“No, I like it. It’s Boccherini, isn’t it?”
“You know music? That's great." He looked around the little room, darted at the bed and swept up a pile of magazines. “Uh, can I get you anything? Are you hungry?”
“No, I just want to sleep.” She pulled back the coverlet, kicked her shoes off, and lay down. “Thank you very much,” she said, and closed her eyes. She felt the blackness welling up, and let it come.
The man leaned over to listen to her breathing. She was asleep already, he thought. He went to his relaxer and sat down. He had never had a woman in his room before, not like this, and it was exciting and dangerous. He felt that he had done something noble and strong; he loved her for accepting his protection, and he was glad that she was asleep so that he didn’t have to talk to her.
His name was Norman Peale Yeager; at twenty-five, he was in charge of Sea Venture’s two independent computer systems, not in name but in fact; his boss, Dan Jacobs, attended the staff meetings, made out the reports, and gave Yeager orders, but it was Yeager who knew the systems through and through, and Yeager who had to fix them if anything went wrong. He did a few hours of maintenance a week, and he was on call twenty-four hours a day, but most of his time was his own, and that was the way he liked it.
On his shelves he had dozens of old LPs, silky plastic discs whose almost invisible spirals gleamed iridescent when he tilted them to the light, and he had a lovingly restored 1982 stereo to play them on. In the evenings, alone in the lamplight, he played them over and over, loving the rich sounds hiding behind the hiss and crackle like music from the past filtering up through layers of time.
Even older things obsessed him; he liked tales of dragons and heroes, of fair maidens carried fainting over saddlebows, of caves and quests and treasures. He daydreamed of living in a higher and nobler age, when a man could fight for good against evil and could triumph in victory or make himself immortal in defeat. Everything that was modem seemed to him an offense: the clothes people wore, the way they talked and moved, the blemishes on their skin. It seemed to him that some apocalypse must come, to burn and wash away the grimy world he knew.
He turned the music down and dozed in his chair. In the morning, not wanting the steward to see who was in his bed, he went out for breakfast. A little after noon, when he came back, he saw that the maid had been in the room, but Mrs. Claiborne was still asleep. About two o’clock he tried to waken her, and it was only then that he realized that it was not sleep but something else.
21
On Tuesday Bliss invited McNulty to attend the weekly staff meeting in his office. Present, besides Bliss, were Armand Schaffer, the head of food services, Pete Williams, the maintenance chief, Arline Truman, passenger services, Walter Taggart, engineering, Dan Jacobs, electronics, Charles Skolnik, chief steward, and Erik Seaver, purser.
Bliss introduced McNulty and said, “Before we do our usual Tuesday drill, I’d like to discuss the problems we’re having as a result of the epidemic, if I can call it that. Mr. Skolnik, will you begin? You must be getting most of the complaints.”
Skolnik smiled faintly. “When they can’t get us, they dump on Arline. We’re running about three hours behind on room service, and it’s getting worse. I’d say probably about seventy percent of the passengers are taking all their meals in their rooms. We’re doing our best, but we were never set up for that.”
“Mr. Schaffer, does that figure conform to your experience?”
“Our restaurant attendance is down almost eighty percent. Most of my people are working for Skolnik now.”
“Ms. Truman?”
“Charles is right, we’re spending most of our time trying to calm down people who can’t get room service on the phone. It’s a very unpleasant situation.”
“Some of these people are practically barricading themselves in their rooms,” Skolnik said. “When the steward knocks on their door, they holler to leave the cart and go away. It’s a morale problem for us, because we have to bill them for those meals, and the stewards don’t get their tips.”
“Any suggestions?” Bliss asked.
“I think we ought to consider a bonus to the stewards, to come out of general funds. Say fifteen percent of their pay.”
“I agree,” said Truman. “The stewards are carrying the whole load—if they get really unhappy, we’re all in trouble.”
“Fifteen percent is too much,” said Seaver.
“No, it really isn’t,” Skolnik answered. “In fact, it’s on the low side, because we’re talking about fifteen percent of their base salary, which is only about a third of their income. If they were delivering meals the usual way, they’d be getting fifteen percent and more on the charge for the food. I’d say definitely it ought to be at least fifteen, and I’d appreciate it if you’d come down and make the announcement yourself, Mr. Bliss, and, you know, thank them for what they’re doing under these trying circumstances and so on.”
“Mr. Seaver, is that agreeable to you?”
Seaver shrugged. “Okay.”
“All right, then.” Bliss made a note. “Now about passenger morale—I think that’s the major problem, isn’t it? Any ideas?”
“If we could tell them something reassuring about the epidemic—” said Truman.
“Any prospect of that. Dr. McNulty?”
“None that I can see. We’re still getting five or six cases a day.”
“Even though people are hiding in their rooms?” Truman asked.
“Yes.”
“Could we do something to convince them that they’re just as safe if they come out?”
“No, because it wouldn’t be true. Some people are being infected in their rooms—from stewards usually—but most of them are getting it in public places.”
“Dr. McNulty, that brings up the issue of asking people to report to you if they feel faint. Shouldn’t we be doing that with the stewards, at least?”
“All I can say is it didn’t work before. Five or six a day is bad enough, but we were getting nine and ten.”
“I just don’t understand that,” said Truman. “How could something like that make the disease spread faster?”
McNulty hesitated. “Let me tell you, I don’t understand it either. Ordinarily, if you’ve got a communicable disease, either it spreads broadcast, through the air, or drinking water, or some vector like an insect, or else it spreads by contact. Either way, you get a rising curve of infection until it levels off somewhere. This isn’t like that. What we’re seeing is one case at a time. The only way it makes sense is if there is a vector, like a bug, say, but just one single bug. Think of some little insect that’s a carrier of the disease—it gets on you, you get sick, then it jumps off and gets on me, I get sick, and so on.”
“Have you found anything like that on the patients?”
“No. But remember, there’s a latent period after the infection is passed on. By the time we see the patient, they’ve already infected somebody else.”
“So if we could examine somebody while they’re latent—?”
“That was the idea, but we never could do it.”
Skolnik said, “Dr. McNulty, does it sound to you like this is a smart bug?”
McNulty did not smile. “That’s a thought that’s crossed my mind.”
“Are you serious?”
“I don’t know if I am or not.”
“Well, if you don’t know, who does?”
Bliss rapped gently on the table. “Gentlemen, and Ms. Truman, we’re all under a strain. Dr. McNulty is doing his best, and I know we’re all grateful to him.”
“Let’s talk about this a little more,” said Truman after a moment. “Doctor, is it conceivable that this isn’t an epidemic at all? Could somebody be going around squirting people with something, or injecting them with some poison?”