“No, wait a minute, Randy, don’t be so goddamned impatient. Look, Doctor, do you want to solve your problem or not? Find the host, stick him with a hypo. Then he’s unconscious and the parasite can’t get out. Take him into a stateroom and leave him there, locked up, with plenty of food. When he comes to, the parasite still can’t get out, because there’s nobody close enough. Then you can explain over the phone.”
“Would you buy that explanation, Yvonne?” Geller asked.
“I’d be madder than hell, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
“Sounds familiar. Isn’t that what Himmler used to say?”
“Come on, Randy. Have you got a better idea?”
“No. How about you, Doctor?”
When they had gone, McNulty thought about them a long time. They were bright, cheerful young people, smart as whips both of them, but there was something wrong with their heads. They just didn’t seem to give much of a damn. Trapping the parasite was like a game to them, and they really didn’t care whether it worked or not. They hadn’t even bothered to tell him their discoveries about the australite until he tracked them down. Sociopaths, he thought, but that wasn’t it either. There was just something missing, something important, and they didn't even know it was gone.
But they were right: he couldn’t think of any other answer.
30
Bliss, after waffling for two days, finally gave his permission on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, when the first patient came in, McNulty found out where she had been stricken—it was a coffee shop down on E Deck. As soon as the patient was in bed and the tube down her nose, he called the Woodruffs and asked them to meet him in the forward lobby in E. He put on a jacket in place of his white coat, took the hypo out of the refrigerator and slipped it into his pocket. He felt like an ax murderer.
“Let’s go, Lori,” he said to the security woman who was waiting in the outer office with a wheelchair. “Remember, you stay behind us, and don’t come up till I call you."
Emily and Jim Woodruff were sitting on a banquette in the lobby. Jim got up when he saw McNulty approaching. “I had a hard time keeping her here. She wants to go looking, she thinks it’s somewhere close.”
“Good,” said McNulty. “Emily, are you all set?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, let’s just stroll around. If you hear that noise, you tell me right away.”
“I’m sure he's here,” she said. “Jim wouldn’t let me look before.”
“That’s right, because we had to get everything ready.”
A few people were in the lobby, looking hostile and suspicious. They glanced into the coffee shop, which was empty except for the waitress and counterman. Lori Applewhite, the security woman, was following them a few paces behind. As they reached the far side of the lobby, a man came out of the restroom. Emily’s face took on a rapt expression. “There he is,” she whispered.
“Him, right there?”
McNulty signaled to Applewhite, who nodded and wheeled her chair past them. The man, gray-haired and slender, was walking rapidly away. “Sir,” she called.
The man turned. “Yes?”
“Security. Will you show me your ID, please?”
McNulty and the Woodruffs were walking past. “Keep on going,” McNulty muttered.
The man reached into his pocket. “What’s this about?”
McNulty turned, got the hypo, slipped off the cap, stuck the needle into the back of the man’s neck and pressed the plunger. He yanked the hypo out again barely in time to catch the body as it fell.
Janice was waiting for them in the room at the end of the isolation corridor. They laid the man out on the bed, loosened his necktie. McNulty took the opportunity to glance into his wallet: the man’s name was Roger Cooke, and he had a driver’s license from Maine. He glanced up at the TV camera mounted at the comer of the ceiling. “Is that thing working?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Okay, let’s get out of here.”
“I must say it seems to have worked,” Bliss said. “How is he taking it?”
“He doesn’t like it, but he’s pretty calm. He says he’s going to sue us. We’re giving him priority on room service; he can get anything he wants.”
“Well, that’s a relief. My hat is off to you, Doctor. Have you had any thoughts about what to do with him when we get to Guam?”
“I’ve talked to the health commissioner there. We’re trying to work something out—a coast-guard ship anchored offshore maybe. It would be better to get him to Manila. There’s a lot of red tape, but I think we can put it all together. What the hell they’ll do with him I don’t know, but at least it’ll be out of our hands.”
“Thank God.”
After three days Sea Venture was almost back to normal; the restaurants were full, the corridors crowded and cheerful. On the fourth day, early in the morning, McNulty got a call from the security guard who was watching Cooke’s room on television. Cooke appeared to be in convulsions.
With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, McNulty went there with a nurse and opened the room. The nurse was the first one to reach the patient. McNulty knelt beside her, got the man’s jaw open to make sure he wasn’t biting his tongue. When he looked up, the nurse was on her feet, swaying a little. She took two steps toward the door, then fell like a tree. Before he could call out, McNulty heard another body fall in the corridor.
Cooke was dead; there was a line of victims in the hall. The horror had escaped.
31
McNulty finished out his workday, went home, took a couple of Nembutals and went to sleep. He woke up in the morning with the clear recollection of what had happened and the knowledge that he could no longer call himself fit to practice medicine. He had broken the oldest rule in the book: “The regimen I adopt shall be for the benefit of my patients according to my ability and judgment, and not for their hurt or any wrong.”
He discovered that the knowledge of his guilt was only what he had always suspected. If this had been Santa Barbara, he could have walked out the door, but it wasn’t. For better or worse, McNulty was the only medical doctor on Sea Venture, and there were still things he had to do. He made up his mind that he would do them to the best of his ability— brilliantly, if possible—and then he would try to figure out what, if anything, was left of his life.
Cooke’s body was on ice down in a comer of the freezer section. His family had been notified. They had been offered the option of a burial at sea, if they so desired, but they wanted the body shipped home. By rights there would be an inquiry. He was guilty of malpractice, or of murder if you looked at it that way, but the worst thing he was guilty of, the thing he could not forgive himself, was stupidity.
On the following day he began a systematic effort to locate and interview all the recovered patients. Jamal A. Marashi, the man who had struck his wife, was a Malaysian living in the United States. He seemed to McNulty an entirely selfish person; his grievances against his wife took up most of the conversation. McNulty put him down as inconclusive; for all he knew, Marashi had been exactly the same before his illness.
Luis Padilla, the steward, was another matter. At first he seemed very much at ease; he denied that he had taken any jewelry from Mr. and Mrs. Emerton, and pointed out that his record was unblemished.
“Mr. Padilla,” McNulty said, “I’m a medical man, not a policeman. I don’t care whether you took that stuff or not. What I’m trying to find out is, what does this disease do to people? Could you just tell me, did you feel any different after you got well? We won’t talk about the jewels at all.”