Sidney's Comet

by Brian Herbert

  “I tried. Really I did. I even stayed up late last night, trying to make sure everything would go right today.” She sobbed.

  “Don’t use tears on me!” Hudson said.

  Mayor Nancy Ogg continued to cry.

  “Look,” Hudson said. “I shouldn’t have been so quick to blame you. There’s a lot of tension here over this comet thing.”

  Mayor Nancy Ogg wiped her eyes with a tissue. “Okay,” she said. She blew her nose. “Dick, don’t stay on Earth too long. If it looks like the comet can’t be stopped . . .”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Hudson said. “All the council ministers have escape rockets. . . . ”

  After the call, Hudson rang Munoz’s country condominium. It rang thirty times without an answer.

  Damn it, Hudson thought. He placed the call again. Still no answer.

  Hudson cursed again, called President Ogg. A recorded voice answered: “Thank you for calling the White House Office Tower. Our hours are nine to five, Monday through Friday. At the tone, you may leave your name, number and a brief message.”

  Hudson heard a tone, said, “Emergency message for President Ogg.” He gave his name, then changed his mind and hung up the telephone.

  I’ll call during office hours, he thought. This is too important to leave on tape.

  Hudson flipped on the videodome at a little past seven A.M. The polls had just opened, and returns were beginning to stream in from electronic tabulating machines on the East Coast.

  “This is unprecedented, ladies and gentlemen,” an announcer said, with the soul-less smile of one having political aspirations of his own. “A punch-in candidate, General Arturo Munoz, holds forty-six-point-three percent of the vote. President Ogg has a narrow lead with forty-nine-point-one percent, and Benjamin T. Morgan . . .”

  Hudson smiled. Precisely according to plan, he thought. The General will trail in a close race, then will vault to the front on the strength of late returns.

  A team of network news analysts was having a round-table discussion as the tabulated returns came in on a studio wall. Suddenly this picture disappeared and the sound went off. A message appeared on the screen:

  IMPORTANT BULLETIN PLEASE STAND BY

  Then the videodome blared: “We interrupt this broadcast for a special announcement. General Arturo Munoz, fourteenth minister of Bu-Mil, has been killed in an autocar accident. The mishap occurred sometime before dawn when the General’s limousine plunged through a guardrail and went off the edge of a narrow bridge near Lake Ovett. Another body has been discovered in the wreckage, believed to be that of his adjutant, Colonel Allen Peebles. Preliminary investigation points to a malfunction of the car’s electromagnetic circuitry. The state funeral celebration and posthumous Purple Badge ceremony will take place Thursday, beginning with . . .”

  Dr. Hudson mentoed the set to silence. He sat staring at the darkened screen in disbelief. How could this have happened? he thought, frantically.

  He left the videodome and moto-paced back and forth the length of the living room module. What the hell should I do now? he thought. But Arturo was insane. . . . Maybe we’re better off. . . .

  Feeling hot and clammy, Hudson wiped perspiration from his brow with one hand. Could he have left any evidence to incriminate the rest of us?

  Hudson paused, stared at his feet and thought: Too risky to check Arturo’ s office . . . but maybe my own. . .It occurred to Hudson that something might remain to be cleaned up. A bit of paper, some item previously overlooked.

  Hudson’s autocar deposited him at the edge of Technology Square, then disappeared into an underground parking tube. The square was empty, recently cleaned. He moto-shoed across it and up the ramp to the Bu-Tech Office Tower. At the entrance, he placed his hand on the black glass of a security monitor identity plate. The vacuum went on, sucking at his palm. Suddenly he pulled the hand back, as if it had been burned.

  My God! he thought. The vacuum . . . it’s . . . it’s a cell reading mechanism!

  Dr. Hudson realized in that instant that the monitor had been reading all his memories, contained in the tiniest cell of his body. He cursed himself for being so stupid. He had even thought of the concept, but it had never occurred to him that his predecessors were so advanced!

  A cold wave of fear spread over him, and a torrent of stinging sweat rolled over his eyebrows and into his eyes. Hudson turned quickly, nearly stumbling as he did so, and moto-sped down the ramp. The shoes accelerated quickly, and halfway down the ramp Hudson mentoed instructions for them to slow down. But they continued to accelerate!

