by Joe Haldeman
“If that doesn’t work, we still have a slim chance. Antarctica.” New New was in regular contact with the scientists trapped there. “The Mercedes can land on its tail, though it takes a level surface and a steady hand. Even if we can’t get into orbit, we might be able to fly it like a floater. Or actually find a floater that could get us there.”
“I thought there weren’t any working floaters in Europe or Africa,” Ten said.
“There aren’t, but that’s because the power net’s been destroyed. With three good engineers we should be able to jury-rig a portable power source.”
“What happens when we get down there?” Goodman asked. “Take the place over from the scientists?”
“No; we’ve made a deal with them. They’ll share their supplies with us until a rescue mission can be staged. That probably wouldn’t be until Deucalion comes in. But we could make it. Then they’d come back with us.”
“Five years,” O’Hara said.
“They say the penguins are fascinating,” Berrigan said. “Never get tired of watching them.” She turned off the cube. “That’s it. Any questions?”
“This is all happening so fast,” O’Hara said. “Nobody’s explained why we have to go down there in the first place. I’m no engineer, but it seems to me there must be a dozen ways we could stop them from up here—I mean, that bomb has to be in actual contact with New New, doesn’t it?”
“That’s right. If we could make it detonate even a kilometer or two away, it would just be so much extra sunshine.”
Goodman scratched his head. “So why don’t we just shoot the goddamn thing with a laser?”
“That would work if they came in slowly enough. A mining laser would at least scramble their electronics, maybe detonate the bomb prematurely, or defuse it. But they’ll be coming in at as much as thirty kilometers per second; we can’t get enough energy flux on target. That’ll be tried, of course, if we fail in Africa. We can also put a wall of dust and rock in their way, using a mass driver, which would be even more effective, if they’re stupid enough not to make evasive maneuvers. But even if we fill the ship with holes, kill them all, the bomb might still make it through. And it’s not just the bomb; when it goes off it’ll ignite all the deuterium and tritium in the ship’s fuel tanks. That’s enough to blow New New into gravel.
And melt the gravel.”
Nothing eventful happened during the five days it took them to spiral in to low Earth orbit. They did a lot of calisthenics, enjoyed unusually good food, read the Mercedes manual with some interest. Twice they took jolts of amphetamine, so they would be ready for the drug’s effects when they landed.
O’Hara got fairly close to Coordinator Berrigan, not just because they were the only women. Berrigan had also been given a year on Earth, to study, twenty years before, and like O’Hara she had chosen NYU in New York City. They hadn’t had any academic work in common, since O’Hara was in American Studies and Berrigan pursued systems analysis. But they’d both had the City—fabulous, sinister, challenging.
They got into their spacesuits just before the ship started biting air, to brake for its final approach. O’Hara was vaguely annoyed to see that Berrigan’s spacesuit was the catheter type.
4
It was a bumpy ride, screaming in over the African jungle, and there was a bad moment when they came down onto the concrete strip, perhaps a shade too fast, the strip still wet from the morning rain. The shuttle started to fishtail, and Berrigan slapped a button that released an emergency parachute. It probably saved them from slithering off the runway, but they were all slammed painfully forward into their restraining straps. Michaels hit the inside of his helmet hard enough to knock himself out for a few moments; O’Hara felt like one blue bruise from shoulders to hips.
Then they were rolling calmly along, engines throbbing a high-pitched whine. About a kilometer from the end of the runway, the Mercedes shimmered in the hot damp air.
“Well, it hasn’t left yet,” Berrigan said, over the helmet intercom. Before they entered the atmosphere, New New had told them that it was still on the pad. They didn’t know how close the Germans were, though; the telescope had lost track of them soon after they got to North Africa.
“Might as well unbuckle. You four with guns get ready to jump out as soon as we stop.” The engines quit and they rolled silently to a halt. “Go!”
The inner door of the airlock was open. Goodman spun the wheel on the outer one and a crack of bright sunlight appeared; then a solid hard square of it. The exit ladder slid out and unfolded with agonizing slowness.
