NEW ASSIGNMENTS
Grant woke up the next morning soaked in a cold sweat, his bedsheet twisted and tangled around his legs. Vaguely he remembered a dream, a nightmare, about strangers pinning him down and slicing away his flesh with sharp scalpels while he struggled and screamed for mercy.
It was early, he saw. He phoned Karlstad, but there was no answer. Recovering from his surgery, Grant guessed as he showered, then pulled on his slacks and shirt and headed for the cafeteria. It was nearly empty at this hour, although Red Devlin was laughing and chatting with a few of the early birds. He must sleep behind the counters, Grant thought.
It wasn’t until the next evening, at dinner, that he saw Karlstad again. Egon entered the cafeteria, walking uncertainly, his legs sheathed in the same kind of studded black leggings, wearing the same kind of turtleneck pullover that O’Hara and Muzorawa always wore, his head completely hairless.
Grant left his half-finished dinner and rushed to Karlstad.
Egon smiled halfheartedly as Grant came up to him.
“Well,” he said shakily, “I survived the surgery, at least.”
“Are you all right?”
Instead of answering, Karlstad pulled down the collar of his turtleneck pullover. “Meet Frankenstein’s monster,” he said.
There were circular plastic gadgets inserted into either side of his neck. The skin around the things looked red, inflamed.
“What’re those?”
“Feeding ports. When we’re in the soup we can’t eat regular food. We get fed intravenously.”
“For how long?”
Letting the turtleneck collar slide back into place, Karlstad answered grimly, “For as long as we’re on the mission.”
“My God,” Grant muttered.
“I’ll live through it—I think.”
Grant stayed with him as Karlstad selected a meager salad and a mug of fruit juice. The man tottered slightly as he walked back to Grant’s table.
“Where’s Lainie and Zeb and the others?” Karlstad said as he slowly, carefully, sat down.
“Not here yet.”
“Um.” Karlstad picked at his salad.
Grant tried to finish his dinner, but he’d lost interest in eating.
“You want to know what it’s like, don’t you?” Karlstad said, his voice flat, dead.
“I don’t want to pry.”
“Pry away, I don’t mind. The worst is over. They sliced me up and put their damned chips into me. But first they drowned me.”
“Drowned …?”
“It’s all done underwater. Or in that fucking perfluorocarbon gunk. It’s like trying to breathe soup. Freezing cold soup, at that. Easier to prevent infection while they slice away at you, they claim.”
Karlstad spent the next quarter hour describing in horrendous detail everything they had done to him. Listening to him, Grant lost his last shred of appetite.
“So now all I have to do is learn to walk again,” he finished bitterly.
“You seem to be doing fine,” Grant said.
“For an outpatient, yes, I imagine so.”
Desperately trying to lighten his friend’s mood, Grant asked, “What I don’t understand is why they put the biochips in the legs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put them in the brain?”
Karlstad gave him a pitying look. “Not enough room inside the skull. They’d have to break through the bone, the way they want to do with Sheena.”
“Oh.”
“The chips are connected to the brain, though. I’ve got fibers running up my spine right into my cerebral cortex. Whatever those electrodes in my legs pick up is transmitted to my brain. Very efficient.”
“There he is!”
Grant looked up and saw O’Hara rushing across the cafeteria toward them. Muzorawa was a few steps behind her. Neither of them had taken a tray. Both of them limped noticeably.
“How do you feel?” O’Hara asked, pulling up the chair next to Karlstad’s.
“Terrible, thanks.”
“Welcome to the club,” said Muzorawa, sitting down beside Grant.
“Shipmates,” Karlstad said sourly.
“Don’t take it so hard,” said O’Hara, with an impish smile. She rubbed Karlstad’s bald pate. “I think you look better this way.”
“Without eyebrows?” Karlstad said scornfully.
“Once you’re connected to the ship you’ll feel differently.”
“Powerful,” Muzorawa agreed. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”
“Better than sex,” O’Hara teased.
For the first time since Krebs had pointed her finger at him, Karlstad smiled.
That Sunday Tamiko Hideshi showed up at the Reverend Caldwell’s services again. Grant edged through the sparse congregation to sit with her. Afterward, they headed for the cafeteria.
“The Catholics go for doughnuts after mass,” she informed Grant as they got into the food line. “The Moslems take coffee and fruit.”
“What about the Protestants?” Grant asked, laughing.
“Brunch,” Tamiko answered, grinning back at him.
Grant selected a fruit salad and soymilk; Hideshi filled her tray with cereal, smoked fish, hot tea, and four slices of toast
“How do you stay so thin when you eat so much?” Grant asked as they sat at a table.
She shook her head. “I’m not so thin. My body’s like a block of cement.”
“You’re not fat.”
“I guess I burn off the calories at work.”
That started them talking about her studies of the ice-covered ocean on Europa.
“We’re making sense of it, little by little,” Hideshi said. “How’s your job going?”
Grant nodded as he chewed down a slice of melon. “About the same: making sense of it, little by little.”
“Making sense of the Jovian ocean?” Her eyes seemed to go wider.
“Little by little,” Grant repeated.
“Maybe we can help each other,” she suggested. “I mean, we’re both working on fluid dynamics, after all. Maybe we should compare notes.”
Grant hesitated, then said, “I’d love to, Tami, but we’re into sensitive areas. I can’t—”
She waved a disapproving hand. “Oh, Dr. Wo and his silly security rules. There aren’t any secrets in physics.”
