The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  He hugged Estrella to him. The best thing they could do was to never talk about it again, he resolved. A resolution he kept for more than a minute, though not as much as two, while they held each other and agreed that neither of them could be held responsible for things they didn’t really mean, because Stan was not only very satisfying, mostly, but definitely the only lover Estrella ever wanted, and Estrella was dear to Stan in all her parts and there was not one single thing he would want changed.

  Then he couldn’t help himself. “Strell? There was one funny thing—”

  “I’m glad you think it was funny!” But she had stopped sobbing.

  “No, I mean, I didn’t understand it. There was this feeling that you were protecting something, that you didn’t want anybody to know—something you were hiding.”

  She lifted her head and gave him a long look. Then she sighed and said, “I guess I should tell you. It’s just that I wasn’t absolutely sure, and I didn’t know how you’d feel about it, and—”

  “Strell! About what?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, then looked away. There were noises from outside the apartment, faint but definite. “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Strell! Tell me!”

  “Well,” she said, “the thing is, I think I might be pregnant.”

  Which is precisely when the door-thing blared its summons. Stan went to answer, staring back over his shoulder at the source of this incredible news…only to find that when he opened it the two female Heechee were there, talking over each other to give him more incredible news still. “It is a bad thing we come to tell you,” Salt said mournfully, while Delete added:

  “It concerns your home planet. It could not be helped.”

  And Salt: “No, it could not. Although if our people had had more time—if they had studied the relevant geology with appropriate care—”

  Delete made the negative belly-twitch. “No! Not even then, I think. We could not have helped, probably. It would have happened in any case, I believe.”

  Estrella had reached her limit. “What the hell are you two talking about? What would have happened?”

  “The event,” Salt explained. “The recent disastrous occurrence which has caused the dying of so many of your species-mates. It could not have been averted, I believe, so that all we can do now is condole. Which we do with great sincerity.”

  11

  * * *

  Waveland

  I

  Needless to say, in the eyes of most human people the great Kilauea tsunami was an overpoweringly awful cataclysm. The mere thought of it made human blood run cold. Even the Heechee considered it regrettable.

  The disaster had not been unexpected. Human scientists had seen it coming even without the help of the Heechee, though the Heechee helped a lot with the details. They were good at that sort of thing. They knew a lot about tectonic troubles, from their experiences of moving planets around inside the great black hole they lived in, and they had no trouble predicting that at some point the Big Island of Hawaii would split in two and splash that great tsunami all across the Pacific Rim. Even the Heechee didn’t have any idea of what to do about it, though.

  When it did come, in all its violence and terror, the size of that wave wasn’t like that of any other tsunami, ever. Even the very biggest historic tsunamis had been not much more than a hundred meters high. This one was a whole other thing. When it struck the beaches all around the Pacific coasts, the curl at the top of the wave was nearly half a kilometer above the shoreline. When all that irresistible mass of water came battering down on the land tens of millions of human beings were killed at once.

  It wasn’t just people who died. Their works went with them. Whole cities were erased out of existence by that wave, as though they had never been. The world mourned.

  That is, most of the world did. There was one particular human person, a minister by the name of Orbis McClune, who took a quite different view of the incident.

  Reverend McClune didn’t mourn at all because, in his view, the devastation of the Kilauea tsunami wasn’t all that bad. It had its good points. One of the best of them was that the wave had obliterated large chunks of Southern California.

  It wasn’t merely that McClune didn’t think the tsunami was bad. He didn’t think it was an accident at all. Quite the contrary. In Reverend McClune’s view that annihilating wave was nothing more nor less than the manifestation of God’s terrible, pitiless vengeance, smiting sinners where they stood. The great wave struck on a Saturday. On that Sunday morning the Reverend McClune got down on his knees before what was left of his congregation in Rantoul, Illinois, and thanked his God and his Savior for mercifully cleaning out the cesspits that had been Southern California, the purulent home of the so-called entertainment industry with its sinful vids and VRs, the vile font of lewdness and nudeness and blasphemies of all kinds.