  I’m going too fast! he thought, panicky. The shoes were out of control, and raced across the square at full speed. I can’t turn! he thought, frozen in fear.

  The shoes carried him past the skatewalk and through a planting area, then barreled onto busy American Boulevard. He saw a streetcleaning truck heading directly toward him! Oh no! he thought. It’s going to hit me! Hudson closed his eyes, put his hands over his face and prayed for mercy from a God he had never served.

  “Eeeeyah!” Hudson screamed as the truck hit him, (bagging him into the midst of its whirring brushes.

  Moments later, Hudson’s mangled body was thrust out of the back of the machine. The streetcleaner skidded to a stop, and its crew of orange-uniformed drivers and helpers got out.

  A small crowd gathered around the crumpled, bleeding form. Billie Birdbright was one of the first to arrive. “What happened?” he asked.

  “Product failure!” a man next to Birdbright said joyously. “He lost control of his moto-shoes!”

  “Praise be to Uncle Rosy!” Birdbright exclaimed happily, not recognizing Hudson. “Another Purple Badge!”

  “And another soul for the Happy Shopping Ground!” the man said.

  Everyone in the crowd bowed their heads and murmured, “Truly we are blessed! All of us are employed!”

  Birdbright heard the happy whine of approaching sirens, saw a white-and-red Product Failure van screech to a stop nearby. Six white-smocked team members rolled out, each with bold red lettering across his chest. The first man’s chest read, “DOCTOR,” and two other men and three women had signs reading, “INS. AGENT,” “LAWYER,” “MORTICIAN,” “P.F. STAMPER” and “HELPER.”

  “He’s dead!” the doctor announced, kneeling over the body and checking the pulse.

  “Wonderful!” the mortician said, clapping her hands in joy.

  The lawyer, doctor and insurance agent mentoed auto-pens to scribble on clip-pads as the helper and mortician rolled the body over. “Stamp his forehead!” the doctor called out cheerily, glancing over the top of his clip-pad.

  “I can’t!” the P. F. Stamper called back. She smiled winsomely. “It’s too mangled!”

  “Oh my,” the man next to Birdbright said. “His head’s too mangled for a-P.F. stamp!”

  “Stamp him anywhere, then,” the doctor said. “Just be sure it’s on the skin and plainly visible. We want this brave fellow admitted to the Happy Shopping Ground!”

  Birdbright watched the P.F. Stamper tear open the victim’s shirt and lift a large chrome-plated auto-stamper over the body.

  “KWAK!” the stamper went.

  “Oh!” the crowd murmured, noting a large black “P.F.” on the victim’s bare chest. Below that the date of occurrence appeared, in smaller letters.

  “A product failure!” Birdbright said, turning to a woman on his left. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  The woman nodded, smiled and murmured something,

  “A bonus, ladies and gentlemen!” the insurance agent called out. ‘The streetcleaning machine is scratched and dented!”

  The orange-uniformed streetcleaner crew auto-clapped and whistled at this news. “Scrap it!” they said in unison. “It’s not fair to repair!”

  The Product Failure team loaded Hudson’s body into the van, then ceremoniously radioed for a tow truck.

  Moments later, feeling warmth in his stomach, Birdbright watched the van speed away. It’
s all so wonderful! he thought. Praise be to Uncle Rosy!

  * * *

  Ordinance Room One, inside the Great Temple at Pleasant Reef:

  “The beings from the Realm of Magic would have laughed their heads off at this point,” Sayer Superior Lin-Ti said from the podium, recalling the previous day’s lesson. “But you see, they had no heads.”

  The youngsayermen laughed politely.

  “Just think of it, youngsayers!” Lin-Ti said, raising his hands to emphasize the point, “Malloy stumbling around in a cappy riot; Javik heading for who knows where: Munoz, Hudson and Peebles all dead. . . . ”

  Lin-Ti opened a discussion period, and the group agreed that these bodiless beings must have been terribly amused at the self-destruct capabilities of the fleshcarriers.

  A youngsayerman asked if Malloy might have been insane . . . and Munoz too. . . . because of the voices they heard. “No normal person hears voices like that,” he pointed out.

