After what seemed like forever I stumbled across Jenny’s body.
My lungs were on fire as I ran my hands over her to see if she was moving—she wasn’t but I did think I felt a faint heartbeat through the material of her pressuit—and to orient myself. Then I got turned around with one arm around her chest and started dragging her back toward the lock.
I was blind. The pain in my leg was trying to steal whatever little breath I had left, and my head was spinning so badly it was a wonder I didn’t just go in circles.
I lost my grip on her and crashed into one of the side walls, bashing my head and giving my bad leg another twist. I came within an ace of fainting, but somehow held on.
Several panic-stricken seconds of groping blindly around later I found her again. Hooking my fingers under the cold metal of her suit’s neckring I dragged her forward another few centimeters. Then myself. Then her. By then I was beyond remembering where we were going. All I knew was we had to get there.
To this day I don’t know if I would have made it or not. Saying I doubt it is giving it the benefit of the doubt.
What I do know is that suddenly I was scooped up off the floor, then gently parked on a wide hip like some women carry their children and pressed tight to soft warm flesh.
Mother? I thought crazily, wrapping my arms around my rescuer’s body and holding on tight with a combination of animal instinct and absolute desperation.
Whoever held me bent down. My messed-up leg hit the floor and twisted off sideways. I would have screamed, but the arm cradling me kept my face pressed up against warm fragrant flesh, stoppering my mouth.
So I fainted instead.
When I came to again I wasn’t dead. I have to rate this as one of the nicest surprises of my life.
I opened my eyes to bright strip lights and that alcoholy smell which spells infirmary.
“The sleeper wakens,” said a soft voice beside me. I turned my head. There was Gloria standing beside the table I was on, a fuzzy blue blanket wrapped around her broad shoulders.
I said something witty like “Urg.” My brains were slowly reassembling themselves and my thought processes rebooting, but I wasn’t quite up to coherency yet.
Then an instant later one part of the operating system went back online. “Jenny?” I gasped, trying to sit up.
Gloria put a hand on my chest, holding me down. “She’s OK, Dave.” Her touch was gentle but irresistable. “She’s in the next room. Bob got to her in time. She’ll be just fine.”
I let my head fall back, the events which had brought me to this point doing a fast replay in my head. They got pretty iffy toward the end. “What—what happened?”
She smiled and stroked my cheek. “You saved Jenny.”
“What happened to her?”
She chuckled. “A more severe form of what happened to me, Gabe, Bob, Jeff, and a whole lot of other people who had the same thing for dinner.”
“Dinner?” Either she wasn’t making sense or I’d sustained brain damage.
“Dinner,” Bob said, coming in to stand beside Gloria. He looked tired but pleased. “We all had the pot pies made with food transformer turkey.”
“That damned Kentford unit?” I asked. Gloria nodded. “You mean the stuff it made was poisonous?”
Bob made a face that was half pained, half amused. “I think skewed would be more accurate. The turkey it produced contained over five times the normal amount of L-tryptophan, the enzyme in turkey meat that can make you feel logy or sleepy after eating it. Most of us who had pot pie were sedated to one degree or other.”
“I had liver,” I said. I don’t like it, but had always figured it was good for me. This proved it.
Bob smiled ruefully. “Not me. I had seconds on the pot pie. Jeff almost had to drag me out of bed and keep kicking my butt to keep me moving. It turns out Jenny has a sensitivity to the enzyme. Normal concentrations wouldn’t have bothered her, but she’s a growing girl and had two big helpings at dinner and went back for a third later on. The thing is, children don’t always react to things the same way as adults. In her it first brought on hyperactivity and insomnia, which is how she ended up going for a midnight snack of more turkey pie, and then killing some time by testing the lock in the dead of night. That third helping took her over a threshold and brought on nausea after a while. Her body’s purging itself of what was giving her trouble would have been fine, except that she was in a pressuit and helmet. You know what happened then.”
I shuddered and nodded. “She started drowning in her own vomit.” That’s a particularly ugly way to die.
He patted my shoulder. “Hey, thanks to you we got to her in time.” He looked me straight in the eyes. “You know, not many people would’ve been brave enough to go into full vacuum buck naked to save someone.”
“I think stupid is a lot better word. Besides, I didn’t last long enough to save her. Someone else had to save the both of us.” I looked back up at Gloria. “You, right?”
She shrugged. “You weren’t that far from the lock,” she said, avoiding my gaze. “I’m sure you would have made it.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” I shook my head, remembering. “I was suffocating, crazed with pain, half-conscious, so dizzy I didn’t know which end was up, and blind as a bat in the bargain.” I frowned, suddenly confused. “I was blind in there. I figured the vacuum had wrecked my eyes. How come I can see just fine now?”
She finally met my gaze. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
Her face broke into a pleased smile. “No, you never saw it, did you?”
“Saw what?”
“You can see for yourself.” She raised her voice slightly. “Sorry? I know you’re there.”
“I am, and I’m glad you’re all right, Dove.”
“It’s Dave.” It looked like things were back to normal.
“You be nice to him,” Bob warned. “It was Sorry who spotted the pattern in who was acting groggy and told me to check for L-tryptophan.”
“Thank you very much. Sorry,” I said formally. “You can call me Dove anytime.”
“I probably will,” he admitted sheepishly. “So what did you want, Gloria?”
“I’d like you to replay the video record of what happened from the moment Dave entered the outer test chamber. Do a split, showing both inner and outer chambers at once. No sound.”
“No problem.” There was a meter wide screen on the wall facing the examination table. It lit, and after a second the left side showed me running in the door and skidding to a stop, wild-haired, wild-eyed, and naked as the day I was born. The look I gave Gabe could have killed, then I turned to stare at the screen he was supposed to be watching, all the color draining from my face. I gave the slightest shake of my head as I looked at and rejected the pressuits. A second or two later I was running toward the airlock, arms and legs pumping.
“Watch close now,” Gloria said beside me.
I hit the lock, slowing suddenly as I disappeared into it.
The right side of the screen showed me toppling out the other side—
—covered from head to toe in shiny black.
“The human body is largely water,” Gloria said quietly as on the screen I fell, my right leg going off at an angle it had never been designed to bend into, steam shooting from my mouth as I screamed. I winced, remembering how it had felt. At the moment it was blessedly numb.
“You tore hell out of your knee there,” Bob put in, adding his own bit of medical color commentary. “You’re going to be in a cast at least a month.”