Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "But you can guess." I told her, feeling unmoved by protestations of ignorance. She was too good a scientist not to have an idea. "Mike's got it right. The pill keeps the survivors healthy, stops them breeding too much but what else?"

  She clearly didn't want to say, looking round for support but Bradley was holding a silent Hilary and remembering Linda, his face like black granite. Mike was regarding her as if she'd crawled out from under a stone and Mary was just crying. "I did not design this. The alterations, they make the brain obey, they put in new rules. They make slaves as Mike says but 'ere everyone who takes the pills, they are told by someone to do something else."

  "That man we see yesterday, walking to Italy, eh?" Jules gazed at me with apprehension. "We think very 'ard, we think someone tell people to carry the pills, find survivors, offer them. Every one, they pass on the instructions..."

  "Dominoes." Mike muttered.

  "Christ." I began to see. "These damned things get passed on all over, everywhere there is a band of survivors. It must have taken time but everyone who takes the pills, he or she gets the urge to find another survivor and pass them on. Hold on! What about kids?"

  "The enzymes and alterations, they are passed on down the genetic line." Marie said in a small voice.

  "My God." Bradley rumbled. "It's Goddamned obscene. I guess the pills, they don't only come out of this place, huh? No, every complex these maniacs set up, every one."

  "The whole bloody world is under orders, robotic." Mike was staring at Melanee.

  One by one, every eye turned on her, even mine. The whole world was obeying instructions they were born with, all except her. Why?

  Chapter 14

  PLANS

  What do we do? What can we do? The questions swirled round my brain which was sluggish and frozen with grief for Linda. Her loss hadn't hit me yet, not properly, but it would. The urge to kill, to take revenge, was strong but look where I would, there seemed no target that would give me the satisfaction that I needed. Marie? Her protestations of uncomfortable innocence I believed for what they were worth. Jules? He was maybe well informed about why Marie didn't like Selena but apart from falling in love with Marie and talking about trees until everyone got glassy eyed, it was difficult to find sinister intent there. The others? Those enigmatic dwellers in the forest, the ones that carried the pills away from this place and spread them to every living soul they could find? Yes, killing them would be satisfying but not enough. They were themselves, presumably, only obeying implanted instructions. No, it was the brains behind all this that I wanted to get my hands on but Jules and Marie were telling me they had all been dead for ten thousand years. Had they?

  Interrogation of an apprehensive Melanee elicited facts that made sense in a peculiar kind of way. She was a foundling, we knew that, and it made her very unusual. The people in her settlement, the ones she grew up with, they were all predictably bovine. They maintained a level of life that allowed their group to exist but not much more. They had no record or wish to explore a wider world beyond the river valley they all lived in. No one had any memory of any ancestor going further than the sea which was less than forty odd miles away. Thousands of years and no one goes further than a three day walk away from home? Where was the human itch, the unscratchable need to explore, to find out? She knew of other groups, but the knowledge was hearsay, folklore almost, she had never seen anyone other than the fifty or so loosely related members of the tribe that found her and raised her. And then they got suspicious because they found they had someone who could run rings round them mentally, someone who wanted to know the answers to questions they had never asked.

  When we landed, she was the one who wanted to go and see what all the noise was about, her minder going with her with growing reluctance until they found us. Then he seemed unable to resist the idea of filling us full of holes, she couldn't stop him or reason with him. Instructions in his head again, which she didn't hear. The rest of her story we knew but it didn't stop Bradley and co regarding her with frowning intensity.

  "So." He rumbled, Hilary asleep in the crook of his arm. "She's got something the others don't have."

  "No pills." Mike supplied. "She knows what happens, she must have seen it before. Kids taken by those roaming whatever they are, and after that they don't think straight."

