by Greg Bear
There is no biological reason I am aware of why the Earth has not already succumbed. The plague is versatile, can transform any living thing. But Europe remains free—except for scattered incidents—and f doubt it is because of their extreme measures. Perhaps the answer to why I am atypical of recent victims—why I am undergoing changes more like Vergil Ulam’s—will explain this other mystery, as well. Tomorrow I will have the experts take blood and tissue samples from me, but not all of the samples will be removed from the chamber. I will work on some of them myself, particularly blood and lymph.
He hesitated, fingers over the keyboard, and was about to continue when Paulsen-Fuchs buzzed for his attention from the viewing chamber.
“Good afternoon,” Bernard said, spinning his chair around. As usual now, he was naked. A camera in the upper right hand comer of the viewing chamber window continually fed his body contours and characteristics into the computers for analysis.
“Not a good afternoon, Michael,” Paulsen-Fuchs said. His long face was even longer and more haggard than usual. “As if we do not have problems enough, now we face the possibility of war.”
Bernard stepped close to the window and watched the executive shake out a British newspaper. The headlines sent a queasy thrill down his spine.
RUSS NUKE PANAMA
“When?” he asked.
“Yesterday afternoon. The Cubans reported a radioactive cloud advancing across the Atlantic. NATO military satellites confirmed the hot-spot I suppose the military knew ahead of time—they must have their seismographs or whatever but the press only found out this morning. The Russians used nine or ten one-megaton bombs, probably submarine-launched. The whole canal area is…” He shook his head. “Nothing from the Russians. Half the people in Germany expect we will be invaded within the week. The other half are drunk.”
“Any word on the continent?” That was how they had come to refer to North America in the last two days: the continent the real center of the action.
“Nothing,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, slamming the paper on the viewing chamber table.
“Do you—the Europeans—expect the Russians to invade North America?”
“Yes. Any day now. Eminent domain, or whatever you English-speakers call it. Right of salvage.” He began to chuckle. “I am not their lawyer, but they will think of the correct words, and justify themselves in Geneva, if they haven’t bombed Geneva by then, too.” He stood with his hands spread on the table, around the paper. “No one is prepared to discuss what will happen to them if they do invade. The U.S. government in exile postures and threatens with its European-based troops and navy, but Russia does not take them seriously. Before your call last month, I had planned to go on my first vacation in seven years. Obviously, I cannot go on vacation,” he said. “Michael, you have brought something into my life that may kill me. Pardon my self-centered moment.”
“Understood,” Bernard said quietly.
“Old saying in Germany,” Paulsen-Fuchs said, staring at him. “‘It is the bullet you don’t hear that gets you,’ Does that have meaning for you?”
He nodded.
“Then work, Michael. Work very hard, before we are all dead by our own hand.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
At the security desk Suzy found a long, powerful flashlight—very fancy, black like binoculars with a beam that could be spread wide or focused in by turning a knob—and set about exploring the concourse and lower-level walkway between the two towers. She spent some time trying on clothes in a boutique, but she couldn’t see herself very well in the flashlight beam and that quickly palled. Besides, it was spooky. She made a half-hearted effort to see if others like herself had entered the building, and even ventured briefly into the Cortlandt Street subway station. When she was satisfied that the lower floors were empty—except for the ubiquitous piles of clothes—she returned to her Candlelight Room, as she had dubbed it, and planned her ascent.
She had found a chart of the north tower and now traced her finger along the plan of the lobby and lower floors. Flipping back each sheet of the thick manual, she realized that the building did not have long stairwells, but stairs at different places on each floor.
That would make her climb even more difficult. She found the door that led to the first stairway on the chart and walked to it. It was locked. Doubling back to the security desk, she nudged a pile of uniform with her foot and revealed a massive ring of keys on a retractable cord. She pulled the belt from the loops, noticing a bra in the clothing, and removed the keys. “Excuse me,” she whispered, rearranging the clothes into an approximation of their former state. “I’m just going to borrow them. I’ll be right back.” She caught herself and bit the fleshy part of her thumb until she left vivid tooth marks. Nobody there, she told herself. Nobody anywhere. Just me, now.
It took her a few minutes of slowly reading the labels on the keys to find the one that opened the door to the stairwell. Beyond the door, the stairs were utilitarian concrete and steel. On the next floor they opened onto a hallway. She peered around the corner and down a white corridor leading past doors to various offices, some marked and some merely numbered. A quick look into several of the offices told her little.
“Okay,” she told herself. “It’s nothing but a hike, a long hike. I’ll need food and water.” She looked down at her loafers and sighed. They’d have to do, unless she decided to borrow a pair of empty shoes from—
She didn’t relish that idea. In the ground floor lobby, she took a plastic shopping bag from behind the newsstand and filled it with lightweight foods from her cart. Water was more difficult; the plastic jugs were too bulky to hang comfortably from her belt, but she decided there was little alternative. And if she found water still available on the upper floor-there had to be water-coolers—she could always leave the jugs behind.
She began her climb at eight thirty in the morning. It was best, she thought, to climb steadily ten floors and then rest, or explore and see what was visible from that level. That way, she might reach the top by the end of the day.
