Deathworld

by Tom Clancy

  “Excuse me,” said a quiet voice from out of the darkness behind them, “but were you looking for me?”

  They all turned. The Goddess of Virtue stood there looking at them, while lifting up a long pale veil that had covered her face and head. Astraea was astonishingly beautiful, a tall and slender woman all robed in Greek-classical white, and her expression was severe, intelligent, and a little sorrowful.

  Jay Gridley smiled slightly. “Uh, yes, ma’am. Routinely.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “Mostly to say, don’t go… .”

  “But there is nowhere for me to stay,” she said sadly. “My only dwelling is in the hearts of men, and all of mankind is wicked… .”

  They looked at one another. “If you wait about two seconds,” Charlie said, “not all … because a baby’ll be born somewhere.”

  She smiled at him. It was like the sun coming up. “Thank you,” Astraea said. “I think I’ll stay.”

  They were all quiet a moment. “Which way to the Ninth Circle?” Nick said at last.

  “There is none,” Astraea said. “Or rather, this is it. This is Despair, after all. But after this … you go out the far side. That way.” She pointed, and suddenly there was a little light away off in the darkness, like an open door.

  “Uh, thanks,” Mark said. He was a little bemused as he said it, for Astraea had draped her former veil around her neck like a scarf, and now she reached around behind her into the darkness and came out with a sword and a pair of scales.

  “And now,” she said cheerfully, “back to the day job. See you later… .”

  She vanished.

  Mark looked up at his father. “You know her, Dad?”

  he said.

  “You kidding?” said Jay Gridley softly, but with some amusement, as he looked at the distant light. “She’s one of my bosses.” Then he looked down at his son, and his face acquired a severity more like that of Justice’s. “Meanwhile … you and I need to talk. Briefly, because I have to get back to work. But later on we are going to have a long discussion… .”

  Mark arid his father vanished. Mark’s expression was mostly unrepentant, despite his father’s sternness. All Charlie thought it was wise to do was nod and grin just a little. When they were gone, Charlie started to turn toward Nick …

  … and everything dissolved in a mist of light, back to a white plain and blue sky. A great voice came from the heavens and said to Charlie, “Thank you for using Net Access. You have come to the end of your purchased access time for this session. Please see the customer representative for more time .. . or inquire about one of our monthly billing accounts!”

  And suddenly he was sitting in the implant chair again … and behind him, there was a little cchk! noise as the door of the suite unlocked itself and slid open.

  Charlie was on his feet in about a second, and out into the hallway. There he stopped, openmouthed with surprise.

  The place was full of uniformed police. Two of them, right then, along with a dark-suited woman in plain clothes wearing the inimitable Net Force ID, were escorting out someone in handbinders. She was of medium height, dark-haired with some gray sprinkled through it, a little pudgy, maybe about forty. She was a profoundly ordinary-looking person, one he would have passed in the street a hundred times and never noticed. She looked ordinary, like a mother … and she was wearing a soft, fuzzy white short-sleeved cotton sweater.

  There he lost his train of thought, for two more Net Force ops, a man and a woman, came walking down the hall toward Charlie.

  “Charlie Davis?” one of them said.

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Your father wants to see you,” said the woman op. “Right now.”

  Ooops.

  He walked outside, past the shocked-looking counter guy, and saw his dad standing there. By a police car-his mother was just getting out of another. The street was full of people slowing down to rubberneck, or standing there watching and talking. It looked like a disaster area.

  He was afraid the disaster was going to be his.

  But Charlie couldn’t say a word for the moment. The relief, and the fear, and a host of other emotions, had all come crashing down on him together as he walked out of that booth and saw her-the woman who was Shade, or Kalki, or both-being taken away from the next booth to the one he had been in. The next booth-! Charlie went over to his mother and father, and they closed in on him, and he grabbed them both and hugged them hard.

  “We’re going to talk about this later,” his father said, very low. “A lot. But I want to hear all of your side first.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Charlie said.

  “But I notice that someone else is wearing the handcuffs,” his mother said, “so I guess we can assume that you’ve been doing something that’s going to make us proud.”

  Boy, I hope so, Charlie thought as they walked him away.

  It was a long, long talk they had, and one that was going to take more than one evening to resolve. Charlie realized that when he was in bed that night, suffering from near-terminal embarrassment and upset, and at the same time, great pride … for word came down on the late news that evening that the cases of all the Deathworld “suicides” were being reopened. Additionally, after a very belated session with his mother’s hot and spicy ribs (most of the dressing-down he suffered had happened while they were all in the kitchen together, and she was cooking), the vidphone went off. His father went to get it and didn’t come back for something like twenty minutes.

  “Who was it, honey?” Charlie’s mother said.

  “Jay Gridley,” said Charlie’s dad. He sat down and began to toy with one last rib he hadn’t touched during dinner.

  Charlie didn’t say anything, though he very much wanted to-every word he had said, earlier, had seemed to trigger some new and interesting strain of the basic argument. “He says,” Charlie’s dad said, turning to Charlie, “that you may have saved ten or twenty people’s lives.”

  Charlie swallowed.

