KATHERINE WESTFALL’S SUITE
Katherine Westfall did not like having this excitable little man in her sitting room, but she felt that it was better to see him face-to-face rather than communicate over the ship’s phone system. Phone conversations are supposed to be private, she knew, but they go through the ship’s communications system and systems can always be tapped.
Dr. Pohan could not sit still. Katherine had offered him a glass of wine, even poured him a long-stemmed goblet of beautiful Sancerre with her own hand, but the doctor hardly took a sip before he bounced to his feet and began pacing across the thick carpeting.
“They know!” he said, mopping his bald pate with one hand while his other nearly spilled the wine, it was shaking so badly.
“They know nothing,” Westfall said calmly.
“But they suspect! They accused me of infecting her! In my own office! She and that lumbering cyborg, they realize that the only way she could be infected was by the needle I used to take her blood sample.”
He looks ridiculous, she thought, a stubby little bald man with that ludicrous mustache, his clothes all wrinkled and sweaty. Struggling inwardly to hide her disdain, Westfall replied, “You showed them the Nordstrum dossier?”
Dr. Pohan stopped his pacing. “Yes. That seemed to placate them. For the moment.”
With an unruffled smile, Westfall said, “There you are. Crisis resolved.”
“Is it?” Dr. Pohan returned to the sculpted chair facing Westfall’s but stopped short of sitting in it. “How long do you think it will take them to think of checking with Selene University? How long before they find that Frieda Nordstrum never suffered from an animal bite, that she did not contract rabies until she came aboard this ship! How long before they discover that the woman died of a genetically engineered mutation of the virus!”
Katherine took a sip of her wine as she thought about that. Putting the stemmed glass down on the little table beside her chair, she said, “I can see to it that the university’s personnel files are unavailable for their scrutiny. Privacy laws and all that. The ship’s files, as well. They’ll never be able to find that she wasn’t infected while visiting Earth, that she wasn’t carrying the virus in her when she came aboard this vessel.”
The doctor wagged his head. “We committed murder!”
“You conducted an experiment,” Westfall countered. “The experimental subject died. It happens all the time. Scientists are always doing things like that.”
Dr. Pohan looked horrified. “But you … you told me … you
With the sincerest smile she could generate, Katherine Westfall said reassuringly, “As long as you keep Ms. Ambrose’s condition under control she will be satisfied. You’ve told her that the medical staff at
“Yes.”
“Good. Let her continue to think that. Once we get to Jupiter she’ll find out differently, but by then she’ll no longer be your problem.”
The doctor stared at her perplexedly. For several heartbeats he said nothing. Then, “May I ask … why are you doing this? Why did you have me infect her? After all, rabies can be dangerous.…”
Smiling truly now, Katherine Westfall said, “Not as dangerous as curiosity, Doctor.”
Dr. Pohan’s eyes went wide. He understands my meaning, Westfall saw. He understands me perfectly.
Max Yeager was glad to be out of Andy’s junkyard of a compartment. The two men were in the dining room, munching on soymeat patties as they argued about Corvus’s hopes.
“The human mind is the transducer,” Yeager was saying, waving a forkful of salad in midair. “It takes the electrical impulses from the eyes and makes pictures out of them.”
Corvus shook his head. “But how? How does it work? How can the brain turn electrical impulses into visual imagery?”
“We do it with display screens,” Yeager mused. “Electrons paint pictures on the screens.”
“Is that how it’s done in the visual cortex?”
“How would I know?”
Corvus began to reply, but as he looked up from his dinner plate he saw Deirdre and Dorn heading toward their table.
Once they were seated and had spoken their dinner orders to the robot that had immediately rolled up to the table, Corvus and Yeager fell into their argument again.
“It can’t be done,” Yeager insisted.
“You mean you don’t know how to do it,” said Corvus.
“Same thing,” Yeager rejoined, with a knowing grin. “If I don’t know how to do it, nobody knows how to do it.”
“Do what?” Dorn asked.
“Translate the electrical activity in Dee’s brain into visual imagery while she’s in contact with Baby,” Corvus explained.
The argument between the two men swirled on. It wasn’t until their desserts were served that Deirdre said, “Maybe we can go around the problem.”
“Go around it?” Corvus and Yeager asked in unison.
Deirdre hesitated a moment. “This may be silly…”
“Go ahead,” said Corvus. “We’re open to any and all ideas.”
“Well, why don’t I just tell you what I’m seeing while I’m in contact with Baby?”
Dorn objected, “But you seemed to be sleeping when you made contact with the dolphin.”
“If I could stay awake,” Deirdre said, “I could tell you what I’m seeing while you’re recording my brain wave patterns. That would help, wouldn’t it?”
“It sure would!” Andy said.
“But you weren’t awake,” Yeager objected. “Not fully conscious, anyway.”
Deirdre said, “Well, that was just my first experience with the equipment. Maybe with practice I could stay conscious, aware.”
“Come to think of it,” Corvus said, “I stayed conscious when I was in contact with the elephant, back Earthside.”
Yeager objected, “But here with the dolphins you both went into a trance.”
“Yeah, but that might just be an initiation reaction.”
“You think with practice you could stay awake?” Yeager asked, looking from Corvus to Deirdre and back again.
Corvus shrugged. “It’s worth a try.”
With a nod, Yeager agreed. “What’ve we got to lose?”
Katherine Westfall felt relieved when Dr. Pohan finally left her quarters. He’s on the verge of babbling it all out to that Ambrose woman and her friend, she thought. But I can’t get rid of him, it would look too suspicious.
No, she told herself as she got up from her chair and headed for the bedroom, I’ll have to keep bucking him up and showing him that Deirdre Ambrose is no threat to him. As long as he keeps her condition under control, she’ll be satisfied. She won’t snoop any farther. Even if she tries to contact Selene to check on Dr. Nordstrum’s medical file, all she’ll get is a polite refusal to show faculty records.
Then she got a better idea. Freeze her! Tell her the treatment isn’t working and she’ll have to be frozen until
