Although Eponine, Ellie, Richard, and Nicole were all tired from their journey, they were still extremely excited about the forthcoming reunion. Before leaving the igloo hut, first Eponine and then Ellie used the mirror and freshened their faces. “Please, all of you,” Eponine said, “I ask one favor. Don’t say anything about my cure to anybody until I have had a chance to tell Max in private. I want it to be my surprise.”
“I hope Nikki still recognizes me,” Ellie said nervously as they descended the first staircase and entered the corridor that led to the landing. When the group walked out onto the landing and gazed at the circular floor below them, the twins Kepler and Galileo were playing a game of tag, with little Nikki watching them and laughing. Nai and Max were unloading food from a subway that had apparently recently arrived. Eponine could not restrain herself. “Max,” she shouted, “Max!”
Max reacted as if he had been shot. He dropped the food he was carrying and turned toward the landing. He saw Eponine waving at him and broke like a thoroughbred for the cylindrical staircase. It could not have been more than two minutes before he emerged onto the landing and threw his arms around Eponine.
“Oh, Frenchie,” he said, lifting her half a meter off the ground and hugging her fiercely, “how I have missed you!”
8
Archie could do all kinds of tricks with the colored balls. The octospider could catch two bails at once and then throw them in distinctly different directions. Archie could even juggle all six of the balls simultaneously, using four tentacles, for he needed only the other four tentacles on the ground to maintain his balance. The children loved for him to swing all three of them at the same time. Archie never seemed to tire of playing with the smaller humans.
In the beginning, of course, the children had been afraid of then- alien visitor. Little Nikki, despite Ellie’s repeated assurances that Archie was friendly, was especially wary because of her memory of the terror of her mother’s kidnapping. Benjy was the first to accept Archie as a playmate. The Watanabe twins were not coordinated enough to play complicated games, so Benjy was delighted to discover that Archie would gladly join him for an^ active game of catch or Benjy’s version of dodgeball.
Max and Robert were both disturbed by Archie’s presence. Within an hour after the arrival of the four humans and the octospider, in fact, Max had confronted Richard and Nicole in their bedroom. “Eponine tells me,” Max had said angrily, “that the damn octospider is going to live with us here. Have you all lost your minds?”
“Think of Archie as an ambassador, Max,” Nicole had said. “The octos want to establish regular communications with us.”
“But these same octospiders kidnapped your daughter and my girlfriend and held them against their will for over a month. Are you telling me that we are to ignore their actions altogether?”
“There were extenuating reasons for the kidnappings,” Nicole had replied, exchanging a brief glance with Richard. “And the women were treated very well. Why don’t you talk to Eponine about it?”
“Eponine has nothing but praise for the octospiders,” Max had said. “It’s almost as if she has been brainwashed. I thought you two would be more reasonable.”
Even after Eponine had informed Max that the octospiders had cured her of RV-41, he was still skeptical. “If it’s true,” he had said, “then it’s the most wonderful news I’ve received since those little robots showed up at the farm and confirmed that Nicole had safely reached New York. But I am having a very hard time seeing those eight- legged monsters as our benefactors- I want Doc Turner to examine you very carefully. If he tells me you’re cured, then I’ll believe it.”
Robert Turner was overtly hostile to Archie from the beginning. Nothing Nicole or even Ellie could say could neutralize the anger that he still felt over Ellie’s forcible kidnapping. His professional pride was also severely wounded by the apparent ease with which Eponine had been purportedly cured.
“You’re expecting too much, Ellie, as always,” Robert said on the second night they were together. “You come in here, all full of glowing reports about these aliens who snatched you away from Nikki and me, and you expect me to embrace them immediately. That’s not fair. I need time to understand and to synthesize everything you’re telling me. Don’t you realize that both Nikki and I were traumatized by your kidnapping? I can’t change my opinion overnight.”
Ellie’s revelation about the genetic changes made in her father’s sperm also disturbed Robert, even though it did explain why his wife’s genome had defied classification in the tests his colleague Ed Stafford had conducted back in New Eden.
“How can you be so calm about discovering that you’re a hybrid?” he said to Ellie. “Don’t you understand what it means? When the octospiders altered your DNA to improve your visual resolution and to make learning their language easier, they tampered with a robust genetic code that has evolved naturally over millions of years. Who knows what disease susceptibilities, infirmities, or even negative changes in fertility may show up in you or subsequent generations? The octos may have unwittingly doomed all our grandchildren.”
Ellie was not able to mollify her husband. When Nicole began working with Robert to ascertain whether Eponine had indeed been cured of RV-41, she noticed that Robert bristled every time Nicole made a favorable statement about Archie or the octospiders.
“We must give Robert more time,” Nicole counseled her daughter a week after their return. “He still feels that the octospiders violated him, not only by kidnapping you, but also by contaminating the genes of his daughter.”
“Mother, there is another problem as well. I almost feel that Robert is jealous in some peculiar way. He thinks that I spend too much time with Archie. He doesn’t seem to accept the fact that Archie cannot communicate with anyone else unless I am there to interpret.”
“As I said, we must be patient. Eventually Robert will accept the situation.”
But in private Nicole had her doubts. Robert was determined to find some remnant of the RV-41 virus in Eponine and, when test after test with his relatively unsophisticated portable equipment showed no evidence of the pathogen in her system, he continued to request additional procedures. In Nicole’s professional opinion, there was nothing to be gained from more testing. Although there existed a very small probability that the virus had eluded them and did still dwell somewhere in Eponine, Nicole felt that it was virtually certain that Eponine had been cured.
The two doctors clashed the day after Ellie had confided to her mother that Robert was jealous of Archie. When Nicole suggested that they terminate the tests on Eponine and pronounce her healthy, she was shocked to hear her son-in-law say that he proposed to open up Eponine’s chest cavity and take a direct sample from the tissues around her heart.
“But Robert,” Nicole said, “have you ever had a case where so many other tests have been virus-negative but the pathogen was still locally active in the cardiac region?”
“Only when death was imminent and the heart had already deteriorated,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t preclude that the same situation could occur earlier in the cycle of the disease.”
Nicole was staggered. She did not argue with Robert, for she could tell from the rigid set of his muscles that he had already decided on his next course of action. But Nicole knew full well that open-heart surgery of any kind was risky, even when performed by skilled hands. She also realized that if Robert didn’t come to his senses, she would be forced to oppose him on Eponine’s behalf.
Max asked to talk to Nicole privately very soon after Robert recommended that the heart surgery be performed. “Eponine is frightened,” Max confided, “and I am too. She came back from the Emerald City more full of life than I have ever seen her. Robert originally told me that the tests would be over in a couple of days. They have dragged on for almost two weeks and now he says he wants to take a tissue sample from her heart.”
“I know,” said Nicole grimly. “He told me last night he was going to recommend the open-heart procedure.”
“Help me, please,” Max said. “I want to make certain that I understand the facts properly. You and Robert have examined her blood many times, as well as several other bodily tissues that sometimes show minute quantities of the virus, and all the specimens have been unambiguously negative?”
“That’s correct,” Nicole said.
