Come Back

by George Erlynne

  The rain fell outside with unrelenting misery, just audible, making the silence in our close technical cabin heavier. Melanee had thought the deep thoughts and come up with the apocalypse. We had a choice of a dead world forever, spinning endlessly round the sun until the inevitable, accompanied by a sky full of billions upon billions of star systems and nowhere in that vast emptiness was a spark of intelligence. It would spread the sparkling glories of eternity and no one would understand. But even if we carried on, would we ever solve the riddle? Could anyone, anything, ever solve it? Was it solvable at all? Did it matter? Did anything or anyone care? Max Sorenson certainly did, and so did Selena and her crew.

  Then again, was Mary right? The nearest galaxy to us, Andromeda, was two million or more light years away and even supposing she was right and we were the only resident geniuses in this galaxy, what about Andromeda or the other billions of galaxies? What chance that we were the only bright apes in the universe? Impossible odds but could she be right? We would never know and probably could never know. We could only act on what we did know which was bugger all as far as I could see.

  Coming out of this painful bout of semi-intelligent musings, I became aware that they were all looking at me with expectant expressions. Mary was super bright with figures and Mike had a science brain several levels above mine, while Melanee seemed to be growing into the Brain of the Solar System, so my compound of guns and bad language appeared superfluous.

  "It's up to you, old son." Mike said quietly. "I understand what she means. We have the power, maybe, to recreate the Earth, be like Adam and Eve again only no snake. But if you don't agree we don't do it because sure as hell we can't win without you."

  It was blackmail, of course, nice blackmail and papered over with a sad smile but he knew I couldn't refuse, which left me in the position of an executioner if it all went pear shaped and Mary died, not to mention what would happen to my remaining sanity if Melanee left me alone on this dead world.

  "OK." I said soberly, noting the slight nod from Melanee. "But you do as I say. Swear to me you won't get attacks of conscience or faint at the sight of blood, because I don't think we can do it without blood and I want to make damned sure it isn't ours."

  "We know." Mary said, but her hands were tightly clasped together. Mike nodded, biting his lip.

  "We will tell them we are coming." Melanee said calmly. "I will do it. They will listen."

  Chapter 25

  CONTACT

  Melanee had it all worked out. She knew I would agree, she had an action plan running in her head. I was being gently but cleverly organised. Ideas that arrived in my head were really her ideas implanted in my thick skull to boost my own ego by making me think I was being smart. Those deep, dark eyes looked at me while behind them a brain of titanic dimensions calculated everything like a chess game in her head.

  The ship would give us a link to Selena and co and even provide video facilities so that we could see the bastards on our screen. Mary tapped the codes in and waited for the ship to appear over the horizon allowing us to bounce the signal. She was just about to start off when I grabbed her arm.

  "Hold it." I told her. She gave me a slant eyed look but Melanee simply gazed equably at me. "We need to think this through." I scratched my chin while trying to summon up a tenth of the brain power that was watching me with some impatience. "We tell them we're on our way, fine. They're not going to believe any convenient crash and don't forget they have surveillance equipment. Any crash that looked good would be good, I'm not the sort of pilot who can only half crash this thing."

  Melanee frowned at argument with the master plan. "But we cannot just fly up to them." She said, looking at me as if I had just laid an egg.

  But something she had said before was niggling away inside my skull. "You can get into that complex? The one down near Quissac? Without having to go through the main entrance?"

  "It's a pile of rubble anyway." Mike muttered.

  "They are going to know we're coming whether we tell them or not." Mary said, frowning at Melanee.

  "Right." I agreed, looking at Mike. "You and me. We go in and talk. We tell them we're the last ones left, only us two, and we're, well, kind of bitter about losing all the women and Bradley, we tell them we have nothing to lose and we can wipe them out just to sleep at nights."

  A long silence greeted this plan of action which was obviously neither popular nor devious enough for the women. "And how are you going to convince them you can wipe them out?" Mary demanded. "What with?"

