The Season Of Passage Part 42

'Friend,' she interrupted. 'What's my name?'

[Lauren.]

'Have you ever called me Lori before?'

[Yes, Lauren. Minutes ago, when you were resting in your hibernaculum, I called you Lori.]

'Why?'

[Because my basic programming had been overridden by a transposition of alien concepts...]

'Stop. I believe you. Is Gary still asleep?'

[Yes, Lauren.]

'Could you kill him for me using his hibernaculum?' she asked.

[No, Lauren. My basic programs forbid such an action.]

'What if I tell you Gary is trying to kill me?'

[You may tell me that.]

'Gary is trying to kill me. Now can you kill him for me?'

[My basic programs forbid such an action.]

'But don't you have to protect me?'

[Yes, Lauren. It is one of my prime functions. It is also one of my prime functions to protect Gary.]

'Who's more important?' she asked, not really expecting an answer.

[Gary is more important as far as the mission is concerned.]

'What if I told you Gary is a Martian?'

[You may tell me that.]

'Gary is a Martian. He's no longer Gary. He just looks like Gary. He's dangerous. Manipulate the flow of blood through his hibernaculum in such a way that it kills him. That is a direct order, Friend. Do it now.'

[I cannot, Lauren.]

'Why not?'

[Your remarks are not logical. You have not given me reason enough to override my basic programs.} 'I told you, Gary is not Gary. He's a f.u.c.king Martian!'

[There are no f.u.c.king Martians, Lauren.]

It was useless arguing with a machine, even when he was on your side. She considered having Friend rouse Mark, but that would take hours, and Mark would be the last one in the solar system capable of killing Gary.

'Friend, do you still have control of the Hawk's systems?'

[No, Lauren.]

She had foreseen the possibility before she had set off the dynamite. It meant she was locked out of the Nova. She would have to crawl out the hole into s.p.a.ce and make her way to the Nova's exterior airlock. She ordered Friend to prepare for her unorthodox entry and undid her seat belts.

The rip created by the blast was wide and Lauren had no trouble making her way into the starry night. Immediately she began to drift, though, and had to grab for her very life. A false step now and she would join the family of asteroids. In the dark she searched for handles, but in designing the Hawk's nose, the engineers had been concerned with other qualities besides EVA anchors. However, as she rounded the ship's top point, raw sunlight burst before her over the hull and she was able to find protrusions to grab hold of. She turned her back on the harsh light and pulled herself toward the Nova. Mars shone to her port side, approximately four times as large as the Moon as seen from Earth, and a hundred times more visible than she would have preferred. For a moment Lauren suffered from the illusion that they were actually returning to the red planet, and not racing away from it at thousands of miles an hour. It was not a pleasant illusion.

Approaching the Nova, Lauren noted where the antenna dish had been sheared off. What a fool she had been to think the pinpoint collision was an accident! Torn metal drifted near where the antenna had attached, standing at odd angles in the windless cosmos, casting hard shadows on the ship's silver hull. Repair was out of the question, but she was one fool that was learning fast.

When Lauren reached the Nova's airlock her fatigue caused by the growing strength of the Antabolene in her bloodstream came within an inch of overwhelming her. It was all she could do to drag herself inside the airlock and hit the right b.u.t.ton. But as the atmosphere tore against her pressure, she did doze, even though she knew it could be her death to do so. But perhaps it was that fear that brought the dream, for it was hideous. The cosmonaut's gouged eyes floated in a sea of red lava, searching for her on a molten sh.o.r.e. Only now they were beautiful blue eyes, like Jennifer's. They were searching for her to show her what was left of her sister's body. Ashes, Lori, burnt ashes. And it's your fault.

Lauren awoke with a scream in her throat.

She ordered Friend to open the airlock door, and drifted into the axis of the Nova. She floated weightless at the center of the ship, yet weightlessness didn't keep her from shaking. When she came to the ladder that led to the rim, where the hibernaculums were, she told herself that Gary was already dead, that he had been murdered on the frozen Martian plateau. Very good, my love. Drink all you want. There's lots. She began to weep, contemplating what was to come.

