The Micronauts

by Gordon Williams

  The micronauts

  The micronauts

  map of the Garden

  OUT OF THIS WORLD!

  micronautsOOwill

  The micronauts

  Williams, Gordon M., 1934-

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  A novel ot the ultimate frontier - tie meet fantastic adventure of any century

  The world might have been coming to an end, so violent was the rushing storm of noise and commotion, the shaking of grass saplings with earthquake ferocity, the pelting down of seeds through a snowstream of white dust. They cringed in fear, not knowing which way to run from the monstrous creatures screaming and squabbling above their heads.

  Corporal Carr fired one shot before Magruder and the American grabbed his arm. Robinson had a glimpse of great claws and scaly legs and an expanse of creamy feathers. Carr pushed Magruder away, raising his pistol for another shot . . .

  THE MICRONAUTS By Gordon Williams

  Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

  https://archive.org/details/micronautsOOwill

  Darkness fell quickly, catching them out in the open. They were inflating the tent when they heard it.

  “That’s an owl!’’

  “Don’t move—they can see better at night than we can in sunshine.’’

  “Shut up! Everybody freeze!’’

  From the blackness of the huge night it came again, a throaty hooting and then the shrill kuvvit, kuvvit of a tawny owl.

  “It’s right overhead, for Christ’s sake!’’

  “Keep quiet, man, their hearing is incredible.’’

  “Miloblenska?’’

  “Where’s that fool gone?’’

  “Miloblenska? What the hell —

  There was a massive swoosh of heavily-feathered wings—and then the tiny, distant screams of a man . . .

  Hunger.

  The whole world was hungry . . .

  The young driver who did an unscheduled run from WFC’s New York HQ (the old PanAm Building) to Kennedy Airport on the night of Friday, September 5, had lost two days’ food coupons betting on the number of death sentences in the Westchester baby-buying trial. His next legal food would be Meal Two on Sunday. He knew his passenger must be carrying an official travel-pack ration.

  Holding the door of the old Lincoln, he said, jokingly, “Us staff drivers don’t get tipped, they’re very strict about that. But with edible tips—where’s the evidence?’’

  His passenger, a gaunt, bearded man wearing an old combat jacket, olive trousers, and bare feet in thong sandals, shook his head. The driver looked nervously round the floodlit approachway. It was deserted. “I was joking, is all,” he said ingratiatingly. The gaunt man signed the warrant and picked up his old leather bag.

  “Your sense of humor could easily earn you three years in a permafrost camp, son.”

  “I got three dependents—you won’t report me, willya?” the driver said pleadingly but the tall man was already showing his white ID card—WORLD FOOD CONTROL, DEP’T. OF SCIENCE, STATUS-TEMPORARY—to the armed security guards.

  There were only three people ahead of him at the desk marked EUROPE-ALL ZONES, a shabbily-dressed

  young woman with a toddler in walking-harness, and a young-looking man wearing the severe black raincoat favored by WFC administrators. The child was crying.

  He ignored it. For a moment, his eye rested on the inevitable WFC poster, the fatherly face of Commissioner Towne and a single wheatsheaf. A faint sneer passed across his gaunt features.

  “Your travel authorization is not effective before September twentieth,” a uniformed desk clerk was saying to the young mother.

  “I told you—my husband is a sea-bed driller, he’s being assigned to Sakhalin Island on Monday—if I don’t reach Moscow by Sunday night, I won’t see him for another six months. Please let me catch this flight.”

  “That’s impossible. Step aside, please. Your papers, sir?”

  The young executive in the black raincoat produced a plastic wallet from his aluminum attache case. The child dropped to the litter-strewn floor in a tantrum.

  “What’s wrong with your little girl?” the tail man asked the young mother.

  “He’s not a girl! He’s hungry and tired—we hitched here from Chicago by road.” She tried to drag the child off the unswept floor. “I had to give most of our coupons to a convoy driver.”

  The desk clerk handed his papers back to the young executive. “Go through to the departure lounge, Mr. Larson. Flight time is about ten or fifteen minutes.”

  Seeing his red ID card, the young mother grabbed at his arm. “You’re top brass from Geneva. You could authorize my flight, if I don’t—”

  Seemingly terrified by her touch, he slapped at her hands. The desk clerk pressed a button. “Your papers?” the other clerk said curtly to the tall man, obviously suspicious of his long, gray hair and eccentric clothing. The tall man handed over his white card and warrant sheet. The young executive pulled himself away from the mother.

  “Purpose of your flight, Mr. Bruce?” the desk clerk demanded.

  “Professor Bruce. I’m going home. Can’t you help that woman?”

  “She should not have been allowed into the building. You’re a registered Outlander, Professor?”

  “That’s right.”

  The two desk clerks conferred, murmuring secretively and giving him hostile glances.

