Brothers to Dragons

by Charles Sheffield

  Headquarters was on the target list, too, but Job was less worried about Skip Tolson. With Skip's nose for trouble he was probably hidden away already in some new bolt-hole, far from danger.

  Wilfred Dell had stood up and was moving across to the desk. He picked up the vial and peered into it. "A good piece of work, Job. I'll send this out for full analysis tonight, and we can continue tomorrow morning. But now I must fulfil other commitments."

  "There's more to tell. Don't you want to hear how I rode a Tandyman to get out of Xanadu?"

  "I do. But that can wait." There was a glint of lust in the gnome's eyes. "The senators and I have an appointment with some friends of yours. Should I offer your regards to Miss Magnolia, over at Bracewell Mansion?"

  Job stood up, too, and walked towards Wilfred Dell. "I don't think she'll even remember me. If she does she probably thinks I'm dead. A few hours ago, I thought I was, too." He reached out, took Dell's hand, and shook it. "I just want to say, it's good to be here. I don't know if you are surprised that I made it back, but I am."

  Dell had looked startled when Job shook his hand. He nodded. "I am surprised. And impressed. I admit it. As I told you before you left, good men are all too scarce. I'll arrange for you to receive the best medical treatment that we can give. You need rest now—a bath might be a good idea, too. In the morning we will talk about your future."

  Dell ushered the other three men out, leaving Job standing alone. He went back to the chair, sat down, and covered his face with his hands. He had held up this long, but it had taken all his strength.

  One more step, he told himself. One more step; and then I can rest forever.

  * * *

  Job had learned on his first encounter with Wilfred Dell that the man needed little sleep. Bracewell Mansion must have occupied much of the night, but it was no surprise to Job to find himself summoned to Dell's office at eight in the morning.

  Job had already been up for three hours. He had gone to bed at once, still unbathed, but by four o'clock the nausea that had started at midnight was much worse. Long before dawn he went to the medical room in the lower basement of the building to demand sedatives and pain killers. They were provided without objection, but the doctor who spoke with Job gave him a brief examination and shook his head.

  "There's nothing much we can do for you here. Are you seeing specialists?"

  "Later."

  "Do it soon. This is going to knock you flat." The doctor could hardly find a vein for the needle, in Job's ulcerous and wasted arm.

  Job winced as the injection went in. "How long is the pain killer good for?"

  "Five or six hours."

  "Fine. That should be ample."

  "That's not the point! You ought to be in bed."

  "I'm on my way." But Job went upstairs to the twenty-four-hour cafeteria, where he ordered a pint of milk and four raw eggs. The pain killers were beginning to work. They allowed him to force eggs and milk down his blistering throat. The sedatives overrode his nausea, enough to permit him to keep what he had swallowed.

  Back in his room he soaked for two hours in a lukewarm bath, and worried.

  He had no doubts that it had been right to give Wilfred Dell the vial, and explain its contents. In their anger, Gormish, Pyle, and Bonvissuto were willing to destroy everyone in the world, guilty and innocent alike. They were implacable. When people spoke of the Nebraska Tandy and quoted a life expectancy for new arrivals of a year and half, they had no idea that the Big Three were causing most of the deaths. With a more humane policy toward the treatment and training of new prisoners, the average life in the Tandy could be drastically increased—perhaps to the point where it was as long as life outside. But Gormish and her colleagues were fanatics. If they would not try to save people who had been condemned to the Tandy with them, how much less would they care about everyone else?

  Job had been given the chance to stop them. He had taken it. There was no doubt in his mind about that decision.

  But what about the other vial, and his own action?

  That was Father Bonifant's hardest question, one that Job could not answer; but he knew the reply that Reginald Brook would give, and he could not accept it.

  He at last forced himself to leave the tub. The warm water had soothed and relaxed him, but overall he felt worse. Dressing, even in the softest and loosest clothes, was an exquisite agony. When he was clothed he went to sit by the window and stared at the city, spread below him in the morning sunlight. Already a thick haze hung over it. From this distance it was less pleasant a prospect than the clean plain of the Nebraska Tandy.

  When the call came from Dell, Job was ready. He placed the empty second vial in his pocket and walked gingerly across to the other side of the building. He knocked and went into the luxuriously appointed office.

  This morning the only man with Wilfred Dell was Reginald Brook.

