She touched his arm. "Are you all right?"
His body went on automatic. Helplessly, he grasped her hand. He managed not to scratch her, and tried to feel good about that until he saw that she had a small abrasion on the back of her hand. That was enough. His touch would probably have been enough anyway. Eventually she would have eaten something with that hand or scratched her lip or
wiped her mouth or scratched or licked her hand to quiet the slight itching sensation contamination sometimes
produced. And the disease organism could live on the skin for hours in spite of normal, haphazard hand-washing. Any person he touched was almost certainly doomed in one way or another.
"Why are your hands wet?" she asked. And when he did not answer, she examined his hands. He had expected her to drop them in disgust, but she did not seem disgusted. She was a big, strong girl. Maybe she could be saved. Maybe he
could save her -if he stayed.
He remembered trying vainly to save his wife, Disa. She had been a short, slender woman with no weight to lose, barely big enough to qualify for the space program. The disease had eaten her alive. She had been one of the mission's two M.D.s, however, and before she died, she and Grove Kenyon, the other doctor, had discovered that the disease organism caused changes that could be beneficial-if the host survived its initial onslaught. Surviving hosts became utterly resistant to more conventional diseases and more efficient at performing certain specialized functions. Only the toxin excreted by the disease organism was life-threatening. Not surprisingly, the human body had no defense against it. But in time the organism changed, adapted, and chemically encouraged its host to adapt. Its by-products ceased to be toxic to its host and the host ceased to react as strongly to increased sexual needs and heightened sensory awareness- inevitable effects of the disease. The needed time was bought by new organisms of the same disease-new organisms introduced after significant adaptation had occurred. The new, unadapted organisms quickly spent themselves neutralizing the toxic wastes of the old. Thus, the new organisms had to be replaced frequently. The host body was a hostile environment for them-an environment already occupied, claimed, chemically marked by others of their kind. Their toxin-neutralization was merely their reflexive effort to survive in that hostile environment.
But the original invading organisms had too much of a start. Or, if they were not well started, if the new organisms were introduced too soon, those new organisms simply became part of the original invasion, and the host, the patient, was no better, no worse.
The meager statistics provided by the crew and the few experimental animals they managed to raise from frozen embryos seemed to support these findings. All four of the surviving crew members had been reinfected several times. There were no survivors among the first crew members stricken. These had been isolated and restrained. Their vital functions had been continually monitored and restored when they failed. But finally their brains had ceased to function. Reinfection was the answer, then-or an answer. A partial answer. Without it, everyone died. With it, some lived. Disa had died. Meda was obviously stronger. Perhaps she could live.
PRESENT 8
Meda brought Blake his bag when he asked for it and permitted him to examine her. She even permitted him to cleanse the scratches she had made on his arm and face, though she warned it would do no good. It had never done any good before when someone was infected, she said. The organisms were aggressive and fast. He had the disease.
She or someone else had found and sabotaged his panic button with one of the newer permanent glues. With these, permanent meant permanent. He could not use the bag to call for help. Otherwise, the bag was intact. For Keira's sake in particular, it was one of the best. His scope would probably give him a look at the Clay's Ark organism, even if it was as small as Meda had said. He needed all the information he could get before he made his escape. It was not only a matter of his wanting to pass the information on. He also needed to know now of any weaknesses these people had. They were too good to be true in every way except appearance. He had to find something he could use against them.
"I could have used you when my children were born," Meda told him as he took her blood pressure. "Didn't you have a doctor?" he asked. He checked her pulse.
"No. Just Eli and Lorene, my sister-in-law. We don't bring anyone here if we don't plan to keep them. And I didn't dare go to a hospital. Imagine how many people I'd infect there."
"Not if you told them the truth."
She watched as he drew blood from her left arm. It went directly into the analyzer as would all her other specimens. "They'd put me in a goddamn cage," she said. "They'd put my kids in one, too. They were born with the disease, you know."
"Did they have any special problems?"
She turned her head to stare directly at him. "Not a one," she said. She made no effort to conceal the fact that she was lying.
"What about you?" Blake asked gently. "Easy births?"
"Yeah," she said. Her defensiveness vanished. "The first one really surprised me. I mean, I was scared. I expected to be in agony, and I don't handle real pain that well. But the kid popped out with no trouble at all. Felt like cramps."
"You were lucky there was no emergency. May I see your children?" "Not until you're safe, Blake."
"Safe?"
"When you've been sick and gotten well again, then we'll have nothing to worry about. We'll show you anything you want."
He frowned. "Do you imagine I'd hurt a child?"
"Probably not," she said. "But you're at the seeking-weakness stage, and Jacob and Joseph would be a hell of a weakness. If you used them, we'd have to kill you. We want you alive, Blake."
He looked away from her in growing desperation. They really were too good-always a step ahead. How many times had they done this-abducted people, made them vanish from the world outside. He had to beat them at a game they
knew all too well. But how?
Meda rubbed his arm with a wet hand. "Look," she said, "it isn't so bad here. You can do a lot of good-maybe more good than you could do anywhere else. You can help us prevent an epidemic."
"It's only a matter of time before your disease gets out of hand," he said. "We've kept that from happening for more than four years."
"Yet it could happen tomorrow."
"No!" She got up and began to pace. "I can't really make you understand until you've felt it, but we'd go crazy if we were caged. We'd probably kill ourselves trying to escape. The compulsion keeps us on a pretty thin edge as it is. Eli says we're holding on to our humanity by our fingernails. I'm not sure we're holding on to it at all. In some ways, I'm more realistic than he is. But maybe we need a little of his idealism. God knows how he's kept it." She glanced at Blake. "He's my kids' father, you know."
"I guessed," Blake said.
"He helps us hold on even if all we're holding on to is an illusion. Take away that illusion and what's left is something you wouldn't want to deal with. You'll see."
"If your veneer of humanity is that thin," Blake said, "it's only a matter of time before someone finds it too thin. And if what you've told me about the disease is true, one person could infect hundreds and those hundreds could infect thousands-all before the first victims began to show symptoms and realize they were sick."
"Your estimate is low," she said. "Now do you see why you have to stay here? You could become that one person."