I woke up, tangled up in the sheets, drenched in sweat. The door to my room was open. A rectangle of light fell across my bed from the hallway outside. I looked over at the workstation monitor. It said "4:55 A.M." I closed my eyes and lay there for a while, but I couldn't go back to sleep. I was wet and uncomfortable. I decided to take a shower. Shortly before five in the morning, I got out of bed.
The hallway was silent. I walked down the corridor to the bathrooms. The doors to all the bedrooms were open, which seemed strange. I could see everybody sleeping as I walked past. And the lights were on in all the bedrooms. I saw Ricky asleep, and I saw Bobby, and I saw Julia, and Vince. Mae's bed was empty. And of course Charley's bed was empty. I stopped in the kitchen to get a ginger ale from the refrigerator. I was very thirsty, my throat painful and parched. And my stomach felt a little queasy. I looked at the champagne bottle. I suddenly had a funny feeling about it, as if it might have been tampered with. I took it out and looked closely at the cap, at the metal foil that covered the cork. It looked entirely normal. No tampering, no needle marks, no nothing.
Just a bottle of champagne.
I put it back and closed the refrigerator door.
I began to wonder if I had been unfair to Julia. Maybe she really did believe she'd made a mistake and wanted to put things right. Maybe she just wanted to show her gratitude. Maybe I was being too tough on her. Too unforgiving.
Because when you thought about it, what had she done that was suspicious or wrong? She'd been glad to see me, even if she was over the top. She'd accepted responsibility for the experiment, and she'd apologized for it. She'd immediately agreed to make the call to the Army. She'd agreed with my plan to kill the swarm in the comm room. She'd done everything she could do to show she supported me, and was on my side.
But I still was uneasy.
And of course there was the matter of Charley and his swarm. Ricky's idea that Charley had somehow been carrying the swarm inside his body, in his mouth or under his armpit or something, didn't make a lot of sense to me. Those swarms killed within seconds. So it left a question-how did the swarm get into the comm room with Charley? Did it get in from outside? Why hadn't it attacked Julia and Ricky and Vince?
I forgot about my shower.
I decided to go down to the utility room, and look around outside the comm room door. Maybe there was something I had missed. Julia had been talking a lot, interrupting my train of thought. Almost as if she hadn't wanted me to figure something out ...
There I was again, being hard on Julia.
I went through the airlock, down the corridor, through another airlock. When you were tired, it was annoying to have that wind blowing on you. I came out into the utility area, and went toward the comm room door. I didn't notice anything.
I heard the sound of a clicking keyboard, and looked into the biology lab. Mae was there, at her workstation.
I said, "What are you doing?"
"Checking the video playback."
"I thought we couldn't do that, because Charley pulled the wires."
"That's what Ricky said. But it isn't true."
I started to come around the lab bench, to look over her shoulder. She held up her hand.
"Jack," she said. "Maybe you don't want to look at this."
"What? Why not?"
"It's, uh ... maybe you don't want to deal with this. Not right now. Maybe tomorrow." But of course after that, I practically ran around the table to see what was on her monitor. And I stopped. What I saw on her screen was an image of an empty corridor. With a time code at the bottom of the picture. "Is this it?" I said. "Is this what I shouldn't deal with?"
"No." She turned in her chair. "Look, Jack, you have to go through all the security cameras in sequence, and each one only records ten frames a minute, so it's very difficult to be sure of what we're-"
"Just show me, Mae."
"I have to go back a bit ..." She pressed the back button in the corner of the keyboard repeatedly. Like many new control systems, the Xymos system was modeled on Internet browser technology. You could go backward in work, retracing your steps. The frames jumped backward until she came to the place she wanted. Then she ran it forward, the security images jumping from one camera to the next in rapid succession. A corridor. The main plant. Another angle on the plant. An airlock. Another corridor. The utility room. A corridor. The kitchen. The lounge. The residence hallway. An exterior view, looking down at the floodlit desert. Corridor. The power room. The outside, ground level. Another corridor. I blinked. "How long have you been doing this?"
"About an hour."
"Jesus."
Next I saw a corridor. Ricky moving down it. Power station. Outside, looking down on Julia stepping into the floodlight. A corridor. Julia and Ricky together, embracing, and then a corridor, and-
"Wait," I said.
Mae hit a button. She looked at me, said nothing. She pressed another key, flicked the images forward slowly. She stopped on the camera that showed Ricky and Julia. "Ten frames."
The movement was blurred and jerky. Ricky and Julia moved toward each other. They embraced. There was a clear sense of ease, of familiarity between them. And then they kissed passionately.
"Aw, shit," I said, turning away from the screen. "Shit, shit, shit."
"I'm sorry, Jack," Mae said. "I don't know what to say."
I felt a wave of dizziness, almost as if I might collapse. I sat down on the table. I kept my body turned away from the screen. I just couldn't look. I took a deep breath. Mae was saying something more, but I didn't hear her words. I took another breath. I ran my hand through my hair.