Come Back

by George Erlynne

  A rustle up the hill proclaimed the spear carriers were all getting set and my friend was edging away. "Well, it's a pity." I said conversationally. "Is that damned thing still in range?"

  "Only just." Was the somewhat breathless response that came through the outer speakers.

  The effect of this bodiless voice on my companion however, was dramatic. He jumped out of his crude boots, turned white and retreated hastily up the hill. "Talk to me." I urged the speaker, smiling genially at the appalled mob.

  "They come back." The voice was Melanee's this time and the effect was even better. She added a useless injunction to take care of my carcass which they listened to with great attention but growing apprehension.

  "Go away." I told them sternly. "You stay here and the voices will get you."

  "They're on course for us, descending." Mike said, his worried tones telling me our airborne friends were picking up something.

  "Bugger." I muttered, just as a rising moan began to penetrate the gentle rustle of leaves all round us.

  "It's a homer!" Mary shrieked, her voice washing over the now frozen group.

  "Go!" I yelled, and dived for the hatch which Melanee, ever thoughtful, had already opened. Hurriedly slumping down in the pilot's seat I was conscious of scared expressions inside and a vision of disappearing forms outside as the Scottish population departed.

  "Small warhead." Mary said tensely. "Short range explosive."

  The moan outside turned into a rising shriek followed by a bright yellow flash and blast which rocked the car. Bits of the local forest whirled overhead and something whacked against the forward armour, scoring the screen. Black smoke plus a billowing cloud of dust and fragments washed over the car but the pattering of falling fragments stopped and peace returned except for flickering flames up above on the rising ground. We sat rigid, saying nothing because there was nothing to say or do. Another one of those on the car and we were history.

  Minutes ticked by as long as hours before Mary hesitantly tapped into the interface keyboard for the ship's scanners. Peering over her shoulder, we gazed anxiously at the scrolling figures. "The ship can't see us." Mary whispered. "Those bastards are still circling."

  "They homed on the locals." Mike muttered. "Just in case it was us. Poor sods."

  It seemed a likely explanation. Max's flying circus had picked up a group of people standing around in a suspicious spot and calmly decided to obliterate them like so many ants. It made me think because although we knew they were a pretty ruthless crew, they were showing more and more evidence of readiness to use violence at the slightest opportunity which meant they were getting very annoyed or very frustrated or both. But why? We hadn't done a damned thing except stay alive.

  "They're going." Mary said, startling me. We had been sitting in fearful silence for what seemed like a lifetime. "They've gone up to thirty thousand and they're piling it on, course one eight three magnetic."

  "One eight three?" Mike wrinkled his brow. "That'll take them..."

  "Yeah, back to Quissac." I finished for him, leaning back. "OK, the show's over. Suppose you tell me what the hell you found out from that machine up there."

  They all looked at each other and shifted uneasily. "It's a bit of a long story." Mike regarded me with an odd expression which I diagnosed, after a blank moment, as fear.

  Mary stared at her hands tightly folded together. "Back before we all left on our big trip to Alpha Centauri, Max, Selena and Mark were all on the short list for the crew, we were all given seven kinds of hell on the selection, remember? They were pre-selected by the committee and so were six others. Selena was an easy choice, she was the best there was but plenty of Air Force officers had Max's experience and Mark was one of ten physicists." She looked up at me, white faced. "It was a fix and it was all done with the connivance of the Agency and who was in charge of the Agency? Why it was Senator Jorgenson." She looked steadily at me but I shrugged.

  "I never met him." I said.

  "No. Yours was a fix as well but they didn't know that." Mike said. "We looked for a common factor and Jorgenson is the money man behind the Green Church." He paused and glanced uneasily at Mary. "That's the common factor. All of them are members of the Green Church. It's not on their ship records, only Max showed up there, they didn't want any inquisitive ex-military security man to think odd things."

  I grunted. "I always think odd things and look where it's got me."

  "Lucky you did." He muttered.

