scraped with gay abandon…but nothing happened. The machinery was quite dead and disconnected.
Rick was alarmed to find himself trembling. He bent down swiftly to pick Steven up, snatching him away from the turbid floodwater just before it reached the edge of the trailing shawl. Then he looked around desperately. All the thinner root-filaments were under the surface now, but there was still plenty of bare wood visible—wood that was scratchable and cuttable. But where was he to cut? Where was he to scratch?
He felt that he could no longer think, no longer plan.
Steven was still screaming, and his tiny hand grappled with Rick’s ear. The baby sounded truly desperate, as though he had somehow sensed that things were going from bad to worse, and his anxiety fed Rick’s, redoubling it yet again.
Rick held the triangular shard high in the air, with one point outwards, desperate to find some target to aim at. Carelessly, he leapt down into the foul-smelling fluid. His feet were on the floor but he was waist deep. He held Steven over one shoulder, and reached out to hack at the root-bundles near the steadily-climbing surface.
The jagged edge made a scratch, but did not cut deeply. Rick ran it back and forth as fast as he could, trying to make the cut deeper. Steven yelled in his ear, and the sound was so frightfully loud and urgent that it filled his head and brought forth tears of frustration in astonishing profusion.
He chopped and sawed and cursed for three full minutes before he suddenly realized that the surface of the flood had not swallowed up the spot he was attacking, and was no nearer to doing so than when he had started.
The flow had stopped, and the water-level had stabilized.
Rick was astonished by the wave of relief that flooded over him—a sudden realization that they might not be going to die. He did not realize how convinced he had been that he was doomed until the fear was suddenly swept away.
He threw the blunted plastic shard away, and took hold of Steven in both hands, pulling the baby around to cradle him against his chest.
“It’s all right, son!” he said, as his tears of frustration became tears of amazement. “We’re going to be all right!”
Steven’s wild yelling abated, as though the message had got through. By slow degrees, as Rick hugged the baby to him, rocking gently from side to side, silence fell. The water level did not begin to fall, but it did not begin to rise again either. There was stability; there was peace.
Steven was no longer crying and Rick was no longer weeping.
Rick stood where he was, not moving an inch, for several minutes more. Steven put his face into the hollow of Rick’s shoulder, and went to sleep, quite oblivious to the fact that the hand with that Rick was supporting his tiny bald head was still leaking blood from a dozen ragged cuts.
Then the door above them slid suddenly aside, and Rosa’s voice, utterly aghast, said: “Corruption and corrosion, Rick! What are you doing to that poor child!”
* * * *
Dr. Jauregy wasn’t licensed to practice medicine on humans but she cleaned up his cuts and bandaged his hand. She had sufficient sense and sensibility not to start telling him what a fool he’d been, and he was glad of that. He’d heard enough from Rosa, Dieter, and Chloe about what he ought to have known (that he wasn’t really in danger), ought to have thought (that the sensible thing to do was wait), and ought to have done (nothing).
At first he had been astounded by their attitude, deeply wounded by their accusative tones. It had taken him some little while to realize that they had not the least understanding of what he had been through. He had done his best to point out that hindsight gave them calculative advantages that he had sadly lacked, but they had refused to listen, and even seemed intent on blaming him for the fact that the cellar was flooded, simply because he had been down there when it happened.
Rick was still seething with frustration and annoyance. He found it quite appalling that no one seemed to have the least idea of what he had been through, but he now realized how absurd his appearance and his conduct must have seemed to anyone who had not shared his experience. He dared not try to explain how terrified he had been, because he knew that it would only make him seem ridiculous. It was bad enough to have panicked, when—a things had turned out—panic had been quite unnecessary, but trying to explain how and why he had panicked, and attempting to justify his panicking, could now only make things worse.
Now that hindsight had delivered its verdict—that he had not drowned, and therefore had never been in real danger of drowning—all that he had suffered had been for nothing.
It was all horribly unfair, but there was nothing he could say or do to defend himself.
Mr. Murgatroyd was the only one who thought of offering any kind of apology, and even that was far from satisfactory. “Altogether unforeseen,” he assured them, peering solemnly at Chloe, as though she and not Rick had been the one who had been hurt. “That’s the trouble with unprecedented situations, I’m afraid. New bugs, new symptoms. Sorry we couldn’t cope any better.”
“Do that mean you now know what it is?” asked Rick, sourly. “Or is it still a big mystery?”
Mr. Murgatroyd opened his mouth to reply, but paused because Officer Morusaki had just re-emerged from the cellar. “It’s okay,” said the IBI man. “The water level’s going down. The house can take care of it all—give it six hours and the pool will be full again. The wood will mop up all the pollutants and redirect them all back to the reclamation tank. The rootlets are fine—he didn’t do any real damage there. You’ll need a new screen, of course, and a new set of circuit-boards—by the time they’re installed, it will all be as good as new.”
Rick felt the pressure of disapproving stares, but was determined not to feel guilty. “What about the nursery?” he said to the man from the Ministry.
“We’ve identified the culprit,” said Murgatroyd, cheerfully. “As we said, there’s nothing to worry about—nothing at all. Within forty-eight hours, everything will be back to normal.”
“In the meantime,” Dr. Jauregy put in, “just as a precaution, don’t use the nursery systems—the main system is perfectly safe.”
Morusaki nodded in agreement, smiling as he did so. There was something extraordinarily infuriating about the way they all looked. It wasn’t just that they were carefully refusing to say exactly what it was they had found—each of them seemed to be possessed by a glow of private pleasure, which suggested that they were extremely pleased about their discovery. Rick glanced at Rosa, who was reluctantly holding the baby, and at Dieter; he could see that they were aware of it too.
“I think we’re entitled to an explanation,” he said, testily, to the doctor. “Don’t you?”
Dr. Jauregy looked at Officer Morusaki, who looked at Mr. Murgatroyd, who looked dubious.
“If we really were the target of some new Gaian terror-weapon,” said Rick, combatively, “I think we should be told—even if it wasn’t aimed specifically at us.”
“It’s nothing like that,” said Mr. Murgatroyd, swiftly. “I told you—my being called in was purely a matter of routine. It’s nothing like that at all—but we’re living in such interesting times, you see. The defense of the realm has become something of a nightmare, with so many viruses around, organic and inorganic. We have to be very careful. Plague wars aren’t like the
