Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [6]
Picking a mystery, the doctor slipped it out of its place and walked it over to the intensive care unit. The engineer didn’t look up from his printout as Gorvoy approached him.
“Here,” said the doctor, offering his patient the book. “You might find this a bit more interesting.”
Agnarsson continued to study the analysis. “Can I see some other printouts?” he asked.
Gorvoy shrugged. “I don’t see why not. But if I may ask, what do you want them for?”
The engineer finally looked up at him, his eyes gleaming with silver light. “Just get them,” he said softly but insistently, “and I’ll show you.”
As Captain Tarasco entered Gorvoy’s office, he could see the doctor peering at his monitor screen. “You called?” he said.
The medical officer didn’t look up. “I did indeed,” he replied absently. “Have a seat.”
“I’m a busy man,” Tarasco ventured.
Gorvoy nodded. “I heard. McMillan says we’ll be lucky to get the warp drive up and running this century.”
“That estimate may be a little pessimistic,” said the captain. But not by much, he added inwardly.
At last, the doctor looked up. “Take a look at this,” he advised, swiveling his monitor around.
Tarasco examined the screen. It showed him a collection of bright green circles, some empty and some filled in, perhaps a hundred and twenty of them in all.
“I give up,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s a DNA analysis,” Gorvoy explained. “Those circles are traits. Sexual orientation, height, eye color, and so on.”
The captain looked at him, still at a loss. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“Agnarsson created it,” said the doctor. “From memory.”
Tarasco looked at the screen again, then at Gorvoy. “This is a joke, right?”
“It’s not,” said the doctor.
“But how could he have done this?”
“I wish I knew,” Gorvoy told him. “About an hour ago, he said he was bored with lying in bed while I ran tests on him, so I gave him something to look at—his DNA analysis. He decided to play a game with himself, to see how much of it he could memorize.”
“And he memorized all of it?” asked Tarasco, finding the doctor’s claim difficult to believe.
Gorvoy smiled a thin smile. “All of them.”
With a touch of his pad, he brought up a different analysis on the monitor screen. Then another, and another still.
“Seven in all,” Gorvoy said. “My analyses of the seven individuals who were afflicted with the glow effect.”
The captain absorbed the information. “Obviously, this has something to do with his eyes.”
“Obviously,” the medical officer confirmed, “but only in that they appear to be symptoms of the same disease—if you even want to call it that. According to Agnarsson he’s never felt better in his life, and my instruments back him up in that regard.”
Tarasco frowned. “I’d like to see him…speak with him.”
“Be my guest,” Gorvoy told him.
The captain left the doctor’s office and followed the radiating corridor that led to the center of sickbay, where the intensive care unit was located. Only one of the eight beds was occupied.
Tarasco could see that Agnarsson’s eyes were closed. For a moment, he considered whether he should wake the engineer or wait to speak with him at a later time.
“There’s no time like the present,” Agnarsson said, speaking like a man still wrapped in sleep.
Then he turned to the captain and opened his eyes, fixing Tarasco with his strange, silver stare. He smiled as he propped himself up on an elbow. “My grandfather was the one who told me that.”
The captain felt a chill climb the rungs of his spine. “What made you decide to say it now?”
Agnarsson shrugged. “I’m not certain, exactly. It just seemed to make sense at the moment.”
Tarasco tried to accept that, but he had a feeling there was more to it than the engineer was saying. “The doctor tells me you’ve developed a knack for memorizing things.”
“You mean the DNA analyses?” Agnarsson seemed to be staring at something a million kilometers distant. “To tell you the truth, it wasn’t that hard. I just gazed at them for a while,