The frantic activity of the last few minutes was finally starting to settle. Rudy double checked the IV that they had just restarted, having to use a different location on the arm since Steve obviously had ripped the existing one out violently as he launched himself off the bed to go tackle Blankenship. He now had a bandage across that torn and bleeding spot. Satisfied with the IV, the doctor took Steve's pulse again and frowned. "It's still fast," he said. "He's got enough sedative in him right now to put an elephant out, but he's sure trying to fight it."

Oscar was pacing back and forth on a parallel track to the bed, leaving room for Rudy and Carla to work but still staying close. "How is he?" he demanded.

Rudy sighed and touched Steve on the forehead. "This fever has definitely gone even higher than it was the last time I did vitals two hours ago." He removed the thermometer and studied it. "104.3."

"Would it help to transfer him to the full hospital?" Oscar asked.

Rudy debated, then shook his head. "I really don't see what else we could do there for him that we aren't here, and with that fact established, the fewer people involved, the better for security. We're already trying all symptomatic treatment. It just isn't working, at least not yet."

"There's ice," Carla suggested tentatively.

Rudy slowly nodded. "I've been trying to avoid that because of the bionic complications with extreme cold, didn't want to make him feel even worse, but this is getting to the point we're going to have to. All right, Carla, get several ice packs. We have got to get this fever down."

She left the room, and Oscar moved up a little closer, putting a hand on his friend's shoulder. In spite of the amount of drugs he had in him at the moment, Steve still reacted slightly, pulling away from the touch. "Easy, Steve. It's me." Steve settled, and Oscar turned to Rudy and dropped his voice to a near whisper. "Thank God Steve is as weak as he is at the moment. Blankenship said he was just shaken up, but Steve at anything close to full strength would have killed him. He'd have a lot of trouble coming to terms with that once he gets better."

Oscar cringed, thinking how near to disaster things had come. If Steve had actually hurt or killed the scientist, it would have sparked international awkwardness to put it mildly, but even more alarming to Oscar was thinking of the eventual effect on his friend once Steve regained his senses. Blankenship had reported that he had been looking for Oscar to ask him something and thought he had seen him heading that direction a few minutes earlier, so he was just checking rooms quickly for Oscar when Steve abruptly sprang out of nowhere and tackled him. All of them, running to the sounds of the fight, had seen Steve on top of the other man trying apparently to knock him straight through the floor. Steve had been locked in as Oscar had never before seen him, blind and deaf to all else, not even noticing their shouts or efforts to pull him away. The only thing that had finally broken up that fight was Rudy's hastily prepared shot that knocked Steve out.

"He was actually trying to hurt him." Rudy sighed again. "You know, I have never seen Steve truly trying to hurt someone before. Immobilize people, yes, but he always held himself in check and tried to not take it too far unless he had no choice. With Blankenship, he really wanted to that time. He was throwing every effort he could at him. You're right; we were lucky. I hate keeping him drugged heavily, but we're just going to have to increase the doses on the sedatives. He'll thank us when he comes out of this."

"Yes. He's going to be all right, Rudy. He has to be. With everything he's survived, it can't be just a simple virus that turns out to be too much for him."

Rudy ran a hand over his hair, feeling frustrated. "I just hope I'm not missing something. I have run every test I can think of already today, gone over all his systems physical and bionic, and I can't find any other factor, any injury or infection. I've even done toxicology tests to make sure he wasn't poisoned somehow. He was exhausted and run down, but the electrolyte imbalances are improving. By everything I've seen, this is just a bug, but it's sure putting up a fight. Then there was what happened just now. I had checked on him not five minutes earlier, and he was asleep and sedated. Even if he woke up for some reason and saw Blankenship go by through the window, I don't know how he managed to find the strength to jump off that bed, charge out of this room, and tackle him as he was passing. Then this whole thing about Blankenship. Clearly his eye is malfunctioning because of the fever, but it's odd that he's so fixated on one person."

"He knows us, and he trusts us," Oscar suggested. "He knows the lab staff, too. Maybe that's why he's subconsciously throwing everything that's wrong at the moment onto the stranger."

"Could be." Carla reentered at that moment with several ice packs, and she and Rudy started placing them around Steve's neck and torso, trying to avoid contact with the right arm. Steve again shifted a little, pulling back. "You're going to be all right, Steve. We're trying to help you," Rudy reassured him. He finished with the ice, then stepped back, jerking his head at Carla. She retreated to the far wall of the room for a soft conference, and Oscar came over to join them.

