by Ahern, Jerry
There was no evidence to suggest that the atmosphere here in the landing bay area was at all unbreathable, that the environment suits worn by the military personnel surrounding Rourke, Rubenstein and the others were anything more than a precaution.
But John Rourke did not feel like taking chances with anything not requiring risk. He would maintain the integrity of his suit, just in case, but before their situation became more difficult, he would take steps
to alter the odds.
Paul Rubenstein walked beside him, and as Rourke glanced toward his friend, their eyes met. There was wariness in Paul’s eyes, and a look of amazement, too. John Rourke imagined that Paul’s eyes mirrored his own. Whoever these people were, they were technologically sophisticated in at least a quirky sort of way, and somehow he felt they were very powerful.
Forty-Four
Since she could not sleep, Emma Shaw lit a cigarette.
The self-proclaimed Alan Crockett, his big single-action revolver in his right hand, slept opposite her, on the other side of the dying fire.
Electronic surveillance sensors were set up about the camp’s perimeter. She had her guns. Emma Shaw should have felt secure.
Instead, she did not. If this man really was Alan Crockett—and the more she studied his face, the more pronounced the resemblance seemed—he was in some ways a modern-day John Rourke. Crockett, unlike John, was not a physician, nor had he been in the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, there was no Central Intelligence Agency in this century, only the various internal divisions of ONI, or the Office of Naval Intelligence. But he was a survival expert in his own right, and a weapons expert as well. Crockett, however, was an archaeologist.
Unlike the assumed stereotype of his profession, Crockett didn’t look bookish, nor did he usually spend
his time (although he had to occasionally, surely) pouring through old musty books and vid-tapes. He was, perenially, in the field.
It was Alan Crockett who had uncovered the ruins of the Louvre Museum at the bottom of the frozen shallow lake where Paris, France, had been Before the Night of the War. He had discovered the Mona Lisa and numbers of other presumed lost original pieces of pre-War art in a hermetically sealed vault.
It was Alan Crockett who, by means of groundbreaking underwater archaeology techniques, recovered the Crown Jewels of England (and nearly lost his life doing so).
Name some ancient artifact and Alan Crockett, if he hadn’t already found it, was hot on its trail. Until the accident. Through historical records (he had found those during his unauthorized foray into Eden-protected territory to what had been Chicago), Alan Crockett discovered that on the Night of the War there had been a naval disaster of what normally would have been considered epic proportions. Apparently as the result of a missile strike against a United States nuclear submarine operating clandestinely in the North Atlantic, a wave of incredible size swamped and overturned the passenger liner SS Triumphant,
Aboard the Triumphant, as the story which appeared after Alan Crockett’s death recounted it, was an exhibit on loan from the British Museum to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, entitled “Treasures of Empire,” artifacts from Egypt, India and all over the British Empire from the period of its height during the Victorian Era. Its worth in money would have been enormous, but its historical value even greater. While searching for the Triumphant, Alan Crockett supposedly perished.
Emma Shaw’s attention focused on a large, orange ember, glowing hotly in the darkness. She could draw an imaginary line between the glowing red tip of her cigarette and the still-burning wood. But her concentration lay elsewhere, still, on the story this man— who said he was Alan Crockett—had told her. And he hadn’t told her much.
After she accepted his offered cup of coffee, Crockett said, “You see, because of my field work over the years—and I suppose in some small part due to an undeserved reputation for a certain recklessness—the intelligence people thought that I would be ideal for their job. I didn’t quite agree—what they needed was a SEAL Team group. But I took the job anyway.”
“I don’t understand,” she’d said. “Intell like they’d want can be gotten from the air, either by overflights or satellite.”
“Evidently, Commander Shaw, that is what the intelligence people thought, too. Until they realized that there were gaping holes in their North American coverage. And they had no idea why.”
“Gaping holes?”
