A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher Read Free Book Online Page B

three-month residency on an aircraft carrier in the Solomon Islands. Skilled surgical and postoperative nurses in the war were too essential to use on X-ray work, so the Navy relied on volunteers like me. And throughout South Vietnam, in military hospitals and on hospital ships, X-ray technicians were in demand; because shrapnel wounds were often undetectable by the naked eye, or were obscured by blood and dirt, every wounded soldier brought in fortreatment was routinely x-rayed. Sometimes they were cleaned up before being wheeled into the X-ray room; sometimes I had to help strip them down. That night had been one of the worst since I had come onboard three months before: more than a hundred men had come in within a six-hour span, and working with a single orderly, I was covered with as much blood at the end of my shift as any O.R. nurse.
    Sharline had her blond hair drawn back with a torn ribbon. She was about my height, with a very full figure—heavier, she said, ever since she had come to Vietnam. She smelled of iodine and disinfectant soap. Her eyes were bloodshot and her smile blank, as if she had already taken a hit off the packed buds of that pollen-dusty, jade Thai stick she kept in a thin plastic tube taped along her bra strap. After she did take her hit, drawing it in sharply to her lungs, she gazed back at those lights, thirty miles across the choppy sea, as if they were fireworks on the Fourth of July. Like everyone else onboard, at that moment Sharline heard no explosions, no artillery fire—nothing but the wind flapping the pennants on the mast and the slap of the waves against the ship’s hull. But I could hear all the sounds behind those lights: mortar blasts, antiaircraft guns, even the crackle of small arms. No amount of ganja, gin, black beauties, or morphine lifted from the pharmaceutical stores either enhanced or erased them. I had more powerful chemicals at work in my bloodstream, which it seemed nothing could override.
    Outwardly they had only manifested themselves at a single point, on my left palm, which was burning more intensely than usual that night. From the red dot that had formed there after the
Ummidia Stellarum
bit me, concentric lines had appeared, tightly packed in an area smaller than a postage stamp. Every month a new red circle rose up from below my skin, twelve of them now radiating from the dot, like the orbits of planets around a red star. I had long given up scrubbing my palm, or soaking it, or applying compresses, or ice. I was careful to keep it concealed, but whenever one of the doctors or another nurse saw it, I told them it was a tattoo. Which did not explain why it kept growing larger. After a while, I no more wanted to eradicate it than I would have wanted to reverse the strange effects of the spider’s bite.
    The new doctor specializing in tropical diseases, which were oftentransmitted by insect bites, had just come on-line, and I had borrowed several of his reference books one night, but under
spider bites
found no symptoms remotely resembling my own. I took my own pulse and temperature, and both were normal, but the temperature of my palm, which I measured with a flat thermometer, was always 105°. In addition to insomnia, my other symptoms were frequent loss of appetite: sometimes I went a whole day without food and didn’t realize it until the next morning. At the same time, my weight remained exactly the same. Sometimes I drank two liters of water at a sitting, and like a spider craved the heat, but I never sweated, even on the hottest days. After leaving New Orleans, I began having very irregular periods, months apart, and then I stopped getting them altogether. In Savannah, when no rings had yet appeared in my palm, I underwent a complete blood workup after my induction, but it had been all clear.
    I soon discovered that the powers of my memory were greatly heightened: I seemed able to scan its contents, no matter how remote or obscure the incident, to the minutest