  "But this was part of it, the Green Church was run by these people." Mary explained. "They decided to reorganise the world. No more random exploitation of resources, no more rising birth rate and warfare. They wanted a clean sweep with new men and women, people that would populate the Earth as it should have been, back to the Garden of Eden, you see. Harmony with nature, a controlled population which lives like Robin Hood and Maid Marion, sitting in the greenwood and singing songs."

  I gazed at her, wondering if I was hearing right. "You mean they decided to eliminate the whole population of Earth and substitute all their test tube babies. That's plain insanity, not even Hitler went that far. No industry, no power, nothing but sunshine and staring at trees? I don't believe it." I wagged my head. "Nobody is as mad as that."

  "Plenty of people are worse than that." Mike said soberly. "Where have you been?"

  He was right, there were fanatics convinced that Martians lived in Hungary, that half the men in America were aliens in disguise, that Atlantis would rise and take over the European Union, that all car drivers ought to be shot, the list of maniacs was endless or had been, there weren't any left now except those on that lander. "You're serious?"

  They nodded at me. "Very serious. But we still don't know how it happened." Mike was shaking his head. "They set it all up and there were plenty of them still here when we departed to Alpha Centauri. They had to make sure all the nurseries were on line, to get it ready to go at any time. What happened to them? Why didn't they do it? All it wants is someone to press the right switch and it will happen, so why didn't it happen ten thousand years ago?"

  "I am a clone." Melanee spoke for the first time. "I understand what that is now. I am one of the chosen ones, the ones who will rule. I am not supposed to be here at all."

  "She is a genetic design, a special model and if she had the right treatment she would take us all over and make sure we didn't pollute the world." Mike regarded me with some apprehension while Melanee looked confused.

  "Someone, we don't know who, got into that nursery in Quissac and started her off. She would have been brought to awareness when she was maybe a few months old and that someone must have come back to collect the child and bring her up." Mary watched Melanee with careful eyes. "She has enhanced brain power and her cell replication has been altered in some way, but we can't figure it out."

  "Mistress of the world, eh?" I gazed at Melanee wondering who it was I had been sharing my bed with for some months, but then she smiled her smile at me and it was no Earth conquering princess regarding me with haughty control. A young and beautiful woman who loved me stared into my eyes and folded her arms across her stomach where our child was slowly growing.

  "I grew up." She said simply. "And you taught me."

  "That's why they never snatched her." Mary said, looking at Melanee with a certain wariness. "She only had to look at them and they would have all fallen on their knees."

  Melanee turned her dark eyes and her smile on Mary. "Do you want to fall on your knees? Do you?" She shook her head. "No. I am just like you, I feel fear and love," she glanced at me. "And sorrow for Linda and the others who have died. David has given me an ethical sense, not by pouring morals in my ear but by being what he is. I want what he does, what you do, an end to killing and a new beginning without hatreds." She paused before an audience which had become spell bound at her eloquence. "Can we do it? We must. Our children, yours and mine," she smiled a wider smile at Mary. "They should live in a world that can learn from its past and sta
rt again."

  Mary looked astonished and then blushed furiously, while Mike looked blank. I felt the penny drop in my head with an almost audible click and grinned at Mary. "Well, well." I punched Mike's arm. "You old bugger. No blank cartridges, eh? We'd better get this show on the road!"

  "No, you don't understand." Mary waved her hands at me. "We put a block on the computer. It won't tell them anything unless they put in the star ship code." She stopped and stared at me. "Did anyone else know the entry code?"

  "Plenty but they're all dead." I replied. "When they get to Quissac, they could program one of the computers to break the code, it would be easy, it's not one of those one-time prime number things."

  "The machine won't co-operate." Mike said.

  "They've got computers on board." I pointed out.

  "Maybe, but not that sort of computer, I doubt if they have the software." Mary said.

  "Bloody hell." I muttered as the implication sank in. "They can't do anything without us."

