Chapter 7
Another rumble came from the jungle, louder than before. Judy tensed as she stared at the line of vegetation across the trench. She could hear the sharp echoes of trees snapping in the distance.
Thirty-two minutes had passed since communication with their mother had been cut abruptly. No matter how much she tried to reassure herself, her anxiety was increasing a notch with every second that ticked by. If their robot had woken up, what about the ones in all the wreckage?
A clucking sound on her left reminded her of her current assignment.
"Oh, no you don't," she muttered. Debbie was again pecking gravel on the edge of the trench.
She was tiptoeing toward the reckless chicken, careful not to spook her so close to a precipice, when the sky thundered as if a truck-load of bang pops had gone off.
Startled, Judy jerked her head toward the wreckage zone and saw a web of purple lightning streak across the cloudless sky. The rays intensified and the sky turned a weird vivid pink, like a badly oversaturated photo. As the atmospheric fracture widened, her wrist-computer suddenly spewed three loud bursts of static.
Judy felt her insides melting.
First it had been the forest flooding, then the robot waking up and the trench not activating as it used to, and now, this weird phenomenon and the infamous signal her mother had been so concerned about.
Her brother called her from the Jupiter's open ramp. "Judy? What's going on?" he shouted, stretching his head out as much as he could.
As protective as ever, the robot prevented him from going any further and Judy began to think that maybe she shouldn't be out there either.
"Some weird electrical storm," she shouted back to Will before glancing at Debbie.
Don's pet was no longer next to the trench.
Wincing, Judy looked over the edge when she heard clucking from the firm ground behind her.
She relaxed with a sigh of relief. "Enough vitamin D for you today, Debbie," she said as she tried to pick up the chicken. But frayed by the pyrotechnic show, the beast flapped its wings and hopped out of reach. After a few more unsuccessful attempts to capture the bird under Will's amused gaze, Judy glared at her brother. "Are you two going to stand and laugh or give me a hand here?"
"I would but he won't let me," Will said with a shrug.
As proof, her brother stepped forward. At once, the robot dragged him back inside the garage.
"Danger, Will Robinson."
Judy smirked. "You're both useless!" she shouted before resuming her efforts to catch the capricious chicken.
But Judy's good humor had limits and she reached one when after throwing herself on Debbie like a baseball player going head first into a base, she only managed to get hold of a feather. As Judy pushed herself back up, heavy footsteps made the ground shake.
Under her stunned eyes, the robot marched up to the chicken with all four arms deployed and a red glow under his body plates.
Judy stared in dismay as Will let out an horrified: "Don't blast the chicken!"
"Danger, Debbie West," the robot warned.
Then, in a swift movement, the robot captured the bird. A series of outraged clucks, flapping wings, and flying feathers exploded as the robot returned to the Jupiter with his catch.
As much shocked as amused, Judy quickly followed and closed the ramp behind them.
"Did you hear it too, the signal?" Will asked as they climbed the shaft to the main deck while the robot put Debbie in her crate.
Judy nodded.
"Do you think it's mom who caused it?"
"I don't know," she replied.
As Will entered the hub, Judy veered left and peeked inside Penny's room. Her bed was empty and the sheet was on the floor with her tablet as if she had stood up in a hurry. There was a toilet flush. Oh damn. Had she vomited again?
She entered the room and knocked on the bathroom door. "Penny, are you okay in there?"
None of the others who had been hit by the native darts had developed gastric symptoms but Penny was the stress-induced tummy ache type of person, and after the whirlwind of emotions of the previous days, or even months for that matter, she wasn't completely certain that her present symptoms were related to the dart. More likely, it was her body flushing out the stress, and her meals with it.
She was about to knock again when the door slid open and her disheveled sister, as white as a ghost and as sleepy as a sloth appeared.
"Hey, how do you feel?" Judy asked, helping her to lie down on her bed and adjusting the covers over her shoulders.
Penny curled into a ball. "Tired. And I still can't keep anything down."
Judy pulled her tablet. "Your fever has been down for a few hours now. That's good."
"Are mom and dad back?"
"Not yet. I'd like to take a look at your neck."
At her surprise, Penny pushed herself up and slid out of her bed. "Hey, where are you going?"
"The infirmary, why?"
"No, we can do this here."
"Mom didn't confine me yet so I'd better enjoy every occasion I have to be outside of my room while I still can."
Knowing better than to confront her stubborn sister, Judy watched Penny wrap herself in her blanket and shuffle out of her room.
"What's taking them so long?" Penny muttered as she lay down on the infirmary exam bed.