  "The senators are still a little under the weather." It was apparent from Dell's manner that he was not. "We'll begin without them. Let me start by saying that a first examination confirms what you said. The bottle contained a genetically modified form of the variola virus—the smallpox virus, to us simple folk. It will take a while longer to confirm the potency of that new virus, but there's no reason to doubt what you said. So much for Dr. Hanna Kronberg, and her 'great love' of humanity."

  Job shook his head, and felt new pain in his neck and chest. "She didn't develop that virus. The work was done before she arrived in Xanadu, by other scientists. Hanna Kronberg was actually opposed to plague virus development—believe it or not, she really does love people. I was there when she had a big argument with the others in the lab. She wanted to hinder development of an airborne contagious form. What she wanted them to work on, without telling the Big Three, was something quite different—another tailor-made microorganism."

  Dell snorted. "Still chasing her old idea, making us so we can all chew wood like a bunch of beavers?"

  Job saw Reginald Brook's pop-eyed look. It must be his first exposure to Hanna Kronberg's pet project.

  "Not that. For three years she has been after something new. Her latest organism is designed as a symbiote to the human body, to live inside people and help repair damaged structures. It grew out of her earlier work on cellulose digestion. She had started to wonder, what was the point of more babies if all they had to look forward to was disease and early old age? She managed to produce a symbiote that strengthened the immune system and inhibited the aging process, but there were problems. Simulations, confirmed by lab tests on human subjects, showed that the symbiote would produce side effects: diminished sex drive and reduced fertility. And there were other difficulties, ones that she was never able to solve."

  "Well, they're all history. She'll do no more experimerits." Wilfred Dell glanced at his gold wristwatch. "Her efforts will end in three and three-quarter hours, precisely at noon today—when Techville and Xanadu Headquarters are blown off the map. She'll never make her symbiote."

  "She already made it." Job reached into his pocket with shaking hands and carefully took out the vial with the yellow stopper. The pain killers were still working, but Job's condition was deteriorating. He could feel new ulcers and blisters erupting on his tongue and inside his mouth. In another hour speech would be impossible. He held the vial out towards the two men.

  "I stole this, too, from the lab. Hanna Kronberg's latest genetically tailored microorganism."

  Reginald Brook was beginning to repeat his action of last night and flinch away in his chair, but after a moment he frowned and leaned forward. "Wait a minute. That bottle is empty!"

  "Quite right. It is empty—now." Job could hear his voice slurring the words. "It wasn't, though, when I took it."

  "What did you do with it?" That was Dell, the urgency in his voice showing that he was jumping ahead of Job's explanation.

  "When I was still in the Tandyman, I poured it over my hands and rubbed it on my face. It's inside me now. You see, Hanna Kronberg never found
a way to make an air-carried version of this, either. It can only spread from person to person by actual body contact."

  "Goddamn." Dell was glaring at Job. "You may have killed us all. Body contact. Last night, when we were leaving, you shook my—"

  "That's right. Inside me, and now inside you." Job giggled like a drunkard. "Sorry about your sex drive, Mr. Dell. You'll miss it more than most. I hope you avoided body contact last night at Bracewell Mansion."

  Dell gasped. "You fucker! You're dogmeat, Job Salk. I'll see to it personally that you're dead before I eat dinner." Every veneer of sophistication had gone from his voice. His speech was pure chachara-calle.

  "Sure. You think you can make me in worse shape than I am?" Job sighed. "Don't threaten a drowning man with water torture, Mr. Dell. Can't you see I'm dying? That I'm dead already? I wanted to explain last night, but you were so eager to go over to Bracewell Mansion, you didn't want to listen. I blundered around the central Xanadu dump, the hottest part. I rode a Tandyman to leave Xanadu! You hear me? If you want to live, you don't go near a Tandyman without a protective suit. I knew that. I didn't want to die. But I didn't have a suit, and I was carrying something so important that I had to get away. Last night I ate thousands of rads. Thousands and thousands."

  "Fuck you and your thousand rads! It's a pity you didn't fry on the spot." Wilfred Dell was shaking all over. With rage or fear, Job could not tell.

  "But if you shook Dell's hand . . ." Something was finally getting through to Reginald Brook. He was holding his hand in front of his face and staring at it in a puzzled way. "And he shook hands with me when I left last night, and then I shook hands with Walsh and Nelson . . ."

