CHAPTER III
Living Lake
Thirty minutes after we hit the Base the girl was in a jury-rigged hydrating tank, wrapped in wet sheets, with a slow trickle of fresh warm water soaking them. Even her face was loosely covered, and I was glad of that. It was an old woman’s face by now, drawn tight and furrowed over her skull. Only an arm was bare, shriveled flesh beneath which the tendons stood sharply etched.
The arm was bare for the needle that fed sodium pentothol into a vein, slowly, under the watchful eye of Sales, one of our best Base medics. We knew that presently, when the drug began to cloud her mind, Sale’s skillful questions would start drawing out the memories of what had happened to her, reconstructing the basic scenes which had led to—this.
Or—we hoped they would.
“It looks like aphasia,” Sales murmured. “No brain injury so far as we know yet, but—”
“Chief!” It was Davidson, touching my arm. We all turned in the half-darkness that was part of this narcosynthesis treatment. “Chief, the Mobile Staff’s on its way down here. They vised after you left.”
“What for?” I asked sharply, a nervous dread knotting my stomach.
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t say. You’re the boss, after all.”
But I wasn’t the boss of Mobile Staff. They were bigger than I, the bureau of specialists that controlled the administration of all the Rings. They were the bosses. And if they came here now ...
I caught Davidson’s eye in the gloom. Very slightly he shook his head. The secret of Williams’ death was still safe, then. But not for long. And if the Staff talked to Fitzgerald about the lake ...
I made an enormous effort and fought down the rising panic. Information first. Then action. I had to keep that order.
Sales grunted and I looked back, forcing my attention to the business at hand.
“She must have the tolerance of an elephant,” Sales said, eyeing the tube through which sodium pentothol still fed into the girl’s arm. “Or else there’s some chemical metamorphosis—I don’t know. I’ve given her enough to put a dozen men to sleep. But look at her.”
I didn’t like to look at her. It was obvious to me that she was dying. Yet when Sales pushed the wet sheets back from her face the impersonal, disinterested attention still dwelt upon the ceiling, fully awake, uncaring, hearing nothing we said, feeling nothing we did.
Fitzgerald said, “How could she have breathed under water?”
“She couldn’t.” Sales scowled at him. “There’s no physiological change at all. Her respiratory system’s normal.”
“She must have,” Fitzgerald said stubbornly. “I know what we saw.”
“Anything’s possible in a Ring,” Sales admitted, voicing an aphorism. “But I don’t see how it could have worked.” He looked up at me. “How important is this, chief?”
I told him.
“Give me an hour,” Sales said briefly when I had finished. “I’m going to try something else. Several other things. Maybe one of ’em will work.”
“One of ’em’s got to,” I told him, getting up.
In that hour a lot happened. Sales found what he wanted, for one thing. For another, the Mobile Staff arrived. Williams’ body was found. And as for me—it was the hour that marked the turning point in my life.
Williams’ death was reported on my private visor as soon as I got back to my office. I could feel Davidson’s silence like a tangible thing as he listened to the exclamations and incredulity of the others.
All I could do was order the usual investigations got under way immediately. At that moment I decided not to speak of my own presence when he died. I couldn’t let myself be diverted by useless questions on a subject only distantly related to my own terrible problem.
Worse than ever that deathly fear was stirring restlessly behind the closed doors of my unconscious. I knew the doors would swing open soon. Little by little they had let facts escape the barrier, and the barrier itself would be ready to fall.... Soon, I thought, soon.
Looking back now I lose my time-sense about that eventful hour. I think we were still lost in dismayed wonder over Williams when the visor flickered and then framed the grim, creased face of Mobile Staff’s chief, Lewis.
There was a hunted, nightmare quality about this piling of crisis upon crisis, I thought, as I went down to the reception hall to welcome my superiors. If only I could find five minutes of peace to try again those slowly opening doors!
Mobile Staff wears black uniforms. If all Bio employees are carefully tested then Mobile men are screened with such stringent care that there is reason to marvel how anyone ever passes their tests. All of these men in their severe black looked taut, nervous, keen with an edge almost ruthless in its steely temper.
“What about this lake development in Ring Seventy-Twelve?” was the first thing Lewis said to me as we walked back toward my office. It couldn’t have been worse, I told myself. If they had timed themselves deliberately they couldn’t have chosen a worse time.
“Three of us have seen it closely,” was all I answered. “You’ll want to discuss it with us in detail, I suppose.”
Lewis nodded crisply. We didn’t speak again until we were settled in my office, Davidson and Fitzgerald ready for questions beside me. We told what—overtly—we knew. It was Lewis, of course, who spoke with decision.
“I think we’d better destroy the thing pronto.”
“Frankly, sir—” this was Davidson “—frankly, I’d think that over first. The thing’s isolated, whatever it is. We’d run the risk of scattering it abroad.”
“I incline that way myself,” I said quickly. “Isolation. Ring it off, reroute air traffic. Leave it alone and study it ... study it?” I suspected that was wrong. A warning bell had clanged in my brain.
Lewis sat there silently, shifting his keen glance from face to face. Just as he drew his breath to speak my desk visor buzzed.
“Report ready on Williams’ death, sir,” an impersonal voice said.
“All right. Hold it awhile,” I began. But Lewis bent forward and gave the face in the visor a narrowed glance.
“No, let’s have it right now,” he said. Despairingly I wondered how much he knew and how much that abnormally keen brain had guessed already of the undercurrents running swiftly beneath the surface of events here.
The face in the visor glanced at me. I shrugged. Lewis was boss as long as Mobile Staff remained here.