Judy glanced above her shoulder as she retrieved antiseptic wipes and sterile gauzes in a drawer. "Well, a junkyard full of space ships is a field day for aeronautical engineers for one," she replied, putting the supplies on the side table and switching on the lamp above the exam bed. "As for dad, you know what they say about tigers and jungles. Don't move."
Penny winced as she slowly peeled a corner of the bandage.
"His leg seemed better yesterday by the way. You still stand by your diagnosis of permanent damage?"
Really? She was back at it? She couldn't keep food down but she could hold on to a grievance. Despite her irritation, Judy kept on delicately removing the gauze and exposed a small but red, swollen scrab. "No pus, that's good."
"Don't act as if you didn't hear me, Jude."
Judy heaved a deep sigh. "To seem and to be are two different things."
Penny hissed as Judy pressed a disinfecting wipe on the wound. "See, your boo boo doesn't seem painful, but it is. Two different things."
Her sister glared at her with a look that said, I'm not in the mood for your sarcasm, only mine. "He was doing great if you want my opinion."
Judy scoffed. "Great? Did you see his eyes?"
"Okay. Maybe he looked a little tired."
"No, he looked high."
Penny cringed. "What? Like in... No. You're wrong."
Judy straightened up and sighed. Her sister really didn't get it. How could she? She still didn't see him as a normal human being, with qualities and shortcomings. "Look, Penny, I know it's going to be hard for you to admit considering how much you idolize him but there are not many explanations when someone with a permanent limp can suddenly climb up and down steep slopes like he did yesterday."
She tore open a new sterile gauze and taped it on her sister's neck, regretting her words already. She didn't have to justify herself and merely opening the topic was borderline infringing on doctor-patient confidentiality. Unfortunately, her sister was already going back to her annoying conspiracy theories.
"I don't believe you. You just won't admit that you were wrong or that you lied to me about what you really meant to tell him, mom, Grant, and you."
"Oh for crying out loud, Penny! When I started weaning him off the pain meds a month ago, he had such strong withdrawal symptoms that it could only make sense if he had a previous history of substance abuse."
"You said that it was the alien poison of the stingray messing with his system!"
"I'm as much worried for him as you are. You don't have a monopoly on it. But I'm telling you, as a doctor, there's no way he could have been able to hike all day long yesterday without a massive dose of painkillers and stimulants. And his eyes didn't lie. He was high."
"And I'm telling you no. Dad would not do drugs. There must be another explanation. Didn't they teach you in med school not to jump to conclusions?"
Making an effort to control herself and not explode at her sister, Judy stepped back, dragged the stool from under the desk and sat down.
"In med school, they taught us that sometimes, you need to look at the big picture. Like why mom and dad's marriage fell apart, why he left three years ago, why he stopped calling, why he forgot even our birthdays. Something must have happened to him but we just didn't realize it because, when he was there with us, he never talked about himself or his work. Face it, Penny. We know nothing about what goes on in his life. Nothing. And you're the one who read all those books about his job so you tell me. Is there anything about the excessive amount of stress they put them through and how they cope with it? Did you read anything about alcohol and drug abuse?"
When Penny fell silent and stared down at her hands, twisting them together, Judy let out a brief sigh of relief, thinking that she had at last made a break in her sister's protective wall around the image she had of their father. Until she saw her shaking her head from side to side.
"Dad's not an addict. Except maybe caffeine which was legal last time I checked. He couldn't have passed the Resolute's security with drugs in his pockets anyway."
Judy scoffed. "He smuggled a rifle and other military equipment. And it's not only that..." Her shoulders sagged as she hesitated. After taking a deep breath, she raised her eyes and met her sister's suspicious gaze. "I'm missing a box of Dexedrine."
Penny frowned in confusion. "What's Dexedrine?"
"It's an amphetamine."
"You mean like meth?"
Judy tilted her head and winced. "It's closer to cocaine."
Without a word, Penny grabbed her blanket and shuffled out.
Pained by their conversation, Judy began cleaning the infirmary in silence when Penny came back in and proclaimed with a stronger voice:
"Why do you assume dad stole the meds in the first place? Everybody has access to your infirmary."
"The drawer where I keep drugs is locked at all times, and he certainly didn't ask me to open it."
"Everybody can pick locks. I can."
Judy's eyes grew wide. "What?"
"What, you don't know how?"
"No! Of course not! How do you–"
"In one thriller the heroin learned to pick up locks to escape a serial killer's basement."
"So you learned it too?"
Penny nodded. "Yeah. It seemed to be a useful skill to have anyway just in case."
"Just in case you got kidnapped by a serial killer?" Judy shook her head in disbelief. That day was getting better and better. Stalking skills, burglary skills, her sister was developing quite the resume.
