Stewards of the Flame (4 page)

“I’m sorry, Carla,” Anne said smoothly. “Dr. Kelstrom called me. He warned me to watch for you two. You’re to report to his office now, before you leave for the night.”

“Both of us?” Carla asked, as if doubting what she heard.

“Of course not. The patient will be taken back to his ward.”

Orderlies were waiting; they must have been called in advance. Despairingly, Jesse left Carla to her fate and went with them.

~
 
5
 
~

The first time he was made sick, they used low dosage. His heart raced, but did not falter, and his breathing wasn’t seriously impaired. All the same, it was worse than Jesse had expected. He had somehow thought that youthful experience with spacesickness would make induced nausea easier to bear. He remained in anguish for a long time afterward, and eventually he perceived that this had something to do with his general situation. He was unable to muster much optimism.

The memory of Carla tore him in two. It was a light in the darkness; he closed his eyes and recalled her scent, her touch, and it seemed that no world she lived in could be all bad. Yet at the same time, he worried.

How would they punish her? She’d violated rules, not law—surely no more than her job had been at stake. She’d be better off without it unless jobs were hard to come by in the colony. He didn’t know, and in his blacker moments imagined her destitute, forced to seek welfare because she had risked herself for him. The local authorities weren’t the sort she’d want to appeal to. Nor, perhaps, were her friends, if Anne was a sample! If only he were free. . . .

To his impatience for release was now added a burning wish to see Carla again. He knew this was more than desire to repay her kindness.

They moved him to another floor. He was given pajamas, but no robe; the rooms and corridors were kept at an even temperature. Nobody displayed any antagonism toward him, and he was forced to concede that they meant no cruelty. They really believed themselves to be helping a sick man. They behaved with uniform cheerfulness, even as they administered injections that—combined with the drinks they forced on him—would send him into agonizing, uncontrollable spasms of retching, followed by hours of lingering nausea combined with ever-more severe headache, palpitations, and labored breathing.

After several sessions of this, during one of his brief periods of relative calm, new orderlies appeared with a gurney. “You’re going back to Psych for a while,” they announced. He was not given the option of walking there under his own power.

Jesse’s spirits rose momentarily; Psych was where Carla worked—or had worked. But he was not taken to the same area as before. After an endless trip through the grid of corridors they wheeled him into a small room filled with ominous electrical equipment and proceeded to strap him into a reclining chair, over which hovered an elaborate metal headpiece bristling with wires.

Electroshock? Undoubtedly, Jesse thought, striving to conceal his terror as they lowered the headpiece, encasing his scalp, and attached electrodes to his temples. Or something else that would even more disastrously alter his brain. . . . Carla had admitted that such things went on here. He was not sure what he had done to provoke it; perhaps it was merely that the initial psych testing had revealed too much of his personality for him to be judged on the basis of behavior alone. Dr. Kelstrom, or whoever else had looked at the records, must have realized that it would take more than “friendly health advice” to subdue his inner rebellion.

The room dimmed and various lights on the instrument board beside him began to glow, accompanied by a nerve-jarring electronic hum. The technicians had disappeared; whatever was going to happen to him was evidently remotely controlled. He waited . . . and waited. Nothing seemed to have happened yet; he could still think clearly—but perhaps the shock was yet to come. There was no way to judge time; it seemed as if hours had passed. At length he heard the door open and someone outside saying, “All right, now inject him. Kelstrom said to use truth serum.”

Jesse was past the capacity for protest. He lay mute while the technician inserted an IV into his arm. After that things got hazy.

He knew, later, that he had been extensively and repeatedly interrogated, probably for psychiatric reasons rather than as any sort of conspiracy suspect—although the latter, he felt, would have been preferable. The voice of the unseen interviewer was absolutely emotionless, devoid even of supercilious courtesy. Having nothing to hide, he had not tried to resist the questioning. They’d already known he hated them. They’d known Carla had helped him, and that he found her attractive. What had they possibly hoped to gain?

