Lizard pushed past me, moving to the front of the ship. I heard the sound of the door hissing again-this time, I could hear the powder crackling out of its way, even exploding as it came into contact with the warmer metal of the door.
And then the door was shut.
A moment later, Lizard shut the siren off. And everything was black and silent.
"Is there any light?" I yelled. "I still can't see!"
"Just stay there-wait a minute!" I heard her doing something at the front of the ship. She came back almost immediately. I saw a bright glow in front of my eyes. "Can you see anything?"
"A blur. It's bright. It's moving."
"It's a flashlight." She wiped at my goggles. "Keep your mask on. I'm just blowing some of the dust away. Can you see anything now?"
"It's brighter......"
"Just relax. There's a lot of smoke in here. I can't turn on the ventilators. They'll just jam. Give it a minute, I think your freezer is causing the stuff to settle."
"I think my sight is coming back," I said. "This is the eeriest experience."
"Yeah, a lot of fun-" And then she let out an involuntary yelp. "My God! What happened to Duke!"
I tried to focus. I could just barely make him out.
Duke was a mummy. Duke was a pink-crusted body. Duke was a cocoon. Duke was burned all over and frosted with pink powdered sugar. Duke was lying on the floor and gasping for breath.
My lungs hurt too. Despite the masks, we must have both inhaled a couple kilos of the dust. I didn't want to keep going. I wanted to lie down and die. But I didn't. Not yet. I started crawling toward the back, looking for the box with the red cross on it. Lizard came with me. We both knew the drill.
We didn't try to pull the jumpsuit off him. We had to cut it. Parts of it were burned. Parts of it were still frozen. Pieces of charred skin came away with the material. The dust covered everything.
I couldn't tell how badly Duke was injured. We got his shirt off him and I started pasting poker-chip-shaped monitors to his chest. I put the last three on his forehead and temples. Then we wrapped him in a medi-blanket. I found another probe and put it in the crook of his elbow. I attached a pressure-feeder to his upper arm and gave him a half-liter of artificial blood. Then I started him on glucose and antibiotics.
That done, I lifted his goggles and mask. His eyes were swollen. His nose was bleeding. Lizard wiped his face gently with a damp towel. I found a clean 0-mask and carefully replaced his used one. We'd found the chopper just in time. The tank was almost empty.
The console said he was in shock. The ultrasonic scanner in the blanket gave a very confused reading. Then it gave up and merely flashed a simple red warning: WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.
His brain waves were steady though. That was a good sign. So was his heart.
I sat back then, pulled off my 0-mask and flung it at the back of the ship. Everything was covered with pink. A puff of dust billowed where the mask hit.
I still wanted to die. "Give me one of those cloths-?"
Lizard peeled open a new packet and slapped it onto my palm. I unfolded it and buried my face in its cool freshness. "Thank you," I said. "Thank you for the cloth. Thank you for the siren. Thank you for being here. Thank you for saving Duke's life." I didn't know if I was thanking Lizard or God. Probably both. "Thank you." My voice cracked on the last one. Lizard handed me another bulb of water.
"What happened?" she asked.
I sank back against the bulkhead behind me. I sucked water from the bulb for a moment, then looked at her. She pulled off her mask. She was frosted all over with pink powder too-except for her eyes and mouth. The effect was horrible. We both looked grotesque. She sat back against the bulkhead opposite me and waited.
I let out my breath. My chest hurt. I sucked more water. I didn't want to talk. I said, "You are looking at the biggest asshole on the face of the Earth. I screwed it up worse than I have ever screwed up anything-"
"That part I know," Lizard said. "That part is obvious. Tell me the part I don't know."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I led us into a trap. At least it looked like a trap to Duke. I'm still not so sure it was. But the effect was the same." I sucked at the bulb. God, I was thirsty! What was it about this dust anyway? I looked back to Lizard and continued softly, "Anyway, there are creatures out there. We saw them. They surrounded us. They look like little furry men. They're shaped like ducks. They waddle. They have round faces and slitted eyes and floppy ears. They talk like chipmunks. They make faces at each other. They use their hands when they talk. They're too cute to be real. I think they escaped from Disneyland. They surrounded us and wouldn't let us pass. They were keeping us for something. A worm. Three more of them-no, four-came riding up on a Daddy-worm. They held a conference. And then the worm moved toward Duke. It didn't look like an attack to me-but Duke fired anyway. And his torch blew up. It must have been the dust. It's too fine. It explodes-" I shuddered at the memory. I didn't want to talk any more, I didn't want to tell the rest.
