"Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble," Denninger's chest-speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. "She's quite upset."
"No need for her to be," Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. Denninger looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog. That kind of man could be pushed a ways if he thought you held the whip hand. But if he smelled fear on you, he would hand you the same old cake: a thin icing of "I'm sorry I can't tell you more" on top and a lot of contempt for stupid civilians who wanted to know more than what was good for them underneath.
"I want some answers," Stu said.
"I'm sorry, but - "
"If you want me to cooperate, give me some answers."
"In time you will be - "
"I can make it hard for you."
"We know that," Denninger said peevishly. "I simply don't have the authority to tell you anything, Mr. Redman. I know very little myself."
"I guess you've been testing my blood. All those needles."
"That's right," Denninger said warily.
"What for?"
"Once more, Mr. Redman, I can't tell you what I don't know." The peevish tone was back again, and Stu was inclined to believe him. He was nothing but a glorified technician on this job, and he didn't like it much.
"They put my home town under quarantine."
"I know nothing about that, either." But Denninger cut his eyes away from Stu's and this time Stu thought he was lying.
"How come I haven't seen anything about it?" He pointed to the TV set bolted to the wall.
"I beg your pardon?"
"When they roadblock off a town and put bobwire around it, that's news," Stu said.
"Mr. Redman, if you'll only let Patty take your blood pressure - "
"No. If you want any more from me, you better send two big strong men to get it. And no matter how many you send, I'm gonna try to rip some holes in those germ-suits. They don't look all that strong, you know it?"
He made a playful grab at Denninger's suit, and Denninger skipped backward and nearly fell over. The speaker of his intercom emitted a terrified squawk and there was a stir behind the double glass.
"I guess you could feed me something in my food to knock me out, but that'd mix up your tests, wouldn't it?"
"Mr. Redman, you're not being reasonable!" Denninger was keeping a prudent distance away. "Your lack of cooperation may do your country a grave disservice. Do you understand me?"
"Nope," Stu said. "Right now it looks to me like it's my country doing me a grave disservice. It's got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little pissant doctor who doesn't know shit from Shinola. Get your ass out of here and send somebody in to talk to me or send enough boys to take what you need by force. I'll fight em, you can count on that."
He sat perfectly still in his chair after Denninger left. The nurse didn't come back. Two strong orderlies did not appear to take his blood pressure by force. Now that he thought about it, he supposed that even such a small thing as a blood-pressure reading wouldn't be much good if obtained under duress. For the time being they were leaving him to simmer in his own juices.
He got up and turned on the TV and watched it unseeingly. His fear was big inside him, a runaway elephant. For two days he had been waiting to start sneezing, coughing, hawking black phlegm and spitting it into the commode. He wondered about the others, people he had known all his life. He wondered if any of them were as bad off as Campion had been. He thought of the dead woman and her baby in that old Chevy, and he kept seeing Lila Bruett's face on the woman and little Cheryl Hodges's face on the baby.
The TV squawked and crackled. His heart beat slowly in his chest. Faintly, he could hear the sound of an air purifier sighing air into the room. He felt his fear twisting and turning inside him beneath his poker face. Sometimes it was big and panicky, trampling everything: the elephant. Sometimes it was small and gnawing, ripping with sharp teeth: the rat. It was always with him.
But it was forty hours before they sent him a man who would talk...
BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS Chapter 8