Countdown to Extinction

by Louise Moss

  “Let’s go and find out who’s due to see Bertrand next. We’ll take a corridor each and meet back here in a minute.”

  “I’d better go,” Emma said. “They have eyes everywhere. If they see you banging on all the doors, they’ll be up here like a shot.”

  She returned a few minutes later with the news that the women had decided not to have any children in future and were ready to fight for those already pregnant to keep their babies.

  Gerald kept silent. It was a dangerous move. If there were no more babies, the Bluecoats would have no further use for them.

  “It’s a horrible thing to have your baby taken away. I’d rather die than face that again.” Her voice was harsh, but tears welled up in her eyes.

  Gerald resisted the temptation to put his arm round her.

  “If they see there are no more pregnancies, they’ll have to talk to us and see things our way,” she said, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her tunic.

  “Did you find out if anyone’s due to see the doctor?” Adrian asked.

  “Yes, Janine at the end. She’ll tell Bertrand to gather all the information he can.”

  As he made his way along the corridor later for the next meal, Gerald wondered where people were standing a little taller, whether that really was a hopeful glint in their eyes, or whether it was his imagination. But he did not mistake the slight nod they gave him as he entered the Long Room. “No more babies,” rumbled around the room like distant thunder.

  Hagan was concerned. The pregnant females had stopped eating all of their rations. Some had caught infections and the foetuses weren’t growing well. It was getting increasingly difficult for Xela to remove the babies when they were born as the women kicked and bit. Tostig had ordered that three Workers must be present at the births: one to hold down the woman, one to hold down Bertrand and the third to administer the drugs to force the Primitive woman to relax her hold.

  He could not understand why it was happening. At Proteus, he had seen images of the Primitive family unit which comprised of a male, a female and several children. One adult would be watching flickering images coming from a very primitive version of the Mirage machine, while the other would be eating alone. The children would be in different rooms elsewhere by themselves. Even in scenes involving babies, the mothers paid them little attention. It did not seem from this, then, that they needed to be together; in fact, they appeared more content if they were by themselves. Perhaps this herding together they were now doing meant they were developing, although they were a long way from the intelligence of even the lowliest Worker.

  He moved Bertrand to the sixth floor and put him with a female, on Tostig’s orders. There would be no more consultations.

  “Unless the problems are resolved,” Tostig told him, “You will be removed from the project and all memory of it erased from your mind.”

  Hagan knew what he meant by that. In erasing his memories, his mind would be destroyed. Those qualities that made him a Superior would be gone. If he was lucky, they would kill his body too, but if not, they would give him the mind of a Worker and he would be condemned to live like them for the rest of his days. Either that, or they would use him for their mind experiments, the worst fate that might befall him.

  “You have fourteen synodic cycles to quell the rebellion and ensure that the pregnancies are not jeopardised.”

  Hagan left the office, desperate to redeem himself in the eyes of Tostig and the Leaders. It seemed to him that there was some link which joined the Primitive mother to the baby. There was one birth in which the mother had taken the new-born in her arms and, before Xela could stop her, put it to her breast. The reason for this was not clear, but there had been a curious look in the mother’s face. As well as the usual fear as Xela approached, there was a sort of radiance, an expression he had not seen before, which was reflected in the baby’s eyes.

  He visited the nursery where they kept the new-born babies, but that expression was not present in any of them.

  Although the Vault contained a number of suitable children, the Leaders had decreed that one only would be restored, for study purposes, the youngest, just seven years old, with the name Nicola. When she was brought out of The Vault she was tiny, with the thin, wasted limbs that signified the ancient illness known to the Primitives as polio. She was kept in a room next to the nursery and would never know Primitive ways. When she was stronger, they would use her to develop a method of cleansing her mind of all Primitive influences without damaging her brain.

  He had watched her from his office when they brought her up from the Recovery Room, seen her awaken and stare around her, crying out repeatedly for her mummy. These Primitives were afraid of so much. He saw other signs of her fear: she slept patchily, and often called out in the night for her mother. He could have normalised her brain settings, but that would defeat the point of the study. He needed to see her natural conduct. She might provide the clue he needed to understand the Primitives’ relationship with their offspring.

  As he entered Nicola’s room, she stared at him. His anger flared at the direct contact, before he reminded herself she was a Primitive.

  “Hello. Have you come to tell me a story?” she said.

  “A story.” He did not know what the word meant.

  “I know one. Once upon a time, there was a little girl called Goldilocks.” Hagan listened carefully as she talked about three bears, but he did not understand the story.

  “Someone’s been sitting in my bed. Come and sit here. That’s where my mummy used to sit.”

  He was getting good at carrying out these manoeuvres from the laboratory, but sometimes his movements were a little jerky. She did not notice. He sat on the bed, staying out of her reach. When he thought she had finished the story, he stood up to leave and noticed that her lips trembled and lines appeared on her forehead. “When are you coming again?” she said.

