“Oh,” Grant said, stretching his arms as far as he could in the cramped corner by the dispenser.
“Are you hurt?” O’Hara asked.
“No, just a pain across my shoulders. It’ll go away.”
“I’ve got a headache,” she said, “if that makes you feel any better.”
“Me, too,” said Karlstad. Turning to Muzorawa: “What about you, Zeb? Any complaints?”
The Sudanese said nothing for a moment. Then: “We will all have aches and pains, and they will grow worse as the mission continues.”
“That’s comforting.” Karlstad huffed.
“I believe part of it comes from being linked. We feel the ship’s systems as our own bodily sensations.”
Grant nodded.
“And as the systems wear down,” Muzorawa went on, “we will feel their pain.”
“Yes, I remember,” O’Hara said, nodding.
“So we’ve got more and more pain to look forward to,” Karlstad grumbled.
“Yes.”
“It’s not that bad,” said O’Hara. “It can be handled, really.”
Muzorawa smiled knowingly. “The ship’s machinery may break down, but we will not. Machines have no spirit, no courage, no drive to succeed no matter what the cost.”
“Maybe you feel that way,” said Karlstad. “I certainly don’t.”
“Yes you do, Egon,” O’Hara contradicted. “You just don’t want to admit it. Not even to yourself.”
Karlstad looked uncomfortable for a few seconds. Then he turned to Grant. “Which reminds me,” he whispered. “After this delicious repast, we should take a peek at the medical report.”
Grant couldn’t help turning to look at Krebs, floating in the middle of the bridge, linked to the entire ship. He couldn’t see her face, but her limbs looked relaxed, as if she were floating in the sun-warmed waters off some tranquil tropical beach.
Muzorawa looked puzzled. Grant explained, “Egon queried the station’s medical computer about the captain.”
Muzorawa’s expression flashed to disapproval, almost anger. “That was not wise, my friend.”
Pulling the tube from his neck, Karlstad replied, “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
He ducked through the hatch to their sleeping quarters, with Muzorawa close behind him.
“Wait for me,” O’Hara hissed.
Grant said, “Finish your meal, Lane. You won’t miss anything.”
Zeb and Egon were sitting together on the end of Karlstad’s berth, hunched over his palmcomp. Grant floated up to the overhead and held himself there with a hand against the metal ceiling.
“You actually hacked into Dr. Krebs’s personal medical file?” Muzorawa whispered.
Karlstad nodded. “I’m the life-support specialist on this mission, remember. Rank hath its privileges.”
They dared not put the file on the wallscreen of their common area; Krebs could tap into that through the ship’s main computer. So Grant squinted at the tiny, green-glowing display of Karlstad’s palmcomp, hardly aware that O’Hara floated in and joined him up by the ceiling without saying a word.
“I don’t see anything unusual here,” Muzorawa muttered.
O’Hara whispered, “This is prying into her personal affairs. It’s an invasion of her privacy, Egon.”
His head still bent over the palmcomp, Karlstad answered, “She could get us all killed, Lainie. That supersedes her right to privacy, as far as I’m concerned.”
“But her medical report is fine,” Muzorawa said. “She’s fully recovered from her injuries from the first mission. ‘Fit for duty.’ It says so right there.” He pointed to the glowing green screen.
“Wait,” Karlstad whispered impatiently. “Here’s the psychology material.”
“It’s normal.”
“Boringly normal,” Karlstad agreed, sounding disappointed. “It’s almost as if—hold it! What’s this?”
Grant saw the words buried in a paragraph so filled with jargon it was barely understandable: as a result of these physical trauma, the subject is afflicted with moderate visual agnosia.
“Visual agnosia?” Grant asked aloud. “What’s that?”
“Keep your voice down!” Karlstad snapped.
“But what is it?” O’Hara echoed.
“I think I know. I’ll have to look it up to be certain.”
Muzorawa said, “You can’t access the ship’s references without the risk of the captain finding out what you’re doing.”
“And you can’t query the station’s computer again,” Grant added.
“Why not?” Karlstad demanded.
“Because you’ll get caught!”
Karlstad shut down his palmcomp. Grant pushed down from the overhead and settled on the deck, followed by O’Hara.
“Listen to me,” Karlstad whispered urgently. “We may have a crazy woman running this ship. We ought to know what this condition of hers is all about. We have that right!”
Muzorawa said, “It doesn’t matter. Now that we are in the ocean we are truly out of contact with the station.”
“Unless we trail out the antenna,” said O’Hara. “It’s five kilometers long. At our present cruising depth we could use it to contact the station.”
“Krebs would find out,” Grant warned.
“Not if we do it when she’s asleep,” countered Karlstad.
“If she goes to sleep before we start descending deeper,” O’Hara said.
“Lane, do you agree with Egon?” Muzorawa asked.
She frowned, trying to put her emotions into words. “I’m not certain. She does behave peculiarly, don’t you think?”
Grant wanted to argue against it, but instead he asked Muzorawa, “Zeb, what do you think? Should we take the chance and query the station’s medical computer again?”
For a long moment Muzorawa remained silent, obviously weighing the pros and cons of the matter. At last he said gravely, “Yes, I’m afraid we must take the risk. The psychologists may have reported her fit for duty, but the stresses of the mission might aggravate her condition—whatever it is.”
“We have a right to know,” Karlstad repeated.
“Yes,” Muzorawa agreed. “Probably it’s nothing and we are being foolish. But we should know, even if for no other reason than our own peace of mind.”
Grant suddenly got a different idea. “We could ask her,” he blurted.
“What?”
“Ask her about her condition,” Grant said.
Karlstad groaned at the thought. Muzorawa shook his head. O’Hara said, “I don’t think that would be the thing to do, not at all.”
COMMUNICATIONS
Back on duty, Grant kept one eye on O’Hara’s navigation plot. Zheng He was cruising fifteen hundred meters beneath the point where the atmospheric density equaled the density of water on Earth’s surface. The communications antenna was more than three times longer. As long as Krebs didn’t order them to go deeper, they could unspool the fiber-optic cable and contact the station.
When Krebs slept. She showed no indication of doing so. They cruised through the ocean, checking all the ship’s systems, Muzorawa standing glassy-eyed at his console while the sensors poured an unending stream of data into the computers—and sights, sounds, all sorts of sensory impressions directly into his nervous system.
The power and propulsion systems were working so smoothly that Grant almost felt bored, standing at his console. His legs ached now, and a vague, dull pain nagged at him, behind his eyes, barely on the threshold of consciousness, just enough to be bothersome. He tapped into Zeb’s sensor data, intending to peek at the incoming data for only a few moments.