by Bob Shaw
Carewe glanced at Parma’s profile, that of a latter-day Hemingway. “Whose side are you really on?”
“I’m not on the side of the Fauves, and that’s for sure. I don’t mind them opting for a short life and a gay one, full of blood and sperm and sweat and all that stuff, but they shouldn’t kill other people, William. That’s very wrong—wrong enough to justify undermining their faith that summer follows winter.”
Lights began to appear at the distant end of the arrow-straight road. “At least,” Carewe said, “the Helsinki Convention didn’t foresee weather control as a weapon.”
“Didn’t it?” Parma laughed again. “If you ask me, the only reason it hasn’t been proscribed is that it’s the only weapon in constant, world-wide use in the present day. Ever read about the riots in Cuba during the three-year drought last century? It’s been kept quiet, but I’d say the States had weather control even then, and used it.”
“But you said …”
“In the present day. All you need is enough resources to provide you with bigger control fields and computers good enough to figure out the interactions, and you’re all set to fight a war the quiet way, the bitchy way. Ruin a country’s harvest, cause floods, make it so hot and humid that folks who part their hair on the right start killing folks who part their hair on the left. That’s really making war, William. ”
“I’m still not sure which side you’re on. ”
“It doesn’t matter—I do the work. Parma of Farma they call me. ”
The lights ahead expanded abruptly as the truck reached another clearing ringed with prefabricated buildings of varying sizes. Parma pulled up outside the end chalet of a double row which formed a miniature street terminated by dark trees.
“This is yours, ” he said. “We just got it put together this afternoon and the services haven’t been installed, but you can throw your bag in for now. The boys will finish it while we’re over at the Unations club. ”
Carewe hesitated. “I’d like to freshen up. ”
“At the club, William. We’re wasting drinking time. ”
Carewe got out, opened the chalet’s single door and put his bag inside the resin-smelling darkness. Only twenty-four hours earlier he had been setting out with Ritchie for an unfamiliar, bachelors’ evening of drinking, and he hoped the pattern would not repeat itself too closely. What is Athene doing right now, this very instant? He went back to the truck, feeling lonely again, and was driven across the clearing to a comparatively large geodome which housed the club. The circular interior with its central bar had the unmistakable atmosphere of a company-owned recreational facility. Folding tables and chairs were grouped on the springy, sectioned floor and a notice board carried an assortment of papers, some obviously official, some enthusiastically embellished by an amateur artist, talking of forthcoming entertainments. The building was warm, but Carewe shivered. When he returned from the washroom Parma was seated at a table, two half-liter glasses of beer in front of him.
“This is all they serve before eight,” he explained. “It’s supposed to discourage people like me from making beasts of themselves too early in the evening.” He lifted his glass and drained it with a defiant flourish. “Not only is that attitude undemocratic, it’s downright naive.”
Carewe sipped his beer. It was cool, with a pleasant grainy flavor, and on impulse he emulated Parma, blinking as the tingling fluid smarted his throat.
“I like your style with a pint,” Parma said, using the old fluid measure which had become a drinkers’ shibboleth. “Order up.”
Carewe got two more glasses from the human bartender, a bored-looking cool who served the drinks with a conspicuous clumsiness which was probably intended to show he had another more important job during the day. Not many men were in the club, but looking around Carewe saw a higher proportion of cools than he had expected. He recalled that Parma had made no reference to his apparently being a cool, had treated him with impartial male heartiness which had been balm to his ego. He wondered briefly if really having tied off would have made the change in his office friends easier to take.
“You get more cools in this line of business than I expected,” he said, setting the glasses down. “What are they doing? Sublimating?”
“Don’t ask me,” Parma said disinterestedly. “I just do the work.”