  He withdrew his image back to the laboratory to contemplate the story’s meaning and what effect living in such a strange world might have had on the Primitives’ development. Stealing food, running through the woods, animals that spoke (his former researches had indicated that animals did not make comprehensible noises, so there was another enigma) and breaking other people’s property were all part of their lives. They should surely be pleased they did not have to face such problems anymore.

  In view of the urgency of the situation, he monitored the girl constantly. A little later, when the night began to fall and the Workers were all in the dining hall, she got out of bed, went into the nursery and took one of the babies from the cot. Concerned that she would cause harm, Hagan sent his image down to stand beside her, holding his hand to his nose as the strong smell of ammonia hit his nostrils.

  The girl was uttering strange, high pitched sounds and rocking the child to and fro in her arms. When she saw him, she lay the baby down and reached out to take his hand.

  “Oh, are you a ghost?” she said as her hand passed through his image.

  “Yes, a ghost,” he said, even though he had no idea of the word’s meaning.

  Back in the laboratory, he checked the system. At the time when the girl had picked up the baby, her heartbeat had slowed. It was the same with the baby. This could be the breakthrough he needed, if he could understand why it had happened. There was one person who might know. Malchus at Proteus Terrestrial.

  After a brief search, he found the information Hagan wanted. “It is clear from various documents that the Primitives were talking about projected images,” he said, “although they dismissed them as being figments of the imagination, or spoke about dead people leaving traces of themselves behind. They did not carry out investigations, so it is not recorded who appeared to them or what the purpose was.”

  “That is a great pity.”

  “Indeed, but these were very naïve people.”

  Hagan felt sure that if he could discover what it was that passed between the child and the babies, he could prevent their decline in future.
It seemed to have something to do with her taking the babies out of their cells, cuddling, singing or talking to them. The result was always the same: the babies kicked their legs and gurgled as soon as they heard her voice. Furthermore, the development rate of both the babies and the girl was increasing beyond the norms set down by Malchus.

  A few days later, he went to the girl’s room but could not see her. As he turned to leave, she appeared suddenly from under the bed and called out “Boo!”, a word that was not defined in the language programme. Her eyes sparkled like stones in a Mining Mirage and she uttered a strange sound that he could find no name for.

  A strange sensation started in his throat, like a bubble rising inside him. His skin wrinkled round his eyes, and from his mouth came a sound, quiet at first but gathering momentum.

  There was nothing in his world that prompted him, or any other person he knew, to make this sound. The nearest he came to the sensation was the pleasure he felt when he immersed himself in a Mirage.

  “You’re laughing,” she said.

  Suddenly Tostig was inside his head. “The Primitive child has too much influence over the babies,” he said. “She has too much of the Primitive in her for us to allow this to go unchecked. We must start the mind training immediately.”

  Hagan bowed his head. “I will see to it at once.” He thought Tostig was wrong, that she provided a means of understanding the Primitives, but he did not say so. It would mean instant dismissal.

  It was mistake to give the job to a Bluecoat. The girl shrunk away when he appeared in the room, shaking her head violently whenever he approached. Her cries could be heard all the way along the corridor: “I want Hagan. Where’s Hagan?” She was like the savage animals he had seen when he was studying the Primitive world, growling, fighting. It was important that the situation did not get out of hand like the births.

  As he appeared next to her, she stopped screaming and said, “Will you hold my hand? I’ll do it if you hold my hand.”

  Hagan felt the Worker’s eyes boring into his back but when he turned round to confront the man, he saw only Baestel’s blue eyes staring at the wall. This man could cause trouble, he was sure. There was something about him, something that should never have got through the mind training.

  “Go,” he said.

  As Baestel left, the girl became calmer and allowed him to place the small mind training device inside her head. For the next few days she stayed in her room, her eyes dull and her body limp, unable to recognise him when he appeared beside her. Her eyes had lost their shine and she no longer went into the nursery to handle the babies. When he mentioned them, she screwed up her face. “Nasty things, babies,” she said. The mind training was working, but he could tell no-one, not even Zorina, whose first loyalty was to the Leaders, that he missed her games and stories.

  He returned to the enigma of the ghosts. Malchus had found further references to them, including a reference to a “Holy Ghost.” As he studied the research that Malchus had provided, he came to realise that this was a reference to one of the Primitives’ many religions. This might link in with the research he had begun on their spiritual beliefs and the effects of peyote on the mind. He needed to bring out a second body to investigate this phenomenon further, but, this time, the Leaders refused his request to carry out experiments.

  6

  People crowded into Adrian and Merle’s room to discuss their situation. Unknown to them, Hagan was watching everything on the monitors in his laboratory.

  Emma held up her silver locket.

  “That’s the father of my baby,” she sighed.

  “Your baby? But you’re so young!”

  “I was only fourteen when I had him. My parents made me give him up for adoption. I only had him for two hours, then they took him away.”

  “At least you got to hold him and touch him. They took my little girl away before I saw her properly. I never even held her,” said Janine. Each woman had a similar story to tell.

  “We’re all agreed we can’t go on as we have been,” Adrian said. “Before Bertrand was moved, we gathered a lot of information about this place.”

