Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  "Then why did you tell Gray not to talk to me? What could you possibly think might happen if he's so sane?"

  He openly looked up and down her body, taking a slow and offensive inventory. "Miss-y, you need a road map, a compass, and a goddamn motor."

  "Do you think it was a robot?" Laura shouted over the noise. The two motors roared, and the wind rushed by her ears. Hoblenz's boat crashed from swell to swell, rhythmically jarring her bones. He cast a glance over his shoulder at the two men seated by the motors in back.

  Hoblenz held firmly on to the steering wheel, and Laura gripped the long handle in front of her seat. The hull of the speeding craft alternately rose into the air and crashed onto the water.

  "Pretty much had to be," he shouted back, turning the wheel and cutting a wide arc around a jut of land. From behind the thick jungle, Launchpad A came slowly into view.

  "One of the Model Eights?" she shouted. "The one they call 'Auguste'?"

  Hoblenz looked over at her in surprise. He cut back on the throttle, slowing the boat as he headed toward the shore. Two vehicles were parked on the beach. Each had six huge, ribbed [garbled] rose almost as high as the roll bar. They were covered in a thick coat of gray mud. Four more soldiers stood spread out around the [missing]. Their backs were to the ocean, their rifles pointed toward the [garbled].

  It wasn't the Dutch submarine that concerned Hoblenz's men. "You've been doin' some snoopin'," Hoblenz said. He cut the engine a few feet offshore. Their momentum carried the flat rubber bottom onto the sand with a high-pitched rubbing sound. One of the soldiers in back jumped into the shin-high water with a rope.

  Hoblenz himself put one boot into the water. He held out his hand to Laura. She ignored it and jumped onto the dry sand.

  Hoblenz joined her onshore. "Can I have a word with you?" Laura asked. Hoblenz glanced at his men and then jerked his head toward an empty stretch of beach. When they were some distance away, Laura said, "You were at the town meeting last night, right?"

  "'Course," Hoblenz replied, glancing back over his shoulder at his men.

  "What did you think about Mr. Gray's speech?" Laura asked, looking up at the man. "About phase two?"

  Hoblenz stopped suddenly and turned to face her. He had a deadly serious look on his face. "I'm ready."

  Something in the way he said it sent a chill through her.

  "Ready for what?" she asked.

  He gave a curt nod of his head. "For what's comin'."

  Laura was totally unprepared for that turn in the conversation. "And what is that?"

  Hoblenz lost his patience. "The fuckin' phase two!"

  "Well… what's phase two?"

  "War," he replied simply.

  The silence hung heavy around them. Laura was at a loss. "War against whom?"

  Hoblenz shrugged. "Beats the hell outa me." He seemed untroubled by his answer. "Ya see, gettin' ready to fight a war isn't so much drawin' on maps. It's up here," Hoblenz said, tapping his temple with a curled index finger. "I don't think even Mr. Gray knows exactly what's comin', but he's right about one thing. We've always been at our best when challenged. We've always made our greatest strides during violent conflict." Hoblenz was turned on — animated. "All the 'cooperative,' 'noncompetitive' bullshit is just that — bullshit. It's a product of our affluence. A luxury we've been able to afford in recent years. But the time's comin'. The shit's gonna hit the fan big-time."

  "What in the hell are you talking about?"

  "Judgment day. The reckoning. Whatever you wanna call it."

  Laura smiled in spite of herself. "Did Gray start talking about the Bible or something?"

  "No-o! Gray would never preach. But I knew what he was sayin'. There's no doubt in my mind."

  "Well, what words did he use?" Laura asked in frustration.

  Hoblenz squinted, scrutinizing her with his head cocked to one side. "He talked about the tree of knowledge growing and spreading."

  Laura stared back at him, then asked, "What the hell does that mean?"

  He waved a hand at her, unwilling to admit, she guessed, that he didn't understand the comment either. "You had to be there."

  "I wish I had been! Somebody could've woken me up."

  "I asked Mr. Gray if he wanted me to send a car for you," Hoblenz said.

  Laura felt a stab of pain in her chest that was almost physical. She looked up. "What?"

