"David!" Mary brought me back to the present with some asperity. "You haven't been listening to a word!"
"What word?" I enquired blandly.
"How do we get the damned stuff out of that tank? And what the hell is it?" Mike growled. "If it's high octane gas for an aircraft we'll have to reprogram the fuel system on this tub but how do we know?"
"The computer will tell us." I grunted, which was true enough, the car's watchful brain would soon say if it didn't like the fuel but getting it back to the car was a problem. We had a pump, hand worked, for fuel transfer, but transfer into what? The damned stuff was at least a quarter of a mile off.
Mike solved it. We take out one of our auxiliary tanks, float the thing along the line of the old sea wall until it was opposite the spot. He waved hands as he grinned at us, obviously becoming convalescent. "We take out the fuel lines to the port engine."
"What?" I stared at him, but he'd made friends with the on-board computer which produced a work plan for us, detailed enough for a ten-year-old to understand. Feeling aged about nine I scrutinised the mass of instructions, wondering if we could ever put the complex fuel system back together without leaning back at the end of the exercise and staring at a load of bits left over.
"None of these cars had metal fuel lines, it's all artificial compounds, very special plastics, right? We join here and here and it'll stretch." He gazed at me with a certain complacency. He, naturally, was excused boots because of his collection of scratches so I was going to do most of the work assisted by an enthusiastic stone age woman who wouldn't know petrol from coconut juice, plus Mary who thought she was in charge of technical puzzles like this to the point of giving orders while standing around looking impatient.
Of course, it rained. Day after day the clouds rolled over and discharged the usual downpour. It was the cricket season, I remembered, thinking of past times and lazy days as I toiled to obey the instructions from the brains trust. The fuel lines stretched like grey snakes to the oblong tank floating tethered to the bank while I pumped for hours in a haze of fumes. Melanee started to look pale so I shooed her out of that claustrophobic chamber, gritting teeth and listening to the rain outside.
Nine days later, we had everything back together again and no bits left over. The car said it felt fine and it liked the fuel although it was more like heavy oil than petrol. Patching up the blisters on my hands that evening, I cocked an eye at the audience.
"OK, we're mobile. So what do we do? We'll be sitting ducks when we get to Calais."
"We're going back to Quissac." Mary's voice was hard. "We've got debts to pay."
Chapter 24
RETURN JOURNEY
Not only did the weather change to the usual bleary rain of an English summer, it decided to whip up a storm that must have been the brother of the one over ten thousand years ago that made Eisenhower age ten years overnight. The wind rose to a screaming gale, the rain came down like the tropics and the temperature dropped to scarf round the throat levels. I had to pay out cable from the nose to secure us firmly to the bank, finding three hefty trees which were waving wildly in the gale as I wound the wire round the trunks.
Spluttering and shivering when I returned to the car, I wrapped myself in all the clothes I could find and retired grumpily to the passenger seats to doze. Mike was now well on the mend, sporting a fine collection of scabs and incipient scars that he constantly exhibited to Mary who always gave sympathetic clucking noises every time he did it. It was becoming a ritual which I observed moodily while Melanee watched with interested eyes. She kept clear of me, her blinding intelligence having diagnosed the foul mood I had brought back with me, contenting herself with peering out of the front screens and watching Mary practise bandage patterns on Mike's chest.
She was clever of course, in fact she was getting to be one of those irritating women who are always right, no matter what. Mary and Mike were now so wrapped up in each other (it was literally true every night) that they had recovered their mental balance, finding things to chuckle about, shutting out from their minds the awful desolation and fear that hovered over us all the time. I envied them although Melanee did her best to give me amnesia. Now she smiled gently at me, ignored the scowl she got in return and gazed placidly at the near hurricane outside which was making the car rock heavily despite being well inside the inlet and secured.
