by Ahern, Jerry
He left the video shelves and went to one of the book shelves.
“What book?” Michael asked him.
“What else?* John Rourke smiled. There were two books, one the Rourke Farmty Bible and the other was Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged…
There were other hems they took with them, extra Barami HipGrips and PacbrnayrGrips for his father’s revolvers, Pachmayrs for the .45s, as wefl. Spare magazines and speedloaders, were other gear that migfjt prove riecessary to them. From here, they would join Natalia and Annie, then travel inn the Wildlands.
He didn’t need sleep, but he needed rest.
Michad was last irwD the escape turm
hintthenstartir^toworkontte They had worn surgical slippers
oer their boots so no footprints woidd be at least none that
would be recognizable, and he pulled his off now, stuffing them into a pocket of his coat so he’d have decent traction on the ladder rungs…
John Rourke reached the summit and climbed out into the cold night air, Annie’s IDetorhcs ScoreMaster in his right fist, the Smith & Wesson CeiiterjrrialmbJsbeftonitsHipGrip, one pack on his back, another in his left hand.
Keeping from sight of the video surveillance camera, John Rourke took a moment to took upward into the night sky. With no moonlight, and the only artificial light from hundreds of feet below, the star fields were brilliant diamonds set against black velvet.
He thought about the two women he had loved in his life. And perhaps both of them were forever lost to him. Certainly Natalia was. He’d wanted this to happen, intentionally used the cryogenic chambers after
the Great Conflagration to bring his son and daughter to adulthood, so Anniecould wed Paul, so Natalia could wed Michael. He’dwantedNa-talia to belong to Michael, wanted it and feared it and now it had happened.
Happiness and sadness could sometimes be one.
Stars altered their paths slightly over the years, as did men and women, and had he the means, he would have calculated how much subde variation their was between the patterns among the stars now and then. John Rourke watched the stars a moment longer. In the six centuries which had passed since he’d first viewed the stars from the summit of this mountain, his question was still unresolved.
Six
While they slept. Commander Dodd instituted a dictatorship, and during the long years of his dominion, resentment grew in Eden, so did its population. The former was a natural result, the latter was planned. Oat of both grew a resistance to tyranny, forced into the Wildlands for survival.
John Rourke watched the terrain below the now-antique J17-V, KohlatitscorcroLs. Eden lived up to its name, a garden of lush green, the summers soil short and cool, the winters still long and cold, but the tree cover returned, looking like the Georgia that had existed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, rather than the barren wasteland he had awakened to after the first Sleep in the immediate aftermath of the Great Conflagration. In that respect-the re-greening-Dodd and his successors had done well.
John Rourke had always felt the devil was worth his due.
Rourke’s eyes shifted back into the cabin. James Darkwood slept, but young Darkwood had been up nearly all the night and, unlike the rest of the cabin occupants, had not come out of a century and a quarter’s cryogenic repose.
Annie did needkpoint.
Oddly, so did Natalia, although with evidendy less practice. He smiled, thinking about that. Not something that was probably given great emphasis at the Chicago Espionage School six centuries ago in the Soviet Union, needlepoint. Perhaps cross-stitch instead.
Michael and Paul played chess, happily still a pastime for people everywhere.
John Rourke returned to his notes.
A century’ and a quarters worth of history wasn’t assimilated in a moment
Dodd’s plan-or was it Deitrich Zimmer’s? -was to increase the population of Eden exponentially, through immigration of carefully
selected groups and through a rigidly enforced policy of sexual exploitation of women.
Today in Eden, women had no political rights. Like men, they owned litde else but the clothes on their back. Today, economic incentives had replaced harsher methods. Ibday, women were given a cash payment and tax credit for every child they brought into the world. When Dodd was just getting started, women who refused to bear children were forced to do so.
He understood the woman who had tried to pick him up’ on the bus. She wanted to be made pregnant. Although artificial insemination was available to any woman who chose it, it was forced on women of child-bearing age. If they did not become pregnant by more conventional means, the alternative punitive taxes were levied. Over half the young women he had seen in Eden were pregnant.