'Is he still asleep, Friend?' she asked.

[Yes, Lauren.]

Lauren climbed toward the hub. The invisible threads of gravity returned along with the weight of the final confrontation. Time pa.s.sed slowly, yet all too soon she stood next to his body. It was only a body, she told herself, a helpless vehicle possessed by a hateful spirit of ancient origin. Yet she did not believe it. He was still Gary to her: the boyish face that would never grow up; the curly dark hair she always wanted to run her fingers through; the strong muscles that were always ready to wrestle with her. He appeared so frail to her right then, fast asleep with half of his left arm missing. Gary had made no cowardly decision to live forever. He had trusted in her wisdom. Maybe she was wrong, after all. She had been wrong so many times already. Maybe he wasn't a Martian ...

No!

She couldn't listen to the arguments, especially her own. If she had not argued with Jim in the first place, there might have been a few more of them returning home. Gary was dead. She was only giving sustenance to a mirage to think otherwise. But now there was a gruesome decision to be made. How was she supposed to do it? She was no Van Helsing and she had nothing to make into a wooden stake. Yet did the exorcism need to be so messy? When the flesh was destroyed, surely the possession vanished. Legends-they were only stories. Plus she'd never read a vampire story that praised a laser bolt above a wooden stake, yet Ivan and Jessica could have testified to the advantages of high-tech hardware.

Lauren's fatigue made it difficult to think clearly. But the limits of the flesh, she kept saying to herself. The limits of the flesh. The physical laws of the universe didn't have to all be tossed out just because there were vampires running around on the fourth planet. If she killed him, she killed him. He would be dead, totally dead. It didn't matter how she did it. There was no way she was sticking something sharp through his chest. The government would lock her in a tiny room for the rest of her life if they saw that she had desecrated Gary's body.

Finally convinced she knew what she was doing, Lauren crossed to her medical cabinet. There she climbed out of her pressure suit and stood scantily clad before the rows of drugs. There were so many ways to kill a man She needed something simple, something she might be able to explain away as a hibernaculum failure. She picked up a bottle of pota.s.sium. A high dose of pota.s.sium would overload the heart by backing up the kidneys and toxifying the blood. Simple. Neat. Perfect.

Lauren reached for a syringe and stabbed the needle through the cork at the top of the bottle. She drew off ten cc's, two hundred milli-equivalents, enough to kill a dozen men. She would tell NASA it had been a very nasty hibernaculum failure. She also grabbed a scalpel and put it in her pocket. If Gary tried to get up, she would slit his throat wide open and to h.e.l.l with what NASA thought.

Lauren crossed back to Gary's hibernaculum. There she leaned over the clear lid and deactivated the artificial kidney mechanism. She couldn't have the pota.s.sium filtered out of his system as quickly as she put it in.

She was having a hard time. Her hands trembled. Her vision blurred. She took hold of the tubes that circulated his blood. She stared at his blood. It looked so red, so human. She took her syringe and thrust the needle into the tube leading into his vein and began to pump the pota.s.sium into his system: one cc, two cc's, three cc's.

[Lauren, are you awake?]

T know, Friend,' she said.

[Lauren, Gary's heart is under...]

'I know,' she repeated, hysteria entering her voice.

Eight cc's. Nine cc's. Ten cc's.

The syringe was empty.

An alert began to scream. A red light flashed off and on beside his hibernaculum. It pulsed in the cold dark of the room like a bleeding artery. Lauren stared at the monitors above Gary's sleeping form. The green wave that recorded the rhythm of his heartbeat jumped. Gary's body jumped with it.

[Lauren, there is an emergency situation...]

'Shut up!' Lauren cried. She bowed her head. 'There's nothing I can do,' she whispered.

Suddenly the noise of the alert stopped. Lauren looked up. The green wave had gone flat. The other lines followed quickly. Gary lay perfectly still. He was not breathing. He was dead. Nothing was going to use him anymore.

