There was a stir around the table. “My God, what a horrible idea,” somebody said.
“I don’t see how it’s possible,” McNulty answered. “It can’t be one person, because there’s no one person that’s always there. Often there’s nobody around but the two people— the one that’s infected, and the one they pass it on to.”
“Could it be on something that they hand each other—a coin, for instance?”
“No. Usually there’s no contact.”
Bliss sighed. “Now, Doctor, is it the fact that nobody you’ve consulted has been able to throw any light?”
“Yes.”
“And we can’t say when, if ever, we’ll be able to stop this thing?”
“True.”
Arline Truman leaned forward. “You said that sometimes there are only two people in a room when it happens. Wouldn’t that be our best chance? This may sound heartless, but suppose instead of sending somebody to pick up the person who’s ill, we send a nurse in there to take care of them and just keep the room locked?”
“Then you’ve got three people in there,” McNulty said wearily. “What do you do when all three of them get sick? Send in a fourth one—who has to be a nurse? Before the day was out, you’d have the room packed with nurses, all sick but one. The infection rate wouldn’t go down, the only difference would be that we’d be losing nurses, and we can’t spare them.”
“Are there other suggestions?” asked Bliss. He waited. “I hope we’ll all be thinking about this before we meet again. Meanwhile, let’s get on to other matters and let Dr. McNulty go back to his patients.”
Early on the tenth day, about nine o’clock, one of the volunteer nurses came running in. “Dr. McNulty, one of my patients looks better. I think he tried to say something.”
The patient was Randall Geller. He looked disoriented, but his eyes were focusing. His lips moved when McNulty bent over. “Wha’ happened?”
“You’ve been very ill, Mr. Geller, but you’re better now.” McNulty took Geller’s pulse; it was a little stronger.
Late that afternoon Yvonne Barlow regained consciousness. By that time Geller was feeling strong enough to be helped to the bathroom. McNulty called Bliss and said, “I think we re out of the woods.”
It was a wonderful feeling, but it was premature.
22
By Monday Randall Geller was sitting up, looking feeble but alert. McNulty asked him, “What do you remember about getting sick?”
“Not a thing. The last I remember, I was talking to Yvonne.”
“What were you talking about?”
“I don’t know, nothing much. Just talking.”
“What about before then? Do you remember any momentary faintness, for instance?”
Geller looked thoughtful. “Well, yeah. The day before. Just for a second, I felt like I was going to fall down.”
“What were you doing at the time?”
“I was talking to that visiting fireman. What’s his name, Newland.”
“What about?”
“Well. I was showing him some manganese nodules we dredged up. There was an australite in one of them—a kind of glass meteorite. Pretty unusual.”
"A glass meteorite,” said McNulty, scribbling a note. “Never heard of that one. What do they look like?”
“This one was hollow, about a centimeter across.”
“Don’t suppose anything could have got out of it to make you sick,” said McNulty, attempting a joke.
“Well, it could. I cracked it open.”
McNulty stared at him. “Where is it now?”
“I gave it to Yvonne. I guess she put it away somewhere.”
McNulty went and talked to Ms. Barlow. She was recovering a little faster than Geller had; there were deep semicircles under her eyes, but her color was good.
“Ms. Barlow, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you remember anything about when you collapsed?”
“No. I was in the dredge room, and somebody called in that the lunch cart was here. And that’s the last I remember until I woke up in the hospital.”
McNulty made a note. “Mr. Geller was telling me about this thing he found in a manganese nodule—some kind of meteorite?”
“Yes, an australite.”
“What did you do with it, do you remember?”
“I labeled it and put it in a cabinet in my office.”
“If I call somebody down there, could you tell them where it is and get them to bring it up?”
“Sure. Call Tim Vincent. What do you want it for?” “I’m not sure yet.”
McNulty got Vincent on the phone and handed it to her.
“Tim, in the right-hand cabinet on the wall across from my desk, on the second shelf there’s a labeled australite—the one Randy found in the nodule. Could you find it and bring it up to Dr. McNulty?” She handed back the phone. “He’ll be up in a few minutes.”
Vincent was a narrow-faced young man with an uneasy smile. “This what you wanted?” he asked.
McNulty took the cracked sphere and turned it over in his fingers. “Guess so. Is this the way they usually look?”
“They come in all kinds of shapes. Some are like little flat buttons. Some are lumps.”
McNulty sniffed at it. “Could you analyze the inside of this to see if anything was in it?”
“What would I be testing for?”
“Damn if I know. Some kind of gas, maybe.”
“Well, that’s a big order. If it was a gas, there wouldn’t be anything left in there, anyway.”
“Volatile oil, then? See what you can do, will you? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Okay,” said Vincent without visible enthusiasm, and went away.
The next day he found Geller sitting up and eating poached eggs and toast with apparent appetite. “Feeling pretty good?” he asked.
“Sure. Raring to go.”
McNulty sat down and looked at his chart. In fact, Geller seemed to be making a remarkable recovery.
“We were talking before about your dizzy spell when you opened the australite. Do you think there could be some connection between that and your getting sick?”
“That’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Geller said with his mouth full.
“I’m sorry?”
Geller swallowed. “After which, therefore because of which. A common logical fallacy. Before you can show a causal connection, you have to exclude sources of error. In other words, did anything else happen besides opening the australite that could have started the epidemic?”
“Such as what?”
“I don’t know. It’s all bullshit, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” McNulty asked. There was a funny expression on Geller’s face.
“Ah, hell. That’s just the conventional crap I was feeding you. I don’t even know why I said it. Sure, I think something came out of that australite. I’ll tell you something else, I think it’s intelligent.”
“But you say you didn’t see anything when you cracked the thing open?”
“Right. So it’s invisible, or it’s a gas, or too small to be seen, or some kind of coherent packet of energy, or who knows what. One thing we can be pretty sure of, it’s not from here. It fell out of space, maybe millions of years ago. So there’s no reason to expect it to look like anything we’re familiar with.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing, but I thought I was crazy. The damn thing knows what we’re doing. When I asked people to come in if they felt faint, it jumped from one to another every time they started to do it. All right, suppose all this is true. What can we do about it? Give me some ideas—I’m fresh out.”