Brothers to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

  "He needs nothing you can give him. Wait here, don't go nearer—any of you! That's an order. Give him at least twenty feet clearance. I'll be right back."

  She ran into the building and was gone for a couple of minutes. In that time the Tandyman's victim managed to stand up. He stared around in confusion. The others were watching sympathetically, but they left a wide circle of space about him. When Ormond emerged she was wearing a gray suit complete with a glass helmet and was carrying another suit under her arm. "Here." She thrust it at Job. "You're skinny, you ought to be able to get into that with no trouble. Do it. The rest of you, inside."

  The gray suits had their own shoes. Job was forced to remove his and stand barefoot in freezing slush before he could climb into the legs and pull the suit up over his body. He clamped the helmet closed.

  "Take his other arm." Ormond was running a device the size of a small calculator over the man's body and peering at its display.

  "I don't need help." The man tried to shake off Job's hand. "I'm fine. It didn't hurt me."

  "It didn't hurt you. It killed you." Ormond held out the little sensor. "See this? That Tandyman came right from the middle of Tandy Center. Its pincers have been soaking in the hottest nuclear material. You just got four thousand rads. You're a goner. All we can do is try to make you comfortable."

  "Four thousand rads! But I'm . . . I'm . . ." The man opened and closed his mouth, then turned away and vomited into the slush.

  Ormond eyed him with disgust. "That's not radiation sickness, friend, that's funk. You won't start to feel real symptoms for hours." She nodded to Job. "There's no danger now to anyone else, but I'm going to put him in separate quarters. And I'm detailing you to stay with him. Ever see anybody die of radiation sickness?"

  Job shook his head.

  "Well, now's your chance. Got his arm? Let's go." Between them they walked the baldheaded man across the square. He had started to shiver. Job felt like shivering, too. How much dose had he received, when the Tandyman ran past him, or when he had stood close to the doomed man?

  "Why?" he asked. "Why did it pick him out, and not me or somebody else?"

  "I don't know yet," said Ormond. "But he knows. Don't you? You can tell us."

  The man did not seem to hear. He was staring straight ahead.

  "He failed the test," Ormond went on, "the same one you got when you came into Xanadu. Either he's some kind of spy sent in from outside, or else he's an old enemy of one of the Xanadu bosses from their days outside. Either way, it makes no difference. He's a goner."

  " I thought I was a goner when I heard the Tandyman right behind me."

  "I believe it." Ormond nodded. "Takes everybody that way. Using Tandymen to punish people is a great method to scare everybody and keep things under tight control. But I wish they'd either find another way, or at least let me know in advance when it's going to happen. Every time I see a Tandyman running loose it gives me the willies. I guess it's supposed to. Come on, let's get him into the house."

  * * *

  The building that Ormond led them to was a small wooden structure set apart from the rest. She placed the stricken man inside, then made Job strip in the cold Nebraska twilight while she went over him with the radiation monitor.

  "Couple of rads," she said. "Nothing to worry about. You don't need the suit, but I wasn't sure how big a dose we might get. I'm going to take your clothes and bring you new ones. Maybe I can find something that actually fits."

  Job was left alone and naked with the silent stranger. The hut had a stove inside, but it had only just been lit. The room was freezing. Job hunted around until he found a closet full of blankets and helped himself to a couple. He went back to the main room and found the man crouched by the stove. "Want to talk about it?"

  The man shook his bald head. "Go fuck yourself."

  Job was already seeing the skull beneath the skin. Four thousand rads. Ormond was right, the man was a goner. An average lethal dose of radiation was only a tenth of that.

  He retreated to the far side of the room, wrapped himself in blankets, and stretched out on the couch. How long before Ormond came back? She had made no promises. The man was beginning to shiver, bone-deep tremors that had nothing to do with cold.

  If Paley had asked one more question . . . Job might be sitting there by that stove, too, deep in shared despair.

  And the danger was not over. There could be random truth tests at any time, a convenient way for the leaders of Xanadu to keep abreast of what was happening inside the Tandy. The idea that the people in Techville might be doing something that the Tandy bosses did not know about and approve of became less plausible.

