Vitals

by Greg Bear

  Nobody had said it was going to be easy.

  I fumbled with the ship-to-ship, changing frequencies, and finally a breathless voice answered.

  “Messenger here. Is that you, Dave?”

  I recognized Jason, the controller and mission planner for the DSV. I pressed the mike switch. “It’s Hal. Dave flaked. He’s over the side. Get a Zodiac out there—he might still be afloat.”

  “Shit.” Jason held his mike open and I thought I heard sobbing. “Are you driving the sub?”

  “She’s on autopilot.”

  “Hal, we have a bad situation. Someone’s shooting up the ship. We may have casualties. Hal?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Paul and Stan went aft about ten minutes ago. We can’t go back to the crane until they check in.”

  “Dave went nuts, Jason,” I said, eager to make clear my own tale of woe. That seemed too much for him to absorb, and I decided to skip it for the time being. “Just get me back on the ship.”

  “I don’t know how long that will take. Hang on. We’ll do our best.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and braced my hand against the inside of the pressure sphere. The sub almost rolled over.

  I buckled myself in and gripped the mike like a lifeline.

  10

  Nadia herself bobbed in the water next to the DSV and tapped the frame with a grappling hook. I waved, and she gave me a strong chin-nod back, wet black hair peeking out from under her hood, black eyes distinct even behind the mask. She made the hook fast on a lift ring and swam out of sight. When she was done with the other hooks, she clambered up on the frame. I peered up over my shoulder to see her. Behind her rose the dark stern of the Sea Messenger, and the outline of the big red crane mounted aft of the helicopter pad. I saw Jason step into a little booth out of the weather, which was getting worse.

  Then the rain sheeting down made seeing outside impossible. I felt the submarine rise from the waves, felt the waves hold us back, and with a jerk, the sub leaped out of the suck of the sea and swung in open air. Paul and Stan waited for me on the sled and prodded the Mary’s Triumph onto her skid. The sled withdrew into the stern with a grind of gears.

  Nadia jumped down to help Jason fasten the sub to the docking frame. I climbed out of the hatch with her help.

  “We can’t find Dave,” she said, her lips almost blue with cold. “Gary is out there now in a Zodiac.” She looked ill, but stood straight and spoke clearly. I fell in love right then and there, with relief and admiration and more than my share of near-death giddiness.

  “I’m sorry. What happened?”

  “We’re a mess,” Nadia said. She climbed the ladder out of the well.

  “Dave went a little nuts down there,” I said. “He tried to kill me.”

  She gave me a level look at the top of the ladder. “How do you mean, nuts?”

  “He tried to sabotage the sub. Ripped out the control stick and used it to punch the sphere.”

  “Jesus,” she said, but she didn’t sound surprised. Maybe she was in shock. She leaned against the bulkhead. “Dr. Mauritz slipped a gun on board. He killed Thomas and Sylvia. Paul and Stan tackled him right here, where we’re standing. He’s tied up in the sick bay.”

  I had spoken with Mauritz for a couple of hours the day before yesterday. “That’s stupid,” was all I could manage to say. I looked around and saw dark red spatters on the deck and across the bulkhead under an emergency light. Blood dripped from the light cage. The sight knocked me off-balance and I groped with my outstretched hand to find a clean space on the wall.

  Nadia grabbed a towel from a deserted lab, returned to the passageway wiping her face and hair, and threw me an odd, blameful look.

  I felt like a Jonah.

  “I can’t find Max,” she said, and tossed the towel back into the lab. We both heard the helicopter at the same time. She turned away with an exhausted slump of her shoulders, eyelids drooping, and said, “That’ll be the Coast Guard.”

  “Nadia, I have specimens,” I called out to her as she wobbled up the ladders to the bridge.

  “Fuck the specimens,” she shouted. “People died, Hal! Don’t you get it?” She paused at the top and her red-rimmed eyes bored into me. “Mauritz was looking for you. He wanted to kill you.”

