Ss devil you dont know, p.5
(SS) Devil You Don't Know, page 5
She ran to the ward doors. Metal-faced, securely locked, as was the kitchen. But with enough mass piled on the waiting gurney, it might just possibly be accelerated down the ward to smash the doors. And smashing the wheeled metal cot itself might slow them in getting May from the ward. Val did not need a legal opinion to conclude that, with every additional step a fresh felony, the staff of Gulfview might welcome premeditated murder. Whatever might have happened to the Fowler girl, Val did not relish seeing it repeated. She tugged at the gurney, wheeled it up the center aisle toward the holo area. Perhaps the chairs would serve, if she could pile them on, or enlist patients in her enterprise.
She could get no one to aid in her little game. Patients strolled over to watch, slack-jointed and empty-eyed, as Val managed to tip two seats up into the gurney. Whimpering with the effort, she pulled the vehicle near the ponderous holovision set, all of a meter wide and massing perhaps a hundred pounds. She reached to disconnect the wiring, but at least one patient knew what that meant. He wanted his program, and the skinny girl with frightened eyes wanted to pull its plug. He screamed, face twisted in sudden ferocity, and thrust Val away.
Val raced to the side of Laura Dunning, who seemed asleep but for the mobility of her features. "Laura, is Valium the medicine for your power? Could you make some patients help me smash those doors?"
"Dilantin's the only thing that works," came the soft reply. "I only discovered it recently. Do you have any?"
Val whirled to her cache of unused drugs beneath her pillow. They were gone. Disoriented for the moment, she looked up to see young Charles Clegg. He held capsules in one hand while trying to bite off the safety cap of the Dilantin bottle. He had seen people drink it; maybe it would taste good.
Valerie Clarke did not know she could leap so fast, with such hand-eye coordination. She flashed past Clegg in a two-handed grab and the bottle was hers. Clegg was between her and Laura, but Val thought to circle around behind beds across the ward. It was at this juncture that Dr. Robin Merkle emerged from the cell.
He scanned the ward, saw Val, and then spotted the gurney filled with furniture. He looked almost pleased. Val saw it in his face: her cover was blown.
Val held the crucial Dilantin and Merkle, the advantage. He also wielded the hypospray, which could accept pressure cartridges of anything from saline solution to curare. While he could not know Val's intention, Merkle obviously proposed to take her into custody here and now. Their eyes locked. Neither spoke. Lurene Tedder hurried to cut Val off from her narrow corridor between beds and wall.
"Easy, Rob," Lurene cautioned, and Merkle stopped to listen. Val took a step back, poised. "This li'l thing didn't get here on her own, somebody Outside will be askin'."
"If we wait, it's a sure bust," Merkle rumbled as if reasserting an old position. "On the new schedule, we can process another, oh, say eighty pounds of protein." He beamed at Valerie. "Thirty hours or so at twenty-three Celsius."
At this, even Lurene Tedder blinked. "We're gonna process these two?" Val first saw the flicker of revulsion in the woman's face, then realized what it meant to her, Valerie Clarke, and had to steady herself against fainting.
"For more enzyme. Matuase doesn't care what it feeds on," Merkle said, pleased at his logic. "These ladies will complete a perfect irony. Part of the operation, as it were."
Sickened with loathing, Val fanned a faint spark of hope that Lurene would rebel. The lump in Val's throat forbade her any speech; the pounding of her heart was physical pain. Then, with a great sigh, Lurene said, "Well, it's better tactics than planting 'em, like you-know-who," and closed in on Valerie Clarke.
The thought of herself as finely ground fodder in some unknown enzyme production phase nearly robbed Val of consciousness, but the approach of Lurene and Merkle was galvanic. Val spun and ran for the gurney, hoping to get it underway before they could stop her. A quasi-female laugh followed her like a promise of extinction. Val collided against an inert patient, reached the gurney, began to thrust it ahead of her down the center of the ward. Even as it began to roll, she saw that she was simply too small for the task.
Lurene danced almost playfully out into the aisle, hands spread before her to intercept the loaded gurney.
Val grabbed the thing she held in her teeth and hurled it at the woman, then was aware of her mistake.
Val's missile connected against Lurene Tedder's forehead, but the soft plastic bottle had little effect and Lurene diverted the gurney between two beds. Val saw Merkle stoop to retrieve the Dilantin bottle as it skittered near him. The bottle went into his pocket. She had literally hurled her last hope away, and hi a stumbling panic Val fell over the huge form of Gerald Rankine, looming in his bed near the holo.
Rankine stirred slightly and opened unfocused eyes. Val scrambled over the great form and into the holo area, now devoid of its two heaviest seats. Lurene Tedder bawled for Rhea, who trotted up the ward for his instructions.
As Val cowered behind the holovision, mindless with terror, Lurene waved Rhea around while she herself took a frontal approach. Merkle moved to cut off any escape behind the beds; and the very proximity of the three triggered Val as it might any small and cornered animal.
