Sole Survivor td-72

by Warren Murphy

  He touched his throat mike to cover his indecision. "Oleg. I am here."

  No answer.

  "Oleg?" His voice was tighter now. Surely Oleg was behind the satellite. Oleg was playing a joke. Yes, that was it. A joke to relieve the tension.

  Alexei Petrov laughed nervously.

  "Very funny, Oleg. But enough. Show yourself. I have brought tools, and they are very heavy. Come help me." He added that last part because, like a child at the door of a supposedly haunted house, he was not going to enter the cargo bay alone. Oleg would have to show himself first, show that it was indeed safe to enter.

  But Oleg did not show himself.

  Finally Alexei Petrov steeled himself to cross the threshold. His boot bumped something on the floor. Commander Petrov looked down. It was then that he saw the liquid coating on the floor-the red liquid coating. There was no time for his conscious mind to register the meaning of that coating before he saw the object his boot had stubbed.

  It was impossible to bend over in a spacesuit, but if one slowly scrunched down, one could lower his body into a half-crouch. Alexei Petrov did so, the hissing of his oxygen tanks filling his ears.

  The object was a cube of varicolored material streaked with metallic silver, like the outer surface of his own cosmonaut suit. Carefully Petrov picked it up in his gloved hand. It was much, much heavier than it should have been. It was only slightly bigger than a child's building block.

  Coming to his feet, Petrov held the cube up to his visor. He wiped at the visor to clear the condensation that obscured his vision. But of course it was his breath causing the misting, and it was no more possible to wipe the inside of the visor than it was to scratch his itchy nose.

  The cube dripped. The liquid was red, like blood. But it was too pale for blood, too thin. It could not be blood, Petrov told himself. Yet the cube was spongy to his touch, like an organ. Petrov squeezed it and felt it give, but under the surface, his fingers encountered hardness.

  On one side of the cube there was a peculiar indentation. As if a nut-and-bold assembly had been pressed into the cube. There were even the impressions of the bolt threads lining the indentation. Just like the bolts of the inner airlock's walls. The same size, too. Petrov experimentally pressed the cube to one of the protruding bolts. A perfect fit. Too perfect. Abruptly Alexei Petrov decided the cube bore further examination. In the safety of the control room. Oleg could wait.

  Petrov went to the airlock door. But it refused to respond to the electronic controls. He tried manual. And as he tugged on the frozen lever, it became dark.

  Alexei Petrov could not hear the closing of the airlock door leading to the cargo bay-not while sealed in a pressure suit with that damned oxygen hissing in his ears. But when he turned, he saw that he was locked into the airlock.

  Oleg again.

  "This is not humorous, Oleg," Alexei Petrov shouted into his helmet mike. "I order you to open the airlock and show yourself. Do you hear me, Oleg? Cosmonaut Gleb, your superior has given you a direct order. You will obey this at once. At once, do you hear?"

  But Cosmonaut Oleg Gleb still did not answer. "Damn!" Alexei Petrov swore. He threw the cube of unidentifiable matter at the stubborn airlock door. It bounced back like a rubber ball. Reflexively he caught it. A piece of the silver streaking came off, revealing something familiar embedded in the whitish surface beneath. It was writing. No, not writing, Petrov saw as he looked closer. Embroidery. Very, very tiny embroidery. The stitching spelled out a single word: Gleb.

  Commander Alexei Petrov threw up. A splash of vomit coated the inside of his visor and ran hotly down his chest. He tried to wipe it away, but of course he could not.

  Petrov grabbed for the airlock controls, the ones leading into the cargo bay. He did not wish to go into the cargo bay, but he did not fear that as much as he feared to remain in the airlock. He frantically punched the buttons, but the door refused to open. It was frozen.

  Sobbing, unable to see clearly past the yellowish film of vomit coating his visor, Petrov fought the manual controls. They were stuck. He licked at the inside of his visor to clear it, spitting the acid taste down his suit. Then the walls began to move.

  Commander Alexei Petrov felt the strength go from his legs. He did not fight. He did not cry or scream or even pray. He was beyond those things. He slid to the slick red floor next to the soft cube, and because he thought he understood what the cube had been, he looked for a second cube. He saw it sitting in a corner, and then he knew for certain how he would die.