  11

  A 250-foot Coast Guard cutter pulled up alongside the Sea Messenger. The Bell helicopter strapped onto the pad had carried two FBI agents. They were currently gathering evidence and interviewing Stan and Paul.

  Dr. Mauritz was hauled up on deck in a stretcher, past the crew mess, strapped down securely and talking a mile a minute, trying to explain that he was all right, they could let him go now. Mauritz was big-domed and balding. He had a kind of aristocratic English accent, and frankly he looked like a mad scientist. But he sounded apologetic and confused.

  He had put up a stiff fight. Stan and Paul had banged him around hard. His head was covered with bandages.

  I didn’t know how long the specimens would last in the sub. I knew they’d be kept pressurized and at the proper temperature for at least another four hours—unless something went wrong. I didn’t want to take that chance, but I also did not want to seem an insensitive asshole. The mood on the ship, understandably, was not good.

  I waited in the crew mess, sipping a Diet Coke.

  The Jonah feeling is indescribable. It’s about nothing you’ve done personally. It’s about a shadow hanging over you, an unshakable association with shit that no one understands. There I was, the closest thing to an outsider on the Sea Messenger, right in the bull’s-eye. Why would Mauritz want to shoot me? He hardly knew me. Why would Dave Press want to drown me and wreck the DSV? The DSV was everybody’s baby. Pilots would cross swords for the privilege of taking Mary’s Triumph down to the vents.

  None of it pieced together. Without a rational explanation, even the smartest of scientists reverts to a tribal suspicion of bad juju.

  Exhaustion slammed up against emotional shock. I couldn’t keep myself from shivering. Alone in the mess, waiting for the agents to work their way down the list and talk to me, I worried about the specimens.

  Jason came in and stared at me. “You all right?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Owen called Captain Burke and asked about you. He said take care of you and your work. I moved your specimens over to the aquarium. They’re okay, I think.”

  Unspoken, Jason was saying that what Montoya asked for, he got, even in the face of a police investigation. But Jason did not have to approve. “Owen knows about us, about the ship,” he continued. “It’s on TV. You sure you’re all right?”

  “Thanks for moving them,” I said, nodding like a fuzzy dog in a car’s rear window. I could have hugged him just for bringing good news.

  “What’d you find?” he asked, and bit his lip, nodding along with me. We wobbled our heads, matching rhythm, and that was too weird. I stopped.

  “Xenos,” I said.

  “Right. You were diving for xenos. Look like cnidarians to me, though. You sure you got what you were after? Dave grab them, or you?”

  “I used the suck tube,” I said.

  “Do you know Dr. Mauritz, off the ship?” Jason asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why did Dave go overboard?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You didn’t hurt him and push him over, just to hide it? You didn’t fight, I mean, and hurt him. Self-defense?”

  “No. He did it all.”

  “Did he say he wanted to kill you?”

  “No, he just started . . .” I sucked in my breath. “Trying to curse and not doing a very good job. Kind of funny, but scary, too. I better wait for the police. Don’t want this to seem rehearsed.”

  “Right,” Jason said. He got up and stuck his hands in his pockets. “We found Max. He’s dead, too. Nadia’s severely shook.”

  I just stared at him. “I’m really sorry,” I said, as if it were all my fault.

 
“Yeah.”

  Jason left, and a tall man in a blue parka came in. He was forty or forty-five, dressed, beneath the unzipped parka, in a wool sweater and khaki cargo pants, damp with sea spray. He was an FBI agent out of the Seattle Bureau, he said. His name was Bakker and he asked a lot of questions, some of which did not make sense until I realized he didn’t know I had been on Mary’s Triumph when Mauritz flipped. As well, Agent Bakker had not been informed Dave Press was missing and presumed drowned.

  The news seemed to confuse him, so he turned back his pages of notes and started over.

  “What in hell is a DSV?” he asked.

  By the end of the interview, I was ready to collapse. Bakker folded his notebook. None of the pieces fit for him, either. In his experience, scientists didn’t just go around killing each other.