Val flung herself into Rhea Tedder as Lurene crashed against the holo set in pursuit. Rhea found himself grappling with a small demon, all thin sticks and sharp edges, that spat and clawed as he held on.
Recovering, the sturdy Lurene thrust herself away from the holo, already tottering on its stand from her impact, and then Lurene tackled Val in a smothering embrace. Merkle had time to laugh once as he saw Lurene's clumsy success, but he did not see the holo as it toppled onto the silently staring young Rankine.
Lifted aloft by the big woman, Val caught a glimpse of the holo set. It leaned drunkenly on Rankine's midriff, its great window facing his eyes, its picture transmuted into bursts of flickering light by the rough handling.
Val took two fistfuls of hair and wrenched, trying to tear it from Lurene Tedder's abundant mop. Val's throat was too constricted to scream and Lurene only snarled. From down the ward, then, floated a dreamlike, ecstatic moan. "Ohhhh, it's a lovely one," cried Laura Dunning, borne into an orgasmic flood of silently thundering energy.
Because Merkle was most distant from the melee, he was first to catapult himself down the aisle. Val felt muscular arms relax and, kicking furiously, vacated Lurene Tedder's shoulder. Lurene staggered, nearly fell, then began to accelerate down the center of the ward after Merkle. Rhea Tedder tried to follow but tripped over Val before he began to run.
A welter of impressions clamored in Val's head. The holo, crashing to the floor as young Rankine jerked in the throes of a truly leviathan epileptic seizure. Howls of helpless terror from Merkle and the woman, bleats from Rhea, as the three found themselves sprinting harder down the ward. Laura Dunning's cooing luxuriance in a stream of almost sexual power was lower-pitched, but Val heard it. Valerie Clarke splayed hands over her ears and blanched an instant before Merkle impacted against the great double doors.
Merkle, with a hysterical falsetto shriek, never even raised his hands. He slammed the metal door-facing with a concussive report that jolted every patient, every fixture. Head-first, arms and legs pumping, driven by two hundred and sixty pounds of his beloved protein, Dr. Robin Merkle comprised part one of Laura Dunning's battering ram.
Lurene Tedder's last scream was entirely feminine; she managed to turn her head to one side as she obliterated herself against the sheet steel.
The doors, bent under Merkle's hapless assault, flew ajar; a lock mechanism clattered into the corridor beyond as Lurene fell into the opening. Rhea Tedder, ever the rear guard, called his wife's name as he hurtled into the space. One shoulder caught a door frame with pitiless precision, hurled the door wide as the addict ricocheted into a corridor wall. Val, leaping to her feet, saw Rhea disappear down the corridor, lying on his side, still pantomiming a sprinter's gait on the floor. He did not stop for moments afterward; Val could hear the tortured wheeze of his breath, the ugly measured tattoo of his feet and arms beating against the corridor floor and baseboard.
The patients were shocked into retreat from the violence at the ward doorway, and none seemed tempted to approach it. For one thing— two—the remains of Rob Merkle and Lurene Tedder sprawled grotesquely in their way.
With all the caution of a nocturnal animal, Val rifled Merkle's lab smock. She found the hypospray intact and felt armed; then she hefted the Dilantin bottle—and in a moment's reflection, realized that she was doubly armed. As she faced her puzzle, odd pieces began to warp into place, and for the first time in many days, Valerie Clarke knew what it meant to smile in relief.
Quickly, gently Val checked for vital signs. She saw the ruined, misshapen head of Robin Merkle and knew why he had no pulse. Lurene Tedder lay dying, insensible, extremities twitching. In the hallway lay Rhea Tedder, unconscious from shock and fractures, his breathing fetid but steady. She judged that he would live. Her small joy in this judgment was proof that Val could still surprise herself. It was true that Rhea Tedder could answer crucial questions—but it was also true that he could ogle a homely girl. She made a note to tell Chris Maffei: Blessed are the easily pleased, for theirs is the kingdom of Earth.
The corridor intercom needed no special key. She punched Outside, idly musing at the closeness of help for anyone who could reach the corridor. In moments, a policewoman was taping her call.
Two minutes later Val reentered the ward. She opened the isolation cell with Merkle's keys, once again tense almost to the point of retching with thoughts of what she might find inside. May Endicott lay sprawled in fetching disarray on the cot, drugged to her marrow but apparently unhurt. That enviable body would decay one day, Val thought; but not today, at twenty-three degrees Celsius. She could see from a distance that Gerald Rankine had passed the tonic stage of his seizure, and was well into the clonic, his body jerking slightly as the effects of the monstrous seizure passed. She moved to Laura Dunning's side. It felt good to smile again.
Val wondered how to begin. "I have news for you, Laura," she said gently.
Laura was awake but, with the Valium, quite mellow.
"I know. I did it without the medicine," the blind girl said proudly.