When Dodd took over, almost immediately he proceeded to activate D.R.E.A.D., but in secret.
Over the intervening decades, the Soviet Union, prohibited from building nuclear weapons, allied itself with New Germany and Mid-Wake for protection against Eden. Eden possessed the Soviet nuclear weapons seized after conquering the Soviet underwater complex. New Germany armed itself, a technologically simple task, comparatively, sharing the technology on a give and take basis with Mid-Wake.
The alliance between Mid-Wake and New Germany insistently reminded John Rourke of the relationship between the United States and Great Britain before The Night of The War, all but perfect mutual trust (tempered with a little espionage between good friends, to be sure).
There was resistance to Dodd’s policies, and some of the Eden returnees, someof the immigrants from Mid-Wake (whomDodd could not prohibit, although he apparently tried) and some of the Russians abandoned Eden proper, for die Wildlands.
Unlike the settlers of America’s frontiers centuries earlier, these immigrant pioneers brought with them considerable technological sophistication, and most importantly the ability to duplicate it.
Meanwhile, the ranks of Dodd’s supporters also grew, through the help of immigrants from New Germany who were Nazi sympathizers and through the educational programs installedatEden. Children were brainwashed into Dodd’s brand of National Socialism from
the earliest riossibternomerit.
Soon, all noo-whites had either fled Eden or disappeared.
Dodd’s replacement, Arthur Hooks, carried on in Dodd’s footsteps almost as if one were the clone of the other, expanding the baby farming program, deepening the tyranny. The average woman in the fifty years following Dodd’s accession to office, bore seven point five chd-dren each. The crrcBrnstance also contibuted to the decline in women’s rights, because the lite expectancy for women was generally lowered by almost nine years.
By Hooks’ administration, Eden had full deployment of the nuclear arsenal of D.R.E.A.D. Although New Germany and Mid-Wake wished to crash Eden’s tyrannical government and restore freedom there, the risk of nuclear devastation was too great.
Mid-Wake encouraged population growth, rather than demanding it, and Mid-wafcr itself grew. No longer did citizens of Mid-Wake wish to return to their ancestral homeland in what was once the United Slates and was now, ironically, known as Eden. Instead, they re-popuiaied the Hawaiian Islands, then Australia. But the undersea city of M)d-*akr »» still the capitol.
Many Soviets from theirundersea culture, once mortal enemies of the Americans of Mid-Wake, joined with the people they had once fought, creating no separate colonies, but comingling to swell the populations of Hawaii and Australia.
A small percentage of Germans from New Germany in Argentina set out to what was called “Gaul’, where the Wild Tribes of Europe lived. Their goal was to rebuild historic Germany. With the help of the people of the Soviet Underground City, not only did historic Germany become a reality, but the two peoples, in many ways, became one.
The world was arrayed now into two armed camps. How familiar that was.
On one side was the Trans-Global Alliance, led by Mid-Wake (including the states of Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand) and New Germany, including the
state of European Germany. Committed to this alliance as weD were the Russian Ural Republic (once the Underground City) and the Russian Pacific Republic (once the Soviet underwater complex).
On the opposite side stood Eden, the greatest power on earth, greater separately than ancient Rome, Nazi Germany or the Cold
War Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, perhaps greater collectively.
Eden extended along the eastern half of what was once the United States, from Maine to what remained of Florida after the great earthquake, but surpassed those boundaries into what had been Canada and the Caribbean nations, into northern Brazil.
The only neutral nation on earth (sympathetic to the Trans-Global Alliance, but not a member) was Lydveldid Island. Yet, Iceland’s very borders were at risk, the southern tip of what was once Greenland was now occupied by Martin Zimmer’s, Eden troops.