  “We have to know the specific circumstances of your journey,” one of them said snappily.

  “Can’t you read the warrant?”

  The desk clerk folded his arms. “Warrants can be forged.” He looked at the other clerk. “George—test his ID card under the fluoroscope.” He looked back at Bruce. “Well?”

  Controlling his temper, Bruce indicated the warrant. His tone was icy. “Those black marks are words. It’s called reading.”

  The clerk’s face tightened. “If you want to be obstructive, you can stay here all night.”

  Bruce slapped both hands down on the counter. “You said the specific circumstances?” he said, with icy quietness. “Al
l right. There’s a symbiont bacteria in the gut of termites which breaks down cellulose. Cellulose is a sugar the human body cannot absorb. I’m consultant to a program at NRS Six, Georgia, to culture that symbiont bacteria artificially so that we can turn plant cellulose into a carbohydrate for human consumption. You with me so far, son?” His voice began to rise. A uniformed guard came hurrying across the concourse. “I’m now flying London-Helsinki. From there, I get a Department of Mines flight to Vaasa on the Gulf of Bothnia. After that, Frontier Security gives me a ride up to Lake Plateau where I live—far from creeps like you. I do this trip every four or five months, as you goddamn well know. Now, are you going to give me any more of this crap or— ”

  “Let go of my baby!”

  The guard was twisting the young mother’s arm, trying to separate her and the child. The young executive, Larson, had just reached the narrow gateway which housed the ultrasonic decontamination beams. His eyes

  widened incredulously as he heard the tall, gaunt man’s voice. “Take your hands off her, you ape!”

  Larson hurried into the narrow tunnel, following the signposted procedures meticulously, praying that the incident would not delay the flight. He was an assistant comptroller in the Department of Finance, WFC HQ, Geneva; his hunger was of a different Kind . . .

  To his amazement, the woman and child came into the lounge a few minutes later, followed by the gaunt man in the army jacket. They sat at the other end of the big, bare room.

  From his old leather bag Bruce produced two small packages. “This one’s dried hare,” he said to the mother, “needs a lot of chewing. This one’s what we call a protenoid, it’s made from a mixture of dry amino acids—he probably won’t care for the taste. Sorry, it’s all I have.”

  For all the urgency of his return to Geneva, Larson was compelled to intervene. “Don’t you know it’s a serious offense to bring animal flesh into a Scheduled Zone?”

  Bruce turned slowly, piercing eyes resting on Larson’s twitching cheek, a nervous tic which the ambitious young finance officer could never control in stress situations.

  “Another member of the new dominant species, Homo bureaucratis,” Bruce’s deep voice said across the empty lounge. “Don’t you remember being hungry as a child—or does your evolutionary stage bypass childhood?”

  “I should report you for making an unofficial transfer of food allotments— ”

  “Listen, sonny, it was the unofficial transfer of food that got this lady on the flight.”

  Larson was shocked. “You bribed the desk clerk?”

  “I gave him something real to chew, it seemed to rekindle his sense of brotherly love. The guard got some as well. You going to report us all?”

  Larson sat down, his twitching face a brilliant red. “I

  THE MICRONAUTS

  cannot afford to delay the flight,” he said weakly. ‘‘I shall make a report back in Geneva.”

  “You do that, son, your type won’t be happy until that blissful Arcadia where you have the whole world population caged and numbered. My section is Special Research Projects—you should get a fair hearing from Chief-Coordinator Richards, he loves bureaucrats.”

  The solitary stewardess came down the gangway with the usual selection of sleeping pills, mild hallucinogens and ganja cigarettes. Bruce waved them away. “You’ll enjoy our in-flight movie, sir, it’s a new one from Brazil about a breakthrough in phytoplankton harvesting techniques— ”

  “I couldn’t stand the excitement. Pull my curtain, that’s a good girl. And make sure that infant gets something to eat.”

  Alone in the rear cabin for red card passengers, Larson spent the flight outlining the report he would be making personally to the Commissioner in the morning. Having a dread of high altitudes, he did not look down at the deserted spaces of Picardy when the captain of the old 747 shuttle announced their descent to Geneva, but munched hurriedly on his VIP travel-pack ration of expanded chicken-substitute on fish-flour bread. It was the career break he had always prayed for, not just a crime but a major conspiracy!

  Dawn brought the food rioters back to the open space of rough ground in front of the dock warehouse complex. A truck, cocooned in an improvised shield of vulcanized rubber, nosed out from the old tenement buildings.

  “Aim low for the wheels,” Captain Robinson said into his helmet transmitter. The black-uniformed SD squad started firing, but the truck picked up speed across the brick-strewn ground. Behind it came the yelling rioters.

  The truck smashed into the electrified fence. A concrete post was jerked out of the ground. “For Christ’s sake, turn off the water-cannons—there’s five thousand volts going through that wire. Aim above their heads, Bravo Company.”