"Well—yes and no. It's seizures by other people that bring on the power, Laura. No wonder you couldn't tell when the power would come: it isn't your power!"
Confusion wrinkled Laura's nose. "But I make people do things."
"Can you ever," Val agreed, "but not alone. You're a—a modulator, I suppose. Rankine did not get his Dilantin today; and that could've brought on a seizure by itself. You see—oh, excuse me—you understand, whenever you stole a dose of Dilantin from Rankine or that young girl, the patient who needed it was in danger of an epileptic seizure. But the surest way to bring on a seizure is a strong blinking light—and that holo set zapped poor Rankine into the grandpaw of all grand mals, thank God."
"My," Laura murmured with a secret smile, "but it was good. But you mean, I never needed the medicine myself?"
"It probably impedes you. You need a carrier wave from some strong source, and you manage to modulate it into commands. You know what electroencephalography is? Anyway, a real thunderation seizure comes with the damnedest electrical brain discharge you can imagine, far more intense than any normal discharge. Of course, that same intensity raises hell with the higher centers of that same brain.
Like trying to send Morse code through a flashlight, using lightning bolts." She raised her hands, then let them drop in frustration. "All I know is, you've gotta be sensitized in some way to modulate other people's brain discharges into commands. Normal brain activity just doesn't feature such power; those huge discharge spikes are characteristic of epilepsy. All this is simplistic, but I haven't time to detail it now." Nor understand it yet, she thought.
Laura sought Val's hand with her own. "You know something about these things? You'll stay with me?"
The idea settled over Valerie Clarke like a security blanket. "I've learned some from a man. I need to learn more." This astonishingly gifted girl needed her, Val realized. Her smile broadened as she stroked Laura Dunning's brow. "I'm going to claim Rhea Tedder went berserk and stampeded the others into that door. It's a weak story, Christ knows, but it'll accommodate the facts you can see." The ethics of her decision disturbed Val until she remembered Rhea Tedder holding her for the processing team.
A sigh from Laura: "I wish I really could see."
"Don't you? Through other people?"
As if showing a hole card, Laura said, "Kind of." Her hand gripped Val's desperately. "If I could do it better, I could help some of my friends here a lot more. Some of them are trying to climb walls in their heads, to get out to us."
It was possible, Val admitted to herself. And who would be a better tool than an honest-to-God telepath? With a machine-generated carrier wave, could Laura reinforce improved behavior patterns in a trainable MR? The possibilities were untouched, and staggering. Chris Maffei had spoken of Gulfview's problems as the devil he knew, but Val smiled at a new thought: the devil you don't know may be an angel in disguise.
"Who've you been talking to at night?" Val realized that Laura had, at the very least, known of the transmissions at her end.
"Dr. Christopher Maffei," Val answered. Curiously, it sounded flat. The name no longer held its familiar emotional lift. She considered this further.
"Can he help us—me?"
"Us." Val's correction was an implicit promise. "Yes, but he's a proud man, Laura. He'll want to make you famous." Because it'll make him famous, an inner voice added.
Slowly, Laura replied, "I don't think I want that."
"We may be more useful without it," Val agreed. "But I know Chris, and he has strong opinions." She grinned at a sudden unbidden thought. " 'Course, you could always run his opinions off a cliff—and I'm kidding, by the way."
After a long pause Laura asked, "Do you love him?"
Since Laura could probably sense a lie anyway, Val resolved to use utter candor. "Yes." With a starshell burst of insight Val added, "But now I don't think I need him much. Does that sound harsh?"
"Your thinking isn't harsh. And Dr. Maffei: does he need you?"
Put in such blunt terms, the questions brought answers Val had never formalized. They hurt. "Yes; but you see, he's never loved me much."
"I love you." Laura's admission was shy, tentative. "But I don't think it's the same, is it?"
Val chuckled. " 'Fraid not. But it's enough. Was it Vonnegut who said the worst thing that can happen to you is not to get used?" A new resolve sped Val's answer. "In a few minutes a whole raft of people will be here to turn everything upside down and set it right again. You're sedated, baby, so you be goddamn good and sedate! Keep your ability to yourself, don't force any automatic behavior on anybody, don't even hint about it—until I come for you. And I will."
The hand tightened again over Val's thinner one. "You have to leave?"
"For a while. Weeks, maybe. But you and I will figure out how you tick, and we don't want Chris Maffei diddling with your metronome so he can compose a best-selling ditty with it. Later, maybe. And maybe not. The trick is being used properly, isn't it, Laura?"
"You're the boss," Laura said meekly. And listening to police beepers in the distance, Valerie Clarke knew that she was, indeed, ready to assume the leaden mantle of decision-making. She wondered if Maffei's scrambler unit was repaired yet. It was the simplest of matters to find out, but Val could wait.
There was plenty of time for her to put Maffei to use.
Dean Ing, (SS) Devil You Don't Know