"I cannot understand why there is not more of your world left." She turned those deep eyes on me and pointed her chin at the scene outside. Mike and Mary's huddle in the back was still engaged in deep conference about whether they should tear up more of Mary's clothes for bandages, an idea that Mike seemed to be keen on, so I was deputed to answer the brains that stared at me for enlightenment. "I have been running through all the records from your mm computer machine here and Mary put the survey and records from the data box on the memory." She shook her head slightly. "Such huge constructions, you had the world tamed and organised."
"We thought." I grunted. "It's all due to oxygen." I explained, gathering up my physics and geology knowledge, now slightly rusty. "It binds to many different elements, you see."
She didn't see and demanded a lesson in elementary chemistry that left me with a headache until Mike, consumed by curiosity and sated with Mary's attentions, turned his physics brain which was considerably better than mine, on to the education problem. I watched with increasing fascination as Melanee sat there and absorbed valency factors, gas pressures and equations scribbled on scrap paper. Her eyes flicked to the paper and Mike's enthusiastic face while the tutorial went on. Mary slid down to sit beside me, saying nothing but listening, like me.
"Time is the factor." Mike finished. "Even high carbon steels and exotic metals will deteriorate given long enough and they've had ten millennia. Unless material is protected it all goes back to the carbon oxygen cycle, the sole exceptions being some of the artificial ceramics like that glass back in the Quissac complex." He paused in the silence, glancing at me and Mary with sudden awareness. Melanee continued to look at him with a calm face and smooth brow but she smiled, a slow and beautiful smile that somehow transformed her, gave her an air, an indefinable radiation of power, of intellect well above us, bright though we were supposed to be.
"So," she said quietly. "The planet lives in cycles, pulses of life, balanced and almost eternal until you came along. Energy from the sun converted into living mass that returns its elements to the earth to begin again. This is what your enemies want to recreate, to turn back a biological clock and recreate the balance." She gazed abstractedly out into the rain and mist. "It cannot be done. In due time the planet will remove us from the list of life but we ourselves cannot do it unless we kill all life and even that...." She shook her head, a small movement. "I doubt if we could do that. We may think we could, a form of ego deception. There are forces larger than ourselves, immutable laws at work which care nothing for our beliefs or wishes." She sat up and turned that penetrating smile on us again. "What will this be like in another ten thousand years? Just forest or perhaps more living things, people that are like you."
"Jesus." Mary whispered. "What have we got here?"
Mike leaned back, regarding Melanee with amazement tinged with apprehension. "Eidetic memory." He muttered. "Implanted knowledge, it must be. What limits? Are there any?" He continued to stare at her with a kind of nervous awe. The question he asked had echoed around my own head more than once. She had taken in and understood celestial mechanics, navigation, firearm design, chemical properties plus a host of other knowledge without apparent effort. She could probably design and make an H-Bomb in her spare time using a pile of wood and three knitting needles.
Melanee's smile turned to a grin, the ethereal personality disappeared and my night time girl gazed at me and laughed. "Don't look so alarmed. Yes, I have things in my head that I didn't know about, but they don't make me different from you. I can't make you do things you don't want to, I have no power of compulsion. You can kill me if you want to and I
could not stop you." She knew I could not, none of us could. "What matters is what I feel and you feel, not what I think. David and I, we are one unit. Do you really believe I can make him do anything he doesn't want to? I have been given something extra but I didn't ask for it. I want us to live in harmony and not fear and more than that," she paused and gazed at us with tranquil beauty. "I want us to win."
"Thank Christ for that." Mary muttered, triggering a burst of laughter. "They should have called you Eve."
"We have enough fuel to get us all the way to Quissac, even if the dump we left at Calais is gone." Melanee announced calmly. "I have been doing some calculations that Mary taught me."
"Pretty soon, girl, you are going to be teaching us." Mike told her solemnly, but she laughed, a tinkling cascade of amusement that spread over all of us.