He’d lit a cigarette after offering one to her (her father the cop had taught her not to accept cigarettes from strangers because they might contain drugs). She declined. “Not holes in the literal sense, of course, but anomalies, shall we say. Vapor trails from jet aircraft, but no sign of the aircraft. Things like that. What was happening?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He’d smiled at her. It was a good smile; she had to
give him that, whoever he was. “Aside from occasional satellite uplinks through a scrambler—or, unless you count some rather unpleasant interaction with Land Pirates over the last two years—I haven’t carried on a conversation with another human being in more than a year. My horse there—his name is Wilbur, a sort of left-handed salute to some vid-tape nostalgia I always found oddly amusing—is the last of my original companions, as it were. There were three of us, myself, an intelligence officer named Hal Weatherby and a SEAL named Dan Collins. Weatherby was a bright man, but followed directions poorly. He wandered off in a blizzard and we found him two days later, frozen to death. That was only three months after we’d inserted. In fairness to Weatherby, it was one of those freak storms that just come up around here.
“Then Dan Collins died as a result of a rather protracted gunfight with a gang of Land Pirates. They only killed one of us and we killed seven of them, which I guess made us the winners. On the other hand we accounted for twenty percent of their number and they accounted for fifty percent of our number. I buried Dan, just like he and I had buried Hal Weatherby— only a little more gracefully positioned, actually. Hal was still frozen and we had neither the time nor the means to thaw him out.
“After Dan died, it was me alone, except for Wilbur and the three horses remaining in the remuda. The last of those horses broke a leg and I had to kill him. That left me alone with Wilbur. I talk to him quite a bit, but as yet he hasn’t answered me, which I suppose is a good thing. We’re on our way out. In another fourteen days exactly, there will be an aircraft meeting me near the site of old Albany—that was the capital of New York State Before the Night of the War. But if the plane isn’t big enough for Wilbur, they’ll just have to go back and get another aircraft. I don’t abandon friends.”
“You don’t know that John Rourke is alive then, do you?”
And then he started to laugh, so hard that Emma Shaw thought he would choke. “John Rourke’s alive?! What do you take me for, madam? A fool?”
“He was in cryogenic freeze. All the stories about his being dead were a cover-up.” Like the stories about Alan Crockett being dead? She wondered. She added, “I know him, personally.”
“Well, good for you. I thought I saw Jayne Mansfield one night during a blizzard about six months ago.”
“Jayne who?”
“She was a rather underappreciated blonde actress of the mid-Twentieth Century, actually—at least I think so—a rather fine comedienne. She was most noted for her unique profile.”
“Ohh, I see.”
He shook his head indulgently, saying, “I seriously doubt that you do.”
“I do know John Rourke. We’re very good friends. He’s a wonderful man.”
“He’d have to be. He was around in the mid-Twentieth Century as well.”
Emma Shaw said no more on the subject, and neither did Crockett. But she asked, “So?”
“So?”
“Did you find out what was going on? I mean, about
those ‘gaping holes’ and everything?”
He snapped the butt of his cigarette into the fire
. “I ration myself, because the only supply I get of these is from my pickups. Neither Weatherby nor Collins smoked.” He exhaled loudly, and it sounded like half a yawn. “Yes and no, actually. I have, on a multiplicity of separate occasions, found myself beneath such a vapor trail. When looking straight up, I saw nothing leaving it; or, at least, nothing which my instruments could detect. That was unnerving, to say the least. And I pieced together some data over the last two years, mostly from the time I spent among the Land Pirates.”
“Yeah, right.” Emma Shaw exclaimed, laughing.
He shrugged his shoulders, “Choose to believe me or not; that’s academic. At any event, a little way east of here there is, purportedly, a mountain. The vapor trails—according to the Land Pirates with whom I’ve spoken—sometimes seem to originate from near that mountain, or dissipate near it. Anyone who goes near that mountain never returns. If it is the same mountain, Before the Night of the War, it was once a Presidential War Retreat, then abandoned. So, it should have been habitable inside.”
“Is that all you found out in two years?”