  Not to mention that he had a personal reason for wishing misfortune to that part of the world.

  McClune’s sermon didn’t mention that personal reason. He didn’t have to; the congregation knew all about it. He also didn’t mention the obliterated cities of Hilo and Honolulu, Shanghai and Tokyo, Auckland and Papeete and a hundred others, all around the Pacific Rim and on the islands dotting the sea. To the extent that McClune thought about those cities at all, he presumed that they must have been pretty wicked, too. That went without saying as far as McClune was concerned, because why else would God have chosen to destroy them? But McClune didn’t take much of an interest in those other places. Godless California had been on his mind for a long time, and, he assumed, therefore on God’s mind as well. So he was pretty sure that California had been God’s main target. If other communities happened to get themselves obliterated while He was punishing the Californians, well, that was the kind of collateral damage that history was full of.

  So, as McClune addressed the tiny remnant of what once had been a flourishing congregation, he tearfully thanked his God for wiping America’s Pacific Coast clean again. That was the sermon that finally cost him his job.

  On the morning of that unforgettable Sunday there had been fewer than thirty people remaining in McClune’s church, the rest of his flock long driven away by his diatribes against pretty much everything that had happened in the last century. By noontime there were even fewer, because this time he had gone too far even for the loyalest of those few remaining loyalists. The most common word heard among them as they glumly exited the church was, “Nutcase,” along with, “All right, we all know he had a tough break, that business with his wife, but for God’s sake!” and most of all, “Never mind the business with his wife. He’s gone too far this time. We really have to do something.” So the leaders of the congregation were on the phone to the bishop before their Sunday dinners were on the table, and by Monday morning Orbis McClune no longer had a church.

  That didn’t mean that he was defrocked. He kept his status as an ordained minister. He was dehoused, though, because the parsonage went with the church. As an act of charity, the bishop called to offer him thirty days’ grace to find another place, but McClune said, “Don’t bother. I’ll be out of here tomorrow.”

  The bishop regarded him on the screen. “You know,” he said tentatively, “I didn’t want to have to take your church away. I don’t like to interfere in local matters, but, good heavens, Orbis, you know you didn’t give me much of a choice. It was bad enough before, when you went on the comm circuits to call the Heechee demons from Hell—”

  “What other name can you call demons by?” McClune asked.

  The bishop groaned. “Please, Orbis, we don’t want that argument again. I only want to say that when you say things that sound like you’re, well, really almost rejoicing in all those terrible deaths from the tsunami, it hurts us all. It certainly doesn’t give the right impression of what our faith is all about.”

  When McClune didn’t respond, the bishop sighed in resignation. He hadn’t really expected any retraction from McClune, and
he certainly didn’t want another of those interminable theological arguments—no, diatribes—that had punctuated McClune’s tenure in his church. It was only residual politeness, not actual concern for McClune’s welfare, that made him ask, “Where will you go, Orbis?”

  “Why, I’ll go where I’m needed, Bishop.” Then McClune smiled. He had a nice smile. You could even call it a heartwarmingly kindly smile. It had deceived many a person who was astonished to find himself moments later labeled a hopelessly hell-bound sinner, since the smile was not at all in keeping with the harsh denunciations that followed. The bishop, who knew McClune well, tensed when he saw the smile, expecting the worst. But all McClune said was, “When you come to think of it, Bishop, that could be pretty nearly anywhere, couldn’t it?”

  No matter what he had told the bishop, McClune knew perfectly well where he intended to go.

  The next morning, first thing, he rented a storage locker for what was worth saving of his household goods. There wasn’t much. He put the few remaining necessities in a backpack and caught a railbug for the big airport at Peotone.