  With my head in my hands, I let them ramble on. What do we do? The question echoed in my head. Do we just stay here, where the technology is, and grow old? Do we find that group of fanatics and wipe them out? We could then maybe, just maybe, find a group of survivors in their bucolic haze and wait until the next generation was free of the drug and then they can start to

  breed in earnest. A long term plan that left us with white beards and a bleak future.

  "Montana." Mike muttered. "This isn't some local plan thought up on the spur of the moment, I don't buy that."

  "Yeah." Bradley agreed. "To make the whole planet like this, they had to have a plan that covered everywhere. What about Asia? Japan? China? India?"

  "Those pills are very complicated." Marie, who had been sitting in depressed silence, sat up. "They could not 'ave been designed and manufactured overnight."

  Jules nodded his head in painful agreement. I was beginning to regret having belted him so hard but on the other hand he could have been under the ground like Linda. The conversation faltered to a halt as we all sat uncomfortably on the hard floor with our backs to the wall of the huge laboratory complex, under the unmerciful glare of the lights.

  Presently I took my fingers away from my face, looked up and discovered that they were all gazing at me, even Melanee. The rifle that I had rested against the wall beside me was mute testimony to what I felt about things, but they still waited for me. I didn't want to make decisions, I wanted to crawl away and let out my desperate grief for Linda, frightened that her ghost would fade, that the memory of my love would not allow the guilt to escape. I had killed her, my carelessness in not taking simple and proper precautions allowed those primitive obsessives to catch her and now... now she was gone and so was half of me.

  Melanee tentatively put her hand on my arm and turned her remarkable eyes on my strained features. "Daveed." Her voice was clear but low, intimate. "Please. Want you to think for us."

  Bradley and Mike, the holders of more degrees than I had fingers, they nodded. Mary, almost asleep but kept awake by fear of never waking up, gazed at me with a forlorn expression. We were a lost band of anachronistic survivors caught up in a situation no nightmare could have dreamed up and they felt as if the bottom had fallen out of their existence. No more research, no more learned discussions, what was the point? And who were they going to leave their knowledge to? Pigs in the forest?

  I stood up, stretched and sat myself on the edge of one of the test benches, facing them. "I don't believe what happened was an accident." I said slowly. "Whatever it was, someone was prepared for it." The silence that greeted this statement of the obvious was not encouraging. "What's the range of an aircar with auxiliary tanks?" My sudden question made Mike sit up and Bradley deepen his frown.

  "Five hundred, maybe six, I'd have to check." Mike said in reply.

  "How much fuel have we got here?" I fired this at Jules but Mike answered, having absorbed the mysterious processes producing artificial fuel with the enthusiasm of a true physicist.

  "As much as we want. We order the stuff and the factory downstairs delivers."

  "The drones 'ave a longer range." Marie pointed out.

  "True, but you can't ride in them." I responded, wisps of an idea floating around in my skull. "We got two aircars, right?" I brooded. "Tomorrow, I want you to start a systematic survey of all Europe with the drones. Collate with the ship's scanners and search for groups of survivors like Melanee's bunch, OK? Get the ship to look at Asia, Africa, everywhere. We didn't get a detailed survey. Get it to look at Montana, see what Selena's doing."

  They stared at me with wheels going around in their heads, I could see it. Even Mel
anee who was struggling to understand, was thinking hard. "Take ages, days at least, probably a month." Mike said at last. "What's the idea?"

  "The idea is that there's still something we don't know and I think we ought to go and find out." I told them. "But before we do, let's see what we have on this planet of ours. Animals, fish, plants, I want them all checked."

  Before they could bombard me with questions to which I had no answers, I strolled off, Linda’s death constantly dancing in front of my memory. Her face when it faded, her smile stiffening to a rictus of emptiness. Pattering feet that caught me up turned out to be Melanee who glanced up at me but said nothing. We had only explored the long stairwell and the wonders revealed when the lower sealed levels opened up. What was upstairs?

