Pete walked briskly out of the engine room, through the tunnel, and into the missile compartment. He was greeted immediately by Haggerty.
“Pete! I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“I was … walking … touring.”
Haggerty gave him a quizzical look. “Clearing your head, too, I’m sure. Completely understandable. The engine room is one of the few places you can find some peace around here. Nobody goes back there unless they have to.” He looked around. “Are you starting to remember anything?”
Pete shook his head. “Bits and pieces,” he said. “Not really.”
“What else do you want to know?” said Haggerty. “Maybe I can help.”
Pete looked him in the eye. He had a million questions, wanted to know more about his mission, what was happening onboard Polaris before the mutiny. But one question overwhelmed him more than all that.
“I’d like to know more about my wife.”
The doctor shook his head sadly. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do this in my stateroom.”
* * *
The doctor had done what he could to make his stateroom comfortable. There was an antique medical diagram of a skeleton on the wall, next to a calendar with nature scenes. The calendar, Pete noticed, was three years out of date. A stethoscope hung on a hook, next to an old-fashioned black doctor’s bag. He had a quilt covering his rack, and a shelf of well-worn novels.
An object on the second shelf caught his eye: a Lucite block with bees trapped inside.
“Honeybees,” said Haggerty, watching Pete closely as he picked it up. “At each stage of its life cycle.”
It was fascinating to look at: some tiny relic of the natural world entombed in perfectly clear plastic, each stage numbered, one through ten. Tiny white eggs, almost too small to see. A slightly larger larva, then the pupa, which was starting to look like a bee, with tiny legs and wings. A mature worker bee, and a queen. A perfect cube of honeycomb. The queen’s cell, worker foundation, and finally a tiny vial of honey that poured back and forth as Pete tilted the block. He could have stared at it for hours.
“Something we studied in Biology, back when I was an undergrad,” said the doctor. “Fascinating, don’t you think?”
“It’s beautiful,” said Pete.
“Here,” said Haggerty. He’d poured two small glasses of scotch from a bottle he had hidden beneath socks in a drawer. They clinked the shot glasses together cheerlessly and drank them down.
“I never met Pamela,” said the doctor. “Your wife. But you talked about her all the time.”
“What did I say about her?”
“You met on the mainland. You had a whirlwind romance. You left her behind for your tour on Eris Island. You’d see her on leave, but honestly, Pete…”
“Yes?”
“You were plagued by guilt about it. Devastated, actually. We got your fitness reports before you transferred here, Finn shared them with me before you arrived—I’m the closest thing to a psychologist onboard and I guess he wanted my opinion. They all said the same thing—you were brilliant, had made vast contributions to the Alliance, but that after her death you were … a changed man. Said you’d been overheard blaming the Alliance for her death. Frankly, reading between the lines … it seemed like some of them were even beginning to doubt your loyalty.”
The word hung in the air, and the doctor and Pete looked at each other.
“What about you, Doc? Do you doubt my loyalty?”
The doctor shook his head. “I think, after all these years, after all the loss … any thinking man would begin to have doubts. About everything. Thank god we’re not all like Frank and Hana. Or McCallister, for that matter, all blindly giving ourselves to the cause without ever thinking about right or wrong.”
Pete thought about his radio conversation in shaft alley. “I’m thinking about right and wrong,” he said. “I’m thinking about it all the time.”
The doctor leaned in and put his hand on Pete’s shoulder. “Think about your mission now—you’re going to Eris Island to get the cure for this terrible disease. The disease that killed your wife. It’s a goddamn humanitarian mission if there ever was one. How could finding that cure be anything but good? I don’t care who is doing it.”
Pete shook his head—the doctor’s words certainty felt good. “That’s true,” he said.
“That’s why I want to help you,” said the doctor. “Let’s have another drink.”
As the doctor poured his shot, Pete’s eyes drifted back to the honeybees in the clear plastic block. Trapped, dead. So light, you couldn’t feel their weight. And yet those tiny insects were part of a hive—a society, really—that was incredibly complex and captivating.
“Still looking at my little friends?” said the doctor. “Those guys have kept me company awhile now.”
“They’re all female,” said Pete, surprised with the suddenness of that knowledge.
“What?”
“All the worker bees in a hive are female. The males, the drones, they keep them alive only long enough to impregnate the queen. Then the workers let them starve. The bees in that block: all female.”
The doctor shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with Pete’s hard stare. “Of course,” he said. “You know something about bees?”
“I do,” said Pete.
And he knew, suddenly, that the bees in that block belonged to him. The doctor was lying to him.
“Thanks,” said Pete, putting down the honeybees and taking a second shot from the doctor. But this time Pete drank a silent toast to himself: Here’s to finding out the truth.