Humming “Michelle,” she went from flight to flight, hands gripping the steel rails, passing through door after door. She tried to establish a rhythm. Kenneth and Howard had taken her hiking in Maine once and she had learned that every hiker had a certain rhythm. Following that rhythm made the trail a lot easier; breaking the rhythm to follow someone else made it much more difficult.
“Nobody to follow,” she told herself on the fourth level. She tried singing “Michelle” again, but the rhythm didn’t match her steps, so she whistled a march by John Williams. On the ninth level she began to feel winded. “One more.” And on the tenth, she squatted with her back against the wall of the elevator lobby, staring at the doors. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.” But she was stubborn—her mother had always said so, somewhat proudly—and she would persist “Nothing else to do,” she said, her voice hollow in the deserted lobby.
When her breathing eased, she stood and arranged the bottle of water and the sack of food. Then she crossed to the next door and opened it. Up another flight. Another lobby, more hallways, more offices. She decided to investigate one of the restrooms.
“Check for water,” she said. She looked between the Men’s and Women’s and giggled, then chose the Men’s. Shining the flashlight over the mirrors and fixtures, she gave in to curiosity and walked the length of the lavatory. She had never before seen the tall white porcelain fixtures lining the wall. She had even forgotten what they were called. She looked under the stalls and froze, fear tangling and twisting with perverse laughter inside.
A pile of clothes lined the floor in one of the stalls. “Got sucked right down the toilet,” she murmured, straightening and wiping tears from her eyes. “Poor guy. Goddammit.” She dabbed at her eyes with her rolled-up sleeves and twisted the hot-water knob on the sink. A trickle of water came out. More came when she turned the cold knob, but it didn’t look promising.
She left the lavatory and sauntered down a
hallway. Behind a big double wood door with Japanese-sounding names on it was a waiting room, plush velvet couches and glass tables with a big desk near the back wall. There was no receptionist behind the desk, and no pile of clothes, either. Nothing for her there.
From the waiting room, she looked down on the plaza. The concrete was completely covered with brown now. “Climb,” she told herself. Stairway to heaven. Die at the top and be closer. But climb.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It’s like crawling down a throat” John said.
“Jesus, you’re morbid.”
“It is, though, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. He grunted and stooped lower. “We’re behaving like idiots. Why this mound, and why now?”
“You picked it out”
“And I don’t know why. Maybe no reason at all.”
“Good as any, I suppose.”
The tunnel walls were changing as they walked farther along. Big fleshy pipes gave way to fine, glistening net, like spray-painted tripe. John poked his face and the light up close to the surface and saw each little dimple in the net filled with tiny disks and cubes and balls, stacked atop each other in a jumble. The floor was narrowing, the spongy purple rising up in ridges, the ridges running parallel with the tunnel. “Drainage,” Jerry said, pointing.
They passed the light back and forth to share its comfort, sometimes shining it at each other’s faces, or inspecting their skin and clothing to see that nothing was clinging to them.
The tunnel widened abruptly and the thick sweet fog drifted around them. “We’ve walked far enough to be under another mound,” Jerry said. He stopped and pulled his boot from something sticky. “There’s stuff all over the floor.”
John trained the light on Jerry’s boot. Brownish-red goo covered the sole. “Doesn’t look too deep,” he said.
“Not yet, anyway.” The fog smelled faintly like fertilizer, or like the sea. Alive. It circulated in thin, high veils, as if caught between curtains of air.
“Which way now? We don’t want to just walk in circles,” Jerry said.
“You’re the leader,” John said. “Don’t ask me for initiative.”
“Smells like someone left seaweed in a candy store,” Jerry said. “Makes you gag.”
“Mushrooms,” John said, pointing the light down. White capped objects about two inches wide lay all around their feet, popping beneath them as they walked. He aimed the light higher and saw vertical and horizontal lines through the fog ahead.
“Shelving,” Jerry said. “Shelves with things growing on them.” The shelves were less than a quarter-inch thick, supported by irregularly spaced brackets, all made from a hard white substance that glistened in the beam. On the shelves were stacks of what looked like burned paper—wet burned paper.
“Yucch,” Jerry commented, feeling one of the stacks with a curled finger.
“Wouldn’t touch anything if I was you,” John said.
“Hell, you are me, brother. Minor differences.”
“I’m still not touching anything.”
“Yeah. Probably a smart idea.”
They proceeded along the length of the shelving and came to a wall covered with pipes. The pipes grew out onto the shelves and diverged into smaller clusters, leading to the glistening brown stacks. “What is this stuff, plastic or what?” Jerry asked, feeling one of the shelf braces.
“Doesn’t look like plastic,” John said. “Looks more like clean white bone.” They stared at each other.
“I hope not,” Jerry said, turning away. Walking through the fog and swirling air to the other end of the shelving, they found a foamlike white matrix, resembling a rubbery honeycomb, pocked with open bubbles filled to the rim with purple syrup. Some of the bubbles dripped purple onto the floor, where each drop hissed and smoked on impact.