' Tell me that I'm the most handsome astronaut in the solar system.'

Jim, Bill, Jessie, Gary, and Jennifer - the blood of all of them was on her hands, one way or the other. She dropped the empty syringe on the floor and limped into the adjacent room, to her hibernaculum. She crawled inside it and attached the tubes to her shunt. She closed the lid. She told Friend to put her under immediately. Then she tried to relax and let the Antabolene take effect. But the sleep she had held off with such difficulty was long in coming. Finally, however, in the end, she began to drift off.

Then a second red alert jerked her awake.

Lauren opened her eyes and looked at her monitors.

The emergency was in Mark's hibernaculum!

'Friend?' she said with great effort. 'What's happening?'

There was no answer.

'Friend?'

Nothing. Lauren tried to get up but she was too weak. She fell back down. Before she did, however, she thought she detected motion at the edge of her vision. But that was impossible. Surely...

She studied Mark's monitor more closely. The flow of his blood into the cleansing filters was weakening. And something was interfering with his breathing. Carbon dioxide was acc.u.mulating in his blood. He wasn't getting enough air. Again Lauren tried to sit up. This time the top of her head banged the lid of the hibernaculum. She tried raising her arms and pushing the gla.s.s open, but her muscles wouldn't respond. She fell back again. Helpless, she watched Mark's vital signs plummet. He was having severe spasms in his diaphragm. It was as if he were being smothered. And he was losing blood somehow.

Blood! It's the only thing the dead live for.

'Friend!' Lauren cried. Her voice barely rose above a whisper. The computer didn't answer. Friend's ears had been boxed, and in an awful instant, Lauren knew by who -by what. Still Mark's monitor held her attention. The fatal pattern was the same as a few minutes before. The green waves jumped and danced. Then they slowed down, and finally went flat. The red alert ceased. The ship was silent again.

Mark Kawati was dead.

The legends - only stories, she thought. But ignore them at your own risk. She should have found herself some wood.

' Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place the point over the heart, and the hammer in your right. Strike in G.o.d's name, so that all may be well with the dead that we love, and that the un-Dead pa.s.s away.'

Gary had read her the pa.s.sage.

Gary.

The Vampire had risen.

Gathering the last of her failing strength Lauren threw herself at the lid of the hibernaculum. It was no good. She fell back helpless, straining her eyes toward the dark doorway through which would walk the most terrifying of mankind's nightmares.

She heard a sickening thud.

A body had been dropped to the floor.

Then he was before her, standing in the shadows. He wore only baggy shorts. His skin was abnormally white. He grinned with a mouth full of bloodstained teeth.

'h.e.l.lo, Doc,' Gary said.

Lauren screamed.

He walked toward her.

THIRTY-THREE.

His manner was arrogant, the c.o.c.kiness of the already d.a.m.ned, who had nothing to lose. He paused above her hibernaculum, admiring her body with a ferocious grin, and then thrust back the lid. The smell that a.s.sailed her nose was like that of the pit. He reached down and touched her bare thigh. Her abdomen cramped involuntarily, as if it were suddenly filled with dry ice. His hand was hard, very cold.

Don't touch me!

'But you're dead,' Lauren cried weakly. 'I killed you.'

His grin widened, the way Ivan's had when they said something that amused him. 'Exactly,' he said. He let go of her leg and opened the porthole above her bed, the one through which she had first gazed upon Mars. Red light bathed his face, magnifying the faint lines of hatred and despair in his expression. A drop of Mark's blood fell from his teeth and splashed her naked leg. The blood was warm.

'Sweet Lori,' he said. 'You've been a bad girl, very naughty.' He looked down at her with eyes that reminded her of a snake. The pupils were hopelessly out of focus. It was as if he saw her through something other than a human body, through something from the outside. 'I'm afraid the time has come to pay for your sins.'

He backed off and leaned against a coolant pipe on the opposite side of the room. Except for the light from the receding planet outside the window, which shifted from the floor to the ceiling and back again as the Nova rotated, it was dark. Lauren twisted her head with effort, anxious to keep him in her field of view. She caught sight of an open hand lying on the floor in the doorway. Mark. Gary noted her gaze.

