The blood finished spinning and I checked the packed cell volume and total protein. They were both slightly high, indicating dehydration; well, with the vomiting that was no surprise.
Howard hovered over me as I read the blood values. “What does it say?”
“He’s a little dehydrated. Only slightly, though, and it’s probably from the vomiting. I’ll have to take the blood to the lab to find out anything else.”
“So what do we do?”
“We treat the symptoms and see what happens.” Which basically meant 1 have no idea, but I hoped it would satisfy Howard.
Trying to look confident, I mixed a big batch of kaopectate, activated charcoal, and barium. Lynda took it from me and offered it to Curious, who tasted it and then wrinkled his nose, looking disgusted. Lynda gently grasped a handful of his tentacles and closed her eyes, concentrating, no doubt trying to get across an impression of how important it was for him to take the medication. The sea monsters have an extraordinary chemical sensitivity to touch; they pick up amazingly well on human emotional output. Lynda offered the medication again, and this time Curious reluctantly swallowed it. Then he slipped back into the water and floated just offshore, and his brothers and sisters clustered nearby.
“Now what?” Howard asked.
“Now we wait. We see how he responds. I’ll take the blood to the lab and develop the x-ray, and see if anything else presents itself.”
“Oh dear,” Howard said. He took off his glasses, wiped them compulsively on his shirt, and put them back on, then ran his hands through his thinning hair. “Oh, this is awful. For all the problems we’ve had with them, they’ve never really been sick before.”
Lynda went to his side and put her arm around him.
“Oh, Lynda,” he said. “I’m sorry about tonight.”
“Don’t be silly. We can celebrate another time. Tonight we’ve got to see to Curious.”
“Celebrate?” I said.
Howard nodded sadly. “Yes. That was supposed to be the surprise. You see, we’re engaged.” For the first time I noticed the ring on Lynda’s finger, the sparkle of a diamond. I’ve never been too observant when it comes to human beings; I would probably never have noticed without a hint.
“Engaged! Well, that’s wonderful! Congratulations.”
Ye gods, they were going to be married. That meant that Lynda would never come back to work for me, and I’d be stuck with Kami forever. What a hideous thought. I forced a smile and congratulated them again.
But they weren’t any more in the mood for congratulations than I was; they were far too worried about Curious. We drove back to the house, and I let them off.
“I’ll get going on the labwork,” I said. “Keep in touch and let me know how he’s doing.”
They didn’t even go into the house; they went straight for their own truck and headed back to the pond. I crossed my fingers, hoping for the best, and started the long drive back to town.
It was almost midnight by the time I’d dropped the blood off at the lab and returned to the clinic. I developed the x-ray; as I’d expected, I wasn’t able to tell a thing from it. My little portable unit just wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate Curious’ spherical abdomen. Still, with luck I’d be able to see the barium in the digestive tract on the next x-ray, and at least tell if it was moving.
I contemplated going to bed and waiting for the lab results, but I wanted more x-rays and I figured I was too uneasy to sleep anyway. I swallowed some No-Doz, grabbed an armful of x-ray cassettes and a pile of exotics textbooks, and drove all the way back to the sea monsters’ pool.
I took x-rays and blood at hourly intervals, stacking up the x-ray cassettes to be processed later. I spun the blood each hour. Curious was slowly, steadily becoming more dehydrated, more pained, more lethargic. The other monsters hovered nearby, looking frightened and rather ill themselves.
“Oh my God,” Howard said frantically. “They’re all getting sick.”
But Lynda shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think they’re just reacting to Curious’ condition—like they did when Stranger was sick.”
Stranger was, true to the name Howard had given her, a stranger thing than even the monsters. She was an enormous serpentlike creature who lived in a deep luminescent cavern and who had never been seen near the surface. The monsters had made friends with her, and apparently they visited her often. She’d been very ill a few months back, and the monsters had picked up on it, showing vague signs of illness themselves although they were perfectly healthy. I hoped that Lynda was right.
At 5 A.M. I sent Lynda back to town to develop the x-rays and pick up the blood-panel results. When she was gone I sat down on the bank, exhausted. Curious lay in the shallows nearby, his breathing labored, his eyes glazed. He was trembling. I remembered that his mother had trembled just before she died. Howard paced back and forth on the bank, his footsteps crunching in the gravel, back and forth, back and forth. A cold wind blew out of the hills, ruffling the surface of the pond, and I shivered, stuffing my hands in my jacket pockets.
I dozed off for a time, waking up every few minutes to focus my tired eyes on Curious and make sure he was still breathing. The water sloshed hypnotically against the bank as the monsters moved in the pool, and I fell momentarily into a deeper sleep, still sitting up. I didn’t wake up this time until Howard touched my arm.
“Doc,” he whispered.
I blinked up at him. “What? Is Curious—”
“Curious is about the same,” Howard said in a peculiar voice. “There’s something else.”
“What?” I rubbed my eyes and squinted at Curious; he still lay in the shallows where he’d been all night. But Howard wasn’t looking at Curious. I followed Howard’s gaze to the center of the pond.
Enormous limpid eyes stared back at me from a massive snakelike head, suspended five feet out of the water on a slender undulating neck. A mass of fins and streamers fell from the creature’s head and neck and trailed into the water. It was Stranger, the stranger thing from the depths. If I hadn’t known it was her I would have fainted on the spot. I almost fainted anyway.
“She’s at the surface,” I said, gabbling. “I didn’t think she could come to the surface. What is she doing at the surface?” I’d been convinced that she could only survive at depth; obviously I’d been wrong.
Stranger moved her head toward me; reflexively I moved back. Then she swung her head about, her movements startlingly fast, and touched Curious’s face with her snout. Then she disappeared. Hardly a ripple marked the spot where she’d vanished.
“She looked at you, and then touched Curious,” Howard said, gazing at me. “She knows you helped her when she was sick.”
“So she wants to make sure I help Curious?”
“Yes, but I think…” Caddy, one of Curious’s sisters, swam suddenly to Howard’s side, waving the tentacles of her dorsal fin; he clasped the tentacles absent-mindedly, and then said, “I think we’re supposed to follow Stranger.”
“Follow her?”
“Uh, yes.” Howard let go of Caddy’s fin and looked at me apologetically. He knew how much I disliked diving.
“But why?” I protested. “What good will that do for Curious?”
“I don’t know,” Howard said, but he got up and headed purposefully for the little shed where he stored his diving equipment.
“I shouldn’t leave Curious alone,” I said, following Howard reluctantly.
“Lynda will be back soon.”