  “He also says you’re to see James Winters tomorrow morning at eight,” said his dad. “I assume that won’t interfere with school?”

  “Uh.. . no.”

  “Good. Let us know what happens… .”

  “Uh, I will.”

  And that had been all. Charlie had gone to bed in a very subdued mood. But he had not been able to avoid seeing the look his mother and father exchanged as he’d gone upstairs. It had been worried, frightened, relieved … but not angry. .

  The next morning, having left his workspace and taken his seat in Winters’s office, he wondered if being spared last night had simply left him mostly intact for a more thorough reaming-out today. Mark Gridley was there when Charlie got there, and he, too, was looking rather pale.

  For a minute or two Winters just sat behind his desk, looking over documentation that was scrolling through the virtual window hanging nearby. Finally he shook his head and sat back, and looked at the two of them.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s taken me the better part of last night and this morning, but I’ve finally finished reviewing the forensic and other information that our fast-response team went out to act on yesterday.” He sighed. “Mark has already finished his debrief, but since he acted as ‘enabler’ for you on this, Charlie, I thought it might be wise to have him here to sketch in any details there necessary. Does that meet with your approval?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “With one note,” said Winters. “The wild, I would say profligate, illegality of a lot of Mark’s ‘enabling’ needs to be stressed here. I would have thought,” he said to Mark, “that after the last time, I wouldn’t need to have this discussion with you again. But I see that no human agency can possibly predict your actions. You, I’m just going to have to refer back to your father. Again.”

  Mark didn’t quite squirm.

  “Don’t bother trying to play to the stands quite so blatantly,” Winters said. “There is no one in the stands but me, and I am not cheering.”

  He lo
oked slowly over at Charlie. “Meanwhile,” Winters said, “your mother is a very understanding woman.” “She is? I mean, yes, sir, she is… .”

  “Because she has not herself assisted in having you committed,” Winters said, “on finding out what you’ve been up to these past couple of weeks. I seem to remember you telling me that, as soon as you came across any information concrete enough to warrant action, that you would let me know.”

  The silence settled down heavy. “I didn’t think it was concrete enough yet,” Charlie said, his voice sounding even smaller than he was afraid it would. “It needed to be tested.”

  “Using yourself as bait,” Winters said.

  “When you’re hunting polar bear,” said Charlie, “that’s the only bait that’s any good.”

  Winters looked at him hard for a moment. Then he sat back and rocked a little in his chair. “This much I’m going to give you,” he said. “You were right about one thing. The woman you caught was definitely getting ready to do it again. Immediately. Besides the stun gun, we found a big spray can of sco-bro in the front seat of her car. And all the ropes and ligatures you could have desired were in the trunk, ready to use.”

  Charlie shivered. “It’s still May,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Winters. “That much you’re right about. But why?”

  Charlie blinked. “Why is it May?”

  “I mean,” Winters said, “why was she attacking these kids in May?”

  Charlie shook his head. “I never did figure that out,” he said.

  “Because,” said Winters softly, “that’s very close to when her son committed suicide.”

  Charlie’s eyes widened. “Richard-”

  “Exactly wrong,” said Winters, annoyed. “Don’t guess, Charlie. There’s been too much guessing in this, not enough precise use of data. Fatal for a doctor.”

  Charlie swallowed.

  “Mitch Welles,” said Winters.

  “He was the first one,” Charlie said. “April of 2023-” He shook his head.

  “April,” Winters said. “Not May. Now, Maureen Welles had … well, not exactly a collapse after her son died. But she wasn’t well. After she recovered, she went on a campaign to prove that her son had been induced to kill himself by something that had been done to him in Deathworld. She spent all her efforts trying to get the legislation that I told you about through Congress. It didn’t get her anywhere. She was sure that there was a conspiracy against her, but as I said, the only conspirator against her that anyone can identify was the Congressional calendar. And her own single-mindedness.” He let out a long breath. “Her marriage went to pieces in the middle of it all. She and her husband separated-he said, because chasing down her son’s murderer had become her entire life.”

  Winters went on rocking in his chair for a few moments, scowling at his desk.

  “Sounds like she was obsessed,” said Mark very qui- etly.

  “It sounds like it,” said Winters. “Well, all her complaints and attempts to get Deathworld shut downgot her nowhere, as you might imagine, since there was no evidence whatever to suggest that the environment, or Bane, were implicated in any way in her son’s death.” He sighed. “And then the second suicide happened. That’s when we got involved. Once could be an accident. Twice could be a coincidence-”

  “Three times is enemy action,” Mark said.

  “Well, even proverbs can be wrong,” said Winters, lacing his fingers together. “But this time, as it happens, it was indeed enemy action. Because Mitch Welles’s mother decided that if the government and Net Force weren’t going to do the responsible thing and shut Deathworld down, then she would do it herself.”

