The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [119]
“I don’t care!” he yelled. “I could care less if—ah crap, forget it. Forget everything. It doesn’t matter anymore, I guess. We’re gonna die anyway.”
“That’s the spirit!” Reaching over, she gave his right shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I like a man who’s driven by optimism.”
“Driven to madness, you mean,” he muttered darkly. But his shoulder tingled where her fingers had gripped him. That wasn’t logical either. He eyed her in wonderment. “People sure can change fast, and I don’t mean by melding. You’re not the same twitchy tight-ass doctor who treated me in Savannah.”
She spent awhile digesting that while they powered on toward Miavana as fast as the compact rental craft could carry them.
“So,” she finally asked him, “you sticking with this and with me, you staying here in Florida, or are you going back to Savannah?”
He guided the boat around a floating mass of emerald-green, meterwide Victoria regina lily pads. Panicked frogs the size of his open palm scattered in all directions, prompting a brief surface-shattering attack by a couple of lurking pirarucú.
“I go back to Savannah without the thread for justify, I get picked up or killed by the cops. I stay here, I get killed. I go with you, I get killed. Not an easy call, doc.”
Turning away from him she watched the line of exotic vegetation flow past off to starboard. “Your unremitting sarcasm demeans you, Whispr.”
“Really? I thought it defined me as a realist. You’re a physician, Ingrid. Not an industrial spy, not a professional probe. Keep on with this and you’re gonna find yourself way out of your depth and eventual-like singing with the Choir Invisible.”
She looked evenly at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”
He gave a violent shake of head, thoroughly annoyed with himself. “Of course I’m sticking with you. If only to get an apology before we’re both shot, or decapitated, or however badly this eventual-like ends. How the hell do you expect to learn SICK’s secrets when they have toxic scum like Molé working for them?”
“We don’t know that he works for them,” she countered. “He never identified his ‘employers.’ ” She turned thoughtful. “But based on what Gator told us he found out, it’s the logical place to start. We’ll try and learn what we can from SICK, Inc. by doing the last thing a company with their reputation would expect.”
“What’s that—no, I don’t want to guess. Tell me—Ingrid.”
“We’ll go there.”
“Excuse me?” He looked over from the controls.
“To SICK, Inc. Wherever their main research facilities are located. I don’t know that location offhand, of course, but I think I read in a business journal somewhere that their corporate headquarters are in South Africa. Their principal research setup would be the logical place to try and find out if they’re working on something as improbable as a technique for manufactured MSMH.”
Whispr nodded slowly. “Yeah, that makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is how in the name of all that’s melded you think you’re going to get yourself, or me, or the both of us into the R&D facility of a major multinational concern that’s legendary for not playing nice with competitors or, for that matter, governments.”
“One step at a time, Whispr.”
“One foot in the grave at a time. Oh well, never in my most stim-aided dreams did I ever think I’d ever get to Africa. As long as you’re paying, doc, I’m with you on this suicide express.” He was growing wild-eyed. “To the terminal Terminal where we’ll be terminated, that’s where we’re heading!”
She did her best to calm and encourage him. “Don’t be so negative, Whispr. Think about it. Aside from the business of the implants, if the SAEC is working with MSMH and is after the thread and suspects that I have it, the last place their hired hunters like this Molé person would expect me to show up is at the front gate of one of their own administrative or research centers.”
“With good reason.” He turned thoughtful. “I just have one condition for staying on this doomed night train.”
“Name it.”
His words were suddenly filled with a wholly unexpected yearning. “If we