A Season For Slaughter Part 55

That was the one. It happened so fast that everything blurred, and the next thing I knew I was nailed to the floor with Sames.h.i.+ma's knee on my chest and his angry hand quivering stiffly in front of my eyes. The flat edge of his palm is a dangerous weapon. My throat is exposed. My nose. My eyes. He could kill me with a single blow.

I look past his hand and meet his angry glare. I manage a grin. "So-you don't really want to die after all. Do you?"

And abruptly he got the joke. Leaned back. Relaxing. Releasing. Tears rolling down his cheeks. Tears of relief and terror as well. I rolled sideways, up onto my elbow. Lizard ran to Harry. "Are you all right?"

He nodded, as if nothing at all had just happened here. He shook her off. "I have work to do. Excuse me."

Captain Harbaugh helped me up. "That was a d.a.m.n fool stunt-"

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Yes, but-"

"He wanted to be talked out of it. He wanted someone to hold his hand. You and Lizard bought into the whole performance. But we don't have the time. When this is over, we can all hold hands then-"

Lizard was looking at me with surprise and admiration. She followed me toward the door. "How did you know?"

I didn't want to answer, but I did anyway. "I've been there," I said. "Remember?

You had to blow up the road in front of me just to get my attention."

"Oh," she said. She grabbed me by the shoulders and kissed me quickly. "Thank you, Jim."

"We both have work to do." I broke the kiss off several weeks sooner than I wanted to. "I love you. Now I gotta go find some elephants to throw overboard."

Jellypigs are one of the first symbiotic forms to appear in a Chtorran nest. They appear only as a few individuals at first, but within a very short time, there are hundreds of jeliypigs in the nest, living together in oily congestions.

The creatures exude a kind of slime that functions not only as a lubricant for the entire congestion, but also gives each congestion its own identifying smell. Jellypigs will follow trails of their own slime, and it is believed that this is the way the gastropedes direct their tunnel building.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 68.

s.h.i.+ny! s.h.i.+ny!

"There are some things a gentleman doesn't discuss. He only drops hints."

-SOLOMON SHORT Somehow, in all the madness, the mission continued.

Even as the monitors were being pulled from their frames and thrown out of the hatches, the technical teams strove to carry on. I pushed my way through the debris-littered corridors to the medical observation bay. Dr. Shreiber had installed "our most interesting specimen"-that was her term for him-in the number-one theater.

A polite term for a padded cage. Not becaase they were afraid of him, but because-so she said-she didn't want him to hurt himself. "He's a human being," I said grumpily.

"You haven't spoken to him," she replied.

"That's what I'm here for. I want to interview him."

"He's deranged. He's..." Shreiber shook her head. She didn't have the words. It unnerved her. "Listen to me. He's scared, he's dysfunctional, he's turned into something alien."

"I still need to see him."

"I think you should leave him alone-"

"He knows things," I said. "He's been there. He's lived with them. He can answer questions that n.o.body knows."

"You're not going to get any answers." She was angry-as if I were challenging her expertise, not just her authority. "I'm the expert on this one, Captain McCarthy."

"Yes, you are," I agreed. "But I'm the guy who has to make the report to Uncle Ira." I lowered my voice. "Please don't interfere."

She stepped out of my way. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

I pushed into the theater.

Dr. John Guyer of the Harvard Research Mission was sitting naked on the padded floor, playing with his p.e.n.i.s. He was giggling quietly to himself at some private hallucination; his voice had a high, edgy quality. I approached slowly, taking my time to study his appearance carefully.

His skin was sun-brown and leathery. The dark red lines that illuminated his body were furrowed ridges. They curled up and down his arms and legs, all over his back and belly, his neck and face and skull, like a full-body tattoo. They were hardened scars or scales-I couldn't tell. The quills growing out of his head were feathery things. Alive!

He was covered with a very light coat of fur-almost like down-a pale red, almost pink. The long fine strands of it quivered as if moved by the wind. But there was no wind in the room. I remembered the stuff that grew out of the burns on Duke's legs.

I remembered Jason Delandro in his cell. Was this what the final form of the infection would look like?

Without looking up, without raising his head, without meeting my eyes, he said, "I see you. The s.h.i.+ny one! You smell like food. Not smart. Not smart."

I squatted down opposite him, staring at him. "h.e.l.lo," I said. "My name is Jim.

