"What was that?"
"Valium. God."
"Where'd you get it?"
"Look," she said, "don't give me any psychotalk about it - "
" - I was just asking."
Beth pointed to a white box mounted on the wall in the corner of the lab. "There's a first-aid kit in every cylinder. Turns out to be pretty complete, too."
Norman went over to the box, flipped open the lid. There were neat compartments with medicines, syringes, bandages. Beth was right, it was quite complete - antibiotics, sedatives, tranquilizers, even surgical anesthetics. He didn't recognize all the names on the bottles, but the psychoactive drugs were strong.
"You could fight a war with the stuff in this kit."
"Yeah, well. The Navy."
"There's everything you need here to do major surgery." Norman noticed a card on the inside of the box. It said "MEDAID CODE 103."
"Any idea what this means?"
She nodded. "It's a computer code. I called it up."
"And?"
"The news," she said, "is not good."
"Is that right?" He sat at the terminal in her room and punched in 103. The screen said:
HYPERBARIC SATURATED ENVIRONMENT
MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS (MAJOR-FATAL)
1.01 Pulmonary Embolism
1.02 High Pressure Nervous Syndrome 1.03 Aseptic Bone Necrosis
1.04 Oxygen Toxicity
1.05 Thermal Stress Syndrome
1.06 Disseminated Pseudomonas Infection 1.07 Cerebral Infarction
Choose One:
"Don't choose one," Beth said. "Reading the details will only upset you. Just leave it at this - we're in a very dangerous environment. Barnes didn't bother to give us all the gory details. You know why the Navy has that rule about pulling people out within seventy-two hours? Because after seventy-two hours, you increase your risk of something called 'aseptic bone necrosis.' Nobody knows why, but the pressurized environment causes bone destruction in the leg and hip. And you know why this habitat constantly adjusts as we walk through it? It's not because that's slick and hightech. It's because the helium atmosphere makes body-heat control very volatile. You can quickly become overheated, and just as quickly overchilled. Fatally so. It can happen so fast you don't realize it until it's too late and you drop dead. And 'high pressure nervous syndrome' - that turns out to be sudden convulsions, paralysis, and death if the carbondioxide content of the atmosphere drops too low. That's what the badges are for, to make sure we have enough CO2 in the air. That's the only reason we have the badges. Nice, huh?"
Norman flicked off the screen, sat back. "Well, I keep coming back to the same point - there's not much we can do about it now."
"Exactly what Barnes said." Beth started pushing equipment around on her counter top, nervously. Rearranging things.
"Too bad we don't have a sample of those jellyfish," Norman said.
"Yes, but I'm not sure how much good it would do, to tell the truth." She frowned, shifted papers on the counter again. "Norman, I'm not thinking very clearly down here."
"How's that?"
"After the, uh, accident, I came up here to look over my notes, review things. And I checked the shrimps. Remember how I told you they didn't have any stomach? Well, they do. I'd made a bad dissection, out of the midsagittal plane. I just missed all the midline structures. But they're there, all right; the shrimps are normal. And the squid? It turns out the one squid I dissected was a little anomalous. It had an atrophic gill, but it had one. And the other squid are perfectly normal. Just what you'd expect. I was wrong, too hasty. It really bothers me."
"Is that why you took the Valium?"
She nodded. "I hate to be sloppy."
"Nobody's criticizing you."
"If Harry or Ted reviewed my work and found that I'd made these stupid mistakes ..."
"What's wrong with a mistake?"
"I can hear them now: Just like a woman, not careful enough, too eager to make a discovery, trying to prove herself, too quick to draw conclusions. Just like a woman."
"Nobody's criticizing you, Beth."
"I am."
"Nobody else," Norman said. "I think you ought to give yourself a break."
She stared at the lab bench. Finally she said, "I can't." Something about the way she said it touched him. "I understand," Norman said, and a memory came rushing back to him. "You know, when I was a kid, I went to the beach with my younger brother. Tim. He's dead now, but Tim was about six at the time. He couldn't swim yet. My mother told me to watch him carefully, but when I got to the beach all my friends were there, body-surfing. I didn't want to be bothered with my brother. It was hard, because I wanted to be out in the big surf, and he had to stay close to shore.
"Anyway, in the middle of the afternoon he comes out of the water screaming bloody murder, absolutely screaming. And tugging at his right side. It turned out he had been stung by some kind of a jellyfish. It was still attached to him, sticking to his side. Then he collapsed on the beach. One of the mothers ran over and took Timmy to the hospital, before I could even get out of the water. I didn't know where he had gone. I got to the hospital later. My mother was already there. Tim was in shock; I guess the poison was a heavy dose for his small body. Anyway, nobody blamed me. It wouldn't have mattered if I had been sitting right on the beach watching him like a hawk, he would still have been stung. But I hadn't been sitting there, and I blamed myself for years, long after he was fine. Every time I'd see those scars on his side, I felt terrible guilt. But you get over it. You're not responsible for everything that happens in the world. You just aren't."