When he woke he was back in the substance abuse unit, with his brain intact, as far as he could tell. Emotionally, however, he was deeply shaken. He felt stripped, violated, now that the last vestige of personal privacy had been taken from him. The physical indignities paled beside the callous probing of his inmost thoughts. It scarcely mattered that within minutes he was called for another session of aversion therapy, one of many to which he was subjected during the next few days.

Though normally, these sessions would have been held in a room outfitted as a bar, the experimenters dispensed with that in favor of one with a gallery from which medical students could watch. “We’re not trying to condition you,” he was told. “This is simply what will happen if you drink, from now on, for the rest of your life. Awareness of it is necessary for your future safety.”

For the rest of his life, then, his decisions were to be based on their standards of well-being instead of his own? No one suggested that he might ever leave the planet, and indeed Jesse had begun to doubt it. If they’d believed him still in the employ of Fleet, they would not have chosen him as a guinea pig. They planned to turn him into a healthy colonial citizen. That was acknowledged, in fact; several people remarked on how lucky he was not to be deported. They seemed genuinely unable to conceive of anyone’s not appreciating the protection of the galaxy’s finest medical facility.

As the drug dosage was increased, each drinking session made him sicker than the previous one. The goal was to find, then stop short of, the point at which he’d pass out before feeling distress. By the third day, Jesse feared struggling for breath more than he feared the nausea. Still, he drained the glass given him without protest, for it had been made plain that if he refused, the liquor would be poured down his throat. The less indignity, the better. He had few enough chances to avoid it.

The seriousness of the attacks was now such that they were terminated by antidote, leaving him with no worse than residual nausea and weakness. He could thus have multiple “treatments” per day, which was desirable, one nurse said, because hospital beds were in demand. This news was halfway welcome; it meant that he might get out soon. On the other hand, he’d have the implants before he got out. That would be soon, too. It was too final for his liking: a symbol of permanent subjugation to this world’s medical authorities.

During the last session of the fifth day, just before he drank the proffered whiskey, Jesse looked into the observers’ gallery and saw Carla.

She wasn’t in her own uniform; instead, she wore the gown of an intern. She was holding a mask, briefly removed so that he could recognize her. He nodded quickly, almost imperceptibly; she caught the gesture almost before he knew what he was doing. When he looked again, her face was covered.

Yet he felt as if she had spoken to him. He had never met anyone before from whom he got such a feeling. He knew, as positively as if he’d been told, that she would come to his room. The knowledge sustained him. He found he hardly minded getting ill. He did not even react to the announcement, made by the night nurse, that he was scheduled to receive the implants in the morning.

Carla didn’t appear until past midnight, when the corridor was quiet. She still wore the intern’s gown. “Oh, God, Carla,” Jesse said, torn between relief and fear for her. “You shouldn’t be here. If you’ve got to wear a disguise—”

“I’m all right,” she said calmly. “I got only a reprimand, and that not even from Dr. Kelstrom. He hadn’t time to see me and left it to a subordinate. But I was ordered to stop visiting you, so someone might report me if I were noticed—” She stared at him, frowning. “When did they shave that patch of your hair?”

He told her about it, futilely attempting to hide what he felt at the memory of interrogation under truth serum. “I still don’t know what the aim was. If it was meant to change me somehow, I don’t think it worked.”

“The machine only records brain activity. It’s an experimental protocol of Dr. Kelstrom’s; he’s into research of that kind. I’ve—assisted with it, sometimes.” Carla’s frown deepened. “It should have been explained to you! He should have been there personally to oversee! To deliberately terrify you that way—it just doesn’t add up. And as for the truth serum, Dr. Kelstrom
couldn’t
have ordered that! Not for an unconsenting subject. Whoever mentioned his name must have misread your chart.”

“I heard ‘Kelstrom said,’ Carla, not anything about charted orders.”

She shook her head. “There had to have been miscommunication somewhere. But we haven’t time to wonder about it. There’s just one chance left now to prevent the implants.”

“To escape, you mean? We can’t try the front door again.”

“No, right now there’s nobody I can trust, since Anne—” She broke off, obviously deeply concerned; the implications of Anne’s betrayal, he guessed, went further than this one incident. Bending down, searching his face, she went on, “Jesse, how badly do you want to get out with your body unaltered?”

“You don’t have to ask, do you?” He was sure, somehow, that the strong rapport between them made discussion unnecessary.

“Just checking,” Carla acknowledged. “We can manage it, but you’ll have to run some risk. That is, you’ll have to trust
me.
There’ll be no real danger, but it will take nerve.”

Jesse’s heart stirred. Action, even dangerous action, would be welcome at this point, and the thought that Carla cared enough for him to initiate it was even more welcome. He trusted her completely, without asking himself why he should.

She drew a small flask from under her gown. Measuring him, she said, “This is brandy. Are you willing to drink it?”

“Carla, I don’t suppose I can. They give the injections on a regular schedule, simulating the implant, I think. I had one just a couple of hours ago; I doubt if it’s worn off.”

“It hasn’t. That’s the point. They won’t guess, of course, that any liquor could have been smuggled to you, or that you’d have touched it if it had. So if you have an attack now—if you are unconscious, an emergency case—they will assume continued high dosage has unpredictable side effects.”

He nodded, seeing the strategy. “Then what? Will they release me?”

“Maybe, after a standard course of aversion therapy. We won’t wait to see; there are other routes of escape—but none that can be used before tomorrow morning.”

Drawing breath, Jesse said, “Okay. Why not? They’ll do it to me again anyway; I’ve nothing to lose.” She had watched from the gallery, he realized, to learn what to expect of the attacks, so she could judge when to call for help. He would be a real emergency case, and there was no heart monitor in place yet. He could die if Carla waited too long. . . .

It did not worry him. With her, he was utterly safe. He seized the flask from her hands and took several swallows.

The illness hit fast. Before he had time to gasp for breath, his heart lurched wildly, erratically; he clutched at his chest, for once in too much pain to vomit. It passed quickly—her hands touched his and for an instant he knew a strange sense of peace, even well-being. Then he felt himself seized by convulsions. Carla screamed, whether in terror or by plan he was not sure. As people rushed into the room, he blacked out.

When he opened his eyes, it was morning. Carla was gone.

That day they repeated much of the physical exam, omitting only the most invasive portions. A succession of frowning doctors shook their heads over him. “Observation,” one of them declared finally. “Start with light dosage tomorrow, then work up again—and get a video cam in here to watch for symptoms.”

In the early evening the familiar pair of orderlies appeared, this time with a wheelchair. God, Jesse thought, is there to be no respite? So far, when allowed, he’d been able to walk. No doubt the chair was deemed necessary for return from whatever horror they now would subject him to. He bit his lip and put on as brave a face as he could manage.

They took him not to the treatment room but to the front desk of the substance abuse unit. “There’s been a mix-up,” the clerk announced. “Somebody in Psych ordered your discharge this morning. We weren’t told here.”

They gave him a bag containing his possessions. In a small dressing room, Jesse donned the Fleet uniform, not daring to let himself feel joy. He wasn’t out yet. The wheelchair waited, standard transport for dischargees—he must be kept helpless, he judged, as long as he remained within the walls.

Not until they were at the security checkpoint did they release him. He entered his thumbprint gingerly, but the computer raised no alarm.

Dazed, unbelieving, Jesse found himself free on the sidewalk. It was dark. He had no idea what to do beyond getting as far away from the hospital complex as possible. The colony’s city was unknown to him; he’d seen only the bar near the spaceport, into which he’d not venture again, and at the spaceport itself his welcome might not be too warm.

A cab pulled up. The door opened and someone waved to him, beckoning. Even before he saw her face, he knew it was Carla.

~
 
6
 
~

They went to a restaurant on a side branch near the island’s main waterway. Undine was a water world, and canals permeated the seaward areas of the city. “Like Venice,” Carla said, “on ancient Earth.”