  Peotone International Airport was a madhouse. Planes were coming in from all over the stricken California coast, landing with scant loads of stunned, scared refugees, and immediately refilling with rescue workers and supplies for the return. The outgoing rescue workers were neatly dressed, the refugees less so. McClune nearly stumbled over a man, woman and child sprawled by a doorway. All were deeply suntanned. The child’s face was buried in a VR game simulator; his parents wore the perplexed expression of people who had never been seriously worried before; all three were still wearing pajamas, in the wife’s case nearly transparent ones.

  Actually, it was just as McClune had expected it would be. As he had counted on its being, in fact, because he had been confident that everybody would be too involved in the task of getting relief to the survivors to be vigilant. He was pretty sure that all he would have to do was display his clerical collar and say, “The survivors are going to need spiritual counseling, too.” Say it he did, sufficient it was. The load bosses had more urgent things on their minds than worrying about the credentials of one more volunteer. With hardly a glance, they waved McClune onto the plane that was already loading.

  It was a cargo plane, but the kind of goods it was taking to the ruined California coast was a surprise to Orbis McClune. He had supposed the urgent necessities would be such things as food, medical supplies, doctors, nurses. Not so. What was going into the airplane’s hold was mostly great earth-moving machines. What’s more, most of the score or so of persons, the other so-called rescue workers who were occupying the added-on passenger seats on the upper deck with him, seemed to be news reporters, and the others were all lawyers. At least the ones nearest to him were all one or the other, first a young woman whispering to her machine mind in the seat next to him, then a pair of older, plumper males studying documents together across the aisle. None of the other passengers paid any attention to Orbis McClune.

  That was all right with him. He didn’t want to talk to anybody just then. He had something more important to do. He closed his eyes, folded his hands on his lap and began a long, imploring, heartfelt, silent prayer to his Maker, because—in an age when members of the human race flew across the galaxy in great faster-than-light spacecraft—Orbis McClune was scared to death of airplanes.

  II

  What had made Kilauea a mass murderer wasn’t just that it was a volcano. There are lots of volcanoes in the world. There are even quite a few of them which, like Kilauea, are in a fairly continuous state of eruption. The thing that made Kilauea special was that it was on an island. This meant that those little lava flows Kilauea kept continually plopping out had nowhere to go on land, because there just wasn’t that much land on the island of Hawaii for them to go to. The only thing they could do was to ooze downhill to the beaches, and the only thing they could do after that was to tumble right down off the shoreline into the deeps of the Pacific Ocean.

  When the lava got that far, it wasn’t molten anymore. As soon as it hit that cold water it froze instantly solid, with a great display of fireworks and superheated steam. Then so did the next overflow out of Kilauea’s endlessly recharging cauldron of liquid rock, and the one after that, and the one after that. And so as time went by, those increments of quick-frozen rock just off Hawaii’s south beaches turned into a nearly vertical submarine cliff. Then it became an overhanging one. And then it cracked loose, split off from the rest of the Big Island and fell, taking hundreds of square kilometers of the island’s surface with it.

  Water is not compressible. The volume of water that was shoved out of the way by the collapsing cliff had to go somewhere. What it did was to become the tsunami, a ripple spreading across the Pacific at supersonic jet speed until ultimately it hit the rising slopes of the shelf around some land mass. The ripple then swelled, towered, fell on the land.

  For those bits of land, that was just too bad.

  The advance warnings helped, a little. Tens of millions of people heeded them and fled inland, and most of those people did succeed at least in saving their lives. But not everybody was able to get out of the way. Even the ones who could run away couldn’t take their cities with them.

  So Orbis McClune’s plane didn’t land at the old Los Angeles airport. That wasn’t possible. There was nothing left of the airport, or indeed of the city, except for a desert of sand that lay over a waste of featureless, drying mud. The tsunami’s first wave had scoured flat everything in that part of the world all the way from Santa Barbara to Tijuana—buildings, roads, railbug lines and everything else made by man. And then the wave that followed that one covered what was left with sand sucked up from the bottom of the sea, leaving nothing visible that could still be recognized as the work of man.

