A Day for Damnation

TWENTY-ONE

IT TOOK us most of the morning.

Lizard stopped only to check in with Oakland and relay a datachirp from the medi-console. Then she plunged back into her task. She opened up the whole floor of the nose of the ship and filled it with foam before replacing the deck panels.

By then, I had finished foaming the cargo compartments and had begun outlining every seam of the interior paneling. Lizard came back to join me. We set our nozzles for narrow jets and sprayed every corner, every crack, every seam, every seal on the interior of that ship. When we finished, the chopper looked like the inside of a wedding cake.

By the time we sat down in the nose of the ship again, the sun was high above us. And the chopper was starting to get warm. We could barely see the sun through the wall of pale powder, but we could feel its heat. I felt trapped.

And my body hurt worse than ever. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I was keeping an O-mask close now, and taking frequent breaths from it. It seemed to help. A little.

I forced myself to concentrate on the scientific opportunity here. The front window was a bright pink glare. It flickered with a million tiny insect bodies. They were crawling all over it, but they were thickest near the bottom, where the pink powder was still piled up in drifts. It made me feel itchy just to look at them. I thought about a hot bath, one with hundreds of little pulsing jets, all throbbing in a steady underwater massage. I decided not to share that image with Colonel Tirelli.

"Brr!" she said. "I can't stand to look at them. What do you think they are anyway?"

"The Chtorran equivalent of ants maybe," I said. "But I wouldn't bet on it. I don't think we've scratched the surface of this ecology. Remember Dr. Zymph and her jigsaw-puzzle analogy?"

"Yeah?"

"Well, I think we're still at the point where we're just looking into the box. We still haven't dumped it out. We still don't even know how big the puzzle is or how many pieces there are. We just know there are a lot and none of them seems to make sense." I sipped at a water bulb and watched the seething mass of insects on the windscreen in front of me.

"I hate that analogy," Lizard said. "It's got too much can't in it."

"Yeah," I agreed.

Lizard picked up her headset and flicked the radio on. "Oakland?"

"Go ahead," said the radio.

"This is ELDAVO. Checking in. Our situation is unchanged. Except the bugs are getting closer."

"We copy, Colonel."

"Is there an estimate yet when someone can come and get us?"

"Nope. Sorry. Satellite shows that whole area is still hazy. The best we can do is pull a blimp out of Portland and let it glide over you."

"That's a little desperate, isn't it?"

"You want to wait a week for pickup?"

Lizard rolled her eyes. "Get the blimp."

"Oh, we do have some good news for you."

"Yeah?"

"Your patient is stable."

"Uh huh. And what are you not telling me?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Stable can mean a lot of things. How bad are his injuries?"

"Uh-is this line secure?"

Lizard looked at me, looked back at Duke. "Is he still asleep?" she whispered. I looked and nodded. Lizard said to the radio, "Go ahead."

"Uh-we're getting some funny readings off his legs. Like static. But we don't think it's infection. The monitor shows the antibiotics are holding. Maybe it's some effect of the dust. We won't know for sure until we get him home. Other than that, he's fine. Avoid moving him. We'll try and have a corpsman on the pickup vehicle."

"Oh, shit," I said.

"I copy," Lizard said. "Any more good news?"

"Well ... it's official as of ten o'clock. The President's going to run again."

"Thanks. Do we get the ball scores too?"

"Dodgers lead the Braves, top of the third, two-nothing."

"Over and out." She hung up and looked at me. "What are you so unhappy about? You an Atlanta fan?"

"No, I'm worried about Duke." I started crawling toward the back.

"Didn't you hear? Oakland says he's doing fine."

"Yeah, I heard. They also said the Dodgers are winning." I sat down next to Duke. He'd been out all day. I didn't know if that was a blessing or not. Was it better to be unconscious-or in pain? If they didn't pick us up soon, there wouldn't be a choice. We were running out of supplies.

I looked at the medi-console. It was almost time to change his IV. We had plenty of antibiotics left-those were the blue ampules-but we were on the next-to-last bubble of glucose. I wondered what I could do when that ran out. These choppers were equipped only for basic first aid. The assumption was that the patient would be in transit and wouldn't be on the medi-console for long.