Goodman was the first out, scrambling down the ladder, pointing his gun this way and that. “Nobody here,” he said when he got to the ground.
O’Hara followed close behind him. The area did look deserted, and the jungle was reclaiming it. Thick under-growth lapped over the edges of the runway, and here and there the concrete had cracked, grass muscling up through it.
She had never used a spacesuit in gravity before. It felt like being wrapped up in stiff heavy bindings. She hoped they wouldn’t have to move fast.
It took twenty minutes to get to the Mercedes shuttle. By that time O’Hara was breathing hard, cold with evaporated sweat. The air conditioner was working unevenly, with cold spots on her chest and under her chin, but her back was warm and clammy.
“Trouble,” Berrigan said, pointing into the jungle beyond the Mercedes. “People in there.” Her amplified voice boomed out. “We mean you no harm. Just stay away from us.”
A single arrow arced toward them, falling far short. Goodman raised his gun but Berrigan pushed the nozzle down. “No. Not yet—Ten, you repeat what I said.”
Ten shouted a loud string of Swahili. A high-pitched voice answered him. “He says they know we’re from the Worlds; they know we’re the ones who killed their parents. If we don’t leave they’ll kill us.”
“Tell them we’ll leave when we’re ready to. Then all four of you fire into the air.”
While Ten was talking, two more arrows sailed in, falling only a few meters short One skidded along the concrete and came to rest almost at Ten’s feet. When he stopped talking he picked up the arrow and broke it. Then the guns roared and he spoke again.
“I told them to throw their weapons on the ground and leave. That if they hinder us we’ll burn down the jungle with them in it.”
“Good. I hope they believe it.” After a minute seven or eight children, one of them conspicuously tall, stepped out of the bush and threw down a collection of bows, arrows, and spears. The little ones ducked immediately back into shelter, but the tall one shook a spear at them, shouting, and then buried the spear in the ground. He stood with his back to them for a minute and walked slowly into the bush.
“Some sort of a curse?” Berrigan asked.
“I imagine. Some dialect I don’t know.”
“Well… everybody keep a lookout while I do the systems check.”
At the entrance to the lift there was a human skull and crossed femurs. She kicked them away and slapped a red button. The lift hummed and the doors began to slide open. “Well, at least…my God. Look at this.”
A black cloud of flies swarmed out. Inside the lift were dozens of clean-picked skeletons and three fresher bodies, busy with insect life. Spacesuits have a provision for vomiting, an emergency aspirator, and several of them were put to use. O’Hara was surprised the sight didn’t make her sick, and decided that was because it was too Grand Guignol—so revolting she couldn’t really accept its reality. But she didn’t look twice.
“Somebody help me clear this out. But keep watching.”
O’Hara scanned the edge of the jungle intently for a few minutes, but there was no motion. “Ahmed…this was one of the most civilized places on Earth, when I was here. How could they revert to savagery so quickly?”
“Oh, I don’t think you can say they’ve reverted. Not in the sense that they’ve forgotten civilization. I think what we see here is partly a game—they are children,
after all—and partly an attempt at social organization.” In normal times, Ahmed taught anthropology. “Before the war, most of them got some tribal lore at home and studied precolonial history in school. The popular folk heroes dated back to tribal times, and so did a lot of mass entertainment. They’re just acting out a pattern that’s reassuringly familiar.”
“Living in the jungle, hunting wild game?” O’Hara said.
“I don’t know. More likely, they’re living in the city and stalking supermarkets. There’s probably not much game around here, and it takes years to become a good hunter. It would be fascinating to study them.”
A sudden thought chilled O’Hara. “What if they have guns?”
“I was thinking about that. Private ownership of fire-arms was strictly forbidden in the Pan-African Union; I think even the police were only armed with tanglers.”
“We’re lucky it’s not America.”
“We are…they’re acting out their own tribal rituals over there.”
O’Hara suddenly tensed. “Did you see that?”
“No,” Ahmed said.
“I did,” Goodman said. “The big one’s still in there. We oughta start a fire.”