  The lift shafts were caverns of silence and damp creepiness where spiders had made their homes and other things. The steel framework had rusted away to dust leaving wet redness on the walls. Getting into the upper levels was difficult, the metal doors had rusted to fragments and only the special steels of the armoured, airtight hatches was still recognisable. Shoving heartily against one of these let us in to what had been the lower control level for the satellite and orbital vehicles used for the starship construction. These were dotted round the world, allowing constant remote control in real time no matter where the orbit was. Of course there was no light here, my searchlight flickering over long decayed lumps of plastic and metal. The topmost level where the antenna controls were housed was the same with the addition of dim light through ceiling apertures but the glass had long gone. Everywhere there was accumulated dirt and dust, coloured stains where metal compounds had corroded away. No bones although I looked but plenty of insect life that scuttled away from our feet. It was depressing and uninformative. Melanee kept giving me sidelong looks but I didn't explain what I was looking for because I didn't know myself. Clearly no human feet had trod here since that day.

  We explored living quarters, store rooms, generator rooms but it was all a pile of earth stained dust and slime. And yet, under our feet, four or five hundred feet down, there was a live fusion generator and a near sentient computer that had been talking to itself for ten thousand years. What had it found out? Did it have the programming to find answers? If it did, who was it going to tell?

  Abandoning this sterile investigation, we went back up to the main entrance, the light from the sky greeting us with a natural welcome that I for one found soothing. Casting around, I satisfied myself that no strange footprints had arrived recently, took Melanee's arm and descended to civilisation, or what was left of it.

  Melanee, with inquisitive intelligence, had found bed frames in the various rooms that led off from the big laboratory area. They must have been used by the night shift, although this being France who knows what they were doing down there. However, the cloth had disintegrated, deep frost notwithstanding, but the frames survived on which we, or rather Melanee, twisted tree lianas to make a support. She trotted up each day with me as a gun guard, collected suitable plants and fibres and after a week or so there were surprisingly usable and comfortable beds. The others who were all busily scribbling mightily or staring at monitor screens, they all seemed thunderstruck at her inventiveness. And all the time she was listening to me, to them, absorbing information and language like a sponge.

  Each night we slept together. She seemed to have no sense of propriety or modesty and treated me like a God with problems. She was sexually inexperienced but she had a full set of genes and no scruples about using them, finding the feelings delightful and satisfying, demanding that we do it as soon as we bedded down each night away from the others. It became a habit, almost an addiction. The warmth of her was a medicine at first, something to take away the ache of Linda's memory but then things changed, I changed, began to long for her touch and the roundness of her breasts, her seemingly complete and utter surrender to emotion.

  Hilary recovered physically but something in her head was missing, the enquiring scientific mind had gone, not the knowledge but the searching wanderlust for information that made her one of the top theoreticians on the planet. She seemed content, compliant almost, responding to Bradley with affectionate smiles such as you would see in a child greeting its parent. Bradley was torn between rage at the damage and relief that she was still there and still loved him. Mary, on the other hand, recovered completely as far as we could tell, much to Mike's ill-concealed joy. Marie, in a rare conversation with me, (she usually kept well out of my way) confided that she was still working on the neural effects of that pill but thought that different people responded in different ways and she believed that the pill effects required further input from someone or something to make the alterations work. Left unfinished, as it were, Linda had catastrophic after effects and Mary nothing while Hilary had bits of her brain short circuited.

  "Why?" I demanded.

  Marie looked nervously at me and bit her lip while Jules, hovering in the background, was getting more anxious than she was. "It is the control mechanism for the slaves, they 'ave to be told who they are before the synapses grow into the proper pattern."

  "You mean this is supposed to happen when the child is born or before, not when you're an adult?" I found myself biting my own lip, trying to see the logic of the whole idea, but if the brains trust here couldn't understand it, my chances were limited. "Bloody hell, how do you talk to an unborn child?"

