The opportunity to join Sea Venture had come along in an almost providential way. A friend of his, Ray Herring, had been hired as director of the medical services there, but at the last minute some family trouble came up and he had to stay in Santa Barbara. Ray asked Dr. McNulty if he wanted the job and Dr. McNulty discovered that he did. He applied and was accepted.
And on the whole, he had never been sorry. He had a little eight-bed hospital on the Upper Deck, the latest in diagnostic equipment, and three cheerful nurses. His work-load was less than it had been at home, but he was making more money, even without counting the free room and board.
One morning when he was in the middle of his usual series of earaches and sore throats, Janice came to him with the phone in her hand. “Doctor, it’s an emergency—somebody collapsed down in the marine lab.”
“Okay, give me that. Will you finish up with Mrs. Omura?” He walked into the next room, talking as he went. “McNulty. What’s the problem?”
A woman’s voice said, “I don’t know. One minute he was okay, the next—”
“Is he breathing? Conscious?”
“Well, he's breathing kind of slowly. His eyes are half open, but he doesn’t seem to hear when we talk to him. I think you’d better come down here.”
“On my way. Cover him up with a blanket or something.”
McNulty put his head into the examination room where Janice was swabbing Mrs. Omura's ears. “I’m going to need a stretcher and a couple of guys. Will you—”
“Already done, Doctor. They’re on their way.”
“Well, hell,” said McNulty, secretly pleased.
When he got to the marine section, he found a little group gathered around a red-bearded man who lay in front of a fish tank, with three or four lab coats thrown over him.
“Okay, who was here when it happened?” McNulty asked, kneeling beside the patient. He checked the airway, began to take a pulse: it was slow and weak.
“I was,” said a dark-haired woman. “We were just standing here talking. He didn’t say anything for a while, and I looked over at him, and he had a funny expression on his face, and then he was going down.”
Later McNulty wrote in his notes: “Randall Geller, marine scientist, age 31. Collapsed in marine lab appr. 9:20 AM, Dec. 29. No evidence of trauma. EEG negative. Chem scan negative. Patient is stuporous, does not respond to stimuli.”
On the following day he had another patient with exactly the same symptoms: Yvonne Barlow, Geller’s boss in the marine lab. She was the dark-haired young woman he had talked to before, the one who had been with Geller when he collapsed.
McNulty was puzzled. He went back down to the lab, looked around and asked questions, hoping to find there had been a leakage of some noxious gas, but nobody had been using any such thing. The fact that Geller and Barlow had been stricken a day apart suggested a communicable disease, but if so, it was not like anything he had ever heard of. His two patients remained stuporous and unresponsive.
Late that afternoon he got a third one, Manuel Obregon, a steward. Obregon had been in the room when Barlow collapsed.
It began to look to McNulty as if he had an epidemic on his hands. He put in a call to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Their computer had never heard of this, either.
13
From his position in the midst of the electrical network of the man’s brain, he could see another person approaching. It was time to go; he felt the tug of new adventure. He slipped out and for a dizzy instant was only an energy pattern aware of other patterns in space, a perilous dark field that stretched to infinity. He moved to the nearest one, merged with it, slipped in, and again she experienced that incredible flood of sensory information, the vivid colors, the scents, the friction of clothes against her body, the tightness of undergarments and shoes, the sounds, the signals that told her the positions of her limbs. The shock was so great that her knees went weak for an instant and she almost fell. When she came upright again, she saw the man lying on the floor, eyes half-open, mouth slack. It was always that way when she left; she could hold them together while she was inside, and even make some simple improvements in the network of their minds, but once she was gone, they felt the drain of the energy she had taken.
“Julie, are you all right?” A man she knew, John Stevens, was bending over her.
“Yes, I think so,” she heard herself say. “I just felt— What’s wrong with that man?”
“Some kind of seizure. Sit down here a moment, let me see if there’s anything I can do.”
When he came back, he said, “They’ve called the doctor. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Let’s go in.” She observed with fascination the changes that were taking place in her body in response to his presence, the contact of their skins, the faint male odor that underlay the scent of his cologne. She had felt something like this once or twice before, in other bodies, but never so strongly. Her heartbeat had speeded up; she could feel her cheeks flushing.
Now they were in the restaurant, where the tables were spread with spotless cloths the color of saffron, gleaming china, silver, crystal; a slender vase of flowers was on each table, and the saffron napkins stood in folded flowerlike shapes. A waiter in a saffron jacket handed them the saffron menus. She heard herself say, “I think I’ll just have the sole. I’m not very hungry.”
“Julie, if you’re not feeling well, you really ought to go and lie down.”
She felt the responses again, stronger than before. She was intensely aware of her own thighs, of the man’s knees a few inches away from hers under the table. “I don’t want to worry Mom and Dad,” she heard herself say.
“Look, I’m not hungry either. Let’s go up to my room, and you can lie down for half an hour until you’re feeling better.”
Now they were leaving the restaurant, walking down the violet corridor, passing the other people in their variegated clothes. All these sights and scents were pleasing to her, even though the host body was paying no attention to them; she wished they had stayed for dinner, to experience more of the sensations of human food which she had found so pleasurable in the past; but there would be time for that.
They were riding up in the hushed elevator—what ingenuity! Now they were walking down another corridor. The man was opening a door, ushering her inside with a broad warm hand on her back.
“Julie, dear,” he said, drawing her into an embrace. Their bodies were pressed together, the soft tissues flattening; his hand slid higher on her back, his mouth came warm and moist on hers. Her eyes shuttered; her arms went around him, probing the hard muscles of his back. His tongue came gently into her mouth, and she felt herself slumping against him. The hollow organ between her legs was moistening, softening. The breath went out of her lungs; she turned her face away and pressed it into his shoulder.
“Julie—dear—”
Her heart was beating violently; the sensations were so strong that she could hardly bear them. Now he was unbuttoning her blouse, drawing it down over her arms. He unfastened her brassiere; his hands were on her breasts. Now he left her for a moment to pull back the covers of the bed; now he took off her skirt and panties, threw them at a chair. Now she was lying naked on the bed, her moist skin feeling the coolness. Through half-closed eyes she saw him undressing.
The organ between his thighs stood up stiff and glistening. Evidently this was going to be a reproductive activity, the first she had witnessed in humans. Her interest almost overcame her excitement.
And now he was kissing her body; now he was entering her; and now, now, she felt her hips bucking as the sensations rose to a level she would not have believed possible.