Lizard didn't press me. She just sat and studied me quietly. I studied her back.
I didn't know how to be with her. I'd fallen back into this chopper and I'd wanted to bawl like a baby. I'd wanted to cry into someone's arms. That's how I'd always thought of women-that they had an unlimited supply of hugs for the needy-because that's what I thought a woman should be. Because I'd always been one of the needy.
But there weren't any hugs here.
That wasn't Lizard. Lizard was all military. Lizard was as crisp as a brand new banknote. She scared me.
I sucked at the bulb of water again. It was empty.
Lizard went digging in the supplies and handed me another bubble. I took it and bit the nipple open. As I drank, she asked quietly, "Were you scared?"
"That's the funny thing. Not while it happened. Now-" I held out my hand to show her. "I'm still shaking-"
She nodded. "I'm familiar with the experience. People who don't know call it courage."
"Yeah," I said. "It wasn't courage. It was just-me doing what I had to do because I couldn't think of anything else."
Her eyes were too penetrating. I looked away. At the floor, the walls, the ceiling of the chopper.
Did she see how close to panic I still was? She began to speak again, quietly. "I saw an old air force hangar blow up that way once. I was only ten meters from the place where the fire started. It was just a little thing at first. It started in a trash can-some idiot tossed a lit cigarette into it, but the flames suddenly climbed up the wall. I turned for the door just as the fire touched the first catwalk. There was fifty years of dust in the rafters. By the time I finished turning, the fire had already raced ahead of me. In less than three seconds it had reached across the whole ceiling. Somebody yelled at me, so I ran. By the time I made it to the door there was a hot wind pushing me out. I got out of the building, ran twenty meters, turned around to look and saw the whole wall explode outward. I turned around and kept running. The next time I looked back, the roof of the building was just coming off in a ball of orange flame. The whole process of ignition took less than ten seconds. I've been terrified of it happening again ever since. I don't remember being scared at the time. But I've been scared ever since. "
"Yeah-" I said. The bulb was empty. I put it aside. "That's what happened here. I didn't have time to think about it then now I can't stop thinking about it. It's like a video playing over and over in my head and I'm stuck in the middle of it. And I don't know how to stop it. I keep seeing the flames. And the dust. And the worm. And the bunnydogs. I keep wishing I could have done something-"
A flicker of annoyance crossed her face, then she looked at me sternly. "What happened?"
"The flames didn't leap out from the torch like they should have. They leapt back. They enveloped Duke in a ball of fire. I didn't think-I just pointed the freezer at him and sprayed him with liquid nitrogen. The flames disappeared almost immediately. So did the worm and the bunnydogs. I don't know how they navigate in that stuff. I couldn't. I
was lost. I grabbed Duke and started staggering in the direction I thought was the chopper. And I was wrong again. If you hadn't turned on the siren, I'd still be out there dragging him around. Or dead. We'd have been out of air by now," I added.
Lizard nodded. She said, "Actually, you did the right thing. That jumpsuit is flame resistant. So is the O-mask and goggles. There wasn't anything else you could have done. You're alive. He's alive. You did it right."
I shook my head. "But it doesn't feel right. It feels like a replay of Shorty-"
"Uh huh," she nodded. "That's what it looks like to you. Haven't you ever noticed? Nothing is ever just what it is? It's always like something else. Whatever happens, it always reminds you of something that happened before. Right?"
She was right. "Uh-yeah!" I found myself smiling.
"I do it too." She giggled back at me. Her laughter was liquid-and startling. "You told your story," she said, "-so I told mine. Do you know that most conversations are nothing more than two people telling their stories to each other?"
