by Ryder Stacy
Far away Dr. Shecter was calling off heart rate and pressure and other life-critical readings to Dr. Elston, who, with eyes glued to the guiding screen of the Holographic laser, worked frantically on Rockson’s insides. The readings were growing worse, and Shecter’s voice seemed to rise to a nearly hysterical pitch.
Rockson shrugged off the voice and the pain. He entered a space of clear light within himself. The source of his life force. He joined with it, a spinning perfect diamond no larger than a matchhead. He matched speeds within it, so he was the basic force of his life’s engine. He was so tired, but he used all his will power to command his body to fight back. He guided the rays of the Hologram to the clots, the little balls of rock-hard blood that were about to fill the caverns of his powerful heart.
“Still dropping—” the voice said from far above. “No, wait! It’s rising now. Rising for the first time. He’s helping us. I know he is. The pulse is slow but rising.” Rockson found the main clot with his mind—an obstructed artery—cutting off oxygen to a good part of his system. He felt the medicine being driven against it—to no avail. He was in in his heart now, loosening it, helping it push the hard clots through. Balance will be restored, he commanded. He visualized the heart, every part of it, told the muscles to unconstrict—and gradually, though his blood was full of spider venom, the muscles eased. He pulled blood from other parts of his body, pulled it with a mighty surge to help push the death clots through. His extremities tingled and grew cold as he harnessed all his forces, every part of himself, to this one job.
“Pressure rising back to normal, blood purity improving,” the unseen doctors above him said. He had succeeded. He had survived once again. He released the energies of his body back to the unconscious systems that controlled them. He had used every bit of his strength in the battle between life and death. He felt aged, drained. They would have to save him from here on in, ’cause he’d had it. Like a cat curling up in a corner, Rockson’s soul fell into the deepest part of himself and slept the dreamless sleep of the dead.
He awoke he knew not how much later. His head was still pounding as if rockpeckers were tapping their long, razor-sharp beaks into the back of his skull. At least the ability of his lungs to take in air was better. He filled them as far as he could, breathing in the precious mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide and hydrogen and a hundred other gases that had never tasted so good. He tried to open his eyes, but they felt stuck together by dried fluid from beneath his eyelids. Slowly he forced them open, each lid feeling as if it had a pound weight balanced on top of it.
“So, it moves,” a bass voice from the brilliant shadows said with humor. Rockson opened his eyes fully. Dr. Shecter and Head Surgeon Elston, a quite attractive woman in her early forties.
“Doc, I—” Rockson tried to lift his two-hundred-thirty-five-pound body off the bed, but fell backwards in a heap.
“Easy there,” Shecter said, stepping close and putting his age-spotted veiny hand on top of the Doomsday Warrior’s broad chest. “You’ve got to really slow down this time, Rock,” the head scientist of Century City said firmly. “The poison is still in you—a lot of it, anyway. We’ve given you huge doses of our new drug, Neurospan. And it seems to be doing the trick. That spider toxin is almost beyond belief. It’s one of the most potent neurologic corpuscle destroyers we’ve ever seen. Fascinating, quite fascinating. Really, you did medicine a big favor by allowing yourself to get bitten.” In spite of himself Rockson laughed, hurting his ribs and stomach with sharp, biting pains.
“How long?” Rockson stuttered out.
“You’ve been out for about ten hours, my boy, moaning and tossing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you so talkative,” Shecter said.
“I want out,” Rock said, trying to raise himself up again on trembling arms. “I hate hospitals.”
“Relax Rock, you’re not going anywhere for at least a few days,” Shecter said, stroking his thinning whitish-gray goatee. “Tell me,” the eternally inquisitive scientist asked. “What was it like—I mean—being so close to—death?”
