Snake Eyes | Page 2

seventy-six pounds, brown hair and eyes, neither handsome nor ugly. But it was an old picture and could not show the snake and the fear that came with it. You don'f know it, buddy, Innis thought, but you ain't seen nothing yet.
The man came tumbling through the hatch, more or less helpless in free fall, but Innis could see him figuring it out, willing the muscles to quit struggling, quit trying to cope with a gravity that simply wasn't there. "What the hell do I do now?" George Jordan asked, hanging in midair, one arm holding on to the hatch coaming.
"Relax. I'll get you." Innis pushed off and swooped across, grabbing the man as he passed, taking them both to the opposite wall and kicking to carom them outward.
lnnis gave George a few hours of futile attempts at sleep--enough time for the bright, gliding phosphenes caused by the high g's of the trip up to disappear from his vision. George spent most of the time rolling around in his bunk, listening to the wheeze of the air-conditioning and creaks of the rotating station.
Then Innis knocked on his compartment door and said through the door speaker, "Come on, fella. Time to meet the doctor."
They walked through an older part of the station, where there were brown clots of fossilized gum on the green plastic flooring, scuff marks on the walls, along with faint imprints of insignia and company names--ICON was repeated several times in ghost lettering. Innis told George it meant the now defunct International Construction Orbital Group, the original builders and controllers of Athena. Innis stopped George in front of a door that read INTERFACE GR0UP "Go on in," he said. "I'll be around a little later."
Pictures of cranes drawn with delicate white strokes on a tan silk background hung along one pale cream wall. Curved partitions in trans-lucent foam, glowing with the soft lights placed behind them, marked a central area, then undulated away, forming a corridor that led into darkness. George was sitting on a chocolate sling couch; Charley Hughes lying back in a chrome and brown leatherette chair, his feet on the dark veneer table in front of him, a half inch of ash hanging from his cigarette end.
Hughes was not the usual M.D. clone. He was a thin figure in a worn gray obi, his black hair pulled back from sharp features into a waist-length ponytail, his face taut and a little wild-eyed.
"Tell me about the snake," Hughes said.
"What do you want to know? It's an implanted mikey-mike nexus--"
"Yes, I know that. It's unimportant. Tell me about your experience." Ash dropped off the cigarette onto the brown mat floor covering. "Tell me why you're here."
"Okay I had been out of the Air Force for a month or so, had a place close to Washington, in Silver Spring. I thought I'd try to get some airline work, but I was in no real hurry because I had about six months of post-discharge bennies coming, and I thought I'd take it easy for a while.
"At first there was just this nonspecific weirdness. I felt distant, disconnected, but what the hell? Living in the USA, you know? Anyway I was just sitting around one evening, I was gonna watch a little holo-v, drink a few beers. Oh man, this is hard to explain. I felt real funny--like maybe I was having, I don't know, a heart attack or a stroke. The words on the holo didn't make any sense, and it was like I was seeing everything underwater. Then I was in the kitchen pulling
things out of the refrigerator--lunch meat, raw eggs, butter, beer, all kinds of crap. I just stood there and slammed it all down. Cracked the eggs and sucked them right out of the shell, ate the butter in big chunks, all the bologna, drank all the beer--one, two, three, just like that."
George's eyes were closed as he thought back and felt the fear that had come only afterward, rising again. "I couldn't tell whether / was doing all this ... do you understand what I'm saying? I mean, that was me sitting there, but at the same time, it was like somebody else was at home."
"The snake. Its presence poses certain ... problems. How did you confront them?"
"Hoped it wouldn't happen again, but it did, and this time I went to Walter Reed and said, 'Hey folks, I'm having these episodes.' They pulled my records, did a physical...but, hell, before I was discharged, I had the full workup. Anyway they said it was a psychiatric problem, so they sent me to see a shrink, It was around then that your guys got in touch with me. The shrink was doing no goddamn good-- you ever eat any cat food, man? -- so about a month