  "I asked when we were settin' up the metal detectors if I should send a car up to get you." Hoblenz shrugged. "He said not to bother."

  Laura was devastated. They headed back to the others, Laura's head hung low against the glare from the sun.

  "One of my men'll get you to the launch pad to catch a car. There should be plenty of 'em available now that the island's been somewhat depopulated."

  "I want to see where it happened."

  "Where what happened?"

  "Where the soldier was killed," Laura replied, looking up at him defiantly.

  Hoblenz's strained attempts at politeness came to an abrupt end. "Now what the hell for? It ain't no walk across the quad gettin' up in there, ya know, Doc. And I've done taken one shower today."

  She stared into the thick brush. The Dutch soldier went in there alone. At night. He never came out. The ATVs sat poised at the jungle edge. It was impossible to tell what color they were under the inch-thick coat of gray mud. The soldiers there looked around them, glancing over their shoulders at Laura and Hoblenz; "Scared to go back in there, Mr. Hoblenz?" she said it loud enough for his [garbled] to hear.

  She then lowered her voice. "Mr. Gray said I had unrestricted access. I think that includes the jungle." Without waiting for a reply, she headed for the nearest vehicle. Hoblenz followed. Laura stuffed her hair into one of the baseball-style caps they offered her and put on a pair of clear plastic goggles. She climbed onto the slant-nosed hood, and Hoblenz helped her step over the low windshield, grumbling the entire time. Laura resolved to ignore the mud covering the front passenger seat. She settled into the mess beside Hoblenz, who took the driver's seat with audible sighs. Once strapped in, Laura was surprised to see two men climb onto the back of the vehicle and attach themselves by straps to the roll bar — their rifles at the ready. She was even more surprised when the second vehicle started its loud engine, drowning out the faint but constant whoosh of the wind and the surf. It drove up behind them with four more armed soldiers aboard.

  She felt her pulse quicken.

  "You ready?" Hoblenz asked, and with a sudden roar their own engine sprang to life. The vehicle's light fiberglass chassis seemed a minor adjunct to the ATV's main features: its thunderous motor and the two rows of huge tires that formed black rubber walls to the left and the right. There was no steering wheel in front of Hoblenz, just two thick grips protruding from long slots on either side of his seat.

  He twisted the vertical throttle like on a motorcycle, gunning the motor to ever-louder growls and shaking Laura's insides with the disconcerting vibrations. It felt like her seat was bolted directly to the massive engine block.

  Hoblenz revved the engine again and shouted, "Hang on tight!" He then thrust the two levers to the front of their slots. With a kick to Laura's back, the vehicle plowed straight into the solid jungle wall.

  The ATV's sharp nose rose straight toward the sky. Laura's weight shifted. She thought for one horrible moment they were going to tip over backward and crush the two soldiers in back. She felt a lurch and a slip, and then a lurch forward and upward again.

  One side rose above the other as Hoblenz worked the two throttles independently. But with a final roar from the engine, the vehicle rose onto the jungle roof — leveling and then scraping its way forward, half sunk into the scraggly brush beneath. She looked back through the legs of the two standing soldiers to see the second ATV rise up in their tracks. Its muddy belly was streaked white from clawing branches, and it crashed down onto the flattened path made by the lead vehicle.

  They were going over the jungle brush instead of thro
ugh it — the hull partially submerged in the upper reaches of the thick canopy. The giant tires thrashed at the branches with great violence, crawling forward at a snail's pace toward their goal.

  "It's only thick like this around the edges of the jungle," Hoblenz boomed into her left ear. "It gets thinner when you get further in!" She barely heard him over the noise of the engine and the grinding of angry branches against the chassis.

  After a short distance they began to sink into the thick growth like a submarine slipping slowly beneath the water. In jerking, side-to-side motions they descended further into the brush with every inch that the vehicle crawled forward. Laura's heart leapt into her throat with each slip downward, but the clinging limbs of the jungle growth kept them from plummeting to the ground in a great crash.

  It grew dark as the green leaves closed in around and above them.

