Her eyes flared open to stare wildly at the ceiling.
Clutching the bedclothes, she pressed the fists up against her face and cried out:
“No! NOOOO!
God, I won’t!”
Paul backed out of sight and pressed himself against the wall.
A knot of desolation tightened in his stomach.
He looked around nervously.
A nun, hearing the outcry, came scurrying down the hall, murmuring anxiously to herself.
A plump mother hen in a dozen yards of starched white cloth.
She gave him a quick challenging glance and waddled inside.
“Child, my child, what’s wrong!
Nightmares again?”
He heard Willie breathe a nervous moan of relief.
Then her voice, weakly—
“They… they made me… touch… Ooo, God!
I want to cut off my hands!”
Paul fled, leaving the nun’s sympathetic reassurance to fade into a murmur behind him.
He spent the rest of the day and the night in his room.
On the following day, Mendelhaus came with word that the boat was not yet ready.
They needed to finish caulking and stock it with provisions.
But the priest assured him that it should be afloat within twenty-four hours.
Paul could not bring himself to ask about the girl.
A monk brought his food—unopened cans, still steaming from the sterilizer, and on a covered tray.
The monk wore gloves and mask, and he had oiled his own skin.
There were moments when Paul felt as if he were the diseased and contagious patient from whom the others protected themselves.
Like Omar, he thought, wondering—“which is the Potter, pray, and which the Pot?”
Was Man, as Seevers implied, a terrorized ape-tribe fleeing illogically from the gray hands that only wanted to offer a blessing?
How narrow was the line dividing blessing from curse, god from demon!
The parasites came in a devil’s mask, the mask of disease.
“Diseases have often killed me,” said Man.
“All disease is therefore evil.”
But was that necessarily true?
Fire had often killed Man’s club-bearing ancestors, but later came to serve him.
Even diseases had been used to good advantage—artificially induced typhoid and malaria to fight venereal infections.
But the gray skin… taste buds in the fingertips… alien microorganisms tampering with the nerves and the brain.
Such concepts caused his scalp to bristle.
Man—made over to suit the tastes of a bunch of supposedly beneficent parasites—was he still Man, or something else?
Little bacteriological farmers imbedded in the skin, raising a crop of nerve cells—eat one, plant two, sow an old actor in a new field, reshuffle the feeder-fibers to the brain.
Monday brought a cold rain and stiff wind from the Gulf.
He watched the water swirling through littered gutters in the street.
Sitting in the window, he watched the gloom and waited, praying that the storm would not delay his departure.
Mendelhaus smiled politely, through his doorway once.
“Willie’s ankle seems healing nicely,” he said. “Swelling’s gone down so much we had to change casts.
If only she would—”
“Thanks for the free report, Padre,” Paul growled irritably.
The priest shrugged and went away.
It was still raining when the sky darkened with evening.
The monastic dock-crew had certainly been unable to finish.
Tomorrow… perhaps.
After nightfall, he lit a candle and lay awake watching its unflickering yellow tongue until drowsiness lolled his head aside.