"New rules here," Rudy said. "We're going to increase the sedatives until the fever falls and he's oriented again, even overuse them. There's no choice, not any longer. We have got to keep him resting and still so he can fight this instead of what he thinks he's seeing at the moment. Those blinds at the window are also going to be kept fully closed from this point so he can't ever get a glimpse of anything out there. I know it makes him harder to monitor from outside, but we're going to have people right in this room from now on, even if he's asleep. He'll never be alone. Also, we have to be very careful. He hasn't tried to hurt any of us, but he's clearly not in full control of his actions because of the illness. So I want two people in here at all times with him, never one person alone. And they have to be people he knows well, just in case Oscar is right that the reason he's picked Blankenship to fixate on is he's a stranger. We don't want him to get set off by one of us."

Carla nodded. "He'd never forgive himself later if he hurt one of us."

"No, he wouldn't." Rudy chewed his lower lip, again feeling like he was missing some piece of data. At the moment, the data he was most concerned with was the thermometer he had stuck in his lab coat pocket, and he was having trouble focusing past those numbers. "I'll stay here tonight to watch him. I think tonight is going to be the crisis one way or another with this fever. Carla, you can divide the shift with another nurse."

"I'll stay myself all night," she said at once.

Oscar turned toward the door. "I'll have them bring in extra chairs. That way we can each have one."

(SMDM)

It was a long night. Steve's fever continued rising for the first few hours, and Rudy and Carla kept him packed in ice. Steve was very heavily drugged now, but his pulse was still faster than Rudy would have liked, and his expression hardly looked restful. Oscar wondered what he was fighting there inside his mind, what he had personalized this illness as. Was it Blankenship? Or was he off on some convoluted mission that kept getting crazier as it perpetually went wrong?

Finally, around midnight, his fever peaked and then suddenly dropped. He seemed to be sleeping more soundly, too. After another hour without the temperature rising again, Rudy took away the ice. "I think he's turned the corner," he told Oscar. "Hope so, anyway."

"He'll beat this," Oscar said again as he had earlier. He was still trying to convince himself as much as reassure the others. "How long do you think it will be until he wakes up? I know he needs rest, but I'll feel better when I can talk to him, even briefly."

Rudy nodded. "I know. I will, too. Especially after earlier." All three of them were still carrying that final image of Steve trying with all the power he could muster at the moment to hurt the other man. Even as he had lost consciousness after Rudy managed to give him the shot, his last move had been another convulsive grab at Blankenship. "He definitely needs to sleep. Let's not try to wake him, but I'll cut the doses he's getting on the sedative down again somewhat. He'll still be pretty drugged, but as the heaviest burden of it wears off, if he wakes up on his own, hopefully we can talk to him for a minute."

So they sat there watching him sleep, and gradually, in spite of themselves, they dozed off, too. The last day had worn out everyone. Oscar snapped to alertness suddenly, hearing Steve shift, and he looked at his watch. It was nearly 8:00 a.m. Steve's head moved a little on the pillow, and Rudy jolted awake himself and jumped out of his chair. He crossed over to the bed with Oscar a short step behind him, and Carla joined them a moment later. Rudy put his hand on Steve's forehead. "Still got just a low fever, but it's a big improvement," he told them. Steve's eyelids flickered, and Rudy put a hand on his shoulder. "Steve. Can you hear me?"

Steve slowly opened his eyes. It took him several seconds to focus on anything, but eventually, he looked up at Rudy, then over at the other two of them. He looked dazed, but there was clear recognition. "Take it easy," Rudy told him. "How are you feeling?"

"Better, I think." His eyes halfway fell shut again, and he fought to reopen them.

"You're still pretty sedated. Just rest; don't struggle against it. You're getting better now," Rudy said. "You're going to be all right, Steve."

Steve turned toward Oscar. "Where's Blankenship?" he asked.

Oscar and Rudy shared a look across the bed. They had hoped Steve wouldn't remember that whole last episode with Blankenship. On the other hand, Oscar thought, maybe his friend was concerned that he had hurt him.

"Blankenship was fine, Steve," he assured him. "He was just shaken up. You were too weak to have any of your bionic strength, fortunately."

Steve shook his head. "I did. Right then. I was getting some bionics, trying to. Know I was. Had to stop him." He fought against the lassitude of the drugs again.