He swallowed half his drink, his veined nose butting determinedly through the froth, and Carewe felt his liking for the older man grow stronger. Sitting down, he tackled his own half-liter, which somehow appeared more formidable than the first. Later in the evening the beers looked even bigger but, magically, raising one to his lips was sufficient to dispose of it. Carewe, who was not a practiced beer drinker, marveled inwardly at his newfound power as the circular room gradually filled, became thunderous with voices, began to tilt and swing around him. Faces became two-dimensional masks, irrelevant, then he and Parma were outside staggering through gemmy darkness. Carewe had no idea where his chalet was but Parma guided him to the door. He shook hands and plodded away into the night without speaking.
Carewe opened the door, suddenly anxious to lie down, and flicked the light switch. The interior remained black and his drowned memory told him that engineers were supposed to have finished installing the services during the evening. His one earlier glimpse of the chalet had shown an environment control panel directly opposite the door. Carewe walked sightlessly towards it with both hands extended and felt the smooth plastic of the master switch under his fingers. It moved easily and the chalet filled with light—then he saw that the control panel’s saefty cover was not in place.
He stared blankly for a pounding moment at the array of high voltage terminals into which, but for a, freakish piece of luck, he would have thrust his fingers. Unable to feel surprise or anger, he walked slowly to the bed and lay down.
Sleep came quickly, but in the dreams his frail glass body was in peril from great machines whose blindly thrusting crankshafts could have ground him to sparkling dust.
VIII
The morning sun drove spikes of light through Carewe’s eyelids. He sat up painfully, with hammering temples, and made his way into the chalet’s tiny lavatory. His instinct on emerging was to lie down again, but Parma had said something about seeing the team coordinator first thing in the morning and officially signing on. He opened his bag, took out a pack of the oxygen-ascorbic acid bombs he used to stave off the effects of hangovers, and quickly swallowed one. Its gelatin casing caused it to lodge uncomfortably somewhere in the upper part of his chest, and he was going for a glass of water when the environment control panel caught his eye.
The bared terminals shone with quiet menace. Frowning, Carewe looked around and discovered the panel’s safety cover lying on a chair. Memories wavered dimly. Last night he had blundered across the chalet and by pure good fortune had avoided shoving his fingers into the high-voltage wiring. His forehead prickled with perspiration, then he sorted at his own stupidity—without the cover in place the master switch could not be thrown and no power would have been available.
But the chalet’s lights were on. The switch had moved easily.
Pressing his temples to ease the insistent pounding, he went closer to the panel and peered into the interior. The linkage which prevents the master switch from operating until it was engaged by a spigot on the cover was twisted and obviously ineffective. Somebody tried to kill me—the thought spumed through his mind on the instant—and it’s all Athene’s fault. His common sense reasserted itself a moment later and he felt the vast, resentful anger of an immortal whose life has been placed in jeopardy by another’s carelessness. The service engineer concerned was going to roast for this.
By the time Carewe had thrown his soiled clothing into the dispose-all and dressed in a fresh tunic and hose, his headache was clearing. He went out into morning light which stabbed into his eyes from all directions, as though the sky were ringed with suns. The air was warm and the heavy perfume of unfamiliar flowers invaded his lung
s. He walked along the short street into the circular open space which was deserted except for two men in Unations blues lounging in the shade of an awning. Parma’s truck was still parked outside the geodome of the club. Carewe was about to ask one of the men for directions when he noticed the Unations symbol on another dome at the opposite rim of the clearing.
Inside it he found a female clerk at a long reception counter, beyond which stood the familiar cabinets of a computer terminal. Frosty plastic screens formed small private offices around the perimeter of the dome.
“May I help you?” The girl sounded sleepy, and only mildly interested.
“I’m with the Farma contingent—Carewe’s the name.” “Yes?”
“I want to see the engineer who installed the services in my chalet yesterday.” He shielded his depilated chin from her questioning gaze.
“Have you a complaint?”
“Yes. His criminal negligence almost got me electrocuted.”
“I’m sorry, but the engineer left on the first shuttle this morning.”
