Their faces were contorted with the first emotion Tia had seen them display.
Fear.
'They're scared, Tia,' Alex whispered, his voice thick with emotions that Tia couldn't decipher. 'They're afraid. I think they're afraid that the sun isn't going to come back.'
That might have been the case, but Tia couldn't help but wonder if their fear was due to something else entirely. Could they have a dim memory that something terrible had happened to them in the hours of darkness, something that took away their friends and changed their lives into a living hell? Was that why they howled and sobbed with fear?
When the last of the light had gone, they fell suddenly silent, then, like scurrying insects, they dropped to all fours and scuttled away, into whatever each, in the darkness of his or her mind, deemed to be shelter. In a moment, they were gone. All of them.
There was a strangled sob from Alex. And Tia shook within her shell, racked by too many emotions to effectively sort out
'You have two problems.'
Tia knew the name to put to the feeling she got when her next transmission from the base was not from some anonymous CS doctor but from Doctor Kenny.
Relief. Real, honest, relief.
It flooded her, making her relax, dealing her mind. Although she could not speak directly with him, if there was anyone who could help them pull this off, it would be Doctor Kenny. She settled all of her concentration on the incoming transmission.
'You'll have to catch the survivors and keep them alive, and you'll have to keep them from contaminating your brawn. After that, we can deal with symptoms and the rest.'
All right, that made sense.
'We went at this analyzing your subjects' behavior. You were right in saying that they act in a very similar fashion to brain-damaged simians.'
This was an audio-only transmission; the video portion of the signal was being used to carry a wealth of technical data. Tia wished she could see Doctor Kenny's face, but she heard the warmth and encouragement in his voice with no problem.
'We've compiled all the data available on any experiments where the subjects' behavior matched your survivors,' Doctor Kenny continued. 'Scan it and see if anything is relevant. Tia, I can't stress this enough. No matter what you think caused this disease, don't let Alex get out of that suit. I can't possibly say this too many times. Now that he's gone out there, he's got a contaminated surface. I want you to ask him to stay in the suit, sleep in the suit, eat through the suit-ports, use the suit-facilities. I would prefer that he stayed out in the compound or in your airlock even to sleep, every time he goes in and out of the suit, in and out of your lock, we have a chance for decontamination to fail. I know you understand me.'
Only too well, she thought, grimly, remembering all that time in isolation.
'Now, we've come up with a general plan for you,' Doctor Kenny continued. 'We don't think that you'll be able to catch the survivors, given the way they're avoiding Alex. So you're going to have to trap them. My experts think you'll be able to rig drop-traps for them, using packing crates with field generators across the front and rations for bait. The technical specs are on the video-track, but I think you have the general idea. The big thing will be not to frighten the rest each time you trap one.'
Doctor Kenny's voice echoed hollowly in the empty cabin; she damped the sound so that it didn't sound so lonely.
'We want one, two at most, per crate. We're afraid that, bunched together, they might hurt each other, fight over food. They're damaged, and we just don't know how aggressive they might get. That's why we want you to pack them in the hold in the crates. Once you get them trapped, we want you to put enough food and water in each crate to last the four days to base, and Tia, at that point, leave them there. Don't do anything with them. Leave them alone. I trust you to exercise your good sense and not give in to any temptation to intervene in their condition.'
Doctor Kenny sighed, gustily. 'We bandied around the idea of tranking them, but they have to eat and drink; four days knocked out might kill them. You don't have the facilities to cold-sleep fifty people. So, box them, hope the box matches their ideas of a good place to hide, leave them with food and water and shove them in the hold. That's it for now, Tia. Transmit everything you have, and we'll have answers for you as soon as we're able. These double- bounce comlinks aren't as fast as we'd like, but they beat the alternative. Our thoughts are with you.'
The transmission ended, leaving her only with the carrier-wave.
Now what? Tell Alex the bad news, I guess. And calculate how many packing crates I can pack into my holds.
