Steiner is looking at the monitor intently, small beads of perspiration show on her upper lip, her eyes are wide, filled with the eerie light. “Live,” she says.
“Live? Where is he?”
She switches the monitor off, leaves me looking at my reflection in the glass; before I turn away I see in my own face the horror I am trying to contain. Dear God, I think, the sight of him—think it could have been me as well, could have been Werhner. “Belowdecks,” I hear Eva Steiner say; can’t quite believe what I hear.
“I brought him along to question him myself, but it’s been… useless.”
“You’ve got him here? You’ve got him here in a damned cage?” I say. “You’ve got that man in a cage?”
“He’s in a security cell in detention,” she says flatly. “It’s for his own safety.”
“Taylor knew?”
“Colonel Taylor has been working since the beginning on the sensible theory that what’s been missing in the analysis of the blow has been double-blind evidence. And since he was coming here, I let him know Cooper would be… available.”
“You don’t have any right to hold him,” I say. “The crew’s on leave. As of today, the whole crew is on leave.” “If you can say that was a man whom you saw,” Eva Steiner says. “We brought him back. What’s left is ours. Look, Rawley, I know there was no love lost between you. He took your woman for a time, I know that.”
“You were the nurse,” I say, the pattern dawning on me. “You were the nurse who interviewed him on Guam. And Christ, that’s why his name never appeared on a death list. How in God’s name can you—”
“Yes, there are problems, I know there are problems,” Steiner says quickly. “Military’s inquired because of a tracer from someone on your ship—Schole, you know him, he’s a friend of yours. There are problems, but we can solve them.”
I can see a strange, smoldering look in Eva Steiner’s gray eyes. “Let’s say this,” she goes on. “He came in on a death list, he was already dead when you splashed down, a corpse in reentry. That would clear up the tracer.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Military is going to find him in a few days. But if we can show that he came in on a death list, say we simply forgot to post the data, if just one other crew member, like the pilot, will corroborate that he came in on a death list… Perhaps if you talked with him, you’d see. I’m making you a proposition. Name your next assignment, your own ship, if you want. Or this ship, you see what’s here. And there are more interesting places, special places.”
“Did he tell you something?” I ask, my heart thumping. “Did he tell you something different from what’s in the report?”
She says he told her nothing, says so flatly, begins saying that she wants to keep him, he belongs to her.
“I’ve heard enough,” I say.
“No, don’t go. Talk to me! Talk to me!”
My impulse descending in the hum of the dome lift is to leave the ship as quickly as possible, yet once in the secondary lift I punch the lower working lobby, leave the elevator there. There is only a skeleton crew for the layover; across the carpeted floor two service personnel are lazily chatting at the counter. If the ship is set up as I imagine, then the detention area is only one level up from here. I am almost right—up one level, but over in third-class hull, a man with small eyes tells me. With a coolness I did not think I still had, I turn him back to his word game with a casual wave of my hand and pass through the hatchway otherwise in his view, my mind racing as my legs carry me on what I hope looks like a visit to a drunken friend.
On the metal grating in the dim, low-ceilinged passageway between hulls, I am gripped for an instant by the sense that I am doing something foolish, that once I am in detention, the hatch lock could close with a firm click behind me and give Eva Steiner two of us to play with instead of one.
“Cooper!”
There he is, slumped against the metal wall in a poorly lit cell, his hair white, his broad face blotchy and drawn, his eyes glazed over, unfocused.
“Cooper!”
He looks up slowly, looks at me without comprehension, his mouth slowly coming open with drool in the corners, gravity in folds on his face as if he has aged terribly or has been beaten up, worked over, the look of a man lost from the world, lost beyond his ability to remember. Then, making me out, his eyes widen and he begins to grin—a terrible grin, his upper lip drawn back, stretched back. No, not a tape; I shudder, thinking, How long can he have been here?
“Do you recognize me? It’s Voorst, Rawley Voorst.” Now I see stains on his flight suit, the overflowing ashtray on the floor, crumpled papers—and there is an odor, an odor like ozone.
Cooper’s eyes are shining. “Voorst…” he says, his voice hollow, eerie, still grinning. “…you, too… dead.”
“Listen to me, Cooper. I’m as alive as I’m standing here,” I say tightly, gripping the cold steel bars, shaking them. “And so are you. I’ll try to get you out of here, get you to a hospital. Can you understand me?”
Cooper only looks at me, his eyes narrowing, wiping his hand across his mouth.
“Do you remember what happened on Guam? You talked with a woman. What happened then? Did you tell that woman something?”
Cooper smiles crookedly, raises his hand from his face to turn a forearm to me blotched with scars. A cackle runs through his voice. “I’m a corpse, Voorst. She burns me and… I can’t… feel it.”
I bang the steel bar with my fist; there is a low thud. “Cooper. Werhner Schole is here, too. We all came back. You’re as alive as I am, Cooper, there’s a world outside. Listen to me. Tell me what they’ve done to you.”
Cooper turns his haggard face away, he is chewing his lower lip, spittle at the corner of his mouth. He looks back at me; I hear him say: “Do you see things, Voorst?”
The hair rises on the back of my neck. Behind me there is a sound, quick footsteps padding on metal, nearing. Around the corner through the hatchway comes the small-eyed security man, rushing down the passageway, paling. “Hey, no visitors. I got a call down, no visitors. Get out, you gotta get out,” he says, shooing me with his hands.
It is as if there is something crawling on me, on my skin, crawling.
I take one last look at Cooper, his mouth awry with contempt, his eyes, dark with hate, directed at me or the warden, I cannot tell; I see the burns again on his forearm as Cooper raises his hands to his eyes and turns to the wall, the security man is pushing at me now.
The moon is spectral, huge. Werhner and I sit in the wicker chairs at the cabana, spooked into drinking rum, watching the almost full moon rising over the ocean. It has taken me a long time to tell the story, a long time to unwind. “It never did feel straight,” I tell Werhner finally. “And seeing him… My God, man, it was like seeing a ghost.”
“What did Cooper mean?” Werhner wonders aloud, wonders again. “How can he think he’s a corpse? What did they do, exactly? Well, not so much difference now. But if Eva Steiner hadn’t wound up needling you, if it wasn’t for that, who’d know about Cooper? Who’d know?”
“Your tracers,” I remind him. “She did say it seemed like a matter of days. But what might happen in the meantime?” I sigh. “Christ, am I glad we get our orders through military. Imagine what it would be like if SciCom was hooked into that.”
My visions of Cooper still haunt me, the shock of seeing him blue and eerie on the monitor in the dome, the greater shock of seeing him gaunt and ghostlike in the detention cell, the weight of his presence, the strange things he said, wondering if he knew what he was saying. Having seen him, I feel vindicated somehow, though shaken: as if a bridge over which I have just crossed has collapsed behind me.