CV

22

By Monday Randall Geller was sitting up, looking feeble but alert. McNulty asked him, “What do you remember about getting sick?”

“Not a thing. The last I remember, I was talking to Yvonne.”

“What were you talking about?”

“I don’t know, nothing much. Just talking.”

“What about before then? Do you remember any momentary faintness, for instance?”

Geller looked thoughtful. “Well, yeah. The day before. Just for a second, I felt like I was going to fall down.”

“What were you doing at the time?”

“I was talking to that visiting fireman. What’s his name, Newland.”

“What about?”

“Well. I was showing him some manganese nodules we dredged up. There was an australite in one of them—a kind of glass meteorite. Pretty unusual.”

"A glass meteorite,” said McNulty, scribbling a note. “Never heard of that one. What do they look like?”

“This one was hollow, about a centimeter across.”

“Don’t suppose anything could have got out of it to make you sick,” said McNulty, attempting a joke.

“Well, it could. I cracked it open.”

McNulty stared at him. “Where is it now?”

“I gave it to Yvonne. I guess she put it away somewhere.”

McNulty went and talked to Ms. Barlow. She was recovering a little faster than Geller had; there were deep semicircles under her eyes, but her color was good.

“Ms. Barlow, if you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to ask you some questions. Do you remember anything about when you collapsed?”

“No. I was in the dredge room, and somebody called in that the lunch cart was here. And that’s the last I remember until I woke up in the hospital.”

McNulty made a note. “Mr. Geller was telling me about this thing he found in a manganese nodule—some kind of meteorite?”

“Yes, an australite.”

“What did you do with it, do you remember?”

“I labeled it and put it in a cabinet in my office.”

“If I call somebody down there, could you tell them where it is and get them to bring it up?”

“Sure. Call Tim Vincent. What do you want it for?” “I’m not sure yet.”

McNulty got Vincent on the phone and handed it to her.

“Tim, in the right-hand cabinet on the wall across from my desk, on the second shelf there’s a labeled australite—the one Randy found in the nodule. Could you find it and bring it up to Dr. McNulty?” She handed back the phone. “He’ll be up in a few minutes.”

Vincent was a narrow-faced young man with an uneasy smile. “This what you wanted?” he asked.

McNulty took the cracked sphere and turned it over in his fingers. “Guess so. Is this the way they usually look?”

“They come in all kinds of shapes. Some are like little flat buttons. Some are lumps.”

McNulty sniffed at it. “Could you analyze the inside of this to see if anything was in it?”

“What would I be testing for?”

“Damn if I know. Some kind of gas, maybe.”

“Well, that’s a big order. If it was a gas, there wouldn’t be anything left in there, anyway.”

“Volatile oil, then? See what you can do, will you? I’d really appreciate it.”

“Okay,” said Vincent without visible enthusiasm, and went away.

The next day he found Geller sitting up and eating poached eggs and toast with apparent appetite. “Feeling pretty good?” he asked.

“Sure. Raring to go.”

McNulty sat down and looked at his chart. In fact, Geller seemed to be making a remarkable recovery.

“We were talking before about your dizzy spell when you opened the australite. Do you think there could be some connection between that and your getting sick?”

“That’s post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” Geller said with his mouth full.

“I’m sorry?”

Geller swallowed. “After which, therefore because of which. A common logical fallacy. Before you can show a causal connection, you have to exclude sources of error. In other words, did anything else happen besides opening the australite that could have started the epidemic?”

“Such as what?”

“I don’t know. It’s all bullshit, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” McNulty asked. There was a funny expression on Geller’s face.

“Ah, hell. That’s just the conventional crap I was feeding you. I don’t even know why I said it. Sure, I think something came out of that australite. I’ll tell you something else, I think it’s intelligent.”

“But you say you didn’t see anything when you cracked the thing open?”

“Right. So it’s invisible, or it’s a gas, or too small to be seen, or some kind of coherent packet of energy, or who knows what. One thing we can be pretty sure of, it’s not from here. It fell out of space, maybe millions of years ago. So there’s no reason to expect it to look like anything we’re familiar with.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing, but I thought I was crazy. The damn thing knows what we’re doing. When I asked people to come in if they felt faint, it jumped from one to another every time they started to do it. All right, suppose all this is true. What can we do about it? Give me some ideas—I’m fresh out.”

Geller leaned back and wiped his lips, looking pleased. “Well, what do we know so far? First of all, we know that the collapse comes when the thing leaves. When it goes into somebody, they feel faint for a minute. Second, we know, or at least I know, that it doesn’t make you feel any different while it’s in you.”

“What about afterward?” McNulty asked delicately. “Do you feel different now?”

Geller scowled at him. “I don’t know. Maybe. There’s your post hoc, ergo propter hoc again. If I do feel different, we still don’t know if it’s because I had the parasite.”

“Could you tell me what the difference is?”

“In how I feel?” Geller hesitated. “To tell you the truth, I’m just not buying a lot of the stuff I used to swallow.”

“That could happen to anybody,” McNulty said sympathetically.

“Sure. So let’s skip it and get back to the parasite. One thing we know, it couldn’t get out of that glass ball until it was broken. So whatever it is, it probably can’t pass through a solid object. So the problem is to get the jinni back in the bottle.”

McNulty had his notepad out and was doodling. “If we put somebody in a glass case?” he said tentatively.

“It’s too smart for that. Unless we could get them when they’re asleep.”

McNulty shook his head. “Glass case,” he said. “Like an aquarium? What would you do about the seams? There’d have to be an air supply. Might get out through the hoses. Got to be something better.”

“Well, what are its limitations? First of all, it never has gone through a wall or anything, as far as we know—is that right?”

McNulty nodded.

“Okay, that’s something. Next thing, how far away have the patients been from each other?”

McNulty looked startled. “Never thought of that. They've all been close.”

“What’s the farthest?”

“I’d have to ask. Probably three, four feet.”

“Okay, if it never has gone farther than that, it may be because it can’t. Anything else?”

McNulty stared at the wall. “Sleep,” he said. “You talked about sleep. I’d have to go through the interviews, but I bet I’m right—it never has left a person when they were asleep.”

“Good. All right, let’s see what we’ve got. It can’t go through walls, it can’t travel more than three or four feet between people, and it can’t leave a sleeping person. What does that add up to?”

McNulty looked at the desk awhile. “What it adds up to,” he said, “is who’s going to bell the cat?”