  Job drifted off into sleep. After midnight, for the first time in a decade, he dreamed of the Tandyman. A huge golem, half man, half machine, was pursuing him through the labyrinth of the Mall Compound. Its red eyes were gleaming, its hands blazed white-hot. As it reached down for Job and the burning hands seized him, the face changed to become the grinning gnome mask of Wilfred Dell.

  Across the room, the real Tandyman's victim had begun to groan. Job awoke, drenched in sweat. He listened, and found reality worse than nightmare. For the first time he understood fully where he was: inside the Nebraska Tandy, with a minuscule chance of ever getting out.

  Chapter Fifteen

  My breath is corrupt,

  my days are extinct,

  the graves are ready for me.

  —The Book of Job, Chapter 17, Verse 1

  Two rads of absorbed radioactivity produces no immediate effect on a human. Nor does twenty rads. A hundred rads will lead within thirty days to loss of hair, loss of appetite, and a feeling of malaise. Four hundred rads will kill half the people who receive it. Four thousand will kill with a hundred percent fatality rate, and the afflicted person will die within seven days.

  Job had learned the arithmetic of radiation sickness quickly, but without facilities for treatment the facts were useless to him. By the second day Untermeyer—the man had finally told Job his name—was nauseated and vomiting. He could eat nothing. By the third day ulceration of his whole digestive tract had begun and any hope of obtaining information from him was abandoned. Untermeyer's throat had become too painful to permit speech. By the fifth day edema of his body and limbs made it impossible for him to move.

  At midday on the sixth day, Untermeyer died. Job assisted with the burial. Two hours later he received his own assignment: Tandy Center. He would work there for two months before reassignment could be considered.

  Ormond was apologetic. "I told my boyfriend that you're prime material. After the way you've looked after Untermeyer, I said you shouldn't be wasted. Mannie works in Headquarters. But he says there's no exceptions for anyone. New arrivals have to work the hot spots."

  "Thanks for trying." Job followed her to the blue van. He was already mimicking Ormond's accent, although she did not seem to notice.

  "I found out more about Untermeyer." Ormond started the engine and headed in the direction of Tandy Center. "They didn't catch him on the entrance test. Mannie says that Untermeyer worked for Gormish—she's one of the top three in Xanadu—on the outside. It was his evidence that put Gormish here. When Untermeyer was sent here too, he bought a false ID. He must have hoped that Gormish was dead. But somebody recognized him and went to her. She set the Tandyman onto him. She was controlling it herself."

  Job registered the new information: he had the name of one of the three people who ran Xanadu, Ormond had a friend in Headquarters, and the entrance test had its problems. Both he and Untermeyer had passed it. So the chance of continuing tests and checks was increased.

  But none of that information was going to be much use. Job became convinced of that after they arrived at the Xanadu cleanup and maintenance center. It was a long, low building, with a score of trucks and bulldozers parked in front of it. Off to one side loomed dozens of the giant Tandymen. As Job stepped out of the blue van, one of the robots jerked to life and rumbled away down the road th
at led to Tandy Center. Job could not take his eyes off it until it was right out of sight. After it vanished he went inside and was placed with twenty other newcomers in a cold, low-ceilinged classroom.

  "You'll work in and around the center, all of you," said Ormond. She was standing in front of a wall-sized map of Xanadu. "But of course you won't sleep there. No point in absorbing more toxins and radiation than you have to. You'll do a nine-hour shift, six days a week, and come back here at night.

  "The first trick to working cleanup is easy: Know your geography. There's runoff from the center whenever it rains, and the flow directions are well known." She turned and tapped the map. "The main runoff and seepage paths are marked. Spend as much time as you can in here, learn the black areas of the map by heart. If you avoid them and stay on areas marked in green, you'll halve the poisons you pick up.