“Maybe not,” Grant admitted, “but I’m not allowed to discuss my work with anybody outside the group.”
She put on a hurt expression. “Not even with me?”
Grant thought about it. It might make some sense, at that. After all, we’re both trying to figure out the dynamics of alien oceans.
But he heard himself say to her, “I can’t, Tami. Wo would flay me alive.”
She sighed and shook her head. “How can you do science when you’re afraid to communicate with other scientists?”
Grant brightened. “I could ask Dr. Wo for permission to collaborate with you. If he okays it—”
“No!” Hideshi snapped. “No, I don’t think that would work. Wo’s so paranoid he’d send the two of us off to god knows where.”
“But maybe he’d see the sense of our cooperating,” Grant said.
Hideshi shook her head. “Don’t breathe a word to Wo. He’s crazy enough as it is.”
With a shrug, Grant admitted, “Maybe you’re right.”
“I know I am,” said Hideshi.
It surprised Grant when he realized that he’d been aboard Research Station Gold for six months. He awoke one morning to see that his phone light was blinking. When he answered, still yawning and scratching his jaw, Dr. Wo’s grim face appeared on the phone’s tiny screen.
Grant automatically sat up straighter on the bed and tried to pat down his sleep-tousled hair. But the message was a recording.
“Be prepared for your six-month review tomorrow at eleven hundred hours in my office,” Wo said bluntly. Then the screen went dark.
Grant took a deep breath. Six-month review, he thought. Great. That means there’s only three and a half years left to this prison sentence.
He almost smiled. Until he remembered that sessions in Dr. Wo’s office were never pleasant.
The next day, precisely at eleven hundred hours, Grant rapped sharply on the director’s door. No response. He stood in the corridor, resisting the urge to bang on the door again, as people walked by. Wo’s little power trip, Grant knew. He wasn’t going to fall for it again, as he did the first time he’d been summoned to the director’s office.
At last he heard, “Enter.” He slid the door back and stepped into Wo’s office.
The office was overheated, as usual. Even the bloodred tulips in the delicate vase looked wilted, sagging. The director, however, was brusque, all business. It seemed to Grant that Wo was seething with anger and barely managing to control his fury. He reviewed Grant’s first assignment as a lab assistant and his more recent work with Muzorawa in the fluid dynamics lab. Grant sat rigidly on the chair in front of Wo’s desk, keeping his face as calm and impassive as he could.
“All in all,” Wo concluded, looking up from the desktop screen that displayed Grant’s dossier, “a moderately acceptable six months. At least you haven’t made any major mistakes.”
Grant wondered what minor mistakes the director saw in his record.
“Now then, some changes are in order,” said the director.
“Changes, sir?” Grant asked apprehensively.
“First, Dr. Muzorawa will be fully engaged in training for the upcoming deep mission and will be unable to serve as your thesis advisor until the mission is completed.”
Grant’s heart sank.
“Therefore I will take his place as your advisor. You will continue as a distanced student of the University of Cairo. I have been granted a visiting professorship by the university’s administration.”
“You’re going to be my thesis advisor?” Grant asked, his voice an octave higher than normal.
“Do you have any objections to such an arrangement?”
“Oh, no, sir. None at all,” Grant lied. The thought of having Wo over him in still another capacity brought something close to despair to Grant’s soul, but he knew there was no way around it.
“Good,” said Wo.
“In fact, sir, I’m flattered,” Grant heard himself say, trying to make the best of a situation he could not control.
Wo nodded, although his dour expression did not change by a hair. Then he went on, “The second change may be less pleasant for you. I need someone to work with Sheena.”
“With the gorilla?”
“Yes. Her intelligence level has plateaued. Any increase in her intelligence will require cranial surgery.”
“Oh,” Grant said. “That would be difficult, wouldn’t it?”
“Not at all. The animal can be sedated and the surgery performed in perfect safety. It is the recuperation phase that may present problems.”
Grant got a mental picture of three-hundred-kilo Sheena with a bandaged skull and a nasty headache. It was not a happy thought.
“We will need someone to handle Sheena after the surgery, someone whom she will not connect to the medical personnel. A friend, so to speak.”
“Me?”
“You. You will spend at least two hours each day with Sheena. You will bring her fruits and new toys. The toys will be learning games and devices, of course; there is an extensive supply of such in storage.”
“But my studies—”
“This duty will be in addition to your fluid dynamics work, of course. It will take two hours per day from your personal time, no more.”
I don’t have any personal time, Grant grumbled to himself. I spend all my waking hours working on the dratdamned ocean’s dynamics. But he kept his mouth tightly shut.
“Remember, your task is to befriend the gorilla so that she will be able to deal with you as a trusted companion after the brain surgery.”
Wonderful, Grant said to himself. I’m going to get my neck broken by a postoperative gorilla.
If the director sensed Grant’s dejection or fear, he gave no outward sign of it. “Are there any questions?” Wo asked sourly.
Grant steepled his fingers unconsciously, then quickly put his hands down on his lap once he realized it looked as if he were begging—or praying.
“Yes, sir, I do have a question.”
Wo nodded once.
“Sheena … the dolphins … why are we studying their intelligence? I mean, we’re supposed to be investigating the planet Jupiter. Why are we spending time and energy on the intelligence of these animals?”
Wo’s face took on the implacable expression of a teacher who is resolved to make his dull-witted student solve his own problems.
“That is a question that you should meditate upon while you are entertaining Sheena.” The slightest trace of a smile moved the corners of his mouth a bare millimeter.