On Friday things got worse. Thomas LeVore, sixty-eight, saw a woman collapse at breakfast, got up, walked out of the restaurant accompanied by his wife, and collapsed himself two minutes later. His wife, who was hysterical, said that he had felt a momentary faintness and had been on his way to McNulty’s office to report. A similar thing happened to Mrs. Frank Ballantine, fifty-one, who had been near Mr. LeVore, and to Minoru Yamamoto, seventy-eight, and to four other people, all within the space of twenty minutes. Then there were no more cases until late that evening, when Mrs. Ora Abbott, fifty-nine, was carried in. Her husband told McNulty that she had felt faint in the corridor that morning—the same corridor where the other victims had collapsed—but had refused to go to McNulty’s office.
On his way across the lobby the following morning, McNulty noticed that the crowd was unusually thin. People seemed to be trying to avoid each other. There was a funny smell in the air. The Madison Restaurant looked only about half full. There was something different about the sound too; there were no raised voices and no laughter.
McNulty greeted the security guard in the isolation corridor. He looked into each of the patients’ rooms, read the charts, talked to Janice for a minute, and then got on the phone to Bliss.
“Mr. Bliss, I want to check something with you. Is attendance off in all the restaurants, or just the Madison?”
“It’s pretty much everywhere. Less on the lower decks. Room service say their phones never stop ringing. We’ve had to transfer staff to room service, but they’re still running hours behind. If you hadn’t rung me, Doctor, I was going to ring you. Could we do some sort of announcement that would reassure the passengers?”
“I was thinking the same thing. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but I’d like you to tell people not to come in if they feel faint. They were dropping like flies yesterday, all in the same corridor.”
“I don’t quite understand,” Bliss said.
“I don’t either, but I do know people have been keeling over when they start to come here.” He told Bliss about Mrs. Abbott. “She wouldn’t come in, and she lasted longer than any of the others. It doesn’t make any sense, but for Pete’s sake let’s try it.”
“What would you suggest that I say?”
“Well, just that—hell, I don’t know—tell them the medical emergency is under control, and so forth, and they don’t have to report in if they feel faint anymore.”
Bliss’s sigh was clearly audible. “Very well, Doctor. I don’t know if it will do any good, do you?”
“No.”
Afterward, McNulty sat and examined the small, tight knot of panic inside him. The medical emergency was not under control. It was his responsibility, and he couldn’t do a thing. He had a growing number of patients who showed no sign of coming out of their stupor; for all he knew, they would never come out of it. It was hell looking at them in the morning— poor old Professor Newland, for instance, and that nice young couple, Julie Prescott and John Stevens, side by side, waxen and still.
18
Captain Hartman came down to breakfast as usual on Friday morning, and found himself alone in the sea of tablecloths except for a large young man seated two tables away. Presently a waiter came.
“Not much of a crowd today, is there?” Hartman said pleasantly.
“No, sir.” The waiter, an Indian, did not smile.
“Orange juice, poached eggs, toast—cool the toast before you bring it, please.” Hartman closed the menu. “Look, will you ask that young man if he’d mind my joining him? Not much sense in both of us eating alone.”
“Yes, sir.” The waiter bent over the young man’s table. He looked up, smiled faintly and gestured.
Hartman walked over. “Sorry if this is an intrusion. Hartman is my name.”
“Hal Winter.” They shook hands. “Please sit down.”
“I rather expected to be the only one here this morning,” Hartman said, unfolding his napkin.
“Yes. Most people are hiding in their rooms.”
“Mind my asking why you’re not one of them, Mr. Winter?”
“There doesn’t seem to be much point in it. My friend collapsed when we were in our room—first a steward, and then him. How about you?”
“Oh, just bloody-mindedness, I expect. I’m a seafaring man, retired now, but I’ve never thought much of hiding in one’s room.”
The waiter brought their orders. Hartman’s toast was warm. Winter, he was interested to note, had a strip steak and a salad. Over breakfast Hartman chatted easily about his experiences on the Queen; Winter seemed entertained, and even smiled once or twice.
“Any news about your friend?” Hartman asked.
“No, he’s the same. I’m doing volunteer work on the night shift—they won’t let me nurse him, of course, but I can sneak in every once in a while. He doesn’t recognize me.”
“You’re a nurse, then, Mr. Winter?”
“Practical nurse, and I’m trained in physical therapy.” After a moment he added, “This is a rotten thing to happen. He was in a wheelchair to begin with. He never complained.”
“It must be very hard for you.”
“Yes. He’s a great man. Paul Newland.”
“Oh, yes, I read he was aboard. There’s some controversy about it, I believe.”
“There were people who didn’t want him to come.”
Hartman thought a moment. “Mr. Winter, as a professional man, what’s your opinion of this disease?”
“I’m not a doctor.” Winter tore a roll apart, his eyes unfocused. “There doesn’t seem to be anything like it in the literature. Dr. McNulty is a G.P., but he’s consulted with a lot of specialists, and they don’t recognize it either.”
“Not a mutation of some virus, like the Asian flu?”
“It doesn’t act like any known disease.”
Hartman chewed reflectively. “New things do seem to turn up. You remember Legionnaire’s Disease, and AIDS, fifteen or twenty years ago?”
“And herpes. But this is different.”
“Yes, I think it is. Mr. Winter, I remember reading once that some physicians can actually identify an illness by sriiell. Have you ever had that experience?”
Winter thought about it. “No.”
“Please don’t laugh. This isn’t quite the same thing, but I have the strongest conviction that I can smell something in Sea Venture—not the individual patients, but the whole vessel. A scent of illness, perhaps.”
“Or evil?”
Hartman put down his fork. “Have you felt it too?” “Yes,” Winter said.
“I don’t suppose,” Hartman said delicately, “you’ve had nightmares?”
“Yes.”
Hartman said good-bye, left the restaurant and strolled down the corridors. The only people he met were stewards with carts; they all looked grim. The shopping mall was deserted; only the pharmacy was open. There was an eerie silence and a sort of darkness in Sea Venture now, as if the lights had gone dim, although when one looked at them, they seemed as bright as ever.
He was thinking about the first ships that carried the plague to Europe in the fourteenth century. What must it have been like to be the master of one of those ships, watching the people around him fall one by one?
New things did tum up. This might very well be something like the Black Death. Perhaps, he thought, it was something worse.
That night he dreamed that he was in a dark corridor of Sea Venture; all the lights were out, and in the yellowish no-light he saw that the corridor was occupied by a monstrous squid, with garage-long tentacles that writhed toward him like sucker-disked serpents; and he felt utmost despair, because he knew the monster was an evil that could not be killed. He woke with the smell of rotting seaweed in his nostrils.