“Better check with Berrigan,” O’Hara said.
“Go ahead,” she said over their intercom. “But use Ten’s weapon, or Jackson’s. Goodman and O’Hara should save fuel.”
“He was over by that big tree with the pink flowers,” Goodman said.
“All right,” Ten said, and fired a burst into a thicket about fifty meters to the left of the tree. “We just want to scare them away.” He let the thicket smolder for a minute and then gave it a sustained blast. It burst into bright flame and the flame began to spread.
“I wonder,” Marianne said. “When I was here we visited a game preserve about a hundred kilometers south. The man who showed us around did have a gun, an air rifle that shot tranquilizer darts. I guess something that could pierce a rhino’s hide would punch through a space-suit pretty easily.”
“And if it could put a rhino to sleep, it’d probably kill a human being,” Ten said. “But there can’t be too many of those guns.”
“Besides,” Jackson put in, “if they had anything like a rifle we’d sure know about it by now.”
“Or they mighta gone to get it,” Goodman said. “How far can one of those things shoot, I wonder.”
“Probably farther than we can,” Jackson said.
“Why don’t you stop making each other nervous,” Berrigan suggested. “We’re going up now.” The doors squealed shut and the lift rose smoothly, up a hundred meters to the control-room hatch.
Nobody talked while they eavesdropped on Berrigan and the other two engineers, muttering numbers and arcane jargon. Over the buzz of the feeding flies they could hear clicks and whirs from inside the gleaming machine.
“Seems to check out,” Berrigan said finally. “Marianne, Jimmy, you go mess up the op center. Then meet the others at the cryogenics area. I’m going to stay here, just in case.”
They started down the crumbling sidewalk as fast as the suits allowed. Goodman switched to a private channel. “I don’t like that much. She can take off without us.”
“She wouldn’t. She just wants to make sure the children don’t come aboard.”
“They ain’t gonna come aboard. They had two years to go inside there and they didn’t.” Berrigan had had to break an inspection seal to get into the control room.
“It might have been taboo, with all the dead people in the lift. Everything’s different now.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“Let’s just get this job done as quickly as possible.” They passed by a long black window and mounted marble steps that were slick with green growth. The sliding doors of the entrance were frozen shut, the shatterproof glass crazed from a hundred impacts. A sustained blast melted one of the doors and set off a yammering alarm.
Inside, there was another hindrance. It was a once-comfortable reception foyer, now gone to dust and mil-dew. There were prominent signs directing you to various places, but they were all in German and Swahili. Two years before, O’Hara had been rushed through the building on a tour, but she couldn’t remember which direction they’d gone.
“Maybe we should call Ahmed,” O’Hara said.
“Nah… we couldn’t pronounce that Swahili, or spell it. Let’s just you go one way and I go the other, and we burn anything that looks important.”
“We ought to go together. We don’t want to get trapped if the building catches on fire.”
“Okay, that makes sense. This way?”
“Good as any.” They went down a corridor marked ZEITUNGSWESEN BEREICH. They encountered another stuck door, and Goodman kicked it open.
“Well, I’ll be God damned. Would you look at that.”
O’Hara’s glove slapped against her helmet as she instinctively tried to cover her mouth. Instead of screaming, she squeaked.
They were in an observation area over a large room full of muted sunshine. There were forty or fifty consoles in neat rows, and forty or fifty bodies slumped over the consoles or sprawled on the floor. They wore identical white uniforms, stained, and their faces and hands were mummified, shrunken around bone, skin dark gray with a white dusting of mold.
“What the hell happened to them, I wonder.”
O’Hara leaned against a rail for support. “They-they’ve been sealed in here since they died. And they must all have died at the same time. Probably poison gas in the air conditioning. Or radiation, like a neutron bomb. I wonder who did it.”
“Well, it must be the place we’re looking for. Let’s burn it up.”
“Sort of hate to.”
“Yeah.” They clumped down the stairs together. “Break the window first,” Goodman said. There was a bay window of polarized plastic, overlooking the landing strip and launch pads. He melted a hole in it and the Sun glared through.
