Designer Genes. Brian Stableford
it was pain or terror that had brought him to that pitch of anguish.
As soon as the pain began to die down, though, he started thinking again, madly and furiously. He knew that his shoes were too soft, and that there was no way he could contort himself into such a position that he would be able to lash out at the screen with his bare heel. If he was to hit the screen again he would have to use either his fist—the left, this time—or his head.
Rick had no idea how hard his head was, or how much force he could get into a butt, but he knew that it would give him a terrible headache if the screen didn’t break. He cursed the wonderful resilience of modern materials, and the marvelous ingenuity of modern technics. He inspected the keyboard beneath the screen, wondering if there might be a weak spot anywhere there. He tried inserting his fingernails into all the cracks and crevices, but he was too well-manicured to have much effect. He thumped the keys a few times, not too heavily, just in case the keys might respond to the extra pressure, but nothing happened.
He conceded that he was going to have to hit the screen again. He tossed up, mentally, between head and hand. Hand won.
He moved right to the edge of the step, shoving Steven a little closer to the wall. Again he braced himself; again he psyched himself up. Then, perversely, he looked down at the rising tide of filth, which was now only one step down. He could see that if the screen didn’t break this time, he was going to have to pick Steven up and hold him, to keep him out of harm’s way.
He turned back towards the screen, and stared at it as though it were something utterly loathsome, which had to be destroyed. He felt that his entire nervous system was screaming—resonating with that dreadful note that only Steven could produce, and which only he in all the world could properly appreciate.
He launched his left fist at the screen, with every last vestige of his strength, howling aloud in fury.
The screen imploded, bursting into fifty or a hundred shards, some of which peppered his face before falling. Only a handful hit Steven, and none did him any damage.
Oddly enough—or so it seemed—the successful blow did not hurt Rick’s hand nearly as much as the unsuccessful one had, but the shards did indeed cut him in a dozen different places, and blood began to ooze out everywhere. The biggest, sharpest triangular shard was still stuck to the rim of the casing, but Rick pulled it out easily. Then he began poking at the machinery inside the screen. There were bare wires on display now, and circuit-boards—lots of complicated and vulnerable assemblies. He cut, slashed and scraped with gay abandon…but nothing happened. The machinery was quite dead and disconnected.
Rick was alarmed to find himself trembling. He bent down swiftly to pick Steven up, snatching him away from the turbid floodwater just before it reached the edge of the trailing shawl. Then he looked around desperately. All the thinner root-filaments were under the surface now, but there was still plenty of bare wood visible—wood that was scratchable and cuttable. But where was he to cut? Where was he to scratch?
He felt that he could no longer think, no longer plan.
Steven was still screaming, and his tiny hand grappled with Rick’s ear. The baby sounded truly desperate, as though he had somehow sensed that things were going from bad to worse, and his anxiety fed Rick’s, redoubling it yet again.
Rick held the triangular shard high in the air, with one point outwards, desperate to find some target to aim at. Carelessly, he leapt down into the foul-smelling fluid. His feet were on the floor but he was waist deep. He held Steven over one shoulder, and reached out to hack at the root-bundles near the steadily-climbing surface.
The jagged edge made a scratch, but did not cut deeply. Rick ran it back and forth as fast as he could, trying to make the cut deeper. Steven yelled in his ear, and the sound was so frightfully loud and urgent that it filled his head and brought forth tears of frustration in astonishing profusion.
He chopped and sawed and cursed for three full minutes before he suddenly realized that the surface of the flood had not swallowed up the spot he was attacking, and was no nearer to doing so than when he had started.
The flow had stopped, and the water-level had stabilized.
Rick was astonished by the wave of relief that flooded over him—a sudden realization that they might not be going to die. He did not realize how convinced he had been that he was doomed until the fear was suddenly swept away.
He threw the blunted plastic shard away, and took hold of Steven in both hands, pulling the baby around to cradle him against his chest.
“It’s all right, son!” he said, as his tears of frustration became tears of amazement. “We’re going to be all right!”
Steven’s wild yelling abated, as though the message had got through. By slow degrees, as Rick hugged the baby to him, rocking gently from side to side, silence fell. The water level did not begin to fall, but it did not begin to rise again either. There was stability; there was peace.
Steven was no longer crying and Rick was no longer weeping.
Rick stood where he was, not moving an inch, for several minutes more. Steven put his face into the hollow of Rick’s shoulder, and went to sleep, quite oblivious to the fact that the hand with that Rick was supporting his tiny bald head was still leaking blood from a dozen ragged cuts.
Then the door above them slid suddenly aside, and Rosa’s voice, utterly aghast, said: “Corruption and corrosion, Rick! What are you doing to that poor child!”
* * * *
Dr. Jauregy wasn’t licensed to practice medicine on humans but she cleaned up his cuts and bandaged his hand. She had sufficient sense and sensibility not to start telling him what a fool he’d been, and he was glad of that. He’d heard enough from Rosa, Dieter, and Chloe about what he ought to have known (that he wasn’t really in danger), ought to have thought (that the sensible thing to do was wait), and ought to have done (nothing).
At first he had been astounded by their attitude, deeply wounded by their accusative tones. It had taken him some little while to realize that they had not the least understanding of what he had been through. He had done his best to point out that hindsight gave them calculative advantages that he had sadly lacked, but they had refused to listen, and even seemed intent on blaming him for the fact that the cellar was flooded, simply because he had been down there when it happened.
Rick was still seething with frustration and annoyance. He found it quite appalling that no one seemed to have the least idea of what he had been through, but he now realized how absurd his appearance and his conduct must have seemed to anyone who had not shared his experience. He dared not try to explain how terrified he had been, because he knew that it would only make him seem ridiculous. It was bad enough to have panicked, when—a things had turned out—panic had been quite unnecessary, but trying to explain how and why he had panicked, and attempting to justify his panicking, could now only make things worse.
Now that hindsight had delivered its verdict—that he had not drowned, and therefore had never been in real danger of drowning—all that he had suffered had been for nothing.
It was all horribly unfair, but there was nothing he could say or do to defend himself.
Mr. Murgatroyd was the only one who thought of offering any kind of apology, and even that was far from satisfactory. “Altogether unforeseen,” he assured them, peering solemnly at Chloe, as though she and not Rick had been the one who had been hurt. “That’s the trouble with unprecedented situations, I’m afraid. New bugs, new symptoms. Sorry we couldn’t cope any better.”
“Do that mean you now know what it is?” asked Rick, sourly. “Or is it still a big mystery?”
Mr. Murgatroyd opened his mouth to reply, but paused because Officer Morusaki had just re-emerged from the cellar. “It’s okay,” said the IBI man. “The water level’s going down. The house can take care of it all—give it six hours and the pool will be full again. The wood will mop up all the pollutants and redirect them all back to the reclamation tank. The rootlets are fine—he didn’t do any real damage there.