The Boy Who Would Live Forever

by Frederik Pohl

  Oddly, Orbis didn’t think railbugs were particularly sinful. (It was human beings who had invented them, not the damned—the really damned—Heechee.) He took them all the time.

  Not here, though. Not now.

  Nor was there much else available. There were no vehicles at the taxi stand, nor did the other passengers seem to expect any. Most of them were being met and led off by some local authority. That was no help to Orbis McClune. There was no one to meet him.

  What he did next was easy for him, since he had done it so often before. He chose one of his fellow travelers—an elderly woman whose principal virtue was that she wasn’t busy talking to someone else at the moment—and said, “Madam, I am going to ask you the most important question of your life. Will you take a moment of your time to help me save a soul?”

  She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even answer him, just turned and walked away. The next available person was a dark-skinned young man irritably looking around for someone who clearly wasn’t there. He wouldn’t either. Nor would the one after that, which made McClune pause to consider a change of plans.

  These were all quite irreligious people. Perhaps the place to start delivering his message was right here.

  He was looking for a suitable counter to climb onto when he heard himself called. It was the voice of the woman with the palm camera. “Hey, you,” she was calling. “You, Reverend! Come here a minute!”

  She was beckoning to him with one hand, while the other was doing its best to wave off a couple of raggedy-looking urchins, apparently begging for money. As he hesitated she said impatiently, “Come on, for God’s sake. I was talking to my machine mind and I think we might be able to do each other some good. Do you know who I am?”

  McClune did not, but before he could say so one of the children at the woman’s side spoke up. “I seen you,” she said. “You were in the p-vids, telling where to go for food and stuff.”

  “Why, that’s right,” she woman said, giving the little girl a small, un-encouraging smile. “My name is Cara le Brun, I’m a reporter and, yes, I did do some of those public service announcements. So you see,” she said, returning her attention to Orbis McClune, “I’m legit. I’m here to get human interest stories from the victims, and it seems to me you could help me out. Like the religious angle, I mean; Barb says that hasn’t been covered much yet.”

  McClune pursed his lips, considering whether to give up his new plan. “I hear you saying how I’ll be helping you,” he said, thinking about it. “You didn’t say what you can do for me.”

  “Expenses,” she said. “What else? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything’s sky-high here. I don’t know what kind of financing you have—” She paused inquiringly, got no answer from him, gave him a brisk nod. “That’s what I thought. Well, I’ve got an expense account and Barb cleared it with the higher-ups. That means I can take care of your costs, too—I mean, for a day or two, anyway. Within reason. Well?”

  “Who’s Barb?”

  The woman looked impatient. “What do you need to know that for? Barbara is what they call my machine mind, that’s all. So, McClune? What’s your answer?”

  He hesitated, reminded of something. “You haven’t mentioned my name to your machine mind, have you?”

  “No. Why would I? And what’s the difference if I did? I’m waiting, McClune.”

  Relieved, McClune gave her his sweet and meaningless smile again. “I accept, of course,” he said.

  As far as Cara le Brun had a plan, it was to head up into the hills, where most of the survivors had taken refuge.

  At first McClune was not attracted to that idea. Down on flattened-out Waveland was where God’s wrath had struck its avenging blow, and something in McClune’s heart yearned to see the results of that terrible judgment.

  On the other hand, it didn’t take him long to learn that there wasn’t anybody down there who was still alive. His saving word would be better delivered to the survivors, that tiny fraction of former sinners who had been spared a dreadful death. So he held up his hand to stop the little girl, who was going on and on about the advantages of someplace called Barstow. “Fine with me,” he said, ignoring the child. “How do we get there?”

  The woman looked around irritably. “I could spring for a cab,” she said, “but there don’t appear to be any.” She was looking glumly at the point on the curb marked “Taxi Rank,” where a longish line of people was hopelessly sweating in the heat and not moving at all. The only visible motion was far away, beyond the end of the terminal, where some of the earth-moving machines from the plane’s cargo hold were already lumbering away in single file to where they were needed.

