Forever Free

by Joe Haldeman

  It looked like that wouldn’t be a problem.

  If there were people living in town, we’d have to go out into the country and find an alternative landing spot big enough and flat enough. I could think of a couple of farms I wouldn’t mind seeing put to that use, just for old times’ sake.

  We found cold-weather gear in a locker room in the basement, bright orange coveralls that were lightweight and oily to the touch. I knew that it wasn’t oil, just some odd polymer that trapped a millimeter of vacuum between the suit’s layers, but they still felt greasy.

  Hoping against hope, we went into the service garage, but the vehicles’ fuel cells were all dead. The sheriff remembered about an emergency vehicle, though, that we found parked outside. Designed to work in situations where power wasn’t available, it had a small plutonium reactor.

  It was an ungainly garish thing, a bright yellow box set up for firefighting, remote rescue, and immediate medical aid. It was wide enough inside for six beds, with room for nurses or surgeons to move around them.

  Getting into it was a problem, the doors locked shut with ice. We got a couple of heavy screwdrivers from the garage and chipped our way inside.

  The lights came on when the door opened, a good sign. We turned the defroster on high and looked around – a handy mobile base of operations, now and when the rest of the crowd came down, as long as the plutonium held out.

  A ‘remaining hours of operation’ readout said 11,245. I wondered how to interpret that, since it probably used more power charging up a mountainside than sitting here with its lights on.

  When the windshield was clear, the sheriff sat down in the driver’s seat. Charlie and I strapped ourselves into hard chairs behind him.

  ‘The enabling code for emergency vehicles used to be five-six-seven,’ he said. ‘If that doesn’t work, we’ll have to figure out a way to subvert it.’ He punched those numbers into a keypad and was rewarded with a chime.

  ‘Destination?’ the vehicle asked.

  ‘Manual control,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘Proceed. Drive carefully.’

  He put the selector on FORWARD and the electric motor whined, increasing in pitch and volume until all six wheels broke free of the ice with a satisfying crunch. We lurched forward and the sheriff steered the thing cautiously around to the front of the spaceport, and took the road toward town.

  The spongy metal tires made a sandpapery sound on the icy road. My watch beeped and we stopped long enough for me to step outside and give Marygay a progress report.

  There weren’t any suburbs on this side of town; no building was allowed in the direction of the spaceport. Once we passed the five-kilometer limit, though, we were in the city.

  It was an interesting part of Centrus. The oldest buildings on the planet were here, squat rammed-earth structures with log framing on the doors and windows. They were dwarfed by the brick buildings of the next generation, two and three stories high.

  One of the old houses was standing with its front door open, hanging loose on one hinge. We stopped, and walked over to take a look. I heard the sheriff unsnap his holster. Part of me said What the hell does he expect to find? and part of me was reassured.

  Dim light came through the dirty windows, revealing a horrible sight: the floor was scattered with bones. The sheriff kicked at a few and then squatted to inspect a pile of them.

  He picked up a long one. ‘These aren’t Man or human bones.’ He tossed it away and stirred the pile. ‘Dogs and cats.’

  ‘With the open door, this was the only shelter for them when winter came,’ I said.

  ‘And the only source of food,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘Each other.’ We’d brought dogs and cats to this place knowing they’d have to be dependent, parasites, for most of the year. They had been a welcome link to the chain of life that began on Earth.

  And ended here? I felt a sudden urgency to get on into town.

  ‘Nothing here for us.’ The sheriff felt it, too; he stood up abruptly and wiped his hands on the greasy coveralls. ‘Let’s move on.’

  Interesting that we had instinctively assumed that I was in charge from the time the shuttle left orbit, but now the sheriff was in the driver’s seat, figuratively as well as literally.

  As the sun rose higher, we drove down Main Street, steering around abandoned vehicles. The road and sidewalks were badly in need of repair. We lurched over a choppy sea of frost heaves.

