Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

“You aren’t afraid they’ll think we’ve been drinking?” Gavein said to the doctor. Being the principal here, he could take the liberty of joking.

“You’re right,” agreed Hepditch, opening a window. “But it will be colder now.”

Chechug swore again. “The blasted transformer is out. I’ll call maintenance. It’s probably from the quake we had.”

That morning, one could definitely feel it. Even the lamps shook. Earthquakes were common only in Ayrrah.

“What now? We go back?” Gavein wasn’t eager to have that big needle embedded in a vein in his thigh.

“I suppose…,” said Hepditch, hesitating. “We’ll start again tomorrow, at twelve. The other room will have to be made ready.”

“The DS isn’t doing so well, is it?”

Gavein’s remark drew no response.

They wheeled him down the corridors on a hospital gurney, per regulations. He would have preferred to walk, but they said no. Winslow pushed this time.

Sixty-three people had died in the last twenty-four hours. In forty-eight cases, Medved’s group established a clear link to Gavein; in the others, the link was unclear, the facts unavailable. Until evening, idiotic sitcoms were shown.

Winslow came to give Gavein an injection for his radio tomography. It turned out that the schedule had been changed; the x-raying was moved to later, because the MRI would be done on him early the next morning.

She handed him a bunch of pills he had to swallow first. Because he grimaced at her as he swallowed, the last pills stuck in his throat, and he choked. He strained and wheezed, while Winslow stood by, seemingly not knowing what to do. Then he remembered an old trick: he put his hands on the floor near a wall and kicked up to stand on them, his feet resting on the wall. He coughed out the obstruction: two colored tablets, their coating half dissolved. He got to his feet, red in the face and covered with sweat.

“Bad to choke like that,” said the nurse. “Every year, a number of people die from choking.”

“You can’t be serious,” he said with a sour smile. “People actually died before I got here?”

Winslow prepared the injection, a cloudy brown fluid in a vial with a cork. Gavein wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of this dark stuff entering his bloodstream. Winslow inserted the needle through the cork and, holding it to the light, carefully drew the fluid into the syringe. She squirted a few drops from the needle.

Suddenly the building shook. The vibration was so strong that some plaster crumbled from the ceiling. Losing her balance, Winslow put her hand on the glass table for support. The table, though on wheels, didn’t roll away under her considerable weight; it tipped. From its surface slid beakers, stirring rods, spatulas, test tubes, syringes. Unable to control her fall, Winslow stuck herself with the needle she was holding and in addition pressed the plunger.

“Now they can give you an MRI,” Gavein joked, helping her up.

The second shock wave was stronger than the first. Again a rain of plaster fell. Gavein found himself on the floor beside the nurse.

“This, too, is my doing,” he said with a grin.

Winslow waved away his humor. Their dislike was mutual; it wasn’t time yet for them to call a truce.

The quake evidently bothered her less than the fact that she had injected herself. She looked at the spot of the puncture.

“It all went in… all that shit went in,” she muttered.

“You got a bubble? I don’t know about these things, but I would think you’d feel it.”

“Damn. Oh damn. You wait here. Dr. Barth!” she yelled into the hallway.

A name Gavein didn’t know. Through a window he watched the frantic activity of DS personnel trying to repair the damage from the seismic shocks. Some were in white lab coats, some in the green of military uniforms, and some in the gray coveralls of workers. They swarmed around a small bunker in the courtyard. In the distance gleamed the dome of the energy plant that powered the DS complex, and beyond that, on a gray horizon, were the buildings of Davabel.

The last shocks had opened a crack that was several meters deep and about two meters wide. It went across the whole complex. In its path, one building had collapsed, the telephone center. The difference in height between the two sides of the crack was about a meter. The other buildings were not touched, but the underground plumbing and power lines had been broken. When the emergency power came on, there was light again in the night. All the experiments were halted. Instead of meals, dry rations and juice in cartons were distributed.

The television news service reported that the epicenter lay exactly underneath the Division of Science. The land toward the sea had sunk a meter, but another commentator said that Davabel was rising. (Ezzir related, with a chuckle, that his colleagues all feared that the division complex would be swept away by a raging sea at the command of David Death.) Another expert on the screen explained that the boundary between the tectonic plates of Davabel and Ayrrah lay exactly in this location. But this was conjecture only; no one knew the geology of the region that well. Only in Ayrrah had anything resembling a science of seismology been developed. The decision was made to consult the experts of that Land, but such consulting would take time, because although questions were sent to Ayrrah directly by plane, the answers to them could come only by way of Llanaig and Lavath.

Gavein received the recording of the next phone call to Ra Mahleiné. He listened as she gave an account of her daily aggravations and worries, but something seemed wrong. He tried not to respond emotionally to her voice but, instead, to follow only the sense of what she said. When he did this, it was obvious. He had heard these sentences before: they had been taken from previous tapes. He noticed now the subtle differences in tone among the different recordings.

He trembled with anxiety. Debating quickly what to do, he came to a decision. He pushed the alarm and jammed the button with a matchstick. He sat back on the bed and planned his strategy.

Aurelia, the nurse on duty, was the first to come running. She was young, thin-lipped, skinny.

“Please stand by the window and wait,” he told her in a voice of authority. He didn’t want them to confer before they spoke to him.

A little later, Saalstein ran in, his lab coat flapping.

“I’ll explain in a moment,” Gavein said. “Please wait over there,” he added, pointing. “And button up your coat.”

Two more came running: a young physician he didn’t know, wearing glasses and with a pinched rodent face, and Nurse Nylund, the only white nurse he had seen so far at the DS. Slender and tall, she had white eyebrows, pink skin, and a hundred freckles.

Pinched Mouth started to say something, but Gavein silenced him with a gesture.

“I’ll explain in a moment. Where is Dr. Ezzir?”

“He got a cold. Tomorrow his leave is up,” said Saalstein. “Are you—?” he began, but Gavein interrupted.

“Will one of you please explain the telephone tape cassettes to me, or must I call Siskin or Thompson?”

“What cassettes? I don’t understand,” said the physician.

“And you are?”

“Dr. Barth.”

“The last telephone recording of my wife, Dr. Barth, was a fabrication. I want to hear the actual recording. Do you have authorization to make that happen, or do I need to talk with your superiors? But perhaps someone else will come.”

Gavein felt that he had hit a nerve.

Dr. Barth began to stammer.

“No point,” Saalstein said to him. “We should tell him the truth.”

Pinched Mouth underwent a transformation, as if touched by a wand. He turned very red. “If you insist, Saalstein. But it’s on your head. “