  “Where is the nursery?” someone asked. “Did you find out?”

  “Bertrand told me he’d heard babies crying on the other side of the doors. He couldn’t get through to them, though.”

  “What’s happened to him? What have they done to him?”

  The woman shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Refusing to have any more babies is the only way. They’ll have to talk to us then.”

  “If they want us to cooperate, they’ll have to do what we want.”

  “We’ve got to do something. We can’t just sit around while they take our babies away.”

  “We need to storm the place.”

  Adrian was in the middle of speaking when the door burst open. Six Bluecoats armed with cudgels hit out at those nearest the door. Gerald and Adrian moved forward, but they were no match for the guards. Gerald went down and attempted to pull a Bluecoat down with him, but failed. In the confusion several women managed to escape back to their rooms.

  As if they had received a signal, the Bluecoats turned and left. When Adrian heard the double doors opening, he put his head out of the door. They were gone.

  Hagan’s orders had been to disperse the group, but his order to use no violence had been ignored. He ordered Controller One to round up the perpetrators and have them removed from the project. He would monitor the situation more intensely from now on. There must be no repetition of what happened today.

  Tostig had instructed him to continue with an experiment that he had started before being given this assignment. He had been developing an infertility drug, but it had had no noticeable effect on the frozen bodies in the vault. The next step was to test it on a Primitive. If it worked, he might be able to bring the pregnancy rate up to its former number.

  Gerald was the obvious choice for the experiment. If he did not father a child soon he would be eliminated from the programme.

  The Primitives’ threat of militant action was pure fantasy. They were in a secure unit and would remain there until they were of no use to the Leaders.

  When the door banged open and a Bluecoat burst into the room. When he grabbed Gerald by the arm, he thought he was in for another beating. The man pushed him into the corridor and headed for the double doors. They walked straight through and into the waiting lift.

  When the lift stopped at the third floor, he thought of making a run for it, but he knew it was useless. There were too many Bluecoats around. Where were they taking him and why?

  The Bluecoat bundled into a room, empty except for a couch. Bertrand had explained about the remote-controlled surgery that was just round the corner in his days, and Gerald fervently hoped that was not why he was there. These people would have no hesitation in carrying out some bizarre operation if it suited their purpose.

  He climbed onto the couch and felt something sharp dig into his wrists and ankles. There was nothing to see, but when he tried to get up, he was unable to move. Closing his eyes, he resigned himself to his fate .

  A warm liquid entered his veins and circulated around his body. In front of him Margaret’s face appeared, hanging suspended in space.

  Other images came to him: Jan and Geraldine, James and the new grandchild. He flew back through time and placed them all in the garden that he had tended for many years. They sat around the pool eating strawberries and cream, as they did each summer during Wimbledon fortnight, the tennis championship. The scene shifted indoors and they were watching the match on the television. Strong, healthy bodies raced around the court, rippling muscles gripping the racket, slim athletic bodies jumping to reach the ball.

  He melted into the scene and entered the body of one of the players, stretching and running with him, life surging through his body, pent up energy waiting for its release. Thud, thud. The ball bounced from the racket in perfect rhythm.

  Suddenly he was awake,
for a moment wondering why he was lying on a hard couch in this bare room. He felt different, powerful, strong.

  The Bluecoat was back. Jumping off the cough, Gerald pushed the man away and strode out of the room. Instead of the corridor, he was in an enclosed space. Solid walls rose up on all sides. The door he has just come out of, was gone.

  He must have passed out. When he opened his eyes, he was back in his room.

  For the first time, he noticed the way the light picked out the golden highlights in Emma’s hair, how soft and shiny her it was. His body was responding, swamping him with the desire of a much younger man.

  Chiding himself for such base instincts, he turned away, but not before he saw a glint of recognition in Emma’s eyes. She had seen the flash of desire.

  “Where have you been? What has happened?” she said. Her voice was low, seductive.

  Before he did something he regretted, he left the room, moving quickly, striding along the corridor, increasing his pace to a sprint, running around the corridors. At the sound of running feet, people came out of their rooms to watch this curious scene.

  It was thrilling to be alive, to feel the blood rushing through his veins, his muscles working, his heart beating. After two circuits of the corridors, he stopped at the balcony and, taking in great gulps of air, expanding his chest as far as it would go, running on the spot before stretching his arms towards the light. Finally, he tried a few push-ups. Goodness, it must have been thirty years since he’d done that!

  He wanted action now. He was ready to take on the whole lot of them single-handedly.

  Thanks to the women, they had a much clearer picture of the way the clinic was laid out and the movements of the Workers. There were up to twelve-hundred people housed in the clinic, half men and half women. If only they could work out how to open those doors, they would be invincible. The Bluecoats wouldn’t be able to stop them if they all poured out at once.

  He left the balcony and jogged to Adrian and Merle’s room, certain that they would join the battle, but as soon as Adrian opened the door, he saw from his glazed expression that something had happened.