Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch

As Adams collapsed, unconscious, to the ground.

—

The physician on Eisenstadt's team was young, brisk, and—unlike many I'd known—perfectly willing to admit to a certain degree of professional ignorance. "If you want the bottom line," he said, shaking his head, "it's that I can't tell you what exactly happened to him."

Eisenstadt glowered. "And that's the best you can do?"

"Oh, no," the physician said, undaunted by his superior's displeasure. "I said I didn't know what happened; that's not to say I can't treat the results." He leaned over his desk to call up a display. "Here, for instance, he shows signs of having had a mild stroke—we're already cleaning up the damage there." Another display. "Cardiac trauma. We'll probably wind up having to rebuild parts of his heart, but for the moment he's perfectly stable. Ditto for the other bits of scattered damage he sustained."

Eisenstadt nodded. "What about the woman?"

The physician shrugged. "Mild stress-related traumas in heart and central nervous system. No permanent damage, though."

"Why not?" I asked. "Because she's younger than he is?"

"That's a large part of it," the physician nodded. "Mr. Adams also had a definite predisposition to cardiac problems going into... whatever it was he went into."

"Which the stress then triggered," Eisenstadt nodded, ignoring the physician's thinly veiled curiosity. "Could you say, then, that any normally healthy person, having undergone the same stress, would come out of it all right?"

The physician cocked an eyebrow. "I'd hardly say that, Doctor—certainly not with just two casepoints to extrapolate from. It could just as easily be that Ms. Zagorin has stronger than average resistance to whatever it was happened to the two of them."

Eisenstadt considered that a moment. "All right, then," he said slowly. "Having seen what this stress does... would it be possible to somehow pretreat someone so as to minimize the resulting damage?"

The other shrugged. "If the results of the stress remain consistent, certainly. Again, having seen only two casepoints I can't guarantee that the next person won't develop something entirely different."

Eisenstadt's lip twisted. "I suppose it's a chance we'll just have to take. When can we see Ms. Zagorin?"

The physician called up another display. "Give her another few minutes, anyway," he said. "No permanent damage doesn't mean that the thing wasn't traumatic for her. Besides which, the longer you give us to wash the preventatives and diagnostics out of her system, the more coherent she'll be."

Eisenstadt nodded. "Thank you," he said.

We left the office. Calandra, along with her usual pair of Pravilos, was waiting out in the hall; without even looking at her, Eisenstadt took her arm and led the two of us down to an empty conference room. "Wait outside," he told the Pravilos briefly. Ushering us in, he closed the door.

For a long minute he just looked at us, a whole range of conflicting emotions following each other across his face. "Well?" he growled at last, somewhat reluctantly. "Let's have your opinions."

Not our report, I noted, but our opinions. Boldfacing the subjectivity of our talents. Still, he had asked, and even grudging interest was a step up. "Both Shepherd Adams and Shepherd Zagorin were in contact with one or more of the thunderheads," I told him. "There simply isn't room for fraud or error in what happened out there."

He snorted. "Much as I might wish it were otherwise, I have to agree. Assuming, of course, that the search teams find a dead thunderhead in the direction they gave us. So. The thunderheads are alive and sentient and they really can travel out of their bodies. What can you tell me about them?"

I gestured Calandra to go first. "They're clearly intelligent, first of all," she said slowly, forehead furrowed in thought and memory. "I'd guess they've been studying us for quite some time. At least as long as the Halo of God has been here; possibly since the first colonists arrived at Solitaire."

"What makes you say that?" Eisenstadt frowned.

"Their ability to use human speech apparatus to communicate, for starters," Calandra said. "Besides that—" She hesitated, looking at me.

And a piece fell into place. "The general paranoia on Solitaire," I said. "It's a subconscious resistance to the thunderheads' presence, isn't it?"

Her eyes were oddly haunted. "I think so, yes."

I could see Eisenstadt debating whether or not to pursue this line further, deciding to shelve it for the moment. "All right; so you think the thunderheads are intelligent and that they've been studying us. What else?"

Calandra took a deep breath. "Obviously... they're also the ones who've been guiding our ships to Solitaire for the past seventy years."

The muscles in Eisenstadt's jaw tightened... but the thought was clearly not a new one to him. "They're certainly the most likely candidates," he admitted. "You have anything on that besides guesswork?"

"The way their arms moved," I said slowly, replaying the contact in my mind's eye. "The muscle sequences they went through when they pointed the way to the dead thunderhead." I focused on Eisenstadt, found him looking intently back at me. "It was virtually identical to the hand movements I saw in the Bellwether's... on our trip into Solitaire system."

His eyes bored into mine. "You certain?"

"As certain as I can be," I said.

"So why, then," he asked softly, "has it taken them this long to communicate with us?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

He pursed his lips, and for a moment the room was silent. "What about Zagorin?" he asked at last. "Could she have picked up anything herself during the contact, or was she acting purely as a medium?"

"No idea, sir." I looked at Calandra. "You?"

She shook her head. "You'll just have to ask her yourself."

He nodded, an odd reluctance evident in his sense. "Yes, I'd planned on doing that. I just thought—well, never mind." He seemed to brace himself. "I suppose that... now that we know how to get through to the thunderheads, your part in this is pretty much over."

He stopped... and I saw what it was he couldn't allow himself to say. "With your permission, Dr. Eisenstadt," I said into the silence, "Calandra and I would both very much like to continue on with this. Having gone this far, we'd like to see it through." I looked at Calandra, saw she understood what I was doing, and why. "Curiosity aside, we might still wind up being of some use to you."

Relief virtually flooded into Eisenstadt's sense, all the confirmation I needed that my reading of him had been correct. To verbally acknowledge our worth and ask us to stay on had been a sacrifice of humility he hadn't been willing or able to make. But now that pride had been satisfied—now that he could see himself as doing us a favor, instead of the other way around—he could get what he'd wanted all along. "You might be of some value, at that," he agreed. "I'll pull some strings with the governor, see what she can do. In the meantime—" he glanced at his watch—"let's go talk to Zagorin. See what she remembers about her contact. If anything."

I nodded, and together we left... and it wasn't until we were out of the room that the significance of what I'd just done suddenly struck me. Barely two months ago I'd felt real agony over the ethics of using my Watcher insight to manipulate people to my wishes; now, I'd done precisely the same thing to Eisenstadt without the slightest qualms or hesitation.

For the best of motives, of course: those of protecting Calandra's life. No one can have greater love than to lay down his life for his friends... I let that scripture run over and over through my mind as we walked down the hallway with the two Pravilos. And tried to ignore another saying, nearly as old, nagging at the back of my mind. A saying that spoke of the road to hell... and how that road was paved.