Jim McCarthy. What's yours?"

"s.h.i.+ny, s.h.i.+ny, bright and s.h.i.+ny." He opened his arms wide, as if to show me the spiral patterns around his nipples, the purple fur all over his chest and belly. "I see you!" He raised his eyes and looked directly into mine, and it was as if a whole other person were suddenly speaking to me. "This one used to be John Guyer," he said in a strangely dead monotone.

"Dr. Guyer, I've been wanting to meet you." I held out a hand, as if to shake. He just stared at it.

"Punnnk," he marveled. His voice was high and raspy again. "Pretty. Sing with me tonight?"

"Thank you, John. I appreciate the compliment, but I'm a married man." I pulled my hand back. "John, can you understand me?"

He grinned at me wildly, head tilted. "I understand you perfectly. But you don't understand, do you?" He stroked his head with his hand. His feathery quills were vibrating rapidly.

"No, I don't. But I want to. Explain it to me."

He laughed, a deranged noise that rose and fell alarmingly.

"Please," I insisted.

He stopped laughing, looked sideways at me. He shook his head. His laugh came out like a sob. "You can't see what I see. You can't know."

"Tell me," I insisted.

He didn't answer. He began playing with his p.e.n.i.s again, examining it, pulling back the foreskin, wetting his finger, touching his glans, then tasting his finger.

I patted my pockets; what did I have to distract him? Chocolate? Yes! A piece of a Hershey's bar, part of Captain Harbaugh's wedding gift. I broke off a square and put it on the floor in front of him.

He looked at it for a long moment, staring, studying. He recognized it. At last, he reached out and picked it up. He held it against his nose and sniffed it hard. He laughed in sudden delight, throwing himself backward, falling on his back, still holding the sc.r.a.p of chocolate to his face, inhaling the delicious fragrance. "Yes, yes, yes-" He dropped it into his mouth, sucked and moaned for a long moment, rolling back and forth, back and forth across the floor of the theater. He sat up again abruptly. "More!" he demanded, holding out his hand.

I shook my head. "No. No more. Talk to me first."

"Worm lines!" He pointed at me. "You have no worm lines. You can't talk. You can't listen. You're all s.h.i.+ny, but you can't see! You grow worm lines and we talk.

We hug, we kiss, we sing together. We make babies. Give me my chocolate."

"Worm lines? Tell me about the worm lines."

He got childish. "You won't like it..." he sang. He said something else. Something purple and vermilion. I didn't understand the words, but I recognized the language.

I watched him for a moment longer. I wished I had the time to study him at length, but there were other things that needed doing first. When we got back, I'd get myself a.s.signed to Guyer's case. He knew.

And I wanted to know too. More than anything.

A sudden terrifying nightmare thought occurred to me-that the only read way to know what Guyer knew was to become like Guyer. Worm lines. Quills. Red fur.

And probably a state of permanent Chtorran hallucination.

I was crazy enough already. I had no great urge to get any crazier. If only there was some way to get Guyer to communicate in English. I remembered Fletcher and the herd. She might have some good ideas. If all else failed, we could break Guyer's arm and see if that made a difference.

I straightened up, feeling my knees crack as I did so. Guyer opened his arms to me again, exposing his chest fur. "s.h.i.+ny, s.h.i.+ny!" he laughed, as if he were basking in a radiant afternoon.

I sighed sadly and left. This man had been brilliant once. Now he was fit only for a zoo.

"Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast: (cont'd) ROBISON:... Okay, so you're saying that when people disagree with you, it proves they don't know what they're talking about? You are arrogant-even more arrogant than I thought.

FOREMAN: Obviously, you're having trouble with this, John. Where disagreement exists, there is information that remains unknown to one or the other or both of the parties involved. The presence of a disagreement, whatever else is going on, is a red flag that the knowledge in the domain is still incomplete. The disagreement is occurring because somebody's beliefs are being threatened. Here, in this discussion, your belief system is threatened by information and ideas that contradict it, so you become disagreeable, which is not quite the same as disagreement, but in your case it accomplishes the same results.

ROBIS0N: Yeah, yeah, yeah-so what does all this have to do with democracy?

FOREMAN: Everything. Democracy works only when the population is educated and informed. True alignment is possible only when a population is educated and informed. Believe it or not, we're on the same side.