  After he left, I stretched out on the long, padded bench behind the main dining table and blacked out. I should have dreamed of falling through ink, this time without the bubble, drowning in endless, stinking night. Instead, I dreamed of being out in the desert, walking beside a guy with bushy white hair, wearing a long gray shirt.

  12

  SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  The ship returned to the Port of Seattle the next morning and agents and Coast Guard investigators swarmed over her. Diligent men and women marched aboard and began stringing yellow tape and ribbon. A dozen agents with digital cameras and crime-lab kits took samples. We were instructed not to move anything, certainly not to remove anything.

  Jason intervened with the agent in charge, and he allowed Nadia and me to go down to the lab and check the specimens taken during the dive. We were accompanied by a young female agent, built a lot like Dave, I thought, her pant suit a size too small and stretched tight. She watched suspiciously from beneath a knit cap perched jauntily forward on neat cornrows, and asked a lot of questions.

  She would not miss a trick, I judged.

  Nadia did most of the talking. She had more color today, but her manner was cold and efficient, as if her emotions were running on a very low charge.

  I was trying to figure out how to get my prizes off the Sea Messenger. The ship was likely to be impounded for days, and I had no idea what would happen to them over so much time. I just wanted to haul the containers off the Sea Messenger and get them over to the lab I was renting on southeast Lake Union. I was eager to get my critters stabilized in the proper inoculants, supplied with fresh seawater, and under reliable pressure.

  Maybe it was a personal disconnect, like an emotional circuit breaker blowing, maybe it was shock. All I needed on this Earth, right now, was to document and describe the Vendobionts, if that’s what they were. Perform a few tests. Count their little fingers and toes.

  It was not that I didn’t care about the rest. I just did not have a clue how I could help Nadia feel better, or do anything for Jason. I certainly did not feel responsible for what had happened, however strange the circumstances.

  Maybe it was the Sea Messenger that was hexed.

  I peered into my cabin. The plump agent in the too-tight suit stood there with two men in plain clothes—and I do mean plain, black suits and London Fogs.

  My clothes, books, and computer were spread out on the bed, being violated.

  “Hello,” I said.

  The young agent had removed her cap and her cornrows were indeed perfect. She had the most intense and unreadable eyes, and the skin of her round face was an unblemished work of art.

  “We’re through with these,” she said, and indicated the clothes on the bed. “But we’d like to keep these.” She swung her hand—her whole upper body, as well—to indicate my computer and three textbooks.

  “The books are available on Amazon dot com,” I said. “The computer contains private information. Unless you have a specific warrant, I’d like to take it with me. I’m not under suspicion, am I?” I gathered up my few clothes and pointedly thrust them back into the travel bag, flopping over and pressing down sleeves and legs.

  “We need to establish relationships and circumstances,” she said.

  “Am I a suspect?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Do you have a warrant that lets you . . .” I looked for the right legal words, then gave up. “Fumble through private documents?”

  “No,” she said, eyes lidded with sublime nonchalance.

  “I’ll keep it neat and tidy, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if things change,” I said, shaking a little at my presumption, and at hers. I tossed the computer and the books into the bag and zipped it shut.

  I passed Nadia in the corridor as I rolled the bag on its wheels to the gangway. She was smoking a cigarette and looked dead on her feet. She glanced my way, then sharply looked aside and stubbed out her cigarette in a little can.

  I had not seen her smoke before.

  “I won’t say it was a pleasure,” she said.

  I stopped and regarded her sadly, still buzzing from my anger in the cabin. I switched the bag handle to my right hand. “I feel like a goddamned Jonah,” I said, and realized my eyes were watering. “Christ, what did I do?”

  “Nothing,” Nadia said.

  “I have no idea why Dave went crazy in the sub, or why Mauritz wanted to kill me. I really don’t.”

  She kept her face pointed toward the shadows and bleak gray concrete planes of the dock. I flashed on all the women who had ever stubbornly tried to put me aside or pigeonhole me, or blame me, with or without cause.

  “This is nuts,” I said, and tugged my ridiculous little bag toward the gangway.