Something about the certainty with which she said it made me think of Dr. Fromkin. But I didn't get a chance to ask her-Duke moaned.
We both looked at him, then scrambled to see if he was all right.
"Duke?" I put my face close.
He moaned again. "It hurts-"
"That's good, Duke. That's a good sign."
The medi-console beeped and flashed: PATIENT NEEDS SEDATION.
I found a red ampule and plugged it into the pressure feeder. After a moment Duke's breathing eased. "He's out of shock," I said. I didn't know if that was true, or just what I wanted to believe. I tried to convince myself. "The medi-kit wouldn't ask for sedation if he was still in shock. Would it?"
"I don't know," shrugged Lizard. "Let me put that console online to Oakland and see what they have to suggest." She climbed down toward the nose of the ship.
I sat with Duke a while longer, wishing there was something else I could do for him. I wondered if he was going to live. And if he did-what kind of shape would he be in?
I had to stop that train of thought real quick. That would be another good way to drive myself crazy. "Duke," I whispered to him. "I'm sorry. I didn't know what else to do. I love you, Duke. I never told you before, but I really do. I depend on you. Please, stay with me-"
I knew he couldn't answer. Probably, he couldn't hear me either. It didn't matter. I just knew I had to say it.
After a while, I got up and went down to the nose of the ship to join Lizard. She was curled up in her seat, resting her chin on her fist, and studying a weather display. She looked grim. I sat down next to her in silence. The pink dust had risen almost to the top of the windshield. It was getting very dark in here.
"Did you raise Oakland?"
"Uh huh. They're monitoring. They'll let us know."
I pointed at the windshield. "It's still coming down, isn't it?"
"Uh huh. It'll be coming down all night." She pointed at the screen in front of her. "The main body of the cloud still has to pass over us. We're going to be buried in this stuff--and I have no idea how deep it's going to get."
EIGHTEEN
A SUDDEN thought came to me. "Will we have enough air?"
Lizard hesitated. "Yeah-we've got some oxygen tanks with the medical supplies. We can crack those. Theoretically, we should be able to hold out for a day and a half I wouldn't want to have to depend on it though."
She pulled off her headset and tossed it onto the control panel in front of her. "Shit," she said.
"What now?"
"Oh, nothing. I had plans for tonight. Being buried alive wasn't part of them."
"Oh," I said. I couldn't imagine Colonel Lizard Tirelli on a date. "I'm sorry."
"What are you apologizing for? It's not your fault."
"Um, I was just expressing my regret."
"Yeah, well thanks for the thought then. I was thinking about steak and lobster all day."
"Lobster?"
"Uh huh. The Arizona farms are producing again. You should see some of the monsters they're turning out. This big-" She held her hands a meter apart. She added thoughtfully, "Arizona is an easy state to keep clean. There's not a lot of forage or ground cover for the worms. That's one place we should be able to hold the line against them for a long time."
"Is that part of the long-range planning?"
"Not yet. It will be though."
"Are you going to be on the Committee?"
"I've been asked. It's a question of... priorities." She shrugged. "What good is long-range planning if you don't take care of the present?"
"On the other hand," I said, "what you do in the present should be a function of your long-range goals, shouldn't it?"
She looked at me sharply. "Have you been talking to Dr. Fromkin?"
"Uh-no. Why?"
"That sounds like something he might say. That's a compliment by the way. But you're right. I have to go where I'm most effective." She smiled gently. "Which means I probably will join the Committee. I'm just afraid I won't get to fly as much. And I don't want to give up flying."
"I'd think being on the Committee would let you fly even more-you know, on-the-scene observations."
"It's a good idea," she acknowledged. "But I don't know that it would work out that way." She peered at the window then. "Hand me that flashlight-"
I passed it over, and she pointed the beam at the upper edge of the windshield in front of her. It was completely pink. "Yep. I thought so. The nose is completely covered. It must be coming down faster than ever."