  "Can work computer program?" Melanee enquired softly, knowing full well what the answer was. She shook her head slightly as if chiding a wayward child, but damped down my fire of irritation with one of her stunning smiles. "Think you have good idea though."

  "It's you with ideas, me, I only fire guns now." I told her snappily but she just kept the smile switched on. "You tell me just what we put in that computer terminal and you work out what we'd need to do to make the whole thing crash."

  "Crash!" Mike exclaimed. "You mean we tell them we press a button and all their little playmates downstairs never see the light of day?"

  "Impossible." Mary said flatly. "No program would do that, only an idiot would allow shutdown without protection. There would be a mass of entry codes to go through before it did anything like that."

  "But we have a genius here." I explained gently.

  "Even a genius needs a terminal." Mike said shortly.

  "Hampshire." Mary said suddenly, looking with suspicion from me to Melanee. "We've got the fuel to get there and still go and fight a war in the south of France." She shook her head. "She may be a genius, David, but you're a born criminal."

  Silence descended while all pondered. Mike sat staring gloomily out of the forward screen, watching the rain drift across grey water, Mary beside him. Melanee simply retained her smile at half power and regarded me with irritating complacency. Of course, she had manoeuvred me into thinking out this invincible plan of action, I saw it now. She knew I would never let her go into the lion's den, with or without Mary, so I would do the deed. Her smile grew sultry as she gazed at what must have been slowly dawning comprehension on my face. She was thinking several paces in front of me, of all of us now, but there were things she didn't know, like Max Sorenson, for example and I was going to make sure she never did because he would kill her immediately, if Selena didn't beat him to it.

  "Going to be a funny war." Mike opined into the quiet. "And you're going to kill them, aren't you?" His eyes rested on mine with a kind of wary acceptance. "You're never going to forget."

  Mary nodded. "Poor Jules and Marie." She muttered. "No wonder they ran."

  Feeling slightly peeved at this piece of character assassination, I thought it was time we got the show on the road. "You are sure, aren't you, that you can get into that complex, I mean the bits downstairs where all the new generation is ticking away." I enquired, staring at Melanee with some alarm. I didn't want her to have some master plan of her own and not tell me about it.

  "Can remember." She said dreamily, causing Mary to scrutinise her with her best frown.

  "Remember? How?" Mike asked sharply.

  "It is where I came from. The memories, they are, how you say? Yes, implanted, that is the word, is it not?" She frowned herself now, turning that nearly hypnotic gaze from me to the dreary scene outside. "I have been thinking." She added softly.

  "Bloody hell." Mike muttered. "Better get some paper and write it down."

  Melanee shook her head slightly, the smile still there, a faint expression that gave her an ethereal look, almost angelic, otherworldly. Mary glanced at me and firmed her lips, her frown gone but her eyes telling me she was, like me, in awe at the brain power given to this designer woman. That's what she was, a design for a ruler, a sovereign, a queen, a female mistress of the world to come, only it hadn't arrived, not yet.

  "No." Melanee said suddenly. Her smile deepened to the one she kept for me. "I am not what you think." Sh
e was answering our thoughts, not our words. "If there was a final treatment, I didn't get it." Her smile increased to a knee trembling brilliance. "Instead I got something else." She patted her stomach. "David, Mike, Mary, I told you before, I want what you want and I am just

  like you." She made me believe but Mike muttered something under his breath which sounded like 'In a pig's arse' to me, a comment that Melanee chose to ignore.

  "Tell us." I said, taking hold of her hand. If she was going to be a queen then I was going to make damned sure no one else got into the Royal bed.

  "It is a mathematical coincidence that I am here just as your ship comes back. Yes?" She watched our faces with bright eyes. "Too much of a coincidence. I think that twenty-two years ago, a signal arrived from your ship, a signal to bring me to sentience. I was meant to be ready and fully grown, programmed for the new population to come when your crew came, when this Selena? She would have known and the others."