The real question was the red ampule. The painkiller. There was only one left in the kit. And I'd heard that burn wounds were the most agonizing....

I reached for the medi-blanket, hesitated, then pulled it back and looked at Duke's legs.

They were burned and peeling. The flesh was blistered and scabbed.

And then I looked again. Duke's legs were-dusty. No. They were covered with a light pink fuzz. What the-?

I stretched a finger out, carefully, and touched Duke's ankle. The fuzz didn't brush away. It was growing out of his skin.

And it tingled. Like worm fur.

I sat down with my back against the hull of the ship and my knees up in front of me. I put my fists up to my mouth and sucked thoughtfully through them, all the while staring at Duke's legs, and trying to figure out just what the hell was going on.

I hardly noticed when Lizard came back to join me. She looked at Duke's legs and her face went gray. She pulled the medi-blanket over them again and looked at me with a question in her eyes.

I shrugged. "I don't know."

She picked up the medi-console and studied it. The answer wasn't there either.

I looked across at her. "How long before we know? I mean-if the foam is going to hold?"

She shrugged. "An hour. Maybe less."

"What if he wakes up? Do you think we should tell him?" Lizard opened her mouth to say something.

But Duke interrupted. "Tell me what-?" he said.

"Duke! You're awake."

"I've been awake for some time. Listening to you birds jabbering. What'd you drug me with anyway? My legs itch."

Lizard shot me a concerned glance. Duke didn't see it. I said, "I don't know the name of it. It's the red cartridge."

"Oh," he said. "Where are we?"

"Near Red Bluff. As soon as the weather clears, they'll be coming to get us."

"The weather?"

"The dust."

"Is it still coming down?"

"No." And then I added, "But-we're buried. And there's haze."

Duke's face was puffy, but I could still see his eyes narrowing as he looked back and forth between me and the bag. "The light in here is pink," he said. "How deep is this shit?"

"Up to our ears, Duke." That was Lizard.

"Mmm," he said. "Then don't make waves."

"How are you feeling?"

"Cloudy." He reached up and grabbed my sleeve. "Jim?"

"Yes, Duke?"

"Do me a favor."

"Name it."

"Pull the red cartridge. Take me off the sleepytime."

"Sorry, Boss. No can do. Anything but that."

"I can handle the pain. I want to be awake."

"I can't! It's procedure! It might kill you!".

"Jim-" He coughed and for a moment I was terrified. It sounded like a death rattle. "Jim-will you pull that cartridge?"

"No, Duke, I won't."

He closed his eyes for a long moment. I had almost started to think that he had gone back to sleep when he opened them again. When he spoke, his voice was very faint.

"Jim?"

"Yes, Duke?" He was fading fast, I had to put my face close. It came out a whisper. "Then fuck you...." His eyes closed and he fell asleep again.

Lizard looked up from the console. "The machine put him out. He was straining."

"He hates drugs. I'm going to have a lot of apologizing to do." I realized what I'd said and looked up at her. "Sorry. Force of habit."

She didn't smile. "There's something else you want to watch out for."

"Huh?"

"You could have pulled that cartridge, you know."

I shook my head. "No, I couldn't. It's those bugs. If we're going to be eaten alive, he's better off not knowing."

Lizard looked at me sharply. "That's what I'm talking about. That kind of thinking is the first step."

"What kind of thinking?"

"Making other people's decisions for them. The next step is deciding whether or not they should continue living. And you know where that leads. I seem to remember you had a button on that."

"Yeah, well-" I stood up and climbed into the turret above Duke. "It's different when you're the person who has to do the deciding, isn't it?"

She didn't say anything immediately. She just studied me with an introspective look on her face.

Finally I glanced down at her. "Well, go ahead. Say it."

She shook her head slowly. "I don't have to. You already know what I would say."

"No, I don't."

"Yes, you do."

"God!" I said. "I hate conversations like this."

She sighed. "It's not important. I just wondered if you would have accepted that justification?"

I didn't answer. I turned away from her and pulled the shutter back. I stared at the uneasy surface of the bubble. The creatures were more active than ever in the afternoon sunlight. I could feel the sweat dripping down my sides. I didn't want to continue this conversation any more. I knew she was right.

And my chest hurt worse than ever.