"I think you too old to learn, no?" She put her head on one side and regarded us like a bird. "But maybe David continue to teach me new things." She finished. Immediately the other two twitched their heads round to stare at me while I groped wildly to contain the sudden hilarity that arrived. Mike's lips quivered and Mary shook her head slowly while struggling to repress the giggle that exploded from her.
"Twins next time, eh?" She sniggered.
I retreated to my snug nest on the passenger seats with as much dignity as I could muster, which wasn't too much as the laughter pursued me. All very well, I thought, we can behave like two couples in a new Garden of Eden but what about the snake? And what about our simmering relatives down in deepest France? And even if we solve that problem - I was looking forward to digging the graves - then we had the prospect of thousands of bewildered children to cope with. Sleep arrived as unwelcome images flitted across my mind. We still didn't know how the big wipe out had happened and who did it. Perhaps a sorrowful but understanding God had decided that the experiment wasn't a success and reduced our numbers in a sweep of a celestial Hand. Were we the beginnings of a new experiment? Was some Entity sitting back, frowning, wondering if it would all work out this time? And if it did, what would be the solution? What were we here for anyway? Kill and be killed? Was that all there was?
The wind howled outside our metal cavern floating on the waters of Portsmouth Harbour, the rain beat on the roof and darkness fell, inside my head as well as outside. Dreadful dreams arrived, dreams of death and Linda, images that my subconscious had been carrying for all the time we had wandered on this empty planet. Some time in the night, in the almost total darkness of our floating home, a soft cheek nestled against mine and soft hands held on to me. The dreams faded and blessed oblivion arrived.
In the morning, when I surfaced slowly, I found Mike peering with restrained enthusiasm at the bright blue sky that greeted us. "Go now?" He enquired huskily, scratching his scars. "Pity we can't get a weather forecast."
Mary gave him a superior look and tapped away at the interrogator. "Of course we can, the ship can tell us."
"I've been wondering." I said sleepily, aware of Melanee's shoulder leaning against me. "What do we do when we get there? I mean they're not going to kill the fatted calf, are they?" I saw their faces tighten at the thought of going back to war, but it had to be done. "And then there's Jules and Marie." I added.
"What about them?" Mike demanded. "They scuttled off because they thought you were going to kill them." His gaze was steady. "And they could have been right then." His face crinkled into a grin. "They don't know about the civilising influence of our resident genius there." He pointed his chin at Melanee.
Mary didn't seem convinced that civilisation had descended upon me but she opened her mouth to say something important except Melanee beat her to the draw. "I also have big thoughts." She informed us brightly. "I will go and talk to your friends, yes." She turned to regard me as my drowsiness disappeared and granite homicidal tendencies arrived. "Daveed." She drew the name out in her special way. "Listen, please."
"The hell you will..." I began when Mary stretched out a long arm and placed her hand on my sleeve.
"Let her finish, David. She has intelligence far above us, you know that and it's getting bigger all the time. I'd like to know what she's planned for our final act."
"It is what they will wish. I am the one who can tell them how to create the world they wish to live in. All the children that wait to be born, I am the teacher to be and only I know how to bring them to sentience."
For long seconds we all stared at her until clanking noises started up in my skull. "Wait a damned minute." I muttered. "You know how to start it all off? I don't believe it." I glared at her while the wheels spun round in my head at painful speed. "You can't know."
She smiled, a demure and very irritating smile. "You are right, David, as usual but they will not know that, will they?"
"They'll kill you on the spot." Mike asserted crisply.
"They've been gunning for you ever since that bloody French pair spilled the beans." I ground out.
"The programs." Mary murmured. "I see, yes." She looked up at Melanee's bland expression. "You know how to unlock their programs because you watched me do it." She rubbed her chin and glanced at Mike. "She goes in there, but we tell them about her first, right? And who goes with you? Someone has to."
"Not David." Melanee announced with a calmness that told me she knew very well what I was thinking. "If David goes to see them they will know it cannot be anything but mmm what you say? A trick, yes." She swept her eyes over the other two and settled on Mary. "You will come with me."
