“Any more patients?” he asked when he got back.
“Two last night, a broken leg and a heart attack.”
“Where are they?”
“Down the hall, but you’re not going there. The heart patient is recovering, I set the leg and it’s okay. You’re a patient, Doctor, and everything is under control.”
McNulty wished it were true. “How is Bliss?” he asked.
“All right. He called this morning to see how you were.” She went away. A few minutes later she was back, followed by Higpen and Bernstein. “Ten minutes,” she said firmly, and disappeared again.
Higpen looked as if he had not slept, and so did Bernstein. “Doctor,” she said, “we want to talk to you about an idea, if you’re feeling strong enough.”
“Sure,” said McNulty.
“Maybe you remember I said this before. There is a way to get rid of this thing, if one of us is willing to die.”
McNulty started to shake his head.
“I'm not talking about murder, I’m talking about somebody to be a sacrifice, a scapegoat. Suppose we get a few people to agree. There wouldn’t have to be many. We’d go wherever the last victim collapsed and stay there until the parasite takes one of us.”
“And then what?” McNulty asked.
“Get a crate ready. A metal crate, ten feet on a side. The person, whoever it is, gets into the crate and you give them an injection.”
“I won’t—” McNulty started to say.
“Wait a minute, let me finish. We put some kind of a framework inside the crate to hold the person in the middle. And then we lower the crate to the bottom of the ocean. The person dies painlessly; the parasite can’t get out, and the fish can’t get in. Now tell me what’s wrong with it.”
“It won’t work,” said McNulty wearily. “If these folks know what they’re going to do, the parasite will know too, and it’ll get away like it did before.”
“Could you hypnotize them, so they wouldn’t know?”
“Are you kidding?”
Bernstein took a deep breath. Her eyes filled suddenly, and tears began to trickle down her cheeks. “Well, if we have to kill somebody who isn't a volunteer—” she said in a tight, high voice.
“Scapegoat,” said Higpen suddenly. “Yetta, remember the goat in the King Neptune ceremony?”
“Sure I do. What about it?”
“Dressed in a suit, riding in a cart? What if we could get the thing to go into a goat!”
They looked at each other, then at McNulty. “Might work,” he said, and felt a trickle of excitement. “The thing has never seen a goat, is that right?”
“Yes, because we kept it out of perm. Do you think, if we dressed it up in a suit again—?”
“My gosh, I just remembered something.” McNulty sat up straight. “When this thing first started, we were getting a run of patients that looked unusual some way—dress, or skin color. That might have been just because the thing noticed the difference, and was curious.”
After a moment Bernstein said, “Come on.” Her jaw was set. Higpen followed her out the door.
They went to look at the goats, then talked to Miriam Schofelt, who had been the chairperson of the King Neptune Committee this year. She still had the suit they had used, a paper one made by Mrs. Omura, jacket, collar and tie all in one piece. They called Dan Taggart in engineering and explained what they wanted.
“I don’t know about a metal crate,” Taggart said. “Even aluminum, that’ll corrode away after a while. I’d say the best thing would be to use a wooden crate and fill it with concrete, if we had any.”
“I’ve got about a hundred bags of mix in the store,” Higpen said. “Is that enough?”
“Guess so. What mix?”
“Some of it’s one-two-four, some one-one-two.”
“Sounds good to me. How big a crate, did you say?”
54
Down at the end of the lobby, people were gathering around someone who had just come in. Curious, she went that way. The watcher inside her was intrigued to notice that the center of the crowd was a black-and-white goat, dressed in a gray suit and tie, sitting in a cart. It was clear from her host's reactions that this was an amusing sight, but she was not quite sure why. The relationship between human beings and the other species on their planet was something she had never clearly understood. The goat was considered an inferior animal, but if this one was dressed like a human, did that imply that some goats had a higher status?
As soon as she was near enough, she slipped out, across the fuzzy void and in again, feeling the alien body slump as she entered. She had just time to realize that the goat was indeed a lower animal, without speech or reasoning, before the needle entered her neck.
They carried the limp body into the fishery section, where the crate was ready. The crate was partly filled with concrete; they lowered the goat into it and then poured more concrete and bolted on the top. The hoist took it out over the surging green water, lowered and released it. The crate sank and was gone, on its way to the bottom. The horror went with it.
Both windstacks had been carried away in the storm, and there was other damage above decks; the radar dishes and antennas were gone, screens and railings broken. Sea Venture could not signal, but she floated, and at last the helicopter touched down on the landing area. Bliss was there to meet the Marines when they emerged with drawn pistols.
“That won’t be necessary, gentlemen,” he said. “Our resistance is over; you’re free to come aboard.”
“Who are you?” the Marine officer demanded.
“I’m Stanley Bliss, Chief of Operations.”
“My orders are to place you under arrest until the vessel is secured, Mr. Bliss. Will you go ahead of us, please?”
“Certainly.”
McNulty had been watching himself with clinical attention, waiting for alterations in his outlook, and he thought he had found some. It was a little as if all the things that were important to him were weighted parts in a Rube Goldberg machine, and the weights had shifted silently and smoothly to new positions. They were all still there, but their relationships were different. His view of the universe seemed perfectly coherent, and he was comfortable with it; in fact, it seemed to him that he was viewing things more sensibly and rationally than he had before. It was funny to be seeing the situation from the inside, and even funnier that it didn’t seem to make any difference that he had been expecting it.
To begin with, he was not sorry that he was a doctor, and he meant to continue in the practice of his profession if he could get away with it, but he didn’t feel the same way about the rules and conventions. He had a feeling that he had been doing a lot of things just to touch base or protect himself against malpractice suits, not especially for the benefit of the patient, and not doing some other things that might have been helpful. He was discovering in himself a sudden curiosity about herbal cures, for example, and psychosomatic stuff that he had dismissed as pseudoscience. Maybe it was pseudoscience, but did that matter, if it worked?
After consultation with the carrier, it was decided that two hundred passengers would be taken off now, the rest later when Bluefields was joined by two more carriers. Sea Venture, now far off her course, would be assisted by tugs to reach Manila. After that Bliss was not sure what would happen. Probably they would try to fit new windstacks there in order to get the vessel back to her home port in San Francisco. It was doubtful that Sea Venture would ever cruise again; the best thing might be to break her up for scrap.