Mamelukes

by Jerry Pournelle

  “Now?”

  “Sure, now,” Lee said. “Look, people, time’s short and there’s a lot of work to do, and talking about it gets none of it done! You’ve got an hour before closing time. Use it.”

  “Okay.”

  “And tonight, all of you, make lists. What you need. Survival gear. Clothes, toothbrushes—”

  “Spare eyeglasses,” Haskins said. He looked significantly at Saxon’s bifocals. “Captain broke his glasses once, it was two weeks getting new ones.”

  “It’ll be more than two weeks replacing them where we’re going,” Lee said. “Right. Make a note, get to one of those cut-rate places and have them make you five pairs. Which reminds me. Dental work. Spirit’s already started. Bart, we have appointments for you with a local dentist. We’ll work Cal in, too. We want to make sure you won’t have any dental emergencies.”

  “I got good teeth,” Haskins said. He grinned. “Won’t hurt to get them looked at, though. Hey, I like this, it’s like the Army.”

  “Five pairs of glasses,” Saxon said. He scribbled on loose-leaf paper. “Speaking of notes, there are some great new electronic gadgets. Make notes with a stylus. Talk to computers and everything.”

  “You may have all the toys you like, Mr. Saxon. Well, within reason. Particularly if they are small and light and don’t use much electric power.”

  “Good.”

  “You’ll also take books,” Lee said. “Textbooks and reference books. Presume the power fails and you have no access to your computers. Assume you will not have access to libraries or book stores, and that the books you take with you may be the only ones you’ll ever have.”

  Saxon looked at him quizzically.

  “Just how remote is this place?” he asked, and noticed that Sandori had a thin, knowing smile. Did she know something he didn’t?

  “It is primitive and remote and communications are difficult,” Lee said. “What’s the most remote community you can imagine?”

  “Upland New Guinea,” Saxon said. “Barring that there’s no Lost City in the Amazon Basin. Wasn’t there some anthropologist killed looking for that? Sometime in this century, at that.”

  “I don’t recall, but you will not go wrong thinking that way,” Lee said. “Remote, and both communications and transportation depend on factors we don’t always control. Plan for long periods without much contact with civilization.”

  “Medical support?” Haskins asked. “We’ll have that, won’t we?”

  “You should,” Lee said carefully. “But once again, you’ll be better off if prepared for minimal support.”

  “So we take medical manuals. Prescription drugs? Morphine?” Saxon asked.

  “Make a list. I’ll see what I can do,” Lee said. “Medical and surgical manuals, yes.”

  “Surgical?” Saxon said.

  Haskins laughed.

  “Do it yourself brain surgery. Be sure to have a good handbook,” he said, but Lee wasn’t smiling.

  “It’s happened, you know,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “Weapons,” Haskins said. “I’m supposing you’ll have some military units along with us, but do we need personal weapons? ’Cause if we do, with my record, somebody’s going to have to buy them for me. Maybe for Mr. Saxon, too.”

  “Spirit will take care of that,” Lee said. “Do you have preferences, Mr. Haskins?”

  “I like the old Government Model .45 just fine,” Haskins said. “But I expect Saxon would rather have the Beretta nine-millimeter, and I could live with that just to keep the ammunition supplies simple.” He grimaced. “Comes to rifles, I’m no great hand with a long gun anyway. Know my way around ’em, but not my thing. Never had a preference, anyway. Army standard is fine by me.”

  “I think we already have H&K rifles,” Lee said. “The G3 in seven-point-six-two-millimeter NATO standard, I believe.”

  “They’ll do. What kind of troops will be with us, anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Lee said. “But we’re not sending you there to fight. You’ll be there to teach.”

  “Fine by me,” Haskins said.

  Saxon nodded. Fine by me too.