  "Jesus." Mike muttered. "You got loose and they knew, they knew before we ever got here."

  "How?" Mary demanded. "All communication went through me...wait, wait." She put her hand to her head. "Who woke up first?"

  "The Captain, who else?" Mike confirmed, staring at Melanee. "My God, why didn't we think of that."

  "Yeah, but we have a small mystery here." I scratched an itchy chin, a sure sign of trouble to come. "The ship signals back home to start Melanee off, right. OK, I buy that but how did they know she hadn't turned out to be the perfect girl, just like Eve."

  "Eve wasn't perfect." Mary pointed out. "Look what she did to Adam." She laughed, a genuine laugh full of amusement, the first for days. She'd solved a puzzle, and her morale was rising like the tide outside. "Max wakes first, we know that. How far out were we? Around fifty AU's, remember? That's around seven light hours, so any signal he sent back here would take seven hours to arrive..."

  "And the reply comes back seven hours later." Mike muttered. "The bastard asks the complex if everything's AOK and all the people are dead and where's my girl, eh? And then," he glanced at Melanee. "Then it says she grew up the wrong way."

  "And we start to go look in the main program and Max blows a fuse." Mary added.

  "Yeah, somewhere in there was the record of his transponder beam and he didn't want you to find it but not just that, the master plan was going wrong so all hands-on deck and only those in the know would go down and propagate the species." I thought it through and gazed in my turn at Melanee, who was watching me intently. "They would have looked for you and when they found you..."

  "Hence the bombers." Mary finished for me. "They know she can scramble the whole thing."

  "And you." Mike grinned at me. "You bollixed it all up for them by taking us down and thoroughly trashing all their bad intentions and to cap it all, you find her and make her pregnant." He chuckled. "No wonder Max is in a bad mood."

  "Much worse since we froze all the programs." Mary said with a grin. "David, do you have to kill them?" The question shot out of her like a bullet.

  Leaning back on the seat and letting out a long sigh, I regarded them with my best bland expression. "Not to worry, they see reason and we all live happily ever after." The comment was not well received, so I sighed again, louder this time. "Suppose we catch them with their trousers down, eh?" Melanee frowned, trying to understand a concept which her logical mind seemed to be struggling with. "We round them up, fine, and we decide what to do about the kids downstairs, right? Good, but what then? How long do we sit in front of them holding a gun? We let them go? Splendid idea, they wander off into the forest and start picking flowers?"

  "Yeah." Mike muttered. "They didn't wait ten thousand years to turn into gardeners." Depression seemed to descend on him until he suddenly sat up. "Just a damned minute. Why only one of the master races? Why not a Melanee in China or America?"

  Mary frowned furiously, staring at me as if it was all my doing. "Yes, indeed, why not?"

  "Perhaps there is." Melanee said softly. "Perhaps where every nursery is located we have a new model waiting just like me but..." She paused tantalisingly. "Only one nursery found itself invaded by people ten thousand years old who would know what to do with her."

  The puzzle resolved itself. Melanee had done it again. We had brought retribution on ourselves by landing where they didn't want us to, it explained why Max and Co were so adamant about who was going to come back to Earth. They needed to sort out the hiccup in their infernal plan but we had come down on the wrong spot and they knew we would find her sooner or later or she would find us and then we would unravel everything because she had the knowledge in her head but she hadn't been thinking the right thoughts, ergo she had to be eliminated and so did we. What a nice bunch they were and how I was going to enjoy filling them full of holes. Passing on this sentiment in a slightly watered-down version did not go down too well.

  Their faces told me they didn't fancy the prospect, but Max and Selena, plus the rest of the fanatics, all turned into reincarnations of Robin Hood didn't seem likely. They would kill us the first chance they got and there were a lot more of them than us. The conversation died but Melanee lost her smile and became busy, starting to tidy up our cluttered cabin space, an activity which Mary decided to supervise while Mike ran through the aircar's running programs. There was nothing more to say, we were going in the morning.