  "I said the main runoff patterns are marked. But there's hundreds of minor toxin pools and radiation hot spots, and a lot of them aren't plotted anywhere. So you have to learn to use your eyes." She picked up two flowering twigs from the table. "Some plants have high tolerance for certain toxins, others can't stand them. This one thrives in soil full of poisons that will corpse you. Long spiky leaves, yellow flowers—you see them and you stay clear. This one, flat leaves, hairy on their underside, needs pure, clean soil. If you see it, you can go there safely. Except that the same plant has a high radiation tolerance, so you need to keep an eye on your personal monitor. You need to do that anyway wherever you are. Make it second nature."

  Job could see that some of the others in the room were hardly listening. When at the end of the session Ormond offered sheets describing plants that flagged safe or dangerous areas, only half the class bothered to take one. Job took two. Illiteracy in Xanadu carried a higher penalty than it did outside.

  So did many other things. On the second day, when the group made its first trip into Tandy Center, Ormond drove a different route. She took the van past a line of scaffolds, where bodies hung eyeless, blackened and rotting in the freezing air.

  "Nasty, eh?" she said. "I think so, too. But don't blame the Xanadu authorities. The recruits do that, to people in their own group who try to avoid handling radioactives, or put others in danger. You have the same right." She smiled around at them as she headed the van directly to Tandy Center. "So work hard, boys and girls, and help each other. If you don't, you might find you've earned a long vacation."

  Without a shielding cover of snow the Center was revealed as a wilderness, an amazing jumble of barrels and carboys and boxes and storage tanks, some still intact, others shattered by the air drop and spilling solids and liquids onto the ground. The Tandymen had already made a first cut at sorting the debris into useful or lethal heaps. It was the cleanup squad's job to refine that and bring the most valuable and least dangerous finds out of Tandy Center, to the manufacturing and storage facilities.

  Each new recruit was left in a different place and given an individual task. Job was told to seek out and collect cubical containers from the most recent airdrop. "Not dangerous in themselves," said Ormond. "They contain waste products with a high selenium content. We can use the selenium, but more than that we don't want it in the aquifers. It's teratogenic, and people inside Xanadu are having babies."

  Not dangerous in themselves. Maybe. But the blue-and-gray half-meter cubes were scattered over an area with a quarter-mile radius, and some of them sat on the side of steep mountains of trash and were the devil to reach. Job struggled up and down jagged ridges, trying to tread carefully and still keep one eye on his radiation monitor; but by the end of his shift he had a long skin wound in his left calf and his monitor showed that he had received nearly ten rads. Two months like that and he would be dead.

  He was ashamed of himself until he reached the bus that would take them back to the dormitories, and found that the average dose of the group for a single day's work was fifteen rads, not counting one unfortunate who had absorbed an incredible six hundred. Ignoring warning signs and her own radiation monitor, she had sought a dropped package in the glowing heart of Xanadu, where only the Tandymen could go, and had stayed there for most of the shift.

  Ormond said nothing, but the next morning the woman had vanished from the group. She never returned.

  On the first day of the second week, when Job's cumulative dose had already climbed to twenty-two rads, Ormond introduced him to the Tandymen.

  "Suits on before we start," she said. "Most of the radioactivity is in the chest and arms and pincers, but even around the back you can get a pretty stiff dose."

  Suited, she led him into the heart of Tandy Center, to where a couple of dozen Tandymen stood in random array. Pausing by the nearest of them, Ormond showed Job how the back of each had a door that could be pulled open. Inside was enough room for one gray-suited person to sit down. Ormond pushed Job through the narrow opening. "Not enough room for two," she said. "I'm going to be out here, remote controlling. Let me do most of the work. You can always override me manually if you want to, but you don't need to. You're in a lead-lined enclosure, and you could roll or walk right through the hottest spot in Xanadu and not get hurt. If you want to be logical, the inside of a Tandyman is the safest place you can be in the whole of this Tandy."

