Deadman Switch

Eisenstadt leaned forward slightly, cocking one ear forward. "I'm sorry; what was that?"

"They can't answer," Calandra spoke up, a slight wavering to her voice. Her face—what I could see of it—looked both awestruck and more than a little shaken. "Their faces—watch their faces and the way their throats contract. Whatever the word is, they simply can't pronounce it."

Eisenstadt pursed his lips, considering. "With your permission, then," he said, "we'll continue to call you by our name for you: thunderheads. Unless that word should be used to distinguish between you and your physical hosts. They are just hosts for you, aren't they?"

A pause; and when Adams and Zagorin spoke again, I could hear a slight hesitation in their voices. "Not hosts. Bodies... homes... fortresses. Safety. Life."

"Ah," Eisenstadt nodded, a bit cautiously. "Yes—bodies." He considered. "You mention safety. What kind of safety do these bodies provide you?"

Silence. To me it was obvious that Eisenstadt was fishing for details about the thunderheads' defenses. Perhaps it was obvious to the thunderheads, too. "I don't think they're going to answer," I murmured after a minute.

"Afraid to?" he asked. "Or just a lack of vocabulary?"

I considered. "Afraid or distrusting, I'd say. The sense here is different than it was when they were trying to find a way to describe their body-homes, so I don't think it's a vocabulary problem."

He grunted and turned to Calandra. "You agree?"

"That the senses were different in the two instances, yes," she nodded. "Whether the emotion behind it should be interpreted as fear or something else, I don't know."

"I thought you Watchers were supposed to be able to read anybody you wanted to," he grumbled.

"Anybody human," she corrected him softly. "At the moment... they aren't."

The muscles in Eisenstadt's cheeks tightened... and abruptly his sense, too, changed. "Yes, well, maybe you religious types believe in demonic possession," he said, almost briskly. "But I don't. You—Smyt—swivel Adams around a little so that he and Zagorin can't see each other."

I frowned as Smyt and one of the other techs moved to obey. "Sir, there's no way they can be cueing each other. The synchronization is just too close."

"We'll see about that, won't we?" Eisenstadt said coolly. For just a minute, I realized, he'd been caught up in the same sense of awe and wonder as Calandra and I over what was happening; but that minute was over, and now the scientist in him had re-emerged, hard-headed and skeptical. "What kind of readings are we getting?" he added over his shoulder to the techs at the monitors.

"Weird ones," one of them reported. "Heart rate, blood pressure, and cell metabolism index are way down. Neuron and brainwave patterns—" he hesitated. "Frankly, Doctor, I don't know how to read this. There are strong elements of mental hyperactivity—localized at highly unusual sites—but there are also elements of deep sleep. Really deep sleep—just barely this side of comatose. By all rights, they should both be flat on their backs, snoring away."

Eisenstadt chewed at his lip. "Does any of it correspond to other known forms of meditation?"

"Not that I can tell. Of course, the records we've got here weren't designed to be an exhaustive listing."

"Sir," another tech put in, "it looks like their metabolic rates are still going down. Gradually, but noticeably."

"Potentially life-threatening?" Eisenstadt asked.

"I... don't know. Possibly."

Eisenstadt nodded, a slightly sour expression on his face. "You—thunderheads—are you still there?"

Adams's and Zagorin's faces contorted slightly in unison. "Where is there?"

"I meant are you still... in contact with us." Eisenstadt took a careful breath, his emotional resistance to accepting all this at face value fighting visibly against the recognition that we could be ru

"We have no desire to... learn more about you."

Eisenstadt floundered a second, his line of thought bent by the interruption. "Yes. Well. Part of the study we would like to do would involve a dead thunderhead and a procedure called dissection. Would it be possible for us to have—?"

"There is no death."

Eisenstadt took a careful breath. "Ah... yes. Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. What we'd like—"

"Body-homes may die. We do not."

"Yes—that's what I meant," Eisenstadt tried again. "It's one of your body-homes that we'd like to study. If you could indicate an unused one for us and give us permission—"

"You may have a drone to... study."

Eisenstadt paused in mid-sentence. "A drone? What's that?"

"Body-home grown from ster... ilized seed for use of... any who needs it."

For a moment Eisenstadt seemed taken aback. "What do you mean, any who needs it? Don't all of you have your own body-homes?"

Again, the answer was silence. "They told us their body-homes can die," Calandra reminded Eisenstadt softly. "Perhaps growing spare bodies is their version of immortality."

Eisenstadt threw her a sharp look. "Let's try and keep metaphysics out of this," he growled at her... but behind the words I could hear his acute uneasiness with the idea. "All right, thunderhead, we accept. Can you point one of these drones out to us?"

A slight pause. Then, in unison as always, Zagorin and Adams each raised an arm and pointed. "There," they whispered. "Two thousand four hundred... eighty-seven heights."

"Which heights?" Eisenstadt asked. "Ours, yours? These mountains'?"

"Doctor!" one of the monitors called before the Seekers could answer. "Getting cardiac runaway in Adams!"

"Adams! Break contact!"

It took me half a second to realize that the shout had come from me. The twisted expression on Adams's face—the sudden tension throughout his body—it almost literally screamed to me of lethal stress. I took a step toward him—

And was brought up sharply by Eisenstadt's hand on my arm. "Doctor—!"

"Let's wait and see what the thunderheads do," he told me, his voice rigid. "Whether or not they release him on their own."

I twisted my head to stare at him, not believing it. "And if they don't?" I snapped.

His eyes stayed on Adams. "We need to know what kind of value the thunderheads place on human life. This is as good a time as any to find out."

Because Adams was a Halloa. A religious fanatic... and therefore expendable. I clenched my teeth hard enough to hurt and turned back to the Seekers. Adams's stress was still growing—becoming critical— "Thunderhead!" I shouted. "You're killing him! Let him go!"

For a long second nothing happened. Then, abruptly, the alien sense was gone from both Adams and Zagorin. Zagorin slumped, breathing hard through slack lips—

As Adams collapsed, unconscious, to the ground.

—

The physician on Eisenstadt's team was young, brisk, and—unlike many I'd known—perfectly willing to admit to a certain degree of professional ignorance. "If you want the bottom line," he said, shaking his head, "it's that I can't tell you what exactly happened to him."

Eisenstadt glowered. "And that's the best you can do?"

"Oh, no," the physician said, undaunted by his superior's displeasure. "I said I didn't know what happened; that's not to say I can't treat the results." He leaned over his desk to call up a display. "Here, for instance, he shows signs of having had a mild stroke—we're already cleaning up the damage there." Another display. "Cardiac trauma. We'll probably wind up having to rebuild parts of his heart, but for the moment he's perfectly stable. Ditto for the other bits of scattered damage he sustained."