'The hold. I'm in my suit. There's nothing down there that can get me through the suit.'
Tia listened to the moans and cries through her hold pickups; thought about the contact-buttons that showed fluttering hearts and unsteady breathing. She knew what would happen if he got down there. 'You can't do anything for them in the crates,' she said. 'You know that.'
He turned toward her column. 'What are you hiding from me?'
'N-nothing,' she said. But she didn't say it firmly enough.
He turned around and flung himself back in his chair, hands speeding across the keyboard with agility caused by days of living in the suit. Within seconds he had called up every contact-button and had them displayed in rows across the screen.
'Tia, what's going on down there?' he demanded. 'They weren't like this before we took off, were they?'
'I think...' She hesitated. 'Alex, I'm not a doctor!'
'You've got a medical library. You've been talking to the doctors. What do you think?'
'I think, they aren't taking hyper well. Some of the data the base sent me on brain-damaged simians suggested that some kinds of damage did something to the parts of the brain that make you compensate for, for things that you know should be there, but aren't. Where you can see a whole letter out of just parts of it, identify things from split-second glimpses. Kind of like maintaining a mental balance. Anyway, when that's out of commission,' She felt horribly helpless. 'I think for them it's like being in Singularity.'
'For four days?' he shouted, hurting her sensors. 'I'm going down there.'
'And do what?' she snapped back. 'What are you going to do for them? They're afraid of you in that suit!'
'Then I'll,'
'You do, and I'll gas the ship,' she said instantly. 'I mean that, Alex! You put one finger on a release and I'll gas the whole ship!'
He sat back down, collapsing into his chair. 'What can we do?' he said weakly. 'There has to be something.'
'We've got some medical supplies,' she pointed out 'A couple of them can be adapted to add to the air supply down there. Help me, Alex. Help me find something we can do for them. Without you cracking your suit.'
I'll try,' he said, unhappily. But his fingers were already on the keyboard, typing in commands to the med library, and not sneaking towards his suit-releases. She blanked for a microsecond with relief.
Then went to work.
Three more times there were signs of crisis in the hold. Three more times she had to threaten him to keep him from diving in and trying to save one of the Zombies by risking his own life. They lost one more, to a combination of anti-viral agent and watered-down sleepygas that they hoped would act as a tranquilizer rather than an anesthetic. Zombie number twenty seven might have been allergic to one or the other, although there was no such indication in his med records; his contact-button gave all the symptoms of allergic shock before he died.
Alex stopped talking to her for four hours after that. Twenty-seven had been in the bottom rank, and a shot of adrenaline would have brought him out, if it had been allergic shock. But his crate was also buried deep in the stacks, and Alex would have had to peel the whole suit off to get to him. Which Tia wouldn't permit. They had no way of knowing if this was really an allergic reaction, or if it was another development of the Zombie Bug. Twenty- seven had been an older man, showing some of the worst symptoms.
Although Alex wasn't talking to her, Tia kept talking, at him, until he finally gave in. Just as well. His silence had her convinced that he was going to ask for a transfer, and that he hated her, if a shell-person could be in tears, she was near that state when he finally answered.
'You're right,' was all he said. 'Tia, you were right. There are fifty more people there depending on both of us, and if I got sick, that's the mobile half of the team out.' And he sighed. But it was enough. Things went back to normal for them. Just in time for the transition to norm space.
Kleinman Base kept them in orbit, sending a full decontamination team to fetch Alex as well as the Zombies, leaving Tia all alone for about an hour. It was a very lonely hour.
But then another decontamination team came aboard, and when they left again, two days later, there was nothing left of her original fittings. She had been fogged, gassed, stripped, polished, and refitted in that time. All that was left, besides the electronic components, were the ideographs painted on the walls. It still looked the same, however, because everything was replaced with the same standard-issue, psychologically approved beige.