  For all practical purposes the obliteration of that principal airport didn’t matter. Those kilometers-long runways were heirlooms, designed for a much earlier generation of planes. It was not much of an inconvenience for the pilot of McClune’s aircraft to set down on one of the many satellite airstrips in the foothills. The inconveniences started when the plane was actually on the ground. It turned out that each of the scant landing gates was already full, with half a dozen earlier arrivals already waiting on the taxi strips for one to open up. When McClune’s aircraft did get to a gate, moments after the gate’s previous occupant trundled away to the takeoff strip, he found the terminal crowded past recognition. The airport at Peotone had been busy, sure. But this one was less than a tenth the size of Peotone, and it was doing its inadequate best to handle ten times as much traffic.

  As McClune exited the gate, he made the congestion a little worse. He stopped dead in his tracks and closed his eyes for a quick prayer of thanksgiving at having got through the flight alive. He was only a couple of seconds into it when a bump from behind made his eyes fly open.

  The bump had come from his former seatmate, lugging a backpack of her own and still talking to her machine mind as she walked. Clearly she had been paying no more attention to the world around than he. “Shit,” she said crossly. “Can’t you get out of the goddamn way?”

  McClune turned to regard her. What he noticed first about the woman was what she intended to be noticed, that is, that she was brown-haired, brown-eyed and all in all, as any normal person would recognize at once, quite pretty. She was in fact so attractive that she clearly had been able to afford plenty of cosmetic surgery. That fact would normally have been more interesting to him than her good looks, but he wasn’t trying to raise funds at that moment. Had no church to be raising funds for, for that matter, so he merely gave her his heartwarming smile, the one that meant that the person he was talking to was being an unacceptable pain in the ass. He stepped as far aside as he could, into the airport’s crush of people, and said politely, “I’m truly sorry, Miss. I was simply communing with the Lord for a moment.”

  That was as far as Orbis McClune expected the conversation to go, but it appeared th
at the woman was getting some other ideas. She was looking at him thoughtfully, taking in his clerical collar. Then she held up her hand toward him, palm out, and asked, “Are you a priest, then, Father, um—?”

  McClune’s smile, if anything, broadened. “No, I am not a priest of the Roman sect, my dear. I am a simple minister of God.” Then, as he caught sight of the tiny glitter she was holding in her palm and realized he was on camera, he added, “I came here to do what I can for the souls of those in distress.”

  She gave him a microsecond pause before she prompted: “And what is it you can do for them, Reverend?”

  The smile became broader still. “Why, I can bring them back to the merciful bosom of the Lord. What else is important in this world?”

  “Thanks,” she said, closing her fist and turning away, once again whispering to her machine mind and no longer showing any awareness that such a person as Orbis McClune existed.

  That was annoying. McClune was accustomed to being scorned and insulted, even now and then to being punched out. However, he was not at all used to being kissed off as a six-second sound bite. He didn’t like it, either.

  No matter. As he removed himself from the stream of traffic McClune allowed himself a consoling moment to think of the hellfire that awaited the woman, then turned his thoughts toward where he could begin his mission…and stopped dead once more. There were glowboards hanging below the ceiling that bore once-helpful markings, “Taxis” for the rich and extravagant, and of course “Cellular Transport” for everyone else. They no longer represented any reality. A concourse led down to the railbug station, all right, but the entrance to it was blocked by sawhorses bearing signs—hand—painted, of all things!—saying, unbelievably, “No cellular transportation.”

  That was a shocker. The railbugs were what took you from the place where you were to the place you wanted to be, all over the civilized world. You made your way to the nearest railbug station, never very far, and summoned a bug. No more than a minute or two later one would slide off the main line and onto your siding and open its doors. When you got in you took a seat—it wouldn’t have stopped if no seat had been vacant—and chose your destination. The rest was automatic. You read, or drowsed, or watched a vid on the back of the seat ahead of you, or worked on your screen, or whatever. The bug slid back onto the main line, stopping now and then to pick up another passenger or let one off at his own stop. And there you were.