Green Eyes

  ‘You wanna kill the light, squeeze,’ said Richmond. ‘I’m gonna fade.’ He poured the bullets into an ashtray.

  Donnell did as he was told, went into the bathroom and switched on the light. Gray dirt-streaked linoleum peeled and tattered like eucalyptus bark, shower stall leaning drunkenly, chipped porcelain, the mirror stippled with paint drippings, applying a plague to whomever gazed upon it. The doorframe was swollen with dampness, and the door would not close all the way, leaving a foot-wide gap. He hooked his cane over the doorknob, lowered the toilet lid, sat and tried to concentrate on the ledger. According to Magnusson the bacterial cycle was in essence a migration into the norepenephrine and dopamine systems; since his ‘psychic’ abilities increased as the migration progressed, he concluded that these systems must be the seat of such abilities. So much Donnell could easily follow, but thereafter he was puzzled by some of Magnusson’s terminology.

  … each bacterium carries a crystal of magnetite within a membrane that is contiguous with the cytoplasmic membrane, and a chain of these magnetosomes, in effect, creates a biomagnetic compass. The swimming bacteria are passively steered by the torque exerted upon their biomagnetic compass by the geomagnetic field; since in this hemisphere the geomagnetic field points only north and down, the bacteria are north-seeking and tend to migrate downward, thus explaining their presence in the sediment underlying old graveyards. Of course within the brain, though the geomagnetic field still affects them, the little green bastards are bathed in a nutrient-and temperature-controlled medium so that movement downward is no longer of adaptive significance. They’re quite content to breed and breed, eventually to kill me by process of overpopulation.

  Richmond’s heavy snores ripped the silence, and Donnell heard footsteps padding in the next room. Jocundra eased through the gap in the door; she had changed into jeans and a T-shirt. ‘Can’t sleep,’ she said. She cast about for a clean place to sit, found none, and sat anyway beside the shower stall. She spread the folds of the shower curtain, examining its pattern of hula girls and cigarette burns, and grimaced. This place is a museum of squalor.’

  She asked to see the ledger, and as she leafed through it, her expression flowing from puzzlement to comprehension, he reflected on the difference between the way she looked now - a schoolgirl stuck on a problem, barely a teenager, worrying her lower lip, innocent and grave - and earlier when she had entered the cabin; then she had appeared self-possessed, elegant, masking her reaction to the grime beneath a layer of aristocratic reserve. She had one of those faces that changed drastically depending on the angle at which you viewed it, so drastically that Donnell would sometimes fail to recognize her for a split second.

  ‘I didn’t believe you… about extending your life,’ she said excitedly, continuing to pore over the ledger. ‘He doesn’t come right out and say it, but the implication - I think - is that you may be able to stabilize the bacterial colony

  ‘Magnetic fields,’ said Donnell. ‘He was too much in a hurry, too busy understanding it to see the obvious.’

  ‘There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense. All this about NMR, for example.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nuclear magnetic resonance.’ She laughed. ‘The reason I almost flunked organic chemistry. It’s a spectro-scopic process for analyzing organic compounds, for measuring the strength of radio waves necessary to change the alignment of nuclei in a magnetic field. But Magnusson’s not talking about its analytic function.’ She turned a page. ‘Do you know what these are?’

  There were three doodles on the page:

  Beneath them Magnusson had written:

  What the hell are these chicken-scratchings? Been seeing them since day one. They seem part of something larger, but it won’t come clear. Odd thought: suppose the entirety of my mental processes is essentially a letter written to my brain by these damned green bugs, and these scribbles are the Rosetta Stone by which I might decipher all.

  ‘I see them, too,’ said Donnell. ‘Not the same ones, but similar., Little bright squiggles that flare up and vanish. I thought they were just flaws in my vision until I saw the ledger, and then I noticed this one…’ He pointed to the first doodle. ‘If you turn it on its side it looks exactly like an element of the three-horned man Richmond drew on his guitar.’

  ‘They’re familiar.’ She shook her head, unable to remember where she had seen them; she gave him a searching look. ‘This is going to take time, and Richmond doesn’t have much time.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Maybe we should go back to Shadows. With all the resources of the project…’

  ‘Richmond knows he’s nearly terminal,’ said Donnell sharply. ‘He won’t go back, and I have my own reasons not to.’