General Fulton spoke in an undertone with McClennan and Rotterjack. Rotterjack approached the President and put a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. President, we are not the experts here. We can’t ask the right questions, and clearly there isn’t much time remaining. We should get out of the way and let the scientists do their work.”
Crockerman nodded, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he seemed more composed. “Gentlemen, David is correct. Please get on with it. I’d like to speak to all of you before we go out to the site. Just one last question.” He turned back to the Guest. “Do you believe in God?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the Guest replied, “We believe in punishment.”
Crockerman was visibly shaken. Mouth open slightly, he glanced at Harry and Arthur, then left the room on trembling legs, with McClennan, Rotterjack, and General Fulton following.
“What do you mean by that?” Harry asked after the door had closed. “Please expand on what you just said.”
“Detail is unimportant,” the Guest said. “The death of a world is judgment of its inadequacy. Death removes the unnecessary and the false. No more talk now. Rest.”
11
Bad news. Bad news.
Edward awoke from his dreaming doze and blinked at the off-white ceiling. He felt as if somebody very important to him had died. It took him a moment to orient to reality.
He had had a dream he couldn’t remember clearly now. His mind shuffled palm leaves over the sand to hide the tracks of the subconscious at play.
The duty officer had told them an hour before that nobody was sick, and no biologicals had been discovered in their blood or anywhere else. Not even on the Guest, which seemed as pure as the driven snow. Odd, that.
In any ecology Edward Shaw had heard of, which meant any Earth ecology, living things were always accompanied by parasitic or symbiotic organisms. On the skin, in the gut, within the bloodstream. Perhaps ecologies differed on other worlds. Perhaps the Guest’s people — wherever they came from — had advanced to the point of purity: only the primaries, the smart folks, left alive; no more little mutating beasties to cause illness.
Edward sat up and drew himself a glass of water from the lavatory sink. As he sipped, his eyes wandered to the window and the curtain beyond. Slowly but surely, he was losing the old Edward Shaw, and finding a new one: an ambiguous fellow, angry but not overtly so, afraid but not showing his fear, deeply pessimistic.
And then he remembered his dream.
He had been at his own funeral. The casket had been open and somebody had made a mistake, because within the box was the Guest. The minister, presiding in a purple robe with a huge medallion on his chest, had touched Edward on the shoulder and whispered into his ear,”This is Bad News indeed, don’t you think?”
He had never had dreams like that before.
The intercom signaled and he shouted,”No! Go away. I’m fine. Just go away. I’m not sick. I’m not dying.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Shaw.” It was Eunice, the slender black duty officer who seemed most sympathetic to Edward. “You go ahead and let it out if you want. I can’t shut off the tapes, but I’ll shut down my speaker for a while if you wish.”
Edward sobered immediately. “I’m all right, Eunice. Really. Just need to know when we’re going to get out of here.”
“I don’t know that myself, Mr. Shaw.”
“Right. I don’t blame you.” And he didn’t. Not Eunice, not the other duty officers, not the doctors or the scientists who had spoken to him. Not even Harry Feinman or Arthur Gordon. The tears were turning to laughter he could barely suppress.
“Still all right, Mr. Shaw?” Eunice asked.
“I’m a victim of coicumstance,’” Edward quoted Curly, the plump and shave-pated member of the Three Stooges. He punched the intercom button for Minelli’s room. When Minelli answered, Edward imitated Curly again, and Minelli did a perfect ”Whoop hoop ooop.” Reslaw joined in, and Stella laughed, until they sounded like a laboratory full of chimpanzees. And that was what they became, chittering and eeking and stomping the floor. “Hey, I’m scratching my armpits,” Minelli said. “I really am. Eunice will vouch for me. Maybe we can get the sympathy of Friends of the Animals or something.”
“Friends of Geologists,” Reslaw said.
“Friends of Liberal Businesswomen,” Stella added.
“Come on, you guys,” Eunice said.
At eight o’clock in the evening, Edward glanced at his face in the shaving mirror over the sink. “Here comes the Prez,” he murmured. “I won’t even vote for the man, but I’m primping like a schoolgirl.” They wouldn’t be shaking hands. Yet the President would look in upon Shaw and Minelli and Reslaw and Morgan, would see them — and that was enough. Edward smiled grimly, then checked his teeth for food specks.
12
The Secretary of Defense, Otto Lehrman, arrived at seven-fifteen. After Crockerman had had a half hour alone with him and Rotterjack — sufficient time to gather his wits, Arthur surmised — they entered the laboratory around which the sealed cubicles were arranged, and onto which their windows all opened, a larger version of the central complex that held the Guest. Colonel Tuan Anh Phan stood before the isolation chambers’ control board.
Crockerman shook the doctor’s hand and slowly surveyed the laboratory. “One more civilian witness and they’d have had to double up with the military, right?” he asked Phan.
“Yes, sir,” Phan said. “We did not plan to incarcerate entire towns.” This was evidently a struggling attempt at humor, but the President was not in a bantering mood.
“Actually,” Crockerman said, “this isn’t funny in the least.”
“No, sir,” Phan said, crestfallen.
Arthur came to his rescue. “We couldn’t ask for better facilities, Mr. President,” he said. Crockerman had been behaving strangely since the meeting with the Guest. Arthur was worried; that conversation had upset them all on a deep psychological level, but Crockerman seemed to have taken it particularly to heart.
“Can they hear us?” Crockerman asked, nodding at the four steel shutters.
“Not yet, sir,” Phan said.
“Good. I’d like to get my thoughts in order, especially before I talk to Mrs. Morgan’s daughter. Otto, Mr. Lehrman here, was delayed by his duties in Europe, but Mr. Rotterjack has briefed him on what we’ve already heard.”
Lehrman took a shallow but obvious breath and nodded. Arthur had heard many things about Lehrman — his rise from microchip magnate to head of the President’s Industrial Relations Council, and only two months before, his confirmation as Secretary of Defense, replacing Hampton’s more hawkish appointee. He appeared to be a philosophical twin to Crockerman.
“I have a question for Mr. Gordon,” Lehrman said. He looked at Arthur and Harry, standing beside each other near the lab’s hooded microbiologicals workbench.
“Ask away,” Arthur said.
“When are you going to authorize a military investigation of the Furnace?”
“I don’t know,” Arthur said.
“That’s your area, Arthur,” the President said in an undertone. “You make the decision.”
“Nobody has put the issue to me before now,” Arthur said. “What sort of investigation did you have in mind?”
“I’d like to find the site’s weaknesses.”
“We don’t even know what it is,” Harry said.
Lehrman shook his head. “Everybody’s guessing it’s a disguised spaceship. Do you disagree?”