  The cars and floaters were not just abandoned; they were piled up in knots, mostly at intersections. People go off automatic inside the city limits, so when their drivers disappeared, the vehicles just kept going until they ran into something heavy.

  Most people’s homes were open to the sun. That was not reassuring, either. Who leaves for a long journey without drawing the curtains? The same people who leave their floaters in the middle of the street, I guess.

  ‘Why don’t we just stop at random and check a place that’s not full of dog bones,’ Charlie said. He looked like I felt: time to get off this rocking boat.

  The sheriff nodded and pulled over to the curb, in case of a sudden onrush of traffic. We got out and went into the closest building, a three-story apartment cluster, armed with our big screwdrivers, to pry open locks.

  The first apartment on the right was unlocked. ‘Man lived here,’ the sheriff said, betraying some emotion. Most of them didn’t need to lock their homes.

  It was functional and plain past austerity. A few pieces of wooden furniture without cushions. In one room, five plank beds with the wooden blocks they use for pillows.

  I wondered, not for the first time, whether they had pillows stashed somewhere for sex. Those planks would be hard on knees and backs. And did the other one and a half couples watch while a couple was coupling? Adults always lived together in groups of five, while children lived in a supervised creche.

  Maybe they all had sex together, every third day. They didn’t differentiate between home and het.

  The place was completely devoid of ornament, like a Tauran cell. Art belonged in public places, for the edification of all. They didn’t keep souvenirs or collect things.

  There was a uniform layer of dust on every horizontal surface, and Charlie and I both sneezed. The sheriff evidently lacked that gene.

  ‘We might be able to tell more from a human place,’ I said. ‘More disorder, more clues.’

  ‘Of course,’ the sheriff said. ‘Any other one, I’m sure.’ The population of Men was spread uniformly through the city, a magnanimous gesture.

  The one next door was locked, and so were the other seven on the floor. We didn’t have any luck with the screwdrivers.

  ‘You could shoot the lock off,’ Charlie said.

  ‘That’s not safe. And I only have twenty cartridges.’

  ‘Somehow,’ I said, ‘I think you’ll find boxes and boxes of them at the police station.’

  ‘Let’s go outside and break a window,’ he said. We went out to the ruined street and he picked up a fist-sized piece of it. He had a pretty good fastball for someone who’d probably never played the game. It starred the glass but bounced back. Charlie and I did the same. After a few repeats, the window was almost opaque with a craze of cracks, but it still held.

  ‘Well …’ The sheriff extracted his pistol, pointed it at the center of the window, and fired. The noise was astonishingly loud, and echoed wavering down the street. The bullet left a hand-sized hole in the ruined glass. He aimed a meter to the right and fired again, and most of the window collapsed in a satisfying cascade.

  It was time to make contact again, so we rested for a few minutes while I gave Marygay a summary of our disturbing observations. We agreed that they should put off landing until we knew a little more. Besides, the last people to be revived were still a little bit weak for the stress of landing.

  We didn’t have to clear away the glass fragments that still clung to the bottom of the frame. I could reach through and unlatch the window, and it swung out to make a large, if
inconvenient, portal. The sheriff and Charlie sort of heaved me through it, and then we pushed and pulled until we were all inside. Then I realized I could have gone around and unlocked the door.

  The place had been a mess even before we started shooting it up. City folks. There were piles of books all around the room, most of them with bindings from the university library, now eight MF years overdue.

  I checked a diploma on the wall and was mildly surprised – the woman who lived here, Roberta More, was a mathematical physicist who had come out to Paxton to talk to a couple of my students about doing graduate work in Centrus. The four of us had had lunch together.

  ‘Small world,’ Charlie said, but the sheriff pointed out that it wasn’t all that unlikely that one of us would know a random resident here, since we both taught and this was a university neighborhood. I could have argued with his logic, but over the years have learned to find more pleasant ways to waste my time.

  Dust and cobwebs everywhere. Four large oil paintings on the wall, not very good to my eye. One, improved by an off-center bullet hole, was signed ‘To Aunt Rob with love,’ which probably explained all four.