  A watery slurp under the boat-like hull signaled their arrival on the soggy bottom. For a moment there was relative quiet as Hoblenz idled the engine. The jungle floor was immersed in perpetual shade, and it stank of a thousand decaying things. Laura flexed her fingers, which were sore from their firm grip on the dashboard handle.

  "Here we go," Hoblenz said, and he gunned the engine with another twist of the throttles. A roar rose up, followed instantly by the high-speed whine of spinning tires. Great sprays of mud flew up, coating her goggles, stinging her face, and splattering her clothes.

  Laura's T-shirt stuck to her skin — its contact cold and uncomfortable.

  "Ye-e-e-e ha-a-a-aw!" Hoblenz yelled over the maelstrom of noise.

  She reached up and cleared two small windows in her goggles. All she could see of Hoblenz was his white teeth. The rest of him was thoroughly coated in dripping gunk.

  Another tidal wave of mud was thrown up, and it covered her face and arms and chest. She gave up trying to clear the goggles. All she knew now of her surroundings was the groan of the engine, the spraying of the mud, and the occasional slap at her head by an overhanging branch.

  She settled back into that dark world, taking what solace she could from the protection of an ever-thickening [missing] mud. She couldn't tell how long it was before the engine fell silent. In the sudden quiet she thought they'd broken down, but when seconds later the other ATV cut its engine she knew they'd reached their destination.

  Laura pulled the goggles away from her face with a loud slurp. She unbuckled her seat restraints and struggled to her feet. Large volumes of mud dripped from her lap onto the floorboard, and her running shoes squished in the deep muck already there. Laura sullenly climbed over the windshield in disgust, refusing all offers of assistance from the similarly filthy men. Despite the ledges of mud that cascaded from her clothes, she still felt thirty pounds heavier under the weight of the grime.

  She stood erect on the slanted hood of the ATV. The jungle was thinner on the ground than she had expected. But it all grew together overhead, forming a thick canopy that blocked most of the light. The dark green leaves of the plants and trees seemed almost as black as the marshy ground from which they sprang.

  The soldiers moved slowly and with obvious effort through the mire, great sucking sounds audible with every step. Hoblenz had issued no orders to his men that she had heard, but they all began to clean their rifles with pristine white rags. Trying not to cringe, Laura stepped off the front fender into the swamp. Her foot sank deep into the squishy mess, the water rising halfway up her shin to fill the hole she'd made, soaking her foot and jeans. It took surprising effort for her to pull her foot free of the clinging mud.

  Her bright white athletic sock hung in the air above the muck. Her running shoe had come off and disappeared at the bottom of a muddy well, which quickly filled to the top with dark water. She balanced on one foot, her other sinking deep in the wet glue.

  She had to await the soldiers' help this time. They probed for her shoe with bayonets. When they fished it from the swamp, it was unrecognizable inside a cubic foot of black mud. After a soldier carved most of the mess off with his knife, she sunk her foot into the shoe with a loud sound.

  "I am woman, hear me roar," she heard Hoblenz say. The soldiers next to them laughed. "You happy yet, or you wanna take a piss standin' up?" There was more laughter.

  Laura trudged through the swamp, muttering "Fuck you" to Hoblenz as she passed. Up ahead, the four men from the second vehicle had fanned out, their weapons in hand. The area was slightly elevated, and she climbed out of the swamp and into what passed for relatively solid mud. "Which way now?" she asked.

  Hoblenz joined her, but he took his time in answering. "This is the place."

  She looked down at the uneven ground. There was absolutely nothing to set this spot apart from the rest of the swamp. What did you expect to find, she thought, cursing herself silently.

  "You ready to go?" Hoblenz asked — driving his point home by proposing the abrupt conclusion of their trip.

  All the mud people looked at her and waited. She had to justify the expedition somehow. "What did you find?" Laura asked.

  Hoblenz sighed. "I thought you knew."

  "I mean, the Dutch sub dropped him off on the beach and he worked his way through the jungle toward the assembly building. But how could he make it through this?"

  "He didn't come through the jungle on foot," Hoblenz said. "That'd be impossible. He made his way from the beach by skirting the fringe of the jungle along the crawler track. That's where we picked up his footprints with the thermal imagers."