  "And they are going to be very annoyed." Mike said soberly. "And you haven't heard the worst. They told the ship to search for our fuel dumps and someone allowed the ship to answer."

  It didn't need a towering genius to identify who that was. "Marie." I said, thinking hard.

  "She has conflict." Melanee informed me with a frown. "She does not like you and she tells Jules what to do and he does it."

  "She's not the only one who's got a conflict." Mike pronounced bleakly. "The bastards are going to hit our fuel which means we'll have to walk across France because we've got to go back there haven't we? And they are just going to sit there waiting for us. We have to go back to stop this obscene experiment and teach Max and Selena something about human biology they seem to have forgotten." He stopped but Melanee smiled her special smile.

  "Free will. The survival of the fittest. They are not fit." She said decisively.

  Chapter 20

  GOING SOUTH

  Disentangling the car from the loch and testing the systems took hours, especially as the starboard engine monitor told us we had something lodged in the turbines. This meant we had to disassemble the turbine casings and poke about in the innards, painfully aware that if we prodded the wrong bit we had a thousand mile walk instead of a five hundred mile walk ahead of us. The exhaust ports were supposed to close on sinkage but clearly it hadn't with the result that we had God knows what stuck up the final stage compressors. We pumped out the hold, of course, and had the thing floating tethered to a tree while the male brains stared down at a complex assembly manufactured ten millennia ago with no one alive knowing how to mend it.

  Sitting uncomfortably on the after engine nacelles, looking gloomily at the complicated mass of gleaming metallic components, so precisely machined to tolerances of thousands of an inch, not to mention electronic black boxes that neither of us liked to touch, we found the Northern night slowly creeping upon us. Mary and Melanee inched their way to stand behind us on the casing after some hours had passed, watching us gazing helplessly at the problem.

  "We don't even have a maintenance program." Mike told me for the third time, glancing up at Mary's tense face.

  "What happens if we try and fly on one engine?" Mary enquired quietly.

  I shrugged. "It will skim but it won't fly."

  The answer to that was a brooding silence. Since there was no way out of the Loch we could spend the rest of the fuel roaring noisily up and down until it ran out. I stood up. I find it difficult to think sitting down and my thoughts were getting circular, disappearing up their own starting points in a painful way. We hadn't found anything large or sinister clogging up the turbine assemblies and I was wondering just how sensitive that error program was. The problem was beyond us if some Scottish water snake had taken a liking to the engines and decided to make a nest in the combustion chambers. On the other hand, if the monitor had just picked up dead leaves or rotting fir cones washing about inside?

  "There's only one way to find out." Mike said at last.

  I nodded. "Yeah."

  "How you find out?" Melanee asked, her thirst for knowledge now focusing on turbine engines. "Start engine and see?"

  "You got it." I told her. "If the plenum burners are stuffed then so are we but if it's just dust on the final stage blading it will blow out."

  "You hope." Mary said.

  "It's simple really." I told her. "Like binary arithmetic. You know, zero one. If it works then we're fine and if it doesn't we have to go plan 'B'."

  "You got a plan 'B'?" Mike enquired thinly.

  "Sure, ten miles a day, seven hundred miles, we'll be looking at the Channel in under three months. Build a boat, row across, Quissac by mid-winter."

  They all looked at me as if I was demented except Melanee whose expression changed from blank puzzlement to sly amusement. "Bring up child on the way." She said, and Mary laughed, a chortle that changed into screaming hysteria. Mike hastily scrambled up and tried to fold her in manly arms but she shoved him away.

  "I must have been mad!" She choked. "Look at us! Look at me! Pregnant because I didn't have the sense! Where can we go? Oh God, oh God...oh God." She subsided onto the hull plating, shivering violently, sobbing forlornly. Melanee's hand stole into mine and she pulled me away, tactfully leaving a white-faced Mike on his haunches holding out his hands to Mary.