“It wasn’t so bad, doc,” Rock replied, shrugging his body up on the pillow so he was in a more upright position. “We think of ourselves as isolated fragments, just parts of the whole, almost all our lives. But to experience the—the completeness of life and death, how they touch and mingle and subtly shift into one another—if only our lives could be as harminous as death appeared to me. Seeing it makes me feel strange. Like I’ve seen too much, have too much knowledge for a mortal man. It’s like a curse, doc, like looking into the eyes of God.” He stopped, his eyes far away, his throat dry.
“You were D.O.A. when we got you Rock. We barely got you pumping again.” Shecter asked him more about the experience, but when he looked over at Rock’s face, the Doomsday Warrior’s eyes had slid shut and he was back deep sleep. Even a fighter like Rock, one of the toughest men in America, had to heal, had to sleep so his cells could repair themselves. Shecter gave Dr. Elston instructions to de-brief Rock when he awakened. Then he left for the science section. That was his kingdom, a world of scientists and technicians with slide rules always poking from pockets, white smocks filthy and covered with spilled experiments. A world of petri dishes and windtunnels. In Shecter’s domain, men were put to work on everything, exploring everything. Nothing was to be avoided because it was too hard, or too sacred. The head scientist, who had turned Century City single-handedly from a backwards town into a teeming futuristic subterranean city, had not done so by being cowardly or timid. The land of America could be reconquered through the understanding of science and all that it could produce. Dr. Shecter saw the battle between the freefighters and the Russians as a kind of chess game. He took it all with a bit of salt and a dash of sarcastic humor. He was a frighteningly intelligent man, constantly terrorizing all his subordinates, who knew that if they made a mistake or miscalculated an important experiment he would know it, and he would berate them—loudly—for it. But he was also a scientist’s dream to work with. He supported his people one hundred percent, even if what they were following seemed meaningless or insignificant sometimes. He only asked them if they believed it was important. If they did, he would give them everything they could need.
But Shecter wasn’t just the ivory tower scholar who sits back and makes others do the work. He was a kind of Einstein with a hammer, thinking up theories or experiments in his library, where he would often sit for many hours puffing on his long-stemmed hand-carved hickory pipe, then jumping up in flash of technical enlightenment and disappearing into one or another of the Science Section’s many laboratories for days on end to figure out if what he had just though up could actually work, or not. Half the time it did—the other half it didn’t. But over the years, the half that did had produced miracles for the people of Century City—from his medical creations, like pensalve, a mutated penicillin cream that was nearly ten times stronger than regular injections, to his Holographic Laser capable of operating inside the body, as had been done on Rockson, to the Liberator automatic rifle, for years the standby of Century City Freefighters. This was also shipped out to other Free Cities as one of the main exports of the rebel stronghold, praised by U.S. attack forces throughout the country for its power and nonjamming firing ability, not to mention its quick change clip holding fifteen cartridges. Shecter had done work on hydroponic gardening, to which an entire level in the underground city was now devoted, supplying much of the city’s vegetable’s needs. He had developed lighting systems, and power supplies—Century City derived much of its energy from heat engines tapping the rising steam of the earth that broke through in certain of the city’s lowest levels, as well as from solar power, from camouflaged collectors atop the mountain above Century City—Carson Mountain. His main preoccupation now was the new Particle Beam weapons that Rock had brought back from the Technicians, a race of small, bald-headed men and women who lived out in deep missile silos far to the west. They had devoted their lives to developing these weapons, a
s had the generations before them, the descendants of the original missile technicians who had fired the American ICBMs after the Reds had launched theirs. Speaking an almost entirely mathematical language, the Technicians had befriended Rock and his expeditionary force, giving them ten of the incredibly powerful Black Beam weapons to take back with them—five rifles and five pistols. Dr. Shecter had put the weapons through every test he could devise and still couldn’t figure out just what made them tick, their power source or even how to open the damned things up, sealed as they were in a seamless plastic casing. But the weapons were so destructive that the head scientist felt it his duty to put more and more time into understanding them. With more like these, the freefighting forces could lay waste the biggest Red Fortress Cities in America, could wipe whole fleets of jets and choppers from the sky. Could return America to its citizens. Schecter now walked slowly back to his testing chambers, where a staff of white-smocked men and women worked round the clock on deciphering these Particle Beam mysteries. He breathed out a deep sigh and opened the door, knowing he faced yet another long night without answers.