  "But I thought the area from the computer center to the launch pads was high security. The 'restricted area' or whatever the sign by the Village calls it. Don't you have some kind of system — motion detectors or whatever — that would pick up an intruder?"

  "Yep." Hoblenz shrugged. "Error number ten million and something."

  Laura nodded, and more clumps of the drying gunk fell to the ground. "So how did he get in here? You said it was impossible."

  "For a man," Hoblenz clarified, and then fell silent.

  "Look, I've been playing twenty-questions with Gray ever since I got to this island. I thought you, at least, would appreciate the value of straight talk."

  Hoblenz's cheek bulged for a second, and then he spat. "Okay. The sub let him off on the beach" — Hoblenz pointed back the way they had come—"and then he skirted the jungle edge all the way around" — his arm swept through the air 180 degrees—"to a point near the assembly building." His arm fell to his side with a muddy slap.

  "That's where the tracks disappeared."

  "What do you mean, 'disappeared'?"

  "He was picked up and carried. There were broken branches all around. They lead into the jungle, and so did the footprints — odd footprints. You couldn't pick 'em up with thermal imagers."

  "So how did you find the body?"

  "It was still warm. We spotted him from a chopper, then Mr. Gray and me came in here in ATVs and found him — him and the cold footprints." His voice was a million miles away.

  "Awfulest goddamn thing I ever saw in my life, and I've seen some shit. And let me tell you somethin' else. I've never been more scared in my whole life. Not even close. With those goggles on, everything's all green and glowing. Everything that's warm, that is. What we were lookin' for was stone-cold and black."

  "Mr. Gray said you set up lights and found tracks everywhere," Laura said in the reverent tone assumed by Hoblenz.

  He nodded. "Everywhere there's dry land, there's footprints. Look!" he said, and Laura followed him over to peer down at a string of dark holes in the mud. "And over there," Hoblenz pointed, "and there. It's like they were havin' a goddamn square dance out here or somethin'. I don't know if it was one, or ten, or all forty something of 'em. But it was robots. They were here, and they killed that poor son of a bitch. Ripped his goddamn head off." Hoblenz said angrily. His voice then fell to a more menacing tone. "Fuckin' bastards."

  33

  "Where's Mr. Gray?" Laura asked Janet in the foyer.

  "Oh, dear
," the woman responded, looking aghast at the mud that coated Laura.

  "Mr. Gray — where is he?" Laura repeated.

  "In… in the study, I suspect. Still asleep."

  Laura headed straight there in her bare feet, having removed her filthy running shoes and socks at the front door.

  The study was empty — Gray's blanket piled in his desk chair and his shoes on the floor beside.

  She began to search the house for him. There was a drawing room that looked as if it had never been used. A cozy game room with a polished wood bar, dartboard, and billiards table. A beautiful two-story library complete with rolling, brass-railed ladders. All were empty.

  It was a beautiful house. The rooms begged for the warmth of human presence, but they were still and lifeless and empty, After checking the darkened exercise room on the lower level and still finding no one, she was about to look upstairs when she thought, The kitchen. I haven't seen a kitchen.

  Starting back at the dining room, she began to search for a door that had to be nearby. One opened into a butler's pantry whose walls were lined with shining utensils. Walking down the short hallway past a gauntlet of copper pans and gleaming ladles, she saw the ovens and walk-in freezers of the large room ahead.

  Gray sat on a tall stool at a butcher-block island in the middle of the spotless room. His back was to Laura as she approached. He was hunched over a newspaper, reading while having a late lunch.

  Her feet made no noise on the black-and-white checkerboard of the cool tiles.

  He was eating a sandwich. Knives protruded from open containers of peanut butter and jelly that sat next to a loaf of white bread. A mug with a picture of the Enterprise from the old TV series of Star Trek was half filled with coffee. He was reading the sports section of the New York Times.

  Gray looked up at Laura, then surveyed her from the top of her clean head to her clean toes down below, taking in the mud covering all points in between. He looked like he was coming off a month-long vacation, but it had been less than six hours since he'd returned from the jungle. His eyes were a brilliant blue again.