“Write it down and send it on the modem to General O’Toole. Richard and I agreed that he would make a perfect judge. When the mission is over, he’ll compare the predictions with actuality and someone will win a lucky dinner for two.”
Dr. David Brown pushed his chair back from the table. “Are you finished with your game, Tabori?” he asked. “If so,” he added, without waiting for an answer, “perhaps we can clean up this lunch mess and get on with our schedule.”
“Hey skipper,” Janos replied, “I’m just trying to loosen things up. Everybody’s getting tense—”
Brown walked out of the hut before Cosmonaut Tabori had finished his sentence.
“What’s bothering him?” Richard asked Francesca,
“I guess he’s anxious about the hunt,” Francesca answered. “He has been in a bad mood since this morning. Maybe he’s feeling all the responsibility.”
“Maybe he’s just a jerk,” said Wilson. He too rose from his seat. “I’m going to take a nap.”
As Wilson was leaving the large hut Nicole remembered that she wanted to check everyone’s biometry before the hunt. It was a simple enough task. All she needed was to stand close to each cosmonaut for about forty-five seconds with her activated scanner and then read the critical data off the monitor. If there were no entries in the warning files, the entire procedure was quite straightforward. On this particular check everyone was clean, including Takagishi. “Nice going,” Nicole said to her Japanese colleague very quietly.
She walked outside to look for David Brown and Reggie Wilson. Dr. Brown’s hut was at the far end of the campsite. Like the rest of the individual dwellings, his hut resembled a tall skinny hat sitting on the ground. All the huts were off-white in color, about two and a half meters tall, with a circular base just under two meters in diameter. They were manufactured with super-lightweight, flexible materials that combined easy packing and storage with formidable strength. Nicole remarked to herself that the huts looked something like native American Indian teepees.
David Brown was in his hut, sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of a portable computer monitor. On the screen was text from the chapter on biots in Takagishi’s Atlas of Rama. “ Excuse me, Dr. Brown,” Nicole said as she stuck her head in his door.
“Yes,” he said, “what is it?” He made no attempt to hide his annoyance at the interruption.
“I need to check your biometry data,” Nicole said. “You haven’t been dumped since right before the first sortie.”
Brown gave her an irritated glance. Nicole held her ground. The American shrugged his shoulders, half grunted, and turned back to the monitor. Nicole knelt beside him and activated her scanner.
“There are some folding chairs over in the supply hut,” Nicole offered as Dr. Brown shifted his weight uncomfortably on the ground. He ignored her comment. Why is he so rude to me? Nicole found herself wondering. Is it because of that report on Wilson and him? No, she thought, answering her own question, it’s because I have never been properly deferential,
Data began to appear on Nicole’s screen. She carefully keyed in several inputs that permitted a synopsis of the warning data to be shown. “Your blood pressure has been too high for intermittent intervals during the last seventy-two hours, including almost all of today,” she said without emotion. “This particular kind of pattern is usually associated with stress.”
Dr. Brown stopped reading about biots and turned to face his life science officer. He looked at the displayed data without understanding it. “This graph shows the amplitudes and durations of your out-of-tolerance excursions,” Nicole said, pointing at the screen. “None of the individual occurrences would be serious by itself. But the overall pattern is cause for concern.”
“I have been under some pressure,” he mumbled. David Brown watched while Nicole called up other displays showing data that corroborated her original statements. Many of Brown’s warning files were overflowing.
The lights continued to flash on the monitor. “What’s the worst-case scenario?” he inquired.
Nicole eyed her patient. “A stroke with paralysis or death,” she replied. “If the condition persists or worsens.”
He whistled. “What should I do?”
“In the first place,” Nicole answered, “you must start by getting more sleep. Your metabolic profile shows that since the death of General Borzov you have only had a total of eleven hours of solid rest. Why didn’t you tell me you were having trouble sleeping?”
“I thought it was just excitement. I even took a sleeping pill one night and it had no effect.”
Nicole’s brow furrowed. “I don’t remember giving you any sleeping pills.”
Dr. Brown smiled. “Shit,” he said, “I forgot to tell you. I was talking to Francesca Sabatini about my insomnia one night and she offered me a pill. I took it without thinking.”
“Which night was that?” Nicole asked. She changed displays again on her monitor and called for more data from the storage buffers.
“I’m not certain,” Dr. Brown said after some hesitation. “I think it was —
“Oh, here it is,” Nicole said. “I can see it in the chemical analysis. That was March third, the second night after Borzov’s death. The day you and Heilmann were selected as joint commanders. From the breakout in this spectrometry data, I would guess that you took a single medvil.”
“You can tell that from my biometry data.”
“Not exactly,” Nicole said with a smile. “The interpretation is not unique. What was it you said at lunch? Sometimes it’s necessary to extrapolate… and speculate,”
Their eyes met for a moment. Could that be fear? Nicole wondered as she tried to interpret what she was seeing in his gaze. Dr. Brown looked away. “Thank you, Dr. des Jardins,” he said stiffly, “for your report on my blood pressure. I will try to relax and get plenty of sleep. And I apologize for not informing you about the sleeping pill.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand.
Nicole started to protest her dismissal but decided against it. He wouldn’t follow my advice anyway, she said to herself as she walked toward Wilson’s hut. And his blood pressure was certainly not dangerously high. She thought about the strained final two minutes of their conversation, after she had astonished Dr. Brown by correctly identifying the type of sleeping pill. There’s something not quite right here. What is it that I am missing?
She could hear Reggie Wilson snoring before she arrived at the door of his tent. After a brief debate with herself, Nicole decided that she would scan him after his nap. She then returned to her own hut and quickly fell asleep.
“Nicole. Nicole des Jardins.” The voice intruded in her dream and awakened her. “It’s me. Francesca. I need to tell you something.”
Nicole sat up slowly on her cot. Francesca had already entered the hut. The Italian was wearing her friendliest smile, the one that Nicole had thought was always saved for the camera.
“I was talking to David just a few minutes ago,” Francesca said as she approached the cot, “and he told me about your conversation after lunch.” Francesca kept talking as Nicole yawned and swung her legs around to the floor. “I was, of course, very concerned to learn about his blood pressure — don’t worry, he and I have already agreed that I won’t use it — but what really bothered me was he reminded me that we never told you about the sleeping pill. I’m so embarrassed. We should have told you immediately.”
Francesca was talking too fast for Nicole. Just moments before she had been in a deep sleep, dreaming of Beauvois, and now all of a sudden she was expected to listen to a staccato confession from the Italian cosmonaut.
“Could you wait a minute until I wake up?” Nicole asked crossly. She leaned around Francesca to a makeshift table and took a cup of water. She drank slowly.