  Alexei Petrov watched the walls closing in on him, the exposed bolts seeking to press into his too-soft flesh.

  His last thought was to wonder how it was possible. He had helped build the Yuri Gagarin and there was no mechanism that would enable the airlock walls to contract like that. It was simply not possible for the Soviet shuttle to demonstrate the characteristics of an American trash compactor.

  In the Situation Room of the White House, the President listened to the Secretary of Defense's rapid-fire translations of the shorthand transcript of Star City's frantic demands that the Yuri Gagarin acknowledge transmission.

  "They just repeat the same message over and over," the Secretary of Defense said. "But the shuttle is silent."

  "Malfunction?" wondered the President.

  "I doubt it. I think it may have something to do with the object the crew claimed they encountered. There's a distinct possibility, Mr. President, that the craft and crew are casualties."

  The President nodded. It was regrettable, tragic. But at least it was a Soviet craft this time. Perhaps now the American public would fully understand the dangers of space exploration.

  In the background, the Russian calls for the Yuri Gagarin to respond repeated endlessly, the voice of the mission supervisor sinking into a weary monotone.

  Then suddenly there came an answer. A voice that was flat, metallic, and entirely without accent or inflection. And the voice spoke in English. It said:

  "Hello is all right."

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and all he wanted to do was help the homeless.

  Below, Washington D.C. was a blaze of light, its white buildings pristine and ethereal. It was a city designed to be beautiful. By night it was. Artistically arranged spotlights made the Capitol resemble a temple of the ancient world. The White House was a shrine. The Lincoln Memorial was a fragment of the Greek Empire.

  By day, it had appeared different. The buildings were grimy; the city beyond the fringes of the seat of government for the most powerful nation on earth was a ghetto. But by night it breathed the high ideals on which it had been built.

  Remo spanked pollution particles off his palms. He had picked up the grit climbing the cold obelisk that was the Washington Monument. Normal people did not get their hands dirty climbing the Washington Monument. But then, normal people took the indoor stairs during normal visiting hours. Remo Williams had climbed the north face of the marble needle with his bare hands.

  He was a young-looking man in simple clothes-tan chinos and a black T-shirt. His eyes were brown, his hair was a darker brown, and his unblemished skin held a light tan which even the ground spotlights could not whiten. He looked normal. In fact, he looked average.

  His one distinguishing feature was a pair of abnormally thick wrists which he rotated absently.

  With eyes that were more than normal, he scanned the city for the teeming legions of homeless and displaced persons that the TV anchorman had said, in doleful tones, were so numerous in America that they swarmed in the cradle of Liberty itself. He called it America's shame.

  Remo, who had been born in America and raised as an orphan wanted to see all these homeless people for himself. He wanted to help. That was all. It would be one of his final services for the land that nurtured him, before he left it for good.

  The trouble was, he couldn't find any homeless in the streets of Washington, D.C. Not during the day. And not again at night, when the nip of early spring dwindled int
o the chill of late winter. The homeless would show themselves at night, Remo thought. They would come out to sleep on the steamy grates of the Washington subway or crawl into cardboard boxes just off Massachusetts Avenue.

  But wandering the streets, Remo had found no homeless people. Just the ordinary citizens of an inner city-the winos, the drug addicts, the petty street crooks, and the other kind-who wore three-piece suits and held forth in law offices and corporate boardrooms.

  As a last resort, Remo had climbed the Washington Monument, knowing that if there were any homeless prowling the streets below, his abnormally keen eyes would spot them from that high perch.

  Finally Remo did see someone. An old woman pushing a shopping cart filled to overflowing with plastic bags stuffed with dirty clothes and old newspapers.

  Remo pushed himself off the blunt top of the Washington Monument and twisted in midair so that he clamped the north and east faces of the obelisk with his body. Applying intermittent pressure with the toes of his Italian loafers and using the clamping force of his arms to maintain his vertical position, he slid down the monument like a spider slipping down his web.