“Body of J. L. Williams, assistant to chief, was found in a locker in his own office forty minutes ago,” the report began. “The shot was fired from....” The voice went off into medical and ballistic details I ceased to hear. I was turning over in my mind crazy questions about how I could prevent an immediate close study of the lake at the very best, and at the worst its destruction.
“. . . revolver of this caliber possessed only by Chief Owen himself,” the visor declared. I woke with a start. “Last men seen with the deceased were Robert Davidson and Chief Owen. Chief Owen subsequently suppressed a report from Ring Station 27 and ordered a copter for immediate departure. He then took off for—”
The visor buzzed suddenly and the monotoned report blanked out. It was an emergency interruption. Very briefly Dr. Sales’ face flashed upon the screen.
“This is urgent, Chief,” he said, looking into my eyes significantly. “Could you spare me five minutes in my lab right now?”
It seemed like a heaven-sent relief. I glanced at Lewis for permission. His gaze was cold and suspicious but he nodded after a moment and I got up with a single look at Davidson’s deliberately blank face and went out.
Something prompted me to pause at the door after I had closed it. I was not really surprised to hear Lewis’ harsh voice.
“See that Chief Owen doesn’t leave the building before I’ve talked to him again. That’s an urgent. Give it priority.”
I shrugged. Things were beyond my control now. All I could do was ride along and trust to instinct.
Although Sales had asked for only five minutes of my time, he seemed oddly reluctant to begin. I sat down across the desk from him and watched him fidget with his desk blotter. Finally he looked up and spoke abruptly.
“You know the girl died, of course.”
“I expected it. When?”
“Half an hour ago. I’ve been doing some quick thinking since then. And a lot of quick analyses. There hasn’t been time yet to check, but I think she died of psychosomatic causes, chief.”
“That’s hard to credit,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
“She was a perfectly normal specimen by all quantitative and qualitative tests. I think suggestion killed her.”
“But how?”
“You know you can hypnotize a subject, touch his arm with ice and tell him it’s red-hot metal. Typical burn weals will appear. Most physical symptoms can be induced by suggestion. That girl died of dehydration and asphyxia as far as I can tell.”
“We gave her moisture and oxygen.”
“She didn’t know it was oxygen. She didn’t think she was breathing at all. So her motor reflexes were paralyzed and—she died. As for the hydrating apparatus ...” Sales shook his head in a bewildered way. “This sounds crazy but I think our mistake there was in giving her water as a hydrating factor. Chief, how closely did you see that lake? Do you know that it’s water?”
Again that bell seemed to ring in my head. Water? Water? Of course it isn’t water, not as we’ve known water up to now.
“Until I thought of that,” Sales went on, “I couldn’t understand her apparent breathing under water. Now I think I’m beginning to understand. A liquid can’t be breathed by human beings, but there could be—well, artificial isotopes that would do the trick. Also, something drove that girl insane.
“I think she was insane. You might call it a variant of schizophrenia. Or possession if you prefer. Her mind was completely blanketed and subjugated by—something else.” He drummed on the desk. Then, looking up sharply, he said, “I got samples of the lake’s—water. From her body. It’s not water.
“Maybe it once was but now it’s mixed with other compounds. The stuff seems half alive. Not protoplasm but close to it. I can’t evaporate or break it down with any chemical I’ve yet tried.
“There are traces of hemoglobin. In fact, the stuff has many of the attributes of blood. But—and this is important, Chief—I couldn’t find traces of a single leukocyte. You see what that means?”
I shook my head.
“One of the primary results of exposing an organism to radioactivity is a reduction of the number of white cells, making it subject to infection. The proportion of polymorphonuclear white cells goes down relatively. That’s axiomatic. But surely you see what it suggests!”
Again I shook my head. A deep uneasiness was mounting in me but I had to hear him out before I acted. I knew I’d have to act. I think I knew already what I would have to do before I left this room. But I wanted to hear the rest of his story first. I signaled him to go on.
“Another thing I observed about the—call it water,” he said carefully, “was the presence of considerable boron and some lithium. Of course the whole Ring area is subject to constant radiations of all kinds, but the important ones just now are the hard electromagnetic and the nuclear radiations that produce biological reactions.
“I suppose you remember that boron and lithium both tend to concentrate the effects of a bombardment of slow neutrons, so an organism like the lake would get a very heavy dose of the radiations that have the greatest effect on it.”
“The lake—an organism?” I echoed.
“I think it is. Up to now we’ve come into conflict only with evolved and mutated creatures that were recognizable as animals even before genetic changes took place. One reason might be that mutated genes divide more slowly than others and tend to lose out in the race for supremacy.
“A complete mutation like—this lake—is something nobody really expected. The odds are too heavy against it. But we’ve known it could happen. And I think this time we’re up against something dangerous. Big and dangerous and impossible to understand.”
I leaned forward. I knew what I had to do. Now? No, not quite yet. Inside my mind the closed doors were moving slowly, swinging wider and wider, while behind them pressed the crowding memories of danger which would burst the barrier at any moment now.
“Forget all that for awhile,” Sales said with a sudden change of expression. “I talked to the girl before she died. I’m taking cross-bearings on my conclusion, Chief. One line I’ve already indicated. The second is what the girl said. They check.” He looked at me thoughtfully.
“I had to blank her mind clear down to the lowest articulate levels,” he said, “before I could cut back under whatever compulsion it was that killed her. She didn’t know she was talking. I hadn’t much time—she was dying as she spoke. But from what she said I’ve pieced a theory together.” He paused. “Tell me, did you see anything at all during your experiences with the lake to make you suspect it might be—alive?”