Periodically, Eden aircraft would incurse against Lydveldid Island’s air space and Lydveldid Island would file a diplomatic protest. Only because the Trans-Global Alliance was committed to Icelandic freedom did the tiny island nation remain free.
But Martin-who was he really?-continually harassed Iceland.
Portions of the world were still radioactively hot, no-man’s lands that only a lunatic with a death wish would enter. Other areas, in some ways inhospitable, had become havens for fragmentary population groups. The Wild Tribes of Europe were assintilated culturally into Historic Germany (John Rourke had been pleased to learn that Natalia’s school was now the site of a Wild Tribes cultural center, the building and grounds named in her honor).
Other small groups, most notably the people who had left Eden and dissenters from the Russian Ural Republic, lived away from organized government, forming their own societies. Russian dissenters, still believing in Communism, had set up communal societies in western Europe and northern Africa. The Eden exiles, except for very small groups in the deep snows of the Tennessee mountains, lived in confederations of communities stretching from what once hadbeen Montana to New Mexico and into northern Mexico.
The societies here were as diverse, Kohl and Darkwood had said, as thumbing through the pages of a history book, or perhaps a psychology book.
To the west of the Wildlands were the great salt marshes where the Pacific, in the aftermath of the destruction of California, had en-1 croached upon the lowlying desert. To the east, between the j wildlands and Eden, there was the radioactive wasteland which fof-i lowed generally the course of the Mississippi River. «
But, ID the WDdlands, in the last decade, there grew a new menace, one more immediate than accidentally stumbling into a radioactive hotspot. That menace was the Land Pirates.
The Land Pirates, some ofthem said to be descendants of the Russians of the KGB One Corps and the Marine Spetznas.others of various ancestry, traded in precious stones and precious metals, for technology and flesh.
Slavery flourished in some portions of the Wildlands, sexual slavery the most prevalent and the most insidious. Everywhere, people were obsessed with increasing their numbers.
An easy and obvious comparison could be made between the Land Pirates of the tweay-sixth century and Comancheros of the nineteenth century Although easy and obvious comparisons were sometimes as easily and obviously spurious, this one was not.
Intelligence data gleaned’ independently by New Germany and Mid-Wake snggrsrd that Martin, who allowed the Land Pirates to exist, was effecting an alliance with them. His purpose was uncertain, alrhough it seemed obvious, at least, that with the Land Pirates as allies, he could subdue the Wildlands without bothering to commit vast numbers of troops.
And there was a chance, however dubious, that Martin Zimmer was in the WUdknds now, conferring and working strategies with his new allies
To see Martin Zimmer’s race would be worth any personal risk. Because, if this man had somehow used cryogenics and was Deitrich Zimmer. then there was a score to settle for the murder of a child more than a century ago. And yet, Zimmer’s talents as a surgeon, might be the only way to save Sarah from the living death in which she now existed
John Thomas Rourke exhaled, tired but not ready for sleep. He lit a cigar in the blue-yellow flame ofhis battered Zippo.
The thought of knowing the face of Martin Zimmer at once drove him onward and frightened him more than anything had ever frightened him in his long life.
At times, John Rourke wondered if his life had been too long, but he would not allow himself the luxury of death; it would have to be forced upon farm.
John Rourke put away his notes, the reached into the pack near him, pulling out one of the Scoremasters. He had detail stripped,
cleaned and oiled the Little CombatMasters, butkfttheotherga»fcr the long, slow, zig-zagging flight to the Wildlands. Hereauwedme .45’s magazine, drew back the slide and confirrned that the daaber was empty, then moved the slide in line with the disassembly notch and started to push out the slide stop.
The sun was up and, just about now, someone would be noticing that certain items within Martin Zimmer’s little museum at The Retreat were missing. And, when Martin Zimmer learnedjust what was missing, he might experience the same uncomfortable feeling John Rourke had when thinking about Zimmer.