  A hundred or so rioters ran for shelter among the old buildings as the troops fired their automatic rifles. The truck reversed, dragging the entangled heavy-mesh for a few yards, then freeing itself and lurching away.

  They crouched behind the armored car, taking off their vizored helmets and massaging their necks.

  “How did they know about the shipment?” asked Sergeant Smith. “Those containers were sealed in the north of Scotland.”

  “Dockworkers can smell what’s inside a refrigerated container.”

  “Listen—it’s coming again.”

  Robinson wearily put on his black helmet. “Let’s hope we don’t give them a martyr.”

  But it was not the rioters’ truck. Across the open ground came a big black troop carrier, with only the extra antennae and scanners on the roof to denote its conversion to a Mobile Command Vehicle. It pulled up beside the much smaller armored car. A door slid open. Out stepped a powerfully-built man wearing the green uniform of WFC Security. On his helmet were four white stars.

  They saluted.

  “I am Staff-Commander Khomich,” said the man in the green uniform, raising his visor. “Your brigade commander has waived to me on this Event. Give me your appraisal, Captain.”

  The voice was not exactly harsh, but completely toneless, English with a faintly Slavic inflexion. The blue eyes were small, but intensely alert. Robinson swallowed. “Butcher” Khomich!

  “We estimate about five hundred of them, sir. They’ve just tried to ram the fence with an insulated truck. Yesterday we thought it was spontaneous, but this morning they’ve been carrying a Union Jack.”

  “The emblem of the Free England group?”

  “I think we can hold them off, sir.”

  “Come into the MCV, Captain.”

  Inside the MCV, Khomich took off his helmet. Robinson was surprised at how young he appeared, not much older than himself, his face just as hard and expressionless as it looked on television, but his skin pink and smooth. His fair hair was closely cropped.

  “Holding them off is no longer satisfactory,” Khomich said. He looked into the darkened gangway at the rear, where the blue glow from video-monitors outlined the profiles of operators hunched at the console bank. “Are the helicopters here yet?”

  “Approaching from the southwest, sir.”

  He turned to the young SD captain. “Stand down your water-cannons. Have all your men fall back to this position.”

  “But that will only encourage them, sir!”

  “We might as well get it over with, Captain.’’

  “They’ll get tired and go away, sir. These Local Events never amount to much.’’

  “This has been reclassified as a Major Event—it requires a Maximum Impact response.”

  “These people are simply hungry!”

  “Most people are hungry, but they are not rioting.”

  “Look, sir, they’ve heard that four thousand frozen reindeer carcasses are being shipped to Hamburg. How would you react if you heard that some bloody pen- pusher in Geneva had decided— ”

  “I react only to orders, Captain.”

  “Getting video now, sir,” said an operator, “the crowd’s reassembling.”

  On one monitor, they saw an aerial view of the rioters in a side
street.

  “Gas-wagons standing by, sir.”

  “Tell the snatch-group lieutenant I want that flag taken out. Captain, have your squad fall back.”

  Robinson stared defiantly at Khomich.

  “Do you want your men gassed?”

  Robinson hesitated, then pressed his transmission switch. “Black leader to Bravo Company—fall back to the MCV. Prepare for gas.”

  The rioters’ truck came into vision. Seeing the black-uniformed Special Duty squad falling back, the rioters spread out. Suddenly, a group of commandos in protective padding darted out from behind an adjoining building. Before the rioters could defend their flank, the bulky commandos battered into the crowd, seized the illegal Union Jack, and retreated without a loss.

  “It’s not policy to admit the existence of specific terrorist groups,” Khomich explained. A helicopter appeared on the ground-level monitor. Khomich picked up a hand-mike.

  “This is Zone Security Command. Lay down your weapons and remain exactly where you are. There will be no more warnings.”

  Some of the rioters pointed, then veered toward the

  THE MICRONAUTS

  MCV, throwing stones. The insulated truck headed for the fence. Over the video sound-channel came the voice of a helicopter pilot.

  “There’s a sniper on a roof down there.’’

  “Scorch him out.”

  The truck hit the fence. Another concrete post was dragged out of the ground. The crowd ran for the gap.

  “Gas now.”

  On the ground-level monitor Robinson saw a gas- tender appear at the other side of the open ground. Out of what looked like a gun barrel spumed a jet of white vapor.

  The MCV’s camera panned up to roof-level. From the nose of a black and yellow helicopter came a spurt of white flame.

  “Got him.”

  A burning man appeared from behind a brick chimney column. He made jerky attempts to beat out flames on his shoulders, then lost his footing on the black tiles. The flames flared as he soared down six stories to the ground. Both monitors now carried misty pictures with only a few dark silhouettes visible.