  It was not the normal way to descend. But nothing about Remo Williams was normal.

  He had stopped being normal the day he woke up in Folcroft Sanitarium and discovered he was not dead. He had expected to be dead. After all, hadn't he been tried and falsely convicted of the murder of a drug pusher? And hadn't he been taken to the electric chair?

  It was, therefore, a delightful surprise for Remo Williams to awaken in a hospital bed and discover that he was not dead. The trouble was, not being dead was a temporary condition. Unless Remo Williams went to work for a secret government agency called CURE, his death would not be merely official; it would be real.

  Remo chose the lesser of the two evils and was put into the hands of a Korean named Chiun, the most recent Master of Sinanju. The last of a line of assassins, Chiun trained Remo in the fabled art of Sinanju, the sun source of all the lesser martial arts. After only a day in Chiun's stern hands, Remo had begun to think about true death with a certain wistfulness. But eventually he learned to unlock the inner power that all men possessed, but which only the practitioners of Sinanju could ever know.

  In Chiun's hands, Remo stopped being normal. For CURE, he fought America's enemies for nearly two decades while the world got older and Remo seemed to become younger.

  Remo's feet touched the grass at the base of the Washington Monument, his knees barely bending with the impact. He trotted toward Constitution Avenue, oblivious of the cold that did not so much as raise the hairs on his bare forearms.

  Remo no longer worked for CURE. He no longer killed in the service of the organization that had been set up by a now-dead President to deal with America's security problems. In many ways he was no longer an American. He was of Sinanju-the discipline, the traditions, and the tiny village on the West Korea Bay, where he had started to build a home for himself and his bride-to-be, Mah-Li, upon his retirement.

  For the moment, however, he was stuck in America for a year while Chiun worked off a final obligation to CURE. Remo ached to return to Sinanju to finish his house.

  Remo caught up to the big lady. "Excuse me, ma'am," he called.

  At the sound of Remo's voice, the bag lady whirled like a Hell's Angel on a motorcycle. She shoved her heavy cart around with surprising agility.

  "What do you want?" she demanded. Her voice was a croak. Her features were shrouded by a ragged blue kerchief. Dead strands of gray hair poked out from its edges.

  "Are you homeless?" Remo asked.

  "Are you?" the woman snapped back, jockeying the cart so that it stood, like a defense, between her and Remo.

  "More like displaced," said Remo. "But never mind me. I'm asking about you."

  "I asked first," the woman said.

  "Actually, I did," Remo pointed out. "Listen, don't get excited. I just want to help you."

  "What do you know about homelessness?" the woman said, shoving the cart in his way when Remo tried to step around it.

  "I was raised in an orphanage," Remo explained, backing off. "I know how it feels. I wasn't exactly homeless then. But I had no family. It never got better. Not in Vietnam, not after I got back to America. I've lived in just about every city you could name, drifting from one place to another. So I know what it's like. A little. That's why I want to help."

  "You're a Vietnam burnout case?" the woman said loudly. Too loudly.

  "I wouldn't say that," Remo replied. Something was odd here. Remo wasn't sure what it was. The woman seemed no longer afraid of him, but she kept that shopping cart positioned so that it always faced him, the heaps of plastic garbage bags practically in his face.

  "What brought you to this pitiful state in life?" the woman asked. Her voice was clearer than it had been.

  "Pitiful?" Remo asked.

  "Look at you. No clothes. No possessions. Wandering the streets in the middle of the night in this freezing weather. You don't consider that pitiful?"

  "I never feel cold."

  "How many pints did it take to warm you tonight? How many the night before?"

  "What are you talking-?" Remo began. Then he saw the gleam of glass in the green plastic bag that was advertised as a Shur-Lock Jiffy Bag. A dim whirring came to his ears.

  Remo's hand drifted out and widened the hole in the plastic. The lens of a video camera stared back at him. Remo picked it up.

  On one side it said "Property of Channel 55."

  "Hey!" Remo said.

  The old woman yanked back her ragged blue kerchief to expose a coppery wealth of blow-dried hair. Remo saw that her face was young, the skin dried out with makeup and stretched over cheekbones sharp from too-rigorous dieting.

