by Ben Bova
Yet she knew she was not really alone. Koku was shambling through the woods up ahead of her, sniffing the shrubs and pristine air, bringing scents to Lela’s mind that she had never known before. Seeing the green world through Koku’s eyes made it a true paradise, and she began to love the forest as he did.
Yet the night frightened her. Not because of the cold mist that condensed dripping from every leaf. Nor because of the predators that lurked in the darkness. Those she understood and accepted. They would never attack a human. Her sleeping bag was guarded by a tiny electronic transmitter that surrounded the area out to a dozen meters with a nerve-jangling field that would frighten off even a starving jackal.
There were other humans out there in the trees. That is what frightened Lela. There should be no one except herself in this sector of the reserve, yet she kept hearing the distant faint sounds of men talking, occasional clinks of metal on metal, even a whiff of tobacco smoke now and then.
They were stalking her. They had started by going after Koku, but now they were following Lela. They could never keep up with Koku once the gorilla was warned to stay away from them. So they were following Lela. Not merely following her, either, but constantly pushing between Lela and the territory that Koku was supposed to reach. They kept far enough away so that she could not see them. But at least once each day a stray breeze carried fresh proof of their presence.
Or am I being paranoid? Lela asked herself. Alone in the woods, city girl, and you see danger behind every bush. Once again she tried to radio back to headquarters, and once again she got nothing but screeching static on her hand-sized radio. Interference. Was the radio being jammed? How much safer she would feel if she could talk to Professor Yeboa or the captain in charge of the reserve’s rangers. She longed to hear a helicopter thrumming high above, scanning the trees with its arrays of sensors.
Koku was well ahead of her, but still far from the territory where his mates were waiting for him. It was going to be difficult enough to have the tame-born young male take up a natural life in this habitat. Worrying about poachers made matters infinitely worse.
After days of inner turmoil, Lela finally made up her mind. Koku could take care of himself for a day or so. She would confront the poachers and make them know that they would be apprehended and jailed if they did not leave the reserve immediately. Inwardly she was frightened that they might kill her, but she forced such fears from her conscious mind. Nothing like that had happened in years, decades. Besides, both she and Koku were being tracked by locator satellites. Her voice radio might be jammed, but the beam of her locator transmitter was on an entirely different frequency. Even if someone jammed it, the loss of signal by the satellite would itself alert headquarters and a squad of rangers would start out immediately to search for her.
So she took her courage in her hands that morning and doubled back along the steep ridge she had been following. The rising sun was just starting to burn off the chill gray mist. The trail along the ridge was wet, the grass slippery.
Koku had awakened with the sunrise. When Lela closed her eyes she could see another part of the forest, taste the delicious leaves he delicately stripped from the galium vines around him, rejoice in the strength and freedom he felt.
Then she heard voices. Unmistakable. Her eyes wide open now, visions of Koku fading into the back of her mind, she ducked low and crept slowly, carefully through the thick enfolding bushes toward the sounds, as silent as she could be without stopping altogether. A tendril of smoke rose from behind the bushes off to her left. Lela’s nose wrinkled at the smell of grease burning.
With newfound cunning she flattened herself on the damp grass and slithered around a thick clump of bush. There were four of them, two black men and two white. Just starting to break camp. One of the whites kicked loose dirt onto their small fire. They all wore khaki shirts and trousers, and each of them carried sidearms. Lela saw rifles stacked next to one of their sleeping bags. Five bags, she counted. Yet she saw only four men.
“What have we here?” a deep voice boomed out.
Lela scrambled to her feet. A big, ruddy-faced redheaded man was grinning at her, a huge rifle cradled in his bare arms.
The other four men dashed up to them.
“Well, well, well,” said one of the other whites. “It’s the bride of the gorilla herself!”
CHICAGO
FROM behind the roadblock, the TV news reporter quickly sprayed her hair so it would not blow untidily in the early autumn breeze.
It was an unusually warm October afternoon out on Interstate 80, ten miles beyond the city line. The sun shone serenely out of a pale blue sky washed by a morning shower. Off to the east puffy white clouds were building up by the lake shore. The woods on the far side of the highway were glorious in their autumnal reds and golds.
From the slight rise in the ground where the cameraman stood, I—80 stretched out to the horizon, a snarling metallic snake filled with fuming automobiles, vans, trucks, even school buses. Heat waves rose from the highway where the traffic stood tangled and stopped, glittering and growling in the sunlight. A roadblock of National Guard tanks parked shoulder to shoulder across the highway, median divider and all, had stopped the vehicles desperately trying to leave Chicago. National Guard soldiers in mottled camouflage uniforms, wearing their battle helmets and carrying assault rifles, were turning the cars around and heading them back toward the city.
The TV reporter, standing just outside the mobile news van with a big numeral nine painted on its side, made a final check of her appearance in the full-length mirror that hung on the inside of the open van door, then walked quickly up to the spot where the cameraman stood.
