Lance ate quickly and not very cleanly. The Japanese scrupulously ignored the fine spray of crumbs and gravy spiraling from Lance’s tray to the table vent. Lance suddenly grabbed the edge of the table. His stomach heaved and his cheeks puffed out like the throat of a bullfrog. He shot upwards, banged his head on the ceiling, then dove out the hatch.
“Young love gone bad.” Hugh shook his head sadly.
“What the hell,” said Dan. “Saves me from giving him some fatherly advice.”
Lance managed to keep his stomach under control long enough to reach the Whit in Hab 2, where he heaved a yellow-brown ball of gravy, bread, and bile into an airsick bag. This was his third attack since seeing Carla Sue and Jaeckle together. He wiped his face with a moist towelette and stared into a mirror. His normally cream-smooth skin was splotched and seamed like the surface of the moon.
When Lance exited the Whit, he found Lorraine Renoir waiting for him. He felt an immediate flash of anger.
“Commander Tighe sent you, right?”
“Actually not, Lance. I saw you rush in here. Are you okay?”
“No I’m not okay. I just puked like crazy.”
Lorraine reached out her hand to touch his shoulder, but he spun away. His arm slammed against the door of the Whit. The bang echoed throughout the module.
“Perhaps I should examine you,” she said.
Oddly, the impact calmed Lance. He was still angry at Dr. Renoir for meddling with his pain, but he found that stifling his anger was easier than swallowing back his dinner.
Lorraine brought him to her infirmary and told him to remove his shirt. His stomach, chest, and arms seemed terribly lean, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week instead of merely a day. Lorraine listened to his heart and took his blood pressure and stuck the end of a digitalized thermometer into his mouth.
“I believe you have a virus,” she announced.
Lance wanted to scream. He wanted to shout that he didn’t have a virus at all, that if anything he was heartsick at the thought of that bitch-woman Carla Sue lying to him, using him, and then betraying him. He was sick at the thought that right now she was with Jaeckle in her compartment, doing all the things she had done with him, that she had promised she would do with nobody else but him. What right did she have to draw him in, to use her body, to say the things she said? Didn’t words mean anything? Didn’t lovemaking mean anything?
But Lance kept quiet, partly because he didn’t want to call attention to his shame, mostly because he remembered Russell Cramer bellowing in the Mars module. He knew that if he said one word about Carla Sue, he would not be able to stop. He accepted a package of breath mints from Lorraine and nodded meekly at her admonition to stay in his compartment and drink plenty of liquids.
Lance slowly made his way back to Hab 2. Airsick bags billowed from his belt like animal pelts. People in the connecting tunnel stared at him with faces that looked like images in carnival mirrors. Lance felt another surge of anger, this time at the thought that everyone knew the real reason for his sickness. He crossed one arm over his stomach, tucked his chin against his chest, and pulled himself toward home with one hand.
Once inside his compartment, something stronger and more bilious than undigested food rose from his stomach to his throat. He punched his head into the sleep restraint.
“Bitch! You goddamned lying bitch!” he muttered into his dark cocoon.
He called her every filthy word he knew; every damning curse he had ever heard he spoke in the darkness, his voice murderously low, intoning anathema on Carla Sue like an ancient priest casting out a traitress, a villainess, a carrier of loathsome disease. He kept up his deadly chant until, exhausted, he fell asleep.
O’Donnell took Dan’s dinnertime suggestion to heart. But rather than return to the ex/rec area for a game of darts, he wandered into the Mars module. The observation blister was empty.