Leviathans of Jupiter Page 9

  “This conversation began,” he said, “with you saying that I didn’t ask what your medical problem is. May I ask you now?”

  She bit her lip, hesitating. He has a right to know, Deirdre told herself. He’s willing to give you his blood to help you. He has a right to know the truth.

  “I have rabies,” she said, so softly she could barely hear her own words.

  “Rabies.” Dorn appeared unshaken by the news. Then he asked, “I didn’t realize that animals are kept in Chrysalis II.”

  “They’re not,” said Deirdre. “No pets. No meat animals. We get protein from soy substitutes and aquaculture.”

  “Then how did you contract rabies? It comes from being bitten or scratched by a rabid animal, doesn’t it?”

  Nodding, she answered, “That’s what makes it so peculiar. Dr. Pohan hasn’t been able to figure it out.”

  “Is the doctor certain that it’s rabies? It seems totally unlikely.”

  She shrugged. “He’s certain. The virus showed up in the blood sample he took.”

  Dorn looked out at the endless stars for several silent moments. At last he said to Deirdre, “He took a sample of your blood.”

  “Yes. He did it for all the passengers. Didn’t he take a sample of your blood?”

  “Weeks ago, just after I boarded at Selene.”

  “He must have taken samples from everybody.”

  “He extracted your blood with a hypodermic syringe?” Dorn asked.

  “How else?”

  “And you haven’t been bitten or scratched by an animal before you boarded this ship?”

  A little impatiently, she replied, “I told you, Dorn, there aren’t any animals in Chrysalis II to bite or scratch me!”

  “Then the only time your skin has been punctured is when the ship’s doctor took your blood.”

  “Yes…” She finally saw where he was heading. Her eyes widening, Deirdre asked, “An infected needle?”

  “How would it get infected with rabies here aboard the ship?”

  “Dr. Pohan said there was a rabies case on the way out from the Earth/Moon system. A fatality.”

  Dorn shook his head slowly. “I’ve been aboard this ship since it left lunar orbit. As far as I know, none of the passengers who came aboard from Earth or Selene have died.”

  Deirdre felt confused. “He lied to me?”

  “He not only lied to you,” said Dorn. “He infected you with rabies.”

  ANDY CORVUS’S STATEROOM

  Max Yeager looked around the compartment with narrowed eyes as Corvus ushered him into his quarters.

  “Cripes, this place looks like the back room of an electronics lab. Where the hell do you sleep?”

  Corvus waved toward the bed, which was covered with several laptops, a scattering of headsets, thumb-sized hard drives, diagnostic tools, and other gadgets. Two more laptops sat open on the compartment’s tiny desk, their screens glowing, and a half-dozen more rollup screens were pasted to the bulkheads. The compartment’s built-in wall screen showed a garishly colored image of what looked to Yeager like a canary yellow head of cauliflower. Or maybe a human brain. Tiny numbers pulsed on the imagery.

  “What’re you doing in here?” Yeager demanded. Inwardly he felt almost insulted at the cluttered, chaotic state of Corvus’s room. You can’t get any work done in such a turmoil, he thought. I’ll bet he can’t even find the toilet in this mess.

  Scratching at his thick thatch of red hair, Corvus said good-naturedly, “I’m trying to figure out a way to reproduce the visual imagery that Dee saw when she was in contact with Baby.”

  “Aha,” said Yeager.

  “Aha what?” Andy asked. “Aha, like you know how to do it, or aha, you think it’s impossible.”

  Frowning slightly, Yeager said, “Aha, like now I understand what all these screens are showing.” He jabbed a finger at the rollups on the bulkheads. “Brain scans.”

  “Right. The one on the wall screen is Baby’s brain.”

  “And what are all these numbers blinking on top of the imagery?”

  “Color identifiers,” said Corvus. “I’m color blind, so I use the numbers to tell me what the colors are.”

  “Uh-huh.” Yeager swung his gaze back and forth among the screens. “So this one is the dolphin’s brain…”

  “And all these,” Corvus waved a hand, “are Dee’s—Deirdre’s brain.” He stepped to the desk and sat on its springy little chair.