“Careful,” O’Hara warned. “We don’t want to be standing too close to those consoles when the picture tubes blow out.”
“Don’t think they’re cubes. Look like flatscreens to me.” But he aimed carefully and sent a squirt of flame all the way across the room, enveloping the two farthest consoles. He was right; the screens just melted down. The bodies burned passively at first, and then their limbs started to stir.
“Christ that’s ugly. Let’s get this shit over with.” He fanned the flame in a sustained roar over half the room, and O’Hara added hers to the inferno. They backed up the stairs together, spraying fire. The tile floor caught, burning bright orange with greasy black smoke.
Something pinged against O’Hara’s tanks, and she saw a shiny needle spin off into the fire. She whirled around. “Jimmy!”
It all happened in less than a second. At the top of the stairs were four boys, tall boys in their teens, naked except for body paint. Three of them held spears, and one had a large rifle with a wooden stock. He was working the bolt of it.
O’Hara shot high and to the right, flame splashing against the wall behind the boys. The one with the rifle fired; his dart and the fire from Goodman’s gun crossed in midflight. All four boys were suddenly covered with burning oil. Two fell and two ran screaming.
Goodman’s firestream tilted up, spraying the ceiling. O’Hara turned and saw him topple backwards down the stairs, a metal spike in his chest.
He lay on his back on the burning floor. O’Hara started down to help him, saw the flames licking around the tanks of oxygen and fuel, hesitated, called herself a coward, grabbed his foot, and pulled with all her strength. Halfway up the stairs, she heard a terrible rattling groan. She looked at him through the helmet and he was dead, his face dark purple with eyes bulging, swollen tongue forcing his jaws apart. She let go with a cry and his body bumped down the stairs as she backed away. She almost tripped over one of the bodies at the top of the stairs, then turned and ran. She passed two more smoldering bodies in the hall. As she stepped outside there was a tremendou
s explosion, Goodman’s tanks, and the black window popped out in one piece, sailing through the air with ponderous grace in a rain of smoking human fragments.
She stopped dead and sat down and tried to put her head between her knees. Then she remembered the drug pack on her wrist, tore it open, and pressed the tranquilizer button.
Her teeth ached when her jaws unclenched. The pulse stopped hammering in her ears. The muscles in her arms and legs deliciously relaxed. A spear clattered on the steps next to her.
She looked up and a small boy was running away. Languidly she aimed in his direction, thought about it, and fired deliberately high. His hair caught on fire and he ran on even faster, beating at it.
“Poor child,” she said. “I ought to do you a favor.” She stood up and resisted the impulse to brush herself off. Someone was shouting at her.
“Goodman! O’Hara! What happened down there?”
“Goodman’s dead now. I’m coming back.” She switched off the intercom for a while and started walking back up the runway. Every now and then she fired a random burst into the brush. That seemed prudent.
Funny how the jungle had taken over. Two years before, these grounds were all carefully landscaped. She remembered the fat funny woman who had shown them around the place, stream of wisecracks in her lovely lilting accent. They’d each been given a flower, a lily red as blood. You come back some time now.
From the cryogenic warehouse to the Mercedes, the jungle was a solid sheet of flame. The paint on one side of the warehouse was starting to blister and smoke. Jackson and Ahmed were standing guard. She turned on her intercom and went inside.
They had found a forklift and were loading it with long gray cylinders. There was a large vault door beside the racked cylinders. O’Hara didn’t care to think about what was behind the door. Heads.
This was a storage area for Immortality Unlimited, the only one in Africa. Dying people would have their heads separated from their bodies, the blood replaced with some more lasting fluid, and then have the head quickly frozen to the temperature of liquid nitrogen and sent here for storage. The idea was that a new body could eventually be cloned from a cell, and the brain recharged with some memories intact. No one knew how much. When they did it with dogs the dogs would remember some tricks. O’Hara thought it was ghoulish—and so much like groundhogs, to stockpile millions of new mouths to feed someday, when half the world was starving already.