"I know it in my heart, Jude. Dad is not an addict. His eyes were red, and he looked tired because he probably didn't sleep much the previous night because of me and also, he was coughing, like he had some alien kind of flu."
"He didn't have some kind of flu."
"How do you know? You didn't examine him."
"I checked his vitals on my pad while we took a break. He didn't have any fever and his oxygen level was excellent, even better than mine. I don't know why he was coughing."
"I know," their brother said from the doorframe.
Both Judy and Penny swivelled their head fast toward Will.
A minute later, Judy entered the airlock and felt a weird sensation in the pit of her stomach. Please, for pity's sake, he hadn't done this...
"Eww. Why does it smell like a public bathroom in here?" Penny said with a grimace before stepping out.
Not liking the stench either, though for a different reason, Judy crouched next to their dad's rebreather and a toppled travel coffee mug. While Will picked up their mother's whiteboard, she opened the mug, swirled the remaining dark liquid and sniffed. It smelled of nothing else but cold coffee.
"Not my first rodeo, I'm good." Will read out loud as she screwed the cap back.
"What does that mean?" Penny asked from the doorframe. "And to whom was it addressed?"
"Only Harris was there at the camp with him that night," Will replied as Judy turned her attention to the rebreather.
While the dive computer initialized, she scratched some dried blood out of the mouthpiece with her fingernail and cursed as another piece of a puzzle fell in place. The airlock, the urine smell, his rebreather plugged in with an empty bottle of pure oxygen, the blood… Judy felt a cold sweat running down her spine. She prayed to be wrong when the last dry dive data appeared on the small touch screen and confirmed what she already knew. "Damn him."
She had expressively told him not to do this, that it wasn't worth the risks, and that he was more likely to hurt himself seriously.
Judy nervously ran her hand through her hair, leaned back against the wall, and sat down to digest the news.
"What?" Penny asked.
"I know why he was coughing."
"Are you going to tell us or keep this knowledge to yourself?" Her sister asked, her arms folded in front of her chest.
"HBO therapy."
Penny scoffed. "You mean he watched tv to heal his nerves? I knew that worked!"
Though her sister's silliness was a good sign that Penny was feeling better, Judy was too deeply worried about their father to appreciate the joke. As if it wasn't bad enough, he'd recruited Harris to help him go through the procedure. Had he lost his mind? That woman couldn't be trusted, not even with a chicken's life. So his life? She was so manipulative that…
Judy froze and suspiciously glanced again at the mug.
Their dad was an addict indeed, like Penny had noted: a caffeine addict. Having a bad hunch, she picked the mug up and rushed back with it to the infirmary.
With her siblings peeking above her shoulders, she scrapped the dregs at the bottom of the mug, resuspended the dark, granular mixture into a clean vial and transferred a few drops on a gel-matrix.
"What are you looking for?" Will asked as she ran the sample into the spectrometer. "And what's HBO therapy?"
The first question, Judy chose not to answer until she got all the facts, but she explained what hyperbaric oxygen therapy was in a few words.
"So he was high on pure oxygen," Penny falsely concluded.
Judy massaged her temples to ease a headache. "No, you don't get high on pure oxygen under elevated pressures. You get seizures and lung damage. That's why he was coughing."
They waited in silence for the computer to display the analysis report. Judy straightened on her chair and leaned forward to read.
"I can't believe it…" she muttered, slamming her palms against the desk. Her dad hadn't done this to himself. Well, he had decided to go through this dangerous, crazy therapy, and she was right, he was under influence. But people usually didn't dissolve their drugs, prescribed or stolen, in their coffee. They took it with a glass of water.
Penny squinted at the screen. "Carbamazepine. Dexedrine. You were right... I can't believe it. You were right..."
"I'm gonna kill this woman. Despite all the oaths and everything, I'm going to kill her," Judy shouted, unable to keep control of her emotions anymore. Caffeine alone heighten the side effects of Carbamazepine. And a stimulant on top of that?
"Harris?" Will asked hesitantly. "What has she done?"
"She dissolved the drugs I gave her to treat her bipolar disorder plus the stolen Dexedrine into dad's coffee."
"So it wasn't him. I told you it wasn't him," Penny said.
As a grave silence fell over the infirmary, Judy closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, focusing hard on remembering the pharmacokinetic data she'd read on the drugs.
"Why?" Will asked, outraged. "Why would Harris do that to him?"
"Why does the scorpion sting?" Penny asked.
"Because it's in its nature," Will replied. "But only if it feels threatened. We never threatened Harris, so why is she doing all this crap to us? What have we done to her?!"
Penny leaned against the cupboards and slowly lowered herself on the floor. "We discovered that she wasn't Dr. Smith for one. Maybe she isn't Harris either. Maybe dad was close to uncovering her real identity and she wanted to keep him unfocused or maybe she was simply bored and messing with him because that's her idea of entertainment."