  "Welcome to the club." Job laughed again, a dry rattle that tortured his throat. "How many of us are there this morning, Mr. Brook? How many will there be by tonight? Don't you want a symbiote to stop you aging and make you live to a healthy old age? Most people would love it. I thought for an hour or two that it might even help me. But it can't work miracles."

  "An antidote! Something to reverse the action. There has to be one." Dell snatched the bottle from Job's hand and dashed out of the room.

  "Don't bet on it," Job croaked after him. "Hanna Kronberg doesn't think it can be removed from the human system. And she's an awfully smart woman."

  He stood up and walked slowly across to Reginald Brook. Frozen in his chair, the other man raised his hands in front of his face. "Get away from me!"

  "I just wanted to take a good look at one of the real owners of the world." Job stared at Brook for a few seconds, then walked back to slump in his own seat. He was feeling dizzy, and the light in the room had become a patchwork of light and dark spots.

  "You never visited the Nebraska Tandy, Mr. Brook." Job closed his tired eyes. "You never will. But I did. And you know something? Life goes on there. You take the worst poisons and the worst radioactives and the worst pollutants in the whole country, and you pour them all into one little area, twenty miles across. And you know what happens? The earth fights back. Life fights back. People fight back. They have children, and they worry about their future. They seem as happy there as they do here.

  "I sat in the Tandyman last night, after I escaped from Xanadu, and I thought about you and the Royal Hundred. I knew that if I gave that vial to Wilfred Dell, he would take it, and study it. But what would you do next? I knew the answer. You'd restrict its use. You and a few friends would get the benefits, along with the Royal Hundreds, whoever they are, of other countries. You'd like the fit life and the healthy old age—but you wouldn't want it for everyone, because the big side effect is reduced fertility. Hanna Kronberg talks about a future world population that will stabilize at one and a half billion, instead of increasing past twelve. That's good for most people. They'll be better off, because they won't need a whole bunch of kids to look after them in their old age—they'll able to manage for themselves. And Earth will be better off, too. It needs a breathing space. It fights back, better than we deserve, but it can use a rest from too many people."

  Job opened his eyes. Reginald Brook was staring at him open-mouthed, with the terrified and hopeless expression of a rabbit facing a snake. Job rested his aching head on the soft seat back.

  "Did I say everyone will be better off? I don't mean quite everyone, do I?" His voice was an unintelligible mumble. "I mean, everyone but you, and a handful of others like you. What you fear, you see, more than anything, is change. But when the world population shrinks, change is one thing that's absolutely guaranteed. 'It's nice to have plenty of young and poor,' Wilfred Dell told me, 'to look after the old and wealthy.' He meant you—the Royal Hundred. You need the status quo. But what will your kind do when the supply of young and poor dries up? Will you cook your own meals, and clean your own house, and mend your own clothes?"

  There was silence. Job opened his eyes. Reginald Brook had left. Job was alone.

  "It's the hardest problem of all, isn't it?" Job went on muttering, his head lolling forward onto his chest. "Who should run the world? There's no easy answer, no magic solution. There never is, to a really hard question. Who should run the world? Hanna Kronberg and her friends would like to run it, and they can make gadgets that help; but they don't understand people, so they don't know how the gears work in the real world. Wilfred Dell is different. He knows how it operates—the trouble is, he wants to operate it himself. And that's enough to rule him out."

  Job sat up and stared around. It was clear daylight, but the room seemed to be filling with a pink fog, blurring the outlines of everything. When he tried to speak, his throat produced no sound.

  So who will run the world? The question rolled on, inside his head. There's only one answer. No one knows if there's a 'right' way for the world to work, so no one can be allowed to run the whole thing. But everyone plays a part. Hanna Kronberg does her bit, trying to make things change for what she thinks is better. Maybe she's right. Reginald Brook and Wilfred Dell fight every change, doing their best to keep things just the way they are, and maybe they are not always wrong. Even Skip Tolson has a purpose, hanging on when there's no hope and no reason, surviving when he ought to die, clinging to life, never giving up. He does his bit.

  And I did mine.

  It was the answer that faith provided, and it was the right answer. Job was sure of it. Because although Reginald Brook had left the room, Father Bonifant had taken his place in the chair opposite. And Mister Bones was smiling.

  * * *

  Wilfred Dell returned in fifteen minutes, gray-faced and furious. He had three armed guards with him. But he was too late. Job had already slipped away.

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty