Clay's Ark (7 page)

"He came here? This was your home, then?"

". . . yes."

He wondered about her sudden pensiveness, but took no time to question it. He had something more important to ask.

"Where did Eli come from, Meda? Where did he catch the disease?"

She hesitated. "Look, I'll tell you if you want me to. It's my job to explain things to you. But there are some things

you'll have to understand before I tell you about Eli. First, like I said, I scratched your face just now so you'd get sick

sooner. Most people take about three weeks to start feeling symptoms. Sometimes a little longer. You'll feel yours a lot

sooner-and you should be infectious in a few days."

"That could mean I'll die sooner," Blake said.

"I'm not going to give you up that easily," she said. "You're going to make it!"

"Why did you rush things for me?"

"We're afraid of you. We want you on our side because you might be able to help us save more converts-that's what Eli

calls them. We ... we care about the people we lose. But we have to be sure of you, and we can't until you're one of us.

Right now, you're sort of in-between. You're not one of us yet, but you're . . . not normal either. If you escaped now and

managed to reach other people, you'd eventually give them the disease. You'd spread it to everyone you could reach,

and you wouldn't be able to stay and help them. Nobody can fight the compulsion alone. We need each other."

"Who did Eli have?" Blake asked. "His wife?"

"He had nobody. That was the problem. But before I get into that, I want to be sure you understand that there's no way

to leave here without starting an epidemic. The compulsion quiets down a little after you've been sick. You should have

enough control then to go into town and buy whatever you'll need that isn't in that computerized bag Eli says you

have."

"Buy medical supplies?"

"Yes."

"You're going to trust me enough to let me go into town?"

"Yes, but nobody travels alone. There's too much temptation to do harm. Blake, you aren't ever going to be comfortable

among ordinary people again."

He didn't know how he would have felt if he had believed her. But in fact, he meant to take any opportunity to escape

that came his way. He did not intend to live his life as an emaciated carrier of a deadly disease. Yet he was afraid.

Some of what Meda had said about the disease reminded him of another illness-one he had read about years before. He

could not remember the name of it. It was something people did not get any longer-something old and deadly that

people had once gotten from animals. And the animals had gone out of their way to spread it. The name came to him

suddenly: rabies.

She watched him silently. "You don't believe me, but you're afraid," she said. "That's a start. There's a lot to be afraid

of."

He stifled an impulse to deny his fear or explain it. "You were going to tell me about Eli," he said.

She nodded. "Remember that ship a few years ago-the Clay's Ark?"

"The Ark? You mean the starship?"

"Yeah. Brand new technology, tested all to hell, and it still blew up when it got back from the Centauri system. People

figured the scientists rushed things so they would have something flashy to keep them from losing their funding again.

At least, that's what I read. The Ark came down about thirty miles from here. It was supposed to land at one of the

space stations or on the moon, but it came all the way home. And before it blew up, Eli got out."

"Eli . . . ? What are you telling me?"

"His name is Asa Elias Doyle. He was their geologist. In case you haven't noticed, he can drop that dumb accent of his

whenever he wants to. The disease is from the second planet of Prox-ima Centauri. It killed ten of a crew of fourteen. I

think more would have lived, but they began by isolating anyone who got sick. Then they found they had to restrain

them to keep them isolated." She shuddered. "That amounted to slow death by torture.

"Anyway, four survived to come home. I think they had to come home. The compulsion drove them. But when they

landed something went wrong. Maybe for once, someone managed to break the compulsion. The ship was destroyed.

Only Eli managed to get out. But in one way, that didn't matter. He brought Proxi Two back to us as well as a crew of

fourteen could have. And now . . . now it's as Terran as you or me."

PAST 7

A few minutes of careful listening told him there were seven people sharing the isolated wood-and-stone house with

him. There were the two adult sons and a twenty-year-old daughter, who had spent the night in Barstow. There was

their mother, who had brought food and who had been kind, and the sons' new young wives, who were eager for the

separate houses to be finished. There was the white-haired patriarch of the household -a stern man who believed in an

outdated, angry God and who knew how to use a shotgun. He reminded himself of this last when he met the daughter.

Meda, her name was.

Meda introduced herself by walking into the room he had been given just as he pulled on a borrowed pair of pants. And

instead of retreating when she saw that he was dressing, she stayed to watch. He was so glad she was not the woman of

the night before, the woman whose scent had frozen him outside her window, that her brazenness did not bother him.