  He breathed out. “Well, that’s the simple way to describe it. Your mom would know,” and Winters glanced up at Charlie, “that the ways a human mind gets itself into such a position are usually a lot more subtle than people suspect from outside, or after the fact. After all, she had managed to convince herself, over time, that her son couldn’t have killed himself, that it had to be murder. Well, acknowledging that he had committed suicide would mean admitting that it might possibly have been due to something she d done wrong … so that was a realization that her mind buried as soon as it could. From that it was just a step to believing that Joey Bane was personally responsible for his death. And from there, maybe not such a long step to believing that anyone who was in Deathworld willingly was somehow complicit in her son’s ‘murder.’ “

  “Maybe,” Charlie whispered. “It would explain a lot.”

  Winters shook his head. “It may be something like that which was going on in her head. The process itself is obscure, and it’s probably going to stay that way for a while, because she’s not talking about much of anything now. But soon enough Maureen Welles got the idea that, if people had accused her son of being a suicide, then she was going to turn that back on them, get revenge on them for hurting her, for hurting him like that. They would be the suicides, not him. She started monitoring the new login information, and the message boards, as anyone could … but her purpose was to pick likely targets, to make sure that the ones she ‘worked with’ in her Shade and Kalki personas seemed genuinely suicidal, people who ‘were going to do it anyway.’ Their deaths would make her son’s look like what she was sure it was: something done to him, to them, by the environment they’d been spending time in. That this would also hurt Joey Bane must have occurred to her. She may even have had some fantasy of killing him and turning him into a ‘suicide’ as well. More to the point, though, she was sane enough to realize that a string of suicides would affect the place adversely.”

  “But it didn’t,” Charlie said. “It went wrong. In a lot of ways. No one put it together that the suicides were connected. And Deathworld got even more popular.”

  Winters’s look was grim. “You’re right. It backfired on her. Her methods were too subtle. Not subtle enough to completely prevent the suspicion, here and there, that these suicides weren’t uncomplicated. But distributed over so much time, and such a large physical area, they didn’t attract the attention she wanted. And she wasn’t completely nuts, not yet. Her first murder took a lot out of her, scared her-scared her briefly sane. She kept quiet for a while. The next suicide, the one in October, was genuine, and had nothing to do with her. But come the next year, around April, her pain started to unseat her reason again. By May she was more than ready to murder someone else, as revenge against Bane … or as a kind of sacrifice to her dead son.” He frowned. “And she did … then scared herself sane again for a little while.”

  “But she couldn’t stay that way,” Charlie said. “Probably the knowledge of what she’d been doing was starting to prey on her. And her son was still dead… .”

  “And Deathworld was still in operation,” Winters said, sounding a little sad now. “It must have been intolerable for her. One part of her wanting to believe that her son had been exonerated, avenged … another part of her continually wanting revenge on whatever had taken him away from her.”

  “And so she kept on killing,” Mark said. “And then did it again, this month… .”

  “Twice,” Winters said, somber. “But now she was getting into the pattern of serial killers. One murder isn’t enough. The same kind of murder isn’t enough. They have to get closer together, be more terrible, somehow, to provide the same level of catharsis. But they never do.”

  “It’s a drug,” Charlie said softly.

  “Something like one,” said Winters. “The addiction always getting worse, in her case, because the dose increases and increases and doesn’t do any good. And then this last time, she was driven to commit two murders .. . and no sooner have they happened than Deathworld, her old enemy, suddenly is doing better than ever. It drove her to levels of rage she’d never experienced before. She decided to go straight out to try to kill again. And found you … using some pretty advanced ‘hunting’ routines. She tripped the ‘wire’ around your workspace, as you thought. Felt you out, to make sure you were sui
cidal enough. And then went for the kill.”

  Winters’s eyes were resting on Charlie in a way that made him even more uncomfortable than the man’s anger had.

  But there was only one answer to that look. Charlie swallowed. “You remember Helicobacter?” he said.

  Mark looked at Charlie as if he was from Mars. But Winters’s expression shifted microscopically to something a little less uneasy than it had been.

  “Helicobacter pylorii,” Charlie said. “Forty years ago everybody thought stomach ulcers were caused by stomach acid.” He had to laugh, for at this end of time, it sounded silly. But back then, they hadn’t had any other answer that made sense. “Then a scientist, a doctor, noticed that in all the cultures he took of his patients’ stomach ulcers, they all had this one bacterium present. Helicobacter, they called it, because it was shaped like a little helix. He worked with that bug for something like five years, until he was convinced that it was the cause of stomach ulcers, and that it could be killed, and the ulcers wiped out, just by using the right kind of antibiotic for long enough. He published papers, tried to convince everybody. They laughed at him. They said that the proof wasn’t conclusive, that the evidence was all circumstantial. They wouldn’t approve even animal testing, let alone human.” Charlie smiled a smile as grim as Winters’s had been. “So finally the guy swallowed a pure culture of Helicobacter and gave himself the fastest, nastiest case of bleeding ulcers anybody ever saw. Then he put himself on a course of antibiotics, and cured them.”

  Winters just looked at him.

  “A lot of doctors have done stuff like that,” Charlie said. “Pasteur. Jenner. It’s traditional.” He gulped, for Winters’s look was not getting any friendlier. “When you’re sure you’re right. But when it’s a life-and-death thing … the only life you have a right to put on the line is your own.”

  Winters just looked at him, like something carved from stone. “Mark,” he said at last, “would you excuse us?”