They made an almost laughable contrast. The reporter was neatly turned out in a pale silk blouse, pleated skirt, and beige jacket—and muddy, sturdy, comfortable jogging shoes. The Channel 9 pin on her jacket’s lapel was actually her microphone, sensitive to a range of about three yards. The cameraman wore a grease-stained sweat shirt and jeans. He was bald, fat, and had tattoos on both his forearms. His camera was no larger than one of his ham-sized hands. Its monitoring screen was the size of a postage stamp.
“I got all the traffic footage I need,” he said. Pointing toward a woman soldier bearing gold oak leaves on her shoulders, he said, “There’s the major in charge of this mess. She’s waitin’ for you to interview her.”
The major was gray-haired and had a face as hard as armor plate. She was not a happy person.
The reporter stood before the camera and put on her professional smile. “This is Becky Murtaugh on Interstate 80 about ten miles west of the city. With me is Major,” she peered quickly at the major’s name tag, “Wallinsky of the Illinois National Guard.”
Turning slightly, but making certain her face was still on camera, the reporter asked, “Major, how do you feel about stopping all these people who want to leave the city?”
The major grimaced. “I feel like hell! But I got my orders. We’re supposed to keep the city sealed off in order to stop the spread of the plague.”
Someone started honking his car horn and almost instantly the miles-long pileup of vehicles began bleating, blaring their fear and frustration. The reporter had to shout to be heard over the din. “But only five cases of the Horror have been reported in Chicago so far. Why is everyone trying to run away?”
With a withering look, the major hollered back, “They’re scared! They’re afraid of catching it, of course. It’s fatal. And extremely painful. There’s no cure, no vaccine. Nobody wants to die.”
“But the Army has sent out orders to prevent anyone from leaving the city?”
“The Surgeon General, actually. We’re in a state of emergency. The governors of every state in the Union have called out the National Guard to help control road traffic and keep order.”
“So you’re turning back the desperately frightened people who want to get away from the Horror?”
“That’s my job. We can’t allow them to spread the plagu
e into the countryside. The whole nation will be affected.”
“But can’t these people find alternate roads, side roads, to get out into the countryside?”
“Sure they can! That’s what makes this job so frustrating. We can’t put up roadblocks across every back road in the area. We don’t have the manpower or the time!”
“So that means…” The reporter gasped. A sudden pain in her stomach, like a hot knife twisting. She recovered, knowing that the lapse could be edited out of the tape. “That means that just because five cases of the Horror have been reported in Chicago, the entire city of four million inhabitants is under quara…”
The pain struck again, more viciously. She doubled over, clutching her middle. The microphone pin slipped from her lapel to the grass, but still picked up her awful retching screams of pain.
The major bellowed in a voice of command, “Medic! Get a medic up here on the double.”
The reporter writhed on the ground, blood bubbling from her mouth, eyes wild with agony. The cameraman bent over her and got every last second of her death throes on tape.
CHAPTER 25
THERE was no way around the robot that stood guard outside his door. His captors were too clever to face him; not even the squat serving robot appeared anymore. They had stopped feeding him.
I should have made them release me when I had the chance, Stoner thought ruefully. Now I’m stuck here.
We want to find out who they are working for, his star brother reminded him.
I know who they are, he replied.
The voices he had heard from the overhead speakers belonged to Janos and Ilona Lucacs. Stoner was certain of it. The man who had coldly stated that he intended to amputate Stoner’s fingers to see if he could grow them back—that was Zoltan Janos.
Yes, said his star brother. But if he is no longer working for the president of Hungary, for whom is he working? Who built this laboratory? Why is he experimenting on us?
Ilona was with Janos, too. How did they leave Hawaii? How did they get away from Jo? Lying quietly on his cot in the dead of night, Stoner tried to expand his awareness past the locked door of his room, past the stupid hulking robot that stood guard outside, beyond the glimpse of hallway he had seen.
Ilona, are you there? he called silently. Can you sense my presence?
No response. He waited in the darkness, pretending to be asleep, but every sense in his body was straining to touch another human mind. He could feel the presence of many people, more than twelve of them, but dimly, too far away to reach and examine or control. This building is big, he realized. It must have been an army barracks or a dormitory at one time.
And he was trapped in it. None of the humans would dare come close enough for him even to begin to manipulate their minds. They hid away from him and sent their robots by day, controlling them remotely, and then turned them off so that Stoner had no chance to tinker with the machines mentally once their human controllers were finished with them. The only robot he could reach at night was the guard outside his door.
The damned stupid robot on the other side of that door! The perfect security guard, too inhuman to need a cup of coffee or to stretch its legs or move a millimeter from its assigned post. Its electronic brain was an old-fashioned hard-wired computer with limited program capacity, not one of the complex decision-capable neural networks that Stoner could manipulate. The damned machine was too moronic to be controlled or maneuvered or even to blink its electro-optical eyes…
Stoner almost bolted upright in the cot. Only rigid self-control kept him from moving. The robot can see! Maybe I can use its eyes.