  The chaos in the room seemed natural. Subtract the dust and cobwebs and it would be the typical lair of an academic who lived alone.

  It looked like she had been in the kitchen when whatever happened, happened. There was a small wooden dining table with two chairs, one of them piled high with books and journals. One plate with unidentifiable remains, which was, perhaps, a clue. The kitchen was otherwise neat, in contrast to her working room; all the dishes but that one cleaned and put away. In the center of her table, a porcelain vase with a few brown fragile sticks. Whatever it was, happened in the middle of a meal, and she didn’t have time or inclination to finish or clean up. No abandoned clothes, but a person living alone doesn’t have to dress for dinner.

  Her clothes were laid out on the bed, which was neatly made, its coverlet rich burgundy under the dust. Two paintings by the same artist faced each other from the exact centers of opposite walls. A dresser had three drawers: blouses, pants, and underwear, all precisely folded and stacked. There were two empty suitcases in the closet.

  ‘Well, she didn’t pack,’ Charlie said.

  ‘Didn’t have time to. Let me check something.’ I went back into the kitchen and found the fork she’d been eating with, on the floor to the right of the chair.

  ‘Look at this.’ I held up the fork, which had a twist of dried something in its tines. ‘I don’t think she had any warning at all. She just plain disappeared, in mid-bite.’

  ‘Our antimatter didn’t,’ the sheriff pointed out. ‘If we’re still thinking about a common cause.’

  ‘You’re the physicist,’ Charlie said. ‘What makes stuff disappear?’

  ‘Collapsars. But they reappear somewhere else.’ I shook my head. ‘Things don’t disappear. They might appear to, but they’ve only changed state or position. A particle and an antiparticle destroy each other, but they’re still “there” in the photons produced. Even things swept up by a naked singularity don’t actually disappear.’

  ‘Perhaps it was staged, for our benefit,’ the sheriff said.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I don’t have any idea why. But it seems to be the only explanation that’s physically possible. There would have been ample time to set it up.’

  ‘Let’s play a joke on those renegades,’ Charlie said with a broad Centrus accent. ‘Everybody make it look like you disappeared on 14 Galileo 128; leave your clothing and then tiptoe away naked. Meanwhile, we’ll suck the antimatter out of the Time Warp and force them to come back.’

  ‘And then jump out from wherever they’re hiding.’

  The sheriff was annoyed. ‘I’m not saying it’s reasonable. I’m just saying that so far nothing else fits the evidence.’

  ‘So let’s find some more evidence.’ I gestured. ‘Shall we leave by the window, or the door?’

  Twenty-one

  I talked to Marygay a half-dozen times before nightfall. They’d been taking shifts on the binoculars, and hadn’t seen any sign of life other than the tracks we made in the snow. They were barely visible to the best observers, though, who knew what they were looking for; the binoculars were only 15 power. So in theory, there could be thousands of people holed up somewhere.

  But that hardly seemed possible, in light of what we’d found and hadn’t found. Everything pointed to the same impossibility: at 12:28 in the afternoon on 14 Galileo 128, every human, Man, and Tauran disappeared into thin air.

  The time was a supposition based on one datum: a broken mechanical clock on the floor of a man’s workshop that was full of such curiosities. His clothes were right by the broken clock.

  It was starting to get dark as we neared City Center, so we decided to put that off until we had a full day of light. We were all dog-tired, too, and had only managed to keep our eyes open long enough to have a supper of random boxed goods washed down with melted snow. There’d been a cabinet of wine in Roberta’s kitchen, but we were reluctant to take any, stealing from the vanished.

  Charlie and I collapsed on the gurneys, or operating tables, in the back of the vehicle, even finding some blow-up pillows. The sheriff slept on the floor, the back of his head resting on a wooden block he’d found on the street.

