Only shakes of the head responded to Ransom regarding this future possible circumstance.
“Perhaps
“What?” asked Thomas.
“What did you say?” Declan echoed.
The young interns stared at Alastair as if he were mad.
Ransom shrugged. “What else can we do? We are on the high seas on a ship riddled with this disease organism. Do you prefer this plague to reach New York?”
“There has to be another way,” replied Thomas through clenched teeth, “Some other recourse!”
“Perhaps if we could get the bloody creature off and onto an iceberg, maybe?” Declan timidly suggested.
Ransom shook his head. “Suppose this thing’s already spread from stem to stern, lads, from top to bottom of the ship by time we hit the ice floes in the North Atlantic. What then, lads? What then?”
Declan pictured the fearful circumstances if they got too far from any port. “What’re you suggesting? That we become anarchists and bomb the boilers?”
“Shhh… keep such talk down,” Ransom cautioned, looking around them.
“We already sound like anarchists, for Christ’s sake.” Declan leapt to his feet and went to the port side, staring after the lifeboat that had promised to set them ashore. Thomas joined him there, Ransom holding back.
“We’re fools to have not gotten away to dry land, Declan, you know this, don’t you?”
“I do. I do… but there are lives at stake, Thomas, and I can’t just walk away from this. You go! You turn yourself in. I am sure Mr. Ransom and I can do what we must to keep this thing from reaching New York without… without blowing up the ship.”
Ransom joined them at the railing. “We’re exposed here, lads. If you want to be discovered and put ashore, this is the way to do it. I won’t hold it against you. We’ve come a long way together; perhaps it’s time we called it quits as a team. Hell you could get below, find a porthole large enough and swim ashore but I wouldn’t recommend diving from this height. You’ll knock yourselves out.”
“Shut up! Mr. Ransom, Constable, Inspector… whatever you are,” said Declan, losing his temper. “Look here, we must—you and I—locate those bodies; we must provide Smith with evidence that no man can ignore. And as for you, Thomas, you should truly get off this bloody ship now!”
Thomas slapped Declan on the arm. “With three of us seeking evidence, we have a far greater chance of success, and successful early enough, soon enough, Smith will turn back and hold anchor in Queenstown harbor. We find Davenport or Burns and splay ’em the hell open, and Smith and his surgeon will pay heed.”
“Else boys, it’s sending
“The idea of it alone makes me weak,” admitted Declan. “I’m not-tat-all sure I could go through with such an action. I’d likely lose my legs.”
“Hell, I almost did when Ransom proposed it,” said Thomas, the breeze lifting his blonde hair.
“At the same,” continued Declan, “Mr. Ransom has a point if this alien creature spreads this killing disease exponentially. Just imagine its strength, Tommie.”
Thomas swallowed hard, looked about and nodded. “What then indeed if this thing has reproduced aboard
“What’s that about Bellingham in Belfast?” asked Alastair, who had stepped to the rail to join them.
“We need to get to the Wireless Room, see if there’s a message that’s been sent for us from Dr. B. He said he’d do his best to get word after his tests were completed on the egg sacs.”
“We must find that wireless, then!” said Thomas.
Ransom nodded. “Know thy enemy.”
They soon found the door marked Wireless Room, which was open with a long line of passengers vying to get a message out—notices to friends on shore either back in England or ahead of them in New York. Most were here to try out Mr. Marconi’s amazing invention. It was a gamble and hardly a way to lie low, but Alastair put on his most forthright authorial voice and manner, excused himself and the young doctors to make a path straight for the wireless operator. He flashed his Belfast badge at eye-level for all to see and announced, “Official business, please! Out of the way.”
Declan asked the wireless operator, a young man his own age, “Has any message from Belfast been sent for me? Declan Irvin. It’s rather important.”
“Irvin… Declan Irvin,” the operator repeated the name. “I seem to recall the fellow from second shift said something about it, but it was sent round only no one on board by the name of Declan Irvin could be found, so the steward brought it back here. Jimmy said he’d put it with others that couldn’t be delivered; said it was a lot of jibberish.” The operator scurried about searching for the message as he spoke. “Ahhh, here it is.” He glanced at it —“from Belfast, a Dr. Bellingham.”
“That’s it.” Declan snatched if from the operator’s outstretched hand. Ransom dropped a coin in the man’s palm, Thomas backed from the bathroom-sized room, and the three made a hasty departure for the safety of the lower decks.
When they found a relatively safe place to read and decipher what Bellingham had sent, Declan was the one to read the message aloud: ‘Unfortunate news. It is not a single macro parasite, nor a colony of cells, but rather each cell is out for its own survival—they cannibalize one another unless there are other sources of nourishment. However, they begin life in their sacs as an encysted grouping of dormant infected cells just waiting to rupture and spread contagion like a mushroom’s fruiting spore bodies when under the right conditions. Cold does not kill them but it holds them in check. Fire may be the answer.”
“Doesn’t sound good,” muttered Alastair.
They had returned to the relative safety of the crowd now at the aft deck where they’d earlier been, no one speaking for some time now until Thomas asked, “What then happens if this thing is reproducing itself aboard
“What exactly do you mean exponentially?” asked Alastair, not quite sure of the notion in a medical sense.
“Like rabbits,” said Thomas.
“Imagine it this way, Constable,” began Declan, staring out at the sea on this pristine day, the North Atlantic’s surface like glass ahead of them. “Take this table cloth here.” He had turned to another of the cafe tables on this deck where some second class passengers sat drinking and smoking. Their own table had already been claimed by others. “May I use your table cloth for a scientific demonstration?” he asked the amused couples at the table he’d selected.
“By all means,” replied the man who’d huddled with the others, looking the leader of the family group.
“I will need everything off the table, sir.”
The people at the table lifted their drinks and ashtrays, leaving the table free of any plates or other items. “I thought you were going to do the magic trick of snatching the cloth away and leaving all glasses and such in position,” said one of the women at the table.
“Oh no, I can’t do such tricks as that; this is to demonstrate what happens when disease organisms spread exponentially—once reproduction starts.”
Thomas stood back, obviously having seen Declan make this explanation before, while Alastair inched forward, looking on with the interested people at the table and some joining from around them to hear this. Declan said little but rather folded the cloth over once, twice, three times, saying, “You see how each fold makes the cloth thicker and thicker. Measuring now two, maybe three inches.”
“This is common sense,” said Alastair, “but what’s it to do with the spread of disease?”
“I fold it again, and as you see it has gone from doubling to quadrupling… becoming more difficult to fold with each successive fold. But imagine now folding it indefinitely, it grows larger—four inches, eight, on and on. Imagine if it were foldable without limit, that it would continue getting taller and taller, reaching to the deck overhead, and then beyond this ship, reaching to the sky, to the stars even. Each fold represents how a thing multiplies not simply but exponentially. Imagine this with cancerous cells in the human body and you have some notion of how these