  “Betty Shun wants to talk with you,” Nadia said, biting off the information like an insult. You’re being called to the principal’s office.

  I looked back, eyes wide. She was lighting up another cigarette.

  Our generation had taken up Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, reading cheap paperbacks, wearing black suits, and smoking cigarettes, like all the war-weary lemmings of the 1950s, but without their excuses.

  I felt sick.

  13

  After a bad night’s sleep on the fourth floor of the Homeaway, just blocks from the Genetron Building and my rented lab, I opened the curtains. Across Lake Union, morning fog slid over the rusty tanks and pipes and broad lawn of Gasworks Park. I stood there for five minutes, feeling fortunate.

  I was no Jonah. It wasn’t me that was hexed. I had survived, and that meant I was lucky, maybe even on the right track in this great scheme of things. Only the FBI and a couple of murders were in my way, and that pissed me off.

  Rob would have recognized my mood instantly. Prince Hal was not getting his way.

  A cell phone rang on the nightstand. Data phones in the U.S. had been screwed up for weeks with viruses. I carried four with me, on four different systems, just to make sure: a PalmSec, an InfoBuddy, and two standard Nokias.

  It was the PalmSec that was beeping. The pert little a.m. triple-tone told me two things: that I had a call, and that it was before noon. I flipped open the jacket, keyed in my unlock, and answered. “Cousins.”

  “Dr. Cousins, Betty Shun. How are you?”

  “Dandy,” I said, and regretted the flippancy.

  “We’re very sad here,” she said. “We’ve lost a lot of friends.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “We need to get together. I’ll bring along a man who also works for Owen. He wants to talk with you.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “We’re in a car in front of your hotel. We’ll take you to the Crab Cart for breakfast.”

  I had been given my marching orders. But I wanted to find out about my specimens. Time was running out.

  As always.

  14

  Betty Shun stood in the lobby, dressed in a green-leather coat and green slacks. I turned and saw a blocky, balding man in his late forties push through the men’s room door, blowing on his hands. He made sure they were dry before he offered to shake.

  “Hal Cousins, this is Kelly Bloom,” Betty introduced. Shun, B
loom, Press . . . I was seeing a pattern here, all members of the Monosyllabic Verb club. Bloom wore denim all over—denim pants, denim jacket with brass buttons, a blue-denim shirt. And Air Jordans, old but scrubbed clean.

  “Dr. Cousins, first off, congratulations,” Bloom said. “Let’s get out of here and go someplace quiet.”

  They escorted me to the drive. I had expected a limousine or at the very least a BMW, but the car parked in front of the hotel lobby, beaded with rain and speckled with mud, was a mid-nineties Ford Taurus, conspicuously purple, with a dented right fender and scrape marks all along the driver’s side.

  “Yours?” I asked Bloom. He grinned.

  “It’s going to be a long day, isn’t it?” I asked Betty. She gave me a studied smile.

  The Crab Cart was quiet and dark. In the back, under windows overlooking yachts at private moorings, the booths were separated by barriers of glass and wood. Betty ordered first, oatmeal and two eggs. Bloom had nothing, not even coffee, maintaining his ascetic posture. I ordered a bowl of Wheat Chex, toast, and a small crab omelet. Bloom smiled as I laced into my food. Betty ate half her oatmeal, both of her eggs, and patted her mouth fastidiously with the cloth napkin.

  The questions began. Bloom spoke in a pillowy bass, with a gentle North Carolina accent. He kept his hands folded on the oak tabletop. “Do you know why anyone would want to kill you?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “You’re a private investigator, aren’t you?”

  “We both work with Owen’s security detail,” Betty answered. She cocked her head at my raised eyebrow. “Did you think I was window dressing?” She laughed, a tinkling trill. “Owen can afford much prettier, just not much smarter, or more cautious.”

  “Okay,” Bloom said. “You understand we aren’t trying to go around the police investigation, and that we have no authority? You don’t have to answer.”

  “Decent of you to warn me,” I said. The corporate Seattle way—a shakedown without the hard edge.