  He got up at dawn, evidently cold, and woke the two of us by turning on the heater. We spent a few groggy minutes regretting the lack of tea or coffee to go with our cold smoked fish and goldfruit. We could break into a house or store to find utensils and tea, and then conjure up a fire somehow. It would have been easy in Paxton, where every house had a practical fireplace. In Centrus it was all central heating and air pollution laws.

  I had a sudden desire to go back to Paxton, partly curiosity and partly the irrational hope that this sinister disaster hadn’t spread that far; that my home would be the same place I’d left two months or twenty-four years ago. That Bill would be there, repentant but otherwise unchanged.

  We saw the trio of ships drift overhead from the west, dim gold stars in the twilight. I turned on the radio but didn’t broadcast, and they were silent, evidently still asleep.

  I hoped. Anything could happen, here, now.

  The sheriff wanted to go to the police station first. That was the only building in Centrus that he really knew, and if there had been any premonition of disaster at the official level, we might find evidence there. We had no objection. I wanted most to go to the communications center, where there was a line to Earth, but that could wait.

  The station is half the Law Building, a four-story mirror monolith. The east half comprises the courts; the west, the cops. We went around to the west door and walked in.

  Inside, it was pretty dark, and we paused for a minute to let our eyes become accustomed to it. The window wall was at minimum polarization, but it still let in only a thin grey fraction of the morning light.

  The security gate stayed open in spite of the sheriff’s pistol and our potentially lethal screwdrivers. We walked up to the front desk and I turned the log around and flashed it with my penlight.

  ‘Twelve twenty-five, it says. Parking violation.’ Civilian clothes and shoes in front of the desk, a sergeant’s uniform behind. He was probably arguing about the ticket at 12:28. The sergeant wanting him to disappear so he could go to lunch. Well, he got half his wish.

  The sheriff led us across to the other side of the large room, past dozens of office cubicles, some plain grey or green boxes, others decorated with pictures and holos. In one, an exuberant spray of artificial flowers caught the beginning of the day’s light.

  We went to the briefing room, where all the officers would gather in the morning, to review the day’s plans. If the board said ‘12:28 – DUMP CLOTHES AND GET ON BUS,’ at least part of the mystery would be cleared up.

  The briefing room was about sixty folding chairs that had started out in orderly lines, facing a wipe-board on which the writing was still clear. It was mostl
y code, which the sheriff identified as case numbers and squads. The message ‘Birthdays today: Lockney and Newsome’ probably had no hidden significance.

  We went off in search of cartridges for the pistol, but in most of the little carrels there were either no weapons or more modern ones, worthless without power. Finally we found a supply room with a halfopen divided door – I asked whether they still called them Dutch doors; and the sheriff said no, range doors, for whatever reason. (I’ve always had trouble with the language because there are so many words identical to English ones, but unrelated except for sound.)

  They had more ammunition there than you could cart away with a wheelbarrow. Charlie and I each took a heavy box, though I wondered what in the world he planned to shoot with it.

  He took four boxes, and as we carried them back to the ambulance, provided an oblique answer. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this looks like the result of some ideal weapon. Kills all the people and leaves all the things untouched.’

  ‘They had one like that back in the twentieth,’ I said. ‘The neutron bomb.’

  ‘It made their bodies disappear?’

  ‘No, you had to take care of that part yourself. Actually, I guess it would preserve bodies for a while, by irradiating them. It was never used.’

  ‘Really? You’d think every police department would have one.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘It would simplify things. They were designed to kill whole cities.’

  ‘Whole cities of humans?’ He shook his head. ‘And you think we’re strange.’

  We were back outside in time for Marygay’s pass. She said they were going to de-orbit and come in on the next pass, so we wanted some real mass between us and the spaceport.

  They’d decided not to wait for the others. Too much weird was going on. Antimatter evaporating was no more or less odd than what we’d been seeing, and we did know it could happen, and strand them up there.

  Twenty-two

  I was sure the landing would have an unearthly beauty; I’ve seen matter/antimatter drives from a safe distance, or somewhat safe. Brighter than the sun, an eerie brilliant purple.