“AH?!” He leaned forward, shaking his gloved right index finger toward her nose. “My dear Commander, aside from getting—and then satellite uplinking— video on Eden’s newest fighter aircraft, Eden’s latest surface warfare tactics, troop strengths in North America above the thirty-fifth parallel, discovering a safe route across the radioactive zone which severs the continent at what used to be the Mississippi River and getting detailed strength and movement reports on the larger Land Pirate bands, I think that is enough. Don’t you?”
“Well, I mean—so, are you going to go to this mountain and check it out?”
“No,” he told her. “We are. Wilbur is the only remaining horse. Short of bumping into Land Pirates and stealing a horse from them, he’s it, as far as transportation. I imagine you have a survival raft and were planning on using it to get you downriver, right?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Well, don’t. About fifty miles further down, there’s a band of Land Pirates called the Deadlanders. They have their base of operations right on the riverbank. They kill everyone who isn’t a Deadlander. In your case, you might not be that lucky. With that helmet off, you’re quite attractive. So, if they took you alive, they’d probably keep you alive. A healthy woman like yourself might survive two, possibly three months before the overwork, the undernourishment and the continual forced sex caused you to die; of exhaustion.”
“So, I shouldn’t use the raft.”
“Exactly. You shouldn’t use the raft. We’re going to see the mountain. Together. We’ll learn all that we can and then you and I—and Wilbur, of course—will head for Albany and the airplane. And I’ll be very happy. You’ll be very happy. Even Wilbur will be very happy. Now, I am going to get some sleep. I suggest that you do the same. We have a few long days ahead of us.”
Emma Shaw pretended to go to sleep, watched him draw his cowboy gun, watched him go out and check the perimeter alarms, check his horse, then slip into his sleeping bag.
Whoever he was, this man who called himself Alan Crockett had an interesting story to tell.
But how much of it was true?
She snapped her cigarette butt into the fire, lay back and tried to sleep. Her eyes just didn’t want to stay closed.
Forty-Five
About five hundred yards into the vast structure, and perhaps one hundred feet down, maybe a bit more, the troops guarding John Rourke, Paul Rubenstein, Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz and Doctor Mentz stopped before large double doors. The doors were made of the same material as the walls, the support beams, the ceiling and the floor, the same sort of rust-colored metal.
Rather than an entrance into another chamber or anything like that—when the doors opened with something akin to a pneumatic hiss—beyond them John Rourke saw another tunnel.
This tunnel was appreciably smaller in height and width. Its purpose was clear. It was a tube through which something akin to a subway system travelled. To Rourke’s right, nearer to the outside, there seemed to be a switching yard of some sort, but the lighting was dim between where he stood on a sort of platform—the same rust-colored metal—and the yard, making the recognition of detail difficult.
There was a car coming from the right, out of the switching yard. And, it was most curiously shaped. John Rourke remembered such cars from his boyhood. It looked like a trolley car, save for the fact that it ran on a single rail—probably magnetic—and there was no trolley apparatus extending upward from the roof.
The color of the car was a muted, almost faded shade of red. And, true to its image, at the front of the car there was an antique-looking lamp; it cast a dim yellow light before the trolley car, only faintly illuminating the solitary rail.
“Welcome to Oz,” Paul said in a low voice. Rourke said nothing, only nodded. No brick roads yet, of yellow or any color, but indeed there was an almost surreal quality to the place.
And the guards. Why had they not searched their prisoners rather than just taking the visible weapons? Were personal weapons unknown here? Or, was fear of the outside atmosphere so pronounced that an environment suit was inviolate?
And, aside from the message given, notifying Rourke, Paul, Rubenstein and the others that they were surrounded and outnumbered, no other words had passed between captors and captives.