  "Cat Harpy, Eyewatch News," she said into a microphone that seemed to jump into her hand like iron to a lodestone. "I'd like your story, sir. Channel 55 is doing a five-part feature on homelessness in America."

  "I'm not homeless," Remo protested. "Then why are you dressed like that?"

  Remo looked down at himself. "What's wrong with the way I'm dressed?"

  "You look like a bum, you ... you impostor," the woman hissed.

  "Hey, I always dress like this," Remo said. "What's your excuse?"

  "I'm undercover, and you're wasting my time. The first part airs Monday and I've been here all week without one damned interview. Excuse me," she said huffily, brushing past Remo.

  Remo stared at her retreating figure, shrugged, and kept walking.

  Maybe there were no homeless in Washington, despite the news reports, Remo decided. He didn't know whether to feel good or bad about that. As long as he was stuck in America, he wanted to do some good before the year was up and he returned to Sinanju forever. He wanted to pay America back for the good things it had given him. Helping the homeless seemed like the best idea.

  But there were no homeless in Rye, New York, where he was staying with his mentor, Chiun. Nor in any of the surrounding communities. He had tried New York City, but everyone in New York City had that frightened, hungry look, which made it impossible to tell the average citizen from the people the TV newscaster said had fallen through the cracks of modern American society. Remo had decided that it would be easier to tell the true homeless from the street people in Washington, and so he had come to the nation's capital.

  It was no easier.

  Remo's aimless walk brought him to the steps of the Capitol Building. A few minutes ago, when he had had an eagle view of the building, it had been deserted. Now the steps were covered with huddled, shivering forms. Men and women dressed in rags were taking turns holding up Zippo lighters while others tried to warm their hands against the tiny flames. A few munched on fast-food hamburgers.

  A cordon of police ringed the clump of unhappy faces, truncheons at the ready, while passersby stopped to gape. Remo drifted between two cops as unnoticed as if he were a wisp of smoke from one of the flaring lighters.

  He walked up to a
man in his early forties hunkered and shivering in three layers of sweaters and jeans with holes in the knees. The man sat trying to cover his exposed kneecaps with gloved hands. At his feet lay a placard that read: HELP FOR THE HOMELESS NOW! Remo's heart went out to the man.

  "Hey, buddy, don't you have a warm place to go?" Remo asked.

  "Get lost," the man growled.

  "Don't be that way," Remo said solicitously.

  "Don't be a dip," the man shot back. Something in his voice sounded familiar, Remo thought. He looked closer.

  Then Remo recognized him. He was a famous actor who had made his reputation in a film about the Vietnam war. Remo had not liked the film because it depicted a Vietnam as realistic as a Jell-O wrestling festival. The man had a son, also an actor, who had starred in a Vietnam war film of his own. Remo hadn't bothered seeing that film. Neither man had ever seen combat, and Remo, who had, resented the fact that both actors made big speeches about how close they felt to the footsoldiers of Nam after the horrendous rigors of slogging through a Philippine movie set, being shot at by other actors firing blanks.

  "Aren't you-?" Remo asked.

  "No autographs," the man said, his teeth chattering.

  "I don't want your autograph," Remo said. "I want to help you out. I guess you've really hit the skids, buddy. I'm sorry to hear that. But what are you doing on the streets? Don't your kids care about you?"

  "Sure they care. They're right behind me." The actor jerked a thumb at two smaller figures on the next step above.

  Remo looked up. Dressed in tatters were two famous younger actors. Remo had read that they were both sons of the man in front, despite having completely different last names.

  "We're protesting the government's cruel neglect of America's homeless population," the father said.

  "By dressing up like them?" Remo asked.

  "How else can we understand their plight except by experiencing life as they do?" the actor said, taking a pull out of a paper-bag wrapped bottle.

  "You could donate money to a fund," Remo suggested.

  "Money only helps the homeless of today. What about the homeless of tomorrow? And future generations? No, only political action will eradicate this horrible problem. We must shame America into taking action." The man's breath hit Remo like exhaust fumes. It smelled like a mixture of white wine and Pepsi-Cola.