This one's scent was far more interesting than a man's would have been, but she had not yet reached that dangerous

time in her cycle. She was big like her mother-perhaps six feet tall, and stocky where her mother was becoming old-

woman thin. Meda was brown-haired, heavily tanned, and strong-looking-probably used to hard work.

She stared at him curiously and was unable to conceal her disappointment at his thin, wiry body. He did not blame her.

He was disgusted with his appearance himself, though he knew how deceptive it was. He had been good-looking once.

Women had never been a problem for him.

This woman, however, was a problem already. Her expression said she recognized him. That was completely

unexpected- that someone in this isolated place would keep up with current events enough to know what one of

fourteen astronauts looked like. Unfortunately, his face had changed less than the rest of him. It had always been thin.

And with the Ark returning, there must have been a great rebroadcasting and republishing of old pictures. This woman

had probably just seen several of them in Barstow.

"How have you lost so much weight?" she asked as he pulled on a shirt. The clothing belonged to Gabriel Boyd, the

father of the family. He was thin, too, though not quite as tall. The pants were too short. "You look like you haven't

eaten for weeks," Meda said.

"I am hungry," he admitted.

"My mother says you just ate enough for two people."

He shrugged. He was still hungry. He was going to have to do something about it soon.

"We don't have a videophone," she said, "or a telephone, or even a radio."

"That's okay. I don't want to call anyone."

"Why not?"

He did not answer.

"What do you want?" she asked.

"I want you to get out of here before your father or one of your brothers gets the wrong idea."

"This is my room."

That did not surprise him. The room did not look as though it belonged to a young woman. There was no clothing in

sight, no perfume or makeup, no frills. But it smelled of her. The bed smelled of her.

"I was in Barstow with my brothers overnight," she said. "There are some supplies my brothers can't be trusted to buy,

even with a list." She gave him a sad smile. "So I went to the big city."

"Barstow?" Like most desert towns, it had been water-short and shrinking for years-not that it had ever been big.

"Anything bigger would be too sinful. It might tempt me or contaminate me or something. You know, I've only been to

L.A. twice in my life."

He wiped his wet face with dripping hands. She did not know how she tempted him to contaminate her. His compulsion

was to touch her, take her hands perhaps, scratch or bite if she pulled away. Sex would have been very satisfying with

her, too, though not as satisfying as when she reached her fertile time. She was not the kind of woman who would have

attracted him in any way at all before. Now all a woman had to do to attract him was smell uncontaminated.

He looked away from her, sweat soaking into his borrowed clothing. "You're not missing anything by keeping away

from cities," he said. He had been born in a so-called middle-class residential area of that same vast, deadly Los

Angeles she wanted more of, and if not for his grandfather, he would probably already have died there. Many of the

people he had grown up with had died of too much L.A. A girl like this one, not pretty, eager for attention and

excitement, would not survive a year in L.A.

"We barely have running water here," she grumbled.

Fool. She had clean, sweet well water here, free for the taking. In stinking L.A., she would have a limited amount of

flat, desalinized, purified, expensive ocean water. In L.A., you could tell how little money a man had by how bad he

smelled. "You don't know when you're well off," he told her. "But if you're crazy enough to want to try city life, why

don't you just move?"

She shrugged, looking surprisingly young and vulnerable. "I'm afraid," she admitted. "I guess I haven't cut the

umbilical yet. But I'm working on it." She fell silent for a moment, then said, "Asa?"

He looked at her sidelong. "Girl, even my enemies have more sense than to call me that."

"Elias then," she said, smiling.

"Eli."

"Okay."

"You tell anybody?"

"No."

That was true. She was enjoying having the secret too much to give it away. Now he had to keep her quiet.

"Why are you here?" she asked. "Why aren't you being debriefed or paraded down some big city street or something?"

Why was he not in isolation, she meant. Why was he not waiting and contending with a misery no one but him could

understand while a dozen doctors discovered what a dangerous man he was? Why was he not dead in an escape

attempt? And considering the loss of the ship, its wealth of data, its frozen, dead crew, and its diseased, living crew,

debriefing was a laughably mild name for what he would have been put through.

"What's the matter?" Meda asked softly. She had a big voice, not intended for speaking softly, but she managed. She

had come closer. God help her, why didn't she go away? Why didn't he order her away or leave himself?

She touched his arm. "Are you all right?"

His body went on automatic. Helplessly, he grasped her hand. He managed not to scratch her, and tried to feel good

about that until he saw that she had a small abrasion on the back of her hand. That was enough. His touch would

probably have been enough anyway. Eventually she would have eaten something with that hand or scratched her lip or