Paul laughed, and the hollow sound startled him.
“It may be several generations before we know all that will happen,” Seevers went on. “I’ve examined sections of rat brain and found the microorganisms. They may be working at rerouting these new receptors to proper brain areas. Our grandchildren—if Man’s still on Earth by then—can perhaps taste analyze substances by touch, qualitatively determine the contents of a test tube by sticking a finger in it. See a warm radiator in a dark room—by infrared. Perhaps there’ll be some ultraviolet sensitization. My rats are sensitive to it.”
Paul went to the rat cages and stared in at three gray-pelted animals that seemed larger than the others. They retreated against the back wall and watched him warily. They began squeaking and exchanging glances among themselves.
“Those are third-generation hypers,” Seevers told him. “They’ve developed a simple language. Not intelligent by human standards, but crafty. They’ve learned to use their sensory equipment. They know when I mean to feed them, and when I mean to take one out to kill and dissect. A slight change in my emotional odor, I imagine. Learning’s a big hurdle, youngster. A hyper with finger pores gets sensations from them, but it takes a long time to attach meaning to the various sensations—through learning. A baby gets visual sensations from his untrained eyes—but the sensation is utterly without significance until he associates milk with white, mother with a face shape, and so forth.”
“What will happen to the brain?” Paul breathed.
“Not too much, I imagine. I haven’t observed much happening. The rats show an increase in intelligence, but not in brain size. The intellectual boost apparently comes from an ability to perceive things in terms of more senses. Ideas, concepts, precepts—are made of memory collections of past sensory experiences. An apple is red, fruity- smelling, sweet-acid flavored—that’s your sensory idea of an apple. A blind man without a tongue couldn’t form such a complete idea. A hyper, on the other hand, could add some new adjectives that you couldn’t understand. The fully-developed hyper—I’m not one yet—has more sensory tools with which to grasp ideas. When he learns to use them, he’ll be mentally more efficient. But there’s apparently a hitch.
“The parasite’s instinctive goal is to insure the host’s survival. That’s the substance of the warning. If Man has the capacity to work together, then the parasites will help him shape his environment. If Man intends to keep fighting with his fellows, the parasite will help him do a better job of that, too. Help him destroy himself more efficiently.”
“Men have worked together—”
“In small tribes,” Seevers interrupted. “Yes, we have group spirit. Ape-tribe spirit, not race spirit.”
Paul moved restlessly toward the door. Seevers had turned to watch him with a cool smirk.
“Well, you’re illuminated, youngster. Now what do you intend to do?”
Paul shook his head to scatter the confusion of ideas. “What can anyone do? Except run. To an island, perhaps.”
Seevers hoisted a cynical eyebrow. “Intend taking the condition with you? Or will you try to stay nonhyper?”
“Take… are you crazy? I mean to stay healthy!”
“That’s what I thought. If you were objective about this, you’d give yourself the condition and get it over with. I did. You remind me of a monkey running away from a hypodermic needle. The hypo has serum health- insurance in it, but the needle looks sharp. The monkey chatters with fright.”
Paul stalked angrily to the door, then paused. “There’s a girl upstairs, a dermie. Would you—”
“Tell her all this? I always brief new hypers. It’s one of my duties around this ecclesiastical leper ranch. She’s on the verge of insanity, I suppose. They all are, before they get rid of the idea that they’re damned souls. What’s she to you?”
Paul strode out into the corridor without answering. He felt physically ill. He hated Seevers’ smug bulldog face with a violence that was unfamiliar to him. The man had given the plague to himself! So he said. But was it true? Was any of it true? To claim that the hallucinations were new sensory phenomena, to pose the plague as possibly desirable—Seevers had no patent on those ideas. Every dermie made such claims; it was a symptom. Seevers had simply invented clever rationalizations to support his delusions, and Paul had been nearly taken in. Seevers was clever.
But he spent the day wandering along the waterfront, stopping briefly at the docks to watch a crew of monks scrambling over the scaffolding that surrounded the hulls of two small sea-going vessels. The monks were caulking split seams and trotting along the platforms with buckets of tar and paint. Upon inquiry, Paul learned which of the vessels was intended for his own use. And he put aside all thoughts of immediate departure.
She was a fifty-footer, a slender craft with a weighted fin-keel that would cut too deep for bay navigation. Paul guessed that the colony wanted only a flat-bottomed vessel for hauling passengers and cargo across from the mainland. They would have little use for the trim seaster with the lines of a baby destroyer. Upon closer examination, he guessed that it had been a police boat, or Coast Guard craft. There was a gun-mounting on the forward deck, minus the gun. She was built for speed, and powered by diesels, and she could be provisioned for a nice long cruise.
Paul went to scrounge among the warehouses and locate a stock of supplies. He met an occasional monk or nun, but the gray-skinned monastics seemed only desirous of avoiding him. The dermie desire was keyed principally by smell, and the deodorant oil helped preserve him from their affections. Once he was approached by a wild-eyed layman who startled him amidst a heap of warehouse crates. The dermie was almost upon him before Paul heard the footfall. Caught without an escape route, and assailed by startled terror, he shattered the man’s arm with a shotgun blast, then fled from the warehouse to escape the dermie’s screams.
Choking with shame, he found a dermie monk and sent him to care for the wounded creature. Paul had shot at other plague victims when there was no escape, but never with intent to kill. The man’s life had been spared only by hasty aim.
“It was self-defense,” he reminded himself.
But defense against what? Against the inevitable?
He hurried back to the hospital and found Mendelhaus outside the small chapel. “I better not wait for your boat,” he told the priest. “I just shot one of your people. I better leave before it happens again.”
Mendelhaus’ thin lips tightened. “You shot—”
“Didn’t kill him,” Paul explained hastily. “Broke his arm. One of the brothers is bringing him over. I’m sorry, Father, but he jumped me.”
The priest glanced aside silently, apparently wrestling against anger. “I’m glad you told me,” he said quietly. “I suppose you couldn’t help it. But why did you leave the hospital? You’re safe here. The yacht will be provisioned for you. I suggest you remain in your room until it’s ready. I won’t vouch for your safety any farther than the building.” There was a tone of command in his voice, and Paul nodded slowly. He started away.
“The young lady’s been asking for you,” the priest called after him.
Paul stopped. “How is she?”
“Over the crisis, I think. Infection’s down. Nervous condition not so good. Deep depression. Sometimes she goes a little hysterical.” He paused, then lowered his voice. “You’re at the focus of it, young man. Sometimes she gets the idea that she touched you, and then sometimes she raves about how she wouldn’t do it.”
Paul whirled angrily, forming a protest, but the priest continued: “Seevers talked to her, and then a psychologist—one of our sisters. It seemed to help some. She’s asleep now. I don’t know how much of Seevers’ talk she understood, however. She’s dazed—combined effects of pain, shock, infection, guilt feelings, fright, hysteria— and some other things, Morphine doesn’t make her mind any clearer. Neither does the fact that she thinks you’re avoiding her.”
“It’s the plague I’m avoiding!” Paul snapped. “Not her.”
Mendelhaus chuckled mirthlessly. “You’re talking to me, aren’t you?” He turned and entered the chapel through a swinging door. As the door fanned back and forth, Paul caught a glimpse of a candlelit altar and a stark wooden crucifix, and a sea of monk-robes flawing over the pews, waiting for the celebrant priest to enter the sanctuary and begin the Sacrifice of the Mass. He realized vaguely that it was Sunday.
Paul wandered back to the main corridor and found himself drifting toward Willie’s room. The door was ajar,