  * * *

  Saxon unpacked the shopping bags and put his new clothes carefully away in the dresser and closet. There was another box that would go directly into the shipping containers, but he still had plenty of new stuff to wear. It was chosen for function rather than style, although the bush jacket was fashionable enough. It was all expensive, too, Gore-Tex mountain parka, Tilley adventure-cloth pants and shirt and hat, thermal underwear, photographer’s vest. All very natty.

  Lee hadn’t seemed to worry about how much he put on his platinum American Express card. It was all first class, and anything Saxon or Haskins thought they might need had been bought without question, often with spares.

  “Weight and volume,” Lee had said, so they bought most of their personal equipment from the backpacker section of the store.

  Bart Saxon got comfortable in the easy chair and turned on the reading light. He opened a book he had picked up, James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed, and began to read. It felt good to be warm and dry and clean, well fed, with a place to sleep; but mostly it felt good to be an intellectual again. Burke’s writing was a bit wordy and tedious but made an interesting point about how a change in knowledge dramatically altered human understanding of themselves and the world around . . .

  * * *

  Saxon closed the heavy steel doors of the cargo container with a slam and applied the big padlock. There was a certain finality about locking it up. Three weeks of work, and they were done.

  His jaw hurt. They’d found half a dozen cavities, which shouldn’t have been a big surprise given the way he’d been treating himself. Now they were all fixed, and he had new toothbrushes, one an electronic thing that ran on rechargeable batteries and did sonic cleaning so he wouldn’t get gum disease. They all had them, as well as the usual variety. Each had a backpack of personal gear. Toothbrushes, binoculars, personal radios, eyeglasses, camping equipment, flashlights, guns, all packed into one of the cargo containers. Repair kits for every damned thing, like they were going to the Moon.

  Otherwise the big steel containers were jammed full with everything Saxon thought he’d need to teach science to “smart but primitive future leaders.” He had laptop computers, batteries, solar cells, books, and hundreds of CD-ROMs each containing the equivalent of a dozen and more books. There was an Encyclopedia Britannica as well as several smaller and less complete encyclopedias. These were both in print and on CD-ROM. Another set of CD-ROMs held the classic eleventh-edition Britannica; then he’d found a printed copy in a used book store in Silicon Valley and bought that as well. It was bulky, but worth it. That was when they’d decided there would be three containers.

  The number of books he could carry was limited, but CD-ROMs were compact, and he had a number of readers. They ought to last a while if he took care of them. He hoped they would, anyway; and on CD-ROM he had nearly every classic of English literature, plus dozens of other literary works in languages Saxon didn’t know. Math and science disks, textbooks, illustrated lectures, science demonstrations, Burke’s Connections, all on CD-ROM. There were also copies of papers like Einstein’s that had once changed the world. Engineering texts, the Feynman lectures on freshman physics, the complete Loompanics catalog of “primitive living” titles, five mathematics simulation programs including both Macsyma and Mathematica, computer design programs with expensive math and physics add-ons, a program that claimed to be a complete chemistry lab simulator and another that simulated electronics breadboards. He was short of student laboratory equipment, but there was a pretty complete chemistry research lab with reagents, and five excellent microscopes from small compound wide angle to an extremely powerful microbiology scope.

  There was a good telescope, and mirror blanks for making an even larger one. A small machine shop that fitted into a large sample case. All told, he was better equipped than he’d
been in the school in Blackhawk. Electric power would be a problem, but they had both manual and diesel generators, and a knockdown windmill, as well as the solar cell collectors. Rechargeable batteries were both heavy and bulky and there weren’t enough of them, but he had as many as Lee would allow him. There might not be enough power for a machine shop, but there would sure be enough for his laptop computers.

  Saxon waited until Haskins had gone inside, then stopped George Lee on the back porch of the big San Jose house.

  “You have to know that a lot of that stuff is over my head,” he said. “Look, I taught high school science. I know math, and I could teach college freshman chemistry and physics, but I can’t even read Einstein’s original papers on relativity! I sure can’t teach that!”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Then why do we have all that advanced stuff?” Saxon gestured towards the cargo containers. He’d concentrated on buying equipment and books and software for teaching elementary science, and had been astonished when the higher-level programs began arriving by UPS and Federal Express, first a trickle, then a flood of them, all ordered by George Lee from catalogs he’d gotten by answering ads in Scientific American and Science Digest.

