sharks. That could verify Deirdre’s contact, couldn’t it?”
Andy grinned brightly. “It might at that.”
INFIRMARY
It was two days later when Deirdre sat on the medical couch in the infirmary waiting for her daily injection from Dr. Pohan, still wondering about how she might have contracted rabies.
Dr. Nordstrum was from Earth, she thought. She worked at Selene, but she could’ve gone back to visit Earth easily enough; it’s only a few hours’ flight. Okay, she might have been bitten or scratched by some rabid animal. There’s all sorts of wild animals on Earth. Twenty billion people and woods and grasslands and everyplace teeming with bacteria and feral beasts. Earth is like a zoo. A jungle.
But then she reasoned, Still, if Nordstrum was a microbiologist, wouldn’t she have recognized the symptoms of rabies? Especially if she’d been bitten by an animal out in the wild. Wouldn’t she have taken the precaution of the proper treatment instead of letting the infection grow in her body until it killed her?
Maybe she was so eager to get out to the research station at Jupiter that she ignored the early symptoms. They’re not much. Just a rash, according to what the medical files say. Maybe some mood changes; irritability. Maybe that’s what made her ignore—
The accordion-fold door to the treatment cubicle clattered open and Dr. Pohan stepped in. Deirdre saw that he wasn’t smiling.
“Good morning,” the doctor said flatly.
“I’m ready for my injection,” said Deirdre, pushing up the sleeve of her blouse.
Dr. Pohan shook his head as he commanded, “Computer, display Deirdre Ambrose’s record.”
The screen on the partition beside the couch showed a single rising red curve against a grid of thin yellow lines.
“The treatment is not working,” said Dr. Pohan. “At least, it is not working fast enough.”
Deirdre stared at the curve. The virus is growing inside me, she realized. Multiplying.
“What should we do?” she asked, suddenly breathless with anxiety.
Tugging at one end of his mustache, the doctor replied curtly, “Freeze you.”
“Freeze me? Cryonics?”
Dr. Pohan raised both his chubby little hands. “No, no, no. Not cryonics. Not liquid nitrogen. We only have to chill you down enough to slow your body functions sufficiently so that the disease will not grow while we’re in transit to Jupiter. A matter of some nine days, that’s all.”
“Will I be conscious?”
Shaking his head slightly, the doctor said, “You will be asleep. Your metabolic functions will slow to less than one-third of their normal pace. You will be fed intravenously.”
“I see,” Deirdre said. But she had her doubts about the procedure.
Dr. Pohan put on a reassuring smile. “It will be like taking a long, refreshing nap. When you wake up you will be aboard station
“I see,” Deirdre said again. But she still felt terribly unsure about the entire matter.
Pohan slid the door back again. Two white-smocked medical technicians were waiting there, both women, both short, slender Asians. The whole crew must be Asian, Deirdre thought idly as they wheeled up a gurney and helped her lie down on it.
Andy Corvus was in his quarters, reviewing Deirdre’s last session with the dolphins. Max Yeager was sitting on one of the cluttered room’s chairs; he had cleared the junk Corvus had deposited on the chair and simply dumped it on the thickly carpeted floor.
“So you can get Dee to narrate what she experienced and play her words alongside the DBS data,” Yeager was saying.
“That’s the best we can do,” Corvus said despondently, “unless we can figure out how to visualize these nerve impulses.”
“It’s better than nothing,” Yeager said.
“Not much,” Corvus said.
“You’ve checked about the sister that was killed by sharks?”
Nodding, Corvus said, “They’re checking the files back Earthside, but if it happened in the wild they probably won’t have any record of it.”
“Well, you’ve got Dee’s narration.”
“I don’t see how—”
Corvus’s pocketphone jingled. Yeager thought the tune it played sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it.
Andy flicked the phone open and pointed it at the compartment’s wall screen. Deirdre’s lovely face appeared. She looked distraught.
Without preamble she said, “Andy, I won’t be able to work with the dolphins today.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m going to be frozen.”
“Frozen?” Yeager and Corvus yelped together.
“To slow down the rabies,” she said. “I’ll be kept frozen until we reach Jupiter.”
Leaping to his feet, Corvus shouted into the phone, “Don’t let them touch you! I’ll be right down there.” Then his brows shot toward his scalp and he asked somewhat sheepishly, “Uh … where are you?”
Yeager went with Corvus. The two men hurried down the passageway toward the elevator, grasping the big aluminum crate between them. They put it down on the deck as they waited for the elevator.
Once the doors slid open they saw that Dorn was already in the cab.
“What’s happening with Deirdre?” he asked as Corvus and Yeager tugged the box into the elevator with them.
They swiftly explained. “I can put her under with the DBS equipment,” Corvus said, almost breathless with exertion and excitement. “I don’t want them to freeze her if they don’t have to.”
Dorn thought about it as the elevator rose toward the infirmary’s level. “The brain stimulator can put her into a comatose state,” he said calmly, “but will it slow her metabolic rate?”
“Huh?” Corvus blinked. “No, it won’t.”
“That’s why they want to freeze her, isn’t it? To slow her metabolism so the disease doesn’t spread inside her body.”
Yeager looked digusted. “We didn’t think of that.”
“We just wanted to save her from being frozen,” Corvus muttered.
Dorn shook his head. “Good intentions. But it won’t help her.”
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. Dorn bent down and lifted the aluminum box in one hand while his two friends watched glumly.
INFIRMARY
Dr. Pohan was not happy to see the three of them as they burst into the infirmary, Dorn lugging the
