Then the syndrome is called “an allergic reaction,” and it can be more serious than the original attack.
When one of the air-evac medics took time to explain that to Sandy, he understood—more or less. What he understood best was that it was serious. It kept the medics busy. By the time the helicopter had made the ten-minute flight to Hudson City and was swooping down on the roof marked with a squared-off red cross, Marguery was shrouded in blankets, with a tube in her nose and another tube taped to a needle that entered a vein in her arm and her face mostly hidden under a mask.
She wasn’t talking, even incoherently. She was unconscious. After those first quick words of explanation, the medics weren’t talking, either, or at least not to Lysander Washington. No one paid any attention to him at all, at least not until they had pushed the wheeled stretcher Marguery was on into one elevator and hurried Lysander himself into another, with instructions to sit in the emergency waiting room—and the only attention he got then was from the other people sitting around, some with crutches, some with babies in their arms, some half asleep, some nervously pacing back and forth as they waited to hear the prognosis on their friends or relatives within.
The seats were flimsy aluminum-tubing things with canvas backs. Sandy did not want to trust his weight to them. He was more inclined to join the pacers, anyway, because the whole thing was a terrible mystery to him, and he couldn’t help feeling that in some way—what way it could possibly be he couldn’t imagine—the whole thing was his fault.
And no one would tell him anything.
A little girl in shorts and tennis shoes was staring at him, diverted from the situation comedy on the waiting-room TV screen. She had a carton of popcorn from a vending machine in her hand, but she wasn’t eating the popcorn because her thumb was in her mouth. She pulled it out long enough to ask, “Mister, are you the spaceman?”
He scowled at her. He was not in a talkative mood. “No,” he lied. Why should he be truthful when all about him deceived? “I’m, uh, just a normal Earth human waiting for my wife to have a baby.”
“I don’t think that’s so,” the child said critically, “because we go to the other side of the hospital when we come here for babies. My brother’s getting a marble out of his nose; he’s dumb. Do you want some popcorn?”
He shook his head and got up to visit the drinking fountain. He peered down the forbidden corridors of the hospital, pale green and white, with carts that bore unplugged machines and stacks of linen, and people in pale green smocks hurrying back and forth. Ignoring the girl, he went to the reception desk again. “Can you tell me anything about Marguery Darp?” he begged.
“The doctor will be with you when she can,” the receptionist said, eyeing him curiously. “There’s a film room down the hall if you’d like to watch some other kind of television while you wait.”
“Do they have decent chairs?” he asked ungraciously.
The receptionist studied his build. “They have couches, anyway. I think they’re pretty strong,” she offered.
“Then maybe I will,” Sandy growled, but what he decided to do first was to visit the men’s room. He was brooding. This world was entirely too full of unexpected crises! He was tired of being taken by surprise. It wasn’t the way he had been brought up; on the big interstellar ship you at least always knew where you stood, and if there was ever any doubt about what to do next the Major Seniors would tell you.
He did not want to face the curiosity of the people in the lounge again. When he found the film room the couch did, at least, look sturdy enough to bear him. But as soon as he sat and gazed at the screen, he was taken aback to see a familiar face. It was his old cohort-mate, Bottom! He was on a platform, just as Polly had been, and he, too was lecturing an invisible audience. Not on astronomy, of course. His topic was biological control of radioactive and toxic wastes, and he was showing microscope pictures of tiny organisms that, he said, would concentrate all the undesirables into their own bodies, simply by feeding on them, and then the little things could be harvested and disposed of. Result: clean water and soil.
Once the initial shock of seeing an old friend had worn off, Sandy decided the subject was boring. He had heard all that long since, in the buddy sessions with his cohort. It surprised him, though, that even the Earth people weren’t interested—at least, he was alone in the film room. And when finally he gave up and went back to the lounge, the TV there was still playing its sitcoms.
The little girl, however, was waiting for him. “I think you really are the spaceman,” she announced triumphantly, pointing to the door, “because if you weren’t why would that creepy thing be looking for you?”
Sure enough, Polly was galumphing toward him through the door, escorted by a uniformed hospital attendant and looking surly as always. And maybe a little surlier than usual, he decided, because it was close to her bedtime “cookies and milk” meal, and she certainly was not going to get fed in this place.
“What stupid thing have you done now, Lysander?” she demanded—speaking rudely in Hakh’hli, to exclude the humans who were giving them their full attention. “Why do I have to come running to this hospital place simply because you are once again in some sort of trouble?”
“I’m not in trouble,” Lysander said, hoping it was true. “I didn’t do anything. Marguery must—got sick,” he finished wretchedly.
“Got sick from what? I am told that you forced her to go underwater, where oxygen-breathers cannot live. That was wrong of you and not right at all! Why did you do that?”
“I certainly didn’t force her! It wasn’t my idea, anyway.”
“Was it then hers? If so, why?”
“Because she wanted a private place to tell me something. I’ve just found out that you’ve been lying to me all my life!”
Polly didn’t look offended, only interested. “And why do you say that?” she asked curiously.
“Because what you have told me about my mother was untrue and not in any way correct. She wasn’t American! Only human ship in space was Russian.”
Polly sneezed quizzically. “And you are upset about this question which is trivial and not at all important? What difference does it make? Russian, American, Chinese—they’re all Earth humans, aren’t they?”
“That difference—” he began grimly. And stopped. It occurred to him that there might be some sort of tactical advantage in concealing just how much he did know. He decided not to say anything about the gender of the Russians, and finished instead, “That difference is that you didn’t tell me what was truth.”
She looked at him with scorn. “I?”
“Yes, you. Plural you,” he amended. “You Hakh’hli! My own cohort, and everybody else, all the way up to Major Seniors, you’ve all lied to me.”
“My dear Lysander,” she said cuttingly. “Are you listening to yourself? What you say is simply contradiction in terms, for how can any Major Senior lie? What one Major Senior says is truth. If some Major Senior says one hoo’hik is not hoo’hik but Hakh’hli of tho degree, then that is so. Otherwise Major Senior would not say it.” She gave a vast yawn and then announced, “This is not useful conversation. It is more important to speak of your activities, which are not satisfactory. Why are you not listening to Bottom’s lecture on soil detoxification?”