Juanito had lost track of what day it was. He muttered to himself and wiped the cold sweat off his brow with a sleeve as he examined the room for what seemed like the hundredth time since his incarceration. There was a locked door, an unbreakable window, two hospital beds including the one they added for him after his capture, and the medical equipment hooked up to Margarita.

Two large, threatening-looking men in security uniforms delivered food through the door. They made him stand at the far corner of the room with his back to them, hands on the wall. One brought a food tray just far enough into the room to permit the door to close while the other took just two steps into the room, gun pointed unswervingly at Juanito’s back. Before entering, he seemed to take pleasure in standing in front of the picture window while he checked the clip to show Juanito that the gun was loaded and that the safety catch was off.

The entire time he had been imprisoned, Margarita had not wakened once. Where her breathing had originally been shallow but regular like a normal sleeper, it was now labored and erratic. Where her skin had initially had a slight greenish hue to it, now it was the rich green of the average houseplant. Where her skin had been creamy and smooth, it was now pocked with hundreds of small oozing boils.

Despite his pleas, the only treatment provided his wife was the life support she had been on when he first arrived; that and regular bloodletting that also included Juanito and that he assumed was being used for some type of lab work. In fact, no one would speak to him, instead using simple to understand sign language such as a pointed gun. Juanito had been feeling dizzier and dizzier from meal to meal but fought to continue pacing from one end of the room to the other. The shadowy reflection in the picture window showed a man with vibrantly green skin slowly collapsing to the floor.

“I have yet to see your report Dr. Nevrith.” The voice was quiet and cheerful but the eyes belied the sincerity of the Security Chief’s smile.

“I need to examine the bodies. It’s the only way to determine the effects of the spirochete on the host’s body.”

“You have a body, the boy’s.”

“But the boy is dead and so is the spirochete. It seems to disintegrate quickly in a nonliving body. There’s so little left I can’t even match it to any of the known variants of Quicksilver flora. I need to see what it does to a human body.”

“I will provide you with blood samples and symptomology.”

“That’s not good enough. I need to examine an infected human being to see what the spirochete does to a body over time.”

“No, you don’t, doctor. The bodies of the other two infected humans are no longer available. Now you need to find a way to kill it. Later, when we can control it, we’ll worry about what else it does to the human body.”

“If that’s all you want,” he said bitterly. “Just make sure any infected human is ‘disposed of’ like they were and there will be no problem.”

“Very funny doctor. Go back to work. I’m busy.”

It was one of the rare dark periods on Quicksilver when Verne, the gas giant sun that Quicksilver circled, and both Vares, Quicksilver’s moons, were below the horizon. The Immigrant Processing building was noisy as only an empty building can be, with none of the sounds of human habitation, just the pings of heat contraction and the groans of durasteel readjusting to seismically-induced settling. The guards had made their rounds about fifteen minutes earlier and Dan Nevrith had just finished the last of his pre-departure cleanup when he heard the sound. It was faint and, at first, he dismissed it as his imagination, but it would not go away and he finally decided to figure out what it was. However, that was not very easy. In fact, it was actually easier to decide what it was not. It was not the building and it was not the shuffling of the guards as they moved from key site to key site. It did not sound mechanical and it did not sound like any of the usual weather related events. It sounded like...like...he could not tell. With a sigh, Dan stood and began wandering up and down the building’s hallways. He knew he would not be able to rest until he knew what the noise was.

Dan had become a scientist because of his curiosity. His mother had always told him about how “curiosity killed the cat,” but she had never told him what a cat was. This forced him to look it up and discover that it was a nearly extinct species of fur-covered animal that minimally coexisted with man. The same curiosity that led him to discover what cats were and that led him to become a scientist now prompted him to listen and wonder.

He wandered aimlessly, but ever closer to the noise. It now sounded like a faint bell chime. A few more turns and it sounded like a large object vibrating, as if being struck to an irregular rhythm. There was melodiousness to the sound that still made him think of a chime, but he was now sure it could not be that.

One more corner and there was a light coming from a doorway. Dan was about to turn into the light when he heard the shuffling gait of the night security guard. Quickly making a note of the hallway and door, Dan silently headed back to his office. Babs was already unhappy with him for disagreeing with her and he did not want to give her paranoid mind more reason to distrust him.

Back at his temporary lab, Dan quickly packed and headed for the main exit. At the exit, he stopped briefly to talk to the guard so there would be no question that he had left. After the door was unlocked so he could leave, Dan quickly left the spaceport and headed to his office to check on his new specimen. The Security Chief’s summons and his consequent frenetic efforts to provide the answers she demanded had prohibited him from returning to his greenhouse/office for the past three days.

Dr. Nevrith made it through the new security check that had been set up at the gate nearest his lab without incident and then trudged off down the gravel road. It was only a few hundred paces before he reached the turnoff for his lab, and was surprised to see that the automatic lighting had failed. Where he should have seen the glow of industrial size glow lights, there was darkness.

Stopping at the front entrance, he slapped the light switch but nothing happened. “Damn,” he muttered to himself, “the power’s out again.” Rather than try working in the darkness, he turned and shuffled tiredly home, missing the faint sound of rustling leaves inside the greenhouse.

Juanito woke with a gritty taste in his mouth and feeling terribly cold despite the perspiration pouring off his body. Raising a nearly fluorescent green hand to wipe the crust off his eyes, he shivered violently as he turned over and scrunched further under the covers. Too cold to go back to sleep and too ill to return to his routine of pounding against the durasteel picture window, he listened to the now familiar sounds of the room. Beside the bed of his wife, the life support monitor was beeping. He could hear her breathing, syncopated between his own slower breaths. There was a fan bowing somewhere inside the walls, because he could faintly hear the motor under the slightly louder rsh of the air through a vent somewhere above him. Finally, there were the sounds of the building as it gently shifted and flexed. There’d been another earthquake last night, and wherever he was, it was settling into a new equilibrium with the restless surface of Quicksilver.

He felt strangely calm, perhaps because of his own illness; whatever was happening to his wife, it was happening to him as well, so he knew they’d be together as long as the people who held the keys still feared them. When they came into the room, they were dressed in biohazard suits, shadowed by armed guards, and both... nurses? technicians? and guards were visibly nervous, moving very carefully lest they snag their suits on something and be exposed to whatever was making them sick. As much as it could be in this prison, all was right with the world...or was it?

Something was wrong. Juanito was not exactly sure what to do. He heard a rattling wheeze, then another, and then one last wheeze, louder than the ones before. Then, there was nothing, and a shrill wailing alarm tone from beside Margarita’s bed. In an instant, he was beside his wife, cajoling as he pushed desperately on her chest trying to get her to resume breathing. In the background was the continuous shrill tone of the alarm as the life support machine gave raucous testimony to the stillness of her heart.

“Margarita, querida mia, my sweet pearl.” Juanito sobbed as he held his wife’s limp head in his arms, kissing her green lips and crying. “Vuelve, por favor. Come back to me. ¡Vuelve a mí, tu amigo más fiel! Alma mia, my soul, ¡tu no me dejes solo!”

Copyright © 1993, 2010, 2011 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION:

To my loving wife, Betty. She completes me.