Earthbound

by Joe Haldeman

  “Might be. But I think the time for that is past, now. I better check out back.”

  “I’ll go,” Alba said. She had the riot gun. “Won’t use this unless they’re coming in the door.”

  “Good. Take the other pistol, Carmen.” I did. It was the one Paul had used. Keep it in the family. I clicked the safety off, on, off again. A speck of red paint showed when it was off. Red equals fire, easy enough.

  There was a long stammer of automatic fire, part of which crashed through the window. Only seven rounds of it, evidently; there were seven small holes letting daylight in. But the glass hadn’t shattered.

  “He’s close,” Namir said in a hoarse whisper. “If Dustin can’t see him, he’s probably just behind the sandbags. Where you were on guard last night, Carmen.”

  I was trying to swallow, but couldn’t. Most of those bullets hit the wall behind me. If I’d been standing up, I’d have been hit.

  “Stay down,” he said unnecessarily. “He might try to shoot out—” There was a longer sustained roar of fire, glass splintering everywhere, which blew a hole in the picture window more than two feet wide.

  Namir stood up quickly and sighted through the hole. He stood still as a photograph for two seconds and then fired a single shot, which reverberated like a gong in the closed room.

  “Lucky shot.” He strode over to the front door, unbolted it, and opened it a couple of inches. He aimed down through the slit and fired once more.

  “Okay. Paul, come check. Isn’t this the guy from yesterday?”

  I stepped over to look. It looked like him, Jemmie, in NASA coveralls, but he was face-down on the sidewalk, blood and brains sprayed in a fan from the back of his head; Namir’s second shot. I swallowed bile.

  He was still holding his weapon, a pistol not much bigger than mine, but with a large ammunition canister attached.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “One to go, maybe?”

  “I want to go up and take a look around. You cover things down here?”

  “Sure.” He didn’t sound so sure.

  Where would the third one be? Would he or she continue the plan alone? If I were in that situation, with the two others gone, I would be hiding now. Sneak away after the sun goes down.

  Paul had said something to me. “What?”

  “I want you to cover me while I run out and get that guy’s gun. He has two magazines on his belt, too.”

  “Cover you? You mean shoot back if someone shoots at you?”

  “Yeah. Keep their heads down.”

  “I only have five bullets in this thing.”

  “Here, trade.” He set the rifle in front of me on the reception table, and took my pistol, ours.

  He bounded out the door as I picked up the rifle. I barely had time to figure out the safety, when he came rushing back in with the weapon and its two magazines, and kicked the door shut with a slam behind him.

  “Get down!” I was already crouching, but I flopped down, the rifle clattering under me, and there was a deafening explosion.

  His face was about two feet from mine, and we stared at each other wild-eyed. “Grenade. Hand grenade.”

  Namir came rattling down the stairs. “What the fuck was that?”

  “He had a hand grenade. I went out to get his weapon and I guess his hand relaxed. The whatchamacallit sprang off—”

  “The arming lever.”

  “—and I just got back in time.”

  “God. That’s why he shot out the hole in the window. To toss it in.”

  “I wonder if they have more,” Paul said.

  “I wonder why they had one!” Alba had crawled up with her shotgun. “Not exactly crowd control.”

  “Namir!” Dustin’s voice from the door onto the roof. “Guy running away.”

  “Armed?”

  “Not obviously.”

  He went up, taking two stairs at a time. I could hear them talking quietly, and then a single shot.

  Namir came back down. “Shot over his head. Just let him know we saw him.”

  “Wonder if that’s all of them,” Alba said, standing up.

  “Maybe there’s one inside the building here,” came a voice from the shadows. My brother Card came forward. He was holding one of the flare pistols, aimed at Alba.

  “For God’s sake, Card,” Paul said, “don’t shoot that thing indoors.”

  Alba set the shotgun on the floor and raised both her hands. “Let him have his say.”

