“Dr. Ch’o, are you awake?”
Thera squatted next to the prone scientist, who didn’t appear to have moved on his cot since she had last seen him. His dinner sat nearby, untouched.
“You were so kind to give me cigarettes. Are you sure you don’t smoke?”
She took the pack out and held it where he could see it. Then, carefully, she unwrapped the top and tapped out a single cigarette. Smoking was forbidden inside the ship, but Thera lit up anyway, thinking it might break the spell. She felt bad for the scientist, worried about him, as if he were an old friend.
“Remember?” she asked as she took the first draw.
The sulfur smell of the match and the whiff of tobacco pushed at Ch’o’s consciousness. A flood of thoughts came to him, ideas that were in numbers as well as sights and emotions: the half-life of isotopes, his father’s slow death from radiation sickness, his mother’s cancer, his own attempt to save others from their fate.
The girl. It was the girl he had passed the message to. She had come—they had captured her, too.
“You,” said Ch’o.
Thera reached to help the scientist as he pushed to get up.
“You,” he said again.
“It’s me, Dr. Ch’o. They told me you were sick.”
Ch’o shook his head.
“Are you in trouble?” he asked her. “You must be in trouble. The Americans . . . We’ve been captured.”
“It’s OK,” she said, clasping his hand. “The Americans are helping us.”
“The Americans do not control the IAEA.”
“No. They don’t. They’re here to help you. You needed help.”
Thera steered him to the chair. When he sat, she pulled over the other chair and sat in front of him.
“The Americans can help,” said Thera. “They want to know what’s going on. I know you’ve heard many bad things about them, but you have been outside Korea. You know they are not all evil. Not all of them.”
That much was true, Ch’o thought.
“They’re working with the IAEA. They can get your message out. And you don’t have to stay with the Americans; you can go where you want. You were in Europe when you were younger.”
“People are being poisoned,” said Ch’o.
“And you can stop that.”
Someone pounded at the side of the cabin.
Not now, thought Thera, but the young ensign who’d been assigned to liaison with the First Team people came in anyway.
“Ma’am, the psychologist is in-bound. . . . Uh, you can’t smoke in here,” he said. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
Thera shot the private a look of death. She was about to tell him what he could do—a direction that would have been physically impossible—but then remembered that she was supposed to stay in character for Ch’o.
“I’m sorry,” Thera said meekly, stabbing out the cigarette.
A wave of indignation rose up in Ch’o. “Get out,” he told the man at the door. “Out!”
The ensign ducked away. Ch’o pushed his legs over the edge of the bed and put his arm around the young woman.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’ll be all right.”
I told him I have my own cabin and would see him in the morning,” Thera told Rankin two hours later.
“He totally snapped out of it?”
“Whatever shock he was in, he’s out of that. But he’s still wary. Very, very wary.” Thera explained that Ch’o seemed to think that he was protecting her in some way. He was confused by the fact that he had been picked up by the U.S. and not the IAEA.
“The North Koreans think we’re pretty close to devils,” Thera told Rankin. “They have museums devoted to our criminal acts, so he doesn’t understand how the U.S. could be helping.”
“You helped him.”
“He thinks I’m Greek, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“He wants to talk,” she told Rankin. “He has information that will save a lot of people. Thousands.”
“A bomb would kill millions.”
“This isn’t about a bomb. He’s concerned about waste. That’s what he wants to talk about—pollution. Radiation poisoning.”
“A dirty bomb?”
“Pollution. He was going to be put into prison and maybe shot because he tried to alert the authorities. It’s North Korea he’s worried about.”
“That’s what we rescued him for?” said Rankin. “We went through all this trouble because he was worried about pollution?”
“Sometimes you can be a real jerk, Stephen,” said Thera, storming away.