ROBISON: Educated and informed by whom? That's the question. Who controls this so-called domain of ideas?

FOREMAN: Who controls the ecology of the Earth? Who controls any ecology?

n.o.body and everybody. You don't control an ecology, you live within it, either responsibly or irresponsibly. The same is true for the ecology of ideas. You are the carrier of an idea. You partic.i.p.ate.

ROBISON: Ecology of ideas?

FOREMAN: Absolutely. An idea is an organic presence. It's big, it's small, it's new, it's old, it's toxic and dangerous, it's safe and bland; it has a lot of strength, it has no strength. Some of the lethetic intelligence engines have been modeling the idea ecology and having a lot of fum with it. Ideas that generate agreement are herbivores.

They're mostly hannless. Ideas that generate disagreement are carnivorous-they leach strength from the herbivorous ideas. They create dissension, fear, panic. We're the carriers of the idea ecology. The idea ecology drives the action ecology. Ideas don't exist as singletons; they're the expressions of larger processes. Just as there's no such thing as one cow, there's no such thing as one idea. Everything is connected to everything else; that's why there are no secrets.

ROBISON: So you say disagreement is like a pack of hyenas chasing down a herd of gazelles?

FOREMAN: The way you practice it, it certainly seems like it.

ROBISON: And I say that disagreement is one of the ways we establish the truth.

FOREMAN: I agree with you. It is. In the ecology of ideas, new ideas are always appearing, all the time; we're continually testing them. Some of the new ideas aren't strong enough to survive and die out. Others adapt, grow, evolve, survive, and strengthen the entire ecology. The process of ideas rubbing up against each other is just like the process of people rubbing up against each other; that's how you make new people and new ideas.

ROBISON: So let me get this straight. You haven't brainwashed the President and half the Congress and military. You don't have a secret plan, and there's no secret group. You're just a kindly old philosopher with a heart of gold who's doing all this out of his great love for humanity, right?

FOREMAN: (grinning) I guess you could put it that way.

ROBISON: Well, frankly, I don't trust you-I don't think you're worthy of the responsibility.

FOREMAN: I agree with you. You're right. I'm not worthy of the responsibility. I don't know that any of us are. But the job still has to be done, and until someone better comes along, you're stuck with me. So let's get to work.

In larger nests, jellypigs are often found in congestions containing thousands of members, eating their way downward through the hardest-packed soil and clay. They are persistent enough-or blind-headed enough-even to try gnawing their way through bedrock. Given enough time, a congestion of jellypigs might very well chew through stone; their teeth are as hard and as sharp as those found in millipedes. Jellypigs can be found in sizes as small as three centimeters and as large as three meters, though the usual size is one third of a meter.

-The Red Book, (Release 22.19A)

Chapter 69.

Last Call "Integrity is like a balloon. It doesn't matter how good the rubber is, the air still goes out the hole."

-SOLOMON SHORT.

We almost made it.

The choppers carne roaring south from Yuana Moloco, circling us at a distance like predatory dragons. They paced us. They rose above us and lowered great bundles of pressurized cylinders to the cargo platform on the roof of the airs.h.i.+p.

Emergency crews worked around the clock, desperately striving to repair the gasbags, keep them filled and firm-keep them sprayed with sealant, keep them tight and lifting. Keep us safely above the terrifying floor of the worm-infested jungle. The whole s.h.i.+p reeked of the chemicals in the sealant. The stingflies were - everywhere.

We were all wearing netting now and catching catnaps on the floor wherever we could. There was panic in our faces.

The crews couldn't move fast enough. One of the gasbags ripped-just came apart in shreds-and I thought I could feel the airs.h.i.+p lurch beneath my feet, but maybe not.

Sames.h.i.+ma and a work crew were moving a new mylar bag into place and already filling it. They hoped to replace all the bags, one at a time, before the rest of them shredded apart. The choppers were constantly roaring around us. A new chopper arrived on station every fifteen minutes, delivering tanks of helium and occasionally another new gasbag. The tanks and bags were offloaded onto the cargo platform aft of the skydeck and immediately brought below for immediate installation. Everybody was running.

Siegel and his team were pressed into service. The aides whose terminals had been dumped overboard a.s.sisted. Even the Brazilians were working alongside the rest, pulling bags into place, pus.h.i.+ng tanks of helium.