  "Come." She whispered. "Mary knows Mike loves her but he doesn't yet and he needs to tell her."

  Ruminating on her new-found insight into the emotional junkyard that all men carry around with them, I allowed myself to be towed back to the bank of the Loch where the smouldering embers from the missile strike had died down. Collecting the masses of nicely half cooked firewood lying around, we lit a vast fire, set the scanners to tell us if the locals felt like an evening visit and munched rations. The long twilight up here brought back memories of walking under the vast skies of the Highlands, seeking solitude from the multitudes. I smiled at the ironies. Now there were solitudes everywhere. Was that what Selena wanted? Emptiness? Thinking of Selena made me cogitate about the oddness of the master plan and particularly about Melanee. She smiled at me as if she knew what I was thinking about and I was half convinced she did.

  Images of Linda floated in my head where they would never die. I hadn't forgotten her or stopped loving her but Melanee had me now and I owed her. We knew who she was or rather who she was meant to be, but we didn't know how she came to be. There could only be one answer that I could think of. Back in France, and everywhere else presumably, there were now two sorts of people. The 'normal' population, who fished, gathered and propagated but only two kids at a time, three if they were lucky, that was one sort. But the others, what about them? We had only seen them, or I had, as corpses mostly. They were the ones who made sure no girl children escaped the master plan, but who were they, and how did they get born? Where were their women? They collect the ever loving pills, they spread the word but who told them? It all added up to the need to get into that complex at Quissac. I didn't understand how Mike and Mary had scrambled the computer grid but they had, or so they said, and as a consequence the Selena axis couldn't just wipe us out, they needed us. Could we use that as leverage? How?

  "How do we go through France? It will take a long time, yes?" Melanee brought me back to the present with a pregnant question. If, and it was a big if, we could get that engine started, we would be back at where Calais had been in hours. What then?

  "Rivers." I muttered, dragging Melanee back on board where we could look at the display screens. Punching up the European Satellite chart I told the computer to find a way through France from the Channel coast without setting foot on land. Promptly the answer lit up on the monitor with a host of question marks. Melanee stared at the display for ten seconds and nodded, her finger following the recommended route. The French, back in the old days, were great believers in canals. One connected the Seine tributary, the Loing, with the Loire which, in turn, after a hell of a long way, connected to another one whi
ch led us to the Saone. That river fed into the Rhone and where did that go? Why, it passed only twenty miles from Nimes. Easy.

  Easy in the twenty third century maybe. Hordes of warnings crawled all over the screen. The rivers had burst their banks, canals were blocked, locks were gone. Centuries of change had altered the landscape of France but the fact remained, the rivers still flowed down to the sea.

  "Many more miles." Melanee said doubtfully. True enough. Zig zagging through France following rivers would add to the journey. The computer said it would be over a thousand miles. Could we do it before winter? Could we do it at all? There had to be a better way but sure as hell I couldn't think of one. We needed fuel, it was as simple as that.

  Mary recovered. Well, she stopped crying and let Mike cuddle her as we sat on the bank eating our rations. Melanee gave her a complicated female look and calmly set out to explain my bright ideas about swanning through France by boat if we had one, which we didn't. They both frowned but at least those splendid brains of theirs began to work again which was what Melanee wanted, I supposed, thinking that the leadership of this expedition was slipping away from me without my consent. Her brain seemed to be growing all the time but mine wasn't, quite the reverse. Mike gave me a male look of shared sympathy. Mary, however, seeing a problem, started to argue about it.

  "First." She said, glaring at Mike. "In three or four months me and Melanee aren't going to be in any state to be climbing over mountains or swimming damned rivers." She paused, gathered breath and continued. "Second, even if the rivers are where they were how do we get down or up them? We build a boat? How does a boat without power go against the current? And even if we solve that how long is all this going to take? And what sort of state do you think we're all going to be in by the time we get back to this bloody Quissac place if we ever get there?" Having exhausted her powers of verbal destruction, she glared at me.