02. The Shadow Dancers Read Online Free PDF Page B

host dies before the parasite does."
    Sam was kinda disturbingly clinical, but, then, he'd been a vice squad man. "How long before this breakdown?"
    "About thirty hours, give or take with the individual. Never less than twenty-four and never more than forty as near as we can tell. Our samples have been very limited, our information mostly second-hand or eavesdrop or observations by people not trained in this sort of thing. Withdrawal takes another six to eight hours of increasing agony before you pass out and the heart stops. Brain tissue disruption or destruction begins shortly after the pain button is pressed, though, and accelerates from there. We think that's what kills, eventually. The autonomic nervous system-heart, breathing, whatever-is disrupted. Let it go too long and a fresh infusion will get the body going again but it won't repair whatever brain damage you get. The effects are wideranging and inconsistent from individual to individual. There could be memory loss, or some sensory loss-vision, hearing, taste, smell-or some motor function problems or intelligence, talents, abilities-you name it. But pain's the last to go."
    I listened, not understandin' all the biology shit but understandin' the effects on the people good enough. "Bill -how do you know this?" I asked him. "The only way you could know this is if it was done on people."
    "It was," he said softly. "But not by us. This isn't something we'd ever fool with. It's too scary."
    "Can you kill it?" Sam asked. "Without killing the addict, I mean?"
    "Sure. You can kill anything. If we had enough cases, we could easily isolate whatever starts breaking it down. Without tipping off the opposition and letting them know we're on to them, we just don't know for sure if we could cure it or not and if so what the price would be. We got hold of some raw samples, strictly by accident, and ran them through every test and every expert and computer the home world has. We have been unable to make it grow in the lab, and it ignores test animals, even chimps. The only way it'll reproduce is inside a human, and since the reproductive clusters humans produce lack something it needs and can't get, they aren't any good, either."
    With that kind of setup, Bill Markham then let us have the whole load.
    I got to admit I don't understand the Labyrinth, and I ain't sure nobody really does. I sure can't figure out how them early scientists guessed it was there, let alone built this network, this inter-world railroad. I been in it a few times, but I still can't figure what's happenin' in there. It's like a real long tunnel, stretchin' out in all directions, only you're inside a cube with windows. Windows up top, windows beneath, and on all sides 'cept the ones that keep you in the Labyrinth. That means you always got a choice of four worlds to exit to. Every once in a while, there's a switch junction, with a control room and Labyrinth in all directions. That switcher punches his buttons and you go which way he decides, into a whole set of new cubes in all directions until you get to other switch points.
    Sam and me we went to a bunch of 'em, and we alwayswalked, but there's enough room in there to drive a truck through-if you could figure out how to make a truck go up or down instead of just forward, back, left, and right. Of course, it probably ain't left or up in there; none of the usual rules mean much inside there, 'cause you're outside everyplace else. They must have some kinda trucks or flyin' saucers or whatever they use, though, 'cause they move trainloads of shit through that thing.
    Three guilds, which I guess are sorta like unions or somethin', run the thing. One controls the switch points, one runs the stations, and a third moves the cargo through from one point to another. Ain't no way the biggest, baddest computer in creation could look at all that stuff all the time, though, so security mostly monitors the switches 'cause just about everybody and everything has to pass at