And not only did he like Fabrini’s sudden pioneer resourcefulness, but he liked his sudden positive turn of mind. He’d been scared before, Cook knew. Bad scared… and who hadn’t and who still wasn’t? But he had emerged from that with a refreshing can-do sort of spirit. And that was good. Because in this place, Cook decided, your mind could destroy you just as quick as what waited out in the fog.
Fabrini waited a moment, then said, “Why don’t you just tell me what’s on your mind, Cook. I mean, shit, it would take a lot to rain on my parade now being that it’s already fucking sunk.”
“Who said there’s anything on my mind?”
“Nobody had to.”
Cook nodded. “All right. All this is bad enough, sure, but now here’s a little icing on the cake.” He got up and walked over to the porthole, surveying the mist and weeds. “You read what Forbes said. About that white jelly being inside those dead men and how they’d found globs of it other places… what did he say? It had a funny shine to it? That the doctor had burned his hands touching it? That the burns on those corpses looked like radium burns? You see what I’m getting at here?”
But Fabrini just shook his head. “Cook, I dropped out in the tenth grade. Spell it out for me.”
Cook smiled, but not for long. “Radiation,” he said.
“Shit.”
“Yeah, those burns and all the crew getting sick after they came off the Korsund… it sounds like radiation exposure, doesn’t it? Radiation sickness. Forbes wouldn’t have known about radiation back in 1918 and that Dr. Asper probably only knew a little, but it sure fits the bill, doesn’t it?”
Fabrini looked pale. “That thing Forbes talked about… he thought it got the crew on the Korsund and his own crew on this tub. .. shit, do you think this ship is still full of it? For all we know, we might already glow in the dark.”
“If we’ve been exposed, it’s probably too late,” Cook told him. “We’re probably saturated… but remember now, I’m just guessing here. That’s all. Besides, not all radiation stays active for a long time like when they drop a bomb. I read once where the majority of radioactive materials have a half-life – disintegration rate – of days or weeks, something like that. So I’m guessing that after almost ninety years, we’re probably safe.”
“Until it comes again.”
“Yes,” Cook said.
He knew he was reaching with a lot of this. But it sure sounded like whatever that thing was, radioactivity was part of its natural properties much like exhaling carbon dioxide was part of man’s. And maybe it wasn’t radiation as they understood it, but it was something damn close.
“If it’s gonna come for us,” Fabrini said, “I just wish it would already and fry our brains. Get it done with.”
“If it’s still even here,” Cook said.
Fabrini just shook his head. “Oh, it’s here, all right. Crycek might be crazy… but it don’t mean he’s wrong.”
They did what they could for Soltz, which wasn’t much.
Gosling, who had a pretty good working knowledge of first aid, bandaged his wounds and stopped the bleeding. Gave him some pain killers and washed out his eye with sterile solution, put a bandage over it. But that was about it. That was all they could do under the circumstances. They covered him with one of the waterproof blankets and pretty much hoped for the best.
“He isn’t going to make it, is he?” Cushing said.
Gosling just shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
Soltz had lapsed into something like a coma now. He moaned from time to time and shivered violently. He was feverish and sweating, a sweet unpleasant smell coming off him that reminded Cook of burnt hot dogs.
George was watching the bat-thing.
It was dead now.
Just drifting through the weed same as they were. He wasn’t sure what had killed it. Not really. Only that it had died maybe twenty or thirty minutes after it had fallen into the water. The only damage they had done it was smashing up its antennae. Would that have been enough? Could it have died from damaged sensory apparatus? George didn’t think so. Cushing was of the mind that it had asphyxiated, that it had been a water breather and it had just been out of the water too damn long. Simple, pat. But it did not explain why the thing had those streamers of yellow pulp floating from its mouth like it vomited out its own intestines.
George was thinking change in pressure.
Like one of those deep-sea fish brought up in a trawl net, the kind that sort of explode from the loss of pressure.
“I don’t know,” Cushing said. “That bastard seemed pretty lively to me, George. Abyssal creatures tend to be pretty sluggish when they come up, if they’re alive at all.”
Point. The bat-thing had been hovering for some time behind the raft. If it was suffocating, why hadn’t it just dived back in? Curiosity? It didn’t understand what the raft and the pink creatures in it were so it had to find out even at the cost of its own life? No, that was silly. Animals could be curious, but only to a point.