“Then can you give me his name? I want to report the man to someone.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know—anybody who can get him into trouble.”
“You’d better talk to Mr. Kendy, the coordinator.” The girl spoke disapprovingly, as though Carewe were breaking some unwritten law. She beckoned to him and led the way to one of the offices, where he found a young-looking cool with crewed blond hair seated at a desk. Kendy was very muscular for a cool and his pink skin glowed with health. He shook hands with a firm, friendly grip, listened attentively to Carewe’s story and made notes.
“I’ll follow this up, of course,” he promised. “Now, Mr. Carewe, it’s quite late in the morning—are you ready to go to work for us?”
“That’s what I’m here for.” Carewe’s lips felt like dead flesh as he smiled. “But to tell the truth, I’m not too sure what I can do. I juit came out here …”
“Don’t apologize—the Beau Geste syndrome is what keeps us in business to a large extent.” Kendy folded a sheet of notepaper and used a corner of it to pick his front teeth, which were square and very white. “You’re a representative of Farma, so you can help us by administering your firm’s biostat. E.12, isn’t it?”
“But I’m an accountant.”
“That side of things is handled in New York,” Kendy said impassively, but with a trace of irony.
“I know, but I thought … maybe …”
“And I don’t need any assistance in running this office.”
“I didn’t mean …” Carewe steadied his thoughts. “When will the actual roundup start?”
“It already has. The people we’re dealing with are a displaced offshoot of the old Malawi tribe and they’re more resistant to our weather magic than most.” Kendy scribbled his name on a printed form and handed it across his desk. “Take this to the stores dome and they’ll kit you out. The idea is that we’ll keep the rain going right till the end of the operation and work under cover of the ground mist. And this”—Kendy set a blue form beside the first one—“will get you an automatic.”
“A gun?”
“Yes. Hypodermic variety, in case you’ve got scruples about violence. It isn’t practical to use individual shots for mass immortalization.”
The two-seat floater that Carewe had picked up at the Unations transport pool rode easily over the rough track leading to the rainstorm which brooded on the northern horizon. He guided the little machine self-consciously, almost ashamed at having discovered in himself a sense of adventure. At this time on an ordinary day he would have been sitting at his desk in the Farma headquarters, pretending to monitor computerized accounting procedures, bn fact merely counting off the minutes to lunchtime. Now here he was clad in Unations blues, driving an unfamiliar vehicle along a road he had never traveled before, with the African sun beating down through the alien forests.
Carewe rediscovered the truth that his physical arrival in a strange place was an unimportant event—the real significance lay in his psychological spiritual arrival. The latter was always delayed, sometimes by a matter of days or even weeks, by the fact that while he was in the company of other people he could never truly be himself, and therefore was barred from reacting to the new environment. As a young trainee, he had once gone to a three-week seminar in Polar City and had spent the whole period in a kind of numb dismay over his inability to feel any sense of strangeness. But on the very last day, freed of the lecture program and the insistent company of his fellow accountants, he had wandered clear of the city and walked more than a mile into the ancient icescapes. On the exact instant of rounding a blindingly white hummock, thus losing optical contact with civilization, he, Will Carewe, had discovered himself to be in Antarctica as if dropped there by a sorcery which had plucked him from his normal life a split-second earlier. Its timeless, inimical beauty had paralyzed him, stilling his breath, filling his eyes with visions which would never fade.
A similar intellectual revelation was sweeping over him as, suddenly alone, he jockeyed the floater past clumps of brilliantly colored rubiaceae shrubs whose calyx-lobes filled the air with a silent visual clamor. Danger and excitement, new experiences lay ahead; and if the immediate future could hold so much challenge— what of his million tomorrows? This sense of having been gripped by Life, of being imbued with its rainbow-colored essences, could not compensate for the events which had led up to it, but he was alive. Aware that he was undergoing an emotional reaction equivalent to one of the occasional flashes of elation which are a part of normal mourning, Carewe tried to damp down his psychic temperature, but he was whistling discordantly as the track suddenly dipped towards a fairly wide river. Its waters appeared brown and sullen, probably as a result of the sustained deluge the weather control team had created in the vicinity.