  McClune hesitated, wondering if that were a sign. Perhaps it wasn’t God’s design for him to go along with this trollop’s plans. It wouldn’t be hard to talk one of the machine drivers into giving him a ride down into the destroyed area. He closed his eyes, asking for guidance, but he didn’t seem to receive any.

  Or, it turned out, need to. The little girl who had been standing with her fists on her hips, looking indignant, spoke up. “Jeez, don’t you guys listen? You need a guide. I’m it.”

  Le Brun frowned, then inspected the girl narrowly. So did McClune. The child looked to be no more than twelve. Her hair was cut in a ragged soupbowl and did not appear to have been washed for some time. More offensive to McClune, what she was wearing was the shortest of shorts, with a tank top that had been meant for someone with actual breasts.

  Le Brun didn’t seem to like what she saw any more than he did. “What we need is a vehicle, not a guide,” she said. “Do you know where we can get one?”

  “Sure I do. Only the vehicle comes with the guiding. It’s a package. You don’t get one without you take the other,” the girl said. “You want the deal or not? If you don’t, there’s plenty of others around here that will.”

  “How much?” le Brun asked practically.

  “Two hundred a day,” the girl said, watching le Brun’s face. When it didn’t display immediate shock, she tacked on, “Each, I mean. Plus expenses for, like, fuel and such.”

  Le Brun gave her an unamused grin. “I’ll take it before it gets any higher,” she said sourly. “Do you know where we want to go? Someplace up in the hills, where there are thousands of refugees. I’m thinking of heading into the high desert, or maybe—”

  But the girl wasn’t waiting to hear the older woman’s thoughts. “Barstow,” she said sagely. “That’s the place to go.”

  Le Brun didn’t like being interrupted. “Why Barstow?” she demanded.

  The girl was looking around nervously. “It’s got everything you want, take my word for it. And I can get you there in an hour. Are we going?”

  Le Brun thought for a moment. “Has it got a decent hotel, at least?”

  The girl said pityingly, “Lady, there aren’t any hotels, not that you could get into anyway. Trust me. I’ll give you a place to stay.” She wasn’t looking at her prospective employer anymore. She was looking at a pair of sweating and harried policemen, shoving their way through the crowd in their general direction. “That’s it,” she said. “Take it or leave it. Coming?”

  Le Brun glanced at McClune, and then shrugged. “I guess so. What’s your name?”

  “Ella,” she said briefly, starting to turn away.

  “Nice to meet you, Ella,” le Brun said politely. “This man is Reverend—”

  Over her shoulder Ella said, “Who asked you? Let’s get over to the car before those apes start hassling me.”

  The girl’s “car” wasn’t exactly a car. It was an antique, piston-engined vehicle, and, believe it or not, it burned hydrogen. There had still been a few old fuel-burners around when Orbis was a boy, mostly belonging to old farmers too poor to trade up. But now? He suspected it had been looted from some old car museum. Most of it was pale blue, accented with dents and rust spots, and one door was a bright yellow. The vehicle stood almost by itself in a nearly empty parking lot that was a longer hike
from the terminal than either le Brun or McClune had planned on. They were both sweating by the time they got to it, and le Brun eyed their transportation with distaste. “Does this damn thing run?” she demanded.

  “Get in and find out,” Ella ordered, but le Brun hung back. She was looking at the girl behind the wheel, no more than a year or two older than Ella. “Oh, her,” said Ella. “That’s Judy. She’s my driver.”

  “Gripes,” said le Brun. “Judy, have you got a license to drive this thing?”

  “I got better than a license, lady. I got a car. Are you getting in or not?”