Thirty-six hours later, headache gone, Rockson was able to sit up and sip some vegetable broth—and he nearly gagged. Still, after a few minutes he could sip it down, and it felt good and soothing to his throat and ravaged stomach. Dr. Elston walked in just as he was finishing his first “meal” in days.
“Ah, I see the conquering hero is up and around,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. She and Rock had had a brief fling years before when they had both had a bit too much to drink at a Christmas party. She still remembered it, and other men since somehow paled beside the memory.
“Got me where you want me?” he joked with a curling of his lower lip that turned her on instantly. She loved to watch his rough-hewn face, how he moved, how he talked. But she tried to act casual and professional. Wouldn’t do any good to let the man realize she was like silly putty when she was around him. “You like me weak as a kitten, don’t you?” he asked, only half joking.
“Well, there is something rather pleasing about having the man that the entire Russian army couldn’t kill, not to mention Blood Spiders, Grizz Bears and God knows what all else is out there—under my thumb, I must confess,” she said, walking over next to his bed and looking at his chart on a clipboard by the side. “You seem to be doing much better. Once your digestive system gets going and you have a few good meals you should be up and about. Your recuperative powers are absolutely amazing. By all medical textbooks you should be dead as a doornail.”
“How many dead doornails you seen, doc?” Rock said, slapping the pillows around behind him in a futile attempt to get comfortable.
“For the possible benefit of others who are ill or poisoned, Rock, we try to get a description of the things they went through—saw—felt. Do you feel up to talking about it?”
“Doc, I am so bored I swear I’m about to develop Boring Brain disease—I’ll talk your ear off if you let me.”
“Just let me get this tape recorder going,” she said, hefting a rather elaborate contraption, considering Shecter’s many miracles of miniaturization. She put the mike near Rockson’s head and clicked the recorder on. “Specifically, Rock, we try to get a description of the mental forces that helped with your healing. I know you were conscious throughout much of the Laser process. What were your thoughts? How were you able to help us so much?”
“I guess I’m just too mean to die, doc,” the Doomsday Warrior said, with only a half-smile. “I’ve been battling since I was a child. From what I’ve seen of this world, this universe—every living thing has to battle for survival, to stay alive. Other things are always trying to get you, eat you, kill you. You can’t let them. To live is to survive. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s something I think I understood very clearly a long time ago. I battle what attacks me, I leave alone what leaves me alone. That is my philosophy of life. Simple but functional. When I was lying there near death I could feel the poison in me—it was another enemy—another thing trying to steal my life force—take it unto itself for God knows what reason. This I couldn’t allow. So I guess doc, the first thing I’d say about what I did was—vow not to die.”
Dr. Elston listened in fascination. She’d never heard Rockson speak about his own beliefs or philosophy before. There was a power, a directness to his words that was almost hypnotic. Her eyes grew large and bright as she listened, hardly breathing at all.
“But in this case, the battle was different than my usual physical confrontations—it was much—sounds crazy—gentler. I knew that if I tensed up, that the poison would win. Christ, it was already making my body tense as stone, every muscle felt like it was being pulled to the limits of cellular strength. I knew I had to relax. And to relax I had to make my whole body become one. Had to get all the different parts of myself working together as a team rather than as a bunch of separate organ systems each doing their own thing. I was able to get into a very soft, ultrameditative state of mind—a wholeness, a dimension beyond the material. I’ll tell you one thing—a Russian—with their crass, material attitude—their godlessness—would have been unable to direct his healing powers. That machine, incidentally doc, is great. I felt the rays, the heat, working inside of me.”
