"Is he awake?" asked Spence. The boy's eyes, though open, had a dull-glazed shallow look.
"He is slipping into coma."
"We've got to do something," Spence said frantically. He fell to his knees beside the thin body, placing his hand on the frail chest. "The fever's worse." He looked at Gita and then Adjani with urgent expectation. "We've got to do something," he repeated.
"What would you have us do?" said Adjani.
"Anything is better than letting him die like this. Gita, get your pills."
"What are you going to do?"
"The only thing we can -megadose him with the antibiotics. He's dying before our eyes. At least this way he may have a chance."
Gita handed him an assortment of plastic bottles containing various drugs. Spence selected the antibiotics and emptied the contents of a handful of capsules into a small bowl.
"Gita, find the boy's mother," instructed Adjani. "Tell her to bring us honey or sugar water-anything sweet to drink. Lots of it. And hurry!"
"Don't die yet," whispered Spence as he worked. "Hang on, kid. Hang on."
Gita returned and handed Spence a vessel of liquid. Spence smelled it and said, "Smells like flowers; what is it?"
"Jasmine water. They drink it like tea. It is heavily sugared. Very sweet."
"Good, that's what we want." He poured some into a bowl with the crushed pills. "I'm no medic or I would have thought of this hours ago. The glucose will boost his metabolism. He's got to fight that fever."
The boy's mother entered and brought a jug of liquid which she handed to Spence. He smelled it and coughed, "Phew! What is that?"
Gita sniffed the jug and diffidently placed a tip of his little finger in the liquid and brought it to his tongue. "Mmm, it is puyati-nectar of the gods. Fermented palm sap. One develops a taste for it."
"Yeah? Well, we can't give him this."
"Why not? Undoubtedly he drinks it already, and the alcohol might do him some good."
"You're quite a country doctor, Gita. But I have a better idea." Spence grabbed the basin Adjani was using to bathe the boy and dashed the water out of it. He poured it full again with the palm liquor.
"Now we have an alcohol bath. That ought to cool him off quicker."
Adjani nodded and dipped the cloth into the reeking brew. When he had finished he turned to Spence and took the cup from his hands, swishing the liquid around the rim several times. He lifted the boy's head and administered the medicine. Then he turned to the others.
"Well, that's done. Now we wait. We'll take turns watching him and bathing him round the clock."
Spence looked at the weak, pathetic figure wasted painfully thin by fever. Their lives hung by the slenderest of threads, as fine as the breath which raised the little chest slowly and regularly and all but imperceptibly. Will any of us live to see another morning? Spence wondered. The next few hours would tell.
11
… WHAT ARE YOU DOING here?" Ari had become aware of unseen eyes on her; she whirled around and met Hocking gazing at her with an unhealthy leer on his bony face. She had not heard him enter. Her father was asleep on one of the couches across the room and she thought of waking him, but decided not to.
"I have only come to see how my charges are getting along," Hocking said with oily civility. "Have you everything you need?"
"Let us go. You can't hope to gain anything by keeping us."
"Letting you go would be somewhat awkward at this point, I'm afraid. We've gone to an enormous amount of trouble to get you here. But maybe we can strike a bargain."
There was a slight whirring noise and the pneumochair slid closer. Hocking dropped his voice and his obsequious manner. "I want to talk to you. If you cooperate I might be able to help you. I have a plan."
"A plan for what?"
"For resolving this messy affair once and for all," whispered Hocking slyly. He glanced around as if to make certain no one overheard him.
"How do I know you'll live up to your part of the bargain?"
"You don't. But you'd be foolish to pass up any chance you might have to secure your freedom. I'll tell you something, Miss Zanderson. There are forces at work here that stagger the imagination-far beyond your comprehension. You are but an infinitesimal part of a design greater than men dare dream. That I am offering you a chance to save yourself should be enough for you."
As much as she distrusted the loathsome being before her, she wanted to believe there might be a way to influence him to release them.
"I don't know if I should."
"Listen, you little fool! Ortu wants you dead. You're a nuisance to him. But if you help me, I'll get you out of here safely. You have no choice… I won't ask again." Hocking glared at her fiercely. "Well?"
"All right. What do you want me to do?"
"Come with me. Now. And be quiet. Ortu has eyes all over the place."
Ari slipped after the floating chair as it flew along darkened corridors and down spiraling stone steps, deeper and deeper into the bowels of the palace. It was all she could do to keep pace with the egg gliding before her.
Finally they reached a large wooden door at the bottom of a flight of steps. Hocking paused before the door and it swung magically open before them, closing on them again once they had entered.
The room was large and dark, rank with the musty smell of age and silent as a tomb. There was a soft hum and a click, and instantly the room was washed in white light. Ari blinked and threw a hand to shield her eyes.
In a moment she lowered her arm and saw that they were in a room with stone walls at the very roots of the palace. The light came from two huge lamps set in the ceiling, but otherwise the room had no distinguishing features-save one: the enormous apparatus glinting coldly before them.
What it looked like, she could not describe. It seemed insect -like to her-as if it were a construction of nature rather than human engineering-but it had a strong, metallic appearance. The gleaming black thing stood on tall legs over a small platform with a sling chair on it. The chair she recognized as being a more or less common variety, but it was strangely out of place among the protruding knobs and convolutions of the sleek machine. Altogether, the thing had a vague, spidery appearance.
"What is it?" she asked. Her voice quavered, giving away her anxiety.
"This is merely a simple communication device-a sort of radio, you might say. It amplifies and projects brain waves. It won't bite you, my dear. I've used it myself many times. It's quite harmless, I assure you."
Ari was not assured. She liked her collaboration with the enemy less and less with every passing second.
"You're going to put me in that, aren't you?" she stated.
"I'm going to ask you to assist me, yes. That is, after all, why you came. Shall we begin?"
Hocking indicated that she was to take her place in the chair. Ari mounted the platform uncertainly and settled herself in the chair, perching on the edge of the fabric seat.
"You may as well make yourself comfortable," said Hocking as he went about readying the machine. "This will take some time." "What are you going to do?"
Hocking could not resist a smirk at her weakness. Humans, he thought, were all alike: scared children in the presence of things too vast for their puny intellectual powers. "You will not feel a thing. There will be no sensation whatever. See? We are already beginning."
Hocking lied. There was an immediate sensation, and an unpleasant one.
Ari suddenly felt dizzy, as if the room had shifted, and the feeling in her fingers-which she held clasped together in her lap-faded away. For a long moment she could not focus her eyes.