  “You came out of the darkness with just what we needed. Guns, ammunition, information. You’re pretty and smart and have a convincing and useful uniform. Anybody who’s ever gamed knows that rule: If it seems to be too good to be true, it’s probably not true.”

  “I have ID.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “It’s a NASA ID with a DNA spot.”

  “Which means shit without electronics.”

  “Card,” I said, “you’re being paranoid.”

  “We all should be,” he said. “Alba, even if you do work for NASA, or did, how do we know you’re not one of them, now?”

  Snowbird came up behind him. “I could speak to that,” she said, “just from observation.”

  “What have you observed?” Card asked.

  “This morning, when it became light, Alba could have taken the riot gun and killed everyone except the upstairs guard. And then, probably, killed the guard as soon as he opened the door. Her partners in this endeavor would be nearby—we know they were—and then the three of them would abduct me and get on with their plan.”

  “An idiotic idea to begin with,” Alba said. “If, as you say, I’m smart, why would I team up with those idiots?”

  “Good enough for me,” Namir said. “Card, your caution is commendable. But excessive in this case, I think.”

  “I agree,” Paul said. “The same thing occurred to me last night, Card. But after we’d talked for a while, no. Besides, she had plenty of opportunities last night and, as Snowbird said, this morning, and we’re all still alive.”

  I saw a tense look pass between Paul and Namir, and could read it well: Paul was closer, and Namir’s expression was saying, “You do it, and I’ll be right behind you.”

  I opened my mouth to intervene, but then the totally unexpected happened.

  “I’m sorry, Alba.” Card lowered the gun. “I’m way out of line here. Forgive me?”

  “Um . . . sure, Card.” She slowly reached down and retrieved the shotgun.

  “I’m used to spending most of my time in virtuality. Making my living in an imaginary world, and mostly living there. Without it, I suppose my imagination is a little out of control.”

  “It isn’t a bad instinct,” Namir said carefully. “We need to think in different ways; need to look at problems from every angle.”

  “Though we might stop short of pointing guns at each other,” Paul said.

  I was just plain stunned. The Card I grew up with would not have apologized if he’d caused the London Fire and 9/11 combined. The fifty years had mellowed him.

  “Okay,” Namir said. “If we’re going to stay here much longer, we have to bury what’s left of that poor bastard up front. He’ll be smelling pretty bad by evening.”

  Something made the small hairs on the back of my neck stir. “Wait. Where’s Meryl?”

  Namir looked around. “Wasn’t she with you?”

  “Back in the kitchen, a minute ago.” I called her name twice.

  Dustin trotted back toward the kitchen. “Oh, shit,” he said softly.

  She was lying on the kitchen floor in front of the sink, her legs out straight, as if she were resting. There was a red stain the size of a playing card on the center of her chest and a large pool of blood under her back. The window over the sink had a bullet hole and blood spatter.

  Dustin fell to his knees and tried to breathe life back into her.

  I couldn’t find breath myself. Elza shook her head, and said “No.” She got down next to Dustin and grabbed his shoulders li
ghtly. “That’s not . . . She’s too far gone.”

  Dustin didn’t respond at first, but then eased the body back down. He wiped blood from his lips. “She didn’t make a sound.”

  It was one of the bullets that had crashed through the living-room window. Paul and I found two spades in a shed out back. There was a patch of grass with some roses behind it. We all took turns standing guard and digging. After we buried her, Dustin said some words in Latin.

  We washed up in the bathroom, avoiding the kitchen. The water from the tap was still warm.

  I felt like part of me had died. I’d never been as close to Meryl as to the other five, but we had all lived through several different worlds together.

  So we weren’t immortal. We weren’t even bulletproof.

  “The hell with the body out front,” Paul said. “Let’s get our gear together and start pushing up to Fruit Farm.”

  “Nothing here for us,” Namir said, then . . . “What the fuck?”

  The lights had come back on.