Seven
Also, in the Wikilands. aside from pioneers and Land Pirates, there were agents of Allied Intelligence. Threeof these agents, a man and two women, bandied in heavy clothing against the sub-zero temperatures and high winds, met the J17-V as it touched down on the circle of ice. The pad had been cleared and iced over to keep blowing and drifting snow from accumulating.
As John Rourke stepped from the V-stol aircraft and pulled up his parka’s snorkel hood, the ice beneath his feet was so slick he could barely stand. He stepped back, sat briefly on the accommodation steps and secured
Before The Night of The War, this had been suburban St. Louis, Missouri. The dry was neutron bombed and, despite the fires of the Great Conflagration and five intervening centuries, some ruins still stood, visible from the air as they’d terrain-followed to stay under Eden’s air defense net.
Not far from here were places where the radiation levels were still so high that exposure would mean certain slow death.
“Better put on fee creepers,” John Rourke called back inside.
The creepers in place, he went aft along the fuselage to begin unpacking the gear sowed there. Michael joined him in a moment, assisting him.
Rourke looked over his shoulder, Paul with the two women going over to meet the reception party, Kohl and Darkwood with them.
John Rourke’s skin tingled slightly where the full beard and mustache were shaved away just a few hours ago.
The gear stacked away from the aircraft in the event the J17-V had to take off rapidly, John and Michael Rourke started away from the plane to join the others.
The three agents-Rourke was told that one of the women was a German, the other woman and the male agent from Mid-Wake
were just finishing shaking hands with Paul and Annie and Natalia. “This woman is the best field operative in the Wildlands,” Jason Darkwood began. “And she’s not even from Mid-Wake, darnit.” Annie laughed.
John Rourke turned to face the woman, the first time he had seen her eye to eye. And her gray eyes locked on his face in a mixture of terror and revulsion. She was somewhere in her late forties or early fifties, he surmised, long gray streaks in what litde of her dark brown hair was exposed beneath the front of her parka hood.
“This is a sick joke, Jason.”
Darkwood repeated, “Sick joke? Do you know who this is?” “Him and this one,” she pointed to Michael. “The mustache is really cute.”
“What do you say, Hilda?” Manfred Kohl asked.
“You received my report a litde earlier than I thought, I suppose. But where did you find these two - ?”
“What do you mean?” John Rourke interjected.
“You know pertecdy well what I mean, you damned fool. With th
at face if you are seen around here by any of the locals, you will be shot or worse for-“
Natalia interrupted her. 1 thought the people of Eden revered the face of John Rourke.”
“The people of Eden aren’t the people of the Wildlands,” the German agent told her.
Jason Darkwood said to her, “Tell me now, Hilda, what was in that report you think we’ve seen.”
The woman-Hilda-looked at Darkwood oddly, then shrugged her shoulders. If you have not read it, this is the strangest coincidence in history; and, like most people of my profession, I do not believe in coincidence.”
“What was in the report, Hilda?” Darkwood insisted
“The Land Pirates struck a town about a hundred miles north of here almost a week ago. We got there when the town was in flames, the children had been kidnapped and the men and the old people tortured to death, the women of child bearing age kidnapped, of course. We found a few people alive, older people, but all of them dying. Margie and Dan and I tried to get what information we could out of them, because the Land Pirates have been a lot more active in the last several weeks.”
“Get to the point,” Paul told her. Natalia lit a cigarette.
“Fine. The point, Mr. - what was your name again?” “Rubenstein.”
“Part of the joke. I get it,” the woman named Hilda said.
“The point, huh?” Michael suggested.
“All right. Good. I asked a dying old woman if she could tell me anything that could help us. She could not talk, I realized in the next instant, because they had cut out her tongue.”
“Ohh, Jesus,” Annie murmured.
The old woman?” Darkwood pressed.
She drew with her finger in the snow, and drew the word ‘Devil’ in English. And then she opened the palm of her hand. There was an Eden half-dollar in her hand. It was the last thing she did before she died. ery carefully, she set the coin, faceup, inside theletter’D’, and then she tried making a word, but she died.”