  "You don't." Was the answer. "Certain very specific genetic messages 'ave to be implanted and activated at the exact moment of development." Marie paused, absorbed by her own reasoning, tapping away at the keyboard in front of her. "Look," she gestured at the screen showing slowly gyrating complexities of chemical elements. "There 'as to be a starter, like a pulse generator, something to trigger the sequence." She looked at me with questioning but wary eyes.

  "Another pill?"

  But she didn't know and seemed unlikely to find out. They gave me apprehensive looks and drifted back to the workforce which was busy on the masses of junk being sent down from the ship. Hilary was now helping in a curiously languid way, sifting through data, looking for what Bradley told her to look for. Mary, brought back to life as it were, was eagerly scanning the printouts they had found how to produce. I hoped they found something worthwhile before the paper ran out because I didn't think the genius computer downstairs could produce paper like oil fuel although why not? I was minded, in a fit of impatience, to ask it for a fully grown helijet and sit back to await the result.

  Melanee watched me with unnerving patience while I ran through the aircar's specifications, asking pointed but ignorant questions all the time. Days of this passed by until I finished with both cars and started on the armaments and obscurely packed stores revealed in sundry side chambers. Most of it was well decayed clothing but a large sealed container proved to be hiding a ground generator of sophisticated design, a bonus that I didn't quite know what to do with. Brooding over this and stopping Melanee from putting her fingers on important crystal control components, I found feet shuffling behind me and turned to see Jules clutching a mass of paper.

  "We 'ave completed the survey." He told me uneasily. "Bradley does not like it."

  "You find people?" Melanee enquired. He glanced at her with the puzzled frown that they all gave her when she asked intelligent questions and shook his head.

  "Come." He said, leading us off to where Mary and Bradley were huddled round the master computer screen. Hilary was sitting with Marie, relaxed and apparently bored with the whole thing, Marie giving her whispered instructions. Neither of them gave me a look as we ambled up but Mike who had been scribbling furiously, got up and stared at me with a worried face.

  "It's damned odd." He began. "We've done the complete planet but we've kept the definition up to around a half metre. Anything smaller and it would take years, right?" He paused and seemed to be waiting for applause.

  "Well?" I asked. "What's the big mystery?"

  "OK." He took a deep breath. "People first.
We've found three more groups in France, two in England and seven more up to the Ural mountains, including Greece, Spain and Scandinavia."

  "Twelve lots? That all?" I was unsurprised but gloomy.

  "We reckon maybe six hundred bodies." Bradley said. "The ship scanned the whole planet. We can't find much in South America, the tree cover is too heavy and maybe the forest hides more but it can't be many."

  "North America and Canada the ship found nine more groups, one over a hundred strong, it's the same in Asia." Mary added her contribution to the depressing conclusion. "The ship says the total population of homo sapiens on this paradise we have here is no more than five or six thousand."

  "We could have missed a few, the forest canopy is heavy, but not many, there would be traces." Bradley said heavily.

  "Five thousand is enough to regenerate if they were all together but they're not." Mike explained, waving a hand at Jules and Marie who were our biology experts. Tree sex they knew all about, their hormones doubtless being excited by pollen discharges, but they did have biology degrees and they had big brains in addition. Marie spread out a chart they had been drawing spider like lines on and frowned at it.

  "We work on the progenitive curves." She said obscurely. "We look at cross fertilisation graphs and random mutation equations." She looked up at me quickly, seeing, I am sure, the expression of growing irritation on my handsome features. "These groups, they are too small, inbreeding will produce genetic anomalies, the population will just fade away."

  "You see," Mike took over the lecture. "These damned groups are just big enough to keep up their numbers but that's all." He chewed his lip and glared at the chart. "OK. Forget people for the moment. The ship has found out more. You remember before we blasted off, the international consortium arranged for beacons, relay and communication beacons to be dumped on nearly every continent? Small beer, the things were in a hut no bigger than my garage back home with antenna stuck on top, right? Everyone had them, even China and Japan, you get it?"