  “Does it hurt to have the information along?” Lee demanded.

  “No—”

  “Is there anything you need that we’re leaving behind to make room for it?”

  “No. I guess. I mean we could use more student computers.”

  “You’ve got a dozen. That’s more than you asked for.”

  “I hadn’t thought it through. We need more. Maybe some of those new digital cameras they’re marketing. More laptops . . . ”

  “All right, how many more laptops do you want?” Lee asked.

  “Maybe another dozen? With built-in CD-ROM readers.”

  “Let’s go get them. It’ll be a squeeze but we’ll get them in.”

  The salesman at Fry’s would be very happy indeed.

  “Now?”

  “Why not?” Lee asked. “And anything else you need. We’re short on time in case you don’t remember. Now what else?”

  “How about those LCD projectors? And spare copies of some of the CD-ROMs.”

  “Good. I already put in some spare copies of the ones I thought were most critical. I also threw in a few crates of books. Just in case your power systems don’t work.”

  “Thanks. I mean, there’s got to be more I didn’t think of, but—”

  “Better think harder, then. We’ll be leaving soon enough, and it’ll be a bit late then. If you don’t have it going in, you may never get it. Let me make that clear. If you don’t take it with you, you very likely will never have it. So think now.”

  “All right, I’ll give you another list in the morning, but I still can’t teach nuclear physics!”

  “No one is asking you to teach nuclear physics,” Lee said. He seemed very serious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  POLICE INSPECTOR

  It was dusk at the old airstrip somewhere in the hills east of Hollister and west of the San Joaquin Valley. They’d finished their shopping and packing the day before, and slept in until 9:30. At noon trucks had pulled into the driveway of the San Jose house, and work crews had used a small crane to set the cargo containers into the truck beds. That took longer than expected, but eventually the trucks drove away, and Lee hustled Saxon and Haskins and Sandori out of the old house and into the Dodge van.

  “Time,” he’d said.

  They’d driven in silence through the San Jose Valley, stopped at the Round Table in Hollister for pizza. After that they drove south and east of Pinnacles and off into the interior of San Benito County. Now they stood in the clapboard operations building of an airfield that didn’t seem to have a control tower or lights or even paved runways. A couple of small aircraft were parked nearby. Neither looked as if it had flown for years, but the operations shack was attached to a surprisingly large hangar. The hangar was completely closed up, the windows painted over with silvery paint. It seemed far too big for this tiny airstrip. The only other buildings in sight were a farmhouse and barn a mile away on the ridge above the airstrip’s valley.

  “Why do I get the feeling you aren’t telling us everything?” Saxon demanded, and Lee gave him a thin smile.

  “Probably because it’s true. I’ve admitted there are things I can’t talk about until you’re firmly committed to the project and on your way. Last chance, Bart. Spirit. Cal. You can walk out now, take your money—we’ll make it four thousand dollars each—and you’ll never hear from us again. Otherwise, let’s go.”

  “I’m less worried about the mystery than why there is a mystery,” Sandori said, and Lee smiled again.

  “If I told you much more, you might identify the place, and that’s what our principals can’t allow if you’re not coming.”

  “Contras,” Haskins said. “Couple of friends tried to get me off to fightin’ for the Contras when that was still going on. This is something like that. Right?”

  “Close enough,” Lee said.

  “Are we overthrowing or defending?” Saxon asked, and Lee looked thoughtful.

  “A good question,” he said after a moment. “Both.”

  “Can’t be both,” Haskins said.

  “Sure it can,” Lee said. “You’re to work with the existing government, but what you’re doing is going to transform the place, whether they like it or not. There’s no way you can bring science and technology to a place like this without turning the whole place upside down. So—both.”