Slowing his breathing, forcing himself to relax and concentrate all his mental energies, Stoner probed for the simple electrical patterns of the robot’s computer.
And there it was, even simpler and less complicated than the brain patterns of a faithful dog. Stoner carefully traced his way through the command paths of the computer’s programming. With enough time, he thought, maybe I could learn to control this beastie.
Time. That’s the one thing I don’t have. I’ve got to get out of here. And soon.
For the moment, though, he had to satisfy himself with nothing more than a look through the robot’s eyes at the hallway outside his room.
There was not much to be seen.
The robot had four electro-optical sensors mounted in the bulbous projection at its top, four eyes in its head. Stoner saw the door to his own room, a scant two feet away. Without needing to move the robot’s head he could see along the corridor in which it stood. It was a surprisingly wide hallway, and Stoner noticed that it was carpeted like the hall of a hotel. But the carpeting was faded, threadbare. There were even patches of fungus here and there.
Doors were spaced along one side of the broad hallway, all of them closed. The walls were cracked here and there; faint squares of lighter plaster showed where pictures had once hung. Dim bare bulbs glowed feebly from the ceiling, casting pools of grayish light along the mildewed carpet. The other wall of the hallway showed windows, boarded up. At the farthest point, where the hall should have ended, rough planks and slabs of plywood had been nailed up, as if the wall had crumbled away.
Stoner felt puzzled. It looked like an old hotel that had been abandoned. He wished the robot had electrochemical sniffers; he was certain he would smell the tang of salt sea air.
All the doors along the corridor were tightly closed, and the robot would not budge from its assigned post to investigate them. Ilona Lucacs was somewhere in this building, Stoner knew. Lying on a sagging ancient hotel bed, plugged in to her pleasure machine, oblivious to all the world.
She was his one hope. An addict who was in love with the man who was systematically torturing him.
For more than an hour Stoner wandered mentally through the programmed pathways in the robot’s computer brain, learning slowly how he might override its commands and take control of the machine. It would take many hours of exertion.
Sleep, said his star brother.
No, we need to be able to move this hunk of tin!
In a few hours they will begin their experiments again. We will need all the strength we have. Sleep now, rest, prepare.
Stoner knew his star brother was right. Still, he wanted to learn how to control the robot. Before they started hacking off his fingers.
“With all due respect for her long years of fine service to this corporation,” said Amanda Tilley from her seat across the circular table from Jo, “and with great sorrow for the loss of her daughter and kidnapping of her husband, I move that the board ask Ms. Camerata for her resignation.”
Jo sat up rigidly in her chair. Since she had been elected chairman of the board she had insisted that the directors meet around a circular table. They had called it “Queen Jo’s Round Table” at first, realizing that it was her way to stop the power games that the directors played. By emphasizing equality among the board, she also emphasized her own mastery of its members.
But now there was a motion on the table that would end her presidency of Vanguard Industries and chairmanship of the board. Jo studied Amanda Tilley: the woman was bone thin, her hair as white as cream, clipped short and neatly coiffed, her paisley frock conservative yet feminine. Her eyes shifted away from Jo’s gaze uneasily. Her mouth was a tight, tense line in her drawn face.
How like Hsen to use a board member who had been one of Jo’s most faithful supporters. And to use Cathy’s murder as the excuse to push me out. Jo held on to her blazing temper. Self-control had never been more vitally important. The subtle little oriental bastard had not dared to show up for the board meeting, not even in hologrammic projection.
Glancing around the table, Jo saw that none of the directors were surprised by Tilley’s motion. Twenty-two men and women, nearly two dozen business people who sat on the boards of the world’s most powerful corporations. Their clothes were quietly elegant; the women in one-of-a-kind frocks or day suits, the men in hand-tailored suits of gray or dark blue. J
o herself wore a sheath of black and beige feather print design; it clung to her figure just enough to be suggestive without being blatant. On the table before each member rested a computer keyboard with flat display screen built into the table top, and a gleaming stainless steel pitcher that held a pint of each director’s preferred drink.
Some of the directors looked embarrassed at Tilley’s motion, some distressed, others wire-taut. Sir Harold Epping was clearly angered. But no one was surprised.
“A motion that I resign has been put before the board,” Jo said, mainly for the tape that was automatically recording the board meeting. “Is there a second?”
She turned her gaze toward Wilhelm Kruppmann and, sure enough, he muttered, “Second.”
“Discussion?” asked Jo.
Several board members squirmed in their chairs. One of the older men cleared his throat, but then said nothing.
Molten hot anger seethed through Jo’s every fiber. She deliberately waited for a long moment, waited while the other board members glanced at one another like guilty school-children, waited while she fought for control over her fury.
At last she said, in a voice that was calm, quiet, and steel-hard, “I suppose I should open the discussion with a statement of my own. I have no intention of resigning the presidency of this corporation or the chairmanship of this board.”
Several of the members nodded; a few even smiled, relieved.