  The door closed. Job was sitting in claustrophobic darkness. And then the displays came on suddenly, and he was seeing the terrain from ten feet up, rolling across the flat surface of Xanadu. The controls were in front of him. If he chose he could make the Tandyman roll faster, walk, run, or pick up any object that weighed a ton or less. Ormond was in control as they headed for Tandy Center, but after a while Job took over. He soon realized the problem with automatic and remote-controlled modes. Ormond could see an object as small as a pin, but she lacked the coordination to pick it up. Job could do that, easily, with his own direct control. For two hours he forgot Ormond and established the full range of his skills. On level ground the Tandyman was superb; only on the steepest trash-heaped ridges did control and stability become a question.

  "Well," said Ormond, when he finally relinquished command and let her steer him back towards the dormitories. "You certainly got off on that, didn't you?"

  Job grinned. He had. The speed, power, and precision of a Tandyman were overwhelming. After nineteen years of being a weed it was nice to be able to throw quarter-ton packages around like pillows.

  "You won't get more Tandyman rides until training is over," Ormond went on. "You're real good at it, but tomorrow it's back to pick and shovel for you."

  Pick, shovel, and higher radiation and toxin doses. Job had noticed inside the Tandyman that his cumulative dose did not increase at all. But that was an anomaly, a day of special dispensation arranged by Ormond because she had been able to do nothing for Job earlier.

  His total dose crept up, to thirty rads and then to forty. He began to feel queasy when he ate certain foods, his mouth was plagued by little ulcers, and when he showered his hair came out in handfuls. His only consolation was that others of his group seemed worse. Ormond's grim statistics were accurate. At this rate they would lose over a third of the new recruits by the time training ended.

  Work took on a pattern. Job thought about it, and created a new Golden Rule: Do your work if you can, during the shift, but if you get behind, don't compromise on safety. Never, never, never. And never ignore your radiation monitor. By the end of the sixth week he felt that he had been doing this kind of job all his life. Wilfred Dell was a million miles and a thousand years away, almost forgotten until one bright mid-December morning when Job was sorting through a pile of short steel bars. He noticed a stranger standing thirty yards away and staring at him intently.

  Job froze. Had they seen through his test, or was he betrayed by some other word or action?

  The man was coming forward. He was tall and burly, with a full brown beard and long swept-back brown hair. Job gave up the pretense of work, straightened, and returned the stare.

  "Yes?"

&nbs
p; The tall man snorted. "I knew it! When Mannie said skinny brute, with a receding chin and a face like a fish, I was sure there couldn't be another in the whole world. You made it out! I always swore you had."

  The voice had given Job all that he needed in the first few words. "Skip Tolson!"

  "Who else? I told you I'd last through Cloak House, and I did."

  "You don't look like Skip. You used to have curly hair!"

  "Yeah." Tolson swept a hand through his mop. "Funny thing, that, I lost it in the first few months here, and when it come back it grew straight."

  "You were sent right from Cloak House?"

  "Well, not quite right here." Tolson was grinning down at Job. "I had a few years out and free. But then me and a friend knocked off a car, an' it turned out it belonged to a Representative who was out slumming. Our fault, we shoulda' checked it out. Time we did, it was too late. How did you get out of Cloak House? There were fifty theories—none of them any good."

  "Through the infirmary. In with the dead boys."

  "That was my suggestion. Some of the others got pretty wild. A lot of the kids said you went off the roof. They said that if you jumped at just the right place and the right time, the updrafts around the building would float you down gentle. They had fun with that one. Teeter on the edge, screw up your courage, then jump and whomp! For a coupla' weeks they were sweepin' up splattered messes every morning in the road outside. Dangerous place, Cloak House—if you didn't know what you were doing."

  "Not as bad as Tandy Center. Do you work at Headquarters?"

  "I do, matter of fact." Tolson stared hard at Job. "What difference it make?"

  "I thought you might know a way to get me out of this, to somewhere safer." Job held out his radiation-dose meter.

  Tolson hardly looked at it. "Forty rads. That's nothing. I had near twice that when I finished training, and look at me now—fine. You'll be fine, too. Remember, it's radiation gets the publicity, but it's toxins does you in."

  "But can you get me out?"