While her siblings continued to argue about Harris's motivations, Judy calculated.
The peak blood concentration for Carbamazepine was anywhere between six and twenty-four hour for a therapeutic dose, which wasn't the case here. There was at least 40mg/ml in the coffee mug but it was difficult to know how much had precipitated to the bottom of the mug before he drunk. A memory struck her. Their father had stopped putting sugar in his coffee years ago but he still swirled it.
Focus on what you know, Judy told herself to keep her thoughts clear. Quickly, she entered the drugs' names on the database and clicked on overdose.
The peak blood concentration for larger doses of Carbamazepine was up to seventy-two hours and the toxicity depended on the range of concentration: between 11-15mg/ml the side-effects were mild, essentially disorientation and ataxia; between 15-25mg/ml, their dad would have suffered hallucinations and become aggressive; above 25mg/ml, it was seizures, coma, and death.
Judy felt herself go cold with fear.
He'd finished his coffee in the airlock just before biting on his mouthpiece, so his dive computer clock set the time for ingestion forty-three hours ago. He hadn't seemed disoriented during the hike, though that fall he'd taken near the end could be a sign of muscular weakness, it was hard to tell. He hadn't seem delusional as far as she could tell. And she would have noticed a seizure, so he hadn't been at peak blood concentration yet when they had reached the Jupiter the previous evening either.
It must have happened during the night, when he was alone. He had wandered away from the camp, confused, maybe thinking that he was tracking Harris but having no clue of what was really happening to him.
Judy propped her elbows on the desk and put her head in her hands as a terrible weight compressed her chest and made it difficult to breathe.
She had left him outside while he was overdosing.
His cough without apparent reason should have been a red flag. But she'd been so angry at him over that rifle. He could stand on his feet so she had jumped to the conclusion that he could wait to be seen until after she treated Penny's fever and Mark's mild sprain. She hadn't even considered that he could have been in a more serious state than he appeared. As she had reminded her sister, to seem and to be are two different things.
There was a reason first year interns didn't practice medicine without supervision. Because when they did and they screwed up, people died.
This was on her. He was dying somewhere in the jungle and there was nothing she could do, stuck here, she couldn't fly, she-
While hers siblings discussed what to do if Harris showed up, Judy took a deep breath to keep her nerves under control. Panicking would not help their dad. As soon as their mother returned, they'll take off and fly above the forest and use the Jupiter's sensors to search for him. They could do that, right? She certainly hope they could because it was his only chance...
Disorientation. Aggressive behavior. Hallucination. As she reviewed the symptoms and put in place an emergency care plan, something struck her as deja-vu. Hallucination, aggression… right after she'd given Harris the drugs. It had never been for her. How could she be so stupid?
Judy leaped to the freezer, opened the drawer where she kept the used gel-matrices in case she wanted to rerun some test and pulled his sample from the day he'd suffered a vivid nightmare in the infirmary and almost killed Harris in the middle of his delusion. She was putting it in the spectrometer and initialized a warming sequence when their wrist-computers all buzzed with an incoming communication.
"Maureen to Jupiter two."
"Mom? Where are you?" Will exclaimed.
"We're about to land next to you."
While her siblings dashed out of the airlock, Judy started the scan for the cocktail of drugs when her mother's words suddenly registered in her brain. Had she said land, like in land a ship? What the heck had happened to the chariot?
A new spike of adrenaline jolted Judy to her feet. She left the computer to complete the sample analysis and rushed to the closest shaft.
She passed by Will, still restricted in his movements by the robot, and joined Penny outside. Her sister pointed her finger at the vast plain between them and the wreckage zone.
"What's that?"
Judy gasped. Above the pink electrical storm, the sky was turning darker with ominous shadows high in the atmosphere while a Jupiter, flying so low that two landing pods - dangling by a thread - brushed against the ground, with its starboard engine sputtering on and off, hopped its way up and down toward them.
The left rear pod suddenly detached and rebounded hard against the ship's belly. The Jupiter jolted under the impact and veered off course. Penny grabbed her arm and stepped back. "They're going to crash!"
"Judy!"
Alerted by her brother's cry, Judy jerked her head toward him and saw the robot marching toward them, his four arms deployed and his body glowing red.
Judy grabbed Penny's arm too and they staggered several steps back as the robot halted in front of them. Her wrist-computer announced an incoming communication from Don.
"Don? Where are you?" she asked as she heard a whistling sound.
Judy pivoted toward the trench and gasped.
On the other side, Don and Mark emerged from the tree line, another robot in full combat mode with them.