Rudy sighed, and Oscar shook his head. Steve had seemed oriented at first, but now he was diving straight back into this fixation on Blankenship. "Steve, you were just sick. It was all the illness. We know that's what made you attack him."

"No." Steve's jaw was set.

Rudy gave up. They would simply have to buy more time, although this much insistence with only a low-grade fever now worried him. "Carla," he said softly, "get me -"

"No!" Steve opened his eyes fully again, struggling to form the words. "He 'tacked me."

"What?" Oscar asked, wondering if he'd heard that right. Carla, who had taken one step toward the door, filling in Rudy's interrupted request for more sedatives, froze.

"He attacked me. Came in here. I was 'sleep. He woke me up giving me a shot."

"What?" It was Rudy's turn to be incredulous.

Steve nodded. "Gave me a shot. In my right arm."

Rudy frowned. "You're saying that Blankenship came in here when you were asleep, and you woke up with him giving you a shot, and that's why you tackled him as he was leaving? That fight started here, not out there?" That scenario couldn't be a bionic eye malfunction due to illness, which left either a pure hallucination - or, as wild as it sounded, the truth.

"Yeah." Steve's eyes fell closed again. "Not my eye. Shot can't be me. That was him. So I tried - tried to get it back. Got to stop him. Proof. So you'd believe me. Tried to get the needle. But you drugged me." That speech seemed to take the last of his strength at the moment, and his voice trailed off.

"Steve, where? Can you tell us where exactly he gave you a shot?" Steve's left hand moved over to his right arm, and Rudy followed it. He pushed the sleeve up, checking the skin, then tapped the spot. A very small puncture was visible, hard to see unless you were looking for it. "Son of a gun."

Oscar leaned over for a better look. Carla was staring, too. "Why would Dr. Blankenship give him a shot?" she asked.

"Do you realize the strength that it took to punch a needle through that skin?" Rudy asked.

Steve tried to open his eyes again. "He's strong. Really strong. Fight was bionic. Some."

Rudy raised his head, and Oscar saw the wheels spring into motion mentally. It was times like this when he seized an idea that Rudy looked every inch the genius doctor that he was. "He was aiming for the muscle, but whatever he injected might still be in there since there's no muscle to inject into. Liquid wouldn't disperse nearly as quickly in the bionics as in flesh, and Steve's been just lying here still for several hours. It might be drained down into a nice collection for us. Hang on a minute, Steve. I'll be back. I'm going to try something here."

Rudy left, and Oscar moved up closer to the bedside. "I'm sorry, pal," he said. "None of us have been listening to you at all, have we?"

Steve shook his head slightly. "I'm not crazy," he mumbled.

"We didn't think you were crazy, but we weren't even considering the possibility that you might really be seeing something different. We should have at least wondered, especially when you kept seeing it."

"But what is going on with Blankenship?" Carla asked.

Oscar shrugged. "No idea, but something definitely is. There isn't any valid reason for him to give a shot to Steve."

Rudy reentered the room holding two syringes, one full and one empty, and a small instrument kit. "Okay, Steve, I'm going to give you a shot myself."

Steve retreated into the pillow. "Don't knock me out again. You believe me?" Steve asked.

"Yes, I believe you. I'm sorry, Steve. This isn't going to knock you out." He injected the full syringe into Steve's left arm, then gave his shoulder a squeeze. "You just rest for a few minutes. You'll feel better soon. Meanwhile, I'm going to be working on your right arm some, so hold still." He rounded the bed. First, he carefully put on gloves, then opened his instrument kit. Soon he had an access flap opened very near the puncture wound, and he peered through the inner circuitry, retracting a few things out of the way as he investigated. "There. There is a small collection of fluid. Now, let's see if I can retrieve it." He inserted the needle on the empty syringe and then pulled the plunger back. The milky fluid was sucked up into the syringe. Satisfied, he stepped back and capped the needle, then turned to Carla.

"I want a full tox screen on that substance, and be very careful yourself handling it." She nodded and left the room, and Rudy turned back to Steve. He closed up the arm carefully, then spoke. "Steve? Are you feeling better?"

Steve's eyes opened again. He looked sharper, much less foggy than a few minutes ago as Rudy's shot burned through the remnants of the sedatives. "Yes," he said, sounding almost like himself.

Oscar smiled. "Okay, pal. Let's have it from the beginning, everything you've noticed with Blankenship. And this time, we're listening to you."