For an instant, Mary's expression retreated into abject fear. "No!" Mike cried hoarsely.
"I will need you and these," she waved a hand to include mine and Mike's frozen apprehension. "They will be dead."
"How?" I grunted, beginning to understand the full depths of her deviousness.
She smiled at us. "I am not the only one with big brain. You can see, David and Mike, you understand?"
"Christ, we crash this tin tub." Mike seemed captivated and thunderstruck.
"But," I said slowly, thinking that Melanee would have made a good Jesuit. "We make sure that they know you two are coming, right? We have a very convenient smash within walking distance. Yes," I brooded. "But they're not dim, they'll come over all lumps of suspicion, not to mention waving guns in your face if you don't do what they want."
"Mary and I, we interrogated the nexus and we know how to enter the underground complex at Quissac."
"We do?" Mary stared at her. "Was that what you were doing?" She raised an eyebrow at Mike. "When we went to the Scottish terminal, remember? I showed her how the thing works, only..." She gazed at Melanee's calm face. "You didn't need to be shown, did you? You'd worked it all out by watching me and thinking." She shook her head slowly. "Holy Jesus, what have you got in your head." Her stare became rigid and slightly apprehensive. "You're a mutation, you've got something we don't have."
"Stop right there." I snarled. "Just a Goddamned minute." I took a deep breath. “You know how to unscramble what you've done to their ever loving master computer, yes? Fine, we tell them that, yes? That the idea? So they won't blast you until you walk into their parlour." I clenched teeth and ignored Melanee's patient expression. "OK, beautiful, logical. You may have the secrets of the universe in your head but I know people. They'll kill Mary or threaten to and then where are we?" I looked from Melanee to Mike. "You and me, we arrive bristling with guns at the last minute like the Seventh Cavalry. And they don't know we're coming? Christ, it'll never work." I finished flatly. Why had the Americans only had seven regiments of Cavalry? And why didn't they use the other six? Odd, and irrelevant thoughts of this nature flitted through my head as we all stared at Melanee.
Melanee leaned back and regarded us thoughtfully. "No, you are right, I do not know how this Selena and this Sorenson, yes? how they think, but I assume they do think. You see," she put out her hands and looked down at them. "They want to release their population on to the world, but it has to be the right population, properly programmed like your
computers here. And they do not like you," she smiled suddenly. "But you know all that. I can make sure that it does not happen, must not happen, for all of us and the children to come." She continued to look down at her hands while we all glanced at each other.
"Yeah." Mary breathed at last. "I get it, I think." She shifted uneasily before giving Mike a strange look. "The world is dead for ten thousand years. The only ones left are mutations because of those neuron pills. The only free minds remaining on this planet are sitting here and down in Quissac." She stared out of the front screen at the rain which had started up again. "Over five centuries we looked out into the Galaxy for other intelligent life. When we did our little trip we had the ship looking deeper into space than ever before and the probes we sent before they all scanned the stars. We looked for oxygen planets around G type stars, you remember?" Mike nodded slowly. "So," Mary carried on in a flat voice. "There's only us. We're as sure as we can be that no other star system in this galaxy has a planet with intelligent life." She held up a hand. "Don't tell me the numbers, I know them all. We could have missed some, yeah, but there has to be a Goldilocks orbit, you know?" She shifted herself, glancing at Melanee uneasily. "So, if the junta down there win then there won't be any intelligent life in this galaxy because the new generation will be designed that way." She paused while a slowly growing apprehension made me shut the mouth, waiting for the punch line. "We don't matter. Whether we live or die isn't important. What matters is that the human presence here is allowed to grow and be free, free to make mistakes like wars and genocide but free to spread the seed of life that thinks to other worlds, to give some purpose to an empty universe." Slowly, ever so slowly, she lifted her head and gazed at me and Mike. "She knows that and she's telling us, me and you, that we have to get it right no matter what the cost."
Come Back Page 29