Snake Eyes | Page 7

humiliation, tear, anger--George got up from the couch, went to Innis's end of the table, and leaned over him. "Did it?" he said. "What did it say about the snake, Innis?"
"It's not the snake," Innis said.
"Call it the cat," Lizzie said, "if you've got to call it something. Mammalian behavior, George, cats in heat."
A familiar voice--cool, distant--came from speakers in the room's ceiling. "She is trying to tell you something, George. There is no snake. You want to believe in something reptilian that sits inside you, cold and distant, taking strange pleasures. However, as Doctor Hughes explained to you before, the implant is an organic part of you. You can no longer evade the responsibility tor these things. They are you."
Charley Hughes, Innis, and Lizzie were looking at him calmly perhaps expectantly All that had happened built up inside him, washing through him, carrying him away He turned and walked out of the room.
"Maybe someone should talk to him," Innis said. Charley Hughes sat glum and speechless, cigarette smoke in a cloud around him. "I'll go," Lizzie said.
"Ready or not, he's gonna blow," Innis said.
Charley Hughes said, "You're probably right." A fleeting picture, causing Chancy to shake his head, of Paul Coen as his body went to rubber and exploded out the airlock hatch, pictured with terrible clarity in Aleph's omniscient monitoring cameras. "Let us hope we have learned from our mistakes."
There was no answer from Aleph--as it it had never been there.
The Fear had two parts. Number one, you have lost control absolutely Number two, having done so, the real you emerges, and you won't like it. George wanted to run, but there was no place at Athena Station to hide. On the operating table at Walter Reed, it seemed a thousand years ago, as the surgical team gathered around, his doubts disappeared in the cold chemical smell rising up inside him on a wave of darkness . . . he had chosen to submit, lured by the fine strangeness of it all (to be part of the machine, to feel its tremors inside you and guide them), hypnotized by the prospect of that unsayable rush, that high. Yes, the first time in the A-230 he had felt it--his nerves extended, strung out into the fiber body wired into a force so far beyond his own. . . wanting to corkscrew across the sky guided by the force of his will.
There was a sharp rap at the door Through its speaker, Lizzie said, "We've got to talk."
He opened the door and said, "About what?" She stepped through the door, looked around at the small, beige-walled room, bare metal desk, and rumpled cot, and George could see the immediacy ot last night in her eyes--the two of them in that bed, on this floor "About this," she said. She took his hands and pushed his index fingers into the junctions in her neck. "Feel it, our difference." Fine grid of steel under his fingers. "What no one else knows. We see a different world--Aleph's world--we reach deeper inside ourselves--"
"No, goddamn it, it wasn't me. It was, call it what you want, the snake, the cat."
"You're being purposely stupid, George."
"I just don't understand."
"You understand, all right. You want to go back, but there's no place to go to, no Eden. This is it, all there is."
But he could fall to Earth, he could fly away into the night. Inside the ESA suit's gauntlets, his hands were wrapped around the claw-shaped triggers. Just a quick clench ot the fists, then hold them until all the peroxide is gone, the suit's propulsion tank exhausted. That'll do it.
He hadn't been able to live with the snake. He sure didn't want the cat. But how much worse if there were no snake, no cat--just him, programmed for particularly disgusting forms of gluttony violent lust ("We've got your test results, Dr Jekyll")? Ahh, what next-- child molestation, murder?
The blue-white Earth, the stars, the night.
He gave a slight pull on the right-hand trigger and swiveled to face Athena Station.
Call it what you want, it was awake and moving now inside him. To hell wifh them all, George, it urged, let's burn.
In Athena Command, Innis and Charley Hughes were looking over the shoulder of the watch otticer when Lizzie came in. She was struck by the smallness of the room and its general air of disuse. Aleph ran the station, both its routines and emergencies.
"What's going on?" Lizzie said.
"Something wrong with one ot your new chums," the watch ofticer said. "I don't know exactly what's happening, though." He looked around at Innis, who said, "Don't worry about it, pal."
Lizzie slumped in a chair "Anyone tried to talk to him?"
"He won't answer," the duty officer said.
"He'll be all right," Charley Hughes said.
"He's gonna blow," Innis said.
On the radar screen,