  Le Brun looked even more discontented, but, having no evident other choice, dumped her bag on the floor of the van and climbed in after it. McClune followed, slightly amused. It was apparent to him that this woman was used to all the comforts of an expense account. She wasn’t taking the present discomforts easily. McClune, on the other hand, had long since subdued any temptations to ease and comfort, so he followed her to the car door without reluctance.

  Then she stopped cold, blocking the entrance, and he saw that she was looking toward the third seat that was in the rear of the vehicle. “Hey, you, Ella,” she said, turning angrily on the guide. “What’s going on? You didn’t say anything about sharing the ride.”

  Ella shoved her in. “You think you’re the only people want to go to Barstow?”

  “Yeah, but what about the microwave radiation from those things? What if it screws up my machine mind?”

  “It doesn’t do that. Try it yourself,” Ella ordered. Orbis McClune tried to peer past her but the doorway was too narrow. But it was only a moment longer before le Brun muttered a grudging assent and went in.

  Afterward it seemed to McClune that the talk about microwaves should have tipped him off, but it didn’t. The sight of the other passengers was a wholly unwelcome surprise.

  There were two of them, hideous-looking creatures, like stomped-on skeletons of human people, sitting uncomfortably on the bottom of their spines so that the pouches they carried between their legs could hang over the side of the ragged plastic seats. They wore smocks of some drab fabric. They rested their feet on hexagonal metal boxes that glowed with a bluish light. Their eyes gazed out at him from wrinkly, squared-off faces. And they smelled faintly of ancient piss.

  They were Heechee.

  III

  The Barstow road took them to the edge of Waveland itself.

  That road wasn’t where the full force of the tsunami had hit. In the places where it had, now flat and empty under the setting sun, there was nothing left that a person could recognize. On the slopes of the hills at least there was wreckage. Quite a lot of it, actually. Some piles of it could be recognized as the remains of a building. More often it was a scree of Tinker-toy junk that seemed to have parts of two, three or a dozen structures jumbled together. On the hillsides above the freeway men and machines were carefully sorting through the ruins of homes—looking for survivors, perhaps, or for something worth the trouble of carrying away. It appeared to McClune that many of the houses had been ripped from their foundations and then had skidded down the hillside until—crushed, battered, sometimes burned—at last they were caught and held on the shelf formed by the freeway. That was to say, by what was left of the freeway. That wasn’t always very much. The lower reaches of the road were pitted and twisted; in some places the paving was scrubbed completely away. More than once little Judy, muttering very grown-up obscenities to herself as she fought the wheel, had to creep off the paved road onto muddy shoulders, none of them level, so that the old van tilted worrisomely before they got back onto the flat. And, oh, yes, there was traffic to worry about, too. There was lots of traffic, mostly induction-driven cars, but a few antiques like their own, and all competing for the same space on the freeway. Sometimes, as their ancient vehicle came to a particularly squeezed stretch of the road, there just wasn’t enough space to go around. In those places the traffic stagnated into a jam forty or fifty cars long, as the vehicles crept in single file through the bottleneck.

  Reverend McClune took note of all those things, but they were not what was foremost in his mind. That was taken up by the identity of his unexpected fellow passengers.

  Orbis McClune’s whole life had been spent in the knowledge that he was surrounded by lascivious sin and unGodly corruption. He understood that that was the way of the world. McClune detested that world with all his heart, but in his mind it had one redemptive quality. It was rotten with wickedness, but it was human wickedness. It was in fact nothing more or less than the simple Original Sin that God Himself had invented for the purpose of keeping the people of His world from getting too uppity.

  McClune had been dealing with that kind of sin all his life. The Heechee, however, were something else entirely.

  Souls were Orbis McClune’s job, and he knew all there was to know about them. Well, almost all. As he scowled at the reflection of those unwanted fellow passengers in the windshield, he realized that there was one question concerning souls to which he did not have the answer. That was, did the Heechee have any?