'I know what you're thinking, Lori,' he said sympathetically. 'You're worried that Mark isn't feeling well. You shouldn't. He's dead, and he's going to remain that way.' He chuckled. 'I had to kill him. It was necessary, and I enjoyed it. I should tell you of the method I used. I put my hand over his mouth, and I dare say he began to have trouble breathing. He turned a pretty blue. Then he woke up and gave me the strangest look. He didn't understand what was going on, even after all we had told him. But I made it clear to him. I removed one of his tubes and helped myself to a little drink. Then he understood. He got all excited. It was a shame he was in no shape to do anything about it. He pa.s.sed away before I got my fill.' Gary paused and Lauren could see his teeth in the shadows. 'I guess you could say I'm still thirsty, Doc'

Lauren pressed her hands on the sheet beneath her with the intention of giving herself a hard push so that she could sit up. It was then her wrist brushed against the scalpel in the back pocket of her shorts, wedged between her b.u.t.t and the sheet. She glanced at Gary, who was now preoccupied with rummaging through his personal locker. Carefully, she began to ease the handle of the blade into her palm.

He found what he was looking for. He turned and faced her, Dmitri's bottle of wine, in his hand. 'You might wonder why Mark won't be joining the club,' he said.

'Unfortunately, we don't have enough sacrificial wine for two baptisms. Right now - the shape this corpse is in - I can't spare a drop of my own blood. The wine will have to do, until we reach the Garden.' He grinned. 'Let me find a gla.s.s. We'll have a toast, to my manhood, and the pleasure you will give me.'

'I don't understand,' she whispered. She had the knife out of her pocket, but the blade was pointed the wrong way. She began to slowly rotate. Gary stepped near. He held the lip of the bottle above her bare legs, tilting it at a slight angle. She didn't know what would happen if he poured it on her and she didn't want to find out. 'Don't,' she pleaded. 'Please, don't.'

He took back the bottle and chuckled. A blast of fetid breath hit her in the face. 'But this is an honor, Lori. It's an honor you've earned. This is the fulfillment of your destiny.'

Lauren shook her head. She tried to concentrate on the scalpel. She did not believe he could see it on the other side of her leg. 'I didn't make any decision,' she said. 'You can't do this tome.'

'That is where you are wrong. You did decide, Lori, when you began to kill. First there was Ivan-what a mess-and then Bill.' His grin vanished and was replaced by a look of contempt. 'Commander Bill - that coward. He was afraid of his wife. He let her flee. He ignored his duty. We are better off without him.' His grin returned. 'But then there was the hamburger you made of your friend Jessie. To tell you the truth, she hadn't even joined the club yet. You were a bit trigger-happy when it came to poor Jessie.'

'You lie.' Could it be true?

He nodded, reading her thoughts. 'I never lie to those who please me, as you certainly will.' He paused to uncork the bottle with his teeth. He found a gla.s.s on a shelf behind him and placed it on the edge of her hibernaculum. He poured out two ounces of sparkling red wine. He continued, 'Your exploits were many, but none marked you for our club as clearly as your treatment of me. I was a sorry sight when I reached the top of the ladder after the wave, what with my broken arm. But there you were waiting for me in the dark, your laser pointed right at my heart. We can only thank G.o.d the laser wasn't loaded. And then there was this wine. You had already cut off my arm for your own amus.e.m.e.nt. One would have thought that would have satisfied your desire for gore. But no, you had to go for the wine, the d.a.m.n wine.' He hesitated, and when he spoke next a faint sadness entered his voice. 'I trusted you, Lori, that was my decision. I noticed you never drank any of the wine.'

Lauren felt guilt atop her terror. She relaxed her grip on the scalpel. He spoke of himself as different than Ivan and Bill. The only thing that could have made the difference was the continuing reality of the host's body. In some way, she thought, Gary must still be alive inside the. monster.