  Yeager noticed that his feet were bare. He probably can’t find his shoes, the engineer thought.

  Pointing to the two adjacent laptops, Corvus explained, “And these two show Dee’s brain activity in real time when she was connected with Baby.”

  Yeager bent over Andy’s shoulder and peered at the two screens. He couldn’t help worrying that the pair of laptops were too big for the compartment’s desk. If he’s not careful he’s going to wind up with one of them on the floor, the engineer thought. Maybe both of them.

  “See?” Corvus was saying. “When an area in one of their brains lights up, the other brain lights up, too.”

  “Not the same area,” Yeager muttered.

  “Well, they’re not the same brains. Not the same species. One’s a dolphin and the other’s a human being.”

  “So how do you know they’re connected?”

  “They light up at the same time. And even though the regions of the brain showing activity aren’t exactly the same, they’re pretty darned close. I mean, we’ve made functional maps of human and dolphin brains for years. They’re both lighting up in the same functional area.”

  Yeager grunted, “Huh?”

  Looking slightly disappointed, Corvus explained, “This area here in Dee’s brain is her visual cortex. The dolphin’s visual cortex is here.” Andy tapped the laptop’s screen hard enough to make it wobble on the edge of the desk.

  “They both light up at the same time,” Yeager realized.

  “Right! That means they’re both seeing the same thing at the same time!”

  Yeager rubbed his stubbly jaw thoughtfully. “I don’t know if you could say that, Andy. I don’t think you’ve got enough evidence to make that stick.”

  “That’s why I called you. Can you help me?”

  “Me? I’m not a neurotechnician.”

  “But you’ve got a lot of experience with sensors and transducers. I looked up your dossier, you know.”

  Yeager almost smiled. “My experience is with electronics and optronics equipment, not brains. There are lots of people who know a helluva lot more about this than I do.”

  “Is there anybody on the team with you that can help me?” Corvus’s voice was almost pleading.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to take these brain scans and convert them into visual imagery. I want to put what Baby and Dee were seeing into images that you and I can see.”

  Yeager gave out a low whistle. “That’s a tall order, pal. I don’t know if anybody knows how to do that.”

  “Well, then we’ll be the first!”

  Shaking his head, Yeager said, “You want to take the electrical impulses flickering through a brain and turn them into visual pictures?”

  “Right!” Corvus bobbed his head up and down so hard his hair flopped down over his forehead. Pawing at it, he explained, “The brain receives electrical impulses along the nerve path from the retinas of the eyes. It transmutes those impulses into visual imagery. Pictures. Why can’t we do that with the data we’ve got from their brain scans?”

  Yeager looked around for a place to sit down. There was none. The bed was covered with gadgetry. The other chairs in the compartment were also loaded with junk. Corvus himself was sitting on the only available chair.

  Looking down at Andy, Yeager said, “You’re dealing with the difference between the brain and the mind.”

  Corvus nodded.

  “We can scan the electrical activity of the brain. Been doing that for more than a century. But how those pulses get tra
nslated into pictures is something that the human mind does, and we don’t have any idea of how that works.”

  “Not just the human mind,” Corvus maintained. “The dolphins see pictures in their heads, too.”

  “You have any hard data to back up that statement?” Yeager demanded.

  “Behavioral data.”

  Shaking his head, the engineer objected, “Not good enough, friend. You don’t know what goes on in a dolphin’s mind. You’ll probably never know.”

  Almost defensively, Corvus said, “Well, that’s what I want to find out. We’ve got to figure out a way to do it. How can we ever make any meaningful contact with the leviathans if we can’t even make real contact with a species from our own planet?”

  Yeager shook his head sadly. “Beats me, Andy. Beats the hell out of me.”

  INFIRMARY

  “I infected you?” Dr. Pohan slowly rose from behind his desk, like a cloud of smoke boiling up. “You accuse me of deliberately infecting you?”

  “Not deliberately, perhaps,” Deirdre said placatingly.