He slowed the vehicle a little to avoid throwing up too much mud and aimed its nose at the track’s continuation on the opposite bank. The floater waltzed confidently across the fast-moving water, then—in midstream—its engine cut. There were no preliminary warnings such as a drop in power or a change of turbine note—just a complete and instantaneous shutdown. The floater hit the water with a hissing explosion as the hot metal of the engine was submerged, and three seconds later Carewe was sitting in a dark brown plastic bubble at the bottom of the river.
He screamed for help.
An indeterminate time later he became aware that shouting was not going to be enough. He closed his mouth with effort. The emergency cushion field had prevented him being thrown against the control panel, and the superb engineering of the floater’s cabin saw to it that no water was coming in—but if he continued to sit there he would suffocate. He unlocked the door and pushed it. Nothing happened and, suddenly afraid the frame had been distorted by the impact, he drove his shoulder against the tough plastic. Water spattered momentarily against his ankle, but the door remained immovable, held by the outside pressure. The problem was t hualize the interior and exterior pressures by admitting water, but after Carewe had exhausted himself by repeatedly shouldering the door the floor of the cabin was scarcely damp. He thought of screaming again, then came a grim acceptance of the fact that his cherished million tomorrows lay in nobody’s hands but his own.
No water was coming into the cabin; yet during the previous drive he had been plentifully supplied with air—which meant the intakes must have sealed themselves on contact with the water. A possible weak spot? With some difficulty he pulled the trim panel from the roof, exposing plastic pipes snaking away from a multiple fitting which obviously passed through the vehicle’s outer skin. He seized the pipes and wrenched them downwards. They stretched slightly under the strain, but remained in place. Losing control of himself again, he attacked the ventilation system, clawing and twisting it with all his strength until a steely tightness in his chest told him he had almost depleted the cabin’s supply of air. The plastic pipes, engineered to Unations specifications, showed no evid
ence of damage or weakening.
Carewe fell back in his seat, his lungs pumping like an archaic engine, shocked by the raucous animal-sound of his own struggle for breath. Could this really be the … ? His eyes focused on a tiny switch on a flange of the ventilator intake fitting. He reached up, moved it with one fingertip—and water gouted from the ventilator grills.
It took all his self-control to remain motionless until the cabin was almost filled. The air remaining in the narrow space between the lapping water and the roof was virtually unbreathable when he tried the door again, but this time it opened with relative ease. He pushed himself clear of the vehicle, surfaced and swam to the bank. A strong current carried him downstream some distance, but he was able to scramble onto dry ground without difficulty and make his way back to the track. The clay-colored water, translating gravitation into a seemingly horizontal movement, slid swiftly and silently over the spot where the floater must have lain, covering all trace of it. Had he not noticed the manual override control on the ventilator he would still be down there—and nobody would even have thought of looking for him until nightfall. …
Carewe found he was on the northern bank of the river, with the columnar rainstorm looming high on the horizon. The lightweight plastic armor issued to him at the base was at the bottom of the river, but he had the hypodermic gun securely put away in his pouch. He decided to complete his journey on foot, in spite of the fact that he had a very good excuse for turning back. A second murder attempt within twenty-four hours, an inner voice said, would be enough to discourage anybody. He dismissed the idea automatically as he began to walk in squelching shoes, but it returned without any undertones of emotion, as a purely logical proposition. All Unations equipment was engineered to the finest specifications that 22nd Century technology could meet—what were the odds against an accidental engine failure at the single potentially lethal point on his journey? And what astronomical level did those odds reach if one compounded them with the unusual circumstances of the missing safety cover on his chalet’s environment controller?