“Yes, the Laser beams cross holographically inside your body and actually heat and excite the light-sensitive decoagulants so they become more effective. It’s a derivation of that healing device you brought back from the Technicians—it’s given Shecter and our medical people a lot to work with.” She questioned Rock for nearly an hour until she noticed he was getting tired again. She politely excused herself, wishing she could spend more time with the man. He was—fascinating. So different from the run-of-the-mill males who constantly approached her with their lines, their macho smiles. Ted Rockson didn’t need all that stuff—he was the real thing.
Four
President Zhabnov, supreme ruler of the United Socialist States of America—or so it was supposed to be—he thought ruefully, was staring out at the new blast-deflecting concrete walls being hastily constructed and strung with razor wire around his lovely White House in the center of New Lenin, formerly called Washington D.C. The fifteen-foot walls were directly bisecting his lovely rose garden, which was in full bloom.
“Ruined,” he mumbled out loud, looking out from the third floor window of his office, the room that had served as the decision-making seat of all of America’s presidents. Their pictures hung on the walls around him, huge, imposing, in ornate gilded frames. Zhabnov turned away from the window in disgust. The eyes of George Washington caught him full on, almost shocking him with their intensity as they seemed to glare down at him in none too friendly a manner.
“Did you have to put up with this sort of distasteful occurrence?” he asked, staring back up at the white-haired first father of the United States. “No, I’m sure you didn’t—sure you didn’t,” he answered himself, turning quickly away from the somewhat ghostly presence of the powerful man. He walked over to the Executive Desk and seated his portly frame, decked with rows of elaborate medals, into the antique wooden armchair that sat behind it. But I must take precautions. I must armor myself, make myself as impervious as possible to my enemies. My enemy, that is, he corrected himself, as he sipped a cup of darjeeling tea from the presidential crockery and munched on a croissant freshly baked and still steaming from the ovens of the ten-man-staffed kitchen in the basement that were kept going twenty-four hours a day to respond to any of the supreme president’s culinary needs—convenience that had made him grossly obese.
It had to be Killov’s doing, he thought with that gut-wrenching feeling in his stomach whenever he thought of the commander of the KGB in America. The one man of whom he was truly terrified. Even in the presence of the skull-like face, although he himself was theoretically Killov’s superior, he felt like a powerless fool. The man’s strength, his evil ambitions, made him burn like the fires of hell itself. And those eyes, set back in that pale, ga
unt face—he couldn’t bear to look in them. Of course, he couldn’t be a hundred percent sure that it was Killov who had destroyed Pavlov City, the giant experimental complex that had been implementing Zhabnov’s greatest plan—Plan Lincoln—to create a brainwashed army of American rabble to fight the freefighters. Pavlov City had been using the recently created Mindbreaker, a device capable of taking over the brain and will of any but the strongest and forcing them to do whatever the operator of the machine wished. It had been going well, the complex taking in nearly two thousand men and women a day and successfully transforming about a third into Zhabnov’s “American Army,” as he called it. The other two-thirds had become mindless wrecks who had had to be disposed of. Unfortunate, but such is the start of many noble experiments, the president thought. All Zhabnov knew was that Killov had entered the city on some pretext of checking on traitors among the army staff who ran the brainwashing city—Killov controlled the KGB and some air force units in the western part of the U.S., while Zhabnov had firm rein on the regular occupation troops and all other armed services. Killov had brought several hundred of his elite forces in with him—and then radio silence. What happened next was unclear, but apparently there was some sort of violent confrontation with the American rebels. A small nuclear device had been detonated over the fort and . . . that was that. Zhabnov’s greatest plan, his height of intellectual achievement, and millions upon millions of rubles, not to mention nearly one thousand of the complex Mindbreaking machines, all had gone up in the swirling fires of a mushroom cloud. Killov was back in his Denver eighty-story Monolith—a black, windowless building as unsettling to the citizens who could see it for nearly twenty miles around as the KGB commander himself—within hours. He had called the president to sadly inform him that the American rebel forces had stolen a nuke artillery shell and fired it from a tank. The president hadn’t believed a word of it, but had thanked Killov profusely and expressed delight that the commander had been able to make his own escape.