ruthless dedication to the simple, liberating power of free enterprise. Even women.
He’d invited Sofia Lamb to Rapture because she’d graduated at the top of her class. She was said to have written brilliant theses—which Ryan hadn’t had time to read—and to have shown a fearlessness in psychiatric experimentation. Scientific fearlessness was axiomatic to Rapture.
“You can compete with the rest of us here,” Ryan said firmly, as much to convince himself as her. “But of course your initial work would be to evaluate Rapture, help us develop a means of preparing the public for the future. More pressingly, some residents may be developing psychological problems—little, ah,
“Oh, of course, that is quite understood. But later—if I want to develop my own… institute, here in Rapture?”
“Ah yes. That would be splendid. Why shouldn’t people have a psychiatric doctor to consult with? A whole institute for self-exploration.”
“Or perhaps for redefining the self,” she murmured. She stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to be shown my quarters. The trip here has been—a lot to absorb. I need to change, rest a bit—and I’ll need a full tour of Rapture. I’ll start my diagnosis right away—this evening.”
“Good! I’ll have Chief Sullivan send over his files about… problem people. The little malcontents cropping up—the complainers, and so on. You can start with those.”
Brigid Tenenbaum was walking down the chilly dock toward the water, thinking that perhaps she might get some fresh fish for dissection. If they were iced, she could extract their genetic material with some hope it might be intact. She didn’t have a definite contract with Sinclair Solutions anymore, but she could still use their lab after-hours, since she had the door combination. The tale of her attempt to extract semen from one of the submariners with a large syringe had gotten her dropped, unreasonably she felt, from Sinclair’s research labs. Certainly, she’d used bad judgment in implying she wanted something else from the man’s evil-smelling genitals. Perhaps she’d thrust the needle into his gonad rather too vigorously. But for him to run screaming from the lab, naked from the waist down, with a syringe dangling from his groin, trailing blood and shrieking, “The crazy bitch put a spike in my goddamn nuts!” seemed like an overreaction.
Since then she’d scarcely seen Rapture’s founder. Nor had she been able to get an appointment with the man. There was always an excuse from that snippy Diane McClintock.
Sometimes she wished she were back in the camp, working with her mentor. At least they had real creative freedom.
Brigid sighed and tugged her coat closer around her shoulders. It was always nippy down here, in the strange, underwater docks. A kind of artificial cavern, really, within Rapture, filled with water, where the delivery boats pulled up, loaded with fish and other approved goods brought from the submarine bays. The docks were wooden, the walls and ceiling were metal—the water lapped at the pylons with a strange hollow, echoing whisper.
A constable and a black man who seemed to be a deputy were walking past, both of them looking at her curiously.
She saw a couple of dockworkers in heavy pea jackets, standing on the pier below her, waiting for a small tugboatlike vessel to pull up so they could offload it. They were amusing themselves as they waited, tossing a ball back and forth. She recognized both of the men—she’d seen them under Dr. Suchong’s hands. He’d tried to cure one of them, Stiffy, of a partial paralysis—and the other one…
The other one saw her first. He was a stubby-nosed man with a windburned face—but his red face went white when he saw Tenenbaum. He dropped the ball and clapped both hands to his genitals. “No you don’t, lady, you ain’t getting near ’em!”
He backed away from her, shaking his head. “Uh
“Don’t be such a fool!” she called out wearily, searching for the right English words. “I am not here for you. I want fresh fish.”
“You’re calling them fish now, are you?” the man demanded, backing away—and falling off the dock into the water. He got up, sputtering, spitting water—it was only four feet deep here.
“Ha, ha, Archie!” the other fisherman called gleefully to him, going to pick up the ball. “You finally got that bath you been avoidin’!”
“Screw you, Stiffy!” Archie called, splashing off toward the approaching boat. “Ahoy there, give me a hand; I’m comin’ aboard!”
“Ah, whatya scared of a skinny little dame for!” Stiffy yelled, laughing.
She approached Stiffy, putting on a professorial, officious manner so that he wouldn’t try to become too familiar.
“You throw the ball—it is very… unusual for you, no?” she asked, staring at his hands. She’d stood by and observed when Suchong had examined him. “Your hands—one paralyzed, the other only half working, this I remember. You carry some things on shoulders, not do so much work with hands.”
“Sure—that’s why they called me Stiffy. I got another kinda Stiffy, lady, if you—”
She gave him her severest frown. “Do not trifle with me! I wish only to know—how you can catch ball now. With fingers that were paralyzed. Dr. Suchong repaired your hands, yes?”
“Suchong? Hell no! Made a lotta excuses. Funniest thing. We had a net fulla fish, see. I was scoopin’ ’em out of the net, sortin’ ’em out—that much I could do, anyhow—and there was some kinda sea slug mixed in with ’em, floppin’ around. Weirdest lookin’ little slug you ever saw! Little bastard bit me on the hand!” Stiffy chortled. He didn’t seem angry about it at all. “I didn’t even know they could bite! Well, my hands got kinda swole—but when the swelling went down”—he looked at his hands in renewed wonder—“they started to come to life!” He tossed the ball in the air and deftly caught it. “You see that? Before the little bastard bit me, I couldn’t do that, no way, no how!”
“You think it was sea slug that release paralysis?”
“Something in that bite—I could feel it spreading out, like, in my hand!”
“Ach! Indeed!” She peered at his hands. Saw the curious bite marks. “If only I had this creature… You can find another such sea slug?”
“I still got the same one! Chucked it in a bucket of seawater! It was such a crazy-lookin’ little thing I actually thought I could maybe sell it to one of you scientist types. You wanta buy it?”
“Well—perhaps I do.”
“I guess… I guess I shouldn’t have brought my kids to Rapture. But they told me we had to come together, the whole family, or nothin’… They said they needed skills with a boiler, I’d be taken care of and make a pile of dough…”
Dr. Sofia Lamb was watching the middle-aged man in the workman’s overalls pacing back and forth in her office, wringing his hands. “Wouldn’t you like to relax on the couch as we work on this, Mr. Glidden?”
“No, no I can’t, Doc,” Glidden muttered. He sniffled, as if trying not to cry. His eyes were bruised looking from fatigue; his thin lips quivered. His big hands were reddened from his work in the geothermal plant. “I need to get back home. Ya see, my wife, my kids, they’re alone in the new apartment… if you can call it an apartment. A dump is what it is. Lotta shifty characters around there. I feel like the kids ain’t safe in that place… We’re havin’ to share it with another family—there ain’t enough housing in this crazy town. Nothing I can afford, I mean. They said