  The Hampshire terminal hadn't figured much on our agenda but now it was needful to find just where it was and how to get into the damned thing. The Inverness terminal had been conveniently blasted open by a special Scottish gale but down in the depths of sunny Hampshire it might not be so easy. The grid reference showed a spot just to the south of Winchester or where the city had been, but nothing else. I began to get an attack of gloom as difficulties multiplied but Melanee was quite unconcerned, an attitude which caused me considerable exasperation.

  However, an English sun poured down on us in the dawn, the engines started without fuss and we went through the somewhat heart stopping routine of getting up to optimum height by stopping and starting the starboard engine, a procedure that Mike studied with unnerving attention, now that he was walking wounded. His fine collection of scars and scabs was maturing nicely, or so Mary said. How she knew, I didn't like to ask.

  But those trees, the solid mass of them that flashed by under our nose, they brought back the despair which had been hovering in the back of my consciousness. Many happy days had I spent in Hampshire, a splendid County for pubs, and now all there was, running to the horizon, was a green sea. No roads, no buildings, no ancient cathedrals, nothing. Mike felt it, too, staring glumly out of the front screen while Mary and Melanee, neither of them with roots in Hampshire or indeed this rain sodden Island, they both sent out waves of silent sympathy.

  "Two more minutes on this course." Mike said suddenly. "We need a clearing."

  Grunting agreement, I surveyed the surroundings with rising concern. "It's on a hill, yes?"

  "They all are," he agreed. "There!"

  Coming towards us was a hill, nothing remarkable, just another rise in rolling countryside, but on top, quite distinct, was a flat surface, greened with exposure, circular, obviously artificial. The ever-present trees weren't growing on it so there was nothing for it but to plonk this thing down on top of it. Gasps from the passengers told me I should have explained beforehand, but we bumped down and sat back as the turbines ran down in whistling silence.

  "Right." I announced. "That's my part done. Now I sit back and let the brains do the rest."

  This little speech was ill received, Mary giving me a cold look and Melanee producing her best frown. Outside the sun was strong in a clear sky, we had all day to find the oracle, but impatience broke out. Gathering my needs for the day, I left them to it and migrated to the top of the hull, settling down comfortably with my rifle across my knees.

  "You going to sit up there all day?" Mary's strident tones wafted up from below, from where they had all clambered down on to the long grass surro
unding the construction.

  "I'm wondering if there's any Scotsmen around here." I replied.

  The sudden silence told me their brains had clicked on to the last time we had investigated one of these odd concrete wotsits but presently a loud argument started up. The problem was how to get into the damned thing, phrases being flung about ever louder until I was sure the locals would come to find out what the hell the noise was all about. Of course, Melanee solved the mystery. She walked all round the place until she found a well scuffed pathway, stood still and stared at it before letting out a restrained yell which brought the other two scampering up.

  Sitting there, my automatic scanning regime switched on. Sweeping the whole surroundings gave me a crick in the neck but the woodlands were close, maybe only fifty yards off, well within arrow range if anyone was taking a bead on me. Meanwhile, down below, the committee had found the entrance, muffled howls of what I took to be delight echoing up from the innards. I had no curiosity, I didn't feel drawn to computer hardware, quite another sort of hardware in fact. My speciality was security and I was prepared to thin out the population if they appeared, however much that would upset the balance of the British Isles. Besides, it gave me time to think.

  Melanee's master plan had holes in it. The genius had it all arranged but I knew people, especially murderers and fanatics, which was what we were dealing with. Max was no fool and Selena had been one of the brightest brains on the planet when she had billions to compete with. The rest were no slouches either and I couldn't see how we could convince them that the story we were going spin them was true. I wouldn't have believed it. I would have seen it for what it was, a smoke screen while something else was going on. So, plan 'B' then. I waited patiently for the answer to crystallise in my cortex but regrettably a large blank remained and refused to move.