  From Rear View Mirror: an Immediate History, by Lanny del Piche (Eugene, 2140):

  . . . were the Others just playing a sadistic game, when they restored power temporarily on 30 April that year? If my guess is as good as anybody’s, I’d say they were just temporarily changing the parameters of the experiment. Our physical comfort was of no concern to them, and our existential or psychological state was invisible, not even a variable.

  My first area of study was animal behavior. We were reasonably enlightened in our treatment of test animals—any sign of cruelty or even lack of compassion would’ve resulted in student demonstrations and faculty censure.

  But that was about animals who were cousins to humans. A lab rat shares more than our gross anatomical structure; it has more than hunger and thirst; it prefers one taste to another. Individual rats have individual personalities, even when they’re raised in robotic unison. Sacrificing them was a necessary chore, but I remember how I grated my teeth when I grabbed one by the tail and swung him down to smack his head against the lab table. Did the other rats know what was going on? I don’t remember them reacting; if they had, it would have upset me.

  Perhaps a closer analogy would be in our study of microorganism cultures. A drop of nutrient doped with penicillin would create a clear circle that was the purposeful destruction of millions of creatures. And after their survivors had been measured and photographed, the whole small universe went into a red bio-waste bucket.

  When the Others are done with us, will they leave us there on the table, to work out our individual and collective destinies?

  Or will they be more fastidious than that . . .

  5

  We spread through the building, flipping light switches on and off. Suddenly, I heard a sustained musical note.

  “What’s that?”

  “A-440,” Namir said. “Like a tuning fork.” We followed the sound to the Women’s Lounge area, where a small cube had been left on.

  “Same guy,” Alba said. The one we called Spy—it couldn’t be the same one literally; we’d left him twenty-five light-years away. Just a standard “human” interface for the Others.

  He looked out of the cube, unblinking, for another minute or so. Then the tuning-fork sound ended, and he spoke:

  “We have decided to give you power again, for one week, to see what happens.” The screen went blank.

  “One week,” Paul said. “What do we do first?”

  “Let’s see if the cars work,” Alba said. “One of those panel trucks, or a little bus.”

  I followed her out to the lot, carrying my superfluous pistol. Card came out, too. The morning was pleasant, still cool, about nine o’clock.

  She got into the first car and punched in N-A-S-A on the dash keyboard.

  “Shit.” Faint numerals appeared on the windshield, OOH OOM. “They probably all drained out.”

  We tried two others and got the same. Card found the recharging station and unreeled a cable out to a small bus. He plugged it into the rear.

  “All right!” Alba called out from the driver’s seat. She hopped down. “Is there another cable?”

  “Two more. Maybe do that panel truck?” She looked at me and rubbed her chin. “Do you know how to drive?”

  “Umm . . . it’s been a while.” I had a license back in 2070, but moved to Mars in ’72. “Sixty-some years. I suppose cars are a lot different.”

  “But you can,” she said to Card.

  He shrugged. “I have a car, but I live in LA. Haven’t touched a steering wheel in years.”

  “You may be about to.” She pointed to a stolid-looking blocky sedan. “Might as well charge that one up, too. We may want to look official.”

  He went off to do that. “How long do they take to charge up?”

  “An hour, maybe a couple of hours. Depends on the range, mainly. And whether they’re hooked up to free energy. You probably want to take the sedan to get the most miles.”

  “Couldn’t fit Snowbird in there.”

  “Well, the panel truck, then.” She pointed back at the building.

  Paul was at the door. “Carmen,” he called, “we have a problem.”

  “Only one,” Alba said. “How nice.”

  I went to him. “Snowbird’s hurt. Another stray round hit her.”

  “How bad?”

  “Who can say? She didn’t even tell anybody about it; Dustin saw the hole.”

  We walked back to the snack area, where the Martian was standing in a corner. That was normal; she even slept standing up.

  “It’s a small thing, Carmen,” she said. “Just a small bullet, which didn’t hit any vital organs.”