  Dorn, sitting beside her, was unimpressed with the doctor’s ire. “How else could she be infected, except by the needle you injected into her arm? Her skin hasn’t been broken by anything else.”

  Visibly trembling, the doctor hissed, “This accusation is monstrous. Outrageous!”

  Deirdre could see that Dr. Pohan’s face had turned beet red. His mustache fairly quivered with fury.

  “You told me,” she said, in a low, calm voice, “that another passenger had died on the trip between Selene and Chrysalis II.”

  Slowly settling back in his chair, Dr. Pohan glared at the two of them. Finally he nodded curtly. “That is true.”

  “I’ve been aboard this ship since it left lunar orbit,” Dorn said. “I’ve heard nothing about a passenger dying.”

  His voice dripping with scorn, Dr. Pohan said, “Do you think that we would advertise the death of a passenger? Our executives in Selene ordered us to keep it as quiet as possible, while we and they investigate the circumstances of the unfortunate woman’s death.”

  Unmoved, Dorn said, “May we see her file?”

  “To what purpose?”

  “To prove to ourselves that she existed.”

  Deirdre expected the doctor to explode again. Instead, he simply glared at Dorn for a long, fuming moment. Then he snapped, “Computer. Display file of Frieda Nordstrum.”

  The screen on the bulkhead to one side of Dr. Pohan’s desk glowed to life. It showed an ID image of a blond, ruddy-faced woman. Deirdre thought she looked at least twenty years older than herself, although with modern rejuvenation therapies it was difficult to guess ages. The dossier accompanying the image said that she was a Norwegian microbiologist, aged thirty-eight, a graduate of Uppsala University in Sweden. She had left her most recent post at Selene University, on the Moon, to accept a position on the research staff at station Thomas Gold, in Jupiter orbit.

  “And she died?” Deirdre asked.

  “Aboard this ship,” said Dr. Pohan. “Under my care.”

  “Of rabies.”

  The doctor glowered at Deirdre, but called out, “Computer, display medical record of Frieda Nordstrum.”

  The dossier disappeared in an eyeblink, replaced by a brief medical record, which ended in a death certificate. Deirdre supposed that the signature scrawled at its bottom was Dr. Pohan’s.

  “Are you satisfied now?” Dr. Pohan growled.

  Dorn said nothing, but Deirdre got to her feet as she apologized, “I’m sorry we bothered you, Doctor. It’s just that … none of this makes sense!”

  Dr. Pohan rose also. In a gentler tone he said, “I know it must be very frightening to you. But we will have your condition under control within the next twenty-four hours.”

  Under control doesn’t mean cured, Deirdre thought.

  Standing up beside her, Dorn said, “This still doesn’t explain how Ms. Ambrose contracted rabies.”

  The doctor’s face flushed momentarily, but he brought himself under control with an obvious effort. “I have no explanation as yet,” he said stiffly. “It seems clear that Dr. Nordstrum was infected while visiting Earth and carried the infection back to Selene where she boarded this ship before her illness was detected.”

  Turning toward Deirdre, Dorn began, “But how—”

  “How Ms. Ambrose was infected is under investigation, intense investigation. Perhaps the virus has found a new pathway between one victim and another. A new vector. I am studying that possibility, with consultation by the corporation’s medical staff in Selene.”

  “I see,” said Dorn.

  Leaning the knuckles of both hands on his desktop, Dr. Pohan said firmly, “I can assure you, I do not appreciate being accused of infecting my patient, either accidentally or deliberately.”

  “I understand,” Deirdre said. With that, she and Dorn left the doctor’s office.

  Once outside the infirmary, in the passageway leading to the elevators, Deirdre said, “He’s doing his best to track down the way the virus infected me.”

  Dorn seemed unimpressed. “Perhaps he sees a chance to make an important discovery, tracking down a new vector for the rabies virus. It could be a considerable feather in his cap.”

  “You think that’s what he’s after?”

  “It could be a considerable feather in his cap,” Dorn repeated.

  Deirdre broke into a giggle. “He won’t get any feathers in his cap if he doesn’t learn how to control his anger. I thought he’d have a stroke!”