  “But this was not a normal situation,” Lin-Ti said.

  “And our Master heard voices too!” another youngsayerman said, blurting out the words.

  Lin-Ti looked at the speaker. It was the tall one who resembled Onesayer Edward. “And how do you know this?” Lin-Ti asked, tersely.

  “Uh . . . er . . .”

  “You read ahead?’

  The youngsayerman lowered his head in shame. “Yes, Sayer Superior,” he said. “I am very sorry. . . . ”

  Chapter Ten

  THE CAPPY PROBLEM, FOR FURTHER READING AND DISCUSSION

  Mid-September, 2311: Bloody “Cappy Power” revolts on the therapy orbiters of Saint Joseph and Saint Michaels, in which cappies briefly took control. New security measures were established to prevent recurrence.

  Tuesday, August 29, 2605

  Sidney needed to catch his breath. He sat hunched forward on a plasti-marbo bench in the smoky morning shade of Elba House’s rhododendron garden, a few meters off the motopath where hordes of clients rushed by heading toward the Hub. Sidney watched red and yellow helipumpers hovering over the burning R Wing as they sprayed long streams of white foam on the fire. It was warm in the garden, and the thin green smock clung to moisture on his body. He coughed sporadically in the contaminated air.

  Sidney cupped his face in his hands, stared through his fingers at the ground. I faced certain death up there, he thought. And yet . . . I got out! Was it merely luck, as the voice told me? Or . . .

  He took a deep breath, desperately attempting to collect his thoughts. He heard the throb and hum of oxygen pumps, felt a hot breeze across his hands. His nostrils burned.

  “You!” a man called out from the motopath nearby.

  Sidney looked up, saw a short, white-uniformed man standing at the edge of the motopath, staring back at him hostilely. The man held a clip-pad, had straight silver hair. A triangular Bu-Med crest adorned his left lapel. It read: “G.W. 500.”

  “Procedures Checker,” the little man announced officiously. He rolled to Sidney and touched a button on his pad to auto-flip through several sheets of paper. “Name please,” he said crisply.

  After Sidney replied, “Sidney Malloy,” the man scribbled something on his form and commented, “Odd first name.”

  “Sidney isn’t so unusual. It was very popular when I was born.”

  The man scowled ferociously. “Last name first!” he strapped. “Always give your last name first!” Angrily, he tore out the partially completed form, crumpled it and tossed it to the ground. “Malloy, Sidney,” the man said as his mentoed auto-pen danced across the page without being held. “Your client number?” he asked, not looking up.

  Sidney glanced at his plastic wrist tag and provided the numbers, then watched the auto-pen move over the form.

  “Now let me see your pass.”

  “My pass!” Sidney said. “What pass?” Sidney looked beyond the Procedures Checker to Elba House’s burning section. He heard screams and felt empty in the pit of his stomach. The hot breeze carried smoke into Sidney’s face. He coughed.

  “Tut-tut, you must have a pass,” the little man insisted, still not looking up. He wrote furiously with the auto-pen, shaking his head from side to side in disapproval the way Malcolm Penny used to do in Central Forms.

  “What’s this all about?’ Sidney asked, growing alarmed.

  “Clients who are out of the building must be escorted by an attendant or must have in their possession a valid and countersigned pass. Rule twenty-four, section nine hundred six-point-three.”

  “But the building’s on fire!” Sidney snapped. “A fireman told me to take the escape chute!” Sidney watched a woman slide to safety out the end of a chute as he spoke, tried to point her out to the Procedures Checker.

  “Tut-tut, no excuses,” the Procedures Checker said. He entered something on a form, then touched a button to flip to another sheet.

  “I’m not trying to run away,” Sidney said angrily, hearing his voice grow loud. “I’m waiting here for someone to give me instructions.”

  Sidney heard terrible, agonized screams from Elba House, saw an elderly man and woman jump to their deaths. Sidney felt the emptiness in his stomach again, saw his deformed arm quiver. His face was hot, and stinging drops of perspiration drenched his eyes.

  The little man coughed, then peered over the top of his clip-pad at Sidney, narrowed his eyes and chirped, “Procedures are for a purpose. You must ask permission, don’t you see? Forms must be completed, then reviewed by higher authority and referred to a pass committee for evaluation. . . . ”

  “A pass committee? I’d have died up there waiting!”

