Dr. Fournier is sensitive to moods, and the mood inside Rosie has soured to the point where he can no longer bear it. He is hiding from the crew, from the colonel and from his duties.
Of course, this isn’t entirely a new thing. Hiding has been an important part of his repertoire ever since they left Beacon. That was why he colonised the engine room in the first place, and it has served him well. Now, though, he has added some layers to his concealment. He is hiding from new and unfamiliar things. From McQueen, for example, who has taken his radio and seems by doing so to have taken his place as Brigadier Fry’s agent on board the Rosalind Franklin.
More significantly, he is hiding from the hateful revelation that he has placed himself on the wrong side of a crucial argument. The brigadier’s coup in Beacon was reckless and badly thought out. It has led to civil war, which is something the rump of humanity can ill afford. Whether she wins or loses, Fry will have done terrible damage and dragged the whole population of the embattled enclave to the ragged and crumbling edge.
If she loses, that’s the story that will be told. Fournier’s name will be in it, among the misguided and the contemptible. Not prominent. Not up in the headlines. A grubby, derided footnote. Other people are coming back from this expedition with something of honour and something of success. He is coming back as an addendum.
He has tried to blunt the awareness of this in the time-honoured fashion, which is to say with strong spirits. But he has discovered again what he should have remembered, that whiskey even in moderate amounts doesn’t agree with his constitution. Swigged from the bottle, it unmans and dismantles him.
Now he sits in the engine room with his shoulders against the engine cowling, his head tilted back so the crown of it rests directly on the cold metal. Rosie stopped moving some hours ago, but there is a yawing in his head and stomach that makes him terrified to stand up. He is at the stage of wanting very, very much not to vomit but finding that every movement brings it closer.
The door of the engine room sits ajar. On the other side of it, in the lab, Stephen Greaves is moving around. With the lights off, invisible in the dark, Fournier watches him through the gap between door and frame. Greaves is working diligently with the contents of several containers taken from his sample kit. When he was in there earlier, he was with Samrina Khan. Fournier almost spoke to them, but speaking is one of the things he thinks might cause him to throw up. So he only sat and watched as Greaves mixed up some kind of home-made medicine and injected Khan with it.
They talked about the feral children, and about Dr. Khan’s baby. They talked about a cure. Most of it rolled over Dr. Fournier unheeded, but now he finds that some of what they said has lodged in his mind after all.
They were talking about a cure as something that could actually happen. Or … had happened? Fournier wonders belatedly what that medicine was, and what Greaves is working on so assiduously now. The supposed savant (Fournier has seen no compelling evidence of that!) mutters to himself as he works—two different voices, two sides of a conversation. Fournier can’t hear everything, but he gets the gist. Greaves is addressing someone as “Captain” and then answering his own questions in a deeper, exaggeratedly masculine tone.
“But it’s not going to be enough,” he says as himself. “It’s going to run out!”
“You work with what you’ve got, kid,” he answers in the other voice. “Can’t squeeze orange juice out of a stone.”
“I’ve got to save her!” Greaves’ usual voice again, trembling and petulant. “I’ve got to!”
“Fine. But you better count the cost before you get into paying it. There are lives at stake here. Not just hers, but the children’s, too. How far are you prepared to go?”
“But I’ve still got some spinal fluid here. That might be enough to … to make something that works. Not a suppressant. Something that works properly!”
Fournier has raised the whiskey bottle to his lips for another sip, a long time before, and it has stayed there ever since. He sets it down again now, carefully and quietly.
“It isn’t.” The deeper voice. “It isn’t enough.”
“It might be.”
“No.”
“You don’t know!” Greaves’ voice rises to a squeak of protest. “You don’t know, Captain.”
“Kid, I know the cells you’re working with are dead, and I know you need live ones. I know prion contamination has reached 14 per cent. How many batches would you be looking to grow? That pipette is probably enough for ten at best, so you’ve got a maximum of ten configurations that you can test for. And since that would use up all the spinal fluid you’ve got left, you wouldn’t be able to dose her up again—which means you’ve got to get positive results in the next three hours, before her current dose wears off. How is anything supposed to grow in three hours?”
Greaves has stopped dead in the course of this speech. His hands are frozen in the air, a pipette in one of them so he looks like a conductor about to give the orchestra their cue to start the symphony.
“You don’t know,” he says again, his voice barely a whisper.
He seems to collapse in slow motion, going down on one knee and then on both. His head bows down into his lap.
“I’ll have to tell,” he moans. “I’ll have to tell if they ask.”
That’s good to hear, Dr. Fournier thinks. Because he intends to ask.