  Nodding thoughtfully, Dorn agreed, “He did get very incensed, didn’t he?”

  “Well, we did accuse him of deliberately infecting me. I don’t blame him for getting furious.”

  “Methinks,” Dorn muttered, “that he doth protest too much.”

  KATHERINE WESTFALL’S SUITE

  Katherine Westfall did not like having this excitable little man in her sitting room, but she felt that it was better to see him face-to-face rather than communicate over the ship’s phone system. Phone conversations are supposed to be private, she knew, but they go through the ship’s communications system and systems can always be tapped.

  Dr. Pohan could not sit still. Katherine had offered him a glass of wine, even poured him a long-stemmed goblet of beautiful Sancerre with her own hand, but the doctor hardly took a sip before he bounced to his feet and began pacing across the thick carpeting.

  “They know!” he said, mopping his bald pate with one hand while his other nearly spilled the wine, it was shaking so badly.

  “They know nothing,” Westfall said calmly.

  “But they suspect! They accused me of infecting her! In my own office! She and that lumbering cyborg, they realize that the only way she could be infected was by the needle I used to take her blood sample.”

  He looks ridiculous, she thought, a stubby little bald man with that ludicrous mustache, his clothes all wrinkled and sweaty. Struggling inwardly to hide her disdain, Westfall replied, “You showed them the Nordstrum dossier?”

  Dr. Pohan stopped his pacing. “Yes. That seemed to placate them. For the moment.”

  With an unruffled smile, Westfall said, “There you are. Crisis resolved.”

  “Is it?” Dr. Pohan returned to the sculpted chair facing Westfall’s but stopped short of sitting in it. “How long do you think it will take them to think of checking with Selene University? How long before they find that Frieda Nordstrum never suffered from an animal bite, that she did not contract rabies until she came aboard this ship! How long before they discover that the woman died of a genetically engineered mutation of the virus!”

  Katherine took a sip of her wine as she thought about that. Putting the stemmed glass down on the little table beside her chair, she said, “I can see to it that the university’s personnel files are unavailable for their scrutiny. Privacy laws and all that. The ship’s files, as well. They’ll never be able to find that she wasn’t infected while visiting Earth, that she wasn
’t carrying the virus in her when she came aboard this vessel.”

  The doctor wagged his head. “We committed murder!”

  “You conducted an experiment,” Westfall countered. “The experimental subject died. It happens all the time. Scientists are always doing things like that.”

  Dr. Pohan looked horrified. “But you … you told me … you ordered me…”

  With the sincerest smile she could generate, Katherine Westfall said reassuringly, “As long as you keep Ms. Ambrose’s condition under control she will be satisfied. You’ve told her that the medical staff at Gold has the facilities to cure her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let her continue to think that. Once we get to Jupiter she’ll find out differently, but by then she’ll no longer be your problem.”

  The doctor stared at her perplexedly. For several heartbeats he said nothing. Then, “May I ask … why are you doing this? Why did you have me infect her? After all, rabies can be dangerous.…”

  Smiling truly now, Katherine Westfall said, “Not as dangerous as curiosity, Doctor.”

  Dr. Pohan’s eyes went wide. He understands my meaning, Westfall saw. He understands me perfectly.

  * * *

  Max Yeager was glad to be out of Andy’s junkyard of a compartment. The two men were in the dining room, munching on soymeat patties as they argued about Corvus’s hopes.

  “The human mind is the transducer,” Yeager was saying, waving a forkful of salad in midair. “It takes the electrical impulses from the eyes and makes pictures out of them.”

  Corvus shook his head. “But how? How does it work? How can the brain turn electrical impulses into visual imagery?”

  “We do it with display screens,” Yeager mused. “Electrons paint pictures on the screens.”

  “Is that how it’s done in the visual cortex?”

  “How would I know?”

  Corvus began to reply, but as he looked up from his dinner plate he saw Deirdre and Dorn heading toward their table.

  Once they were seated and had spoken their dinner orders to the robot that had immediately rolled up to the table, Corvus and Yeager fell into their argument again.