  “I’ll need your signature on this form,” the Procedures Checker said, growing visibly nervous. Timidly, he extended the pad to Sidney, designating a signatory line on the form with his auto-pen.

  Sidney grabbed the clip-pad violently, thundered, “PEOPLE ARE DYING UP THERE, AND YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT FORMS AND PROCEDURES?” Wedging the clip-pad between his chest and bad left arm, he tore off the completed forms, ripped them in half and scattered them in the hot breeze.

  The Procedures Checker looked on in stunned terror, as if Sidney had committed a terrible sacrilege.

  “GET AWAY FROM ME!” Sidney roared, lifting the clip-pad menacingly. “AWAY!”

  The little man rolled backward over a bench. Mumbling something Sidney could not hear, he picked himself up and fled down the motopath.

  Sidney hurled the clip-pad after the fleeing bureaucrat, then stood for several moments holding his quivering left arm against his chest in an effort to stop its shaking. His heart pounded so hard he felt it might break through bones and flesh. I’ve got to find Tom, he thought.

  Sidney wiped perspiration from his eyelids with both forefingers, then rolled into smoke-filtered sunlight on the moto-path. I’ve never been that angry before, he thought. That was a very bad energy leak. He thought again of people dying in the fire, felt helpless and confused.

  Thoughts went by in a blur as he rolled forward. Barely aware that he was coughing intermittently, it astounded Sidney that he did not really care about the energy leak, was not even concerned about rules. These were frightening new feelings, but they gave him a strangely euphoric sensation, and a new feeling of freeness. These emotions mingled with the deeply felt sense of loss in his soul over the Elba House tragedy.

  Never before had he openly questioned the AmFed Way, but things appeared so wrong to him now . . . paperwork and procedures having become more important than human lives.

  Suddenly he realized that something was trying to enter his consciousness and crowd away his thoughts . . . an immense force clawing and pounding at his brain. Screams of agony continued from the fire above. Peculiar, repulsive odors touched his nostrils. A fit of coughing took over his body, then subsided.

  “Burning flesh!” a tenor voice inside his skull said.

  “Billions more fleshcarriers will burn when our garbage comet hits Earth!” another, deeper voice said.

  Cackling
laughter echoed in Sidney’s brain. “Die, fleshcarriers, die!” the voices said.

  Sidney swooned dizzily and fell to his knees in the middle of the motopath. Above the top of Elba House, the reflected morning sun was almost fully visible on the burnished solar collector. Sidney looked up at Elba House, squinting in the glare. A puff of black smoke covered the sun, then dissipated.

  Sidney raised his good arm toward the smoky holocaust, opening the hand as if to place it against another in prayer. Slowly, jerkily, his twisted left arm rose, its quivering fingers groping heavenward. In a great final burst of energy, Sidney brought the deformed hand up, and it grew straight with true, beautiful fingers that pressed reassuringly against the other hand.

  “Oh please,” Sidney murmured, closing his eyes tightly. “Please—” He fell silent and wished with all his being that the terrible conflagration would end. Believing he was making the greatest wish of all, the wish for someone else, his body trembled for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he saw no more flames, heard no more screams.

  Soon he saw dozens of people sliding to safety through escape chutes. “It was miraculous,” a Bu-Med attendant said as he reached the ground. “The flames were almost upon me. . . . I had given up hope.” He wiped his face on the sleeve of a singed and dirty white Uniform.

  “They were spraying something on the fire,” a woman said.

  Sidney looked down at his left arm and hand. They had been healed! A miracle! he thought with rampant joy. I’ve found God! He extended his hand, flexing fingers which only minutes before had been twisted.

  Have I been chosen for something more? Sidney wondered, watching puffs of grey smoke disappear through a hole in the habitat’s glassplex skin. He thought of the doomies and what the voice had said about a garbage comet. That’s it! he thought. The mission I’m going on with Tom! My destiny!

  The voices in his brain returned, cackling with laughter. “This one breaks me up!” a tenor voice said. “He thinks he’s been chosen to save his world!”

  “Isn’t it hilarious?” said the other.