Chapter 68

Shiny! Shiny!

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 nobody 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 penis. 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 shiny one! You smell like food. Not smart. Not smart."

I squatted down opposite him, staring at him. "Hello," I said. "My name is Jim. Jim McCarthy. What's yours?"

"Shiny, shiny, bright and shiny." 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.

"Pünnnk," 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 penis 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 scrap 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 shiny, 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 assigned 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. "Shiny, shiny!" 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? Nobody 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 participate.