John held back an urge to gag and mumbled something about having to get out
“Sure,” Jerry said, bending down to peer at the bubbles. “Look at this, first.”
John reluctantly bent, hands on knees, and looked at the bubble his brother had indicated.
“Look at all those little wires,” Jerry said. “Little beads traveling on wires, above the purple. Red beads. Looks like blood, don’t it?”
John nodded. He dug into his jeans pocket and pulled out a Swiss army knife he had found under the torn-up seats of the British jeep. He used his fingernails to withdraw a small magnifying glass from the knife handle. “Shine the light on it.” With the beam filling the bubble, he peered through the glass at the purple liquid and the tiny wires with red drops.
The closer he looked, the more detailed it became. Nothing he could identify, but the purple fluid’s surface was composed of thousands of pyramids. The white material resembled foam plastic or cork.
He gritted his teeth. “Very pretty,” he said. He took hold of the edge of a bubble and tore it away. The liquid splashed at his feet and the fog thickened. “They’re not here.”
“Why’d you do that?” Jerry asked.
John slugged the soft honeycomb and pulled his hand away glistening with purple. “Because they’re not here.”
“Who?”
“Ruth and Loren. They’re just gone.”
“Hold on-” Jerry admonished, but John swung with both hands now, tearing the lattice of bubbles apart. They could hardly see each other for the sweet, cloying fog. Jerry grabbed his brother’s shoulder and tried to pull him back. “Stop it, stop it, John, goddammit!”
“They took “em!” John screamed. His throat spasmed and he clutched it with one hand, still gripping and tearing and punching with the other. “They’re not in here, Jerry!”
The rolled in the goo until Jerry pinned both his brother’s arms. The light fell with its beam tilting upward behind them. John shook his head, sweat flying, and began a long, silent sob eyes scrunched shut mouth stretched wide. Jerry hugged his brother tightly and looked over his shoulder at the beam-lit, swirling fog. “Shh,” he said over and over. They were covered with the smelly brown muck. “Shh.”
“I been holdin’ it in,” John said after sucking a deep, tremulous breath, “Jerry, let me go. I been holdin’ it in too long. Let’s get out of here. Nobody’s here. There’s nobody down here.”
“Yeah,” Jerry said. “Not here. Maybe somewhere, but not here.”
“I can feel them, Jerry.”
“I know. But not here.”
“Then where the hell—“
“Shhhh.” They lay in the muck, listening to the soft hiss of the fog and the curtains of air. Jerry could feel his eyes opening as wide as a cat’s in the dark. “Sh. There’s something—”
“Oh, Christ,” John said, struggling from his brother’s arms. They stood, dripping muck, facing the direction of the lantern’s beam. The fog roiled and puffed in the light.
“It’s a jogger,” Jerry said as a silhouette took shape.
“It’s too big,” John said.
The object was at least ten feet across, flattened, fringe hanging from its side, appearing brownish in the uncertain light.
“It doesn’t have legs,” Jerry said, awed. “It’s just floating there.”
John stepped forward. “Goddamn Martians,” he said quietly. He raised his fist. I’ll break—”
And there was a moment of forgetfulness.
Morning light tinted the east aquamarine. The town, covered with brown and white sheets, resembled something that more properly belonged underwater, a low, flat section of ocean bed.
They stood in the drainage ditch beyond the fences, looking toward the town.
“I can’t move much,” Jerry said.
“I can’t either.”
“I think it stung us.”
“I didn’t feel anything.”
John moved his arm experimentally. “I think I saw them.”
“Saw who?”
“I’m pretty confused, Jerry.”
“Me too.”
The sun was well into the sky before the
y were able to walk. Over the town, transparent hemispheres drifted between the outlines of the buildings, occasionally shooting down thin pencils of light. “Looks like jellyfish,” Jerry commented as they wobbled toward the road and the truck.
“I think I saw Loren and Ruth. I’m not sure,” John said. They approached the truck slowly, stiffly, and sat in the front seat, closing the doors behind. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“I saw them down where we were. But they weren’t there. That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, I mean, where do we go now?”
“Out of town. Somewhere else.”
“They’re everywhere, John. Radios say that.”
“Goddamn Martians.”
Jerry sighed. “Martians would have zapped us, John.”
“Fuck ’em. Let’s go away.”
“Whatever they are,” Jerry said, “I’m pretty sure they’re from right around here.” He pointed emphatically toward the ground. “Right from inside that fence.”
“Drive,” John said. Jerry started the engine, put the truck in gear and roared them off down the dirt road. They spun out on East Avenue, narrowly missed a deserted car at the next intersection, and squealed onto South Vasco road, heading for the highway. “How much gas we got?”
“I filled ’er up in town yesterday. Before the sheets got the pumps.”
“You know,” John said, bending to pick up an oil rag from the floor and wiping his hands, “I don’t think we’re smart enough to figure out anything. We just don’t have any idea.”
“No good ideas, maybe.” Jerry squinted. Someone stood by the road a mile ahead, waving vigorously. John followed his brother’s puzzled stare.
“We’re not alone,” he said.