Enigma Ship - J. Steven York [8]
Gold glanced over at Corsi, who, despite her best efforts at restraint, was giving him the “I told you so” face.
Chapter
3
“How,” asked Carol Abramowitz, grunting as she slammed a handball off the far wall of the court, “did I get this assignment?”
Dr. Lense dashed to intercept the ball, smashed it with rocketlike power. It bounced off the wall and was past Abramowitz before she could react. Lense recovered the ball and bounced it against the floor so that it snapped back into her hand. “As I recall, ‘this assignment’ was your idea. ‘Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral, that is the question.’”
Abramowitz sighed and wiped the sweat off her upper lip. “I know that, but I’m a cultural specialist. None of those really fall into my area.”
“I’m a doctor, and the captain asked me to assist. That makes even less sense, if you want to think about it that way. I’d say he wants a couple of intelligent people not locked into some fixed technical or scientific viewpoint. This doesn’t fit into any neat categories. Maybe trying to make it fit is what threw the Chinook off.”
Abramowitz sighed again, lifting her short black hair off her neck. “What’s the score?”
“I’m winning,” said Lense.
“I don’t doubt it, but what’s the score?”
“I play to win. I’m winning.”
“But the score?”
“I’m not keeping score, I’m just winning.”
“You’re not keeping score?”
“Don’t need to. If you want to, you keep score.”
“I don’t know how. I’ve never played handball. I swat this ball against the wall until I miss, that’s all I know. Why are we playing handball?”
“You want my help? I think better while breaking a sweat.”
“That makes one of us.” She plopped down in the corner, her back against the glass observation wall.
Lense put her hands on her hips and frowned. “You’re no fun at all.” She waited to see if Abramowitz reacted, which she didn’t. “I’ve got the rec room for thirty more minutes. The computer can shift things around and we can play something else. Racquetball, roto-goal, Bolian squash—there’s a ping-pong table that pops out of the floor.”
“I don’t play any of those, or Aztec basketball either.”
“What? Oh, never mind. What do you play?”
“Golf.”
“Golf?” She looked around the room.
“The walls don’t move that far, trust me.”
It was Dr. Lense’s turn to sigh. She shuffled over and sat down facing Abramowitz. “Animal,” she said.
“What?”
“Animal, that’s my answer. The Enigma is some kind of space-dwelling organism, like the space amoeba.”
Abramowitz looked up and brushed a strand of damp hair out of her eyes. “You’re making that up.”
Lense shook her head. “It’s the subject of many a trick question at Starfleet Medical. In 2268 the Enterprise, A or B or X or something—I don’t remember which one—encountered an eighteen-thousand-kilometer-long space-dwelling amoeba that consumed an entire star system before they could stop it.”
Abramowitz shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”
“Anyway, Enigma hasn’t shown signs of intelligence, and it doesn’t have warp drive. It does have camouflage, and it does ingest things, possibly as food. Ergo, animal.”
“Mineral,” Abramowitz said suddenly. “Or mechanical anyway. It’s some kind of probe, or maybe a cloaked ship on autopilot, the crew long dead. They could have lost warp drive in deep space, and couldn’t fix it. The crew died of old age, or they just ran out of food and air, but the ship is still going its merry way, running on autopilot.”
“So why does it keep swallowing things up?”
Abramowitz took a deep breath, considering the problem. “If it’s a probe, it could be taking samples, or collecting specimens. Maybe it’s trying to recruit a replacement crew.”
“I like my solution better.”
“If your ‘solution’ is correct, then roughly one-hundred and fifty people are being digested by an amoeba as we speak. If my theory is correct, then they may be safe and waiting for rescue. I like mine better. A lot better.”
Lense reacted as though