The car was slowing down now, and Rourke assumed that soon they would all be boarding it. That would likely be the moment to recover their weapons and disarm or kill the enemy personnel. When Rourke saw the shoulder patches worn by these men, any softness in his heart eroded fully. Nazis like Gunther Spitz and Dr. Mentz were evil; but, even more evil, if that were possible, were those who masked race hatred beneath the guise of a religion a principle tenet of which declared that God is love.
Killing unnecessarily was the mark of a brute; but, if it came to killing these men, John Rourke would do it remorselessly. They would kill him, perhaps joyously.
The trolley car stopped.
Doctor Mentz asked, “Where will this take us, Herr Doctor?”
Paul answered, “To the wizard’s office, possibly.”
John Rourke had already transferred the A.G. Russell Sting IA Black Chrome knife from beneath the flap of the accessory bag to his right hand.
The doors on the side of the trolley car at the front and rear opened. There were steps going up into the car.
Posted on a little round seat was a motorman.
But the motorman was not real. Neither was the motorman some sort of sophisticated wonder of modern science. The motorman was, in fact, an audioanimatronic robot, not really a robot at all, but an articulated mannequin with mechanically operated facial expressions and hand and body movements and a prerecorded series of messages to imitate a human voice.
As the lead elements of the military unit surrounding Rourke, Rubenstein and the others started aboard the trolley car, the motorman’s voice twanged out in something roughly like Midwestern standard, “Careful to watch your step there! Find a seat and stay clear of the doors, please!”
Paul was shaking his head, either in disbelief or disgust, perhaps both. John Rourke found the thing faintly amusing, but rapidly passing round the bend of what might ordinarily be thought bizarre.
As Rourke stepped up into the trolley car—the leader of the unit and the man carrying Rourke’s and Paul’s weapons were already seated—Rourke’s eyes took in how the audioanimatronic motorman was attached to the car’s controls. The right hand rested on the controller and the left hand on the door bar, the feet set to be working pedals. Unless there were wireless connections, however, the motorman seemed to function as a real motorman would, merely to operate, not as an integral part of the controls.
John Rourke remarked through his radio to any and all listening, “When I was a boy, and we’d be bussing it for some school function, I remember that some people always picked the bus as the place for getting violent.” Paul was now up into the trolley. Spitz and Mentz were not.
But someone would be needed to deal with the enemy personnel still on the platform. “Violent,” Rourke said again. “Now!”
Forty-Six
Paul Rubenstein mule-kicked his left foot back and upward into the testicles of the armed man behind him and the man, at last, spoke. “You—” Paul’s right elbow snapped back and whatever the fellow had been about to say was terminated in the same instant. Paul’s elbow contacted teeth and bone and there was a squeal of pain.
John Rourke was a blur of motion. The little black A.G. Russell knife was in John’s right hand. It pistoned forward, burrowing into the neck of one man, then withdrew to thrust into the chest of another. John elbow smashed one man, knee smashed another. Paul realized he was needed more elsewhere. The radio receiver beside his ear was feeding him grunts and groans from the two Nazis who were still on the trolley platform. Paul twisted round on the little rubber-treaded step and, supporting himself on the chrome-plated grab rails to either side, swung his feet outward, catching one of the guards in the chest, slinging the man back into two more of the guards.
Even if Mentz and Spitz were Nazis, there seemed to be nothing slow-witted about Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther Spitz. Spitz had already brought one of the guards down and was decking another with the butt of one of the peculiar-looking assault rifles the guards carried.
Paul Rubenstein jumped down from the trolley car, onto the backs of two of the guards, these men battling with Dr. Mentz, Mentz handling himself against them gamely enough, but ineffectively. Under his breath, Paul hissed, “Why am I helping this son of a bitch?” But there wasn’t time to ponder the question any further. Paul bulldogged both of the enemy personnel to the platform surface. He slammed one man’s forehead into the metal of the platform, shoving the second man away. As this man made to bring his rifle up, Dr. Mentz struck the fellow a sincere-looking but apparently wholly ineffectual blow to the jaw. The guard wheeled away from Paul Rubenstein, toward Dr. Mentz instead.