She levered herself out of her seat and started working her way to the back. I followed behind. She dug around in a side panel and produced another flashlight and an emergency lamp. The lamp she hung from a hook in the ceiling. "There-that's better." She handed me the second flashlight.
She climbed past Duke and pointed her beam around the tail of the chopper. I didn't know what she was looking for. She stuck her head up into the rear bubble and pointed the flashlight around inside. "Uh huh. We are now completely buried. I sure hope this crap isn't an insulator. We could get awfully hot in here-"
"I thought that Banshees were tiled."
"They are-but if we're buried, there's no place for the heat to go." She climbed toward the back. "You hungry?"
"Yeah."
"Good. Get the emergency rations out."
I checked on Duke-no change-and then pulled out the ration box. We reconvened at the front of the chopper. We swiveled the seats around to face the rear. Better to have the fifteen-degree noseward tilt holding you in instead of tipping you out. I leaned back and put my feet up on the deck. The ration bars were chewy and required a little concentration.
Abruptly, she asked, "Have you ever been invited to a Blue Mass?"
I shook my head. "Is that an invitation?" I asked.
She gave me a sour look. "I was just wondering if you knew anything about them."
"Sorry," I said. "I've heard that the members are pretty aggressive in their recruitment."
She nodded. "I was invited last week. They have them every weekend now. Hundreds of people attend, and pay a thousand caseys each for the privilege." Lizard's tone went softer then. She said, "I was just wondering-I've heard stories. But not from anybody who's been to one. Apparently there's some kind of confidentiality agreement. But I hear that... there's a lot of release. A lot of abandonment. I'm not sure what that means. There's supposed to be a lot of sex too."
She left that thought hanging between us for a beat, then commented, "I don't know that screwing yourself into insensibility is the best way to handle the madness, but obviously it works for some people. So ... sometimes I wonder if it would work for me. I can't help but wonder if maybe all those people have really found something."
Her voice grew very soft then. I had to strain to hear what she said next.
"Sometimes I get tempted. What if it really does work? Wouldn't I be a jerk not to go? It would be nice to forget-even for a little w
hile. That's why I would go. To forget."
I was embarrassed. I wanted to say something, but I knew that whatever I said would automatically be the wrong thing to say. "Except-" Lizard continued, "I know that it's a trap. It's like drugs. Another escape. Once you start trying to escape, it isn't long before you're running. I've seen it happen to too many people already. I don't want it to happen to me." Abruptly, she fell silent.
I glanced over at her. She was staring at her ration bar moodily. I looked at mine. "It sure isn't lobster, is it?"
"That's right-rub it in." She sounded bitter.
"I'm sorry-" I made up my mind then, I had to ask. "Colonel-?"
She didn't look up.
"Uh-sometimes I get the same kind of feelings. And-uh, I figure that I'm probably not the only one. So I figure that the brass must know about it. I mean ... there must be some-uh, outlet. Or something. Isn't there?"
She didn't answer immediately. I was beginning to wonder if she was going to answer me at all, when she said, "Yes, the brass knows that most of the men and women in uniform are this close to the edge. And no, there isn't a solution. At least, not the kind you're looking for-the easy one."
And suddenly, she was Colonel Tirelli again, crisp and military. Under control. "Remember Dr. Fromkin? He's working on that problem now. The President asked him to. So far, all he's said about it is that the only answer is an unsatisfactory one. He says that each of us is responsible for what goes on inside our own heads. Therefore, each of us is responsible for maintaining our own balance."
"But, how-?"
She shrugged. "That's what he's working on. I suspect it's a more advanced form of the Mode training, but I don't know. Listen-" she added, "you're in Special Forces, the Uncle Ira Group, so you can always call Dr. Davidson in Atlanta."
"Do you talk to him?" I asked.
"Now, you're getting personal," she said.
"Sorry-"
"There you go, apologizing again." She looked over at me, a funny look on her face. "Do you ever do anything else?"
"Oh, I'm sorry-I mean, uh, yeah-I screw up." I looked back at her. "So I'll have something to apologize for. Sometimes I think that's the only social transaction I'm good at." I grinned apologetically.
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