  It was an interesting theological point. The beasts of the field had no souls, Scripture was clear on that. However, the beasts of the field didn’t speak in human tongues, or wear clothing, or invent spaceships. McClune had no answer, but he had one fervent prayer: Lord, if they have souls that need saving, let that cup pass to someone other than me.

  The thing was, Orbis was certain that it was no part of God’s design that had put those abominable creatures on the Earth. They were intruders. They came from outside. They did not belong on the world that God Himself had specifically decreed—it was all written out there in black and white, in His very own Book—was dedicated to the exclusive use of the human race. There was nothing there to give domain to any bizarre creatures from other worlds. So to McClune the Heechee were unblessed by God and thus incarnate evil. If there was one single embodiment of concentrated sin that stood out above all others in his mind, that was the Heechee.

  The catalogue of their wickedness was plain. It was because of the Heechee that so many human beings had abandoned God’s world to flit around in space. It was because of the Heechee that soulless machine minds had come to play so large a part in human affairs. It was because of the Heechee that countless sinners on the point of death had chosen to be reborn as immortal electronic abstractions, instead of rotting beneficially away in God’s own soil as they waited for the final call. This last wickedness was particularly repellent to McClune because of the circumstances that ended his former marriage. But worst of all, it was due to the Heechee that those excellent spurs to decent behavior, want and fear, had so nearly disappeared from the world.

  McClune could not help himself. He groaned aloud, causing the newswoman to turn to him irritably. “What’s the matter with you, McClune?” she demanded. “Can’t you hold it down? I’m trying to do an interview here.”

  And she turned her palm camera back to the Heechee, leaving Orbis McClune to stare gloomily out at the passing scene.

  It was full dark when they reached Barstow. Hardly even spray from the tsunami had managed to get that far inland, so there were no destroyed buildings lining Barstow’s streets. There were refugees, though. They filled the streets, ambling aimlessly or sitting wherever there was a flat place to put a weary bottom on—steps, curbs, flat-topped fire hydrants. They clogged the streets, where panel trucks and flatbeds and buses were inching along as they brought help to the refugees—or brought more refugees. The people swamped the little parkland spaces, a lot of them with sleeping bags or bundles of blankets, jealously guarding a place to stretch out. They lined up before the few open restaurants and motels, not in the hope of food or shelter but simply waiting for a turn at the toilets. They lined up, too, before the trucks that had stopped to dispense flat, heavy packets of CHON-food, flown in from some surviving Food Factory. Some of the people looked despairing, some simply bewildered. But the expression on most of the faces was outra
ge. The better dressed the refugees, the more furious they were. You could see that they were both stunned and angry. In this world, at this time, for these people, this sort of thing was simply not meant to happen.

  McClune looked out at the horde with sober gratification. These were the souls he had come to save. They had been chastised, and it was his duty to tell them why. “Stop the car,” he ordered, already beginning to rehearse the catalogue of their sins.

  But that didn’t happen. “Not a chance,” gritted Judy, peering at him through the rearview mirror, and Ella backed her up.

  “Can’t do it, old-timer,” she said firmly. “There’s a vehicle curfew here in about twenty minutes, and there’s cops here that would take this car right away from us if they caught us breaking it.”

  “And shut up, too,” Judy added, “because I need to concentrate on my driving. Want me to run over one of these creeps?”

  The “accommodations” the two girls had provided for them weren’t lavish. They amounted to a large and oily smelling shack that apparently had once been some kind of repair shop before suffering some kind of fire. Judy immediately rolled the jalopy inside when they arrived—for fear of its being stolen, she said, although McClune could not imagine who would steal it. The old rustbucket took up a lot of the shed’s available space, too. The remaining space was mostly filled by their beds—well, by the canvas cots that were all Ella and Judy had to offer. (“Hey,” Judy snarled when le Brun complained, “you can sleep on the sidewalk if you like that better.”) At least the cots were brand-new. They had come straight from the trucks that were handing out emergency supplies. So had the blankets.