  “Let me see.” She turned around and showed me, a small black dot high on her back, about where a human shoulder would be. There was a little pink froth of blood.

  “I can feel exactly where it is,” she said. “It’s not doing any harm.”

  Paul was standing behind me. “Are there any doctors for Martians at that Russian place?”

  “There are members of the blue family. They’re something like doctors.”

  “We have to get you there anyhow, for food. This just makes it a little higher priority.”

  “It’s too far,” she said.

  “Not anymore,” he said. “I’m a pilot. We just have to dig up an airplane somewhere.”

  “That would be a figure of speech?” Snowbird said. “They don’t bury airplanes?”

  “Right . . . Damn, I threw away my cell. Do you still have yours?”

  “Think I can find it.” I went into the next room, where we’d changed into NASA work clothes. My cell was in the corner where I’d tossed it, the power light a barely visible dull red. I plugged it into the wall and it went bright red, then yellow, then green. I took it in to Paul.

  He punched a few numbers and shook his head. “Nothing’s up and working yet, I suppose. Do you speak any Russian?”

  “No, nyet.”

  “I do,” Snowbird said. “So does Namir. We used it sometimes on the starship.”

  I recalled that Namir’s father had come from Russia. He’d gone back for some Olympics and brought home a souvenir balalaika, which was why our mysterious spy had such an odd instrument aboard a starship.

  I took the phone from Namir and was looking at it, trying to decide what to do next, when it suddenly rang, the anonymous-caller tone. I punched the answer button, and a young woman’s face appeared.

  “Carmen Dula?” she said. “You look just like your picture!”

  “Um . . . most people do.”

  “Sorry.” She covered her eyes with a hand and winced. “I am Wednesday Parkman, calling from the office of the president. At Camp David, Maryland.”

  “Okay. What does the president want?”

  “Well, I don’t know, really. I was told to call your number and Paul Collins’s until one of you answered. But you answered right away. So let me try to find the president?”

  “Sure, and Paul’s here,
too.”

  “Hold on!” Her face left, and we saw the ceiling for a moment, and then a slow pan of Monet’s lilies, with a cello playing softly.

  “I don’t guess she’s had this job for too long,” I said.

  “How the hell did they get up to Camp David without power?” Paul said.

  “You couldn’t walk there in a day,” I said.

  The lilies dissolved, replaced by an important-looking man I recognized just as he said his name. “Dr. Dula, I’m Morris Chambers. We met briefly at the White House.”

  “It seems like a long time ago.”

  “Doesn’t it. The president is drawing together a committee to deal with the current”—he made a helpless gesture—“situation, and he’d like you to come here as soon as possible.”

  “Washington,” Paul said, “or Camp David?”

  “Washington is chaos,” he said. “Once you’re in the air, we’ll give you a code word that will allow you to land at Camp David.”

  “Okay. So what do we get into the air with? We’re still on the Armstrong Space Force Base.”

  “Let me check.” He got up from the desk, and we had another minute of Monet and strings. He appeared again.

  “You were rated for multi-engine commercial a half century ago. Airplanes are simpler now, but there’s no GPS.” Of course not, no satellites.

  “If there are charts and a compass, I can sort it out. It would have computers, even without GPS?”

  He looked away from the phone and then nodded. “Navigation computers, yes. There is a subsonic twelve-passenger NASA plane waiting for you on Runway 4, South terminal. That’s the only secure terminal, they say, so go directly there. Security there wants your license-plate number.”

  Alba was leaning in the door. “Government plate, 21D272,” she said. “It’s a little blue bus.” Paul repeated it.

  “What will this committee be doing?” I asked. “What can they do in one week?”

  “The key phrase is ‘maximum survival.’ We estimate that there are still about 300 million people alive in America after yesterday. We would like to have . . . a maximum still alive a year from now. Having learned how to live without technology.”