  “I may like that part,” Sandori said.

  She wore a print cotton dress, only the second time Saxon had seen her in skirts. Her legs looked sturdy, well-muscled. Well shaved too, he noticed, and was a bit surprised. In three weeks he’d learned very little about her beyond her militant championship of women’s rights.

  “You may well like that part,” George Lee said. “God knows the women can use some education.”

  “Not just where we’re going.” Her voice was firm.

  “All right, not just there,” Lee said. “But it’s there you can make a difference. I never saw a place more in need of Women’s Liberation. And it’s time to decide. Bart. Coming or going?”

  “Let’s get the guarantees straight,” Saxon said. He looked around the operations office. It seemed bare of schedules and papers and the kind of clutter he’d expect. It was clear this airstrip didn’t get much business. And what business it did get might not be on the record . . .

  “When do we get home?”

  Lee shook his head. “All I can promise is that you’ll be at least six years on—over there. At least six years. After that we can negotiate, depending on what you’ve accomplished. By then you’ll have a sizable international bank account in hard currency. More important will be what you’ve done for yourself locally. You’ll know the language, have important positions. In local terms, you’ll be rich.”

  “What does rich mean?” Sandori demanded.

  “As we told you. The equivalent of millionaires. With respect from the locals if you’ve done your jobs.”

  “What’s this equivalent?” Haskins demanded.

  “Depends on the currency, of course,” Lee said. “The per capita income there is under a hundred bucks a year. Look, did we stint on your budget up to now? Have we broken our word to you in any way?”

  “No—”

  “We bought you all the equipment you wanted, and some you didn’t ask for. And now it’s decision time. Bart. Coming with us or going back to the streets?”

  “I wouldn’t be going back to the streets,” Saxon said. “Sober they don’t look so good. Not sure what I could do, anyway. Okay, I’m coming. When do we leave?”

  “In about ten minutes. Cal?”

  “I’ll stick with Bart,” the Black man said. He straightened noticeably. “Sure.”

  “Ms. Sandori?”

  “Spirit. I’m coming.”

  “Good. Glad to have you aboar
d, Spirit. This way—”

  There were two uniformed men and a metal detector in the next room. The uniforms were similar to the ones they’d provided Sandori, khaki with private security patches, but they had holstered pistols as well as batons. Lee gestured towards the metal detector.

  Sandori stopped, frowned, and produced a Glock pistol from her handbag. Then she hesitated a moment and drew a Beretta from somewhere under her skirt. “What do I do with these?”

  “In here.” Lee waved and one of the uniformed guards took a metal camera case from under the counter. It had foam rubber inserts. “You’ll get them back,” he told her.

  She put the pistols in the case and Haskins shrugged and took out a butterfly knife and a Beretta. “These go in there too?”

  “Yes,” Lee said. “Bart?”

  “I don’t have any weapons.”

  “All right, this way.” He indicated the door to the hangar.

  Saxon noticed that Lee had not gone through the metal detector. He saw Haskins and Sandori exchange looks which told him they’d noticed as well.

  * * *

  “What kind of airplane is that?” Haskins demanded. He looked closer. “Jesus Christ. It’s—”

  “A flying saucer,” Sandori said quietly. “I don’t believe in flying saucers.”

  “I would be much disappointed if you did,” Dr. Lee said. “We’ve certainly taken enough trouble to discredit any stories about them.”

  “But this is one,” Saxon said. He studied the dark gray craft that nearly filled the large hangar. It was big, probably larger than a 747 without wings, but that was hard to determine in the dim light. There was little to give size-reference data. It was just—big.

  It wasn’t really a saucer at all. It was flat on the bottom, and long, an ovoid shape like a football sliced lengthwise below the center line, then slightly flared at the bottom. There weren’t any recognizable features. Bulges and distortions in the hull seemed randomly placed, and none of it made any sense. It looked vaguely menacing although Saxon couldn’t say why.